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Nov. 18, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:40:49

3901 The Cost of Cultural Abandonment – Call In Show – November 15th, 2017

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	So we have five callers, five great conversations.
	The first is, what are the factors to program a socialist, to create a socialist, and what would be the factors to program a conservative or an independent?
	The second caller is an asocial American who moved to the Philippines to start a family With his wife and wants to know how they're going to raise their kids in this dual culture.
	It's a great conversation about that.
	The third caller, okay, got a little fractious, but that's fine.
	He asks me, well, Steph, if you believe the universe to be godless, how can you justify any sort of preferable behavior?
	How can you have any values or ethics?
	The fourth caller is a practicing Orthodox Jew who is plagued with serious doubts about the existence of God, but of course, as you can imagine, faces enormous blowback from his community should he go public with his thoughts.
	The fifth caller is a 25-year-old Christian male.
	He had become an atheist a couple of months ago for about a week, and one of the things that Drew him back to Christianity, which I can certainly understand is the need for ethics.
	How can an atheistic world create any objective morality or have a set of rules that doesn't require subjugation to some sort of totalitarian leader?
	It's a great set of questions. Please don't forget, help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	You can follow me on Twitter, at Stephan Molyneux.
	Please also pick up and share and leave a review, theartoftheargument.com.
	You can also buy the book on Audible if you'd like to hear me narrate it.
	And last but not least, you can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	All right, well, up for us today we have Brett.
	Brett wrote, what are the factors to program a liberal, socialist, and what are the factors to program a conservative, independent?
	Once programmed, why does the program desire social conformity higher than the preservation of the self and will break the pillars of the ideology to attempt social conformity of others?
	It's like there is a virus in the basic program.
	If I was an alien with a 200-plus IQ, how would I mathematically program left and right ideologies?
	And why must left and right brains go to such extreme level of behavior to influence social conformity to satisfy the program?
	And how do we make everyone aware of what's truly going on in their program and aware of the people who exploit the program to achieve greed and power?
	That's from Brett. Oh, hey, Brett.
	How are you doing tonight? Hey, very well, Steph.
	Thank you so much. And yourself?
	Ah. I'm alright.
	I'm alright. A little grumpy, but that could make for a great show.
	So, not at you.
	Well, very, very briefly, if you want to create a socialist, you create an organism that flourishes on quantity.
	And if you want to create a conservative, you create an organism that flourishes on...
	Quality. Quantity versus quality.
	This is the RK selection stuff that I talked about in the Gene Wars presentation, which I still strongly recommend people check out.
	It's a fantastic lens, which clarifies a lot in society.
	I just saw this pretty horror...
	You know, it's always this... The antinatalists don't have children!
	And they always show you pictures of white babies.
	As if white...
	I mean, they might as well show pictures of Japanese babies.
	I mean, as if whites are the problem with not having...
	Well, with having too many children.
	You want to show some babies in Africa, maybe you're going to start to talk about demographics or Muslims in Europe.
	But no, it's always white people.
	So... So yeah, if you create an organism in an unstable environment with sort of random predation, then their best survival strategy is to reproduce as early as humanly possible and as much as humanly possible.
	You know, I've seen some data that seems to suggest, if not downright state openly, that in the 19th century, a little over 120, 130 years ago, women hit menstruation at the age of 18.
	18! Now, 11, 12, 13, sometimes even earlier, because unstable environment, various demographics, the father absence promotes early menstruation, because father absence is associated with a chaotic environment, with war, and with our selected characteristics, which means that you want to have as many kids as early as possible, because you can't really do much to control how they turn out.
	But, of course, if you have a different kind of society...
	Then you want to have fewer kids and invest a lot into each individual child because you have a huge amount of influence over their success as adults.
	So you think of rabbits versus wolves.
	You think of mice versus owls.
	You think of this kind of stuff.
	So when you create...
	An environment where resources are plentiful, then you provoke just this kind of rapid reproduction strategy, very little investment in offspring.
	I mean, if you look at middle-class moms speak thousands of words a day to their children, welfare moms who are home a lot more speak about 600 words a day to their kids.
	There's just not really that much investment in their offspring.
	And so when you have a situation with excessive resources, and the welfare state really is the foundation for that, then what happens is human reproduction is not self-regulated via a lack of resources, and so you end up with people reproducing like crazy.
	And when there's that environment going, then the least intelligent are going to breed the most, and the most intelligent are going to breed the least.
	And so you have a very harsh environment which produces case-elected people or people who focus on quality of offspring over quantity of offspring, who are more wolves and less frogs.
	And so scarcity of resources promotes intelligence, because when resources are scarce, but...
	The behavior is controllable or predictable, like your success.
	If you're a good farmer, you'll survive.
	If you're a lazy or irresponsible farmer, you won't.
	If you plan for winter, you'll survive.
	If you don't plan for winter, you won't.
	The scarcity of resources combined with the capacity of the mind To control the outcome of the management of these resources.
	Well, that promotes intelligence.
	And then intelligent people create a system with a huge amount of resources, which then the welfare state, it seems, well, why would you withhold from people who need all of these wonderful resources?
	Well, because it's bad for them.
	It's bad for everyone in the long run.
	So, that to me is how you would work to create these kinds of resources Conservatives versus leftists, rightists versus leftists or socialists versus capitalists.
	And unfortunately, since a lot of it occurs at a genetic level, and of course, significant portions of personality is genetic, it's very, very tough to undo.
	Yeah, Steph, I've went through a lot of your RK, gene ward, survival, infant nurturing, families, the state.
	And I tell you, I want to thank you.
	I've learned a lot from your A podcast in that area.
	But what I'm really trying to do here is when I would say I want to program a new leftist or right person, I have some input factors here, and I just want to confirm them from you real quick.
	One input factor would be the type of security is growing up.
	If I have a family security, then I'll be more right.
	If I have a state security, I'd be more left.
	If I have my type of indoctrination, if I have a family or church indoctrination, then I tend to be a little bit more right than if I had a state or an atheist type indoctrination, then I'd be more left.
	My type of long-term dependency, my level setting on that or my factors here would be the type of long-term dependency.
	If it would be the self or the family, then I'd be more right.
	But then if I wanted to be a left brain, then it may be more state or more peer group, meaning my dependency is the state.
	I'm going to tend to be more left.
	And then I think the other one you taught me, which is outstanding, is the level of ability to compete and win.
	If I have that attribute, meaning I'm just a natural in the environment I am in that time, then I'd be more right.
	But if I have a low ability to compete and win, And then I'd be more left-brained.
	And then I'm playing around with these factors that I think that may are not in the model.
	And you hear about them a lot.
	And that is the factor called educational level.
	I think if I looked at just raw education level, my R-squared or my correlation to a left or right brain may not be that high, meaning I wouldn't get a good fit in the model.
	Also, like high-low IQ, I don't think that matters that much either.
	I think it's the other factors that matter.
	And even race or gender or levels of empathy, I don't think those are in the model.
	I think the other models I mentioned, type of security, type of indoctrination, type of long-term dependency, level of ability to compete and win, and then maybe self-awareness would be strongly correlated in the model.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	Well, I think with regards to education, it would be more the case in the past, before you just had this flood of low-rent idiots swarming into higher education, than it would be in the past when education was a true metric of intelligence, than I think it would be more correlated.
	But now, of course... Any idiot who's willing to parrot back leftist talking points from the professor can walk away with a degree, a massive amount of debt and spiritually crippled existence.
	So I think there was more of that in the past.
	As far as IQ goes, I agree with you.
	I don't know that it's so strongly correlated as far as R versus K or left versus right.
	I think... I think that the challenge at the moment is that the left has way more integrity than the right.
	The left has way more integrity to their belief systems than the right.
	So the left openly says...
	A lot. And this is factors in the left, but I've not seen it strongly criticized, so I'm going to assume it's somewhat representative.
	The left says, if you've got a friend who voted Donald Trump, ditch that friend.
	They've said, don't date men who voted for Donald Trump.
	I've even seen articles, divorce your husband if he voted Donald Trump.
	And this is all stuff I was, I mean, I was saying, I wouldn't say divorce people, but I was saying many, many years ago that you should choose your relationships based on your values.
	It's called the against me argument.
	And the left has been very clear on ostracism and very clear they take their values very seriously.
	Now, it used to be that Christians...
	Took their values more seriously insofar as, no, we can't have immigration from lots of non-Christians.
	No, I don't want you dating outside the faith.
	But in the name of tolerance and diversity and all the goopy stuff, which is basically about disarming the K people so the R people can have their in-group preferences, you know, I don't know that there are people on the right who'd say, oh, I'd never hire someone on the left.
	Like, I'd never work with someone on the left.
	I'd never support...
	The inclusion of someone on the left in our group.
	Okay, well, maybe this is open-minded and tolerant and so on, but the problem is the left isn't doing that.
	The left is relentlessly focused on hiring and promoting other leftists.
	And so, and I remember this all the way back in my, even back to my undergraduate days, which would be in the 90s, early 90s.
	And so the left take their ideas more seriously.
	The left is willing to promote in-group preference, and the left is willing to ostracize and promote the ostracism of those who disagree with them.
	Now, the left, of course, is also willing to attack your reputation and try and destroy your source of income and so on.
	Now, that's pretty harsh, but it is effective for a lot of people.
	So, the left has more commitment.
	The left has more integrity.
	The left values their values more than non-liftists in general do.
	Which is why, you know, when I suggest you should base your relationships on your values, everybody screams at me that I'm some exclusionary, hyper-xenophobic cult leader, right?
	But then the left does it, and it's really not mentioned much at all because they understand.
	Like, I know. I know what is necessary to win, and I've been talking about what is necessary to win for over a decade now.
	I know what is necessary to win.
	I spent a lot of time studying the left before I became a public intellectual, and I have been making the case patiently.
	And the blowback has not come from the left for the most part, because the left, you know, that's what you need to do to win.
	You need to have relentless in-group preference.
	If you're fighting a war, you don't hand your ammo to the enemy.
	When you're fighting a war, you support the people next to you in the trench.
	When you fight the war, you make sure that your guns are aimed the right way, all metaphorically speaking, of course.
	So, I know and have known for many, many years what is necessary to win.
	And I have made the case very publicly of what is necessary to win.
	And I've received a lot of blowback from people who are losing to the leftists who know how to win.
	They know how to win. And so, asking people to have relationships based on values Well, the left does it all the time, relentlessly, and that's why they win.
	And when somebody like me, who's not on the left, says to people, hey, you know how those people are winning all the time?
	Let's do what they do.
	And people are like, oh, that's terrible!
	We're sinking to their level.
	It's like, come on. Come on.
	If you're at the Battle of Agincourt and suddenly they've got longbows, what do you say?
	Well, we can't use longbows because then we're sinking to their level.
	And... You're not sinking to their level, you're rising to victory.
	You're using what is necessary to win.
	And this goes all the way back to objectivism, all the way back to what I read as a teenager.
	Ayn Rand had said, in any conflict between two positions, the most consistent one will always win.
	Is the left consistent?
	Yes, they are. Do they have relentless in-group preferences?
	Yes, they do. Do they use every method, both legal and illegal, sometimes mostly legal, to attack people they disagree with?
	Yes, they do. Are non-leftists going to lower themselves to that standard in order to win?
	Like, I'm sorry, it's what wins.
	I don't know what it means to say, lower yourself to someone's standard.
	It just means, do you want to win or do you not want to win?
	And the left has been winning pretty relentlessly for the past hundred years.
	And either we're going to learn the lessons about what wins, then apply them, have relentless in group preferences, and ostracize those who want us dead.
	Like, don't kid yourself.
	The leftists, if they get the power, this is what they do.
	They line people up and they blow the backs of their fucking heads off and put them in shallow graves by the millions.
	This is what they do. It's how they roll, or it's rather how your head rolls when they have the guillotine switch.
	So it kind of pisses me off.
	Maybe this is one of the reasons why I'm feeling a bit crabby tonight, which is fine.
	It's fine to be crabby. But it kind of pisses me off.
	And this is why I did a big rant in the wee hours last night on Roy Moore.
	It kind of pisses me off what I've been saying for many, many years, exactly what needs to happen in order to win.
	And people are claiming that there's some high ground that they're taking.
	They're claiming, we have to do it the right way.
	No, you don't win a war the right way.
	You win a war, you lose a war. You win the war, you lose the war.
	And whatever helps you win, if it's legal, is the right thing to do.
	And it's not that much more complicated.
	There's no such thing as grace for losing.
	I mean, if you win, then it means that you save the leftists from themselves, too.
	I mean, if the leftists win, they'll eat their own.
	You know, the leftists won in Russia, the leftists won in China, the communists and so on.
	I mean, half the people of three-quarters of the people sometimes who fought for the revolution ended up getting shot in the back of the head and dumped in a shallow grave.
	You're saving the leftists from themselves in the same way that a tough-life intervention saves an addict from himself.
	They are out of control.
	They are addicted to power.
	They need an intervention.
	And people can say, well, we don't want to do it their way.
	It's like, but their way wins.
	Their way works. So if you say, I'm too cowardly to fight and I'm willing to lose rather than do what wins, okay, that's fine.
	But for Christ's sake, don't tell me that it's some kind of moral high ground.
	It's just cowardice. You don't want to do what's effective.
	You don't want to do what wins.
	And that means that you're going to lose civilization, you're going to lose freedom, and you very likely may lose your life.
	And this idea that you're taking the moral high ground by daintily expiring into the ash bin of history, no, it's a war for whether you have civilization or whether you have slaughter, for whether you have freedom or whether you have totalitarianism.
	As I've said before, there is no upward limit to the power lust of the left.
	And they fundamentally lack compassion for anyone who's not like themselves.
	And they have deep hatred.
	We just look at the number of means of assassination and murder and death and violence and guys with slingshots and guys with big sticks.
	I mean, the guys who cover up all their faces and go to rallies.
	I mean, they're very clear that they want to commit illegal actions and not get caught.
	They're very willing to use violence.
	They're very willing to escalate.
	And that's what wins.
	And the left is committed to that, and they have no conscience or remorse.
	I mean, the left pushed very hard to get Chavez successful in the minds of people and to legitimize his regime and his nationalization of the means of production in many ways in Venezuela.
	And now that Venezuelans are starving, now that You know, four bucks can get you a blowjob from a street hooker in her teens now that women, middle-class women, middle-aged women are streaming over to Colombia to sell their bodies on the streets in return for a handful of bread.
	Now that you have people giving away or selling their children because they can't feed them, now you have people dying for a lack of medicine.
	The left doesn't care.
	Like, there's no, oh, what did we do?
	Oh, my God, what did we do?
	You know, I put out a little video with a minor factual error.
	I'm like, oh, no, what did I do?
	What did I do? But the left can help destroy an entire country and put millions of people's lives at risk.
	And they don't care.
	How many people are circling back and saying, wow, Venezuela, I supported this crap.
	Horrible. Horrible.
	But they don't care. So understanding that they don't care about you, that they want you dead, that historically when the left wins they just go around slaughtering everyone, that they are serial killers barely restrained by the vestiges of a civilized situation.
	Go down to Venezuela.
	Go down to Venezuela with three goddamn quarters in your pocket and you can pay to rape a child.
	And that is what the left has created.
	And they don't care.
	They don't circle back.
	They don't care.
	They don't have any compassion or remorse or conscience.
	Cold-hearted, homicidal, psychopathic.
	A lot of them. Again, there are those who are exceptions to this general rule.
	But no, I mean, to be on the left, you have to...
	Overlook communism.
	You have to overlook what happened in Cuba.
	You have to overlook what happened in Cambodia.
	You have to overlook what happened in China and Russia.
	And you have to overlook the 100 million plus bodies communism produced.
	You have to overlook what's currently going on in North Korea.
	It started as a communist country.
	And if you have the capacity to overlook communism, That pile of bodies?
	You're a terrible human being.
	Fundamentally, you are a godforsaken, horrible, hideous, virulent, disgusting wreck of a human being.
	If you can overlook that many bodies.
	If you can look at what happened...
	Under Allende in Chile.
	The guy, Allende, who wanted to turn Chile into a communist dictatorship.
	And then you're concerned that the parliament begged Pinochet to remove him from power, and they killed some communists, and this is your big horror scenario, Naomi Wolf?
	This is your big... Oh, Naomi Klein.
	This is your big horror scenario?
	I don't even know what to say.
	I don't... We're not the same species, fundamentally.
	Morally, for sure. It's win-lose.
	Now, there is, I think, still, though it's really, really close, there is still...
	Some chance to turn things around peacefully, but it is going to require a ferocious act of will.
	It is going to require ferocious in-group preference.
	It's going to mean people stop the fuck fighting with each other.
	Stop squabbling over inconsequential bullshit.
	Stop letting the left's tentacles separate and divide and turn us against each other.
	It's going to take ferocious in-group preference.
	It's going to take ferocious ostracism.
	It's going to take ferocious opposition, peacefully and verbally, to terrible murderous ideas.
	And even then, the odds are not high.
	But if we don't do that at least, there's no chance at all.
	Thanks for your call. I really appreciate it.
	I hope it's helpful. Let's move on to the next call.
	Alright, up next we have Mike.
	Mike wrote in and said, I'm an asocial American who moved to the Philippines to start a family with my wife.
	However, I find that there are certain differences in culture that me and my wife are having a hard time getting past.
	My wife is not a bad woman and I strive to be a good man, but now that we have children and we're planning to stay here in the Philippines, how do I know which parts of my culture and past to let go of, especially in regards to raising our children?
	How do I know if I'm giving up too much of myself and my heritage for the sake of my family?
	That's from Mike. Mike, how are you?
	I'm doing good. How are you doing tonight?
	So fun? I'm all right.
	I'm all right. Didn't you have these conversations with your wife or with yourself before you got married and have children?
	The original plan was to move to America, but...
	You said you're American, right?
	So what do you mean? I'm not sure what you mean when you say move to America.
	The original plan was that we were going to live in America.
	So I didn't think about it as much as, you know, the way we would be raising our children in another culture.
	I was thinking about it more along the lines of how do I support my wife coming to a culture that she's not all familiar with.
	So when the decision was made that we were just going to live in the Philippines, I kind of wasn't prepared for it.
	Wait, wait, wait. Why did you decide to live in the Philippines?
	A couple of reasons. One, the country is definitely more conservative, more old-fashioned.
	The people here are friendly. The people here are social.
	All around, I just felt like it was a better...
	We both felt that it was a better place to live, to raise our children, to create our life together.
	Just because America is...
	They have jobs.
	They have money. They're the number one producer in the world.
	The people, depending on where you live, of course, but the people aren't always the most social, the most friendly, the most accepting.
	And a lot of the people I knew in my life were talking about they wanted to Americanize my wife to make her not what she is, not to accept her.
	They wanted to turn her into what they considered to be a woman in an American culture.
	And that bothered me a lot.
	The decision was made to move to the Philippines instead.
	Because as I've grown, as I've listened to you, I've learned more about feminism and what it actually is.
	It's not just a buzzword.
	It's basically trying to destroy women.
	And I've come to learn through listening to you that the more...
	Females are around women like that, especially those that they would consider their peers, the more they're willing to accept that.
	Well, wait, wait. Okay, hang on.
	There's a lot of info to process.
	Okay. So first of all, you keep saying the decision was made, which is a very sort of passive thing.
	You made the decision, I assume, with your wife, right?
	Yeah, we agreed. We agreed together.
	And who wanted more to move to the Philippines, you or your wife?
	It was pretty equal, honestly.
	Now, do you not trust that your wife will continue...
	Hang on. Do you not trust that your wife will continue to love you if you live in America and she's exposed to women who might be feminists?
	The bigger issue I was worried about was that she would be isolated.
	Because other women wouldn't like her, is that right?
	Yes, and I don't think that she would be willing to be around people like that who...
	Honestly are extremely negative in just about everything.
	Not negative with a reason, not negative for a change, but negative about...
	Because the Americans that she met here, she made friends with a few of them, but most of them she just didn't get along with them, didn't agree with them, and...
	So I was more worried that she would be isolated, especially from my family.
	So here...
	We have a strong family basis with her extended family, her mom, her sisters, her aunts and uncles, her cousins.
	Whereas in America, I don't think she would have had that.
	And raising a family without extended family support would be much more difficult, and I think it would put a lot more stress on both of us.
	And without the friend group, I just, through our conversations, we really felt like it would be better to live in the Philippines rather than in America.
	And what do they speak in the Philippines?
	Tagalog. I'm sorry, what?
	Tagalog. Tagalog, okay.
	And do you speak that? A little bit, not much.
	Most people here speak fairly good English, so I've been a little bit lazy on learning the language as well as I should, because I can communicate with everyone here.
	What about your society?
	I mean, she might be, as you say, isolated in America, but how are you in the Philippines?
	People here are really friendly.
	We have a great church here with a lot of people, and most of the people in the Philippines are pretty friendly towards Americans.
	They don't have any bad blood towards us.
	You never really hear anything negative towards Americans.
	Some just think like, hey, it's American.
	And some are just like, hey, he speaks English.
	And they always want to improve their English because they all, a lot of people work in call centers calling to America.
	A lot of people want to move to America to work there, so people here are friendly.
	I have no problems with that, and it's a little bit more than I'd like because, as I said, I'm more asocial.
	As far as support groups, friends, I'm not an issue here.
	What does asocial mean?
	Antisocial would be you actively seek to disrupt social gatherings, things like that.
	I'm just more of a wallflower, stay in the background, don't I don't really get too involved with other people.
	Maybe small groups, but I'm not really comfortable in big groups.
	Okay, okay. I got it.
	Now, what are your experiences of the Philippines as a whole and the Philippine people?
	Third world country that's trying to improve itself.
	of.
	There's a lot of rich people and a lot of dirt poor people here, and the dirt poor people are people living on the streets, doing odd jobs, trying to feed themselves, feed their children.
	Sadly, you see, I wouldn't say a lot of that, but it's something you see every day when you leave the house.
	But the people here have a lot of heart, they have a lot of character, and they're actually, I would say, very intelligent people, very, very friendly, very kind.
	Not just the foreigners. I mean, family groups, mainly because of the poverty, are very strong here.
	Like, you'll have a lot of people living in one house together, and when you're living in close quarters like that, you can't really fight all the time.
	So, you know, there's usually a lot of overlooking stuff, you know, tolerance towards each other.
	So, through their struggles, I'd say that there are really wonderful people here.
	Day-to-day life, Prices are about the same as in America, but the pay here is terrible.
	My wife's brother-in-law makes about $100 a month working as a carpenter building houses.
	$100 a month?
	With the same prices as in America?
	They didn't even buy you groceries for a week.
	Yes. So how does he survive?
	The family supports each other.
	As I'm sure you know, when you cook a large portion of food...
	Hang on, sorry to interrupt, but if wages are that low, who the hell has any money to support anyone else?
	There's a lot of luxuries that they don't have here as well.
	No, no, no, but $100 a month.
	I'm just confused.
	I'm just confused.
	$100 a month, you couldn't conceivably live on, right?
	I mean, even if you double up, you live like 18 to a rum stack like cordwood, you can't live on $100 a month.
	Trust me, I've been a student. Cheapest rent I could ever get was $270 a month.
	You can buy food at, like, wet markets and, like, Kind of like farmer markets around here that comes directly from the farm.
	And it's not as high-quality food.
	It's usually pretty low-quality, but it's a lot cheaper.
	So maybe about half the price.
	So it's the grocery equivalent of $200 a month.
	It's still not enough. I guess you could do $200 a month if you really go lean on groceries.
	But I mean, that's just... That's just food.
	That's not anything. It's not a phone.
	It's not electricity.
	It's not rent. It's not a car.
	It's not anything, right?
	I mean, how? I don't know.
	I don't really understand how people survive.
	Is it a welfare state?
	I mean, do they have redistributionist policies?
	No. There's actually not very much in the way of taxes here.
	Like, taxes are actually really low.
	They do have SSS and, like, Elder Social Security to help the elders, especially those who don't have families.
	But there's no type of welfare.
	It's mainly, you know, the people here, they survived just by banding together.
	And in my wife's family, they all live together, and her older sister has a really good job.
	And she's doing most of the supporting for the family.
	And you find that in a lot of the cases.
	Everybody has their own stores.
	Am I right in assuming it's a government job?
	No, actually. She works as an office manager.
	As I said, you've got the really poor and then you've got the really rich.
	There's really not much of a middle class here.
	So she happens to fall more in line with the wealthy side of things.
	I wouldn't really call it that, but she makes about an American salary.
	And that's actually enough to support the family, pay the power bill, pay the water bill, and support most of the day-to-day needs of life there.
	Right. And do you know what the average IQ is in the Philippines?
	I've heard you mention that on your show.
	I live in the city area that's probably the equivalent of New York.
	It's probably much lower in the provinces, the countrysides.
	I believe you mentioned it's between 80 to 95, but the people I meet here, they seem fairly intelligent.
	Yeah, I think it's 86, if I remember rightly.
	It's roughly on par with American blacks.
	Mike, what do you do for a living?
	I work online for a Canadian company, so that way I can actually support my family.
	Right. Okay. Okay.
	Well, I mean, your kids, I mean, they'd be biracial kids, right?
	Yeah. Right. So that's going to be a challenge.
	Biracial kids do face a lot of challenges because we're a tribal species, right?
	And so it's hard for some biracial kids to know where they fit in.
	So that's a challenge.
	And I assume that the Philippines is fairly racially homogenous.
	Is that fair to say? Yes.
	Right. Right.
	So, there is that challenge.
	What are the cultural aspects of the Philippines that you're concerned about, Mike?
	Well, sorry.
	In regards to that challenge, I'm not predicting too many issues with that, because again, they're really accepting towards Americans.
	And a lot of Asians like to have their skin whiter, so...
	Both of our babies have really white skin, so they're actually really popular with just about everybody.
	Some of the issues that I've just been finding that's causing a little bit of problems with us is how we plan to raise our children.
	For me, I'm a little bit more strict, and I want to raise our kids in more of a...
	I want them to be able to depend on themselves and their life.
	I want them to To know that in life, you know, sorry if this is gonna sound bad, I want them to know that they can always depend on themselves, even if they can't depend on anyone else around them.
	But my wife, being from a culture of, you know, everybody works together for the survival of the family, leans a lot more towards A community.
	So you have, sorry to interrupt, but just to cut things to the marrow, you want your children to be individualistic, but you're in a collectivist culture?
	Pretty much, yes. Right.
	Right. And so, how are you going to raise them as individuals in a collectivist culture?
	What's the plan? Part of it is just by the example that I set.
	And by instilling in them that sense of what to expect out of life, sharing my personal experiences with them in life.
	Do you think when they grow up, they'll want to stay in the Philippines, or do you think they'll want to go to the States?
	They're still young at this point, so I don't really know.
	But genetically, they're likely to be smarter than The Filipinos, right?
	They're definitely very intelligent.
	Sure, sure. Yeah. So, I mean, they're going to be smarter and a different skin color and biracial and so on.
	Do you think that they'll grow up feeling comfortable staying in the Philippines?
	Do you think that that's where they will find their emotional and intellectual home?
	Considering that Though we will go to visit America to see my family, the fact that my family isn't the most accepting or the most friendly, I think that family would be enough to keep them here as they grow older.
	I'm sorry, could you just say that last but again?
	I think that for the sake of family, they'd want to stay in the Philippines, but if they decided they wanted to go to work, They would be able to go to America, they would be able to support other people, because one of the things in the culture here is a lot of people go overseas to work to support their family.
	But if you want to raise them to be individualists, do you think that they will feel that same level of responsibility to support everyone back in the Philippines?
	That's a good point. Sorry, go ahead.
	I classify myself as asocial, but I've always felt like a lot of responsibility towards my family and towards the people close to me, like taking care of them, helping them.
	So that actually wasn't something I'd consider.
	Right. Now your family, your own family, they don't sound hugely accepting of the relationship you have with your wife?
	Not particularly, no.
	One of the biggest reasons was because They felt like I shouldn't have to leave the country to start my family, that I should stay there.
	Right. And of course, you're not available to help your family nearly as much when you're in the Philippines, right?
	Yeah. Just the basic cost of living here pretty much limits that possibility.
	Right, right. So as you know, like in the West, you've got your kids like after high school, they generally move out or at the very latest sort of after college and the goal is independence from the family system.
	But in Filipino culture, I assume that they, you know, they build an extension to the house and you stay close to the family and it's tribal and collectivist from that standpoint.
	Yes, usually the oldest child will stay with the family even after getting married and having children to take care of the aging parents.
	But the rest of the children either stay or move out depending on if it's better to live in that house or to live in the husband or wife's house.
	Right. Now, how was that relative to your own experience growing up?
	Did you move out from home when you were relatively young?
	I ran away when I was about 19 just to finally get out of there.
	Oh, so you were very, very keen on getting out of the family environment, right?
	Yes. Right.
	Right.
	Was it very unpleasant in your family growing up?
	Extremely.
	It wasn't...
	It's something that I've kind of gotten over as I've grown up, but it was...
	It was...
	The thought of living was not a pleasant thought growing up.
	The thought of living at all, you mean?
	Yes. So you were suicidal as a child?
	No, I was too afraid to commit suicide, but I was...
	One of those people hoping the stories about God and the afterlife were a lie, because once this life was over, I'd rather just rot on the ground and just have everything be over with.
	I figured when life would be enough.
	And I do know that your adverse childhood experience score, Mike, is 7.5, which is Horrible, and I just really wanted to.
	You got verbal abuse and threats, physical abuse, no family love or support, neglect, not enough food, dirty clothes, no protection or medical treatment, your parents divorced, lived with an alcoholic or drug user, household member, depressed, mentally ill or suicide attempt.
	So that's pretty much a shit show, right?
	Yeah, it wasn't the most pleasant situation to be around, especially growing up.
	Kids are actually fairly resilient.
	No, no, no.
	That's what people say.
	Kids aren't that resilient.
	We know that. If kids were resilient, there wouldn't be such a strong relationship between adverse childhood experiences and adult dysfunction.
	They wouldn't like if children were so resilient, then being abused as a child wouldn't on average take 20 years off people's lifespan.
	They wouldn't be more prone to promiscuity, ill health, ischemic heart disease, cancer, tobacco use, alcohol use, drug use.
	Children are not resilient.
	I just I mean, I really just have to be very clear on that because I don't want that to pass.
	Now, there are some kids who seem to be somewhat hard to destroy, but it's very much the minority.
	So it's sort of like, you know, there are some people who could be overweight and smoke like crazy and still live to be 100.
	But nobody knows that ahead of time.
	Children are not resilient.
	And I'm sorry to contradict you so frankly on that, but the data in no way supports what it is that you're What it is that you're talking about.
	So they're not.
	They're not resilient at all.
	Children are very delicate. And when broken, very, very hard to put back together.
	But I am curious about this.
	If your family was so destructive and abusive towards you, why do you have this perspective or opinion or belief that you should be there to support your family?
	I mean, your family of origin, not your current family.
	Oh. After I finally left, I wandered around a bit.
	I didn't really do much of anything.
	To be honest, I was actually quite angry for a while and I just stayed away from people.
	I just kept it to myself because In a lot of ways that's a kinder thing to do to others.
	But at one point I met a friend who told me something about God and I kind of like laughed at him and he wound up being a good friend and he showed me some things I wasn't aware of and I came to become a Christian and I learned how to forgive others and One of the things I realized was that my family,
	regardless of what they'd done, they needed something in their life that would allow them to move past the past.
	And after seeing the change that was in me, because a lot changed in me, like the anger left, a lot of things I was...
	I wasn't in as much mental pain as I had been because there were times where I felt like I was going crazy once I got out on my own and I felt like there would never be peace.
	Once I got a sense of peace in me, I actually found my family noticed that in me after I visited them.
	I sort of stayed around and hung out and tried to be there for them so that they could see that There is a such thing in life as change, that it is possible.
	Because one thing growing up that I always heard was, you know, nothing ever changes.
	People never change. And did they change?
	Nothing ever changes. My mom did.
	My older sister, unfortunately, she didn't.
	And she never found that peace.
	And I'm still hoping that she will.
	But unfortunately, she's one of the people who's addicted to Legal opiates.
	I see how that's ruined her life.
	It gives her a sense of peace, but it also destroys her.
	And your father? I tried.
	I tried. He, uh...
	He, uh...
	I don't know. I have trouble being around him.
	So even with everything, it's really hard for me to see him too much.
	So there's only so much I can do.
	Aren't you kind of in the Philippines to get away from your family?
	A little bit, yes.
	Because I'll be damned if I'm going to let them do to my children what they did to me.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah, and I just want to...
	I mean, you've got this very abstract thing about feminism and culture and society and America and so on, but...
	Oh, that did play a part, but not as much.
	Yeah, it's really not. I mean, it wasn't feminists who gave you an ACE of 7.5, at least not directly.
	So... Yeah, true. Right.
	And how did you meet your wife?
	Actually... I met her online after I'd been in a motorcycle accident and I couldn't walk.
	I just wanted to see if the world was still there.
	I went into a Christian chat room and I was just talking to people and I met her and things just really went well.
	She was in the Philippines and we started talking and I wasn't able to work.
	There was a lot in my life I wasn't able to do right then.
	I decided, you know, once I was able to walk again, I'd try visiting the Philippines.
	Because, you know, when you shatter your leg, it takes a little while to actually get back to a working state.
	But honestly, I believe God brought my wife to me because she's everything I wanted.
	And in a lot of ways, she's much more than I deserve.
	And what does...
	What's the foundation of her attraction to you?
	What is it that she loves about you?
	I'm not saying she shouldn't. I'm just curious.
	My manliness. Sorry.
	A lot of it is we share the same values.
	We're both Christian. We both have a very strong faith in God.
	She appreciates my sense of humor, which I'm not really showing right now.
	There's also the physical attraction.
	She likes bald men, so I don't let her watch her show.
	I think in a lot of ways, we've got a good sense of attraction.
	It's a good bit of physical, a good bit of mental.
	She had a pretty bad childhood as well, so we can kind of relate on an emotional level as well.
	Do you support her family as well?
	I try. The standards here are a little bit different in regards to what's considered support.
	So there was some issues with that at first, but I've kind of come around to understanding why they are the way they are.
	So I definitely...
	When they need it.
	Like I said, the older sister is taking care of it right now, but in the past I have helped support them.
	And what happened in her childhood that was bad?
	She went to live with her dad for a little while, and he was pretty abusive.
	I'd say she probably has a four or five on the ACT. Her mom was very, really abusive for a while, but she also came to see that God was good to be.
	She's made a complete change in her life.
	I can't even begin to say it, but She used to be a little bit hard on me.
	If you could not use the name, we'd appreciate that.
	Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. She used to be a little bit hard on my wife, but she's gotten to the point where she's actually really supportive of her children, us as a couple, of our grandchildren.
	She was never one to hit the children or anything like that, so there's never any major worries there.
	Her mom is actually, for all the time I've known her, I'd say she's a good mom now.
	And her parents divorced, is that right?
	How old was she when her parents divorced?
	I think about eight, seven or eight.
	And did her mother remarry or her father?
	Her father was dead, but her mom never did.
	Oh, her father died when she was young?
	No, her father remarried, but her mother never did.
	Okay. Right.
	And, I mean, I may have bad information here, but isn't divorce illegal in the Philippines?
	Okay, that's a little bit more complicated.
	As I said, her father was not dead.
	I wouldn't want to go into those details too much, but polygamy is only illegal if the state finds out about it.
	Well, I think you could say that about most things, right?
	It's only illegal if you get court speeding, right?
	It's a little bit more common here because of the Catholic, how they have their hands on the government here.
	Divorce is illegal, but annulments can be obtained under certain situations.
	It's just really difficult. Sorry to interrupt.
	Are there any more abusive people left in the family around where your kids are?
	No. Okay.
	Okay.
	No.
	And I guess everyone's committed to peaceful parenting, reasoning, no hitting, that kind of stuff?
	Uh.
	Ugh.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Maybe not to that extreme, but there's nobody who's going to discipline my children.
	There's nobody who's going to overstep any lines.
	If they go to visit their mom's house, sometimes her sister will watch her.
	I know her sister does sometimes spank her child, but they're not going to spank her.
	I'm sorry, I got confused here.
	Whose sister spanked whose child?
	My wife. My wife's sister, my sister-in-law, will sometimes spank her own children, but she wouldn't spank my children.
	She wouldn't yell at my children.
	Would she spank her children in front of your children, or would they know about it?
	It's possible. And have you tried to talk to her about spanking?
	I don't actually get along too well with that sister.
	But that's not what I asked.
	No, I haven't talked to her about it.
	And why not?
	You said that the family is friendly and people are open and they listen and they're committed to community and right.
	Can't you talk to her about hitting her kids?
	I don't know how to bring up that conversation with her, though.
	Like, I don't know how to...
	Advise somebody else on how to be a parent.
	I listen to you for a lot of the parenting advice that I get, and that leads me to looking into various things that you'll talk about.
	And I'm still trying to learn as I go, trying to...
	Okay, now you're just fogging me here.
	So the woman who hits her children, she watches your children?
	No. Oh, so she doesn't watch your children.
	Yeah. The...
	Grandmother will watch the children, and she lives in the same house with them, but she's usually in her room doing...
	All right, just the grandmother...
	Just the grandmother...
	Why has the grandmother not talked to her daughter about hitting children?
	It might be more common here.
	I'm not actually sure.
	Have you talked to the grandmother about not hitting children?
	No. Do you know if the grandmother hits children?
	No, she doesn't. She doesn't.
	How do you know? I've actually talked to my wife about this.
	Wait, wait, wait. You've never talked to her about it, and I'm just curious how you know.
	I've talked to my wife about it, and she told me that her mom has never hit her or her sisters.
	Okay, so has your wife talked to her sister about not hitting children?
	Yes. And?
	The sister is a little bit proud, and she doesn't really listen very well.
	And how are your sister's children?
	How do they behave? Say again?
	How do your sister's, sorry, how do your sister-in-law's children behave?
	She only has one right now, and the child is only three years old, but she's, yeah, you're right.
	She's not very well behaved.
	She's a little bit spoiled, honestly.
	Spoiled? What do you mean? She's being hit?
	Yes, but she's also the center of attention.
	She spends all of her day playing on an iPad.
	So she's neglected and she's hit?
	I'm trying to understand, Mike.
	You want to be a good person, right?
	And being a good person means standing up for kids in your environment.
	I don't understand. Who else is going to talk about it except you?
	The family is obviously not dealing with it.
	And if you want to be admired, if you want to admire yourself, don't you need to do something?
	I mean, wouldn't you have liked it if somebody had intervened?
	When you were a child in your family and reduced some of the prevalence of abuse?
	Actually, I probably would have been scared for that person, but that was a different situation.
	I do see what you're saying, though.
	Me and my wife have been talking a lot about spanking, and we've...
	We're getting there.
	We're actually... Both coming to understand that it is a bad thing, but when you come from a childhood of that, even if you tell yourself you're not going to do that with your children, don't you question if that's actually the right way to do it?
	I certainly don't. Are you saying that you've hit your children or your wife has hit your children?
	I have popped my son's hand when he was doing something dangerous to teach him not to do what he was doing.
	So if there's something dangerous, yes, I will pop his hand and I will teach him.
	If I see him trying to play with an electrical socket or something like that, yes, we safeguard everything.
	But at the same time, you want him to know not to go around those types of things.
	So yes, I will hit his hand in those cases.
	Wait, sorry. How old is your son?
	19 months. So why?
	I don't quite understand. I mean, why is he in an environment where he gets to play with a plug?
	Isn't your job to keep him away from plugs?
	Or childproof the house?
	Or at least the stuff that's at hand level?
	Yes, but even if it's childproof, he could still get through that and...
	No, no, no.
	Childproof means you can't get through it.
	If he can get through it, it's not childproof.
	Okay, cool. Slightly child-safer.
	Like, we'll put the plugs in there.
	We'll try to limit the dangers.
	But, you know, when he knows how to grab and pull that out...
	But why haven't you...
	I mean, does he not respect it when you tell him not to?
	Why wouldn't he listen to you?
	Sometimes he will when we say no.
	Sometimes he won't.
	But he's at that age range where he's trying to decide...
	What he can get away with, like testing his boundaries, playing with things around him.
	Sometimes I'll be watching him and he'll be playing with something and he'll be looking back at me to see if I'm going to respond and I'll just sit there and watch him because it's really key just to see what he's doing.
	So I think a lot of times he's just testing his boundaries and as long as there's nothing that'll danger him, I'm okay to allow him to explore, but anything where I see potential for him getting hurt, I want him to understand that there's danger there.
	No, but why aren't you in a situation where you are preventing him?
	If you're close enough to hit him, you're close enough to pick him up and move him away, right?
	Unfortunately, we have an 18-month-old and a 6-month-old, almost 7-month-old.
	No, no. Physically, if you're close enough to hit him, you're close enough to pick him up and moving away, right?
	Yes. So you have no excuse for hitting him.
	If he doesn't understand the danger of a plug, then hitting him means he has no idea why he's being hit.
	But how do you explain to him the danger of the plug?
	Well, I have no idea because I don't know what his language skills are like.
	But it's your job to keep him safe.
	And hitting him is teaching him pain and fear, not any kind of understanding.
	Right? So if he genuinely can understand why something is dangerous, then you keep him away from it.
	And if he can understand why, so you shouldn't hit him.
	And if he can understand why something is dangerous, then you reason with him and you explain it to him.
	And he will respect you if you don't hit him.
	If you hit him, it won't work.
	Does it work hitting him?
	Does it work? To a degree.
	No. It works, and studies are very clear on this, Mike.
	It works for a short amount of time and breeds almost immediate lack of compliance and opposition.
	I mean, if spanking works, parents wouldn't have to keep hitting their kids all the way up until the early teens.
	And True. Right?
	It doesn't work. And it's going to cost IQ points for your kids.
	And you don't have the right to take IQ points from your children.
	Any more than you have the right to starve them so they don't end up their full height.
	They're just not yours to take.
	I agree with you on that.
	I've actually been trying to learn as much as I can regarding this because I don't want my children to have the childhood that I had.
	No, and listen, I want to...
	It's better, right?
	I hope so. No, it is.
	Look, it's better. I mean, it's an improvement, but there is no end to...
	You're a Christian, right? You know that there's no end to the perfectibility of man, right?
	Definitely. And so I want you to have the goal of no spanking.
	Of no hitting. Because that's going to give...
	The children are going to respect you for reasoning with them.
	They will not respect you for hitting them.
	Nobody likes to be treated like an errant puppy.
	Nobody likes to just get smacked.
	It's humiliating.
	And it causes you to lose respect for the person who's smacking you.
	And you know what it's like to behead, right?
	Yeah.
	And you don't want that for your kids.
	There's a fine line between fear and respect, so...
	I think you may be right on that, but I'll have to reflect on that, because...
	There's no fine line between fear and respect.
	Let me ask you this, Mike.
	Do you want your wife to fear you?
	No. Why not?
	Don't you want her to respect you as well?
	No, because I want her to grow.
	I want her to become more than what she was.
	Right. So your wife chose to be with you, right?
	Your wife chose to be with you.
	Your children didn't. So you need to have higher standards of behavior towards your children even than you have towards your wife.
	Your wife can leave you anytime.
	She chose to be with you.
	She had all the options in the world.
	Your children did not choose to be with you and cannot leave.
	So the idea that you're going to lower your standards for your children is counter-rational, right?
	It's a crazy argument.
	Well, you're trapped, so I can treat you worse.
	Come on. I'm not disagreeing with you, but can I ask you a question on that?
	Yeah, yeah. With my wife, if there's an issue, we can talk it out.
	We can... Explain our points of views, but with a child, especially at that age, you try to explain it to them, but they're not going to understand you fully.
	How do you explain that to a child without having something there to let them know that if you do this, I'll be honest with you, if you do this, there's pain involved.
	And it's to prevent him from the worst pain that he would experience if he actually did grab it or stick something in there.
	But how do you explain that to someone at that age?
	Okay, let me ask you this. Let's say I have a 19-year-old son and I throw a bunch of steak knives in front of him.
	What's he going to do? Play with them?
	Yeah, he's going to pick them up. Is he now in danger?
	Most likely, yes. Do I get to hit him for picking up the steak knives?
	No. Wait, why not?
	Why not? He could experience a worse danger by cutting himself with the steak knives than me merely hitting him.
	Yes, but you willfully put them in front of him.
	There you go! You are responsible for keeping your children away from dangerous things!
	How do you do that with an electrical socket?
	How do you do that with an electrical socket?
	Are you kidding me? If I offered you a million dollars, a million dollars, right now, Mike, I offered you one million dollars to use your giant brain to figure out how to keep a 19-year-old from sticking a fork into an electrical socket, do you think you'd be able to come up with something for a million dollars?
	Yeah. Probably?
	Really? You'd leave a million dollars on the table because you just couldn't figure it out.
	Maybe you're dragging down the average in the Philippines if that's the case, but I'm pretty confident you can figure that one out.
	How do you prevent a baby or a toddler from putting something into a dangerous wall hole?
	It's about a quarter. And I know this because I've childproofed a home.
	It's about a quarter. You get these plastic things.
	You jam them in there. Sometimes you've got to hammer them in there with a soft mallet.
	And the only way you can get them out is with, like, dynamite and a screwdriver.
	So you childproof. Maybe I need to find better plastic covers because the ones we have don't seem to work very well.
	And do you know the reason why you haven't looked for better plastic covers, Mike, is because you have the option called hit your children.
	If you didn't have that option, you'd be amazed at the creativity you'd come up with.
	Right? If you didn't have the option To hit your children, you'd have to come up with some other method, right?
	And some other method would be, oh, look, I get to be creative and actually solve problems rather than resort to physical force.
	Yeah, I don't.
	You take that off the table.
	I'm going to assume that the option of hitting your wife is off the table, right?
	No, I wouldn't hit my wife.
	Right. And so, when you have a disagreement with your wife and you can't hit her or you won't hit her, good for you, what do you do?
	You find other solutions.
	If you have a solution called hitting, you stop looking for new solutions.
	If you take hitting off the table, you'll be amazed at how creative you will be and how many problems you will solve.
	You're 100% right on that.
	I mean, it's probably going to cost you, like, $3 for decent cover-ups to the plugs, right?
	So what's standing, like, it's a $4 solution that you're hitting your kids for.
	There's not as many options here as there are in America, so I have luck.
	Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Are you saying? Mm-hmm.
	That Amazon or any other online company does not deliver to the Philippines, really?
	Because that seems like a pretty big market opportunity to me.
	You're right. I haven't been creative enough.
	I didn't think about that. And I sympathize.
	The reason you don't think about that is because you think, well, why would I bother looking online when I can just hit my kids?
	Whereas if you can't hit your kids, you're like, wow, I now have an interesting problem to solve.
	And that's the culture that I want your kids to grow up in.
	I don't care particularly Filipino, American.
	What I care about is nonviolent.
	No, I do agree with you.
	And to be honest with you, that was a part of the question that I really wanted to cover in this because I hate to see that part of myself, especially with my kids.
	You do. As you said, I know full well what it's like And I'm not at all accusing or saying, Mike, that you're like those who abused you as a kid.
	I'm not putting you in that category at all.
	So please don't, like, I don't want you to say, when we finish talking, oh my God, Steph thought I was just like, no.
	I mean, you say it's a pop, it's a light smack, it's, I mean, I'm just, take it off the table, that's all.
	If it's so little, just take it off the table.
	You don't need it. You don't need it.
	And you'll have a much better relationship with your kid's Otherwise.
	And with myself. And with yourself, right?
	Look, when you get old, you're going to get forgetful.
	What do they call them? Senior moments, right?
	Yeah. And will your kids get to hit you then?
	Hopefully not. Well, why not?
	Hopefully, as you said, we've established that love, we've established that relationship and that respect for each other.
	And Hopefully I can teach my children as they grow up that hitting is not the answer.
	Yeah, like I had a friend growing up who had a grandmother who would regularly like put things in the oven and forget about them.
	She was just, I mean, she lived to be like, I don't know, Methuselah's great aunt or something, like she was old.
	She got a certificate from the government.
	Oh my god, you can't be killed.
	You're an undead. You're like the entire elderly cohort of Japanese mainland cratering with dead grandparents.
	Well, not grandparents these days who's having kids.
	Now, the idea, though, that you forgot to turn off the oven.
	Bang! Well, because she has a mental disability, right?
	She was becoming forgetful, and she was actually quite a cool woman.
	I remember talking to her once.
	She was a singer in the past.
	Oh, here's a little drag. Here's a little bit of spelunking, a little bit of fishing for an old memory that otherwise would have vanished from the world.
	But she was a singer in the Second World War, and she used to go to the hospitals where the troops who were wounded were trying to recover.
	And she went to a burn ward or a burn unit, and she sang, and they loved her singing.
	But they couldn't applaud because their hands were burned, right?
	If you get in fire, your hands come up to shield yourself.
	So most of them there had horribly burned hands.
	They could not applaud. And so they hissed between their teeth to express their appreciation when she was singing.
	I remember her telling me that story, and it's...
	Now it's for everyone for all time.
	So she lives on.
	So if your children have a mental disability, so to speak, called being children, it's the same as a senior moment, and you don't hit.
	If they're capable of understanding, then reason with them.
	And if they're not capable of understanding, don't hit them.
	It's also going to prevent them from understanding, because you've got this thing called hitting.
	Which means you're going to explain less, and they're going to ask less.
	So, you know, here's the thing.
	Your kids are going to face some real challenges, right?
	They've got one foot in America, they've got one foot in the Philippines.
	They've got a collectivist culture, they've got an individualistic father.
	They're biracial, which means it's going to be tough for them to find a particular tribe or cohort.
	What that means is you better give them every conceivable advantage to make up for some of the challenges that they're going to face.
	And so, don't hit them.
	Reason with them. Negotiate with them.
	Teach them how to get what they want through their verbal skills.
	And don't teach them that when you have the power, you use force rather than reason.
	Because they're going to face some challenges.
	Give them every possible advantage.
	Take the hitting off the table.
	That's the culture I think they should be raised in.
	So thanks for your call, Mike. I appreciate it.
	And let's move on to the next call.
	Alright, up next we have Connor.
	Connor wrote in and said, If one believes the universe to be godless, then how can you justify any sort of preferable behavior?
	What can be your base from which to justify your value judgments?
	That's from Connor. Hey Connor, how you doing?
	Doing good, how are you? I'm well, thanks.
	You can back off the mic a little there, brother.
	It's kind of loud. My bad.
	No, no, that's not your bad. It's first time calling.
	So, I do believe the universe to be godless.
	How do I justify preferable behavior?
	Well, through philosophy, through reasoned arguments and evidence.
	My question is, if you believe the universe to be inhabited by one or more gods, how do you justify any sort of preferable behavior given that human beings believe in about 10,000 different gods?
	We can get to that secondarily.
	But I would appreciate to hear some of your evidence first.
	Oh, for as to why there's preferable behavior?
	Yeah, without a god.
	Well, you just proved it for me.
	See, you say that, and I was reading your book, and I'm actually not saying that.
	No, you just did. No, I heard it.
	I really, I just heard it.
	You asked me to use reason and evidence to make my position, right?
	Right. So if I just, like, here's what happened, and this is why I did what I did.
	So, Connor, I just made an assertion.
	Did you accept it?
	No. I want to hear your evidence.
	No, no, no. Yeah, so I made an assertion.
	I said, reason and evidence philosophy, right?
	So I made an assertion, and you said, that's not enough.
	Give me your arguments or give me your evidence, right?
	Right. So you have universally preferable behavior called arguments are better than assertions.
	And not just a little better.
	Like assertions are zero. I assume a solid sound and robust argument is like a hundred.
	So you are coming into the conversation accepting that reason is infinitely better, is universally preferable to assertions.
	I assume that you would not accept a mere assertion In Tucson or every third blue moon on the 2nd of October or 3 o'clock in the morning, it's universal.
	Always and forever, it is preferable for you, universally, infinitely preferable, to use reason and evidence rather than make mere assertions, right?
	And that's why I said you just proved it.
	Two things. One, I'm only proving it because I believe in God.
	So if I believe in God, then there is justification for this preferable behavior, which I suppose is why you asked me the question you asked me.
	But from the second point is that just because I'm saying that I want to hear your argument, that doesn't mean universally that that applies.
	That only means that I personally, subjectively want that.
	And I'm not saying that it's universally preferable.
	All I'm saying is it's preferable to me.
	It's preferable to you.
	I would like to hear your argument, but I'm not saying objectively arguments are better than not having an argument.
	No, you did. You said, I don't accept your assertion.
	I want an argument.
	I'm only saying that though.
	I'm only saying there's a preferable behavior because I believe in God.
	If there's no God, then there's no preference.
	Wait, wait. You know I'm an atheist, right?
	Yes. So why on earth are you asking me for reason, evidence, and arguments if you have to be Christian to believe in these things?
	Well, I'm not saying you have to be Christian.
	I'm just saying you have to believe in a God.
	Okay, but I don't believe in a God, so why are you asking me for reason and evidence if you say you only do that because you're religious when I'm not religious?
	Well, that's the thing, though. Your book, UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, is a guide to ethics without having God.
	And so I want to know how...
	I mean, I've read half of your book.
	I haven't finished it, so sorry about that.
	But I want to know how you get to that point without a God.
	But why should I indulge your subjective preference in a philosophy show?
	If it's a subjective preference, why on earth would I indulge it?
	So that you can get more people on your side.
	No, no, no. Listen, if you have a subjective preference, you're like saying to me, Steph, I like ice cream.
	Okay, you like ice cream.
	There's nothing to argue about with that.
	If it's merely a subjective preference for you that reason and evidence is better than mere assertion, Why on earth would I indulge your preference for something that is subjective and personal in a philosophy show?
	Because philosophy is about universals and objectives.
	But what I'm saying is, it's only subjective if you don't believe in God.
	It's a conditional statement.
	So, I'm saying is, since you don't believe in God, I want to hear your argument.
	But what, so you want to hear, are you saying that you want to hear my argument, even though for me, my argument will be perfectly subjective?
	Well, I mean, I'm going to go into it with an open mind.
	You could convince me.
	I'm not going to just say that you're wrong from the jump.
	So, if I make a recent argument, you will accept it?
	Upon reflection.
	No, I understand. Depending on how good.
	So, if I make an assertion, you won't accept it, but if I make a reasoned argument, you will.
	Yes. So, it's not a subjective preference.
	And we're right back to where I started, which is you find recent arguments infinitely preferable to subjective statements or mere assertions.
	No, it's a conditional statement.
	What I'm saying is a conditional statement, though, and you're trying to make it not.
	You just said that you would accept an argument from me.
	I'm not Christian. Possibly.
	Right? No, no. First of all, you said upon reflection.
	In other words, I'm not saying that if I make some spectacular argument, you're just going to immediately agree.
	What I mean is that if you accept the reasoning behind my argument, then you will accept the argument, right?
	Yeah. Okay, so you find arguments infinitely preferable to mere assertions, because you will not accept something on a mere assertion, but you will accept it if it's rational, right?
	If it's a good argument, yeah.
	Okay, good. So then it's not a subjective preference, it's universal.
	Like, if I said to you, I like chocolate ice cream, does that mean you have to like it?
	No. No. If I say ice cream contains dairy and you understand the argument, is it incumbent upon you to accept the argument and to recognize that as a true statement?
	No. It's not.
	So do you believe that ice cream does not contain dairy?
	No. Oh, sorry.
	I kind of... I'm thinking as you're talking...
	Oh, no, no problem. This is complicated stuff, man.
	I'm totally fine. We can shoot past each other regularly.
	That's totally fine with me.
	It doesn't bother me at all. In fact, it would be kind of weird if we didn't.
	So if I say, I like ice cream, it doesn't...
	You're like, oh, that's interesting, but you're not bound to anything, right?
	You don't have to like ice cream or not like ice cream.
	I'm just stating a personal preference, right?
	Right. But if I say ice cream contains dairy...
	Right? That is a statement of objective truth or objective fact, which if you like objective facts, you have to accept, right?
	Right. Right.
	So better than or worse than, chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla.
	This is not an objective fact.
	This is a statement of subjective preference.
	But if I say ice cream contains dairy, or chocolate ice cream contains...
	Cocoa or vanilla ice cream contains, I assume, vanilla, right?
	Then these are statements of fact that are not subjective preferences, right?
	Right. So you are willing to change your mind to conform with a rational argument, but you won't do it with a statement of subjective preference, right?
	Right. So rational arguments are universally preferable To subjective preferences when it comes to stating universal truths, right?
	If I say I like chocolate ice cream, I'm not stating a universal truth.
	But if I say ice cream contains dairy or chocolate ice cream contains cocoa, I am stating a universal truth.
	I see what you're saying.
	And within that...
	Okay, I'm going to have to pivot now and come back to what you just said.
	But where I'm pivoting to is, I know you like Nietzsche a lot, and I too like Nietzsche.
	And obviously, he makes a lot of claims.
	For me, I think the most important claim he makes, other than the revaluation of all values, is that God is dead.
	And what are we going to do now that God is dead?
	Where are we going to get our morals from?
	And with that being true, In your book, you clearly say an is is not a not.
	And I know I'm covering a lot of things right now.
	I'm sorry that I'm not super linear with my mind.
	But you say an is is not a not.
	And then you don't believe in God.
	So I'm thinking, what could be an objective basis for morality?
	Because just saying that an argument is better than an assertion is better for me, for me to change my mind.
	But without a god, why should I care about life at all?
	Or why should any of us care about arguments or not arguments?
	What might just make right?
	And I guess you could do a utilitarian argument, but then who's the arbiter of utility?
	And I'm throwing a bunch of things at you.
	So take whatever you want and go from there.
	Well, you just fogged up the whole damn thing, right?
	We were having a nice, tidy little constrained argument with a purpose, and now you've just basically called in an airstrike of every idea known to mankind in order to muddy the waters.
	I just, I mean, I don't mind.
	I'm just pointing it out that I'm aware of that.
	And then I can tell you. It just seems like you're trying to put me in a hole, and I'm trying to open you up to the hole.
	No! Oh, come on, man!
	You said, reasoned argument, I will change my mind.
	I make a reasoned argument, and then you complain that I'm cornering you?
	Come on! If you pay me an American dollars, we can complete the transaction.
	Here, here are your American dollars.
	Hey, man, you're stealing from me!
	It's like, I'm running things according to the standards that you put up, and now you're feeling cornered?
	You said recent argument is what will change your mind.
	I give you a recent argument.
	And you pivot to Nietzsche and life and meaning and I don't know what else, right?
	And then you say, well, you were cornering me.
	It's like, no, I'm just taking it to your word.
	But what changes your mind?
	What was that? You can't complain rationally about being cornered when you say, this is the standard by which I will change my mind.
	Somebody fulfills that standard.
	And then you say, well, I feel cornered.
	That's not fair. You didn't fulfill the standard.
	You didn't fulfill the standard.
	Sure did. You didn't.
	Sure did. If I hadn't fulfilled the standard, you would have told me instead you pivoted because you knew I had.
	No, I pivoted because there's so much more to this debate and you're trying to put, I know I've read your, you know, half of your book.
	I know how you do. Dude.
	Oh, come on. I've been doing this for decades.
	All right. You'll hear it when you, you'll hear it when you play back.
	I finished the argument, but rather than accept the argument, you pivoted to Nietzsche and meaning and life and God and what else, right?
	Well, there's a lot of domains that this argument takes place on.
	You pivoted away from an argument that you didn't like.
	Saying that there's other dimensions?
	Come on. You know how arguments work.
	At least I hope you do, which is you ask for a reasoned argument, you get a reasoned argument, And then you pivot into some other direction because you don't like the conclusion.
	Okay, that's fine. But then be honest and say, I don't like this conclusion.
	Don't give me this, let's talk about Nietzsche now.
	It's like a distraction.
	Well, no, it's not a distraction because I was very clear the whole time with what I was doing.
	It's not like I did a sleight of hand and tried to sneak something on you.
	I told you very clearly I wanted to pivot because there's a whole other...
	There's so many more domains this argument could be taking place on.
	You got me in a corner on a niche, like in a niche part.
	I got you in a corner?
	What do you mean I got you in a corner?
	I made a rational argument about subjective versus objective.
	How is that getting you in a- you asked for a rational argument.
	I gave you a rational argument and now I'm a bully or I'm cornering you.
	What are you talking about?
	Well, did I say you were a bully?
	I think you're saying that. All right.
	I cornered you. What does that mean?
	I made a good argument. That's what you asked for.
	You made a good point. You know, you say, you say, Steph, hit me with your best shot, man, right here, right in the jaw.
	Hit me with your best shot. Oh, man, you punched me.
	I can't believe it. You know, what's the meaning of the word punch?
	I mean, come on. You asked me for an argument.
	I gave you an argument. And then you pivoted.
	This is a shot, man. I'm not saying any of those things.
	I'm not going to have an argument with you if when I make a solid argument, you then pivot to another topic completely without acknowledging the previous argument, because it's pointless.
	We're never going to get anywhere if I make a solid argument to you, you understand it, and then rather than accepting or rejecting the argument, you pivot to some completely other thing.
	We can't build anything.
	We can't build any consensus.
	We can't build any certainty.
	And what troubles me more is that you don't even seem to have the basic self-knowledge to understand what you did.
	I think I do, and I think you're wrong about that.
	Well, you're just making an assertion, and by your own standard, assertions are worthless.
	Yeah, and you're making assertions, and yours are worthless.
	So we're back at point zero.
	No, I actually made some pretty good arguments, but I can see how this one goes.
	Enjoy your guard. I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	Up next we have Jacob.
	Jacob wrote in and said, Jacob,
	how are you doing? Thank God, how are you?
	I'm well. A Jew plagued with doubts.
	I've never heard of such a thing.
	Never experienced this in my life.
	First of all, I'm sorry to hear about the death of your loved one.
	Is there anything you can share to give me some context?
	Yeah, sure. It was my grandfather.
	I'd been studying to be a rabbi.
	I was ordained as a rabbi.
	My grandfather was a secular Jew when he died, so it was obviously very upsetting to me.
	He was a very good person, very idealistic person.
	After he died, it seemed silly to think about things like whether or not he kept kosher or kept the Sabbath.
	It seemed like how could you start to evaluate people like that?
	It seemed silly.
	I always had lots of doubts.
	I think everyone has doubts.
	Basically, I found a lot of Meaning religion and I was aware of the doubts.
	I wasn't like fooling myself or anything, but yeah, it just became sort of much less meaning there and much less like, you know, it seemed like it's like so, you know, just being a good person is like enough of a thing, you know, like it's enough of something to spend your life on, you know.
	So Jacob, what happened With your grandfather, specifically, that made you feel that things like kosher and the Sabbath and so on were less meaningful or relatively meaningless?
	I want to really make sure I sort of get that connection.
	So, okay, so...
	I guess he was the first, like, you know, secular...
	So, you know, like...
	Ideally, if you're religious, you shouldn't look down on people who aren't religious.
	You tell yourself you don't.
	He was the first person I knew who wasn't religious and wasn't observant.
	I was very close with him.
	The idea that there'd be a hell that he would be punished by for not keeping the Sabbath or stuff like that.
	sacrificed so much for other people and was, you know, such a good person.
	And, you know, I mean, he's my grandfather, so I guess I was somewhat, I'm obviously biased, but, you know.
	So he was a very good man, right?
	Yeah. And what do you think Jacob drove him in his pursuit of goodness, in his pursuit of virtue?
	As you say, I mean, if he was secular or a cultural Jew, then it wasn't...
	I mean, I think Judaism is not so big on the afterlife as a whole, but it was not...
	Fear of God's punishment or desire for a sort of theological reward.
	It was for some other reason or it was some other motivation that drove him in his pursuit of virtue.
	And do you know, did he ever talk about what that was before he died?
	Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, yeah, so...
	I mean, in Judaism, like, doing things for reward and punishment is...
	Considered a very low level of...
	We don't like to...
	But also...
	He was raised secular in South Carolina.
	He just was brought up to...
	It's important to better your community and make the lives of the people around you better and support your family.
	He's just raised with very good values and believes strongly in things.
	He owns a steel mill.
	During Jim Crow, he refused to discriminate against his black employees.
	He used to make separate bathrooms.
	He supported most of the poor people in the Jewish community of South Carolina, America of Columbia.
	These are things he felt was important, and he did them.
	And how did he face, was his death something that he could conceptualize ahead of time?
	Was it an illness or was it old age or was it sudden?
	How did he face mortality?
	So he basically just went to sleep one night and didn't wake up.
	He was not unwell before that?
	I mean, I guess he had some heart problems, but no one expected it.
	But just like general old age crap, right?
	Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's, I gotta tell you, that's a pretty gentle way to go.
	You know, if you're gonna go, and we're all gonna go, that's not bad at all, right?
	Yeah, I say that if there is a God, that would be, you know...
	You would expect someone like him to get that sort of death.
	Right. And did you have anything with your grandfather, Jacob, that was unresolved or anything that you wish you'd said?
	I mean, there always is, of course, with that kind of sudden passing.
	There's always that feeling.
	But was there anything in particular that stands out?
	Well, I guess, you know, part of it is...
	So my mother obviously became orthodox.
	I mean, it could have been on me, but my mother became orthodox.
	And I guess that made some friction, but he never took it out on us or even on my mother.
	But I do kind of feel like he felt like we were younger, so a mother would tell us stuff like, yeah, your grandparents do this, but you're not allowed to do this.
	It's wrong. So I always felt guilty about that, even though it wasn't me.
	I always felt like all the dishes had to be our dishes.
	I always felt like we made them feel like heathens.
	Wait, what do you mean all the dishes had to be your dishes?
	Because, like, we kept Jewish dietary laws.
	Oh, right, right, right. So, like, you know, they have to, like, burn out the oven, and you'd have a special set of dishes.
	Right, right. No, and listen, I mean, it's a hell of a powerful question.
	It really is. And I mean, people have melted their brains into ashes in pursuit of this, which is, okay, so let's take it from a general religious context, right?
	So a man does great wrong in his life, but finds God, seeks forgiveness, and devotes himself to faith in the last three months of his life.
	But he did great harm. Did wrong.
	Cheated people, lied people, hit people, whatever, right?
	Yeah. So that is someone who dies a good man.
	On the other hand...
	Because technically in Judaism, he goes to hell.
	Because there's not that sort of blanket, get out of hell free card that Christians have around forgiveness and absolution.
	Is that right? Yeah. In Judaism, you can only get forgiven by God for sins between you and God.
	But for sins between you and man, you're basically screwed unless the man forgives you.
	Oh, yeah.
	but has a change of heart, whether it's fear or whatever it is, right?
	And he seeks forgiveness, he makes amends, puts people in his will who he stole from, or whatever, right?
	And then he ends as a righteous man.
	Yeah.
	Now, on the other hand, but he's religious, right?
	Now, on the other hand, there is a man who does great good in his life, like a grandfather, but he's not religious.
	Who is better for the community?
	Who is a better person?
	Well, if you just look at the actions themselves, then someone like your grandfather is better in terms of community value and doing good things in the world, though they don't have faith in a God.
	On the other hand, the other person who did harm and negative things during his life is worse for the community and worse as a whole, despite the fact that he is religious and And it comes down to this question of, is it good deeds or is it faith that makes you a good person?
	Now, of course, there are a lot of people who argue and say, well, you can't have the good deeds without the faith.
	It is the faith and the devotion to God's law and your subjugation to moral standards embedded in religion that allow you to consistently Do good works.
	Other people say, of course, that if you have the option for absolution near the end, it kind of gives you a bit more carte blanche to do bad things through.
	That's a bit more Christian, because God can forgive you for the wrongs you do to other people, not just the wrongs you do to God.
	Well, I understand it's different in Judaism.
	And so the question of whether religious faith serves virtue, or the question of—and this was a big disagreement, of course, between Catholics and Protestants—is it faith or good works that get you into heaven?
	And one side said, no, you have to have the faith.
	It doesn't matter how good you are.
	If you don't have the faith, you won't get into heaven.
	And other people say, it is the good works that get you into heaven, and your inner state of mind is between you and God.
	But as far as society goes— It is the good works that do it.
	So it's a huge question, and it's a big, complicated question.
	I can sort of tell you my thoughts about it later, but is that anywhere close to the stuff that's been going on for you mentally and emotionally?
	Yeah, so that's part of it.
	And then there's just the general, like...
	You know, so I've, you know, I've never been like, you know, I've always been very clear that I have lots of doubts and, you know, lots of, but like, yeah, I guess, guess you know it's sort of like that yeah
	that's pretty much what brought it to a head like where it was just like where i was able to live in a sort of cognitive dissonance for quite some like you know because i sort of like a lot of the ideas and the um the you know values of the orthodox orthodox jury but uh yeah like you know it also brought like you know
	i'm not so like you know like i'm not so convinced of all this so you know Now, let me ask you this though, Jacob.
	Would you pursue, let's say that you came to the conclusion in three minutes.
	No, let's give you four. No, let's say you came to the conclusion relatively soon that there was no God.
	Would you still find the values of Orthodox Judaism that you treasure at the moment, would you still find them worthwhile ideals to follow?
	Yeah. Okay, so then your commitment to virtue exists to some degree independent of faith in God, right?
	Yeah. Entirely independent of belief in God.
	Well, now that's an interesting question, though, because do you think that those beliefs would have lasted for thousands of years if people didn't believe in God?
	No, probably not. So I don't know that the values can exist completely, even if you have complete atheism.
	Is my belief contingent on them?
	No, no, I understand. But I just wanted to point out that if the values were only transmitted because of religious faith, then even if you don't have religious faith, there's still religious faith involved in them even being there for you to admire.
	Yeah, I misunderstood. Yeah, you're right.
	Okay, okay. Now, the challenge here, if you can...
	Be a good man without believing in God, then it resolves some of the problems, right?
	In terms of this doubts.
	Because if you accept or believe that there is no God, Then that part can be put to one side.
	You can still, of course, continue to pursue the values that you find admirable, but then the challenge becomes the isolation, if I understand this correctly, Jacob, the isolation of not believing in an environment of believers.
	Yeah, and being disingenuous.
	Sure. On the one hand, I feel like the community and the Not the beliefs, because I don't particularly want to lie to my children, but raising children like this and the values and whatever.
	I would like to stay here, but if I go publicizing my actual true feelings, even my true doubts, It won't bear well for my children in this community.
	Right. Now, this community, though, did accept your grandfather, right?
	To some degree? No, not really.
	Oh, really? No. I mean, he was in a pretty secular community.
	He wasn't in an orthodox community.
	Okay, okay. Now, how far orthodox are we talking about here?
	It's a bit of a spread, as you know.
	Yeah, yeah. So basically, since I was 14, I was sent to a school where I studied Talmud for like eight hours a day.
	Right. I mean, I'm not as extreme as that, but, you know, I could quote most of Talmud, you know, By heart, I remember most of it.
	All the Bible, you know.
	Right. So, a fairly committed community, I guess.
	And is this what's happening with your kids to some degree as well?
	Yeah. You know, my kid, my seven-year-old, knows all of Genesis and Exodus pretty well, almost by heart.
	You had talked about your circling planet rabbi.
	Can you just give me a bit more details on that?
	So in these schools, they obviously push the more gifted kids to go to become rabbis.
	So it's kind of like if you're being pushed in that way along there, so it's very hard to, you know, not to...
	But also, I liked the studying, I liked the textual analysis.
	I always thought it was interesting and different.
	I find studying Talmud to be very deep.
	I come from a lineage of rabbis.
	And so how far along that process did you get?
	So I was ordained as rabbi.
	And did you practice for some time?
	So no, so I was studying to become a judge on a, I don't know if you, how well you want me, how far you want me to get in the weeds here, but on a bait den, you know?
	Oh, feel free to weed me.
	I'm always curious. Go ahead.
	So basically, so...
	Between Jews and non-Jews, so we go to civil court, but between Jews, so the Talmud has a very elaborate and civil law that, you know, constantly has to be updated, and there's like a whole, and, you know,
	so basically between Orthodox Jews, a lot of times they go to a Orthodox Jewish court where, you know, civil matters of And also divorces, so like, you know, studying how to, you know, in Judaism, so the divorce into a certain document, there's lots of laws.
	We have, you know, I have like 12 bookcases of Jewish law books and things in my house, you know, like, so...
	Yeah, I mean, I was studying to be a judge on a Jewish court.
	You're giving me past tense.
	What happened with that process?
	Well, with this crisis of faith, I decided that it would be disingenuous for me to continue because There's nothing worse in Judaism than somebody who does God's work disingenuously.
	So if you are doing something that is faith-based, but you're lacking faith, that is really bad, right?
	Yeah, and I felt like if I'm going to continue living like this, I don't know.
	I don't want to come down on it too hard.
	But I'm saying, I've got to continue living like this.
	I don't want to make my faith become the main pillar of my life.
	I felt like that was just too much of me being a liar.
	Yes. No, I mean, I can completely understand that.
	If the belief energy has gone out of the transaction, it's tough to prop up, right?
	It's like that tent that's falling and you're just running out of poles, right?
	Now, your wife is a strong believer, and at least to your knowledge, she's not had these sort of doubts?
	Yes. Yeah, pretty much.
	Right. What do you think would be your ideal solution for this, Jacob, if you could, you know, wave the wand, so to speak?
	Well, the ideal solution, I mean, like, I don't know, like, this is mainly why, you know, I wanted to call in, because I don't really know.
	Because on the one hand, like, it would be much You know, it would be much more convenient if I just believed, right?
	Right. But, and like, you know, like, I hate to like, you know, if I would just, you know, come and say, you know, I decided to declare myself agnostic to everyone.
	Like, it would just disappoint everyone.
	It would mess up my, you know, it would like...
	Make a lot of disharmony in my house.
	Like, but, you know, I've discussed it with my wife a bit, but, you know...
	Sorry, that last bit, I just misheard that.
	Could you say that again? After disharmony in your house?
	So I've discussed this. Yeah, so it would make a lot of disharmony.
	Like, I've discussed it with my wife a bit.
	But, like, yeah, it's really like, you know, if this is...
	I mean, also, you know, she married me like I was considered a star, you know.
	You're switching things up just a little bit here, right?
	As far as what your wife got into, the deal with, right?
	Yeah, I feel bad.
	Like, it's kind of not fair.
	Yeah, yeah. No, I understand.
	I understand. So...
	I mean, a couple of questions are popping into my head, which may be of various degrees of utility, Jacob, so let me know.
	So, how much flexibility are you allowed?
	I mean, obviously you're allowed to have doubts, because it would be crazy not to.
	To go through life with no doubts about something that you can't prove that you've never directly experienced.
	I mean, nobody could go through that.
	Jesus himself had doubts, right?
	Yeah, well, you know, we're not so keen on him, but, you know.
	I think I remember that.
	But... How much latitude are you allowed in terms of having doubts?
	Is it completely taboo to talk about it at all?
	Is there an area or an arena or somebody that you can talk to about this where it's like, well, yeah, we all wrestle with this and, you know, here's my solution or here's how I work with it.
	I mean, are you allowed any latitude for doubts?
	Can you express them? How does that work?
	I mean, I could talk to my father about it.
	You know, he's... He's my father, so he has to put up with me.
	With my wife, I could talk about it.
	like she understands, it's just very painful to her, so I choose not to.
	And yeah, like people just don't like to hear about people's doubts, even though, I don't know, I imagine that I'm not the only one who has them, even in this community, but, Well, what would be the fallout with your kids, though?
	Right, so let's say you say, I have enough doubts.
	I have enough doubts that, and I guess people must have some idea if you have withdrawn from the pursuit of the judgeship and so on, but if you say, I have doubts to such a degree...
	Sorry, go ahead. I mean, I had a good...
	You know, I had a good excuse that I decided that, you know, because it did involve being a student until you're like 35.
	So I just took a job as a programmer, which, you know, is...
	Okay. Okay, got it.
	Got it. Okay, so people don't know that that came about partly as a spiritual crisis symptom, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, okay.
	Yeah. So...
	With your kids, if you came out agnostic or atheist or in some continuum along like that, would your kids say, well, you know, why are you putting me in hot pursuit of something you found so wanting?
	I mean, I'd imagine that...
	I mean, I'd imagine they would.
	Right. And what would your response to that be?
	Um... That I feel that even though I have strong doubts, but I feel that the education and the values that they'll get is worth the constriction.
	And because I sort of had a...
	I sort of...
	Don't feel that changing their...
	I mean, I guess this is not good for...
	This won't be a good answer for them.
	I just don't feel like changing their path so dramatically will be good for their development.
	Right. Yeah, I mean, they'll have some pushback.
	I can pretty much guarantee you on that.
	Yeah, I mean, like, you know, they'll be like, I don't want to wake up at 7 in the morning to go to prayers.
	Right, right. With your wife, I mean, the big challenge, and you say it's a big change in the deal, but you are the man who is wrestling with faith, and do you think if your wife had to choose, I'm not saying she does, but if she did have to choose, would she reject the man who rejected the faith, or would she still love the man who rejected the faith?
	I mean, I'd like to believe that she'd choose me.
	But, you know, people are biased in that, you know.
	Yeah.
	When you have talked to her about your own doubts, what has her counsel been?
	So she wants to be supportive, but it's very hard for her.
	And She generally just ends up crying, and that I stop.
	Right. Do you know of anyone else in the community, or do you suspect of anyone else in your community, Jacob, who is having similar deaths?
	Yeah, I mean, some of them I caused, but...
	Yeah, I know. I have another friend who became a rabbi, and he is a total atheist, but I don't really respect that decision, though.
	So, is he a secret atheist?
	Yeah. You know, and I've, not in the Jewish community, but in the Christian community, I've certainly talked to people, actually met and chatted with people in great depth who run It is a...
	It is a very, very difficult position.
	It is one of the great challenges that can occur in life.
	And it can go the other way, too.
	I mean, you could start out as an atheist, and you could start out as a communist, and you could start out as just about anything.
	And then you could, through better information, better arguments, or whatever it is, maybe a giant blow to the head, I don't know, you could end up in some situation where...
	The transition of who you were and what you believe to where you are now is a great challenge to your relationships.
	Because, I mean, your relationship was predicated on your piety, your faith, and, you know, I would assume, not inconsiderably, your high status within the community as a gifted man who was, well...
	On the move, doing great things, right?
	So these are very big changes for people to navigate, for sure.
	And, I mean, when I met my wife, I was an unemployed writer, and then I, because I was, I'd finished my software entrepreneurial gig for a while, I was taking some time off to write books.
	And then I was back in the software field, and then I was a podcaster.
	I mean, there's been a lot of transitions and changes for her, but those are mostly professional rather than, you know, I'm still similar to, oh, I guess there have been some changes, of course, right, over the 15 years that we've known each other, but it is a big challenge.
	And it comes down to, do people love the question or do they love the answer?
	This sounds simplistic, but I think that there's some real truth in it.
	You know, in science, they love the question.
	In religion, they tend to love the answer.
	In philosophy, we love the question.
	In dogmatism, they love the answer.
	Well, there's actually an interest, it will be reminding me of the Talmud has that question and it says, what's better, the person who asks the question or the person who says the answer?
	Yeah. The Talmud says it's unresolved.
	Well, that's a bit fancity to me.
	No, because questions without answers are just annoying as hell.
	But answers without questions are dogmatic and limiting.
	So the question is, to me...
	Does your community love you for subservience to an ethic?
	In other words, for not asking questions.
	Or does your community love you for the mind that you have and its capacity to ask questions?
	Now, I don't know the answer to that.
	I have my suspicions, but you know your community obviously much better than I do, infinitely better than I do.
	But... If you are ruthlessly honest within your community, I mean, aren't you going to face significant risks of ostracism, like you just cut out of the family portraits, so to speak? Not really a risk.
	It's pretty much a sure deal.
	Right. Right.
	So their loyalty is to the ideas within you rather than your process of thinking and being as a man, right?
	I don't know about that. I mean, part of it is the...
	I mean, listen, I think my immediate family will stay by me.
	But I mean, I think that this community, you know, like, they're willing to suspend whatever they feel.
	It could be that they really would appreciate it deep down and whatever.
	But, you know, like, there's this sense that, you know...
	We need, this is what we need to do to survive, is to drown out people who have these, I mean, I don't want to paint them worse than they are, but this is what I sense, is that, you know,
	like, there's, I mean, it could be also that, you know, I was in a, you know, my family, I guess, was I was, you know, I'm somewhat less than what I grew up, but I mean, my family is very religious.
	Could be that, you know, I probably could shift into a slightly more shades of gray Orthodox community, which I've been trying to do.
	But, yeah, it's a lot of it is even if they even if they really like, yeah, deep down And they'll tell you privately, yeah, we all have doubts, but if you're talking about it and making a big deal, you're going to destroy it.
	Destroy it, you mean the community?
	Yeah, there's impressionable people who will just say, oh, this rabbi says it's garbage.
	Which I would never say.
	No, no, quite the opposite.
	I mean, it's the underpinnings or the justification rather than the values themselves that you have an issue with.
	Yeah. Right.
	So, the question of ostracism is a powerful one because it comes down to the essence, and this is true for many groups, which is, okay, well, what does it mean to be Jewish?
	Right. Is it a set of beliefs?
	Okay, well then, you know, if you think of Ayn Rand or if you know anything about objectivism, then you say, okay, well, you can just follow Ayn Rand.
	You can learn the arguments. You can accept.
	And lo and behold, you're an objectivist, right?
	And then you can say, well, I've got some questions or some issues or some problems with it.
	I'm going in another direction.
	I'm no longer an objectivist.
	You can kind of go in and go out of that like a public park, right?
	Yeah. And so I can understand the concerns of the community saying, okay, well, if it's just a set of beliefs, then anyone can adopt these beliefs and they can say, okay, now I'm Jewish.
	And that does not keep the exclusivity, which, again, I sort of understand as well, genetics and the history and all of that, I can understand that as well.
	So the reduction of religion to a set of beliefs is It's a big challenge.
	I can become a Platonist if I want to accept Plato's ideas.
	I can say, oh, I'm a Neoplatonist or whatever.
	I can have that label.
	But it takes away the in-group preference, the exclusivity to some degree.
	If it is a set of beliefs that people can step into and step out of, like they're changing clothes, if that makes any sense.
	Which doesn't help you. I just want to point that out.
	Yeah, I get it.
	For me, I'm big on the philosophy, right?
	So for me, I'm big on the philosophy.
	So if you want...
	To bring philosophy into a religious community, I think that's great.
	I know it's not easy, and it may, of course, as you say, ostracism is a certainty, right?
	At least for some, and maybe for most, maybe for all, outside of your immediate family.
	And it is a wrenching process for your immediate family as well.
	Very, very difficult process.
	I'm a big one for philosophy, though the sky's full.
	You stand with reason, you stand with evidence, You ask the questions with the methodology of philosophy, though the skies fall.
	Now, my own experience has been, of course, that the pursuit of philosophy makes friends and makes enemies.
	There's almost nobody who's indifferent.
	There's just almost nobody who's indifferent.
	The revolution in my own personal life was...
	There's no relationship in the before and after picture for me for philosophy.
	It's like a... I don't know, I was going to say it's like a meteor hitting a town, but that just sounds like pure destruction, so it's not a very good way of phrasing it.
	But there's nobody left in my truly pre-philosophical life who's here now.
	Like, nobody. It's like this giant neutron bomb of history has gone off, and I have great friends, great companions, a great wife, a great life...
	But it was a transition in which there's nobody left from before.
	What was before? Maybe I'm not familiar.
	Oh, I mean, just in my various incarnations and transitions, you know, I mean, in terms of my belief systems, when I really began to practice philosophy, In an unapologetic and truly consistent manner.
	In other words, they weren't just ideas that I was arguing about, but they were values that I was manifesting and choosing relationships based upon value compatibility.
	That's what I mean when I took it out of the books and out of the clouds and put it into my life as a living, breathing phenomenon about how I'm going to make decisions in my personal life, in my professional life.
	Once I stopped compromising, once I stopped backing down, once I stopped diluting everything, I want to get along with people.
	I want to be liked. And I'm not putting it like, oh, I just want to be popular.
	I know it's deeper than that, more powerful than that.
	But once I was like, I can't subjugate myself.
	To that which I cannot accept.
	I can't subjugate myself to that which I cannot reason through anymore.
	Like, I can't do it. And for me, it wasn't like, oh, it's a big abstract integrity.
	Like, for me, Jacob, I just stopped sleeping.
	Things had gotten in my point, compromises had happened in my life to the point where I've never, I mean, I've been a bit of a light sleep in my whole life, but it was just like, boom, it's off.
	Can't sleep. Which went on for like, I don't know, 18 months.
	It's just some godforsaken thing.
	And I'm not, you know, some people like, I don't know, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, like, yeah, I got 20 minutes catnap on the plane.
	I'm fresh as a daisy. For me, if I don't get my seven hours, I'm like, bald-headed zombie boy.
	I mean, it's not a fun environment for me at all.
	And so, sorry, just let me finish up.
	And then, so this transition for me of just saying, okay, well, At some level, at a deep physical level, at a somatic level, the compromises are unsustainable for me.
	And that was through a process of therapy, it was a process of journaling, it was a process of extraordinary levels of self-castigation for me in how dare you have these values and not live them.
	How dare you claim to be interested in philosophy?
	How dare you claim to be philosophical?
	And not embody these values in your life.
	It was a very harsh process for me.
	And it was very much a philosophical, tough love mentoring situation from some part of my brain that I didn't even know existed until it reared up and smacked over my house of cards and took control.
	And so for me, that process was worth it, although I did not always feel so at the time.
	And I just want to point out that that ostracism occurs With just about everyone I know who has truly began to think for themselves, to reason from first principles, to become philosophical.
	That process is...
	There's no exception that I know of.
	Now, that hasn't been said.
	The challenge, of course, is you've got a wife, you've got kids, you've got a community that is very tight.
	And I could move from a historical community, an accidental community, to a philosophical community...
	Without as much difficulty as I think you might have in transitioning, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I think that makes sense.
	So the only advice that I would give, and this is a difficult situation, as you know, you're a smart man, there's no easy answers to this.
	I'll tell you what I did, which worked for me.
	I did it as long as I humanly could.
	I complied.
	I conformed.
	I spoke to people where I felt it was safe and appropriate to do so.
	I did it as long as I could.
	I really did it as long as I could.
	And maybe, for you, that might be forever.
	Or maybe it might be tomorrow.
	That's something that is hard to predict.
	Because, as you know, there are things—well, I shouldn't say, as you know, that's presumptuous—but there are things that move within us that are beyond our vision and beyond our sight.
	There is integrity that moves beneath our vision.
	There are titanic forces that work in the unconscious that surprise us with the depth and power.
	Of our propulsion or our being blocked.
	I don't believe in this literal collective unconscious that Jung talks about and so on, but I really do understand the power of the religious or spiritual experience where people say that they have been inhabited by the light of God.
	It has changed their life, put them on a new course, and has given them strength to achieve things they never imagined they would be capable of.
	Because certainly for me, That was the case.
	That something reared up in me that deepened me and strengthened me and gave me a support that I could only couch in my own mind in terms of the religious, although as an atheist I was not able to project it into the universe that way.
	If you try to leave, like let's say you are honest about everything that's going on, Let's say that you are ostracized and you go through terrible personal trials and so on.
	I think that that has the capacity to destroy people if they have still doubt within them.
	I think that you can take a new path when you have confronted and resolved doubt.
	And confronting and resolved doubt, in my experience, is to do with...
	Staying in the situation until you can't.
	Now, once you can't, then you have the strength for whatever comes next.
	But if you leave early, if you leave at all, but if you leave early and it's because you think you should or it's a better thing to do or it's intellectual, if you don't have the full alignment of your entire being, I think that's a dangerous situation to be in psychologically and emotionally.
	I mean, we're tribal animals.
	To break from any particular tribe is very hard.
	And my experience has been, Jacob, that you stay with it as long as you can.
	You stay in touch with your own feelings.
	You talk to whoever you can.
	And if it turns out that you can bear it, at least while your children are young, there's some pluses in that.
	If it turns out...
	That you can't. If you have the full, I mean, as I did, as other people I've talked to, if you get the full physical revolt, like, I can't do it.
	I can't do it.
	Then if you make a transition out of that mindset, you have the whole body integrity that gives you the strength to make that transition without succumbing to any self-destructive impulses.
	I hope that's not too abstract, but that's what I was thinking about when I was thinking about this question today.
	I'll give you one other analogy.
	Thank you.
	If you're at the top of a burning building, you don't jump too soon, right?
	You don't jump too soon.
	In fact, you hope you don't have to jump at all.
	You hope the firefighters come in, kick down doors, spray that foggy crap all over everything, and then they just walk you down through the charred staircase.
	You hope you don't have to jump at all.
	You certainly don't want to jump too late, because then you're on fire.
	You want to jump at the right time, and that's when you have to.
	When you can't stay in the burning building anymore.
	Now maybe, if this is a burning building for you, maybe you can find a way to put the fire out.
	Maybe there's a way you can adjust to things so that you can maintain what you have and feel also a sense that you can continue to explore questions within your own mind.
	Maybe the fire grows to the point where you do end up having to jump.
	But let's say you jump and you break both your legs and you look back up and you say, well, that really hurts, but it was still better than staying.
	But if you jump too soon, like let's say you jump and you break both your legs and then the fire just gets put out five minutes later, you're like, damn!
	That was a terrible time to jump, you know?
	Because the key thing is if you jump without certainty, the potential for regret, for self-recrimination and emotional unavailability to your family is extraordinarily high, I think.
	Because you're consumed then not with doubt that is existential or metaphysical with regards to God, but doubt as to whether you may have harmed your family, or doubt as to whether or not your children will still respect you, or doubt as to whether you've made a terrible decision, and that renders you unable to be a leader and emotionally available within your family, I think. So for me, it was stay as long as you can, be as open as you can to adapting to the environment, and see how you feel.
	Okay. I think that's probably good advice.
	Well, tell me, I mean, you are opaque emotionally to me, Jacob.
	Like, I don't know where your heart is in all of this.
	So, when I'm talking about this kind of stuff, does it stir your feelings at all?
	I mean, how do you...
	I'm, you know...
	Like, I'll tell you, like...
	I feel like if it was a strong belief, I feel like it would be different for me.
	Let's say I decided to become a Buddhist.
	That's the way to go.
	Maybe I would have some sort of fervor and strong emotional I just don't want to lie to myself or other people.
	I don't have a strong...
	I just have doubts.
	I don't have anything that's replacing them.
	So the only thing that's really...
	That's really, you know, keeping me from just letting sleep, like, you know, just letting, living things alone is just like this, you know, this, this, you know, like, I just don't, you know, I don't want to have to,
	you know, lie to my kids, you know, be like, you know, misrepresent what I feel and, you know, tell people things that I don't necessarily think are true, you know, like, that's what, like, you know, but I remember anything to replace it with that's like, you know, I'm not going anywhere better.
	Right. Maybe you are, though.
	If the values in Judaism that you find admirable, do you think as a whole...
	And look, I know the relationship between Jews and non-Jews is complicated sometimes, to put it mildly.
	But do you think that if there was a way that you could spread some of the good values that you find in Judaism to the world as a whole, do you think that that would make the world a better place?
	Yeah, I just don't think, you know, that's not pretentious enough.
	Maybe I just don't feel like I'm able to do that.
	Why not?
	I feel like...
	I mean, even when I was studying to be a rabbi, I wasn't studying to be a preacher, studying to be a judge.
	I feel like I want to spread and inculcate good values to people around me, to my kids and to To help people around me,
	but like, I don't know, like, I feel like, you know, you know, getting up and trying to change the way people view the world is just not something I want to do so much.
	Do you think, oh, let me ask you this.
	Does the situation that you're in now, Jacob, does it remind you or does it have any emotional resonance with anything that's happened in the past in terms of, like, impossible situations or a feeling of needing to falsify your own existence in order to survive socially?
	Well, I mean, listen, to be honest, I, as a teenager, I had a lot of criticisms about Orthodox Jewry that got me actually expelled from one school.
	Like, you know, I've had, I've been, I have this need to, you know, obviously when I was younger, I feel I had this need to speak out and let my opinions be heard, but then I sort of maybe was trained to shut up, Yeah.
	Anything before that?
	Yeah, I've been in...
	What do you mean?
	Well, just in terms of being in impossible situations or feeling this need for a false self to navigate things environmentally.
	And what happened as a teenager is very important and powerful, but do you think there was anything that may have occurred?
	As a child, oh yeah.
	So my father...
	We moved, like, every, like, two years when I was a kid.
	You know, my father, he, you know, he was, at one point he worked for, you know, he was, he bought a company in Florida and then he worked for a baiting company and then he, so, and then he went to Washington and he was, he worked under H.W. Bush and then, you know, so we basically moved, like, Every, like, two years or so.
	My whole life, as a kid, I was going to these close-knit communities and sort of had a...
	At some point, maybe, you know, you learn to have a certain persona and fit in and whatever.
	It could be that. It has something to do with it.
	I don't feel like there's anything super impossible situations.
	I did learn to lay low and figure out the social landscape before opening my mouth at a pretty young age, but I don't know if there's any serious Time where I felt like I was in a just impossible, not that I can remember. Right, right.
	I mean, did you...
	How did you feel about the moves?
	I mean, that is a lot of moving.
	Yeah, so...
	I don't know.
	I feel like I didn't know anything else.
	So... And...
	There was always a really good reason for us to move.
	It always seemed like...
	I remember when I was 12, my father worked.
	He's an economist by trade, so he worked for H.W. Bush.
	And then we all thought we were going to stay in...
	We all started, we were going to stay in there for the second term, but H.W. Bush didn't have a second term.
	So at that point, my father was out of a job, so he decided, oh, we'll move to Israel.
	And we stayed there for a pretty long time until I was 12.
	And then when we moved from there, I remember that was very...
	That was, I think, the last time I ever, except for when my grandfather died, I think that was the last time I ever cried.
	But yeah, you know, it was...
	I mean, I moved a lot, but I never, you know...
	I don't think it...
	I mean, I think it had some social effects on my...
	Also, if you live in the same community, I feel like a lot of people...
	I saw a lot of different types of...
	You start to realize, oh, not everything is so black and white, because I was in this community where everyone did it like this, and now they're doing it like that.
	In Judaism, there's all these...
	A lot of times, you'll have these close-knit communities where they think that the way they do things is the only way it's ever been done.
	Start to notice if you've moved around a little bit and you've lived in a couple of places by the time you're 12 that it's just not so, but I don't know.
	Yeah, the orthodoxy of that diversity can be kind of opposite poles pulling you, right?
	Yeah, so like I had a sister who, for instance, in Israel we were in a much less intense religious community than in America.
	In Israel, generally, like, you know, people feel like they're in Israel, so there's not so much of a ghetto, you know, like, we need to protect our children from the street mentality.
	Sure. That makes sense.
	That makes sense. So, like, yeah, so my sister, I remember, was, like, she, when we moved from Israel, like, I think she was, like, 14 at the time, and she just, like, wasn't happy with the suddenly moving to the And the new standards of the community in America, she just didn't...
	But it's harder for girls than for boys, because, you know, for boys, like, as long as you're studying Talmud, they're pretty happy with you.
	Right. Right.
	Right. Well, first of all, I really sympathize.
	And admire.
	There is an easy path of conformity that is available to you, and it's not happening for you.
	And I'm a very big one on, you know, think for yourself and reason though the skies fall.
	Now, I say that in the full position that my wife, my friends, my community, they have to deal with new answers, but they don't have to deal with a new methodology.
	I mean, I'm like a scientist coming up with new conjectures.
	I'm not like a guy who's gone from priest to scientist or vice versa.
	So I'm a big one for reason though the skies fall, but I mean, I fully understand that it's a different situation for me as it is.
	So, again, I sort of just reiterate that if there's anyone you can talk to, your sister, your father, people you can talk to about what's going on for you, you may be surprised.
	You may be surprised at how frank you can be and how far you can go with that.
	But, yeah, definitely I'm not a big one for burning bridges until you have some place to go or some certainty to get you there.
	And I don't know for sure, because again, emotionally, to me, you're somewhat opaque, Jacob, but I don't get the sense, and obviously, you know, don't let anyone tell you what your own emotional experience is, but I don't get the sense that you have, you know, plagued with serious doubt is one place to be, Am certain that something is false is another place to be.
	And without that certainty, I wouldn't make any big decisions at the moment, but I would continue to explore.
	And continue to think for yourself, and again, communicate with whoever you can.
	But... These kinds of changes, in my experience, you can't just will them.
	You have to be in alignment with yourself.
	You have to have a more deep emotional certainty, because intellect alone, I don't think will give you the strength to either stay or to go, whatever happens.
	Thanks. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I... I'm glad I spoke to you about it.
	Is there anything else you want?
	I'm not sure if there's anything else you want to add or not.
	I have to let you tell me that.
	No, I think that's good.
	I think that, you know, that, you know...
	I, you know, I called to, you know, because I've seen you and I've seen that you're, you know, someone of a deep thinker and a level-headed person, you know, I wouldn't call like Sam Harris about this or anything, you know? Just remember speaking to Biskudi here.
	I actually do sympathize with the tinnitus.
	So, okay. You know, stay in touch if you want.
	I certainly would be happy to chat again.
	But, and I, listen, I appreciate, you know, it's a very, very sensitive, and I appreciate the honor of having the conversation.
	That's a sensitive issue to deal with.
	The entanglements are complex.
	The benefits from the community are complex.
	But the challenge to individuality is a big problem.
	And listen, this is a big, deep human experience.
	We all have things that we disagree with in our social or our political environment.
	We have to find ways to navigate these things.
	We have to have integrity within the bounds of the rules and the societies in which we live.
	We can't live purely individualistically because we live in a society which has laws and rules and relationships and complexities and so on.
	So I really do.
	I do sympathize. I admire the wrestling.
	This is where the progress of mankind as a whole comes along.
	If everyone was certain, we'd still be living in caves.
	So I appreciate that.
	And I wish you the very best of luck.
	Go have some conversations with people and keep thinking, keep questioning.
	And I know...
	That you will get to a place of peace with the decision one way or another, which doesn't always mean ease, but thanks so much for your time, Jacob.
	I appreciate it. And let's move on to the next caller.
	All right, up next we have Michael.
	Michael wrote in and said, I'm a 25-year-old Christian male who had temporarily turned to atheism three months ago and then a week later returned to my faith.
	How can an atheistic worldview of what is moral lead to a coherent set of rules that has any authority without being totalitarian?
	If it does not, then how does the atheist not rationally accept nihilism?
	If the former and the latter cannot be reconciled, then why would an atheist be opposed to believing in an absolute set of morals that come from a supernatural god?
	That's from Michael. Michael, how are you doing tonight?
	Hey, Stephan. How are you doing? I'm well.
	I'm well. Seven days.
	Seven days dipping yourself into the atheist acid bath.
	What was that like?
	And what happened? Was it like day seven?
	I mean, God created the world and you went back to the faith.
	I mean, what happened in that dip?
	Honestly, it was listening to Jordan Peterson's YouTube videos.
	For some reason, listening to him led me towards the belief that God does exist.
	And I soon started...
	Exploring that more and more, and I came to the conclusion that it's the Christian God that is the real one.
	So, yeah, that's basically how it was like.
	And I realized, too, that atheism sort of comes about when you worship...
	The rational and empirical mindset that when you worship your brain and everything that exists in the rational world, that's how you become an atheist.
	It's because you say, I can't see God with my head in that sense.
	And I've realized that's what brings about atheism.
	I do believe that. Well, yeah, I mean, and it has become increasingly difficult to separate atheism from nihilism.
	Yeah. And I wish it wasn't.
	You know, I was just this happy, dippy little atheist who came out of the objectivist tradition wherein you get a very strong set of morals and ethics with the absence of religion.
	Now, I believe that objectivist ethics are incomplete, which is why I worked on universally preferable behavior, the free book at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	But I came out, like, I did not have a void of virtue that came out of...
	I didn't stand on this bridge of value and meaning and depth and then when I No longer believed in God.
	I lost the whole damn bridge and just fell.
	And I think there is a lot of atheism that feels like you're chewing through the chains of historical conservatism and now you get to wander the jungles and the plains of mere evolutionary dopamine hunting.
	And there is not much meaning in that.
	And again, it is very hard to find atheists who are for smaller government.
	Yeah. And I... I guess I don't see how it's possible to not be nihilistic if you are atheist, because I don't know where you would get any sense of morality besides just the common sense that you have.
	I mean, because that's what you appeal to, correct?
	Common sense. That is, to me, one of the great false advertising slogans in human history, and I'm not blaming you for this, Michael, because it's common.
	It's common coinage, but, you know, common sense.
	My God, if sense was common, we wouldn't need philosophy.
	I don't know. To me, common sense is like saying, oh yeah, everyone's going to make really wise food and exercise decisions just by nature of being alive.
	Common sense is so, so common.
	So common. Common sense.
	We need a big, giant, redistributionist, violent, coercive welfare state in order to have charity and niceness within society.
	Common sense. Oh, yeah.
	No, common sense. I don't know.
	Common diamonds. Well, I guess they are in a diamond shop, but they're certainly not in the world as a whole.
	Sorry for that tiny side rant, but please go ahead.
	I guess what is it that drives you then?
	Like, what is your aim then in all of this?
	Why do you think that the liberals are wrong?
	And why do you think that certain...
	Yeah, why do you have a right and a wrong, I guess?
	Because you have some aim, I assume, right?
	And that comes from that common sense mentality of like, this is the right thing to do.
	I know this works. This is correct.
	But that's something outside of rationalism.
	That's something outside of what we can measure.
	Correct? Is that not true?
	Well, it depends what you mean by aim.
	And I hate to be Bill Clinton's depends what the word is means.
	But it depends what you mean by aim.
	So if by aim, do you mean sort of my personal aim as a thinker or the methodology of how I decide on and produce what it is that I talk about?
	Or do you mean a larger aim in terms of attempting to have an objective, rational set of ethics without Without divine sanction or enforcement, necessary enforcement by the state?
	Do you mean sort of the aim philosophically or more personally?
	Well, I think they're the same, right?
	I mean, what you...
	I don't know, like the reason why you don't want to abuse your daughter, for instance, like the fact that you're defensive of her and you love her, that comes from like some innate...
	No knowledge that that's wrong to do that.
	Oh God, you innate knowledge.
	Are you kidding me? The vast majority of parents across this world beat their children savagely.
	But they're all wrong for doing that, correct?
	They're evil, yeah. It's an evil action and it's an evil thing to do.
	Yeah. And you know that's evil, right?
	Absolutely. Yeah, but where does that come from?
	And I'm not saying this is like...
	It comes from the great enemy of philosophy, which is hypocrisy.
	It comes from, for me, like, okay, I've got all the intellectual arguments.
	They're in my books.
	Let me tell you some of these slightly less intellectual arguments, Michael.
	I'm afraid you hit a gusher here, so get comfy.
	Okay. All right.
	Because I loathe hypocrisy.
	Yeah. I find that values and virtue...
	Are such treasures in the human mind that people who use it, people who use moral statements in order to merely gain resources in a shitty Darwinian context, guilt people into giving them money.
	Like the people who publicized this kid who died on the beach in Turkey in order to crash waves after waves of third world economic migrants into Europe.
	Well, when the European kids, the white kids, get driven over, you can't show their bodies.
	This kind of manipulation that occurs.
	Like, there's this whole rant on Roy Moore and the left and their complete indifference to the suffering of women around the world.
	We really want to keep women safe, just like they do in Sweden, where, what is it, sexual crimes went up 30% year over year?
	Of course. In Port Africa, you get Africa.
	It's not that complicated. So, I loathe the hypocrisy.
	And I'll tell you, this is a very personal moment that was incandescent in the forging of my commitment to morality.
	So, my whole life when I was a kid, my mother beat me and hit me and did terrible, violent things.
	Yeah. When I got bigger, at one point, she was rushing at me and...
	I was standing, like it was the front doorway, and I was standing a little bit of ways in, and there was a cupboard that opened while you put your coats.
	You know, you come in, and it wasn't a sliding door.
	I remember this very clearly.
	It was a door that opened, and it swung out.
	And she got angry at me about something, and it doesn't matter what, and I never ever thought that I brought it on myself.
	I mean, I recognized that there were certain things that I could do that would be more or less dangerous, but I never ever thought I was hit because I was bad.
	I mean, this is never something that didn't even cross my mind.
	It's nothing I had to talk myself out of.
	It's just a fact. Oh, so was it like that your mom would just punish you because she was angry then with you?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, there was no, I mean, she would say it was because of X, Y, and Z, but I mean, it was just, that was never believable, so.
	But it was just really, yeah, that's wrong, for sure.
	So, what, are you saying that there's some justification for hitting children?
	No, no, let's get to that later. Okay, let's get to that later.
	You know, it's that old thing from, from the, was it the godfather?
	It's like, why haven't you hit your wife?
	Well, she's never, she's never deserved it.
	It's like, that's not really a great answer.
	So, so she was, I was about, I don't know, maybe 12 or 13.
	I was not the biggest kid.
	I'd become like, I don't know, almost six foot tall, 195, and, you know, fairly well built and all of that, which I work at quite a lot.
	But anyway. Oh, you're six feet tall?
	I did not know that. Just under?
	You know, it's like if it's the morning and I'm standing tall, then it's six feet.
	And then, you know, if I get progressively more question murky over the course of the day.
	So anyway, I was about maybe 13 years old, 12 or 13 years old.
	And my mother was rushing at me to hit me with her hands raised.
	And I didn't really think about it.
	I guess it was just the size disparity was beginning to change.
	And I grabbed the door and I swung it open to block her path.
	Something I never would have done as a child because you're helpless and you can't save yourself.
	Yeah, yeah. And it hit her in the wrist.
	Now, it wasn't like a big hit.
	It didn't leave a mark or anything like that.
	It was just a self, like, you know, throw something in the path of this crazy person who's charging at you.
	And my mom, oh my God, it was like the worst thing in the world conceivable that I might have banged her wrist a tiny bit with a door.
	Like, I was like a terrible human being for laying a hand or an object on a family member in anger.
	Welcome to soft defense.
	And I tell you, man, holy, holy.
	That was a very powerful moment for me.
	And I remember it so vividly.
	It's ridiculous. Like, I remember what time of day it was.
	I remember whether it was cloudy or sunny.
	I remember what was on the kitchen stove.
	Like, I remember. I remember the color pattern, the coats in the hallway.
	I remembered it all.
	Yeah. And she would not shut up about how terrible it was that I basically had had the nerve to defend myself against the beating.
	Now... I hate that.
	I hate that hypocrisy.
	And the reason why I'm certain that it's evil is that my mother says that it's evil.
	I mean, I've got all the arguments.
	Don't get me wrong. This is not a syllogism here.
	I'm just telling you emotionally because I've already done the intellectual arguments.
	I'm just giving it to sort of straight man-to-man what happened for me emotionally.
	My mother completely convinced me in that moment that hitting was wrong.
	Because that's what she said.
	Marx completely convinced me that exploitation was wrong, which is why when he banged his maid and threw it out on the street and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	I mean, he's an evil guy.
	Can I interrupt real quick? I do have a question.
	Are you saying that you were convinced that evil or that hitting was wrong because your mother said it was?
	When she heard her wrist trying to hit you, and you opened the door.
	She gave me a universal argument about how wrong it was, how unacceptable it was.
	And it wasn't like, it was wrong because...
	Why? I was her size.
	So, was it wrong because I was bigger?
	Well, she couldn't say, Steph, like, it's wrong to hurt me.
	Because you're bigger.
	Well, she was bigger than me growing up.
	There was no conceivable way that she could express any moral outrage at me for what I did without utterly damning everything that she'd done when I was a child.
	But yeah, the reason why she claims it's wrong, and I'm sorry I'm missing the point, but I'm trying to follow your...
	But it's because she claims it's wrong because it caused her pain, correct?
	Like she did not like the feeling that occurred.
	Yes, but she only hit me because she knew it caused me pain.
	Ah, yes. Okay.
	Right? So if it's bad to cause people pain, then it's bad to hit your child.
	Because you know it causes the child pain.
	That's why you do it. And I'm sorry to...
	One last question. Why do you not think it's conditional, I guess?
	Like... So you viewed that at that point in time as an absolute then?
	As all causing of pain is wrong then?
	No. My mother had no moral arguments.
	But she relied upon the universality of morality to justify her position in the moment.
	I see, okay. She didn't say, I don't like that you're doing to me in self-defense what I initiated against you these dozen years.
	I don't like that you're getting bigger.
	I don't like that the tables have turned.
	And then, wouldn't you know it, she was able to magically switch.
	It was incredible. What a transition.
	What a healing moment.
	She was able to magically switch.
	After that, she didn't hit me again.
	Because she could see in my eyes the scrolling text.
	Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
	Hey, there's a gift for you, everybody.
	Enjoy. Right?
	Because you played the victim from then on out then.
	Yeah, yeah. So she knew that I was not...
	So then she had to switch to verbal and emotional abuse more than physical abuse because the physical abuse wasn't working.
	So... Yeah, because kids get physical abuse.
	Like, that's... That's innate.
	Like, they understand that from the beginning.
	Well, until they get bigger. Yeah, and then exactly.
	Then verbal and emotional abuse is probably the more powerful tactic, I would assume.
	Well, it is if you believe it, right?
	I mean, if somebody says you're bad, it only hurts if you believe it.
	That's true, too, yeah.
	You have to operate in that system for you to cause shame.
	Like, that's that full point.
	Yeah, you have to internalize it.
	You have to internalize it.
	I mean, people think that they're describing me sometimes.
	They say mean things on the internet.
	They're just describing what they see in the mirror.
	They have nothing to do with me.
	That's true. So here's the thing for me.
	Everybody continually talks about morality and everybody continually talks about universality.
	Because without universality, you can't win a moral argument.
	We saw this earlier with the guy who was talking about Ice cream and universality, the guy earlier who was...
	It's not a completely different question from you, but...
	No, it's very similar.
	I was thinking about that, and I was like, I hope I don't screw this question up.
	Yeah, so if a parent says, I like to hit you when I'm frustrated because it makes me feel better and more powerful, you're just going to say, verbally or not, well, you're a complete asshole.
	Yeah. Right? But they don't say that.
	What do they say? Well, they say they're doing it because you're wrong and they're punishing you.
	Because you're bad and they're good for doing it.
	Yeah. Right? People who vote for the left, they don't say, I need a big government because I'm incompetent as fuck.
	I need a big government because I've made stupid decisions with my life.
	I need a big government because...
	I like being able to sell bombs at a billion dollars a piece.
	They don't say any of that stuff.
	They say, well, we need to defend the country and it's kind to help people in need.
	People don't say, well, I got really, really fat and I didn't get off my lazy sofa-bound ass even to get up and change the channel.
	Now I have this handy-dandy remote.
	And I ate like crap, and I didn't exercise, and now I want to put a gun to your head to pay for my healthcare treatment.
	They don't say that. They say, people have a right to healthcare, right?
	The left don't say, or the Democrats in America, they don't say, well, we can't win the argument based on reason and evidence, so we need to import massive numbers of third world people who are going to vote for the left.
	Yeah, for their own self-interest.
	No, they say diversity is a strength.
	And of course it is for them. Oh, yeah.
	That's what they're really appealing to.
	I mean, it's all, oh, oh, now that we switched immigration to visible minorities, the only reason you don't want immigration is because you're a racist, right?
	I mean, come on. Yeah, no, that's what they claim.
	So nobody, nobody can make any arguments without appealing to the universal.
	Right? Yeah, exactly.
	And so since nobody who's in the arena of talking about anything to do with ethics, they're always talking about universals.
	So the idea of saying there's no such thing as universals or universals can't be proven, everybody who steps into the arena is talking about universals.
	Now when you start catching them on their hypocrisies, then they get really angry.
	So when the left says, oh, but Roy Moore may have touched a girl who was 16 or 14 or whatever, and you point out Bill Clinton, Bob Menendez, Epstein, like a whole bunch of other people, that hypocrisy is revealed.
	And so the idea is like, everyone...
	Is continually talking about moral absolutes and moral universals.
	And so the idea that it somehow needs to be magically proven...
	I mean, I did it.
	Universally Preferable Behavior is a great book.
	People should read it. You should absorb it.
	It'll take a couple of reads.
	It took me 20 years. But it's sort of like saying, I need to really, really go out and prove to everyone that you don't need umbrellas when it's sunny.
	Because who, I mean, other than, you know, people who are using parasols or trying to keep the sun off.
	Well, of course you don't need, I mean, nobody has umbrellas out when it's sunny.
	So the idea of people saying, well, you prove to me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that gravity exists.
	Or somebody phones me up on a cell phone and says, I need you to prove to me 150% that cell phone technology works.
	Wouldn't you just look at your phone and say, you realize you're not yelling into a fucking Kleenex box here, right?
	You know you're calling me on a cell phone demanding that I prove to you that cell phone technology works.
	Well, how do you know it's not robotic AI? It's just talking back to you.
	Well, you wouldn't argue with the robot, would you?
	So the fact that they're demanding I do something assumes that I have free will.
	Oh, so it's programmed by someone then.
	At least you could prove it to that point, correct?
	Sorry, that's a big philosophical statement there.
	Well, because you said that you know that you're talking to another human being because you can hear them on the phone, correct?
	Well, yeah. So if you're talking to someone on the phone saying, I request this or I require you to do X, Y, or Z... You can't say the other person doesn't exist.
	You can't say cell phones don't work.
	I mean, you can say anything you want, but it's contradicted by what you're doing.
	The only people who could legitimately ask for proof about universal morality are people who never ever talk about universal morality, and that's precisely no one.
	Everybody talks about universal morality.
	All the time. It's continual in any debate of any substance.
	Free will, universal morality, personal responsibility, right and wrong, good and evil are everywhere.
	All the time. So people who say, well, you've got to prove it to me.
	Doesn't make any sense.
	It's like somebody staring into the bright lights of a theater stage, standing up there on a podium saying, the tears running down their face because the lights are so bright.
	It's like, you proved to me that those lights are on.
	I just, I've never, it's kind of weird to me that, I mean, tell me, I mean, do you have conversations with people who say there's no such thing as right and wrong or truth or falsehood?
	Well, of course, yeah, absolutely.
	And so what they're saying is, it's objectively wrong for you to say that there's any such thing as objective wrongness.
	But that's an objective statement itself.
	I mean, like to say that everything is subjective, that's an objective statement.
	You cannot escape it. The moment you've said everything, you've just made an objective statement.
	Exactly. It is absolutely true that there's no such thing as absolute truth.
	I mean, this is embarrassing.
	I remember when my daughter was three and a half, I gave her that, and she's like...
	But does it not...
	I mean... Actually, one of my questions I had for you, because when I formulated the question I had for you in the email, I had not listened to nearly as much of your radio shows as I had back then.
	And I listened to a lot more of your stuff.
	I listened to a lot of the conversations you've had with other Christians who have called in.
	At first, I thought that your main...
	I guess separation with Christianity was about something along the lines of that God is a silly concept and that we don't need to have a God.
	We don't need to believe in the supernatural.
	That's silly. But is that more the case?
	Or is it more the case that you feel that Christianity had failed you, specifically your church, and that you didn't see the The spiritual significance of what Christianity had to offer based off of your childhood experience.
	Is it a combination of both, or is it more...
	Well, no. I mean, there is the personal experience that sows the seed of doubt, and then there's the rigorous philosophical process of creating the arguments, right?
	There was some scientist who came up with the structure of some particular kind of Adam because he had a dream of a snake eating its own tail.
	And he woke up and he's like, I got it!
	Right? Now, you wouldn't say it's proven because he had a dream.
	But if you say, well, why did you have that idea?
	You say, well, I had this dream.
	So I certainly did notice that the Christians I grew up with As I was a Christian at the time.
	We're not fulfilling the lofty goals.
	And I'll tell you something else, too.
	I, probably too early in my life, learned about the two world wars, the two great European fratricides of the 20th century, World War I, World War II, with a grand total of 60 or 70 million dead, if you include the Spanish flu.
	And I remember being maybe six or seven years old.
	And I said, I remember saying to my mom, who started World War I? She said, the Germans.
	I said, how long did it last?
	She said, four years. I said, but who started World War II? She said, the Germans.
	I said, how long did it last? She said, four years.
	Now, she wasn't quite right about that, but I do remember thinking...
	Well, isn't that an odd coincidence?
	That can't be just accidental.
	There has to be some kind of reason for that.
	That just can't be accidental.
	Yeah. And the great...
	The 20th century has been a century of almost unmitigated disasters for Europe.
	Yeah, completely. Completely.
	And what's left of Europe, I mean, there's many strong arguments to be made that Europe died in the 1940s, and everything since then has been the death twitch.
	Once you wipe out the bravest, most case-elected, most loyal, and sometimes the most intelligent young men over two generations, Europeans stopped having kids.
	Well, of course they fucking stopped having kids.
	What's the point? You have your kids, you raise them, and then they get broken up, smashed into atoms and scattered across the stratosphere by some homicidal state mechanism of ultimate war.
	Of course you're going to give up having kids.
	Of course. Why?
	I mean, do you want to adopt a cat and train it and love it and take care of it when you know for sure that someone's going to come along and strangle it and splay it across your sidewalk?
	No. Thanks, but no.
	And so knowing early on about these two world wars, I also remember asking, Were Christians in charge of the countries in World War I? Yep.
	Were Christians in charge of the countries in World War II? Yep.
	Okay. So that didn't stop it.
	Wait, you think that Christianity was the cause?
	I didn't say that. I said, were Christians in charge?
	And the answer is, they were.
	And I said, did that stop it?
	No. Christianity in Europe has killed itself.
	Now, whatever replaces it better not be the same thing that produced the last two world wars.
	And do you say Christianity has killed itself because it led to...
	It was not enough to stop the wars.
	Yeah. It was not enough to prevent them and it was not enough to stop the First World War.
	If the First World War had been wound down after six months or a year of stifled, claustrophobic, incessant, immovable trench warfare, if people had said, whoa, this is a whole new different kind of war beast, we better reassess this because we're just throwing soldiers into the fire like a kid with kindling.
	If they had found it within their hearts, within their minds, within their souls, within their prayers, if their priests had demanded it, if they had marched, if they had said, this is not war as we have understood it before.
	This is not 5,000 or 10,000 people meeting on a distant field.
	This is the destruction of Christendom.
	This is the slaughter of millions.
	This is fratricide.
	If Christianity had been strong enough to curb and tame and wind down the First World War within a year of its inception, when everyone, everyone remember, everyone said, it's going to be over by Christmas.
	I hope I get to the front before it's all over.
	And it went on and on and on.
	And nobody was able to stop it.
	Now, if the First World War had been wound down, There would have been no Russian Revolution.
	There would have been no American entree into the First World War.
	There would have been no crippling Treaty of Versailles.
	There would have been no destruction of the German economy.
	There would have been no Hitler.
	There would have been no Second World War.
	These were Christians in charge, led by Christian moralists in the priesthood.
	They were not able...
	To stop what they had started.
	And that led to wave after wave of decimation across Europe.
	And it led to a ferocious, paralyzing, self-destructive pathology of pacifism on the part of the Germans to the point where they can't say no to anything anymore.
	And once more, sowing the potential seeds of Europe's destruction.
	Ah, through pacifism this time, instead of Totalitarianism.
	Well, actually, the hardest I've laughed in the past month or so has been when you...
	I was listening to a podcast where you said, the Germans are either at your feet or at your throat.
	I don't know why, but I found that really, really funny.
	Yeah. I don't even think I came up with that.
	I think that's a quote, but I think it may have been Churchill who said that.
	That's hilarious. Well, I had a German mom.
	I do know a little bit about some of the cultural aspects.
	My mom's also German, so...
	She's not heavily into the tradition or anything.
	One thing you said, you talked about how the Christians allowed the World Wars to happen.
	Do you think that that happened because those people, those Christians, were actively pursuing Christian morals and goals?
	I don't know. I don't know.
	But here's the thing.
	If you live...
	In some town below sea level, and you build a huge dike, a huge wall, a huge barrier to keep the water out, and the barrier cracks and destroys your town twice in 20 years, you're going to say, they're not doing a very good job of keeping the town safe.
	You say, well, do you think that the engineers are actively plotting to destroy the town?
	It's like, I don't care.
	I just know we need something else.
	Now, the fact that Western powers, I mean, to see what the West looks like from outside the West is tough, but let me give you a brief word picture, and hopefully this will help make some sense of this.
	Okay. The West is horrifying in many ways from outside the West.
	And we've talked about the imperialism and...
	Massive bombings and redrawing of the Middle Eastern maps and destruction of Muslims and so on.
	But also, you have a ridiculously fratricidal, unbelievably murderous, world war-causing set of countries who now have atomic weapons.
	Yeah, that's scary. Hey, the white people who have been slaughtering themselves by the tens of millions and dragging the entire world into their wars, now they have weapons that can destroy the world 20 times over.
	Yeah. Holy crap.
	Think that makes you feel comfortable when you're in India or Indonesia or Japan or whatever, right?
	Of course not. I mean, I think from outside, they look at the white, the Europeans and the North Americans, they say, holy crap!
	I mean, these guys think nothing of killing 40 million of each other.
	Do you think they're going to care about me and Micronesia?
	I don't think so. And they can destroy us.
	Many times over.
	Are we going to rely on their pacifistic nature now?
	I mean, it was whites in America and whites in Russia staring each other over the needle tips of like 20,000 nuclear warheads.
	Because, you know, you can't feel safe with only 19,000, but 21,000 would be nuts.
	The whole world had to stare at crazy white people with their giant planet-ending weapons crossing their fingers.
	Let's hope we don't all die because white people are crazy.
	Do you think liberalism is born out of that fear then?
	Like the tyrannical father then?
	Like they're like so afraid of the tyranny that white people are able to...
	No, not the tyranny, the destruction.
	Another war between white people.
	And let's face it, I mean, the First World War and the Second World War, they dragged a lot of non-whites in, but it was a war between white people.
	If we have a war now, we are in huge trouble, like especially with China and Russia.
	That's a scary thought.
	Well, yeah, yeah.
	And while significantly Jewish, there was a European phenomenon of communism that spread to Russia and spread to China.
	You know, you think smallpox blankets to the, which is a myth, you think smallpox blankets to the natives in North America was bad?
	How about European communism to China?
	Christ. Yeah.
	So, around the world, people were terrified that white people were going to destroy the planet.
	And I'm not going to tell them they were wrong.
	I'm white, and I was terrified white people were going to destroy the planet.
	So, the fact is that, I don't know.
	I mean, I don't know if this is at all conscious or even if it's rational at all, but I wonder if some people say, well, yeah, we kind of need to displace the Europeans because they're crazy and they have nuclear weapons.
	Yeah. I can understand the case.
	I really, really can't.
	And so, Christianity, there is an enormous amount that I admire about Christianity.
	Really, honest to God, and I have been stingy and nasty about it in the past, for which I will apologize every time it comes up, and rightly so.
	Okay. But it was not enough to stop What happened?
	And my particular concern is that it was not enough to stop the abuse of children.
	Now, Christianity was enough to end slavery.
	Christianity was enough after...
	I mean, why did we get separation of church and state?
	We got separation of church and state in general.
	Because the religious fanatics killed each other for a couple of hundred years until only reasonable people were left.
	Because the reasonable people didn't get involved in those wars.
	The crazy fanatics just killed each other for hundreds of years, wiping out that gene pool of crazy fanaticism.
	And there is some genetic element to that, in my opinion.
	And every personality, facet or structure is heavily informed by genetics.
	And so... After hundreds of years of religious warfare, after the Reformation, the extremists had all killed each other.
	Yeah. And so then we had a century and a half of relative peace.
	Well, after the Napoleonic Wars, excluding the Franco-Prussian War, 1815 to 1914, relative to most of European history, fairly peaceful.
	I mean, without counting the Dark Ages, which were...
	Dark Ages partly because of the Muslims, right?
	Constantly driving people away from the life-sustaining oceans and deep into the countryside and all that.
	So, with the slave trade of the Europeans.
	So, but that separation of church and state, the establishment of a relatively free market and a small government gave massive resources which allowed governments to wage virtually endless war.
	The resources produced by the free market were turned by the state to amazing capacities for destruction through war.
	I mean, it's like you've got, hey, I now produce 10 times the crops that I used to produce.
	And the government comes along and says, fantastic!
	We'll use it to feed all the soldiers.
	Oh, great.
	Fantastic. And so, I mean, like, it's weird when you think about it.
	But almost all the wealth that was generated through the Industrial Revolution, almost down to the last dollar, was destroyed in the First World War.
	It's like the 19th century created this massive pile of money and they set fire and burnt it all to the ground along with 30 million people in four or five years.
	Yeah, tragic. And these were all Christian countries, all with Christian leaders, all with a strong Christian clergy, And Christianity, for all of its strengths, was not enough to stop it.
	And so I can understand why secularism grew after the Second World War.
	I can understand why communism seemed appealing.
	I can understand why socialism seemed appealing.
	I can understand why imperialism was seen as so destructive.
	I can understand why white people were feared and hated.
	Because white people were fratricidal, seemed entirely hell-bent on destroying their own collective history, had weapons that could destroy the entire planet, pretty itchy trigger fingers.
	So I can really understand why the world looked at European civilization.
	You know, Gandhi was asked about this.
	He said, what do you think of European civilization?
	You know what he said?
	I think it would be a good idea.
	Now, to me, the state, the society, voluntarism, what is coarsely called anarchism, which means without central coercive rules. which means without central coercive rules.
	language is anarchic.
	There's no central agency that determines what words can and can't be used.
	There's general social rules, and there's ostracism of people with bad spelling sometimes, and there's, you know, the language grows and flows and so on, but there's no central, you have to do it this way, or science or mathematics or so on.
	There's no central authority.
	It's the same thing with podcasting and so on and internet conversations now.
	It just means without a central coercive authority.
	Non-aggression principle-violating agency called the state.
	Now that is the solution.
	The solution, in the long run, is better parenting, and Christianity did something to improve parenting, but not enough.
	Because of the fundamental misunderstanding of the maxim, spare the rod and spoil the child.
	Which means, to most Christians I've talked to, if you don't beat your children, they'll grow up to be brats.
	Well, I'm sorry, you beat your children, you get wars.
	The Origins of War and Child Abuse is a book by Lloyd DeMoss that I read.
	It's available at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	You can hear the audiobook. It's a very strong case.
	You beat your children, you get war.
	And Christianity was not enough to confront parents.
	Confronting parents is a very difficult thing.
	I think about this sometimes in terms of psychiatrists.
	Psychiatrists... Some kid comes in who's messed up.
	Does the psychiatrist want to confront the parents who pay the bill and say, no, no, no, you guys are causing this?
	Well, what are they going to do? Are they going to go probably to some other psychiatrist?
	Don't you tell me the problem is with the kid!
	Or does the psychiatrist say, oh yeah, here, give some pills to your kid.
	Strong incentives for the latter to occur.
	Now, priests, in most religions, I think, what priests do is they say, instruct children in these religious concepts, and central to these religious concepts will be honor thy mother and thy father.
	Now, that is not an argument.
	Honor thy mother and thy father is not an argument.
	Honor the honorable is the beginnings of an argument.
	It's the beginnings of causality.
	And so the spare the rod, spoil the child misinterpretation, which is not about hitting your children, but saying if you don't instruct your children, then they will grow up poorly.
	And I think that's, of course, that's true.
	I mean, of course, that's true. Children can't raise themselves.
	Yeah, correct. So, when it comes to Christianity, the temptation to bend to the will of the parents, to sell to the parents, rather than to the children, rather than to universality, only philosophy can crack the ice of parental authority and reach down to help the children.
	Only philosophy can do that.
	And only philosophy in the age of the internet can do that.
	So, governments can't do it.
	Governments don't care about children.
	Why? Children don't vote. No politician can base his political campaign on confronting parents and helping children.
	Because children don't vote and parents do.
	And pissed off parents don't vote for you.
	Can the psychiatric profession spend its time confronting parents?
	Well, I mean, some can, or Dr.
	Phil does it sometimes on his show.
	Not as much as I think he should, but what does that matter?
	But parents pay the bills.
	Or the government pays the bills to psychiatrists, and parents vote for governments.
	Do priests reach past parental authority for the sake of saving the children?
	Well, no, because it's the parents who have to bring the children to the church.
	And it is the parents who put the money in the collection box.
	So, which...
	To schools, of course, schools obviously don't care about the children.
	They don't even care about the parents.
	They care about social control and free resources from the taxpayer.
	They care about...
	Summers off, jobs, security, pensions, benefits, nothing to do with the kids, and little to do with the parents.
	So... You tell me what institutions can reach past the power and control of the parents and actually bring universal principles to bear on the children.
	What about a parenting book? Well, the children don't buy parenting books.
	It's the parents who buy parenting books.
	So who can confront the parents?
	Who has the incentive to do that?
	Well, I would argue that philosophy, the age of the internet, has that for the first time in human history, which is why there's such blowback, right?
	Because so much of society has been organized around appeasing parents at the expense of children.
	I mean, if we cared about our children, there'd be no such thing as a national debt, right?
	Yeah. So, Christianity was not able to solve the problem of child abuse.
	I believe that philosophy...
	In the age of the internet, has at least a fighting chance.
	Well, I mean, what is Christianity, though, but just a philosophy on how to live?
	I mean, if you were to come up with some, you know, some well-defined, universally preferable...
	Oh, dude. I'm sorry to interrupt you.
	They're not called the Ten Arguments, are they?
	What are they called? No.
	Ten Commandments, yeah.
	Right. Do you think that divine commandments work in a philosophical context?
	I'm not sure. I don't know how to answer that.
	No, they don't. Thou shalt not steal is not an argument.
	Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right.
	Thou shalt not murder is not an argument.
	But isn't that the goal of philosophy?
	To get to some objective truth?
	Yes, but through arguments, not commandments.
	Commandments are not arguments.
	I guess I just have trouble understanding how atheism could, or just a human being, I guess, could come up with the system that would work that way, where people would actually treat it with any sense of authority.
	No, no, no, but the authority.
	See, you're looking for authority.
	No, no, no, no.
	It's like science.
	Science doesn't work on the argument from authority.
	A scientist can't say, well, I'm a famous scientist, so I'm right.
	Science is a process that is not centrally organized.
	Science is a process that is participative.
	And is it an objective methodology that, frankly, anyone can participate in?
	You don't have to be a formally trained scientist to contribute to science.
	Many times, it's been amateurs or people outside the field completely.
	So there's no central authority to say, well, who's in charge of science?
	Well, it's a process. Who's in charge of math?
	Who's in charge of the free market?
	Who's in charge of...
	You know, it's a process.
	It's an objective methodology, I suppose.
	Yeah, but things like math, those are just fields that exist outside of whether or not humans know what they are.
	And we just explore them.
	That's all we do, is we're just exploring...
	Just the laws of nature, really.
	I mean, math is the language of the universe.
	And religion, I think, is the language of how to act.
	And the only way you can really navigate that realm is through accepting the fact that what we aim towards and what we try to be like Comes from something outside of us.
	Because it's obviously the case.
	Like, we don't command ourselves.
	You know, you have your New Year's resolutions.
	Like, I'm going to lose 20 pounds after January.
	It's like, you can't command yourself to do shit.
	Like, what you do is based off of...
	It's like this passage of time goes by.
	It's like, at one moment, you want this, and then...
	Two days later, you want the exact opposite.
	And it's because our aims and our principles are not aligned with our desires and wants.
	And the Bible talks about that as that's basically sin.
	We can't really control ourselves because we're very feeble attempts at a God.
	Well, we can't control ourselves without the reinforcement of faith, without the reinforcement of prayer, and without the support of Jesus, right?
	Yes. The human will alone, unsupported by the divine, is weak source in the extreme, right?
	Yeah, it leads to destruction.
	That's the vanity and the pride of thinking that you can control your will without...
	basically planted there by the devil so he can take you over.
	You don't need Jesus.
	Just follow your own instincts, says the devil, knowing that merely your own instincts are generated by the material which leads you to him, right?
	Yeah.
	But let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this.
	Do you think that human disputes should be resolved according to reason and evidence or force?
	Hmm.
	I guess it depends on the dispute.
	Like, I can't say for all disputes it should be reason and evidence and all disputes it should be through force.
	Because, I mean, like, in our society, if someone, some guy murders his wife, he's put in jail no matter what he...
	No, but that's...
	No, no, no, come on. But if he's murdered his wife, it means that he has tried to resolve a disagreement through force, i.e.
	murder. I'm sorry, I'm trying to figure out where I... You're trying to find a way out of, and I respect that.
	It's a great thing to do.
	Always try and find the exceptions.
	Not to the point of paralysis, but...
	Okay, yeah.
	Do you think that human beings should resolve their disputes through force or through debate?
	Okay, yeah. First, you're right.
	First, it's through debate.
	But those debates are set up to set up force, correct?
	Like, enforcements. Like, you debate on what to enforce, correct?
	No. I mean, just talking about disagreements with people.
	Is the world round or is that flat?
	Should that be resolved through violence or should that be resolved through science?
	Oh, okay. Yeah, through science.
	Yeah. Right. Does the earth go around the sun or does the sun go around the earth?
	Should that be resolved by science, by measurement, by reason, by evidence, or should that be resolved by force?
	Yeah, through science for sure, through reason.
	If you have a disagreement with someone about a contract, would it be nice, would it be preferable?
	Not does it always happen, but would it be preferable if people, if the person you had a disagreement with looked up the contract and obeyed the contract?
	Of course, yeah. Yeah, because in that case, the evidence that we're talking about is the contract itself, not natural phenomena in the night sky.
	So, I mean, self-defense doesn't fit into this framework because self-defense occurs when somebody is no longer trying to reason with you, but has initiated the use of force, right?
	So they've already failed the argument, so that's not on you, right?
	So we would want...
	We would want disputes to be resolved by reason and evidence, in general.
	That's because you and I are smart people with integrity.
	But if you're a dumb person who's violent, and if you have no conscience, then you would much rather that disputes be resolved through force.
	Yeah, and there's people that are definitely like that, no matter.
	I think those people exist, for sure.
	Hell yeah. Yeah, and force or emotional abuse or, you know, whatever, it's got some sort of escalation.
	I mean, that's half, three quarters of the internet sometimes.
	There's porn and abuse, and sadly some of those two I hear are somewhat related sometimes.
	So, yeah, so we would prefer reason and evidence over force, and there are good philosophical arguments.
	As to why we would prefer that or why we should do it that way.
	You know, if you're trying to decide, if you're buying a used car, you would, I think, we would rather have a world in which people negotiate and haggle on the price of the car.
	If they can't agree, they don't make the transaction.
	If they can't agree, they do.
	But of course, the guy who's selling it wants a billion dollars and the guy who's buying it wants it to be free, right?
	Right? Does that mean the guy who's buying it gets to punch the seller in the head and take off with the car because now he's got it for free?
	Well, he gets what he wants, right?
	But you can't have a universal statement called only this guy gets what he wants and the other guy gets the exact opposite of what he wants, right?
	So you have to have universals.
	Universals are people should be free to get what they want peacefully because the moment you use force, you've broken the universal in that you get what you want, but the other person gets not what he wants.
	So, reason and evidence fulfills the requirement of universality that is necessary for philosophy.
	And it is just generally a better situation for most people in the world.
	And even for the person who wants to use violence to get his way, even for the person who wants to steal the car, we refrain from approving of their action.
	We punish, we sanction, we act against them, even forcefully, to protect the value of the car and to protect the property rights.
	Why? Well, because that person is wrong.
	It's wrong. Because he's requiring that there's such a thing as property rights.
	In other words, he gets to keep the car he's stolen.
	So he's both denying and affirming property rights.
	You can't have your property rights, but I damn well demand mine.
	It comes back to the hypocrisy.
	Guy steals a car, goes to take a pee in the bushes.
	Someone comes along and steals the car from him.
	He's like, hey, man, you stole my car.
	I'm so angry. Right?
	You broke the universal truth.
	Yeah. I mean, so it's hypocrisy and it's nonsense and all that kind of crap.
	So... You can't rationally simultaneously affirm and deny property rights or the personal rights, rights to bodily integrity and so on.
	You can't, you know, my mom can't simultaneously, you know, try to hit me and then say that my self-defense is somehow aggressive and violent and immoral.
	I mean, she can do it. It's just that that's a hypocrisy that is self-detonating, self-defeating.
	It's a self-detonating argument.
	So then universals are just like...
	It's basically a common language that we all speak about moral issues then.
	Yes, and we know, we generally know that someone is insane when they act with no justification whatsoever.
	Yeah. Right, so the guy who hits his wife is like, hey man, she was screaming in my face.
	Or the guy who hits some other guy, well he looked at me and found he disrespected me, he's got a justification, right?
	And we know someone's crazy when they do an immoral action with no justification whatsoever.
	Why did you hit that guy?
	No reason. Did he do anything to you?
	No, don't even know who he is.
	And also, when they neither justify nor cover up what they did.
	The moment someone justifies and or covers up, we know that they're sane.
	Evil, but sane.
	So when somebody acts with no justification whatsoever, they're crazy, and you don't have to worry about debating with crazy.
	I remember, my God, talk about an old memory.
	So when I was 11 or so, I had a bird, and I was carrying that bird in a cage on a bus.
	I'm sure I could figure out why, but it's not coming to me right now.
	And there was this crazy homeless guy on the bus.
	And he kept asking me, what's in the cage?
	Lift it up. I want to see it.
	That cage is too small for that bird.
	It doesn't have enough to drink. There's no place for it to poop.
	You're being mean to that bird. You're blah, blah, blah, right?
	And I was, you know, I was 11.
	I was in a new country. I was kind of shy.
	And I was just kind of giving these half answers.
	And then a woman leaned over and she said, you got to stop talking to him.
	You know that, right? Just stop talking to him.
	He's crazy. That woman, thank you, by the way.
	Long dead, I'm sure. But thanks anyway.
	Thanks to your kids, your kids' kids.
	Because you can't, you know, it's the old Billy Joel line, you should never argue with a crazy man.
	So once somebody's crazy, they're not part of a discussion in philosophy.
	Yeah, because they just change the rules all the time.
	They change the goalposts.
	Well, there's no, no, they don't, there's no universals.
	Oh, yeah. So you justify things according to universals.
	Yeah. And so a crazy person will never justify what they do or defend what they do or advocate for anything according to universals.
	Which is why people don't say, I want a welfare state because I've made bad decisions and I want free stuff.
	They say a welfare state is a fundamental human right for kindness and morality within...
	They pull all these universals all the time to justify what they want.
	Because of objective oppression.
	Right? And it's objective oppression that- Yeah, I mean, can you imagine the honest politician's speech?
	I want your vote because I'm pathologically insecure.
	I'm too ugly to go into show business.
	And I really want to prove my deadbeat father was wrong about my future.
	Yeah. Oh, and I really like it when people need things from me and I don't have to pay for them myself.
	I love handing away the money of your future children to political cronies in the here and now.
	I love it when people come up to me and kiss the ring and defer to me and beg for me and take me out to lunch because they think I'm all so kind.
	I mean, it does great things for my ego.
	That's why I want your vote. Yeah.
	I mean, that would be funny.
	I guess it would be pretty funny to have.
	Maybe I'll do that one day, the honest politician speech.
	But... That's not somebody just, I want your vote because I want to build a bridge to a better society for us all, and I want to take care of this, and I want to do that moral thing, and this moral thing, and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Oh yeah, the Handbook of Human Ownership is something you can, sort of an honest political speech that you can listen to.
	So, the moment that somebody is using universals, is justifying universals, is making an appeal to universals, that's how we know.
	They're sane. They may still be evil, but they're sane.
	Like my mom said, it's wrong to hit a family.
	It's wrong to hit your mother. Now, that's not a universal.
	It's a cloaking, right?
	It's wrong to hit your mother.
	Well, why? What, I can hit other women who aren't my mother?
	No, it's wrong to hit adults.
	Well, why is it wrong to hit adults but not to hit children?
	I mean, you can't universalize these things.
	So, universals are everywhere.
	And then people say, well, but how can you establish universals?
	You know what I mean? Like, just listen to people.
	It's culture. Like, it's society.
	Society is a set of universals, for sure.
	Well, culture is not, though.
	Culture is specifically defined as that which is not universal.
	Because if it's universal, it's science, it's philosophy, it's math, or whatever.
	All right. You had one extra thing you wanted to say?
	Yeah, so I know in that, the audiobook, I listened to about half of your audiobook about the universal preferable beliefs, and you talked about how the laws of nature are unchanging and they exist.
	And then you kind of talked about how because those exist, there's like a parallel between the laws of nature and And correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm misrepresenting this, but like the laws of nature exist, they're unchangeable and all that.
	And then the universal beliefs, the moral beliefs that we have are like a parallel to the laws of nature.
	Is that right?
	Am I saying that correctly? Well, I wouldn't say that they exist, but they're objective and measurable.
	I mean, they don't like, I'm not sure that gravity exists in the way that a tree exists, but it's still objective.
	Yeah, but it's true.
	The laws that we eat is predictable, and it transcends, I guess, gravity itself.
	It transcends what we see.
	We were able to sum it up in that sense.
	But morals, the way you're talking about it, it seems like the universal beliefs that we have, they're just subject to time then, correct?
	So it depends on what age you live in.
	And, like, if you live in a certain age, like, let's say, the Roman Empire, then you have a different set of universals.
	Like, if it's okay to beat the living hell out of your children in the Roman Empire, because of the fact that 95% of the people believe that, does that mean it's okay then?
	Well, no. I mean, it is not.
	Like, the initiation of the use of force is a universal argument.
	It's an eternal argument.
	It applies to human beings.
	It doesn't apply to animals, right?
	Because animals can't conceptualize and organize their behavior according to universal standards.
	But no, it is true that hitting your children is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	It's as true now as it was in the Roman Empire.
	It's as true now that human beings should not be property because you can't have property and be property as well.
	It's a contradiction in categories.
	And it was as true in ancient Egypt as it is now.
	I mean, right now in Liberia, you can go with $400 US and you can buy a human slave.
	And you'll know about that because Black Lives Matter has been protesting it madly, the re-emergence of out-and-out slave markets in Liberia.
	And other places.
	You've seen this. They've said, let's put aside all this George Soros stuff.
	Let's put aside all of this creeping socialism.
	Let's put aside all this race-baiting.
	Let's go deal with the fact that slavery is openly re-emerging in Africa.
	Oh wait, they haven't done any of that.
	Because, well, for reasons that are too obvious to talk about.
	So, it is true.
	It is true. These are universal arguments.
	You know, the old syllogism, which is in The Art of the Argument at theartoftheargument.com.
	Just holding that up for the camera for a moment here.
	Ooh, it's pretty warm. I'm going to buy that book.
	I'm sorry? I said I think I'm going to buy that book.
	I would like you to. And please leave a review, whether you like it or not.
	So, Socrates is a man.
	All men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal.
	I mean, that's as true now as it was 2,500 years ago.
	So, logic doesn't change.
	People can reject it, of course, right?
	But it doesn't change.
	I feel stupid for asking this question.
	So, the argument against slavery is logic then, I guess, because of the anti-aggression principle?
	Well, it's universality, right?
	So universality is that human beings have self-ownership.
	Well, I guess how do you...
	How is the death penalty or...
	No, no, hang on. I'll jump from one to another so quickly.
	Okay. So human beings have self-ownership because without self-ownership, there's no such thing as moral responsibility.
	Oh, okay. So self-sufferance, yeah. So you have self-ownership.
	And this is biologically true.
	Like I can control my own arms.
	You can't directly control my arms, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, okay.
	So we own our actions.
	You own yourself. You own the effects of your actions.
	That's why you get property rights.
	That's why you own a murder.
	If you create one, you own that.
	You're the one who's sent to jail, not your dog, not your pants, not your hands alone.
	And so you own yourself.
	Now, how can you own yourself and be owned by someone else at the same time?
	Logically. I'm not saying practically, yeah, the guy can have a gun to your head, but logically, if you have self-ownership, you can't be owned.
	It's like saying a dog can be both wild and a pet at the same time.
	You cannot own yourself and be owned by someone else simultaneously because the two contradict each other.
	Thank you.
	I want to go for a walk.
	Your slave owner says, no, you can't, or I'll kill you or whatever, right?
	Then who owns you?
	Who is responsible for your behavior?
	If you're taking orders and being told what to do at the point of a gun or a whip or whatever, then you cannot say that you simultaneously own yourself, but also that you're owned by someone else.
	It's one or the other. Now, you can choose to sell your labor on the market.
	You can exchange it for wages or whatever, right?
	But in terms of slavery...
	You cannot combine ownership of another with ownership of the self.
	Yeah. Like, if I say it's my car and you say it's my car at the same time, we can't both get it, right?
	No, yeah. Right?
	So, if I say I have self-ownership and you say I own you, we can't both get it.
	It contradicts itself.
	Yeah, you're the only one that can own it, for sure.
	As far as the death penalty goes, no, I'm not talking about that right now because it's a status phenomenon.
	I don't think the death penalty is the productive way to go in a free society.
	And of course, my whole goal with peaceful parenting is to end up with a society where murder would be so rare.
	That it would be like taking out insurance against a meteor strike.
	I guess it could happen, but it probably really won't, because murderers were all victims of child abuse in the past.
	And so without child abuse, we don't get murderers, or it's extraordinarily rare.
	People might, you know, they have a degenerative brain disease or something like that, so who knows, right?
	But I think it would be as risky as a meteor strike if that, so...
	So, I guess, so is your, I guess, denial of Christianity, or the belief in a God, or a supernatural God, is it more based off of the...
	The failure of the spiritual aspect of it to change people fundamentally?
	No, no, that's an argument from effect.
	That's one of the things that set me on the path.
	But even if God...
	Even if all Christians were nasty people, which they're not, of course, quite the contrary, but even if all Christians were nasty people, that would be no argument against the existence of God.
	So for that, I don't want to run through the arguments again.
	It's also been a show that's almost four hours long, but...
	If you want my arguments against that, I have a book called Against the Gods, question mark, Against the Gods, which goes into...
	It's really more about agnosticism than outright atheism, but the arguments are still very relevant.
	So I will refer you to that book because it's a big thing to chew through those arguments at this time of night.
	So I really appreciate everyone calling in.
	Thank you so, so much.
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	Thank you, my lovelies, for a wonderful evening's chat.

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