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Jan. 25, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:32:38

3976 The Death of White Guilt - Call In Show - January 17th, 2018

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	All right, all right.
	Stefan Molyneux, hope you're doing well.
	Good callers tonight. The first caller wanted to know, okay, who owns America?
	Tell me, who owns America?
	Is it the taxpayers? Is it the government?
	Is it the immigrants? And can any European be said to have any property rights in North America, given what happened to the indigenous people?
	Population had a little bit of a rant about that.
	Second caller, we talked about religion and values.
	Why have values become so absent in the West?
	And what's the role of the fall of Christianity in that?
	Next caller, a brave and energetic young woman who's overcoming significant obstacles and wants to know...
	Why so many of her relatives, young people raised in decent households, middle class, educated, are doing nothing with their lives?
	Well, that's a little frustrating to hear, and we talked about that.
	Next caller, we talked about religion and values.
	Why have values become so absent in the West?
	And what's the role of the fall of Christianity in that?
	You can help out the show at freedomandradio.com.
	Don't forget to use our affiliate link if you have shopping to do at fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
	Follow me as well on twitter.com at Stefan Molyneux.
	Alright, well up first today we have Afton.
	Afton wrote in and said, in the death of DACA, Stefan asked a question that comes up in my life often when discussing the topic of America as a nation, culture, and government with anyone.
	Do children inherit things their parents obtained illegally?
	Stef goes on to say, do Bernie Madoff's children get to keep the profits of his Ponzi scheme?
	Well no, I mean, it all has to go back.
	I'd like to ask Stef, who truly owns America?
	The reason the answer to this question is important to me is that when discussing this topic in my personal life, I often find myself unclear of how the European colonist settlers have a valid claim to America when they acquired the land through initiating coercion against the indigenous people who were already here.
	I believe that clarifying the truth on this matter will help bring unity between individuals and create a greater incentive to refrain from using the force of government to resolve the cultural and political conflicts that are still present in our society.
	On a personal level, it'll give me more confidence when facing the aggression and hostility that this topic can manifest when I'm debating the subject.
	That's from Afton. Hey Afton, how are you doing tonight?
	I'm very well.
	Thank you so much for having me on the show, Steph.
	My pleasure, my pleasure.
	So you're very concerned about one culture taking over another culture or expanding aggressively?
	I definitely find that intimidating, but more so I'm wondering if the people who are defined by American culture have any true claim to the land that America was built on.
	I did a little bit of research and I discovered that the population of the indigenous people that were here initially was primarily wiped out by influenza And other illnesses that were introduced by the Europeans.
	But of course, that was not necessarily intentional.
	It was not intentional.
	Right. There was no germ theory until the late 19th century.
	Yes. So, in that case, it was an indirect thing.
	But I wonder if simply because of the fact that a massive number of people Were wiped out if the surviving members of that culture sort of lost the claim to the land that was forfeited with the death of people.
	Do you think that there's sort of a collective ownership of America, or if that's possible?
	Well, okay, so you're criticizing white people as if white people were the only people to expand throughout human history.
	Is that right? No.
	Because this is something to just tell you.
	It's kind of boring and repetitive.
	And I'm not criticizing you.
	This is just something that's bubbling around in my brain.
	It's just kind of boring and repetitive that everybody fixates on colonialism and on the indigenous American experience and so on.
	You know, Islam has been a very expansionist ideology since its origins and has expanded often quite violently, but nobody seems to really talk about that.
	Everybody kind of gravitates to the exact same group and the basically the two or two and a half examples.
	White Western European males expanding into the New World and white Western males and slavery.
	Now, as far as the treatment of the indigenous population goes, it was not a genocide.
	They did not wipe them out intentionally.
	They tried to negotiate and to navigate with them.
	And they created treaties.
	And at one point, significant portions of the United States were divvied up and given to the natives.
	And then they sold them and ended up, you know, they had problems with alcohol for various genetic reasons.
	There continued to be reservations.
	There continues to be massive payouts.
	And I just, you try and find me any conquering tribe.
	Look at how the Muslims took over Pakistan or India.
	Look at Genghis Khan, for God's sakes.
	Look at how the Bantus, which came from the north part of Africa and then ended up in the southern part of Africa, wiping out The indigenous population there.
	So I just find it interesting that of all of the expansions in human history, you pick in many ways the least aggressive, the most gentle, the most negotiated with, where the most payouts are still occurring.
	And you kind of overleap every other brutal, unacknowledged expansion in human history.
	And I'm just kind of wondering why.
	It seems a little unfair.
	Also, you're picking on the nicest group, the group that is the most self-critical, which seems kind of bullying, in my opinion.
	Well, I completely understand why that would be frustrating for you.
	I think the reason that I'm interested in the European colonization of America is because I'm from Canada.
	I was born in Canada. And I also agree that, you know, European societies, Western societies, are relatively peaceful to other societies.
	Many indigenous cultures base their laws and customs on metaphysics, and of course in the Middle East that is also the case, and it's very dangerous.
	But the issue is that when I speak to people about Canadian culture for example a lot of the time there's this criticism that Canada was stolen from the indigenous people and the Europeans and the British came here and you know tortured people and made them sick and wiped them out and put them on these reservations and that in terms of the concept of reparations eventually we should give I suppose The control of the resources in the country to Indigenous people and I just find that really confusing and when I do argue the issue,
	I often say that there was definitely some aggression involved initially when the British came here and decided to conquer Canada.
	But the way that our society functions now is very peaceful and I'm not really sure what Canada would look like if we just, I don't know, went back to Europe or...
	I'm trying to figure out if we have a valid claim to the land.
	As far as I could research, after all of the indigenous people in America were sort of wiped out...
	No, no, no. They weren't all wiped out.
	What are you talking about? They weren't wiped out.
	Well, the majority of the population...
	wiped out by illness, were they not?
	Sure.
	But I mean, they died from illness, inadvertently died from illness through no ill intent on the part of the people who came here.
	It was not white Europeans who wiped out the indigenous population.
	There were wars, don't get me wrong.
	And there was violence on both sides, but there was a war.
	But so what?
	There were wars between indigenous populations.
	They found graves with 500 smashed-in skulls.
	There was slavery. There was unbelievable violence and torture and rape among the indigenous populations.
	So, if you want to get mad at someone, get mad at the smallpox bug, right?
	Get mad at cholera.
	Get mad at... I don't have any understanding as to what it means to say that some vast immorality.
	The tribes themselves were constantly expanding and rubbing up against each other.
	And Indian wars, as they were called, and native indigenous wars, were constant, omnipresent.
	So they had no problem using violence to expand their own territory, to go and take slaves, to go and rape women.
	So I don't quite understand where it's like, well, there was this harmony, this beautiful paradise, and then these evil Westerners came along with their smallpox blankets and wiped everyone out.
	Right. I mean, this is false.
	It's a false big white guilt button that people hammer because it gets them resources.
	And I'm concerned that you're...
	I mean, I know you're trying to oppose it and all that, but...
	I mean, I'm going to judge a culture by how it acts itself.
	There were no... When one Indian tribe conquered another Indian tribe, they didn't pay them massive reparations for 200 years.
	They didn't give them their own sectioned area of land.
	They didn't give them free healthcare and free education.
	That never happened. They wiped them out.
	In general, took the women as slaves, murdered the men.
	I mean, this is what happened.
	So I don't...
	This is how the world was.
	And the Europeans were the nicest of all.
	By far. And so it just seems like the very nicest group throughout all of human history is the only one.
	And it's like resources. It's like when people say, well, resources were taken from South Africa.
	What resources? Were they using a lot of oil and uranium and all that?
	I mean, were they using a lot of that stuff?
	I don't really think that they were.
	I think that they were unable to invent the wheel.
	They had no written language, and they never built a two-story building.
	So yes, when science, technology, and capitalism came along, then those groups, then the Europeans and others, the Chinese are now doing it in Jamaica and in Africa and other places, they came along and took resources out from under the ground.
	But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, if your culture is unable to build a two-story building, they're not going down half a mile to pry out some diamonds.
	It's just not going to happen.
	The resources were inaccessible and unavailable to the tribes and all of that at the time.
	So I am not a big fan of this endless reparations.
	I think it's incredibly destructive to indigenous communities.
	And what happens is the money goes to the tribal chieftains in general, and then the tribal chieftains use it to dole out to buy favors, and it's incredibly destructive.
	To the indigenous populations as a whole.
	And I think we've got to stop it all.
	We have to stop it all.
	And we can't go back in time.
	There are many people in Canada who had absolutely nothing to do historically with those who took over other countries.
	There were people in Australia who were forced, forced into prison ships and were sent out as prisoners with a lot of manufactured Evidence and false charges and so on.
	So they were enslaved and used to build Australia.
	Do they get reparations for having been enslaved?
	This reparations thing will never end.
	Will never end. And it's only and forever applied to white Western Christian nations.
	Nobody goes to Saudi Arabia and says, well, you know, some of your expansionistic stuff was pretty rough in that you've plowed under a lot of existing tribes and so on in your expansions.
	Like, it doesn't go that way.
	So I'm just tired of it.
	I'm tired of the group who had historically the most benevolence and the highest standards and the most care and concern being the only ones blamed for these kinds of movements in human history.
	Human history was a fight.
	It was a battle.
	And some people lost and some people won.
	And all of those people are dead.
	And if we're going to go with reparations, do people get reparations back for all the people who have taken welfare over the past 50 years?
	That seems to me a little bit...
	You can find those people.
	You know how much money they've taken.
	Can we get reparations back for that?
	Because that was money taken by force.
	So I just wanted to point out that I'm just...
	It's not your fault. Please understand.
	I'm not mad at you. I'm just kind of tired of this stuff.
	Because here's what happens, right?
	So, according to the standard narrative, the evil whiteys came and destroyed all of the indigenous populations, right?
	So going to another country and stripping it of resource is really bad.
	Then migrants come in and immigrants come in, illegal immigrants come in, and strip resource.
	But that's blowback, you see?
	So white people are too bad, right?
	Too bad. It's really, really bad when white people go to other people's countries and take their resources.
	Okay? Then white people should stop Taking high IQ immigrants from third world countries, because that's strip mining very important resources for the continuation of those cultures.
	So, there is a lot of contemporary injustice that is going on in the world that we need to deal with.
	There are literally hundreds of thousands of slaves on Haiti.
	Black Lives Matter. Dealing with that, does that matter to people who claim that they care so much about injustice?
	They don't. There are literal open-air slave markets in Libya as a result of Obama and Hillary Clinton's foreign policy.
	Now, why aren't people going crazy And trying to do something about those present injustices.
	Oh, they care so much about slavery, care so much about human subjugation.
	There are literally millions of slaves around the world.
	A lot of slaves in Islamic countries.
	Some white slaves in Islamic countries.
	So who is caring about that injustice and why don't they?
	Well, two reasons. Number one, a lot of these groups don't admit any guilt and will just tell you to fuck off if you try and make it.
	And number two, there's no way to get resources out of them.
	Either they have no money, Or they have money but they have no guilt.
	If they have no guilt and they have no money, you can't get resources out of them.
	So this is all just, this is not morals.
	This is not ethics. This is not trying to make the world a better place.
	This is ferocious collective guilt, racist rent-seeking.
	It is finding the group that is the most self-critical and has the most resources and pounding, pounding, pounding the guilt button until money comes out.
	This is nothing to do with virtue.
	This is everything to do with greed and exploitation of morally sensitive groups.
	That's all it is. All it is.
	You know, I've been to these reservations.
	I've seen what it's like up close.
	These soft gulags of heavily funded exclusion.
	It is brutal.
	I hate what the Canadian government did with the residential program where they stripped children in an effort to assimilate.
	Because, you know, assimilation and integration works really well.
	They stripped, at gunpoint, children from their parents and the indigenous communities and tried to raise them as good little white Catholics or Protestants.
	And it descended into the usual hell of abuse and sexual predation and God knows what.
	Horrible. Another government program.
	It is about the transfer of resources to assuage guilt and to bribe potential voters.
	It is about feeling good and it is about relieving guilt.
	And it only gets attached to Christians.
	Because Christians, oh, whoa, look at all the moral heroes out there in the world.
	I'm not putting you in this category.
	Look at all the moral heroes out there in the world who get on their noble steeds with their lance and their armor.
	And they say, let us be so brave and so daring as to criticize an entire religion, which is centered around, turn the other cheek and forgive your enemies and love your enemies.
	Oh, look how brave I am.
	But if people aren't calling out, say, Islam for its violent expansion, its tendencies in the past and demanding it pay reparations, and who is?
	I don't want to hear about Europeans because it's got nothing to do with ethics.
	It's just a form of soft, guilt-ridden exploitation.
	It's a new church.
	Wow. Well, that was exactly what I was hoping to clarify asking this question.
	Don't study the West.
	Study everywhere else and then ask people, please show me all the posts you've made.
	On other websites about predations from other cultures.
	And if they haven't, it's like, well, why not?
	You show me the work you've done bringing Haitian slavery or Librian slavery to light.
	Then if you haven't, I don't want to hear about slavery.
	You tell me how you're going to the Middle East or writing letters or trying to get people in the Middle East to pay reparations for the ungodly numbers of European slaves taken by force in the Middle Ages and beyond.
	Sex slaves, work slaves, and there's not a big white population in the Middle East, just as they took incredible numbers of slaves from Africa into the Middle East.
	Where's the reparations for that?
	It doesn't even show up on people's radar, which tells you nobody cares about this ethics.
	They just, you know, it's like that old guy was asked, why do you rob banks?
	He says, because that's where the money is.
	Why do you push collective guilt?
	Well, I find the most guilty and the most rich and I push their guilt buttons till they cough up money.
	It's a shakedown. And these people all claim to be so horrified at unjust exploitation.
	And then they hammer the white guilt of people who had nothing to do with this and verbally abuse them and shred their self-esteem and attack their culture and undermine their history.
	Destroy people's happiness in their own history.
	For the sake of money, mere material money.
	And then they say, exploitation is really, really bad, you see.
	Give me a fucking break.
	Amen, Steph. Wow.
	All right. I'm going to move on because I got to get up early, so I can't do a late show, but I hope that was helpful.
	I think it was very helpful.
	Thank you so much. Thanks for calling in.
	Alright, up next we have Stanley.
	Stanley wrote in and said, That's from Stanley.
	Hey, Stanley. How are you doing?
	You might need to unmute, if you are in fact muted.
	I'm well, how are you?
	I'm good. It's a great set of questions.
	Is there anything you wanted to add to the topic before we dive in?
	Do you have any questions before we start?
	Do you think that it is Christianity that leads to these higher living standards and more Freedoms?
	Because there are lots of belief systems that use ostracism to punish people who disobey.
	What is it specific, do you think, to Christianity that causes higher living standards and more freedoms?
	Well, I'll talk about that just a little.
	I'd rather stick to the... Biochemistry and molecular biology, because that's what my background's in.
	But if you just look across history, everywhere that Christianity's been has led to less violence and higher living standards, even if it was state-sponsored, but even more so if it was a free country.
	Because if you have Islam, or you have atheism, or Marxist atheism, Or you have Buddhism or Hinduism, a lot of times it's a very mystical religion.
	In Christianity, for the most part, if you move into the centuries past the 3rd century AD, you have a rational religion that people say, okay, there's a rational guide, there's a rational set of rules, these are the rules we have to follow, and it sets up science.
	But if you just look across But the West, you know, the more Christian countries tended to do better.
	Right. So, I'll give you a little, this is sort of what I thought about since I got the question, and you can let me know what you think.
	There is an argument that says since the fall of Christian values, we live in a state of nihilism.
	And the nihilism Results in hedonism and extreme volatility in social rules and social conventions, which is why you see these hysterical witch hunts and mob attacks on people.
	There's all this hysteria and so on.
	I don't view the fall of Christianity or the withdrawal of Christianity from the public sphere as To be anything to do with atheism?
	Or anything to do with modernity as a whole?
	Well, there are really no more non-believers in God today as a percentage than there was 500 years ago.
	And if you look across history, it was never the poor that went to church or attended any kind of service.
	It was always the upper class, the nobility, and that sort of thing that attended church.
	Well, if they did, the services were in Latin, which the average person couldn't read.
	Right, but even at that, Christianity kept a reign on the nobility, I guess, for lack of a better word.
	I mean, the Spanish Inquisition is considered one of the worst atrocities of Christianity, and the church only executed 1,200 people, which, while a tragedy...
	It was six hours of a day in Stalin's Russia.
	Right. Yeah, no, I know what you mean.
	I know what you mean. Or, as I've talked about before, if you look at the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church, it's enormously, significantly, massively smaller than the sexual abuse of children in government schools.
	Yes, and I would like to move it back to the, like I said, my degrees are in molecular biology and biochemistry.
	I think I would rather focus on that area.
	No, and that's where I wanted to go, given that that's where your focus was, Stanley.
	So let me give you a short little burst about where I think our values have gone.
	The values have gone because the consequences have gone.
	Why do we need values? We need values because there are consequences.
	And if we remove consequences, then...
	We remove values. So, for instance, one of the big consequences of premarital sex was getting pregnant outside of bedlock.
	You have a birth control pill and your consequences become somewhat lessened.
	In other words, you now have issues that are softer and harder to quantify and less directly tragic in that you have the delay of marriage, you have STDs, you have the progressive...
	But incremental incapacity to pair bond if, for a woman in particular, you have too many partners.
	And so when you end up with that kind of birth control, the consequences called pregnancy become diminished, minimized.
	Now, when you have then...
	Control over reproduction, then women can go more into the workforce and then you get feminism, which wants people to go, women to go into the workforce for a variety of reasons I've talked about before.
	But then what happens is, life finds a way, nature finds a way.
	And so you then end up with unwanted pregnancies.
	And what I mean by that is not necessarily that unwanted pregnancies occurred as a whole, but unwanted insofar as the women had babies outside of wedlock.
	And then you need the drive for abortion, abortion being another way to control the consequences of sexuality.
	And then, because there are women who get pregnant outside of wedlock and won't have abortions, although abortions aren't available or whatever, you need a welfare state to transfer money from responsible married people to irresponsible single moms in general.
	And then, with the welfare state, the financial consequences of sexuality Not only get erased, but actually become positives.
	Your babies, rather than being liabilities, have now become sources of income because you get money through the welfare state.
	So, my question is, or my answer is, and this is just one of many consequences, why do you need values when there aren't any consequences?
	It would be like saying to someone...
	If we lived in a world like the Woody Allen world where smoking was good for you.
	Smoking is good for you and somebody really likes smoking.
	And then you say, you should quit smoking.
	And the person says, why?
	I love it and it's really good for you.
	Or somebody who is really into exercise and you say to them, you should quit exercising.
	You say, why? I really like it and it's good for me.
	And so if you remove, like, if you remove smoking as a bad thing, if smoking were to magically become a good thing, then convincing people to quit would be pointless.
	Well, you need self-discipline to quit smoking.
	Why? Smoking is good for me. The consequences have not only been removed, they've been reversed.
	And that's the fascinating thing.
	The consequences have not only been removed, they've been reversed.
	In other words, having a child or getting pregnant outside of marriage was complete disaster.
	A complete disaster for the woman, for her family, for their reputation.
	And this is why there were values of chastity, of chaperoning, of not abandoning teenagers to the wild tsunamis of their own hormones.
	Because there were negative consequences.
	That accrued to individuals.
	You know, national debts and crap like that, they don't accrue to individuals.
	And now we've gone from not only...
	Single motherhood being a huge disaster for a family, it is now a huge positive for women as a whole, especially lower IQ women who are going to make more money by having kids than they could possibly or reasonably get in the short run in the free market.
	So Christianity arose to some degree, as do moral systems as a whole.
	It arose because there were consequences, and the consequences could be more clearly seen by older people than they could by younger people.
	The transfer of hard-earned, bitter knowledge from the elders to the younger is more easily achieved through analogy, superstition, divine punishment.
	These are all methodologies for transferring self-restraint from the elder generation to the younger generation, which Has sexual maturity long before brain maturity, right?
	So that is a very different kind of situation.
	So this not only removal of consequences, but reversal of consequences means that you don't have any immediate need for morality, for self-restraint, for discipline.
	So where have our ethics gone?
	Why the hell would we need them, so to speak, if consequences have been removed?
	So to me, it's not so much the fall It is the rise of the nanny state, which is the first removal and then reversal of consequences from negative to positive.
	And that changes everything.
	And to get to your point about molecular biology and biochemistry, That changes personality.
	So for instance, the deferral of gratification is one of the personality traits.
	Conscientiousness, so to speak, attention to detail and so on.
	It's one of the big five personality traits.
	Significantly genetic, biological.
	Now, You need some chaos in society because you need to have the foaming edge of progress.
	People who are going to say no to social norms so that there's progress and so on.
	But you need a big ballast of stability as well.
	And you've got a big ship and a little rudder.
	And if you were to reverse those two, you wouldn't have any stability at all.
	It would just capsize. And so irresponsibility was limited by the fact that...
	People who were wildly irresponsible would get pregnant but then would most likely have to give up that child for adoption to more responsible people and therefore the genetic component would still be there but whatever environmental factors there are would be applied against that chaos.
	But now we have irresponsible people raising their own children And this is just one of particular many personality traits.
	And so we have an enhancement.
	And we take money from responsible people and give it to irresponsible people, which is eugenics, right?
	We are taxing the responsibility genes and we are subsidizing the irresponsibility genes.
	And we have, if you want to check out of a great book, the author's been on the show called The Welfare Trait.
	He talks about employment-resistant personalities.
	It's a peculiar combination of volatility and irresponsibility and no deferral of gratification, maybe even low intelligence, that people are very, very hard to employ.
	And certainly when there's the lure of, say, money through drugs or criminality or the welfare state, it's very hard for them to get jobs and keep jobs.
	And so, why did Christianity fall away?
	Christianity did not fall away because it was out-argued.
	It did not fall away because the devil took over, I guess you could say indirectly, but Christianity fell away because consequences fell away.
	And then you get to say, to people who are moralistic, you get to say, oh man, you're just squares who won't have any fun.
	Live a little, have fun. Why?
	Because consequences are gone, have been reversed.
	What was bad has become good.
	And then you can have all of this post-modernism.
	Why do you need truth?
	Why do you need virtue? Why do you need self-restraint?
	Why do you need discipline? When the government will force everyone else to subsidize your screw-ups, why do you need any of that stuff?
	And when you don't need values, you don't need the methodology for transmitting values, which is religion.
	But of course, we do need values.
	But the consequence of not having values has also been taken away from us.
	All right, so that's my particular thoughts about that.
	Tell me what you think. First, I'm going to get to why I think our values fell away and why the welfare state rose.
	But then after that, I was going to kind of redirect back to my question.
	You know, if you look at why our values fell away, it was because we imported all these German, Russian, Western Europeans that were atheistic, secular, humanist, socialist to teach in our universities because they were the ones that could afford to escape The rise of these fascist and communist states.
	And so they came over, they taught in our universities, they taught our kids, and they, I believe, ruined a generation.
	Well, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's part of the state.
	That's part of getting rid of consequences, right?
	So it was the government, particularly through the GI Bill after the Second World War, as you know, that funded all of this transfer of European socialist and atheist and communist values to an impressionable group of parents who then raised the hippie generation.
	So this is, again, part of the, you know, the consequences are, you come to America, it's a free society, then you should try and sell your intellectual goods on the free market.
	But what happened was, government subsidized universities, government subsidized students, and it was all a big socialist system that spread socialism.
	And so this, again, changes the consequences.
	If you're not intellectually popular, then you shouldn't be able to sell your books, you shouldn't be able to sell your courses.
	But if the government pays...
	It pays for people to come and pays for you to be there, and you get to ride the coattails of the historical reputation of the institution.
	Again, that's more getting rid of consequences, which is, well, you're unpopular, but we're paying people to come and see you teach, and we're paying you to teach.
	And it's not part of the free market.
	So that, again, is, I think, one of these getting rid of consequences.
	Well, we can agree on most of this.
	But like I said in the question, Darwinism made sense.
	And I'm kind of, I guess, going to go on a little bit of what you did there and go for just a second.
	But Darwinism made a lot more sense 250 years ago when the idea was put forth.
	Because at that point, we thought cells were protoplasma, which was just a mixture of chemicals that within the next few decades would easily be able to reproduce.
	And we found that not to be true.
	Also, Darwin wrote in his book about something called the Cambrian Explosion.
	I'm not sure how familiar you are.
	But basically what happened is they put this tree of life out.
	And honestly, I mean, I don't have a problem with atheists, but I do wish that they would be intellectually honest and say the way we portray things is not the way that the evidence leads.
	Because what they do is they put up this tree of life.
	Well, that's not at all what it looks like.
	What it looks like is you have two or three different organisms for until about 530 million years ago.
	And then suddenly we see every thylum or every body type basically that exists today.
	There's been no more body types formed.
	And what we found in molecular biology is that you can't change those body types.
	We've been trying for a hundred years with the simplest organisms that we can test And every time you change the body type, it results in death.
	Not even deformation, but death of the organism.
	And the reason being that it's not only the DNA. It's also something called epigenetics and the sugar coat.
	And what epigenetics is, is it's something that Darwinism directly opposes, which is that you can...
	We have two parents under a certain environment, and the environment can actually pass on an epigenetic trait to the child.
	One example in nature, for instance, is the blind fish, which they actually have used in evolutionary biology arguments for years and years.
	The blind fish in the cave.
	Some of those fish have actually had DNA mutations that caused them to lose their sights, which was a loss of information, not a gain of information, which that's another topic.
	But also, there are epigenetic traits that have been passed on.
	So you can take those fish out of that environment for an extended period of time, and after two or three generations, their eyesight comes back because they still have the DNA information.
	It's just that the epigenetic traits is related back To what the environment was.
	And under Darwinian evolution, that shouldn't be possible.
	Also, is the sugar code.
	It directs sales to where they're supposed to go and differentiate sales into what they're supposed to be.
	And there's no way, we don't even begin to understand some of this stuff.
	But what we do know is that as far as Darwinian evolution goes, what we should have seen is nothing could be transmitted without DNA and also that a tree of life should be a gradually branching tree, not a few organisms and then a wide birth of organisms.
	Well, listen, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Stanley, but I'm not going to debate evolution with you at this point.
	It's just not something that was sort of really part of the question.
	So I'll move on to the next caller, but I do appreciate the question, and I hope I at least gave something for you and the audience to think about.
	But I appreciate you calling in.
	Thanks for your time. Thank you.
	Alright, up next we have Madison.
	Madison wrote in and said, I'm a 24-year-old woman and I'm seeing more and more of my young cousins, 18 to 21, doing absolutely nothing.
	These are young men and women raised in middle-class, happy homes.
	They refuse to work, even if they've gone through college or a trade school.
	My worry is that they will never do anything with their lives despite their intelligence.
	How do I explain to them the importance of work and economic success?
	That's from Madison. Hey Madison, how you doing?
	Hi, how are you? I'm great.
	Right. Thanks for calling in.
	It's a great, great question.
	So let's pretend, let's pretend that I'm some pear-shaped guy in my early 20s.
	Okay. And I'm sitting on the couch.
	And I'm twiddling my Xbox button mashing games.
	And you come in and what do you say to me?
	What's your big rant about why I should do something with my life?
	What's my big rant?
	Yeah, what would you say to them? If you could say, without consequence, like, imagine you're me and have no sense of consequences for what you say.
	So I can say whatever I want to the person that's driving me crazy.
	Well, I would probably say, what are you afraid of?
	Because I really...
	I really feel like it's this huge fear culture right now, and that my cousins are being raised in very kind of, I would say like oppressive, crippling homes from mothers who are terrified to let their kids outside.
	And that's what I'm noticing more and more, is that everybody I see, their mother or their father, they're really, really, what's that word?
	They coddle them. And so I think that they really push education, but they don't remind the kids that after college, you actually have to work.
	So they'll go through and then they're like, oh, what do I do now?
	And I would tell them, what are you afraid of?
	I really think that it's fear that is causing this.
	And I would try to understand what their fear is and maybe come at it from an empathetic perspective.
	Ankle and then kind of tough love because I feel like these people are just really scared.
	Why do you think they're scared?
	What's the evidence for that? You could be right.
	I just want to make sure I know where you're coming from.
	Okay. I'm trying to think of examples.
	This is a specific thing.
	I have a cousin who is 21.
	She's a girl. She's never been on a date.
	She's too anxious to go to a classroom because she's too anxious to be around people because she was homeschooled.
	I'm sorry, I've got to take issue with that causality.
	Because she was homeschooled, she's afraid to be around people?
	No, no, no. Homeschooling is not the key factor there.
	Many, many homeschooled kids who have great social skills.
	I was homeschooled.
	No, no, no. I don't think it's the homeschooling specifically.
	I just wanted to make sure that we don't get those comments because we will.
	No, yes, absolutely.
	Please, I want to clarify that.
	It's the way she's being homeschooled.
	She was homeschooled. She was kept in.
	She wasn't allowed around a lot of people.
	She was kind of kept in her circle and that's it.
	So she never experienced different types of people is my point.
	She never had to go through people being mean to her or making a rude comment.
	She never really had to deal with things that make you upset.
	It's kind of like she was in a safe space.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah. Even now.
	Yeah. Even now at 21, she's still living in that safe space with her family.
	Right. And she does school online and she said, I don't want to be around anybody.
	I don't want to be around people.
	I don't want to be around people.
	And what do you think of her parents?
	I think they're very, they coddle her.
	I mean, her four siblings, they're the same way.
	And they're very, very religious, which I think might add to it as well.
	I would say almost to an extreme extent, Southern Baptist.
	Everybody seems to be anxious.
	Can I give you another example?
	Yeah. My mom has a friend whose daughter can't leave the house and quit high school because of anxiety.
	I mean, that's fear, right?
	Is that just fear for the world?
	Well, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I don't know. I mean, isn't that troubling?
	Because that really concerns me when I'm hearing these things.
	And I'm hearing it a lot.
	And she's 18.
	And it's like, I'm not hearing people excited for life at 18 like I was.
	I'm hearing... Oh my God, I don't want to leave the house.
	I mean, how do you try to get somebody out of that?
	Well, you can't, right?
	Right. I mean, you can't.
	What is it that you want to sell them about being out in the world?
	What's the benefit of being out in the world?
	Well, I think I might have a bias because I actually have an illness that keeps me home.
	And I see these people that are perfectly able to go out and do things I wish I could do.
	Oh, it's like... Have you ever read Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?
	I haven't read it, but I know the general thing.
	Well, you know, it's an old...
	It's a good movie, too, but...
	This guy, Randall Patrick McMurphy, RPM, he's basically locked in a psych ward and eventually he finds out that the other people are in there by choice and can walk out whenever they want.
	And he's like shocked and appalled that they would be there by choice when he hates to be there.
	Right. And takes on the establishment.
	And that's, I guess, the feeling.
	Like if you don't have a choice to go and other people do but won't leave, it's like, well, you're not locked in.
	Why the hell are you still here? Exactly.
	And here's the thing.
	I've been sick since I was nine years old.
	It got better.
	And then when I was 18, I had a stroke.
	And it's like an ischemic event.
	So in my eye, essentially like a stroke in my eye.
	It's hard to describe. But my eyes were crossed for six months.
	And I've had seizures and severe migraines since.
	It's been six years.
	I still tried to work.
	I still tried multiple times.
	Because I was raised that you don't give up.
	Right. And I feel like the young people are giving up before they even start.
	Right. And that breaks my heart because, you know, and I might also not even be able to have children.
	So I'm like, damn it, I want to be able to raise a kid that's not like that, you know what I mean?
	And then maybe I have a lot of, like, internal kind of anger for it and suppressed, like, jealousy maybe.
	But, like, my cousin went to hair school, which is what I wanted to do.
	And now she's dog-sitting and living at her parents' house rent-free.
	And me and my husband are doing it alone, on our own, and we're doing great, and I'm sick.
	And I'm like, what are these parents doing?
	Great. Well, first of all, I'm very sorry about your ailments.
	Those are serious and significant, and I assume at times debilitating, and I really just wanted to express massive sympathy for all of that.
	That is a cross and a half to carry, and I'm very sorry about all of that.
	Oh, I appreciate that.
	It's been hard.
	I actually got addicted to painkillers because of my chronic pain.
	And about a year and a half ago, I was like, fuck this.
	And I just literally stopped because I was ruining my life and I haven't had any problems since.
	I just made the decision and quit.
	Oh, good for you. And I've had to live with much worse pain.
	But I tell you, I was insane, Stefan.
	I was insane. I got put into a hospital because I was just going insane.
	And it was all the medications they had me on.
	And this is why I'm so anti-medication at this point.
	Because they had me on the highest doses of Prozac, Abilify, painkillers, nerve relaxers and everything.
	And I was kind of out of control and I really blame a lot of people for not helping me.
	Do you mean people in the hospital or others?
	In my family, I don't know how they didn't see that I wasn't out of my mind.
	Because I was. There was genuinely, like, the medications were genuinely affecting my behavior.
	And for about two years, I was out of my mind.
	And I suffered a lot.
	So I think I have a lot of, like, you know, fire in me about all of that.
	So when I see people around me that are perfectly capable and have ambition and they're smart and they have everything they want...
	And they don't take...
	It's like they have the freedom, but they take advantage of it.
	Well, yeah. Or they don't take advantage of it in a way.
	And the image that I get is like...
	Oh, yeah. The image that I get, Madison, is like a starving kid in the gutter watching helplessly as...
	Fat people throw out food.
	Perfectly good food.
	Aren't I so, like, bright and sunshiny?
	No, no. Listen, this is important stuff.
	I mean, this is important stuff.
	This question of motivation.
	This question of what does it take to go out there and live your life?
	Well, and another thing is, like, I had a very terrible childhood.
	And, like, I started listening to you about...
	Three months ago, I'd say.
	And oh my god, just resonate with you so much about, you know, like parents and stuff like that.
	So I just, um, and they've had perfect childhoods.
	I know this is like internal jealousy, but it's kind of good to get that out.
	But it's like, I don't understand how I can have that motivation when I had everything go wrong and they have zero when they had everything go right.
	Isn't that just backwards?
	I don't know. This is a big question.
	It's a big question. The people who had the most idyllic childhoods in many ways in the West were those who grew up in the Late 40s, like the boomers, right?
	Late 40s, early 50s.
	And they produced the hedonism of the 60s and the nihilism of the 70s, the materialism of the 80s.
	Absolutely. There is, and I listen, I mean, I'm aware of this as a parent.
	What does it mean to give my daughter a good childhood?
	Well, I had a bad childhood, which gave me, as it gave you, particular strengths.
	Right. And so if you give a really good childhood to someone...
	What does that mean? What does that mean?
	It's a very, very tough question.
	Is it saying, well, I don't want my child to exercise too much because, you know, that makes them tired.
	Well, that means they don't have any muscles.
	Right. So what is it that builds the musculature of our personalities?
	Opportunity, yes, for sure.
	But is it not also resistance?
	Right. Absolutely.
	You have to train mentally as well, and people forget that.
	I think social anxiety is probably a big factor as well.
	I really do believe that.
	I personally believe it's social media.
	I think social media is the biggest problem.
	It's terrible for people.
	Because these are the kids that have grown up with it.
	I mean, I grew up with it, but...
	I wasn't, like, obsessed with it.
	You know what I mean? I never was...
	I mean, I was on it and I loved it, but I was more into, like, writing and stuff back when I was a teenager.
	God, that was so long ago.
	I can't believe that.
	But my young cousins grew up with this, and, you know, they're selfie-obsessed.
	They're narcissists. It's all about...
	It drives me crazy seeing that because it's, like...
	I feel like that's fake happiness.
	I feel like it's... It's just fake.
	Everything is so plastic and they all look the same.
	They all act the same. It's like the brainwashing is working even on people that have everything that you think they would think opposite.
	I don't know. Well, it's a big problem.
	So Facebook, Twitter, other social media sites can damage emotional well-being, particularly of heavy users, particularly younger people.
	Oh, they are. And then...
	Yeah, my mom's friend, her daughter refuses to go.
	She's the one that won't leave the house, but she's on Instagram with all of her friends having a great time at home.
	And it's like, I look at that and I'm like, well, I thought you can't leave the house, you can't do anything, but you'll go out to Starbucks with your friends.
	You see what I mean?
	Right. Right. And her mom's falling for it.
	And her mom's letting her do it.
	And her mom knows deep down that she's faking.
	Because her husband won't do anything either.
	So it's like, there you go right there.
	The mother is enabling it and would never admit that.
	But she's allowing it, so it will continue and continue.
	And I think this is what is happening, is enablement from the parents and social media.
	I think those two things are huge impacts on young people.
	I'm just sad to see that.
	I wish there was something that we could do to discourage it, but people kind of have their opinions now.
	on social media.
	Everyone's kind of obsessed at this point.
	Right.
	So it is pretty addictive, right?
	So some researchers have found that social media use is more desirable for their minds and nervous systems than tobacco and alcohol.
	It's very, very addictive.
	Yeah, I read that.
	Everyone gets a little dopamine.
	Oh, someone liked someone. You follow and, you know.
	Yeah. And, of course, the comparison, right?
	Oh, my life isn't as cool as everyone else's because they're all posting.
	Nobody posts. So, look, I got a pimple this morning, right?
	Everyone posts, like, their cool stuff.
	And everyone promotes all of their successes and everything's great.
	And it also tempts you to stay in touch with people.
	Otherwise, you wouldn't, right?
	Because the cost of keeping in touch with them is pretty low.
	And, you know, you break up with someone.
	Normally, you just separate, right?
	Tear the page in two. But now, if you want, you can watch everyone...
	Move along. And of course, if people have made mistakes in social media, like they published or posted stuff that, well, potential employers might have a look at, might review if they've gotten into trouble that way, then it can be pretty tough for that.
	And it's bad.
	Now, again, you know, there's pluses and minuses and blah-de-blah.
	If you have a life, like I have to do some for my job, right?
	So if you have a life, then I guess it's part of your life.
	But if you don't have a life, it can become your life.
	Social media is like the video game.
	For chicks. Right. You know, because like men feel like they're achieving something because they will.
	I posted something and people like it.
	I've achieved something. No, you haven't.
	No, no, you haven't.
	The fact that people like your picture of what you cooked is not an achievement in the real world.
	Sorry? And don't forget the amount of like, I've seen so many times on Twitter, like somebody will post something that's totally false, right?
	And it gets retweeted.
	How many? 15,000 times?
	And there's 15,000 people that now know, that think they know something.
	That's also a problem.
	I see that happening more and more and more.
	Honestly, I feel like the world fell into some weird, chaotic wormhole.
	Everything flipped on its head.
	Up is down, east is west.
	That's how it feels. Everything's just going insane.
	It happened really fast.
	I feel like I'm just noticing it more and more and more.
	I really pick out patterns a lot and people.
	I read faces a lot.
	I'm really good at that because when I was a child, I would just kind of sit in the background and shut up because I was told to.
	So I did. So I'd watch people's faces and I learned about people.
	And so now I can kind of just see the suffering on everybody's faces.
	And I see, you know, my 21-year-old cousin who has never even had a boyfriend, never even thought about a boyfriend.
	And she lives with her brother.
	They share an apartment, they share a truck.
	And I'm like, are you going to live with your brother the rest of your life?
	And just do online school?
	Like, what's next? What's your ideas?
	What dreams do you have?
	You know, do you want to travel?
	Do you want to see something?
	Like, what's your dream job?
	And they have nothing to answer with.
	They don't know. No.
	They've never thought about it.
	And the more you scroll forever on Facebook, the bigger risk your mental health is facing.
	People spend an average of 50 minutes a day, Facebook, Instagram, messengers, and so on.
	So, over the course of a person's life, that's five years and four months on social media.
	Oh, my God. And then they spend seven years and eight months watching television.
	Doesn't that just seem pathetic?
	Yeah. Like, we are the apex predator.
	We are like, we are the fucking bomb.
	Right. You know, like, look where we got.
	And it just seems like, like you said, you said it, nihilistic.
	That is, it's like everyone, it's like everyone got possessed by Frederick Nietzsche, okay?
	Like, that's how I feel right now.
	Right. But it is. It is a nihilism and also a hedonism.
	Yes. There's hedonism as well that is spreading.
	And it changes your personality.
	Absolutely. So there's a 27 study published in Behavioral Brain Research.
	Looked at a bunch of participants over a five-week period and found that a higher daily frequency of checking Facebook was, quote, robustly linked, end quote, with smaller gray matter.
	In the nucleus accumbens, which is located in the area of the hypothalamus, this is one area of the brain associated with rewards, and research shows, quote, has been implicated in aspects of human drug addiction, including the ability of drug-paired cues to control behavior, end quote.
	So there's a theory. That's a theory, right?
	Why some people say checking Facebook is addictive.
	It's a way of distracting yourself from your life and of not getting important things done.
	You think you're doing something. You think you're achieving something.
	And you get those little dopamine rewards as if you are.
	But you're not. And again, I'm on Twitter.
	I have a Facebook account and all that.
	But that's kind of the job.
	I don't sort of sit there and say, well, I could do a show or I could scroll through.
	The other thing, too, is that I don't know if this is the case with your relatives or friends, Madison, but exposure.
	To opposing ideas is foundational to building mental strength.
	Just like exposure to opposing weights is how you build your muscles.
	There's a great interview Jordan Peterson did with a woman from Channel 4 News.
	He's over in the UK at the moment on his book tour.
	She says to him, why should your freedom of speech be more important than someone's right to not be offended?
	He says, well, because...
	to be willing to offend and be offended.
	And he said, you're risking offending me by even asking me that question.
	You don't care about my rights, so you obviously prefer freedom of speech over someone being offended, 'cause I could be upset with what you're saying.
	I'm paraphrasing.
	And it was a kill shot, of course, and it was a great moment.
	But of course, if you're in social media, you can tailor your entire existence so that you never encounter robustly argued opposite perspectives.
	And that makes you weak. And that makes you fragile.
	Yeah, the echo chambers. They've done studies on this in Twitter, like the left and the right.
	You know, there's very little that travels between them.
	Now, I have to read a lot of mainstream media as part of my job.
	And so I am robustly exposed to alternative and opposing viewpoints and arguments I consider incorrect.
	And I'll do entire article rebuttals and Get into the skin of people's arguments and so on.
	And if you don't do that, you become weaker and you become tied.
	The echo chamber becomes a prison.
	You can't go outside of it because then you have no idea who you are anymore.
	Well, and then you are vulnerable and terrified because you've been in the blanket and the comfort.
	Just bloated with this narcissism is what these people look like to me.
	They're just... You know, you're in one group and that's it.
	And it's so tribal and it's so easy to see.
	This is what I don't understand is how people don't see this.
	Like it's right in front of everybody's face and they're just like, no, no, that's not real.
	No, it's okay. And it's like, no, you can clearly see people are separating, people are getting, people are fighting, race war, you know, gender war, everything.
	And you can clearly see echo chambers are forming and But everyone's like, whatever.
	Okay. And it's like, obviously dangerous.
	You can see in history, anytime people start dividing, shit hits the fan, essentially.
	Like, this is ridiculous.
	And I feel like...
	And if you really think about it, all of that contributes in the end to how people grow up.
	Well, okay. So let me tell you a little bit about why this is a challenge.
	So there are people who have...
	Like real anxiety issues and lots of sympathy, you know, therapy, whatever helps them with that.
	I'm not a fan of medication at all, but, you know, whatever helps.
	I think we're on the same page as far as that goes.
	I have OCD, so anxiety is part of my life, so I can tell you.
	It's hell. Yeah, it's tough.
	I mean, it's a battle, right? But there are people, there are people who use their anxiety as a weapon to resist risk.
	I tell you, you know who's a genius about this?
	My daughter. I believe it.
	So as far as knowing when it's genuine and knowing when it's fake...
	Right. You know, like, I mean, you should hear her mock a kid who fake cries.
	You know, like, who's doing it for attention or doing it to get another kid in trouble or whatever.
	Like, she's just like, boom, right?
	But if there's genuine crying, like, she's over there helping, she, like, boom, she, like, knows.
	She knows the true from the fake.
	And if people are, you know, fake scared, she's like, oh, just do it.
	You know what I mean? That's good.
	But yeah, but if it's like, if it's real scared, you know, she's talking them through it.
	She's like, she's really great. She has no patience.
	And I don't, this is just, you know, she has her own personality, her own character.
	This is, you know, I can take credit for a little bit, but not much.
	Mostly my credit is just staying out of the way and, you know, maybe sanding a little bit of the edges.
	You can take plenty of credit.
	I'm sure you had a lot to do with it.
	Genetically, not so much.
	She is who she is.
	But she's very good at figuring...
	And she's actually teaching me the true from the fake.
	She's better at it sometimes than I am.
	Because I'm prone to a little bit too much sympathy.
	I'm prone to a little bit too much empathy.
	So she's good.
	And Mike's good at this as well.
	Beating back my...
	Hallmark card over bear hug sentimentality.
	It's important. He seems so nice though.
	Sorry? I said, he seems so nice though.
	Seems. Seems.
	Vicious. Vicious. No, it's helpful.
	You know, we all have people who need pushbacks on sentimentalities or issues that we have where it's hard.
	I forget wrongdoing.
	You know, if someone wrongs me, like literally like three days later, I'm like, hey, how's it going?
	You know, and I have people in my life who are like, remember that person?
	They did all this shitty stuff to you.
	And I'm like, Oh yeah!
	That's right! I live in a bit of a blur of a nail.
	I'm the same way. Sometimes you have to, like, I call it picking your battles.
	Like, you know, are you going to sit there and be miserable over this forever, or are you going to let it go and move on with your life and focus on the positive?
	Well, yeah, but you don't want to forget.
	If you're back in the orbit of someone, you don't want to forget.
	Doesn't mean you don't forgive, but you don't want to forget.
	You never forget. You're always cautious after that point.
	But, you know, you can't let it eat you alive, either.
	Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy, but okay, if you put it that way, I agree, Madison, you should not let things eat you alive, because who's going to advocate for that, right?
	Okay. So as far as, so here's the problem, right?
	So anxious people who are aversive to risk, the problem is, so if they're genuinely anxious, then what they should be doing is overcoming their anxiety in order to embrace risk, like you're doing, right?
	Now, if, on the other hand, they're using their anxiety to avoid risk, then they need to be made more anxious.
	I don't know if you heard, this is probably maybe two years ago.
	I remember this call very clearly.
	I remember most calls very clearly.
	And I remember there was this guy, I think he was in his 40s, and he was living in his brother's garage and so on.
	And he's like, I don't want to panic about my life.
	And I'm like, you kind of do.
	Right. You really kind of do want to, now would be an excellent time to panic because you're in your 40s and you're living in your brother's garage.
	And so there is probably something on the part of the parents, I would guess, and let me know if this is wrong, there's probably something on the part of the parents, Madison, where they say they try to keep the anxiety level on their kids as low as humanly possible.
	Absolutely. Bad idea.
	Yes. Bad idea.
	You gotta turn it up. You gotta crank it up.
	Because sometimes only fear dislodges you from fear.
	So if you're in a plane, the plane's going to go into the side of a mountain, you'll jump.
	Now you're scared of jumping, but you jump to avoid the even worse fate of going into the side of a mountain.
	If you jump, maybe you got a chance, right?
	So sometimes fear, you dislodge yourself from fear because of a greater fear.
	This is what I'm going to talk about with assertiveness later with Christian.
	So sometimes it's like, get out.
	Get out of my house.
	You have three days.
	Now, that is – that's going to make the kids very anxious, which means – but if they can't stay – and I think that, you know, maybe if you're like Anna Freud and you're helping your father with his papers or something like that, then maybe you can stick around.
	You know, my daughter takes over my show or whatever.
	Who knows, right? But – But for the most part, like, get out!
	It's like an exorcism.
	It's like, you're an adult. Get out!
	And then go live your life.
	And go be anxious and go deal with your...
	Like, just go be a human being in the world.
	And you'll be amazed at what kind of strength you have.
	But if everything's around, well, my children have an anxiety level of seven, so I don't want it to go higher.
	So I'm going to not nag them.
	I'm going to try and make their life as comfortable as possible so they don't feel too anxious.
	It's like, nope. Bad idea.
	You give Novocaine to the guy with the toothache, it just gets worse.
	You know, that pain is what drives you to the dentist, right?
	And people, oh, I'm scared of the dentist.
	It's like, well, are you more scared of swallowing your own bacteria and having your heart explode?
	I would hope so. So sometimes pushing people into fear has them recoil and overcome the fear.
	Like, I remember when I was a kid, I have had...
	I said a couple of, you know, like most kids, every now and then you have a couple of stitches, right?
	So one time I was walking in the Don River and I stepped on, it's probably cleaned up a bit now, but it was a godforsaken old wreck of broken metal and stuff.
	And I stepped on something, I had six stitches on my feet.
	Another time I cut my knee and the doctor put in a bunch of stitches.
	And I was very nervous about getting the stitches taken out.
	It didn't turn out to be that painful, but he stepped on my foot.
	Right? So he stepped on my foot hard, took the stitches out, and I was like, hey, oh, they're out.
	So sometimes something else to distract you is better.
	But of course, expecting people to come up with that themselves, if they haven't already done it by the time they're in their late turns, early 20s, it's not going to happen.
	I didn't want to get a job when I was 11.
	I didn't at all. I have a family I knew when I was a teenager.
	One of the kids was – he was going to be an intellectual, don't you know?
	So the story of the kids – I love intellectuals.
	So his brother had a story that he would tell from time to time with amiable bitterness.
	And he would say, you know, I was never going to be an intellectual, so I got all the job of gardening.
	And so I'm sitting there, it's like 9,000 degrees, I'm cutting the hedge, and it's really hot, and I'm thirsty, and I got to finish this before the end of the day.
	And I look over and I see my brother, you know, reading von Mises by the pool.
	And, you know, because he's going to be the intellectual, and I'm like, I'm like the, I don't know, the chore monkey or something like that.
	The chore monkey.
	You know, this is the way things sort out sometimes.
	I tell you, I had my first job at 14 in my mom's salon.
	I folded towels and I swept the shop and got paid a little bit.
	But, I mean, I didn't have a choice.
	My mom said, come on, you got to learn how to work.
	I did my laundry by myself.
	I pretty much took care of myself from 12 on.
	So I guess I'm kind of just used to doing shit on my own.
	Yeah. And I'm...
	I have a hard time understanding other people.
	I don't know why. I don't understand why people don't get how to do that.
	Oh, you mean how to run their own lives?
	Yes. I don't understand how people have to call and get their mom's approval at 22 years old or 21.
	Like, what? No.
	Can't you make your own decisions?
	Why do you have to call your mommy?
	Right. Like, am I being harsh?
	No, but it's selfishness on the part of the parents.
	Exactly. And see, that's what I think.
	I think it's disgusting and abusive.
	Yeah, because they want to feel needed.
	A lot of times it comes out of parents who don't get along.
	Parents who don't get along don't want the kids to break orbit because then they're just stuck with each other.
	I see your point. And another thing too, like...
	When talking to my daughter about sugar and about exercise and things like that, I say, you know, we think of the 18-year-old Isabella or the 20-year-old Isabella.
	Like, my job is to deliver you to the 18 or 20-year-old Isabella with good teeth, good muscle mass, good bones, and healthy.
	And I said, you know, if you don't want to, it's cold, right?
	So sometimes tough to get her out and exercise and all.
	And I said, but, you know, if you think of that girl, you know, twice your age, that young woman twice your age, what does she want?
	Does she want you to sit on the couch or does she want you to go and exercise?
	You know, does she want you to have sugar?
	And my daughter's great with sugar for the most part.
	It's fine. But part of that is simply because just reminding her of the future.
	And if you don't have a sense of the future, it's hard to be motivated about anything.
	Because you've got to look down that tunnel of time and say, okay, if I photocopy this day, where is it going to take me?
	You know, if I spend, you know, an hour watching TV, an hour on Facebook, two hours playing video games, and then I have a nap.
	If I keep doing that, where does it take me in 10 years?
	Whereas if I do whatever, right?
	Yeah, nobody has long-term vision anymore.
	It's all about right this second.
	Not about what might happen later.
	And we have this wonderful ability to portray a false self through the internet that really feels like something's happening, like something's being achieved, or to do it through video games.
	And it's sort of like pornography.
	Our inner systems don't really know the difference between fake and real.
	Exactly. You don't...
	Your brain is just taking in the impulse and the, um, I'm so sorry, I can't think of the word.
	Not impulse. The feedback?
	The image? Yes.
	Yeah, like, you know, it's just taking in what you're getting, like, from your senses, you know, and that when you're watching pornography, your brain doesn't know, you know, you're just taking it in and that's where pornography, um, Becomes addictive, just like social media.
	Your brain thinks there's an orgy and you should probably get some so that your genes reproduce.
	It doesn't know about pixels or anything like that.
	I'm so sorry. My stroke, sometimes I can get – my brain is all – I can get a little tripped up.
	Madison, you're doing fantastically. Absolutely fantastically.
	If you didn't tell me, I wouldn't know.
	See, I – and that's – When you have something like that, you kind of have a natural guilt, like, oh my god, I sound stupid, oh no, oh no, you know?
	Yeah, no, it's great.
	So, as far as...
	Oh, can I say one more thing?
	Please. About being afraid.
	I don't remember where I heard it, but it really inspired me.
	I heard, you know, the only time that you get to be brave is when you're terrified.
	You know, that's the only time you get to be brave.
	And isn't it better to be brave than scared?
	And I think that's a really good point, that there is a positive in being scared.
	Just like you said, being scared is what pushes you eventually into something.
	Like, no hard work goes unrewarded.
	You know, that's what my mom always told me.
	Virtues are needed because of the undertow of immediate preference.
	Like if you tell a lie, it's because you want comfort in the moment rather than intimacy in the future.
	Right. And so, yeah, I mean, yeah, courage is a virtue that is necessary because we have fear and discipline is a virtue because we have inertia and all of that.
	So I don't know exactly what I would say because I don't know much about these people, but...
	But I would say something like this.
	To me, it's a big perspective, but it can help a lot.
	So if you look across the entirety of the universe, I have absolute certainty that there's life out there in the universe, but we don't know where the hell it is.
	It's a hell of a long way away, and the chance of it being anywhere close to our level of development is almost infinitesimally small.
	You know, like in Star Trek every, well, there are the Klingons and the Romulans and the humans, and they're all roughly about the same level of development, despite the fact that the universe is billions and billions of years old.
	You just have it. Right. But so it's not going to be like that.
	They're either going to be like, we're going to find microbes, or we're going to find intergalactic space lords, masters of time, space, and dimension, who also want to go to Paris.
	Interesting. There you go.
	Interdimensional lizards. And so I would say, but if you look across the universe, it's mostly empty.
	God is inordinately fond of two things, hydrogen and beetles.
	And it's full of nothing.
	And even where there is stuff, it's stupid stuff.
	It's just rocks and burning balls of nuclear fission.
	It's either empty or stupid.
	And more rare than the stars in the night sky is the coalition of ancient star stuff known as human consciousness.
	Your little couple of pounds of matter in your matrix skull prison are the most improbable incandescent collection of crap turned to consciousness that can conceivably be imagined and it is incredibly, incredibly rare that you should have this gift.
	To spurn this gift, to not make maximum use of this gift, is an insult to every part of the universe that can't take an insult because it has no consciousness.
	It's an insult. A comet.
	Can you imagine? You're a comet.
	Hey, here I go.
	Round again. Woohoo!
	I'll be back in 88 years.
	Hayley out! You know, like, how boring is that?
	Wow, sure is dark out here.
	Silence is happening.
	Yeah. Oh, look. Some more black stuff that ain't there.
	I'm looking into the abyss and it's looking back at me.
	That's terrible. Oh, a couple of times, you know, every 88 years, I get a little bit of a tail.
	It's very exciting. You get some tail.
	Yeah, you get some tail. You get some tail.
	That's right. And it's big tail, too, like sperm whale tail.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Haley's Comet, the ultimate Jebby Jaser.
	So there's all of this crazy stuff going on.
	Well, think of a snowflake.
	A snowflake.
	I'm a crystalline structure that's unique, but I have no concept of it because I've just frozen water.
	Here I go, flop into the snow, and I'm plowed under by a passing truck.
	And then I melt the next day.
	That's it. No consciousness.
	Nothing. Nothing. The question is, no consciousness, but does it have a purpose?
	No purpose. And you get to be in your brain rather than one of the billions of gut bacteria.
	Absolutely. My job is to turn food into non-food.
	My job is to stimulate you to eat carbs, because I like carbs.
	I mean, that's it. You get to live in somebody's lower intestine for, I don't know, a day and a half, and then you're dead.
	And then you get to make more and you don't even enjoy the sex.
	I mean, like, good God. Good God.
	I mean, everything that's not us sucks.
	Oh my goodness, thank you.
	That's what I'm saying about Apex Predator.
	Everyone always gets mad at me for saying that.
	I'm serious. I'll be in a conversation, and I'm like, I don't really care.
	Humans are Apex Predators.
	We're the boss of the Earth.
	And everyone's like, oh my God, you don't care about the environment.
	And I'm like, no, I do, but we are the Apex Predators.
	We are the best.
	We know what we are, and that's what matters.
	Yeah, I mean, they probably don't like the word predator, but...
	We are the most glorious things in existence.
	Absolutely. To sit there wasting your life taking photos of your fucking food.
	Thank you. Somebody liked a picture of my asparagus as late to Job in a restaurant?
	No? Shut up. And you don't even get an orgasm out of that.
	What's the point? You get one like, wow.
	Wow. I'm probably sure someone does, but I don't want to know.
	And I certainly don't want to see photos.
	I bet you there's people on Twitter who have the job looking at asparagus porn, but that ain't me.
	And I don't want to hear about it.
	Sir, you are right.
	No, and this is the thing, too.
	Here's another thing, too, on social media.
	Hey, look, everybody. I bought something.
	Did you make it? No.
	Then shut up. I bought a big TV! Do you know how it's made?
	Do you know any engineering? Did you make anything?
	No. Shut up. You went out, you put some plastic, you went into debt probably, and someone delivered something to your house.
	Ooh, you're a genius.
	I bought a book!
	Did you write one? No.
	Then shut up. I don't care.
	I don't care. Did you make something?
	No. I took a photo of someone who made something.
	Then shut up. You're not even the shadow cast by the statue.
	It's like we're celebrating the small things.
	I mean, they're too small.
	We're celebrating, like you said, like asparagus.
	Instead of celebrating big achievements, shouldn't you be focusing on something else?
	Of course, that's fun once in a while.
	There's nothing wrong with...
	I'm a believer in everything in moderation.
	But if it's your entire life, and it's affecting your life to the point where...
	It's video games or drugs or anything that you have nothing in your life.
	I had sex with someone!
	Right. So did about a billion bunnies in the woods.
	Good job. That is the foundation of civilization.
	Banging. Excellent.
	Because no other species ever did that before.
	It's not unique for you at all.
	I did rubby bits and had a nap.
	I know, like, I'm really concerned for people who like to post that they pooped or that they had sex.
	Or the after-sex selfies, which I have friends who have sent to me, like, on Snapchat.
	And I'm like, what?
	Who does this?
	Like, who does that, Stefan?
	Who sends a picture of that to their friends?
	Me in the wet spot!
	Who posts that on Facebook? I achieved something!
	I know! I achieved a nap in an STD transmission, Fultrum.
	I give her a thumbs up if she told me, but I really don't give a shit about, like, seeing, you know, the afterglow.
	I'm happy for you, but I'm okay.
	Yeah. No, it's very sad.
	That's the culture we have. It's very sad.
	And, of course, you know, eating and screwing and buying and eating some more and having a poop, it's like, it's really not that interesting.
	It's really, you know, there's no book of excrement in the Bible, right?
	There's none of that. Okay, there was the Last Supper.
	I don't care what Jesus said.
	I don't care about the betrayal.
	I don't care about the prayers.
	I don't care about anything intellectual that happened on the Last Supper, but what was on the menu.
	That's what I want to know. I want to see pictures of the food.
	It's like, oh my God. Oh my God.
	Birds do it. Bees do it.
	Even educated fleas do it.
	It's like amoeba screw and reproduce.
	It's really not that interesting.
	Now, go make a painting.
	Go build a business.
	Go make something.
	Even if it's nothing that important.
	Go make something.
	Go build something.
	Go contribute something to the world.
	I think there's a lot of boredom too.
	And like this idea that just because we have everything like electronics and all this stuff...
	That that's fulfilling us.
	We have great lives, and we do have privileged lives, everyone in America.
	But we're still bored because we're not fulfilled.
	Right. I really don't believe that.
	So yeah, I would say that regret is a very tricky demon in the world.
	Because regret...
	It's like the tiger that crawls up in the grass and you can't see it, and then by the time you see it, it's too late.
	That's like regret. Regret's like a predator that hides in distraction.
	And regret gets closer and closer and closer, and it's quiet, and it sleeps, and it seeps, and it drifts through like smoke, and then it takes you.
	And people ward off.
	You know, the anxiety to me, a lot of it is to do with just warding off.
	I don't know if you've ever had it, Madison, where there's some connection.
	You've been kind of resisting it.
	Maybe you haven't really thought about it that much.
	Someone puts two and two together in your brain and you get that incandescent four.
	Yes. And a lot of anxiety is about making sure, keeping those connections at bay.
	Like, if you're wasting your life, if you're doing stupid shit, if you're not achieving anything, if you're not adding to your sexual market value, if you're not doing anything to continue the species or add to human culture or human civilization or human thought, if you're just a parasite, On the excessive earning potential of your parents.
	Well, deep down, you know all of that.
	You know all of that.
	And what's terrifying is somebody's going to put that plug in their socket.
	And then it's going to be like, oh my fucking God.
	It's like in The Simpsons, the comic book guy.
	The comic book guy. I've never seen The Simpsons.
	I'm not kidding. In The Simpsons, there's a nuclear weapon, I think it is, that's about to hit Springfields.
	And the comic book guy who's been obsessed with the minutiae and trivia of comic books and has been sneering and bullying based upon other people's lack of knowledge.
	Like he hasn't written any comics.
	He just has a comic book store, I think it is, and just snarls at everyone who doesn't know things and all of that.
	And just before the bomb goes off, he just looks at the ground and says, I have wasted my life.
	He gets that, the plug goes in, right?
	And I remember that. It's a very, very strong moment because there will come a time and the demon of regret, man, once that demon gets into your system, it will only come in and plug that in when it's too late.
	Regret is a great danger that regret will only hit you when it's too late.
	Like you realize how much you love that person.
	Everyone has the one who got away, right?
	How much you love that person after you drive them away.
	Boom! It's too late.
	It's too late. It's too late.
	Oh, I should quit smoking. Why?
	I got lung cancer. It's too late.
	Absolutely. So I think getting people to freak out is important.
	I just went through that when it came to the medications because when I quit the medications and I came out of it and the plug went in and I realized how I'd been living and what I'd been thinking and I was like, oh my god, I have to change.
	I have to.
	I cannot live like that.
	I have an incredible husband and family.
	I have a lot of charity, but I give back as much as I can.
	I wish more people would realize that, but they have nobody encouraging them like I did.
	I had my husband who I've been with for six years, and he's never left my side, even at my worst.
	He's still here with me because he knew it wasn't me.
	He knew it was the medications.
	And he's held my hand through it all.
	And nobody is helping these people either.
	But I have the argument in my head, like, wait a second, though.
	They're adults now. They need to be making their own decisions.
	But are they crippled now by anxiety to the point where they can't make those decisions?
	What do you think about that?
	Well, I think that human beings can change a lot.
	And the problem is, as long as their parents...
	You see, you're going to have to provoke a lot of disruption in the family.
	Right. What Jesus said, I have come to set father against son, brother against brother.
	Because if the parents are enabling this distraction and dissociation from the world, if the parents are shielding their adult children from the need to have a life, then the parents are preying upon the children.
	They are vampirically exploiting the children.
	It's the parents who are unable to move on.
	And children always serve the parents.
	Now, if the parents don't want to give up being parents, it's really, really tough for the kids to break away.
	I mean, how many times have you heard this story?
	You know, I was told this is the Jesse Lee Peterson story, right?
	I was told my whole life. You're 16, you're 18, you're out of here.
	Right. I had to get ready for that, you know, and I had to get prepared for that, and I went and I did this.
	Now, if the parents aren't willing to give up being parents, and I've told my daughter repeatedly, my whole point as a father is to stop being a father.
	I'll still be around, I'll be an advisor maybe, I'll be a friend and all that, but I'm going to, the whole point is for me to stop parenting you.
	And so I want to transfer as much responsibility to you as possible, as reasonable, and so on, so that you learn all of that good stuff.
	And if the parents won't let go of being parents, in other words, if they need the kids around because the parents have nothing to go for, nothing to live for, the parents have no next phase of your life.
	Like parenting, you know, 20, 25 years, okay, that's a big chunk of your adult life.
	It might be half your adult life, but it's still only half.
	What are you going to do afterwards?
	What are you going to do after you've been a parent?
	The emptiness syndrome, the depression, the anxiety.
	It's the parents who are probably keeping their anxiety at bay by hanging on to the children, and thus not getting on to the next phase in their life.
	And so the lack of motivation and ambition on the part of the parents to do something other than being parents means that the kids can't leave, I mean, you can say, well, they can, but kids will always obey their parents.
	And if there's an unconscious demand that they stay around and stay dependent, it's very tough.
	I've never seen a kid successfully escape that.
	I'm sure they could, maybe with knowledge, but you've got to hit the parents.
	My husband did.
	He separated from abusive parents.
	But were they clingy parents?
	They were obtrusive, intrusive, very intense.
	Right. So they made him uncomfortable, but these are the parents who pay the bills and make it comfortable.
	They are the amniotic sack parents.
	They are the enabling, soft, gooey, quicksand, sticky, moat around the kids kind of parents.
	Those parents are tough to get away with.
	I see what you mean, yeah. Yeah, you're right.
	I would call them different than that.
	You ever sat in a bath so long?
	You ever do this? I'm a bath guy myself.
	I love the soup called me.
	But you sit in a bath, you know, you're reading something or whatever, and your bath just gets cold and cold and cold.
	And it's like, oh, I gotta get out.
	You know, I gotta get out.
	Now, if your bath were to stay magically the right temperature...
	You wouldn't really get out, right?
	I mean, obviously you would eventually, but there would not be that, oh, getting kind of cold, you know?
	Got to get out of the bath. It's like that, if you put a frog in boiling water, he'll jump right out.
	And then if you put it in and warm it up slowly, it'll just boil to death.
	Is that a word? Boil to death?
	Yeah, so I mean, you see this with single moms, particularly with their sons.
	The sons become the pseudo- A husband.
	And what happens is the single mom can't attract a good guy because she's a single mom and also because she's got this weird Hamlet thing going on with her son.
	And then the son grows up and the son doesn't date and the son kind of hangs out with the mom and the mom doesn't move on and they end up in this sick spiral of...
	Timelessness. And then what happens is eventually the mom dies, the son's in his 40s, and he's kind of crippled because he's not gone out and started his own life and so on.
	And it's tough.
	You know, when parents are clingy, It's very hard.
	Very hard to get free.
	You know, it's the difference between, you know, if you walk on hot sand, you're like, jump, jump, jump the Dudley Moore in town, right?
	You jump, jump, jump on the hot sand, and you get to your blanket.
	But quicksand is a different matter, right?
	Quicksand is really tough to get at.
	All right, listen, I got to move on to the next caller.
	Oh, of course. But I appreciate the question.
	I know we jumped all over the place, but...
	All right. Well, I wish you the very best of health, Madison.
	I hope it clears up over time.
	And thanks so much for your call.
	Oh, thank you. Have a good night.
	You too. Bye.
	Thanks, everyone, so much for listening and for watching.
	Please don't forget to help out the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Have yourself a wonderful night, everyone.

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