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Feb. 20, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:15:32

4008 The Dangers of False Forgiveness - Call In Show - February 14th, 2018

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	Hey everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing well. We had four great, great, great, great cheese greater to error callers.
	The first wants to know about standards in friendships.
	Is it the same to say, I have ethical standards in friendships, as it is to say, I'm going to break up with you as a friend if you don't do what I want?
	It's a great question. The second caller...
	Not Sam Harris, although sounds, well, you'll hear.
	We had a great throwdown on free will versus determinism.
	Lots of meaty intellectual content to that one.
	A great erudite and very well-read caller, and I really, really enjoyed that back and forth.
	And the third caller wanted to know, has Christianity become the cuck religion?
	Has it become so much turned the other cheek that it no longer is able to shield Western civilization from radical and often subversive changes?
	Now, the fourth caller wants to know about forgiveness.
	What is my philosophy of forgiveness?
	And how does it manifest?
	And she had some very good arguments to counter what it is that I was talking about, and you'll see how that played out.
	It was a really, really great conversation.
	Thanks, of course, everyone, so much, as always, for the true privilege and honor of having these conversations with you.
	Please, please help support the show.
	At freedomainradio.com slash donate, you can sign up for a subscription.
	It's really helpful. Then we have some way to plan income for the following month.
	You can, if you've got some shopping to do, use fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
	And of course, follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Here we go! Enough intro!
	On with the show!
	All right, well, for us today, we have Mark.
	Mark wrote in and said, "Steph did a talk recently where he said something to the effect of 'anytime there is a threat where someone is trying to edgelord over him, the friendship is over.' It seems to me all they have done is revealed their contract, what they need.
	How can you distinguish this type of behavior between the natural law of 'if you conform to my contract, I will continue to be your friend' If you deviate from this contract, I will not.
	How are they different? He terminates the friendship because they have not fulfilled his contract, and they terminate the friendship because he has not fulfilled theirs.
	Am I missing something? That's from Mark.
	Hey, Mark, how's it going?
	Steph, how do you do? I'm well, thanks.
	Something to the effect of anytime there is a threat where someone is trying to edgelord over him, the friendship is over.
	I always do find it kind of fascinating to hear what people hear from what it is that I'm saying.
	And I wonder if you can give me a bit more clarity on what it is that you think I mean in this context.
	Well, I probably need to start by saying I don't like my question.
	As I typed it, I thought, It felt like two conflicting ideas.
	But to me, what it sounded like you said, or what the implications of what you were saying were, was anytime someone, well, as you've said, edge lords, so they sort of, it's almost like they're painting you into a corner with a threat, then that's a red flag for you.
	And that would make sense to me.
	That makes sense to me. But then when I think about that, I think, well, isn't that threat always there to a degree, one degree or another?
	Well, a threat, I don't know.
	I mean, the question is, why are you a good person?
	Are you a good person because it gets you friends or keeps you friends?
	Or are you a good person because that's your own commitment to virtue?
	So if you're a good person because that's your own commitment to virtue, and you recognize you can't have friendships or really any kind of relationships unless you're virtuous, then a friend can't really threaten you.
	Do you know what I mean? Well, yes, agreed, but can't they withdraw?
	Like, if you undertake certain activities, won't they stop being your friend?
	Well, sure. I mean, I would assume my friendships would be somewhat challenged if I performed some heinous and evil action, right?
	Yes. Right.
	Yes. So yes, there is always a sort of unspoken contract in friendships, without a doubt.
	And my love for the people in my life is predicated upon them and me pursuing virtue as reasonably possible in the confines of a dicey system where virtuous people are often targeted and attacked by the mob.
	So nobody's looking for perfect virtue in such a world.
	It does not exist.
	But yeah, what I don't want, what I don't want, of course, is friends threatening the withdrawal of their friendship if I do not conform to what they want.
	Now, if what they want is virtue and blah, blah, blah, we already agree on that.
	I mean, so, but if we both agree on virtue, if I'm doing something that's not good, or I'm talking about doing something not good, then a friend, a true friend, would say, I don't think this is living up to the values that you've talked about or the values you try and hold, and here's why I think it is, and that kind of stuff, right? Well, that's not a threat.
	That's a reminding me of virtue.
	Now, if I tell that friend to go F off and I go off and do this, Terrible thing.
	Well, okay, that friend has the right, of course, to say, well, I tried to give him good advice, and he's not the person I thought he was, and so on.
	But I don't like at all, of course, oh, you voted for Trump.
	Well, you're not my friend.
	You know what I mean? Like, if someone just doesn't do what...
	Or you voted for Hillary, you're not my friend, right?
	I mean, if it's just conformity to the preferences of others...
	Then that is not a good reason.
	I don't like a friendship being a good that can be withdrawn for non-compliance, not with virtue, but with the wishes of the friend.
	Okay. I mean, I hear what you're saying.
	Can you define virtue?
	What? I'm actually dead serious.
	Come on, man. Man, I'm not kidding.
	What does virtue mean?
	What is that? Yeah, so what is that?
	What is virtue? Well, virtue is conformity with universally preferable behavior.
	And that's sort of the bare minimum.
	Like, don't do evil. Don't violate persons and property and so on.
	It's having rational courage.
	It's having reasonable standards of behavior.
	It's encouraging others towards virtue.
	It's listening to feedback.
	It's changing your mind with new information.
	It is being a good person according to values independent of mere social approval.
	It's being philosophical. Okay.
	I mean, if you lie to your friend for, I mean, I would say for no good reason, but for no particular reason, you're just like, you can't be friends with someone who lies to you all the time, right?
	Now, if you say, well, you tell the truth or I'm not going to be your friend, okay, well, the problem is that doesn't work.
	And the reason it doesn't work is that if your friend then starts To tell the truth.
	Well, first of all, you don't know if they're just telling you the truth because they suddenly believe in the truth or because you've just threatened them.
	Like, you can threaten someone with a withdrawal of affection or withdrawal of love or withdrawal of friendship.
	In order for them to behave better, but they've not internalized anything and therefore they can't be trusted.
	It is the internalization of moral values that matters.
	And threatening people does not cause them to internalize moral values.
	It's the problem I have with things like obviously spanking or even timeouts and things like that.
	It's like, okay, so you're bigger and you're stronger.
	What have you done? Well, you've got the child to conform to your wishes in an external fashion.
	Simply because you've threatened them with being bigger and stronger.
	You haven't taught them anything.
	You haven't taught them anything.
	It's like getting someone to repeat the phonetic series of a sentence in Japanese without teaching them anything about the content of what they're saying.
	Can they repeat that sentence in Japanese?
	Sure. Have they learned Japanese?
	No, they haven't at all.
	Right, so... I mean...
	Yeah, go ahead. It just seems to me, Stefan, it's probably the way my mind works.
	If you and I were friends and I lied to you, I can't see how we'd be friends anymore.
	And if you said to me, if you lie to me, I don't want to be your friend anymore, that would be perfectly reasonable to me.
	But I think you're talking about something which is slightly different from, but when you say that, that's what I hear.
	And I think that's perfectly reasonable.
	Well, okay. So, I mean, there's a lot in what you've said.
	Now, let me ask you this, Mark.
	How many times do you lie or misrepresent or minimize or lie by omission or falsify something over the course of any given, let's say, week?
	I would have to say several times, depending on who I'm dealing with.
	Sure. I mean, I think, you know, I think that we can all recognize that there's a certain amount of social lubricant that is required to navigate through this world that sometimes means not being perfectly frank about everything that you're thinking, right? We all have a bit of a private world.
	And... Is that a gray area, Steph?
	People say, well, how you doing?
	I don't know. Maybe you're really worried about something you don't want to share.
	You say, I'm okay. Right?
	I mean, we do this all the time.
	We do this with acquaintances.
	We do this with governments.
	We do this with just about everyone.
	And it's fine. It's fine because it's not particularly important.
	But when it comes to important things, you know, that's...
	Kind of different, right? And so, you know, as far as, do we all have standards of perfect honesty?
	I don't even know what that would mean.
	Is perfect honesty, me telling everyone all the time everything that I'm thinking?
	Well, no. Because I'm telling them stuff, not thinking stuff, right?
	Where it's important, where it's relevant, where it matters.
	You understand, right?
	So this thing about telling the truth or not telling the truth, it's a gradation.
	And there are absolutely...
	There are absolutes at the end, at either end of the spectrum.
	I mean, there's telling important lies for no good reason, and then telling unimportant lies for a fairly good reason, right?
	And there is a certain amount of social lubrication that goes along in this kind of stuff.
	And I mean, so having a standard called, oh, no, you told a lie.
	You told Aunt Ethel that you liked her cheesecake when I know you didn't really like her cheesecake.
	That's it. No friendship for you.
	Do you know what I mean? We just kind of coast along on some of this stuff.
	And the idea of perfect honesty is a bit of, I think, a platonic standard that people can't achieve, or I'm not sure even if they should.
	Okay, so if we're talking just about friendship though, let's say you and I are friends, does that mean like Then I would expect perfect truth from you.
	If I'm giving you perfect truth, that would be my contract.
	Mark, I just had a whole argument against perfect truth.
	Did you not hear what I said? Yes, but I said if we confine it to friendship.
	No, no, I just had this conversation that it's impossible to achieve perfect truth.
	Now, you can argue against it, but please don't pretend I didn't say anything.
	Okay, okay. I disagree with it.
	I think you can be perfectly honest with Haven't you ever been perfectly honest with your wife, for example?
	What? Okay, tell me, what is perfect honesty?
	When you tell someone exactly what you're feeling and what you think.
	Well, of course, I'm perfectly honest, but it's not something you can keep up all the time because you've got other stuff to do.
	Yes, of course, but I'm talking about it within the confines of your friendship.
	Well, yeah, but I mean...
	Go ahead. I'm not talking about Aunt Ethel.
	There's a gradient that slides down as you move further and further out.
	Right. But I'm talking about with your friends, people that are close to you.
	I can't see why you couldn't achieve perfect honesty and perfect truth.
	You tell them what you really think and what you really feel.
	Well, sure. I'm not saying that you should falsify your experiences to other people.
	But perfect truth, what does that mean?
	If I'm feeling kind of a bemused resignation and some nostalgia, and it's like, I don't even like...
	What does perfect truth mean?
	I can't replicate my experience to other people.
	I have to force it through language.
	You know what I mean? Like, it just seems like you have a very, very high standard.
	Now, I think it's important to be honest.
	If I'm worried about something and a friend says, how are you doing?
	I say, I'm kind of worried about this.
	Absolutely. Be honest about it, right?
	For sure. But perfect truth.
	I don't know. You can always fall short of that, right?
	Yeah, it sounds like a strange question.
	It seems like I'm coming from a strange place.
	It's just my personal thing I'm trying to resolve.
	It's just within my relationships, my closest relationships, unless I've had that, I usually get worked over by people.
	Well, let me ask you this, Mark.
	Do you accept that taxation is theft?
	Do I accept that taxation is theft?
	No, I've never been really comfortable with that idea.
	Ah, okay. What's wrong with it?
	I think there needs to be, and I've thought about this, I think there needs to be a certain amount of free market and a certain amount of help for people that, for whatever reason, can't get their shit together.
	That has nothing to do with what I'm saying, though.
	The question is, is taxation theft?
	Not, do you think people should be helped?
	Which, of course, people can be helped in a voluntary manner, right?
	No, I don't believe it's theft. No, I don't believe it's theft.
	You don't believe it's theft.
	Okay, why is it not theft? Because people grow up within a society, they benefit, they stand on the shoulders of the people that came before them, and they contribute back to that society through taxation.
	That's how I see it. But they contribute not to the society, but to people in the government who hold guns.
	I don't know what you mean by the society as a whole.
	There are very specific people who claim the right to initiate the use of force against citizens, I guess, in Australia, particularly disarmed citizens, and take their money by force.
	I'm not sure what your contract is showing up here.
	Yes. And so maybe...
	See, my position is we have a system here which...
	While it's not a perfect system, I've benefited from it.
	And it's hard for me to go, well, let's rip it down and put another one in place.
	That has no bearing on the question of whether or not taxation is theft.
	Well, I've already answered that I think it's, like, I don't think it's theft because I acknowledge, I say, like, our system is, we take out and we put back in.
	That's how I see it. But my exposure to it isn't, I haven't been heavily robbed by the government as I see it.
	What do you mean as you see it?
	We're talking about philosophy, not Marx's worldview of subjectivism.
	Okay, what is the definition of theft?
	When you take something that belongs to me, usually against my will.
	Okay. Most times against my will.
	So how is taxation not theft?
	Well, I'm part of a system, and I benefit from the system through social services, going to school, roads, and hospitals.
	And then when I make a profit, I offer some of that back to the system.
	To continue the process so that we can have some semblance of society.
	This is how I see it.
	So you don't mind paying taxes because you feel that you benefit from the system as a whole?
	Yes, and if I earn over a certain amount of money, statistically I'm not any happier.
	So if I take $60,000 a year, And I have enough food for my children, a nice block of dirt with a house.
	Technically, well, not even technically, what I've noticed myself is I don't get any happier.
	So I go, you know what, you guys have some money, you take that money, I've got everything I need.
	So then you would be fine removing the coercive element from taxation, right?
	Well, no, then just people wouldn't pay their tax.
	Would you? Uh...
	Maybe not. I don't know.
	Wait, wait, wait. You just gave me this whole argument about how it's virtuous and good and wise and you benefit and society gets to continue and you're just talking out of your ass here?
	What are you talking about? You wouldn't pay your taxes if you weren't forced to?
	I don't think people would generally.
	No, no. Would you pay your taxes if you weren't forced to?
	I don't know yet. I'd have to think about that.
	I've never been confronted with that.
	I get my pay. My pay is short some money and that's fine.
	I go, look, just let it go.
	I take what's mine.
	So you might not pay your taxes if you weren't forced to?
	Yes, that's true.
	If I could get away with it, I may not, but you'd never get away with it, so you have to pay your taxes.
	Well, no, hang on. So for you then, the element of force, the element of coercion, the element of the gun to the head, which is the essence of taxation, that is...
	The definition of taxation.
	Because without that, the whole system wouldn't work, as you say, right?
	Well, not this system.
	Not this monetary system that we live in, no.
	It wouldn't work. Okay, so why do some people have the right to create a contract and impose taxation on others, but other people don't?
	In other words, why do people in the government get to do it to you, but you don't get to do it to me, I don't get to do it to you, or we don't get to do it back to the people in the government?
	Why is it only certain people who have the right to initiate force and take property, while other people don't?
	My opinion on this is they've set up a system that...
	Hopefully it allows people to trade and share and they put laws in place so hopefully that it takes care of those that don't have a lot, allows those that acquire a surplus to be redistributed amongst the community and hopefully that equals some level of fairness.
	That's my understanding of Yeah, that's a nice set of syllables, but it doesn't answer the question.
	Why do only some people in society get to initiate force and take property from others?
	Why does not everyone have that possibility or right in society?
	Why do you have opposing rights where if I come and take your property by force, I'm evil and should be put in jail, but if the government does it, they're virtuous in serving the community?
	I think they can do that because they have power.
	They have more power. No, no, you said it was virtuous.
	Now, if you're just saying they can do it because they have power, then it's no longer virtuous, right?
	They're just doing it because they're bigger, right?
	You can't go up against the government.
	You ask me why they're doing it.
	At least that's what I hear you asking me.
	No, no, no. Why do some people in society have the right to initiate force against others and take their property at will?
	And you call it virtuous or good or noble or sustaining of civilization or whatever.
	But if anyone else does it, they're evil and must go to jail.
	Um... I still don't see it as theft.
	I don't care what you see.
	The question is what is true.
	Just tell me why.
	And listen, if there's a good argument, I'm happy to hear it.
	Why do only some people get the right to take property by theft?
	I would answer that question by saying because they have more power, it gives them the right to do it.
	And there's not much I can do about it.
	Okay, now that's, see, that's, so then we're talking about two very different things.
	One is, because the first story you had was about how virtuous it was and how it helped people and it was necessary for civilization and society and the poor and so on, right?
	And then I said, okay, but what's the moral, right?
	You say, well, there's no moral, right? They do it because they're bigger and stronger.
	They have the weaponry and so on.
	In which case, okay, well, you're submitting to a superior force.
	Okay, I mean, I understand that.
	But that's not moral.
	Like, I mean, if you're unarmed and a mugger comes up and he has a gun and says, give me your wallet.
	Okay, you say, well, I give him my wallet.
	Why? Because he's armed and I'm not.
	He's going to shoot me. Okay.
	But nobody says that that's necessary for the maintenance of society and virtue and social contract.
	It's like, yeah, he's got the gun. So you give him your wallet, right?
	I mean, these are two very different things.
	Steph, if it's stealing, right?
	If they're stealing from me and they build roads and hospitals and maintain...
	I'm okay with that.
	I can rationalize the abuse of power.
	I go, okay. I mean, I don't like necessarily police.
	I always get edgy when police pull me up.
	But if I'm speeding and they catch me speeding, I go, you've got to have those people.
	You've got to have what? You've got to have policemen.
	Why? Because People that like power gain power and they abuse other people that don't have power.
	So the abuse from police is far less than it would be from a group of gangs, for example.
	I'm sorry, I don't quite understand.
	What do you mean? Well, the police have power and they keep all the other gangs, the other smaller people in check.
	If we don't have police, those other people rise up and they may come and steal my property and hurt my family, take things from me.
	Oh, so your concern is that in the absence of the police, you might end up with the possibility of something that's already happening?
	Something far worse.
	Because if people want to abuse other people, won't those people be drawn to the power of the state?
	And wouldn't they do things like indoctrinate your children rather than educate them?
	Wouldn't they do things like restrict and control your freedom of speech and your freedom of movement?
	Wouldn't they do things like use your children as collateral from which to borrow money to bribe their way to power?
	Wouldn't they do all those kinds of terrible things?
	Wouldn't they open the door to third world migration to your country so that they get a big power base of people dependent on the state?
	Yes, they would. And they do.
	Right. So your concern is that there's this terrible stuff that's happening already.
	But if we have more significant freedom, then something bad could happen.
	Yes. Right.
	The only thing is the freedom scares me because I'm like, it's bad at the moment, but if you open the floodgates, what am I going to get?
	And from what I've seen, I just go, nope.
	And what empirical example do you have of, let's just say, a Western society?
	And I'm thinking in particular of America.
	At the frontier of America in the 19th century, let's say, do you have examples where there's less government presence, less policing, and things are worse than sort of what is going on in the West at the moment with mass migration, with, you know, in America, there's unfunded liabilities to the tune of $1.7 million per taxpayer.
	I mean, it's a completely mental indoctrination of the children like you wouldn't believe.
	And empirically, Why do you think that things would get worse than where they are if state power were diminished or eliminated?
	I don't know if I can answer your question to the level that, like, you're asking me something I haven't thought about a lot in terms of a particular point in history.
	My rationale is that any time I've seen society break down, you get gangs come forward, you get violence, and you get basically the most aggressive Dominant types of people rise to the top, not necessarily the most intelligent, and then all the intelligent people flee, and it's just...
	And where have you seen that happen?
	Third world countries.
	You know why I said Western countries, right?
	Because in the third world, you usually have an IQ on average of between 70 to 85.
	So they can't sustain...
	Like below 90, you can't sustain a modern civilization.
	So, I mean, that's why I said Western countries.
	I was pretty specific about that.
	Where have you seen that happen in the West?
	Yeah, I can't cite too many Western countries.
	And part of the reason for that is I don't involve myself in a lot of politics.
	I don't follow it too closely just because...
	I end up just getting worried about things that aren't happening in my country, and I make a point of doing that.
	But I can't cite a country, but I can cite a workplace where a dominant person left, and once they left, it got nastier and nastier.
	I think that's a fundamental part of human beings.
	You mean somebody started taking other people's property by force?
	What do you mean? Yes.
	They refused to pay me at the end of the shift.
	I'd been there the longest.
	The dominant male of the place left.
	While he was there, I was protected.
	As soon as he left, They slowly ground me down until they tried all sorts of boundary pushes on me where they wouldn't, they didn't want to pay me at the end of a shift for making a mistake.
	And I sort of, I was just horrified.
	But this is what I've seen, and I saw it in school a lot too.
	You know, just, you know, terrible things.
	I'm sorry that this happened to you, Mark, it sounds terrible, but you have a whole government and a police force, so I assume that you called them and they sorted it out for you, right?
	No, they certainly didn't.
	I thought you said that you paid taxes in order to gain the protection of the state.
	No, well, they didn't sort that particular situation out.
	Why not? Because I handled it.
	Why didn't you call the government?
	You've been paying hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of taxes over the course of your life, and now you need something.
	Why didn't you call them? No, I wouldn't call on the government for that stuff.
	I handled it. Interesting.
	So you didn't need the government, you handled it on your own.
	Yes. But you need to pay taxes because the government is there to help you.
	Now, let me just sort of explain, because there's going to be people, sorry to interrupt, a little bit confusing for some people.
	Let me sort of explain why I'm talking about this.
	Is that you're talking about sort of perfect honesty, perfect truth in a friendship and so on.
	Now, here's the reality, Mark.
	Let's say that I live in Australia, too, and you are a big fan of taxation.
	I'll tell you what I would say to you.
	I would say to you, listen, Mark, by supporting taxation, you are supporting people having the right to use violence against me if I don't pay what they want.
	You are supporting the right for people to take my property by force, and should I resist, they will kill me.
	Like, this is what it is with the government.
	Comply or die. That's the way it works.
	It's comply or die. So if you wanted sort of perfect honesty from me in a friendship, and you were keen on taxation, then I would say, well, you want me thrown in jail and shot if I resist for disagreeing with you about this weird abstract social contract idea.
	Now, that would be my perfect honesty, right?
	And the reality is that if you want to support the system of state taxation, then you do want people who disagree with you thrown in jail and shot if they resist.
	Now that's honesty.
	And that's facts.
	Now, if you want perfect honesty, that would be perfect honesty.
	And that would be what I would put before you.
	Now, if you were to say, gosh, you know, I hadn't really thought of it that way.
	That's a good argument.
	And, you know, maybe you thought about it.
	Maybe you had a couple more conversations about it.
	And if you said, no, Steph, you know, this is the way things have to be.
	If you disagree with me about the way society should be run, then you, Steph, should be thrown in jail and shot if you resist.
	Well, do you think we could stay friends?
	No, but I would never say such a thing.
	No, you have just spent 20 minutes saying it, man.
	Man, I don't want you to go to jail and get shot.
	Perfect. Then we agree.
	Then we agree that we should not have this brutal system of coercion, exploitation, debt, and the selling off of children to foreign banksters for unfunded liability bribes to the general population.
	See, now we're cooking.
	Now we're doing real well because you don't want...
	Violence to be used against me for disagreeing with you.
	And I tell you, man, I do not.
	I do not want violence used against you for disagreeing with me.
	Like, let's say that I think the best way to help the poor is to start a business and hire them.
	And let's say you say the best way to help the poor is to go around collecting money or give money that you've got and give money to the poor, right?
	Now, I would never in a million years imagine, imagine, Mark, that you should ever have violence initiated against you and your property taken by force and if you resist thrown in jail or shot.
	I would never imagine. If you have a different way to solve social problems than I do, I would never in a million years imagine anything like supporting the use of force against you.
	Now, if we have that reciprocal agreement, if you agree that I can pursue what I think is the best course in society and you can pursue what you think is the best course in society and neither of us wants to use force against others, each other or others at all, fantastic.
	But, but, if...
	You support the right of the state to take my property by force, because you think that they know the best way to handle it, or they know the best way to do things, or there's some weird abstract social contract that turns out to just be like a social contract, like a chain around your leg is a social contract.
	Well, then we have a problem, because you're supporting the use of force against me.
	Now, this is the kind of, and this is just one example, Mark, of the kind of honesty that friends need to have with each other.
	Reject the use of force. Reject the use of violence.
	The initiation of violence.
	Self-defense, perfectly fine, another matter.
	Reject the initiation of violence.
	That's how we build a civilized society.
	And that, to me, is an example of the kind of honesty that needs to be in friendships.
	Well, thanks very much for your call. I appreciate it.
	I'm going to move on to the next caller, but it was a really enjoyable chat.
	I hope that you found it helpful, too.
	Thanks, Steve. Alright, well up next we have Peter.
	Peter wrote in and said, This I believe,
	and if I've modeled your worldview correctly, must be the fundamental crux of your purported difference between human cognition and mere data processing, with which you hand-wave away any modern or future advancements in artificial intelligence.
	If you cannot answer these simple questions with the same standard of rationality and evidence that you otherwise demand, then what is the difference between your belief in free will and other mystical belief?
	Lastly, if you were to entertain that free will is a bogus concept, then all organic cognitive apparatus would be reduced to very sophisticated computers and removed from the constrained will rather than AI being an attempt to do the opposite.
	In that case, how would you believe your models of awareness, meaning, and morality would have to change to accommodate this fundamental fact?
	That's from Peter. Peter, Peter, thank you so much for calling in.
	What a great, great question. I appreciate that.
	Hi, Stefan. How are you doing?
	I'm pretty good. How are you doing?
	I'm well, thank you. So how would you like to begin to approach this?
	I guess since you asked me the question, I can start?
	Or if there's something else you wanted to add?
	Well, it's your show.
	I'll leave it up to you. I will let you know that prior to asking this question, I hadn't reviewed your videos on free will.
	I just listened to that man versus machine debate.
	Um, regarding artificial intelligence, but I've listened to enough things of yours to know that you do believe in free will, and so that was the driver of the question.
	I did, though, last night go and review your three-part series on free will, so maybe that would help you know where What common basis we have to start.
	And so then if you want to open up with a basic response, feel free.
	Sure. Do you think that I have the capacity to change my mind?
	Yes. Obviously you do.
	Good. Good.
	So it sounds like we agree.
	I think you have the capacity to change your mind as well.
	So isn't that kind of in the free will park?
	Well, no.
	Once I did review your three-part series, I have to say it was a little bit strange for me because you didn't seem to be adhering to a classical definition of free will.
	As best as I can tell, you actually are a determinist, but you don't admit it because what you've done is you've And correct me if I'm wrong in my understanding of your position, but it seems like you have redefined the term free will to be a rather mundane concept, which is...
	Peter, do you feel like actually making an argument, or are you just going to describe things in negative terms that I've done?
	Like, just make an argument, man.
	Let's cut to the chase here.
	Like, telling me you've watched my videos, but I seem to have done a mundane thing, and I'm a determinist.
	It's like, just make an argument, man.
	Let's keep this thing moving. I am making an argument.
	No, no, you're not yet. Not yet.
	Okay, well, hold on. I think that you've redefined free will.
	So I'm trying to come to an agreement on terms here.
	It seems like your definition of free will...
	Is once a cognitive apparatus, and let's just use the human mind to start with, gets to the point of sophistication where it's able to abstract, where it's able to not only just mirror the experiences from observable reality, but then do some comparative analyses on that and abstract out concepts,
	that once it's able to do that, and then it can compare its potential actions to an abstract concept, it seems like you're saying that that ability there Is free will.
	Yes, it's our ability to compare proposed actions to an ideal standard.
	Right. And so what I'm calling that mundane, and I'm using the word mundane.
	That's not an insult. That's not saying you're boring.
	That's saying mundane as opposed to supernatural.
	Oh, like material. Yes.
	Okay. Yeah, I got it. It's a bit of an archaic use, but I'm fine with that.
	Okay. All right.
	So go on. So once I found out that that was kind of your definition of free will, I think that most determinists would not disagree.
	And they would actually, I think if they understood that, that you had made that redefinition.
	Once again, if I understand your viewpoint correctly.
	It's not a redefinition, it's an argument.
	I mean, I'm making a case as to how I think free will operates and what it is and so on.
	So it's like, because the redefinition sounds a little bit like I'm just like doing a shell game, you know, I'm just redefining the terms so that I'm right.
	But it's an argument as a whole.
	So yes, the capacity.
	So what is unique to the human mind?
	Well, what's unique to the human mind is our capacity to compare proposed actions or proposed arguments or statements or whatever it is to an ideal standard.
	Now, the ideal standard we call truth or accuracy or empiricism or experimental data or whatever it is, right?
	The scientific method or reason itself.
	So there's a proposition in front of us, and we have the capacity to compare that proposition to an ideal standard of truth, of consistency, of reason and evidence and so on.
	And our capacity to do that is where we have free will.
	So, where our free will diminishes is when we reject any kind of ideal standard.
	We become solipsistic or basically Cartesian self-reference, you know, where everything's in my own mind and everything is post-modern.
	Everything you believe is true and nothing is valid and nothing is really objectively true.
	It's what you feel. Well, we kind of lose our free will because we have no standard to appeal to.
	We have no standard to test our propositions against.
	And so, yeah.
	That is, to me, where free will exists.
	It can't just be, well, we do one thing rather than another.
	Like, you know, if you have two favorite toys of your dog and you throw them in opposite directions, your dog is going to go to one or the other.
	It's going to choose, in a sense, to go after one or to go after the other.
	You know, you throw a frisbee to the right and you throw his favorite tennis ball to the left.
	Well, he's going to go after one.
	And it may not be the same one the next time you throw it.
	He's making some kind of choice.
	But he's not making his choice relative to an ideal standard, right?
	And that, I think, is kind of important.
	Like, if you throw a ball and your dog catches it, he's able to instinctually work out the mechanics, the equation, and catch the ball from the air.
	But we wouldn't say that he understands the abstract mathematics of how to do it, right?
	So if you want to make a catapult that lands somewhere, or shoot something and lands somewhere, you can calculate the...
	The force needed, the arc, the heaviness, the weight, the gravity, maybe even the wind or something like you could actually have an ideal standard and build according to that.
	So it had to be something that was more particular than just choice.
	And it also had to be something that was not replicable by a machine, right?
	Because you don't need to be programmed to compare proposed statements or actions to an ideal standard, but computers would be.
	So it has to be something...
	To explain why we debate only with human beings, right?
	I mean, Peter, I'm assuming that you don't have debates with washing machines or computers or the weather or anything like that, right?
	So that's a lot.
	No, no, just the last question.
	You only debate with human beings, right?
	Well, no. That depends on what you mean by debate.
	Oh, come on, man. No, no, no.
	If you're going to start hedging this crap, are you telling me you debate with the weather?
	Are you telling me you debate with other complex systems whose outcomes you can't perfectly predetermine?
	Have you ever debated with a television set, with a computer tablet, with the weather?
	Have you ever debated or engaged in a debate process with anything other than a human being?
	Not in the way that you mean it, but I have negotiated with other beings.
	Like, for instance, you negotiate with your pets as you train them and show them what you will and won't put up with, let's just say.
	But that's not a debate. It's not using human language because they don't understand it.
	It's not a debate. Because there's no ideal standard that you can internalize.
	You're just training them with positive and negative feedback.
	In English with organisms that understand English, correct.
	Let me ask you this. Have you ever debated free will versus determinism with your dog?
	It's not sufficiently complex in its internal cognitive model to be able to do so, so no.
	Right. Good. Okay.
	And the reason why is because the dog doesn't have the abstract concepts that it can compare proposed actions or statements or arguments to, right?
	Well, I think that animals, I don't know enough about canine psychology to answer it about dogs in specific, but I think that certain animals do have the ability to understand abstract concepts.
	Like, for instance, you know, they even trained a parrot to be able to tell the difference from specific colors or color in general.
	Yeah, I don't know anything about that, but I'm pretty sure no one's having any free will versus determinism debates with a parrot.
	Is that fair to say? Well, no, that's a straw man.
	Okay, okay. So, there must be something unique in human consciousness if it's the only thing you're willing to debate with, right?
	Well, sure. Humans are very different from other creatures, mostly by order of their internal sophistication.
	No, not different.
	Unique. Because we only ever debate with human beings, never with anything else.
	In fact, and it's not even like it's better to debate with human beings.
	It's like it's insane to do anything else.
	Right? So, I mean, a television these days, right?
	They have inputs, they have outputs, and so on.
	But if somebody was debating with the television, that would be a sign of mental illness.
	Wouldn't that be a sign of being crazy?
	Of course. Okay, if you'll allow me, I think we are getting a little off track from the point I was trying to make.
	Wait, wait. Why are we off track if I'm trying to make a point?
	We're not, but I've answered it.
	Okay, so, no, you haven't answered.
	Because you're saying that human beings are different, and I'm saying, no, no, no, they are unique.
	Because to debate with a human being, as we're doing, is great.
	I love it. It's wonderful.
	I hugely appreciate this call, and I'm massively enjoying the conversation.
	So, and I think it's essential for health, for wisdom, for reason, for good knowledge.
	Debate is essential, right?
	Do you debate with people who only speak Swahili?
	Do you debate with people who are too low in intelligence for them to be able to understand anything that you would say?
	Maybe they can't even speak. Yeah, okay, but so there are gradations within human beings, absolutely, no question.
	But... If it is wonderful and positive and good to debate with a human being, and it's insane to debate with anything who's not a human being, then human beings aren't just different.
	They are unique.
	And they're unique in a way that's almost unparalleled anywhere else, right?
	Like a human being can't run as fast as an airplane, but they're still on the same spectrum.
	Like they're going someplace at some speed, right?
	But this is like completely opposite.
	It's wonderful to debate with a human being.
	It's insane to debate with anything else.
	So then something very unique, fundamentally unique about the human mind, right?
	Yes, I understand.
	I agree with what you're saying. And yes, our intelligence is unique as far as we can tell from what we've seen.
	And the reason I'm saying this, and I'll shut up in a second.
	I just want everyone to know the reason I'm saying it, and then I'll zip it and you can go to town.
	The reason I'm saying this, Peter, is because...
	The determinist position is something like the human brain is part of reality.
	Reality is not self-generated, self-sustained action.
	Everything else in the universe is basically like dominoes falling.
	Like the moon doesn't say, well, I think I'll just sit comfortably in this orbit.
	I'd like to be closer.
	Maybe tomorrow I'll try and get an edge a little closer.
	It just does what it does based on the laws of physics and matter and momentum and...
	Gravity in someone, right? So the determinist position says, well, we can't carve out a unique position for the human mind.
	Because it's made of matter and energy.
	It's chemical processes, it's neurons firing, it's matter and energy, just like everything else in the universe, right?
	So we can't create this special carved-off category called the human brain.
	It's subject to all the same physical laws as everything else.
	So how does the human brain, in the absence of the ghost in the machine, which is called the soul, how does the human brain gain this magical exemption from all the other properties of matter?
	Why do we ascribe free will?
	Now, I would say, well, one of the reasons we know that the human brain is in its own category, it's the only thing we debate with.
	So we're fundamentally saying there's something unique about the human brain compared to everything else in the universe that we know of.
	And therefore to say, well, we have to treat it the same as everything else in the universe is false because we don't.
	Because we only debate with the human brain and it would be crazy to do anything different.
	That's ludicrous. I mean, if a chimp only communicates with chimps, does that mean it's unique and has free will and is special beyond anything else?
	No, it means it's a chimp.
	I don't follow the logic on that.
	Well, exactly. I didn't follow the logic on yours.
	Right? I mean, you're saying that we are special merely because we communicate with each other.
	Well, yes, we are sophisticated.
	No, I didn't say that. No, no, that's not what I said.
	That's not what I said. I didn't say human beings are special because we only communicate with each other.
	What I'm saying is that we only debate.
	With human beings. Whales communicate with each other.
	Dolphins communicate with each other.
	Squirrels communicate with each other.
	And chimps do too. I didn't say communicate.
	I said debate. It's very specific and not accidental.
	And I don't disagree that humans have a capacity, given our apparently unparalleled level of intelligence at this point, I don't disagree that we make better debate partners and that we can certainly debate topics of complexity.
	No, no, no, not better.
	No, it's unique, Peter.
	It's not better. Human beings are just better debaters than parrots.
	It's like, well, you know, I have a debate team I need to assemble.
	I'll take human beings, but if they're kind of busy, I'm perfectly happy second stringing a banana or the weather or a chimpanzee or a parrot.
	Like, it's not that we're better debaters.
	Like, nothing else can debate.
	Right. There's a point of sufficiency that we've reached.
	And I believe that that is what you're trying to say is free will.
	You're saying, once you reach this certain threshold, then I'm going to call abstract analysis beyond that point, I'm going to call that free will.
	If you have the ability to compare specific actual potential actions that you're taking or actual circumstances in life, if you're able to compare that against some abstract standard, that's the threshold.
	And you're saying, Above that, I'm gonna call that free will.
	But what I'm saying is, there's nothing supernatural about that.
	That is merely saying that, well, you've reached that level of sophistication.
	When did I say it was supernatural?
	Well, that's what I'm calling the difference between the classical definition of free will and what you're calling free will.
	So give me the classical definition of free will, please?
	I'm not trying to catch you.
	Just tell me where you're coming from with this.
	Of course. So I think that the question of free will is a bit problematic.
	I don't like the concept because it's basically an amalgam of multiple concepts.
	One of those is awareness itself.
	Not self-awareness.
	Not cognition. But awareness itself.
	Now, the other aspect is, you know, self-awareness and cognition.
	And then on top, because that cognition, of course, does make choices.
	Now, I know that you have particular definitions of the word choices, but for now, just what I mean by choices is decisions are made.
	Cognition is basically the patterned, creating patterned outputs Based on patterned inputs.
	Because if it's random, there's no cognition.
	And we know for a fact that the universe is ordered.
	There's consistency to the universe.
	Because the very fact that we exist, that cognition, human cognition, brains, the fact that they evolved, It proves that the universe is actually consistent in its laws, in the way that it operates, at least to a certain extent, because otherwise there would be a caloric cost to creating cognitive systems, but there would be no benefit.
	And so in a consistent world, you can have patterns arise I love that point.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you, Peter. I love that point.
	That is like a skylight made of stained glass in my brain.
	I just really want to stop and appreciate that great point.
	Not because it does anything to my argument and your argument, just that argument that, yeah, of course, we invest so much in the brain, right?
	It takes like, what, a third of our energy and it's 3% of our body mass.
	Like, we invest so much in the brain because the patterns that it's able to develop the concepts, that it's able to extrapolate, work and gain traction within material reality.
	And that is, evolutionary speaking, why it's worth investing in the brain so much.
	Just, I just want to tell you, that is a, that's a beautiful point.
	And I just, thank you.
	Well, thank you. So there's that.
	And what I'm calling choice is basically that cognition, that a cognitive apparatus has the ability to produce different pattern outputs from different pattern inputs.
	But I want to basically separate that.
	I want to be very exact with our concepts and our language.
	I want to separate that concept from the concept of awareness.
	Now, if you put those two together, that's really what free will is addressing.
	It's saying that, well, in a human being, specifically, the classical definition of free will, in the human being, specifically, Since we are aware, we kind of want to explain that awareness.
	And so you say, well, geez, I'm making these choices.
	Look, I mean, cognition is happening.
	And I'm aware of that cognition.
	So, you know, what is the driver?
	And free will, the answer of the free will argument has always been that Well, there is a, I mean, if you take the most classical, you'd say there's a soul, but there's something, there's something of some other nature that is not of this world, that is not, you know, just simply an obeisance of the universal observable laws of nature, but it's something separate. And that that thing is somehow driving the cognition and is also the source of the awareness.
	And I think that that concept It dovetailed nicely with also the more classical social organizations of society, which were usually religious in nature.
	So you had these religions where they said, here's an absolute standard of morality which we want society to follow.
	And it's basically spiritual in nature.
	They would invent gods or Or what have you.
	And they would say, here's the standard of morality, here's the standard of behavior, you know, in this society.
	And I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to, it's a very, very brief aside, but I just wanted, these are not arbitrary in the same way that evolution has driven conceptual development within the brain.
	Those religions, which tended to have at least slightly more productive moral systems than other religions, would tend to flourish and spread.
	Absolutely. Yep.
	And so, you know, but here's the standard they're saying, and we're going to hold you accountable to that standard.
	Well, how can you hold somebody accountable to this spiritual, you know, this moral realm that you're defining spiritually, if you don't also somewhat define the human themselves spiritually?
	And so the free will argument was that you have a soul, this spiritual soul, and it's held to the spiritual, absolute, abstract concept of Of morality, which we're justifying, you know, metaphysically.
	And so here's your metaphysical soul justified metaphysically.
	And that's how you escape the dominoes, right?
	The dominoes of just matter acting upon matter, like just falling.
	I mean, this is how you escape the causality.
	The cause and effect of matter and energy is through immaterialism, through the ghost and the machine, right?
	Well, I think the ghost and the machine are one.
	I don't think you need to escape it.
	But that's what the classical definition of free will did.
	And that's not what you do.
	And so that's why I think that after reviewing your three-part series, I say, oh, well, you know, geez, you know, Stephen's a materialist.
	Well, then, I mean, he's a determinist.
	So I wonder what you're missing.
	So I'll just give you a definition that's out of, you know, standard text.
	Free will, the ability to choose...
	Think and act voluntarily.
	For many philosophers, to believe in free will is to believe that human beings can be the authors of their own actions and to reject the idea that human actions are determined by external conditions or fate.
	So that, I just, I mean, we went through a long bit there with what you were saying, but that's kind of a textbook way of looking at it.
	So, to me, the question of free will is, of course, we can say, well, we choose, but that's not Particularly, again, dogs can choose, and they can choose to—you see dogs, you know, you pile the biscuits on their noses, trembling, but, you know, maybe they will or maybe they won't.
	So there are some choices there.
	But something very specific to human beings must be what we talk about with free will.
	We might put a dog down who's become dangerous, but we don't consider it an act of punishment or retribution for a moral failing.
	And where human beings lose the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, whether that ideal standard is some moral standard or simply the obedience of the law, where human beings have lost that ability if somebody becomes aggressive and it turns out they have a brain tumor.
	That has eaten up some capacity for self-restraint in their frontal cortex or whatever, then we would say, okay, well, that's not a moral issue, that's a medical issue, and we would attempt to cure that person through chemotherapy or surgery or radiation therapy or something like that.
	So we do have a standard of morality.
	It's not proof, it's just some empirical evidence that if somebody is of too low an intelligence to know the consequences of their actions, if If I walk up and punch someone, then we say I'm responsible for punching.
	If it turns out I have a completely unforeseen epileptic attack and my hand just lashes out and hits them, we view that as a tragic accident.
	We would not charge me with assault because I'm not able to compare my proposed actions, i.e.
	hitting, with a perfect standard.
	Whether that standard is the sort of Kantian reciprocity thing, like act as if the maximum of your action becomes a general rule for everyone, or whether it's basic empathy, you know, well, how would you like it if someone came up and hit you, or whether it's illegal to do that, or it's not nice to do that, or whatever it is, right?
	So if human beings biologically or medically or have lost that capacity or don't have the capacity because their intelligence is like, I don't know, like an IQ of 40 or something like that, Then we don't hold them responsible.
	And so it has to have something to do with the human capacity to compare what we're going to do with an ideal standard.
	And the reason I think we know that is when people don't have that, most, at least common law, legal systems don't hold that person morally responsible.
	And so this question of morality, and that to me is where free will is the most important, the question of morality or moral ownership, we own ourselves, we are responsible for the effects of our actions.
	Well, if we don't have anything to compare our actions to, If we don't have any standard to compare our actions to, then there can't really be any such thing as morality.
	I know that's not a proof, it's just sort of an observation.
	That all makes perfect sense.
	Yeah, that all makes perfect sense, and you've kind of covered some of that before, and that's exactly why, like, I think in one of your videos you were talking about, you know, you don't take a rock to court or something.
	Well, yeah, absolutely. Because the reason why, you know, we have moral systems is to enforce constructive social behaviors.
	And so we choose then in morality, well, what do we view as somebody or what are the precepts of moral responsibility and whatnot?
	And the reason why we basically have courts operate the way they do is because our goal is to change what we view as unconstructive behaviors among certain members who break those rules.
	And then we also want to deter other members from doing that.
	Well, you can't You know, deter a rock or a mentally retarded person from doing certain things.
	But you can adopt, as you mentioned earlier, right?
	Through direct training, yeah.
	And I think that's the approach we usually take with people with sufficiently low IQs.
	We may try to directly train them through conditioning.
	Or we may restrain them, like if somebody's mentally ill and hurts someone, like they're crazy or of very low intelligence, we may confine them, but only out of a sense of we don't want other people to be hurt, not because they did a bad thing and should be punished.
	Okay. Now, I certainly agree with you, Peter.
	Well, first of all, I just wanted to point out you really do sound a lot like Sam Harris.
	That's just complete coincidence and accident.
	I just wanted to mention that before I forget.
	Well, okay. Let me respond to that because it's funny.
	I had never heard of Sam Harris about, I don't know how long ago it was, five, six years ago.
	And someone accused me of the same thing, and so I looked him up.
	I haven't listened to much of him, but, you know, I do believe that there is an absolute truth to the universe and that the closer you get to it, the more you'll sound like other people who are also sufficiently close to it.
	No, it really is quite remarkable.
	I just wanted to point that out.
	Okay. Now, when it comes to the question of consciousness arising from the arrangements of matter and energy in the human brain...
	I wouldn't say arising. I'm sorry?
	I wouldn't say arising.
	What do you mean? I mean, yeah, feel free to explain what you mean.
	Well, so there are monist views of reality, and then there are dualist views.
	And that's, you know, the whole, that's why when you said that the ghost and the machine, I said, well, I think the ghost is the machine.
	And this is my view, but, you know, I think a problem that a lot of dualists have is they say, well, now hold on, maybe this might take three minutes, but give me a chance.
	No, take your time. Okay.
	You go back to Descartes, you know, on, I believe it was the discourse on the method, and he's talking about the boiler room.
	And he reaches this truism of, I think, therefore I am.
	And what a brilliant and concise way to state the fact that the gestalt understanding of our current, you know, present moment of awareness is in and of itself proof of our own existence.
	The problem with the solipsists and the people that came after that in following his quotes, well, first of all, the rest of the book was But that truth was really good.
	Let's pay attention to the physical world around us, and let's say that truth, instead of trying to come up with some concept of truth in the logical space, let's just take epistemology in a different direction.
	Let's just say that truth is consistency.
	Now, they didn't boil it down, I don't think, exactly that well, but I do, and I say that that is literally what truth is, is consistency, and nothing more.
	But that gives you huge explanatory power, because you can then build theories and test them against things, and you get the scientific method.
	And we have figured out so much in the last couple of years.
	And I just want to bracket that by saying truth is consistency, I think, for me at least, internal logical consistency first and foremost, and then consistency if relevant with empirical evidence.
	Yes, both.
	Yes, both are necessary.
	I think if you had an internally consistent view of the world, or a consistent theory space, but it had no relation to the world, I think that'd be odd.
	So I don't know if I'd put them in that order.
	No, but if you want to test a scientific theory, you would not go out and experiment first.
	You would look for internal consistency.
	Like, you don't build a bridge and just see if it stands.
	You look for the internal consistency of the math and load-bearing crap or whatever that's used.
	Yes. Once your theories have kind of proven to hold under many conditions, yes, then you can take the theories and you can extrapolate more and more information.
	Like, for instance, well, if all my theories hold, then this bridge will work.
	But you kind of have to experiment first on a base level before you can even extrapolate theories.
	That's how cognitive systems generally bootstrap themselves.
	Right. Got it. Okay. Yeah.
	I lost my...
	Sorry, we were talking about truth being consistency and that it certainly does need to touch on the world as a whole to be valid.
	And we were going from Descartes through Kant and to the empiricists.
	Yes, I've got my bearings now.
	So, yeah, so I think that dualists basically...
	So, for one thing, an unfortunate consequence of that sort of series of events is that everybody now...
	They throw away supernatural systems, largely, and spiritual systems and whatnot, and they throw away solipsism because it's some kind of useless.
	And so they focus on the empiricism, the scientific method, and it becomes so concrete in their mind that that becomes their definition of actual reality.
	And then one, there are a couple problems.
	One, they...
	They don't have any explanation for what awareness is.
	And that's important because you have to.
	Because the two, the second problem is that is, maybe it's the same problem, that is what a fallacy that I call it, they've misplaced what's concrete.
	They think that physical reality is what's concrete and knowable.
	The truth of the solipsists cannot be denied.
	The only thing that you know absolutely for sure is the understanding of your own awareness.
	So you can't discard that.
	You have to answer that question.
	And the dualists have a great difficulty doing that.
	And so what they do is what I think, you know, that's why I had an issue with your word.
	I forget what it was, but arising or whatever.
	They basically, some people do this, and I think it's dumb, but they do it.
	And they say awareness is an emergent property, an emergent behavior of matter when it's in, you Conditions or whatnot, then all of a sudden, consciousness or awareness arises out of nowhere, ex nihilo. And to me, that seems...
	Well, it seems magical.
	There's no real reason to say that.
	It seems like a placeholder...
	But life itself is an emergent property, right?
	So, patterns...
	No, no, sorry. Because no individual carbon atom is alive, or has the capacity of...
	Locomotion or self-replication or whatever.
	But when it's assembled into a particular aggregation, then you get this emergent property called life, which applies to none of its constituent parts.
	But as a whole, it comes into being, right?
	Well, correct. Because you can't have a pattern.
	You know, the constituent parts aren't the pattern, but a pattern can occur within a substrate.
	So, yeah. So life is an emergent property of matter.
	I'm not sure why consciousness can't be, if life can be.
	No, life is a pattern in chemistry.
	What is consciousness a pattern in?
	The brain matter.
	A pattern in what of brain matter?
	Consciousness is an effect of matter, like gravity is an effect of mass.
	Okay, so consciousness, or I would say awareness, but are you saying that awareness itself is literally a property of material interaction?
	No, I said it's an effect, not a property.
	So every single material interaction affects a moment of awareness a la Alfred North Whitehead.
	If life is an emergent property of matter, then consciousness can be an emergent property of matter.
	And clearly life has to be accepted as an emergent property of matter because you and I are both alive and requiring that for us to have that conversation.
	And so given that human consciousness is always associated with the human brain, then consciousness must be an emergent property of matter, the matter within the human brain.
	I accept partial concept, but I don't accept the language.
	Life is not an emergent property.
	It's not something wholly new that comes about.
	Life is merely a pattern within the substrate of chemistry.
	I don't know what that means, sorry.
	If you organize chemistry in certain ways, you know, chaotic ways, nothing particular is going to happen.
	But if you organize it in some specific way, like let's say RNA within a phospholipid layer, then it's going to do certain things.
	But it's not an emergent, nothing new has been created.
	It's just that it's acting just like it would have, right?
	But because it's organized in a certain way, it creates a pattern.
	And that pattern happens to be that it replicates itself.
	And so we call it life.
	If you obtain energy and use that to replicate yourself, that's life.
	Well, you know, that one particular phospholipid in the bilayer or one particular You know, carbon atom in the RNA strand isn't alive.
	That wouldn't make sense. That would be like saying that a single water molecule is a wave.
	A wave is a pattern in water.
	And life is a pattern in chemistry.
	No, but a wave doesn't grant any new particular characteristics to each of the individual water molecules, but life itself is something different.
	It is something new that comes out of the aggregation of material objects that are put together.
	No, it's not. So for you, I guess the further determinist position I can see.
	So for you, an animal is exactly the same as a wave.
	Well, no, obviously it's not exactly the same.
	There are a lot of differences. But an animal is a pattern within chemistry.
	Because you can't train a wave, but you can train a dog, right?
	So there is some differences.
	Waves can't have babies.
	Dogs can. Waves can't be trained to be walking eye dogs or comfort pets for the afflicted or walking eye dogs for the blind.
	There is something different about life versus life.
	A wave. Like, by what I mean by that, it's like, okay, there's a cloud of Earth.
	And a cloud of Earth, if you get enough of them together, you get a hill or a mountain and so on.
	But a hill is just a description.
	Of a whole bunch of clods of Earth put together.
	The hill is not describing something new that comes out of this aggregation of clods of Earth, right?
	Yes, to call a hill an emergent property of Earth would be just a little weird.
	That's all I'm saying. That's why I disagree with the language.
	But you just did that, because you're saying that a wave is to the water molecule as life is to the carbon atom.
	And now you're saying they're not. Only in the sense that it's a pattern within, but it's not a new property.
	If we describe a wave, all modeling has to be done in an abstract sense.
	I mean, if you could understand literally the motion just by the sheer power of your intellect, you could understand All of every single motion within the ocean, then you might not even talk about waves.
	You'd be like, well, that's the ocean.
	It's doing what the ocean does.
	This is a bunch of fog.
	No, this is a bunch of fog. I don't know about this theoretical thing about we know everything that's going on in the ocean.
	Earlier, I talked about life being an emergent property, and you said that's like calling a wave an emergent property.
	Of a water molecule.
	And then when I said, well, the clumps of earth, you put them together, you get a hill, and you say, well, that's not an emergent property in the way that life is.
	I did not say emergent property.
	I've been arguing against the use of the phrase emergent property.
	I've been using a different terminology, and there is a difference.
	No, you said a hill is not an emergent property of clods of earth being aggregated.
	I said it's not. Correct.
	Okay. That would be weird language to use that because what you're saying, what you're implying is that something new, fundamentally new, has been created because you piled the dirt on top of each other.
	That's not true. Agreed.
	Agreed. Yeah. And your argument as well is that life is no more of an emergent property than a hill is.
	Correct. And what's your proof for that?
	Because they seem different and I think the burden of proof might be on you for that one.
	No, actually it's not.
	No, the burden of proof is always on the person who's trying to say that the universal laws of nature, of observable nature that we do see, and that's all the determinants are saying.
	They're saying, look, if you take the universal laws of observable nature as best as we've described them, you have to apply them universally.
	That's all it is. But if somebody is going to say, well, you know, under these specific conditions, something new arises, no, the onus is on them.
	But I'm not saying that. Do you not know that?
	I'm sorry to sound annoying and insulting, Peter, but do you not know that biology is a different discipline than physics?
	Do you think that's a mistake? Well, because then that's where, so you kind of cut me off where I was trying to say that, you know, when we analyze any particular thing, since we can't understand literally everything that's going on, what we do is we abstract and we create models.
	And sometimes those models are produced from one angle or, you know, because one discipline is looking to So we create a model of a wave.
	And we say, well, this is great because it allows us to, you know, design ships better and everything.
	But the wave itself isn't something fundamentally new.
	It's just the aggregate motion of the water molecules given the tides of the moon and all of that.
	And the same thing with life.
	You know, when we are trying to understand DNA itself, well, sure, we use the practices of chemistry and the tools of chemistry and we describe organic chemistry and all the interactions and everything.
	When you want to talk about life itself or ecosystems or whatnot, you might use Different constructs.
	You might be talking about the way that the organisms and the agents within the ecosystem interact and everything, and it's very different.
	But you're using very different tools, but what those tools are, they're just tools to understand what's going on from a particular angle.
	And what I'm saying is life, that's a concept that we as humans invent in order to use it to kind of understand, well, what is the difference between a human and a rock or a dog and a rock?
	Well, okay, well, the dog...
	It reproduces itself. It eats food.
	It takes that energy. It does things with it.
	And so we say, ah, yeah, it seems like a lot of things do that, but some things don't, you know?
	I mean, when we get more sophisticated, we say, oh, wow, even plants do that now that we know how plants work.
	And so, you know, eventually we create this symbological construct and we say, that's life.
	And we create that concept construct because it's useful so that we can say, is this thing alive or inert?
	And if it's inert, what that means is it doesn't Seek out energy and then use that energy to reproduce itself.
	That's all it means. Nothing new has been created.
	Life is just a pattern, but we say, okay, that's interesting.
	That pattern repeats itself in a lot of different ways in a lot of different places.
	So we're going to give a name to that and we're going to call it life.
	Yeah, it's different. Life is different from non-life.
	Yes. Okay, good.
	And consciousness is different from non-consciousness.
	Well, I would say awareness is different from non-awareness, but I can't conceive of non-awareness.
	Okay, that's fine.
	That would be a contradiction, because to conceive is to be aware, right?
	So to conceive of non-existence would be...
	Okay, so I mean, I think we're fine, right?
	So life is different from non-life, and human consciousness is different from everything else that we know, which is why we only debate with human consciousness.
	And human consciousness is always associated with the human brain.
	So it has to be an effect of the human brain in some manner, in the same way that life is an effect of, as you say, particular patterns in matter and energy.
	Well, no. No.
	So life is different than non-life, but we can't use the word to describe it.
	No, I'm saying that nothing unique has occurred.
	What does the word unique mean in this context?
	Okay, I agree. Humans are unique in our intelligence.
	I get that. But what I mean is that nothing...
	New has been created.
	A unique physical principle hasn't been created.
	And if you're going to claim that, then that's where the onus is on you, and that's where you are kind of in that camp.
	Who's claimed a unique—what is it?
	A unique what? That some unique physical principle is being applied to a human mind or arising out of a human mind.
	When did I ever say—I'm not sure what you mean.
	When did I ever argue that there was some unique principle?
	Well, circling back to where when you said something like consciousness arises, and I said, well, I would take contention with the use of the word arise.
	And then I said it's an effective matter in the same way that life is an effect of certain patterns of energy.
	And then I asked you, so every material interaction has awareness?
	And you disagreed, I think, if I'm wrong.
	Every what? Sorry, just say that again.
	I couldn't follow.
	Every physical interaction has a concomitant piece or moment of awareness, if you will.
	That's what seemed to be the conclusion of what you had said.
	I'm asking if you think that's true.
	I say that consciousness is an effect of the brain, and I'm not sure.
	This is a big canyon.
	Maybe I'm too limited in my thinking, Peter, but if you can be patient with me, I can't see how we...
	I say consciousness is an effect of the brain, the physical brain, and then you're like something about everything and everything?
	Well, consciousness...
	Okay, if you're going to say that...
	Okay, the human brain is aware, would you agree?
	Yes. Okay.
	And so, either the awareness is arising based on the operation of the human brain itself, by nature of the atoms doing what they do, which is following the same physical laws as everything else.
	Either that's true, or...
	There's something unique about the human brain that is making the human brain aware, but all other matter is not aware.
	And I think that free willers, in the classical sense, Like to say that the latter is true, that it's unique and new.
	Whether they say that that's because of a soul or whether they say that that's because of, like I said, that's why I think that saying emergent, an emergent property is a bit like magic because I feel like you're cheating.
	You're just saying, well, sure, of course, there's nothing like soul.
	Only fools believe that.
	However, when you do this little unique thing, something magically new pops into existence in order for me to justify that.
	Come on, just stop insulting.
	I mean, I'm enjoying the debate, but don't just say that I'm claiming magic.
	I mean, come on, that's not an argument.
	And saying that you feel that it's like cheating, that's also not an argument.
	Let's try and keep it on the up and up.
	That's all I'm asking. I think you'll agree.
	I'm one of your more honest...
	And up and up callers here, so I'm just trying to be exact.
	No, no, saying that I'm arguing for magic...
	You're not arguing for that.
	Okay, then why are we bringing it up?
	Well, you may be...
	Are you arguing with people who aren't in the conversation?
	I would ask you to not do that, too, because they're not here and can't talk for themselves.
	Well, if you believe that awareness that you experience as a human being, if you believe that that arises ex nihilo, then...
	Then yes, unless you have a reasonable explanation of that, then I am going to call that In the same realm as mysticism, which actually I think that was in my original question.
	So you're saying that biologists, in order to differentiate between life and non-life, need to know about DNA and every conceivable piece of chemical and material interaction that produces life.
	They have to be able to explain it all the way down to the atomic level, otherwise they have no capacity to rationally differentiate between living and non-living things.
	Well, if they understood those things, they would certainly have a more correct view.
	Okay, but look, nobody's saying that anybody understands human consciousness down to the atomic level.
	Nobody does. But saying you understand that that's a ridiculous standard that's not applied to anywhere else.
	In human thought.
	This is one exception.
	Like, we say biologists in the classical world.
	Like, Aristotle was considered to be a very skilled biologist.
	And he was. He had massive collections.
	He dissected. He documented.
	He knew nothing about DNA. He didn't even know what cells were.
	They didn't have any microscopes back in the day.
	So he was able...
	To be an excellent, first-class, top-rate, top-shelf biologist while knowing virtually nothing of what we now know.
	And of course, there's a long way to go when it comes to this kind of stuff, right?
	So to say, well, if people want to argue the case for free will, they need to explain how it operates at the atomic level.
	Where else would you have held that standard?
	Well, everywhere. I think in general, we have such a standard everywhere.
	So then there's no such thing as biology because biologists cannot explain life at the atomic level.
	No, but what we seek out is the ultimate knowledge.
	We try to find as low of an order cause as we can to explain the phenomenon so that our models are more accurate.
	I'm not saying let's stop now.
	I'm not saying that's the end of our journey to knowledge.
	I'm just saying that if you have a standard that free willers Need to explain consciousness down at the cellular and atomic level, that is not a reasonable standard.
	And you would not apply it to other things.
	This is a very particular standard you have, right?
	Well, no, that's not what I'm asking of you.
	But what I'm saying is that if you're going to say that your awareness only happens in your brain and doesn't happen anywhere else, where those same interactions are occurring...
	Then I think the onus is on you to say why it's different.
	I'm not saying... No, no, no. The onus is on you, Peter.
	Because if you've only ever debated to a human brain, which is what we're doing, right?
	Your brain is interacting with my brain through the medium of the body and the internet and all of that.
	So if you only ever debate in the presence of a human brain, then the onus is upon you to say that it's not unique because you're acting.
	On the presumption, on the certainty that it is completely unique.
	And if you say, well, you can't say that consciousness is rooted in the human brain, then you actually have to answer why you never debate with a fridge or a dead brain or a piece of liver or a toe.
	You get the idea, right? Because you only ever talk to human brains.
	And then you say, well, but you have to prove to me that there's something unique going in.
	It's like, no, I don't. Because you're acting as if on the certain knowledge that there is something unique going on because you only ever talk to human brains.
	It's very pragmatic, but okay, I have two questions.
	I have two answers to that. One of them is that I do have a theory for how it works, but I don't know if you want to take the time to hear it on your show.
	No, I'd like to answer the question, or the rebuttal, I guess, that I have.
	Right, so there's one.
	I do have a theory of how awareness works.
	And it's not unique to humans.
	But two, I've already answered why I only speak to humans.
	And because what I'm doing in my mind as I build more and better models of the world and I compare them to the world, I need to find more and more sophisticated examples of information to compare and contrast against.
	And so here I am figuring out how Skype works so I can call you.
	But I wouldn't do that to a dog because a dog cannot help me hone my models at all.
	So consciousness is an effect of the brain because you only access consciousness by talking to a brain.
	No, I would say the brain is a specific example of the awareness that naturally arises from material interaction, and it's specific in the way that a human brain is organized.
	Have you ever talked to a consciousness that is not related to a human brain, that is floating somewhere in space or somewhere in the air or is embedded in a piece of clay?
	Of course not. I mean, I'm being facetious.
	You only ever talk to human brains.
	So I don't have to prove to you that consciousness is specific to the human brain because that's exactly how you act.
	No, that is not true. And that's why I also want to differentiate between concepts here.
	I'm not sure what you mean by...
	No, because we've already said that when I'm talking about you debating, that we're only talking about human beings because we don't debate parrots.
	So I think that that can be implicit when I'm talking about how you interact and debate with, that we're talking about the human brain.
	No, but then you say that therefore no other consciousness exists, and that doesn't follow.
	What? When on earth did I say that no other consciousness exists?
	That's a pretty bold statement, given that I haven't traversed the ends of the universe and back to discover simultaneously every possible life form in the known universe.
	Well, maybe I misunderstood you, but I thought that you said...
	The proof that humans are uniquely conscious, in your words, is that I only speak to humans.
	So, the argument is, when I said that consciousness is an effect of the brain, and you said, prove it, and I said, well, you only ever talk to brains.
	You only ever access consciousness by talking to brains, and so I don't have to prove it, because it's the empiricism of your entire actions.
	And so the idea, like, I'm sure that there is consciousness out there that has nothing to do with human brains, you know, on some planet around Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse or whatever.
	I'm sure that there's consciousness out there.
	But we're just talking about what we know and can verify empirically at the moment.
	Are you actually sure? I am, you know, I mean, can I prove it 100%?
	No. But the idea that throughout, what is it, 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion suns, that there are no other n-plus planets that have ever evolved life, given how incredibly useful consciousness is, and has made us the dominant species on the planet with no even close to second competition, I would be beyond agog if there was no other consciousness in the universe.
	Okay, interesting.
	So, So basically, when you say consciousness, you mean basically human consciousness.
	And when you say free will, you mean basically the extent to which a human consciousness can compare its behavior to an abstract standard.
	Well, I think that by excluding all life forms except human beings, I thought that was pretty much understood.
	Because we had the earlier conversation about dogs and parrots and so on, and we had agreed that it was specific, that certainly free will was specific to human beings as we were going to talk about it.
	Well, according to your definition of free will, yes.
	No, we agreed because we don't debate with parrots, and we had this, I don't know if you remember, we had this back and forth about that about 45 minutes ago.
	Yes, but I did not agree that the classical definition of free will, which is any type of interaction or a quality of the universe which doesn't follow from the natural laws that we understand and observe, I did not agree that that is only belonging to humans.
	I agreed that I only debate humans because only humans have the ability at the moment to address concepts of sufficient complexity to entertain me.
	Yeah, I don't think this is an important point.
	We're talking about human beings. Okay, let's just keep going.
	Well, so, okay, then I guess I have to sort of back up to my prior point, which is that the way that you've defined the terms and the debate about quote-unquote free will, I don't think that's in a disagreement to what behaviorists believe.
	Wait, so behaviorists believe that human beings have the capacity to compare proposed actions or arguments to an ideal standard?
	I'm sorry, I was talking at the moment.
	But I said behaviors, I meant determinists.
	Can you say that again? Okay, got it.
	That was my confusion because I thought we were back to trading dogs again.
	Okay, that's fine. That's fine. So determinists or anyone who debates with me must believe that I have the capacity to compare the contents of my mind to an ideal standard or a better standard, the standard of truth or accuracy and so on.
	Would you agree with that? Yeah.
	Good. Then you and I both agree that human beings have the capacity to To compare the contents of their mind to an ideal standard.
	And that the ideal standard is something we should choose, but we can't guarantee that someone will.
	We can work to try and make it as appealing as possible for them to believe things that are true rather than false.
	But there's an ideal standard called the truth, accuracy, consistency, conformity with empirical evidence, and so on.
	And we have the capacity to compare the contents of our mind to this ideal standards.
	And we should encourage each other to compare the contents of our mind to an ideal standard, because truth is better than error.
	If we both agree that, then I don't see the difference between us.
	Well, correct.
	And that's why, I mean, I started this off saying after I've viewed your series, I think that you are actually a determinist.
	No, no, no, no, no. That you can't say.
	That you can't say. Well, then how is that position not determinist?
	How is our capacity to compare the contents of our mind to an ideal standard?
	How is that in violation of determinism?
	Because determinism would not say we have the capacity but the inevitability.
	The contents of our mind are like rocks bouncing down the side of a hill.
	Like a rock bouncing down the side of a hill.
	It does not have the capacity to say, it would be immoral for me to land on that car, so I should go to the left.
	Neither would a human if you tossed it off the hill.
	Well, yes, but then the question would be, well, if you tossed him off a hill, probably, because he would roll and hopefully stop himself, you'd toss him off a cliff.
	No, but then the question is, the person who's throwing the other person off the cliff, do they have the capacity to say, ideally, I would not want to murder someone, so I'm not going to throw this person off the cliff, right?
	That is the question. Is the ideal standard called not violating someone's capacity to continue living?
	And so on, right? Yeah.
	So we have a standard for a rock, which is, wow, bad luck that thing landed on you.
	So here's an example, very sort of simple example that hopefully will illustrate.
	If I park my car at the bottom of a hill, I go for a walk, there's a rainstorm, the rain dislodges a boulder at the top of the hill, it bounces down and crushes my car.
	I come back and say, ooh, bad luck, right?
	Now, the second is I go for a walk, it rains, and someone stretches and leans up against...
	A rock at the top of the hill and accidentally pushes it down and hits my car.
	And we'd say, ooh, you know, that was kind of bad luck, but there was some human causality there.
	We don't know how, you know, maybe it's an accident.
	Now, the other is somebody hates me.
	They see that I've parked my car at the bottom of the hill.
	It's raining, and they go and deliberately push the car down, push the boulder down onto my hill, right?
	Now, in the deterministic model, there's absolutely no difference between these three situations.
	Yes, there is. What?
	Well, a human is different than a rock.
	Wait, are you saying that human beings have magical properties that are different from their component materials?
	No, I'm saying they have internal complexity that you don't understand, so you have to be able to make guesses about their behavior.
	One of those guesses is- Hang on, the weather has internal complexity that we don't understand.
	Does the weather have free will and moral responsibility?
	The weather may be complex, but it's chaotic.
	There's no internal order or sophistication.
	No, the weather is not chaotic.
	The weather definitely follows physical patterns.
	We may not understand all the cause and effect, but the weather is not random, right?
	The weather is atoms and energy affecting each other.
	But it's actually the constraint that matters.
	When you're processing information, one of the most important things is what don't you pay attention to.
	In effect, the human brain spends a lot of time figuring out what to ignore.
	I don't understand what that means relative to what I just said.
	So the weather is a bunch of chaotic, and I'm not saying random, but I'm saying chaotic in the mathematical sense, motion.
	But if you understood all the inputs, you would understand all the outputs, right?
	Well, yes, and same with the human brain.
	But the way that the human brain...
	And I'm not a-ha-ing because I got you or anything like that.
	I'm just saying, so the human brain is the same as the weather.
	No, it's not. You just said, just like the human brain.
	Well, you can't say, look, here's one similarity, and therefore they're exactly the same.
	Okay, so what's different about the human brain?
	Because I agree with you that this is why I don't debate with the weather, King Lear style, right?
	So the human brain is different from the weather.
	How is it different from the weather?
	And how is it not part of the same general physical system of cause and effect?
	Okay, so the weather is just a large jumble of mathematically chaotic interactions.
	And it is not what I would call cognitive because it doesn't take inputs and then do something predictable to them to produce a predictable patterned output from the patterned input.
	But a human brain does.
	But you don't have insight.
	Just like you don't have insight into the weather to tell where all those molecules are going, but you also don't have insight into a human brain.
	And so it makes sense to basically try to guess what is going on.
	What did that human model inside their brain?
	Were their actions based on a reason?
	Were they accidental or were they based on a reason which could potentially repeat in the future?
	And so we treat them morally different than a rock because We have to assume that their behavior is when it is clearly motivated, when we can prove that it wasn't just done by accident, when we can prove that they took deliberate action to do something.
	Ooh, deliberate action? Wait, wait, what do you mean by deliberate action?
	That the model itself produced something on purpose to regenerate that behavior.
	Like, it wasn't, you know, if they casually lean against the boulder, well, people do actually casually lean against something.
	And the normal case leaning against an immensely large boulder is not that the boulder The assumption most humans make is that it's so heavy and it's been here for so long that it's not going to move.
	So it's very reasonable to believe that that could have been done by accident.
	But if they've got a team of 10 people behind the boulder heaving the boulder, you can say, no, no, no.
	That was the intended effect of your action.
	And therefore, we're going to take you to court and say, how do we correct this behavior?
	Apply a punishment so that maybe you'll say, well, geez, if I do this again, I'll get punished again, so I won't do it.
	And also show to other people that, you know, they should Shouldn't heave boulders on people's cars.
	And that's very significant difference between a human and a rock.
	They will choose better. Correct.
	Okay. So now we're back to the same place, which is the boulder can't choose, but human beings can.
	Well, the...
	The boulder's actions can be predicted.
	A human's actions can't be predicted.
	The human is making a choice. No, no, no.
	You just said... Come on, man.
	Give me a break here. Come on.
	Don't just fight for the sake of fighting.
	You said, the human beings...
	I said, the boulder can't choose, but human beings can.
	And you said, yes. I'm not trying to catch you.
	I'm really... I'm not trying to corner you or do some sort of victory lap.
	But you understand that that's the free will position, that human beings are functionally different from boulders.
	Boulders can't choose and human beings can, and you just agreed with that.
	Now you can withdraw that, but let's not pretend you didn't.
	No, no, no. I'm not withdrawing anything.
	That's your definition of free will, that the internal complexity of a human mind...
	Free will is that human beings can choose.
	Yes, that's not a radical definition of free will.
	Well, then it's not in disagreement with determinism.
	So you just keep saying that.
	But determinism is that there is no free will.
	Now, if you say human beings can choose, but there's no such thing as free will, I would submit that you don't really understand determinism, Peter.
	No, that's not true, because I have not yet, at this point, I have not drawn reference to any unconstrained behavior, like in the original question, to any sort of orthogonal concept to the universal laws of nature, which means that if you were to run, you know, the universe to its completion, there would be an ultimate fate, there would be an ultimate destiny, and you will end up there.
	There's not like a hundred different possibilities or an infinite number of possibilities.
	You will end up in a specific place.
	You said the rock cannot choose, the boulder cannot choose, but human beings can choose.
	And you're saying this is not some orthogonal right-angle departure from the laws of physics, but you've just created a very separate category.
	One is called the weather, the television, the fridge, the boulder.
	None of these things have choices.
	And in terms of free will, our capacity to compare proposed actions or arguments to an ideal standard, only the human mind has this capacity.
	No, the difference between the human mind and the weather is that the weather, like I said, is mathematically chaotic and it's not patterns, it's not cognitive.
	The human is cognitive. And so when you say choice in the context of human cognition, what you're saying is that the informational structure, the informational architecture and symbolic architecture within the human mind that's built from mirroring various interactions with the world gets constructed in such a way that the information will be processed.
	That's what you call a choice, but it's still deterministic.
	I don't know what any of that means.
	Sorry, man. You have to take another run at it.
	Please. Like, I'm not trying to be a, I just, I don't know what that means.
	The information will be processed.
	I don't know what that means.
	I mean, you could say computers process information.
	I mean, you could say, I mean, I don't know, right?
	You could say that bears process information because they don't eat boulders, they eat salmon.
	I mean, I don't know what this means.
	Well, bears certainly do process information.
	Right. So please try and keep stuff specific to the human mind so we don't spill over into other consciousness.
	Well, I believe that the human mind is not fundamentally different from other things.
	It is only different in gradations.
	It's different in magnitude.
	As I've said, other types of organisms can do the things we do.
	They just can't do them nearly as well.
	So you're saying that a chimpanzee is just not quite as good a debater as a human being?
	Not quite as good a mathematician, not quite as good a physicist as a human being.
	No, no. It's lower level than that.
	It's about the chimpanzee can do symbol manipulation.
	It does have language.
	It can think and memorize things.
	Yeah, but it would be crazy to debate with a chimpanzee.
	We all understand that, right?
	Correct. But a human has those abilities in greater magnitude.
	When you have those abilities in greater magnitude, you do actually gain the ability to do certain things that a chimp simply can't do.
	And what you're trying to do here, Peter, with me, is you're trying to get me To displace the existing contents of my mind with something that is more true, that is more accurate, that is more consistent, or true, accurate, and consistent if you think it's more binary.
	So you're saying, Steph, I'm going to bring to you reason and evidence by which you should surrender an existing position that is incorrect, or we could say more technically not in conformity with reason and evidence, and you should replace it with concepts that are in conformity.
	With reason and evidence.
	Is that fair to say? Yes, it's primarily being done by comparing the symbological constructs and the architectures of our brain, not necessarily by...
	It's mostly reason. Boy, aren't you a user-friendly thinker.
	I don't know if you...
	I just...
	I'm not going to be annoying, but I'm just going to say, you know, read more Plato in terms of like the dialogues, because when we're having a public conversation, it's important to try and be as...
	We're as user-friendly as possible.
	And when you come out with these polysyllabic, do you think that most people are going to know?
	We're trying to have a public conversation to help people as a whole, right?
	Which is why it's going on long.
	And it's just a suggestion, you know, from a guy who runs the biggest philosophy show in the world to try and, you know, like this is not something Socrates would ever say.
	He never used the word He never used the word epistemological or metaphysical.
	I'm not saying you have, but just in general, if you can friendly it up for more people, I think that you'll find that you'll use your considerable and enormous intellect and amazing language skills and reasoning skills and debate skills.
	It'll be better for the world as a whole if more people can digest what it is that you're saying.
	Yeah, I apologize.
	I did kind of ask Michael if this was an appropriate topic, because I know that it does get intricate, and I think that You know, exactness.
	I won't use exactitude.
	Exactness of language is very important, you know.
	No, and I appreciate that.
	But, okay, let me ask you this, Peter.
	And I think maybe we can close on this.
	And I really do appreciate this.
	This is a great conversation.
	Do you believe, well, you've already said that people have choices.
	Do you believe that they have moral responsibility?
	I think that my definition of morality, as stated before, it's a set of principles that are shared between a group of people that define the acceptable conduct of behavior among those people.
	And so if a person is within that society, then the society will hold them accountable, and that is moral accountability.
	Under certain conditions, the society will hold them morally accountable.
	But do you believe that people are morally accountable?
	To a society in which they belong, I think that they will be held that way, so they should act as if they are.
	So, a Satanist society who would punish you for not killing a newborn, that you would be immoral for not following those rules if you were part of that society?
	Yeah, it's not a society I'd recommend joining, but...
	Well, why? Okay, so then there must be some larger moral considerations That supersede subjective definitions from groups that you would consider immoral, is that fair to say?
	No, it just stems from the human penchant for reciprocity.
	What words can I use?
	For reciprocity, because I don't want my children murdered.
	I'm sorry for the word.
	No, it's fine. Okay, so...
	If you're happy with murder as the means for solving human conflicts, like if you're in the mafia or whatever, and you feel that you can protect your children, then that's fine for them, right?
	Is that in this worldview?
	So I guess, yes, if I was in sort of a Machiavellian, might makes right, If I believed that and I thought that I could hold my own and dominate, then maybe I would accept a society like that rather than try to find a different one.
	So why are you correcting me on free will if you wouldn't correct somebody who's willing to strangle babies?
	I'm just kind of curious about the moral hierarchy here.
	I mean, if it's perfectly fine, if that's your world and that's what you like and that's what you want and you're willing to accept the risks and the reciprocity and so on, if it's perfectly fine to murder, to rape, to steal, to strangle babies or whatever, you wouldn't correct those people, but you want to correct me on the question of free will.
	Do you see that that seems kind of odd that this is a higher priority for you than, say, the life of a baby?
	Well, first of all, I'm not in contact with people like that.
	No, no, no. I didn't ask you if you were in contact.
	I'm asking you about the moral consistency of your worldview.
	I specifically said that I would not join a society like that.
	That's not, no. I didn't ask you if you would join it.
	I asked you whether it was wrong, and you can't say that it was wrong, because if they're willing to accept the risks and that there's society, you can't say that they're wrong.
	But you're willing to tell me for an hour and a half that I'm wrong, but you won't correct somebody who would perform the most egregious acts of immorality.
	That's not what I said. I said I would say that they were wrong, specifically because I would have sought out a different society with different states.
	No, no, no. How can you say that they're wrong?
	It's just their society.
	Let me finish. Because morality at heart to primates is essentially the question of us versus them.
	And when I go to a different society, I'm defining a different us with a different standard of behavior.
	And societies do judge other societies by their behaviors.
	When I went to the other society, I now point the finger at them and say, they're wrong.
	They do things wrongly.
	Now, what I did say was, if you are, if you happen to be a member of a particular society, You better act as if you're going to be held morally accountable because you will be.
	Right. So you can't say that anyone's wrong who would be out there killing babies, but you'll argue with me for an hour and a half that I'm wrong.
	Do you understand that that's a bit of a contradiction?
	I can and do say that they're wrong because I belong to different societies.
	No, you can say that they're wrong according to your rules, but that's like your tennis player saying, well, the squash players are playing tennis wrong.
	It's like, no, they're playing squash. No, but those are my rules.
	But they're not objective rules.
	It doesn't matter. I'm a subjective being.
	You're a subjective being.
	So why do you care what I believe if everything's subjective?
	Well, I include you in us, Stefan.
	Why am I on your team?
	I appreciate what you do.
	I do appreciate the reason and knowledge that you bring to people.
	I think it's a good thing. No, no, but how do you get to put me in your team?
	Why am I? You're a subjective being.
	How do I get to be on your team of subjective beings when I virulently fight against subjectivism?
	Against subjectivism?
	You don't think you're a subjective being?
	Fuck no! Good God no!
	That would make me a complete fraud.
	Philosophy is about the pursuit of objective truth.
	Well, subjective beings can pursue objective truths.
	At least insofar as objective truths can be known.
	Right. And morality is the most important objective truth that we need.
	And if you still have issues with that, I would recommend my book on a rational proof of secular ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior.
	It's free! Free!
	At freedomainradio.com slash free.
	But I really do appreciate the call.
	It was a great workout. And I appreciate the quality of conversation and debate that you brought.
	But I am going to move on to the next caller.
	And I really do appreciate it again.
	All right. Thank you. Thanks. Alright, up next we have Emily.
	Emily wrote in and said, White Christian America is under attack,
	and I am angry to see it, but has Christianity not made the West vulnerable to exploitation by pushing a gospel of grace and forgiveness instead of a loyalty to kin and country?
	As white people everywhere are asked to give more of their money and more space in their countries to second and third world immigrants and refugees, does Christianity really provide the backbone to protect ourselves from this invasion, or does it ask too much grace to be extended to people from outside groups?
	That's from Emily. Hey, Emily.
	How are you doing tonight? Very good.
	How are you? I'm well.
	I'm well, thank you. Yeah, kind of frustrating, isn't it?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	I mean, there's some pretty practical reasons as to what's going on, which is the government is firing hundreds of millions of dollars at churches in refugee resettlement programs, and they are taking their 30 pieces of silver to betray the West.
	Mm-hmm. So there's that sad, sad truth.
	And there is the great curse of wealth, the great curse of comfort, the great curse of over-civilization, Emily, and the great curse of over-civilization is sentimentality and self-indulgence.
	So sentimentality is when you get to pretend to be good while passing the costs off to others.
	So people who say, well, we should take in all these people from the third world, well, they're not putting them up in their own homes, and they're not paying more taxes to do so, because what's happening is it's being funded through bonds and through debt.
	Well, two sides of the same coin, right?
	People aren't saying, well, you know, I really, really want to get, I don't know, another million people from the Middle East into Germany, and I'm willing to have my taxes triple to pay for it, right?
	And they're going to stay at my house, right?
	So sentimentality in this context is you see a picture of a boy drowned on a Turkish beach, which It turns out it was because his father overloaded the boat because he was trying to get someplace for dental care, and it was his fault and his responsibility.
	And if he'd done that on a lake in any of the five Great Lakes in southern Ontario, northern U.S., he would have been thrown in jail for reckless child endangerment.
	But that's sentimental.
	Oh, I feel bad, and I want to make the bad feeling go away.
	So bye-bye culture.
	And this sentimentality comes about because of excessive wealth.
	If you... See, a hungry family, like this is going way back in the day in Europe, I guess not even back, just a couple hundred years maybe, you see a really, really hungry family, and you know, you know you only have enough food to get through the winter for your own family, you have some tough choices to make.
	But if you have the magic ability to create food out of thin air, well then you can just feed everyone, feed the world, and do the whole thing, right?
	That's right. And so we have wealth in the West, and that wealth is used as collateral to borrow.
	Oh, they'll pay taxes next year, and the year after, and the year after, so lend us, lend us, lend us money.
	And then when you say no, you seem really mean, because it's like, well, it's free.
	We can give universal healthcare.
	We can take in all the refugees and pseudo-refugees and non-refugees and pretend refugees, and we can take in guys who are 28 who claim to be 15.
	Why would you say no?
	It's free! And so with the great wealth and the debt and the borrowing and the money printing and the bonds and all of this unreality that comes from leveraged Wealth that dissolves human beings into sentimental fantasies.
	You get this self-indulgence and then anyone who says no, we have more food in this buffet than we could possibly eat.
	And then Oliver Twist knocks on the cold frozen window pen and says, please can I have a little bit of butter tart?
	And you say, no! It's like, you bastard, more food here than we can possibly, this starving urchin is out there in the snow, wants to come in and have a butter tart, even though he can't say the word.
	Why would you say no?
	And therefore, anybody who counsels restraint in a time of the subjective frenzy of perceived infinity is viewed as a cold-hearted, mean people who just wants that child out there to suffer.
	Mm-hmm. And I don't know, like once the government gets the power to print and to borrow, how do you preach restraint when people have this fantasy of infinity?
	We have all the food in the world.
	We have all the money in the world.
	We have all the resources in the world.
	Why wouldn't we help people?
	Who would say no?
	Who could possibly say no?
	And Christianity...
	Well, man does not live by bread alone, and Christians used to have more loyalty to Jesus, more loyalty to the Trinity.
	But once you get this fantasy of infinity, made possible by central banking, by government debt and loans, once you have this fantasy of infinity, How do you say no?
	It's like, when I was growing up, well, it's a personal story, but I think it's important.
	When I was growing up, I'd say, I would like X. And my mother would say, we can't possibly afford it.
	When I was, ooh, maybe 13 or 14, this is back when there was still Soviet Russia, still communist Russia.
	In my high school, there was a trip to Russia.
	And I wanted to go, like, I can't even tell you.
	I was rapidly curious what was behind the Iron Curtain.
	I had literally dreams and fantasies of looking at the great onion domes over Moscow and stomping the streets of Red Square and seeing the Kremlin.
	Like, I just wanted to go.
	I remember very clearly it was $1,600.
	It was $1,600.
	Now, that same year, I wanted to join a swim team that was $7 to join the swim team.
	And I kept showing up to the swim team pretending I'd forgotten my money because we didn't have $7 for me to join a swim team.
	And eventually I was kicked out because I just, I mean, but, you know, I got to do some swim races.
	And... Sixteen hundred bucks might as well have been sixteen billion dollars.
	There was no way, no possible way to go.
	And this happened a lot.
	This happened all the time. It's one of the reasons I got my first job at eleven and been working solidly ever since, two to three jobs sometimes.
	Because I want stuff, so I gotta earn stuff so I can buy stuff.
	Now, my daughter, I have a little bit more money put aside.
	I'm not saying it's like, hey, here's $1,600 or anything like that.
	But, you know, if she's out, like we were out yesterday and we had a little bite to eat, I just wanted to say thanks again to the wonderful waiters at the restaurant who were very kind.
	And we chatted for a while and they were big fans of the show and it was wonderful to meet you.
	And I can't tell you how much I appreciate that sort of feedback.
	It was wonderful. And thank you again.
	My daughter was very pleased to meet you as well.
	And we went to, you know, one of these kind of dollar stores.
	And she wanted, she loves dragons, and she wanted three dragons, and they were $3 each.
	Now, when I was a kid, if I'd wanted something $3 each, be like, can't afford it.
	Now, I can't say to my daughter, can't afford it.
	So we have to find other ways to limit reality for her, to make her, you know, bump up against the reality itself.
	That is very real, that when resources run out, boy, they really do run out, like that old saying, the rich guy, how did you go broke?
	How did you become bankrupt? He said, very slowly, then very quickly.
	And so my big concern, and it's the concern of people who've made some money, my big concern is, well, how do I reproduce in my daughter the same hunger and drive and ambition that I had Because I grew up broke.
	It's a tough question and I'm still working on it.
	But the West became great because we were broke and we worked and we fought and we struggled and then we got rich and then we burned up 70 million of the best and brightest young men in the world wars and the in-betweeners and the Spanish flu plague and God help what,
	right? And now we're so wealthy that we have lost reality.
	We have lost limitations.
	We have become In a way, psychotic.
	Psychotic. Grandiose. Grandiose.
	Megalomaniacal. Like just, you know, people high on cocaine or on the upside of the manic-depressive spectrum.
	And they're just, I can do anything.
	I can talk through time.
	I'm going to write down.
	It's like this guy I knew when I was in college.
	He took a whole bunch of uppers.
	It wasn't a friend of mine. He took a whole bunch of uppers to write an exam and failed the exam because he said, I just wrote the most amazing essay.
	I just wrote it all on the same line.
	So he just kind of scratched his way through, like, I don't know, eight pieces of paper.
	He wrote this wonderful essay, all on the same line.
	It couldn't be deciphered. So we've become detached from limitation, detached from reality, detached from...
	I mean, look at the budget.
	President Trump just passed.
	I mean, staggering amounts.
	The burn rate of the American government is a million dollars a minute.
	A minute. A minute.
	Which it can't pay for much of.
	But it's just debt, debt, debt, debt.
	Dollar reserve currency, dollar reserve currency.
	And it's really hard to preach limitations when people are on the upside of a psychosis where they believe that resources are limitless.
	And this happens in societies on a tragic, cyclical basis.
	You get freedom.
	Small government produces massive wealth, which allows the government to grow without people really noticing.
	And then by the time it's so big, and by the time the demographics are so screwed up, Well, in the past, when you had this kind of psychosis, you would feed people into a war.
	Now they can't go to war in the West because of nuclear weapons, and so they're importing the war, I believe.
	I mean, tragically, it's a terrible form of population reduction and population displacement and replacement, I think, at times.
	So how do you preach restraint during a time of perceived infinite resources?
	It's really, really tough.
	And I don't know how to do it, Emily.
	I don't know how to do it.
	The only thing that I know works in history, if anything works, is to keep saying, it's going to crash, it's going to crash, it's going to crash.
	And people saying, ah, you've been saying that for a while.
	It's like, well, just because you're still alive doesn't mean that you're never going to die.
	And then when there is a crash, the people who've said it can't last are suddenly vaulted up, elevated to a position of authority because they warned that they were right.
	And I think that Christianity as I grew up with, Christianity that I grew up with, I mean it was Protestantism and I was raised a Protestant and...
	The Christianity, I don't know what yours was like.
	Mine was like, you bloody well save.
	You don't spend.
	You recognize your limitations.
	You hoard your resources.
	I mean, it was like, I mean, good Lord, the England that I grew up in was facing massive coal shortages.
	It was cold half the time.
	We were, there was no meat.
	It was because there was so many government unions is what sort of provoked the Trump round one, which was Margaret Thatcher.
	And I think that you just have to tell people that they're up.
	They're unreal. They're gonna come down.
	And it's gonna come down hard.
	And then people will say...
	We have sinned. We have sinned against reality in our psychosis and imagined infinity of resources.
	We have sinned against reality.
	We have sinned against the proposition, the commandment that thou shall not steal.
	We have sinned against the limitations of all organic life forms.
	We have sinned against... The very principle that hard work, thrift, thrifter ratio, and saving, responsibility, we have sinned against that.
	We have sinned against the intergenerational contract that we won't screw the next generation by selling them off to banksters.
	Those are definitely things still taught in the church, especially conservative denominations, such as the one I grew up in.
	And I just wanted to draw attention to the extremely devout, sincere Christians out there who are also crazy leftists on the side.
	And it sort of surprised me.
	I didn't expect it. I went through a series of very, very conservative Christian schools.
	And I got busy and distracted.
	And when I When I went back online, so to speak, and started paying attention to what was going on in the world, I was just shocked to find that many of my acquaintances and friends were sincerely mistaken in campaigning for open borders and many things that sounded like straight-up communism to me, espousing beliefs in racism, believing the media, and repeating lies of Black Lives Matter.
	And I just didn't know where it came from.
	And I thought this was a good juncture to examine Christianity itself for a root cause and ask ourselves if the self-effacing and outward focus of the religion has anything to do with it.
	And what do you think? I think it does.
	Christians are wonderful people.
	I love my family.
	I love my friends. I love many of these crazy leftists I speak of.
	But I see this outward focus.
	I mentioned the Lord Jesus comes soon attitude.
	And I see a lot of people thinking about heaven and the poor starving children.
	And I think they look over at their neighbors and they see all this wealth that you were talking about and they forget that it's not theirs.
	And they think we can just open the borders and if we feed the third world, we can all be the same.
	And of course, you know, you and I know that's not true.
	There's differences in people groups, differences in abilities, differences in personalities, moreover IQ. And there's a lot in the Bible actually about selling your possessions, turning the other cheek.
	Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this earth.
	And I think there's a lot in the Bible to fuel some of these leftist thoughts.
	And it disturbs me because we have 2000 years of Christianity In our European history, and it seems to be very, very strongly tied to concepts that I don't think, as I said, that they have the backbone to protect our borders, to make us proud of our individual countries, and proud of who we are.
	No sense of individuality, hard word to say.
	I just wanted to talk about this with you, and I wondered what your thoughts were.
	I certainly wasn't looking for an argument at all.
	I'm sure we're on the same page with many things.
	It's been a while since I went to church, but what's the conversation about evil?
	About evil? Yeah.
	It's been a while.
	Let's see. That goes back to when I was a little girl.
	Evil is brought into the world by sin.
	When we sin, which of course we are in a state of sin until we become born again.
	I was kind of raised a Jesus camp Christian, so I believed in the born again concept.
	So evil is everything outside of Christ.
	And it doesn't matter if your motives are pure.
	If you are not born again, you are an agent of the devil.
	How does that play into third world immigration?
	Well, I'm not sure that concept does exactly.
	Certainly, Christians don't see the third world and think evil.
	They don't think of terrorists.
	They see a bunch of needy people.
	Oh, this reminds me.
	Lots of talking about forgiveness in Christianity and cute little stories about how the murdering rapist, if he asked Jesus into his heart, is forgiven and born again.
	Whereas the person who was good their whole life goes to hell because that's not good enough.
	Salvation is through faith alone type of teaching.
	Yeah, but they already have someone in their heart and it ain't Jesus, right?
	That's right. But the idea that forgiveness and salvation is just a prayer way, I think that does impact what people think when they see a bunch of terrorism.
	They think, well, Jesus would turn the other cheek.
	Jesus would forgive them if they repented right away.
	And there's this idea that if we bring Muslims here, we can minister to them, so to speak.
	And a lot will be saved.
	Almost like if we can bring tragedy here and then we can be real Christians.
	I think there's a desire in the Christian church to have hardship here in America.
	This is some Jesus Camp stuff.
	It's definitely present.
	In the types of schools I was going to.
	Almost this wishing for something to suffer over.
	Hmm. I think they're going to get their wish.
	Yeah. And then they will be less happy.
	You know, suffering is one thing, you know, in this abstract Schopenhauerian sense, but when you're Kate Steinle's dad, it's not so much fun.
	Yeah. But Christianity was strong in the past.
	I mean, Great Britain was more Christian in the past and ruled a third of the planet.
	Didn't take shit from anybody.
	And yet, Great Britain's not doing so well.
	And what did they do?
	They got taken over by a bunch of material secular lefties who toasted religion.
	Well, the Catholic Church ruled Europe with an iron fist and wasn't kind.
	I know a lot of progression happened, but sometimes I think it was despite Christianity.
	Christianity was spread through force and fear through much of Europe and mixed in with pagan rituals.
	And so now it's very hard to think of European tradition without thinking of Christianity as well.
	But there were religious practices before Christianity.
	And the unity that Christianity brought in, there was a massive unification across Christian Europe through the Crusades.
	I think it's taken a blow to individual European countries.
	And then it's been part of the blotting out of individual identities.
	I think it plays into when leftists talk about white people not having heritage.
	I think Christianity played a huge part in blending all of Europe together, and I think that's been negative.
	Yeah, and I mean, the progress of scientism, for want of a better phrase, of sort of materialism and the assault that science has had upon faith, the assault that reason and Darwin has had upon faith.
	You know, I mean, if I could go back in time, I mean, I would send myself back in time.
	To the mid-19th century, and I would strive mightily to replace Christian ethics with something like universally preferable behavior or rational proof of secular ethics.
	That's right. Because when Darwin came along, then the answer as to where the world and its inhabitants came from and how human beings came to be was displaced.
	God was displaced. The soul was displaced.
	And as I talked about with Dennis Prager, when the soul and God is displaced, the moral certainties are displaced.
	And when the moral certainties are displaced, you say, well, why are we here?
	Why did we win? It was Darwinian.
	It's nature red and tooth and claw.
	It's kill or be killed. It's dominate or be dominated.
	There's no ethics. There's no higher purpose.
	And this is where you get even with the last caller, who was talking about this radical subjectivism that comes directly to I have a quote here by Thomas Eliot.
	He said, or wrote, I'm not sure which, I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith.
	I think that's true.
	Well, I'll tell you this, it cannot survive the disappearance of moral certainty.
	You know, in any—this is straight out of Rand, right?
	In any conflict between two positions, the most consistent will win.
	And in any conflict between two cultures, the most morally certain, which doesn't mean morally right, but the most morally certain will win.
	Because they sacrifice.
	They have—you know, look at— Muslims come to the West and they start building mosques wherever they can.
	This is expensive things.
	Where are the churches of secular reason?
	They are committed.
	They believe in what they believe.
	They are willing to sacrifice for it.
	They're willing to have the five or six or seven kids.
	They're willing to do what is necessary.
	And I regret that it's Christianity or bust.
	I think where secularism has come in and attacked morality and tradition, it's been extremely errant.
	And no people can survive without spirituality, without...
	Well, moral certainty. Cohesion.
	Yeah, now, of course, philosophers, I don't know if they either got sucked into the left or were more skeptical, but they did not recognize the danger.
	And this is something, listen, I'm being perfectly honest, this is...
	Something I take the most pride in about my career as a public intellectual is I have been focusing on rational certainty for ethics since day one, because I don't think we can go back to the church.
	I don't think we can. I think that it's philosophy or bust.
	It's philosophy or medievalism.
	We either go forward or we go way back, and who knows for how long.
	So this is why I continue, rightly or wrongly, but this is, I have to act with integrity to philosophy.
	But when Darwin should have been like, holy shit, we're going to lose our ethics.
	We're going to lose our moral certainty.
	We're going to start to crumble. We're going to fall apart.
	We're going to substitute Darwinian power, which is unlimited democracy.
	It's just mob rule. With the leverage of state power, we're going to start substituting Darwinian power struggles for universal ethics, which we had until Darwin came along.
	And not just Darwin, but a lot of science stuff in the 19th century.
	But the philosophers didn't sit there and say, you know, hull breach!
	Hull breach! Western civilization is going down!
	The fatal blow was struck, like the iceberg of Darwinism hit the ship of moral certainty in the West.
	Christianity is very unique.
	I think the string of absolutes espoused by Christians leads naturally, speaking also from personal experience, to this going wild type of period when you decide, you know what, done with Christianity, no longer for me.
	And it's extremely dangerous and destructive to swing from one extreme to another.
	There's balance in some Hindu beliefs and balance in some Buddhist beliefs, but Christianity Especially the Jesus camp stuff says you're asking Jesus into your heart or you're dying and going to hell.
	And there's a long list and codes of behavior and expectations.
	Christianity in practice when it's done by sincere Christians is extremely exhausting.
	And to go from that to, okay, no longer Christianity, it leads to this licentious period.
	Sure. Why not rush and eat and sleep?
	Because Darwin said, we're just animals, right?
	Right. So add to that science coming in with this, hey, we're not made by God.
	We actually evolved.
	There's, you know, a process that happened here.
	We come from something. Add to that A loss of faith and you just have a complete, I'm surprised, you know, the sexual revolution didn't happen sooner.
	It's just, that's how it works.
	That's human nature. And I regret that.
	I regret that there's not a remembrance of the balance that would have existed from a spiritual perspective before faith, before Christianity.
	And I think in many, many ways, Europe would have been better off if it hadn't been Christianized to the extent that it was.
	You know, I know what you mean.
	I mean, I know what you mean.
	And Zeus would have fallen the same way.
	Whatever, like when Darwin came along, and science made such extraordinary progress.
	I mean, it was mind-blowing.
	How much progress? I mean, 400 years ago they didn't even know that the blood circulated around the body.
	They thought that humans lived on humors, you know, phlegmatic and sanguine, and they thought it was an imbalance of humors, and you need to, you know, they bled people who were ill in the hopes, you know, like, they didn't know.
	Up until the 19th century, mid-19th century, it was more dangerous to go to a doctor than cross your fingers.
	They had no clue what the hell was going on, and this was way back.
	And then science and the free market Which were not proposed and supported primarily in Christian texts.
	And I've done a show with Tom Woods about the Catholic churches, in particular, support of science.
	But the scientific worldview produced so much human progress relative to the almost 2,000 years prior of church dominance.
	That the church, it couldn't be sustained.
	Like, once you get science, you get materialism, you get Darwinianism, and it hollows you out morally.
	What's that old line from the George Michael song?
	It filled my pockets but emptied out my soul.
	It will make you materially wealthy, and it will hollow out your moral certainty.
	And these two things go hand in hand, right?
	As we talked about, once you get wealthy, then morality becomes tougher.
	Like, you don't need thrift when you have a billion dollars, right?
	And so, whether it being Christianity or non-Christianity, if you get scientism without philosophy, your society will fall.
	Because, first of all, you'll become a personal moral responsibility, where I just had this conversation with this determinist guy.
	And you lose moral responsibility, and you become radical nurturists, not naturists, right?
	Nature versus nurture.
	You become, in a sense, environmental heavy in your exposition on the progress of the human nature.
	Experience on human personality.
	It's like, okay, well, it's the old trading.
	Trading place is an old movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, where a broke guy, a street bum, gets put into the position of being a rich stock broker, a stock trader, and he does fantastically.
	Because, you know, you just pull him out of one environment and put him into another environment, the Eddie Murphy character becomes a fantastic stockbroker, becomes enormously wealthy, and it's like, it's nonsense.
	It's a complete lie.
	And it's informed by this scientistic, pragmatic, consequentialist, Marxist fantasy that the environment is everything.
	And there's no nature.
	It's all nurture. We're born a blank slate, tabula rasa.
	We are written on by our experiences and our environment.
	Like I saw in a magazine in Canada recently, this whole bullshit about the wage gap.
	And it's like, women are socialized into being more agreeable.
	It's like, how do you know? You don't know.
	You don't know.
	I mean, personality is significantly genetic.
	And that has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
	But you can see this obsession because it's what they're selling.
	Change your environment and change yourself.
	Well, it's what people want to hear.
	Sure. That there's a chance we can all go for it.
	They certainly don't want to hear that you're born with abilities.
	It's a wide range.
	Nobody has to sleep in an alley, but everybody wants to think they're going to grow up and be a millionaire.
	Right. And that just doesn't happen.
	And people also, if their kids go off the rails, they like to blame the environment.
	They don't usually blame their own parenting environment.
	And what they do is they say, well, you know, he hung around with the wrong crowd, or, you know, maybe I put the kid here or there or something.
	What they don't necessarily want to hear is, my kid went off the rails because I chose the wrong sperm donor for my genes.
	Right? I chose a guy, he was shiftless, he was lazy, irresponsible, not too smart, and these are all genetic traits.
	Not exclusively, but significantly.
	Significantly. Even risk-taking has been measured as high as 80% genetic.
	Your capacity to take risks, 80% genetic.
	IQ, later in life, 80% genetic, and nobody wants to say, Well, my kids are screwed because I screwed the wrong guy, or I screwed the wrong woman.
	There'd be no opportunity to virtue signal.
	You couldn't ever... God forbid we take that away, right?
	The second and third world, if you looked at the stats, and it's not just IQ, it's personality.
	We're different. We think differently.
	And to think of the ramifications of even admitting people are different, not even to say some are smarter, but to just say people are different in ways that aren't going to change, strips Your chance to virtue signal in front of all your neighbors.
	Yeah. I'm so sad to see it in the church.
	It's not the church I grew up in.
	Right. Which is why I've been asking these hard questions.
	What's going on? Is there something with a theology?
	And I don't think that philosophy can save where the world is going, but I do think it can point the way out of where it's going.
	I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, and I've been doing this in a very public manner, and there are people who really get it.
	And I don't have as much contact with the younger generation as I'd like, so I could be completely wrong on this.
	But just from what I see, I would not bet a lot on philosophy being able to prevent what's going to happen in the world.
	But I do believe that even if you can't prevent people from getting lost, you can shoot up a hell of a flare to help them find themselves again.
	And I think that's the role that philosophy has.
	There's always people worth saving.
	And this work is vital.
	But I think history proves that history will repeat itself.
	Well, it will until we figure out.
	Stateless society. I mean, I strongly believe that.
	And yeah, there are individual Romans who got it.
	And there were individual Romans in ancient Rome who were worth saving.
	But it didn't matter when Rome fell.
	Everybody ended up in the countryside.
	Everyone ended up under the rule of the Goths and the Gauls.
	And the Roman population went from a million or two million in Rome down to 18,000 in less than a year.
	Right. So there's all these wonderful people worth saving.
	But when the whole damn thing goes tits up, the individualism doesn't matter as much.
	Great philosophy will continue to come out of the West and we'll never have a chance if we let in the second and third world and quite literally dumb our countries down.
	We'll never have a chance.
	Well, we'll lose free speech.
	If we lose free speech, we lose philosophy.
	We lose guidance.
	We then have destroyed our compass and GPS deep and dark in the woods and we'll be lost for a hell of a long time.
	I mean, maybe there is no second chance after that.
	Well, that's one of the reasons I work so hard.
	We're wildly outnumbered.
	Yeah. Yeah, not our thought, though.
	I mean, and it's the thought that matters.
	But yeah, we missed, you know, and hindsight is 20-20, but we as the West, we missed the need for ethical certainty once Darwin took down the Ten Commandments.
	We just miss that.
	We miss that.
	And that's pretty damn important.
	And that's why one of the first things that I did, one of the very first articles I put out before I even had a podcast, was called Proving Libertarian Morality.
	And that was the genesis for what I worked on very hard in my very, very first time as a public intellectual, was a theory on ethics that could give people moral certainty.
	And I mean, you could hear this, I'm not trying to pick on Peter here, but I mean, the determinist caller.
	You know for a fact that when you get this scientism, when you get this reduction to the material, that you're going to get this radical subjectivism.
	That you're going to get this, well, this group believes this, and the other group believes the other, and I happen to prefer this, or we can look at, Sam Harris does work on this in the moral landscape, you know, well, The consequences of this are better for people or the consequences of this are worse for people and so on.
	And I like the work that Sam Harris did in that myself.
	But it's not enough.
	Consequentialism is not enough to grant moral certainty.
	It's just not. Because it's experimentation.
	And it's consequentialist.
	And we need moral certainty to the point where we have borders.
	And the borders around the country are simply borders, that there's certainty around our beliefs.
	The reason that the West doesn't have any borders is the West doesn't have any boundaries.
	The West doesn't have any moral certainty.
	And if you have no moral certainty, you have nothing to defend.
	I agree. You know, like, if you get into a big property dispute with someone and you don't really think that you own the property, you're just not going to fight that hard.
	Whereas if you know it was handed down to you by your great-great-great-grandfather as a family treasure, you'll fight tooth and nail.
	But if you don't believe you have something, you can't really work that hard to defend it.
	If you don't have moral certainty, it's the boundaries around your ethics that matter and the consequence that there being no boundaries around countries.
	Mm-hmm. And morality is around self-sacrifice.
	It's something that Mike Cernovich talked about the other days, thinking of running for Congress.
	And he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, he said, I don't really want to run for Congress.
	And some reporter said, well, then why would you?
	And he's like, because if the Republicans run a globalist somewhere that I can help, I'm kind of obligated to.
	And he's like, people don't have any sense of moral obligation anymore.
	Why would you do something if you just don't want him?
	It's like... There have been times when I haven't wanted to do this damn show.
	Not tonight. This has been a great show.
	Great show. No sense of duty.
	No sense of obligation.
	You know, I have this ability to babble fish philosophy into the language that is useful to people.
	It's valuable to people, and I'm incredibly grateful that I have that ability.
	I'm not even going to guess where the hell it came from.
	But I have the ability to engagingly and entertain people in philosophy.
	And the idea that I'm going to say, well, you know, I could make a fortune as a lawyer, or I could make a fortune as a pundit, or, you know, I mean, God, I mean, the amount of money that I could make if I just had gone mainstream is...
	But that's not the gig.
	The gig is if you have the ability...
	You have the obligation, because I did not earn this ability, because I now, I know how much is genetic, I know how much of this brain was handed to me on the silver platter of DNA dominoes.
	And so you have an obligation, you have an obligation, and people don't have obligations.
	I remember this boomer who called in.
	Month or two or maybe three ago, talking about, well, you know, what we did give you was holistic medicine.
	And, you know, you couldn't get to take any moral responsibility for anything.
	Because it's all about self and ego and happiness and contentment and, you know, chasing the chimera of...
	You know, you get contentment after you've battled evil.
	Like, you can have a good massage after you've worked out.
	Like, you have to do things that are good.
	You have to enhance goodness in the world.
	You have to fight evil in the world.
	And then you get some happiness.
	Happiness is the shadow cast by the statue of heroism.
	People all just want the statue.
	They want the shadow.
	They don't want to do the heroic stuff.
	They don't want to do that which earns you a sense of pride and contentment.
	They just want it to be handed to them on a conveyor belt of sugar and video games and sex and porn.
	And it's like, stop it!
	Just stop it!
	Go out and earn your happiness for God's sakes.
	Go out and earn it through courage, through virtue, through standing up for something, through protecting the treasures that were handed to you so that you can hand something down to the children that some of you may end up being asked enough to get off the fucking couch and have maybe once in a while.
	Ain't no West without Western babies, people.
	Not gonna happen. All these people, I don't really feel like having kids, you know, you might miss out on some sleep.
	Yeah, just like your parents didn't think.
	Look, they gave you the gift of life.
	Go pay it forward, you lazy bastards.
	Ruts, make babies, and enjoy your life, because it's a beautiful thing to do.
	But it's all just become about, because again, if you're Darwinian, no obligation, no part of the great chain of being, no part of the cycle of existence, you're just Darwinian.
	So have non-procreative sex everywhere you can.
	Like you're an endless series of golf balls looking for a hole in one.
	And drink!
	And be merry!
	And do drugs! And watch porn!
	And play video games! Because those things are fun!
	Binge watch! Rather than baby make!
	Ugh! How hollow!
	How terrible! It's self-indulgence, sentimentality.
	What is your higher purpose if you're just meaningless meat muscle?
	We lost the higher purpose when we lost God, and it was damn well up to philosophers to do it, and they just plain didn't.
	It's certainly Christianity has served to hold people to moral tenets.
	But I think when it comes to that whole saving the West thing, Christianity is empty.
	I think you have to know who you are.
	You have to be proud of where you come from.
	And I think Christianity has in part stripped these things from the West subtly and slowly.
	There's certainly no scripture verses about saving your country and locking up your borders.
	There's tons of verses though about we are all God's children.
	It's an extremely egalitarian New Testament.
	We are all the new Israel.
	And Christianity doesn't recognize differences within people groups.
	It's actually, I would say, aggressively anti-differences.
	Well, this is why Christianity plus the left has erased any...
	Like, if you talk about group IQ differences, which are as scientific a fact as there is in the realm of psychology...
	IQ is significant. IQ is important.
	IQ differs between ethnic groups and between genders.
	And if you say that to the left, they're insane because it diminishes their capacity to tweak the environment to produce perfection.
	And it also offends religious people because they say, well, we're all God's children and we're all made in God's image and we all have a soul.
	That's right. The looks I get when I start talking about IQ, and Christian people don't like to hear it.
	There's kind of a wall there, I'd say.
	And the reasoning stops if you push it too far.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah, because the leftists, of course, say that it's a struggle for survival of the fittest.
	And that it's just a mere pillaging of resources and an amoral scrabbling for reproductive success.
	And it's, okay, well, if that's the case, then demographics really matter, don't they?
	No! Right?
	I mean, it's... That's crazy.
	So, we'll, you know, we'll see.
	You know, I will, to my dying breath, keep fighting the good fight and...
	We still have the treasures of Rome.
	We still can read our Cicero.
	We still can read our Socrates, our Aristophanes, our Aristotle.
	We can still read all of these things, though the societies that served them up are long gone.
	Just try and shoot your flare into the sky so it sticks, you know?
	What's wrong to give up?
	Of course, yeah. I mean, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	And even if you can't stop this cycle, you can work like hell now to prevent the next one.
	Yeah. I mean, I think there's hope.
	I think if people really didn't think there was hope, they wouldn't be out walking around and trying and breathing and all those things.
	Yeah, I would say you never know.
	You never know. I mean, the stuff that China's doing with genetics is incredible.
	Who the hell would have anticipated that Trump would strike like a meteor on the landscape of the world?
	Who would have realized just how much the mainstream media was committing credibility seppuku for anybody with half an eyeball to stare in their general direction?
	I mean, it's really hard to know.
	The internet, this show, other people's work that people are doing.
	Who would have known? Who would have known?
	It is... You know, there's a populist leader in Italy.
	I think he's looking to deport 500,000 migrants.
	I mean, you don't know. When people are up against the wall and they finally get it, and of course our goal is to just wake up, wake up, wake up, facts, facts, facts, stuff's coming, stuff's coming, wake up, stuff's coming, come on, man, come on, come on, snap out of it, snap out of it, wake up!
	That's the gig, right?
	And, you know, cold water, slap them on the tits, I don't care.
	Like, whatever you gotta do to wake people up and get them to stare in the right direction, once people, and this is why this narcotic of dissociation and not talking about things and viciously attacking anybody who touches on Any of the important stuff could help save the world, or the West at least.
	This is why just getting people to wake up is...
	You know, I guarantee you the left will wake you up when it's too late.
	The left will bear their ferocity, like we just talked about this with Simon Rush from South Africa, and how the Marxists in power, the blacks in power, the Marxist blacks in power, are finally showing the mask slipping, right?
	They're showing the feralness that's underneath the anti-white hatred.
	And we see this with Obama's choice of his official portrait painter.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah, hideous, hideous stuff.
	Ugh. We just have to shoot off there, hope it sticks, hope it wakes people.
	And I believe that if people are given the right information, they will make the right decisions, which is why propaganda is so effective, because it gives you the wrong decision all the time.
	So that is the goal.
	And more than that, no man nor woman can do.
	All right, and move on to the last caller.
	But thank you so much, Emily. It's a great topic.
	I think we did it some fair justice.
	Lovely to talk to you. You too.
	Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
	White Christian America is under attack, and I am angry to see it, but has Christianity not made the West vulnerable to exploitation by pushing a gospel of grace and forgiveness instead of a loyalty to kin and country?
	As white people everywhere are asked to give more of their money and more space in their countries to second and third world immigrants and refugees, does Christianity really provide the backbone to protect ourselves from this invasion, or does it ask too much grace to be extended to people from outside groups?
	That's from Emily. Hey, Kat, how are you doing tonight?
	Doing well. How are you doing?
	I'm well. I'm well.
	Short. I'll just call you Kat.
	I don't know what it's short for. Don't tell me.
	Don't tell me. All right.
	If forgiveness, I think, is a wonderful concept.
	I pay the debts that I owe.
	And if I have wronged someone, then I attempt to make restitution.
	I ask what I can do to make things whole, and I do what I can, if it's obvious, right?
	If I Break someone's vase, I'll get them a new vase.
	So I pay the debts that I owe.
	And if somebody proves me wrong, I will accept and modify my position accordingly.
	And if someone wrongs me and makes restitution and makes whole what they did, then I will forgive that person.
	Because we all make mistakes or we all will occasionally act even in temper or in malice or hostility.
	And to catch yourself when you're doing something either irresponsible or wrong, To apologize sincerely, to make restitution, earns forgiveness.
	So I think forgiveness is a wonderful concept, but it has to be earned.
	I think love is a wonderful concept.
	It has to be earned. Friendship, wonderful concept, has to be earned.
	Now, the problem I have with the modern conception of forgiveness, which is distinct from the Christian sense of forgiveness, where forgiveness did have to be earned through genuine contrition.
	Is that somehow it has become socialized.
	It has become like a welfare state.
	Like you just owe people forgiveness.
	And there are two arguments sort of made for it.
	One is you owe them forgiveness because it's just this good thing to do, regardless of what the other person does.
	Which is like saying you owe people money regardless of whether they've earned it.
	Or whether they deserve it because they're genuinely trying to make their lives better.
	That's number one. And number two...
	It's like this weird voodoo curse.
	I mean, I'm sure you've heard it, right?
	You have to forgive people, you see, Kat, because if you don't, you'll stay angry and you'll stay stuck.
	And if you forgive them, then you can move on.
	Now, you know you're in the bad argument land when you hear phrases like, move on.
	I mean, it's almost as bad as just saying, you know, just saying.
	It's like, no, you're not saying anything.
	So this weird curse, like, if you don't forgive, you'll be stuck and you'll be angry and you'll be bitter and you won't be able to move on.
	It's like... No.
	No, you won't. Because if somebody acts in a bad way towards you and does not apologize and does not make restitution, you know what you get to do?
	Funny story. You get to move on.
	Just not with that person if the wrong was egregious enough.
	So it's terrible.
	And it tells me, this is something that just came out of the boomers, I think.
	Came out of sort of the self-help movement that was driven by general boomer narcissism.
	Which is the boomers were really screwing the next generation.
	And they sure as hell don't want to make restitution for it because restitution would be, sorry, we won't take our pensions because we laden you down with $1.7 million worth of debt and unfunded liabilities, you poor little bastards.
	Oh, and by the way, the schools got shitty and we lied to you about going into debt for university because university is crap and you can't discharge those debts in America even through.
	Bankruptcy. So the boomers shafted the next generation.
	Ah, wouldn't you know it? Lo and behold, they came up with this idea that you just have to forgive people no matter what they do and no matter whether they give you restitution or whether they take ownership or if they have contrition or anything like that.
	You just have to give forgiveness.
	So the generation that kind of approved and sustained the welfare state and massive old age pensions and Huge amounts of virtue signaling foreign loans and foreign aid and massive amounts of debt.
	Really shafted the next generation.
	Presided and maintained the opening up of the borders after the 65 Immigration Act.
	Well, funnily enough, those people who really screwed the next generation came up also with this argument that you just owe people forgiveness no matter what.
	It's like, why would you need forgiveness?
	Why would you need that argument, boomers?
	Why would you need that? Because you want to keep your ill-gotten gains, don't you?
	You selfish, selfish bastards.
	You want to keep all of the crap you stole from the young.
	And you want to keep using immigration to drive up your property values.
	And because you don't travel that much, right?
	You don't use the roads that much.
	It doesn't really matter to you if there's mass immigration.
	Your kids aren't in school anymore.
	You don't really care. Your kids are really past university age, and so you don't really care about the quality of universities.
	You don't care about the continuance of the culture because you're old and you're selfish.
	Why on earth would you need this new idea, very anti-Christian, very anti-philosophical, that you just owe people forgiveness regardless of what they did or what they do with what they did?
	Well, because you had a whole generation of people who screwed the next generation.
	And they want to be forgiven.
	Otherwise, they'll curse you with the voodoo of the elders about not being able to move on.
	Does that help at least my perspective on it?
	Well, it does. And I do think I've heard you say before that it's about a kind of earned forgiveness.
	And I'm 100% on board that you don't actually owe forgiveness to anybody.
	But I've heard you talk about...
	I think you do if they've earned it.
	Well, no. Yeah, you're there.
	You don't owe forgiveness...
	For nothing. You don't owe forgiveness because the universe says you owe forgiveness in general.
	Right. But I think, especially in terms of really personal things that go on, like I had a lot of horrible things in my childhood, so I've heard you talk about things like that, and my mom was definitely at fault for a lot of it, and now I have a relationship with her,
	and let's say she, you would say she hasn't earned it in the sense that She's at a better place now than she was before, but she's never fully said, yes, that was 100% wrong, and I shouldn't have let that happen to you, and I shouldn't have done that to you.
	That's not how it is, but she's working towards it.
	What do you mean she's working towards it?
	I'm sorry. Well...
	That earlier in my young adulthood, she would have completely denied that she had any culpability because she wasn't given the tools and she did the best she could, but that as time has gone on and...
	I've forgiven her, but not given her license.
	I think another thing is how you define forgiveness.
	I've forgiven her, but I haven't said, it's okay that you did it, or you didn't do something that was that bad.
	We're pretty clear about how things were.
	But because I don't belabor the point, I think it's given her a little freedom to approach it herself.
	So over the years, she has admitted a whole lot more fault and a whole lot more sorrow over how our life went as children.
	That's been a big improvement.
	That took a lot of time.
	If I had demanded that in the beginning, that was a non-starter.
	It wasn't going to happen. What I think is What's interesting is talking about the benefits of forgiveness.
	I don't like the wishy-washy, well, can you move on?
	Can you not be bitter? I think people deal with things in different ways.
	I think you can cut ties and move on.
	As a young adult, I could have walked away from my family and never talked to them again, and it would have been fine.
	I'd be fine to this day if I had done that.
	And maybe it's kind of the poor man's forgiveness.
	But there's a lot of science out that says physiologically we have a response To holding on to those things or to forgiving.
	And I've been really fascinated with the vascular health increases, lower rates of depression and anxiety, heart rate and stress that It's directly correlated to our ability to be forgiving in general.
	And there's, of course, emotional forgiveness that follows decisional forgiveness, and it takes a while.
	But as much as they can quantify these things, it seems like it's physiologically beneficial to us.
	So for the forgiver, you know, screw the forgive you, whether they deserve it or not, or you ever tell them or, you know, whether you reconcile with them or not, it seems like if you're defining forgiveness as I'm letting go of the resentment.
	I'm also letting go to any claim to reparation.
	I'm not going to pursue any kind of restoration because really, you know, I don't even know what that looks like.
	And I'm not sure you could ask somebody, even a whole healthy person, to know what restoration looks like.
	Oh no, that's not hard.
	There is stuff that is hard, but restitution is not hard.
	Restitution is when you're fine with what happened.
	You're not happy it happened, but you're okay with it, right?
	So the example I've given before is, let's say that I borrow your car and I ding your bumper, right?
	And then if I just dump it back on you, then you're very upset that I dinged your bumper and you wish you hadn't lent me the car, right?
	Now, if I ding your bumper and hand the car back to you with a million dollars saying, I'm sorry I dinged your bumper, you're really happy I dinged your bumper, right?
	Because you got a million bucks.
	Well, minus fixing the bumper.
	You know, human beings and traumas are a lot more complicated.
	No, no, no. Hang on. Hang on.
	Let me just finish the principle.
	I agree. I agree. Let's get the principle, then we get the complication.
	Now, if I hand you back your car...
	And I say, I'll come tomorrow and I'll take it off your hands and I'll get it fixed for you and I'll bring it back to you and I buy you a bunch of flowers, whatever you like.
	I don't know, right? Then you're like, okay, well, I'm not happy that it happened, but I'm okay that it happened.
	It's in the past. It's right. That's restitution.
	You don't want to just do the bare minimum.
	Because that's not enough.
	You don't want to do too much, otherwise the other person's kind of happy you did it, and that's overrested.
	You want to make the person whole so that they're okay that it happened.
	Now, this is the tough thing with childhood.
	Here's the tough thing with childhood.
	With childhood, let me ask you this.
	What restitution is possible for what happened to you as a child, Kat?
	How would it be okay?
	I don't think there is any.
	I don't think there is any either.
	I don't think there isn't either. That's a challenge, and that's why people should not let things fester and get worse and worse and worse, but they should pursue restitution as quickly as possible, as decisively as possible, because if you let things rot and rot and rot and waste and waste and waste, well, it gets worse and worse.
	And at some point it becomes, well, you can't.
	Like, there's no restitution I'd take for my childhood.
	There's no, like, my mom won the lottery or something.
	It's like, here's $10 million.
	It's like, nope, keep it.
	Thanks. Not interested.
	Yeah, 100%.
	Right? So where no restitution is possible, my argument is, well, you can hang around if you want, but it's going to be really stressful because no restitution is possible.
	Oh, see, I guess there, that's probably where I wonder...
	It doesn't make any difference to you in terms of unearned forgiveness, whether it is, say, physiologically beneficial.
	I mean, I have other dogs in this fight because I'm a person of faith.
	There's a religious component.
	The religious component is that the person must show contrition before you forgive, right?
	Well, that's not exactly so.
	I've heard that said, and I get where you're coming from, but that's not exactly so.
	The religious component would be You have been forgiven much, so you should be able to forgive.
	But forgive is not license.
	Forgive is not, well, you just go on about your life and don't suffer the consequences.
	That's a dangerous area that people get into where they think, well, if I forgive, I've somehow given permission.
	I've, you know, absolved a person of consequence.
	And that should never be the case.
	But in terms of forgiveness, in terms of not holding on to the bitterness, That the Christian concept would be, you know, you've been forgiven your 50 billion, so you have to forgive your five and change here.
	But even, you know, that's hard to argue because we're not on the same page there.
	But I'm just talking about the science of the thing.
	I'm a scientist. And so I find that fascinating.
	I didn't even know that existed.
	This changed my whole life.
	I was very destructive as a young woman.
	And then this came into my life.
	And I've made a complete 180.
	So, you know, anecdotally, for me, it was beneficial, but maybe that doesn't mean anything.
	That could have just been my voodoo magic.
	Well, no, listen, okay, so the cardiovascular stuff, the stress response and so on, that's when you're in a state of danger, right?
	Stress is, I need to gear up my system because I'm in a state of danger, right?
	Yeah. So you suggest that you can remove yourself from that state of danger, but it doesn't have to be by forgiving them.
	Well, sure. I just talk about a theoretical person, right?
	So if Bob's father is like a raging abuser, verbal abuser, let's just say, right?
	Well, if Bob continues to expose himself to that verbal abuse, it's going to be triggering the PTSD and the stress, and it's going to be unpleasant and difficult, and he's going to lie awake and feel humiliated and want to fight back, but he's in history.
	It's really stressful. Now, if the father is able to curb his verbal abuse...
	And able to apologize and go to therapy and pay for Bob to go to therapy and so on.
	Well, okay, maybe there's a way that after a certain amount of time, Bob can trust that his father will not act in that way, right?
	And okay, well, I've heard the argument that says you need seven times the good stuff as opposed to the bad stuff.
	Because as human beings, we tend to hold on to the bad stuff for damn good reason.
	You know, like, if there are 99 berries you can eat, and then that one striped one that makes you really, really sick, you really want to remember the striped one so you don't die.
	You know, the dog that walks on its half wobbling on its side with the foam coming out of its mouth is not the dog you want to pet, right?
	I mean, we're good at figuring out that.
	I mean, I remember as a kid, I ate a bad banana.
	I didn't eat a banana for two years.
	The memory of the banana, like, oh, that was horrible.
	So... If Bob's dad can curb his tendency to verbal abuse, then maybe Bob's fight-a-flat mechanism, his cortisol levels, his stress is going to go down over time, right, as he tests the waters and his father has apologized and has changed his ways, right?
	So that's one way. Now, I suppose that involves forgiveness, but forgiveness, if it continues to put yourself in that stressful danger, oof, terrible.
	Terrible. If forgiveness just means, as you say, like you go back and he verbally abuses you again and you forgive him, you go back, then that's not, I'm guaranteeing you that forgiveness is not lowering your blood pressure.
	I mean, there's no way, right?
	Because he's still in a state of danger.
	Now, if Bob says, like if Bob's dad doesn't change his ways or doesn't change his ways in a way that works for Bob, then Bob can say, nope, not going to spend time with my dad.
	Not going to do it. I didn't choose to have the guy in my life.
	He's been verbally abusive my whole life.
	He's not changing. Forget it.
	Now, then what he does is he hangs out with people who are not verbally abusive, and his cortisol level goes down, and he's not triggered, and the stress goes down.
	Now, the problem is, though, that for Bob, his entire social circle, his family, his friends, his extended family, who knows, maybe even his boss, co-worker, they all support Bob.
	What Bob's dad has been doing to him.
	So then when Bob says, I'm not putting up with this anymore, I'm not going to deal with it, then what happens is, you know, other people say, Bob, you're being really harsh.
	He's your dad. You need to spend time with him.
	He's your father, right?
	You're going to regret it. And then they stress him out for trying to have some boundaries to bad behavior in his life.
	So a lot of times, if you want to peel yourself off a core abusive relationship, it's a whole system that's out there.
	All these people, you don't have a relationship with just one person in your life.
	You have everyone's interconnected, right?
	You know those family trees, it's like the lions, and it's like, no, no, that's not how it works.
	And everyone who's alive, and even the dead people, you've got lions crisscrossing everywhere.
	Everything's a web. Everything's a web.
	When I said no to my mother's abusive ways, dominoes, dominoes, dominoes.
	Everyone. And that's the reality.
	Now that's stressful, right?
	Having boundaries is stressful because it's not just the individual abuser, it's all the other people who supported him, or who've got their own abusers they don't want to deal with, or who are more subtle abusers, or who are married to, like, who knows, right?
	And so when you start setting limits and you start saying, you know what, I am not going to have people in my life who treat me badly.
	It doesn't mean people won't occasionally make me mad.
	It doesn't mean, I mean, it happens, right?
	Just because you're not eating a steady diet of candy bars doesn't mean you can't have an icy square from time to time, you know what I mean?
	But when you say, I'm just not going to have people in my life who are dangerous to me, who are dangerous to my happiness, it's like pulling a thread.
	I'm just going to pull this thread. The whole damn thing comes down a lot of times.
	It's really stressful. Now what's on the other side is something much more relaxing.
	So I don't know these studies, but I can certainly understand how...
	If you stay in a place of danger, and if, you know, when I was separating from my abusive mom, people were like, oh, she's your mom.
	What are you doing? That's so terrible.
	You're going to regret it. She needs you.
	She took care of you.
	Like, that was horrible. Because I'm like, I'm telling you what she's done, and you're siding with her against me?
	What a horrible betrayal.
	What a horrible thing to do to a victim of abuse.
	That's stressful. You know, because you realize that she did not act alone.
	That she acted with a whole bunch of accomplices that don't want the light turned on.
	Because they don't want to see what they did.
	They don't want to see who's suffering they ignored.
	They don't want to see what evils.
	They explicitly or implicitly support it.
	And so they'll try and hold you right back into that bloody plantation.
	They'll want you to go right back into that dungeon.
	That's pretty stressful. I think.
	It certainly was for me. Well, I think that's true.
	And I think that anecdotes like that are absolutely plausible.
	But I think what's fascinating about this research is that they run the spectrum from forgiveness traits.
	So it could be you forgive people for little infractions all the time because you are just a forgiving person.
	It's not a big deal. Well, and we commit them to, right?
	Exactly. And there are people who are sort of, I don't know, predisposed, also conditioned, any number of things, to be more forgiving and people who are more withholding of forgiveness.
	And it's those traits and things like the Stanford Happiness Project and the Physiology of Forgiveness, which I think is done by a cardiologist.
	I'm a cardiologist and there's a really fascinating Duke study that follows people over 25 years and when they were 25 and when they were 50 checks in with them and they have something that they call Oh, it has to do with hostility, but one of the high markers is the unwillingness to forgive.
	And at 50, the people who test that way have a 20% mortality rate, mostly due to cardiovascular pathology, whereas the normal people, the control group, are at 2%.
	So it's a huge difference in how that follows you.
	But these are traits of forgiveness and of just being willing to It's not about, you know, what conditions you put on it.
	So I think, I mean, it's compelling, isn't it?
	That it makes a difference.
	And we're not just talking about big traumas and one-time events, but for people to have the capacity to To extend forgiveness, which, I mean, I think there's a lot of tangential benefits that often accrue to that, and often don't, because I think a lot of times when people perpetrate against you, they're not going to reform. Yeah, I mean, sorry to interrupt.
	I mean, okay, yes, I completely agree with you that if you walk around with a whole bunch of stress and anger and hostility, that that's going to be not great for your health.
	Completely. Completely agree with you on that.
	I think that the point is, there's people who believe they do not, who still suffer the physiological side effects of not being willing to extend forgiveness.
	No, no, no.
	If you're safe, if you're safe, then your level of stress and hostility is going to go down, right?
	Well, how does that explain people who are still suffering that physiological deficit?
	They are safe. They're safe.
	They're just... Wait, what if they're still being exposed to toxic levels of abuse and betrayal?
	Well, sure, but these are widespread studies.
	So, I mean, that's going to be...
	You know, it's not like they're not going to control for that.
	People who are in an abusive relationship at the moment...
	Listen, you can't bring me empirical evidence in the middle of a conversation.
	Like, if you'd sent this to me ahead of time, I could have looked it up, but you didn't.
	And my question is why? Oh, I'm sorry.
	All the links, I will email them to you just to full disclosure.
	Okay, okay, yeah. Listen, I mean, I can't debate the scientific evidence for a study I've never read, right?
	Absolutely. I'm not a scientist as far as that goes.
	I can give you the moral perspective, which is that forgiveness is earned and you don't have to forgive people.
	Now, you can say, well, your blood pressure will go down.
	And it's like, okay, well then you can abandon standards of justice and morality if you want to save your blood pressure, if that's what's necessary, but that's not the moral argument, right?
	You're coming to me for a sort of medical argument, but I'm not a medical professional, I'm not a doctor, I'm the philosopher guy, which means that I can give you the moral arguments, but if you're going to say, but your blood pressure will go down, then you need to talk to somebody in a white coat, not somebody in a white room.
	No, for sure. I actually don't think that's enough.
	And it's kind of why I was interested to get your take on it.
	Well, I think that your development of a secular moral system is interesting.
	And so... This is one area where I am just interested to pin down right where you're at.
	And I'd like to know the long-term effects, right?
	So I have no doubt that if you relax your standards, right, if somebody's really wronged you and just say, you know what?
	I'm just going to be around them.
	I'm going to forgive them.
	I am not going to demand a change in behavior, and I'm not going to have those standards, right?
	I'm gonna lower my standards so that dysfunctional people can be around me and I'm gonna be fine with it.
	I can understand how that lowers your blood pressure in the moment.
	I really can, for sure.
	In the same way that taking cocaine makes you happy.
	But my question is, what happens in the long run?
	Do you let your children be around these abusive people?
	Do you let your children see you be humiliated and abused by these abusive people?
	What effect does that have in your children in the long run, right?
	So yeah, okay, maybe your blood pressure goes down, but there's a price to be paid for everything.
	And that would probably depend on how you're defining forgiveness, because you certainly, you know, that does not need to be a part of it.
	When people are a toxic influence in your life, you can forgive them and still cut them loose.
	And there are people who I think, sorry to interrupt you, but where this may be reasonable, and I don't know, but there are people who hold on to anger even after restitution has been made.
	Oh, you remember that time and five years ago?
	Like they just won't let it go.
	Yeah. Like they're in the relationship, the person has made restitution, and they won't let it go.
	And that's what happens then, is that a lack of forgiveness gives them power over others, right?
	And then they're holding on to the power, and that's a form of abuse, in my opinion.
	Like, I'll give you an example that I'm sure is, right?
	So, you know, we were on a break, season three, right?
	So, a boyfriend and a girlfriend are going out.
	They take a break. The boyfriend sleeps with someone else, right?
	And they get back together, and she says she didn't, and he says he did, right?
	She gets angry, and he says, well, we were on a break, and she said, well, we never explicitly said what I thought, and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And he's like, well, I'm, you know, I'm sorry, and here's what my thinking was, and here's what I did, and so on, but I genuinely didn't think I was betraying you because I thought on a break meant we could see other people, and I thought that was understood.
	Like, whatever, right? So it was more of a mistake than something immoral, right?
	So then she says, okay, I'm taking you back, right?
	But she won't let it go, right?
	So every time there's a conflict, it's, oh, yeah, well, you slept with that, right?
	Well, okay, so I think he's got a reasonable explanation as to what happened.
	Assume the breakup was mutual, or maybe even she suggested it.
	Then that is something where she should...
	If she's in the relationship, she kind of has to forgive him.
	Like, you can't just hold things over people forever, right?
	If they have tried to make amends or if they're not repeating the behavior, if things have changed, you can't just keep holding things over people forever and ever and ever and ever, particularly if it's hypocritical.
	So I would say that if it's that situation where people are refusing to forgive even when it's been reasonably earned or is not justified, If they won't let go of the wrong that was done because it gives them power over someone, like every time she brings this up, he kind of folds and is like, okay, I'm sorry, right?
	So this is their way of resolving disputes by giving her dominance, right?
	Well, then we have a different situation where her letting go of that is a bloody good idea.
	Now, her letting go of that might be like, you know what?
	I really can't forgive this guy for sleeping with another woman, so I'm going to leave the relationship.
	Or I'm going to stay in the relationship, but I'm going to stop using it as a weapon, right?
	100%. And I'm sure that that is a component in the studies.
	That's not going to work. You're definitely going to have higher stress levels in that situation.
	Right. But, yeah, abandoning standards I don't think is the way to go at all.
	Sorry, go ahead. If it's abandoning standards, then what is it you mean when you're saying forgiveness?
	If you're forgiving somebody, what are you doing?
	What's your definition of it?
	You are accepting that they have understood that what they did was wrong, they have understood how much it hurt you, and they've made a commitment to change and demonstrated that.
	Okay, yeah. See, I guess it's just a completely different thing for me because that's not what I am doing when I'm forgiving somebody.
	So that's probably part of the disconnect.
	And what are you doing when you forgive somebody?
	You're just trying to lower your blood pressure?
	Well, no, for me, if I'm forgiving somebody, and like I said, you know, I've been in the position where, you know, these things have been serious things, and they have not acknowledged, or they do not know.
	I'm letting go of my That long-term problem comes in, that you are not fulfilled in that sense that you have had an injustice perpetrated on you and it has not been made right.
	And frankly, in human affairs, it just very often will never be made right.
	And if you can't deal with that internally, I think that's a problem.
	I think leaving yourself in that victim area is a problem and people deal with it differently.
	I mean, I just completely disconnected and I thought people were tools and for a while I thought I might be a sociopath.
	You know, because that was my way of dealing with it.
	But I think people deal with it differently, but it's unresolved because you've been wronged and no one's going to make it right most of the time.
	And does the bad behavior recur with the people you've forgiven?
	Oh, absolutely not.
	I don't allow them to be in a position to do that again.
	See, I think that that's not a component of forgiveness.
	So you're safe. I have to reconcile with you.
	Yeah, so you're safe. Yeah, absolutely.
	And you're allowed to be safe. So what are we disagreeing with?
	I'm telling you that if you can forgive people if, I mean, if you remove the negative stimuli, then why do you need to stay?
	Like if someone's abusing you and you get them the hell out of your life, what's the hell is the point of staying angry with them?
	The anger has served its purpose.
	Oh, I don't think we do disagree if we define it those ways.
	Although I do think that there are times that people, I mean, you, hmm.
	Okay, people who have abused you and no longer are.
	I think there are times when it might be appropriate not to necessarily kick them out of your life.
	But, yeah, I mean, I don't think we necessarily disagree that much.
	Well, no, but what if you have kids?
	Well, I do have children, and...
	My children are around my mother in a controlled way.
	And my mother's very different now than she used to be.
	And I'm very honest with my children.
	I don't really pull punches with them.
	So I explain, look, sometimes your grandma loses her cool and it doesn't seem totally reasonable.
	And that's not appropriate.
	She has some trouble keeping her temper.
	She doesn't abuse them in any way.
	They're not like with her.
	But she's around and sometimes she does.
	She gets a little emotional and she'll lose it a little easy.
	Wait, wait. What do you mean she gets a little emotional?
	What do you mean? Oh. She cries at a long distance commercial like I used to when I was a kid, but what do you mean?
	She loses her temper.
	Like what? What does that look like?
	She loses her temper quickly.
	At this point in her life, she doesn't lash out and say horrible things and, you know, throw things at you or do horrible things, you know.
	That is in yesteryear, but she still cops a pretty serious attitude, you know, if she is emotionally stressed and, you know.
	I see that and I use it as a teachable moment.
	It's a problem. And if you allow yourself to indulge in temper tantrums, you know, then you get sick.
	Okay, but what do her temper tantrums look like?
	What are your kids seeing? Well, she doesn't.
	So she doesn't throw temper tantrums anymore.
	So what I, you know, I can compare it to what I know used to be the volcano that would erupt in the past.
	What my kids see is pretty mild, you know.
	Okay, what does it look like?
	For heaven's sakes, how many times after I ask this question?
	You can not answer it, but don't talk around it.
	Like, what does she say? What does she do?
	Okay, so she might get a phone call while she's here from somebody, and it's some family drama that upsets her, and she'll get all red in the face, and she'll...
	Gosh, you know what?
	She'll snap at the boys pretty quickly.
	If they're running around and making noise, you know, I don't even believe in letting them be children.
	So she'll say, stop it!
	You need to be quiet! And so I'll kind of step in and say, well, mom, I let them do that.
	So it's okay that they're doing that.
	But, you know, if we want to move to another room, then that's fine.
	And I just tell them, you know, you don't lose your temper at people like that.
	That's not the first way you talk to somebody is to ask them nicely.
	You don't just shout at them to stop.
	Okay, so you have standards of behavior.
	Right. And what happens if she does not conform to those standards of behavior?
	Well, like I said, I mean, usually I will play redirection, but I don't kick her out of my house for it because she will.
	She doesn't. She doesn't fight me on it.
	She's like, oh, you're right. I'm sorry about that.
	You know, so it's not a situation where it's going to escalate into something I'm not going to let them see now.
	Okay, so you say, what, that's unacceptable or inappropriate or what?
	I'll just tell her, you know, mom, they have permission to do that.
	I don't want to yell at them for that.
	You know that that's not what we do.
	You know, we try not to raise our voices.
	The idea, the ideal in our house is that we don't yell.
	We don't teach them that, you know, you don't listen to us until we get a certain decibel.
	But, you know, it's very foreign to her.
	But like I said, because she doesn't fight me on it and she respects and, you know, goes back to where it needs to be, I'm not going to kick her out of my house for that.
	You know, if it was bad, I would.
	I wouldn't allow them to see it.
	But for them, I think it's probably good for them to have some exposure and for me to say, yeah, you know, nanny used to even be a lot worse.
	I mean, it's good exposure for them to be yelled at?
	Well, it's not good exposure for them to be yelled at, but I do think it's good exposure for them to see how you deal with it when somebody behaves inappropriately.
	Well, what they see though is that you expose them to behavior you consider wrong.
	Well, I understand what you're saying.
	But I think if you take that to its logical end, you can't really expose your children even to yourself.
	You know, like I said, if she was going to push the issue and create a scene and we were going to have a problem, then that would be a problem.
	Wait, you're saying you're like your mom?
	I'm saying I'm like, well, no, I'm not saying I'm like her.
	Okay, so then don't tell me it's like exposing them to yourself if you're different from your mom, right?
	No, what I'm saying is if I don't allow her to make a mistake, because she'll admit it's a mistake at this point in her life.
	Okay, but how often does this happen?
	Oh, it does not happen all the time.
	Gosh. You know, maybe she's here a lot, and maybe, I don't know, once a week, once every other week.
	It's not big stuff.
	It's not like she goes into a screaming fit.
	It's just that it's a pretty high standard here of not raising your voice.
	For me, it's kind of a sticking point.
	It's not as though she's screaming at them.
	I think other people People think I'm permissive.
	It's not their business how I do it, but because I don't yell at them and go straight to extreme punishment, some of my family thinks I'm permissive because there's been a lot of physical punishment in our past.
	Are you always around when your mom's with your kids?
	Yeah, yeah. She just comes over to our place a lot.
	No, but you're always around, right?
	Yeah, I'm an at-home mom, so I'm here.
	Right. So, do your kids, your sons, I guess, do your sons have a good relationship with your mom?
	They do, actually.
	They do. My oldest is eight, and he's, like I said, I mean, I don't pull any punches with him, so he, you know, he empathizes with her.
	He's very sensitive, so...
	Right. Well, it's your choice.
	Obviously, I mean, I don't need to tell you anything you don't know.
	If there's enough pluses, then go for it.
	I mean, I'm always a little bit concerned, though, for me, when, like, I want my daughter to know that the standards are universal.
	And if it's like there's an exception to the standards, like, well, you know, we don't yell, we don't call names.
	So if somebody was around who was doing that, I'd kind of need to explain why.
	Why aren't these standards that are universal?
	And you say, well, no.
	She gets a pass. Now, I'm not saying you let her get away with it, but she keeps doing it, right?
	Once a week or once every two weeks, as you say.
	So she keeps doing it.
	And she gets a pass in terms of like, well, that would be unacceptable behavior for others.
	So then the question is for the kids, okay, why does she get a pass?
	In that way, I mean, your children are sort of perpetually getting a pass in the sense that they misbehave and you correct them.
	They misbehave and you correct them.
	You're never going to eject them from your home for it.
	Wait, wait, why do your kids misbehave?
	What do you mean? Well, I mean, kids, they just do things that sometimes you're like, well, that's not really, like my son.
	I mean, he just He's kind of goofy and he'll goof off too much and not pay attention because of it.
	So I have to redirect him. I have to say, look, you have to practice self-discipline.
	You have to practice self-control.
	You know, I'm not... That's a standard.
	It's good for you. But, you know, it just is what it is.
	We're just going to work on the behavior.
	And what I'm saying is my mom...
	Hang on a second. You're saying that your son should practice self-control, but his grandmother, who's welcome in the house, does not.
	Well, yeah, but he doesn't...
	Come on! We all lose it.
	Come on! I love you to death.
	You got to get that connection, right?
	Well, but I am guilty of things that I apologize to my children for on occasion.
	I mean, it's not like I've never snapped at them.
	I have, you know, and I apologize.
	I think that was inappropriate.
	And how often does that happen? Sorry about that.
	That is pretty rare.
	That is pretty rare.
	But, you know, it happens on occasion.
	You're doing six things and, you know, I've got a lot of kids around here, so there's a lot of noise and you just, you respond in a way that you just don't think...
	Yeah, a little sharper than you want.
	Look, I understand all of that.
	But if you're saying to your eight-year-old, you have to have self-control...
	But your mom doesn't.
	And she's around and modeling that behavior.
	And again, I know you disapprove and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But it's not really that serious if she's around, right?
	And I understand where you're coming from.
	And you just hear one little bit of it.
	I think she has a lot of things to offer these days and is a very positive influence in a lot of ways.
	You know, she makes things teachable moments, which is great because that's what I do.
	Wait, wait. She's a positive influence because she's a teachable moment by doing bad things?
	No, no, no. I do not mean teachable moments.
	Okay, I just wanted to make sure I understood this.
	No. I mean, she's the kind of person who says, well, you know, you can see the logical extension of what you're doing is this.
	You know, I mean, she just engages them in a more mature way, which most adults don't, so I like that, you know.
	Right, right. Okay.
	Well, I just wanted to double-check.
	Always good to do a quick review, but...
	Yeah, that would be my thought about forgiveness.
	And if it's working out with your mom, it's working out with your mom.
	I'm certainly not going to tell anybody it's not, if that's the case.
	So, listen, I really, really appreciate your call.
	Really appreciate everybody's time tonight.
	What a delight and a truly wonderful experience it is to chat philosophy with you guys.
	And thanks to all of the callers.
	Thank you to you for listening, for sharing, for liking, for supporting.
	What is going on here? freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Ah, February. One of the leaner months sometimes in the realm of philosophy.
	It's a short month too. So freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Don't forget to pick up your copy of The Art of the Argument, available at theartoftheargument.com.
	Of course, you can get it also on Audible.com.
	Very happy with that book.
	Just working on a new one, too.
	Wanted to mention that as well. Got some shopping to do.
	FDRURL.com forward slash Amazon and Twitter.com forward slash Stefan Molyneux.
	And last but not least, second last but not least, you can sign up for our new newsletter at freedomainradio.com.
	And February the 24th, what is that?
	Very, very soon, we've got A Night for Freedom, anightforfreedomdc.com.
	It's going to be a little bit more of an intimate affair, which I'm very thrilled about.
	More time to chat and to meet and greet with people I'm looking forward to.
	I don't just bungee in and do a speech, people.
	Like, I'm in there. I'm chatting.
	I'm hugging. All kinds of good stuff.
	It's wonderful to meet you guys face to face, and I really, really like that opportunity.
	So you can check out the tickets.
	At anightforfreedomdc.com.
	There'll be, of course, other great speakers there.
	The wonderful Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson will be there.
	I'm really looking forward to working with him.
	And that's it for tonight.
	Once again, I thank you.
	I hope you have a wonderful week.

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