March 18, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:03:51
4031 Intensify the War on Drugs? - Call In Show - March 14th, 2018
Question 1: [2:58] – “My wife and I have been trying for 5 years and have had 4 surgeries, 4 miscarriages and one failed IVF attempt ($50,000 total expense). I'm listening to one of your call-in-shows right now and Stef is having a rant about Westerners having babies. I want a person to raise. I also badly want my wife to be a mother. Adoption is anywhere between $35,000-50,000. I'm at a fork in the road right now ('m 40 years old and she is 37). Do we try to go for adoption?”Question 2: [1:01:08] – “Whenever the idea of marriage or longer-term relationships is discussed among my circles, the saying ‘people change over time’ continually crosses my mind and makes me wonder how people can commit to someone they don't really know. Sure they may know the person today, who they are, what their values are, what they want out of life, goals, ambitions, values, family goals, etc. etc. but acknowledging the idea that people change over time, I'm left kind of puzzled at the prospect of commitment to who that person will be tomorrow, the day after, the year after or ten years down the line. How can you commit to someone 10 years down the line, when not only do you not know who they're going to be by that time, but you don't know who you yourself are going to be?”Question 3: [1:24:08] - “In studying the drug epidemic, I've realized that the black market for drugs for exhibits the same market characteristics of any other commodity market. It's my view that if illicit drugs become prohibitively expensive, their use (i.e. demand) will fall precipitously. To make this case we needn't think it terms of hypotheticals, just look at the way the DEA stopped the quaalude crisis. Our country had a real problem with quaaludes when the drug cost 25 cents a hit in the 70's and early 80's. By investigating and shutting down the supply centers, the price of quaaludes rose to over $250/pill and the number of quaalude addicts (and deaths and injuries) fell to almost zero. We should take a similar approach to the drugs that currently plague our society.”Question 4: [2:37:15] – “I'm a 20-year-old man. When I was but a few days old I was circumcised, too much skin was removed, and the cuts were too deep. As a result I am bound as a man today who can't have sex with a woman or achieve orgasm (severe neurological damage). I feel embarrassed, ashamed, inadequate, violated and angry beyond comprehension. The 14th amendment’s equal protection under the law clause (yes the one the courts used to legalize gay marriage) says I, or any other male should have been protected from genital cutting since females are LEGALLY protected from it. I'd like to bring awareness to what an absolutely pernicious and repulsive practice it is, and how it's personally made me want to end my life. I'd like to finally talk about it anonymously, to try and leave this horrible anger behind.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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So, Four Callers, and this show, more than a lot, shows, I think, the incredible range of topics in this philosophical conversation.
It's just incredible stuff.
And the first is a couple who are struggling, struggling, struggling to have a child.
It's been a whole series of medical heartbreaks, and they wanted to ask about the philosophy of adoption, the risks, the costs, the benefits of adoption, or other options.
We had a very, very good conversation about that, and a lot of couples struggle with this, so I hope that you will listen in, even if it's not your issue, hopefully it won't be, but you may know someone, who it's happening to or will.
Now, the second caller wants to know, how on earth can you commit to someone For your whole life, 10 years down the line, you don't know who you're going to be.
You don't know who they're going to be.
How can you commit and say for sure that you're going to stay together?
Well, there are ways to do it, and we talked about that.
Now, the third was a debate.
Hmm. Quite a debate with somebody who says that he used to be against the drug war.
Now he's for it. And man, it got pretty wild, particularly towards the end.
So I hope you will enjoy that.
I think there were a lot of good tips and tricks about how to work with debates.
Even if you have had this one before, this is a new way of looking at it.
Now the fourth caller, just a heartbreaking story.
He was circumcised and the circumcision went absolutely terribly and left him with a legacy that...
It's hard to imagine even wanting to wish upon your worst enemy.
And when you are given this kind of tragedy, what can you do to give your life meaning?
What can you do to make the world a better place, given how much the world has harmed you?
That is a big challenge, and I know there are a lot of people out there Who've been handed a really raw deal in life?
How can you turn it around and make your tragedy part of helping to motivate you to make the world a better place?
It's a big challenge, but there's a lot of power in it.
I hope you will really listen carefully to that conversation.
Thanks everyone so much for your continued support of this amazing, amazing experience.
Here we go. Alright, well up first today we have JP and Shani.
JP wrote in and said, I'm listening to one of your call-in shows right now, and Steph is having a rant about Westerners having babies.
I want a person to raise.
I also badly want my wife to be a mother.
Adoption is anywhere between $35,000 to $50,000.
I'm on a fork in the road right now.
I'm 40 years old, and she is 37.
Do we try to go for adoption?
That's from JP and Shani.
Hey, guys. How you doing?
Hi, Stefan. Hi, doing all right?
Well, what a challenging topic.
I just first and foremost want to express my very, very deepest sympathies about this.
That is very tough.
That is very, very tough stuff.
And it kind of dominates your whole mindset, right?
Like it's all you think about.
Sometimes there is this unease, this hope, this how many resources do we keep throwing at this, this...
Wanting something positive to happen, expecting it to happen, and then dealing with the negativity.
And I just really wanted to express my very, very deepest sympathies for this.
It's a very, very horrible situation and remarkably common.
You know, when you have issues like this, you hear, of course, other people.
10% of married couples have significant issues with infertility and It is one of these things that once you hear about it you really hear about it but until you do it's kind of off the radar for a lot of people.
Yeah, I would completely agree with that, but I just want to say thank you so much for having us on your show.
My husband's been listening to you for a very long time now, and I would say that you've been very, through your talk show, convincing and kind of...
Many things. And instrumental, I would say, in a lot of the things that he does, in his personal and also even work life as well.
So thank you, because that also helps me.
So thank you for that. I appreciate that, and according to completely unverified, non-independent, non-research, your chances of conceiving go up much higher if Free Domain Radio is playing in the background.
Not a lot of people know that, for reasons that are probably quite clear.
Maybe that's why we're having so many issues.
We'll have to keep that in mind.
That's right. It's the worst porn ever.
And do you know what the issue is, and more importantly, who's to blame in the relationship?
Wow. Well, the issue pretty much is fibroids.
Yeah. And, you know, Shani is black and black women have a much higher frequency of fibroids as they age their 20s.
But then again, even with her, I mean, she's got that gene that just keeps producing these things like grapes on a vine.
And it's just the...
Who is it? The fertility specialist.
He keeps saying, oh man, she's got that gene.
She's got that gene. And the problem is, of course, you can still have children with fibroids.
Many, many women do.
But it gets to the point where when they get to a certain size, they compete with the fetus for blood.
So it's like a race.
You know, the first miscarriage, the first failed pregnancy or the miscarriage was she had a big fibroid in there and but the baby got to the second truck just said to the second trimester yeah and then it was like all looking good and then boom just was miscarriage yeah and and then of course they said you know we got to take care of these fibroids before you proceed if you want to continue to have try to have kids so then we got into the surgery And it was like one,
two, two surgeries right away and then further down the line we went in another surgery to remove more fibroids and they grow that fast.
And so it's one of those things where you're racing, it's a race against the clock and you know that every day that goes by those things are growing and once they get to a certain threatening size It's sort of, it's very tricky to have the baby as well.
Yeah, and I just want to say that it's definitely, I guess I'm to blame for our unfortunate situation.
When you go through IVF and you see a fertility doctor, they run a series of tests.
And JP has a, not to get all personal, but has a sperm count to probably impregnate an entire village or something.
I'm like Genghis Khan or something.
And so knowing that, it kind of, you know, it was, I don't know, it's just, we've had a talk and I kind of told JP, you know, that I was, you know, sorry that he had to go through all of this with me because obviously...
Sorry, hold on. She's all emotional.
No, no, I mean, I get it.
He's got this kind of sperm count.
It's like, lo hith tadpoles doth darken the sky with their multitudes.
And, you know, you share a coffee cup with the guy, and you got, like, fetuses coming out of your ears.
So I... Now, of course, you know I was being facetious, and nobody is to blame with these kinds of things.
It is just... Bad luck.
And you, of course, you say that you're black.
Of course, the important thing to remember is that race is just a social construct and therefore has no medical consequences whatsoever.
So your doctors must have just been completely confused about all of that.
So you can tell them that from me.
Yeah, they were having a lot of hard time with that.
Yeah. Just will it to be different.
Yeah. So, and the other thing is that...
With Shani and I, man, it was a long journey to get to the point where we are now as far as setting up our lives so she could be the mother she wants to be and I could have the household that I wanted, which was to make enough money to have her be able to Comfortably, out of doubt, stay at home for as long as she wants.
The thing about children is even before they're born, your life revolves around them.
That's a good way of putting it.
They're alive before they affect your life.
Even years before they come out.
Five years ago...
Well, we had started trying to have kids before then, but that was the first miscare thing five years ago or something like that.
And your whole life revolves around it.
And you think, okay, this is where I got to be with the money here.
This is what we have to do here.
This is, okay, I want to get this house so we don't have to do this.
And everything revolves around it.
And it definitely makes you as productive as you can be because there's a countdown clock, you know?
Yeah. And...
When suddenly, you know, I mean, everything.
I got my whole business going to the point where I wanted to be in the house and everything.
A whole bunch of different life-changing things that really came all together perfectly at just the right time.
And it's sort of like the feeling of Setting the table, but for the big feast, you sit down and you can't eat it.
Oh, no, and it's terrible.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but how many times you end up having sex when you don't really feel like it, but it's just the time that nature demands it.
Yeah, that can be hard at times, for sure.
Trust me. Yeah, that is one of those things where It changes everything.
That kind of sex is a lot different than Then just, you know, when you're, I don't know.
In the mood, basically. Yes.
The species demands it is not the most romantic phrase that gets your blood going.
And, you know, it's funny because I'm not the youngest parent.
I knew a couple of couples who had some fertility issues.
And, you know, when you're young, it's like, yeah, you'll be having sex even when you don't want to.
And you're like, I can't ever think of not wanting to.
And it's like, well, you do get there.
At some point. You certainly do.
Absolutely. Definitely.
And the thing that was one of the strange feelings that I had, not a strange feeling, but as soon as we had this last episode where it didn't work out, this was after the IVF, and Shani will kind of go into reasons more specific about why we decided we're not going to try anymore.
Um, biologically or, you know, um, I had, and so then it was up in the air about, well, adoption or not, and we'll talk about that in a second, but that all of a sudden this feeling comes over you where the whole, your whole future just bursts wide open.
It's like you had this sort of Not in a bad way, but this burden you're carrying, this child, this unborn child that's going to be in your life that's not there yet, and everything revolves around it, and you take that out, it's like, boom, it's just this wide open feeling.
What else am I doing now? Yeah, what else am I doing now?
And one of the things that I did want to talk to you about, considering this is a philosophy show, and I wanted to get your take on What is, you know, it's when you have a child, I would imagine, you know, a lot of the pathways and options you have in front of you immediately dissipate and there's one shining pathway.
It lights up right there. That's called be a father.
And so It dictates how you spend a lot of your time.
And it takes a lot of burden off of your shoulders to, you know, how am I going to maximize my life experience?
How am I going to get the most out of this life?
What am I going to do? Should I do A, B, C? I don't know.
But you have a kid, boom, there it is.
That's your purpose right there.
For a large part.
And it, you know, in sort of, I don't know who it was.
It was one of the existential philosophers Saying that one of the crises in life is that you have complete responsibility over finding meaning yourself.
I mean, it's up to something of that nature.
I can't remember who it was.
But it's all on your shoulders.
You're alone in this. It's all on you.
And one of the things about having a kid is, well, it really takes care of a lot of purpose.
Boom, there's your purpose for the next 18 years.
And yeah, you can do stuff in this allotted time on the margins that you'll have, but there it is.
And you just go at it.
You don't have to doubt or think or choose, and this is my job now.
And so once that's taken away, then you get lost.
Now, what am I going to do?
What's the hell of a point now?
What am I going to do with myself?
I'm just going to keep making money for what?
What am I going to do with it?
Yeah, so that's basically where we are right now.
Right.
And we'll get to the existential stuff in a sec.
There's just a couple of things that I wanted to mention first.
And this is just more to just get stuff off my chest than anything else.
But first of all, it is now my conclusion as I have passed a half century on this planet that the female reproductive system is basically evil.
I don't know who designed it.
I'd really like to chat with whoever came up with the blue print or red print, as it were.
But basically, I didn't really understand until I got older just how evil the female reproductive system is.
I didn't even know what the word endometriosis was.
I thought it was some kind of dinosaur.
Endometriosis. Big problem.
Fibroids. These are not the children you want to have because they're very ungrateful.
They steal from you and they won't take care of you in your old age.
Your breasts, half the time, it's like they turn into these puff adders that try and kill the women.
It's like, hey, these are really attractive.
Nice and bouncy. How about we kill you?
And they turn on you like vampires.
It's crazy. Just how evil the female reproductive system is.
And of course, it's a lot more complicated than the male reproductive system, or system, singular, I suppose.
But it's like the amount of moving planets that have to align it.
Like, I literally cannot believe how many billions of people there are on the planet, given how evil, unpredictable, crazy...
Crazy, suicide-bomb-y that the female reproductive system is.
Oh, you don't appreciate how precarious life is.
Yeah. There's so many things that have to happen.
Well, you conceive, and then there has to be a heartbeat.
Well, you can't get happy, really, until you see the heartbeat.
So once you see the...
And then after the heartbeat, then it has to be this amount of weight, and by this point, just so many obstacles.
The horrible thing, though, Stefan, is that...
Just kind of going on with your point is that you don't necessarily know how hard pregnancy and reproducing is because a lot of people make it look so easy.
And so, you know, for me, seeing even, you know, my friends or just, you know, just being out and about my husband and us seeing people with kids or, you know, you hear on the news and someone has like Six kids.
It's so annoying, I cannot even tell you.
There's an old Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck movie called Forces of Nature that was actually, way back in the day, was recommended to me by a woman I was dating at the time.
It's actually a pretty good movie, and there's a character in it.
They say, do you have any kids of your own?
No, but I see them everywhere.
Seriously. And it's like, you don't know how many children there are in the world until you're trying and failing to have your own children.
And it's like, they're everywhere.
And, and, let me just say one other thing as well.
They're everywhere. And assholes get them like candy at Halloween.
Like, jerk parents, mean parents.
Like, if you want to have kids, and you're not able to have kids, you're struggling with it, and you're just desperate to have that tiny bundle, and you know you're going to treasure it more than gold itself or water in the desert, and then you just see idiots out there yelling at their kids.
It's like, you have a treasure!
What are you, crazy? Stop yelling at your children!
Do you know how lucky you are to have fun?
And just yelling at them and dragging them through the mall, and it's like, what are you...
This is insane. It seems like the good people who wait and are careful and considerate, they don't get the kids, but the idiots who breed like you're just pressing Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V on the jerk gene, it's like, ah, we got kids, we got villages of them.
Yeah, yeah. No, honestly, I completely agree.
We have a home business and whatnot.
JP teaches music out of our house to children.
And so one of our clients, we brought on a student that we're kind of, I guess, kind of putting her on scholarship.
Yeah, yeah. Anyways, we put on a scholarship, but she knows she has a cousin that unfortunately is 14 years old.
Isn't the high school, obviously.
Well, it's funny because when you're trying to have a kid, sorry, Shari, I want to just, every time somebody, you think, you hear a story about someone being pregnant, you're like, oh, they're pregnant?
Really? Oh, how old are they?
Oh, it doesn't, you know, you start to fantasize and start to things pop in your mind.
Like, do I want, you know, maybe there's an opportunity here, you know, maybe.
Oh, like if they're older kind of thing?
Or if they're, you know, are they going to, are they, do they want, are they going to give the kid up for adoption?
Oh, you're like circling like buzzards.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like the hyenas trailing the pregnant zebra.
Right, okay. So, Shani, that's the preface.
So, go ahead, Shani, what you were saying.
Yeah, so basically, when we found out that there was a possible need.
A possible need. Yeah, a possible need.
JP and I kind of looked at each other like, oh...
And so we reached out and just to know if there's anything that we can do, if she was looking to put her child up for adoption.
And unfortunately, should I say it?
Well, no. So basically, no.
Assistance basically trumped us, you know, taking on that child.
No, they're getting paid.
They get paid, what, $200 a month for the child.
And that was...
I think that was what the mother had told one of our One of our friends said, quote, they get this much a month, so we're going to keep the child.
And they get that much from...
Oh, so they don't really want the child, but the child is the gateway to 200 bucks a month.
And they're the kind of people who say, well, that seems like a good deal to me.
I mean, what could a child cost?
Eight bucks a month? That's $192 profit.
Exactly. Yes.
You guys are making me cry on my own show.
That's just like, that's horrifying.
That's horrifying. So, you're a biracial couple, right?
I mean, people don't say, my wife's black, if they're black, at least usually.
So, you're a biracial couple. You do know, of course, that there are some challenges with biracial couples just in terms of blood types and miscarriages are a little bit more common.
I just wanted to mention that.
Although, with the fibroids, that's not the major issue, right?
Yeah, I mean, it seemed the major issue was the fibroids, but I don't know if they have perhaps...
You know, the problems with the blood type.
Yeah, sure. I'm sure that could...
We were not aware of that.
I'm not a doctor, just so you know.
Like, look it up and all that.
But that's just something to be aware of.
And isn't it funny? And I say this more to you, Shauna, but...
Ah, it's funny. Your whole life, it's like, don't get pregnant.
Gotta make sure you don't get pregnant.
Cross your legs. A dime can help you avoid getting pregnant.
Just put it between your knees and keep it there and take this pill and put this weird space alien thing up your hoo-hoo.
And like, you've got this whole don't get pregnant thing.
It's like you spend 15 years of your life trying desperately not to get pregnant.
And then the next 10 desperately trying to get pregnant.
It's like, can we just meet somewhere in the middle here?
Just have a little bit of fertility, but not too much.
Well, I mean, you know, we were all, and I would say probably, you know, my generation, we were taught that, you know, going to school, going to college, you know, getting your degree, you know, working and doing your career to the best of your ability was the things that you had to do.
So all these things, though, unfortunately, take lots of time.
And by the time you know it, you're about 30-something years old, and then now you're trying to have a family.
But unfortunately... Biology, those forces are against me, you know, and if I would have known this, I would have probably tried to have kids around like 27, maybe even earlier, 25, if I knew I had, you know,
fertility issues. And another thing is that I talked to one of our friends, she's in California, she's 27 years old, and she actually felt Nervous and horrible for being pregnant at 27 years old because all of her friends are doing extremely well in their careers.
And she kind of had to put all her feelings aside and said, no, this is actually a blessing.
And 27 years old is the right age to be a mother.
And so, you know, of course, she knows about our situation and everything.
And now she finds it a blessing and she's like completely head over heels about being pregnant and starting her next chapter.
But that is, I think, what our generation deals with.
I guess, you know, a lot of the kind of like the feminist movement has kind of given us a work.
It certainly doesn't help. Yeah.
No, and what you're talking about, sorry to interrupt, but what you're talking about is very, very serious.
And the tragedy that you guys are facing, a lot of people are facing, and I don't know if it's, some people say it's engineered, it's on purpose, or it's just the way that it shook out.
But this whole, for young women, go get educated, go start your career, and never talking about babies, and never talking about the basic biological facts of fertility.
90% of your eggs are gone by the time you're 30.
90% of the eggs are gone by the time you're 30.
And I never, ever even knew this until it was too late.
Right. And so this information is almost like it's deliberately withheld.
It is a form of population culling.
Smart people. Because it's the smart people who least need the government.
It's the smart people who can solve things for themselves.
And it's the smart people that the government always says, oh, yes, well, you've got to go get your education on, go get your career started.
And it's like, but what about...
The fact that it's pretty good for society if smart people have children.
We know that intelligence is enormously genetic.
So it's kind of important.
But it's a form of population culling.
I mean, I don't know, again, the course, the process, the plan, I don't really care.
But the effect of it is population culling because you are encouraging the smartest men and women to put off childbearing until they can barely have one or two children.
Whereas for the other people, it's like, here's $5,000 to have four children by five different guys.
And it's like, I just think I know where this is going to play out.
Yeah, it's completely frustrating to...
I mean, the government definitely plays a hand in the ridiculousness that's going out there with people...
Um, basically just having kids to get paid.
Being subsidized. Yeah. Yeah.
It takes the data out of the equation and we have a lot of broken families out there because of it.
Right. So let's, uh, and appreciate you letting me just talk about this stuff.
It was on my mind since I saw your question.
So the question now becomes one of adoption and I'm just going to tell everyone right up front, you're going to hate me and don't get mad at me.
Just don't shoot the messenger.
These are just the facts as I see them.
And, um, I'll just give you a little spiel and you can let me know what you think.
So as the research into the genetics of intelligence goes further and further, you have a big challenge when it comes to adoption.
And I've been racking my brains like for the last day, and you guys let me know what you think of course, but racking my brains for the last day.
Trying to think of how a smart person who is responsible with her sexuality, who was responsible through the pregnancy, who was responsible through the childbirth process, how a smart woman would end up in a situation where she would be giving a child up for adoption.
I'm trying to sort of figure that out, right?
And, of course, it could happen, but intelligence isn't the only thing.
There are other personality traits that are, well, all personality traits are significantly genetic, but things like conscientiousness, your attention to detail, your capacity to follow through, your planning, your organization, your deferral of gratification, these all have a lot of genetic elements.
And we can say, oh, that's terrible, and it's confining us.
Like, no, that actually gives you a lot of forgiveness.
It gives you a lot of compassion in the world.
It gives you a lot of kindness.
In the world. Because people who aren't smart or people who lack conscientiousness or people who aren't very agreeable and so on.
I mean, in the past we used to just say, well, they're just like everyone else.
They're just bad people who've made bad choices.
And it's like, no. It's true sometimes people will be short because they didn't have enough food to eat when they were growing up.
But most times people are short because the genetics are there and they're just short.
Right? And...
So you have kind of a level of forgiveness when you look across the world, not for good and evil, because there's no genes for good or evil that I'm aware of, but just in terms of the real diversity of humanity, which is intelligence and personality and differences along those lines.
So here's the challenge.
If you're going to adopt, then you have to find a woman Who had sexual activity, got pregnant, kept the baby, and is giving it up for adoption.
And she also should be fairly smart and responsible because you know that the genetics are going to pass along to the child.
If she's not smart, and you guys are smart, I'm just going to go out on a limb here.
I assume everyone who listens to this show is at least in the top 1% of intelligence.
Like, that's just my assumption.
And I, you know, in listening to you guys talk, you sound like a delightful couple.
You sound smart, sensitive, wise.
So I'm putting you right up there.
Raising a kid, Who's not smart is gonna be a problem.
And I'm not talking like a Nicholas Cruz problem.
Remember how that couple adopted Nicholas Cruz and his brother?
And he ended up shooting up that high school and is now they're trying to get the death penalty on the guy.
Well, this was adopted. And I saw a true crime show.
This is all extreme stuff.
But I saw a true crime show where a family, spoiler, didn't end well, a family, the parents were murdered by one of their And the problem was that they had one child biologically and they adopted one child.
Now the one biological child was doing really, really well.
And the child who was adopted was not, and was increasingly resentful of the child who was doing well, and, you know, he's holding guns, like Nicholas Cruz style, he's holding guns to the heads of his parents, threatening to kill them, and what can they do, right?
I mean, so he did end up killing them, then he went to jail, and so on.
That's, of course, extreme stuff, and I'm certainly not trying to imply that everybody who's adopted is anywhere close along that continuum, but...
It's important to go into it with your eyes open.
What kind of woman is going to end up giving up her child for adoption?
Well, a child who can't get the man who got her pregnant to marry her.
A woman who maybe doesn't have the extended family support system that she needs.
And a woman who can't handle or doesn't want to raise the child on her own.
Which, you know, a child who goes into an adopted household is going to do better than a child of a single mother, I think, statistically.
But that's the challenge.
Now, if you know someone who, for some reason, you can get the adoption thing going, that's a different matter.
But as far as picking the straw out of the general population, I gotta think that overall, the children who are put up for adoption come from more chaotic situations.
personalities, to put it as nicely as possible, than you guys would have.
And if there's a mismatch between your levels of intelligence, your level of conscientiousness, your levels of agreeableness, and all the other things that are significantly genetic, in other words, there's not going to be a whole lot you can do to change that, what's that going to be like for you?
That is the question.
Stefan, I've been listening to you for quite a long time and I knew exactly what you were going to say.
And of course, all those things you said have occurred to me and been rolling around my head for the past year or, you know, whenever I consider this situation.
And, you know, just to I've been very as far as adoption goes.
You always ask yourself, can I really.
I know the empirical evidence shows that people adopt children and they love their children and like their own child.
I mean, that's what I've seen in my life from people I know.
But just as far as the fears go, I remember, you know, well, two things.
One thing is my wife showing me some Some pictures of some kids in foster care, you know, and they have these public adoption agencies that are more foster to adopt, where the kid's already alive, and it usually goes from, like, two years old, and some kids are, like, 14.
They have their little profile, and, you know, hi, my name is so-and-so.
I'm waiting for someone to come and adopt me, and, you know, this is what I like to do.
And I remember...
Looking at a couple of these pictures, and even the younger ones, and just having a crisis moment, like, wait a second, what is that?
That's not for me. Wait, what do you mean?
Oh, you mean adopting that kid is not for you?
Yeah, it's not my gene. This is somebody else's product.
You get that in your head.
This is not natural.
I need to see my own genes.
I'm not saying that it can't, you know, you can't create a bond with somebody who's not, obviously I have a bond with my wife, she's not related to me, but it's definitely things that, can I trust myself to love deeply something that's not my own gene pool?
Can I trust my, yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I'm assuming you can because I've seen it done, but those are things as a man that come into your mind.
Well, as a woman too, in this situation as well, right?
Yeah, and then the other thing is, you know, I've pretty much ruled out the whole foster care.
That is not acceptable to me, that the kid has been alive for so long without my influence on them, if we were going to go that route.
In my mind, I've ruled that out.
But there's this thing called open adoption.
Where you basically, it's kind of, you make a profile.
It's very expensive.
And the agency comes and they do a home study and they, you know, look at your finances and everything else.
And then you get approved, right?
You get approved. You get to be part of their, on their website.
And then they have mothers who want to For some reason or another, you know, give up their child that's still in utero.
So the whole idea, the only thing that would ever interest me would be, no, they'd have to, you know, I want, you know, from the womb to my arms, and I'd want to pick what person is having the baby, you know.
You know, who's this person?
I get to know about them and meet them.
And Given all those things you said, well, look at the situation they're in.
That's got to speak something for temperament, for their ability to postpone gratification, maybe.
And you won't be able to do much to alter that.
As parents. No, no, you can't.
It is enormously humbling to understand the genetic research.
As parents, you will not be able to do much to change that.
It's not like you have no effect, of course.
I mean, there's an effect.
Right. But it's important, you know, we always have this idea that, and it's taught to us, and it's a wonderful idea.
This idea that love conquers all.
This idea that you take this child who's been harmed by the world, who's been given up from adoption, who's maybe had an irresponsible parent.
I mean, according to what I've read, Nicholas Cruz's original birth parents, like drug addicts, and I mean, just a mess, right?
Who knows? Was he in foster care, though?
He was in foster care for a while?
I don't know. Yeah, I think so.
I don't know if, I mean, those details aren't out.
But it was a very poor beginning.
I mean, who knows what poisons were pouring through the mother's bloodstream when she was Pregnant, I mean, who knows, right?
Who knows what may have gone into the breast?
I mean, this may never come out.
But there's very little that you can do.
And again, this makes it sound, oh, it's hopeless and so on, but it's realistic.
I recognize it with my daughter.
I can sand a few edges.
That's all it is. You can sand a few edges.
You are not given a hammer and chisel.
You're given a piece of fairly fine sandpaper as a parent.
That's what you're given. You can sand maybe down a few rough edges, but you can't change the basic shape.
That's the way that I work.
And again, I find that actually quite peaceful.
Well, that's a great analogy, yeah.
But I place a lot of emphasis on genetics.
I mean, I want to see my genes.
I want to see my wife's genes. I want to see our genes.
That's what's very interesting to me.
But I don't know, Shani, do you have any...
I mean, I've been talking.
Do you have anything to say? This is where Stefan, JP, and I kind of fork in the road as far as how we want to go about the adoption process.
I am not necessarily ruling out fostering, just because I know we've talked a little bit about the horror stories of fostering, but there's still a lot of Good that comes out of it as well.
And I think that what JP and I do agree on though, is that if we are going to get a child, whether it's, you know, fostering or, you know, open adoption or whatnot, it has to be, the child has to be probably under one.
We want the child as a baby so we can have the most influence on that child as possible.
I just, I know someone at my job that she just, you know, she knows about our story and she knows all the struggles that we've been going through, especially recently. she knows about our story and she knows all the And she has fostered a boy that is 13 years old.
He is Doing amazing, and he has colleges looking at him and trying to win him over.
At 13? Really? Yeah, apparently he plays sports.
Oh, okay. Yeah, and not only that, but he's academically, like, I don't know, he's like just, I guess, killing it academically and also athletically.
So, she says that they were wanting to, you know, groom him for the SATs and this and that, even at 13.
So, I don't know.
But I mean, that just kind of is... Well, that's what she says.
Yeah. But I mean, it may be entirely true.
See, and this is why it's an odds game, because there are genetics, but of course, genetics aren't 100%.
Two really tall people can give birth to a kid who's 5'2 and vice versa, right?
And so you could have really chaotic, maybe even not so smart parents who give birth to a child with high IQ, high conscientiousness, and high agreeableness, but not too high that they can't get a raise, right?
So you can, of course, get that in the same way that you guys might have a kid who's not smart.
I might have had a kid who wasn't smart or whatever it is.
So there's a dice roll in all of these combinations.
The question is, where do you place your odds?
Right, right. It is a dice roll.
And for the record, the 13-year-old thing was an example.
That's not something I'm interested in at all.
I'm really sort of, you know, I don't want to, I've kind of told Shinys before, look, Shiny, we've been through a lot.
I don't want to adopt somebody else's problem.
And you don't deserve that.
I don't, you know, deserve that.
You know, it makes a great story.
I know adopting a kid in foster care and then they have this wonderful life and stuff.
But that's a little bit way too much of a odds in the other direction for me.
And I'm not interested in that at all.
I mean, I haven't heard no one's made a good argument.
You know, to change my mind about that.
You know, not good enough so far.
What about the option, sorry to interrupt, but what about the option of taking an egg from your wife, combining it with the sperm from you, and then putting it into a surrogate womb?
Well, we actually, now that you mention that, we have four little creations still frozen of ours in the laboratory.
You have to pay for as long as they're in storage, you know, and that's expensive.
But when we did the IVF, they, you know, you can actually pick the sex and you believe that?
They said, here's, which one do you want?
We have three males and two females.
That was mind-blowing. But they, and then they thaw them out.
And then you pick one and they thaw it out and they put it in there, you know, and you already know the sex and everything.
We didn't want to know the sex.
We just said, put the best looking one in there.
And that didn't work.
The, it ended up being ectopic.
Oh, yeah. That's another example of, hey, do you feel like making some life, or should I just try to kill you?
Oh, God, yeah.
And the thing is, for the longest time, they couldn't see that her hormones were showing that she was pregnant, but the guy sticks that wand in there, and I'm looking at it, and every little thing, I'm like, what is that?
What is that? What's that big? And they seem to know what everything is.
What is that thing? They couldn't see anything, but the hormones were saying she was pregnant, and then they assumed that, well, you know, it was played safe and assumed it's ectopic, and so here's some chemotherapy drugs we're going to inject into you.
And so then she had to get those to terminate whatever was going on if it was ectopic, just to be safe.
And that caused complications, you know.
She's very sensitive to She's a very natural girl here.
She does not like taking Tylenol.
She's very sensitive and she hates shots.
Oh my god. That was another ordeal with the IVF. You have to give them these injections.
I literally had to pin her down to give her injections.
It was quite a...
Hey, hey, man, I don't want to hear about your kinky stuff.
Wait, sorry. That's confusing.
Not the nice guy, yeah. You know, Stefan, as far as the surrogacy is concerned, I mean, so, you know, JP mentioned that we have four embryos, which is true.
However, even if you go through surrogacy, that does not...
It's not like a foolproof process either.
We can put our embryo in somebody else and the pregnancy can terminate or they can have a miscarriage as well.
It depends on what the rules of each company, the people who do these things.
Sometimes I think the I don't know if the carrier can keep the child.
I don't know. But that's twice.
Now we're talking about close to 100 grand.
This is twice. This is two times adoption.
This is like you have to be a celebrity.
It's a lot of money.
But I'm not saying it's not something I wouldn't do.
I just, you know, and this is where we get into the, I really need your, you know, your input.
You know, if knowing that everything's a dice roll here and, you know, it, let's say, you know, the options are don't, don't do it.
Just, hey, you know, we tried, we tried to do our Our jobs as human beings to complete the life cycle and do that, and it didn't happen, so guess what?
We don't have that burden. You know, it's easy to tell yourself, hey, I'm free, you know?
And then the other thing is adopt, right?
Or try to have a surrogate, you know?
And for me, sorry, just to mention, surrogacy has an interesting aspect to it.
We know about epigenetics.
And, you know, maybe surrogates are wonderful, warm-hearted people who just want to help couples who are having fertility issues have children.
But again, what kind of woman is going to end up in that situation?
And is there going to be any effect on the gestation environment, level of responsibility?
I don't know. I mean, so there's a little bit of a murky area there as well.
There certainly is, Stefan.
One of my friends of mine who's a doctor said that, a friend of my father's, Who we keep in touch with, said there are some sketchy situations that occur with surrogacy.
It can be a little bit of a racket as well.
And sometimes the mother will say, hey, or the one caring saying, hey, you know, I might need a little bit more money for this or that.
You know, it's just...
You know, I don't know.
Yeah, it's like changing your mind.
It's like changing your mind halfway along the roller coaster, right?
Right, yeah. They do have some leverage, right?
Exactly. So it ends up being a legal battle.
Obviously, they're just dangling the cherry or basically wanting to barter for additional money.
So, you know, we don't want to put ourselves in, tie ourselves in more money and, of course, more heartache, more importantly.
Yeah, and I mean, I know that I was reading to my daughter from very early on in the pregnancy, you don't have the same sounds around, the heartbeat is going to change a little bit.
I don't know. There's some pluses, but it's not a cure-all.
Sorry, go ahead.
No breastfeeding either, right?
I mean, Sharni's... Yeah, that bond.
If she's house, she's going to have to be formula.
Right. So what I'm getting from this, Stefan, is the position we're in is unfortunate, okay?
There's no way, like, hey, this is the easy way out of being.
If we want to have a child in our life, it's a roll of the dice, and one option is more dicier than the other one, but they're both pretty dicey.
And... So the option is, is it worth that risk?
Or can you inspire me?
Because when you don't have a kid, I mean, it feels like you've only done half of the life process, your life.
And then the other half, you're missing half of the life experience.
Well, I mean, at this point, I think that, you know...
JP and I, we've tried to do as much as we possibly can to kind of set everything up like JP said before.
And, you know, we give back to the community.
I think, you know, even through the business we have.
I mean, I remember when I had the first miscarriage, I literally told JP I was hysterical, crying, devastated.
And, you know, these kids Six days a week are coming to our house for private music lessons.
I'm like, I don't want to see them anymore.
I don't want to see them.
So it's just like, you know, we give back.
We do everything that we're supposed to.
We're married. Everything else that we could possibly think of doing, we've done.
Biology doesn't care about your virtues, though.
No, no. No, you think you could earn these things, right?
We should. That's the way it should be, but it's not.
Well, yeah, I know, I know. And I've mentioned this before, but I wrote a poem that had a big impact on me, you know, because poems come up.
And I wrote the poem when I was in my late teens, and it went like this.
Two men in a wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
That's one hell of a poem.
Well, it's true, though. I mean, your virtue isn't going to give you a shield against the canine incisors.
It's like, but I give to charity!
Right? Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
So the question is, is it worth the risk?
You know, is it worth...
The risk. And, you know, I'm around a lot of kids ranging from 60 when they're in high school.
And I have the richness of being around young people.
And a couple of people I work with for me, they're young.
And I have people around me.
And, you know, my happiest times are...
When all my little inventions, my students come, because when I have them perform, they perform together and they don't necessarily know each other, but they're all learning something and they come together and they do it together and they meet each other.
I just love being, you know, I love that togetherness.
And of course, this is one of the reasons why it's very hard for me to, you know, to know that we're in this situation because he's, Obviously, touching these kids in a very positive way.
And their parents are always so thankful of JP's talents and everything and seeing their kids grow and develop.
But at the end of the day, Stefan, they leave.
They're just your clients. Well, I mean...
On a scale of 1 to 10, how frank do you want me to be?
I always leave that up to your discretion.
Be frank. On a scale of 1 to 10, how frank do you want me to be?
Be as frank as possible.
10. 10 plus.
All right. Everybody's level of risk tolerance is different.
And as you know, I can't possibly tell you what to do.
I can sort of lay out the costs and benefits as I see them.
So, if for you the goal is to have children, then you can have a child in the house.
If your goal is to have your children, then you have potentially divergent paths, right?
Because, JP, you can have children.
Just not with Shani, right?
And that's the challenge that when there's mismatched fertility, and I'm not telling you anything you guys don't know, and I'm sure you've had this conversation, but I would be remiss in not pointing it out as a whole, that if you want to go and have children, as the guy who's got the tsunami swamp Hawaii sperm count, right?
I mean, you can have more than children.
You can have like a half a continent, it sounds like, right?
Yeah. Yes.
I mean, you give a firm handshake and the guy ends up with two hands, right?
So if you want to have your children, you can do that.
Now, if the marriage is to have children for you, right, then you can have children.
You just have to be with a different woman.
And again, I know you guys have had this conversation, but that's one aspect.
Now, if you want to be with your wife more than you want to have your own child.
And listen, I know there's this kind of thing in marriage.
Right. Where it's like, I love you, I love you, I love you.
But we all kind of know that marriage is the sanctuary wherein children are raised.
That marriage fundamentally has purpose because of children.
And so, there is sort of this idea that people have in marriage, which is, you know, I'm there for my wife.
And okay, that is certainly true.
And love is very important.
But if marriage for you is for children, then...
You won't be able to have children in this marriage, but you could have another marriage where you could have children.
And again, this is just... And we all have this ideal, and everybody thinks about this who gets married, I'm sure.
You know, if my wife has this illness, would I stick around?
If my wife has this illness, would I stick around?
If my husband gets this illness, would I stick around?
And we all like to think, well, no matter what, you know, she could end up limbless with half a brain hanging in a freezer and I'd still love her.
But in basic, realistic, human fashion, for me at least, it's like if there was a physical ailment but her mind and spirit was still intact, that would be...
It's easier to decide about if there was something which, you know, some brain injury or something where she wasn't herself anymore.
It's like, well, that's not the person I married, you know, and if there was no possibility of recovery from it, then that would be a different matter.
So, this is a foundational question, which again, I know you guys have talked about or discussed or thought about, but for the audience as a whole, I think it's important to recognize the value of love, but I think it's important also not to be over-sentimental about love.
And if you guys want to be with each other more than you want to have your own children, that's fine, and that's, you know, that's nothing wrong with that.
That can be a great thing.
If you want to have children as your major life thing, Then your paths diverge, right?
Shani, you were saying that it's kind of like a fork in the road.
This was earlier regarding a discussion, but in your discussions about that, I assume you've had them, where have you ended up?
I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?
Well, I guess it's more for your husband than yourself, which is, do you want to be with your wife or do you want to have your own children?
Questions for me? Answer smartly, no.
Well, that answer was a long time ago when I gave her my word and my word to the people at the wedding that we would be together until we're dead.
Aww. Alright.
Okay, so I just wanted to get that up front.
Before my sort of last thing to say, I wonder if you guys, and this is a big ask, so feel free to say no to anything, but...
Particularly you, Shani, if you could tell all of the young women who are listening to this show and the young men, what do you wish, with all your heart, you had been told when you were growing up that you are now finding out the hard way?
I would say that...
I would probably do things a little bit differently knowing what I'm going through now.
I would say that while You know, a career and an education, of course, obviously, all those things are important.
But I think that mapping out your entire plan as far as your personal life, your financial life, all the things that you want in life, all of those things need to be put in perspective.
I think that there's a lot of things that, you know, are withheld.
From young women.
Even when we get into our own, even in college, a lot of us don't know how to even balance our own checkbooks.
There's a lot of things that's lacking.
But as far as my situation, I think it's important to really take a good look at Raising a family, that's something that a woman wants to do.
And I think that a lot of people frown on, you know, having a family and raising kids and being a stay-at-home mother.
And being a stay-at-home mom is the best thing, one of the best things That you can ever do for yourself and, of course, for society.
Raising a child and raising them to be a good individual.
And, of course, you know, what was that, JP? We see all the variations.
Oh, and, of course, you know, we've been very blessed through the business to see different variations of people, of families.
And the best children that we have seen are homeschooled children that have a mother at home and, of course, a very intact family, meaning the father and the mother are working together to raise that child.
Those have the best outcome for the child.
Hands down, after 10 years of doing this, we're talking, you know...
You got a sample size.
Yeah, hands down.
I mean, we're talking about, we have 48 kids that come to our house on a weekly basis.
10 years. And we've been doing this for almost 10 years.
Eight years will be this June for our business.
And I mean, we've seen it time and time again.
The kids that succeed succeed.
And do the best and are the smartest and the happiest.
Yeah, happiest, that's the most important thing.
The happiest, the most brilliant children are the ones that have a mom at home, a dad to provide, and of course, you know, the kids are homeschooled.
Those kids are just so delightful, so smart, so just bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and they take in information like sponges.
I mean, it's just, the world is their oyster.
Oh, and they're very nice to you.
They're so social, too.
I mean, they're the most social kids.
They're so nice and engaging and very social.
I mean, there's the, you know, people...
I think a lot of people kind of frown upon, you know...
Taking, keeping the child at home because of the socializing aspects of it.
And that, honestly, that's a bunch of croc.
That is a bunch of croc.
We've seen it, like I said, firsthand.
I've never seen, I don't know, some psychologist or some psychiatrist, someone comes in with social anxiety.
They say, well... Here's what you need to do.
You need to grab a gun, go rob a bank and go to prison so that you can be socialized.
You can learn how to be more comfortable being socialized.
That's the way to get over.
No, come on. I mean, you go into a lowest common denominator, Lord of the Flies hell pit of miniature sociopathy.
I don't think that's a good way to traumatize your kids, but I don't think it's a good way to get them to socialize at all.
No. When you go to school, they basically tell you for long periods of time to kind of sit down, be quiet, and you have to basically learn to the best of your ability.
If you're a bright child, you're bored.
And if you are a child that might be a little bit more fidgety or whatnot, all of a sudden you're labeled with ADHD and you're medicated.
That drives me nuts. Well, just to mention as well, I'm sure you've thought of this, but just for the clarification of the audience's sake, I'm concerned that when you guys talk about the homeschooled kids with the mom at home and blah, blah, blah, that somehow you think, well, if you provide that environment, you'll get kids like that.
But again, going back to genetics, the most likely explanation is that you've got high IQ parents who think for themselves, who have a high degree of conscientiousness, And other traits that make them good parents.
And they obviously, I think it takes a certain amount of intelligence.
Well, it certainly takes a very sophisticated cost-benefit analysis to do the wise thing and pull your kids out of government school because you're like, well, we're paying for it anyway.
Whereas if you want to homeschool, you're sacrificing, you don't get your money back for the crap you have to pay for crap schools.
And so you may be looking at the effects of genetics and thinking that, well, you know, if we, you know, if you stay at home and then you go to work and we're going to provide that environment, we'll get kids just like that.
That may be putting a lot more onto environmental factors than may actually be there.
That's, just wanted to mention that.
So the last thing I'll say is this.
I would not myself take that risk of adoption.
And of course, people have suggested it, since I talk a lot about parenting.
I myself would not.
And I was more open to it in the past before I learned more about genetics, but I follow the data as far as the data takes me and try to go no further.
The reason for that is that I have a lot to offer the world in terms of what I do.
And I have a responsibility in having these conversations and the other work that I do to help bring philosophy to the world.
I kind of have a responsibility for that.
And if you can find a responsibility that fulfills you that way, then I think that is a pretty good thing to pursue.
Because you have control over your own actions.
You have control over...
What you can achieve in the world.
The amount of control you have over your career is almost infinitely greater than the amount of control you have over children in the household.
Again, because of genetics and so on.
And so, if you can't find a purpose outside of parenting, then in a sense the cost-benefit ratio doesn't really matter.
Because that's where you're going to find your purpose.
If you can find a purpose outside of parenting, then the cost benefit starts to make more sense in terms of calculation.
If you adopt two kids, Well, see, that's interesting, right?
See, if you adopt two kids, unless they're twins from a very responsible mom, come on, I mean, this is not, that's like, hey, don't worry about saving for the retirement, just play the lottery, right?
So, if you want more than one child, then you're going to end up with non-biologically related siblings, and that's going to be a big challenge as well, because then you're rolling the dice twice, hoping to get double sixes each time.
One time... What if I adopt ten kids?
Well, then you're rolling the dice ten times, right?
So, if you adopt ten kids, almost for certain, you're going to end up with one with irredeemable behavioral problems genetically.
That's my guess.
I'm not, you know, that's just my sort of guess about where the odds would play out.
So, that is a big challenge.
Now, if you luck out, then you get what you want.
You get kids. The kids are great.
You have a great time raising them.
But I'll tell you this. I mean, you know this abstractly, and I'm going to be annoying and pull the P-card, pull the parenting card and say, like, it's astonishing how much time you have to spend with your kids, particularly if they're not in school.
I mean, it is...
A long time you have to spend with your kids, particularly if you're the stay-at-home mom.
And so, if you have trouble with your kids that you can't fix, that is a long time to have trouble with your kids that you can't fix, and it just gets worse and worse and worse.
If you have kids with significant intelligence issues or behavioral issues or...
Lack of deferral of gratification issues, acting out issues, lack of self-restraint issues, explosive acting out issues.
Your parenting will never be done and you'll be working at it when the kids are 30 and 40 and you'll be dreading every phone call.
And like that to me is a kind of nightmare.
It really is a kind of nightmare.
And that's sort of in a sense a punishment I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
And I've thought of some pretty creative punishments for my worst enemies, but that is not one of them.
And so, if you can find a way for yourselves to have meaning and purpose outside of parenting, then that helps a lot.
If you can't, then it's more tempting to roll the dice, but the dice are loaded and the dice are dangerous because if it goes wrong, I mean, there's not much of a refund policy, right?
Like, if you adopt a couple of kids or you get a couple of kids into your home, If it doesn't work out, and listen, if you get two or three kids, it only has to not work out for one of those kids for the whole machinery to get a big monkey wrench in it, right?
But then you have these kinds of problems that you cannot fix and that you are responsible for for the next 40 to 50 years.
Now that to me is a risk that is too high to take.
But also, of course, I have meaning and purpose outside of parenting, and I'm not saying you don't, but if you can find it to the point where you can enrich the world and feel satisfied with the course of your life without parenting, that to me is an easier decision.
If you can't, then you are going to stare down the barrels of these odds and Where your level of courage slash foolhardiness may be is obviously up for you to decide.
But if it goes wrong, you're going to have, I kid you not, decades of the most unbelievable misery.
Well, that puts it quite straightforward.
Thank you. So hopefully they'll spur you to find meaning outside of Halal.
Well, you know what I mean. Yes, yes.
That's... That's what I called in for to hear this, Stefan.
So thank you very much for that.
And I appreciate it, of course.
And thank you, Michael. You're very welcome.
Will you guys let us know what happens?
Of course. Thank you. I always like to know.
And I am, again, I really...
I mean, I could pull the annoying card and just say, well, this is opening up your life for something else wonderful that you don't know is even there.
And this may be true. It may be true.
It may be true. But it's still not something that you want.
And for that, I have enormous sympathy and just really wanted to express that again.
I appreciate that, Sivan.
Thank you so much. For other people, remember, if you're a woman, your reproductive system is either going to kill you or disappoint you.
So have children when you're very young.
Have children when you're in your early 20s.
That is the best time to have children.
You have plenty of time when your kids get older.
To get educated.
To have a career. To make a meaningful contribution outside of your family.
But if you're young and everybody's like, ooh, here are the breadcrumbs.
You've got to go off to college. You've got to start a career.
That sucks. Then you have a career with a big giant gap in the middle because you want to be responsible.
Parent, you want to breastfeed, you want to be around for the first couple of years of your kids' lives, at least up until the age of five, that's where personality is mostly set, to the degree that you can affect it.
So you have two or three kids, I mean, you're, sorry, you're out of the loop for 10 years or so.
Why on earth would you want to start something, take a 10-year break, and then try and pick it up later?
How ridiculous. And how bad for society, because the governments are going to fund a lot of your education and not get much of a return on investment.
Read a couple of articles recently about the fact that the majority of doctors coming out of schools these days are females.
And it's a huge problem for healthcare.
One of the reasons why healthcare is getting so expensive is that women work considerably less than men over the course of their career, not just in terms of hours of the week, but in terms of consistency of the work.
They work about 25% less than men.
Well, someone's got to pay for that.
Unfortunately, it's the taxpayer or the insurance company or the private payer.
So if you want to have kids, and I recommend it, More than anything else except philosophy.
If you want to have kids, if you're a teenager, just plan for it now.
Plan for it in your early 20s.
You know, find the right guy before they all get snapped up and you end up like a lonely...
embittered Swedish medical expert with a taste for strangeness, then you want to sort it out in your life sooner rather than later.
The odds of you having fertility issues in your early 20s are very low.
The odds of you having fertility issues in your 30s are very high and it can be very expensive and you can have years of fear, anxiety, hope, crushed hope, disappointment, bitterness, unhappiness, And again, massive expense in your 30s when it's such an easy problem to solve and a fun one to solve, I might add, as well in your early 20s.
So thanks, guys. I really, really appreciate your call.
I hope it was helpful. And let's move on to the next caller.
Okay, up next we have Josh.
Josh wrote in and said, Sure, they may know the person today,
who they are, what their values are, what they want out of life, goals, ambitions, values, family goals, etc., etc., but acknowledging the idea that people change over time, I'm left kind of puzzled at the prospect of commitment to who that person will be tomorrow, the day after, the year after, or ten years down the line.
How can you commit to someone 10 years down the line when not only do you not know who they're going to be by that time, but you don't know who yourself are going to be?
That's from Josh. Hey Josh, how you doing?
Um, I'm doing good stuff, and hearing that read aloud, my grammar was horrible.
Oh, I know, I know.
I hear what you're saying. I mean, I know what you mean.
It happens. It happens to the best of us.
So... This is why you marry someone based upon values rather than conclusions, right?
So if you meet a woman and she listens to reason and evidence and alters her thinking to follow reason and evidence, you're never going to get bored of that person and you're never going to fall out of love with that person because that person is committed to a process rather than a conclusion.
So let's say you meet a woman and you love diversity, multiculturalism, all this stuff that is touted, right?
And she loves it too.
She doesn't know why. But, you know, she just goes along with the general religion of diversity, the cult of diversity, multi-cult, your realism, as you understand it.
And then what happens is, you read the Putnam studies, you begin to think about things, you see the effects of, say, multiculturalism in the British town of Telford, where a thousand young white British girls have been raped, tortured, mutilated, And even killed since the 1980s and the British police have done virtually nothing to combat this for fear of being called racist and also because they needed to ring the southern border in case a tall blonde Danish woman managed to sneak through and speak to Tommy Robinson.
So let's say you follow all of this and you're like, I don't, you know, I don't really think that diversity is such a value.
I understand why the left says it because People from the third world tend to vote for the left, tells you all you need to know about the left, but I now have my doubts.
Now, if you have changed your mind on this particular perspective, and your wife...
Doesn't think, doesn't reason, doesn't follow reason and evidence, then she's gonna get mad at you, and you're gonna say, well, but here's the data, here's the reason and evidence, and she's like, when have I ever given you a clue that I care about reason and evidence?
I'm in it for popularity, I'm in it to not make waves, my score for agreeableness on the big five personality scale is north of the tip of Mount Everest, so...
Sorry!
I now hate you. Right?
I mean, we see this.
I get these messages all the time and we see them on the web.
You know, I voted Trump and my wife still hates me for it or whatever, right?
Whereas if you've married someone who's into reason and evidence, then if your doubts about multiculturalism, the virtues and values of multiculturalism, which again is just another big government program, and you say, okay, here's the reason, here's the evidence, and she says, well, I do follow reason and evidence so I can see where you're coming from,
or your reasoning is wrong here, your data is wrong here, and so you need to fix your thinking this way, in which case you say, if she's right, thank you very much, I'm glad you steered me away from the blank cliff of error and back into the sunlit Planes of truth and veracity.
Great. So if you just marry someone because they're sexy, well, that's gonna fade.
Sorry, Father Time has his scythe-y way with the best of us and lop off various attractive parts or make them sag.
So if you marry just for sexiness, well, that's not gonna...
We all know that.
That's not gonna play out. If you marry because there seems to be compatibility in the moment, but the compatibility is in conclusions...
I hate Trump. I hate Hillary.
Whatever. If it's just in the conclusions rather than in the process, then you get trapped.
You can't change. You can't start to think.
You can't start to reason because the only thing you have in common is irrational addiction to anti-rational dogma.
Well, you can't then grow as a human being.
But if you find someone And they accept reason and evidence.
You will forever be growing, forever be learning, and it will forever be delightful.
And the same sort of thing, just imagine this.
You want to hire someone who's going to be working in your science lab for the next 20 years.
You hope the next 20 or 30 years.
Well, what do you do? Do you go and find someone who's really into astrology and telekinesis and so on and then try and turn them into a scientist?
Well, no. What you do is you find someone who's got a long track record Of valuing science.
And you talk to them about valuing science.
And they say science is a process.
It's not a set of conclusions. Well then they're going to stick with you.
And they're going to work out as a scientist.
At least until the government funds them to be anti-science.
In terms of climate models.
So just find someone philosophically.
On the right side.
Of reason and evidence, and you don't have to worry about whatever new information comes their way.
In the same way a good scientist doesn't get paranoid about new data that comes his way, it's like, that's kind of the point of science, right?
So that would be my suggestion.
Okay. So to be frank with you, I did not have a, well, really a follow-up to this, because for all of my thinking, for all of the scenarios I run in my head, all the conversations I've had, this is the one question, or one set that Of questions that has always drawn a blank in my mind.
Usually with any other question, I have a scenario I can run through, a series of back and forth that I can go through where questions I would ask another person, you understand.
This is the one where it's a complete brick wall for me.
So I just wanted your thoughts on that.
I'm sorry, I don't have too much.
No, that's fine. I appreciate that.
I'll give you an example.
Mike and I work together, and we have made the commitment that reason and evidence is what we use to convince each other of stuff.
We have our disagreements, and we have our conflicts.
One of the big ones was, of course, I had staked my reputation, staked my reasoning and Powers of observation and rationality and communication on political action.
You must be crazy.
Political action is a giant waste of time.
And then Mike started talking to me about Donald J. Trump.
And I'm like, what?
The reality star with the gold toilet?
What are you talking about? And I was like, what?
Why on earth would we pay attention to this?
Do you remember that, Mike?
Do you remember any of those conversations?
I listened to the first half of the 90-minute conversation that we released publicly where the skepticism that you had around Trump at the beginning was certainly palatable.
And yeah, I was far more interested in Trump.
And that primarily, to kind of play off this as well, was because of the IQ stuff, which Steph had found and was reading a lot into and then brought to me, which was new to me.
So the idea if you don't have the same standards for something like reason and evidence, I wouldn't have probably responded very well to the IQ stuff because that's a pretty difficult thing to swallow.
And I wouldn't have even been along to have a conversation about Donald Trump at that point, who one of the reasons I was interested in him in political action was understanding the IQ stuff and demographics and how that plays out politically, which we wouldn't have gotten to if it wasn't for the initial conversations.
Having those standards of reason and evidence at the start, it solves you from getting into a whole lot of problems later off and blowing up relationships and friendships and marriages and God knows what else.
Yeah, and I mean, I took one Donald J. Trump and said, all right, fine, Mike, I'll trade you for one Ann Coulter.
Because, Mike, you only had some vaguely negative perceptions of her, right?
Yeah. We were at dinner.
This was, I think, at Porkfest, like, years and years ago, when you were talking about an Ann Coulter book you were reading.
And I had still been programmed by Jon Stewart and a lot of libertarians that Ann Coulter was the devil.
And I was just like, you're reading Ann Coulter?
And of course, like most people that I talk to that have their reaction, they've never actually read anything she's written.
Like, I can't believe you're reading Ann Coulter.
And you're like, oh, she wrote about this and this and this and this is the data.
I'm like, wow, that sounds really interesting.
I have this prejudice against someone and I've never read a single thing that they wrote.
That's not good. That's a problem.
So then I read some of her work and it's like, oh, she's absolutely fantastic.
Well, and this is so for those who are confused about my switch towards political action and away from political action, the whole point of this, although this may be a bit like shutting the barn door after the horses left.
It's Mike's fault. That's really the only thing that I want to get.
This is the only thing I want to get across.
It's Mike's fault. Mike did it.
It's him. It's him.
It wasn't me. I wanted to stay pure.
And Mike dragged me down into the gutter of political action.
I thought personal responsibility was one of those things that we agreed on ahead of time.
Look, he's doing it again!
He's trying to use my words against me.
Alright. I just wanted to mention that.
We listen to each other and we have a lot of disagreements about what we should work on and which way we should go.
This is a long...
This has been a long-standing relationship in the show, and we've dealt with a lot of very challenging topics, had a lot of successes, some real attacks, and some setbacks, and drawbacks, and so on.
And it is a relationship that stands the test of time, because we have dedicated ourselves to reason and evidence.
So if you've got that...
Well, I actually look forward to our disagreements because of that.
Because if you disagree with something that I think, or vice versa, There's normally a good reason why, and it leads to an incredibly productive conversation.
Maybe one of us doesn't have a certain piece of information and hasn't put it into the puzzle the way the other person has, and it's always like, oh, okay, I learned something new from this conversation.
I could be completely wrong, but I'll at least know why I was wrong and come to that understanding, and that in and of itself is incredibly useful.
And we do have a good sort of veto.
We have a mutually assured destruction.
So I just wanted to say, there are some wonderful shows out there that would have been fantastic for the entire show as a whole, but Mike won't let me release them!
It's the problem. But yeah, I like when we have disagreements.
And that will apply to other relationships too.
If you have disagreements with really close friends, if you have the same standards for working it out, the relationship is strengthened by being able to disagree, have a great conversation about it, learn from it, and then move forward.
That actually strengthens the relationship as opposed to the relationship that isn't tested.
And the first disagreement that you have, it's like a giant calamity because it's experienced no stress previously.
And you have no methodology to actually work through a conflict or a disagreement.
All right.
Well, I hope that helps.
And look for the values. This is why I'd say to people philosophy is a process.
Productive relationships are a process.
Do not get wedded to labels and conclusions.
And be prepared to be dislodged from even your most precious positions if the data overturns them.
And we're constantly getting new data in science.
So we can see this now.
The genetics of intelligence, which...
I mean, I've hedged on it.
I have basically been of the opinion that it's largely genetic for a long time, simply because I've seen so many efforts try to change it fail.
And I think that with better health and nutrition, we've reached pretty much the environmental gains have already been achieved.
But we do have this reality that's coming in now that...
Well, it's enormously genetic, and they are now starting to identify the genes associated with intelligence, and all of this stuff is happening, and we now have, what is it, 500-odd genes that are associated with intelligence, and all of this is pretty clear.
And so, as far as this goes, I am getting, of course, more and more Certain, as the data accumulates, that intelligence is very, very significantly genetic.
And now people say, well, you can't find the genes associated with intelligence.
Yeah, they kind of can. And it's just the way the data is going.
And as a result, I have to, I guess, a little bit more come out of the closet.
And I stayed in the closet, not out of fear, but just out of the data wasn't there.
But yeah, it's mostly genetic as far as the data goes.
If that changes, of course, I will change along with it, but that's where the data is right now.
It would be kind of nice if it wasn't the case, but it really is, and we can begin to hopefully accept that and really Work with it.
But yeah, sorry. It's just the way things are.
Here we go. By studying the genetic data from more than 240,000 people, scientists have found 538 genes which are linked to intelligence.
And yeah, so the, you know, one of the great questions that people have been avoiding, of course, is how genetic is it?
And the answer is, well, it's very genetic, significantly genetic.
Not overwhelmingly as far as we know yet, but it's just the way that it is.
Again, I wish it were different, but it's really not.
So if that helps people, the same study, this is a quote, the study also showed that the same genes which influence intelligence are also linked to other biological processes such as length of life.
The new research suggests that intelligent people are biologically fitter.
And again, talk about unfair.
It is enormously unfair.
But nature is not fair.
Nature is just efficient.
And we've got this reality coming out now that intelligence could be measured with a, this is another quote, intelligence could be measured with a swab of saliva or drop of blood after scientists showed for the first time that a person's IQ can be predicted just by studying bare DNA. Hey, you know what's not culturally relative?
DNA, for the most part.
DNA is not a social construct.
And so, yeah, these are the realities of where the world is.
And I hope that people will begin to process them and understand them and begin to make policy and life decisions accordingly.
It may be a lot to hope for, but nonetheless, I'm still going to hope for it.
So... All right.
Thanks very much for your call. I'm going to move on, but I really, really appreciate your question.
Yes, sir. Thank you. All right. Up next, we have Jacob.
Jacob wrote in and said, In studying the drug epidemic, I've realized that the black market for drugs exhibits the same market characteristics of any other commodity market.
It's my view that if illicit drugs became prohibitively expensive, their use, i.e.
demand, would fall precipitously.
To make this case, we needn't think in terms of hypotheticals.
Just look at the way the DEA stopped the Quaaludes crisis.
Our country had a real problem with Quaaludes when the drug cost 25 cents a hit in the 70s and early 80s.
By investing and shutting down the supply centers, the price of Quaaludes rose to over $250 a pill, and the number of Quaalude addicts and deaths and injuries felt almost zero.
We should take a similar approach to the drugs that currently plague our society.
That's from Jacob. Oh, hi Jacob.
How are you doing tonight? Doing well.
How about you, Stefan? Oh, see, man, I would have just said, hey, man, I'm doing well, man.
So we could make the Quaaludes jokes at the beginning.
All right, I'll get that out of my system.
It's now out of my system.
So you would suggest that which drugs should the Quaaludes approach be taken with?
It should be taken with all illicit drugs that exhibit A lot of deaths and injuries.
So you go down the list. For instance, there's a lot of talk about the opioid epidemic these days.
But if you look on a state-by-state level, methamphetamine is still a huge issue.
And Oregon, in 2017, they had more deaths from methamphetamine than from all opioids combined.
So I would propose that you take this approach with virtually all addictive substances.
That includes marijuana.
And I would crack down and step up the drug war.
I do like President Trump's proposition of the death penalty for drug dealers.
And also, just to preface the conversation, I used to be very much of the opinion of ending the war on drugs and taking a libertarian approach, decriminalizing drugs.
I used to very much hold that opinion.
But I did the research and I talked to policy experts.
You know, people in the DEA, folks like the Undersecretary of State for Drug Enforcement, Robert B. Charles.
And I talked to people on the other side, too.
And I very much made a 180 in terms of this issue.
So I would propose banning virtually all illicit drugs.
But they are banned. Right.
But the bans are not enforced.
So in the United States, you have decriminalization very much.
Very much taking place.
For instance, in California with something like Prop 40, the sentences of tens of thousands of drug users and drug dealers have been retroactively reduced and these folks have been let out of prison.
And so, you know, the politicians go around and say, oh, our prison population is lower.
That's a success. But if you look in the community levels, crime is through the roof.
These people are incorrigible criminals and they continue to commit crime.
I would also encourage a crackdown on Simple users, I would make simple possession penalties go way up because what we see a lot of times is that drug users are not, you know, totally able to be dismissed of moral agency here.
A lot of drug dealers deal drugs to support their habits.
They commit property crimes.
Oregon, which is a state that has a particular lot of data, that's why I keep going back to it, but Oregon has 70% of their crime consists of property crime.
85% of that property crime is committed by drug addicts.
These are folks which should be in jail and programs like drug court which aim to dole out the penalties and deal with things with soft approaches like treatment and therapy have just failed and have put citizens that have nothing to do with drugs in harm's way and I think that's why they're morally objectionable.
Why was there not such a big drug issue in the past?
I.e. when?
When? Like early 19th century?
19th century as you know you could get cocaine in the corner store and it was in drinks and so on.
So why was there not such a big drug epidemic say the 19th century early 20th century?
Well I'm not comfortable saying that there wasn't such a big drug problem.
Clearly there was and that prompted legislation.
No, no, no, no. Listen, you can't possibly say that the only reason the government expands its powers is to deal with huge problems.
Come on. That's not why the government expands its powers.
The government expands its powers because it likes power.
So, in the 19th century, a child could go in and buy heroin and cocaine in a drugstore.
And there was not massive drug gangs.
There was not an opioid crisis.
I mean, there were issues, of course.
The issues tended to be more around alcohol.
But why, when the drugs were legal, was there not such a big issue?
And also, if drugs are decriminalized or legalized, as they have been substantially in Portugal, is there not a huge issue there?
Sure, so just because I have the data in front of me, I'll start with the Portugal example.
I love this example, and the libertarians on this issue love to point out Portugal.
No, no, just give me the data.
I don't want, like, we're going to spend so much time on insulting people who disagree with you.
We'll never get to it. Just give me the data.
Let's do that. Homicides are up 60% since drugs have been decriminalized in Portugal.
I'm not saying that correlation necessarily— I'm sorry, homicides are up 60%?
That's correct. That's right.
Homicides are up 60%.
Lifetime drug users, defined as the people who have tried any drug even once, rose 8% to 12% from 2001 to 2007 during the drug decriminalization period.
Past month and year drug use remains steadily low with only 5% of 18 to 24 year olds having Answered yes.
Incarcerations stayed about even in the Portugal example.
But crime rates have risen 10%.
This is similar to what we've seen here in California with Prop 40.
There are certainly numbers that are lower.
The sort of gateway drug effect seems to have doled out a little bit.
But when you're looking at things like homicides up 60% and again it's hard to look at these numbers and obviously it's hard to isolate and the measurement standards change very often so You know, I want to preface these statistics with that.
And incarcerations have risen slightly, but really only at a rate slightly higher than that of the population.
Obviously they have migrant crisis, that or the other.
Yeah, so has this been normalized by ethnicity?
The study has been normalized by ethnicity.
Oh, so Portugal does keep good data on whether it's the migrants or the native whites who are committing the crimes?
I wouldn't say Portugal does, but third parties and institutes do, yes.
Alright, so I'm gonna just trust you on this one, because there has been a crime wave.
Sweeping across Europe as a result of the migrant crisis.
I mean you're fully aware of all of that, right?
I mean gang activity, drug activity, violence, rape of course is through the roof in Sweden and in other places.
So I'm gonna trust you on this and I'm gonna be mad if it's not the case, but I'm gonna trust you on this that the homicides going up is related to the decriminalization of the drugs and It's not due to the migrant crisis or other factors I would, again, I would hesitate to draw causation from correlation.
You just drew it. You just drew it.
No, you can't hesitate now.
Because what you did earlier was you said, after decriminalization, the homicide rate went up 60%.
Was it 60%? That's right.
That's clear causation.
Because we're talking about drugs being legalized, right?
That's right. Or not legalized, but decriminalized.
Decriminalized. So you're saying, as a result, because that's what your implication was before, otherwise you're just bringing up a random statistic for no point.
So your implication before was, after the drugs were decriminalized, murder went up, homicide, sorry, went up 60%.
So that's causation.
You're saying it's as a result of.
Now, if it turns out that this is a result of the migrant crisis, which isn't actually that hard to figure out, assuming that they're able to keep crime statistics by ethnicity, foreign-born and so on, right?
Foreign-born, like, I mean, if you look at London, I mean, the acid attacks, the knife attacks, the beatings and so on as the result of the migrants coming in are enormous.
Now, let's say that England a couple of years ago had also decriminalized pot, and you'd say, well, acid attacks in England are way up after pot decriminalization, but it would have nothing to do with pot decriminalization, it would have to do with the migrant crisis.
So, given that you gave me that cause and effect and I can't look it up right now, I'm just going to assume that you've done the right thing and not been an ideologue and made sure that the crime wave of homicides has nothing to do with the migrant crisis.
That's correct. And look, I agree with you.
I think the migrant crisis has been a disaster.
And in fact, you know, drug use and really virtually all things that we would Determined to be activities to take place in a third world disaster have obviously spread to the West vis-a-vis the migrant crisis.
So are you saying that in Portugal, the migrants who are dealing drugs in virtually every other country, or not all the migrants are, but as migrants from the third world come into a country, their use of drugs, their...
Sale of drugs, the setting up of the drug cartels and so on.
Are you saying that in Portugal that hasn't happened?
The migrants have not got into the drug trade?
See, that's just presenting a false dichotomy, Stefan, because there's been two major policy shifts in Portugal in the last 20 years.
There's been the migrant crisis and there's been drug decriminalization.
Now, to try to tie the murder increase to the migrant crisis would be irresponsible because Every migrant would literally have to be a serial killer for a murder rate going up by 60% to be attributed to migrants.
So what other policy changes do you have?
Well, you have the decriminalization of drugs.
Okay, well hang on, hang on. So how many migrants have come into Portugal over the last 15 years or 10 years?
I've looked at numbers that range between 200,000 and 1 million.
So, you know, it's anywhere in that range.
It's a substantial number. Now, you also know that the sweet spot for criminality is around IQ 85, right?
That's correct. And what would you say is the average IQ of the people coming in from the Third World into Portugal?
Well, they've got a lot coming across from Northern Africa, so you're talking about closer to 70s, actually, rather than 85.
Right. Of course, though, there would be some numbers of those who would be 85 or even higher who would probably be more in charge, right?
Yes. Because around the world, whites are not murdering more.
So murder hasn't gone up.
In fact, it's gone down in some ways, right?
So whites in Minnesota, whites in Belgium, whites in South Africa, they all murder around the same rate, which is very, very low.
Now, for the murder rate, for homicide rate to go up 60%, the idea that a million people would all need to be serial killers just to push it up 60%, I don't follow that math, but I'm certainly happy if you could explain it to me.
Again, Stefan, the migrants are committing crime, but just not in the numbers that would be able to attribute that policy change to...
You get a million people with lower IQ, with hostile ideologies pouring into a country...
And you're saying that that's not enough to push the homicide rate up 60%.
And the reason I'm asking that is that the rape rate in Sweden has gone up far more than 60%, almost exclusively as a result of the migrants coming in.
So I believe, and this is off the top of my head, if I remember rightly, it's gone up about 1,500%.
Just the rape rate in Sweden.
And so if the migrant crisis is responsible in Sweden for almost a 1,500% increase in rape, I'm not sure how 60% could not at least largely be explained by a migrant crisis.
Again, correct me if I'm astray.
I would correct you because even the time frame that you're looking at, which in this particular study is 2001 to 2007, Is not before any migrants showed up in Portugal, but it's long before the sort of wave that's been attributed to the chaos in Syria.
Again, plenty of migrants between 2001 and 2007, I'm sure, but not in the numbers that we're seeing in the last couple of years.
So with respect to that particular data point, I would not attribute that to the migrant crisis.
Furthermore, what you've actually seen since 2013 is that that number has Fallen about 5 to 10%.
So again, I really think, you know, I think the migrant crisis is as big of a disaster as you do.
I think Europe should build its own walls.
I'm on the same page with you on that, but I think it's kind of neither here nor there with respect to the drug issue.
Okay, so let's just back up for a sec there.
So 60% is about one, roughly give or take, it's about 1 20th of 1,500%, right?
And so if we had 1 20th the number of migrants coming into Portugal per population as we had coming into Sweden, then we would expect the homicide rate to Go up less than the rape rate would have gone up in Sweden.
So if you're saying, well, there were fewer migrants, well, sure, but the 60% increase is only 1 20th of the rape increase in Sweden.
So yes, there are fewer migrants, and I would assume that there would be 5%.
If we say that there are 5% of the migrants that went into Sweden, And also we say that the raise in the homicide has some relationship to the raise in rapes in Sweden, then the fact that there would be fewer migrants is why the number is lower than 1500%.
As to the homicide rate declining, Well, there are a number of reasons as to why that might be occurring.
First and foremost, there may be better healthcare, which means, and this is one of the reasons why the homicide rate has gone down throughout the Western world, is because it's harder to kill people with really great healthcare.
And so, because the ambulances and the ER doctors and the procedures and the plasma and the blood availability and the expertise is also much higher, it's harder to kill people.
And secondly, I'm sure you heard about, I just talked about this in the last call, that in Telford, there had been over a thousand young white British girls raped, tortured, abused, sold into sexual slavery, and even murdered by Pakistani Muslim rape gangs.
Well, lo and behold, those weren't recorded, really.
Look at that. Political correctness caused a reduction in the amount of reported crime.
And so the idea that when there's a full-blown migrant crisis going on in a country that reported crime goes down, well, we can see lots of examples where massive amounts of criminality were occurring that just weren't reported on or were shifted into another category like self-defense or where, of course, the victims of the attempted murderers or the beaters or whatever survived as a result of improved medical care.
So again, I'm just speaking off not having looked at all of this data, but these are the first Questions of skepticism that would arise in my mind.
And the reason I'm saying this is because the amount of murder that occurred during prohibition, right, the 13 years of prohibition in the United States, declined enormously once alcohol was re-legalized.
So the idea that murders spike when...
A drug that is in demand by the population and is supplied by criminal gangs, the idea that murders go up when that drug is decriminalized, then it would sort of, you'd need to explain why it dropped so enormously after alcohol was decriminalized at the end of prohibition.
I think, Stefan, anybody that would compare alcohol to heroin or methamphetamine is direly misinformed on the realities of these chemicals.
Wait, sorry, that's your argument?
I'm direly misinformed?
Can you give a brother a little content here?
Yeah, so Stefan, alcohol is very different than methamphetamine.
Yes, please don't tell me things I already know and that the audience already knows.
I'm just going to urge you to just make the case rather than give me all the framing stuff.
I mean, prohibition of alcohol and prohibition of illicit drugs, and I really think they're apples and oranges.
Yeah, you're just saying the same thing over and over again, but not giving me any arguments.
They're different. They're apples and oranges.
You're misinformed. It's like, can you just give me some content?
What kills more Americans, alcohol or illegal drugs?
So Stefan, we've tried this, right?
We've decriminalized pot in California.
And we both agree that drug use is bad.
So we can start with the same foundation there.
And so the question is, from a policy standpoint, is how do you reduce drug use?
Wait, wait, hang on.
Didn't you just skip over the argument you're supposed to make?
No. How do you explain the reduction in violence after the end of prohibition?
I think it would be largely to do with...
I'm not sure, Stefan.
I'm not familiar enough with the data to describe the drop in violence in the late 30s into the 1940s.
But I would assume it's because a lot of young men went to Europe and went to the Pacific to go fight a war.
That's what I would attribute probably the drop in violence in the 30s to.
But again, I'm not ultra familiar with the data.
But I think a lot of young men going overseas and being busy with that as opposed to In the United States committing violence here.
Do you think that the criminal gangs profited from alcohol after it was decriminalized?
No.
Do you think that there were substantial, say, Italian mafia or mob gangs in America prior to prohibition?
Prohibition gave rise to bootlegging, which was a major source of revenue for Italian crime syndicates.
They really weren't. There really was not the Mafia in America prior to Prohibition.
And ever since Prohibition, the Mafia has come in to America and the Mafia now, of course, is making enormous profits as is other organized crime, making enormous profits.
Off of drugs being illegal, right?
You understand that. Because people still want the drugs.
And you know these arguments as well as I do.
People still want the drugs. And so it's up to criminals.
to get them and provide them to them and criminals of course because the drugs are so profitable have a huge incentive to get people addicted to these drugs which is one of the reasons why you can get some stuff for free at the beginning and or cheap or subsidized or whatever and then they hook you in and then you're a regular cash cow for them because and also you know that someone's drug habit can cost two thousand sorry two let's say two hundred bucks a day And in order to supply that habit,
given that they get about 10% of the value of a good on the black market, they have to steal $2,000 worth of stuff in order to support a $200 a day habit, which destroys entire neighborhoods and communities, and of course means that they're generally not able to get into any kind of treatment programs unless they're Arrested and usually the kid of a congressman, in which case treatment is the way to go.
So there is that aspect of things.
And also, I mean, drug use is bad?
I don't know. I like Sergeant Peppers.
I think Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I don't think Paul McCartney was right when he said it was about a drawing his kid had on the fridge.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the acronym is LSD. I have enjoyed Pink Floyd.
I have enjoyed even some of the writers like Burroughs who did a lot of drugs.
Ken Casey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a drug-addled journey.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a drug-addled journey.
Freddie Mercury composed Bohemian Rhapsody, while I believe he was on cocaine.
So it's kind of tough for me to say, well, it's just bad, because a lot of really creative good stuff has come out of people's use of drugs.
I don't recommend it. I think you can get creativity without it, but nonetheless...
It's hard for me to say what is good and bad for other people.
Now, I don't want to pay for their bad decisions.
I don't want to be forced to pay for their bad decisions.
But neither do I want to be forced to pay and lose my liberties in pursuit of people who make these bad decisions.
And that is one of my big concerns.
Fundamentally, it's philosophical.
Is that putting a mind-altering substance into your body is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Your body is your own property.
If you punch yourself in the head, you can't charge yourself with assault, because it's your body.
And so, if people want to put mind-altering substances into their body, I don't agree with the decision, but I don't agree with becoming a Marxist.
That doesn't mean that it should be illegal.
And so, because it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle, I don't see how we gain the moral right to point guns at people's heads who wish to partake in those activities.
Right. Stefan, I agree with you from a sort of idealistic point of view and non-aggression principle and a post-government society and the rest of it.
But right now, we do have a government that's going to make decisions about whether to enforce drug laws or to not enforce drug laws.
And that's sort of the binary option that we have in front of us.
And I used to be very much of the opinion that they should not enforce drug laws, that it's a waste of capital.
But when you look at what that leads to, it's devastating.
It's devastated middle-income communities that are now replete with addicts, with drug dealers.
And drug dealers aren't nice people.
Let's be very clear about that, Stefan.
You know this and we all know this.
You know, somebody's college buddy, weed dealer friend, I don't know.
But your average hardcore street drug dealer is not a nice person and not a person you want in the park while your kids are playing there.
And I would rather have these people in jail than on the streets.
And if I need to pay tax money to do that, and if I need to accept the fact that perhaps jail is not a nice place to do that, and I am initiating force to do that, I'm a-okay with it.
I see it as very much moral.
But you haven't actually addressed my argument.
Your argument being that maybe drugs aren't bad and they don't violate the non-aggression principle.
I mean, and you name all these, you know, these great songs and whatever, and I think Eminem's maybe the best example.
He stopped, you know, using opiates and his music sucks.
But, you know, there's a million examples that go the other direction.
I would have, you know, loved to see Tom Petty, but he overdosed on heroin and Jimi Hendrix and the rest of them.
Wasn't Tom Petty he OD'd on heroin?
Wasn't he in his, like, 60s?
Yeah, yeah, he OD'd.
That's what happened to him. Wow.
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just saying, if you're going to say drugs are always bad, well, they do produce some very wonderful things in the world.
But, no, the question is, is it a violation of the non-aggression principle to put a mind-altering substance in your body?
And the answer is, of course, no.
Now, you can say, well, that's idealistic, but that's not an argument.
The question is, Is it a violation of the non-aggression principle?
Are you doing evil to another against his or her will by ingesting A marijuana brownie.
Well, no. Yeah.
Now, I don't think it's a wise thing to do.
I think it's short. And I think it comes, as I've talked about before, with Gabor Maté and in presentations I've given at a school that it is the result of child abuse, that people have a shortage of dopamine in their system as a result of trauma.
They take drugs in an attempt to feel normal, and then they crash, and so on.
And so that is...
A real tragedy. Better parenting is important.
Better schools are important.
But here's the problem.
In my view, the biggest pusher of drugs is the state.
The state facilitates, funds, and pays for the mass drugging of children in government schools.
The government facilitates and pays for Opiates that are used by people as a result of getting prescriptions and so on, and it corrupts the pharmaceutical industry, it corrupts the medical industry.
The problem is not that the government has too little power with regards to drugs.
The problem Is that the government has far too much power when it comes to releasing drugs into society.
I do not like that the government pays for opiates.
I think they get over-prescribed.
I think they get abused.
I do not like that the government so often pays not only for the drugs, but pays parents to have their children declared disabled through ADHD and other, to me, at least largely made-up Non-issues.
I don't like that the government pays parents hundreds of dollars a month and pays for all the medication to put their kids on these mind-altering substances.
So when you say, well, maybe you have great confidence that the government is going to do a really good and right and just thing when it comes to controlling drugs in society, but it seems to me that the big issue with drugging in society is as the result of state power, not as the result of the government enforcement.
Yeah, Stefan, I've seen something very different, which is when the government gets aggressive and cracks down on the supply of drugs, the number of deaths and injuries, which Maybe doing drugs doesn't violate the non-aggression principle, but if somebody's not dead, I think that's preferable to them being dead.
You know, if somebody's not injured, I think that's preferable to them being injured.
And in all likelihood, if a drug addict gets injured, I'm paying for it.
Oh, come on, man. Look, I hate to nag you, but these are terrible arguments.
No, no, come on.
Oh, I think it's better for people not to be...
Okay, great. If it's better for people not to be injured than to be injured, then there should be no playgrounds, there should be no stairs, and we should have a speed limit of five kilometers an hour on the highway so nobody ever dies.
I mean, come on, man. You've got to step up your game a little bit more than saying useless crap like, I prefer people to be not dead than to be dead.
In many Ohio counties...
Okay, we're going to ban all airplanes because somebody might die in an airplane.
We're going to ban all sports because you can't have a bicycle because you can fall off your bike and die because I prefer people not to be injured than to be injured.
These aren't arguments. So, Stefan, how about this?
How about the fact that in many Ohio counties, 10 babies a day are being born addicted to heroin?
You do not say, well, oh, well, you know, I guess that's their choice.
And, you know, nothing we can do about it.
Just let's get drugs on the street and hopefully more supply will result in less people doing them.
You know, it's none of my business.
I don't care because, Stefan, you're paying for that.
Are you putting arguments in my fucking mouth now?
No, I'm not, Stefan. Yes, you are.
You're saying, oh, Steph, you don't care about the 10 babies born addicted to drugs.
You just, oh, you don't care.
And that's what you're strawmanning me with now?
Have I said anything of the kind?
It's not what I said. You're bringing this up as if this is somehow my perspective that you're arguing against.
That is a strawman by definition.
Just as you said that I want to ban playgrounds because some kids skin their knees.
No, that is the logical consequence of saying it is better for people not to be injured than to be injured.
That is not a straw man. That is your argument.
And this is why it's a terrible argument.
That is a point.
It's a point in your argument that doesn't work and therefore you have to retract the argument that you'd rather people be not injured than injured, which is what you said.
I don't have to retract the argument, Stefan, but the bottom line is that playgrounds have a marginal utility and drugs do not.
And the idea that, well, Dark Side of the Moon is a good song, so I guess drugs might be good.
I mean, come on. It's ridiculous.
Opiates have a marginal utility, do they not?
Are you saying that marijuana has no marginal utility?
It can't be used to treat, say, chemotherapy nausea.
It can't be used for glaucoma.
It can't be used for a wide variety of other pain management issues.
Are you saying that drugs themselves have no marginal utility?
Heroin has no marginal utility.
Opiates have no marginal utility.
Marijuana has no marginal utility.
Of course they do. Stefan, I'm saying that Drugs should be regulated.
And I'm a fan of small government.
I think a lot of things should be deregulated.
So I keep making arguments and you just keep moving on.
I mean, it's like we're not even talking on the same page.
You're saying, well, no, you see, you can allow for injuries from bicycles because bicycles have marginal utility.
And it's like, well, I say other things have marginal utility and you just don't even address the issue.
So am I saying no drugs have any marginal utility?
I'm not saying that. Of course not.
Okay. So we need to drop the idea that non-deaths are better than deaths and non-injuries are better than injuries because we can't sustain that as a moral argument.
There's no end to that level of regulation.
You understand that, right?
I understand that from a fiscal policy question, you want fewer people that can't pay for their own healthcare to be in hospitals.
Wait, what? I want fewer people who can't pay for their own healthcare to be in hospitals.
Where does that come from?
If you're making law and less people are coming into the hospital overdose, that's a good thing.
So you want to reduce that. And the way to reduce that is to crack down on the suppliers of drugs.
And do you think that the government has not been doing that over the past 50 or 60 years?
Do you think that they haven't been, say, arresting people en masse?
Do you think that they haven't been sentencing people to decades in prison?
Do you think they haven't been literally napalming Farmers fields in Mexico in an attempt to get them to stop growing cocoa and other things.
Do you think that the government has not been waging war against drugs for the past 50 years, spending trillions of dollars in an attempt to stop the flow of drugs?
And do you think that...
The government is going to somehow get better at something, which you say, after it's been doing it for 50 years, these drugs have been illegal for decades and decades and decades.
And this is where you are.
And the government has had enormous resources to be able to fight the war on drugs.
And we're talking about not just like massive amounts of military weaponry, massive amounts of airplanes, GPS tracking devices.
They have the entire internet.
They could scour everyone's emails and phone calls and text messages and Skype chats and...
Can get into your rectum with some sort of weird digital probe, I'm sure.
They have an enormous amount of resources, far more than ever could have been imagined when the drug war started.
And you're saying at the end of all of this, they have failed so terribly, the drugs are a huge issue, but boy, if we give them just a little bit more power, everything will be great.
Okay, so I see where you're going with that.
And the question is, right, if we've been fighting this war for 60 years and the drug issue is worse than ever, We must be doing something wrong.
And I agree, we are doing something wrong.
What we're doing wrong is that if you sort of look at a much more micro level at what's happened with the drug war, every time we take two steps forward, it's been three steps back.
So you get a major escalation in the drug war, followed by, oh, congressmen don't really want to do it anymore, and they're just going to let the pharmaceutical companies and the, you know, traditional sort of Mexican drug cartels run amok.
Obama, you know, prosecuted very little drug crime at the federal level relative to Bush.
And so each time you get an escalation, and when you get that escalation, make no mistake, the data shows that deaths and injuries from drugs go down.
But every time you get that escalation, it's followed by a de-escalation.
So I think if we just took a steady approach, then the number of deaths and injuries as a result of drugs would steadily fall.
And the data has shown that.
No, you pointed out the original one, which was Quaaludes, right?
That's right. So, absolutely.
If you ban quaaludes, then you get a short-term suppression of quaaludes.
Of course. And then what happens is people switch to something else.
Or the price goes up and then more people come in.
Of course, like the moment that you, you know, if a cop shows up at a bar where there are criminals, those criminals will probably try and leave the bar.
Does that mean that the criminals will never come back to the bar?
No, you just have an immediate effect.
But the question is, does it work in the long run?
So yeah, you ban quaaludes for sure.
People are going to say, eh, you know, there's easier drugs for me to deal than quaaludes, so I'm not going to do quaaludes right now.
But then what happens is people still have, they'll either switch to some other drug, because it's not like if you ban something, people magically are no longer addicted to drugs.
And people who are addicted to drugs, as you know, burn their entire lives to the ground sometimes.
Like, they'll lose everything.
They'll lose their job, their careers, their wife, their children, their house, their health, their savings, everything.
And so simply banning something doesn't change that level of unbelievable demand.
And so, yeah, sure, I completely agree with you.
If you ban quaaludes, it'll take a little while for people to find substitutes.
It'll take a little while for the price to be raised for quaaludes if they can't find substitutes to the point where it's worth taking the risk.
Yes, you can gain immediate compliance.
It's like if you spank a kid, you gain immediate compliance in the moment, and then 20 minutes later, they're back doing the same damn thing.
So taking one study of quaaludes in a very short period of time and saying this is indicative of the entire...
War on drugs is, to me, not...
If it worked, why hasn't it worked?
Why are the problems which America has with drugs far worse now than they were at the beginning of the war on drugs?
And you're saying, well, if the government did more, well, the government is doing way more.
You say, well, if the government sustained it.
But guess what, man? The government won't sustain it.
It never has.
Even if the sustainability worked well, I mean, if you look at the reduction in violence that happened in the big five democratic violent cities in America, you know the way it works.
There's always a pendulum and a cycle with government, because there's the left and the right, and the right cracks down hard on particular kinds of criminal activity, and then everyone's like, oh, that's terrible, and they vote in the Democrats who go soft on it, and the government will never stay hard on the drug war, because it never has. I acknowledge that.
And what I would say, Stefan, is that if you look at some of these Asian countries that have a death penalty for drug trafficking, they still manage to produce fentanyl and sell it over here.
But they don't have the addiction problem.
And again, there's so many variants involved here.
And so using...
IQ would be one of them.
Yeah, East Asia. Yeah, now listen, smart people don't get addicted to drugs as much.
Now, I know that there's exceptions that people are saying, I knew a really smart guy who was addicted.
Yeah, it happens, but it's less common as a whole.
So, you know, the bottom line is we've seen both sides, as you just pointed out.
We've seen escalation, we've seen de-escalation.
Escalation seems to work better.
The government's going to waste money one way or the other.
I think that tossing money towards fighting the war on drugs seems to be a good return on capital sort of expenditure.
And it's happened with Quaaludes.
If you want to save money, just have the government stop funding all of these terrible drugs for kids.
If you want to save money, just have the government stop funding all these terrible drugs for adults.
Have the government stop paying for all of these drugs.
Because insurance companies have an incentive to not be ripped off.
The government doesn't really at all.
And, you know, I'm sure you've heard the same apocryphal stories as I have, which is the physician in a small town writes prescriptions for opioids like 100 or 1000 times the population of the entire town, right?
I mean, because it's paid for by the government, and therefore they have very little incentive to control corruption and overuse in these areas.
And so if you're concerned about the government spending money to facilitate the spread of drugs in society, which of course you should be, then we have a great system to get rid of, which is the government underwriting and funding these drugs.
We turn it over to privately run insurance companies who are going to really measure out the dosages, who are going to make sure that their customers aren't ripped off, and who are going to do a hell of a lot better job combating drugs.
Drug use, drug over-prescription, and massive drugging of children for diagnoses that are, to me at least, entirely made up, such as the DSM-5.
So there's a lot that can be done to reduce the flow of drugs within society.
It's just that that has to do with reducing government power rather than expanding it.
Right, and on most of that I couldn't agree more, Stefan, in terms of the government funding all sorts of wonky Medical procedures, you know, turning your child into a, you know, 99th derivative gender or whatever the hell is going on.
I think that government should be completely out of the healthcare business in terms of underwriting prescriptions because, of course, private prescription companies are at the behest of their shareholders and who have skin in the game.
And it's entirely profit driven, which is better, in my view, than being politically driven.
Although, you know, I must say, on I like to bring this down to a real level, Stefan.
And if I've got drug dealers on my neighborhood, I want cops coming through, busting their head into the curb, tossing them into a paddy wagon, and sending them to jail.
And I think, don't you want that too?
Well, here's the thing. I don't know if you understand that criminals are not passive in this situation.
So why is it that the government goes hard and then soft on drugs?
Well, the government goes hard on drugs.
Because that's what the citizens want and they think it's going to work.
And then what happens is It's called regulatory capture.
I'm sure you're aware of it. That the criminals start to influence government, either directly, through threats, indirectly, or through bribes, or through influence, or through some other measure.
And we see this happening, of course, over and over again.
Whenever the government cracks down hard on something, it ends up going quite soft on it.
The government's going to crack down on financial crimes, and then ends up giving $700 billion to Wall Street in the financial crash.
The government is going to go tough...
On a gun crime and then they end up, well, the media ends up inciting riots in largely black neighborhoods and then everybody's terrified in the police department of getting into a confrontation with a black perpetrator or some other perpetrator and then ending up in jail or threatened or whatever it is, their career destroyed. And so there is always going to be this kind of pushback because here's what happens.
The government cracks down It doesn't destroy the demand, and it sure as hell doesn't destroy the supply.
The supply is, of course, the destruction of the family, the increase of the criminal elements, the single-mother households, the junky, virtually third-world projects in America, and so on.
And the criminals then say, oh, the government's really cracking down, so we better go bribe some cops, we better go threaten some cops, we better go be some cops, we better go run someone into office that we like, who's going to change the rules for us.
See, the criminals react.
They don't just sit there like a bunch of animals at a watering hole who've never met people before waiting to be shot.
They act and they change their behavior.
When the cops are getting too efficient at controlling crime, then the criminals react in some manner to diminish that.
And they would do that as well. As you know, it's a multi-hundred-billion-dollar business at a bare minimum to run these drugs.
And they don't want to...
Lose that money. So there's hundreds of billions of dollars they have at their disposal to alter behavior.
And so here's something that you think is going to happen, which is that the cops are just going to sweep through, magically be able to identify all the drug dealers, And then kill them over time, right?
After due process and all of that, right?
But here's the problem.
Would you be comfortable living in a society where you, your friends, your family, could be in the situation where a criminal could just plant drugs on you, call you in as a drug dealer, you get hauled in, you get processed, you either plead guilty because you can't stand the stress of a trial, or you have a trial where you're found guilty because the drugs were clearly in your possession, and then you get killed.
Because the government kills you, right?
Or the cops might do it as well.
The more power you give to fallible human beings, the cops aren't machines, and the criminals react in very sophisticated manners to anything that encroaches upon their turf and their territory.
And so this fantasy, I think it's a fantasy that you have.
I know that's not an argument. I think it's sort of made a case that somehow the government is going to be really efficient at doing this stuff.
Is never gonna be co-opted by the criminals.
The judges are never gonna respond in really sympathetic ways to criminals who play the victim or who threaten their family or something like that.
The criminals are just gonna give it all up and march off to the jails.
Well, no. The criminals are everywhere.
The criminals are in the Justice Department.
The criminals are in the schools.
The criminals are in the Police Department.
The criminals have their influence and their fingers everywhere.
So when you think you're giving power to the government, you're actually also giving power To the criminals to use against their own enemies and you may in fact be targeted and the criminals may plant something on you and then you're going to be hauled off and all this terrible stuff is going to happen if they perceive that you're threatening their interests or they just don't like you for some reason.
So there are no magic machines that enact what it is that you want to have done and this is why reducing government power leads to a better result and this is why increasing government power leads to a worse result.
It just gets co-opted by more and more bad people.
I agree with pretty much all of that, Stefan.
And I think that there's many perils when it comes to handing over power to government.
And I know there's such thing as recency bias, etc.
But I've seen it happen.
And I've seen what we've had in California with Prop 40.
And our streets are incredibly more dangerous because these sort of, oh, he's a minor drug offender.
No, he's not. He's not a minor drug offender.
He's a violent gang member.
Put back out on the street and people end up killed or worse.
Hang on. You're saying this is a more recent phenomenon?
That's right. Under Prop 40 in California, this is in the past couple of years, this sort of move to let drug offenders out of jail.
Do you think that there may be any other factors that are increasing the crappiness of California?
Of course, Stefan. Of course.
Like open borders, sanctuary cities, everything else.
You've seen the map of like Mexico is basically invading America.
Canada maybe next. But Mexico is basically invading America.
You can see the counties all turning to the Democrats and it's moving up from the south north.
Absolutely. But you can track who's committing crime and who's a repeat offender and oftentimes Within days of being released from jail, these people are reoffending.
And we can talk about, you know, well, we need to give them occupational training and this, that, or the other.
And there's a lot of tough situations that people are in.
But I'd like to be as safe as possible.
And a society that's decriminalizing drugs and releasing drug offenders onto the street, in terms of empirical evidence and statistics, is more dangerous.
Well, no, because these drugs were legal in America in the 19th century, and they weren't these problems.
It's not like there was no addiction or anything like that, but...
The demographics of America in the early 20th century and 19th century, I think that gives you a lot of...
So the issue then is demographics.
In terms of who's likely to use drugs, how those drugs...
A lot of times what you see is drug use is contagious, too.
So who's likely to be... Hang on.
You're saying that the issue is demographics.
Not a significant issue is demographics.
Significantly, yes. So because America's not controlling its borders, Americans should lose more of their rights.
So the failure of one government program will lead to the expansion of another government program.
I don't think you have to take anybody's rights, Stefan.
It's just a matter of violating the law or not.
I follow the speed limit. I wish I could drive 90.
I don't. It's not a matter of taking people's rights.
No, no. That's begging the question.
The question is whether these things should be legal or not.
Saying that we should... We have to obey the law because they're illegal is begging the question, right?
So whether it's your right to use drugs in terms of the...
I think morally it's your right to use drugs.
I think that legally it's not.
And, you know... Wait, wait, wait.
Morally... So the law is immoral.
The law is to ban drugs, which you say is a moral activity.
The law is to ban drugs, it's immoral.
It's certainly not immoral to use drugs, and therefore to use force against people engaged in a moral activity must be immoral, right?
So the drug laws would then be immoral.
No, I said using drugs legally or morally, I think, you know, within the scope of the non-aggression principle is actually quite sound.
But when you talk about legally, it's not.
And, you know, listen, take an average drug possession charge and take it all the way to the Supreme Court and find out if indeed that charge is unconstitutional.
But I'm not a lawyer. I'm a philosopher, which means I'm not arguing the law.
I'm arguing ethics. I mean, saying it's right because I'm not a positive...
Like, in law, I'm natural law, not positive law.
Like, whether it's right or wrong, whether it's moral or immoral, that's the province of the philosopher.
The province of the lawyer is, is it legal or illegal?
Now, I'm not going to co-join these two particular worlds.
They're not very compatible. And so, if you're saying something is immoral, but we should give the power of the death penalty to the government for people engaged in moral activities...
That doesn't seem very moral to me.
So, I don't think that giving a 16-year-old kid, for instance, heroin is a moral activity so that you can pay your rent.
Well, you wouldn't be giving it if you're paying your rent.
You'd have to charge, right? Well, a lot of times you're giving it.
Just like you said earlier in the show, you're getting people hooked.
You hand out free samples.
They come back for more. This is what happens all too often.
No, hang on, hang on, though.
But the question of 16-year-olds is a red herring.
Because you can't legally give alcohol to a 16-year-old either.
Correct. So, the question of whether drugs should be legalized is not the same as saying drugs should be freely legal for purchase by 15-year-olds, right?
It's the same, like, it would be like saying, well, let's legalize...
Furnishing a minor with alcohol is a far less serious defense than furnishing a minor with illegal narcotics.
Well, not if they're driving.
And for good reason, right?
Because one is much more dangerous than the other.
So why is it, do you think, that the people are willing to give out free samples of a very expensive drug?
Isn't it because it's so profitable to get them hooked, and isn't it profitable because it's illegal?
No, it's because it's not very expensive.
A hit of heroin costs about four bucks.
And when it's expensive, you don't give out free samples.
For instance, a Quaalude, you wouldn't give out a free sample of a Quaalude.
It costs $2,500 a hit, the few that remain that haven't expired.
You wouldn't give out free samples.
You wouldn't get new addicts, I believe, if drugs were, like I said in the email, prohibitively expensive.
So that's why they give out free samples, because it's not expensive.
Cocaine's not. Wait, are you saying, I mean, this is very interesting to me because I don't really know much about this.
Yeah. Are you saying that a hit of heroin is four bucks?
Yeah. Oh yeah, it's cheaper than candy.
Yep. That's pretty wild.
In the inner city, yeah.
In the suburbs, it's more expensive, maybe 20 bucks.
But that's your lunch money for a week if you're a high schooler.
Now, I also think that the welfare state contributes a lot to this as well.
Because the welfare state, of course, allows you to have a drug habit and survive, to some degree, because you get the money from the welfare state.
The welfare state also puts a lot of money into the hands of people who can then spend that money on drugs.
And so, I think the welfare state is a huge...
The better treatment of children is also essential, that if we can improve parenting, if we can reduce or eliminate spanking as a whole, if we can improve schools, and if we can improve parenting as a whole, you're going to end up with far fewer people who are going to be addicted or want to take or use drugs.
And, you know, my concern with these kinds of approaches is not only are you Not only are you giving the government vast powers, which you're assuming that the government is not going to be corrupted by.
I mean, power corrupts. It's funny, I was just thinking this the other day, apropos of everything, perhaps.
We always say power corrupts, but then we want the government to have vast powers, assuming that they won't be corrupted.
And so, the concern I have is giving the government these powers to, say, Put drug dealers to death.
Well, they're going to make mistakes, of course, and there's going to be drugs planted, and there's going to be cops who get corrupted by this whole level of power.
And whether it's going to even save money, death penalties have so many appeals and so many pushbacks on what's going on.
Whether it saves money or not, I don't know.
But if you make it so much harder for people to sell drugs and to buy drugs, it just draws more and more violent and desperate people into the industry because people are going to need the drugs.
Or it shifts the burden to the point where if the only legal way you can get these drugs is through prescriptions, then people will start to steal prescription pads and forge them.
And people will threaten doctors in order to get their drugs.
I mean, the demand remains constant.
And as you know, they can't even keep drugs out of prisons.
They can't keep cell phones out of prisons.
And whether it's hiding or bribery or whatever.
So even if you turn all of society into a prison, You won't be able to eliminate drug use, drug consumption.
Playing whack-a-mole with the symptoms to me is a recipe for endless totalitarianism.
The budget of the Drug Enforcement Agency is hundreds of times larger now than when it was first formed.
And the problem of drugs is worse.
They have unparalleled capacity.
To spy upon people.
To seize property.
To go through and comb through just about everything you do online.
And they still can't solve these problems.
And so the pattern is we say, oh, well, let's give the government more power.
And they'll be able to control the drug issue, the drug problem.
And then what happens is we give government more power to deal with this issue.
And the issue gets worse. Now, where your faith is that we give them, instead of them having 5,000% more power and resources than when the drug war began, we give them 6,000% more than when the drug war began, that that's going to help or that's going to solve the problem?
It seems to me woefully blind to the patterns of what's been going on over the past half century.
It doesn't work. It makes things worse.
So, I I think one of the important...
So first of all, I agree with everything in terms of the welfare state and peaceful parenting, the rest of it.
And I think one thing you might have to consider, Stefan, is trying to create a peaceful parenting, low IQ edition that's maybe like written in Braille and it's like just a couple of signs or something because I just think...
Braille is actually a high IQ thing, but I know what you mean.
Yeah, or something. I don't know.
Block letters, perhaps. Block letters.
Yeah, something along those or something like that.
But the other factor that you see happens a lot, Stefan, and plays a big role in this, and the Oregonian did the best study of this that I've seen, in fact, is the purity of the drugs.
So, as you mentioned, people still produce the drugs, even when the, you know, super labs are shut down and the big fish are taken out of the sea.
You know, people make shake-and-bake meth in the bathroom of Walmart all the time.
Or people grow their own weed or whatever, right?
Grow their own weed. And what you see is, not so much with marijuana, but with other drugs, marijuana as well to some extent, is that when the purity of the drugs falls, as it naturally does when the big fish are taken out of it and it trickles down to amateurs, so does the number of deaths and injuries.
Which, again, I know from a moral standpoint, deaths and injuries are sort of a non-issue.
But from a policy standpoint, and from sort of a...
No, no, no. I never said they weren't an issue.
My issue was saying we always prefer non-injuries to injuries.
It's just a false statement.
But of course it matters that people are dying.
That's how we know there's a crisis.
Right. So the purity of the drugs goes down.
And so that's the other kind of bonus effect you get when the government steps up its aggressive actions against producers of illicit substances.
And thus fewer people die.
Pure people die. Right now what you're seeing is, particularly with opioids, but also with meth, the purity of what's being dealt is extremely high.
You have things like fentanyl being put into the meth, which by definition isn't pure, but it's strong, which is the kind of operative part of being pure.
And so people die.
And if you can make a dent In the drug problem, I'm not saying you're ever going to completely eradicate it.
I think anybody who says you're gonna have a drug-free world, or you're gonna have a gun-free world, or you're gonna have a whatever-free world, I think that's naive.
Well, but if you want drugs to be safe, legalization makes them safe.
No question. No, legalizing drugs makes them safe.
Because then you have drug companies manufacturing them and you can sue them.
You can't sue a drug dealer because you can't protect an activity that's illegal through the court system.
And so if you want drugs to be safer and for the doses to be measured, And for impurities to be discarded, you want them put through the same process as the manufacture of aspirin because very few people die from aspirin.
And so if your concern is impurities or excessive dosages in the drugs, legalization will solve that for sure.
You see, I don't agree because when somebody does crack, for instance, like let's assume you have bear brand crack or they do heroin.
We all know this. The first high is what they're chasing.
You know, after a while, they're not even trying to get high.
They're just trying to get right, get their fix, as they call it.
So despite it being pure or not pure, and some stuff on the streets, I'm sure, is pure.
That's not going to change the fact that you're going to have this effect of chasing the first high.
Higher and higher doses are going to be needed to achieve that or even to get to a baseline level.
I actually don't think that having pharmaceutical grade Heroin everywhere available at Target or having pharmaceutical grade crack everywhere available.
I don't think that would change that sort of natural brain chemistry issue.
Well, but of course, the drug dealers wish to get them addicted as soon as humanly possible and so we'll give them the most potent dose right up front, right?
That's right. And actually what you see is even when...
So when a heroin addict dies, that particular strand of heroin sells out, sells even better.
Right. So you said that people die from impurities, right?
My response was that if it's legally manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, the impurity issue will disappear.
But by an excess impurity is how they die.
So they have a stronger drug, and that's what kills them.
You see this with meth, you see this with heroin.
And when purity drops, in other words, when shake and bake meth is what's on the street instead of Mexican ice, the number of deaths and injuries drop.
I don't know what those terms mean.
Shake and bake being, you know, bathroom at Walmart meth instead of pharmaceutical grade meth that's made from ephedrine that comes from India into Mexico.
So the pure meth is what's more dangerous, not the impure meth.
No, but it's the dosage level, right?
Ultimately, yes. You overdose, correct.
And so when you're on the street, you have no way of knowing what the dosage level actually is, right?
Correct. Now, if you are getting something from a pharmaceutical company through a drugstore, you know what the dosage level is going to be, right?
That's right. So that solves that problem.
No, no, no, it doesn't because you're just going to have to buy more to get that first high, Stefan.
You're just going to shoot up more stuff.
It doesn't solve the problem.
You're going to use your first hit.
You're going to get addicted. And then you're going to have to use continuously more and more.
You're going to have to take more hits of crack a day.
You're going to have to take more lines of cocaine a day to achieve that same high.
It doesn't matter that it's pure. It doesn't matter that you know it's five grams.
Okay, I'm a little confused. You brought up the impurity issue and now you're saying it doesn't matter.
I'm confused. What I'm saying is having more pure stuff and having certainty about dosage is not going to reduce the number of deaths and injuries.
And indeed, what happens is The more pure stuff that you have on the streets, the more that people face deaths and injuries.
Wait, so are you seriously arguing that the fact that there are no quality controls on the drugs has no effect on the lethality of the dosage?
And the fact that there's no control over the amount of drugs that people are actually putting into their system, it has no effect on the lethality of drug use?
No, I think it has an adverse effect on it, just as you're arguing.
But I'm just saying that giving totally...
Okay, so we will solve some problems that you're talking about through legalization.
Some of them, yes. Okay, good.
I never said it would solve all the problems, so I feel we've just kind of been chasing our own tails here.
But it certainly will deal with the problems of not knowing the dosage and impurities.
It will deal with those problems.
Okay, good. And that will help.
Accidentally take a drug that they didn't know was there.
You're not going to have somebody try to take ecstasy.
It turns out it was fentanyl.
You're not going to have those problems, so that'll be good.
That's an upside. And it won't be mixed in with baby powder, and it won't be mixed in with other junk, and there won't be more there than should be there, and there will be reliability, safety, and purity in the drugs themselves.
And by purity, I don't mean concentration.
But what I mean is that there won't be garbage in there that will kill you.
Chemical integrity of what's...
Okay, so that is one positive upside.
Now, Mike did have a chance to have a look at your data regarding Portugal, because this was the first data that you brought up, and if Mike would be so kind as to step you, or step us, I guess, all through what he learned, that would be excellent.
Okay, so the drug policy in Portugal was legally effective from July 2001.
And this is from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Report.
Global study on homicide from 2013.
Number of homicides in Portugal.
This is the outright number, not a rate.
Number of homicides in Portugal per year.
Year 2000, 116.
2001, 105.
2002, 119.
2003, 149.
2004, 144.
2005, 133.
2006, 155 2007, 185 2008, 130 2009, 130 2010, 124 2011, 114 2012, 122 So from 2000 114 2012, 122 So from 2000 to 2012 which is the most recent data I have this is not adjusted for population obviously this is just a raw number
It's 116 deaths to 122 deaths.
So no statistically important change.
For the homicide rate per 100,000 in Portugal, 2000 we have 1.1, 2001 1.0, 2002 1.1, 2003 1.4, 2004 1.4, 2005 1.3, 2006 1.5, 2007 1.8, 2008 1.2, 2009 1.2, 2010 1.2, 2011 1.1, 2012 1.2.
So there certainly is a bit of an increase.
Now, while not identifiable in a large amount of actual bodies, it is an increase that's significant in homicide rate per 100,000, but it seems to have settled back to similar places to where it was in the year 2000 by the most recent data.
So I don't know if that spike had to do with drug decriminalization, if it had to do with other factors.
I haven't looked into that.
I don't know. But these raw numbers, it's not as if They decriminalized drugs and thousands of additional people in their small population were dying on the streets immediately.
That's not the case. And if it was, of course, decriminalization that caused the increase in murderers, decriminalization is still in effect and therefore the murder rate should not have settled back down, right?
Right, right. Which is why I mentioned that when you started talking about the migrants.
I said, well, maybe, I don't know.
And in fact, one weird sort of thing I would point out is that the number one country that's migrated to Portugal has actually been Moldovans, which of course ethnically are sort of like Uh, Ukrainians and Romanians mixed together, followed by Chinese and Ukrainians.
So actually, Portugal has not gotten the brunt of the sort of, uh, you know, low IQ Islamist invasion.
No, but you brought up decriminalization leading to higher murders or homicides.
Right. But it doesn't.
But it has, right?
No. No, the numbers are back down.
The numbers are back down.
Yeah. Right.
One thing that has been constant is the decriminalization of drugs.
And the numbers are back down to where they were when drugs were first decriminalized.
So it has to be...
There are other factors at play here, potentially, that can't be discounted when trying to figure out what increased the homicide rate.
Yeah, for a couple of years it went up, but by like 20 people a year out of a population of Portugal, which is fairly large.
So it's a very small increase in terms of the body count, and it's settled back down, even though drugs have remained decriminalized.
So your first argument has failed, the first piece of data that you gave me.
The first piece of data I gave you, I believe, was about the number of people using drugs, which obviously is the most operative statistic.
And I also preface that by saying, obviously, a multivariate analysis of homicide rates is required.
No, you associated a rise in homicides with the decriminalization of drugs.
And it's not, because the numbers are backed down, even though drugs remain decriminalized.
So, Stefan, how can you say that the drop is attributed to decriminalization, but the rise is not?
You see, it's a double-edged sword.
I never said that the drop...
Did I ever say that the drop was the result of decriminalization?
I believe that's what you said, right?
No, I said nothing of the kind.
So... Decriminalization is the constant factor, and the murder rate went up a little bit, 20 bodies or so over a year in Portugal.
And then it has declined back down to where it was.
But you're saying decriminalization leads to an increase in homicides.
And the numbers don't support at all what you say.
Stefan, drugs were decriminalized.
That was the major policy change.
And the murder rate per 100,000 people rose.
And then fell. Right.
So if decriminalization causes an increase in murder rates, given that it's still decriminalized, why have murder rates gone back down again?
That's unknowable. But that doesn't support your thesis?
Of course it supports my thesis.
No, your thesis is that decriminalization leads to an increase in homicides.
Decriminalization has remained constant and homicides have declined back down to where they were when they started, which does not support your thesis.
If decriminalization was positive, wouldn't the rates have fallen instead of risen?
If decriminalization was positive, wouldn't the rates have fallen?
Well, no, they may be completely unrelated.
It could be due to something else completely.
We don't know. But there's no causality direct in the numbers to decriminalization.
Otherwise, the numbers would either have gone higher or stayed high.
But they didn't. They went back down.
Oh, there's a number of things that can be attributed to that.
Okay, so here's where we stop debating.
Because what happens is, you gave me your first piece of data, and of course, you know, these debates are on the fly, right?
I'm not going to sit here and say, okay, Mike was kind enough to look it up, I didn't ask him, too, he went to look it up, and thanks, good job.
So here's where we part ways, and I'll tell you why we part ways.
And I'm very glad that we had this debate nonetheless.
I had some suspicions about your honor and integrity when it came to debating.
But here's the thing. One of the first pieces of data that you put forward has been disproven.
And my question is, and this is related to the call that I had earlier with the guy who was saying, how can you have a productive and positive relationship with people over the long term?
And I said, well, if they follow reason and evidence, and if they're willing to change their minds according to reason and evidence, then you can have a productive and positive relationship with that person in the long run.
Now here, in this particular moment, you failed that test.
Because the data denies what you're saying.
Now, a person with honor and integrity with regards to debating would say, wow, that data does not support what it is that I said earlier.
I apologize for putting forward information that is not correct.
Maybe you've never seen these numbers.
Maybe they're new to you. I hope so.
Because otherwise it would be even worse.
And you'd say, okay, so in that particular instance, the data does not support my first example.
Now, that doesn't mean your arguments fall apart.
It doesn't mean that you're wrong about everything.
It just means in this particular instance, the data doesn't support what it is that you are arguing for.
Now, you're wriggling and trying to Find a way to have the data support, but it doesn't.
You and I both know it.
I'm going to finish here. This is my show.
I'll mute you if you have to, because I'm done with the talking to you.
So, here's the thing.
In this moment, I evaluate what someone is doing when they get data that goes against what they're arguing for.
Now, you can say...
I'm going to have to conditionally withdraw my point because the data doesn't support it, or there's new data that's out there that I'm not aware of, and that's all perfectly fine.
This all happens. New data comes up, maybe you weren't aware of this or whatever, maybe you looked this up five years ago, I don't know.
But in that moment where you are confronted with data that goes against Your hypothesis is the moment where you are put to the test.
Now, unfortunately, you're put to the test in a very public fashion here, which is instructive.
But this is why I invest time in these public conversations, whereas I wouldn't in a private one.
Because now, people around the world in the future will be aware that when you come across information that goes against your argument, you won't admit it.
You will attempt to baffle gab.
You will attempt to...
You will attempt to obfuscate.
You will not do the honorable thing, which a decent intellectual or decent human being in this arena needs to do, which is to say, wow, that data goes against what I was arguing.
I have to withdraw that argument until I've had a chance to evaluate it further.
I apologize for misinformation.
I will get back to you.
No one's going to get mad at you.
No one's going to put you down.
It's like, love you.
What an honorable, wonderful, and decent thing to do.
And then what happens is, see, the positive thing about doing that is, Is what happens is, everybody can now respect other things that you've said.
But you see, the problem with doing what you just did, my friend, is that now everybody who's got half a brain is just going to discard everything you said because you're an ideologue.
You're not in pursuit of truth.
You're in pursuit of a conclusion.
And you're willing to do whatever semi-dirty tricks you can do in order to maintain your conclusion.
And I saw this with some straw manning.
Listen, I wasn't perfect in the debate either.
Don't get me wrong. Nobody ever is.
But if you gave me information that went directly against data, that went directly against my hypothesis, I would say...
Well, sorry, I was misinformed.
And I've done this before in the show when people have given me data that goes against something that I thought was true or understood that was true.
In the past, for instance, I've said that genetics accounted for 80% of intelligence in late middle age.
That was the data that I had.
And then since I talked to the editor of the Intelligence Magazine who has pointed out that It's 80-plus percent by the age of 18.
Okay, that's new data for me, so I have to revise and have to point out that that's an update, and that's what you do when you get new data.
Now, you had a moment here in a public arena where you got data that went against And you wouldn't admit that you were wrong.
Not you personally, but you had bad data, right?
It happens, right? Maybe you didn't have the updated.
Maybe you read someone who themselves had cherry-picked data, and you're like, oh, I didn't realize that they had cut off that data and excluded the stuff that didn't fit their hypothesis or whatever, and maybe I should check a little bit more of my sources and so on.
I mean, the amount of vetting we do on sources is crazy.
And still, still not perfect.
I did a... Video.
It doesn't even matter. I explained it in the comments, but anyway.
So in this moment, the shame is that you have some good arguments, and I enjoyed the debate, but the problem is I'm now going to discard all of the arguments because you rejected a data that went against your hypothesis and wouldn't admit that your hypothesis was not supported by the data.
And then that to me you just become another boring ideologue, kind of like a hack.
And the shame is that you had some good arguments.
Now I'm just going to not bother with them because now I've seen how you handle data that goes against your hypothesis.
Life's too short to examine anything else that you said.
But I do appreciate the call. I'm going to move on to the next caller.
Thanks again. Thanks, Stefan.
Alright, up next we have Randy.
Randy wrote in and said, I'm a 20 year old man.
When I was but a few days old, I was circumcised.
Too much skin was removed and the cuts were too deep.
As a result, I am bound as a man today who can't have sex with a woman or achieve orgasm.
Severe neurological damage.
I feel embarrassed, ashamed, inadequate, violated, and angry beyond comprehension.
The 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Under the Law Clause, yes, the one the courts use to legalize gay marriage, says I or any other male should have been protected from genital cutting since females are legally protected from it.
I'd like to bring awareness to what an absolutely pernicious and repulsive practice it is, and how it's personally made me want to end my life.
I'd like to finally talk about it anonymously and try and leave this horrible anger behind.
That's from Randy. Hey Randy, oh my goodness, what a story.
What a story, my friend. I am so sorry about what happened.
I mean, words can't even encompass or contain what was done to you.
Yeah, uh...
Where do I start, you know?
Well, let's start at the beginning, I guess, the part that you don't remember.
What happened to this?
I mean, circumcision is a barbaric and brutal and horrifying ritual that in any civilized society would be, of course, never acceptable, but what happened in the procedure that you know of?
You know, I... I couldn't say exactly because I never talked to, I guess, the third-rate pediatrician that did it to me or my parents about it, but it was botched.
Obviously, there was a mistake, but I got to thinking that maybe there was no mistake because the more and more I researched it, which I did fervently for the past few years, I realized that the complete goal of it is just to deprive them.
As much sexual pleasure as possible.
Which is the purpose of female genital mutilation as well.
Clitorendectomies and so on is to remove the pleasure that the woman can have in sexual function.
But that's barbaric.
Yeah. And apparently male.
That's completely different.
If males weren't perceived as generically disposable, it would be...
Except it is equally barbaric for the man.
It is the removal, even in the best case scenario, it is a removal of one-third of the skin of the penis.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was doing research on this.
The male foreskin just by itself contains 20,000 nerve endings, maybe north, maybe south of 20,000.
By comparison, the female clitoris has somewhere around 8,000.
So we're talking at least Two and a half, twice as sensitive for males and more detrimental.
So I hear this argument a lot online that it's not morally equivalent.
You can't draw a parallel between male and female genital cutting, and I just find that to be completely false.
If anything, it's actually worse.
It also diminishes sexual pleasure for the female, because one of the purposes of the foreskin is to provide a less friction-y form of sexual intercourse, right?
Because the penis is going in and out, and you can sort of think of sliding an umbrella into its case and back.
That it's less frictiony because the friction is to some degree taken up by the slack of the foreskin, and this is another reason why circumcised, I myself am not circumcised, so I just sort of want to, because I guess everyone's curious, and there was this rumor floating around about my heritage, but there is a buffer for the female if there is still the foreskin for the male, and it makes it more pleasurable for the female as well.
Yes, it does. I have heard numerous testimonies, both online and in person, that is actually the case.
And I got to thinking, hmm, it's almost as if nature intended it to be that way or something.
It's almost like that had a function.
It's just crazy how we're just now starting to figure that out.
Yeah. Of course, I'm being sarcastic.
Yeah, I know. And how old were you, Randy, when you first began to suspect that things were not right?
Um, God, I don't...
I don't...
I'll give you a ballpark when I was about 14, I guess, hitting puberty.
Um... I realized that something was wrong.
I did track in the 8th grade and in the locker room and stuff like that and I realized that there was even a difference between what I looked like and other guys that had a less severe circumcision.
All the skin is completely gone.
Obviously, it's not enough to really have an erection without feeling like someone's grabbing You can imagine like a pair of pliers just grabbing your skin and then pulling it tight and just holding it there.
So yeah, so when you get an erection, of course, the other thing too is that the foreskin is there to give the skin enough give so that the erection doesn't cause any pain, any stretching of the skin, right?
And so for you, when you get the erection, there's physical pain because the skin is stretched.
Is that right? Yes, that's an element of it, but The worst part was, in my case, there's actually nerve damage beyond that.
So it's not enough nerve damage that I can feel pain.
So it's almost like literally a torture technique.
It's like I'm not going to completely sever the nerve endings or something so that you wouldn't feel it, but I'll leave just enough there that you can still have some agony and I don't know.
Yeah, because if you felt no sexual desire or had no nerve endings in a sense, you would be less likely to get the spontaneous erection.
But as it stands, you get the spontaneous erection which then causes, I assume, a horrible amount of pain.
Yeah. I've always had a very high tolerance for pain just as a child in first grade, breaking my tibia, spiral fracture, and getting kicked in the ribs by a horse and all this stuff.
I'm pretty aggressive as a person.
I was a Muay Thai kickboxer for four years in high school.
I was fighting with grown men every single week, getting hit in the liver and stuff.
The physical pain never really bothered me, even as a child when I was I'd say fairly severely with a belt or a wooden spoon.
It would just make me kind of angry and indifferent to what was happening.
I never really got that.
Oh, this hurts so bad.
It's excruciating. This pain, Stefan, it's like I'm crying or so excruciatingly painful.
It's like this dull, almost decentralized, just persistent, almost like a backache.
Like an ache. I'd say it's more like an ache than a sharp pain.
It just doesn't go away.
If you've ever had an injury or some type of bruise, it's more equivalent to something like that.
So it's not just localized in your penis.
It is throughout your body when the discomfort occurs, right?
It's pretty much localized.
I mean, it's not like my I start hurting everywhere or something like that when it happens.
But, I mean, yeah, it's pretty much just...
That's the only part of my body that's, you know, been damaged.
Right. And how often do you experience this kind of pain, Randy?
You know, it's not that often anymore.
And I'm sad to say, not because the situation got any better, but just because I've been in my own You know, hypothesis or what I know to be true is that I've just been subconsciously conditioned by that pain.
You know, I was taking psychology classes in college and they'll electrocute a dog or something like that every time it lays down and eventually just stays standing up until it collapses from exhaustion.
So the same kind of thing happened to me that the pain stimulus served as a kind of, I don't know the right word, restriction or Oh yeah, no, if you get hit with a taser every time you have a boner, your boner kind of vanishes, right? Exactly, so it's like, well, what's the point?
It's just going to hurt, you know?
So, yeah, it's not too bad anymore, but it still is not, it hasn't gotten better, it's just...
And what does your penis look like?
Is it sort of visible damage?
Is there scar tissue? No, it's not.
Or is it not really that evident until you get an erection?
You wouldn't probably be like, wow, that's fucked up, but you'd be like, there looks like there's way too much taken off, like, tight-wise, like, over half the length.
And there is a lot of scarring, you know?
And then, obviously, phenulum and rigid band and all the other parts are just completely...
Removed, completely amputated.
It's another foreskin actually contains and circumcision actually destroys several parts.
It's not just like this dangly piece of skin like people want to tell you.
It's actually a fairly complex organ.
The other thing that my research kind of made evident to me was that you're actually kind of getting a two-for-one talking when you get circumcised because not only is there the destruction and Amputation of those 20,000 nerve endings, but the gland, the head of the penis is actually supposedly supposed to be made out of mucosa membrane, which is the inside of your mouth, inside of your vagina if you're a woman.
And when that's perpetually exposed to the wear and tear of rubbing up against fabric and air and stuff like that, your skin, your mucosa membrane will actually form like a callus over it to Protect it.
And the callus obviously covers up more sensitivity and nerve endings.
I believe the process is called keratinization.
It's a layer of keratin that builds up over the gland.
So not only do you lose the nerve endings, but the ones you still have left are covered up as a response to the stress.
I think that's something that most people don't know, but that's the other way it screws you over.
Yeah, no, I... I can't imagine you know that friction against underwear uh swimsuits uh and and saying would be i mean it would be would be horrible and yes you're right i i hadn't thought of that but of course the long-term response of the body to that kind of excessive friction is is to attempt to protect itself yep and uh i've never actually i've seen that mentioned Maybe on Reddit or some other place,
but I actually haven't ever seen that point specifically addressed.
Wow. And you mentioned that you haven't talked much about it with your parents.
I assume they know.
No, they don't. Oh, they don't know.
Why do you think?
I mean, you know why, I guess, but why haven't you talked about it?
I don't want them to blame themselves.
What they did, it's appalling.
They didn't know. I still haven't worked out my feelings on this.
That's kind of why I was going with the call.
I've listened to your show for a long time and you've listened to all these talks, but you've really helped people through it.
I haven't really talked to anybody about it.
Because of the embarrassment and shame behind it, but I didn't tell my parents because I don't want them to blame themselves.
How can you live with that as a parent?
They always told me, oh, your mom didn't have an epidural, and she breastfed you, and she just made sure that you didn't have all these cocktails of vaccines, and you grew up healthy, and this and that.
I'm just thinking, yeah, great, guys, great.
You did these things right, but why did you cut off, why did you amputate part of my dick?
Why did they amputate part of your dick?
I mean, you won't know for sure without...
Were there religious reasons?
Was there a cultural reason?
Absolutely not. My dad was a Catholic and my mom was Lutheran or whatever.
There was no religious...
I was born in 97, right?
There was nothing. I'm sure they were convinced by the doctor.
They were just ignorant. Well, no, no.
See, they can't be that ignorant if they're like, well, we didn't give you this cocktail and we did all...
They couldn't have been ignorant about it.
I mean, because they're thoughtful parents with regards to your well-being, it sounds like, in other areas, right?
No, because this is something that I've seen, and the biggest opponents I've found just in my years of research, the biggest opponents to, you know, in favor...
of harming babies are actually other men.
It's not women. It's other men that want to justify what was done to them.
You're either fighting babies or you're fighting for them type of thing on this one.
They actually want to justify what was done to them and my dad himself was in fact circumcised so his way of justifying that was doing it to me and my brother.
So that he never had to admit anything was wrong with him, what was done to him.
Did your brother, did he go under the knife with the same guy?
No, he was pointed at a different hospital two years before me.
Does he know? No.
So you've told no one?
No, I have a friend.
I have a good friend.
My whole life I've been a loner.
You know, I really only have one good friend, but I told him about it.
He's like, that sucks, and he goes on to fucking his girlfriend, and that's it.
Have you talked to a doctor about your options?
Mm-hmm. Another person that I told was actually a cousin of mine who's a drug addict among things, but a pretty smart guy, graduated from USC, and He was complaining to me about how much his life sucked and how hard it was one time when I was up at night barbecuing some brisket.
And I said, dude, you have no fucking clue.
You're going to sit here and tell me you're a mess in your life and you're addicted to drugs and you can't hold down a job and you're always making stupid lies and he's just done so much bullshit.
You're telling me it's because your dad smoked a joint with you on the beach in Cancun when you were 14?
Give me a fucking break.
Or your mom was an alcoholic.
You know? Your dad was such a dumbass that he died because his heart exploded from steroids when he was 50.
Like, come on.
He's over here telling me about all these problems and this and that.
I'm like, all the problems that you have right now are of your own doing, your own creation.
And so I actually got pretty mad until I was kind of like on the spot.
I was like, this was a life sentence at birth.
My entire life, I have to sit back in the shadows and constantly observe with all this pop culture and this this and that this you know pornography and songs and love and this and that and that's never going to be something I can be a part of you know how mad that makes me that I never had a choice and I just got went off on him you know to his face and he wasn't very sympathetic about it but He was kind of like,
we'll take care of it. So he makes an appointment at a urologist because he's got some fucking STD from banging pie hookers or something when he was in Asia.
And we go there. There's a very good urologist, Indian man.
He starts actually poking my dick with needles and asking me, can you feel this?
Can you feel that? I say no.
I do a lot of the stuff and he goes, well, you know, this is Neurological damage.
He suggests removal of the remaining skin and a graft or something like that.
And I'm like, the problem here was caused by removal.
I don't think more of the same thing that caused the problem is going to be a remedy.
Did he say why that might be valuable?
No, he really didn't.
It was like a token little, oh, well, we can do this type of thing so that It's not like he just said, I'm fucked, you know?
And as soon as I told him that that sounded illogical, he just backed off and shrugged his shoulders.
And what was pretty funny, too, is I saw this look in his eyes and he said, well, I did it to my son.
He goes, well, my son circumcised and didn't have any problems.
He immediately, like, that justified it to me.
He looked me right in the face and just justified it.
And I could see it was because he was just, like, terrified.
He never wanted to admit that the practice that he did, or he was a proponent of, jeopardized the lifelong health of his own child.
And it was just, it was one of those moments where you could just see, this is exactly what the problem is.
It's people like this. They'll justify it no matter what.
They can't be wrong.
Because they're too deep into it.
Right. It probably is worth getting another opinion.
You know, Steph, yeah, I could get another opinion, but they'd tell me the same thing.
Like, I'm not dummy.
It's my own body, too.
I know. And at the end of the day, from what I can understand or read, there's no surgery or severe neurological damage.
You can't repair this micro, tiny little nerve endings.
So... But what about, again, I'm no doctor, right?
But what about any kind of skin graft that might give you more flexibility for erections?
That could help.
But again, the issue is underlying...
Neurological damage and skin grafts don't do anything in the way of fixing the neurological issue.
It's just a circulatory.
The skin is basically when you get a graft, it's just the blood vessels are connected.
There's no actual sensation you have in the skin itself.
I'm afraid that's also not really a great option.
Well, just say, talk to someone else.
That's, you know, obviously do what you want.
I mean, that's just my particular...
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wanted to be wrong.
Like, I pray that I'm wrong.
If that was the solution, oh, you just get a skin graft, you know, I'd be doing that shit tomorrow.
Right. No, I understand, though, that if there's...
So, do you have...
Where do you lose sensation?
I mean, not at the very base, but like how far?
It's, um, I don't know.
It's not just like it's just one spot.
It's like the entire thing, it seems like.
Oh, just kind of numb the whole thing?
Yeah, it's just almost like you got an injection of lidocaine, if you've ever had one of those.
But it never goes away.
No, I have a little scar on my thumb.
There's one on the inside.
I actually have one on the outside a little bit where I dropped some plates.
I tripped over a dishwasher, dropped some plates, and cut my thumb.
And, yeah, I lost some sensation.
It very gradually came back.
It's still not 100%. It doesn't hugely matter.
It's like a square inch on my thumb where I have less sensation.
But I can't imagine if it was, I mean, a significant portion of the penis.
That's... Yeah.
And, you know, that's all anyone really can do is just basically what you did is just, you know, accept some...
Throw out some sympathies and just express condolences, but I just want people to be aware that...
I mean, it is evil.
It preys upon the portion of the population that can absolutely just not defend themselves.
And I can't think of a more innocent demographic than newborn babies.
It's horrifying.
Well, of course, yeah. I mean, what it means is dating.
It's obsolete. Yeah, dating is punishment.
Marriage is hard to imagine.
Fatherhood is...
Next to non-existent.
Well, you'd have to get the sperm taken out of your balls, right?
I mean, it would be like your delivery mechanism is suboptimal.
Let's put it that way, right? So, I mean, in terms of like life as a whole...
Christ. It sucks.
And being a monk isn't cool anymore.
I think about ending my life almost every day or every morning when I get up to take a piss.
It's difficult.
But I kind of went through this pseudo-spiritual journey where I said, well, I guess I can't be a man anatomically, but How can I still be a man?
That's from working hard, not being a pussy, conducting myself with honor, respecting other people.
My thoughts on suicide, I've always had a pretty philosophical mind, so I debated almost endlessly in my mind the different points and pros and cons.
I listened to your personal take on suicide being, forgive me if I'm misrepresenting this, but I seem to remember it was fairly selfish in your eyes.
Well, here's the challenge, Randy, and I say this, you know, this is like, I don't want you to focus on me, but it tears my heart in two, and anybody with half a conscience out there is appalled at what happened to you, and we can't even imagine how many other boys this butcher butchered, right? Thousands, possibly.
Probably. And here's the thing, though.
If you kill yourself and your parents...
I mean, you're worried about your parents blaming themselves.
If you kill yourself and your parents don't have any idea what's going on, do you know what they're going to do?
They're going to blame themselves.
They're going to blame themselves. And that's going to be infinitely worse than the circumcision issue.
So as far as causing your parents pain, talking to them about the botched circumcision, the botched genital mutilation.
Well, all genital mutilations are botched in the eyes of morality, but talking to them about this and having a connection with this and having people...
Because it's the isolation. You're isolated from women.
You're isolated from friends. You're isolated from your parents.
You are alone with this damage, right?
Yeah. Something new.
So... No one gives a fuck, though.
I'm isolated by a society.
You can be a woman and say, I was raped.
And everybody will rally behind you and say, you're strong.
We'll put this guy behind bars.
We'll do this. And I'm not trying to diminish the atrocity that is rape and sexual violence against women.
I'm not diminishing that anyways.
What I'm saying is that's almost not as bad because it's not permanent.
The woman can still go on to get married, to have children, to have a...
Everything. A functioning life.
A functioning sexual life.
I was raped, essentially, sexual violence or mutilation in a way that all that was taken from me permanently.
And there's nobody saying a peep.
Nobody in my defense.
In the defense of the boys.
Nobody is standing up.
Nobody gives a fuck out there.
Nobody even, you mention this to people, they give you a sideways look.
You say you're a woman and you're raped, oh shit, everybody, now you're a victim and you're elevated and all this stuff.
And it's isolation by society.
Our society is ignorant.
They don't care. They don't know.
They can't help it.
No, it's worse than ignorant.
Apathetic? They just don't give a fuck?
No, it's worse than ignorant because Because if they were ignorant, then once they found out, they would care.
It's not ignorance, because in a lot of ways, they don't seem to care after they find out, either.
Yeah. Like, you know, confiding to the guy who's getting STDs from Thai hookers, okay, this is not going to be Mr.
Empathy, right? This is not going to be somebody who's going to be able to give you the sort of feedback and compassion that you deserve.
But even when you illuminate, To people.
The circumcision issue, I mean, it's been diminishing over time.
Circumcisions have been diminishing over time for a lot of the populations.
But there's no big movement.
It's like, oh, well, we'll just let this kind of slowly fade away over time.
But there's no big movement. I mean, if you were a woman who'd been rendered sterile and unable to enjoy sex of any kind, sexual arousal was painful as a result of female genital mutilation, and this was common?
The outrage would be astonishing.
But because it's men, and it's my male privilege, apparently, to not be protected from genital amputation or mutilation, it's okay.
What's going to happen to your parents if you tell them, Randy?
This is the big question for me.
Because we'll get on to ways in which you can do good things with this horror, but what do you fear is going to happen to your parents if you don't tell them to the point where you're thinking of ending your own life?
What's it going to do to them?
You know, I kind of had an indirect conversation with my father about it some time ago, and he goes, imagine if there was an issue that men had, or some issue that men didn't have the same rights as women.
I said, well, actually, there is one.
And he goes, what do you mean?
I go, genital cutting.
Circumcision. I'm like, you do realize that when they...
It's very common in the Islamic world that they'll remove the clitoris, labia, whatever, from a female.
It's called FGM, female genital mutilation, not female circumcision, because that would be a euphemism, and we don't want that.
And... God, I'm trying so hard not to lose my shit at this.
You can lose your shit, man.
If there's a good reason to lose your shit, this would certainly be one of them.
It's totally fine with me.
I've lost my shit about this before once or twice.
It's not good, but I feel like blowing the gasket here because the double standard, I feel like I'm the only one that sees this shit.
Wait, but what did your dad say?
He looked at me with a puzzled look.
We were actually driving. And then he looked back at the road and he said, yeah, but that's just skin.
Right. And I said, I thought to myself, I didn't say anything.
I thought to myself, yeah, just the skin.
The largest, most important organ of your body that contains, you know, all your nerve endings and keeps you.
You know what flaying is, Stefan?
You ever watch Game of Thrones? I did make it through a little bit of Game of Thrones, but I couldn't find anyone I liked and there was a lot of gore.
So, anyway, go on.
Anyways, I was just bringing it up because there's actually a family or a house that their sigil is the Flayed Man and I don't know if you know what flame is.
It's medieval torture where you basically...
You cut the skin off. Yeah, you cut the skin off.
Exactly. You remove the skin of someone that's still alive.
You know what they actually die from?
It's not blood loss. Their heart stops from the pain, right?
Yeah, but if it doesn't, you know what they die from?
Dehydration and infection.
Your skin is...
If you just take off your skin, never mind.
Say you don't lose a drop of blood.
Say there's some way that I could remove all of your skin without you shedding a drop of blood.
You would still die fairly rapidly because your body would lose all of its moisture and you'd lose all your ability to repel incoming pathogens.
And several, I don't know how many it is, I want to say like 10 babies die every year from infection.
And it's comical.
It's just... God, that makes me...
You mean from second season? Yeah, well, okay.
This is the whole... They'll give you this medical...
Voodoo, mumbo-jumbo, pseudoscience.
It reduces infection rates.
Never mind the fact that we've been doing this for the better half of the century and there's still STDs running rampant in America.
They tried in Africa. Makes no difference on the HIV transmissions rates, but we want to reduce infections.
So what are we going to do?
We're going to give an infant child who has hardly any immune system, we're going to give him an open flesh wound and In a diaper that's going to be full of feces, it's going to be full of shit and piss, and we're going to give them an open flesh wound.
So that actually winds up leading, in many cases, to more infections and complications, which is just hysterical in my mind.
That's the very thing that they wanted to prevent or claimed they're preventing.
But what they're doing is just charging the insurance company, the parents, a fat fee, and then Taking the severed foreskin of the infant.
And it's not like they just throw it away in the trash.
They keep it for the stem cells.
Sell them various products.
It's diabolical, Stefan.
It's one of those things that the more you learn about it, the more you're against it.
And it sucks that it had to happen to me to learn about it, but yeah.
It's just so many things, and I mean, I'm not really that angry or crying about it or anything anymore because I have almost no tears anymore.
The damage has been done.
There's only so much you can cry about the same thing before it just becomes like...
It doesn't matter.
My life doesn't even matter to me at this point.
It has no meaning.
And that's just not me. That's not me just being melodramatic or...
You know, being a nihilistic pussy, that's just how it is.
I thought that by going on this show and just talking about my experience that hopefully people will hear this and they will understand that this is evil.
It is evil.
There's no redeeming good quality about it.
There's no justification.
There's no moral argument.
There's no ethical or religious or anything that I've heard anybody put forth that can justify it.
And that's not just because of my bias that it happened to me and fucked me over.
I've thought about this.
I've agonized. I've just obsessed over it.
For years, I've thought about the same thing.
I've ran through every possible moral, ethical, legal argument you can make.
None of them add up.
The stupidest fucking thing I ever heard was the religious reason.
Why would you ever, if you're a creation of God, and you view your God as this supreme, omniscient being of infinite wisdom, You think he just made a fucking mistake when he designed your genitals?
Oh, guys, sorry, I'm going to need you to cut that one off after they're born.
That's my bad. What?
You think evolution, like every male mammal has a sheath for their penis for no reason?
Dogs, cats, bears, whatever the hell you want to point at, horses?
They all have something that covers up their penis?
Come on. People should be an exception to that.
Everything. And then not to mention just the appalling morals.
Have you seen the videos of how they do it?
It's disgusting. It makes me vomit.
The child is literally sitting there screaming, the baby, at the top of his lung.
They don't even give it a fucking anesthetic.
Oh, it can't feel anything?
I heard...
I don't even know where I heard.
It makes sense. They say they can't feel it.
But the baby's going into shock.
Its brain can't handle that amount of pain.
It just shuts down and sits there staring at the ceiling.
Oh, that's because it doesn't feel anything.
No, that's because it's in shock, dumbass.
It's not because it's...
You know? Fred studies the amount of hours babies cry, circumcised, non-circumcised.
Well, obviously the ones that were cried a lot more.
I wonder why. Maybe it hurt a lot.
Changes the brain. They did MRIs, CAT scans on the brains.
It has permanent, lifelong...
Just that traumatic physical pain at that young of an age will forever change your brain.
Well, yeah, it does seem to be.
Here are some statistics for those who are following this stuff.
Just a little bit of data here.
Out of 100 circumcised boys, 75 will not readily breastfeed post-op.
One will require additional immediate surgery and sutures to stop the hemorrhage.
Eight will suffer infection at the surgical site.
One will be treated with antibiotics for a UTI. One will have more serious complications.
Seizure, heart attack, stroke, loss of penis, death.
55 will have adverse reactions from the surgery.
35 will have some degree of post-op hemorrhaging.
One will be treated with antibiotics for surgical site infection.
One will develop fibrosis.
3 will develop post-operative phimosis.
31 will develop metyl ulcerous.
And... There is...
This popped into my mind.
You probably shouldn't watch the movie Bad Moms.
Oh, yeah? There is a scene in it where the question of the uncircumcised penis comes up.
And, you know, in usual comic fashion, the women are astonishingly coarse and un-Victorian about it.
So Mila Kunis plays a character.
She's Jewish, I think. She says, what if I find a guy who's uncircumcised?
Run out of the room screaming.
It's like finding a gun in the street.
Just scream and get out of there, her friend says.
Uncut guys are great, one of the actors says.
They're always so nice to you because they know their dicks are gross.
And then the Mila Kunis' character says she doesn't want to touch the foreskin.
And the other character says it's like a giant man clit.
And it's like, okay, that's kind of important, right?
And there is a huge amount of body shaming that goes on for...
Oh, but that's okay, because it's women doing it to men, so it's fine.
Yeah. And never mind the atrocious double standard.
I mean, men can't even say, oh, she's fat, I don't want to date her without being attacked.
Yeah, but this, you can make fun of male genital mutilation.
And you can say that the, of course, it's not uncircumcised, it's intact, right?
But you can say that, yeah, you can say that a man's penis that has not been genitally mutilated is gross, and you should run away from it, and it's terrible.
And that's funny. And it's funny.
The audience, it finds it hilarious.
And this is how, you know, when people say to me male privilege, I mean, you've got to be kidding me.
It's the most ridiculous thing that can be imagined.
Male privilege is like white privilege.
It's just a way of elevating people so you don't have to have any empathy, sympathy, or humanity towards them.
It is how you lay the foundations for war.
It's the dehumanization of men.
And that's a...
Basic psychological thing that I learned is I found it interesting whenever there's hangings or executions, the classic bag over the head isn't actually so that the person being executed feels better.
It's so that the people doing the execution don't have to look into their eyes or see their face or see them as a human being.
Because let's face it, babies look completely different from their adult form.
You wouldn't recognize me if you looked at me right now 20 years ago as a baby.
It's almost like They're not human.
You don't get to see the face of almost the person you're doing it to.
No, it's an act of branding and of dominance.
We own you. We have sliced you.
We have cut you. We have put our mark upon you.
You belong to us. It's an act of extraordinarily primal livestock ownership.
Because, of course, what are men?
Men are going to be taxed livestock and war livestock for all of human history, except now in the West.
Although the battle may be coming, I do not think the men will fight.
And whether that's for the better or for the worse remains to be seen.
But I do hope you understand.
Listen, there's nothing that can make you whole, obviously.
Again, I'm going to urge you to...
Go to a better urologist, or maybe at least one who's not mentally wrapped up in circumcision justification.
But there will be thousands of people who listen to our conversation, Randy, and will not get their son circumcised as a result.
Guaranteed. Thousands of people.
I can't tell you how much joy that gives me.
That is the purpose.
I'm not going to compare my childhood with what happened to you as a child, but I will say this, that for me, growing up with insanity, growing up with mental disintegration, growing up with rage, hostility, paranoia, crazy stuff in the household...
I see what happens when subjectivity overtakes the human brain and turns it from a wonderful tool to explore the universe into a cudgel to beat the remnants of rationality out of anybody you have power over.
I can see where this goes.
I've experienced the future in the past.
I've experienced the future of the tyranny of insanity in the past.
I can at least dedicate myself to helping to build a world wherein there is some kind of capacity to fight against irrationality, anti-rationality.
I've seen where it goes.
Now, this doesn't make my childhood not traumatized, not abused, but it puts the best potential use of that in the world.
And that, to me, is the noblest calling when you have suffered, is to take your suffering, to show the lessons learned from that suffering to others.
And help them avoid what you can no longer escape.
I can't escape my past, you can't escape the physical damage that was done to you as a baby.
The mutilation that was done to you against your will.
And to speak frankly about it with people, you can be an extraordinarily powerful and committed agent of change and of enlightenment.
Because when you hold the circumcision issue up to people, it does an enormous number of powerful things in the world.
I mean, number one, hopefully it convinces people not to mutilate their children.
That is barbaric, it is unholy, it is absolutely evil.
It goes against the basic Hippocratic oath of first do no harm.
You are doing harm. You are doing harm.
Now, Secondly, what it does is it exposes the absolute lack of empathy that characterizes male suffering in society.
The lack of empathy towards male suffering from women, from other men.
Right? What did your father say?
It's just skin.
Would he say that about an acid attack on a woman's face?
It's just skin. She's still got most of her face.
I mean, that would be crazy, right?
And so, when you bring these issues up with people, and you can be a very powerful change agent for this in the world, if you choose, this is in your life no matter what.
You can either let it plow you under, or you can use it to make the world a better place.
This doesn't justify anything, of course, that happened to you, but what it does do is It gives the suffering extraordinary meaning and richness and virtue in the world.
The evil that was done to you can be turned to a horrifying mirror against society to get it to recoil, hopefully in the long run, from its own barbaric, brutal mistreatment of infant boys, of baby boys.
And to bring this issue to light Is a form of turning evil into good that is the most powerful alchemy known to man.
To take the evil that was done to you and use it to battle evil.
Because what does evil do? Evil hopes that by harming us, it takes us out of the fight.
Evil hopes that by traumatizing us, it renders us too shaky, too uncertain to be able to go out and fight evil.
In other words, the people who most know the nature of evil and what was done unto you was a terrible evil, Randy.
Evil hopes that those who most know the nature of evil by being subject to its brutal power Are rendered the least able to accurately describe and inoculate people against evil.
Because it marginalizes them, it puts them, oh he's odd, he's weird, he's quirky, he's a loner, he's bitter, he's...
right? That's how evil cauterizes and separates you from your capacity to fight evil in society.
But if you can overcome that, and if you can say to hell with you evil, you harmed me, I'm gonna harm you right back.
Now I'm not gonna use your weapons.
I'm gonna harm you in the best way to hurt evil prior to armed conflict, which is scorn, humor, hostility, ridicule, power, passion, truth.
That is how you drive back evil peacefully, as long as evil can be driven back peacefully, which is not always throughout history, and often it's quite rare.
Where we are in that cycle remains to be seen.
I'm still giving it my all for words, not swords.
So you have been unbelievably and barbarically harmed and brutalized by this and it has separated you from people around you.
Now, you need to talk about this in my humble opinion.
It's just my thoughts.
You need to talk about this with your parents.
Because they will not know who you are.
This is at the core of who you are.
This, in a sense, defines in many ways who you are, because it's always there for you, and it has such a powerful and negative impact on your life.
This is, to some degree, who you are.
And if they don't know what happened to you, they can't know who you are.
And the good that you've done just in having this conversation about such a private and terrible deed that was done to you, Randy?
The power that you have in this conversation to help people pull their children out of the bloody hands of these primal butchers?
It's beyond calculation.
I hate the idea that a penis has to be sacrificed in order for penises and men to be saved.
And it doesn't make the sacrifice worth it, but it is the most good that can come out of the harm that was done.
Yeah. That's...
That's...
Steph, that's...
I told you about ending my life.
I, uh... I'm 20.
Everyone tells you you got your life.
I'm in college right now and I'm just done.
I came downstairs one morning and told my dad, he's kind of like, what's wrong?
Are you sore from working out?
I said, no dad, I'm in the prime of my life, but I'm just burned out.
I don't have a lot of energy to do a lot of stuff.
I'm exhausted half the time, but I'm not in bad physical shape actually.
And he goes, oh, here we go again.
Why don't you just jump off a bridge?
And I looked at him and I just grinned.
And I said, you have no idea.
And for the longest time, I'm a disappointment in this area, I'm a disappointment in that.
He would always say to me that you're weak, you're not mentally strong, you're not this, you're not that.
And I would always just kind of laugh because I have the strength to...
Delay myself, the gratification, the release from the pain.
Because I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to sit here and I already know I'm going to suffer for the rest of my life.
That's never going to change. But I know that I can have a positive impact.
Like you were saying that you can take evil and turn it into good or what happened to me can be used as a tool, motivation to change something that is so horrible.
That's what kept me going.
That's what keeps me going right now is that I've actually already saved.
My cousin had a kid and I sent her some information about how bad it was without actually telling her anything.
And she actually decided against it.
So there's one life, one person who I objectively helped and made a difference.
And even though I hate my life and I hate waking up every day, I hate the nightmares, I hate I know that I can help other people.
And I think that is what makes a man is somebody who can stand up to evil and not just say, well, there's nothing I can do.
I guess I should just end it now.
I guess I should just get it fucking over with and just never make a difference, never say anything.
So that's what keeps me going.
And that's why I called into your show.
And then also for, you know, just obviously you're a good philosopher and good at helping people with this kind of stuff.
And you provide a platform as well to get a particular point out.
But I just want to know why.
You know, that scene in Forrest Gump when Bubba dies there on the river and he looks and says, why did this happen to me?
I saw that movie, you know, I've seen it ten times throughout my life, and that question of just that one word, just why, was just something that I never got, never got the reason to why.
Why me?
You have to make that why.
Sadly, I mean, we'd like to think that there's a plan, and you were harmed so that you could prevent other children from being harmed.
Now, you can make that out of your being harmed, but it won't happen to you.
You have to will the why it happened.
Why was I so ground down by proximate madness as a child?
Well, it wasn't so I could come out and do what I do, with all the skills I have at fighting irrationality and hoping to spread reason throughout the world.
There's no why. Oh, well, it happened so I could do this show.
No! The show happened because I willed a why out of honor for the suffering in the past.
How can I honor the child within me who suffered in the past?
By attempting to push back against the craziness in the world.
So that other people in the future don't have to go through what I experienced as a child.
You know, and I see these kids going into These horrible brain frying higher education arts degrees and I see these little kids being programmed to like hate themselves because they're white or hate themselves because they're male or hate themselves because they're straight and you have privilege and you're unconscious bias and racist and like this is an infection.
This is like I'm working as hard as I can so that people now don't have to go through what I went through as a child.
And people in the future won't have to go through what I went through as a child, or at least less of it, or at least they'll be able to identify it.
This has helped me, what happened to me, reject all of that.
I have never, for a second, even in my...
Maybe for a second, I don't know, not much longer than that, bought into all that bullshit.
It's being shoveled. I'm in college right now, and I listened to a guest on your show not too long ago.
I actually forgot his name, but he was basically talking about the same...
Having children when he was young that he was smarter than a lot of his teachers and he'd get in trouble and all this other stuff.
In a way, I related to that because I was basically the same way.
I was always asking questions about this and that.
Pretty good at biology and chemistry and this kind of natural stuff.
That's why I'm getting a degree towards it.
Anatomy. But I always...
It felt like I was a little bit up the ladder from my peers.
It sounds kind of bad, but for my age, I guess I was more mature.
I thought about things a lot more.
I would just sit there and think, does this make sense?
Is this logical? And I'm very disagreeable by nature.
I'm one of the most disagreeable assholes you could possibly be.
It's called integrity, not disagreeableness.
But then I heard, well, Jordan Peterson is another guy that I listened to.
Being disagreeable to a degree is actually a very good thing because you'll challenge people's bullshit and call them out on it.
I don't accept when people start saying falsehoods around me.
No, you're full of shit. I've called out professors in the middle of lectures, my political science professors, telling us how communism wasn't really that bad at my college that I'm going to.
I said, do you have any idea how many people Joseph Stalin killed?
Do you know what the gulags were?
And you're over here telling us all these kids that, oh, communism was this and whitewashing what they did?
The five-year plan Stalin had?
The millions of people that died?
He killed ten times as many people as Hitler did.
Killing fields in the Khmer Rouge?
Give me a break. Come on.
Yeah, it's like if you're dealing with dicklessness, a dick at the front of the class is not that big a deal, right?
Yeah, and then he fails me, you know, even though I pass every single test because I didn't do, and he would weigh different portions of the test.
So this 1 through 10 is weighted 90%, and 10 through 60 is weighted 10%.
The question of whether, the question of why you're in school is perhaps a topic for another time, but I wanted to tell you something that's important, I think, for your enthusiasm for living.
You say you hate the dreams, you hate the nightmares, you hate your life, and so on.
I'll tell you why you want to die, I think, and why you shouldn't want to die.
So you do want to die, I understand that.
You feel suicidal at times, but don't you fucking do it, and here's why.
Evil wants you gone.
Evil wants you to die.
Good wants you to stand up and speak.
Evil wants you to die because you're a witness to a universal crime.
And you know what happens to witnesses when they're about to take the stand against organized crime?
You know what happens to them?
Wiped out. The death impulse, the thanatos, the desire to plow yourself under history out of misery.
I understand. I understand.
And that is the voice of the devil.
That is the voice of evil that wants you to not stand up and stand between the sadists and their prey.
It is evil that wants you gone.
It is good that wants you to speak.
And that is the battle. The angel, the devil, on each shoulder.
That is the battle that you're facing, Randi.
Evil wants you dead so you don't testify.
So don't you fucking do it.
Don't you give in when you can stand between the sadists and their prey and take the boys out of the clutches of these bastards.
I will. I will.
I'll make that promise to you right now.
I'll be strong enough to keep doing that.
So hopefully I die a natural death.
And they come up with nanobots to fix her dick.
I'll be the other day. Did you ever see the movie Logan?
I don't think so. I don't think I've even heard of it.
You've never heard of that? X-Men.
You know Wolverine? I did see an X-Men movie a while back ago, but I've heard enough about the director recently that I can't do it.
Okay, but... The newest one that came out in 2017 was called Logan.
A phenomenal movie.
I don't know if you've ever read a book or seen a movie in your life and you've just really just connected or related with a character in the general feeling.
Fight Club. But anyway, go on. Fight Club.
This is exactly what it is.
This is exactly what I feel the general theme of the movie is.
I mean, you'd have to watch it, but I'm sure viewers out there, people have seen that movie.
It's very highly rated.
But basically, you know, the Weapon X program, he had the adamantium put in them.
He was made to be a killing machine and he starts dying, but the whole movie is him helping out kids.
Bringing them from persecution in America to the Canadian border and he winds up dying and doing it.
Fighting himself, a clone of himself that's a younger, stronger, better version of himself.
That's one of the main...
Spoilers! Okay, come on. Yeah, I have people already seen it.
I saw that movie.
He wanted to die.
He was made into something that he didn't.
And then at the very end, as he lays dying, you know, I won't spoil everything, but he says, don't be what they made you.
That's exactly what he said.
I heard that, I swear.
I've never been hit harder in my entire life by a movie than Logan, because I felt exactly the same way, like to the T, everything almost in that movie, besides me being a badass superhero.
When he said, don't be what they made you, directing that to his daughter, she was made to be kind of like a killing machine too.
And In my life, I haven't exactly been the greatest person.
I've had an unbelievable amount of anger that have directed outwards at people in other areas.
I guess that's understandable.
I listen to Buddhist philosophies, different gurus and stuff like that.
The amount of control that you have over your life as an individual in your own mind can be incredible.
Immense. And I don't have to be this angry, hateful, the world was against me, I was fucked over, therefore I have a justification to fuck over other people and be an asshole the rest of my life.
I don't have to be that way.
And that part, I just said, I had an epiphany in my mind.
That was about a year ago, I guess, when it came out.
Um... And I still live by that.
It's just I kind of practice meditation.
It really helps to clear the mind, to just calm down completely.
Because I'll get in phases where I get obsessive.
I can't stop thinking about the same thing.
I'm just perseverated on the issue.
And I just can't.
I just start going basically crazy because I have nobody to talk to.
And my own mind is my worst enemy.
I am my own worst enemy.
The thoughts, the dreams, the subconscious, everything...
It's basically myself.
My body is my own prison.
My mind is like the jailer too.
Oh, you're not ever going to be worth a shit.
You shouldn't. All this stuff.
Just be able to have the mental fortitude to quiet down.
And just...
Choose.
Choose. Be somewhere.
I appreciate the...
Honesty here, but I'm going to push back when you say something like I am my own worst enemy and so on.
You are struggling to deal with a vicious assault upon the very essence of your masculinity when you were a helpless infant, and you're struggling to do so in a social situation with no empathy or connection whatsoever.
I don't think it's you who are your own worst enemy here.
I think you are really struggling To try and find a life for yourself when so much of what is natural has been walled off and you can't even talk to the people who authorized it.
So, you know, be nicer to yourself about all of this.
If you were talking about your brother who had this issue and you said he's his own worst enemy, I'd say, no, no, no, no, come on.
Don't mirror the lack of compassion that others have for you within yourself.
You are struggling nobly and manfully with a terrible, terrible mutilation.
I am my close second worst enemy.
How about that? No, you are a multiplicity.
You are a multiplicity.
You have friends and enemies within you.
You have good and evil within you as we all do.
And we are tempted by the evil within us.
And I was very tempted in the business world with my abilities within this business world of production and negotiation to go for money.
Very tempted. But I knew that to go for money would be to sacrifice something very essential.
So instead, of course, I seek wealth through podcasting.
Anyway. No, I seek truth through podcasting.
The money helps. But...
You have good and evil within you.
You have sympathy and coldness within you.
You have love and you have hate.
You have compassion and you have anger.
And we can focus and be angry at the people who wronged us, or we can have compassion for the people we could help if we let go of some of the anger.
And that is the big challenge.
Whether we can use our pain in service of those who will be hurt if we do nothing.
If we can arise from being burnt by a lack of compassion around us to turn to a suffering world and have compassion for that world.
For that world.
That is the great challenge.
I'll give you a tiny example.
So, I did a conversation a little while ago with Lauren Southern about what's happening in South Africa.
And of course, there's a lot of comments from blacks in South Africa saying, you know, well, karma sucks, don't it, bitch?
You reap what you sow, what goes around comes around.
It's like, I mean, I understand the source of all of this, and I understand why it's manifesting in this way, and it wouldn't shock me or anger me in the way that it used to, but...
But that's not breaking the cycle.
If what goes around comes around, then the attacks upon the South African farmers can then be met with violence.
And it's like, well, you reap what you sow.
People who attack the South African farmers, now the cycle is you reap what you sow.
Karma is coming back. And it's like, this will never end.
If we continue to justify our own aggression.
Human history right there.
Human history right there. You did it to me.
Karma's a bitch. I do it to you.
And then you say, well, karma's a bitch.
And you do it to me. Well, you reap what you sow.
You do it back. Well...
You've just essentially summarized all the history classes I've ever taken.
Right. That's literally it.
Yeah. You killed my brother.
Well, you killed my brother. Well, you killed my brother.
Well, you killed my brother. And you end up with your third cousins or whatever.
So this is the challenge. Can you take your suffering and use it to fuel your compassion for those who will suffer if you do nothing?
Because you have a compelling tale to tell, and you are not alone in this.
But you feel alone because you're isolated in your community and because you haven't been public enough.
I mean, I can tell you. I guarantee you, man.
We put this out, you are going to get comments, and we are going to get messages of, like, I have the same thing.
I have the same thing. I have the same thing.
I have the same thing. I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do. This guy is my story.
This guy is speaking the truth.
They're isolated, too. And as you say, it's because of a lack of sympathy.
A woman says, I was female genitally mutilated.
Massive compassion. Well, not from feminists who think Hayaan Hirsi Ali should not have a vagina because they don't care about the girls being raped in Telford because they're the wrong kind of victims.
They're white, you see. The perpetrators are the Muslims.
So... Victim hierarchy.
Speaking honestly in this fashion does enormous good in the world.
And of course evil wants you to shut up and of course evil wants you to die and go away.
That's what evil does to witnesses.
Doing the opposite of what evil wants you to do is usually a pretty good plan.
I just don't...
I don't know how I'm going to go on though.
I don't... In my life, I've almost fallen a good bit into the nihilism.
I'm in college and my grades aren't that great, not because I'm a dumbass, but because I just don't try, because I don't see much of a point in it.
No, no, but this is the thing.
This is my advice, is that unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, your life now has to be about service.
That sounds very grim.
I fully understand what you mean, and I'm not going to try and argue you out of that perspective.
I mean, I've done 4,000 plus shows on philosophy because I'm in service of philosophy.
My life is not just about what I want to do.
My life is about what is important and necessary for the world.
I am in service.
I am a dray horse.
I am a mouthpiece for the rational future.
Sorry? Not to interject, but voluntarily you are in service with your philosophies.
No, because once you accept service, it's no longer voluntary.
It's like you can choose to sign up for the army, but once you're in, you're in.
And I get that you didn't choose for this mutilation.
I'm not trying to sort of conflate that.
But I didn't choose...
Being surrounded by insane people as a child.
So if you're in service for the boys you can save, then that is how you organize your life.
I've actually been attacked as an anti-Semite before on YouTube as well because I posted some comment about how there's no religious justification in the covenant of Abraham.
Anti-Semite is not an argument.
Racist is not an argument.
Misogynist is not an argument.
Cult is not an argument.
None of these things are arguments.
It's actually saying that Jews should not be criticized is anti-Semitic.
What? Jews can't handle criticism?
I think they can.
Certainly Jews criticize others.
So yeah, let's have Jews join the human community as other groups and all groups should join the human community of criticizing and being criticized.
We can all take it. And if you think Jews can't handle it, then what do you think?
Jews are just innately weak and can't do...
I mean, that's anti-Semitic.
No, refusing to criticize. Is the greatest criticism of all.
So, it's not an argument.
Such a breath of fresh air just to hear someone with logic for what's of my life just to say.
God, that's a breath of fresh air.
Yeah, it's like when you criticize women and people think you hate women, it's like, no, no, no.
If you want to exclude women from criticism, you're the one who really hates women.
Because to exclude groups from criticism means that they've got to just drift by in their own vanity and unguided.
And we've seen what happened even with intelligent women in shows recently that I've talked to women in various places, a Swedish woman and a woman from America.
If they're unguided, uncriticized, they go without...
Without any guidance, just wandering around, wasting their lives and destroying resources and never having love and family and a future that way.
I mean, there's nothing more hateful than denying criticism to a particular group.
Oh, I can't criticize the black, the prevalence of single motherhood within the black community because I'm racist.
It's like, no, no, no. If you want people to be happy, you criticize them.
I mean, it is funny, too, because people criticize me or you, obviously, for criticizing other groups.
So they're saying, we can handle criticism, but those other groups can't.
So they're saying, we're strong and those other groups are weak.
That's so bigoted.
Blacks can handle criticism of single-parent households.
Jews can handle criticism of circumcision.
They're not fragile.
They're not weak. They're not tiny little flowers.
They're breath of wind.
I mean, how pathetic and ridiculous it is to exclude certain groups from criticism.
You're saying they can handle it, and the only people who can handle criticism are white males.
So white males are the only strong group that can handle criticism?
That seems pretty bigoted and sexist towards everyone else, frankly.
Well, it's an admission or a confession of inferiority is essentially what it is in my eyes.
I think so. Like you were saying.
So, get a second opinion.
Talk to your parents in my humble opinion.
This is just a gesture. I don't tell you what to do.
These are my sort of ideas. And figure out how many people you can save.
Because when we are harmed, the temptation is to fall into the pit of nihilism, to fall into the pit of despair, and to have no purpose to our life.
But when you've been harmed that grievously, your life is never going to be absent that harm, and you can either have it plow you under, or you can use it to help and save others.
See, when you sign up for service, you escape isolation, because now you have a cause, and now you share, and people will connect with you.
So service sounds like you say it's like being a slave and so on, but no.
You are a slave to nihilism, suicidality, and isolation at the moment.
You are a slave to history without even the comfort Of companionship, of friends, of people who understand what you're going through, who share what you're going through, who can give you tips and strategies and mindsets and ideas and approaches and options that you have not thought of, as you can provide to them things that they haven't thought of.
Right now you're isolated because you're in service of nothing and dominated by the brutalities of history.
If you put yourself in service, you get companionship, you get friends, you get a tribe.
Yeah. I was listening to the previous caller talk about infertility problems and their marriage and stuff, and I thought to myself while I was listening, well, shit, they've already been married and had sex and been in a relationship.
It's more than I'll ever get or say for myself.
And there's that part of me that just...
I can't shut off in my mind.
It just perpetually wants to feel bad for myself.
That's because you're suffering.
When your suffering becomes visible for others, it can submerge within yourself.
Because your suffering is invisible to others, Randy, it is omnipresent in your mind's eye.
When your suffering is recognized by others, it diminishes in your mind.
Okay. You're carrying the entire burden of suffering yourself with no social feedback, which means that you say it's always on your mind, and it is.
It's always on your mind. Now that I have dedicated myself to service, and now I have friends and companions and a family that recognize the suffering that I endured in the past, I don't really think about it that much.
Honestly, this is like, I'm not kidding.
I don't really think about my childhood that much at all because I'm in service.
I'm doing the best I possibly can.
Can with the tools I learned through being trapped.
And you can escape the past by being visible in the present.
You know, I just want to escape the past, but it catches up to me every day.
Right. That's because you're alone with it.
Right. You need companions to take down the predator of the past.
The predator of history is too big.
No man with a spear can take down an elephant.
You need a whole group of people.
Lions rarely hunt alone, right?
You need a whole group of people to take down a predator as big as the past.
You can't do it alone.
And just personality trait-wise, I've always been Pretty much insatiably curious.
I love to learn about things.
Books, shows, internet, all this stuff.
I absorb so much knowledge about almost anything you can think of.
What kills me is just the fact that I don't think I'll ever get to experience what it's like to have a wife or a relationship or a child that actually matters to me.
And you hear all these horror stories.
These women want kids and stuff and have these problems with infertility.
No, you can have kids.
I guess. No, physically you can have kids.
Okay. You can get married and you can have kids.
There may be a woman out there for whom sexuality is a big problem as well.
And that is something you could have in common.
And you could definitely have children.
But that... That absolutely, I don't know, almost cucks my desire for relationships.
I have to be honest with myself.
I can't lie. I'm inadequate and broken sexually.
So where am I going to find a woman that wants that?
That just raises her hand and says, I don't care.
I have been rejected.
No, but there are women out there who are damaged physically and sexually.
I guess I'll find them.
Well, no, but you can't find them as long as you're keeping your secrets!
Well, I straight up told them about this.
No, no, no, no. You have to tell a wider group of people than one drug-addicted cousin.
No. Yeah, I get that.
But I have literally been, you know, tried to have sex and stuff like that and been in relationships and, you know, this is kind of the issue that I had.
And I have been You don't have to tell me that women are going to reject you if you can't have sex with them.
I get that. I get that.
So you're going to have to spread your debt wider so that you can find women for whom that is not going to be as big an issue.
And they're out there. Yeah.
They're out there. There are women who find it very painful to have sex, and there are women who are asexual.
I get that. I get that.
I understand completely what you're saying, but what I'm saying is, for me personally, it's just that...
Logically, I can't...
I know what you're saying logically.
You can find some area of this than the other, but...
The thing for me is that it's like I don't even want to bother looking and face that disappointment again because you're going to run into oh well it wasn't important to her or it wasn't so it's like you cast your net out butt and you get some like ugly feminist who's like I'm asexual I'm like asexual by choice it's like no you're just ugly to get laid.
And so... Look, fuck that, man.
That is the sound of the past winning.
Look, you can talk yourself out of any of that future if you want.
And you're doing a very good job of it.
I'm not going to enable it.
I'm not going to enable it at all.
I'm not going to enable it.
Because you can talk, you can say, well, there's all these circumstances and situations by which I'm always going to be alone and I'm never going to have a relationship and I'm never going to have kids and it's going to go on and on forever.
Sure, you can say that if you want.
It's not true. And I'm going to tell you that it's not true.
And you know that it's not true.
It is not factually true that the only person who will ever be with you is some horrible human being.
There are good women out there who've also had medical issues, surgical issues.
They may have a low libido for perfectly healthy reasons.
They may have whatever, right?
And they can be great companions for you.
Now, you can say to yourself, well, I don't want them.
I'm never going to find them. Okay, fine.
Well, then, guess what?
That's going to be true. And if that's the life that you want for yourself, then that's the life you can choose for yourself.
Now, you can then say, okay, well, sex isn't everything in a relationship.
You know, 10% of marriages, people don't have sex at all.
Like, literally don't have sex at all.
They're still married. Does that mean their lives are hell?
I don't know. Can't imagine, but different strokes or non-strokes for different folks, right?
So you can, of course, say to yourself, I'm going to be alone forever, I'm never going to be...
Right? Sure. But here's the funny thing, man.
You like this show, right?
You like listening to what I do on this show?
Yeah. If I had said to myself, there's no possible way that people are going to want to talk about race realism, peaceful parenting, the death of the West, anarchism, voluntarism, like, there's just no way.
There's no way. It's too radical, it's too extraordinary, it's too shocking, it's too...
Like, no way!
You wouldn't even have...
You're relying on me not doing what you're doing in order to have this damn conversation.
You understand? Yeah, I do.
Well, I'm sure glad someone out there isn't as self-defeating as I am so I can have stuff to listen to.
Don't parasite off other people's activities and then say, well, I can't.
Because everything you consume is full of people who...
Say I can. I will.
I can't tell you how much I love that trademark savagery you have, where just the caller's bullshit just doesn't seem to work.
It's tempting, don't get me wrong.
I do have some degree of...
Well, I listened to that last guy.
Congeniality, but... No, I mean, I want to tell people the truth as I see it, and I want them to tell me the truth as I see it.
Life is too short for bullshit.
It is. It is indeed.
You know, another thing that...
I mean, I'll tell you this.
What this guy did might not even have been an accident.
Maybe he's just a sadist.
Oh my god, no.
No, maybe. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know.
And... There are maybe, I don't even know how many people out there who are either incompetent or sadistic in this area.
And during the time that this conversation has been occurring for us, hundreds of boys have probably had this procedure done.
You're not alone.
You're not alone.
I think, you know, the male suicide rates, you looked at those?
Yeah. Male to female suicide rates.
It's all that privilege, see?
Yeah, I was thinking about that the other day, and I was like, well, if I'm this embarrassed and ashamed and, you know, this suicidal deep down, I can't imagine how many other men have had the same issue and just said, fuck it, and ended their life.
Well, no, you're afraid that if you tell your dad, he'll kill himself, right?
Yeah, I'm afraid.
Oh, your mom? Yeah, I'm afraid that, yeah.
Because they thought they did such a good job raising me naturally and this and that.
And it's like, I don't want to be the one who ruins that and tells them, hey, you actually made such an egregious mistake.
Such a stupid thing.
Look, it was terrible what they did and they should not have enabled it.
And given your youth, they had every reason to know better.
But the issue with the parenting is not what happened to your penis.
The issue with the parenting is that you can't tell them.
That's the issue. That's the issue that when you broach the subject with your dad, he shuts you down.
That when your cousin says, I'm getting these pamphlets from you, they don't say, well why is he interested in this topic?
The fact that you broach this with your cousin and nobody gets back to you on it and he doesn't give you much sympathy.
The issue is with the family structure as a whole insofar as you're isolated because the knowledge you have is not convenient.
The issue with your parents was obviously that they shouldn't have said, go circumcise my son.
There's no question of that.
But given that that's something they can't change in terms of what they did, the issue now is you're not happy and they're not helping.
Now, either they don't know that you're not happy, in which case they're crappy parents, or they do know, but they're not helping, in which case they're crappy parents at the moment.
But they can change that.
They can't change what happened to you 20 years ago in a hospital.
It sounds like in a back alley with a fork.
But they can change what they do now, but they can't until you talk to them.
But the situation that plays out in my mind is, what do you say to that sorry person?
Whoops. Sucks.
Like, that's in the past.
That's water in the river. I know what my dad would say.
He'd go, ooh, sorry.
And then I guarantee you he would do this.
Oh, but I had it done.
Your brother had it done.
All your friends, I'm sure, had it done.
I mean, it's really not a big deal.
So it must just be you.
It's just you. We've all had it done.
It's only you that's got a problem with it.
So the problem actually isn't what was done to you.
It's you. No, and you can say, it's true, Dad.
Let's say that we were playing Russian roulette, right?
And I spun the chamber, poof, didn't blow off.
And then, you know, two down, your brother blows his head off.
And you say, well, it was fine for me.
It was fine for him.
It must just be him.
No, this is the risk you take when you submit your boys to this kind of procedure.
It's Russian roulette. Yeah, but he's one of those people, kind of almost reminiscent of the last caller you had, that it literally does not matter what evidence or facts you show them.
I made this choice to believe this.
I've become an ideologue in the way that...
You cannot convince me that the choice I made was wrong, no matter what statistics you show me or anything, because in order to believe and tell myself I'm a moral person and I was right...
Okay, so hang on.
So it's your dad I'm talking to when you tell me all the things that can't be done and how impossible it is, right?
It's your dad who's saying, you can't get married, you can't have kids, you can't have a future.
No, in your mind, not in real life.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Because he won't change his life.
Okay. Well, you need to deal with that.
And that may be a therapy thing.
You know, if you're in school, you may have crappy commie profs, but you can probably get hold of some mental health services.
There may be a decent therapist around and all of that.
But that you need to deal with because...
Having the physical disability that you have combined with this negative I'm going to have to close it down because I'm losing concentration and I never want to give people less than my best.
So I really, really appreciate you talking about this, Randy.
Massive sympathy. I will continue to think about you and I hope you will tell me, if you get a second opinion, anything that might be able to be done.
I would certainly like to hear what goes on.
If you do anything about this in terms of getting the word out, please let me know and I'll do everything I can to help.
Support what you're doing, and I really appreciate the honesty that you brought to this conversation.
As I do appreciate the honesty everyone brings to these conversations, my honesty is thank you, thank you, thank you.
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