March 29, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:29:31
4041 Wrong Because Dolphins! - Call In Show - March 25th, 2018
Question 1: [1:53] – “My research tells me that Determinism and Free Will must be compatible. If you agree then how is this accomplished? If not, then why can they not be compatible? In my opinion, humans are ordinary animals and have no special type of consciousness. If you agree then why do you say that other animals do not debate and simply process data while humans have something unique that is beyond data processing while debating?”Question 2: [39:21] – “I'm a 35-year-old American male living abroad in a Latin American country. I'm very grateful to my host nation for the opportunities it's afforded me. I speak the language and make a concerted effort to conform when out in public. However, I see that many of the locals here have worked illegally in the United States. In fact, many small businesses here earned the capital to start via illegal immigration. They were willing to work long hours at significantly lower wages in the US and disregard the consequences of bad credit, hospital bills, and other financial obstacles most American citizens cannot, because they could simply pack up and leave. They had a home nation to fall back on where US wages spent better and allowed them to advance further economically in ways Americans could not. “ “After having lived down here for several years, I no longer agree with America's de facto open-border policy. It seems lopsided in favor of developing economies and their citizens. I see now how their financial gain is at the direct expense of low-skilled American workers, and to make matters worse, because the American economy is in decay, many older Americans wishing to retire are being forced to leave and to take their savings, social security and other financial assets abroad. In fact, some countries down here openly encourage Americans to retire here. So first their citizens came to the US to earn wages and send home remittances, and now they are receiving the added benefit of the disposable income of American retirees. This may be great for them, but it's terrible for American interests. As a foreign national living abroad, does my current disagreement with relaxed immigration policies make me a hypocrite?”Question 3: [1:11:52] – “Stefan has mentions subjects as ‘red flags’ and also that childhood trauma can develop certain patterns in behavior or even deficiency in the brain which leads to certain behavior. He also has mentioned facts about promiscuity and how that decreases the chances of a successful marriage with a person who has had more partners in life. The reason I want to have this call is because recently my boyfriend broke up with me after 2.5 years and his arguments were: ‘You have too many red flags, Stefan Molyneux says this and that about this and that… so you are too much of a risk for me and I don’t want to continue and take this risk.’ If someone has the ‘red flags’ (childhood trauma, promiscuity, drugs, emotionally unstable) is it always going to be a risk? Is it possible to truly heal and be virtues or will it always be a risk at all time because you cannot change the past? Can a person with red flags ever get rid of the risks it creates by doing self-work or will it always be a risk despite? I really want to make better decisions in life about relationships. Stefan always says, why is everybody calling me afterwards? Well I try to call him beforehand and use his advice to make better decisions.”Question 4: [2:51:46] – "Should I as a father and husband be more concerned with the philosophy espoused in a community or engage with a community despite my reservations for the social wellbeing of my family? What is more important being free of philosophical fallacies even if that means not being a part of a local community or finding a community that I can halfway stomach to increase the social circle and support for my family despite the illogical or disingenuous teachings?"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
Sometimes, as the host, this show even outdoes itself.
I have very high standards for this show.
This is one you definitely want to kick back your Buster Browns and listen to the first caller.
Well, it was kind of a debate about determinism and free will, but it really turned into a meta-debate about debating.
Also, dolphins.
Very, very interesting conversation.
The second caller is a foreign national.
He lives abroad, of course. And he has noticed some things about the local population and their relationship to living in America, both legally and illegally, and wants to share those, which I think are very illuminating, and wants to know, is he hypocritical for being against immigration while he himself is living abroad?
And I did a lot of listening and had a few things to say about that.
The third caller...
Hmm... Long, deep, and meaty.
I'm afraid we're going to have to characterize that one.
And she wants to know why I made her boyfriend break up with her.
And I don't think it's going to be a huge mystery as we go through the conversation, but she pulled through magnificently at the end.
And the fourth caller, well, he's involved in a pretty strict religious community.
He's had his doubts, he's had his breaks, and now he's worried about his wife and his children and their relationship to all that he believed before.
It's a very, very difficult situation to be in.
We had a great conversation about that.
So enjoy the show.
I know that you will. Please, please.
Trade value for value, my friends.
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And, by the way, of course, don't forget to order your copy of The Art of the Argument, available in print, in e-book, in audible, audiobook as well, at theartoftheargument.com.
Alright, well up for us today we have Marcus.
Marcus wrote in and said, That's from Marcus.
I think it means do something unique, if I do something unique.
All right. Is it Marcus?
Is that right? Got to unmute, Marcus.
Okay, I'm here. There we go.
How you doing? Oh, I'm fine.
So I basically like what you're doing.
Good. Now, you say free will and determinism are compatible.
Yes. I wonder if you could explain to me your definition of free will and determinism so I understand where you're coming from.
Well, this is a kind of long story, but what it is is you are a programmer, right?
Yeah, I've certainly done that for many years.
Right. And in there you have if-then-else statements.
And, you know, for every participating part in the universe, There is, you know, all the other parts are the environment, and that changes, and you can ask questions to the environment, and then you get a response, and you can make a decision, and that's your free will.
So you can make a decision?
Yeah, on the response.
I mean, you can say, for instance, I can say, now I'm connected to Stefan, so therefore I talk.
Or if I wouldn't connect to you, I wouldn't talk, see?
And so that is the free will.
That you can make these decisions, but they are deterministic, these decisions, not in the sense of mathematics, but in the sense that there's only one solution to the situation.
Because like in a program, when you have an if-then-else, at the time when the computer asks this if-then-else, the condition is established already.
Yeah, so just so people who may not know the if-then-else statement, so for instance, in something like Visual Basic, Let's say you're writing a word processing program and somebody closes the program and you have a flag that their document has not been saved.
Then what happens is, as everyone knows, you get a message box that comes up that says, do you want to save your data?
And there's yes, no, and cancel.
And Windows, it's MSGBOX. And then open brackets and a whole bunch of options for the kind of buttons you want, the title, the icon, and so on.
And so there's yes, no, and cancel.
So yes is, okay, I want to save my document and then exit.
No is I don't want to save my document and then exit.
And cancel is I don't want to exit.
And there may be a confirmation, like if someone says...
No, they'll say, well, now you're going to exit without saving your document.
Are you sure? And so these are message box statements, and they're if-then-else, right?
So there's a three, right?
So if someone says yes, then save the document and exit.
If someone says no, don't save the document and exit else, they had to have hit cancel, and so neither exit nor save the document.
So those are if-then-else statements.
And I guess my question is, do you view the computer as the same as the human mind when it comes to processing these statements?
Not exactly.
The computer is just very simple.
And we are more souped up, but it's just a matter of how much flexibility we have.
And so it appears, you know, as much more free will than we actually have because it has been established that when somebody decides to go drink water, the process in the brain to go drink water has already started when this person is not even thinking about it.
You mean thirst? Sorry, you're saying that the pattern for thirst occurs before somebody decides to get a drink of water?
Yes, exactly.
But how does that diminish our free will?
I'm not quite sure about that. I mean, the same is true for animals as well, right?
Right, that's correct.
Exactly true. But see, nature just prompts things.
It's not random.
It's based on data in the body or the cells or wherever it is.
No, but free will is not random. That's a false dichotomy, right?
No, I'd say it's not random. Nobody who argues for free will, at least nobody sensible, says that free will is random.
No, I don't say that.
But you use the word random. I'm not saying...
No, these impulses come, they're based on situations in your body or in cells or whatever it is.
And you just then confirm in your mind that you're going to drink or maybe you can refuse that.
These options you have.
And it is not, you cannot decide, I want to have a million bucks.
That will not work because you're never going to get them.
But you can only do things that are possible.
And these are things that are prompted in the body.
Wait, I'm sorry. I'm really trying to follow this.
So you're saying we don't have free will because we get thirsty and we can't will a million dollars into existence.
That's why we don't have free will.
No, we do have free will.
We can decide whether we're going to go drink or not.
We can abort the impulse.
But the impulse is before we even know that we're going to drink water.
Well, of course, we have to have something to choose.
Otherwise, it would be kind of random, right?
So if I'm not thirsty, like if I've just had a big drink of water, then I'm not likely to go and get a drink of water.
So, of course, I mean, if I want to start a philosophy show, if I love philosophy, if I love talking about philosophy, I need that desire in order to choose whether or not to start a philosophy show.
Like, I have no desire to become a ballet dancer, so I wasn't sitting there saying, well, I'll flip a coin.
Philosophy show, ballet dancer, right?
It wasn't going to happen. So, of course, you have to have desire.
That tells you what you might want to choose.
So I think we're in agreement here that we have free will and there are certain things that are beyond our choice because we are not gods and so we have to choose.
And of course, if we were gods, if we could just will a million dollars into existence, if we were gods or the Fed, then we wouldn't need it.
Free will. Because we'd be omnipotent.
We'd be all-powerful and probably all-knowing, then, since I assume the two would, to some degree, go hand in hand, although they contradict at some point.
But sure, we need free will because we are not all-knowing and all-powerful, so we're going to need to choose to weigh our options to figure out where our scant resource called mortality goes.
So the fact that we have desires is foundational to free will.
I think I'm more agreeing with you than anything else, but I just wanted to mention that.
No, this is correct, and I see free will in that way, but nature is still deterministic because you can go do the things that you got the impulse for, or you can deny it for whatever reason.
You may still be thirsty, but still not go drink, see?
Or you may need to go to the bathroom and then just say, I'm not going, which then you just have pressure I think we're stating obvious things here.
There may be many reasons why you don't drink.
You might be a Muslim and it may be Ramadan where you don't drink water from sunrise to sunset.
You may be very thirsty. In fact, I remember a Muslim I knew once saying that this was in Morocco.
And he was saying that, you know, late in the afternoon on a hot day, if you're, you know, you're given the choice between a woman and water, you'll probably take water because you're that thirsty.
Or you may be a model and you need your abs to show, so you need to be dehydrated so you don't drink for that.
So sure, we have both impulses and the capacity to deny our impulses.
We have self-control.
Yes, and that is basically, now all these things like to do philosophy, you know, that's not an impulse that is obvious, but as you grow up, you develop these habits and this you can compare to drugs.
You do various things and this is again not really random.
You just do things and some you like and some you don't like and then your body learns these things.
And then you do those things again and again because we are habitual.
No, but that's not philosophy.
That's hedonism, which is just like his pragmatism plus hedonism, which is you just try a bunch of stuff.
You figure out what you like the most and then you keep doing that.
That's not philosophy. Again, that is what animals do.
It's also what serial killers do.
Like they really like killing people.
Hey, that works for me.
And therefore they go on their stabby merry mayhem way through society.
So that's not philosophy.
Yeah, but philosophy is to think about what things mean and I'm a very curious person and I see no difference between my curiosity and what you call a serial killer going and killing people.
It's just something I like to do.
Right, so I'm trying to figure out what we should.
Could you just repeat that last point again?
I can say, you know, I learned to like philosophy.
So I like to practice this and or I like to do research certain kind.
And then I like these things.
And because I do that, I do it over and over and I get good at it.
And because I'm good at it, I love it even more because I maybe impress people or who knows what it is.
And that is then something you repeat over and over.
Like you say is here, kill a ghost kills people.
No, so look, I understand.
So you're not choosing what you want to do based upon abstract values.
You're choosing what you want to do based on personal pleasure.
So of course you're going to feel like a machine because you're not in control of what you like.
And because you're not in control of what you like, in the short run at least, let me finish my point.
Because you're not in control of what you like in the short run, then you end up saying, well, I'm going to do more and more of what I like and avoid...
Things that I don't like or things that I'm not good at or whatever it is.
Things that are a negative experience for me.
So of course you're going to feel like a machine because you're not making your decisions according to abstract standards of virtue.
I would say to that is...
See, everything around you is your environment, and in response to what you decide, you get a response from it.
And this is an exchange that constantly happens.
I mean, in-out, in-out, you put out information, you get information in, and then you decide What you like better and you make other decisions.
No, you've got to stop repeating the same thing.
I get it. This is like the fifth time you've gone through this.
Yes. There are a lot of people who are hedonistic.
And what they do is they say, I like this, so I'm going to do more of it.
I don't like this or that, so I'm going to do less of that.
And they feel like machines because they're basically just being run by their endorphins.
They're being run by their neurological system.
They're being run by often unconscious machines.
So, sure, they are more close to machines than human beings.
Free will is not like our capacity to process oxygen.
Free will is not like our heartbeat.
Free will is something that you develop and you earn, and free will is the consequence of studying abstract values.
If you don't have abstract values, To compare your proposed actions to, then you're just going to go with what is easier, what is more convenient, what is more popular, what is more pleasurable.
That's just basic hedonism, which is closer to just being a base four-legged mammal than a higher entity human being.
Well, I would say to that, that you put an enclosure around these things and then you leave philosophy beyond it.
I think philosophy belongs right into that.
You put an enclosure around these things and then you lead...
Hang on, hang on, hang on. You put an enclosure around these things and then you lead philosophy beyond it.
What does that even mean?
Give me a syllogism.
Pretend I'm hungry.
Pretend I'm a baby bird and you can regurgitate the worms of syllogisms into my starving beaklet.
Give me an argument rather than blanket statements of general incomprehensibility.
Well, why don't you tell me what is this extra thing that philosophy is, which is beyond things that we do And like to do.
I mean, I don't think there's a debasing thing.
Nature is absolute.
Whatever nature does is the truth.
Nature is absolute. Whatever nature does is the truth.
Are you just like peeling over fortune cookies and reading to me the bland, anti-intellectual contents of your mind?
I mean, I don't understand this. Nature is absolute.
Whatever nature does is the truth.
What does that mean? I have no idea what any of that means.
Give me an argument. Well, I'm asking you to tell me what is this extra thing that you do when you do philosophy that is beyond data processing.
Okay. Okay, so let me ask you this.
How many times have you debated abstract ideas?
Let's be generous and call them that.
When have you ever debated abstract ideas with something that is not human?
I know I heard this, you saying that...
Oh good, then you know how to respond.
Then you don't need to ask me.
Because I've already made the case, so if you've heard this case, what you need to do is rebut my case rather than ask me to restate it.
So how would you rebut the case that you only ever debate with human beings while at the same time claiming human beings are exactly the same as everything else?
Animals do debate.
See, when two animals meet in the forest and, you know, they have body language, we have body language.
That's a debate. No, it's not.
It's not? No, listen, I was vice president of a debating club in university.
Traveled all over the place doing debates.
Not once! Not once!
Did we bring a marsupial on the team?
Not once did we have a four-legged furry critter coming up to do a rebuttal of a complex argument.
Not once did we have a lizard or a frog or a cat or one of those half-dinosaur things that flares out its neck.
Not once! So, the idea that debating is something which includes both abstract argumentation and mating and hostility displays might just be stretching the word a little bit too far.
Have you ever debated with an animal?
Yeah, we do debate with an animal.
No, no, not we. Let's talk first.
Have you ever debated with an animal, and how did it go?
Um... It is not on the level of language that you do these debates.
That's an other language that, for instance, dolphins have brains that are basically more powerful than ours.
They do something...
Dolphins have brains that are more powerful than human beings?
Yes. How do you know that?
Various research has been done and people have written about this.
Well, what does that mean?
Does that mean that they're larger than human brains?
No, it's just in those studies they've made, they have established that the capacity of a dolphin can exceed what a human can do.
What does that mean, the capacity of a dolphin can exceed what a human being can do?
I don't understand what that means.
The brain, the brain of a dolphin.
No, but what does it mean to say the capacity Can't exceed what a human being can do.
Dolphins, I hate to put it this way, because they're very adorable animals.
And don't get me wrong, if I was stuck in a riptide moving away and a dolphin helped me back, I would thank it forever.
But dolphins are stupid.
Dolphins are retarded. I mean, it takes forever to teach them simple tricks.
They're dogs. They're dogs of the sea that are very cute with tiny teeth, make chittering noises, and smile blankly.
But dolphins are dumb.
So the idea that you're going to come to me and say, well, a dolphin can write a better play than Shakespeare.
I mean, come on, do you listen to yourself?
Do you have any kind of echo chamber here that reflects back what you're saying?
And has you say, well, maybe I might have taken a left turn at Albuquerque there.
No, dolphins, they have sonar.
We do not understand that.
What do you mean we don't understand sonar?
How do you think submarines get around?
How do you think radar works?
What do you mean we don't understand sonar?
We have the words! We do not.
They have tried to talk to dolphins.
They seem to understand us.
We do not understand them.
Yeah, okay. Okay.
So we're having trouble deciphering dolphin language, and therefore they're smarter than us?
No, I'm not saying they're smarter than us.
Do dolphins have free will if they're superior to human beings?
Or more free will? I didn't hear your last statement.
If dolphins are smarter than human beings, do they have more free will than us?
They have free will, yeah.
Dolphins have free will? Yeah.
So dolphins have the capacity to prepare proposed standards to...
Sorry, dolphins have the ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
I would bet they can do that.
You would bet that they could do that?
Yeah, I have no proof for that.
Right? I have no proof for that.
That's true. That's true.
But I bet that all life is very much the same.
Ours is not any different.
All life is pretty much the same.
Right. But you'll only ever debate with human beings.
That is because we share the language.
We cannot really communicate with other creatures in any form whatsoever.
And that's mostly our ignorance, not theirs.
It's our ignorance. So dolphins could write better plays than Shakespeare if only we understood their sonar language.
I can't believe the sentences.
All right. So here's an article.
Dolphins are not as smart as you think, say scientists.
Sorry, dolphin lovers. Dolphins are believed to be intelligent and second in smartness next to humans.
However, some scientists claim that dolphins are not as smart as was previously thought.
Dolphins are cetaceans, mammals that live in water bodies and are found worldwide.
John Lilly, an American physician, neuroscientist, writer, philosopher, and not a dolphin, because he's a dolphin researcher, popularized the notion that dolphins were intelligent.
He later claimed that dolphins were even smarter than humans.
He wrote 19 books, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Lily tried to teach computer language to dolphins in an attempt to develop a common language between humans and dolphins.
His research on dolphins suggested that the sea mammals could recognize symbols, recognize themselves in the mirror, and identify their body parts.
Dolphins' large brains were believed to make them smarter and more intelligent than other species.
However, recent studies, this is fairly recent, recent studies suggest that dolphins are not as smart as thought by many scientists.
And let's see here.
The large brain of the dolphins help them retain heat and has nothing to do with intelligence.
This is Paul Manger.
He says, sophisticated cognitive abilities appear to play no role in the evolution of large brain size and cetaceans, indicating that alternative theories of large brain size evolution and cetaceans should be considered in more detail.
The intelligence of cetaceans is qualitatively similar to other vertebrates.
Sea lions can learn to recognize symbols more quickly than dolphins, but they have never been treated as more intelligent than dolphins.
And so, yeah, they're not...
Justin Gregg, a researcher and author of the book, Are Dolphins Really Smart?, also suggests that while dolphins show many cognitive behaviors, some other animals also have similar abilities.
Both Greg and Manger believe that dolphins are not as special as many people believe and that they are at par with many other animals.
These are all opinions.
No, no, they're not.
I mean...
We don't really have a proof of that.
But see, I'm not arguing that this proves my part.
I'm just saying that DNA is at the bottom of life, and everything is based on DNA, and we are just...
Everything's based on DNA. Okay.
So the original guy who said that dolphins were really smart...
Man, it's the dream of the dolphin!
Yeah, yeah, I know my goofy techno.
All right. So this guy who wrote 19 books on the intelligence of dolphins, here's a little bit of bio for him.
In the early 1960s, Lilly was introduced to psychedelic drugs such as LSD and later ketamine and began a series of experiments in which he ingested a psychedelic drug either in an isolation tank or in the company of dolphins.
These events are described in his books, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, Theory and Experiments, and The Center of the Cyclone, both published in 1972.
So this guy basically dropped acid, hugged dolphins, had an epiphany, and calls himself a scientist.
Like, I'm sorry. I don't even know what to say.
That is unbelievably not science in any way.
It could be fun, don't get me wrong.
It may be fun, but it's not science.
Well, I'm not defending what he did.
I'm not saying any sort of that kind of thing.
I just think that we are deluded about...
Wait, was that a cat? Huh?
Was that a cat? I don't know what it was.
Oh, I just thought I heard a cat.
Okay, anyway, go on. No, no.
I'm not saying what I'm saying is based on Lily or whatever he did.
I'm not saying that at all.
I think we are deluded about ourselves.
Yeah, but you see, again, this is not philosophy.
I believe that we are deluded about ourselves, okay, in what grounds, compared to what, according to what data, what theory, what syllogism, what argument.
You just say stuff. Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this. Have you done any drugs, my friend?
No, I don't do drugs, no.
And the reason I ask is that in general, people who just, they're called deepities.
It's like stuff that kind of sounds cool, but when you think about it, it just kind of evaporates.
You know, it's like trying to have a solid meal from candy floss.
You know, you put it in your mouth, and it's like, hey, there's a big fistful of, oh, that's pretty much nothing.
It's sweet, rots my teeth, and spikes my blood sugar.
So, the reason that we know that dolphins aren't that smart is they're hard to train.
They can't be taught.
And listen, do you know how many people...
I mean, it's just... It's a basic...
I mean, it's like...
It's like no one's ever heard of capitalism before.
I mean, can you imagine how much money you'd make if you could sell Conversations with a Dolphin?
Conversations with a Dolphin!
My new autobiography.
But... If someone could actually get dolphins to do smart stuff, to give ideas, to give thoughts, to have conversations with people, my goodness...
Well, the one thing I would say is that if that happened, not only would everybody know immediately and people would like hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars from it, but somehow this would absolutely mean that a resource-based economy could work.
I don't know how. But all they need, all they need, all you need is dolphins.
That's all she needs. We can go back to the original question.
So you're basically saying that free will and determinism are not compatible.
Well, no, of course not. They're not?
No, they're not. Why?
Because... There are antonyms.
Free will says we have a choice and determinism says we don't.
Yeah, that's in a mathematical sense because if you have any...
No, no. See, when you say in a mathematical sense, you're not making any sense.
There were no numbers involved in what I said.
No numbers at all.
No, there's... So you can't say when I make an argument that's kind of a syllogism, you can't say, well, that's only true in a mathematical sense when I'm not using math.
See, in mathematics, you have an equation.
Let's say the speed is related to the acceleration.
And so you can say where, let's say, a solar eclipse will happen in the year, who knows, 3000 from now.
And you can calculate that.
But that's not exactly what nature does.
It operates in a different way.
But what I said had nothing to do with predicting eclipses.
It's independent of time.
It's independent of other variables.
An argument that states we have free will and an argument that states that we do not have free will can't both be true.
They are incompatible.
It is one at the expense of the other.
If we have free will, the argument we don't falls.
If we don't have free will, the argument that we have free will falls.
They cannot both coexist. It's like trying to go north and south at the same time.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
You keep saying that, but then you're terrible at communicating everything.
If every time I point something out, you say, well, that's not what I'm saying at all, then you're really, really terrible.
Because I am a good listener. I've been doing this for 11 years and before that for many decades.
I'm a good listener. I have lots of debates.
So if I don't have a clue what you're talking about, Shouldn't you take ownership for that rather than blame it on me?
Well, when you let me say something...
Ah, now we're getting passive aggressive.
All right. Okay, go ahead. No, I'm not passive aggressive at all.
I'm saying I cannot explain what it is if...
Determinism just means there are no options.
You don't have various solutions to conditions.
The experiment, if you repeat it, will give you the same result.
If it's philosophy debating or whatever it is, it's still the same.
Only these things are very complex in a sense that we cannot even understand them today.
Okay, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Let me ask you this. Do you at least accept That saying we have free will and saying we have no free will are incompatible positions.
Yeah, that's true, but that's not what the determinism is.
It is not opposing free will at all.
So determinism and free will both say we have free will.
So what do you call the position that says we have no free will?
If it's not determinism, what do you call it?
If you don't have an if-then-else statement...
No, no. You understand that there are people who argue that we have no free will.
Now, normally, in regular old English, maybe not in dolphin, but in regular old English, that's called determinism.
Now, there's something called compatibilism, which is a little different, but hang on.
You can't complain about me not letting you speak and then interrupt me when I'm five sentences in.
I mean, you can, but it's just crap, right?
So, there is a position that says we have no free will.
Normally, that's called determinism.
You say it's not.
So, what do you call the position which says we have no free will?
When we have no free will, yeah, you can call that mathematics.
What? Mathematics?
What does that have to do with anything?
Mathematics is a human discipline.
It's not a statement about human consciousness and its capacities.
Well, you describe things in nature with mathematical formula.
And these events have no free will.
Okay, so you mean physics?
Yes, but you see, for most people, physics describes inanimate matter.
And there's a subsection of physics, I guess, which is called biology, which describes life and its effects and causes and properties and so on.
So what do you call the physics?
Because you can't use the word physics to describe determinism, because determinism is specifically related to our capacity for free will, whereas physics is related to the entire universe.
So you can't use the word physics.
It's too broad. So what do you call The philosophical position that we have no free will.
Because I need to start using that word rather than determinism, which you've somehow redefined to include free will, which is why we're having such fundamental, well, at least one of us is having such fundamental confusion.
No, I agree with you totally.
That is the problem.
It is a problem of words and what things mean.
No, no, no. It's a problem if you redefine determinism to include a capacity for free will.
That's like redefining the word racism to saying, believes all races are perfectly equal and never has any problem with anything or anyone.
It's like defining love as killing people.
I mean, if you're going to take the wrong word and define it as its opposite, then it's going to be confusing.
So I need to know what word you use.
It can't be mathematics and it can't be physics.
What word do you use for this philosophical position that there's no such thing as free will?
I really think we get lost here totally because we're really talking on different levels.
No, no. I'm asking you for a clear definition and you're saying we're lost.
And you apparently are saying that we're lost because I'm asking for a clear definition.
Let me break it out for you kind of clearly here.
We're lost if you get to baffle gab and bullshit your way and make up whatever terms you want to describe whatever you want.
And if you don't actually provide syllogisms and you just use random word salads to attach to particular concepts, then we're lost.
The fact that you would accuse us of being lost when I'm asking you for clear definitions of what the hell you're talking about is crazy.
Clear definitions are the exact opposite.
Of being lost. It's like you and I are both lost in the woods and I say, okay, well, let's pull out our GPS and let's find out where we are on our GPS. You say, no, that will make us lost.
It's like, no, that's how we find out where we are.
So what is the word you use for the philosophical position that human beings do not possess free will?
I cannot answer that because the way you choose to phrase it doesn't allow an opening.
So everything's subjective for you, right?
I can just choose. We can't agree on a term.
No, it's not. You won't use the common term and you won't give me an alternative word.
So now it's just the way that I phrase things that is causing the problem.
It's not the fact that you are avoiding and resisting any clear definition of your position.
It's my fault that you won't give me a clear definition of the topic you want to talk about.
No, it's not your fault. It's a fault of history.
You mean the last 20 minutes or what?
No, the last million years.
Oh, so now the problem is, the problem is not that you won't give me a clear definition, the problem is the last million years.
No, I say that in a way.
It's just a lot of history is there and we have not transgressed yet out of that, but we will.
So we haven't transgressed out of the last million years of history and that's why you won't give me a clear definition.
I cannot do that because whenever I say, whatever I say, you try to put it in the frame that you are familiar with and it's not fitting.
I'm just asking you for the word to describe the position you want to talk about because you're misusing the word.
You're using the word determinism.
Hang on, you're using the word determinism to include free will.
That's not valid because then you have a word which traditionally means or it actually objectively means.
No free will. And you're saying, well, no, the way I use the word determinism includes free will.
And I'm like, okay, well, that's wrong.
And you say, well, that's the word I'm using.
And I say, okay, well, what word can we use for the position that includes no free will?
And you won't tell me. And you're blaming millions of history, and I'm sure dolphins have come into it somewhere, and it's mathematics, and it's physics, and it's like...
The weird thing is, it's not even that complicated.
I get that you're not going to give me the word, and you're going to just baffle-gab me and try to passive-aggressively blame me or history, because you won't take ownership for the fundamental responsibility you have in any intellectual debate, which is to define your damn terms.
Figure out what you're talking about.
And so if you say, well, I have no problem with making free will and determinism compatible, Well, sure, if you define determinism as free will, then you've just basically said, free will is compatible with free will.
A mental framework which allows for free will is compatible with a mental framework that allows for free will.
Wow! Philosophical genius, Aristotle, stand aside!
We have ASA tautology man coming through, right?
And so, of course, you have trouble if you define black and white as black, and you say, well, black and white are the same.
Well, yeah, okay, if you define black and white as black, then black and white are the same.
But you're not following any standard or objective use of language.
And so if you say, well, black and white are the same, you know, black is white...
Sorry, black is black and white is black, so black and white are the same.
I say, okay, well, what color do you have for white?
Or what word would you use for white?
And you say, well, I can't tell you that because we have a million years of history that stand between us and physics and mathematics.
At some point, I'm going to say...
You don't know what you're talking about.
And the problem is not that you don't know what you're talking about.
The problem is that you steadfastly refuse to take a break in your mind and say, okay, yeah, I guess if I want to talk about free will and determinism, free will and the absence of free will, that I do need to give my debating partner a word that encapsulates the no free will position.
And I get it.
You're not going to give me that word.
You've called up for some ridiculous emotional reason that has nothing to do with philosophy.
Well, like I said, if you describe nature using mathematical formulas, then you have exactly that dilemma.
Okay, so here's my definition of a mathematical formula.
Are you ready? Yeah.
Okay, so now it's been, what, 35 minutes?
I asked for your definition at the very beginning.
It's 35 minutes later.
And clearly, I'm not going to get a definition.
You're just here to play some kind of troll game and some emotional nonsense game.
I get that. And I'm sorry about whatever in your life caused you to end up in this very foolish position, but I'm not interested in that aspect of things right now.
Here's my mathematical formula, my friend.
Two plus two equals not you.
So let's move on to the next caller.
Alright, well up next we have Flipper.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Don't make me use my blowhole!
You know how that gives me a migraine.
Dolphins are pretty rapey too.
They are very rapey, I just wanted to mention that as well.
Talk about a rape culture, holy crap.
We need a Me Too moment for dolphins.
I'm sorry? We need a Me Too moment for dolphins.
It's all of us too.
Alright, well up next we have Willie.
Willie wrote in and said, I am a 35-year-old American male living abroad in a Latin American country.
I'm very grateful to my host nation for the opportunities it's afforded me.
I speak the language and make a concerted effort to conform when out in public.
However, I see many of the locals here have worked illegally in the United States.
In fact, many small businesses here earned the capital to start via illegal immigration.
They were willing to work long hours at significantly lower wages in the U.S. and disregard the consequences of bad credit, hospital bills, and other financial obstacles most American citizens cannot because they could simply pack up and leave.
They had a home nation to fall back on where the U.S. wages spent better and allowed them to advance further economically in ways Americans could not.
After having lived down here for several years, I no longer agree with America's de facto open border policy.
It seems lopsided in favor of developing economies and their citizens.
I see how their financial gain is at direct expense of low-skilled American workers, and to make matters worse because the American economy is in decay, many older Americans wishing to retire are being forced to leave and take their savings, Social Security, and other financial assets abroad.
In fact, some countries down here openly encourage Americans to retire here.
So first their citizens came to the U.S. to earn wages and send home remittances, and now they are receiving the added benefit of the disposable income of American retirees.
This may be great for them, but it is terrible for American interests.
As a foreign national living abroad, does my current disagreement with the relaxed immigration policies make me a hypocrite?
I certainly feel that were I to publicly voice my thoughts on the matter, I would receive backlash.
That's from Willie. Well, hey, how's it going?
Pretty good. How are you doing? I'm well.
I'm well, thank you. Thanks for the call.
Yeah, that's pretty horrible, isn't it?
Yeah, it's actually kind of interesting because years ago I used to be quite liberal in my views.
I worked with a lot of immigrants and I was very sympathetic to their cause, but after moving down here and seeing how they usually get a larger return on their investment, so to speak, I've changed my opinion quite a lot.
Yeah, I mean, politicians need to be able to give away free stuff in order to get votes.
And once the domestic population gets wealthy enough, you have to import populations that you can then give free stuff to.
And so, if politicians aren't in the position of giving free stuff, then the government is a lot smaller.
If the government is kind of reactive and just there to protect your persons and property, which occurred for about 12 minutes after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the Constitution, then this is what happens.
They're in the business of selling free stuff they didn't earn.
That's the politicians. That's what they have.
That's their whole deal.
That's their gig. Selling stuff they didn't earn.
Giving free stuff that they did not earn.
And so of course they want people to come in from the third world because then they can give people free stuff.
And by creating a really bifurcated society, like a number of rich people, very little middle class and a lot of poor people, they can steal from the rich and give to the poor.
That's their deal. So...
Yeah, I mean, the fact that money is flowing out of the United States, I mean, we know this in particular, like one of the guys, Carlos Slim, which I've talked about before, he, I think until recently, had a pretty significant stakeholding in the New York Times, and I think helped pay off like $400 million worth of their debt or something.
And he loves, of course, open borders and amnesty and all that kind of stuff because people from Mexico flow to America, they get a bunch of taxpayer money through welfare and other benefits, and then they send that money back to Mexico where people use that expatriated money to buy Carlos Slim telecommunications products, and it's a great deal. It's free money for him, it's free money for the immigrants, and it's not even massively higher taxes in the short run for the domestic population because it's largely funded through debt and other instruments and money printing.
So, it's sort of the next stage that almost no one saw coming, which was when they began to run out of the poor in the United States.
You see, the government runs out of poor, a redistribution of government that runs out of the poor is in a desperately bad situation.
Because their whole market is the poor.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
And so when they start to run out of poor people, then they have to make sure that they don't run out of poor people.
So they educate badly, they enclose in ghettos, they dump welfare to make sure that people lose their ambition, and of course they import massive numbers of people from the third world.
That is their food.
You know, when you run out of food, you go to the grocery store, and when you run out of poor people, you scoop them up from the third world and bring them in so that you have people...
You can give free stuff to.
Because if everyone's like middle class and above, not only do you not have a good excuse for giving free stuff away, but you taking from the very people that you're supposedly giving to.
Like if the government comes along and says, I'm going to give you $1,000 and all I have to do is tax you $3,000 to do it, then the gig is up.
People say, I think I'm okay.
Good plan, but I'm going to have to give you a negative on that one, right?
And so it's like, I can take two of your kidneys and then insert one back in.
Does that sound like healthcare to you?
It's like, well, maybe if you've passed out at spring break in Mexico, but for most people, not so much.
So yeah, they don't want to run out of poor people.
And... That kind of reminds me of what I heard Angela Merkel say years ago.
She said something along the lines of, well, because our population is aging...
We need to import people to support our aging population.
And I always thought, well, I didn't always think this, but recently I thought that that was a very weird statement because rather than reach out to the German diaspora people who have populated a lot of America over a couple hundred years, she chose to reach out to people who have virtually no linguistic or ethnic or cultural heritage or relatability and who are Completely incompatible.
I mean, if I were her, I would have reached out.
My family is mostly German and heritage, so I've always kind of resented that.
If she had reached out to us, we might have taken her up on an offer like that.
Well, how about white South Africans?
Right. No, but I'm sorry, just to interrupt as well.
But that, of course, the fact that Merkel and a lot of people are saying this, that she's saying, we don't have any money to pay for our retirees.
Right. Now, anybody with half a brain would say, wait a minute, what happened to all the money that Germans paid into their retirement plans?
Right. And they'd say, well, it's gone.
We spent it. And say, okay, so it was basically a tax.
And the German government, as is true of Western governments as a whole, the German government had no intention of using the money forcibly paid into retirement plans to actually pay for any retirements.
And of course, I mean, what's in your retirement, what's in your social security lockbox?
A bunch of dusty treasury notes, a bunch of IOUs.
There's no money there. And so to me, that should have raised a whole other question, which is, well, where the hell did all the money go?
The trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars that people throughout their working lives paid into their retirement schemes, where did all that money go?
And of course, it's all been stolen and spent and used for political bribery and used to prop up the Russian ruble in 1983 for another month.
And so that to me is a very interesting question.
Where's the money? Where's the money?
And the idea, of course, that you're going to bring in a whole bunch of people from the Middle East who don't speak German.
I mean, here you have an ideology that's had cousin marriages for untold hundreds of years, which does not propel you to the peak levels of human intelligence.
And of course, in a lot of Islamic doctrine, it is the non-Islamics who are supposed to pay you a tax, not you who are supposed to pay the non-Islamics retirement benefits.
So that's just not the way things work.
And of course, the whole point, it's not to bring in people Who are going to pay a lot of money?
I mean, nobody would really think that.
They want to cause a lot of social chaos so that they can impose austerity under states of emergency and not pay people's benefits that way because there's no money.
Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was going to say that what's terrifying for me is that for many years I completely subscribed.
I bought all that.
I bought all those lies. I thought, well, if we import the third world and give these people opportunities, everybody will win out.
But, I mean, you can't fix the third world by importing it.
I mean, one thing...
The third world has had exposure to the free market and limited government now for hundreds and hundreds of years.
If they could do it, they would have done it by now.
If they wanted to do it, they would have done it by now.
And in a culture that...
In a culture that respects only strength and power and dominance, bringing that culture in and then expecting to respect you and paying for them to be there, I mean, good Lord, it's a fundamental inability to understand what's different.
I mean, why would they want to be the West?
These people from the third world.
They look at the first world and they see massive debt, massive decadence, destroyed families, men who won't have children, women who won't have children, a decaying economy.
Come on! I mean, the lifeboat is smaller than the Titanic, for sure, but it's really impossible to lure someone from the lifeboat onto the Titanic after it's at 45 degrees.
The Titanic, that is.
So even if the West, at the height of its strength and power, was not able to motivate other countries to emulate the West, now, in the nadir of its decay, the idea that somehow...
We retain a robust enough example that the world will just want to be like us.
I do not think that's going to work.
Well, there's a huge misconception in the United States that all these immigrants want to be American.
And if you live down here, it's readily apparent that they don't.
They want to take advantage of an opportunity.
They want to go to the United States, earn some money there, Frugal with their spending while they're there, save, and then come back.
They don't really want to learn English.
They don't really want to assimilate.
They want to be loyal to their native nations.
And I don't see anything wrong with that, but I don't think the United States should be obligated to support that.
Well, people used to want to integrate before the welfare state.
Right. Because without the welfare state, you had to integrate if you were going to survive.
But now with the welfare state, and in that I include a wide variety of income redistribution schemes, along with things like affirmative action, which is just another form of welfare.
But in the past, sure, people used to want to integrate.
They learned English, they learned some values, they learned some cultural stuff, because that was the only way to survive and flourish.
It was a small number of immigrants relative to no...
Welfare state and massive opportunities if people learned English and assimilated.
But once you get large, particularly racial groups, but certainly ethnic as a whole, once you get large ethnic groups that can create this cyst or this island in America because of the welfare state, Then they don't have any interest in integrating because they can get all the money they want because the government's showering all this money on their little moat castle of independence or isolation or non-integration.
So, yeah, of course, that's the way things work.
Culture follows value.
And if you can get the value without changing your culture, fantastic.
In fact, if you integrate, if you assimilate in America or in the West these days, you lose government benefits.
So they're actually paying people to not change and taxing them if they change to Western standards.
So of course they don't. I mean, this is not complicated.
I do want to point out that it's kind of interesting.
Well, actually, it's interesting, but it's not surprising.
American expats living down here pretty much do the same thing that Hispanic immigrants do in the United States.
They form the little enclaves and the vast majority of expats down here do not assimilate.
They do not learn the language and they're very shocked at how things work differently and they often complain.
It's not everybody. I'm not saying that nobody assimilates, but usually the locals are quite surprised when they find out how well I can speak the language because Just most people don't assimilate.
Well, it's very pricey.
To learn another language to the point where you're economically valuable is at least 10,000 hours.
You know, you don't want to hire someone who's just kind of okay at the language to deal with difficult customers or to negotiate deals because misunderstandings can arise.
You know, we've all had that experience where you phone up tech support, right?
And you get someone with a really thick accent, and you're on a cell phone, and it's like, oh, Lord.
Shall I just hang up and try again?
You know, because it's like, they can't really understand you.
You can't really understand them.
You call and you find a native speaker or somebody who's really fluent in the language.
You're okay. Yeah, it's interesting, too, because where I live, there's even those sort of...
There's a lot of cultural and linguistic miscommunication, even between the people of the mountains and the coast.
Try watching Trainspotting without subtitles.
Right. My grandfather was actually Scottish, and I could barely understand half of what he said.
No, but the people up here in the mountains have their own way of speaking.
It's a colder climate, and the people down on the coast, the people from the mountains call the people on the coast monos, monkeys.
They say that it's always party time, that they have this completely different way of living, and they don't like it.
I mean, and it kind of makes sense because down on the coast, it's warm all the time.
You don't really have to plan ahead.
Whereas up in the mountains- They are selected.
Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I would not be shocked in the slightest if there were a 5 to 10 IQ disparity between the people of the mountains and the coast.
People would probably crucify me for saying that, but it just becomes apparent.
People up here in the mountains are very, very different from the people on the coast.
It's crazy that people would expect to have an influx of people who are very dissimilar to them and have them assimilate.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Here's the racial difference too.
When white Europeans came to America, after a generation or so, give or take in general, nobody could tell where they came from.
Nobody could tell that they were a foreigner, so to speak.
Right. But you come over from Somalia, for the next thousand years, right, assuming a lack of miscegenation, for the next thousand years, everyone knows you're not from Europe.
I actually, when I first moved here, I remember speaking to an Ecuadorian woman who's actually still a dear friend of mine.
I really like her. But I said to her, I would like to speak Spanish as well as I speak English one day.
And she turned to me and she said in Spanish, but you can never change the color of your skin.
And it was just like, it was not life-changing, but it was like, wow, I really am different.
Like, they don't see me as one of them and they never will.
I'm not saying that they hate me.
I mean, everyone here is extremely nice to me.
No, it's like Japan. You can go live in Japan for 20 years, you won't be Japanese.
And most people in the United States just have no understanding of that, and I would actually encourage most white Americans to go live abroad in a non...
I've been in a white country for a while just to see that most other people see ethnicity.
It's not that they're going to hate you, but you're not one of them.
Of course they do. It's called evolution.
Right. Genetic in-group preference is the entire basis of evolution.
You have to care more about your own kids, more about your own genetics, more about your own tribe.
And people say, well, we have to move beyond that.
It's like, yeah, I'll believe that.
When you start hiring conservatives who are vastly underrepresented in media, academia, and television, then I'll believe that you're into diversity and all this.
But the left ferociously guard their own in-group preference and make sure that nobody else drifts in and then get mad.
Of course they do. Look, if you can convince the other team to pass the ball to you while you only pass to your own team, hey, sure beats having to train a lot now, doesn't it?
I actually totally agree.
I often have this argument with a friend of mine, and I say to him, imagine, it's like sort of the Good Son scenario.
Do you remember the movie The Good Son with Macaulay Culkin?
And I don't remember the other people's names.
I don't think I've ever seen that one.
Well, at the very end of the movie, Macaulay Culkin basically plays a psychopathic kid, and he does all these horrific things throughout the movie, and the mother eventually comes to find that He killed his younger brother.
He drowned him in the bathtub. Spoilers!
Sorry, go ahead. And at the very end of the movie, the son is hanging off the cliff and his cousin is hanging off the cliff.
I think it's his cousin. And the mother has to decide which one she's going to save.
And she ends up letting the son drop.
Now, she had a very strong preference to save her son, obviously, because he's more genetically similar to her.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Sorry, I have to get all biology on you there.
She is actually saving her genetics by not saving her psychopathic son.
Right. Well, that's what I'm saying.
Okay, I'm making that point, but in a really bad roundabout way.
Okay, okay, go ahead. I was saying to my friend that you can have overriding scenarios like that with the good son.
The mother can... She has a genetic preference to save her own offspring, but if there's something wrong with her offspring or if there's something that's going to inhibit...
No, no, no. She doesn't have a genetic preference to save her own offspring.
She has a genetic preference to save like genetics, which is a very different thing.
Okay. So if she's got a son who's killing her other children...
Then letting the sun drop saves her genetics in the long run.
Her resources being poured into something that's destroying her genetics.
It saves her nephew, and her nephew is probably more like...
No, but her future children, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that.
The future children, her entire gene pool, like this kid's part of an extended family, if he's off there killing kids, then it's harmful to her genetic proximity algorithm to have this kid around.
Right, okay. I guess the point I was trying to make to my friend was that if you, let's say you were in that scenario and there was somebody, you had a, I hate to be like this, but say you had a black child and a white child and you're white, you're more likely, if you disregard your social biases that have been implanted in you over the years, you're probably going to have an innate desire to save the white person.
It's funny how you make the white person that and not choose the black person saving the black child.
Because I'm white. No, it's not that.
It's a little bit more than that.
And listen, the studies have shown very clearly that babies fresh out of the womb prefer faces which have their own skin color.
So babies are racist.
In other words, if you have a moral negative that applies to babies, it is not valid.
Because babies can't be racist, obviously, but if babies prefer people with their own skin color, then given that that can't possibly be racist, the whole term needs to be rethought.
Of course, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess I just don't see how we're disagreeing.
Maybe I'm not articulating myself in an accessible way.
No, no, we agree. Yeah, listen.
Genetically, a black person will be more likely to save a black person.
I mean, if you have any doubt about genetic in-group preference, just if you want fun in a horrifying kind of way, you go to YouTube and you type in the following.
OJ Crowd's acquittal.
Right. Because after O.J. was acquitted for the double murder he did, then the whites were all stone-faced and horrified, and the blacks, in general, were cheering and having parties and dancing in the streets and so on, right?
Well, my friend brought up an issue, going back to that Good Son scenario where you would pick somebody to save and let the other person die, my friend said, well, what if it was a In this case, what if it was a white man and a black female?
If you're a man, you're more likely going to choose the female.
He sort of said that in a way that He thought that that totally undermined the whole racial preference.
No, because you're still proving...
Well, again, assuming that...
But if you're in a populated area, who knows, right?
But here's the thing, is that let's say that you're on a desert island and you're a white man, and then there's a white man and a black woman, then you're going to save the black woman because that's the best chance for your genes to continue because you can't have your genes continue with the white male.
Right. I totally agree.
I mean, I had a hard time conveying that to him, but I think he finally agreed with that.
It's about the genetics, not about the individual, and that's what I think we're agreeing on.
Yeah, totally. But I guess, to go back to my original question, am I a hypocrite for remaining here?
No, but you are a white person for obsessing about hypocrisy.
No, seriously, I'm not kidding about that.
Okay. What are you talking about?
Right, yeah, yeah, you know, yeah.
Like, what are you talking about?
You're making arguments. So here's the thing.
I was brought to Canada when I was 11 years old.
Now, so I can't talk about immigration.
But this is ridiculous. Look, if someone gets pulled into a lifeboat, and the lifeboat is now full to capacity, and they're the last person into the lifeboat, and the lifeboat is now like sinking, like one more person, the whole thing's gonna sink.
Does the last person who gets in, who says, we can't take any more people, do the people in the water say, you hypocrite, you got on board?
Right. The argument is the argument.
And if people are going to say, well, you can't make this argument because of X, Y, and Z. Now, I'm fully aware I have done the truth about Marx.
And I've made the argument, you don't buy the fat guy's diet book and so on.
And I understand all of that.
And that makes sense.
But that doesn't mean...
See, when I make this case, that doesn't mean...
That the fat guy who writes the diet book is automatically wrong.
It's just when you don't have a lot of time in life, which we don't because we're mortal, when you don't have a lot of time in life, you have to prioritize how you're going to spend your scant and short energies.
So your friends should give you the benefit of the doubt no matter what.
Now, if you're a public figure, that may be a different matter.
The idea that people would blame me for something that I was dragged in against my will to Canada when I was 11 I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm happy we came, looking at where England's at right now.
But the fact that people would try and blame me or invalidate my arguments for being dragged over to Canada against my will when I was 11, well, I didn't want to come.
I was happy in England.
But nonetheless, so, but your friends, your friends should give you the benefit of the doubt, because they're your friends.
Now, if you're just some stranger, then it's possible that you can dismiss someone based upon that, but your friends should never call you hypocritical for making this argument.
Yeah, I guess I just, I wonder if, um, well, I guess when you get down to it, I don't see it as being, like, I don't see myself as an immigrant here being an equivalent to an immigrant in the United States, because one, I came here legally and I abided by everything that was set out for me.
You're taking a lot of welfare there, brother?
No. You're taking a whole lot of taxpayer money from the local population?
Well, it's interesting because actually people are required to demonstrate That they have some kind of health insurance to come into a lot of the countries down here.
Of course, they're required to show they have some means of supporting themselves or they have to get someone who's going to take over their bills if they don't.
They have to show an income.
They have to show some savings.
They have to show something that shows they're not going to be a burden on the public purse.
I mean, what is talked about in Republican circles in America is considered insane and fascistic and evil and racist by a lot of people on the left.
And it doesn't go 10% of the way that most countries go in terms of making sure that their immigrants don't end up being a massive burden.
Like, other countries are insanely restrictive relative to...
Mexico is insanely restrictive relative to America.
So, it's so funny.
Like, if you were to take most countries' immigration policies and rebrand them as some Republican scheme, People would go insane, and they would say it's completely fascistic, and then you point out that this is Israel, or this is Japan, or this is Mexico, or this is wherever, right?
And then you hear crickets.
Oh, it's, I mean, it's mad.
This is the one huge problem.
I won't go on a big rant on this, but this is one of the huge problems with the left, my friend, these days, that they're in such a weirdly distorted echo chamber that they have no idea how insane they are.
Like, they literally have no idea.
How far from anything to do with the mainstream, not just of Western history or Western values, but of the modern population.
They genuinely believe Donald Trump had a 2% chance of winning.
And the fact that he won hasn't given them any pause.
They just assume, well, Russians, right?
They just make up. They literally just make up.
Like there's a rumor floating around the internet that I came to Canada because my mother had to flee IRA violence in Ireland.
Now, why would somebody make up nonsense like that?
Well, so they could say that I was a refugee and therefore I should never have any criticism.
Like, it's just, it's a way of making up a fairy tale in order to have people avoid my arguments, my data, the evidence that I've culled and the interviews that I have and all of that, right?
That was completely false.
Absolutely, completely and totally false.
But this is, like, they will literally just make up stuff.
Just, and they have no qualms in doing so, because for them it's just a higher purpose.
You know, for them it's like a guy with a gun to your head says, where's your kids?
I want to shoot them, and then you lie.
And so they feel this extremity of moral outrage, and so for them, it is such an extremity that they can just...
Make up whatever they want and feel perfectly justified.
They can say, it's Russia.
Russian collusion. Now, I don't think many of them really believe it.
But it's, you know, they have to get Donald Trump out of power because he's literally Hitler.
And so whatever extremity you go to is still perfectly justified.
It's like Oskar Schindler lying to the Germans to rescue the Jews.
And it's like, well, are you going to get mad at him for lying?
No. Because he had a higher purpose.
He was saving lives. And so they have abandoned any pretense.
At truth-telling, at honor, at integrity, they could just make up whatever they want.
You know, if they genuinely believe that it's guns that are causing, like gun ownership that's causing the deaths of little children in schools, well, whatever lies they have to tell, they will tell.
And this level of dishonor, like the fact that the left is there to a large degree, that they'll literally just make up whatever they want in order to get what they want.
They're just pathological liars because they have such a moral extremity deep within their heart that they feel anything is justified, even violence.
So, hang on, that's where the left is.
And you're like, well, I wonder if I'm being a little hypocritical because it's like, dude, I don't think you know the fight that we're in right now.
Oh, I do. Well, I believe I've woken up to that.
But I wanted to make another point, though, about the myth of the immigrant work ethic.
A lot of Americans have this notion that That all immigrants are extremely hard-working, and a lot of them are, but if you come down here and you meet people who worked in the United States for 10, 15 years illegally, the reason why they worked so hard in the United States is because they were getting exponential returns on their investment, so to speak. Nobody down here works 16-hour days.
I mean, they just don't.
If you go to any business around here and you ask to have something done, you'll often get told that it will take a few days, and a few days turns into weeks, and it can even turn into months.
I mean, there is a level...
I mean, you could say that white people are technically hung up, but other people lack a certain promptness and punctuality that I think...
No, see, with the Northern Europeans, you had to have 16-hour days during planting and harvesting time because you needed to survive the winter.
Northern Europeans were...
You actually had to be lazy in the winter.
Being lazy in the winter is like scuba diving.
Like in scuba diving...
You desperately don't want to exercise.
You desperately don't want to raise your heart rate, because then you use up...
It's a very lazy sport, right?
Because you want to conserve your oxygen as much as possible.
So, Northern Europeans and Siberians, very hard working in the summers, spring and fall in particular, planting and harvesting.
But... Very lazy in the winter.
And they should be, because they want to conserve their energies, right?
It was a lot of getting together and telling stories under a big blanket in a giant bed, right?
That was the sort of idea.
And so because there's this intermittent work ethic that is necessary, like this ferocious intermittent work ethic that is necessary in northern climates that isn't necessary in southern climates, Then, where you can plant, not as far north as the sort of Inuit, but what happened then as part of capitalism is they said, okay, so we've got people who are willing to work 16 hours a day.
Let's just make that year round.
And that capacity to do that kind of went that way.
And that's one of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution took off so much as you had a work ethic within capitalism.
The genetic group, which then you could just stretch out for month after month after month.
And that was the Protestant work ethic, as it's been called.
And it has been called the foundation of capitalism and so on.
I don't believe that that's true, but I think it was material once you got a free market and you had a population that was used to significant sections of hard work in the year to just stretch that out.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right. Okay, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really, really do appreciate your time.
And yeah, don't worry about hypocrisy, man.
Here's the funny thing. If you don't care about hypocrisy, nobody else will.
But if people don't have arguments, they'll try and focus on hypocrisy.
Okay. Well, thanks a lot, Stefan.
I appreciate it. Alright, well up next we have Sarah.
Sarah wrote in and said, The reason I want to have this call is because recently my boyfriend broke up with me after two and a half years and his arguments were, you have too many red flags.
Stefan Molyneux says this and that about this and that.
So you are too much of a risk for me and I don't want to continue and take this risk.
If someone has the red flags, childhood trauma, promiscuity, drugs, emotionally unstable, is it always going to be a risk?
Is it possible to truly heal and be virtuous or will it always be a risk at all times because you cannot change the past?
Can a person with red flags ever get rid of the risks it creates by doing self-work or will it always be a risk despite?
I really want to make better decisions in life about relationships.
Stefan always says, why is everyone calling me afterwards?
Well, I try to call him beforehand and use it as advice to make better decisions.
That's from Sarah. Well, hey Sarah, I'm sorry to hear about your relationship, but I appreciate the call.
Thank you very much for having me.
Whoa, that's quiet. Oh, is it okay now?
Yeah, that's better, thanks. How long ago did you break up?
The first time with the same reasons was November, and the second time in January.
Okay, so you broke up twice, and it was based upon his...
Interpretation of my message about red flags, is that right?
Yeah, I think so.
Right. Now, you mentioned four things that I think are important, and I'm just curious whether or not they apply to you.
So childhood trauma, promiscuity, drugs, or drug use I assume, and being emotionally unstable, do those all apply to you?
Yes, unfortunately.
And I do sympathize with that.
So, what happened in your childhood?
Let's start with that. Well, when I was born, my biological father and my biological mother were political active in Iran.
So, my father went to fight against the regime and unfortunately died.
And my mother, me and my sister...
Sorry, do you mean died or was killed?
Yeah, was killed during the fights.
So my mother, my sister and me went to Iraq and stayed there for three years.
But the time came that it was not safe anymore for me and my sister.
We were three and seven to stay in Iraq.
The place where my mother was, they said to her, this is not a safe place for children.
You have to send them away.
You can go with them, but you have to send them away.
And my mother was then 23 years old back then.
So for her, it was a difficult decision to stay with the group or to go with us.
She was not capable of taking care of us.
So she sent me and my sister to Holland.
And then I got adopted by two Persian people who had also very traumatic experiences in Iran.
So the household was very unstable.
They couldn't provide Love and caring and stability.
And they had this way of abusing physical abuse to teach us certain values.
So in the whole childhood, I was abused physically.
What kind of physical abuse do you mean?
Well, just hitting in my face.
After I've done something wrong, they start hitting me.
And they tried to teach me what was wrong by hitting me and afterwards they were explaining what was wrong what I did.
So in my whole childhood, abuse was something very common.
I'm sorry, sorry. What a terrible lesson to learn.
And a lot of times, like, I don't know what your experience was like, Sarah, but for me, a lot of times, I really suspected that it was not that I broke rules, it's that someone was bad-tempered, someone was in a mean mood, somebody was feeling frustrated or angry.
Therefore, I would get hit, and then a transgression.
Would be invented because sometimes I would be able to get away with stuff and sometimes I wouldn't.
It would depend upon the mood of the adult.
And so, for me, I learned pretty early on that the rules are invented to excuse the punishment.
Breaking the rules does not trigger the punishment.
The punishment is triggered by a bad mood, but the rules are used as the excuse, so that the person who's abusing the child can feel that they're enforcing rules rather than just being an abusive person.
Yes. Well, my mother, not the biological one, but my foster mother, she really regretted that she hit me.
Like she, when I got older, she said I was wrong for hitting you.
So I actually could forgive her because she...
Why did she change her mind?
Because she saw the damage she has done and she learned more and she got more self-knowledge.
She went to therapy. She had a really traumatic life herself.
She went to this prison in Iran.
People get tortured there.
She went through a lot of therapy for herself and found out that her ways were not the best ways.
But she was also under the influence of my foster father.
Who had been brought up in the same kind of youth as what he did to us.
Like his father would beat him also.
So she learned from him.
She didn't know any better. She was 23 when I came to Holland.
And he was 33.
So for her, she was like, okay, this man who I live with, Does it a certain way?
It should be right. And she just copied her, his way of doing.
And after she went to therapy and learned a lot, she said to me, she came back to me and said, I was wrong for hitting you.
That's not a good way to treat a child.
And she was really regretful and I forgave her.
My father I didn't forgive because to this day, he won't admit.
And I don't have any contact with him also.
And they separated, right?
Yes, they separated.
Actually, they weren't really a husband or wife because they came here as a refugee, like two friends in a home, in one house.
And we came after. They lived together for like a few years.
And then the point that they couldn't live together anymore because of the way...
They were bringing up us as children like they got all fights about how to bring up and how to raise us so they separated me and my sister went to my mother's house and my foster father had a son of his home and he lived with the son and after a few years my sister got into puberty and my mother was like okay I cannot handle this so She sent my sister to my father.
So I was left with my mother.
And then I got depressed because I lost my sister.
I couldn't see her as much as I wanted to.
So when I got depressed, she sent also me to my father.
And that was at the age of 14.
And that time of my life was the darkest time because there were a lot of fights every day.
A lot of hitting. I saw him beat my sister.
You know, it was very traumatic.
So that was a difficult time.
And at the age of 18, I just flew.
I just ran away.
I said to my father, I found a house of my own.
I'm going way by. You know, I just had the opportunity to go and I went as soon as possible because I couldn't live in that environment anymore.
Right. And how did you meet the ex-boyfriend?
On the internet. Right, right.
And what's his background?
Like, in what way you mean?
Oh, ethnic, religious, cultural, family, you know, give me the A to Z. I think the ACE score of him is zero.
He has a...
You must be very pretty.
Well, that's...
I don't know.
You sent some pictures.
You're very pretty. Thank you.
Well, I know that for sure the first...
Persian, don't you know?
Anyway, go ahead. The first reason we met was just physical.
Sure. I'm aware of that.
I'm not stupid. I know that...
So he was a good-looking guy? He was a good-looking guy and I was in a place...
Actually, there's a lot of details I have to tell in order for you to understand the situation.
When I met him, I was in a relationship.
Oh, you were in a relationship?
Yes. I'm actually very ashamed now.
Are you Tori spelling you?
Yes, you're totally right.
And if I could change my choices back then, I would have done it.
But that's what happened.
I was in a relationship, a really unhappy relationship.
And it was not that I was...
Actually looking for someone, but he came in my life and he filled that gap that I needed to be filled.
So I fell in love because of what I... Okay, he filled that gap that needed to be filled.
It was very physical. No, because it wasn't only physical.
Because in the first three months of our contact, I wasn't in love.
I was just talking to him.
And I learned to get to know him.
And then I fell in love for the things I missed in my own relationship he gave to me.
Like the emotional connection I missed in my own relationship.
I would never have cheated on my boyfriend just for the sake of he's pretty.
It's not valuable to me.
It was the emotional emptiness I felt in my own relationship which my ex fulfilled.
Now let me just go over the hypergamy checklist which doesn't mean of course that you weren't in love but I just wanted to sort of get.
Was he more handsome than your previous boyfriend?
Actually, he's not my type at all.
He's a handsome guy, but he's very muscled.
I was never attracted to muscled guys.
Never. In my whole life, I was always like...
But then you were. Okay.
So, he's handsome and he's muscled.
And what is his career?
He works. Is it a professional job that he does or what does he do?
No, you don't have to. You just give me the industry.
You don't have to give me the specific job.
He coaches people to get stronger, leaner, less fat.
Oh, he's a personal coach, a personal trainer.
Hello? Is that right? Yes.
Yes, that's right. And is he an entrepreneur or does he work for someone else?
An entrepreneur. Ah, is he making some good money?
Probably, yes. What do you mean probably?
Come on. I don't know.
What do you mean you don't know? You know the guy for two and a half years?
You don't have an idea how many coins he's got in his pockets?
He's making it, yeah, he's doing well.
Is he taller than your previous boyfriend?
Yes. Is he richer than your previous boyfriend?
No. Really?
Previous boyfriend made more money than an entrepreneur?
Yeah, I think so because he was an entrepreneur.
You think so? Well, I know...
See, first you said no, and then you said, I think so.
Well, I don't know his number.
I didn't check his bank account, but I know my previous boyfriend was a dentist, so he made a good money.
I'm going to go with dentist, not muscled.
Yes. Okay, so taller, more handsome, more muscled, making good coin.
Yes. And his personal qualities, his virtues, what were they?
Well, I sat down and thought about it.
I wrote down a few, like assertiveness, caring, commitment, compassion, confidence, determination, encouragement, passion, patience, self-discipline, wisdom.
Those were his virtues.
Right, right.
And did you have problems before he started listening to my show?
No. No problems at all.
I am the entire cause of these problems.
That's not correct. I got the power!
Okay, go on. We had problems, of course, because we started our relationship based on a lie.
We were in an affair.
Did he continue with his previous girlfriend while you guys were getting together?
Well, when we met, he had a girlfriend and I had a boyfriend.
And in, let me see, three months he broke up with his girlfriend.
But were you guys together in those three months?
Like, did you have sex? Did you date?
Yes, yes, yes.
So there was overlap.
Yes, we were both cheating on our relationships.
Wow. Yes, I know.
It's really, really bad.
I hope the steroids didn't affect penis size.
Yeah. I don't know.
Now that you know.
That you know. All right.
You don't have to tell me, but that you know.
No, I don't. All right. Although, actually, maybe not.
There's no null hypothesis, right?
Okay. All right.
So you were cheating and then you got together.
Yes. So your first red flag is that you cheated, right?
Yes. Of course, right?
You know that. I know that, yeah.
And did you guys, how long was it before you moved in together?
We didn't live together. Oh, you didn't?
Okay. No. Okay.
No. Why not? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't.
I'm just curious. Because the relationship was too unstable.
Oh, Sarah. Let me contrast two of your statements.
Yes. Number one, we had no problems before he started listening to you.
I corrected that.
Okay. All right. I just...
Okay, good. I want to make sure that I can put that in the review.
All right. All right.
Hang on. She can be a tiny bit manipulative.
Just making a note here.
That's fine. I just need to know.
All right. So what was unstable about the relationship?
We had a lot of fights.
There was no respect.
There was no trust.
You just listed off all his virtues and then you say there was no respect.
Compassionate, wise, like it was a whole, right?
It was a whole bunch of synonyms for big muscles, big penis.
No, I'm just kidding. So it was a whole bunch of synonyms for, like, nice, good, wonderful, virtuous guy, and then the relationship was really unstable, lots of fights, no trust, no respect.
No. Like, rationally...
Sorry, no, go ahead, go ahead. Rationally thinking, I know that, like, A person who cheats is not very virtuous.
That's not a virtuous person, because if you cheat, that means that you're not a reliable, honest person.
Can I just be really annoying here?
And I'm going to come to your defense and your boyfriend's defense a little bit, so hopefully that will help.
I can consider a situation, I can see a situation wherein cheating doesn't necessarily mean disaster.
If you're with two terrible partners, you've been doing a lot of self-work and you happen to meet and you click and there's virtue and it's like you're coming up for air for the first time.
I can understand how this can happen.
I can't fundamentally speak to the quality of the relationship, but I do know a man, he got together with his now wife when she was pregnant with another man's child.
And they're still together.
So... I guess that has worked for them.
Again, I can't sort of speak to the fundamental virtues of the relationship, but I can see a situation where doing the crossover may not be a disaster, but the big problem is, the big problem of this, is that if you are in a bad relationship and you meet just the right guy, you meet just the right guy to move forward in your life with, you know what the honorable thing to do is, the decent thing to do is what?
Breakup? Yeah, you end your current relationship.
You take some time to process.
You do your therapy. You do it wisely, right?
Now, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, right?
I mean, you probably even thought about all of that at the time, right?
Yes, I went to therapy during this event.
No, no, but before you sleep with the guy.
Yeah. No, I was not...
I wasn't even...
That was two and a half years ago.
I wasn't even... Thinking, like, how I'm thinking right now.
I wasn't... Alright, how long after you met him did you sleep with him?
The first time. I'm sorry, what now?
I just want to make sure I got that, because that sounded very tentative.
Speak up from the diaphragm, young lady.
The first time we met?
The first time you met, you slept together?
Yeah, like, first time we saw each other, yeah.
Well, hopefully not the first time you saw each other, because it was probably in a public place.
No. So, it was lust?
Yes. Okay, got it.
Got it. Yeah, it was lust, and I couldn't leave my relationship because I knew that.
Well, no, you couldn't leave your relationship with honor because you'd already screwed the new guy.
Right? Because, like, let's say that you meet the guy who's the guy of your dreams, you're in a relationship, then what you do is you say...
Okay, I want out.
I want the new thing to work.
So I need to break up with my current boyfriend.
We need to take a break to process the relationship.
We need to get some therapy.
We need to make sure that it's right.
If that would happen, this event would happen right now in my life, I would do that exactly.
No, no, I understand that.
I understand that. But I'm just looking at where the seed was planted rather than how it grew.
So... It began as lust.
Sorry? It began as lust, yes.
Yeah, yeah. So the problem with the meat bang, right?
Yeah. I guess in two senses of the word meat.
But the problem with the meat bang is that it shows a fundamental lack of capacity or willingness to defer gratification.
Now if you want to know, the fundamental thing you need to have a good relationship outside of virtue is the deferral of gratification.
Can you explain that?
Well, so deferral to gratification is not indulging your emotions in the moment for the sake of a greater good or a greater goal.
So everyone gets snappy, everyone gets mad, everyone has conflicts, and you don't ever raise your voice and you don't ever call your partner names because that does significant harm to the relationship in the long run.
You may gratify your own temper in the moment.
But it's like smoking.
Smoking satisfies your nicotine addiction in the moment at the expense of your long-term health and possibly survivability because like one out of every two smokers dies from smoking, right?
Yes. So, the capacity to defer gratification is essential.
Like, outside of virtue, that's the number one thing you have to look for in a partner.
Do they have the capacity to defer gratification?
Now, when we look for people, we often look for markers that they have the capacity to defer gratification.
Now, those could be education.
They could be having money.
They could be not being fat.
Not being fat is a marker for having the capacity to defer gratification, because food tastes good in the here and now, but nothing tastes as good as thin feels, as the saying goes, right?
So we're looking for all of these markers to defer gratification.
Are you a single mother?
Well, we'll find out a little bit more about this later in the show.
Do you have the capacity to defer gratification?
Because if somebody doesn't have the capacity to defer gratification, They will almost certainly become abusive.
Because abuse is satisfying your temper in the here and now at the expense of your relationship in the long run.
It is a fundamental inability to defer gratification.
So when you guys did the meat bang, You are both signaling your lack of ability or willingness to defer gratification even by one day.
And then you wonder why the relationship is so full of disagreements and anger and blow up and acting out in temper.
Because you met through your deferral, through your inability to defer gratification.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes totally sense.
And it's what we discussed a lot of times, like...
He was in an emotionally unstable place at that moment.
I was in an emotional state at that moment.
We were not thinking rationally.
The emotions and the hormones were just the leading way.
So, of course, that's how it started.
You started by sabotaging your existing relationships.
Yes. But here's the problem.
Why is he putting it all on you?
Why is he putting it all on you?
He's saying, well listen. Steph says, Steph Molyneux says, you have all the flags.
You have all these red flags, Sarah.
So you're the problem.
I'm perfectly fine, but you, you see, have all these red flags.
Now why do you think I'm skeptical about that?
He... I have no idea.
Well, did he do the meat bang as well?
Did he cheat on his existing girlfriend?
Did he end up in a relationship with no respect and no trust?
Did he end up with lots of fights and I assume verbal abuse flying back and forth?
Why, if he's so healthy, would he be with you two and a half years ago when you were where you were?
Because you're pretty. Yeah, and because we have some connection, emotional, physical connection.
No, you have lust. Yes, that's what I... And lust cannot last.
Lust is like expecting a fireworks show to give you daylight.
Yes, and that's where we end up right now, where we are.
And lust turns to hatred, because it's an act of self-contempt.
It's animalistic. Like in November, that's like six months ago, he started having these arguments that he chose to end the relationship with, but I keep telling it's not only the red flags of mine, it's the whole relationship that hasn't got a good start and base.
Here's the problem with lust. I just want to be clear to you and to the listeners.
Don't get me wrong, lust is great.
Lust for life, lust for success, lust for your partner.
But here's the thing. If it's only lust, the problem is, Sarah, as you know, you have to lie to yourself.
Because you can't look at your partner in the eye and say, I don't really like you, but you're rocking some cool abs and you've got a penis like a baby's arm holding an apple.
You can't look at that person and say, I only care about your body and your holes and I care about my outie and your innie.
And I care about dumping my load.
But I don't really like you as a person.
What you have to do when there's lust is you have to look at your partner and say, okay, I've got to make up a whole bunch of positive bullshit about you because my juices are flowing.
So I have to lie to myself about your qualities, about what a great person you are, about what a nice person you are, what a wonderful person you are.
When it's just base animal lust.
And the problem is not the lust.
The problem is that you have to lie to yourself about it.
And you have to lie to your partner about it.
And you end up trapped in this cage of falsehood and bullshit.
Where you're just lying to each other, lying to yourselves.
And that's where the no respect and no trust...
You can't trust each other because you're lying to each other about the value that you bring to the relationship.
Which is penis and pussy, right?
Basically. Well, I'm not agreeing with you on that because it has begun as lust.
But once you get to know a person better, more and more time passes, you see some qualities that you admire.
In the first maybe six months, I didn't see it.
It was only lust. But after that, when I saw these qualities, I learned to love the qualities.
Now, here's the lies I'm talking about.
I'm sorry, I'm just going to be really frank to you.
No, it's okay. So, are you saying that after six months of verbal abuse and fights, when the lust is burned out, you suddenly saw the quality of the person?
Come on. No, no, no. Because the first six months, it wasn't that horrible as it was in the last six months.
No, but you said at the beginning the relationship started with no trust and no respect.
No, because we all both knew from each other that we were capable of lying.
So, are you trying to tell me that you think that the relationship is fine when there's no trust and no respect?
No, that's not fine.
Okay, so don't tell me that the relationship was fine at the beginning.
No, I mean, there were no fights and no name-calling in the beginning.
But no trust and no respect?
Well, if you know someone who's capable of lying, then it's hard to trust that person.
Right. They have to prove to you that they are not lying anymore.
So, yeah, you had a lot of sex.
Virtuous. Yeah, you got a lot of endorphins, you had a lot of sex, and you bonded through sexuality rather than through virtue, right?
Yes, in the beginning, yes.
Right. And after lying to yourself and lying to each other and cheating on your partners and having empty photogenic sex...
You're saying at six months, these virtues began to sprout, and you began to appreciate him for his qualities of personality.
Yes. Is that something that's wrong?
That's just not believable, that's all.
But after...
You cannot know a person in the first two, three, four months.
You get to know them by spending time.
You knew exactly about each other, that you were cheaters and liars.
So you absolutely knew each other.
I'm not saying that's all you were, but that was definitely part of it.
Yes, that was part of it.
And that's why I'm saying that after a while, when you get to know a person on other things, you kind of appreciate the other values they have.
Okay. Now, his other values, if you can just remind me?
His self-discipline, which I really loved.
You mean his workout ethic?
Yeah, and his way of always having a goal to reach.
I'm on the same level on that.
I think life is about having goals, and he taught the same thing.
He had compassion.
I was caring a lot.
When I was upset or having problems, he was always trying to help me feel better.
He was assertive.
I like assertive people.
I like people who have an opinion.
So there were a lot of things in his character that I admired.
But in the first six months I was not busy looking at those qualities.
It was too dark. It was only about hormones, so I was not paying attention to his person as a person with virtue.
How does his self-discipline work with having the meat bang the first time you lay eyes on each other?
Maybe the self-discipline wasn't that high at that moment, but later on.
Well, no, not just that moment.
I mean, it went on and on for six months, right?
Yeah. And his caring for the feelings of his prior partner?
Yeah, the lack of it.
Very cold-hearted, right?
You get cheated on, it changes you, right?
Yeah. I don't know if you've ever been cheated on, but if you get cheated on, it really does a number.
I know. Really does a number.
I've never been cheated on, but I do know, and I've had deep conversations with people who have been cheated on, it messes you up.
I know. It becomes very hard to trust.
Very hard to feel adequate.
And... It brings a lot of baggage to the next relationship.
Yes. As was the case with your dentist and his former girlfriend, right?
Yeah. I mean, there is of course also the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases if you continue to have sex in your existing relationship while doing the meat bang with the new guy.
Yeah. You're right.
And that's very scary for people, particularly in these days of long-term and potentially fatal sexually transmitted diseases.
If you sleep around and then come home and have sex with your partner, you're bringing all that other person's prior partner's bacteria into his ecosystem, right?
Mm-hmm. And that's terrifying.
Yeah, I eliminated that risk by doing a test before and he took it.
You guys did... Oh, STD tests.
Yeah. Before, did you continue to have sex with the dentist while you were having sex with the personal trainer?
Yeah, but there was no possibility of...
But his drilling was terrible. Anyway, go on.
It's like he's got anesthetic.
My dentist boyfriend was a virgin, so...
You cheated on a virgin?
Yes, I did. So his first sexual relationship ended on him being cheated on with a personal trainer who's taller than he is.
Oh, man.
That's cold.
Yes. That is so cold.
I am really, really ashamed.
If I look back, I really hate myself.
Holy... How long had he been with his existing girlfriend?
Six months. Right.
Because, you know, especially if you continue to have sex with your partner when you're screwing the strange, they think back on that sex obsessively and say they feel really betrayed.
Because they wonder if you were having sex with them thinking of this new guy.
Which you probably were. Yeah.
And when you see your boyfriend treating his girlfriend with such destructive contempt, and when he sees you treating your dentist with such destructive contempt...
And I'm not saying, yeah, break up by all means, you know, but do it in a decent manner, right?
Don't do it with crossover, because that's incredibly harmful, right?
Like, to have sex with two people at the same time when only one person knows.
That's going to stick with someone.
It's like herpes of the brain.
It sticks around forever, right?
Yeah. Now, did your dentist ever suspect anything?
Yeah, he found out. Oh, you didn't even tell him he found out?
What was the plan after three months?
Were you just going to continue to juggle these balls?
Oh, it's so wrong.
I know it's wrong. I know it's bad.
No, no, I'm curious. I mean, what was the plan?
Well, I had no plan.
I was just being confused.
No, no, I'm not giving you that.
Come on. Confused.
You weren't confused. You weren't confused.
I mean, unless you're technically retarded, which you're not, you weren't confused.
You know, it was like rationally thinking.
I knew that my dentist's boyfriend was the best for me.
But emotionally thinking I couldn't be with him anymore during the lies and I felt I wasn't in love with him anymore.
But I had, like, a five-year relationship.
I had to give up. Wait, you were with the virgin dentist for five years?
Yeah. Ah.
I really thought I would get, like, old with this guy and have children and have family.
Well, if it's any translation, you probably aged him like a vampire.
Holy crap. You were with him for five years?
And then you screw in the personal...
I mean... Here we go.
Welcome to the MGTOW comments in the channel below.
I know. I was really afraid.
I hope this don't get up on YouTube.
No, no. Listen, you are going to increase sales of ball-peen hammers to guys to hit themselves in the crotch with.
To avoid this kind of situation.
I really hope that this conversation really helps other people not to make the same stupid mistakes.
No, no. See, you keep saying things like confused and mistake.
This was deeply wrong.
I know. A deep betrayal.
This was horribly immoral.
I know. I don't know that you do.
I do. I really do.
Because I have thought about it and listened to your shows and read about your Real-time relationship and virtues and everything.
I know how wrong it was and how wrong it still is.
How bad a person I was doing that to another.
A selfish, really selfish, not virtuous person.
Well, I don't want to say in general, but this action in itself was astonishingly destructive.
I know. I'm really aware of it and I regret it very much.
Okay, so you were together.
How did he find out, the dentist?
Well, he recorded...
He what?
Is it okay not to answer this one?
Perfectly fine. Let me just ask you this.
Did he find out in a way that was particularly traumatic or did he just get indications?
I think it was traumatic, yeah.
The night he found out, I saw something inside in him that I never...
I was so heartbroken.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I hurt him really bad.
Yes.
You weren't his, it was just his turn.
I was the lover of his life and I betrayed him.
And what was it in him you think that you had fallen out of love from?
His lack of Emotional...
How can I explain?
I didn't feel the emotional connection.
Like, rationally speaking, I knew he was the best man for me.
But emotionally, I couldn't feel it.
But what does that mean?
I'm not saying you're wrong.
I'm not sure what that means.
I didn't feel like I was in love or want to be with him physically or was emotionally attached.
Hang on, hang on, because there's a lot here that I'm just trying to sort of understand.
So when you say there was no emotional connection and then you say you didn't want to be with him physically.
Both, both. Well, no, because there was no emotional connection with the new guy, but you wanted to be with him physically.
So these two are not co-joined, right?
In you. There was no emotional connection when you had sex with the guy the very first time you met him, right?
We can say that for sure.
Okay, so I'm just sort of trying to understand.
Did his values change or did he...
Like, I can sort of picture...
I had a friend once who was...
A woman who was getting out of a five-year relationship and the guy had started off with great promise but had turned kind of lazy and distant and dysfunctional and smoked too much pot and, you know...
And, you know, she was just like, she was ambitious, she was doing well, and there was just a divergence.
You know, her life was having a trajectory and his was just kind of puttering along like some stalled scooter.
So, did something happen to his, maybe his drive or his ambition or his Did he become dull and plodding and boring?
Was there anything that changed towards the end?
Well, there have been some situations like he was really selfish with his house or money.
He was always like, this is mine.
I bought this and I will never share.
This is This is something you get from me.
You have to be grateful.
So these things happened in the second and third year.
Wait, he didn't give you money? Well, he gave me money, but it was always like...
He didn't give you enough money.
No, it wasn't that I wanted his money, but he was always very clear, like, this is my part.
This is for me.
I will never, ever have joint houses or joint business.
This is my share and you don't get that share.
Yeah, so it was his business that he had built and he had grown and he didn't want to give it to you.
Well, the business, we grow together, actually.
Wait, are you a dentist? I started it.
No, I was the manager.
I started the dentist office with him.
But he was always like, but this is my office.
This will never be yours.
So he disappointed me in a way that...
Wait, but did you get paid for being the manager?
Yeah, in the beginning, it was like...
If I wanted to buy something, I could buy it.
No, no, wait. Did you get paid for being the manager?
Not at the beginning, no.
Well, it's a startup, right?
But did you get paid at some point for being the manager?
Yes. I did.
Okay, so he was paying you for the services that you provided, right?
Yeah. And so you were being paid for doing work for him, so you were getting the benefit of his...
I mean, you wouldn't have anything to manage if he wasn't a dentist, right?
No, that's true.
So is it that you wanted to get paid more for being his manager?
No, I just wanted to know that everything we achieved together was for us together.
But why weren't you married?
That's what you do.
If you want to co-join everything, don't you get married?
But he would never co-join with me even though we would get married.
He always said that if you get married, it will be on terms that everything that's mine is mine and everything that's yours is yours and we will never share.
So that were his values that I really hated because I'm a person, if I achieve something when I have a relationship or a marriage, I want to share.
I don't care about mine or his or So we weren't on the same level on that stuff.
No, no, hang on, hang on, hang on. I don't know if you...
I'm just gonna have to say all this stuff, so forgive me and tell me if I go astray.
All right. No, please don't. You wanted his money because he was bringing a lot more economic value to the relationship than you were, right?
It wasn't about the money itself.
Yes, it was about the money. Oh, come on.
Don't tell me all of this.
It's about the principle. It's about the principle.
No, you cheated on the guy.
You don't get to talk to me about principles, okay?
It's about the money.
Before I cheated. I'm sorry?
Before I cheated. Well, yeah, I get it.
But you wanted equal financial stake in something you weren't providing equal financial value to.
See, this is the way it works in marriage.
And I'm sorry for sounding so annoying, but I don't know any other way to do it.
The way it works in marriage is, I mean, do you want kids?
Yeah, probably. Maybe.
All right. With the right person.
Well, clearly the dentist wasn't the right person, right?
Because otherwise...
Because it's one thing to say to a man...
I am going to take care of your household.
I'm going to help you run your business.
I'm going to raise your children.
I'm going to run your house, pay the bills, help you with your taxes.
So I want a share, an equal share of the income, right?
Now that is a reasonable deal.
And I think that's a fair deal and an equal deal.
But why would you get half of his stuff if you weren't even the mother of his children?
Like he did the dentistry school, you didn't.
He's working the dentistry hours, bringing that value to the business.
You're not. So why would you get half the business if you're not providing half the value?
And the only way you could provide half the value is to run his household and raise his children.
Or contribute equally in terms of income through whatever, right?
But then you wouldn't need. See, let's say he makes a quarter million dollars a year.
If you make a quarter million dollars a year, you don't need to commingle because you're both equal.
But if you're making $75,000 a year, he's making $250,000 a year, and you say, I want to commingle, you're just asking for a subsidy.
Now, you can ask for a subsidy if you're providing the value of raising his children and running his household, but if you're not, you just want free stuff, right?
Why should he give you his money?
You're not raising his children.
And you're asking to be paid to be with him.
Because basically what you're saying, Sarah, is give me $100,000 and I'll continue to have sex with you.
Give me $100,000 and I'll stay with you.
Do you know how humiliating that is for a man?
No, no, no. I'm not agreeing with you on that because that's not what I wanted.
Okay, well, tell me what you wanted that didn't involve him transferring money to you.
It was the fact that he would...
Like, I told him to share his everything with me after we had children.
I didn't expect it before, but his statement was, no, mine will always be mine.
But you said you didn't even know if you wanted to have children.
Well, we had the conversations, but I backed out of it because I knew that he was always going to have a way of saying, this is mine and this is yours.
But he would pay the bills while you were raising his children, right?
Yeah, while I was working on his dentist's office.
Right, so you would be paid for raising his children because he would pay your side of the bills, right?
Mm-hmm. So the fact that he didn't want to sign over the business to you is a different matter, right?
As opposed to if, like Sarah, you get married, you raise my children, let's say our expenses are $100,000 a year, I will pay your $50,000 a year as recognition of the fact that you're doing amazing and wonderful work by raising our children.
Yeah, but I started the office for him.
I did that. What do you mean you started the office for him?
Like, I started it.
He didn't have a dentist's office when I met him.
I said to him, let's go and start the dentist's office.
I will do everything for the dentist's office, like the management, and you can do your dentistry.
We started it together.
I started it, I went to the bank.
Who gets paid more, the dentist or the manager?
Of course, the dentist. Of course, because the dentist is bringing significantly more value than the manager.
No disrespect, but I mean, just economically speaking, it takes a long...
Did you have to go to school for six or seven years to become a manager?
No, I went to school.
Right. So what happened is you helped him to start his business.
So let's say he went from making $100,000 a year to $250,000 a year.
I mean, just whatever.
I mean, let's just pick those numbers.
And so, if he's making $250,000 a year and he's married to you and he's splitting his income with you rather than the business itself, then you're getting paid $125,000 a year for your role in helping him Increase the business and for raising his children.
In other words, you got a raise, like let's say he made $100,000 before, you just got married, then he'd split the income, you'd get paid $50,000 a year, right?
Now, you help him raise his income from $100,000 to $250,000 a year, that's a net $150,000 increase, which means you're now getting paid, instead of $50,000, $125,000, because he's paying for both sides of the income spend.
So you got...
You know, more than double your salary.
You got two and a half times or whatever it is.
You went from $50,000 to $125,000, right?
So you are getting very, very well paid for helping him to start his business, right?
But why does that give you the business itself?
You're being very well paid as long as...
Because I started it in a way that I thought that we would be also business partners.
But why would he be business partners with you when he's bringing the majority of the value?
Like, that wouldn't make any sense.
If I'm bringing, like, okay, so let's say a business manager gets paid $50,000 a year, and a dentist makes $250,000 a year, so he's bringing five times the value, why would he give you half the business?
He'll give you half the income while you're raising his children.
I wanted a recognition.
Even if he would give me, like, 10%, it was enough.
But why would you get 10% of his business?
Because I helped him build a business.
But you're getting paid for that.
Yeah, but it will never be mine.
Why should it be yours?
Because I started it.
But you're being paid for that. That's like saying, no, that's like saying, I'm a waiter at the restaurant, so I should get 10% of the restaurant.
If it was something you built?
No, you didn't build it.
He built it. You facilitated it.
No, he did the dentistry.
I did everything else.
But the dentistry is the business, you understand?
And you got paid for doing all of that, right?
But why would he give you the business?
What do you... Let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this, and I really, really appreciate this aspect of the conversation.
It's tough for some people, but let me ask you this, Sarah.
If you weren't his girlfriend, would you expect to get part of his business?
Yes. You would.
Yeah. So you think all office managers should get a stake in the business, should get an ownership of the business.
If the office managers start the business with the person with thought that it would be something you do together, he did not hire me just as a manager.
No, forget the doing it together stuff.
Forget the doing it together.
If you weren't dating him, Would you expect to get part of the business?
In other words, do you think that most businesses say to the business manager, you get a stake in the business?
Depends on why you do it together.
No, no, no. Forget the why.
There's an important reason why I'm asking this.
I need you to peel off the girlfriend aspect.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah. Forget being his girlfriend.
You're just, he's a friend of a friend, he's your brother-in-law, or whatever, right?
Okay, let's say some, like, my sister.
Let's say... She asks me...
Your sister's a dentist, right?
And you say, oh, you should, you know, you should, I mean, what is that?
You should take out some ads and you should get an office space, right?
And that's what you did? I went to the bank with the whole plan.
I made the whole dentist's office how it looks.
I built the strategy.
I did the marketing. I hired all the people.
I was the brain behind the whole concept.
No. I'm not trying to say that what you did wasn't helpful or important or good.
But I have been...
The chief producer in a software company, I was the head technical guy, the chief technical officer, and a salesman, and a negotiator, and did marketing, and, and, and.
And we had an office manager who did what you did, and they made considerably less than I did.
And they did not get a stake in the company.
Right? So you only get a loan because he's...
Like, if you went alone and said, I want to start an office, they'd say, no, you only got a loan because your boyfriend was a dentist, right?
So you help him get his business started, which is great, and I'm not trying to say that that wasn't important, and I have no doubt that you helped increase his income, which is why you got well paid for it.
So you got a job, and he got a business, right?
Now, would you expect to get profits from that business forever?
For getting the office going?
If we weren't boyfriend and girlfriend?
Yeah, if it was just some person you were working for or your sister or whatever, would you expect them to give you a portion of the business forever?
In other words, when you're 80, you're still getting profits from this business.
If they sell the business, you make money from the business, would you expect to get ownership in the business for renting offices, doing some marketing and hiring some people?
Maybe only because I was entering it as an entrepreneur.
I wasn't... No, no, I'm asking you, would you expect...
Yes, I would. You would, okay.
Now... In my case, I would.
Why in your case? Because I was entering it as an entrepreneur, not as a manager.
But no, no, were you being paid?
In the beginning?
In the beginning, no. How long were you not being paid for?
In the first two years, I think.
Yeah, first two years.
Oh, you didn't take any salary for the first two years?
No, I didn't. And then, did your later salary make up for that?
I don't think so.
It's not like he paid me double because I didn't have any income in the first two years.
No. He just set an amount and he paid me.
Were you happy with that amount?
Yes. And do you feel that it made up for the two years of no income?
No. And what were you living on when you weren't making any money for two years?
Well, I lived with him.
So you were being paid?
Just in kind? Yeah, like a roof on my head.
Wait, come on, just the roof on your head?
And clothing maybe.
No clothing, no entertainment, no vacations, no nothing.
Yes, yes, yes, all of that.
But that's not payment for my services, that's payment for being in a relationship.
Oh! You didn't just say that, did you?
I did. Oh, you didn't.
You've got a ka-ching on your pussy?
No. Oh, I think you do.
When you're in a relationship.
I'm sorry. We're going to have to pause and circle this one like a shark.
Okay, but because I didn't have got any pay in the first two years, I actually paid for my own vacation.
That's the price he has to pay for sex with me.
Right? Well, he always said, like, I paid you because you got this dress and then you got that dress.
I understand that. But if you were a roommate, he wouldn't be giving you that money.
The difference is you're having sex with him.
Yes. So, you expect to be paid for having sex with a man.
You expect to be paid in terms of he's paying all the bills for, I assume, a fairly decent lifestyle, and then you expect part of his business because you're bringing pussy to the equation.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but because you're bringing sexual access to the occasion, you want more than would be available in the free market.
He owes you for sexual access.
He should give you part of his business in perpetuity.
Now, you understand. I know you'll say that you only slept with this other guy because he didn't give you part of the business, but if he had given you part of the business and then you'd have had the meat bang with the personal trainer, do you think that would have been a wise decision on his part?
No, of course not. If he'd given you 10% of his business and then you'd had sex with another guy while continuing to screw him on the side?
No, that would be a terrible mistake of him.
It would be a terrible mistake.
So he made the right decision.
Yes, he did. And in business, I'm just saying, because you're kind of mingling these things together in your head, right?
And I really want to help you clarify this stuff.
In business, you get what you negotiate.
You don't get to say, but I'm having sex with you, so I should get more.
I mean, there is a name for that kind of business, but we don't want to go there, right?
So in business, you get what you negotiate.
And if you're willing to work for someone, for a roof over your head, and entertainment, and dresses, and dinners out, and vacations, and internet access, and heat, and food, and insurance, and healthcare, and dentistry, all of that kind of stuff, then you are being very well paid for starting out.
Listen, I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur and forego paychecks.
Trust me. I took a 75% pay cut to start doing this show.
So I know what that's all about.
And there was nobody paying me a lavish middle class lifestyle when I was starting out as an entrepreneur.
So you get what you negotiate.
Now saying, I was willing to do the deal and work with him.
Without getting part of his business and then resenting him because you feel he should be paying you more because you're having sex with him?
That's why he won't give you more.
No man wants to pay for it!
No man wants to hand over cash for sex.
That's why he wouldn't do it.
Guaranteed. Because if he gets the sense that you're saying, you should give me part of your business because I'm having sex with you, you're saying, I don't like having sex with you to the tune of 10% of your business.
In other words, you can fill the hole in me if you fill the hole in these finances.
That is profoundly humiliating for a man.
But that's not only what happened between us that I got...
Did I say it's the only thing that happened?
I'm just saying it's an important thing that happened.
His arguments for not giving it, sharing his things with me were because of his upbringing and his own parents' problems.
First of all, you keep saying like he didn't share anything with you.
He did. He paid your bills.
And I assume you guys weren't living in a hole in the ground, right?
So he paid your bills.
You were well paid. And your salary went up, so to speak, because then he paid your...
Did he pay your bills and then give you a salary as well?
No, no. Oh, so when he gave you the salary, you then had to pay the bills?
Yeah, I paid my own bills because we broke up then.
Because what? We broke up.
After we broke up, he gave me salary so I can...
So you can what?
So I can pay my own bills because we...
Wait, he paid you after you broke up?
Yeah. What?
After you did the meat bang with the personal trainer and cheated on him for three months straight while still having sex with him and then you didn't even tell him but he finally found out he gave you money?
Well, I still work for him.
Still work together.
I'm guessing, Sweden. Don't tell me.
Don't tell me. Don't ever, ever.
Wait, do you still work together now?
Yes. Wow.
Wow. We have, actually, we have a Good relationship together now because he know and he forgave me for what I did.
Hey, you know what? I may end up in two relationships of yours in one call.
Yeah. Yeah, listen, don't ever look down at your vagina and think of it as a moneymaker.
This is a general thing.
It is a terrible, terrible thing to do to a relationship.
Now, If you're providing value, like you're running households, raising kids and so on, it's not like your vagina is the moneymaker, but you're being well paid for the services that you're providing in the household.
But don't ever look down, and this is very, very important for a woman's self-esteem and for a man's self-esteem, self-respect.
Never look down and say, you owe me money because I'm having sex with you.
You owe me part of your business because I'm having sex with you.
You owe me special financial considerations because I'm having sex with you.
But that's not the case.
That's not the case in this.
Well, you can keep telling yourself that, but we've established that fairly clearly.
It was not like I was at home sitting doing nothing and he was bringing the money and I was saying, like, give me that.
No, I'm not going over this again.
We've gone over it like five times, okay?
So if people believe you, then they believe you.
If they believe me, then they believe me.
But I think we've both made our case, all right?
And I'm just telling you for the future, negotiate up front.
You get in life what you negotiate for.
There's no special physics.
The universe does not tend towards the arc of justice and fairness.
What do you get in life? You get what you negotiate.
You get what you ask for and whether people are willing to give it to you.
Like when I do my request for donations, freedomainradio.com slash donate, people give it to me or they don't.
If I don't ask, they probably won't.
If I remind them and say, here's the value I'm providing and so on and so on, right?
But don't ever look down and say, sexual access...
is part of my negotiation.
In other words, I'm going to negotiate differently because I'm a girlfriend than if I'm just some stranger.
Because sexuality in a relationship cancels itself out.
You enjoy sex.
He enjoys sex. Which means you're not bringing extra value because of your sexuality.
Because the moment you say you're bringing extra value because of your sexuality, you're saying that he likes sex more than you do.
That you don't like having sex with him as much as he likes having sex with you.
And that kills the sexuality.
A man wants to feel wanted for his mind, his heart, his soul, his body, his moves or whatever, right?
That's what the man wants to feel wanted for.
Now, his ability to provide, sure, that's part of it.
I mean, because he wants to go out and gather resources so that he can get a quality woman and quality children and a decent, reasonably comfortable lifestyle and so on.
But no man wants the woman to say, part of my negotiation is my vagina.
Because that devalues the sex that she's having with him.
And it is part of an old system.
Which, again, I'm not saying I'm entirely disagreeing with, but it's part of an old system.
Wherein women will say, I'm not working, I'm raising children.
I'm running your household. It's not the sex that he's paying for.
Nature did not so design women that women don't enjoy sex, but men do.
There's a reason the clitoris is where it is, and the boobs are in front.
Because the missionary... Anyway, you know all of this.
So... Men and women enjoy sex equally, which means women don't get to come and say sexual access comes at a premium.
Now, what does come at a premium is running his household, raising his kids, or whatever, right?
That's fine. That's fair.
But if you say, he owes me part of the business, when that's not part of any office manager situation that I know of.
I've never known an office manager to get part of the business, ever.
And again, it's complicated because he was paying the bills and so on, but this is what happens when you don't get married.
This is what happens when you don't figure out whether you want to have kids.
Women get paid for having kids and running households, raising kids and running households.
If you're not raising kids and running his household, well, I guess you get paid because you're helping him with his business, and that's great.
But the idea you would get part of his business simply for helping him to find office space and hiring people, and again, I'm not trying to diminish what you did.
It's important. But he's the product.
You're the facilitator. And facilitators don't get ownership.
I mean, the office manager who helped Microsoft get their first office Did not get Microsoft shares.
That's just not how business works.
Anyway, so I just wanted to mention that for future reference, because I want you to have a good relationship.
I want you to have a sustainable relationship.
And it's important to understand that he was right.
He was right not to give you part of his business because you betrayed him.
Now you can say, well, if he'd given me his business, then I wouldn't have betrayed him.
But then all you're saying is that my loyalty has to be bought.
No, because it wasn't only that.
It was more the unhappy...
Yes, but how much of the unhappiness came from you wanting part of his business and you perceiving him as being ungenerous?
Not a big part.
Small parts. Because if he would make me happy in other ways, this wasn't a significant problem for me.
Maybe the emotional distance also, maybe the emotional distance came from feeling that he was undervalued sexually.
Maybe.
Maybe a part of his own lack of emotional knowledge.
Um...
The first two, three years I was happy.
And then I started being unhappy because I relived my childhood.
and broke up my relationship with my father so I got in a really depressive time and I felt like he wasn't there emotionally for me to support me and to help me get past that so I felt really lonely that time in that relationship that also has had developed a feeling of disconnection with him so was he building his business at the same time?
Yeah. So he was supposed to build his business at the same time as being a therapist to you?
Yeah.
Do you think that's a reasonable expectation?
No, I don't know.
I mean, I'm just telling you my personal perspective on this, Sarah.
Something I desire. Yeah, this emotional support stuff is a big issue in relationships.
I don't feel supported. I don't feel emotionally supported.
You're not there for me. I don't think it's our job to be there for our partners.
To be honest, I mean, I'll just tell you straight up.
I could be wrong about all of this.
I'm just telling you straight up what I think.
I don't think it's his job to be your therapist.
I don't think it's his job to emotionally support you.
Like, the guy's building a business.
He's got other things going on in his life.
He's got his own family issues to deal with.
He's got whatever's going on, challenges at work and all that.
People aren't working. I mean, the idea that...
And it's a female thing in particular.
Like, I need this emotional support.
I need you to be there for me and so on.
But being there for someone who's going through a significant trauma is a very complicated and challenging job, right?
I understand that. I mean, you wouldn't say, well, I had cancer and you didn't give me chemotherapy, right?
Because that's a very technical and specific thing that someone would do, right?
So this idea that, well, I'm going through difficult stuff, it's like, well, then you need to go talk to a therapist, or maybe there's friends who can help or whatever, but did you have anyone else in your life who was helping you through this difficult time period, Sarah?
No. Right.
So it's all on him, right?
Your entire history, your problems with your father, like what happened in Iran, what happened in Iraq, what was happening with your mom, it was all getting dumped on him, right?
Yeah, I think so. And then when you didn't feel better, I mean, I'm sure he tried, right?
I mean, he tried to listen and so on, but I mean, he can't fix that, right?
No, he can't. I know he can't.
Nobody can. And what value were you providing in response?
See, this is the thing.
We always have to think not just of what we need, but what we can provide.
And adult relationships, it's value for value.
Now, it doesn't mean it's always going to be perfectly one-to-one.
Right? It doesn't mean, well, I washed one dish, now you wash a dish.
There's times where it kind of goes up and down depending on each partner's particular circumstance.
But it has to balance out.
Otherwise, one person is exploiting the other person.
Right? So, the fact that you're going through a difficult time, hey, it happens, and you're going to need support in that particular point.
But what's in it for him?
How long did this...
Emotional challenge go on for?
A year. It went on for a year, okay.
What's in it for him?
I think at that moment nothing because I wasn't capable of giving something to him.
So you were taking his money and You were taking his emotional energy.
You were taking his time.
I assume that it wasn't like there was a lot of sex or reciprocity or fun.
So what was in it?
We always have to keep asking this question.
Because a lot of times we try to go back to our childhood and get what we should have gotten when we were children.
You know, I have to be there for my daughter because I'm the adult and she's the child.
So when she needs something, I'm there for her.
And I don't sit there and say, oh, yeah, well, what have you done for me lately?
That's actually starting to happen now that she's nine or whatever.
It's going to be 10 this year. So I have to start training her in reciprocity.
When she was a baby or a toddler and she wanted to do some game, I wouldn't be like, nah, that doesn't really work for me.
But now I have to be that way.
She's an only child, so I just kind of have to mirror.
I can't just be there for her and do everything that she wants because it's not going to give her a sense of reciprocity and she's going to be kind of entitled when she grows up.
But the question is, you're going through a year of significant depression Which means that you need things from him, and you're kind of grabbing at his emotional energies like a drowning person at a stick of wood, right?
But we do always have to ask ourselves, what am I bringing for the other person?
Because we're adults now, which means we don't get childhood.
There's no do-over. There's no mulligan.
We can't go back and get what we want from our parents when we've grown up.
It doesn't work. We then become exploitive and users and manipulators and so on.
So, if you're going through a particular kind of crisis, you have to have in your head that you are taking withdrawals from the relationship bank.
Big withdrawals.
You need, you need, you need.
Support me, support me, support me.
I'm depressed, I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I'm anxious, I can't sleep, I can't sleep.
You're taking withdrawals.
And that happens.
Don't get me wrong. Again, it's a dance, right?
It happens. But you also have to Put money back in.
You have to put back in.
Now, if you are going through such a significant series of challenges, then you have to go and get professional help.
I have three years of therapy now.
No, I'm talking about back then and I'm talking about whatever may happen in the future.
You have to keep remembering to provide value to the people in your life.
You know, once you're over 18, and maybe even earlier than that, you have to provide value.
I mean, you wouldn't, if you'd had a job, you wouldn't have gone to your boss and sat in his office hour after hour crying about your dad, right?
Because at some point he would have said, listen, I'm sorry about your dad, but I got a job to do.
You either go to work or you're fired.
Like, you know, this is a place of business, right?
Well, all relationships are places of business.
All relationships are places of business, and one way to get out of depression is to provide value.
I didn't think of it that way, actually.
Because if we just take and we take and we take, we know we're not providing value, and when we don't provide value, we feel kind of worthless.
And I'm not saying, you know, I want to re-clear, I'm not saying weigh the balance every five minutes.
Well, I listened to you for five minutes, now you shut up and listen to me.
It goes back and forth, but it has to even out over time.
Yes. And if there's something that is just draining the relationship, you have to go and get it dealt with outside of the relationship.
Which means therapy, which means friends, which means sister, mother, family, I don't know who.
But you can't, like, if it's just the guy...
Holy crap. Need, need, need, right?
And then here's what happens though, I think for a lot of women, I don't know if this is the case with you, but then what happens is because you feel low, a low sense of self-worth because you're taking, taking, taking, you look down at your vagina and say, well, at least I'm putting that back in.
But that makes it worse.
I think people don't do that consciously.
No, no, I agree. I completely agree with you.
It's not a... Because if you say it, I think, oh, that's a stupid thing to do.
No, but I think that does happen.
Again, I'm not saying it's conscious.
And listen, men do it too, but they do it with money.
You know, the cliche of the man who works all the time but buys his children expensive gifts.
And men say, well, I'm not there, but I got to...
They look down and instead of looking at their crotch, they look at their back pocket where their wallet is and say, here's some money, kids.
Like making up for...
Yeah. Yeah.
That's right. So we went really off topic.
You think? Yeah.
I don't agree.
Can we go just a little bit back to my first question about my red flags and my future?
Because that's something I really can't answer myself.
I know I... I've made bad decisions a lot in my past and I really want to be better make better choices and I don't know if I can undo consequences like for instance the drug use I did a lot of self-medication just doing drugs just forgetting the pain I felt And actually when I stopped doing it,
all the history of my childhood came back to me.
It was like I was just putting it away by numbing myself.
So how can that be a consequence for my future?
You mean if you meet the next guy and he says, what was your life like?
And you said, well, basically at some point you'll say I did a lot of drugs.
Yeah. Yeah, well, that's a red flag for sure.
Okay, so... Now, if you say, well, I have now really focused on providing value to myself and I've gone to therapy and I haven't done drugs in so long and here's why and here's what I've learned and so on, right?
Because your question is, do you forever have to remain damaged or broken or a taker or whatever, right?
Yeah. And, no, I mean, I had a terrible childhood, and I am a good husband and father, and a good friend.
You have to do the work, for sure, but you can definitely overcome these things.
Okay, but can you overcome the damage it brought to your brains?
Well, you can do more than that, though.
Possibility. No, you can turn the weakness into a strength.
So that's subject drugs.
So how about promiscuity?
Well, I don't know because it affects women differently than it affects men.
So I don't know. Like you said that when women have a lot of relationships, they tend to...
Yeah, they're not good and stable wives.
Well, what's your number? What's your number of men?
Fifteen. Fifteen?
Yes. But you've been in some long-term relationships, right?
Yes. Yeah, one five years only.
One five years and one two and a half, right?
Yeah. Were the other ones mostly shorter term relationships?
Were there a few long ones in there?
One year, three months, six months.
Some none because, well...
It wasn't ever like, oh, I want to have sex with you only for the sex.
It was always like, okay, I like you.
I want to get to know you better.
I got to know you better. And then I got sex and I got to know you better.
And I thought, oh, no, this is nothing for me.
Right. So I quit it.
It was never only about the sex.
Yeah, I got it. I got it.
And I don't feel like I'm emotionally disconnected because of it.
I'm a very emotional person.
I can have a really emotional connection.
No, but emotional doesn't matter.
Stability matters. The ability to defer gratification matters.
Because here's the problem as I see it.
You're 31 years old.
Yeah. You're 31 years old.
Now, if you want to have kids, you're already a ticking bomb, right?
Yes. And if the man wants to have more than a few kids, you're off the market.
You're 31 years old, and the last relationship you had, you cheated on a guy with a personal trainer and had sex with him the first time you met him.
Those are the facts.
Yes. That was two and a half years ago.
Sure. But that's the latest data that's around.
Yeah. That's the latest data that's there.
Do I have to prove myself?
Well, you've got some hurdles to overcome in terms of being chosen by a quality man because you've got a lot of red flags, right?
Yeah.
Now, this just means that it's sort of like if you are a very handsome man or a beautiful woman, it makes it a little bit easier for you to be an actor.
right? Now, if you're not handsome or pretty, you can become a character actor, which generally means you need to be a better actor than the leading man or the leading lady, right?
So right now, You are no longer anywhere near the top of sexual market value, right?
You've had sex with 15 guys over the years.
You cheated on your last guy in one day.
You're 31 years old.
You don't even know if you want to have kids or not, and you have no experience in a sustained relationship.
And you just got dumped.
Twice. Which means that the guy made the decision and you wanted to stay, but he didn't want you.
That's important information for the next guy to come along.
So at your age, with your history, with your experience, with your track record, you're going to have to adjust your standards.
Now that's going to be very tough for you because you're used to hypergamy.
You're used to trading up. Trading the dentist for the personal trainer, right?
No. I don't think I would be ever happy trading down.
But you're going to have to.
Because you're past the peak of your sexual market value.
And you have red flags all over the place.
You know, it's one thing to go for a loan with a pristine credit score.
It's another one when you defaulted on your last three loans.
You say, well, I want the same amount of money.
You're not going to get it. Because you have a bad track record.
Yeah, but I would never be happy if I knew that I was trading down.
Right, right. Like, when I meet someone and I know, okay, this is a downgrade because of the red flags, I wouldn't be happy with that person.
Right. And that's why it's going to be very tough for anyone to date you.
Because a guy who you would consider a trade-up has way more options than you.
True. He can go and date someone who's 24, Who's got no track record, who never cheated on anyone.
He doesn't have to sit there and think of 15 penises that were there before him.
So the guys in your neck of the woods in terms of age and status, they have real options.
And there's no ticking biology bomb, right?
If he wants to have three kids, he'd go date some 23-year-old or 24-year-old who's going to be more stable, who's not going to have all this baggage, who's not got a track record of red flags.
And who's not like, we got to do this now!
And he's not going to wander into territory of genetic defects and fertility issues and so on, right?
So, I'm sorry to tell you, and I wish people had told you this before.
I wish women knew this before.
But you can't get what you got in the past.
You just can't.
Because you've hit the wall as far as age goes.
Your fertility, like 90% of your eggs are already dead and gone.
So if you want a guy who's, you know, tall, good-looking, rich, in his 30s, he's going to look for someone else.
So the question is, Can you settle?
Now, if you can't settle, then you have to be alone.
Now, maybe you can find someone.
Listen, these are just odds.
Some people win the lottery, right?
You might find someone.
But you had fun, you had your resentments, you had your history, and you had your tragedies, which I'm incredibly sympathetic for, and I don't mean to minimize or diminish those.
But you had the meat bang with your personal trainer, and then you tried to make it work, and it didn't work.
You had your drugs, which were fun, but caused instability, right?
You used your looks to gain attention.
You used your sexuality to gain attention when you were younger, which was enjoyable and more fun than dealing with your issues, which, again, I have massive sympathy for.
But when you have fun in your 20s, you pay for it in your 30s.
Yeah, I know. That's the rule, right?
There's nothing free in this world.
I feel it. Right.
I mean, you tell me, what is it, when you look around in the dating scene, where you are?
Sarah, what do you see? I'm not looking around, actually.
But I find most men are shallow.
Don't have goals.
Are not serious. About life.
About purpose. About virtue.
You know, in the past half years I learned a lot.
A lot more than I knew back two and a half years ago.
Have you really? Yes, I have.
Because now you're insulting men.
What do you mean?
Most men aren't serious.
They have no balls. They're shallow.
No. Most men here I met...
They're not... They're not...
No, come on!
They're shallow? You banged a guy's abs.
They're shallow? They're not serious?
You slept around on your dentist boyfriend with a personal trainer, but they're not serious.
I wasn't either back then.
Okay. But you say this like you're somehow above it all.
No, I'm not above it all, but I've learned...
By reading, by listening to you, what's important.
Okay, but how about you learn not to insult men you might want to end up dating?
Well, if they're not shallow, I won't insult them.
You're asking me what I see in the dating scene.
You fucked a pretty boy, Sarah.
You don't get to call men shallow.
Come on. And you say, well, it was two and a half years ago.
Yeah. And you were in your late 20s.
Like, I'm sorry, you...
I was stupid. You don't...
Anyway, this is the kind of disconnect.
This is the kind of red flags that men are going to see.
And this is the challenge you're going to have, right?
The answer is, I've made some really bad mistakes.
I'm working really hard.
I'll be lucky to land a good man, but I'm going to provide so much value, his head's going to spin.
And not because my head is spinning.
That is the correct answer.
I dug myself into a hole and I really have to provide a massive amount of value to a man in order to make up for the mistakes that I have made.
Yes. Right? That's the right answer.
The wrong answer is, men are dumb, stupid, shallow and ridiculous and they have no balls.
No, do you understand? Do you see the difference?
One is a realistic appraisal of the situation, and the other is, stay away from me, sane men.
Yeah, you're right.
You know, if my resume is I got fired from my last job because I stole from the manager, I don't think I'm going to go in all kinds of cocky to my next job interview.
No, that's...
Bosses are stupid and shallow and they don't know what the hell they're doing.
Hey, you want to give me a job? I stole from the last guy.
This is the... This is what I'm trying to get when you say, I've learned.
I don't think you have.
Yet. I hope this conversation helps.
And I'm not trying to grind you down or anything.
I'm trying to help you to get what you want.
You want a stable relationship.
You maybe want to have kids.
I'm really working as hard as I can to deliver to you what you want.
But if you go in after you cheated on a long-term boyfriend, With a personal trainer and it's been a wreck of a relationship and he dumped you and you go in all arrogant to your next date?
Oh my God, like I can't tell you how that is absolutely not going to get you what you want.
Figure out the value you can provide.
See, you could be all kinds of judgmental and haughty when you were 22, right?
I mean, I'm not saying it was wise, but you could get away with it, right?
Probably. But not at 31, not with your track record.
I mean, you can do it if you want, but it looks ridiculous.
Now is the time to figure out what you can provide rather than what you can take.
Yes. Thank you.
Now is the time to have the male experience.
The male experience when you're young is what can I provide, not what can I take?
I mean, unless you like the top 1% of look-see guys or whatever, right?
But the personal trainer who meat-banged you while he was in a relationship can't stand you.
That is not a good reference in the old resume.
I'm just saying this haughty stuff.
It will destroy you.
It will destroy any chance you have for happiness and for love and for connection.
Be humble. Listen, I'm not telling you anything I don't...
Every day, I do a show.
I rack my brain. I mean, I'm sitting there.
I get these questions ahead of time and I talk about them with Mike or I rack my brain and figure out what approach am I going to take?
What research do I need to do?
What... Every day, Sarah, I get up when I want to do these shows and I figure out what value can I provide to the world?
What's new? How can I be firm without being unkind?
How can I be decisive without being cold?
How can I be illuminating without blinding?
I mean, it's really, it's a tough job.
Let me tell you this, it is a tough freaking job.
And I'm very humble because I never sit there and say, well, I've got 4,000 podcasts.
I've provided enough value.
I have to keep providing value every single day.
I can't just repeat everything.
I can't just do the same thing over.
Some people do. They have like a one-trick pony or whatever, but we do everything here, right?
So I continually have to figure out how I provide value.
I'm not resting on my laurels.
I've got the biggest philosophy show in the world.
I'm not sitting there saying, well, time to coast.
No. I mean, I'm doing these shows.
I'm going to do speeches.
I'm traveling. I just finished another book.
It works because I humble myself every day about how to provide value.
And if you do that in relationships, How can you provide value?
How can you make other people's lives better and happier?
Not to the point where you're being exploited.
I mean, I ask for what I want.
I provide value and then I say, please help me out with donations or share or like or subscribe or whatever.
I provide value, but I don't do it to the point of being exploited, but I never ask for what I want.
I ask for what I want. Provide value, ask for what you want.
So I'm not saying be exploited.
But if you introduce yourself to a guy talking about how men have no balls and they're shallow and Not serious, and oh my god.
That's your view of men?
Well, the men I've met.
They'll run screaming. Well, they won't.
They'll just, they'll pretend to go to the washroom and climb out through the bathroom window.
Don't, don't do that. Don't do that.
I mean, that's not attractive even when you can get away with it.
And now that you're 31, it looks ridiculous.
This is like watching a grandmother on a stripper pole.
Taking it to extremes. You're not a grandmother, you understand.
but I mean in terms of like appropriateness to the situation in life I understand what I have to do and And... And you do have things to offer.
That's why I'm frustrated.
Yeah, I do. I do have...
You do. You have self-knowledge.
You've got therapy. You listen to this show.
And listen, you called up this show...
To ask a difficult series of questions.
And you're taking it magnificently.
You have great things to offer.
That's why I'm frustrated that you're acting in a way that's not going to have you provide them.
You're like a woman with a great voice who chain smokes.
Stop chain smoking!
So anyway, enough of sort of...
Tell me what you think and feel.
How you doing? Well, I get the answer.
I need it.
I hoped it would be different, but I mean, I was afraid of this answer.
What were you hoping for?
That I can undo the consequences.
Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe you can't.
I don't know, but...
The entitled gimme stuff, that's not going to do it.
Maybe, you know, if you can go back to your boyfriend and say, holy crap, listen to this.
And, you know, if he wants to call in, that'd be fantastic too.
But, you know, listen to this. I've really got some...
A wake-up call and, you know, I've been a taker and, you know, I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know.
But because you had such a traumatized childhood, it's hard for you to think of providing things because you're used to hoarding and you're used to trying to survive on very little.
When you grow up starving, you never think of sharing your food, right?
But you're in a situation now where you can do different than what was inflicted on you when you were young.
It's really hard that you lose something you love and care about because of the mistakes and past decisions.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
And I just want to tell you as well, you are already providing great value, Sarah.
Because in this conversation, you are saving people's love lives.
You are saving people's hearts.
You are helping people make a better decision with their life.
Now you're still young enough.
It's not like you're 40. You're still young enough to be able to get what you want.
And the fact is that your generosity in your heart and in your mind in this conversation has been an incredible gift to the world.
And it is very kind what you have done.
Because you've put yourself in an emotionally difficult position in a public forum for the benefit of strangers.
I really wish young people would listen and Decide not to make those mistakes of having relationships or doing drugs, go to therapy, you know?
I wish I did that when I was 17.
You did what? That I knew these things.
That I could have made better decisions if I did no such things now that I know now.
Oh, I read The Fountainhead when I was like 15 or 16, and it took me another more than 15, almost 12 to 15 years to actually start putting the values into practice.
So I know about the delay factor.
And again, this is why I sympathize and massively respect.
What you're doing, because you say, well, I wish people would make better decisions, but you're actually doing something that will help.
This will help tens or hundreds of thousands of young people, Sarah, make better decisions.
And that's very kind.
Thank you very much for your time.
You are very welcome. Will you let us know how it goes?
Oh, thank you.
All right. All right, let's do one more.
I'm just going to pause the video for a sec.
All right, let's do one more call.
Alright, well up next we have Jonathan.
Jonathan wrote in and said, Should I, as a father and husband, be more concerned with the philosophy espoused in a community, or engage with a community despite my reservations for the social well-being of my family?
What is more important, being free of philosophical fallacies, even if it means not being a part of a local community or finding a community that I can halfway stomach to increase the social circle and support my family, despite theological or disingenuous teachings?
That's from Jonathan. Hey Jonathan, how you doing?
I'm doing very well, Stefan.
How are you? I know why you stand now and pace around.
Sometimes I had to start doing that myself.
Oh, you mean just today or in general?
Oh, just the last hour or so.
You know, it's tough to sit.
It's tough to sit. And I think the sort of physical sagging that occurs, like the Klant-Kent versus Superman posture, the sitting just kind of hunches you over.
It interferes with blood flow to your brain.
Like, I don't think I could do what I do.
I don't think I could do it as well if I was sitting a lot.
How many kids do you have, brother?
I have three. A son and two daughters.
Congratulations. They're nine kids.
Six and three.
Excellent. Good spacing.
Good spacing. Yeah.
Every two years and three months, you're like, hey, honey.
Well, it wasn't quite like that.
We've had a miscarriage after the second.
We almost had four.
I've got another friend who's dealing with that, too, and I'm very sorry.
That's harsh. Yeah, it's especially harsh on the wife, on the mother.
All the biological...
Changes you go through and then losing and then trying to recover.
Yeah, nature, mother nature is a mass killing bitch in the womb.
I really, I sympathize, I sympathize.
And what is the situation for you?
I mean, are your kids in government schools or what?
Well, yes, they're in government schools, but why this matters to me so much and my wife and actually about 10 people in the family And not just an immediate family, but cousins and a sister, is because we all grew up as Jehovah's Witnesses.
That's what we were raised to be.
Aha! Quite a journey.
And if you know much about Jehovah's Witnesses, one of their favorite phrases, well, the way they refer to their faith, is the truth.
And it's anything but the truth.
Yeah. And the discovery...
Growing up in that and thinking you serve the truth, going, well, I'm sure in your area you see Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on doors from time to time.
Yes, indeed. You've probably seen them at your door.
Yep. And I admire them.
I mean, all the other stuff aside, they're in, and they're doing, and they're committed, and they are no fooling, and that's not easy.
It isn't. I did it for years.
I mean, they have different kind of programs.
They put people in where they call it pioneering or auxiliary pioneering, where you knock on doors 60 to 90 hours a month.
Yeah. Yeah. Try doing that while working or going to school when you're in high school or something.
It's rough.
Yeah. But yeah, I definitely still respect that of them.
Oh, no. I mean, if more people did that kind of stuff with saner beliefs, the world would be a better place.
Exactly. That's one of the reasons I'm calling, sir.
You are one of the very few, maybe one or two people in this whole world that I would put these questions to because I identify you as somebody that's really on the path of The truth.
You don't know everything. You're not perfect.
None of us are, but you're trying your best to uncover the truth.
Like in your book, On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, that I just finished this morning, you bring out that the truth is something we uncover, like an archaeologist.
And talk about it. It's in the conversation.
Like you and I will come across some great truths in this conversation that never would be in existence otherwise.
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I still...
Appreciate a lot of the scriptures in the Bible, even.
I mean, I'm an agnostic atheist myself now.
Well, sometimes I think of myself as a deist or, you know, kind of more agnostic than atheist, but kind of oscillate between thinking there couldn't be a God and maybe there's a prime mover or something.
That's just something I can't ever quite settle on.
But, no, with the witnesses, the real...
The thing that's a shame is I think probably 80-90% of them really want to help people.
And they think they're saving souls.
They think they're going to save people from Armageddon.
And they're living by particular values that most people would never be that dedicated to any value.
Yeah, well, the dark side of it is it's not just out of the goodness of their hearts either.
It's also because of Yeah.
Yeah.
So if they don't go at enough, then they get kind of shame for that.
And if they, I don't know how, where you are, how strict they are.
Like I kind of, when it comes to morality and it comes to sexuality, I think we, we all need to be balanced in our expectations.
We should not tolerate people that are promiscuous.
And we shouldn't tolerate rape and murder, of course.
And I fully support ostracizing people that do those things.
But, I mean, they ostracize people for looking at porn and admitting to having problems with porn addiction.
They ostracize people for celebrating birthdays and holidays.
Hopefully not with the same, like hopefully not with the porn birthday party.
Hopefully those two things are separate, right?
That would be... That's why I love you, Steph.
Happy Humday to you. Mix some humor in with that truth.
For your birthday, I got you this virtual reality helmet and a handful of goo.
All right. Oh, nice.
Well, I won't be giving that to my son in three or four years.
Good. So, John, what is the belief system that you feel might be most challenging or problematic for your kids?
Well, oh, from the Jehovah's Witnesses?
No, just in general.
What's the biggest one that is of concern to you?
Well, I mean, I also consider myself an objectivist.
I've read Atlas Shrugged and some other works of Ayn Rand.
I've read some of your works and some of other objectivists.
And probably the thing that I think is...
Kind of disappointing is how rare we are.
That's true. You know, I seek since...
Well, if you have a moment, I wouldn't mind sharing what happened when I decided to get out of the Witnesses.
Sure. Because that'll help you understand why I, frankly, want to find us a new home and a new community.
Sure. So, I got baptized when I was 14.
And when you get baptized as a Jehovah's Witness, they consider you in it for life.
If you want to leave, even voluntarily, you're going to get shunned and ostracized if you leave.
So, at 14, I was still a child.
And, you know, obviously, then at 19, I started having questions.
And I did a little bit of research, but just enough to scare myself silly.
You know, the internet was around 1999 when I was 1938 now.
And it scared me silly.
It scared me so much, I just couldn't look at it anymore.
I couldn't do any more research because the implications would mean if this wasn't the truth like they pronounce, that I would Maybe lose my mom and dad.
I would lose my sister.
I would lose my cousins, and I would lose all my friends.
Because with the Witnesses, it's not just a church you go to, and then the rest of the week you do whatever you want.
No, they have you busy doing stuff all week, and you're only supposed to be friends with people in the Witness faith.
So I put all that aside, and I tried to get my mind back in.
The game, so to speak.
And ran across a fellow witness.
I'm not going to say my wife's name because she just wants to keep her name out of it.
Because this is public.
But I ran across her congregation about 30 miles from where I live and fell in love.
Fell in love in October 2004 and then we got married In May 2005 and we, a couple years later, bought a house and started having kids, trying to do things the right way.
You know, trying to make a stable family.
But the problem is I found out shortly before we got married that my wife had been sexually abused when she was 13.
And the man who sexually abused her The church knew about it and they did not report him.
They did not do anything.
They did not let the rest of the congregation know and it happened numerous times.
And probably not just to her, right?
I don't know for sure, but there's a high likelihood of that.
He was 21 and she was 13 when it started.
Is he still around? He's not living in our area anymore, fortunately, because the temptation to go Bash his brains in would be too great.
It tortured me. I'd never done anything to the man, but the further away he is from me, unless I want to be put in prison, the better.
You know what I mean?
So I'm at a funeral one time, and I threw a Bible at him, and a bunch of the witnesses escorted me out.
And escorted him out because it was making the scene, but the outrage I felt, I couldn't help it.
I mean, if you love somebody, you know, you're supposed to...
It's not even about what you're supposed to do.
If you naturally...
I'm sure you love your wife.
If you saw somebody face-to-face that had done things to her and people knew about it and they did nothing, it would totally outrage you.
Yeah. Well, that happened...
Half a few years before I decided to finally get out.
Because of how much that bothered me, I finally did more research and researched the Bible itself and kind of, you know, not just lost my faith in the witnesses, but the Bible too as being the truth, being God's Word.
So I quit going to their meetings around April 2011 and then And this was actually, yeah, I need to, if you don't mind, there was a scene that happened the last time I went to their meetings.
My wife had just had our second, our first daughter.
My son at the time was a little over two.
And he used to love the Thomas the Train books.
And he was holding a Thomas the Train book beside me.
My wife is sitting beside him.
And then our newborn daughter is beside my wife on the fourth seat in the, you know, the to-go seat.
Struggling remembering the right word.
Anyway, my son, he lets go of his book.
He drops it and then he reaches out to grab it and he falls.
Well, I didn't catch him in time because I was sitting there so mad about what I was hearing at church, and so too self-involved.
And so, you know, he falls on the hard floor and hurts his head and his hands, and I'm mad at myself, and I'm mad at the place we're at for, you know, letting me get so full of outrage that I allow my son to get hurt like that.
Now, I picked him up and he was okay.
But then his little sister...
I'm sorry, I'm starting to tear up.
His little sister, who's only a couple weeks old, she starts crying.
And she hears her older brother in pain there at that place.
And seeing a little innocent girl and my little innocent son in pain at that place...
And my wife also really distraught.
I couldn't hold it in anymore.
And I just... After I had my son in my arms trying to calm him down, I looked at everybody and I said, No more.
No more. I'm done with this bullshit.
This is all bullshit.
Some of you know it's bullshit.
It's not the truth.
It never was. Can't do this anymore.
And, you know...
I did not intend to make a scene like that, but I did.
And that was me, finally.
Saying enough was enough.
And you bring up a very, I think, important point that I try to get across to parents a lot.
That if there's something in your life that takes you away from your family and your mind and your heart, that's something to be fixed.
Exactly. You may not have been able to catch your son no matter what, but you did have this sort of mind space where you're not kind of there.
Whatever is taking you out of your relationships is something to be solved, to be fixed.
It can't go on. Exactly.
Because your allegiance is to your wife, your allegiance is to your children, your allegiance is to your values, your allegiance is to your tribe, so to speak.
And if there's something running interference in your connection with people, that is a problem that needs to be solved damn quick.
Exactly. Well, what I did was I didn't go to their meetings anymore until, well, the next year I did go just one time.
They have what's called the memorial.
When they, at Easter time, they observe the wine and the bread.
They pass it around.
But I went that one time just because of appeasement.
My wife at the time still believed, even with all that had happened to her.
And my mother got on to me, just, please, I know you don't really believe anymore, but at least do this.
We'll feel you're still kind of saved if you do that.
So I went and I actually wasn't even mad when I went in 2012 to the memorial.
I was just like, really?
Is this what I saved away?
Is this what my family has been in for four generations?
Yeah, I'm a fourth generation or was a fourth generation witness.
But I'm like, this is ridiculous.
This is so pointless.
It's not helping people.
And that's what really would get to me too, is they go door to door and they think they're saving themselves, they think they're saving other people, and all they're doing is, I mean, yes, they may motivate people to not be promiscuous and not do some things, but they cover up pedophilia and they cover up other things.
Just family issues, physical abuse.
It'd be nice if we could get self-restraint and self-discipline without craziness.
Exactly. Exactly.
That's what we need in this world.
Can a brother get a virgin without madness?
Or do we just have to...
Yeah, I'm not going to toot my own horn too much, but I am proud that I was...
I resisted temptation that I was a virgin when I got married.
My wife's the only woman I've ever had sex with.
It doesn't mean I'm perfect or haven't viewed things I shouldn't have.
No, but it means that you're most likely going to stick around, and I'm sure that you will.
Oh, yeah. I would rather be dead than run away.
I mean, really. I can't imagine life otherwise.
So anyway, yeah, so November 2012, I turned in a letter, and I actually entitled the letter Evidential Morality.
And it's, after we talk, maybe you'll think that phrase is somewhat similar to your universally preferable behavior.
But I was trying to get down to the nitty-gritty about what made people good and what we ought to stand for.
So I turned that letter in.
To one of the elders, people in charge of the congregation, just about 10 doors down from where I live on the same street.
And then he came back asking me if I really meant what I said and asked me to sign off on it, and I did.
And a couple days later, they announced it, and my parents had to start shunning me, my wife and I. Our marriage almost fell apart because she could not believe that I finally did that.
She didn't know if she could be with somebody, no matter how much she loved them, that was going to be shunned by everybody else she knew.
Trying to fight like hell to wake her mind up.
It was already awake to a certain degree, but When you're in, it is a cult.
That's all you know.
It's unconceivable that you're going to do anything else, that there is anything else.
Well, the shining is very powerful.
Ostracism is very powerful.
And if it's not enough, John, for your wife to have doubts about the institution that protected the man who sexually abused her as a child...
It's tough for an abstract argument to make a stronger case than the tragic empirical experiences that were inflicted upon her and protected by the church.
Right, right. But there is also a little bit of a Stockholm Syndrome there as well.
Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry.
You're the last person I want to interrupt.
Yeah, no, we've made progress since then in 2013 and 2014.
It was rough and It didn't help either that I got involved in a local atheist group that's far left, that's very far left.
Well, all you had to say was atheist group.
I could pretty much get the far left from there.
See, that's part of my thing about it's a shame.
We're too rare, Stefan.
No, it's like in the battle between Rand and Marx.
I'm afraid that Marx has kind of taken the atheists.
Checkmate! Red.
Red King beats Blue Queen.
And me, I'm still like, no, no, I'm not giving up.
So let me tell you the way that I approach this stuff, and hopefully it will happen.
I appreciate all of that background.
Yes. The world is going to come to a crisis relatively soon.
Again, I mean, who knows exactly when, but you know how Jesus said, there are those among you who shall not taste of death before I return in all my glory.
Well, I shall not taste of death before the world crisis comes to pass.
So, there are only two ways to survive a significant crisis in society.
Number one, complete conformity.
Number two, complete independence.
Complete conformity or complete independence.
Those are the only two ways to survive.
I think half and half is bad.
So, if you think about life under the Soviet Union, life in the Soviet Russia and Communist Russia, if you completely conformed to it, you were probably okay.
Right. Probably.
I mean, it certainly gave you a pretty good art if you just completely conformed.
I mean, even someone like Solzhenitsyn ended up getting in trouble because he wrote letters critical of the regime, and it didn't come out of nowhere.
It's not just, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
So, if you completely conform...
You're probably okay. If you have complete independence, then you can see it coming, you can adjust, you can find a safe place to land, you can stock up your provisions, you can learn your weaponry, lots of different things you can do if you're completely independent.
So, complete conformity, complete independence, these seem to me the best options.
The stuff in the middle, which is where a lot of people are going to lie, is, to me, that's the danger zone, that is the risky zone, that is where you are likely to end up in the most trouble.
Well, again, this gets back to the original question.
I mean, as a husband and a father, it's not just me that I'm concerned about.
Of course. It's my three kids, it's my wife, my sister.
She has three boys, and she's still officially a witness, but she's trying to get out.
And you can't...
Most likely, John, you cannot reason these people out of what they believe.
They weren't reasoned into those beliefs, and you can't really reason someone out of a belief that he or she is not reasoned into.
But what you can do is you can provide an example of what a rational life looks like.
Now, that may awaken their desire for it, but they can't be reasoned into it, but maybe they can be empiricaled into it, if that makes any sense, like the evidence.
Like, you can't talk, if your whole family's fat and you're fat, okay, you lose weight, maybe they're like, oh, okay, he can climb stairs, he can play squash, he can go, you know, trampolining with his kids, he's, like, happier, he's healthier, he's, you know, he's glowing, then maybe they'll say, okay, I want to lose weight.
So sometimes you just have to be the implicit leader, I call it, right?
The explicit leader is, come and do this, and here's why, and here's the reasons, and go for it.
The implicit leader is, I'm going to go my own way, and what you see of me may be something that changes your mind.
Right, right, right. Let the evidence trump everything else.
I may not sit there and nag everyone in the world to not hit their kids, to reason with their kids or whatever.
Or I can drop little snippets about my parenting and how much fun it is and then maybe people will change their minds because they want that.
Like advertising is put on this eyeshadow and you'll look like this supermodel.
I mean, we know it's a complete lie, but they don't sit there and say, well, okay, here's what happened.
See, you invest $18 in this mascara and you can get a guy who makes $20,000 more a year.
So it's a small investment.
We've done the studies. Here's your return on investment and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
No, they just say, oh, you know, wear these glasses and you'll look like this model who doesn't need glasses who's wearing glasses, right?
And so, there's very little in this world that you can achieve through explicit leadership in the realm of values.
Implicit leadership in the realm of values has great power.
Because people say, I want that person's experience.
I want that person's life.
And this is why in, you know, weight loss programs, you see the before and after pictures.
You don't see the, here's the triglycerides, and here's the blood pressure, and here's the pressure on the knee joints, and look at these numbers, they've changed, and here's the estimated longevity.
It's like, bikini body ready!
You know, like, advertisers kind of understand that, and a lot of intellectuals, a lot of people who like values and abstracts and ideals, we don't respect advertising enough.
Like, advertisers, they know what the hell they're doing.
They know what they're doing.
They know what works.
And we should meet advertisers where they stand in modifying behavior because they have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on the line for the ads that they are trying to get people to take their products, use their products, buy their products.
And if you look at ads, and I actually, I do study ads, I look at ads, okay, what works?
What doesn't work? How did this ad program work?
Because there's some ads that are famous, but didn't sell anything.
My sister does ads for beer, actually.
Okay, so... She designs ads for beers.
Right. So, you know, the beer commercials don't generally say, your friends are boring, but with beer, they won't seem that way.
They'll give you some genuine party lifestyle that somehow everyone who drinks beer has washboard abs.
That's not actually been my experience in seeing people who drink beer.
Although it does apparently make boobs explode.
That's why I got man boobs.
Now I get it, finally.
You're feeding them with...
The only thing that's in man boobs is beer, which is why men shouldn't breastfeed babies.
But anyway, that makes them very...
I'm going to help them burp. So yeah, the implicit leadership of this is the kind of life you can have if you think for yourself.
This is why you can't go halfway.
Because going halfway is kind of like torture.
And if you say to people...
Oh, it was.
Yeah, it is torture, right? It was sitting there outraged and feeling powerless.
Yeah, if you say to people, here, come join me in the middle of nowhere.
Come join me in the null zone.
Come join me where I'm neither on the pier nor enjoying a boat, but I'm kind of splitting down the middle with one foot on the pier and one foot on the boat.
Come join me in this torturous middle land.
Where I have knowledge that tortures me, but not enough to make me happy.
So, if you go all the way, and you cross through the null zone, and you cross through the desert, right, the valley of the shadow of death, and you come out on the other side, I just talked about this, well, you just read about this on Truth, the village at the end where we can meet.
So if you get good companions and if you have a better life and if you go all the way, then you are a very powerful implicit leader for people.
But if you kind of go halfway and you're tortured and stuck in the middle, then you're actually repelling people from the pursuit of truth.
It's sort of like saying to people, well...
You're limping along. Yeah, yeah.
And you're saying to people, well, you can diet and it's really painful and difficult, but you're never going to lose any weight.
Do you feel like joining me on the diet?
It's like, no, you have to... You have to do it.
You have to do it. Go all the way, lose the weight, exercise, become healthy, and then people will do it.
But if you're only pretending to diet, but you're not losing any weight, and then people think you're depriving yourself of all these things, they're going to say, well, so you get all the negatives of dieting, which is you don't get to enjoy your food, but none of the positives, which is losing weight.
So I don't want that at all.
That's just a form of torture. It's like, hey, would you like to replace food that tastes good with food that tastes bad for absolutely no change in your body?
Well, no. We'd want that.
So you kind of have to go all the way.
You want to feel healthy.
I wish I had known about you back in 2013-2014.
I appreciate all this advice and it's helpful now.
It would have really been helpful then.
I was not able to communicate with hardly any family back then.
I mentioned my sister.
She's woken up and we talk daily now.
There was a shoot from late 2012 to June 2016, there was no talking at all.
I would send her a message, hey, sis, how you doing?
I love you. And she might say, I love you back, or she might feel so emotional about saying anything to me that she didn't.
And that's devastating.
Yeah. Yeah, no, the ostracism, I mean, I've got whole books on how ostracism should run society because it's very powerful.
Yeah, if it's used the right way.
It's like the nuclear option.
And if the case, you know, if what's going on warrants the nuclear option, so be it.
But don't use the nuclear option just because people believe differently.
Or because they celebrate birthdays or something.
Ostracism in defense of sanity is healthy.
Ostracism in defense of insanity is not.
I agree. Well, actually, it can be healthy in a way because then crazy people don't want to talk to you.
But emotionally, it's difficult with your family and particularly, of course, with your wife and so on.
I would say with regards to your children, you can't undo the knowledge that you had.
A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original shapes.
You can't go back to old John.
There's no path back, there's no route back, there's no rewind, there's no mulligan.
No, I don't want to be a witness again.
I've been to like the Unitarian Universalist Church a little bit.
And what I'm kind of dealing with, I like some of the people there, most of them actually, Quite a bit.
I've been there a couple times, but again, there's a mixing in the politics and it's tilted toward the left again.
And I have a choice, especially I live in the South.
And, you know, around here in the South, it's like, okay, what church do you go to?
And people's, most of their community, a lot of their support, even in, I mean, whether you're a Jehovah's Witness or not, comes from their church.
Whether it's a spiritual group or whatever like that.
And the church has gone as lefty as many other institutions these days.
Yeah. Yeah, so I'm kind of at the point where now, like, okay, I actually like being around a lot of the people at the Unitarian Universalist Church, and I'm like, okay, should I ran and bear some of the leftist talk and Should I worry about exposing my kids to that or other family to that or should I... No, no, listen.
Having your kids...
And I'm thinking more in particular of the nine-year-olds.
Having your kids exposed to ideas which are incorrect is not bad.
You know, it's like, you know, there's this idea that if your kids, you know...
Don't let them play in the dirt.
They have to wash their hands all the time.
And well, they end up with allergies and they end up with underdeveloped immune systems because we need a certain amount of rough stuff in order to gain strength.
We need resistance. So exposing your children to ideas that are irrational is fine.
Then you get a great topic of conversation.
You can teach them how to think and how to judge for themselves.
So I don't think we want to try and shield our kids away.
from that kind of stuff.
Now, whether you, and then having conversations with particularly your eldest about, you know, daddy likes to socialize.
I don't agree with everything.
And you and I are going to disagree with things.
My daughter and I are going to disagree with things over the course of her life, my wife and I, and this is going to happen, right?
So as long as the methodology for solving the problems remains constant, reason and evidence win out in the long run.
Disagreements are not only inevitable, but they're actually healthy.
So having your kids around people whose some of their beliefs you don't agree with, yeah, I think that's fine.
You have great conversations about things that you disagree with.
And they also will learn over time...
How to keep their tongue, how to hold their tongue at times, right?
The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
And there are times where we bite our tongues.
And this is a delicate balance to figure out.
Sometimes they'll blur it when they shouldn't.
Sometimes they'll keep silent when they should speak up.
And this is, again, just part of teaching your kids ninja commando moves for spreading virtue in a dangerous world.
Right, right. That makes perfect sense.
They want to see you navigating a difficult world with honor and integrity.
And if you don't go out and navigate anything...
They won't learn that skill from you when they need to, because unless they're going to go live totally in the woods, they're going to be part of society.
I'm sure they will be a positive and productive and healthy and virtuous part of society.
But I think just, you know, hiding away.
Like, I go and do these speeches.
Yeah, no, I don't want to hide away at all.
Yeah, I go and do these speeches.
There are lots of people there I disagree with significantly.
And we will have those conversations.
We will have those negotiations.
And that's part of what we want our kids to see, that We are not snowflakes.
We can function in the world.
We can disagree with people in the world.
We can encourage people to virtue in the world.
And I think that's going to be very positive and powerful for your kids.
They're, you know, they're stronger than you think of kids, right?
Kids are both weaker than we think and stronger than we think.
They're weaker than we think in that we don't get to beat them up without repercussions, but they're stronger than we think insofar as they can.
handle seeing imperfection.
They can handle bad ideas.
They can handle irrational ideas.
They can handle all of that kind of stuff.
As long as people help them navigate and are clear about the mental landscapes that they're moving through, we give them great strength that way, I think.
Right, right. Well, and I mean, shoot, in your book, the only criticism I really have is just, and I hate to criticize you at all.
Well, I hope not, because to love me is to help criticize me if I'm wrong, right?
Well, yeah, I don't want to be a sycophant.
I don't want to suck up to people and just agree that's Jehovah's Witness mentality.
Oh, don't say anything against the leadership because they're straight from God.
No, we're all human.
The thing I wrote down on here was, let's see, you talked about it's natural to love children because they're our offspring.
We have an attachment for them, and I agree with that.
But the thought of...
I came up with was children are also full of natural wonder and they easily identify whether we're being honest or not.
So they know whether people are being good or whether they have integrity or not.
And one of the things you brought out about teenagers challenging their parents, a lot of times when teenagers are a problem or seem to be a problem, it's actually the parents that are the problem.
Because the teenagers are calling them out on their bullshit and their hypocrisy.
So, yeah, kids, man, the kids, shoot, I don't know if I, I don't think I would have stood up that day and said it was bullshit.
I don't know if I would have voluntarily left if it wasn't for my kids.
Well, it would be easier, right?
Because it's one thing to inflict it on yourself, but to inflict it on your kids who have no choice in the matter, it's a different thing.
Yeah, well, I mean, I couldn't.
I just, I didn't see myself raising them like that.
I mean, as a kid, when there was anything holiday related or birthday related at school, I went to the library.
I had to go isolate myself.
I did not want to subject them to that.
It's a long time to be lying when you're a parent.
You know, you're around your kids a lot.
And, you know, you may want to rethink government schools if you have any options.
But you're around your kids a hell of a lot.
And if you have to kind of falsify and lie things to them, that is...
18 years, at least, of not being yourself, and that's not good.
I couldn't do it. No. Well, listen, John, I hate to interrupt this, but it's been a very long show, and I'm sorry that you got the tail end, but I always want to gear down when I'm beginning to lose my concentration.
I hope this helps.
If there's anything else I can do, please call in when I'm fresher, but thank you.
Thank you so much. For your time, thank you everyone so much for your attention, for your support.
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