June 25, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:05:42
4129 Syrian Migrant Against Syrian Migration - Call In Show - June 20th, 2018
Question 1: [2:11] - “I'm originally Syrian and currently German. I came to Germany in 2008. I did my master’s in physics, I did then my PhD in particle and atomic physics, and then a did post-doctoral period in physics, and then decided to become a software developer professionally. I've been developing software since my masters. I've been doing software development professionally for over a year. Now basically the question I'd like to discuss with is: Where the hell am I going to go?”“To put this question in context, I'm a workaholic. Besides my day job as a developer in the space industry, I have 3 other jobs, which is freelance work as a crypto developer, and my own personal project of a cryptocurrency exchange, and finally consultancy work for the university, since I built a communication platform they use for some experiment. And with all this, I trade cryptocurrency, so I made even more and more money... but... I'm going to pay half of it as taxes!”“As you can imagine, someone who works this much wouldn't be happy with 45% taken off his paycheck. My fault and sin is that I make so much money because I work hard. And instead of buying a big house for my family after living for years in apartments that range in size from 25 to 57 square meters, I have to pay taxes for those ‘refugees’ that live in 120-meter apartments and sleep every day until noon and don't even learn the language of the country. I'm talking from what I saw and what my wife saw with our naked eyes. And yet, those people complain and are not happy with everything they're getting for free, while I tear myself 16 hours a day working... and let's not forget the sexual harassment my wife started receiving since the migrant crisis.”“And it's not getting any better! Although the dominant right-wing part in Germany got highly voted in the last elections, it still isn't enough. The vote results are like 17% or something. And to be clear about my culture, I and my wife are ex-Muslims. Currently I'm a flaming atheist, the kind that had debates with people and argues using quantum mechanics and quantum field theory why this universe probably doesn't have a creator. So after all this, I'm thinking of leaving... this country is going down and is continuously taking a cut of my children's money... where the hell will I go? All western countries have gone crazy with leftism, and I don't see a way out! Should I just stay in Germany and shut up and outlive this crisis? How should we deal with this?”Question 2: [1:39:35] - “I always hear Stefan urge people to have kids when they’re young. Please explain how this is possible in today’s economy? If you’re going to have a baby shouldn’t you own a home first? You would at least need a two-bedroom apartment preferably in a safe area near a good school. Most people of child bearing age don’t have the same opportunities their parents had. We are faced with sky rocketing home prices and rent. Heck, higher prices for just about everything except for stupid electronic gadgets. Jobs opportunities are few, precarious, and often low paying. Few young people can afford the healthcare needed to have a kid. Many don’t have healthcare at all. Many are living hand to mouth where having a kid is just not feasible without outside support.”Question 3: [2:32:21] - “Do atheist tend to lean towards far-left ideology? If so, why? I once believed that socialist governments tend to push towards atheism, but I am beginning to believe that maybe the reverse is also true. I am surprised that many critical thinking nonbelievers are so quick to buy into the half-truths and unsupported claims that socialism offers. They will argue against religion using empirical evidence and logic yet when choosing a political affiliation, they throw reason and evidence out the window. I'm increasingly concerned about this due to the growing numbers of "NONE"s here in the US and what impact they may have on the future of our republic.”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
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Three callers tonight, but some great conversations.
The first, very interesting call.
It's a Syrian migrant who came to Germany who thinks Germany is far too overrun with, wait for it, you guessed it, Syrian migrants.
What a conversation about ethnicity and integrity and culture and history.
And the second caller didn't like, or I guess doesn't like, that I make suggestions about people having children when they are young.
Well, let's just say he's in a demographic where it seems hard to understand why the stipulation or encouragement would be relevant, but all of that is answered over the course of the conversation.
Now, the third caller, well, get ready to be outraged, atheists, because he wanted to know, well, do atheists tend to lean towards far-left ideologies, and why?
Well, It's very illuminating, what we talked about, and I hope that you will check it out all the way to the most magnificent end.
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Alright, well first today we have Sam.
Sam Rudinen said, I'm originally Syrian and currently German.
I came to Germany in 2008.
I did my masters in physics, I did my PhD in particle and atomic physics, and then I did a postdoctoral period in physics and then decided to become a software developer professionally.
I've been developing software since my masters.
I've been doing software development professionally for over a year.
Now basically the question I'd like to ask is, where the hell am I gonna go?
To put this question in context, I'm a workaholic.
Besides my day job as a developer in the space industry, I have three other jobs.
Which is freelance work as a crypto developer, my own personal projects of a cryptocurrency exchange, and finally consultancy work for the university.
Since I built a communication platform they use for some experiments.
And with all this, I trade cryptocurrency, so I've made even more money, but I'm gonna pay half of it in taxes.
As you can imagine, someone who works this much wouldn't be happy with 45% taking off his paycheck.
My fault and sin is that I make so much money because I work hard, and instead of buying a big house for my family after living for years in apartments that range in size from 25 to 57 square meters, I have to pay taxes for those refugees that live in 120 meter apartments and sleep every day till noon and don't even learn the language of the country.
I'm talking from what I saw and what my wife saw with our naked eyes.
And yet those people complain and are not happy with everything they're getting for free while I tear myself 16 hours a day working.
Let's not forget about the sexual harassment my wife has started receiving since the migrant crisis.
And it's not getting any better.
Although the dominant right-wing party in Germany got highly voted in the last elections, it still isn't enough.
The vote results are like 17% or something.
And to be clear about my culture, I and my wife are ex-Muslims.
Currently, I'm a flaming atheist, the kind that had debates with people and argues using quantum mechanics and quantum field theory why the universe probably doesn't have a creator.
So after all this, I'm thinking of leaving.
This country is going down and is continuously taking a cut of my children's money.
Where the hell will I go? All Western countries have gone crazy with leftism, and I don't see a way out.
Should I just stay in Germany and shut up and outlive this crisis?
How should we deal with this?
That's from Sam. Hey, how's it going?
How's Stefan? Can you give me the pronunciation of your name again?
I can just say Sam.
It's fine. It's Samer.
It's Arabic. I can handle one extra syllable.
Well, it's just not pronounced that...
Easy in English or German or any language.
So I just gave up eventually and Sam's fine.
I'll go with Samer unless I get it completely wrong.
That's fine. So what's the story?
Give me the little history of your backstory.
Originally, Siri, and when did you leave?
Why did you leave? What happened?
Well, I used to be in Emirates for 18 years until I finished my high school.
I had to leave the Emirates for family conditions.
And then I went to Syria and did a bachelor in physics.
So since I went to Syria, Syria is not for me.
It's a corrupt country. It's a corrupt system.
I mean, people go there in physics and have a dead end.
We are there to become teachers.
And this is not me.
This is not how I operate.
So I was looking to leave Syria since I arrived there.
Finally, after I finished my bachelor, which took four years, and then one year in preparation, like IELTS and GRE and all these exams, I succeeded and left to Germany, to Stuttgart, where I did everything.
Basically, I went to Germany to study.
I did a master's, I did my PhD, and this backstory that you saw there.
I don't know if that answers everything.
Basically, I continued, and Eventually, I wanted to become a scientist, but it's really difficult, and since I'm so experienced in programming, all groups would throw me at programming projects, so I would not have become a very good professor.
I don't know if you know in academia, if you don't publish so many papers, you don't have a good chance.
Oh yeah, publish your papers, right?
Yeah, exactly, exactly that.
So, since I'm really good at programming, people have been throwing me at programming projects again and again and again.
And so, eventually I decided, well, I may as well just do it professionally and make more money.
And I still have my connections.
So you kind of did probably a decade or more of physics research and ended up doing something not particularly related to physics.
Well... Good job, higher education!
Way to provide economic value to everyone included.
That is true.
Although I have to say that although I did physics, my master's was computational physics.
And my PhD was like half of it was in programming.
Like I developed some magnetometer and that required some real-time data analysis system, which I did in C++.
Like very high performance stuff.
Yeah, but you taught yourself the programming, right?
Yeah, that's true. Right.
That is correct. So the fact that you use something self-taught to help in your physics degree doesn't make your physics degree any more valuable because you probably would have taught that stuff yourself because it's very interesting.
That is true. That's true.
But having a project where I can apply that...
This is like the Brian May story.
I'm going to get a PhD in physics.
No, I'm going to write Fat Bottom Girls instead.
All right. And what was the family conditions that...
Was it UAE that you were in?
What were the family conditions that caused you to leave?
Well, okay. Basically, we started a company and we were scammed.
This is like a very long time ago.
We were scammed by some Emirati.
Because in Emirates, there is this law that foreigners are not allowed to own property.
So you cannot even own a company.
So my mother wanted to start a company, by the way.
I'm from a single mom.
My dad left since I was 10 years old.
So she started this company and she went into lots of trouble and the company was scammed out of her.
And she had to leave Syria eventually for legal reasons.
So I stayed there for a year.
I finished my high school and then I went to Syria after her.
I couldn't stay. And besides, education in Emirates is very, very expensive and very crappy.
So, I mean, there was no reason to stay there anymore.
All right, okay. So your mom had to leave.
Was she going to be sued or was being sued?
She was sued and she was, you know, in Emirates it's quite easy to be deported.
Like really, if you pick up a fight in the street, you'll be deported.
It's that easy. Yeah, you know, it's amazing how easy immigration and demographics can be when you have an absolutist monarchy as opposed to some sentimentalist Ivanka Trump whispering in Daddy Trump's ear kind of democracy.
But yeah, all right. Oh my God.
I mean, I'm looking through what's happening here.
People like refugees break the law every day and no one cares.
The police don't even have the power to To cuff them or something.
Well, no, because if you arrest people based upon their criminal activity, you're going to end up arresting a lot of migrants.
But that's racist, you see.
So you can't do that.
So you basically have released fairly feral people into the general population, disarmed the general population and made sure the police can't deal with it.
It's not really very sporting when you think about it.
It's quite scary.
I mean, I'm I'll divert you to a different topic a little bit, but I'm really scared.
I mean, for this project I'm running, this exchange thing, if I put a few servers in my apartment and I get attacked, what am I going to do?
I mean, I swear, if I have the power, I'll get some assault rifles and protect myself.
But I can't. I can't protect myself.
And I can't expect the police to protect me.
What am I going to do? Were you safer in Syria than you feel in Germany?
Absolutely not. No, Syria, I mean, look, in Syria, you don't have a chance to succeed unless you have corrupt connections.
No, no, no, security.
No, sorry. I just meant in terms of you said that your wife is subject to sexual harassment, I assume, from the migrants.
She was harassed all the time there.
She came here in like 2012 when she was safe.
No one was harassing her.
And suddenly in a year or two, everything started over again.
Oh, so she was being harassed in Syria.
You flee to Germany, and the wave of grabby Middle Eastern hands kind of follows you, right?
Exactly, exactly. And she tells me, like, no one harasses me except for Arabs.
Sure. Like, I mean, even Germans, when they want to talk to her, they talk nicely.
And then she shows them the ring, and they're fine.
Okay, they just... Thank you for your time.
Yeah, some cliches are there for a reason.
And the grabby Arabs, the grarubs, I don't know what you'd call them, but that may be there for some empirical research.
And what is she facing from the migrants in Germany?
Very different things that range from sudden grabbing and running to stalking.
Like, once there was this guy who stalked her and she had to lose him.
Oh, just following and following, right?
Making comments. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, she wouldn't want him to know where she lives, so she had to lose him.
Right. Right.
Right. And what is the mood from what you can see, Samer, in Germany?
I mean, are you able to talk privately?
Do people express private concerns?
Or is it pretty much like, no, this new country is fantastic?
Oh, no. I mean, okay.
When I was in my postdoctoral time, I had huge fights with my colleagues on this refugee issue.
Huge. And they were all leftists.
They were driving me crazy. I mean, back then I was so ignorant.
I didn't know this leftist, rightist, all this stuff.
I didn't know any of it. I was like, guys, those people are different.
How are you just bringing all these numbers here?
I mean, it's basic statistics.
If you get 100 people here, you can change them maybe.
But if you get 1 million, they will affect the population here.
This is like, you're a scientist.
How can you accept this?
And they start making these cliches of answers.
I don't know.
The best argument that I heard of one of them, which is not true, but is just the best because it was honest, was that those people will help in pension payments.
Those people will help in pension payments?
Yes, this guy was worried that...
Yeah, so the people from the low-IQ countries and from a fairly hostile ideology who don't bother learning German and who kind of look down on you if they're Muslim.
They would look down at non-Muslims as being somewhat inferior, if not the enemy, that's certain flavors of Islam.
Those people are going to be just fantastic for paying your pensions.
Yes, yes, yes.
And the funny thing is that, I mean, he was always, this guy was always coming back at me and telling me, hey, why are you any different?
Why don't you think of them as you?
And I was like, dude, I came here, in two years I left my religion.
I abandoned everything I had for like 25 years.
I mean, do you really see everyone doing that?
And he would not understand this difference.
I mean, I don't give a shit about it.
Wait, wait. So he doesn't understand that certain regions might have different belief systems and different people, so I guess everyone in Germany is a Nazi, right?
Because, you know, it's Germany, so everyone has to be the same.
By the way, he was on the verge of calling me Nazi a few times.
Sure. Sure. That's what happens when they run out of facts and arguments that work, is they just go to pulling the Nazi bomb and rolling it under your tent, right?
Yes, yes. I think he just didn't say it because of professional courtesy or something.
Well, listen, I mean, in defense of the Germans, right?
So... There's been this great void of understanding in the modern world.
So there used to be this instinctual understanding about differences between races and cultures and so on, and people couldn't always explain it very well.
But a lot of it had to do with, for instance, they used to say in the 19th century, well, we're Christians, and Christianity is good, and non-Christian religions are not good, right?
I mean, that's the basic argument.
When the West kind of lost Christianity, then it kind of lost any reason to be, quote, prejudiced or discriminatory against other ethnic, cultural, or religious groups, right?
Yeah. I mean, is it a negative judgment or an accurate judgment of another group is to look at the basic science, at brain size, at white matter, at IQ tests, at inbreeding, as you know, is a huge issue with cousin marriages and so on knocking 10 points or more off the IQ of the population.
So if you're not going to have the Christianity as a way of saying, are group good, their group isn't, Yes.
Yes.
Yes. It's genetic.
So that is a big problem at the same time as we are beginning to automate lots of tasks and there's AI and there's big robots doing all this.
We need fewer and fewer low-skilled people.
So bringing in people who have low IQ and nobody knows how to budge that in a population, nobody knows how to change that at all, well, that's a bad idea.
That's just not going to work.
So if you're not going to have the Christian shield, we're Christian, they're non-Christian or anti-Christian, therefore, there's no compatibility.
You might say, well, we're a high IQ society and this is a low IQ group and nobody knows how to change it.
It is effectively permanent.
Like Jason Richwine has studied the Hispanic IQ issue in the United States and he's tracked it, I think, for three or four generations.
It's kind of permanent.
It doesn't change.
It doesn't budge.
You don't get this magic rise in IQ just because you touch a Western country's soil.
There's no magic IQ boosting soil pixies that go up your nose and start putting extra hamster wheels between your ears.
And so in Germany, they can't say, well, we're Christian and they're not Christian, so our souls are saved and their souls aren't and their religion is not good compared to Christianity.
They don't have that shield anymore because they're so relentlessly secular.
But at the same time, they're being denied the basic science of brain size and gray matter and white matter and IQ and all that kind of stuff.
And so they don't have the scientific or evolutionary reason to say, let's question this.
So then the only reason, and this is all by design, Right?
So the left strip away Christianity, so you don't have your own in-group preference as a Christian, and then they attack anyone who talks about ethnic IQ differences, so then you don't even have the – you don't have the religion, you don't have the science as a barrier to say not so good, and then all you're left with is – Uh, I guess I'm racist.
You know, that's all you have.
Once you don't have the religion and once you don't have the science, the only thing you can have left is some irrational in-group preference that's kind of cold and tribal and bad, which the left has, but they don't want anyone else to have.
It's quite brilliant. So that's why once they dismantle Christianity, they attack anyone who talks about ethnic IQ differences so that you have no defense against this kind of bad decisions.
Yep. And I have to say that I didn't know any of the Scientific evidence of the IQ stuff back then.
This is like three years ago.
But my argument was that those people are different.
They have a different culture.
I mean, those people...
My simplest argument was that those people would attack a girl in the street and blame her for her clothes.
I mean, how could you get such a culture here?
I mean, regardless of IQ, which is true, regardless of all this complicated stuff.
And by the way, I brought the...
I did not bring it, but the guy once was discussing with me and he was waiting for me to say anything about genetics to attack me.
And I don't bring arguments that I don't understand, so I didn't bring that argument.
I didn't say anything about genetics.
But I expect that if I would have mentioned that, he would have eaten me alive.
Well, then, of course, even if we say it's got nothing to do with genetics and IQ, the inbreeding is a significant issue.
The inbreeding is harmful to intelligence.
And so even if you say the genetics are identical, the inbreeding makes it kind of a non-starter as far as long-term integration goes.
Let me tell you this little story.
My aunt is married to her cousin.
She has five kids.
Yeah. Two of whom are insane.
And one of them cannot walk properly.
And the other two are okay.
Yeah. No, I mean, this is a funny thing, too, because, you know, the left is continually attacking the South.
Because the South is Christian, the South is militaristic, and the South is very patriotic, and so the left has to continually attack the South.
And what do they always talk about when it comes to the South?
Inbred hicks! That's what they always talk about.
My sister, brother, cousin, wife, you know, my sister wives, and like they're always making fun of the South.
For inbreeding, even though it's not really inbred.
But boy, you look at other cultures where inbreeding is not only acceptable, but considered kind of positive.
And it's like, well, we got to embrace that, you see.
And this is a funny thing, too. Because when you talk about integration, I would say that, I mean, you'd have to give the West at least...
200 years of anti-racism.
200 years of anti-racism because Wilberforce was in the 19...
Sorry, 1830s was beginning his arguments.
Abolitionism started at the turn, really kind of gained momentum at the turn of the 19th century.
So we're talking give or take, you know, just rounding up a little bit.
200 years of anti-racism in the West.
And boy, they put a lot of work into it, right?
You know, the anti-racism, we got 800,000 people in America, men, of course, almost exclusively men, died in most horrible conditions.
During the Civil War, which the general story is that it was around slavery and so on, that the untold amount of blood and treasure that the British Empire spent to eradicate and eliminate slavery around the world was enormous.
So in terms of anti-racism, it has been a giant project in the West for 200 years.
And the left has really amped it up since the 1960s.
Hang on, let me finish. And so, after 200 years of anti-racism, anti-racism, anti-racism, what does the left think of Western countries?
Well, it thinks of Western countries that they're hopelessly racist.
That racism is unfixable, that racism can't be solved, that racism is endemic, obviously, of course, to white people.
Nobody else seems to be racist because of racism.
And after 200 years of hammering at people to not be racist, they still consider white culture to be hopelessly racist.
You could say basically the same thing for sexism, maybe 150 years for sexism and so on.
And so to the point where...
If you look at the sort of 60 plus million people who voted for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton said half of them are deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and so on.
So you still have 30 million people, at least in America, that are considered to be hopelessly retrograde after 200 years.
You still have 30 million people.
Yet somehow these same people who say, after 200 years of working on white people, white people are still hopelessly racist and sexist and patriarchal and blah, blah, blah.
But don't worry, we can fix the Islamic immigrants with a pamphlet, a lecture and about 12 minutes.
And it's like, ah, I don't really think that makes a lot—if white racism and sexism is so intractable, even though whites for at least 60, 70 years have been saying racism and sexism is bad, how are you going to solve all these Middle Eastern migrants who don't even think that their beliefs are wrong at all?
Yes. It's a catastrophe because it has become emotional and, like, I mean, they don't use—I mean, If I'm a president or something, or someone's power, and I want to get all these people in, I will do a study.
I will try to understand the implications.
But what Merkel did is insane.
Open the borders, let everyone in?
What do you expect?
You know as well as I do.
She hates the Germans.
The white Germans.
And this is true, I think, of the rulers.
In Europe in general, I don't think anybody really gets just how much they hate the whites.
Why? In Europe.
Why do they hate the whites in Europe?
Yes, yes. It's a fine question, but I'll tell you this.
If I was hopelessly corrupt and the ruler of a country, I'd get pretty fucking sick of the population too.
I get pretty fucking sick of the voters who whine and who complain and who always want something for nothing.
And the moment you tell them the truth, they get mad at you and vote you out of office.
The moment you dare bring a tiny little beam of sunlight into the darkened, idiotic, medieval, stone-dead brain of your average voter, they react like a vampire with garlic crosses and sunlight and run screaming in the opposite direction and vote you out of office immediately.
So it's a little tiring.
Whereas if you want to be a politician, how quickly do you learn how to lie to everyone?
How quickly do you learn to promise things to people with no plan on how you're actually going to deliver them?
I mean, how often do you stand up there...
At a podium and you say, well, I'm going to give you free this and I'm going to give you free that and you're going to have extended this and we're going to get more funding for this and we're going to give you extended maternity leave and free daycare and blah, blah, blah, right?
And all of these stupid voters sitting there like empty-headed vampire baby bird beak widening give me half-chewed-up worm and call it food.
The voters just like a bunch of trained seals cheering.
Whereas if you say, we've lived on the debt too long, we've got to solve things, we've got to fix things, we're going to have to cut back like crazy, people won't want to listen.
Oh, you're evil, you're bad.
We're going to go back to the guy who's just giving us endless sugar with no dentistry of the future.
You must get so sick of these voters who are so stupid for the most part, that anyone who comes along and says, this system is really not working, there's no plan to make it work, and we've really got to start making some hard decisions because resources are not infinite.
And human desires may be infinite, but resources are very finite.
So we've got to figure some stuff out.
We've got to reevaluate things.
The welfare state is not working.
The fatherless families are not working.
Anti-racism is not working.
Positive discrimination in forms of affirmative action is not working.
Government schools are not working.
And the moment you say, well, you know, we should introduce just a few cracks of voluntarism into these herded-around, gun-to-the-head interactions like taxes and regulations and government services and so on, people go completely insane.
They call you a Nazi and they destroy your political career, if not attempt to destroy your personal life completely, right?
And so, you know, as far as...
What the politicians think and feel about the average voter?
I can't imagine how much contempt and eye-rolling they must do in private.
Because in private, they're like, oh yeah, this is not going to work at all.
But you can't go out and say that to the voters because this mindless herd will tear you limb from limb if you bring one fact a year to their attention.
This is one of the reasons I think capitalism and democracy are incompatible.
Because one of them will kill the other.
This is how I think of it now.
And, you know, another point is, you know, it surprises me because Merkel had huge, tremendous support before she did her stupid move in 2015.
I mean, she really had huge support.
And now all the support we see for the AFD, this just started recently.
It's not like, it's not been there like five years ago.
Well, and we all know the migrants aren't going to leave peacefully even if the AFD get in.
And they say, well, we, you know, sorry, bad mistake, guys.
You're going to have to go back. It's like, well, I guess you've now backed Germans into a corner which they haven't inhabited for 70-odd years, but that's where you've left them because they're either going to have to knuckle under and comply with the migrants' demands or they're going to have to escalate forced to the point where they can get the migrants out and it's going to be a big bloody mess.
Yeah, well... And so many people have become dependent on the state that they don't like to see the state as coercive.
You know, the woman who's married to the mob boss doesn't want to watch him doing a hit, right?
Because she just wants to think the money's magically flowing in from his construction companies.
All right, so tell me a bit about your history with Islam and what happened.
You said it was just two years ago?
No, I started my...
Well, I stopped praying.
In 2010. Like, there was one day I said, okay, something's wrong here.
I'm not going to pray anymore. I was a regular prayer for years.
So I decided to stop, and I stopped and started investigating.
And back then, I was really ignorant.
I didn't know evolution.
I didn't know Big Bang.
I didn't know anything. And this is like the kind of scientific background these countries put you in.
I mean, these things are not discussed.
I mean, how did the universe come to existence?
God. How do creatures exist?
God. Let's say Allah.
How do they say it? So, basically I was under this, and then when I came to Germany, I was in a free society.
So, I was really religious, but I was not dogmatic.
I was always ready to be proven wrong.
I was happy for that, although there's always this religious stubbornness, but I was always happy to listen to the other side.
So I went to Germany, I started talking to people, and I started to see neutrality around me.
Because, you know, peer pressure really does a lot.
When you see everyone around you agrees with you on every nonsensical idea you think about.
And it's not that the idea is right or wrong, it's just that the idea supports the religion.
This is how it works. So...
I go to Germany, I start discussing with people, and my first experience with atheists was during my master's thesis.
I went to this office with three other people, or three other people, yes, four.
Four other people around me, and all of them were atheists.
All of them. And we always used to have these discussions, and they're leftists, for sure, and They were just challenging me on the ideas I was posing.
And I was like, at some point, I would fail.
And when I fail, I would research.
And when I research, I would find catastrophes.
And basically, what made me start questioning Islam, really, was this joke called Scientific Miracles or something like that.
I don't know how to translate this in English.
But it's basically science in the Koran.
Where, for example, they say the Quran said how embryos are developed in the wombs of mothers or whatever.
It's ridiculous. It's like three or four verses that don't explain anything, and they're up to interpretation to a very high level.
And then people interpret them in a certain way that makes it correct.
And then when you dive into this, you find it strong.
You find it strong according to all the explanations, the official explanations of the Quran.
You read them and it's incorrect.
I mean, what can you do? It's like it doesn't work out.
And there's even many other problems in the Quran, like with the science, because I was a scientist back then.
So that's where you're most familiar, right?
Exactly. And if you look at those people like Hamzat Sources, you know him, I think.
If you look at how he debates other people, he goes to Lawrence Krauss, for example.
Lawrence Krauss is a physicist, right?
He's a professor. He does not talk to him about physics.
He talks to him about Arabic language.
And he goes to other scholar who is good at the language and he talks to him about science.
And this is how all people who understand science believe in Islam, is that they catch other fields that they don't understand and ignore their field.
And I did not accept to do that.
So I started researching the scientific background of Islam and whether it makes sense, and everything starts falling apart.
Not a single claim That's made by this religion is correct from a scientific point of view.
Not a single one.
And I was like, desperately looking for any, like, come on.
And eventually, you find very hard evidence that not only it's vague, but it's also incorrect.
And then you start asking people, and whenever you start asking people, you get many responses that vary from being attacked to, like, hey, ask the very understanding people, and then you fall into this dilemma.
Okay, is the religion simple or not?
If it's simple, then I should understand it.
I don't need to ask 15,000 people until I find one interpretation that may be compatible with whatever I understand.
If it's simple, that has to happen.
If it's complicated, then this is not for all humans.
You know, all these dilemmas.
And then it just doesn't work out.
And one day, I watched this show that explained one verse.
And this one of the embryo development.
It explained in very deep detail.
Like, I'm not a doctor.
Well, I'm a doctor. I'm not a...
I'm not a physician, so explain in very deep detail how it's wrong.
And that was the point where I broke.
Like, that's it.
I'm going to stop. I'm not going to pray anymore until this thing clears out.
And then from that day, everything I research, everything I read, just supports, like, leaning towards atheism.
And back then I was a deist, I think, not an atheist, because there's a big void that is left after you leave religions.
And over time, I learned all the science, like evolution, Big Bang, and you just see all this.
And you start becoming objective more and more.
And eventually, one and a half years after that, I declared that I'm an atheist.
That's it. I'm done.
There is no way this makes any sense.
And everyone is open to discuss this with me.
Yeah. That's basically a summary of all that.
Because, you know, one of the things that troubles me about, I guess, the Middle East and non-Christian religions is the lack of universalization or the lack of universality for moral obligations.
So, in Islam and in Judaism, there is a higher obligation to your fellow Jews and Muslims as opposed to I mean, I know there's more respect for people of the book as a whole, but for Christianity, it's thou shalt not kill.
And that was a change from the original, which was thou shalt not kill other Jews.
In other words, the moral obligations were for people of the religion, but the moral obligations did not extend in the same way to people outside the religion.
So, for instance, as far as I understand it, if you're Muslim, you can choose to tell the truth to a non-Muslim, but you're not obliged to tell the truth to a non-Muslim.
Probably. I mean, the problem here with these moral obligations is that they range from their source.
I mean, if it comes in the Quran, it's up to interpretation.
I mean, people would say this would mean this, it would mean that, and you'll not be done, but most likely it will be taken.
And this includes, like, for example, the right of Muslims to insult and humiliate non-Muslims when they take Money from them.
I don't know what that money was called.
I forgot the word. This is the tax that can be imposed upon non-Muslims.
Is that right? Exactly.
You are to insult them.
And even though it's written in official explanations of the Quran that this is what it means, some scholars, some Islamic scholars came and made new interpretations that this means just that you have to be You have to respect the state.
Something like this. So, you see, there's always this game.
And then after Quran, you have Hadith, which is basically what Muhammad has said.
And this has too many levels of credibility.
It's like there's the correct, which they call sahih, and there's ba'if, which is weak, and there's mawdu'ah, which is Like, not believed or so.
And like, everyone believes whatever they want.
It's not like there's a universal standard for people to believe it.
It's like, if they like some hadith, they ignore the source and the credibility.
And if there's something they don't like, the first thing they ask you, hey, what's the credibility of this?
And then, I mean, I can give you an example.
During my post-dectoral period, there were pamphlets put in the menza, in the restaurant of the university, in the cafeteria, pamphlets about Islam, how it encourages knowledge.
And there's this saying that Mohammed said that Something in the lines of Sikh knowledge from the crib to death or something like this.
And it's not true.
He did not say that. And like all official Islamic literature confessed that he did not say that.
Why are you using this in a pamphlet?
You see? So there's not like an universal way to deal with this stuff and people don't research.
And when you want to see what people decide, like when you look at ISIS, ISIS is basically the correct Islam because they follow everything to the ladder.
You see? They do everything their religion tells them with no selection, with no bias in any way.
But a normal Muslim would look at these scripts and choose whatever he wants.
So... Basically, what conclusion we come at is about your question, like about the in-group preferences.
It's basically what you read and what you prefer and what you want to do and what you don't want to do.
You can always disregard something and say, yeah, yeah, it's impossible that Mohammed has said something like this.
And then you just disregard it.
And then, like, it's a cocktail.
And the problem is there's no...
You cannot...
Like, say this is right or wrong, because people don't care.
People don't care as long as you support this religion.
It doesn't matter what's right.
So it's kind of a soup, really.
Like, there's no way to find the truth, and there's no central authority in Islam.
And it's a mess.
So I cannot say that what he said is not there in Islam, because it might be there.
But it doesn't mean that everyone will agree with that, because everyone selects the version of Islam they like.
Right. And some of the later writings, I mean, I've heard the argument that some of the later writings supersede or take precedence over the earlier writings, and the earlier writings tend to be more conciliatory, more peaceful.
The later writings tend to be more aggressive.
And so you hear a lot of the earlier writings outside of Islam, but in certain sects, the later writings that are more aggressive have more focus and are considered to be more...
Accurate or core because they're later rather than earlier.
Yeah, they like delete the earlier version.
This is like a concept.
It's called I don't know how to say this in English but it's like when something new comes it erases whatever comes before.
And in Muhammad's history, he has like the first few years in his life, he was weak, he couldn't do anything.
He was not particularly successful as a preacher until he got just a smidge more aggressive, right?
Exactly. And all he did back then is that he went to these slaves and he told them to act against their owners, or I don't know how to say the word.
So when he did this, everyone turned on him.
And then he was fought and kicked out of Mecca.
And then after that, he went and collected some gangs and made those gangs and went back to Mecca to attack those people.
And then after he did that, he became a monster.
So the first period, when he was weak, everything was about peace.
I mean, the word peace was not there, but...
Everything was there like, let's be nice, this is what my god told me.
But then when he becomes strong and powerful, everything was deleted from before, and then we have a new era.
A monster, you said.
Tell me more. Yes, I mean, there are too many stories, like this very famous story of Benny Koraiva.
I don't know if you heard this story, but he basically claimed that some bosses...
There's this tribe and they have their leader who did some act of treason.
I don't know what they did, whatever it is.
And because of that, he went to that tribe and he killed them all.
And we're talking about over 500 people.
What, on his own?
What? On his own?
Well, he and his army.
He took the army and he made warfare and it remained for a few days and then he went in and just basically because the leaders did something wrong, he killed everyone.
Wow. I mean, what kind of peace is that?
Okay, if you're not happy with whatever those leaders did, just don't kill everyone.
Just kill the leaders.
Well, and some aggression towards Jews, if I remember rightly as well.
Yeah, actually, I think those were Jews.
I don't remember really.
This was a long time ago in a recent case.
Because I had a period in my life where I even had a Facebook page.
Like, I wasn't...
Telling those stories and discussing this stuff, my Facebook page, because Facebook is pro-Islam, our page was closed 1,500 times, so we gave up eventually.
It's pointless. Whenever we reach 20,000 members or something, they would just shut us down, and we would start over.
Back then, I had all this information.
Now it's fading away because I don't care anymore.
Now I have my life, my family, and it's over.
It's decided. When I want to debate someone, I can open references and show them.
Is your wife also an atheist?
Was that a journey she went with you on, or is it something different?
Well, when I first knew her, she was a Muslim.
And I was very cool and I did not attack her or something.
I avoided talking about religion.
I remember the first encounter was about this topic.
She asked me whether I was fasting.
It was Ramadan. And I told her, let's not talk about this.
And she pressured me.
I told her, no, I'm not fasting.
She told me why. I told her, because it's harmful.
You should not be fasting. It's bad for you.
First website, and took the first page, like the website that says, hey, fasting is very beneficial for you.
And she sent me that link, and I told her, come on, I'm a scientist.
You're thinking to send me a random link, really?
And I told her, okay, if you get me some really peer-reviewed study, That shows that fasting and not drinking...
I mean, okay, I'm okay with not eating food.
That's helpful. But if you show me a scientific study that shows that not eating for 12 and not drinking for 12 hours is good for you, I will definitely do it every day, not only on Ramadan.
And she wasn't able to do that.
And that was the first day.
And so there was always these...
Discussions like, why don't you do this?
It's not good. Show me.
She would look for references.
She would not find any.
And also, on the other side, if there's something she is not convinced of, she would ask me.
I would show her the evidence, and that's it.
So she was a reasonable person, and I liked that about her.
So when she left Syria and came here, she was like, On the verge of being an atheist, she came here, she was a deist sometime, and I think now she doesn't believe in any of that crap.
I don't know if she's an atheist.
She's an atheist, exactly.
But honestly, I don't care. I mean, whether you're an atheist, deist, whatever, the most important thing for me is not to believe in that harmful nonsense.
Otherwise, I don't care, honestly, with any relationship I have.
As long as you don't impose this stuff on me, I'm fine.
Well, and the kids, right? I mean, as long as the kids can grow up and decide for themselves as they get older.
Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a very important part here.
Oh, yeah. No, I had to...
There's a woman I kind of dated, kind of didn't date, but we got along well.
A very smart woman. And she was a Christian.
And I was not that strong an atheist back in the day.
I hadn't really sort of puzzled it all through myself.
But I definitely was not a Christian.
And I do remember saying to her – it's funny because we never kissed.
We never really dated. But we did talk about what it would be like to be married, which is kind of like an interesting anti-Tinder universe thing.
And she was like, oh, yeah, my mother's religion.
My father's an atheist. He just gets to sleep in on Sundays.
You know, she takes the kids to church and that's what happened with me.
And you can just sleep in. Like she was dangling good sleep in front of me like she didn't care, right?
Yeah. And I said, well, you know, for me, I think that we don't want to, like when you have kids, you don't want to say, well, atheism is true.
You don't want to say religion is true.
You want to teach them to think for themselves.
And then if my kids grow up and want to become Christian, I'm not sure exactly how or why.
Maybe they have a vision. Maybe they convince me.
I don't know. Maybe something happens to me too.
But I was like, well...
You know, I don't want to teach them that it's true when they're young, but if they choose it when they're older, that's...
But she's like, no, they have to be told that it's true when they're young.
And that was it. And that was kind of the stickling point.
We talked about it a little bit more, and then we just kind of drifted apart because couldn't negotiate that.
Absolutely. This is, like, I'm also thinking how to introduce my son about this.
Like, I mean, he will come and ask me, what is God?
And I don't know. Maybe I'll do, I'll tell him, like, this movie, The Island, you know?
This guy asks another guy, what is that?
This guy, the first guy is like, he knows nothing.
He is copied and he doesn't know anything at all.
And the other guy thinks and tells him, you know when you look at the sky and close your eyes and wish for something really, really, really too much?
You really wish for that? Tells him, yeah.
Then he responds, God is the guy who ignores you.
God is a dream your heart makes, or something like that.
So, that's very, very interesting.
And, you know, good for her.
I mean, good for you, obviously. That sounds kind of patronizing, you know, I mean, you're a brilliant guy.
But good for you for questioning and asking.
And great for your wife when you say, okay, give me some proof.
And she's not like, well, it's written here, in this holy text.
And she actually went to go and look for the scientific...
And that's admirable.
That's very cool. Wish we could get the leftists to do that as well, you know?
Here's some data on race and IQ. Heretic!
Eugenicist, racist, Nazi!
It's like, can you maybe just look at the scientific text?
No! Like, they're worse than, anyway, worse than most fundamentalists because you ask them to look into the science and they simply won't.
Whereas your wife, who's a Muslim, you ask her to look into the science.
She's like, yeah, okay, I'll have a look.
Yep. More open-minded, far more open-minded than your average leftist.
Absolutely. When science is the base, the common base, then there's no reason to argue.
And either way, I mean, the nice thing is that she accepts challenging her thoughts.
Because I know people.
I have another admin on this page where I was.
He wanted to marry a Muslim, and he insisted on that.
He told him, hey man, don't do it.
She will kill you. I mean, you will not live in peace.
Oh, okay. I just want to make sure we're talking about allegorically kill you.
Yeah, sure. Not like ISIS, you won the sleep or anything, right?
No, no, no. She will kill your life.
You'll be unhappy.
So he insisted, and he was one of those people.
That told us, hey, be nice, don't curse, don't say anything.
We were like cursing like hell in the page.
And we told him, no, we can't.
And he didn't listen to us.
He went through.
And basically his wife would be scared of thinking of anything against Islam.
Like, you know, she would not...
It's not like he would give her evidence and she would look at it and say no, but she would not even think about it.
She would be too scared to do this.
And this is a catastrophe. Imagine God telling you, hey, you have to believe this and you don't even have to think about it.
Not even close. If you even come close to thinking about it, I'm going to burn you.
This is the thought that this woman had.
Well, there is also the punishment for apostasy.
Oh, yeah. Well, I'm a prostate now.
I have to be killed. Right.
So the death penalty...
See, I mean, I stopped becoming a Christian.
And people were like, all right.
You know, I mean, we wish it were different and all that.
But, you know, follow your own path, young man.
But the death penalty, that's...
Yes, but this is not the reason why they don't think.
They don't think because they're afraid of the Judgment Day punishment.
Not the apostasy thing.
The apostasy thing is something that comes later.
You don't think about that. By the way, the end of that story is that they got divorced and she destroyed his life.
That's what happens when you pick someone who is not compatible with you.
How did she destroy his life?
Well, it was basically a dark life.
I mean, he told me that, for example, I would have a problem at work.
I would come home and instead of patting on my back and telling me they're there, she would tell me this is what Allah is doing to you because you deserve it, because you're an atheist.
Imagine this kind of life.
Right. So a little bit of a dry well sympathy.
Yeah. How would you feel that someone loves you if he doesn't support you when you have a problem?
And he has this knife at your back whenever something happens, he stabs you.
I can't imagine this kind of life.
Well, and it's one thing if every bad thing is punishment, but what if every reward is not given to you, right?
Because obviously, the God would not reward an atheist.
So, hey, I got a raise! It's like, it's a temptation!
Exactly. It's a temptation when it's good and it's...
A punishment, it's ridiculous.
It's hard to admire the integrity of a religious person who marries an atheist as well, because it's like, oh, I guess maybe she's going to save him.
I don't know. I think the concept of saving is not in Islam.
I don't think it's there.
Well, there's conversion, right?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly.
That's what he meant. Okay. But because there's a Christian in this concept of the savior and saving all this stuff.
I'm not into Christianity a lot, but you see what I'm going with it.
So tell me a little bit, if you don't mind, the quantum mechanics and quantum field theory argument as to why our universe, as you said, probably doesn't have a creator.
Because I hear a lot of people using quantum mechanics like this Las Vegas strip slate of hand as to how to introduce God into the equation.
But I've not heard it in that way used to deny the universe's creation.
The thing is, there's two sides to the equation.
First, there's logic and philosophy.
You know all that. There's a God.
I mean, you need a God to create the universe.
But then if you need a God, who created God?
But then if there is no creator for God, why would you not accept the universe without a creator?
Right? This is the logic.
This is the simple logic. But then let's come to...
This is all mathematics, okay?
Apart from mathematics, let's talk about physics and mathematics, like evidence, because there's always two sides of the coin.
There's logic and there's evidence.
So what about evidence? Let's look at this universe we live in.
If you take like one cubic meter of volume in space, outer space, between galaxies, you look at how many atoms you have there, you have like a few atoms, maybe three, four atoms, take them out.
What do you have left? Nothing?
No, it's nothing. If you zoom in, if you try to measure, like if you try to make this cube smaller and smaller and smaller, to the atomic size and even smaller, and you try to measure the energy of that cube, the energy inside that cube, as a function of time, it's not zero.
It's going to be fluctuating all the time.
And this is basically a consequence of something called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
So the Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be used in multiple forms.
One of them says that in atomic particles, you can either measure the speed, or basically the momentum, or the position of a particle.
You cannot infinitely accurately measure both.
There's an equivalent form of this, if you do a simple multiplication, that says that you cannot measure energy in a very small period of time.
So the smaller the period of time is that you try to measure the energy at, the bigger the standard deviation or the variance of the energy measurement you'll get.
So it can blow up, and this is actually something that we see experimentally.
When you have these beta decades, for example, in particle physics, One step of these decays is that, well, you have a neutron that decays to a beta particle, which is basically an electron, and you have a neutrino and a proton.
Well, there's an intermediary step that happens there, and it's necessary.
And this step is creating something called a W boson.
This W boson has a mass which is 85 times the mass of a neutron.
85 times!
Where did this mass come from?
This mass came from the uncertainty principle because it's possible.
So when you talk about very short periods of time and very small space, energy is undefined.
So there's this fluctuation in energy.
In space, energy is not zero.
The smaller the scale you go in, It's more like the more fluctuating it will be.
If you want to measure energy very accurately, you have to expand this cube to the size of the universe and measure from the beginning of time to the end of time.
You have to sum all these values from the beginning of time to the end of time and over this whole cube.
And then you might get zero.
The total energy of the universe is zero.
And this is basically what they mean when they say the universe is flat.
You see? Does this make sense?
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's just back up to the 65 times, was it?
The mass? 85 times.
85 times the mass, okay.
So... Isn't this kind of in contradiction to the thermodynamics law that says you can't create or destroy matter or energy, you can only transfer them from one to the other?
Well, thermodynamics is a classical physics law.
So it's not applicable at this level, right?
Absolutely. And there's something called the...
What was it?
The... The Ernst Theorem that shows that quantum mechanics value, when you take the expectation value, which is basically the average value of any quantum mechanics motion equation, if you take the expectation value of that, it will give you the classical results, the Newtonian mechanics results.
Which means that quantum mechanics is, if it's correct, if everything's good, and so far we know it's good because it works in the lab, If it's correct, then it is the general case of Newton laws and all these thermodynamics laws and all this stuff.
So it's not like it violates them because it's more general, not because it's wrong, you see?
So, what you mean is, because the way I sort of understand it, and, you know, obviously this is very layperson-y, so I appreciate your patience with this, but my understanding of it has been something like this.
Some really freaky stuff goes on at the quantum mechanics level, but when you zoom out, certainly to the level of the senses, it's all stabilized and equaled out to the point where...
Newtonian physics or classical physics works at the sense level.
Now, you zoom in deep enough and some freaky stuff is going on.
But it doesn't have much – it has impacts on the philosophy of science, but it doesn't have impacts on, say, the philosophy of sense data or the philosophy of logic or the philosophy of morals and so on because these things don't happen at the subatomic level.
I didn't get the last part, but you're right that when you zoom out, yes, It's Newtonian laws.
When you zoom in, some freaky stuff happens.
Let me give you an example.
In quantum physics, it seems to me that it's possible.
Tell me where I go astray. It's been a while since I've read about this stuff.
But it seems to me it's possible in quantum physics for an entity to be in two places at the same time, right?
Well, I don't like it when people put it that way.
Go on, please.
Correct me where I go astray.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, when people say this, they basically are exemplifying the tunneling experiment.
The tunneling experiment says that if you have a barrier, an energy barrier or any kind of barrier, and you put an electron in one side, there's a probability that the electron is also on the other side.
The bigger the barrier, the less the probability is.
And basically, the electron is in both places because there's a probability he's here and there.
But it doesn't mean that he's in both places, you see?
This is my contention to this.
Because when you do a single measurement, it is in one place.
It will localize, you see?
But then if you don't measure, you have the wave function in both places.
And wave functions, you know, they're proportional to probability of their presence, of the particle's presence.
So... But only in both places because we don't know which one is true.
It's kind of like this Schrodinger's cat experiment.
She's dead and she's alive because we don't know.
There's a wave function that explains whatever is happening, but it doesn't have to be one state that's true.
That's the argument. The wave function expands in both positions, like before the wall and after the wall, But if we want to view it in the classical way, we understand things, it has a single localized position, then yes, it could be in both.
But this is not the way to look at particles, because subatomic particles are waves, basically.
The wave expands on a big region, and when you measure, it's in one position.
Right. Oh, yeah.
So another way of putting it is, you know, looking at the wall behind me here in the studio, I understand at a conceptual level that the wall being atoms, you zoom into atoms and their relationship to each other, it's mostly space.
There's not much there.
So even the wall behind me is mostly space.
And I, myself, am mostly space.
However, I can't walk through the wall.
Two really spread out nebulae could kind of crash through each other and kind of get...
But you can't walk through a wall, even though at the subatomic level, it's mostly empty.
Yes. That's because it's kind of...
You can think of it as a net.
When I told my brother this, he went crazy.
Like, how is it that like 99.99% of everything is empty?
You can think of two nets clashing into each other.
Right. Yeah, because it's the relationship between them that you can't pass through as well.
Exactly, exactly. All right, so let's get, I appreciate that, and feel free to call back in and talk about more of that kind of stuff, because I have not talked about that stuff for quite a while on the show, and I find it fascinating.
Okay, so, yeah, the taxes.
Yeah, I got a friend here in Canada who makes some pretty good coin, and he says, you know, like, I can spend up to this amount, and everything I spend over this amount gets taxed at an insane rate.
Yeah, well, in Germany, it's just under 600 euros.
Yikes. Yeah, the same thing with the Beatles.
The Beatles were paying 95% taxes when they were in...
Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.
No, there's a song, right?
I think George Harrison wrote it called The Tax Man.
That's one for you, 19 for me, right?
Because it's 5%. They were paying 95%.
Yeah. Oh, my God. And the same thing.
This is why Queen ended up as tax exiles in Switzerland.
And this is why Bono...
Right? From U2. It was very much around, well, we've got to help the third world and I want a big government and I'm kind of a socialist, but he doesn't want to pay the taxes associated with it.
He'll bug out as quickly as possible and try and hide his money.
You know, tax avoidance, not evasion.
But yeah, he'll do whatever he can to avoid paying his taxes because it's a mess.
And I also know a guy when I was younger who got a raise.
And ended up paying more in taxes.
In other words, he got a raise, and he ended up with less take-home.
I think they fixed some of that stuff more recently, but it's crazy.
I think they fixed it with progressive tax.
You know what? I'm happy with paying 20% of whatever I get in a flat tax.
I'm happy with that. I understand there are things that we have to pay for the government, and I know you don't like the government at all.
I just disagree with you by 20.
Yeah, I know.
I've heard your arguments, and I think you may be right.
But 20 is better than 50.
No, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
And this is the point. They're unreasonable.
They're being unreasonable. I think if they remove welfare, 20 is easy.
So, like, for example, who will fund scientific research?
Like, there are companies that do that, but, like, this experiment...
Wait, what, you're trying to sell me the government on scientific research?
Really? Yes! Come on!
Come on!
Who do you think funded my PhD work?
Oh, yeah, no. Listen, I get that you have some benefits from the tax system, but then you can't really complain about the migrants who are coming here from benefits for the tax system, now can you?
Look, here's the lie.
I mean, okay, look, the argument here is easy.
What is the end goal of all this?
The end goal is the survival of humanity, the betterness of humanity.
We want to do better, all of us, right?
And how do we do better?
I know it's coercion.
I know it's wrong. I know. But, like, there's no one good, right answer because there's all these contradictive, like, solutions.
But then think of the internet.
Who did the internet? The government did it in the military.
And think of, like, this, I mean...
Yeah, and the internet has huge problems because it was founded by the government and the military.
Right? I mean, it's unsecure.
It's a great way of transmitting viruses.
It can be slow and inefficient.
And it's subject at the moment, of course, to centralized coercive control because it's not blockchain technology.
If we'd waited just a little bit longer, we'd have had an internet that you couldn't censor.
And that's a big problem. And the other thing, too, is you can say the government created the internet.
No, no. The government created some of the protocols for exchanging information.
But it was the capitalists who made the internet user-friendly, who made it something that people could use.
Wasn't the military who did the internet?
Well, look, again, so the military created the internet to have a decentralized way of communicating in the event of nuclear war, but without the free market.
Building browsers, building all of the communications technology, building the personal computers, building the cell phones, the internet would remain something buried in a DARPA lab, right?
It was the free market that created the interface that allowed this horrible, terrible government technology to be used in this kind of way.
Absolutely. And I don't agree on that.
Nothing that you and I are using to communicate, my friend, was created by the government.
I mean, the underlying protocol, but none of the hardware or software that we're currently using.
Correct, correct. And I mean, like, I'm talking about this researcher in my PhD.
I mean, this research was, it's fundamental physics.
The purpose of the experiment is to find out why there's matter in the universe.
Yeah, but I'm not – see, here's the thing.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I'd be kind of curious about, you know, what happened 12 milliseconds after the Big Bang.
I think that's interesting. I'm curious as to about why there's matter in the universe.
I'm curious about this, that, and the other.
Great. I'm just not curious enough about it to violate the non-aggression principle.
You know, that's like saying, well, I'm really curious how a date with this woman would go, so I'm going to kidnap her.
And it's like, well, no. See, you can be curious about these things without kidnapping people's money to pay for it.
Okay, yeah, yeah. I see your point.
But you see, this is the thin line here.
Because there's always fundamental research that's helpful to humanity.
But, I mean, who will do it?
Do you care about it?
Would you fund it? There's a problem here.
Because if I fund it, like I and 50 other persons, then it can cost us millions.
Oh, I think I understand, Simir.
So you want an agency, you want the government to do what you think is important, but not any of the bad things that it does.
No, no, no, no, no.
So you want the government to fund science, but not fund migrants.
You don't get that choice, I'm afraid.
No, no, it's not like this.
It's, again, like I said, it's not because it's my opinion, but it's because, like, what is the end goal of all this, the goodness of the humanity?
I mean, I don't, there are things, there are good things that the government have achieved, whether they're the best or not, that's, like, debatable.
But I can't see them happening without the government.
That's a problem. Yes, but would you...
I don't agree that... Let's say that...
So what if you can't see them happening?
Why does it have to go through your brain what is possible for humanity to achieve?
Like, just because you can't imagine it happening certainly doesn't mean it can't happen, right?
Well, it didn't happen, like, for hundreds of years.
When was the last time? I mean, before governments were there, Before the 1900s, when was the last time a huge scale experiment?
Wait, wait, wait. Before governments were there?
Do you feel that before 1900 we live in an anarcho-capitalist paradise?
I'm not sure I quite follow this.
Okay, maybe that's not the best argument.
There seemed to be quite a lot of government in the Middle Ages, if I remember rightly.
Let's flip it the other way around.
Only the government made such big-scale experiments.
You mean like population replacement in Europe?
Yeah, that is a very big experiment.
And you want science funded, you get the other stuff too.
You get war, you get debt, you get vote buying, you get corruption, you get population replacement, you get fiat currency, you get all of the family courts, you get...
Like you can't just pick and choose, right?
I mean, of course the government's gonna, you know those angler fish that like really deep in the ocean and they hold that little light over and then the fish, ooh, there's light, it's pretty, right?
So I'm telling you, Sam, the government will always dangle something over you that you want.
Oh, science. Oh, physics.
Oh, and they're like, yes, yes.
Samir, come to the dark side.
We have physics here.
And come to the dark side and we'll fund your pet projects.
And then boom! All right, now your wife's getting molested every time she walks down the street.
Why? Because you wanted science, didn't you?
But you didn't get science.
You got migrants. Why can't we fix the bad things?
Because it's the government!
It's the government. So once you give people the power to strip half the wealth out of a country, they're going to do what they want to do with it, not what you want to do with it.
I can't argue with that.
I absolutely can't argue with that.
And this is a problem. Because I wish there's a solution where, like, there's, like, where we can make, like, an authority that's not as crazy as...
There is. There is.
It's called voluntarism.
It's called the free market. Yeah, okay.
Well... I can't argue with that, really, but I have not seen that working before.
That's what scares me. What do you mean?
How are we talking if not the free market?
No, I mean, I have not seen that before.
I have not seen individuals come together and fund a $50 million project by themselves.
But how do you know that that $50 million science project is the best thing to do?
No, there's no way to know that.
Yeah, now if you want to fund it and you want to raise money, fantastic, right?
By the way, the government does not choose what experiments to fund, just by the way.
There's an institution that is full of scientists that chooses that.
Just pointing that out.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Were you saying the government doesn't have an influence over what is studied?
They do have an influence, absolutely.
You think? Why do you think people aren't studying the genetics of intelligence across ethnicities?
You know, that's kind of the number one question in the world today because we're trying to jam all these ethnicities together and saying, hey, everyone's going to get along just famously.
And the one thing you'd want to know is how genetic are the IQ differences between ethnicities?
Because if they're genetic, we can't change them.
And so that would be the number one thing if the government was sensible.
That would be the number one thing to study.
As far as the origins of the universe, I don't really care that much.
I care about the end of Western civilization, which might be imminent a little bit more than what happened 14 billion years ago or something, right?
Yeah, well, probably if we understand the origin of the universe.
So, no, it's very political.
It's very political. Absolutely.
That's why string theories still kick it around.
Don't worry. It's about to become useful.
Just like stem cell research.
It's about to become useful. You're right.
You're right. It's a complicated problem.
No, it's not a complicated problem.
Don't use force to get what you want.
Here's the interesting thing, Zebra.
You left Islam more easily than you're leaving statism.
The problem is that I tend to solve problems more than lashing out available solutions.
This is how... I deal with everything I have.
I can't just say, there's a red button, press it, no more government.
I'm not sure it's going to work out.
It's quite scary. No, no, but listen, I agree with you.
I agree with you, it's scary.
But you also said that when you left religion, there was a void, right?
Yes. Absolutely, when we leave something like the state as a valued concept, it is a step into the dark, for sure.
It is a step off a cliff, hoping that paradise awaits you below, and it does feel very strange and very unusual.
But this was the same thing when people said, let's end slavery.
They didn't know what was coming next.
When people said, let's not have a monarchy, they didn't know what was coming next.
And so when we make these steps forward, They are challenging.
But let me make a case to you from a physics standpoint, right?
So, you know the Ptolemaic system way back in the day where they tried to explain the motions of the planets and of the sun while having an Earth-centered solar system, right?
And they had to explain this retrograde motion of Mars, right?
Because being on the inside rim of the orbit, Earth goes around the Sun faster than Mars, so at some point Mars appears to go backwards, right?
And so they created all these circles within circles, and as their observations got more complete and correct, The Ptolemaic system got more and more complicated and unwieldy.
And then what happened was people said, well, I wonder maybe if just the sun is the center of the solar system.
And when they did that, everything fell into place.
Or to take a more modern example, they used to believe in all of the ether, right?
This ether in the 19th century was considered to be the stationary goo through which everything moved and so on.
Yeah. And then Einstein came along and said, okay, I got a crazy notion here.
Let me just run it past everyone.
What if the speed of light is just constant no matter what?
Yes. And people were like, well, that's just crazy, right?
And yet, when you make the speed of light constant, just as if you make the sun, everything just, boom, falls into place and works out, right?
Yes, yes. So what if we just make the non-aggression principle The same as the sun at the center of the solar system.
What if we just make the non-aggression principle the same as the speed of light is constant?
Everything will fall into place and make sense.
And you say, well, what happens if we accept that the speed of light is constant?
It's like it doesn't matter. What matters is, is the speed of light constant?
They say, well, what happens if we accept the non-aggression principle and universalize it, which erases the moral legitimacy of the state?
Say, well, what happens is it doesn't matter.
What matters is, is it true?
Is it moral? Is it valid?
And we all accept in our personal lives That the non-aggression principle is valid.
We don't walk around beating people up to get what we want.
We don't around raping people.
And we just say, okay, what if our personal life, what if the morals of our personal life are truly universalized?
It may look weird in the same way that nothing in Einsteinian physics or Newtonian physics or Quantum physics denies our personal experience.
You know, I am falling towards the Earth, but the Earth is also falling a tiny bit up towards me, more if I've had Indian food for lunch.
And that is, nothing in physics contradicts our personal experience.
We simply take our personal experiences, extrapolate them to find universal laws.
And it's the same thing with morals.
If we take our personal hostility and contempt and disgust with the initiation of the use of violence and simply externalize it and universalize it, yeah, the universe looks very different, just as it did to people who put the sun at the center of the universe, just as people who no longer believe in God, and just as people who accepted that the speed of light was constant, the universe looks very different.
And quantum physics makes the universe look very different.
The question isn't what happens afterwards.
The question is, is it true?
Now, if it's true, to hell with what happens afterwards.
We simply have to accept the truth.
No, you're right. I bought what you said once you said that this void is maybe something I'm scared of.
You're right. It's something new.
It's something that may be better.
But without experiencing it, we won't know.
You're right about that. Yeah, you're still on better.
Like, would you say, if Einstein comes along, like you're in the 1920s, Einstein comes along and says the speed of light is constant, and you say, well, I don't know if that makes things better.
And you'd be like, well, that's the wrong question.
The question is, is it true?
Correct. In terms of what makes things better, is the non-aggression principle valid and true and universal?
Well, I've got this book called Universally Preferable Behavior where I make the case that it is, and I think it stands.
I know that it stands. So it is true.
And so what happens afterwards, whether it makes things better or worse, we can't know any of that.
All we can do is evaluate what is true and moral.
Yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.
And, you know, the one thing I don't understand about the non-aggression principle, what about nationalism?
I mean, how are we going to protect the country?
Are we going to have a capitalistic army also?
Or, like, who's going to protect the country from whoever is outside?
Well, first of all, Semer, who's protecting you now?
Do you feel protected now?
You're being forced to pay for dangerous people to come in and harass your life.
No, I mean, on a bigger scale.
I mean, if Russia goes crazy, like it always does, and decides to, okay, I'm going to invade Germany.
I mean, it would be much worse than whatever we have now, right?
And, I mean, there's a German army that prevents that.
And, I mean, where is that going to come from if there's no government?
I'm just asking. No, I understand.
What's the German army doing right now?
Right now, the German army and the German, let's just say the German enforcement agencies, what are they doing right now?
What they're doing right now is arresting people for hate speech and anyone who doesn't pay their taxes so that they can pay for what looks a hell of a lot like population replacement from the third world.
Right now, the Germans are not being protected.
They are, in fact, being endangered.
The great myth of the state is, it's working now.
Show me something better. It's not working now.
How well were the people dependent on the Roman Empire?
How well were they served when the Roman Empire fell?
It's not being served right now.
Now, as far as How you could have protection of a geographical region without a state.
I just did a conversation on this with Dave Smith.
You can find it online called Immigrant Derangement Syndrome.
And I've also got some free books, Practical Anarchy and Everyday Anarchy, which talk about free market solutions to things that you're talking about.
And hopefully they will help. But the fundamental thing is it doesn't matter what happens afterwards.
It matters that we do the moral thing.
We do the right thing. Nobody knows how...
Nobody knows how the cotton gets picked after UN slavery.
And anybody who pretends to know is lying to you.
I don't know how all of these things would be solved by the free market.
But right now, do you think that, let's say that Putin did invade Germany, right?
Do you think that Putin would have invited 800,000 Muslims into the country?
No. So, kind of hard to see how Putin would be worse than Merkel, right?
Well, maybe he would take us slaves.
You'll make us old slaves then, and then it's worse.
I don't think so.
I mean, they didn't even do that in the Soviet Union.
Okay, so let's do the big question, and it's a great conversation.
I really appreciate you calling it, but let's do the big question, which is, what do you do?
Where do you go? Yeah.
So I would say this.
As long as you have reasonable protections for your freedom of speech, stay and fight.
The moment that you simply cannot, with any safety or security, make a case for the improvement upon your society, try to get to a place where you can.
Yeah, I mean, the question here basically is where do I go?
Like all Western countries, I've become crazy.
Like really, when I think about this...
Sure. No, listen. I'm sorry to interrupt because that case was made in the intro.
Yes, countries are going crazy.
And as long as we have freedom of speech, we can do one of two, three things.
There are three things that can happen.
Number one, we can fix it.
So we simply make the case.
And I'm... I mean, I'm not religious, but I'm on my knees praying for people who are working on the genetics of intelligence.
Because right now, my show is kind of in the wilderness.
Then we can, and there'll still be an upward battle, because there are still people who deny evolution, despite the fact that it's overwhelmingly supported by science and all.
But for the most part, you can start having intelligent conversations about ethnicity and IQ and intelligence, genetics, once the genes have been mapped and proven, and the Chinese are working very hard on this and so on.
So, who's going to have credibility when the science catches up to what seems to be pretty evident to just about everyone who studied this in any open-minded way?
Well, what's going to happen is the people who were talking about it, who then are validated by the science, are going to have a great deal of credibility.
And that credibility is going to spread to other things.
Speaking about it ahead of the curve takes a significant amount of courage.
Like, there's a lot of people I know privately who know about ethnicity and IQ, but who won't talk about it because they're afraid of being attacked and so on, right?
So having the courage to talk about an essential issue and I couldn't look at the camera knowing what I know and pretend I didn't know what I know, it would be a shameful and humiliating thing for me to do.
It would be the word cock is like one atom of the nuclear bomb of shame that that would produce within me and a betrayal of the audience who pays me to speak the truth.
So if you're right, We gain credibility by being right ahead of the curve.
Science supports what it is that we are saying and have been talking about for many years.
And then we gain a lot of credibility and we can begin to positively affect changes in policies to the point where things are saved.
And it's going to be a lot more than just immigration.
It's going to be the welfare state.
Genetics of intelligence has a lot to do with the welfare state as well, in which you're paying, in general, people who are the least intelligent to breed the most.
And that is a form of eugenics, which I hugely oppose, as I oppose all eugenics.
So either we can turn it around, and that's well worth the fight.
Or we can't turn it around, but what we do is we leave enough information for the next round of civilization to learn from our mistakes.
And that has value too.
Like, I mean, the fact that Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and Diogenes and Stoics and a fact that all these people thought and wrote had a lot to do with bringing about the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason.
Like what? 1,500 years after they were generally put to death or fled or banished or whatever, right?
So we might just be laying down the tracks for the remix of Civilization to learn from, because it's going to be really hard to erase all of this stuff from the world now that it's out there on the internet.
You can burn down the Library of Alexander, but you can't very easily erase stuff like my show, half a billion copies and views all over the world, and it's going to be there.
So maybe it'll be there for the next reboot.
The third solution is we all end up in camps and nobody learns anything and society just goes on and on and on, which is what's going to happen if nobody does anything, right?
And so we aim to speak the truth.
We aim to help the world as much as humanly possible, and either we'll succeed or we'll fail.
Now, if we don't do anything, we'll fail for sure.
And the chances of success would be relatively low if the science, particularly in this area, wasn't so close to coming up with actual genuine answers.
So as long as we can speak, as long as we can make our arguments in the public square with the social risk and the risk of ostracism and the risk of economic attacks and so on, but not being thrown in jail, right?
I mean, once you lose your free speech, you don't bother anymore.
That's what's happening now, right?
There's this internet problem that's happening.
You published a video about it yesterday.
Yes. Now, that's still got a month to go.
That still has a month to go.
It has not been passed into law as yet.
In a month, the European Parliament is going to vote on it, and hopefully people can rouse themselves to oppose to that.
Oh my god, if that happens, it's going to be a disaster.
I mean, I've had trouble on Facebook already, just Facebook.
Imagine if everything on the internet is monitored, although I don't know how they're going to do this.
There's encryption everywhere.
But if this happens, there's no more freedom of speech.
And even the AFD would not be able to make videos or stuff.
Well, no, but I mean, life finds a way, right?
The water, like you put a rock in the stream, the stream doesn't just stop.
It just finds another way, right?
So they'll just find other ways to share information, share ideas.
And then what will happen is if people lose their free speech, they will simply turn to coercion, right?
They will simply turn to rebellion, to...
I mean, it's the old saying from Kennedy, right?
Those who make peaceful reform impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
So, you lose free speech, people just, they're just going to find other ways to solve the problem, ways that are far less pleasant than having conversations.
Yeah, what I'm worried about is that we have now 2 million refugees that have come here, not refugees, well, migrants in general, that have come in.
Very small fraction of them works and is productive.
And, I mean, They breed so much, as you know.
And Germans have a fertility rate of like 1.3 or something.
And don't you think there's a critical point?
Because most of those people will stay, and they will replace the population.
Well, no, not when the country runs out of money.
Probably not. I'm afraid if the country runs out of money, there will be violence.
Oh, there will be violence, for sure.
Once the country runs out of money, there will be violence, for sure.
But the idea that everyone's just going to stay in a cold place without free money from the government, you know, maybe we'll find out one day.
Oh my god. This is like why I mentioned violence in the beginning, like how I'm going to protect myself.
Because I think of these scenarios and if a bunch of people came here and break into my apartment, what am I going to do?
Use kitchen knives? I don't know.
It's insane. How long have you lived in Germany?
What is your sense of patriotism or loyalty to Germany?
No, no. I'm loyal to Germany.
I love this country. I really do.
I like everything it's doing.
I feel like Germans are very successful and hardworking people.
From my profile, you would know that I appreciate this a lot.
But, like, I mean, what's happening recently is that law is not being implemented.
Law is not being used.
I mean, the one thing that I like Germany for, like, in the first place, the law, because there's value to human life, there's value to me regardless of who I am, is not being implemented anymore.
I mean, if someone attacks my apartment and I kill them, maybe I will go to jail.
Well, you know what they say, it's better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
Well, it's insane.
Really, I don't find a way out of this.
Right. So, as long as you feel that you can reasonably make a case for a more sane policy, if you can criticize existing government policies, if you can criticize existing ways of doing things, And I, you know, my suggestion in Europe is take aim at the welfare state, not at the migrants.
The migrants are a symptom of the welfare state.
If there's no welfare state, there's no migrants.
And so people – you want to work at criticizing the welfare state because you can't be accused of racism if you want to get rid of the welfare state because the welfare state is still predominantly used by whites in terms of just sheer numbers, not necessarily proportion of the population.
But the welfare state is used by whites.
And so if you take aim at the correct thing, I don't see how it's hate speech to criticize the welfare state and to say we need to end the welfare state.
But if you start talking about immigration while they're still the welfare state, I mean, it's worth talking about for sure, and it might help.
But I think that the more sensible thing to do is to take aim at this massive income redistribution scheme and eugenics called the welfare state.
You know, in Germany in particular, you can say, well, I don't know that inviting a bunch of people in who don't like Jews is really breaking with the German tradition of hostility to Jews.
This is one thing I don't quite understand about what's going on in Germany.
Is that there are, you know, a lot of the migrants, a lot of the Muslims really, really hate the Jews for reasons that go back many, many centuries.
And so bringing in a whole group of people who have a big problem with the Jews, not all of them, but significant numbers of them, I don't know how the German government is getting away with that without being called anti-Semitic.
Like that to me is kind of confusing.
And that may be another thing to talk about is the safety and security of the Jews.
And you, in particular, have a very big superpower, a huge superpower, which is that you're not a white native German.
No, seriously, like where you come from gives you superpowers that you don't really quite understand as yet, I would assume.
Like a Syrian immigrant criticizing the migrant crisis?
Dude, what are they going to do?
They get a short circuit. People are all over the place.
Because you also, you know, you can say to me, hey, don't talk to me about Syrians and what Syrians are like, bro.
I lived there for a long time.
Don't germsplain me to that degree, right?
Well, when I did that, they just told me, like, how are they different from you?
Double-sided sword. There's no way to run away from this.
When they want to attack you, they attack you.
There's no way. Right.
Well, you have a story.
You have a story that I think is quite powerful.
And I would also say, if you think all Syrians are the same, then you're kind of a racist.
That's nice. Because that's like saying, well, I mean, good heavens, every black must be like Candace Owens.
Or, you know, it's like, no, there's lots of differences in the black community.
I mean, to put them all in one big blob is racist.
And to say all the Syrians are like me, that's racist.
Yes, absolutely.
That's correct. Stefan, would you know, like, you have, I mean, maybe it's a stupid question, but where would you think, like, I like Western culture in general.
Is there any country you know that's not crazy?
That's not crazy with leftism?
Is there anywhere left to go?
Well, no, those are two different questions, right?
So, is there any country not crazy with leftism at the moment?
No. Is there, does that mean that all countries are equally crazy?
No. I mean, certainly in America, you have the First Amendment, and there's no such thing as hate speech in America.
So you can make your case in America quite powerfully.
Canada, I know Canada has this pretty bad reputation for hate speech laws and so on.
But Canada is not too bad.
You make a reasoned case with evidence and so on, and you're good for the most part.
So there are places.
Now, other places, like, I mean, you talk about basic facts about Islam in Syria or – sorry, in Sweden.
Sorry. Just a Freudian slip there for a moment.
In places like Sweden or places like the UK, you can face some significant problems.
Yes. So I wouldn't necessarily go to Sweden to talk about these kinds of things.
But if you go to other places, then that can make a big difference.
Also, immigration policies are different, right?
So there are some countries where they try to get the smartest immigrants.
Now, in Canada, there is that kind of Picky, choosy stuff.
But of course, the majority of Canadian immigrants are still family reunification stuff, which is not filtered by the quasi IQ of test of education and achievement and so on.
But there are still different places with different standards that you can go to.
And there are also places where...
They're on the upswing as far as trying to deal with this stuff.
I mean, you can certainly see that places like Italy, Spain not so much, but Italy is starting to surge back against the migrant crisis.
It may happen at some point in Greece.
I think you can look at it in Austria.
You can look at it a little bit in Germany and see.
We'll find out, I guess, in about two weeks what's happening between The Interior Minister and Mother Merkel, what's going on with that.
But yeah, so I mean, as long as you can still talk about...
Reason and evidence.
And I mean, I'm not a big fan.
I don't think it should be illegal. I'm not a big fan of the promotion of hatred and, you know, these people are corrupted.
These people are terrible. And I mean, that's not polite.
It's not right. It's not constructive.
It's not helpful. And it's certainly not an argument.
But as long as you can still make an argument, then make the argument.
And if at some point it becomes pretty clear you can't, Then you've got to go, I would assume, I would argue, you've got to go someplace where you can.
And I'm pretty sure you're not going to get into a lot of trouble in Hungary or Poland for criticizing immigration.
Oh, but these are poor countries.
These are very poor countries. Well, how rich are you in Germany?
These are poor countries.
You're getting taxed at 45%.
Yeah, that's right.
But still, probably, I'm getting paid way more here.
What do you care about what you're getting paid in salary if you're a crypto guy, dude?
What matters is, can you get your crypto without giving it all to the government?
By the way, Poland is crazy with crypto.
You can pay more than what you earn in crypto.
I don't know if you heard that. They have this constant 1% tax for every trade.
Wow. So, I mean, if you do 100 trades, you pay 100%.
Wait, wait, wait, no. It's 1% of each trade, right?
No, no, no, no.
No, so you're not paying, you pay, oh, come on.
I mean, you can do a bunch of smaller trades and then a big one, and anyway, or you can just hold them all off for a big one, but you know that math better than I do.
Well, if you trade Bitcoin for Ethereum back and forth 100 times, you'll lose the whole amount.
That's how it works. I mean, there has been stories on Reddit and discussions on this, and it's insane.
Basically, what people are going to do, they're going to ignore it until they get sued and then the judge will find a way.
But I just wanted to tell you that Poland is not the best place anyway.
No, I didn't know about that.
I didn't know about that. So, listen, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
But first of all, I just wanted to say I hugely appreciate the call.
Very, very instructive and enjoyable.
Feel free to call back anytime.
And, oh, I also wanted to mention maybe you can – are you a father?
Are you a father? Yes.
Yes. You're a father?
Yes, yes, I'm a father. Okay, so what are you doing working 16 hours a day, man?
I work at home with my son and my family.
With your son? Okay, how old are your children?
My son is nine months old.
So, doing a lot of crypto trading with your gurgly apprentice there?
No, no, he sits someplace beside me and I work when he, I mean, I play with him every Now and then.
And we're together all the time.
This is how I work all the time.
All right. I don't know.
I'm just saying maybe you could dial back the work a little bit because you want to make sure that bond with your kid is very...
And they need eye contact. They need direct playing.
You know all this stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely.
I'm planning when in a few years, hopefully I'll be done with this very high intense work.
No, do the high intense work later!
You got to lay in your connection with your kids now.
Otherwise, the teenage years are going to be very tough.
Really? Okay. Oh, yeah.
No, you want to get your connection with your kids real solid right now.
And that way, your teenage years with your kids are going to be great.
Otherwise, if they don't have a strong bond with you, then what's going to happen is they're going to bond with their peers and fight with you.
We're talking months in age, really.
Yeah, seriously. Now, now, now is the time, man.
If you gear back now, get that connection right now.
I mean, what the hell does work matter relative to that strong connection with your kids?
They're not just blobs. They're absorbing, they're connecting, they're forming relationships, they're learning how to trust, you know, all the stuff that's going on right now.
You can read Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby or other works around how much is going on in the baby's brain, but they're not just gurgling and eating and pooping.
They're scanning and connecting.
And laying in the foundations of all their relationships for the future in the first year or two or three of their life.
Okay. Well, good to know. I didn't know that.
I thought like until three, four years, nothing matters.
Right. That may be how it works in the United Arab Emirates or in Syria, but it's not how it works in the West.
All right. Well, thanks very much for your call.
I appreciate it. We can move on to the next caller.
Thank you, Stefan. Okay, up next we have Joe.
Joe wrote in and said, We are faced with skyrocketing home prices and rent.
Heck, higher prices for just about everything except stupid electronic gadgets.
Job opportunities are few, precarious, and often low-paying.
Few people can afford the healthcare needed to have a kid.
Many don't have healthcare at all.
Many are living hand-to-mouth where having a kid is just not feasible without outside support.
My father used to live in the same area I currently live in.
We both at the same age made around $75,000 a year with just a bachelor's degree.
Mine in finance, his in architecture.
Except his rent at the time was $75 a month for a comparable one bedroom, and my rent today is $2,000 a month for the same space.
This allowed my father to get onto the property ladder very easily, start a family, build enormous wealth over his lifetime.
Meanwhile, myself and many of my peers can't really get their life started without significant support from their family.
Faced with these circumstances, why even try to swim against the current?
Why not just piss off and pick grapes in Queensland?
Life in the United States as a millennial is typically just spinning your wheels in the mud at best.
Please help me put this in perspective.
That's from Joe. Hey Joe, how you doing?
Hey Joe. Joe!
Hey, can you hear me? Yeah, there you go.
Sorry, I was fumbling to get the mute off.
Oh, no problem. No problem. So, you don't have to tell me where you're living in particular, but I assume it's a fairly ritzy neighborhood?
I grew up in Southern California, and it's all become pretty ritzy over the last few decades.
A lot of people from outside the area moving in and a lot of natives have left.
I'm, in a way, the last of the Mohicans around here, you can say.
But I'm not just here for frivolous reasons like bikini babes and good weather.
My family's been here for four generations and most people I grew up with have left.
And so I'm wondering, you know, maybe I should get out of here too.
Well, there's a lot in sort of what you're saying.
Do you have a job where you have to be present in an office or a central location in order to do your job?
Well, actually, since I wrote you, there's been a really amazing development in my life since then.
My company has granted me the opportunity to work full-time remote.
Which has been great because...
Oh, so you did the don't bathe.
Yeah. That's good.
Don't bathe and come in in scuba gear.
Stand in the sunlight until your armpits begin to ferment and you'd be amazed at how quickly you get a ticket home to work remotely.
Also Tourette's. Yeah.
My company is like most large companies.
There's just tons of leftism.
I'm a white male.
I've hit what Scott Adams calls the diversity ladder.
So I took another angle at it.
I'm like, well, there's no point in me always being here.
They trust me to do my job, but if you're going to be there, you're more likely to climb the ladder because of my circumstances.
I've kind of just been muddling around there in an office for five years.
If you're hitting the diversity ceiling, right?
In other words, if you're a white male and they need to hit their numbers, you can sit down with your boss and you can say, hey, listen, why don't you convert me into a contractor?
That way I'm not showing up on your diversity statistics because I'm not part of your payroll.
Plus, maybe I can work from home some number of days a week, maybe three, maybe five, who knows.
But there's lots of ways that you can help out your boss while still being productive in the workforce if you're hitting that diversity wall.
Yeah, and that's kind of how it worked out, actually.
So I don't really need to stay here.
I just had the whole world open up for me, actually.
Yeah. And so I guess my question is the same as Samir's.
Like, why would I... Should I stay here and fight the good fight?
I'm just spinning my wheels.
I can't get onto the property ladder.
You know, I could do better for myself in another country, it seems like.
Well, okay. I mean, there's lots of options in America.
So... That is, let's look at a couple of different ways of looking at that question.
Now, are you in a situation where you're dating seriously, you're engaged, you're married, or you're looking at having kids relatively soon-ish?
Yeah, I'm actually about to get engaged.
I like to have kids, and that's really hard to do in the area I'm in.
It being so expensive, it A lot of young families have been driven out of the area.
Yeah, so you can't compare things directly to your father because when your father lived there, it wasn't as ritzy, right?
Yeah, you could say that.
I mean, don't get me wrong, the cost of living has still gone through the roof.
Nothing's really changed.
I mean, these places around here haven't been updated since the 70s.
I mean, the appliances and everything are still like, it's a museum piece.
Maybe there's some fresh paint.
I mean, you want new appliances, you pay probably a lot more than I'm paying.
What does your fiancé-to-be want to do in terms of scheduling kids?
Well, she'd love to be a stay-at-home mom, but I mean, on my salary, it's just not possible.
Wait, wait, wait. It's just not possible.
What do you mean? Well, I know the point you're about to make.
You're going to tell me that if she goes out and works, well, then we have to pay for...
You know, babysitters and daycare and all that, and they kind of cancel each other out.
And I know what you mean.
Yeah, because if your wife or your girlfriend or your fiancé, let's just say wife, if when you're young, your wife doesn't make that much money.
And so having her stay home makes a lot more sense.
If she's some corporate lawyer in her mid-30s, then you're giving up a huge amount of scratch just to have her stay home.
But when she's young, you haven't really missing out on that much, right?
So as far as, like, do you want to stay in the same neighborhood?
Well, insofar as having grandparents and extended family around is good, For parenting, for your kids, there's value in that.
Would your father or parents help you out at all financially, in terms of like, I don't know, down payment for a house or anything like that?
I mean, I have my pride as a male.
I kind of, I suffer silently.
Well, did they ever vote Democrat in California?
No, my parents were very right-wing.
And have they fought the good fight in public for all of that?
No, no.
Okay, so they haven't really fought the good fight, so they kind of owe you a little, right?
I guess you could say that.
But I mean, I started a business once, and it was kind of my first go at it, and I lost some of their money, so in that, it didn't work out.
So I can't really ask them for anything ever again.
Do they want grandkids? I feel like.
My mom certainly does.
I think my dad's take her to leave it.
He doesn't really care.
He doesn't care? He has grandkids, really?
Yeah. Yeah, I've hinted to him about it.
Did he not enjoy being a father himself?
It was Father's Day recently, and we've talked about it.
And I could tell, yeah, I understand what you mean by that.
Like, being a dad for him was...
It was pretty stressful, it seemed like.
He was always working, he was never around.
And we had a lot of nice things, but I had never really had much of a relationship with him.
Right. So, you don't want to do what your dad did?
No, I mean, I don't.
But the circumstances are different.
I'm I got to work like that just to stay afloat, really.
Well, no, you don't. You just need to, if you want to stay exactly where you are, and no one helps you, right?
Yeah. So, yeah, you can move.
Now, you don't have to leave California.
It's not like everywhere in California is that expensive, right?
It's pretty expensive everywhere, honestly.
Well, that's a pretty blanket statement to make, right?
Well, like, the places you want to be.
Well, no, but why do you want to be there, right?
So, for instance, do you want your kids to go to government schools?
That's another thing.
How would I afford private school on that kind of salary?
Why would you have to send them to private school?
There's homeschooling, too, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
But, like, I'm working on...
No, but you've got a wife who wants to stay home.
Yeah, but she pulls in some good coin.
I mean, being as, you know, a female, I mean, there's a lot of opportunities for her.
Wait, wait. I'm so sorry. She's always moving up the ladder.
She makes more money than me, actually.
All right, all right. Hang on, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
So, what does your wife do?
I'm just going to call her your wife.
I know you're not engaged yet, but just...
Yeah, yeah. She's a marketing executive, but I mean, she gets laid off like every year, it seems like.
I'm so sorry to keep interrupting you, but I'm just trying to establish something.
No, no, go ahead. So, she is a marketing executive, and was she educated?
Does she have a bachelor's like yourself?
Yeah. All right. So, she's well-educated, she's a professional, and she wants to be a stay-at-home mom.
Yeah. Good thing we educated her, wouldn't you say?
Right, right. Good Lord.
Yeah, all right.
But I tell her, honey, I mean, we need empowered women in the boardroom to, um, because all these men are just going to run everything.
What? That's her statement?
That's what I tell her.
Oh, that's what you tell her. Yeah.
Why are you telling her that?
I'm just, I'm not sure how everything would add up.
No, what you're telling her is, stay and make money, honey.
Right? Yeah, in a way.
My own situation is pretty precarious myself.
I mean, I've had a job for five years now, but I have the diversity ceiling.
Throughout my 20s, it's been very hard to keep a job.
It's And I've been through long unemployment stints where I've almost gone bankrupt several times.
Well, how old is your wife?
She's the same age as me.
We're both 35.
So why are you asking me about having kids young when you're in your mid-30s?
I mean, that shit may have sailed just a smidge ago, about 15 years.
The point I was going to make was me going through my 20s in such a precarious situation.
I wouldn't ever dream of having kids.
It was so precarious.
And I'm wondering how, just to open up to a broader audience, how would you go about that in your 20s?
No, but you make different choices.
If you decide you want to be a father, you make different...
Okay, let me tell you a story. It's story time.
Here we go. So, I'm 12 years old, and I'm in Florida with my mom.
And... I'm feeling very lazy and I'm on what's called a lilo.
It's like an inflatable raft.
And I'm just kind of drifting out there, you know, the waves are rocking and it's a beautiful sunny day.
I got my sunglasses on and I'm kind of like half dozing and I'm sitting there thinking, man, I should really, I don't know, get in the water and swim back to shore.
And I'm just, but I'm just feeling really lazy, really kind of dozy.
Anyway, I guess I fall asleep.
Because when I wake up, or when I basically open my eyes, I'm like, you get that feeling, I guess astronauts have it, you get that feeling where you just feel kind of in the middle of nowhere.
And I lean up, I look around, and the beach is a tiny little thin strip on the horizon.
Thank heavens I could still see it.
Tiny little thin strip on the horizon.
Now suddenly, I go from kind of dozy and pretty relaxed to, well, I'm kind of far out at sea now, aren't I? And suddenly I have a whole different relationship to the sea.
It's not just this cool little place where there are these tiny little fishes, but I'm out here beyond the trench, baby.
I'm beyond the big deep. There could be anything down there.
So I'm feeling kind of nervous.
I go from like, you know, totally relaxed to like, hmm, maybe like a five on the anxiety one to ten scale.
So then I start paddling back.
Now, of course, all I can think of is how my hands must look like little pieces of chicken to everything down there that might want to eat me, right?
So then what happens is, first of all, what happens is some flying fish suddenly jump over my raft.
Now, first of all, it was kind of startling.
Second of all, it was kind of beautiful.
Third of all, it scared the crap out of me.
Because I knew enough about marine life to know that flying fish don't just jump for exercise.
They jump because they're chased.
Which meant that something bigger was down there chasing the flying fish.
Then what happened was I bumped into a sunfish.
This big old fish that just...
And it lolls around and I'm just like I completely freak out at this point.
And it may not have been the wisest decision but remember I was 12.
I basically just go into the water and I swim.
Now, I'm a pretty good swimmer.
Now, this was before I was on like the swim team and the water polo team and I swam pretty well, pretty fast.
But I really swam like a Well, like a boat with an outboard Mercury motor hooked up to a space shuttle.
You know, I basically was barely touching.
I was like cartwheeling across.
And I made it back to the shore.
Like, it was the worst thing to do because, you know, like a panicked swimmer sounds like a wounded fish, I'm sure, to every great white shark in the known universe.
But I was highly motivated to get back.
I went from like, eh, just kind of drifting along to like...
Oh, wow, I'm pretty far out.
I better start paddling back to like, oh my god, flying fish!
Ah! Swim!
And I got back to shore, and my heart was pounding and pounding, and I literally waited like the rest of the afternoon, hoping that my inflatable raft was going to come in because we were poor and we couldn't afford another one.
That's the same vacation where some creepy guy with a beard offered to pay for my video games in the video game arcade.
No thanks! I think I'll stay chloroform free today.
Thank you, my elderly creepy uncle friend.
So the point of that story is, yeah, you know, you're pretty lazy, but then suddenly when you're motivated, you're pretty focused and you're pretty driven.
And so you can say, well, I can't imagine.
If I was in my 20s, I was unemployed, I was this, I was that.
Well, when you have a family to provide for, it's sort of like, you know, back in the hunter-gatherer days.
You say, well, I couldn't possibly have had a family on the amount of food that I hunted and killed and grew when I was a single man.
And it's like, well, sure, because you were a single man.
But suddenly you got a wife and kids to feed, you get pretty damn focused.
And you get pretty ambitious and you become very good at negotiating because you have the motivation called...
Feed your family and kids.
Because a bachelor can live on like 10% what a married man needs to have to provide for his family.
And if you have the kids, you'll find a way.
I mean, saying we don't have enough money when millennials are like the second richest generation in the entire history of the planet.
Boomers, yep, well off.
You know, they had the government print all the money and borrow all the money and the welfare state and they got all of this great stuff.
They got the welfare welfare state without having to pay taxes for it.
Benefits and bonuses and social security and all this kind of good stuff and Medicare and Medicaid floating around.
So yeah, the boomers, they were the richest.
You guys, second richest.
Second richest human beings in the entire history of the planet say, I can't possibly have enough resources to raise children.
Are you kidding me? Of course you do.
Now, does that mean you have to move?
Sure. Sure.
You know, like the indigenous population of North America, the buffaloes are on the move.
We have to move too.
Yes, the economic opportunities are on the move.
So you have to move too.
But that's all right. I mean, migration is a very core part of human existence and so on, at least within a country.
So yeah, you go to some place where you can afford it.
And you don't have to worry.
With homeschooling, you don't have to worry about the quality of the local government schools.
And you certainly, probably, as a white person, if your kids are going to be white, like if your wife is white, your kids are going to be white, well, they may face racism in schools.
And back in the day, your father didn't have the opportunity to work from home.
He didn't have the opportunity to work online.
He didn't have the opportunity to learn how to program Games for phones and stuff like that.
I mean, there's incredible opportunities for, I mean, just, I mean, to look at me, right?
I mean, yelling in your basement used to be a sign of mental illness, and now, well, freedomainradio.com slash donate, you can help me continue to do it if you think that's a useful thing to do, and we all know that it is.
So, if you start to think more proactively and say, okay, well, things aren't exactly the same as they were in my father's day, sure.
There have been some drawbacks.
Price of housing and all of that in developed areas is pretty high.
Taxes are pretty high. But online opportunities are huge, and you have the capacity to now work wherever you want to be, which your father didn't have.
He couldn't go work in some shack in the woods.
And resources for educating your children at home are far better than they used to be, right?
I mean, I'll mention this before.
The Freedom Project Academy, Dr.
Duke Pesta, FPEUSA.org, I think, is the website.
You can check out that stuff.
Tom Woods has some great stuff.
The Ron Paul curriculum is...
Like, the amount of resources to help educate your kids are staggeringly great.
And so, yeah, there have been some drawbacks.
There are some negatives, but there's, I would say, more than equivalent opportunities and possibilities now that you have.
So, it's the whole thing.
It's like, you never know...
Yeah, that's kind of what my dad told me.
He's just told me, you're a resourceful guy, you'll figure it out.
And I know that the fire will be lit under my ass when I have a kid on the way.
But you have no time to wait, right?
If your girlfriend is 35?
Yeah, I really don't. You've got no time.
No time. You've got to start now.
That's how I ended up in this spot.
Because, you know, the model is, okay, you get good grades, you go to college, you get a decent degree, and then you get a well-paying job, save your money, buy a house, then have a kid.
And that's always...
Been the model set up for me, but, you know, I got stuck in the mud between, you know, after college and then going to work.
Yeah, the migrants and the illegal immigrants don't seem to be following that plan so much.
Just come and have kids on welfare.
But I'm talking about proper case-selected households here for myself.
And that's how we get tripped up there.
And I guess the trap is after that, well, I just didn't get enough university.
So you go back into university and you...
I haven't done this, but most people just end up in the worst dead imaginable.
Oh yeah, no, there's a lot of lies that are floating around there, but you know, every generation gets lied to.
You know, the lie to the previous generation is you really need to go to Vietnam to fight for freedom to prevent the domino theory from coming into.
The lie before that was we're going to go and make Europe safe from fascism, don't you know?
And the lie before that was we're going to have the war to end all wars, the war to make the world safe for democracy.
Yeah, everyone gets lied to by their elders.
You know, debt is still better than death.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good perspective.
Thank you for that. Another lie was, hedonism will lead to happiness.
Have key parties, share your wives, everything will be great.
You work on the internet as well.
I know you're in Canada, but if you could go anywhere, Where would you go?
You just told Samir that there's no countries not infested with crazy leftism, but I'm interested in maybe leaving the West and going to Latin America, but I'm not sure how having a family down there would be.
Why Latin America?
Where in Latin America?
Well, actually, in the area I'm in, I'm very close to Mexico.
I mean, some crazy stuff happens there, but, you know, you can...
Maybe it was like this area 20 years ago down there where there's still room to live and there's little rules, but, you know, some crazy things happen.
People get decapitated and hung from bridges now and then, but I think it's settled down.
People tell me, you don't go looking for trouble, you won't find it.
Yeah. Are you tired or something?
You seem very sort of low energy.
Yeah, I've been working all day.
Yes, I usually do.
The fire's been lit under my ass.
I have like three jobs as, you know, just a bachelor.
But do you not have any savings?
I mean, you've been working for 10 years at least, right?
That's the point I was making about getting stuck in the mud.
You know, through my 20s, I managed to save up like 40k almost.
Lost it all in the bust, in the Great Recession.
How did you lose it all?
Winning the debt. Well, I started a trading company.
I followed the markets pretty closely.
I had a great strategy that was working out.
It was back-tested and all that.
Interest rates and volatility changed and just wiped it all out and took out my savings.
So you were not a very good investor if it wiped out your savings, right?
No. You should not put the essential money into high-risk stuff that can destroy it, right?
Well, I was only a threat to myself back then, really.
Well, no, because the resources you accumulate in your 20s are the foundation of your family in your 30s, right?
Yeah, and, you know, I couldn't find work for years, and I just went into debt and You know, I finally got another job.
Wait, sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt.
What were you living on when you couldn't find work for years?
You know, just all jobs.
I was cleaning houses.
And was that enough for you to live on your own?
Yeah, barely. I mean, I was getting unemployment too.
Oh, for years you were collecting money from the state?
Yeah. Other taxpayers had to pay for your investment losses.
Well, they're... I was a taxpayer for a long time.
I was thinking I got just the money back I'd put in.
I don't think that's true.
If you only work for a couple of years and you're taking years of unemployment insurance, I think you took out probably a little more than you put in.
Well, I had a job for five years.
I went unemployed for almost two and then I finally got another job, crawled back from, you know, I got back out of debt and, you know, Just in time to lose my job again.
But are you staying in the same area?
Just boom and bust. No, I've moved around.
I've crossed the coast for different opportunities.
And I've recently just come back here to where I grew up.
And I'm just thinking, like, I've been through so many booms and busts.
Should I be sticking my neck out right now and thinking about starting a family?
You know, can I do this?
What if I go back unemployed again?
I'm so used to being hunkered down.
I have no idea what economic growth looks like.
No, but you have a family that has some resources, right?
They're not going to let you live on a bridge, right?
Yeah, it's a subsidy, though.
If I can't do this on my own, is that a flaw in my character?
Your family loves you, and they don't want you to starve, and they don't want their grandchildren to starve, right?
True. I mean, you weren't so proud that you wouldn't take unemployment insurance, right?
True, very true.
And it's more personal if your family pays, right?
No, I just, I'm sorry to sound annoyed, but like, I had no family safety net when I was heading out doing all my entrepreneurial stuff.
You know, you've got a family safety net and you're saying, well, I don't know, too risky.
Yeah, I just don't know how to ask them for money.
I've never asked them for a dime.
That's the flying fish scenario again, too.
You'll find it's actually a lot easier to ask for money when you're facing eviction and starvation.
You'll find a way to ask for money, right?
Yeah, so if you just open it up back to a wider audience, if you're in your 20s and you want to have a young family, you're talking about like Getting the grandparents involved and having subsidies for that, right? Well, no, I don't think that's necessary.
I mean, you can live pretty cheap, right?
You said you need a two-bedroom apartment to have kids?
Yeah, I mean, don't you need a nursery and all that?
Why? It seems like people, besides a bigger place, I've observed people with children and it just seems like That you're just pissing money constantly.
I go out with my friend.
That's a choice. Yeah. Listen, people had kids during the Great Depression.
People had kids during wartime.
People had kids during the plague.
It's like, but we have slightly diminished economic opportunities, so that's it for the human race.
It's like, come on. Come on.
You don't need all of that crap.
Yeah, I'm hoping it's just one of those things I over-worried about and somehow worked its way out.
What? I don't know what that means.
What are you talking about? You know, sometimes you overworry about things and things just have a way of working themselves out.
No. No.
No. Listen, what does your girlfriend want if she's a stay-at-home mom?
Does she say, oh, it doesn't matter where we are as long as we're together and as long as the kids are healthy?
More or less. I mean, she has a...
She comes from a well-off family and she's used to some of the nicer things in her life.
Yeah. Jesus, man.
I just don't like asking for help.
Well, then what you want to do is design your life so that you don't have to spend much money.
You're working from home.
You may need no car.
I mean, it depends on where you live.
You live next to a grocery store, that cuts your need for a car down enormously.
You live in a cheap place, you know, you can get nice places for like $750 a month in various places, right?
Go to a small town.
Go to some place that's out of the way.
Go into the country. There's so many things that you can do to keep your expenses down.
Have no car. Learn how to bike ride.
Go to a place where there's not a lot of snow, so you don't need a car as much.
I mean, don't have your kids involved in expensive activities, but if you're in the country, they can play in the woods.
They can play in the backyard.
You'll have room. You'll get good relationships with your neighbors so that you can cross-pollinate You're babysitting so that you don't have to pay for babysitters.
You know, I'll watch your kids, you watch my kids.
So get involved in a homeschooling community where maybe you can drop off your kids as other people can drop off kids if you can teach them stuff.
So there's so many things that you can do to lower your expenses so that you can at least enjoy the first little while home, your first five, seven years home with your kids.
And, you know, that doesn't mean you can't work and can't continue to grow your business or your income.
But you don't need all of this stuff.
To be a parent. I mean, most of our ancestors with the boomers accepted didn't have any of it.
All right, I see. Yeah, I guess I've just been around the wrong parents that have all the accessories.
Well, no, you have the perfect example, which is your father worked all the time, you had lots of stuff, but you missed him, right?
Yeah, I did. If you had the choice to have less stuff and more dad, which would you have chosen?
Or dad. Of course you would have.
Because the stuff is all forgotten now, right?
The stuff was all sold at garage sales 20 years ago.
The stuff you have to have.
I say this to my daughter. Oh, dad, I have to have this.
It's like, what were the last five things that you have to have, that you had to have, right?
Exactly. There's some box in the basement.
We gave them to Goodwill.
They're lost in some drawer.
I need another rubber ball.
No, you don't. Unless you're opening a gym, you don't need another rubber ball.
All of this stuff, we got to have stuff for the kids.
It doesn't matter. You don't use it anymore.
You don't even remember where it is.
It may be somewhere in the basement.
It may be forgotten. That's all the stuff.
That your dad went to work to get you.
Now, your relationship with your dad can never be recovered in the way that if he'd been there when you were younger.
It doesn't mean you can't have a good relationship with him now.
But it sure ain't going to be the kind of relationship you could have had if he'd been around.
So you're looking at kids and saying, well, the kids want stuff.
Kids don't want stuff.
They want their parents. Now, you get to stay at home and work at home and you get to homeschool your kids.
It's a beautiful thing. That's natural.
How did kids, throughout most of our evolution, get schooled, get instructed while they hung around with their parents and done stuff that way?
That's how it works. And that is how- Yeah, I really wish I had more of that with my dad and less stuff.
Because now your dad is giving you useful stuff like, well, you're a resourceful kid, you'll figure it out.
It's like, well, that doesn't really help, right?
No, it doesn't. And your dad is indifferent to having grandchildren.
Oh, that's sad.
That's really sad. He's also indifferent as to whether you want children, because that's what it is to be indifferent.
You know, if my daughter wants something, it matters to me.
It doesn't mean I'll give it to her, but it matters to me.
It matters to me because it matters to her.
And when you say my father's indifferent about having grandchildren, it means that he's indifferent to your desire for children, right?
Right. That's pretty sad.
And that's the result of working so much.
Yeah, thanks for helping me put that into perspective.
Because I guess when you're a parent, you have to justify yourself as being a good parent by what you can provide.
And I guess that's not necessarily what it's all about.
I mean, material things.
Let me ask you this. Who wanted all this stuff?
It's not the kids. Your father probably didn't enjoy working that much.
Kind of narrows things down a little bit.
Who wants all this stuff?
Or who wanted all this stuff in your family?
Most of it's junk I didn't want.
I know. So who wanted it?
I guess the parents want to give that to you so they can make themselves look well in front of the other ones, right?
It's your mom. My mom?
Yeah. Yeah.
Did your mom want the high-status house?
Did she want the nice stuff? Did she want the kids with the latest fashions?
Did she want all of that cool stuff?
Yeah. Yeah.
So your dad had to slave away to satisfy your mom's thirst for status at the expense of his family.
Exactly.
And the reason why you can't imagine things that are different is because you haven't identified that this greed for status on the part of your mom probably had a lot to do with the fact that you missed your dad.
And it's your mom who wanted stuff rather than your dad around, which is kind of cold, right?
Oh, yeah. I don't have the best model for how to set up a successful marriage based on theirs.
I know what not to do.
How so? What's missing for you for them?
Well, growing up, you know, my parents argued a lot.
I got really bad grades as a kid in school.
And I don't know, those teachers didn't know what was going on at home.
Like, you'd see my homework and it'd be all messed up.
I'd be getting F's and D's.
They just thought I was a dumb kid, so they put me in special classes.
But, you know, my parents were fighting all night about bills.
And, you know, they slept on different floors.
Why were they fighting about bills?
I don't really remember because I was so young but like bills would be laid and you know my dad wouldn't forget to pay him or maybe he just didn't have the money because I mean his business went through a bad patch where he built something and didn't get paid for it as an architect and that was really bad for us and just other instances where My mom is a really big nag to my dad.
His solution to that was, I need my space away from you on another floor.
She was a nag?
Yeah, a really big one.
Still is. Is your girlfriend at all like that?
No, she's incredible.
Wow. A woman I ended up with.
Even though she's out of work at the moment, she's sorted out a lot of things for me.
In her downtime, you know, she saved me money on car insurance.
She sorted out, you know, my health care, you know, got me a more efficient setup with that.
And she's great.
She keeps the house tidy, which my mom never did.
She can cook and none of those things I had with my mom.
Was your mom, I mean, did your mom work?
Yeah, she worked.
But it was to pay for things she wanted.
You know, she has some expensive hobbies.
But your mom did? Yeah.
Like what? Horseback riding.
Oh boy, that's some price.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Yeah. Those are like kind of her kids in a way.
Those horses have better health care than I do.
Yeah, the love for animals is...
Problematic for a lot of people.
I saw this study that the states in the US with the highest birth rates, the Google searches or the search engine searches, they're all for like pregnancy problems or how to raise babies or best kind of diapers and all that kind of stuff, right?
Whereas the ones with the lowest birth rates, the top search engine hits, they're all about cats.
Yeah. And I actually, I hate the substitute that people have for children.
It's like, you didn't have children? I don't even want you to have cats.
All right. So, if you identify this pattern in your parents that your dad was nagged into providing horsies for mama, which is, I don't know, the idea that you'd prefer horseback riding to Sleeping with your husband, you know, like, wrong writing, lady!
Wrong saddle. I mean, that's just pretty sad, right?
Yeah. And I guess, subconsciously, I'm setting myself up for that same sort of thing.
Yeah. I think I need to provide so many material things, and that's why I've put it off for so long.
Yeah, no, you don't.
Having kids and starting a family.
I just didn't feel, you know, competent as a male provider when I necessarily didn't have to.
You don't have to provide material things.
It's more, yeah.
Let me tell you something.
I would have liked my dad's time more.
Of course you would have. Of course you would have.
And your dad would have rather spent time with you too.
But he was afraid of the nagging from your mom, right?
I mean, no man ever wants to say to his wife, it's the horses or me, for fear of what the answer will be.
Right. But I'll tell you something that's interesting.
I have a great deal of difficulty spending any money on my daughter.
I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding.
She does not want things.
Or the things she wants, she's like, can I have a quarter to get a rubber ball from a vending machine?
It's like, I think we can swing that.
I think we can manage that.
But I can't...
I can't...
She doesn't want to buy things. She doesn't want to do expensive sports or hobbies.
And, you know, we've exposed her to stuff.
Her favorite thing to do is to chat with me or this thing I've talked about before we do called role-playing, which is kind of like a verbal storytelling form of Dungeons& Dragons with a little bit of dice from time to time.
But mostly it's like problem-solving and taming dragons.
And right now she's in a place called Sea Town.
Now, Sea Town is interesting.
Because it's the third town up the coast.
A, B, C town.
It's right on the C, so it is C town.
And also it's communist, which is the C as well, right?
And it's a communist. So she's like, well, what is communism?
So I explain how this town is a communist town and so on.
And right now she's in the process of attempting to foment a revolution to Take over the town.
And this is the role-playing that we do, and it's vivid, and it's powerful, and it's so much fun.
We can do it for hours. It's hilarious at times.
And that's what she wants to do the most of all.
And it costs us nothing.
Nothing. And other than she likes to go trampolining, which can, you know, it's not that expensive, but can cost a little bit of money.
That's about it. She doesn't want to.
Want to go to Palladium? No, let's role-play!
Want to do gymnastics? No, I'd rather roleplay.
Right? I mean, it's free.
And it's great. And it's great.
So you have that kind of relationship with your kids.
They'll want to spend time with you, not have you spend money on them.
Right. Parenthood, there is no substitute.
What do you find is your biggest expense as a father?
Ah, interesting. Biggest expense is a father.
Ah, she likes to wear the same stuff over and over, so she's not much of a clothes horse.
Actually, she hates clothes shopping.
Oh, she's like me. When I was a kid, everything was uncomfortable.
Well, my skin was dry. I didn't find that out until I was sort of my early teens.
But, ah, biggest expense.
I mean, she likes arcades from time to time, but we don't really go that often.
I don't know. I mean, we're at the point now where she's had an allowance for a while, so she's saved up her money.
She's got some chores to do. She gets an allowance if she does her chores, and she's been saving up her money.
So for me, it's become a whole lot easier because it's like, can I have this?
It's like, it's your choice.
It's your money. Okay.
So you want to, you know, pay your kids for the chores that they do, which isn't hugely realistic insofar as you don't get paid as an adult for doing your chores, but, you know, it's a first exposure to working.
And then the budget is called, it's your money.
For you, is the schooling a large expense?
No. No.
Okay. In a way, I think I could imagine a world where having kids is less money than being a bachelor.
And that if you have a kid, that means you can't go out as much.
And going out costs money.
Is there truth to that?
Well, yeah. I mean, when I used to live at Young at Eglinton, that was this amazing experience.
Amazing Thai restaurant.
And I am pretty partial to Thai food.
And I used to go there.
Not too often, but, you know, maybe once every week or two.
And that was pretty pricey. My daughter likes to eat at, like, places where they put vegetables inside of wraps.
You know, that's... She doesn't want to, you know...
Hey, want to dress up and go to a nice restaurant?
No. Here's where I want to go.
She has very uncomplicated tastes.
And... As long as we can role play.
That's the important thing.
If we can do that when we're eating, she's happy.
So, no, you can stay pretty cheap for that kind of stuff.
Okay. Yeah, I guess I've had bad examples of parenthood and all the things you need to provide in order to justify yourself as a parent.
It's not necessarily about that.
And I was looking at, I was thinking about Young families that don't have any degrees.
I see how they live.
A lot of them are working at Verizon or waiting tables and just barely covering their gas to get there and back and imagining them having kids.
I guess it's another perspective if you have a family that can help out.
You know, you can still provide your time.
Yeah, conversation is free.
Connection is free. Love is free.
And, I mean, of course you need money to live, and no issue with that, but the idea that you've got to have a lot of money to raise kids, I don't see that at all.
If you've got a great connection, you don't need to spend as much money.
I mean, if your parents had been really connected and in love with each other, your mother wouldn't want her to ride horses all day.
True. Yeah.
My dad would go on these expeditions to get away from her.
Oh, yeah. No kidding.
I mean, one of the reasons that I was such a successful entrepreneur was I hated being home.
Wasn't getting along with my girlfriend.
So, I was like, yeah, I'll stay at the office.
I'm happy to be busy.
So, yeah, it's...
Well, and you know, the thing too, I mean, if you stay home and you focus on your relationship with your wife and you focus on your relationship with your kids, well, you're probably not going to get divorced.
And if there's one thing that's expensive, it's getting divorced.
That's why my parents stayed together, actually.
We hate each other, but it's too expensive to get away.
It was a golden cage, I guess you can call my house, when they found out the lawyers were going to take a third.
Yeah, no, that's no good.
That's no good. And the other thing too, when you have strong relationships, then you're less likely to get sick in general.
It's not bulletproof or anything like that.
So, I mean, I get in the States, healthcare is a huge issue.
I was talking to a family the other day.
They're paying $1,700 a month in healthcare, in insurance.
I mean, that's nuts.
So, I mean, it depends where you are, depends, you know, what stage of life you're in, depends on a variety of things.
But I get that that's a different matter and there's only so much you can do about that.
But, yeah, as far as the rest of it goes, you got a lot of choices.
A lot of choices. I never was unhappy because I didn't live in a house.
I was unhappy because I didn't have good relationships.
And don't let stuff and status get in the way of your relationships.
Because there's this urge.
Men have it in one sector.
Women have it certainly with the home, right?
A man's job is his penis.
A woman's home is her vagina.
And there's this idea of status.
We need status. We need to look good.
We need to appear successful.
And all of that is crap.
There's only one person or one group that you want to have status with, and that's your children.
You want to have credibility with your children.
You want to have status with your children.
In other words, they want to look at you As someone who has authority and wisdom and connection and value and love to offer them.
And anytime stuff gets in the way of your relationships, you need to reevaluate.
Now, you need stuff.
You need a roof over your head. You need food.
I mean, it's not black and white, right?
And yeah, you got to work.
I mean, right now I'm doing this show rather than chatting with my family, but that's all right.
You need resources, right?
But don't let stuff get in the way of your relationships.
There's a reason they use the same word for owning things and being demonically possessed.
Possession, right? Because they really can drag you away from what matters to the point where all the horses that your mother loved when you were young are now dead.
But the death of her relationship continues.
It's a bad decision to put stuff over people.
Right. Wow. I like that.
Possession equals possessed.
Yeah. Well, it's the old thing.
The stuff you own can end up owning you, right?
And the desire for status is...
You know who wants status is people who can't experience love.
Like, once you experience love, Status?
Who cares? Like, out there in the world, there are people, like, I'm going to be doing this tour with Lauren Southern in Australia.
You can find out more about this at axiomatic.events, but the mainstream media as a whole in Australia is churning up their usual chum to attract the sharks of the left and so on.
And it's like people try to take me down by attacking my status, by attacking status.
I'm a pretty successful entrepreneur in the IT world, and I remember being described years ago in a mainstream media article as A former IT worker, which is, you know, something that would also could be used to describe someone like Bill Gates.
Bill Gates is a former IT worker.
Yeah, it's true. Technically, he worked in IT. So, you know, not that I'm at the same level, but you know what I mean.
And so people keep trying to attack me on the grounds of status.
Like, oh, we can say stuff that's going to lower his status.
It's going to make him look like a bad guy, like a crazy guy, lower his status.
It's like, but I have love.
I know that I'm loved.
And when you have love, what do you care about status?
What it does, it reveals the attacker's greatest fear.
Like, whatever people attack you with is their greatest fear.
Like, when I attack people for being openly irrational, well, that's my greatest fear.
I don't want to be openly irrational. I don't want to be covertly irrational.
Irrational is the, like, that's the one.
One job, be rational, right?
Which is what I strive to do and all that.
But when people attack you, They are nakedly displaying their greatest fear.
So when people attack you, oh, we're going to make him look low status.
Okay, well, that means that their status is their greatest possession, which is a terrible thing.
And that low status is their greatest fear.
Ooh, okay, well, the bully reveals his vulnerabilities.
It's like smog flying over you saying, hey, shoot this arrow right on this scale that's not here.
Or when people attack you and They try to humiliate you.
What are they saying? Well, they're saying, they're openly revealing that they're the most afraid of humiliation.
Because whatever they attack you with is the thing that they're most afraid of.
And so, when you have love, you don't care that much about status.
I mean, I care about the status of my relationship with my wife.
I care about the status of my relationship with my friends, my daughter, and so on.
But random people and reporters and trolls and why do I care?
I have love. Why do I care about status in the world?
And it kind of makes you strong.
Makes you strong. People who are afraid of being controversial, people who are afraid of arousing ire, are openly confessing that they lack love.
Because if you had love, if you experience love on a daily basis, if you have the power of love, You can be hated and never take it personally.
Because love, the love of those around you, creates this incredible shield against people's hatred.
No one can tell me that I'm not loved anymore.
They can tell me that I have a great Mohawk.
It's just not going to happen. All right.
Well, thanks very much for your call. I will move on to the next call and we'll do one more.
And let's see who's up next.
Spin the wheel! Where it stops, nobody knows.
Alright, up next we have Kyle.
Kyle wrote in and said, Do atheists tend to lean towards far-left ideology?
If so, why?
I once believed that socialist governments tend to push people towards atheism, but I'm beginning to believe that maybe the reverse is also true.
I'm surprised that many critical thinking non-believers are so quick to buy into the half-truths and unsupported claims that socialism offers.
They will argue against religion using empirical evidence and logic, yet when choosing a political affiliation, they throw reason and evidence out the window.
I'm increasingly concerned about this due to the growing numbers of nuns, N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S, in the United States and what impact they may have on the future of our republic.
That's from Kyle. Well, hey, Carl, how are you doing tonight?
I'm doing well, Stefan. How are you?
I am well, thank you.
And when did you first begin to notice this atheism lefty thing?
Well, I'll tell you, I've been a non-believer for around a decade now.
And I've been following podcasts and just the basic social networking of atheists.
And I'll tell you, leading up to the election of President Trump, and especially after his election, It just seems they've went from church-state issues to just about every left issue there's out there, and none of them are willing to present any sort of rationale for their positioning.
I've definitely moved away from the term atheist.
I like to consider myself a non-believer, mainly because of the political baggage that is now attached to it.
And do you have friends or people that you know who fit into that category?
As left-leaning atheists, is that what you're...
Yeah. No, I'm basically looking at the overall, what tends to be the voice of atheism around the United States through podcasting.
I don't want to name any names because I'd rather not promote these shows.
Even though I'm a non-believer, you've answered a lot of my inquiry through several recent videos, Why the Left Hates Science and Death by Welfare, which brings it down to just the brass tacks.
I mean, is there like this Goldilocks effect within a society that requires some sort of faith in something?
Because where atheists like to say that they can be good without God, they have this idea that humanity cannot be good without government.
And I just, I'm really worried about with the lack of religiosity, lack of a better term, in the United States, and it's growing, that this is going to do nothing but fuel the left here.
And we need to get away from the left.
It's going way too socialist.
And it just really concerns me, and I was wondering your thoughts on it.
Well, atheist societies are dying.
And that's not what was promised, right?
I mean, if you look at societies that are very atheist, like Sweden, like Japan, well, they're dying.
They are either not anywhere close to replacement levels.
Japan What are they, 1.1?
They sell more elderly diapers than child diapers.
And they have an unbelievable level of national indebtedness.
It's like north of 200% of GDP can never be paid.
And now they're talking about importing half a million immigrants and all of that to shore up the death of the island.
Another country significantly atheist would be Sweden.
Which is dying.
Its freedoms are dying. Its culture is dying.
Its birth rates are down.
And you see this all over the West.
Except in Christian areas.
If you want to know where there's some high birth rates, look for some Mormons and you will find lots of baby cribs.
I was going to suggest the Catholics along with that.
Well, look at the birth rates in Italy.
Very low. Very low.
Now, birth rates aren't everything and I have no problem with declining populations at all, any more than I have problem with negative interest rates or deflation.
These can all occur in a free market free society, for sure.
I don't think that the low birth rates in the West are organic though.
I think that they're indoctrinated and I think also that you can see that the low birth rates are also to do with high taxes, less opportunity, the stuff that we were talking about with the last caller.
That it used to be that one man working eight hours a day could support a family of a wife and five kids and now two parents working 10 hours a day can barely support a child or two.
So And that's because, you know, if you look at sort of general indebtedness in the U.S., it had these big spikes, you know, First World War a little bit, Second World War was very high.
And then after the 1960s, it just cranked up and stayed there, which is when the great multicultural experimentation began to occur and the welfare state, which is part and parcel of that.
And so I have no problem with declining birth rates if it's organic, if it's natural and so on.
And maybe you need fewer people, but you can automate more and there's Smarter people have other things to do than raise children, although I do think that parenting is given short shrift.
I mean, if parenting involves yelling and hitting, sure, you can get a robot strapped to a ping pong battle to do that.
But if it's around nurturing and cultivating human reason, then it is a very skilled and complicated task.
Well, I guess my dilemma though is as much as that is leading in the wrong direction, and I guess maybe it's just all extremes do, if we swing the pendulum the other way and we look at countries that are theocracies or heavily based behind especially Abrahamic religions,
they tend to become, you know, a lot of nationalism And that has its own place as far as extreme problems.
I don't see us going- No, but they'll survive.
They'll survive. I mean, no, look.
I mean, Islam is flourishing and spreading and growing and is in no danger of low birth rates, right?
It's in no danger of any of these things.
I get your point.
So, I mean, you can say that they have their problems, sure.
But they get to continue to have their problems, whereas the West might not.
Right? Right.
And nobody ever said, well, embrace atheism and erase your culture and erase your history.
And so to me, the big issue with atheism, which was as evident as the first time atheism showed up, the big issue with atheism is that when you take away God, You take away, for a lot of people, free will, and you take away morality.
Now if you have a society where people do not strongly believe in free will, and where people do not strongly believe in morality, you have a society that is taking its first steps towards death.
You have a big God and a small government or you have a small God and a big government.
That's kind of the way that it generally works.
Where you have no God under communism, you have a giant state.
And when you have strong religiosity, you can have a smaller government because people self-regulate and they are afraid of punishment from God and therefore you don't have to have as much punishment from the state.
And they are charitable.
Because they wish to gain favor, to some degree because they want to be good, and also because they wish to gain favor for their acts of charity from God and rewards in heaven.
And Christians are, in general, more generous than atheists.
So when you get rid of God, which logically is an unassailable position, and you can't logically justify the existence of a deity.
But when you get rid of God, the question is why?
Why were the atheists so keen to get rid of God and say, oh, well, you know, but it's illogical.
But as we've seen, as you pointed out, if they're so into getting rid of illogical or anti-rational entities, then why did they switch from God to the state?
The state of all things is far more toxic than religion.
Sure, and it has about the same success rate as God.
What I guess I'm caught in a personal dilemma mainly because I don't believe.
I don't think it's a choice that I have.
I just don't believe it. Well, it's not true.
It's not that you don't believe. It's not true.
Okay. There's not.
Okay. You accept that it's not true.
Yes, I accept. Unless you can show me something that's tangible.
But then it's not God. Right.
Agreed. The moment it becomes tangible, empirical, scientific, it's some super dude maybe, but it's not God.
Sure. Aliens, whatever.
And that's what I get from a lot of arguments.
But I have a son who's 17 and I've raised him non-religious.
I haven't banned him from going to church or anything.
I just instilled in him, if you're going to believe something, believe it for the right reasons and for good reasons.
And with generations after generations moving away from the church, especially here in the U.S., it seems it's just skyrocketing from my understanding of things.
How do we stop it?
As a non-believer that does believe that there are problems within the church, and I am quite vocal about it, yet I'm also a conservative, I tend to believe in liberty.
So you can put me in the libertarian if you want to.
I do think that freedom is what makes the United States unique.
What do I do?
I mean, I'm sort of caught between my principles here.
Whether do I stand up for rational reason or do I stand up for results?
Well, you combat the new superstition called statism.
That's quite a chore right now.
You think? Yeah, but we have the greatest weapon, right?
Which is the internet.
You do a great job, Stefan. I really appreciate the information you put out there.
And without that, I can't say that I would have the knowledge that I have.
So why were the atheists so keen to get rid of God?
Well, they say, well, because God is not true.
But collectivism is not true.
Statism is neither true nor valid.
And they say, well, because God doesn't exist.
And I remember having this email...
I was on some listserv group years ago, and I remember having this conversation with a bunch of atheist libertarians.
And I said, the government doesn't exist.
And they're like, what are you talking about?
And they sent me pictures of the White House and of the Pentagon.
And I was like, yeah, those buildings exist, but would you accept that God exists because the church exists?
No. Well, I look at the government as an imaginary monster that we cannot afford to feed.
And we need to keep that thing as small as possible.
No, but it's worshipped by the… Atheists worship the state.
Yeah, absolutely. In general, atheists worship the state.
And yes, I know there are exceptions.
I would be one of them. You would be one of them.
Sure. But we're talking in general, right?
In general. Well, I think… So hang on.
So the question is, why did they want to get rid of… Why did they want to get rid of… God.
Why do atheists want to get rid of God?
Well, I think it's because they wish to be hedonistic.
And in a certain Darwinian sense, that makes sense.
Darwinism works on hedonism.
Animals work on hedonism.
Why do animals have sex?
Because it feels good, right?
Why do animals hunt?
Because they like hunting and it feels good to eat and it hurts when you don't.
Why do they go and risk their lives lapping up stagnant pond water at Pete's Pond in Africa?
I don't know if that's still available on the internet, but it was years ago.
Well, they go down and risk getting eaten by going to drink from the pond, which tastes like crap because being thirsty is really uncomfortable.
You know, they get chemicals in their brain to bond with their children.
Say, oh, it's love. Well, not really.
Not really. I mean, it's just chemicals, right?
And so, being an animal is hedonistic.
And Darwinianism, evolution, works on hedonism.
And so, when you get rid of God, the great danger is you collapse into the animal.
You have no longer the divine uniqueness of the soul which stamps you as a child of God.
As Jesus and God says that God has given man dominion over all the animals.
He's separate from the animals.
He's halfway between animal and God.
The unique spark of conceptual divinity that we have that is a miracle as far as we can tell.
I mean, nobody knows how it works.
It's just an incredible thing. I mean, it has a physical explanation, I'm sure, but right now it's in the realm of miraculous because we don't know how it works and it's incredible.
And so the great danger, the great possibility was that God was the bookmark for what makes us uniquely human and not just an animal.
My daughter was so offended when I said that human beings were animals.
No, we're not! We had a great discussion about it, and she really helped change my mind on all of this.
Really upset that I said human beings are animals.
No, we're not! And she made very good arguments.
And she's helped change my mind on this.
We're not. We're not.
Because there is a uniqueness in the human concept.
There is a uniqueness in the human's ability to conceptualize that is just absolutely different from every other animal.
You know, a cat hunts mice and a lion hunts deer or gazelle or whatever, zebra.
Okay, so the lion is a bigger cat, but it's still the same kind of mechanic.
You know, a guppy will eat a plankton.
A shark will eat a seal.
But it's still the same. It's just the difference of size.
It's not fundamentally a different kind of mechanic, right?
But there's nothing like a human being anywhere in the animal kingdom.
And I mean, for all the people who have these weird animal fetishes, sorry, you're wrong.
You're just wrong. Oh, but they talk Coco Gorilla a little bit of sign language.
Yeah, okay. That's great.
And geese pair bond for life, but it's not love based on the virtuous actions of the goose.
So human beings are incredibly singular, fundamentally unique.
There's nothing like humanity anywhere else in the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the insect kingdom, nowhere.
You know, there's an old saying that somebody asked a biologist, I think it was a biologist, said, do you think?
That there's a God. He said, I don't know if there is a God, but if there is, he's inordinately fond of beetles, because there's just nothing but beetles in the world.
They're like, I don't know, massive amounts of the biomass on the planet.
So God may be inordinately fond of beetles, but he's certainly not inordinately fond of consciousness, human consciousness, the ability to conceptualize, the ability to philosophize, the ability to extract Conceptual identifiers and principles from merely sense data, from mere sense data, that's unique.
And it's not only unique like everything has a neck.
It's a mammal, I guess, but the giraffe just has a really long neck.
Okay, it's a long neck. But it's not like we just have a long neck and other things have a neck.
We have something completely unique.
And I think that God was like the bookmark for that.
It's what separated us from the animals.
And why did we need that?
Because if we sink into the animal, if we sink into hedonism, which is to be guided by the mere impulses of pleasure and pain, we lose what is human.
And when we lose what is human, when we sink into the animal, do you know what we need?
We need a herder. We need a farmer.
Because we're not regulating ourselves, we become animals.
So we need owners.
We need masters.
We need governments. Because we're not regulating ourselves.
And so when you have Darwinianism replace religiosity, the great danger is we collapse into hedonism, into the physical.
And we can see this.
We saw this Occurring in particular in the 20s with the flappy era.
We saw this occurring in the early part of the 30s.
We saw this in the 50s to some degree with the emergence of the jazz culture and the emergence of the drug culture and so on.
We saw this in the 60s.
It just went completely nuts. And the darkest decade of my youth, which was the 70s, was a complete play out of all of this.
So hedonism is, well, I'm not going to cross my legs, grip my teeth, and wait for the good guy.
I'm just going to go for the hot guy.
Because if it doesn't work out, I can just go on the welfare state.
And that's how my kids will be taken care of.
And it happens for men.
It happens for women. We just, when you are consequence-free, like this is what animals do, right?
I mean, the dogs don't sit there and say, well, we better not have sex because we do have quite a few puppies around and I don't know if we can really sustain them.
So maybe we'll hold off until we get some higher education, right?
They're just like, I want to screw.
And so as a dog, I screw.
And you got cats yowling on the fence, making more kittens.
They don't care. When the dingoes have gotten rid of in Australia, you get a massive proliferation of rabbits until they run out of food, then they all starve to death.
Consequence-free, sex in the moment, forget about the future.
Well, I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer, right?
The future's uncertain and the end is always near, right?
The roadhouse blues. This is the nihilism of the 60s.
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
I'd trade all of my tomorrows for a single yesterday.
This hedonism, blind Darwinian hedonism of the moment we collapsed into the merely mammalian and we lost the divinity of our consciousness.
And this is why the 60s were so creative and so destructive and why the 70s were less creative and even more destructive.
And this is why education was destroyed by postmodernism.
This is why the family was destroyed by the welfare state.
This is why gender relations were destroyed by government programs.
This is why love was destroyed by feminism.
And this is why the West is being destroyed by immigration.
Because we have nothing to fight for but the pleasure of the moment.
And the pleasure of the moment is not enough to sustain a civilization because a civilization is about denying the pleasure of the moment.
You know who denies the pleasure of the moment?
Muslims. They deny the pleasure of the moment.
I mean, they pray five times a day.
Get up early. I remember being in Morocco.
They fired off cannons and said, wake up, wake up.
Prayer is better than sleep. Well, you want to sleep, but you go pray.
They're about denying the pleasure of the moment.
And that's more civilized than the rank hedonism that has infected and undermined the West.
And why did they want to get rid of God?
It wasn't because they disliked all irrational entities because they then turned to the state.
They wanted to get rid of God because they wanted to live a consequence-free base mammalian life.
Now, there is no such thing as consequence-free.
So if you have free love, free sex, you get sexually transmitted diseases, you get infertility, you get heartbroken, you lose your capacity to bond, you end up with unwanted pregnancies.
Because civilization is about, we're not rabbits.
We don't just fucking make babies regardless of consequences.
We can see down through the tunnel of time.
That's our conceptual ability.
But they wanted to live as mere base of the brain, medulla-stimulated mammals.
But the consequences are crude.
And so then, what do you do?
Well, you either regain your spark of divinity and recognize that you're not an animal and you damn well act better than an animal, or you create a giant welfare state and income redistributionist scheme so that you are not responsible for the consequences of your actions.
You can just push the consequences down to the next generation or the generation thereafter, through national debts, through unfunded liabilities, through whatever, right?
And this hedonism, we all think of hedonism is just about like food and sex.
And look at the hedonism. Obesity is all over the place in the West because hedonism.
Sexual license all over the place in the West because hedonism.
It's our selected. But it's not just sex and food and comfort and all of that.
Why? Mammals don't sacrifice things in that kind of way.
And so what else?
It's being indulged in.
It's rage. It's rage.
So when 9-11 happens, people say, it's the Taliban!
We're going to go blow them up!
People, yeah! They indulge in the rage.
They don't stop and think.
What are the consequences? Now 17 years on, we know the consequences, but people at the time, they want to indulge their rage.
Saddam Hussein... As weapons of mass destruction, we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud.
He could blow us all up. We hate that guy.
He's terrible. His sons rape people.
He's horrible. He tortures people.
Let's go get him! Yeah!
Indulge in the rage. Don't stop.
Don't sit. Don't think. It's happening right now as we speak with all this bullshit about, well, there are children in cages at the border because of a law signed in 1997.
Clinton! Clinton! And there were more children in detention under Obama.
Twice the number. And 10,000 of the 12,000 in detention were unaccompanied, just wandering across the border.
Who the hell knows?
Maybe they escaped from their pedophile, rapist, mule gang, drug lords, I don't know.
You got Peter Fonda talking about dragging Barron Trump from the arms of Melania and throwing him into a cage with pedophile rapists and having her watch.
That is a psychotic indulgence in rage.
That is hedonism. The hedonism of hatred.
And that...
The guy was in Easy Rider.
I mean, he tells you all you need to know.
He tells you all you need to know.
Blue Velvet. The Dennis Hopper was in that.
He tells you all you need to know. The hedonism of hatred.
We've become such a sentimental, feelings-based, rage-based, and passion-based society that we are attempting to hold up the cathedral of a civilization with all the self-knowledge of your average otter.
We have descended into the material.
We have descended into the mere flesh.
And we have become avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure.
And we are being taken over by those Who avoid pleasure and pursue pain sometimes because they're tougher.
They're willing to make sacrifices, which we can't even imagine anymore.
Why would you sacrifice to save civilization?
Why would you tell the truth even though it harms you?
Well, you tell the truth under religion, under Christianity, you tell the damn truth because otherwise, tell the truth and shame the devil.
Otherwise, you contribute to the damnation of the world and you yourself may go to hell for bearing false witness.
So you tell the truth even if it's uncomfortable.
Why on earth would a mere mammal in pursuit of pleasure and avoiding pain, why on earth would that mammal tell the truth?
What the hell was Socrates doing?
It made no sense at all. It makes sense if you know about the spark of divinity.
It makes sense if you understand the value of humanity.
It makes no sense if you're a mammal in pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
Why on earth would you tell the truth?
This is why it's so easy to erase free speech laws in Europe.
Next month, the European Union Parliament votes to end free speech basically on the internet with these horrible Article 13 censorship laws in the guise of protecting property rights.
Yeah, they really care about property rights.
This massive taxation power of the governments of Europe.
They really, really care about property rights, right?
This is why they never ever would push debts down to the next generation who never voted for the benefits because, you know, they're so into property rights.
It's really, really important for them.
So why would you fight?
Why would you fight? Well, you see, if you tell the truth, people might get mad at you.
They might phone your boss.
They might try and get you fired.
They might, well, okay. Jesus got nailed to a cross.
You tell the truth.
Why? Because it's the right thing to do.
But mammals don't tell the truth.
I saw this video today, this dog playing around in a Pool.
I guess he wasn't supposed to be in there.
And then he notices that his owner is watching him and he kind of slowly slinks out of the pool and goes and hides behind a bush.
Because he's, you know, he was pursuing pleasure, which was being in the pool.
And then he thought maybe he'd get punished from his owner.
So then he got out of the pool and hid behind a bush and just no philosophy, just pursued a pleasure and then avoidance of pain.
So I think that atheism had a lot to do with Just wanting to loose the restraint of divinity and merely indulge the animal.
And the animal starts with lust.
It starts with hunger.
But so often it ends with murder.
If you look at the atheistic regimes, In the communist world and other places, yeah, it ends with a lot of death.
It ends with a lot of murder. Because we can't live like animals.
We can't. We're not animals.
We're human beings.
We cannot live hedonistically for long.
Hedonism is self-destruction.
We can as long live hedonistically or we can as successfully live hedonistically as putting a chimpanzee in charge of bridge building.
It's the wrong tool for the wrong job.
So the far left is about stripping free will, right?
Because what does the far left say?
It's all environment. If you're born poor, that's your mindset.
If you're born a woman, that's your mindset.
If you're born this, if you're born that, that's your mindset.
Well, of course, the white males have to be attacked because they're exempt from all of this.
And so there's a strong environmentalism, a strong rejection of free will on the part of a lot of atheist thinkers.
And so because there is...
A focus on determinism, on the destruction of free will, then you can't really blame people for the consequences of their own actions, which means you need a massive government to redistribute resources from people who just happen to be more successful randomly, accidentally.
You know, you're in the casino and someone rolls these dice and then you roll this dice and it's just random.
So why should this guy have more?
It's just luck. It's just the way the dice rolled.
So take some money from him, give it to him.
So he doesn't get beat up by the mafia.
This guy, what does he need the executive penthouse suite for?
So because it's all environmental, you can't take ownership.
You're not responsible. And so, well, you know, if you're a woman, you had sex out of bed like you got pregnant and you want to raise the kid, yeah, it's not the government pay you.
It's not your fault. It's no free will, no morality, no choice, no capacity to defer gratification.
So... This is why when you go atheist, so often you go hedonistic, people lose their capacity to shame others, to punish others, to attack others, except on the left.
Again, always except on the left.
Everything gets subscribed to the environment, which means nobody's to blame, which means everybody's mistakes must be fixed by the state.
And this is why you end up with a giant government.
Now, the last thing I'll say, and thank you for letting me rant on this way, but it was a great question.
It's your show. Last thing I would say is this.
The honorable atheists are the atheists who say, well, we have now removed the spark of divinity from humanity, so we must find a way to replace it.
We have now removed free will from the lexicon of humanity, so we must find a way to replace it.
We have now removed morality from the lexicon of humanity.
We must find a way to replace it.
This is why atheists get so mad at me.
Because I talk about choice, consequences, responsibility, free will, and universal morality.
Not some bullshit pragmatism about, well, it's really nice if we don't have cholera in the water.
But it's fine to take away something from people, but don't leave them with nothing.
That's wrong. If you don't have a better house for people to move to, don't destroy the house they live in.
Don't just turn them out into the storm of society.
Because the whole world didn't become atheist all at once.
Some countries became more atheist, while other countries became more religious.
And we can see who's winning.
We can see who's growing, who's spreading, and who's shrinking and collapsing and dying off and being overrun.
Because human beings will always win against animals.
And right now, The religious are more human than the atheists, because the atheists have descended into the mammalian, which means that they need the superstition of the state to shore up their hedonism.
Well, you know, you really didn't make me feel any better about my outlook.
I guess I've just held on to the idea that humankind is good at heart.
And we always try to do the right thing, but...
No, but I've got the answer.
Yeah. I mean, I've got universally preferable behavior, I've got lots of arguments against determinism, economic determinism and material determinism, so I've got the answer.
Go out there, go forth, my friend, and proselytize universally preferable behavior.
That puts the spark back into the mind of man.
That puts morality back in the center of society.
That is the ethics for the new millennium.
If we are going to have universal ethics, if we're going to have philosophical ethics, that's it.
So I'm not saying I'm turning you out of your house of atheism, so to speak, giving you no place to go.
Oh, I'm ready to go anyway.
Yeah, I'm saying this is why I put so much effort into explaining UPB. I got like 20, 30 videos.
I got a whole new book coming out with a whole section on going over UPB for the uninitiated who don't want to plow through the bigger book and all of that.
It's the thing. Okay, I'll have to check it out.
It is the shiznit. I do believe that's the phrase.
Don't have a lot of time for reading.
I catch almost all of your stuff, either audio or video.
It's an audiobook. I mean, you can find it on the website.
It's also on YouTube as an audiobook.
So yeah, you can get the mp3. You can do that.
Sweet. I don't want to take up too much more of your time.
You certainly have...
Answer a lot of my questions.
I have some other thoughts on it, but maybe that's for another time and a different discussion.
Hey, it's been... Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate you listening to my question and answering it.
But I think that's it for me.
All right. Well, thanks, Kyle. I appreciate that.
Thank you, everyone, so much for calling in and chewing the cud of these great morsels of mental energy with me.
It's a great pleasure to chat with you about all of this.
Don't forget... If you're anywhere near Australia slash New Zealand, axiomatic.events, you can check out the show that's coming up with Lauren and myself.
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