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Aug. 24, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

04:00:02

4176 Church and State - Call In Show - August 22nd, 2018

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	Hello, hello everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing so well.
	It's virtually criminal. So, four callers tonight.
	The first, oh man.
	You know, sometimes you hear the bad mom stories, and sometimes you hear the bad mom stories.
	This is a woman who's been called terrible things by her own mother for wanting to be a stay-at-home mother in her youth, and the prejudice against young women who want to have children, say, and continue civilization as we know it, that prejudice is enormous, and we talked about that.
	The second caller, hmm, definitely a Christian, thinks that Christianity is very simple, very easy, there should not be any denominations other than his, and doesn't understand what I mean when I talk about the separation of church and state, although I think the content of the argument as well as the form is making my case, as you'll see as it plays out.
	Now the third caller says that I'm not a fan of abortions and I'm not a fan of single mothers.
	That is a contradiction.
	Is it? Is it? Is it?
	Well, you'll see. And the fourth caller, she's been on before, she's great.
	She had significant issues with my formulation, that magic in stories is an analogy.
	For madness. And, you know, she did everything right.
	It was a great conversation.
	We defined our terms. We chewed through the issues.
	And you'll see how it plays out.
	It was really, really a delightful conversation.
	Just the model of the kind of stuff that we're looking for in this kind of approach.
	So it was great. So, yeah, don't forget to check out theartoftheargument.com to support the show.
	Please, my friends, to support the show of shows at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Sign up for the newsletter at freedomainradio.com.
	Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	And, and, and, if you've got some shopping to do, it's not the worst place in the web to go to at fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon.
	Alright, well up first today we have Hannah.
	Hannah wrote in and said, I am 22 and from England.
	I'm engaged and my partner and I are very happy.
	My life plans consist of starting a family reasonably soon and leaving behind my work in favor of being a stay-at-home mom.
	The problem is, in choosing this life, I've pushed away almost all family members and friends.
	I haven't been completely rejected, but I have horrified and disgusted everyone I know with my decision to reject a university offer in favor of supporting my partner rather than competing with him.
	I have been called reckless and stupid, or the other way and they've called me a lazy leech.
	This sheer abundance of hostility I've been met with has made me question myself and my decisions because it is highly unlikely that I alone am correct and literally everyone else is wrong.
	Do you have any advice for the average person trying to start and keep a stable family in a world that's so hell-bent on destroying it?
	Surely isolation cannot be the answer.
	That's from Hannah. Hannah, Hannah, how you doing tonight?
	Hi. I'm very good, thank you.
	I'm a little bit starstruck to be actually talking to you.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Don't worry. It'll pass relatively quickly, I promise you.
	Are you white? Yes.
	It's interesting because when, say, Muslims, not that Islam is a race, but, you know, when Muslims have high birth rates or when Muslim women say, I want to start making babies, do you think they get the same kind of hostility in Europe?
	Absolutely not. Yeah, isn't that interesting?
	Seems to be pretty much targeted on the white side.
	Women, which is interesting, to put it mildly.
	I knew a Jewish woman who was thinking about not having kids, and she was told by her parents that she would be continuing the work of Hitler if she didn't.
	So, it was pretty intense to have kids and so on.
	So, yeah, it seems to be something like...
	It seems to be something really specifically focused on white, particularly Christian women, and so I just wanted to point that out.
	This is not some universal judgment.
	This is a hostility laser applied in particular to white women.
	So, what was the university offer?
	I work in dentistry, and this was a course to do dentistry, so not just be the assistant anymore.
	I didn't actually get it, and they sent me an alternative, and the idea is you do a year of this, and then you qualify to apply for the actual dentistry course.
	But looking into that, there's no guarantee you will get on the course even after doing this access course, I thought.
	Do you find yourself deeply drawn to teeth as a whole?
	No, I actually used to study law.
	You used to study law? Ah, right.
	This is where it gets complicated because the English equivalent is different to American.
	This was like a college.
	So to me, college is what you do when you're 16.
	Right. And then when I was 17, I thought, oh, I don't like this.
	And the opportunity for dental nursing come up and I took it and I'm still sort of here.
	Yeah, no, I mean, the reason, I mean, there are some people who are passionate about dentistry, and I'm glad that they do that, because it's nice to have clean teeth.
	So I'm all down for that.
	But, you know, it's just a strange thing for me, Hannah, to think, and tell me what you think, but...
	On the one hand, you have children who are going to run into your arms, who you can cuddle with to read bedtime stories to, who you can teach how to walk, who you can watch learn how to play piano, who can argue and debate with you, and who can grow up to be magnificent, wonderful, actual, real-life human beings, or you can scrape along people's gum lines for 40 years.
	You know, it seems like what a weird equation.
	And I'm not saying every woman has to be a mom.
	But it's pretty great all around being a parent.
	And it just seems like how dare you contribute to the continuation of Western civilization when you could be yanking stuff out of people's heads on a regular basis?
	Well, the main sort of argument I'm faced with is do both.
	They're crazy. You'll stop working?
	No, no, no. That's what parents are for.
	That's where the grandparents come in.
	And I remember about two years ago, I was talking with a colleague who was, at the time, trying for a baby.
	And she said, it would break my heart if somebody else heard their first word.
	And I, oh, that really sat with me.
	She was trying? Oh, she already had one, but was trying for more?
	No, no, no. She was trying for a baby.
	And... We were talking about this, like being a staying-for-mom, and she said it would break her heart if somebody else heard a child's first word, like if she palmed it off somewhere else and went to work.
	Well, especially if that somebody else doesn't really care because it's not their kid.
	And was she trying to have a baby because she was in her 30s or what?
	Yeah, yeah. We're good.
	There's the prize of waiting.
	You get to inject yourself with weird chemicals and hormones.
	And you get to check your FSH levels.
	And you get to maybe cross your fingers and hope you don't get some mid-30s abortion baby.
	And yay! Excellent!
	Wonderful! You know, that's your prize for waiting.
	You did get to clean a lot of people's teeth.
	But now it's really, really tough to have a baby.
	And let's say you get your baby out when you're in your mid to late 30s.
	Let's say you want a couple.
	Oh, sorry. It's too late.
	Maybe, maybe you can get one.
	And that is a real challenge.
	Not something that people talk about that much.
	Well, you know, I'll tell you what, I heard her talking to the boss, and he was on about doing something, and I just heard her say, oh, well, I can't do that, because by then I'll be on maternity leave, and she still doesn't have, she's still childless.
	This was two years ago. Oh.
	I know, I know.
	That is a kind of heartbreak that doesn't go away.
	I know. That is a kind of heartbreak that doesn't go away.
	And I said this before in a show, but it's worth repeating.
	Where are the movies and the novels and the songs about women who regret sleeping around in their 20s, pursuing their career in their 30s, and being childless for the next 50 years?
	You know, you're going to live to a ripe old age these days, particularly if you're a woman.
	And baby rabies that strikes in the 30s is very intense and very strong.
	And it's like constantly being hungry or constantly needing to pee to just want so desperately to have a baby.
	And let's say you try till you're 40.
	Well, maybe you're going to live to 85 or 90.
	It's 45 to 50 years.
	What are you going to do with all that time?
	Who's going to comfort you in your old age?
	Who's going to be around? Where is the cycle of life?
	And where is that joyful sacrifice?
	In being a mom that someone else did to some degree or otherwise you wouldn't even be here.
	And, you know, four billion years life has been crawling its way out of single-celled organisms all the way to this amazing capacity we have and it could all just end.
	With one generation.
	And it's really tragic.
	Now, of course, the media want women to go to work.
	Get down into the salt mines and cubicles and fluorescent lights and watch your eggs slowly dry up and die in front of a computer screen typing and tapping and calling and meetings and boredom and stagnation and irritation and bad bosses and you know what, right? Yeah.
	But don't have life, don't have fertility, don't have the beauty of babies.
	And it's a horrible deal.
	Of course, the government wants you to do it, the media wants you to do it, because then you're out there paying taxes rather than generating income for, well, rather than costing the government money, so to speak.
	Now, again, it's really, really targeted Add whites.
	And that is really freaking sinister when you stop and really think about it, that one group and one group only is told not to have babies until some amorphous, blobby, foggy later.
	Well, I think you're making a wise decision.
	There's tons of time for a career.
	Obviously, if you studied law and you have the capacity to be a dentist, you're A smart young lady.
	And that very intelligence, it's funny, you know, people say, well, you're too smart to be a stay-at-home mom.
	Excellent! So let's just make sure that the least intelligent women have the most babies, because that's really what our whole civilization was founded on, wasn't it?
	So no, I mean, people say, if you're smart, I mean, people can't even tell me.
	Like, I'm a smart cookie, and I love being a father, and find it a very exciting, deeply enriching, wonderful, challenging, beautiful experience.
	Other than being married and maybe doing this show, I would not trade it for anything in the world.
	And I don't think anyone could say, well, you know, Steph, I guess you couldn't make it intellectually, so I guess it's fine to be a dad.
	No, it's... It's a great challenge, particularly if you are thinking about it in your own terms rather than just replicating history.
	I think you're doing the right thing.
	You have your babies when they get older.
	If you want to have a career, you can start your career when you're 30 and you can work till you're 70 if you want.
	That's 40 years. If you want, tons of time to work.
	You know, that's the way nature plays you, right?
	You've got tons of time to work, decade after decade after decade to work, but you have a small, narrow window in which to have the healthiest babies and to have the energy to be a great mom.
	So what else are people saying?
	Oh, you're going to end up dependent on a man.
	Like that's the worst thing conceivable.
	Well, what if you pick a man who's dependable?
	Checkmate. Yeah, and I think, I dislike saying this, but it's complete jealousy, I think, on their insecurities, because suddenly they think, oh, hang on, I've slept with 20 plus people, who am I going to marry? Well, who's going to want to marry me, knowing how that breaks a woman's capacity to bond and raise their chances to divorce you and strip your wallet out through your ass?
	Well, I got engaged only recently.
	Congratulations. It was a bit funny, actually, because I proposed to him.
	And received a bit of backlash from that and then it wrote, hang on, I can't propose to my man, but I can have a sex change.
	That's perverse. Well, the other thing too, why would anyone get mad at you for proposing to your man?
	I mean, isn't female empowerment and having a voice and making choices what feminism's all about?
	God, don't get me started on feminism.
	No, no, I'm going to get you started right now on feminism.
	What's your relationship with the fembots?
	You know, my group of friends used to tease me because I would always go off on one and just go on about how absolute cancer it is.
	It is just grim.
	It's, well, it hasn't produced anything good ever apart from very ugly, very unhappy women.
	Well, it's unfair to call them just unhappy because they're very good at spreading that unhappiness.
	So it's not a self-contained system of misery.
	It's a wonderful way of spreading that, you know, when I was a kid, misery loves company.
	And yeah, they absolutely sow seeds of mistrust and hostility and hatred and a feeling of victimization and feminists.
	Well, it's the oldest trick in the book.
	Women want resources so they can either be attractive or they can whine, bitch, moan and complain until men just say, fine, here, give me some peace.
	Well, I watched The Death of White Guilt in Australia, and they are absolutely certain about things that are absolutely wrong.
	And there's no arguing with that.
	No, and they won't debate, right?
	Because I am on my own.
	I felt like we agree, but I'm a bit more vocal than he is.
	And it's me that gets into the sort of arguments, and it's always in like a no-win situation.
	You're always, you know, a bit like a child, you know, if I shout louder, I must be correct.
	Well, it's kind of an insult to children, but I know what you mean.
	Yeah, sorry. No, well, you know, people scream the loudest when they're trying to outshout their own self-doubt, right?
	I mean, they are on very shaky ground, logically, and yet they have...
	See, if you can get people...
	To make major life decisions based upon an ideology, it's very hard for them to back away.
	It's very hard.
	For them to back away. So let's say some woman said, well, I'm going to just sleep around.
	I don't want to settle down with a man.
	I'm going to have a career. And I'm going to basically make myself unmarriable or unattractive.
	I'm going to gain weight, right?
	Feminism and fat, they kind of go hand in hand, right?
	Because you don't need no man.
	And, you know, being objectified as a sex object is bad.
	So you can cut your hair short.
	You can dye it blue. And you can look like you've just eaten four servings of the Michelin Man.
	And so, once people have gotten fat, once they've made themselves ugly, they've gotten tattoos and weird piercings and stuff, I mean, no sane man is going to want them.
	So, do you then question the ideology when it has fundamentally distorted your entire physical being, taking 20 years of your life off due to obesity?
	And had you in endless series of crappy, decaying, horrible relationships with, you know, a 2D6 role of abortions.
	I mean, that's...
	How are people going to back away once they've made those kinds of life decisions?
	How are they going to back away from that and question the foundation of that which has turned them into fat, ugly, miserable people?
	You know, you get people to commit to that degree and they just can't back away, which is why they can't debate.
	Because they're not debating about ideas.
	They're debating about, was it wise to get fat, sleep around, get STDs, not have babies?
	I mean, those are very, very foundational decisions.
	And feminism has pulled a real...
	Number on women, getting them to commit to all that horribleness.
	And then you can't question it.
	Yeah. If they get you to kill someone to join a criminal gang, well, that's why they get you to kill someone.
	Well, that's why they get you to rob a house.
	So that's why they get you to beat up a homeless guy in order to join the gang.
	Because then you've compromised yourself morally so much that you kind of question the gang.
	Because questioning gangs, questioning whether that was the right thing to do or not.
	Giving up babies. It's a big thing.
	It's a big commitment. Giving up love.
	Giving up love. I mean, that's the foundational thing.
	Women. You know, men can get by with stuff and things and logic, but women, in general, really flourish in a world of love.
	And it's one of the most beautiful things around women as a whole.
	And taking love away from women It's so cruel.
	It's so cruel. And how do they push back?
	How do they walk that back?
	Because by the time they've realized it, it's usually too late.
	You know, love is not a lifelong gift you can just have anytime you want.
	It's not like something you put in the freezer.
	You know, I still have some wedding cake in the freezer.
	You know, from like 16 years ago.
	At one point, we're going to break out that wedding cake and have a bite or two, except I don't really eat sugar anymore.
	But it's not like...
	Love is not something that you can just freeze dry.
	You can't put it in cryogenic vats and just retrieve it anytime you want.
	Love is like health. You get unhealthy enough, you smoke for long enough, you get fat enough, you're never really going to be healthy again.
	Princess Margaret did this and it was...
	Back in the day, she had this like 18-inch waist or something because she was like a chain smoker.
	And you look at the second half of her life and it was just a disaster, even though she quit smoking.
	Same thing with Aretha Franklin.
	She quit smoking in the 90s, two packs a day she smoked.
	But she'd already gained weight.
	She'd become diabetic and she was never healthy again.
	It's the same thing with love.
	You keep shredding your heart on bitter and vicious and venomous ideology.
	Well, all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put a woman's heart back together again.
	So the fact that you're pursuing love at a young age and you're going to be surrounded by love.
	Being surrounded by love is like standing in an impregnable fortress.
	People who say, Steph, how can you do it?
	So much hostility, so many lies, so much rage against you.
	It's like, yeah, but I live in a cathedral of love.
	I have people around me who love me and who I love.
	And if you don't have that, you know, you're always going to feel vulnerable because you can never trust people to have your back to watch your sex, as they say.
	So who's called you a lazy leech, who in particular?
	My mother and a close friend.
	I feel compelled to start with your mother at first.
	I thought you would. Good lord.
	A lazy leech.
	Yeah, right. So tell me a little bit about your mom and how she mothered and what she did, Hannah, if you don't mind.
	Miss Palindrome, tell me all about it.
	I'm sure you could guess, but I will tell you anyway.
	There is a bizarre turbulence that plagues mother and daughter relationships.
	It's different, though, because I think it's something that, for a woman, for a girl growing up, it's something you sort of realize later on, because when you're a kid...
	You know, you don't know any different.
	And, you know, when I look back now, I think, God, that was awful.
	But at the time, you know, I had a great time.
	Because, I mean, it's different. But you can leave the house.
	You're not stuck there. And I had a great time playing with friends.
	But then you get a bit older.
	You go to high school.
	And you encounter, you know, teenage girl problems and conflicts.
	And you need help. You seek help.
	You ask for help. You need advice.
	And, excuse me, but I don't think, fuck off.
	Is sufficient advice.
	Tell them to fuck off.
	Well, no. Oh, that was your mom's advice with the mean girls?
	Yeah. Like, no, no.
	And this is... Not a lot of life skills embedded in those phrases.
	No. So this is why, you know, I do, I mean, sometimes now I do feel like a, you know, moody teenager going against, you know, you don't know me, mom, you know, going against advice that should supposedly be better than mine, but it's just not.
	And you know, you tell a third party this, like, I don't know, you just happen to mention, like, sometimes it's funny.
	It's not funny, but I think that might be a British thing.
	You sort of deal with situations by making fun of it.
	And, you know, I put the feelings out a couple of times and nobody would really bite, because it's a cold subject.
	You know, your mum doesn't really...
	I don't want to say she doesn't love me, but...
	Is there something not there?
	I don't know how love can really coexist with the phrase, a lazy leech.
	I just don't know.
	I just like telling you things, but big things.
	She doesn't know I'm engaged.
	She doesn't notice the ring.
	Maybe she has, I don't know.
	Just different things. What do you mean?
	She doesn't know you're engaged?
	No. She hasn't noticed your ring?
	Nope. How long have you been engaged for Hannah?
	About three months. I'll tell you a big thing.
	This did cause an argument.
	I've been sort of... Well, I know it's not the right thing to do, but you keep quiet, you sail on.
	I moved out when I was 19, so to me that was...
	Well, I ran away from the problem, which is not the correct thing to do, but never mind, it happened.
	Wait, hang on. So you're saying a lot here, and I just...
	Sorry? I don't want to leave stuff in the dust.
	Well, you moved out when you were 19.
	I guess partly that was because you didn't get along with your mom, right?
	It was a job opportunity.
	I started working away.
	Oh, somebody offered you a job as a lazy leech?
	Is that... I'm looking for that.
	Hey, if you need an assistant, I'm in.
	So this was sort of the big...
	This just paints the whole picture.
	I moved away and...
	I came back to visit and she was annoyed at me.
	She said that she'd gone out with a group of friends and they'd asked, oh, where's Hannah staying?
	And she couldn't remember. She didn't know which city I was in.
	And that was my fault.
	But you know, I tell you every time I come home.
	She didn't even know what my occupation was.
	If you were to ask her, what does Hannah do?
	I don't know. And I really went off it when I was like, right, Forget the fact that you're treating me like shit.
	What if something happened to me?
	Where are you going to pick up my body or my car if you want some money?
	Where am I? That is outrageous.
	That is totally unacceptable. And then she started to cry, you know, like women.
	I'm being confronted.
	Oh, no. Water works.
	Oh, man. That's rough.
	Was she around when you were growing up or was she working?
	No, she was working, but my dad was night shift, so he would be around during the day, so my dad brought me up.
	Ah, well, see, that's your problem.
	Too much exposure to male common sense.
	Oh, man. Am I wrong?
	No, no, you really, really not.
	I'm really not. See, fathers have a capacity to remain somewhat...
	I know this is going to sound odd in the context of your mom, but dads have the capacity to be more objective about their children.
	I don't know if it's because the women grow the kids, but you know, like you were saying about the mother-daughter relationship, I think where it's complex and some of that's because it's real hard to get space between the mother and the daughter.
	Now, I know your mom not knowing How to spell the last half of your name or, you know, whether you're left or right-handed or what color your hair is or whether you're carbon-based or biped or whatever.
	I mean, I know it doesn't sound like she was too close to you, but there is, like, if my daughter's upset, I can sort of look at it and say, okay, well, let's figure it out.
	It could have been me. Let's sort of figure out what's upsetting or whatever.
	And I don't take it personally, but not so much in my household.
	But what I've seen is that moms, it's just they take everything so personally.
	They're so reactive. And they escalate very quickly, and I don't know if that's growing a baby in your womb and breastfeeding it in flesh of my flesh, but there's not much of a gap.
	It's a little claustrophobic in there.
	Do you know what she reminds me of?
	Have you read Great Expectations?
	Love that book. Like Pip's sister, and she always wears the dirty apron to give the neighbors the impression that she's always working.
	It's a bit like that.
	Playing the martyr all the time in these no-win situations.
	Like, do you need any help with that?
	No. Okay. Why does no one ever help me?
	Well, no. Ask for help, for Christ's sake.
	Interesting that you would bring up Christ.
	Oh, well. That's also absent.
	Were you raised agnostic?
	Atheist? Just totally absent.
	Not atheist as in, no, but just like mutual, like to my family, my location, a Sunday is when you do your grocery shopping.
	Yeah, because all the Christians are in church, so the hours are more free.
	Now, what was your mom, so she worked during the days when your dad was home.
	Now, let me ask you this. When your mom would put her key in the lock to come home, or maybe the garage door opens, I don't know.
	When your mom would be coming home, and you're spending time with your dad, your mom would be coming home, what was your feeling?
	I can't really remember.
	Well, not a lot happened at all.
	No real conversation.
	I can remember little bits.
	None of them particularly good.
	And from about, say, age.
	13 onwards, I avoided as much as I could because it was just constant.
	I mean, thinking back now, I probably was a newly teenager.
	How are you? Fine. I probably wasn't the best, but at the end, you know, that's just in hindsight.
	Let me ask you this, because you said that you...
	You said you left home when you were 19, and that was running away from your problems, which you know isn't right and so on.
	I'm not sure how that is not right, especially if you can't solve the problem.
	If there's lightning outside, you go inside.
	Say, well, I'm running away from my problems.
	It's like, no, it's lightning.
	You can't solve that problem except by going inside.
	If you stay outside, you have a risk of getting struck by said lightning.
	Hmm. There's a shark in the water.
	Well, I don't want to swim away from my problems.
	You know what I mean? The house is on fire.
	Well, I don't want to run away from my...
	You know what I mean? You get it, right? If you can't solve the problem, what's wrong with moving away from it?
	Well, I mean, I bet you've had people saying, oh, but she's your mom.
	Oh, you've got to solve it.
	Oh, you only get one mother.
	Oh, this or that. And you just think...
	Thank God you only get one. Can you imagine if you had more than one?
	Oh, I'm surrounded!
	I say this, of course, only with regards to difficult mothers.
	But yeah, you only get one mother.
	It's like, yeah.
	I only have to run away from wrong direction.
	No, of course. You know, it's your mom.
	She's your mom. She means well.
	She loves you deep down.
	You have to reject all empirical evidence and come with me in the platonic fantasy land called sentimentality.
	No, listen.
	I judge people by how they act.
	I could give two righteous shits about blood and family.
	And it's like, no, I'm...
	Well, you saw the speech I gave in Australia, right?
	I don't care who is killing 30% to 50% of the aborigine babies.
	I just don't like the fact that 30% to 50% of the aborigine babies are being killed.
	And if it's aborigine hands, strangling or beating the head against the rock or slowly pouring sand in the aborigine baby's mouth, it's bad.
	And the big question when it comes to philosophy and objectivity and truth, the big question as you know, And I haven't talked about this for years.
	Ooh, new stuff for the new people.
	So what happened to me was I basically said to myself, all right, let me try this mind exercise on for size.
	Let's say I met my mother at a dinner party.
	She wasn't my mom, like just some woman.
	Who is my mom? I met her at a dinner party.
	What would I do? And other than try and change seats as quickly as possible to the point of feigning appendicitis, it would not be to stay in that person's orbit for the rest of my life.
	It would be like, hey, yeah, remember that crazy woman from the dinner party?
	Woo! Glad that conversation didn't go on too long.
	She was nuts. And if you can think about your...
	Family, your friends, everyone, as you just met this person at a party.
	What would you do? I mean, if I met my wife at a party, I'd try and snatch her up as quickly as humanly possible.
	And... That's an important question because I don't like subsidies.
	I don't like subsidies in business.
	I don't like subsidies in government and I sure as hell don't like subsidies in family.
	Don't trade in accidental blood for absolute virtue.
	Don't trade in accidental biological proximity for actually having to be a decent damn person.
	Take responsibility for who you are and stop cashing in on the accidental and stop pursuing the virtuous.
	I do not like it.
	In fact, I really, really hate it when people use the accidents of biology as a substitute for the quality of personality.
	Because it makes people lazy.
	Family sentimentality is the welfare state of relational virtues.
	You don't have to work.
	You're going to get money anyway.
	And it really is vile.
	It is this pathological altruism of, well, I don't like you, but you're family.
	It's like, you just have to stop with, I don't like you.
	I don't like you.
	Now, subsidizing people is really, really bad.
	Affirmative action for the accidental biological cage of family distorts and destroys the natural economy of relational virtues.
	But she's your mom!
	It's like, yeah. She gave birth to me.
	She raised me! And she can either do the greatest harm or the greatest good for the development of my personality.
	But don't subsidize people.
	Don't subsidize the third world in your countries.
	Don't subsidize the military industrial complex.
	Don't subsidize idiot decisions made by idiot people.
	Don't subsidize stupid health decisions made by people who damn well know better.
	Don't subsidize.
	Don't subsidize!
	And it will not subsidize in love!
	Because you don't get both.
	You either get to actually love people or you get to fake love people.
	You don't get both. You know, they say this in economics.
	Bad money drives out good money.
	In other words, if money is being printed like crazy, people turn to cryptos, Bitcoin, gold, whatever, right?
	Bad money drives out good money.
	And fake love drives out real love.
	That's the price you pay for this.
	Put your mom in sentimentality and bullshit.
	She's your mom.
	Yeah, so she should know everything about you and she should be a wonderful person and she should have taught you all about love and confidence and security.
	And she should help you make better decisions and she should be wise.
	But the idea that some biological label can wallpaper over a sucking chest wound of selfishness and narcissism?
	No. You know, good people...
	They don't need those lies.
	Good people, we don't need that propaganda.
	I don't need a world to constantly scream into the ear of my daughter and say, but he's your dad.
	You have to spend time with him.
	He's your dad. He means well.
	He loves you even though he doesn't always show it.
	He's a good person deep down.
	He cares about it. I don't need this constant stream of propaganda.
	Why? Because my daughter loves me.
	And I love my daughter. I don't need it.
	In fact, I would consider it entirely insulting.
	Like, get away from my daughter. Make your own mind up.
	So you understand, it's only the evil, nasty, selfish, manipulative jerks who are constantly peddling like mad this endless sandblasting propaganda.
	Well, I could become a good person and earn your love, or I could just create a social environment that attacks you randomly for not giving me what I want.
	Huh! I wonder which way I'm gonna choose.
	And it is a fundamental immorality to subsidize love.
	You understand? It is not a neutral thing.
	I mean, I'm gonna appeal for people who think that substituting Accidental biological relations for genuine virtue and love.
	Okay. It means that you don't get real love.
	It means that you are controlled.
	It means that you're not independent.
	It also means you're not that good a person.
	Now, I don't mean before you've heard these arguments or before you've understood these things.
	We're in a state of nature as far as that goes.
	But for the people out there who are listening to this, gotcha.
	Gotcha. You're lassoed now, my friends.
	You now know.
	That subsidies are terrible.
	Subsidies are corrupt.
	Subsidies are what evil provokes you to give because they haven't earned anything.
	They haven't earned what they want.
	So they bully and they manipulate and they use guilt and they use sentimentality and they use punishment and they will turn people against you if you don't give them what they want.
	And that is the hurricane of manipulation that we just have to plant our damn feet deep in the ground, stand tall, and withstand, because it will pass.
	So when you say, well, I ran away from my problems, which was your mom, and that was bad, you know who told you that was bad?
	Your mom. And you know what that is?
	a manipulation at a demand for a subsidy she damn well didn't earn.
	Well, yeah.
	Um...
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I needed to hear that, actually.
	Thank you. What does your fiancé think of your mum?
	Oh, Christ. We did the whole, you know, meet the parents thing.
	I met his, he met mine.
	And she was on her best behaviour.
	She could not have been nicer.
	And now it's, oh, what were you worried about?
	Oh, she's fine. Oh, they mellow out, parents mellow out in their old age.
	Oh, you know, she's this, she's that, like, making all these excuses for her.
	And I just thought, oh, right.
	You know, that's an act of aggression against you.
	Your mom is now attempting not just to have your fiancé think well of her, but also to set you at odds with your fiancé.
	It's an act of absolute sabotage.
	Yeah. Because it sets you at odds against your fiancé.
	He now thinks you're exaggerating, you're crazy, she's fine, what's the problem, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yeah. And it opened up a bit of a conversation I probably, well, I would have had, but I didn't really want to have.
	You know, I mean, I'm sure, you know, from your life, there are just some things you cannot forgive.
	I'm sure everybody argues, but, you know, there are times when enough is enough, and you just walk away, like you say, regardless of blood.
	Well, it's a seven to one ratio that I've read about, that you need seven positive things for every one negative thing.
	So if you have a bad month with someone, you need like seven months without problems.
	If you have a bad year with someone, you need seven years of no problems.
	And if your mom has been negative to you for 10 years, you need 70 years of perfect just to break even.
	Not even counting the fact that your mom is your first impression, right?
	It's more vivid.
	So for me, the tipping point was my mom can't live long enough for things to even out.
	Sorry. It feels like she will.
	But you can't.
	Why didn't he have you back with this?
	I get it?
	Yeah, hello?
	Why did your fiancé seem to be a little bit siding with your mom, right?
	He wants us to get along better because that's what he thinks is right.
	I don't think he can comprehend that I would not talk to her again.
	Not total, well, I don't know, maybe total cut off, but certainly a reverse and a back away.
	Because I'll do birthdays and I'll do Christmas, but apart from that, I'm not really interested.
	Does he know what happened in your childhood?
	Yeah. Do you want to mention any of that?
	I mean, I have your Adverse Childhood Experience score, but I'll leave it to your discretion for what you want to talk about.
	No, I'll just say it.
	This is when I was working away, so I am approximately 200 miles from home, and I was assaulted.
	I was sexually assaulted.
	I'd just turned 19, and I thought, right, This is big.
	This is a thing. I need my mom.
	And what happened, if you don't mind me asking?
	I was in a bar.
	I used to...
	The place I worked for, they didn't have any room to put me up there, and they paid for me to live above a pub, a bar.
	It was kind of like a hotel, but it was just a pub, like sort of a conversion.
	And I made friends with some people there, and...
	I don't know what it's like in the US, but they've changed the laws you can't smoke inside, so everybody has to go outside.
	And I don't smoke. However, if your friends go out for a cigarette, they'll start talking.
	They'll be out there for 40 minutes, and you're sat there doing nothing.
	So I went out to join them, and it's not just people there.
	And this guy got talking to me.
	He was ex-Navy.
	And I don't know why, we weren't talking about it, but he just started, like, kind of breaking down on me, and he was going on about this really messy situation, something to do with Sierra Leone and particular things he saw.
	And, like, honestly, this man is, like, crying and, you know, trying to console him.
	You know, you're going to be all right, whatever.
	And next thing I know, I'm...
	Up against the wall, fighting for what felt like my life.
	You went from crying in PTSD to attempting to sexually assault you, or sexually assaulting you.
	Yeah, sexually assaulting me.
	Wow. Yeah.
	And you know what I... That's quite the honey trap, you know, like, I'm crying, I'm crying, argh!
	Right? I would have done this, I would have done that, but I'd just frozen for you.
	Oh, you know, fucking hell.
	Yeah. Sort of all strength into one.
	The moment I finally pushed him, he must have went about three feet on the ground and I ran up the stairs, locked all the doors and went inside, you know, locked myself in my room.
	And it's a strange thing because it's not...
	It's a bit like suicide.
	It's not supposed to happen.
	So there's not sort of one way somebody can tell you how to feel.
	You know, it runs over your head.
	You think, did it happen?
	You know, a man making up a whole...
	I think, well, of course it happened.
	But, you know, it's just such a mess.
	You feel like that, you know, you're upset, you're angry that you let it happen.
	You're ashamed, you're embarrassed, you feel guilty.
	And, you know, that was the moment I thought, I need my mom help.
	And so first thing in the morning, I rang work and said, right, I can't come in.
	I'll explain it, but, you know, there's something I need to do.
	And I went straight to the police station, made a statement.
	Went through the whole process, but then it was no witnesses or particular evidence or anything like that, so it was my word against his.
	And I was due to move to another job, and this policeman said, you'd have to go to court.
	And I dropped the charges, and I just left the city, never went back, and just walked away.
	Probably gave him a good old scare, though.
	Well, I'll tell you what.
	He worked for the same company as I, completely separate, like this is a massive scale.
	I've never seen him before in work.
	But he basically brought the company into disrepute, they sacked him, and as a result, found out from a third party, he's lost his car, he lost the house, his wife found out and divorced him.
	Good. Good.
	Good. I've got no problem with any of that.
	And when I, you know, I rang my mom and I told her, I said, I dropped the case, she took a fucking head.
	She told me I had wasted police time.
	You've wasted everybody's time.
	What the fuck did you do that for?
	And it rings in my head.
	It makes me sick just saying it.
	This was a couple of years ago.
	I just cannot bring myself to forgive her.
	And I don't think I should. And I said this to my fiancée.
	He didn't speak for about 10 minutes.
	Did he apologize for saying that your mom seemed fine?
	Yeah, profusely.
	Good. Good. That's good.
	So he has an input for new information.
	Right. Now, has your mom ever apologized for any of these things that she's done?
	No. Wow.
	You know, I mean, typical sort of narcissistic woman, you bring it up and they start crying.
	And that sort of Stops any real conversation.
	You know, I used to know a counsellor and she told me something interesting.
	I'm not sure if I'm saying it completely accurately.
	She was saying that you have like four, inverted brackets, personalities in your head.
	You have the good adult, the bad adult, the good child and the bad child.
	So say the good adult is like, you know, a good listener.
	The bad adult is quite narcissistic and manipulating.
	The good child is sort of obedient and You know, takes on your advice and the bad child is like mischievous.
	And whenever you have an interaction with anybody, like say for example now, I'm talking to you and you're listening, so I'm the good adult and you're the good child, if that makes sense.
	And if you force somebody into a different personality, you know, they kind of freak out.
	And I sort of tried it once.
	She was off on one in a bit of a mood.
	And I just said to her, ma'am, what's wrong?
	Tell me what is wrong.
	And she burst into tears and walked off.
	What did I actually do?
	I asked her what is wrong, which is a perfectly normal thing to do.
	But no, she wasn't having it.
	Yeah, I mean, I know what you mean.
	I've heard these sort of many personalities within...
	The mind and yeah, of course, we all have a child personality because we were a child and we have an adult personality once we've grown up and There are times when people try to talk to us as if we are bad or naughty children, and we have to resist that because we're not, right? I mean, your mother probably has something where you are a bad and naughty child.
	You wasted police resources, you lazy leech, and, you know, like this abuse that you'd pour upon a naughty child, and when you break that, then she has no choice but to burst into tears because she doesn't have another way of pretending to interact with you, right?
	So if you resist that, right?
	Then, yeah, I mean, this happened to New Zealand and in Australia with the media, right?
	That they were, you know, you're a bad racist, whatever, whatever, right?
	And it's like, nope, never said that.
	Nope, you're wrong about this. Let me give you a reason.
	And then they freak out, right?
	They kind of shut down.
	You can see the short circuit going on, right?
	Because they're trying to interact with you in a particular way.
	They're trying to put you in a kind of box, right?
	And you're just like, nope, I'm not going to feel guilty.
	I'm not going to feel bad.
	I'm not going to feel naughty for dealing with facts, reason and evidence.
	And when people, people, I mean, when you see this happening in life, it's almost impossible to stop seeing it, which is that people are constantly trying to put you into a particular position.
	And in a sense, dictate your responses, right?
	It's the old, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
	No, right. You know, like, I mean, you're supposed to be put into a kind of mess with all this kind of stuff.
	And you just identify the framing and you reject the assumption, right?
	So, you know, in one of the interviews in Australia, the guy was like, you know, basically, do you think you have a lot of white, like, you seem to have a lot of white nationalists in your followers.
	And it's like, Well, first, you're just trying to, you know, thank you very much for associating my name with that phrase, which is, of course, the first point.
	And the second is, I don't know what my listeners' beliefs are.
	I can't read the minds of a million or two million people.
	How could I possibly do that, right?
	Do you actually have an argument that's not race-baiting?
	And then it's like, oh, I don't know, actually.
	Let me check further down in my notes.
	So, with your mom...
	It's the cry bully, right?
	So she tries to be a bully, and if that doesn't work, she bursts into tears, which is also being a bully, right?
	Shutting down your capacity to have input to her.
	it's shutting you up in a different kind of way right so did she work throughout most of your childhoods Yeah, all of it.
	She may have had a year or two off when I was a baby, but...
	You don't know? No, I'm not going to remember.
	Not like you would remember directly, but...
	Yeah, I'd say she worked most of it.
	Well, yeah, a little bit, pretty much.
	The whole lazy leech thing comes from...
	Well, basically, when I sort of turned down the university offer, you know, my fiancée had, you know, said to me, this whole thing is for your personal gratification.
	You do not need to do this to financially provide.
	I've got your back.
	You're fine. I make enough money.
	This would just be for you.
	It's okay. You know, when...
	When I proposed, he didn't actually say yes straight away.
	He asked me what I wanted in life.
	And we basically agreed that we want a family, multiple children, and that I would stay home.
	And that would be that. Yeah, all the stuff that worked for about 150,000 years.
	Yeah. And I mean...
	Well, I certainly don't want my mom looking after them.
	So who else has left?
	Oh, look, it's me. So I can't be working.
	And he's like, yeah, that's obvious.
	So we're doing fine.
	But it's just everyone else.
	And my concern was, well, it can't be just me.
	But I think it is.
	No, no, no. See, here's the thing.
	Your social life is defined by your worst relationships.
	Alright. Do you understand what I mean?
	You got that, right? I think so.
	So, let's say you have, you ever see these long trains and they've got like four trains at the beginning to pull these endless carriages?
	Well, if you've got four engines, they can only go as fast as the slowest engine, right?
	Hmm. Can't go faster than the slowest engine because they're all bound together.
	So if you have a dysfunctional relationship in your life that is unresolved, you can't get out of that particular environment.
	And part of the struggle, the seesawing with your fiancé is about that.
	Look around all your relationships.
	What is the most dysfunctional relationship?
	That's the one that's got you tethered.
	That's the one, you know, like they put the dogs in the backyard, they put a stake in the ground, and they put like a 30-foot tether on the dog so that the dog can roam around but not...
	Break free, right? Your tether, your chain, your limitation is your least functional relationship.
	That's the one you need to either break through or break out.
	Now I can tell you with 100% certainty, you will not be able to break through with your mom.
	I'm not saying don't try. You know, don't listen to me.
	I'm just some guy on the internet, right?
	So try and try all you want, but it's not going to happen.
	People don't change much.
	Unless they're already constantly in the process of changing.
	Like, I'll change. You'll change because, you know, we have self-knowledge.
	You say you knew a counselor and you probably read about self-knowledge and all that kind of stuff.
	And, um... Your mom's not going to change, because she's not in the process of trying to change.
	In fact, when any suggestion to change is brought up, what does she do?
	Yeah, she cries.
	She cries. And you always know that tears aren't real, because if you keep pushing, you just get rage, right?
	Yes. So the TS are just a back-off mechanism, like a cat going, right?
	But if you keep pushing, you just get attacked, right?
	So the TS are back-off, and if you keep going, you get the rage, because there's no real person in there.
	It's just a bunch of self-justifying, empty echo manipulation bullshit.
	And so you're not going to be able, I think, to break through to the good relationships Until you find closure with the dysfunctional relationships.
	Because that's always in your head.
	It's always part of your interactions with others.
	And I'll tell you this.
	You'll know this when you rise up with your fiancé to a better situation.
	Those of us who are functional – let me tell you what it's like.ucian scan scan scan scan scan! Because we know that most people are dysfunctional.
	And so when we meet new people, we scan.
	We look for red flags.
	We look for warning signs.
	And we're very adroit and adept at seeing them and backing the hell off.
	So you're going to be scanned by...
	Higher quality people, I don't mean higher quality in terms of a dedication to ethics, but people who've got more closure, who don't have dysfunctional relationships left in their lives, those people are going to be scanning you.
	And they're going to see, within a few minutes, whether or not you make the cut.
	And they're going to be nice, they're going to be polite, and they may meet you, but you won't get in.
	You won't get into that circle.
	Not because of dislike to you, they may have great sympathy for you, but you don't invite people to a dinner party who bring a drunken and belligerent uncle.
	You just don't, because it ruins the dinner party, right?
	Yeah. And it's not like you will take your mom ever, you understand, but it's just something that happens.
	Since I got out of dysfunctional relationships, I'm scanning, scanning, scanning, scanning, and I've become very good at it.
	And that's why you say, where are all the people?
	Because you're in between, right?
	You're out of the dysfunction, not completely.
	Because you said to me earlier, well, I ran away, or I left home and I ran away from my problems, which wasn't a good idea.
	So you're still ambivalent about your mom, right?
	Which I understand and I sympathize with, I really do.
	But you can't get to the higher plane.
	You can't get to the better place until you deal with what was before.
	And you cannot have a more functional social relationship in the long run than your least functional relationship still in your life.
	because they just won't let you in.
	That's very interesting.
	The amazing thing is when you deal with them, people will appear.
	Because you know, we're always looking for quality people.
	Yeah.
	And you'll find them.
	Then you're going to have to ask your dad, why did you marry this woman?
	Thank you.
	Oh. Because, you know, there's always one parent who gets away, but they're a system, right?
	Yeah. Are they still together?
	Yeah, yeah. Been married, um...
	I'm 25. How old am I? 26 years.
	Oh my god, that's not a night shift.
	That's a graveyard shift. Forever.
	Why did he marry her?
	How pretty was she?
	Reasonably. She had a very nice figure.
	And what about your dad in terms of attractiveness when he was younger?
	Not really. I mean, you know, just being honest, but she was a virgin when she met my dad.
	Hmm. Does your dad know?
	I think so. That his wife called you a lazy leech and said about your...
	Sorry? He was there.
	He was there. And what did he say?
	Oh, nothing.
	Nothing ever. The house could be burning down.
	Dad, the house is on fire.
	Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, that is it.
	I'm getting a little bit of that in this conversation, you know.
	Does he know that your mother accused you of wasting police resources?
	I might have told him, but wouldn't have gotten a response.
	Reasonable, neutral relationship, I think.
	Neutral? What do you mean neutral?
	We don't fight, but...
	No, come on. There's no such thing as neutral when you're a parent.
	Somebody calls your daughter horrible names.
	You can't be neutral. Then this is bad.
	You can't be neutral. Right?
	Yeah. And what that means, of course, is that he's terrified of her, right?
	Yes. Right. And he needs you to stick around, right?
	Why? Let's say you bail and say, she's just been too horrible for too long.
	Can't do it. Got my own life to live.
	He's stuck, right? He's left behind.
	He's got to deal with her alone.
	And she's going to be really upset because you're gone.
	So he's going to have to deal with all that.
	Guy's hanging on to you like a shipwrecked victim on a sodden barrel.
	But it's unfair, right?
	It's unfair. He chose her, you didn't.
	Right? Yeah.
	You just got her.
	So it's unfair.
	And you are contributing to the stagnation, right?
	Yes. Yeah, I am.
	How so? I'm not doing anything about it.
	I'm afraid. I'll admit I'm afraid.
	What are you afraid of? I know what I should do.
	I don't know why.
	I just can't bring myself to do it.
	What should you do? Just break it off.
	I don't think it's going to need to be extremely dramatic, but just...
	Well, is stop making the effort the right phrase?
	Well, I mean, my particular recommendation in these kinds of situations is, you know, get a therapist, work through the process, talk to your mom, until you're certain, until there's no doubt anymore.
	That's my, you know, every situation is different.
	So there's not one prescription, not one size fits everyone.
	But that's my general situation.
	But, you know, oftentimes you're not, I haven't, I mean, it's been a while since I've heard of A mom this bad.
	Oh, really? Yeah.
	Yeah, she's wretched.
	Yeah. Absolutely wretched.
	Absolutely wretched. I'm just not sure.
	There is an isolation.
	I mean, I know I have my fiancé, but maybe, I don't know, maybe it's not particularly appropriate.
	To talk about it deeply?
	I don't know. What do you mean?
	He's not really giving the answers that I want to hear.
	And I don't know if that's a problem with me, or maybe I need to talk to somebody else about it.
	You know, that's no fault. No, it's his family.
	Come on, it's his family.
	You start making choices with your family.
	I'm not saying they're photocopies.
	But you start having real boundaries and standards with your own family of origin.
	What happens to his?
	Oh well, there it is.
	There's an issue. Go on.
	He managed to work through his.
	Do you know, oh my goodness, I've just realised something.
	Our families are almost the same.
	His father's frightened of his mother because she's deeply religious.
	He's got three siblings and all of them Basically moved away, like went to university and basically didn't come back.
	They were in contact and stuff, but my guy has the closest relationship to her because one day he stood up to her and said, this is all bullshit.
	You've been feeding us bullshit for years.
	I don't agree with it.
	You mean the religion? Yes.
	Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, Irish Catholic, like, we'll go in there.
	And he stood up to her and said, no, I don't like it.
	I don't agree with it. Stop it.
	You know, stop telling me to read the Bible.
	Stop telling me your opinions.
	Because they're not your opinions, they're the Church's opinion.
	You know, they say for example in the news, like, you know, the Pope of all that sexual abuse.
	Like, oh, we're not going to cover it up anymore.
	You know, the Pope could say, oh, you have to paint your, everybody has to have green walls.
	Two things about the Pope.
	Number one, involved in the cover-up of pedophilia.
	Number two, very pro-migrant.
	That's all you need to know.
	Those two beliefs coexist in the same brain.
	Pro-pedophilia, in a sense, at least covering it up and washing the feet of migrants.
	This is the first time I was going to be able to do this.
	Who aren't, in fact, migrants.
	Yeah. Okay, so there's a whole system here locking you down, right?
	Yes. Right. And you hope to be able to keep it all together.
	Spoiler! You can't.
	You can't. You're on the road.
	Like, sorry. You're on the road.
	You're on the road to self-knowledge.
	You're on the road to philosophy. You're on the road to truth, my dear.
	And everyone starts down this road like, ah, it's kind of flat.
	I can navigate this.
	I can take my time, and you know, it starts to tip a little.
	It's like, eh, it's a bit of a hill there.
	It's a little slippery. Oh, well, I'll just dig my heels in, walk down nice and slow.
	Oh, it's getting a little...
	Ooh, that's kind of steep, actually.
	Ah, well, I'm sure I can...
	I just had... I don't want to run, because I don't want to end up in that ever-accelerating run that has you faceplant into...
	Oh, my gosh, this went really steep.
	Holy crap! Ice!
	Oh, no! Vertical!
	No parachute! There's a tiny net at the bottom!
	Ah! Everybody just starts.
	And I was the same way.
	I'm like, yeah, I can handle this.
	No, I can't. No, you can't.
	Yeah, you can. You invite truth in like you invite a vampire in.
	It's just that they suck out all the bad blood, if you know what I mean.
	So it's worth it. Oh, it's worth it, yeah.
	It's just not something you can particularly control.
	Okay. That Norris Barclay song, Crazy, ha ha ha, you think you're in control.
	It's like, yeah, this philosophy is its own thing, you know?
	It's its own momentum.
	It's its own uncurling and unfurling.
	And you're on that path.
	If you met your mom at a dinner party and she sat across from you and talked to you, what would you say?
	What would you do? What would you think?
	Didn't know her before. Just some woman.
	Never again. Right.
	Right. Right.
	Now the never again-ness, Hannah, is already in you.
	The never againness has been in you for many, many, many years.
	But there are other people in your life who desperately don't want you to connect with that.
	Because it makes their lives more difficult in the short run, right?
	Thank you.
	You understand? If you were in some relationship with some guy and you were both doing drugs and he didn't want to quit, how would he deal with you trying to quit?
	Give me more. Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Because if you quit, he's left alone.
	If you quit, he has to quit.
	If you quit, He's got to deal with his problems for real, right?
	Yeah. So, nobody wants you to grow.
	Because then they have to grow.
	And that's the challenge.
	I mean, I wish we lived in a world where growth and self-knowledge was applauded by most people, but it is viciously attacked by most people.
	See, everybody says, I want freedom.
	I want freedom. Give me freedom!
	Everybody cheers at that William Wallace thing.
	Freedom! Too bad.
	Everybody wants this freedom.
	They, like, beg for it.
	They die for it. They pine for it.
	They yearn for it. They fight for it!
	I want freedom!
	Oh no, is someone around me acting actually free?
	Crush them! Kill them!
	Undermine them! Destroy them!
	Put them back in the box!
	They're actually exercising the freedom I say I want?
	No! Right?
	Yeah. It's terrible.
	It's terrible. It's like, I don't know if you've seen this internet meme, it's pretty funny.
	It's this Mexican guy in America.
	He's like, Mexico, it's the best.
	Mexico is the greatest country in the world.
	Mexico is wonderful.
	America sucks. Mexico, viva Mexico, Mexico, Mexico.
	Then he gets deported. He's like, wait, what are you doing?
	Are you sending me back to Mexico?
	Oh, this is the worst thing ever.
	I can't stare. Oh, my God.
	It's like the same thing.
	Freedom is great. Oh, no.
	Hannah's actually exercising freedom.
	I don't want that freedom.
	I don't want actual freedom.
	Your father, if asked, would probably say that he values political liberty, but he lives with a tyrant who does more to him than all but the most extreme totalitarian states could do.
	bullies him, subjugates him, controls him, humiliates him, right?
	Yeah, actually take the freedom.
	Take the freedom. It is an insult to all of our evolution to deny your natural freedoms.
	You know, we fought our way out of the primordial ooze.
	We survived sunlight as white people, saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, being chased out of Africa, if that's what actually happened.
	And We have some significant shreds of political liberty left.
	We have some significant freedom of speech.
	We have some freedom of religion.
	We have some freedom of thought. We have some freedom of expression.
	We have the internet. To not actually be free after we struggled so much under the enslavement of tyranny and predation and pre-consciousness, to not actually exercise the greatest muscle that we've been granted, is an insult to all of the beings That suffered so much to hand this precious gift of choice to us and freedom and virtue and the capacity to improve.
	You go to your average panda, not a lot of room for growth emotionally, right?
	Not a lot of free will among the Mako shark, right?
	Grasshoppers, well, they do what grasshoppers do.
	All butterflies do is fight any way the wind blows half the time and Hopefully land on the ass of some flower.
	But we have actually a choice.
	We can choose. We can improve.
	We can be better. We can live according to reason and evidence and virtue and truth.
	And the amount of suffering it took to grant us that capacity is beyond calculation.
	And to spurn that gift for the sake of conformity with people who are too lazy to improve is such a desperate shame.
	And it's really not so bad to be free.
	It's really not so bad to be free.
	In fact, it's pretty fucking great.
	Don't get me wrong. The band-aid takes off a few hairs when you pull it.
	Don't get me wrong.
	It feels a little bit like dying.
	But as I wrote in a poem when I was 16, sometimes we have to bury ourselves in order to be resurrected.
	You have to go down into a kind of death to become free.
	And it's the death of approval.
	Freedom. When you're not politically enslaved, freedom...
	Simply means freedom from disapproval.
	Freedom from shame.
	Freedom from bullies.
	Some bullies you can't get rid of.
	Gotta pay your taxes.
	Right? But other bullies, you really don't have to do anything.
	You don't have to pick up the phone.
	You don't have to answer the phone.
	You don't have to reply to the email.
	You just don't have to do anything. And lo and behold, you have freedom!
	Right? Freedom!
	Fuck the English.
	Sometimes it's your mom.
	You gotta sweat, right?
	So I hope that helps.
	Does it help? Yes, it does.
	And freedom for your kids. You want to build...
	A house for your kids. You know, every woman I've known, before the baby is born, they go on an absolute cleaning frenzy around the house.
	And good, too. I did the same thing before my brother's kids were born.
	Just scrubbed morning, noon, and night.
	Pulled out the refrigerator, pulled out the oven, scrubbed everywhere.
	The kids would even... It's what you do.
	You clean the cave before you have the babies.
	So you're having some babies.
	Time to clean the cave. Will you let me know how it goes?
	I will, yeah.
	Useful chat?
	Yeah, tremendously. Thank you.
	You're very welcome. And I appreciate the call.
	I appreciate the call and the courage in talking about this stuff.
	Yes, and by the way, I'm still starstruck.
	Well, then I guess I lied at the beginning.
	See? These are the kind of dysfunctional relationships and manipulations you've got to get out of your life, Hannah!
	I'm just kidding. All right.
	Well, thanks, Emil, for the call and feel free to call back anytime.
	No worries. Thank you very much for your time.
	Thank you. Thanks.
	Bye bye. Alright, well up next we have Gary.
	Gary wrote in and said, I'm shocked that you would say that for a couple of reasons.
	First, because it means absolutely nothing.
	It's like saying common sense gun control, or vast right-wing conspiracy, or multiculturalism.
	It's just empty words that mean nothing.
	No one ever defines what it means.
	It's just a PC thing people say to appease other people.
	It's pseudo-intellectualism.
	It is something I'd expect to hear from a government school teacher or Jon Stewart, not a philosopher like yourself.
	Since he used this phrase multiple times, I must ask, what does it mean?
	Why do you think it's a Western idea, and why would it be a good thing?
	That's from Gary.
	Hey, Gary, how you doing?
	I'm doing well. How are you?
	I'm well. Shocked?
	You were really shocked?
	That seems like a pretty strong phrase.
	Like, I'm shocked if a car stops too suddenly and somebody goes through the windshield and lands in my lap.
	That's shocking. Me using the phrase separation of church and state.
	Shocking? Really? All right.
	Maybe I oversold a little bit to get on the show.
	But a surprise. Is that...
	Okay, and so I guess my question is, you've heard the phrase separation of church and state before little old me used it, right?
	I didn't invent it. Countless.
	Okay. Countless times, yes.
	So what research have you done as to the etymology of this idea?
	Okay. I think it's, okay, the first time I'm aware of that the phrase was ever used was by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 when he addressed the Dunbarry Baptist Association in Connecticut.
	Are you familiar? Is that the first time you'd ever seen that phrase used?
	The idea had been talked about prior, but I think the actual phrase, yeah, I think it's there.
	Okay, so I would say there's two things we need to define.
	Church and state.
	So I did a search.
	I wanted to find a definition of the word state that encompassed the whole thing.
	I think I found one on Wikipedia.
	I'll read it off and hopefully we can agree to go with this definition.
	A state is a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain geographical territory.
	Well, I would say legal, not legitimate.
	Legitimate has, yeah.
	Yeah, I was going to substitute legal, legitimate.
	Yeah, I'm fine with that.
	Okay. I think you got something right.
	Right? I'm shocked!
	That had the best definition of all the definitions I searched for for state.
	Defining the church is easier.
	Jesus did that for us in the Bible.
	He said in 1 Corinthians, all of you together are Christ's body, and each of you is a part of it.
	Okay, so the body.
	In Paul's letter to the Colossians, he wrote that he is also the head of the body, which is the church, and he is the beginning.
	So obviously the church is defined as individuals, Who follow Christ?
	No. No, that's Christian.
	Okay. No, Christian is an individual who follows Christ.
	I mean, I know that Jesus used the metaphor, the analogy is you're all members of the church and so on.
	But the church is a formal organization, a structured legal organization that exists to promote and protect the faith of its followers.
	The church, I mean, it's a building, but it's an ecclesiastical structure that's defined usually in law.
	Okay. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I tell you, I am going to go with Jesus' definition over yours.
	I'm just going to put that out there.
	Jesus is the head of the church.
	He formed the church. No, but we're not talking about Jesus' definition.
	We're talking about... The legal definition, the legal concept, right?
	So Jesus was not talking about separation of church and state, because if you say that the church is everyone who follows Jesus, then what you have, logically, is the separation of everyone who follows Jesus and the state, which means, logically, that everyone who follows Jesus doesn't have to follow the state, which means I become religious to become an anarchist.
	Well, now you threw in another word.
	I'm an anarchist and a Christian, so I'm both those things.
	But now you've added another word.
	You've added religious, which is...
	Now you've added another definition.
	Let's just stick with church and state.
	But what about non-Christian denominations?
	What about Hindu? What about Sikh?
	What about Muslim and so on?
	And what about them?
	What are you asking me about them specifically?
	Well, separation. If we say that the church is an ecclesiastical structure...
	That is defined in law or defined in some formal manner, then it encompasses non-Christian denominations and therefore it makes it even more important to have a separation of church and state because then you have not just the potential for Christian factions to compete, to gain control of the power of the state to impose their version of religion on others, but then you have non-Christian denominations doing the same thing.
	Some of those, and I'm looking at you, Islam, a little bit more practiced and efficient at that kind of takeover.
	Okay, so when you say, okay, we're...
	No, but look, all Western countries have multi-religious societies, right?
	Again, you keep using this word religious.
	We haven't... What does that mean?
	What do you mean by the word religious?
	Okay, so the religion is the belief system.
	The congregation is the follower.
	And the church is the legal structure that organizes it.
	And it can include things like the building and so on, right?
	So there's Christianity, which is the belief system.
	There's the Christian, who is the follower of the belief system.
	And then there's the church, which would be the Protestant or the Baptist or the Catholic organization and real estate.
	I have to disagree with that.
	So you have the church, which is the body of Christ, the followers of Christ, a building that says church on it that people go to Sundays and Okay, but what do you call the ecclesiastical structure?
	The church as in the tax-exempt entity that takes money and buys real estate and organizes the belief system and the belief structure and so on, right?
	So what do you call that? He's given us His Word.
	Are you saying that there's no difference between Baptist and Protestant and Lutheran and so on?
	Sure, there are differences, but there's only one Word of God and that comes from Jesus Christ, right?
	Hang on, so who's right with all these denominations?
	Jesus Christ is right.
	No, no, but who's right because there are all these denominations that have different interpretations of what Christ said, right?
	I've answered that question. Jesus Christ is right.
	Jesus Christ has given us His Word, and you don't need to be—it's like the Constitution.
	If you have normal, basic reading comprehension skills, you can understand it, right?
	I mean, to a relatively high degree, you can understand what Jesus wants us to know.
	When you look at the different churches, the Methodist Church or Baptist Church, these are just dividing factors, right?
	They have nothing to do with Jesus Christ.
	If Jesus Christ wanted to have a Baptist church, he would have started a Baptist church, but he didn't.
	Jesus said, wherever two or more are gathered in my name, I am there.
	Okay? So, no, he didn't want you to go into a building that said church on it every Sunday and follow a bunch of rules that man gave you.
	He gave you the rules laid out for you perfectly.
	Didn't he give one of his disciples the key to a church and...
	Right. And the church was the body of Christ.
	He sent out apostles to go spread his message.
	Okay, is that what you're saying?
	Because the message of Jesus Christ is not a very difficult one.
	It really isn't, right?
	To have a hundred different interpretations of it is man's error, right?
	Are you sure it's not that complicated?
	Because the Bible is quite long.
	And there's a lot of words, and some of those words do contradict each other.
	So, the idea that it's just simple and easy to fathom the Word of Jesus may, or the Word of God as a whole, since Jesus only gains legitimacy by being the Son of God, so you've got to bring in the Old Testament as well.
	So, saying this book that goes on for thousands of pages that has, you know, some translation challenges, it has some contradictory concepts in it and so on, that it's just ABC simple to interpret, may be a bridge too far for some people to follow.
	Alright, let me step in there, because you said twice now that there are contradictions.
	There isn't a single contradiction in the Word of God, right?
	Sixty-six books, over three thousand chapters, not a single contradiction in the book.
	I've done this, I don't want to say professionally, but I have done this, and anytime someone throws a contradiction at me, I can easily shred it in a matter of seconds.
	All right. Excellent. Let's do it.
	Okay. Because I did a show on this years ago.
	So let me see if I can find this kind of stuff.
	All right. All right. If you're just going to give me verses, I need to pull up my online Bible.
	Are you going to read the actual verses?
	Go ahead. Go ahead. All right.
	Hang tight. We're talking about church and state, but that's fine.
	Well, no, I fully understand your issue.
	Because for you, there's no such thing as the church, as I would define it.
	Right. And therefore, it's like saying separation of unicorn and state.
	Like, I understand that, you know, if you don't believe they exist, then, well, nothing.
	Okay, so let's go ABC. Spin the wheel!
	We've got... Old Testament.
	You know what? These are, like, these go on for pages.
	Hang on a sec. There's another website.
	Let me ask you, because I don't want to assume, I've read the New Testament probably 15 times, and the Old Testament probably 7 or 8 times.
	I leave Bible studies.
	Oh, here we go. Here we go.
	Here we go. All right. All right.
	So here, Genesis 1, 3, 5.
	On the first day, God created light, then separated light and darkness.
	Genesis 1, 14 to 19.
	The sun, which separates light and day, wasn't created until the fourth day.
	Genesis 1, 11 to 12, 26 to 27, trees were created before man was created.
	Genesis 2, 4 to 9, man was created before trees were created.
	Birds were created before man was created in one part of Genesis.
	Hang on, hang on. In the second part, man was created before birds were created.
	And... Men and women were created at the same time, according to one part of Genesis.
	Later, men was created first, women sometime later, and so on.
	So, there are, you know, some contradictions.
	You read someone's interpretation of it.
	Give me the two verses in the Bible that contradict each other, and let's take a look at it.
	All right. Give me two verses that contradict each other.
	Right. Okay, so Genesis 1, 3-5, King James Version.
	All right. And God said, let there be light!
	And there was light!
	And God saw the light, that it was good!
	And God divided the light from the darkness, and God called the light day and the darkness.
	He called night, and the evening and the morning were the first day.
	So that's the first one.
	First day. First day God creates light.
	It's light. Now, Genesis 1, 14 to 19.
	I'm okay. And God said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night.
	And let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.
	And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.
	And it was so. And God made two great lights, the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night.
	He made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness, and God saw that it was good.
	And the evening and the morning were the fourth day, right?
	So first day, fourth day.
	Can't be both, right? No, no, no.
	The first day he made light.
	Who is the light of the world?
	Jesus Christ is the light of the world.
	Jesus doesn't, God doesn't even make a sun or a star to give light.
	He is the light of the world.
	So there is no contradiction.
	And then on the fourth day, He made the universe.
	So there is no contradiction there.
	So try again. All right.
	I'm not going to try again.
	I'm going to go back to the first one.
	Okay. So God said, let there be light and there was light.
	God divided the light from the darkness and God called the light day and the darkness he called night.
	Now day, I'm sure you've been outside recently, is the presence of sunlight.
	Darkness is the presence of moonlight.
	So saying, well, no, it's some metaphor for God is not true based upon what the Bible's actually saying, which is that it's day and night and it's sunlight and the moonlight.
	Okay, the argument is that God created light in Genesis chapter 1, verse 3 to 5, right?
	And calls it light and darkness called the light day and the darkness he called night.
	So it's not an allegory for God's divine virtue upon the universe.
	It is daytime and nighttime.
	In other words, the sunlight and the moonlight.
	Okay, so show me where in Genesis chapter 1, verse 3 to 5, where it said that God made the sun on the moon.
	It says, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night, and the evening and the morning...
	Hang on. Dude, if you ask me a question, can you let me fucking answer it before you're yelling in my ear?
	All right. And the evening and the morning...
	Okay, I'll give you one more trance. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
	Day. See?
	We've got day and we've got night.
	Evening and morning. That is sunlight, right?
	Sun goes down in the evening, rises in the morning.
	Nope. Nope.
	No, it doesn't. Not necessarily.
	Not necessarily. All right.
	Not at all. No, not at all or not necessarily.
	God is not at all.
	Oh, so not at all that the sun goes down in the evening.
	Does the sun go down in the evening?
	It certainly could.
	I mean, there are places that are dark 24 hours a day, or they're not.
	There are places that are light 24 hours a day.
	But that's not the point.
	God didn't create the sun.
	He is the light of the world. He has the ability to light the world and darken the world if he speaks it.
	So there's no contradiction. The idea that God needs a sun to light the world is a bit silly if you think there's an all-powerful God.
	Wait, where does the word need come in here?
	This is just saying what God did.
	Right. Okay, just say yes or no.
	We can get to your opinion and your interpretation later.
	Does God say sun or moon in Genesis chapter 1 verse 3 to 5?
	Does he say the word sun or moon?
	No. No.
	Okay, so we can assume that they weren't made then.
	Let's move on. No, but we've got day and night.
	We absolutely do.
	Which is characterized by the presence or absence of the sun.
	It's called an implied premise.
	Yeah, it's an implied premise, and it's an incorrectly applied premise, right?
	So, God did not say he made the moon or the sun in chapter 1, verse 3 to 5.
	You've interpreted it that way because you believe that.
	Well, that's not what God needs.
	No, I believe that day and night are associated with the presence and absence of the sun.
	But okay, let's do one more.
	This is kind of fun. I enjoy it.
	Okay. Okay, so let's look at Genesis 1, 11-12, 26-27.
	Those are the two contradictions.
	No, this is new contradictions.
	And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, and the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth...
	And it was so. And the earth brought forth grass.
	I feel like I should do an audiobook reading of the Bible.
	And the earth brought forth grass, an herb-yielding seed after his kind, and the tree-yielding fruit whose seed was in itself after his kind.
	And God saw that it was good.
	And this is before man was created.
	Now, Genesis 2, 4 to 9.
	These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created.
	In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens and every plant of the field before it was in the earth and every herb of the field before it grew.
	For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth and there was not a man to till the ground.
	But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground, and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
	And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.
	And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
	So, in one version, the trees were created before man, and in another version, trees were created after man.
	Hang on. Okay.
	I've not heard this contradiction before.
	I've done a million of these with people.
	This has gotten a new one on me.
	Stop it. Let me take a look.
	Can I process this real quick? No, there could be an asterisk here, and I'll help you along here.
	So he says that the trees were made before man, and now he's saying that he made man, and then he says, and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
	So maybe there were trees that aren't pleasant to the sight and bad for food that he made earlier.
	And that these new trees are pleasant to the sight and good for food and the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
	So maybe there's two classes of trees, one created before man and one created after man.
	That's certainly... Yeah, listen, I'm not trying to be a total troll to you here.
	Like, I mean, I'm trying to examine this as honestly as I can.
	And let's try one more.
	Let's try one more. Because, you know, that could be a reasonable answer.
	And if I was a priest, I would certainly...
	Look at that. Okay, so Genesis 1, 20 to 21, and God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
	And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind, and God saw that it was good.
	Well, chicken is pretty good.
	All right, so that's birds being created before man is created.
	And, let's see here...
	Oh yes, so...
	And then Genesis 2.19.
	So we have the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field being created before man.
	And then Genesis 2.19, it says, And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.
	And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof, right?
	So originally we have...
	The fowls of the birds being created before Adam.
	And then after Adam is created, God creates the birds and brings them to Adam.
	So, you know, these are just things, this is not like foundational to the Ten Commandments or anything.
	But if you're going to say there's no contradictions whatsoever, it's a challenge.
	So you're saying so that man gave...
	Okay, so now the Lord God has formed out on the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky.
	He brought them to the man.
	That doesn't mean that they weren't already formed.
	He brought them to the man.
	No, it says he formed every beast of the field and every fowl.
	Formed means to create, right?
	To form something. Not that he gathered them, but he formed...
	Can I just ask you what version of the Bible you're reading?
	Good old KJV. Okay.
	Okay. I always read the new kids.
	Listen, you know, this is a horrible thing to do to you in the moment.
	So, you know, like, I'm not trying to say, ah, I win.
	This is just some, it's called BibleGateway.com.
	And so you don't, like, feel free to look into this kind of stuff and, you know, get back to me.
	Like, I'm not trying to sort of troll you or corner you.
	Ah, you know, getcha.
	Just, you know, when you say there are no contradictions in the Bible, I've read a lot of contradictions that seem to me contradictions in the Bible.
	And you could say, well, they're not really contradictions when you look deeply into it, but, you know, you'd think that an omniscient all-knowing God would be able to write something down that wasn't confusing to people or seemed like a contradiction.
	So there may be contradictions in the Bible.
	And again, you can always say, well, the word formed here was a mistranslation of this or that.
	It could mean that he gathered them together.
	Well, sure, but it's not very clear, right?
	And if you have the argument in your head already, That there's no contradictions in the Bible, then I'm guessing you're not really going to find any contradictions in the Bible.
	But if, like me, you're kind of neutral about it, then I'm going to look and say, well, you know, these seem kind of contradictory, and that's a challenge.
	And so saying that it's kind of simple is a challenge.
	You know what I mean? Okay, maybe I overspoke in simplicity.
	It doesn't take a genius.
	It doesn't take years and years and years of Deep study to get a basic understanding of the Bible is what I meant to say, right?
	Simple might have been an overstatement, just like when I said I was shocked.
	That might have been an overstatement too.
	But real quick, in Genesis chapter 2, 19 to 21, it says, Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird in the air and brought them to Adam.
	He didn't say he created them right then and there.
	They're just reiterating the fact that God created every beast and every bird and then took them to Adam.
	So you're saying that the time frame is that it's before.
	So we say out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air.
	That happened before and then we create Adam and then he brings them to Adam.
	Absolutely. Look at it this way.
	If you grilled hot dogs and then you grilled hamburgers, and I said you took the hamburgers and hot dogs to your wife, does that mean I meant that you made the hamburgers and then the hot dogs?
	No, you took that, what you created, and then gave it to someone.
	That's all this is saying. I wouldn't create them, though.
	I wouldn't form them. I'd just cook them.
	Thank you. No, no, no, that's important because the word formed means to generally to manufacture, to create, right?
	Right. He formed every beast and then said, I'm going to give, and every bird and every animal said, I'm going to give all of these now to Adam, to me.
	That doesn't mean he created them right then and there.
	He formed them in the past and then said, now I'm going to give these to Adam, to me.
	See, now here's the thing, and this is important, right?
	And I'm not saying that the other stuff wasn't important, but here's the point that I would make.
	If I were writing the Bible and I submitted this to an editor, do you know what the editor would say?
	This is kind of unclear.
	And he'd say, or she would say, this is the edit I would suggest.
	Genesis 2.19, what you need to say is, and out of the ground the Lord God brought every beast of the field and every fowl of the air that he had previously formed unto Adam.
	Or that he had formed a few days ago, or whatever, right?
	It's the same thing with the light and the dark and the sun and the moon and so on.
	It's like you could make it clearer.
	You could make it less confusing.
	And that's my sort of question is that...
	What the...
	Is that a fowl of the air or a beast of the field?
	That sounds like something in pain.
	Sure. So if you're all-knowing and all-powerful, can't you just make it so that it's not really confusing at all or doesn't require a lot of interpretation to square these circles?
	I don't—again, I don't think that takes a lot of—you want to imply that he made the beast and the birds right there, but it doesn't say that, right?
	So, I mean, these are nitpicking things, but if you're looking at it through my eye— No, it's present tense, though.
	Formed is present tense.
	Yes, he formed every beast.
	That's correct. Yeah, and they're talking about when he brings them to Adam and he says, formed every beast and brought them to Adam.
	So, if I say, I cooked you some food, if I, in a story, I say, I cooked some food and brought it to you, and then I say, well, no, the food was cooked three weeks ago.
	Sure. That would be kind of confusing, right?
	Because I'm saying, I cooked, not, I did cook in the past.
	I'm cooking. Right. Formed is cooking, currently cooking.
	So, I'm currently cooking the food and now I'm going to bring it to you.
	And then I say, well, actually, no, the food was cooked three weeks ago.
	That would be confusing, right? No, it'd be confusing if it said God was forming every beast while Adam was standing by the barbecue, and then he brought Adam.
	That would be confusing, but that's not what it said.
	No, it says, Lord God formed.
	Out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field, every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam.
	That's sequential. Yeah.
	So if I formed...
	A car. If I form a piece of paper, and seven years later, I bought it to you.
	I don't understand your point.
	Does that mean I formed it right in front of you?
	No, it means I formed something, and then at a later date, I bought it to you.
	All right, let's do another one.
	Okay, let's do another one. No, no, hang on, because I mean, these are a little bit more confusing.
	So let's just do Adam, right?
	So Adam is told by God, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.
	For in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.
	Right? That's Genesis 2.17.
	Genesis 5.5 turns out Adam lived for 930 years.
	Genesis 5.5, and all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.
	Yep. But that's long after he ate of the tree of knowledge and good and evil, where God said, if you eat of this tree, you will die.
	Okay, this is pretty basic.
	You're aware that there are two deaths, correct?
	There's the physical death, and then death as a permanent separation from God.
	And so I would imagine that an all-powerful, all-knowing, omniscient being would make that distinction so it wasn't confusing.
	It's made several times throughout the Bible that there are two deaths.
	The first death, which is why you have to be born again, right?
	Like, Catholics aren't Christians because they don't believe that you have to be born again.
	You must be born again because your old self is dead.
	And then you have to be reborn, right?
	Which is why he was asked, how can you come back out of your mother's womb?
	Nicodemus said, how can you be born out of your mother's womb?
	I'm not talking about a physical birth.
	I'm talking about the second birth, right?
	Which is the spiritual birth.
	So when you enter into sin, you've chosen death.
	The only way to escape that death is to be born again, to be born new.
	Because there are two deaths.
	The first death, the physical death, which God says, A man is once to die, and after death comes the judgment, and you need to get everlasting life, which means an everlasting stay with your maker in heaven, or everlasting death, which is eternal separation from God.
	Yeah, I get that that's an answer, and it's a good answer, don't get me wrong.
	I'm going to give credit where creditors do.
	That is a good answer. It's just a little confusing if you use the same word to refer to physical death and spiritual death.
	Because one is not that serious, the physical death, if you go to heaven, and the other one is enormously serious in that if you experience it, you may go to hell.
	So it'd be important not to use the same word for both.
	Okay, let me ask you about this one, which is something that, you've heard this before, so this is nothing new, right?
	This is something that I remember reading when I read through the Bible.
	Truly, this is Jesus, truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming into his kingdom.
	Yeah. What does that mean?
	Jesus is good. Okay, so there will be people who will never die, physical or spiritually.
	They will be on earth, and Jesus will come back.
	He said he'll come back like a thief in the night.
	Not even he knows the hour.
	Only the Father knows the hour.
	So Jesus will return, right?
	And let's say that's tomorrow.
	Me and you haven't died yet, right?
	We have not tasted death in the physical sense or the spiritual sense, correct?
	We're still living.
	We still have time to get right with God.
	We still have time to sin. So we haven't tasted death at all.
	And Jesus will come back like a thief in the night at that time.
	No, but the people, he's saying some standing here.
	So this is 2,000 years ago, right?
	Wait, give me the verse again.
	Sure. So Jesus says, truly I tell you, he's talking to people, right?
	Standing right in front of him.
	Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
	What's the verse on this?
	I have to look it up in time. No problem.
	Matthew 16, 28.
	Okay.
	So, there's a question on when this was going to take place, right?
	Not whether it would. Do you want to really dig into this?
	Because there's a couple of different solutions.
	I thought you said it was simple.
	Because if you have to really dig into it, it seems to me kind of complicated.
	I'm not trying to troll you.
	You told me that it's really obvious and simple and there should be no different denominations of Christianity.
	Well, there's not different denominations of Christianity.
	There's biblical Christianity and then perversions of it.
	It's like if you give a test to someone and ask them what 8 times 8 is, you may get a series of different answers, but there's only one answer correctly.
	Yes, that is correct. People who get the answer wrong, that doesn't mean there's different answers to eight times eight.
	There's still only one answer. So you have it right, but thousands and thousands of theologians who've spent their life studying it have it wrong.
	Jesus Christ has it right.
	No, you have it right in terms of your interpretation.
	You're the guy who's eight times eight is 64.
	Everyone else is like blue unicorn, 50 pie, whatever, right?
	So you are the one with the correct interpretation or the accurate interpretation of the Bible, and everyone else is wrong who disagrees with you.
	I mean, everyone else is wrong who disagrees with me.
	Yeah, just like anyone else who disagrees.
	If I said 8 times 8 is 68, and I convinced a million people to believe that 8 times 8 is 68.
	No, no, but I just want to understand.
	I want to get where you're coming from.
	And again, I'm not trying to troll you.
	You have it right. Everyone who disagrees with you is wrong.
	Sure. And that's why we need a separation of church and state.
	Okay, well, what does that mean then?
	It means that the government cannot force anyone to pursue particular religious beliefs.
	Again, now you've added the word religious.
	That's not what we're talking about.
	We're talking about an obedience to Jesus Christ.
	And then you said that this is a Western idea, correct?
	Wait, an obedience to Jesus Christ has nothing to do with religion?
	Now you're just trawling me, right?
	Come on. No, I mean, what do you, no.
	It has nothing to do with, what is it, science?
	It's greater than religion.
	It's obedience to Jesus Christ.
	And I wanted to get into the science thing with you, right?
	Because if you look at the way that we found out that blood is a lifeline to the flesh, that the passages of the sea, the four winds of the air, this is, that the earth is a spinning ball and not a flat disc, that it hangs by itself.
	This is all from the Bible, right?
	So you say, let's take that out of school, like government schools.
	So now we're taking all the knowledge that the Bible has given us out of schools, too.
	So we can go back to saying... Why doesn't the Bible talk about germs?
	That would have been helpful. Why doesn't the Bible talk about washing your hands?
	That would have been helpful. It does.
	But the Bible does talk about washing your hands.
	The reason why the Jews didn't get the plague was because they washed their hands.
	I can actually quote that for you.
	That's one of the things the Bible talks about is washing your hands, right?
	It's in the Jewish law to wash your hands.
	The Bible, God told the Jews to wash their hands in running water.
	At that particular time, science says to wash your hands in still water.
	Okay? So you're 100% wrong on that.
	Wait, wait, but does the Bible, because my understanding is that the West did not really develop germ theory until like 150 or 200 years ago.
	But you're saying that germs are discussed?
	Leviticus 15, 13.
	When dealing with diseases, hands should be washed under running water.
	I don't know how else you can interpret.
	Tell me how else you can interpret that.
	No, but what about germ theory?
	What do you mean by germ theory?
	Well, the fact that there are microscopic little beasts that cause a lot of diseases and so on.
	Right, so diseases is what we're talking about.
	Yeah. When dealing with diseases, hands should be washed on the way.
	No, no, no, I get the hand washing. I stand corrected on that.
	But my question is, it would have been quite helpful to talk about bacteria and viruses and germs and so on, right?
	Again, I'm not a biblical scholar on the Levitical law.
	I'm sure it is. I couldn't find it in a couple of days I had to try to look all this stuff up because I knew what you were going to come after me with.
	But... I'm sure germs, if you talk to a rabbi, I'm sure germs are addressed, right?
	But don't the Jews have it wrong regarding Jesus?
	Do the Jews have it wrong regarding Jesus?
	Not if they obey Jesus. Well, they're not Christians.
	Many Jews are Christians.
	Jesus was a Jew. All the founding, all the apostles were Jews.
	Most of the founding church were Jews, so I'm not sure where you're getting that from.
	But they're Jews.
	Jews can be Christians.
	No, I understand that. The majority of Jews are not Christians.
	The majority of most people aren't Christians.
	I think I get where this is going.
	I mean, there are some Jews for Jesus and all of that.
	Or the Muslims, right?
	The Muslims view Jesus as a prophet, but not the final prophet, right?
	And they're wrong. Yes, they're demonstrably wrong, right?
	Because we can look at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
	Right? Where the Jews will say, the resurrection skeptics will say that that never happened.
	And the Muslims will say, oh, that happened, but he never came back.
	Well, if he was alive then, and he was alive later, right?
	Because the Muslims will say, yes, he was crucified.
	And the Jews will say, you know, we saw him later.
	Then he was alive then, and then he was crucified, and then he was alive later.
	So there's no other option there besides he rose from the dead, right?
	If there are two people, and one says, yes, I saw him the day before, I saw him crucified and killed, and someone else says, yeah, I saw him three days later, he was chilling at the park.
	What's the only option there?
	You mean other than somebody maybe mistaken or lying?
	Well, someone could be mistaken or lying, but...
	So let me ask you, right?
	So let's say you had 12 witnesses, and all 12 witnesses corroborated the same story, right?
	And then you threatened them with arrest.
	If you do not change your story, I'm going to arrest you.
	None of them changed their story.
	You said, okay, I'm going to kill you if none of you change your story.
	None of them changed their story.
	You started killing them and said, the rest of you are going to get killed unless you change your story.
	And none of them changed their story.
	And that story corroborated perfectly.
	Do you think they're telling the truth?
	Well, that's a very interesting question.
	I mean, you and I both know that there are massive amounts of popular delusions in the world that people really, really believe in.
	That they are willing to, you know, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that people are willing to go and kill and die.
	For all of that kind of stuff.
	We don't want the smoking gun to be in a form of a mushroom cloud.
	Saddam has weapons of mass destruction that can reach America.
	And I mean, people believe the wildest stuff.
	Michael Brown was shot execution style seven times in the back, hands up, begging, don't shoot.
	People still believe that stuff, even though it's absolutely...
	False. There are people out there who still believe that George Zimmerman was stalking and attacking poor little Trayvon Martin who was defenseless.
	There are people who cut their own balls off to go and join the Halle Bop Comet.
	Please understand, I'm not trying to disrespect your religious beliefs by putting them all in the same category.
	But the other thing too, I don't have a chance to cross-examine these 12 people.
	You don't have a chance to cross-examine these 12 people.
	These are stories that have been rewritten and rewritten and translated and handed down.
	And you and I both know that there was a lot of money in religion as they always have.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Dude, dude. Okay, come on.
	Dude, let me finish. No, let me finish.
	Okay. Thank you. So, There is a lot of money in religion.
	I mean, there's a reason why the Vatican is sitting on tens of billions of dollars worth of treasures.
	There's a lot of money in religion.
	Where there's a lot of money, there are incentives.
	We know this, right? I mean, there's a lot of money in things like Mike Brown was shot execution style.
	There's a lot of money because it helps get Democrats elected and because it gets George Soros to fund Black Lives Matter and you name it, right?
	It's a lot of money. Where there's a lot of money involved, And there's hearsay involved.
	I tend to be skeptical.
	I just do.
	And I'm sure you do as well, right?
	So I'm not trying to say, oh, that proves that everything's false.
	But when you say, well, these are all second, third, fourth-hand translated stories where there's a huge amount of financial incentives at stake.
	So I think skepticism is not the worst mental state to approach that with.
	You're wrong about that.
	The transcripts, they're the original transcripts.
	Okay, so it hasn't been written and rewritten.
	It's been translated from the original Greek and Hebrew to 300 different languages, yes, but it hasn't been rewritten.
	I've seen the original transcripts.
	What do you mean transcripts?
	You mean court transcripts? The original transcripts of each of the Gospels.
	They haven't been written and rewritten.
	You can read the original transcripts of the Gospels.
	But the Gospels weren't written down until sometime after Jesus' death, right?
	It wasn't like there was a guy writing down like a court transcription, writing down everything that was said as it was going along.
	It wasn't like affidavits or anything.
	Some of the Bible stuff was written long after Jesus was dead, right?
	Not long. Not long at all.
	Not at all. So let me ask you, and this is like...
	Wait, wait, how long then? You say not long.
	How long? 30, 40 years, perhaps.
	A lot of James was written within a couple of years.
	So... I mean, they weren't all written at once.
	I hope you're aware. Yeah, that's what I understood, that 30 or 40 years passed from the death or life and death of Jesus before the Gospels were written down, right?
	That's a long time. Not really.
	I mean... It kind of is, man.
	It kind of is when there's no video, there's no blogs, there's no audio, there's like, it's people's memories.
	It's, you know, like, it is kind of a long time.
	Not remotely, right? Listen, go to a guy who's 50, like me, I guess, and say, tell me all the details of what happened when you were 12.
	Now, that's my own life.
	Do you think I'm going to get it all right?
	All perfect? It's not one event, right?
	So, the resurrection is like, I was in New York City on September 11th, right?
	I can tell you the details about that, and that was almost 20 years ago.
	So you would say that my details are completely void, and everyone who's there, if you asked 12 people, and 12 people all gave you the same exact details of an event that happened like September 11th, you would say, no, that's all fictitious, even if they correlate perfectly.
	I mean, no one would say that. If you're saying that, you're just being argumentative.
	If 12 people all gave you the same story of what they saw in this monumental event, And they all gave you the same story.
	Of course you believe. Unless you have an agenda.
	Have you ever, I mean, had conversations with family members or friends about stuff that happened in your childhoods?
	Okay, you're saying stuff.
	I'm not asking you about the first time I went to a Yankee game.
	I'm not asking you about...
	No, no, but answer the question.
	Do you find that people get everything right?
	They all agree with each other?
	If all 12 people agree, then yes.
	No, no, no. I'm asking about your life, not 12 people.
	In your life, when you go back and talk with family or friends about stuff that happened decades ago, there are contradictions, right?
	And I mean, eyewitness accounts have been studied to be found enormously unreliable.
	And you bring up 9-11, there's lots of video and audio and news footage and all of that about 9-11, right?
	I've managed interpretation. You believe that's from...
	Okay, sure. That's...
	At the end of the day, you're going to have to believe managed interpretation if you weren't there.
	And even if you were there, right?
	Why do I have to believe someone's interpretation?
	Because that's what you're getting, right?
	You're not seeing it firsthand. Someone is bringing it to you via satellites and cameras, right?
	So you're now tracking them that they're giving you...
	No, but there's no satellites or cameras!
	Back in the day in Jesus' time.
	In September 11th? No, no, no.
	Let's go back to Jesus, right?
	We're talking about people remembering stuff or writing down stuff 30 or 40 years after the fact, right?
	Well, throughout the 30 or 40 years, right?
	The latest books are 30 or 40 years.
	Then in Islam, I believe, if I remember rightly, sorry to interrupt, but in Islam, didn't Muhammad rise up to heaven on a winged horse?
	Lots of witnesses for that.
	But they're wrong. There's not a lot of witnesses for that.
	That's just inaccurate.
	The Bible has over 40 authors.
	Do you think that there weren't a lot of people who saw the miracles of Muhammad back in the day?
	Not according to the Quran.
	The Quran is all written by one person.
	The Bible is written by 40 authors, right?
	So if I told you a story, you'd say, no, maybe I believe that, maybe I don't.
	If 40 people told you the same story, it makes it more believable.
	The only reason you would have to not believe 12 people who don't change their story facing death is because you don't want to believe them.
	Like Simon Greenleaf said, who is the father of our legal system, he wrote the encyclopedia that is still used to say in the 1840s and was a Jewish skeptic of the resurrection.
	After investigating the claims of the gospel, he came to an obvious conclusion.
	This is the Word of God.
	Any fair court would not just accept this evidence, but would have more than enough evidence to convict him guilty as the Son of God.
	I mean, the only reason that you would have to not believe the claims of the gospel is that I don't want to believe them, right?
	They're corroborated by 12 eyewitness accounts.
	Everyone says the same thing.
	There are 142 pieces of evidence that can be secular evidence about the claims in the gospel that can be Verified.
	142 of those 142 are verified as true.
	The only reason you have to not believe the gospel is because I don't want to believe in the gospel.
	And that was the quote that I was going to read to you.
	I think it was from Franklin. No, it was from John Locke.
	The problem with Christianity is not with the brain, it's with the heart.
	I don't want to believe it's true because now I'm going to be held to a higher standard.
	So if I just say it's untrue, then I'm not held to that standard.
	But Locke wrote all the time on how Do you think that the idea that something was written down, there's consistency, therefore it's true, do you think that that would only apply to Christianity, or would that also apply as a principle to other religions and religious texts as well?
	Can you ask me again? You broke up a little bit.
	Yeah, sorry. So, if your argument is, and I don't mean your argument like your disputation, right?
	Your premise. If your argument is that it's written down, there's consistency, there were eyewitnesses, therefore it's true, well, that's a principle that would apply equally to other religions as well, right?
	And other belief systems.
	Sure, yeah. If there's something else that is non-conscious, Well, after the FBI's stuff recently, I'm not sure that you'd want to bring up police reports as the gold standard of truth these days, but...
	No, listen, the mainstream media says to everyone that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
	There are tons of people who believe that and they believe that they have scads of proof and you've got all of these – what is it?
	More than a baker's dozen of intelligence agencies are saying that it's true and so on.
	And that would seem to be something even more consistent than – You know, 12 disciples and stuff written 30 to 40 years.
	They're talking about this in real time.
	The first-hand account and 142 pieces of verifiable evidence all verified is true, right?
	I mean, like, again, you have to build a case not to think this is true, right?
	Like, I could build a case to believe anything.
	But at the end of the day, like...
	People who look into it all come to the same conclusion.
	Yeah, this is probably true.
	I mean, there are countless atheists who come to debunk the Bible.
	And after reading the Bible, like, you know, Lee Warner Wallace, right?
	Are you saying that everyone who reads the Bible comes to the same conclusion?
	Did I say everyone?
	I mean, that would be a stupid thing to say.
	No, I thought you did. Maybe I misheard it.
	I said countless.
	Countless. Okay.
	Right? Like, Lee Strobel is another one.
	You know who Lee Strobel is? No.
	No. Okay.
	That's neither here nor...
	Okay. But he was an investigator, and one of us, they were legal investigators, who said, I'm going to disprove this using forensics and using my investigation skills.
	And he gets to the end of it, and we're like, wow, this is actually true.
	There's not a thing in here that I can debunk.
	But that's the power of the gospel, right?
	That's how we know that it's true.
	Well, except, of course, if you take the scientific explanation that a virgin cannot give birth and people cannot come back from the dead, then it's not true.
	Okay. If that person is God, then that's right.
	But that's kind of begging the question, right?
	Because the whole question is, if it's true, then there's something divine.
	Because God's not a person.
	No, no, no. If it's true, like if it's true that there was a virgin birth and someone came back from the dead to just, or, you know, walked on water or whatever, then clearly there was something pretty wild going on, very powerful going on.
	This would either be extraterrestrial space technology that we can't imagine, you know, the old Arthur C. Clarke quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or It would be God.
	But if you say, well, these things are not possible, virgin births and people coming back from the dead, then you would require an extraordinarily high level of proof to accept these things as true.
	And my argument is, and has been, that if you are religious, then proof is not true.
	Your game. Proof is not your deal.
	Faith is your deal.
	Well, that's ridiculous. I mean, I've just told you why.
	No, I don't think the concept of faith is ridiculous, my friend.
	And saying that things I say are ridiculous when I'm making a case is not getting you any friends on this side of the internet, I'll tell you that.
	I mean, it is. I'm not trying to insult you.
	Yeah, you are. You're not trying to insult me.
	You're actually insulting me.
	Because I, okay, I'm sorry.
	I can't possibly disagree with that.
	I thought there was a love your enemies thing in Christianity, or is that just my misinterpretation?
	I want you to come to Christ, right?
	Yeah, but insulting me is not how Jesus got people to come to Christ, did he?
	What did I say about, how did I insult you?
	Because now I think you're not telling the truth.
	I made a recent argument and you said that's ridiculous.
	So I didn't insult you.
	I insulted your argument. Okay, gotcha.
	Just wanted to get everything straight.
	Okay, alright. So that was a lie you made up for no reason.
	And I insulted your argument.
	Because I've given you evidence for everything that I said and why I believe it.
	And then you said, oh, if you're religious, I've never used, then you don't need proof.
	Which is absolutely absurd and has nothing to do with anything that I said.
	There are many theologians, there are many very well-educated theologians who've made that case.
	So there's Tertullian, right, who said, I believe because...
	There are a lot of people who say a lot of things.
	There are a lot of intelligent people who justified slavery and segregation and becoming a Japanese people.
	Does that make them right? Just because someone said something at some point doesn't make them right, even if you think they're really smart.
	Oh, I agree. It's an argument.
	I didn't say I'm right because someone else said it.
	I'm saying that to call something...
	So let's keep this conversation between you and I and not other people.
	All right. Just a moment here.
	Let me just have a look here.
	This is like from Sunday school, so please...
	Forgive me while I remember.
	And I do love you, Steph, and I want the best- I'm not feeling the love, man.
	I gotta tell you. Again, maybe you don't know what love is.
	I don't know what to say. Love is more- Oh yeah, no, I guess I don't.
	Now I don't know what love is.
	I don't think- I wrote a whole book defining love.
	But don't worry, folks. I have no idea what love is.
	I have a wonderful marriage and all of this, but I have no idea what love is.
	Dude, I mean, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you really have to learn how to talk to people so that they want to listen to you rather than hang up on you.
	Like, if you want to serve Jesus, you got to control your temper.
	I'm really not interested in your thoughts on how I should serve Jesus.
	I'm interested in Jesus. All right.
	And there we go. We're going to move on to the next caller since you're not really interested in my thoughts.
	And I don't know anything about love.
	And my arguments are ridiculous.
	So thanks for your call, man.
	It definitely was very, very instructive on why we need a separation of church and state.
	Because people who are certain, without reason, tend to be very aggressive.
	And that's why we don't want to give them political power.
	But thanks very much for your call, man.
	Let's move on to the next caller.
	Alright, up next we have Panda.
	Panda wrote in and said, Many abort to increase their dating prospects, as you can hide an abortion from a man, but not a child.
	That's from Panda. Hey, Panda, how you doing?
	Oh, sorry, I realized my mic was muted.
	Oh, no, no problem at all. No problem at all.
	How are you doing, Stefan? I'm well, how you doing?
	I'm good, thank you. I'm about to go on holiday in like two hours, so...
	Oh, you're giving me a time crunch here.
	Oh, man. I'm kidding, it's fine.
	But I just want to say, like, Well done with all the work you're doing, especially with trying to get rid of white guilt, and that's something I'm trying to work on on my channel as well.
	Let's bleach guilt, shall we?
	Sorry? Let's bleach guilt, shall we?
	Yeah, I mean, you guys have done so much for us, for the entire world, and it's just ridiculous that now white men are the most hated people.
	You've done so much. Thank you.
	I appreciate that. So, let's talk about your question.
	You say, one-third of British women have had an abortion likely due to pressure to pursue a career first.
	I don't think that's true.
	I think one-third of British women had an abortion because they chose to have an abortion.
	I mean, you're taking away agency right away.
	Oh, there's pressure to pursue a career first.
	It's like, that doesn't cause abortions.
	That's true. I mean, the statistic itself is just a statistic.
	What I said about pressuring to do a career, that's more just going upon the general theme of what women are facing.
	We had a call earlier with a woman who was facing a lot of career to pursue a dental career before having children.
	So there is pressure to pursue a career first.
	I get all of that. I'm just not sure how that leads directly to that.
	Abortions, right? Because there's 18 different kinds of birth control available for women, so pregnancy is, well, it's almost miraculous, I guess, in those situations.
	That is true.
	About that of a caller, I'm actually planning to talk to her because I think her case is very interesting, since I've also had the same issue with expressing such beliefs as well, that I need to focus on making myself financially stable and then I can have children.
	And me, depending on the man first, would just be like me just being a leech, essentially.
	Wait, that's not your perspective, though, is it?
	Not at all, but I would say that's a perspective I'm exposed to a lot.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. Like if you depend on a man, somehow you're not independent and so on.
	It's like... I don't know why they use the word depend when they actually mean love and be supported by.
	Women are all like, you've got to support me, you've got to support me.
	And it's like, can I do that financially so you can join motherhood?
	No, that would be me being a leech.
	It's like, yeah, there's nothing confusing about any of this to men at all.
	All right, so tell me what you mean when you say there are high odds that a man could be dating a single mother of a dead child she got aborted.
	Do you mean that a woman who has an abortion is a single mom?
	Or that a single mother has a life child and also an abortion?
	Okay. I know that's a really weird way to word it, but I'll clarify my position in that.
	Well, to me, when there's a fetus in your stomach, that is essentially a human.
	That's a child. They just haven't been born yet.
	And when you abort it, you are essentially killing that child.
	So... Obviously, I'm not saying everyone in the one for statistics is in this situation, but let's say if we're speaking about someone who, let's say, had sex with someone casually, they were going to end up as a single mum if they were going to give birth to the baby.
	They don't want to become a single mum, so they abort it and no one would ever know that they were going to become a single mum.
	Does that make any sense?
	But they're not a single mother.
	If they abort their only child.
	I guess when I use the word mother, I mean that more in a biological perspective as opposed to that.
	I got these weird visions of like the aborted fetus, like the woman rocking it and like giving it birthday cake and singing to it.
	And it's like, no, the child dies.
	And so does the motherhood.
	Yeah. As I said, I kind of viewed that more as a biological perspective as opposed to an active role.
	Say, for instance, if someone were to give birth to the child and they give it away, that still makes them the biological mother, but they're not having an active role in the parenting.
	Okay, so then there's the biological definition and then there's the process of being a mother, right?
	This is the old Dr. Phil line that Parenthood, the parent is a verb, not a noun, right?
	And so I would say that a woman who gives birth to a child and gives the child up for adoption is not a single mother.
	She is the mother of a child, but she's not a single mother because she's not in the process of raising the child, right?
	Sure, that could be a better way to word it, I guess.
	Right, but the woman who kills the baby in the womb, not even a mother.
	She was pregnant. But she's not a mom.
	Not a mom until it comes out, in my opinion.
	And if it only comes out dead, not a single mom.
	Like, let's say that the child comes out stillborn.
	I had a sister this happened to.
	And if the child comes out stillborn and you have one child that came out dead, are you a mother?
	No. Sadly, tragically, I mean, heart goes out to you, but...
	Or if you have a miscarriage, right?
	Which is tragically common.
	You have a miscarriage, then...
	You were on your road to being a mother, you were pregnant, but you didn't become a mother because you're the fetus, the child died in your belly.
	So, yeah, go ahead.
	I just want to say the way you analyze that, that's correct.
	I guess in my question, I was just trying to sound a bit drastic in it.
	But yeah, the way you've explained it to me, I do believe you're correct.
	Regarding that bit of information of...
	Yeah, so just to analogize it, if you're studying medicine, you're on your way to being a doctor.
	When you finally get your MD, you're a doctor, right?
	But you're not a doctor until you get the MD. Same thing if you're on your way to being a mother because you're pregnant, you're on your way to motherhood.
	But anyway. Now, there's still nurturing involved when you have a baby in your belly and you've got to take your...
	Folic acid, and you've got to take your nutrition, and you've got to not have too much coffee, and no smoking, no drinking.
	So there's still maternal stuff that goes on with the baby.
	But the motherhood, I think, begins outside.
	And I think we would view someone whose child died, like a car accident or an illness or something, if it was the only child, would not be a mother anymore, which would be, I mean, again, massive.
	I'm just trying to be technically sort of Correct.
	So... Yeah. I would have trouble dating a woman who had an abortion.
	It would be a red flag for me.
	Sorry to have to use that color, but that's the analogy, right?
	No, it would be. It would be.
	Because my question would be, well, how did you get pregnant if you didn't want to have a baby?
	Now, and how am I going to know the truth, right?
	Because it could be, well, I was on the pill and he was using a condom and there was spermicide and we did the rhythm method, but somehow...
	Technically, yes, you can shoot gold electrons at lead and some will appear on the other side, and I guess you can shoot a few past the goalie even if you're on the other side of town, but I'll never know the truth.
	All I will know is that she got pregnant, and the most likely explanation is she had unprotected sex.
	Now, if she had unprotected sex, that means she has a very short time preference, a lack of capacity to defer gratification, which is going to be indication of a problem in the relationship.
	So, I mean, I'm not saying it would be a complete deal-breaker, because again, you know, depending on how much you trusted her and so on, but it would be definitely a red flag.
	And not as much of a red flag as a single mom, but certainly more of a red flag than if she didn't have an abortion.
	Um... Sure, so by that regard, you're saying, obviously, both are not ideal.
	You'd rather go for a woman that's in neither situation.
	Well, no, I would not date a single mom.
	I would not date a single mom.
	But I mean, a red flag, an abortion would be a red flag, but not necessarily an automatic deal breaker like single motherhood.
	Sure. Two things, though.
	The thing is, with abortion, You don't have to tell anyone about that.
	It's something you can easily hide away.
	And the second thing I have to say, I'm a bit confused with why you said that since you are someone that has said that you are against abortion.
	I know you say it's a bit of a difficult topic for you, as it is for me as well.
	But I'm just interested that you seem to have more of a preference over Obviously, I'm not saying you want to, but...
	Oh, I see what you mean. Like, so the single mom didn't kill her baby, but I have more problems with her than the woman who did.
	Sure. Yeah, yeah. No, that's a very, very important question, and I'm glad you raised it.
	And it's such a good question. I'm getting...
	Okay, no, I won't do that. I won't pretend there are bandwidth issues.
	Sorry? Tempting though it is. So, no, I would say this.
	So, there is a practical element to single motherhood, which is, I'm glad the baby's alive, but I don't want to pour my resources into another man's child.
	Now, if the woman's had an abortion, that's not great, but at least it wouldn't be the case, now I have to Poor resources into another man's child.
	I want to pour resources into my own child or children, right?
	And so also, a woman who is a single mom has probably an ex-husband or an ex-boyfriend who's kind of floating around and kind of in the kid's life who is going to look at me like I'm just stealing his dessert or something, right? And that's a problem.
	Because either he wants to get back with her, in which case I'm an interloper, or he doesn't want to get back with her, in which case He desperately does not want to be with the mother of his children, which is an even bigger red flag than the single motherhood, right?
	Like either she chose a good guy and she drove him away or she chose a bad guy.
	So either she's horrible or she has terrible judgment.
	Now, so there's just certain practical aspects to the single mother situation and, you know, just time consideration and so on.
	Like when you get together with someone, it's nice to have just a bunch of time together to hang out, to watch movies, to curl up together and read a magazine and chat about what you're reading, to just go on vacation, to do weekends away and stuff.
	It's really nice to have that kind of time to get to know each other.
	That doesn't really happen when there's one or more children floating around.
	That kind of time doesn't really happen at all.
	And then, of course, there is the challenge of trying to establish a relationship with a child who doesn't have much of a father around.
	And it's really complicated because...
	You can't be any kind of disciplinarian or feedback loop.
	I'm not disciplinarian, but if the kid's more than a couple of years old, you're not my dad.
	You can't tell me what to do.
	There's all this kind of surly stuff, and it's just a mess.
	It's a mess. So there's just certain very practical aspects to that, you know, though I guess I'm glad that she didn't kill the baby in the womb.
	That doesn't mean that it means that it's more dateable in terms of the relationship succeeding.
	Sure. I mean, I can understand for, let's say, a man with high sexual market value wanting to completely avoid that option, obviously because he's got option to date women who are not in that situation.
	However, I'm more interested in, for instance, men with lower sexual market value.
	I mean, for instance, I know someone personally who...
	He's not the most attractive, he's very overweight, he doesn't dress well, and he couldn't find a woman whatsoever.
	Sorry, he can't find a woman?
	He's now married to a wife who had a child from a previous marriage.
	Obviously, that's not ideal, as you said, since you have to pour in more resources.
	As I said, if you're a man with not many options, sometimes it can be preferable.
	But obviously, I think it's important to establish the fact that the woman has recognized that she's got herself into this situation.
	Oh, so you mean losers?
	So you're saying that a single mom is someone who losers might date?
	Unless there's something more subtle about what you're saying.
	I mean, why wouldn't the guy just lose weight, exercise, dress better, up his game?
	Like, why would he want to settle for a single mom when he could up his game and get a woman who wasn't?
	Well, I guess in the same way that the woman got into that situation as well.
	Well, no, he can lose 50 pounds and it's legal.
	She can't lose 50 pounds except by ditching the kid, which is illegal, right?
	You are correct.
	Just that some men aren't willing to go through that process, I guess.
	So they're losers. I understand.
	Some men would rather just stay fat and unattractive and then they'll just snuffle around a single mom.
	And the single mom is like, well, my sexual market value is so low because I'm a single mom.
	I'll put up with a guy who's 100 pounds overweight who dresses like he just cut the backseat off a Volkswagen.
	Yes. But that's not an ideal situation and I would not recommend to either person that you pursue that because if you get together with someone just out of a lonely, pathetic, desperate, loser need, the odds of the relationship working out and you being happy is practically zero.
	Because the single mom is going to be in his life because he didn't want to lose weight and dress better and up his appearance.
	That is a confirmation of him settling with the lowest of the low.
	And she's going to look at him every time that he's showering and see his giant fat ass, and she's going to say, well, this is who I had to settle for because I'm a single mom.
	You don't think that breeds a lot of contempt and resentment over time?
	You could look at it in that way, but at the same time, looking at purely on the single mom's perspective, She would be in a far better situation if, in her perspective, I'm not speaking about the man, if she was with someone than still being a single mom.
	Wait, wait, wait. Hang on.
	If she's better being with someone rather than being a single mom, why is she a single mom?
	She had to dump someone to be a single mom, right?
	Or someone had to dump her, so why didn't she change to conform to whatever the man wanted so he wouldn't dump her?
	I agree with you. It's better if there are two parents raising the children.
	So if she's better off with someone, why is she alone?
	Why is she not with the father of her child?
	Well... There are many reasons for that.
	No, I agree. No, I'm sorry to interrupt.
	And I agree with you. But then saying it's better if she's with someone is false because she's chosen to not be someone or someone's chosen to not be with her because of some reason.
	So you can't say it's better if she's with someone because she's alone.
	I see what you're saying.
	Well, if it's a case of she...
	I know you're going to...
	Point me out on this, but just hypothetically speaking, if she was with someone, let's say, abusive, she would rather set her down with, as I said, someone who's not abusive, but just doesn't take care of himself.
	That's a better situation to be with than being with a man who's Physically abusing you.
	I'm not saying that this is the case for all single mums.
	So what you're saying is that it would be great if she had her son or her children bond with a man who's going to drop dead of a heart attack in five years or ten years.
	Or who can't play with them in playgrounds.
	Or who is embarrassing to be around because he's so fat.
	And trust me, kids notice and they care.
	I understand what you're saying.
	Single moms can up their sexual market value as well.
	It's not a complete disaster scenario, right?
	I'm talking about the guy losing weight.
	Single moms can up their sexual market value as well.
	They can look into themselves.
	They can figure out why they ended up in a relationship where they got pregnant And harmed their children possibly irrevocably, probably irrevocably, by having them grow up without a father.
	They can go to therapy.
	They can, if they can't afford therapy, they can read lots of self-help books.
	They can get involved in self-knowledge.
	They can figure out exactly why they ended up on such a disastrous situation.
	They can clean up their lives.
	They can clean up their relationships.
	They can get dysfunctional people out of their relationships.
	They can learn how to be great parents, and then their sexual market value could be higher Than if they were single and dysfunctional.
	Sure. I mean, I've had this discussion with- Or they can just marry a fat guy!
	Sorry, go on. Sure.
	I mean, I've had this discussion with many people because I'm, for instance, I'm libertarian leaning and I'm not a great fan of the whole idea of giving welfare.
	So the solution I've always provided is, well, if someone's A single mother and have a child.
	To me, I feel like the priority is that the child needs to have the experience of experiencing husband and wife together, mother and father.
	They're not in that situation.
	To me, the only way to get that is, for instance, if the single mother, just for example, becomes a maid of a two-parent household.
	So that way the child does get regular exposure to what it means to be with...
	And bring her a kid to work?
	No, no, no. I'm saying like being a stay-at-home maid of a...
	Oh, a livid maid. Living maid, yeah.
	Of a family that's...
	But why would a family want a living maid with a kid when you could get a living maid without a kid?
	I guess more out of virtue, you could say...
	Don't you want to make some noise at night?
	Anyway, sorry, go on. I guess it's more like when I look into...
	Like religion and sort of seeing what sort of solution they provided.
	Oh no, their solution was prevention, right?
	Religious solution is prevention, which is don't have sex and for heaven's sakes, don't have a kid outside of wedlock.
	That's a sin. Sure, the solution is definitely prevention.
	However, there are also exceptional circumstances, like even in the Catholic Church.
	And then you give the child up to adoption to a two-parent household, where the child will do much better than the child would with a single mother.
	A single mother is just basically selfish because they're holding on to a child that would do much better in a two-parent household on average.
	They're holding on to the child for emotional sustenance.
	They're holding on to the child for benefits, for free stuff.
	And it is exploiting the child.
	It's a form of child labor.
	It's indentured servitude for the sake of government rewards for single moms to hang on to their kids when they're babies, right?
	When they're older, who knows, right?
	Adopting kids out when they're six.
	I have no idea how well that works or what happens.
	I'm just talking about as a baby.
	If you're a single mom and you give your baby up to a well-vetted couple who is desperate for a child, that child is on average going to do a lot better than if it stays with the single mother.
	So it's just selfish, neediness, exploitation, financial, I don't know.
	And I'm talking about averages.
	There are great single moms and there are terrible adoptive families.
	So please, you know, don't, oh, I know a single mom.
	Okay, I understand all of that.
	I'm just talking about the averages and people thinking that the plural of anecdote is data.
	I'm not talking about you.
	It just wastes everyone's time on the planet.
	But in general, no.
	The religious solution was you give your child up for adoption because 10% of married couples can't have kids.
	And a lot of those married couples really, really want kids.
	So you give your child up to a functional, stable, well-educated, Good income, committed, two-parent household with a mother and a father, and that child is going to do way better on average than staying with a single mom.
	So why don't the single moms do that?
	Well, in the past, that would be the case of religion.
	The reason, the only thing that changed is the welfare state, so it's about money.
	Okay. Two points spot out.
	If you're talking with regards to a baby, sure.
	I definitely agree with you on that.
	Adoption is the best solution.
	I still believe there should be more opportunity for open adoptions.
	We can get into that a bit later if you're interested.
	However, getting a child into adoption who's much older, that is much more difficult.
	That's why religion said give it up at birth.
	Because that was what was best for the child.
	Now, if she's held on to the child for a while, then she screwed up its chances of being adopted, which means she's further harmed the possibility of the child coming out well.
	And the second point I've also had to say, one of the whole...
	Issues, I think, with the whole adoption argument is that now IVF is a lot more common or surrogacy.
	A lot of people who want to have a child who can't usually go for these means since people understandably want to have a child that's genetically connected to them as opposed to Well,
	sure, because then you're dealing with a known quantity rather than some unknown quantity, which is the genetics of the parents, which is often hard to figure out.
	But of course, there's a massive oversupply Of children to single moms these days because of the welfare state, right?
	So without the welfare state, the number of single mothers was far, far fewer.
	Children born out of wedlock to whites in the 1950s was like 5% or 6% max.
	Now, of course, it's over 50% in some areas.
	And again, what's changed? The welfare state.
	And so there's far fewer children who end up needing to be adopted if there's no welfare state.
	So, I mean, I agree with you, there may be a mismatch and so on, but...
	The solution that we've got is to just pay women to have children with irresponsible men.
	That ain't gonna work.
	And the money's gonna run out anyway, so...
	No, I definitely agree.
	I mean, I have my own problems about the welfare state anyway as well.
	If anything, I think it does a disservice more to women who want to have children in a stable, arranged...
	Sorry, not arranged.
	Stable, planned marriage.
	There's more of a disservice to these types of women, whilst those who just end up pregnant, well, they can get stuff handed over to them.
	So it does a disservice to these sorts of women as well.
	Well, it's just buying votes at the expense of children's futures.
	I mean, this is what the left has traditionally done.
	They don't... Oh, children being ripped from the arms of their parents.
	It's like nonsense. They don't care about that at all.
	They're just like, well, there are a lot of single moms around, so we continue to give them free stuff.
	Then I guess we all circle the drain till the caliphate slams down its lid on us.
	Sure. Another point I also wanted to raise, you are correct in that there are many different types of contraceptives.
	I do agree with that.
	However, Depending on what you use, there is still a chance of failure and misuse.
	Not really. Misuse, yes.
	But then if you can't read the instructions, maybe you shouldn't be a parent to begin with.
	But no, it's virtually impossible if you use birth control properly.
	To get pregnant. And of course, even if we accept that there is some possibility, as there is always the, you know, once in a Mary Magdalene possibility, but that's why you have sex inside a marriage, right?
	So that if you do end up getting pregnant, you're already in the situation that's for the best for the children.
	I mean, just for the best for the children.
	That's all I'm asking for. What is best for the children?
	To hell with the boomers and their narcissism and their selfishness.
	What is best for the children? What's best for the children is not always what's best for your penis or your vagina when you're horny.
	What's best for the children is the whole point.
	And we have a society that is structured around basically what's worse for the children.
	What's worse for the children?
	Terrible schools, government debt, terrible student loans, indoctrination into leftist ideology, leaving you $50,000 or more.
	In debt and sexual licentiousness that destroys families to the point where children are growing up with virtually no instruction whatsoever, and we've basically lost our civilization in two generations.
	So, that's my speech.
	No, no, I agree with that, but I'll also say this, what's also worse for the children is this constant Look, I understand not all...
	Let me just finish my point first.
	There's this constant push for women to pursue education, create this career.
	To get a career started properly, it takes a good few years to build it.
	And this is during the time when women are at their most fertile.
	And that's when...
	Because obviously, when fertility is higher, that's when there is actually a higher...
	Well, let's say if women were having children younger and then later choose to use contraception, the chance of a child coming out is far, far lower since women's fertility would drop.
	And what I wanted to say is, I believe many women are aware of the fact that having children is ultimately Best in their 20s.
	It's what's best for the children as well.
	But they kind of lack this guidance and support with this.
	And you might be wondering, well, women should not be babied in this.
	But let's be real. Many women are kind of agreeable.
	Many women kind of just prefer to do what the mob does.
	The women that kind of want to go against that, like I would say myself and the previous caller you've had, We're kind of shunned upon, but those who go to university...
	Because the thing is, a lot of the people who are having abortions, they are affluence women.
	They're women who want to get their careers established first.
	Is that true? I don't think that's true.
	I could be wrong.
	And maybe we're just looking at different data sets.
	And I'm not going to try and do this on the fly, but my understanding is that the smarter you are, the less likely you are To end up with an unwanted pregnancy.
	I mean, I'm just looking at the black community.
	Just had Candace Owens on. She was telling me that more than 60% of the black babies are killed in the womb, right?
	And so I don't know.
	I mean, this is why when you said earlier in your...
	Later, it's because they're being pushed to a career.
	I'm not sure. Again, people can look this up, and I just wanted to push back without anything definitive, just because I think it is important to look at that data if it exists.
	But I don't think it clusters or is even that high among the more cognitive elites.
	I mean, perhaps maybe while we might have conflicting data, she may be using...
	And data from the United States, whilst I'm using it more UK-based, which does differ slightly.
	Yeah, it could be. It's not hugely important.
	I just wanted to not let it pass by if I disagreed.
	But we can't decide it conclusively right now, but I just wanted to mention that for people to look into.
	But sorry, go ahead. Sure.
	What else was I going to say?
	Sorry about that. I know you're going to really disagree with me on this, but I just think it might be an interesting point to consider.
	Well, it is kind of going a bit off the hook.
	One thing that really interests me when I was reading about religion, specifically on Islam, is that they They allow for men to marry multiple women.
	That shocked me.
	That just made me seem like, oh, that's something misogynist.
	That's anti-woman.
	And through reading Not the Qur'an, because as they say, they always refer to the imams, go directly to what the preacher is saying.
	And that's what, not all, I'm not saying every imam would say this, but some sort of say, well, this case of allowing men to marry a second woman is for...
	Those who are in a situation where it's just purely just a mother and child since before there wasn't a welfare state.
	No, I don't know. It's not necessary because there's no way that men are going to marry, Western men are never going to marry more than one wife because then you end up with no stuff.
	You end up with one wife divorcing you, you get half the stuff.
	If you've got two wives divorcing you, you've got no stuff.
	So there would have to be a huge reform in the family court system and the anti-male, gynocentric legal system as a whole.
	There'd have to be a huge reform for that even to be a possibility.
	And if that kind of reform happened, more men would just get married anyway, so there wouldn't be a shortage of men.
	That's true. I mean, that makes sense.
	I'm not suggesting this as a solution for now.
	I'm just saying... Well, this is what happened in the East.
	I'm not saying it... I mean, maybe it probably won't be compatible for the West.
	I'm just saying without the welfare state, if you're essentially a mother and a child in Arabia, you two are just pretty much going to die.
	Like, there is no way you can just die.
	No, I don't know about that.
	I mean, I don't think that happens in particular, but...
	No, listen, this is, you know, there's a lot of, I see the comments on there, repeal the 19th, the women, the men who say, well, you just got to take away women's rights and everything will be fine.
	And I don't think that's true or fair or valid or universally applicable or moral.
	But I will say this, that men got the vote because they were drafted into war.
	And I've said this before, but it bears repeating.
	Men got the vote because they were drafted into war.
	That's what you had to pay to get the vote.
	Now, women got the vote because they complained.
	And men are nice.
	And what did women have to pay to get the vote?
	Well, once women got the vote, in general, they voted for big, giant government programs because...
	For various biological and psychological reasons, they generally prefer, women generally prefer security to freedom.
	Freedom benefits men because it allows you to compete and gather more resources, but security benefits women because you have to feed your children every day.
	So what was the big sacrifice that women made to get the vote?
	Men had war, which was a huge sacrifice.
	What sacrifice did women have to take on to get the vote?
	Well, I would argue that the sacrifice that women have to Take to keep the vote is giving up the welfare state and giving up old age pensions and giving up free health care.
	That is what they're going to be drafted in if our civilization is to survive, because right now women's addiction to free stuff is drawing every other culture and race across the known universe into Western countries.
	It is the giant, in a sense, spilled honey that brings Other creatures to feed.
	And women are going to have to give up.
	Well, women aren't going to get to keep the welfare state and all of these benefits anyway, because they, I mean, no one's taking away anything that's sustainable anyway, you know?
	But women are going to have to give up the welfare state in order to save their societies.
	No one's telling the truth about this to women because most people are politicians or they're scared of women, which I think is silly.
	Women are People just like men and I take on men.
	I'll take on women and tell them the truth.
	But women are going to have to give up all of this free stuff from the government if there's to be any chance for our society to continue.
	Women are also going to have to give up this fantasy that you can have this wonderful education and career and then just somehow magically have a great guy in your 30s and have lots of babies.
	You can't. You can't.
	And so you can educate women into a career when they're young or you can have a civilization but you can't have both because just not enough babies not enough kids so women are gonna have to start having kids they're gonna have to start liking men again white women and they're gonna have to give up free stuff from the government and that's the price now no one's saying they've got to go to Vietnam and get their ass blown off No one's saying they've got to go off metal boats into Normandy and have their brains shot out by German machine gun fire.
	You just got to give up free stuff, and that's the price of the vote.
	It's a lot better than war.
	It's a lot easier than war.
	It's a lot safer than war.
	The question is, will women do it?
	I fear that the answer is no, which means that the fate of our civilization is sealed.
	Well, to be honest, I kind of feel like it's no as well.
	I mean, I have had this discussion with many women, in particular white women, just because I live in a country where I'm mainly surrounded by white women.
	And every time when I mention this, they like to just bring in the accusation that I'm a white nationalist.
	For me, I look at the birth rates going on in this country and ethnic minorities of Muslim background are having far more children.
	To me, we can keep preaching about the free market and all of that, which I agree with, but if the people who believe in the free market are not having children, then we aren't going to achieve that.
	Yeah, England is going to be majority Muslim.
	In a generation or two, according to current birth rates.
	Do they think that the Muslims are going to be real keen on making sure that women have their feminism and women have their preferential advantages in the workplace and that there's lots of affirmative action and equal pay for work of equal value?
	Good lord now. Good lord now.
	I mean, in certain legal situations under the Quran or under Sharia law, a woman's testimony is worth far less than that of a man.
	So women aren't going to get it through your heads.
	You don't get to keep this stuff.
	It's a delusion. It's a fantasy.
	It's never going to last.
	It's either going to stop because you stop it or it's going to stop because Sharia is going to stop it.
	Or because everybody runs out of money, in which case there's civil war.
	Like, it's not going to last.
	And people who ignore that, well, we all know what happens to people who ignore reality in the long run.
	Um, what's that?
	They don't make it. Yeah, I mean, I guess the whole reason I just brought up this whole topic, um, I mean, for instance, um, I don't know if you remember me from my previous call.
	We had like quite a few months back ago that I work in a sushi counter and quite a lot of the people I work with.
	Oh man, now I'm hungry again.
	My saliva remembers you.
	Yeah, quite a lot of people I work from are from Islamic backgrounds.
	And like, for instance, one of my co-workers who he's He's part of a family of five, six children.
	There's two older people and they both are married to wives and they have three children.
	Whilst those who are not from an Islamic background, they either have one or no children.
	Right. Demographics is destiny.
	It really worries me that this is what's going to happen in my country.
	The country that has all the freedoms, the tolerances...
	No, it's not happening because of the freedoms.
	It's happening because of the tyranny.
	It's happening because of the welfare state.
	And it's happening because the government...
	See, once the government's in control of the currency, once the government controls the currency, the citizens lose control of the government.
	Because creating money out of thin air, borrowing money, printing bonds, and getting money is the great delusion by which the government pretends it's adding value to the economy.
	Sure. And so you end up with these infinite resources.
	Now, if you have infinite resources, why would you want to say no to someone?
	Why would you just want to say no to anyone?
	We've got infinite resources.
	We have as much money as we want.
	We have as many resources. We have as much healthcare as we want.
	We have as much housing as we want.
	There's no limit to anything.
	We've become psychotic in the West, like deeply delusional.
	We've become like somebody who's got a limited stock of food, who's just wolfing down all the food at the beginning of winter.
	Oh, we got food forever.
	We got nothing but food.
	Why would you bring the neighbors over?
	Everyone can come in and eat my food.
	It's like, you're going to starve. We've become deeply delusional because we've been lulled into this genuinely...
	I'm not kidding about this. It's a psychotic frame of mind.
	When you go to somebody who's megalomaniacal, who's intensely narcissistic, who's got delusions of grandeur, and you try to put limits on them, They get enraged.
	Like you say to some coke addict, stop taking coke tonight, he's gonna get enraged.
	Try and take away food from the binge eater, they're gonna get enraged.
	We have got this delusion of endless omnipotence and resources.
	We have become deluded gods in the graveyards of our freedoms.
	And we are not expiring because we're free.
	We're expiring because we're free from reality.
	We've been cut loose from any empiricism, any restraint, any rationality.
	Nobody says, well, we can bring in all these migrants, but we have to triple your tax bill because they're expensive.
	No! It's just debt and borrowing and money printing and bullshit.
	So anyone who says, no, well, you just got to be a racist and blah blah blah, right?
	We've become completely delusional.
	We can say to women, go get an education, spend your fertility years slaving away in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, typing meaningless bullshit that no one's probably ever going to read.
	And yet we still get to have a civilization.
	We don't, because there are no kids.
	It's like children of men.
	None. We can create a system that destroys any incentive for men to get married.
	Same thing that happened in Japan.
	The Japanese kids these days, they see what happened with their fathers who worked from daybreak to midnight, never got to see their kids.
	They saw if there was a divorce, catastrophe for the man.
	They saw him basically being a slave and now people are like, well, I wonder why the Japanese kids don't want to have kids anymore.
	So, it is not because we're free that we are expiring.
	It's because we are deluded.
	We are detached from reality.
	We have this illusion. Like, it's like you could...
	I mean, what would your spending be like if somebody typed $10 million into your bank account?
	Well, you'd probably go out and spend a whole lot.
	And if it turned out that money was illusory, well...
	Like some people who have Bitcoin, you'd have a lot of money to pay back and you wouldn't have the resources to pay it back.
	If you thought you were invulnerable, that you couldn't be hurt, physically, bullets would not pierce your skin.
	Then you'd do insane parkour and you'd die right away.
	Delusions of grandeur, delusions of omnipotence are fatal to an individual and to a society.
	And we have these delusions of grandeur that we can do anything and pay for everything and absorb everything and take every culture and there's never going to be an end to our resources, never going to be a limit to anything.
	That is psychotic.
	That is psychotic. And that is not a delusion that other cultures share, because those cultures have come from want and hardship, right?
	And so those cultures are like, yeah, we could educate our children, sorry, we could educate our women and have them drive and this and that and the other, but then we just won't have any kids.
	So we're not going to do that.
	And again, the answer is freedom.
	The answer is freedom. But we are expiring from an excess of sin, not an excess of virtue.
	Freedom is a virtue. But we are not free to ostracize anyone anymore.
	We're not free to say, I don't want to pay for single moms.
	We're not free to say, I don't want to pay for women who abandon their families.
	I don't want to pay for men who abandon their families.
	I don't want to pay for the healthcare of people who chose to get fat and didn't exercise.
	I don't want to pay for the teeth and dental care of people who just didn't floss and brush.
	I don't want to pay for it. We have lost the ability to ostracize each other.
	And that was the fundamental freedoms that we had.
	That was the fundamental freedoms.
	Now, everyone. Open borders.
	Fuck open borders. It's open wallets.
	That's the problem. Build a wall around your wallet and you have freedom.
	Build a wall around your country, maybe.
	I can't even get that done unless you're Israel.
	So, it's not that free market people aren't having kids.
	It's because we have almost no free market left.
	And money is being herded around from people to people to buy votes at the point of statist bayonets and debt and enslavement of our children.
	And then we invite people from the Middle East, we invite people from Africa, we invite all these people into our culture, and we expect them to assimilate?
	Fuck, I don't want to assimilate to the West as it stands.
	Oh, look at this great culture we have.
	We don't see our children.
	The women go off to work.
	You get two weeks after you give birth, then you're back at your job.
	We have massive amounts of debt.
	We indoctrinate our children into communism.
	Women can destroy families on a whim.
	They can accuse husbands of sexual abuse of children and destroy their lives like that.
	Want to be like us?
	Of course they don't.
	Hell, they probably feel. Let's put them out of their misery, culturally speaking.
	Hard to disagree.
	We have drifted so far from where we were, from the freedoms that founded our nations and our cultures.
	We have been bought and paid for.
	And we took that fundamental temptation that the devil offered Jesus I should give you the whole world in exchange for your soul.
	We sold off our children and their future for the sake of petty shit in the here and now.
	Mere materialism.
	Mere possessions.
	Demonic and material.
	What's left to save? Go on.
	Sorry. I was just saying that's interesting you mentioned materialism as well.
	That's something I have discussed and discussed in my channel, that women these days, they're sort of seeing femininity as more of a materialistic thing as opposed to a maternalistic thing.
	Because you'll see many people saying, oh, I'm not going to have children because I can't afford it.
	But they can afford to spend a lot of money on makeup, fancy clothes, traveling around the world.
	Emerge birth rate in some places in Africa is 5.2.
	Do you think they can afford it?
	Exactly. Yeah.
	So Panda, you know how I know you're a very nice young lady?
	How comes? Well, first of all, you're a listener to this fine quality show.
	But secondly, and we're having a great conversation, but also...
	You've mentioned your channel, but you haven't told me the name.
	Oh. You haven't told all of the people who are listening to this show the name of your channel, and you should.
	Sure. It's Panda Mojia, together in one word.
	So Panda Mojia, spelled M-O-J-I-A. Yeah.
	The video I think everyone should look out for because it's relevant to discussion.
	I created a video called Motherhood in Your Twenties.
	So that's a video relevant.
	Sorry, I'm just a bit flustered.
	No, no, you should. You're a very nice young lady, but...
	You've got to just ask for things.
	And you've got to just put the name in.
	What am I going to do? Cut it out or yell over it or something?
	You know, just put the name of your channel in.
	I'm happy if there's people talking.
	Listen, if you're a woman talking about motherhood in your 20s, I'm down with that message.
	Go listen to her channel. Sure.
	I mean, I guess the main reason I just want to talk about, because I feel like Many women are secretly kind of aware of it.
	I think many women are kind of aware of the fact that having children is optimum in their 20s, but they kind of feel like, oh, no, but I need to establish my career.
	Because this is something even my parents are constantly thinking.
	I'm from an Iranian background as well, let alone people from much more liberal-minded backgrounds.
	Like that girl you're talking to, she probably has it like that.
	Another thing I think a lot of women really need to consider is Do you seriously think it's normal to have to put yourself on hormones for like 10 years of your life to then later be put on more drugs to create more babies?
	It's not exactly old school now, is it?
	No, well, I mean, essentially in some ways I'd say women are kind of being drugged.
	Obviously, I understand it's better to go on drugs Contraception then to become a single mother.
	Obviously, I completely get that.
	But I think it's something more women need to question.
	Why is it that you have to go to the doctor to get contraceptives?
	Why is it not something you can just readily get?
	Because there are big side effects on it.
	And one thing I remember was it blonde in the belly of the beast.
	She mentioned that being on contraceptives does actually affect your ability to choose a partner.
	I mean, for instance, I used to be on contraceptives and that was also the time when I felt like I wasn't really considering my partner choices as much because I'm just like, well, I'm protected.
	It doesn't matter. When I mean contraceptives, I'm specifically referring to hormonal ones because those tend to be much more effective than, let's say, barrier methods as opposed to condoms, which are still effective.
	I'm not denying that.
	But there is a little bit more of a leeway because it can break.
	You don't have to be with as nice a guy if for sure you can't get pregnant, right?
	Well, I know for a fact now that I completely refuse to use hormonal contraceptives.
	I need to really think about who I'm with.
	I can't just be of anyone because obviously I still do understand that It's better for me to be married.
	But let me put it to you this way, Stephanie.
	Sorry to interrupt, but it's also better for you to not repeatedly get your heart broken.
	Yeah. That really messes up your capacity to bond with someone.
	Yes, yes, yes, definitely.
	But this is kind of seen as something normal.
	I'm part of a few...
	Women's groups, I don't usually agree, but I'm just kind of interested to sort of just hear what other women's experience and usually when you sort of see someone that had a breakup and oh it's fine like just like do some was it self-help stuff like go and watch a movie like go and hang out with friends and it's kind of like I feel like well When I sort of look into religion,
	the whole point where religion is structured is to sort of avoid those sorts of situations, again, into intense heartbreak.
	Especially for men, changing girlfriends is like changing jobs, but for women it's like dying to change a boyfriend.
	I've established that in my previous school.
	But it's kind of all characterised.
	There's A part of your life, something every woman has to go for.
	And I'm like, well, many Muslim women are not going through that.
	And I reckon that's probably why a lot of feminists in some ways are taking an interest in, maybe not taking interest, but sort of somewhat sympathetic to Islam.
	I know there's this whole power, like what the state wants and all of that, that's all true.
	But I think there is an element of jealousy, that why do I mean, I know there are issues in Islam.
	I'm not saying it's all perfect and all of that, but I'm saying that...
	Yeah, I think we can take that for granted.
	They feel like they're missing out on something.
	I really sense that.
	The feminists, they feel like they're kind of missing out on, I guess, a sense of stability.
	Because Islam is very clear with what a woman is supposed to do.
	Whilst in Western society, it's...
	It's a bit all over the place for women, to be honest.
	Now you have to be a careerist and kind of have kids on the side, which most women can't do that.
	I mean, when you see women who are careerists...
	Peel the baby nursing off your breast, get into a car, fight traffic and go make money for someone else.
	Like, why would you want to do that?
	I never have understood that.
	But of course, women are a bit hive mindy, right?
	And women are a bit, well, they score very high in agreeableness and neuroticism, which means that Well, they take social cues a little bit more so than men.
	But I don't know how women got talked out of motherhood.
	That just blows my mind. That's just an amazing, amazing feat.
	It's like talking men out of sex, you know?
	Like, it's just amazing. I guess that's the McDow thing too, right?
	I've been a stay-at-home dad.
	My wife was a stay-at-home mom.
	It's like, why would you want to peel that child off you, drive it off to some stranger's house, and then go to work?
	That's weird. That's your baby.
	That's the thing that looks at you with those big luminous Disney eyes and desperately needs you and you alone more than any other thing in the known universe.
	Wants to bond with you, wants to play with you, wants to connect with you, wants to fall asleep on you, wants to cuddle with you, wants to listen to your voice, wants to merge and then grow from you.
	You are the soil from which these roots go deep and the child grows high.
	Why would you want to give that up?
	For a heavily taxed paycheck.
	Ew. Like, how horrible.
	How on earth was it possible to talk about these, oh, women with a maternal instinct, women with a maternal instinct.
	It's like, it really didn't take much to talk women out of having kids and being moms and bonding with their kids.
	And it's like, that's really sad.
	That's really fundamentally very, very sad.
	Could I give a theory for that?
	Yeah, go ahead. We've got to keep it quick.
	I've got one more caller, but go ahead. Sure, I understand.
	Well, to me, it seems like when you have children, it really exposes a part of yourself that you don't really know until you have children.
	I mean, I'm speaking as someone who doesn't have a child, but I think you've mentioned it somewhere on one of your videos where when you had your daughter, it felt like your entire life flipped around.
	You just had to... It exposes a part of you that you don't really see when you're just living completely by your own means.
	And I think a lot of women don't want that to be exposed from them because they don't want to see who they really are and prefer to just see themselves as just good people, men are evil.
	And if you don't have children, it's really hard to sort of see that aspect of yourself.
	Does that make sense? No, I don't agree with you at all.
	You could be right, but I'll just tell you what I think it is.
	Women like approval. And women don't like disapproval.
	And right now, women get approval, as you heard from the early caller, if you've experienced yourself, Panda, women get approval by going to work and delaying motherhood.
	And women get disapproval for staying home when they're young and being moms.
	Oh, yeah. I don't know that it's that much more complicated.
	It's like, I would rather have approval than motherhood.
	I would rather avoid disapproval than be with my baby.
	That's how strong women's preference for approval and avoidance of disapproval is.
	That it's stronger than the maternal instinct because it didn't take a lot of pressure for women to give up being moms for the sake of approval.
	It's much, much stronger than the maternal instinct.
	I don't know why, but it is.
	Sure. Thank you very much, Stefan.
	I appreciate the call and let me know how it goes.
	And I hope that you will get in touch with the other lady and I appreciate the call.
	Sure. All right. Thank you very much.
	Thanks, Mel, as always. Take care. All right.
	Bye-bye. Alright, up next we have Michelle.
	Michelle's called him before, and this time, it's for a debate.
	She wrote in and said,"...this young philosopher is going to attempt to snatch the pebble from the master's hand.
	I challenge Stefan to debate me on his hypothesis.
	Magic is always madness." Stefan argues,"...magic in stories is always and forever a metaphor for madness, and thus it is universal, is the first question that you must ask of your argument." I like the application of this view of magic to some stories, but I do not think it is universally applicable.
	Why does a way of seeing a metaphor in stories need to be universally applicable?
	Is a way of seeing a metaphor in stories an argument?
	I am arguing that magic is always madness is not universally applicable.
	That's from Michelle.
	Hi, thank you for having me.
	You're welcome. Thank you for calling.
	It's an honor. Thank you.
	All right. Why do you know Leike the thesis?
	Other than you think it's wrong.
	It needs to be corrected.
	Well, okay. Okay, so I know this, when you first posed this thesis, it was about four years ago, and then some of the calls on the debates on it have been about three years old.
	So I was curious, did you want to lay out your hypothesis first?
	Well, yeah, I'll do it very briefly.
	Okay. Magic doesn't exist.
	Magic is violations of the laws of physics.
	And since it doesn't exist, the only place that the laws of physics can be violated is in the minds of a crazy person.
	Like people who say, I believe I can fly.
	Like they jump off and they think they can fly or they think they can live without food or whatever it is, right?
	So the only place where error can exist is in the mind.
	Error does not exist in empirical reality.
	And since magic is a delusion, it is a form of willpower over material cause and effect, it can only exist within the mind.
	Now, what is madness?
	Madness is the rejection of reality.
	And since magic is a rejection of reality, and magic therefore can only exist in the mind, and since the rejection of reality is madness, Then magic must always be an analogy or a metaphor for madness within the human mind, delusions of grandeur.
	And the example that I give in my great review of the movie Frozen, good thing my daughter liked that movie because I really got to analyze the hell out of that thing.
	But at the beginning of the movie Frozen, there's a whole long sequence that took me forever to understand where men are painstakingly using mere physical tools to get giant blocks of ice and everything.
	And then women...
	Can just make ice magically with magic and so on, right?
	But they can't. Now, there is power in female sexuality insofar as that they can magically get resources by using their sexuality or their physical attractiveness or their general lovability to get men to provide resources to them and the children that they have together with the men.
	But magic Is not an accurate representation of female sexual market value and female sexual power.
	And so the idea that women can just magically summon resources using hand gestures and spells and so on, well, it's not true.
	And so it is...
	A mad way of looking at basic sexual market value.
	And look at Harry Potter, right?
	Harry Potter, these wands don't do anything.
	They're just little sticks, right?
	Of course, right? I mean, you get those wands in a kid's store and they don't do anything, right?
	So why does he think that he can do all of these amazing things?
	Because he's delusional. And there are people, of course, who believe that they are magic and have magic and can cast spells and that's a sign of insanity.
	If you believe that That you can walk on water and you're not Jesus himself, well, that's a sign of mental illness.
	If you believe you have magical powers, that is a sign of mental illness.
	And so magic in movies is the invitation, in fact, it's the absorption of the mind of the audience into the mind of a crazy person, or the world of a crazy person where magic can happen.
	So that's the very brief View of it.
	And you disagree, which is great.
	Let's talk about it. Okay.
	So before we go on, what we need to do is clarify some terms and make sure that we agree on the definitions.
	In the call, Criticism the Truth about Frozen, that didn't seem to really come out very well, so I'd like to make sure we get that done.
	So I want to make sure that first we agree on the term of a metaphor and what that is.
	Would you like me to go ahead and read?
	I've got the dictionary.com definition here, or if you'd like to give it, that's fine.
	No, that's fine. Okay, so from dictionary.com, a metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance.
	Do you agree with that definition?
	Yes. Okay, I figured that one would not be difficult.
	So the next term that we need to agree upon is the definition of genre.
	So from dictionary.com again, a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like The genre of epic poetry, the genre of symphonic music.
	So the categorizations that we use in terms of storytelling would be the genre of science fiction, the genre of fantasy, documentaries, contemporary works, so on and so forth.
	Okay. So, the next term would be suspension of disbelief.
	And I think this is where we might have a little bit of a back and forth.
	And I believe that these two terms, genre and suspension of disbelief, got kind of mixed up in the criticism, the truth about Frozen video.
	So, suspension of disbelief.
	This is from Wikipedia.
	Let's see. The term suspension of Disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief has been defined as a willingness to suspend one's critical faculties and believe something surreal, sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.
	No, I wouldn't get that far.
	Do you agree with that? Yeah, I wouldn't go that far.
	Because you can have an entirely naturalistic play.
	And in the theater, of course, as you know, it's called The Fourth Wall, in that you can have, like you think of an Ibsen play or a Chekhov play, which is naturalistic.
	And you have a dining room, and people are, head of gobbler generally takes place in sort of one or two rooms.
	So you have this room, it's perfectly naturalistic, and people are doing their naturalistic stuff.
	It's also known in England as the kitchen sink drama, so sort of Base, gritty, totalitarian realism.
	Nobody does anything magical.
	Nothing weird happens. Nothing supernatural happens.
	It's all happenstance.
	But you still have to suspend your disbelief.
	You have to suspend your disbelief.
	Because you have to say, well, I'm going to pretend I'm looking at an actual house, and I'm going to pretend that I'm looking at actual people, and I'm going to pretend that these events are real, rather than this is a bunch of actors in a set.
	And that's not anything surreal, insofar as nothing surreal is happening in the story.
	And so suspension of disbelief perfectly applies to something wherein there is no magic whatsoever, or no surreal or counter-empirical realities occurring.
	Okay, so let me ask if you agree with this.
	So, because it's from Wikipedia, it's like an article about it, and this is something that is debated amongst authors and wannabe writers.
	So, would you agree with this criticism?
	It says, aesthetic philosophers generally reject claims that suspension of disbelief accurately characterizes the relationship between people Kindle Walton notes that if viewers were to truly suspend disbelief at a horror movie, for example, and accept its images as absolute fact, they would have to have a true-to-life set of reactions.
	For instance, audience members would cry out, look behind you, to an endangered on-screen character, or call the police when they witness an on-screen murder.
	Well, it's suspension of disbelief, not elimination of disbelief, right?
	Okay, okay, right.
	So, I was going to say to that, there's an argument that I agree with from Tolkien.
	It says, sorry, let me find this spot here.
	J.R.R. Tolkien challenges this concept in his essay, On Fairy Stories.
	Choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality.
	Tolkien says that in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what he reads is true within the secondary reality of the fictional world.
	By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes secondary belief possible.
	Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief.
	From that point the spell is broken and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story and must make a conscious effort to suspend disbelief or else give up on it entirely.
	Okay, so...
	To believe Tolkien's world, the world has to be consistent.
	And Tolkien, of course, worked for many decades before writing Lord of the Rings to make sure that his world was consistent.
	And I was listening, I've been listening off and on to the audiobook from audible.com, which is worth checking out, of The Lord of the Rings.
	And there's one little section where they come to a, on the journey early on, in the Hobbit's journey, they come to an area which was mined Many, many years ago, and there's barely an outline of the sort of scores that were used in the minor quarry, and it just passed along.
	Now, of course, that's not important to the story, but it does give a sense of depth and time in history, and therefore importance to the story as a whole.
	And so, I think that you have to do more suspending of disbelief if there is A contradiction in the story.
	So like I'll give you a silly example.
	So many years ago when I was a kid, there used to be a show on television called The Carol Burnett Show.
	And they did a spoof of the movie Jaws.
	And in it, they locked a door and then a guy made a big show of swallowing the key.
	And then they did their comedy bits and so on.
	And then at the end of the skit, they got up, they opened the door and they walked out.
	Which made no sense because he'd swallowed the key and they'd already tried.
	So that was an error.
	And so you go, okay, that was kind of funny, but it jolts you out of the story because now you have to suspend too much disbelief, which is that a door that they made a big deal of locking and swallowing the key, you can suddenly just open and walk through.
	And I remember that being annoying like 40 years later.
	And it's rare.
	And you can see this in...
	If you're kind of anal, like the continuity gaffs that they have in movies, you know, like some guy runs up and the gun's in his left hand and then he turns a corner and the gun's in his right hand.
	Like, you know, there's this whole job called continuity, which is like to make sure that if the guy's got his hair locked over his forehead going this way, that it has to be that way in the next shot.
	And, you know, they get most of it right, but they get a few things wrong.
	If it's not that big a deal, that's okay.
	But you have to have an internal logic.
	And if the internal logic, you can buy just about any premise if it's set up well and is consistent.
	But if there is inconsistency even within the framework of the story, it jolts you right out of the story.
	And if there's too many, you just won't continue because you don't trust the author anymore.
	It seems sloppy. Yes, I agree with that.
	For example, I read this called The Book of...
	Job and a series of unfortunate events by Robert Heinlein.
	I hated that book because the character is like this pious religious man and then like halfway through the book you know he's in hell and meets a demon and he just drops his morals and turns on a dime and he's like I'm a freak now yay!
	So yes I'd agree with that.
	It completely just takes you out of the story when you have a break like that.
	Okay so Can I give you an example story here?
	So, okay, so in science fiction, we usually think of it as a genre that takes place with dealing with technology, possibilities of the future, and then of course things like aliens, time travel, stuff that doesn't exist, but we don't call it magic.
	So for example, and you're familiar with Star Trek, correct?
	Well, you've got to give me some narrow down here, because Star Trek is a pretty wide tapestry by these days.
	Okay, really quick, I'm sorry.
	So, just Star Trek...
	Like the first one? Whatever, the first one is fine.
	Yeah, the first. Captain Kirk, okay?
	So, how is the spaceship powered?
	Well, it has a warp drive, and it also has impulse power.
	Okay, how does the warp drive work?
	Well, it warps. Okay, but it's powered by something, right?
	Yeah, I do believe it's powered by Captain Crook's sex drive for tentacle sex.
	You're right. We have these drives, these big penises on the back of the spaceship, and they have like warp nine is what, nine times the speed of light, and that's when the dilithium crystals always break up and stuff like that.
	So there's impulse power for like low rent stuff.
	And that's like the airplane cruising around on the tarmac is impulse power.
	And then like being at 40,000 feet is like the warp drive.
	And there's a logic, right?
	So there's some dilithium crystals which are necessary.
	And if they break their warp drive or lose the dilithium crystals, they might need more.
	So, but yeah, none of this, it's never explained how it works.
	Because of course, if you knew how to create a warp drive, you wouldn't make a TV show about a warp drive.
	You'd make a warp drive, right?
	So you could go all over the universe.
	Okay. Well, yes, right, but so the explanation that's given for these is the dilithium crystals, which are supposed to be these crystals of infinitely dense energy, correct?
	Well, I don't know about infinitely, but yeah, dense, yeah.
	Right, okay, it's just not possible, right?
	Or so, okay, so take their...
	Well, even going faster than the speed of light is not possible, at least according to current physics.
	You can add more energy, go faster, it just gets converted into mass.
	Right. And, like, you know, they can teleport.
	Their teleportation is that they take them down to, like, the atoms and teleport them through space and reassemble them somewhere else.
	Like, these are magic. Yeah, they fax people.
	Yeah, it's not. No, no, no.
	It's not magic. No, it's not magic, though.
	Okay. But it is. It doesn't exist.
	It can't.
	It's not magic. It's the fact that it was very expensive for them to have a spaceship, and it was very cheap for them to have these shimmer in sheep around.
	No, it's not magic. It's not magic because it is considered to be advanced technology.
	So there's, you know, the old, I use this quote twice, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, is the old Arthur C. Clarke thing, right?
	And so it is not fantasy because it is within the realm of of reality.
	There aren't wizards with hats who create spells out of nothing.
	It is considered to be technologically advanced insofar as you can't explain how you get from A to B, but nothing impossible fundamentally is being proposed.
	So for instance, 3D printing is a weird kind of way that you can create something at a distance.
	And you can have holograph projections, which you can produce at a distance.
	There's a lot of people beaming through space and so on, but nobody's saying it's magic.
	So the spaceship travels very fast, but we have stuff that travels.
	Now, dematerializing and materializing That is not possible.
	But if you think about it, of course, it used to take eight months to go from England to Australia on a boat, and now you can get there in a dozen hours.
	So that speed level has increased to the point where it's almost like you dematerialize and materialize relatively old things.
	So it's like you go from one place to another, you just make it super fast.
	You go from one planet to another, you just make it super fast.
	It's an acceleration of...
	What is already possible, it is not...
	You can snap your fingers and create a glacier, which is not an acceleration of anything that's possible, but something that's impossible.
	Does it make any sense? It's a speed-up rather than a change in possibility.
	I... Okay.
	I get what you're saying, but I just...
	Like, I can't really...
	I want to be open to agreeing with you, but I don't agree yet.
	No, that's fine. Please, push back.
	Okay. It is not possible and will never be possible to have infinitely dense energy crystals to power ships.
	Like, I understand it's an exaggeration or like, you know, maybe...
	It's an increase in density, though.
	They're still not saying it's magic, right?
	Are they really called infinitely dense?
	That seems like such an anti-scientific thing to say for Star Trek.
	Okay, but... That's it.
	I'm looking them up. Okay.
	Okay, you do that.
	Um... Sorry, I got lost.
	That's what I call a victory.
	I'm so cheap. No, you haven't gotten me yet.
	I'll scream racist for you. Okay. Dilithium is an invented material which serves as a controlling agent in the fast and light wart drive.
	In the original series, dilithium crystals were rare and could not be replicated, making the search for them a recurring plot element.
	According to the periodic table shown during a Next Generation episode, oh, that was somebody on the staff having fun, it has the chemical symbol DT and the atomic number 87, which in reality belongs to frankium.
	In the real world, dilithium is a molecule composed of two covalently bonded lithium atoms.
	Well, of course. Dilithium is depicted as an extremely hard crystalline mineral that occurs naturally on some planets.
	It is believed that this material exists in more than three dimensions at the same time, blah, blah, blah.
	I don't see anything about infinite.
	Where when placed in a high-frequency electromagnetic field, eddy currents are induced in its structure which keep charged particles away from the crystal lattice.
	This prevents it from reacting with antimatter when so energized because the antimatter particles never actually touch it.
	It's used to contain and regulate the annihilation reaction of matter and antimatter in a starship's warp core.
	Blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	Yeah, I don't know. I don't see any sort of infinite.
	Like, there seems to be some scientific-y things going on here.
	Okay, so I will withdraw the word infinite, but I did go and watch a bunch of nerds that are smarter than me on YouTube talking about these technologies and how they're just not possible.
	Not in our lifetime, not in any lifetime.
	Physics in our universe does not support the possibility.
	These technologies in Star Trek.
	Okay, okay, so hang on, so hang on.
	So let's say, let's say, sorry to interrupt.
	So let's say that faster than light is not possible, and that seems to be the case, right?
	Faster than light is not possible.
	Okay, so they can only go warp 0.9, rather than warp 9.
	So it just takes them longer to get someplace.
	But it doesn't fundamentally change the universe, right?
	Like, what would the movie Frozen be without their ability?
	It wasn't like, okay, well, in reality, women can only magically create crystals at one-tenth the rate that they do in the movie Frozen, right?
	I mean, they can't do it at all.
	Whereas you can travel from planet to planet.
	We can spend 4.3 light years worth of time going from here to Alpha Centauri.
	And if we go close to the speed of light, and we're in a Brian May song, then we can go there and come back and meet our own grandchildren, because our will have aged very little, and our children will have aged a lot.
	So it's not that they have made something impossible possible.
	They've just made something faster.
	Like, you can go from A to B. You can't teleport, and I doubt you ever will be able to.
	I mean, you can't phase out and phase in or warp in that way.
	But you can't go from A to B. They're not doing something that's impossible.
	They're just making it fast. And of course, the reason they did that, as I mentioned, not really in jest, was that it was pretty expensive to get spaceships going down with people in them, but you could just phase that out.
	And it's just cheaper, right? They didn't have a lot of money.
	So they're not making things impossible possible.
	They're just making things faster or more efficient.
	Does that make sense? Okay, so if I understand, just to repeat it back to you, what you're saying is that if it's An exaggeration of something that is still within the realm of possibility.
	We cannot go faster than the speed of light, but in a science fiction, we'll accept that they can go faster than the speed of light because they're just theoretically doing something that already exists, but in an exaggerated way.
	Is that correct? Yeah.
	So if I said a guy can run 80 miles an hour, you'd say, well, that's not possible.
	But a guy can run 25 miles an hour.
	So it's an extension of something that's already there.
	And they're saying, well, we can go nine times the speed of light.
	Well, no, you can't. But you can still travel from star to star.
	It's just that for the convenience of that story, they needed to go faster.
	Otherwise, the characters would have to...
	Like, time would have a weird kind of thing.
	They wouldn't be able to maintain their conversations with Starfleet Command because there'd be a new Starfleet Commander every single time they came out of their close to...
	Like, they had to just find a way to not deal with the time dilation issues.
	So they just came up with this warp drive, right?
	Where you can go faster than light and it doesn't affect your...
	Your time frame, but it's still just going from A to B. It's faster, but it's not magic.
	Okay. So basically, in other words, they are maintaining an internal consistency within their universe.
	They're not breaking that.
	So that's the suspension of disbelief.
	It's continued, plus it's not...
	Okay, I'm sorry. I think I do understand what you're saying.
	Like what you said, in Frozen, she manifests ice crystals with the wave of her hand.
	We can't wave her hands and create ice, but we can move from A to B, and our technology does progress so that we can do so faster with every iteration.
	Yes, that is correct.
	Or if you look at Harry Potter, they have a flying car, right?
	Now, they don't have a flying car like it's got a jetpack or chitty-chitty bang-bang or I don't know how that car flew or whatever, right?
	But they have a flying car that is powered by magic.
	They don't even make any attempt to say, here's how it works.
	There's a helicopter blade or there's jets underneath or something like that, right?
	It's just magic.
	And that is not an extension.
	It's like, well, cars can't fly that high or cars can't fly that fast.
	It's like... Cars can't fly without external propulsion mechanisms, but they just get to say magic.
	And that's different from, we're just going faster than you could otherwise go.
	It's a difference of kinds, not of degree.
	I think that's the key. Okay.
	Okay. I think I can agree with that.
	But then, so here's my problem.
	This is not an argument. So, okay.
	Okay. If I say that I agree with you that magic is always and forever a metaphor for madness in all stories, when I read a story like the Bible, and I'm an atheist, but I do appreciate the Bible, I love it as a metaphor in mythology, so for me when I read that book, the metaphor that's supposed to be presented is philosophy, the philosopher, and truth.
	That's the way I see it, and I know Christians wouldn't agree with me, but that's okay.
	And so when you say that magic is madness, and there's a story of a philosopher who I see as a philosopher doing magic, the way I see this metaphor presented is that he's not actually doing magic.
	He's getting a reaction.
	It's just a metaphor.
	So like when it says that Jesus can walk on water, I would say that in a metaphorical sense, we see people like you or Lauren Southern or Dr.
	Peterson walk on water too.
	Like all the storms of the sophists come to you and try to take you down, but yet we see you walk on the water through the storm no problem because your eye is on the truth and philosophy.
	And it's a metaphor. It's not You know, real or magic.
	I'm not literally saying these things.
	So, to me, when you say, well, magic is madness, then it makes it turn this metaphor into Jesus is just a crazy dude.
	Does that make sense?
	Wait, we can't choose something more controversial like the Koran?
	All right, fine. Yes.
	Okay, but do you understand why it doesn't sit?
	That's a nice U-turn into challenging territory, but that's good.
	That's good. Okay, so let's test the theory.
	So, let's say that the stories...
	is in possession of divine power.
	No question, right?
	I mean, the guy comes back from the dead, he's born of a virgin, he walks on water, he can summon fire with a gesture, he can drive demons out of people and into a herd of pigs for some reason, like can't just get rid of them.
	But Jesus can produce food magically, right?
	I mean, the loaves and the fishes, they just keep replicating and replicating, right?
	So if the stories of Jesus are accurate and true, as one of the early Corleus would, I'm sure, strongly support, then he is in possession of divine power.
	Now... Well, that's...
	Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
	So, if you're a psychiatrist, and someone comes to you and says, I can magic...
	I can walk on water...
	Your first thought is, no, you can't.
	That's crazy. I hope.
	Right? Unless you're a postmodernist, in which case you just say, you're racist.
	But if the guy says, no, it's true, and you have a lake nearby, and he goes out and he walks on water on the lake, and you try and follow him and you plunge into the water, then he's not crazy, right?
	Because he can actually walk on water.
	He's telling a truthful statement, right?
	Now, if he says he can walk on water, but he can't, he's either lying or he believes it, right?
	It's really only two possibilities.
	So if he can't walk on water, but he says he can, he either knows that he can't walk on water, but he's lying to you, or he genuinely believes that he can walk on water, in which case he's really crazy if he can't, right?
	Right. The third possibility there is that if Dr.
	Peterson comes to me and says that metaphorically I can walk on water, let me show you, and then Gives his speech, you know, and sails through it, despite all the howling, masses banging on the windows outside.
	I have just witnessed him metaphorically walk on water.
	Like, do you understand? I don't mean it in a crazy, literal way.
	I cannot imagine that a religious man like Dr.
	Peterson would use a Christ metaphor for himself.
	I just wanted to point that out, like all respect to Dr.
	P. That's just, I can't imagine.
	Can you imagine? Can you imagine if he tried?
	I mean, the media, not only would I think he would consider it vaguely blasphemous, but the media would have a field day, right?
	Yes. Well, this actually might be a fun conversation to have another time is looking at these topics in the story and these passages from a metaphorical point of view.
	But because we look at stories from a metaphorical Sorry, metaphorical point of view, and that's how you, you know, we're talking about Frozen and stuff, and that's how we're talking about this madness application.
	To me, like, this is a story.
	It presents metaphors.
	If you put this metaphor of madness to magic, then that means that these other metaphors are lost.
	Well, I will say this, though.
	I will say this about Jesus, though.
	Putting aside the not insignificant question of whether he could actually walk on water, the fact that billions of people around the world both believed and continue to believe that he did, in fact, walk on water, have caused them to change their life to such a degree that walking on water is the least of his miracles.
	Yes. Yes.
	I mean, if Jesus said, I, in 17 or 1800 years, I'm gonna really work to end slavery, People would say, oh, come on, man, that's like a little hard to test right about now, isn't it?
	It turned out to be true. It was the Christians who took religious arguments for morality from the New Testament and used it to end the worldwide scourge of slavery for the first time in human history.
	So to me, the miracle of Jesus and the miracle of Christianity is very little to do with loaves and fishes, very little to do with coming back from the dead, very little to do with being born of a virgin or turning water into wine or anything like that.
	So to speak, of Jesus is that partly as a result of people believing these stories, he had such an unbelievable effect on Western consciousness for thousands of years.
	Yes. Yes, exactly.
	It's the narrative, which I know Dr.
	Peterson has been circling around this thought a lot lately.
	He's been talking a lot. The narrative that we need in the West.
	A lot.
	Yes, no, that's true.
	And I think this is very important.
	I think that's why it's not just on his mind and your mind and Lauren's mind.
	It's on a lot of people's minds right now.
	And it's on my mind, too.
	And I think this has a lot to do with it.
	And so, for example, you talked about Luke Skywalker in Star Wars when you were talking about madness.
	And again, this is not an argument.
	But in a way, I see Luke Skywalker as the Western hero.
	And I think that's part of why this episode, this Last Jedi movie that came out has caused such a controversy.
	Luke Skywalker represented the modern representation of the Western hero when that came out.
	As you know, Lucas studied the man with many faces, the story of the Western hero.
	Joseph Candles, the man with a thousand faces.
	Yes, thank you very much.
	Yes, that's correct. So he is our generation's, or I'm sorry, I guess your generation's version of the Western hero.
	And I think that's part, like, when they, this last episode of Star Wars, they killed him and crucified him, oh, so badly.
	Like, I'm not even a huge Star Wars fan, and it made me so angry to watch that.
	Yeah, it's almost like the entire script was written by the South African government.
	Yeah, they killed the Western hero in front of us, and to me, like, it did, it was kind of reminiscent of this metaphor of Jesus, too.
	And I think that's part of why this This conversation is being drug into the foreground right now because they're killing our Western heroes, and all of these Western heroes are based on Jesus, the philosopher.
	I think that's all like part of this culture war that's happening right now and we're trying to figure out.
	And so that's, I guess, part of why I'm trying to figure out this metaphor of magic and madness because I see a lot of our Western hero metaphors and they're couched with magical abilities, but I don't think it's supposed- But we can't go back.
	We can't, sorry to interrupt Michelle, we can't go back.
	That's the problem. We can't go back to magic because we have science.
	We can't. And Jesus walking on water, hell, throw on a jet ski, you're doing way better than Jesus.
	I'm not kidding.
	Like, I mean, as far as that goes, I mean, I would rather be able to fax things sometimes or email things than be able to transport myself, because it's more convenient.
	I'm going to hand someone something and come back.
	Science... Has stripped magic of its power, because in the past, before science, magic was the only way you could imagine any kind of efficiency occurring in nature.
	But now we actually have science.
	We can't go back to a respect for magic.
	Now, other cultures that have a respect for magic...
	are doing fairly well and flourishing and spreading and so on, but that's because we're kind of between a rock and a hard place.
	We got one foot on the pier, one foot on the boat, right?
	We've got our traditional magical stories and we have science.
	And I'm saying, as a rationalist, as an empiricist, as a philosopher, we can't go back.
	Science has permanently discredited magic because science does things that magic couldn't even conceive of in historical.
	Terms, right? I mean, think of Lord of the Rings.
	You got one nuke and Mordor is done.
	You don't need to send two hobbits in with some stupid ring.
	Boom! You got one sky laser pinpointing Sauron's tower.
	Hit it in the base. Boom!
	Down he goes. You want to take an F-16 against the Nazgul?
	I think the Nazgul are going down.
	They couldn't even handle one elf and a A tide coming down a river.
	So magic has bowed and been crushed under the weight and power and productivity of science, just as the way that wealth used to be dreamt of in the past was either some magical inheritance or more likely a great service to the king.
	All the old stories, I built something with the king, the king loved it, he gave me money, right?
	But the free market Has superseded and destroyed wealth through service to the king or wealth through magical inheritance or, you know, he thought he was just a poor country boy.
	Turns out, Luke Skywalker, he was royalty, he was powerful, he just didn't...
	Accidental inheritance.
	You didn't even have to earn it. And now you can earn things through the free market.
	So accidental inheritance and magic have bowed to science and the free market.
	We don't need...
	Old magic. We need new reason.
	And this is why I'm trying to drag the world forward to say, we can't go back to the fables.
	We have to go to the non-fiction section of our culture.
	That's the only future that we have.
	We can't go back. And people are just kind of torn, right?
	Because they still want to worship the state.
	That's the new religion that's taken over Christianity.
	And this is why when I say, no gods, no rulers, people really freak out.
	Because we don't have a very strong conception of who we are as a species if you're not worshipping something or subject to something or awed by something.
	And I'm saying be awed by yourself.
	Be awed by your potential. Be awed by what you could do.
	And take advantage not of service to the king.
	Take advantage not of following people who claim to walk on water.
	Take advantage of your possibilities and opportunities in the free market.
	Using science and reason and evidence and philosophy, we can't go back.
	We can't.
	It's not possible there's too much evidence about how powerful science is relative to religion.
	How powerful science is relative to religion.
	Science is the miracle.
	And religion is the illusion.
	Reason is the power.
	Faith is the dead end.
	And we are not taking the strength of philosophy, of reason and evidence, science, empiricism, and using it in combat against more primitive cultures.
	So we're tempted to go back to magic, but we can't.
	Because the only reason we have what we have in the modern world is because we said no to magic and yes to science, and yes to reason, and yes to evidence.
	We've got to keep going forward.
	There is no way backwards.
	We can't do it. We can't believe it.
	You ever have a guy, you have a good relationship, and then whatever happens, happens, and you're like, I'm not in love with this guy anymore.
	Can you go back?
	No. We're not in love with magic anymore.
	And we can't be, because magic...
	It was a mess for us, as it is a mess for everyone.
	It's effect without cause.
	It's delusions of grandeur.
	And it's an argument from authority.
	Jesus had such power because he was believed to be divine, not only for the strength of his arguments.
	Now, his arguments gained infinite strength almost because of the penumbra of divinity, the outline of divinity.
	But you get from a philosophical standard, that's kind of cheating, right?
	The art of the argument isn't fake magic until people believe you and then you'll win.
	That's cheating, right? And because it was cheating, it prevented science in some ways from taking its place at the center.
	It prevented philosophy from taking its place at the center of our society.
	We can't go back. I mean, it's tempting, don't get me wrong.
	In the same way that some of us would like to be kids again when life is stressful and difficult, but we can't go back.
	We have to keep pushing forward and close the circle with philosophy, not go back to the fog of magic.
	Okay, so can I ask, within everything you've just laid out, Um, so are you saying that even though there might be these great metaphors of philosophy and truth in a philosopher with Jesus, that because there's all this metaphor of magic laid on top of it, if those are there, they get lost and muddied because of this layer of magic?
	Well, you just had to listen to the earlier caller who was talking about the Bible.
	Well, it's the Word of God, it's the Word of Jesus.
	It's like, there can't be any contradictions.
	It's like, that's not thinking.
	That's not even joining the dots.
	I see. So like, I'm not exactly sure how to word this, so basically maybe the time of magic and metaphors is kind of over, and like we need a new narrative and new metaphors to be pulled out because we're lost right now.
	No, no. The age of magic is over, which means nothing can be magical, which means nothing can be delusional.
	It's the age of reason or nothing.
	There's no going home again.
	There's no going back to the past.
	There's no going back to the way we were.
	Because we've had 400 years of science, and we've had 250 years of the free market, and we've seen what that kind of freedom can do for us, for humanity.
	That can't be unseen, that kind of progress.
	I mean, you've seen these lines of average human income over the last 150,000 years, and it's a total flatline until like 150 years ago, and then it goes through the roof.
	We have 30 or 40 times the wealth that we had 150 years ago.
	You can't unsee that.
	And that didn't come because people prayed and it didn't become because we found a magical way to turn water into wine and to replicate loaves and fishes.
	It happened because of the hard work of animal husbandry and agricultural engineering and learning how fertilization works and learning how to better irrigate and the steam engine and you could go on and on, right?
	This happened because we pursued science, evidence and reason.
	And if you stack up the effects of magic and the effects of reason, the effects of superstition and the effects of science, there's no comparison, and we can't unsee that.
	So I don't know how we burrow back through a couple of hundred years of science in the free market into some pre-scientific, pre-free market mindset.
	We can't do it. It's like you spend 10 years learning Japanese and you're totally fluent and then somebody says, well, I'm going to speak Japanese, but you better not understand anything.
	You can't do it.
	You can't undo what you have learned.
	And we've learned it.
	And now we're stuck and we won't assert reason and the free market.
	And so we're kind of being plowed under by more primitive cultures, I think, because they're certain but wrong, and we're right but uncertain.
	Okay.
	Like Saudi Arabia is going to behead some woman for speaking up for women's rights.
	Naturally, feminists are mostly ignoring her.
	Sorry. You suck.
	That's a country. You suck as a culture.
	You're chopping people's hands off.
	You're beheading people. You're giving people a thousand lashes or a hundred lashes for questions.
	They're imprisoning women in Iran for taking off a hijab.
	That's terrible. But they're certain.
	Right. Right?
	This is what I talked about in my speeches in Australia.
	It's possible. In fact, the default position in humanity is to be perfectly wrong and perfectly certain.
	Belligerent idiocy is the natural state of mankind.
	Now, we have doubts as a culture.
	We have uncertainties, which is why we developed science in the free market.
	I don't know how society's economics should be organized.
	Let's just let people decide for themselves.
	I don't know which is the right state religion, so let's have separation of church and state.
	I don't know the truth about the universe, so let's have science to explore it.
	But that very uncertainty that's given rise, that cracked medievalism and gave rise to the geister of the modern world, that very uncertainty is ending us too!
	Because uncertainty is great for exploring, but uncertainty is disastrous for stuff you've already conquered.
	I mean, if you wake up at night and you don't know where you are and you're in your own home, you have dementia.
	That's bad. Uncertainty about things you should know or already have explored or already know is catastrophic.
	But certainly, with certainty, striding off into some unknown wilderness is also disastrous.
	So you need caution when you're exploring, but you need certainty for what you've already learned.
	And we've learned that science, reason, evidence, the free market are the very best things, bar none, no close second.
	But we won't assert it.
	Because we've created entire subcultures within our own culture that are dependent on the complete opposite.
	Of reason, universality, morals, and the free market, because they're dependent upon the coercively redistributed money of the state.
	Made up money of the state.
	Borrowed, pillaged money from the state.
	Child selling.
	You know, we ended slavery and then we got fiat currency.
	Oops! Bit of a U-turn there.
	So, I don't see.
	Honestly, I don't see. And this is where we're stuck.
	And what people want to move forward to It's the past.
	That's what's so insane.
	Look at people like Richard Dawkins and Harrison and other people.
	They worship the state.
	That's the most primitive thing there is.
	Far worse than religion.
	Christianity, far worse than Christianity.
	Christianity gives you an individual conscience.
	It takes compulsion away from morality, for the most part.
	The state doesn't do any of those things.
	There's no capacity under Christianity to sell off the unborn to buy votes in the here and now, but it's the state's modern existence and purpose.
	So they say, well, we can't go back to magic, so let's march steadily forward to statism.
	No! That's not going forward.
	That's going back pre-Christianity.
	That's a mirage.
	You think it's the future?
	It's the distant past.
	Render unto God what is God's.
	Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
	And the modern atheists come along and say, well, let's not render unto God's stuff.
	It's all Caesar. Let's give everything to Caesar.
	It's all Caesar's. That's not progress.
	At least they said there was something that was non-Caesar in Christianity.
	So, that's where we hang.
	That's where we hang. And we're either going to move forward to reason or we're going to slide back To barbarism.
	And that's my goal, is to help encourage and challenge and chide people into moving forward to reason.
	Magic is done. Madness is done.
	All we have left is neuroticism, which is not survivable.
	And I agree with you on what you're saying, that yes, the state is the new religion.
	And I'd say even in the Bible, there actually is anarchy in the Bible.
	And so I don't have a specific quote for you right now, but like...
	Why didn't the Romans invade Ireland?
	Because Ireland was anarchic.
	There was no tax system to take over.
	Anyway, go on. Well, there was a mountain village in China that was anarchic for hundreds of years because the Chinese armies couldn't get to them.
	In the Bible, God says, you don't need a king, you have me.
	And the Jews, they beg and beg and beg for a king.
	And he's like, no, it's going to be a bad idea.
	You don't need a king. You got me.
	I'm here. And they're like, no, please, please, God, give us a king.
	And he's like, all right, it's going to be bad.
	And then so they get Solomon.
	He's the first king and he's pretty good.
	But then every king after that gets worse and worse and worse.
	And they go through trial after trial and they go, I should have listened to God.
	But They never go back.
	So, sorry, that's kind of a side thought.
	So let me just to clarify real quick so that I can make sure I agree with you on this.
	So in Frozen, for example, Elsa has magic.
	Elsa is mad. The people believe she has magic.
	They're all mad too. They believe in her delusions.
	Or they're scared. Right, they're scared she's the queen.
	She can behead them. I agree with that.
	I see ice. The emperor has lots of clothes on, says everyone but the little boy, right?
	Right. So then I question, okay, so the Bible has magic.
	Jesus uses magic.
	Is Jesus mad?
	Well, the reality, of course, is that Jesus, according to science, cannot walk on water.
	He cannot create infinite loaves and fishes, and he cannot turn water into wine.
	But the question is, was the magic used to sell the ideas?
	In other words, if the only way you can sell ideas is to pretend magic, is it insane to pretend magic?
	Thank you. Okay, thank you.
	That's what I was caught up on.
	I could not... That's what I was stuck on, was if you have to use the magic to sell the idea.
	Thank you. Okay.
	All right. Well, I agree.
	You win. No, it's interesting.
	And I think we're kind of meeting in the middle here, right?
	Because it's kind of a funny thing that if you can convince...
	Okay, let me give you a silly example, right?
	Some axe murderer wants to kill you, but you can create a guttural voice that sounds like the voice in his head who says, let this one live.
	And he believes that that's the voice in his head.
	And he's like, okay.
	Well, you get to survive, right?
	By playing into the madness, right?
	Yes. Now, the effect that Jesus had on the world is, I think, at present though, diminishing second to none.
	Now, I've always thought that Jesus had a powerful enough set of ideas, but the only way to sell them was through magic.
	And so... Maybe Jesus was a philosopher, but then all the people who wrote down stories were so taken by his philosophy, but they couldn't get anyone to believe it because there was no tradition of Socratic reasoning and debate and no freedom of speech and so on.
	So the only way that they could get People to accept the arguments that Jesus made about morality and virtue and obligation and family is to say, yeah, but he could walk on water.
	Now, if people believe that, then they'll give a hell of a lot more attention to what Jesus said, right?
	Yes, I agree. That's exactly how I see it, too.
	And we see this also happening with the magic called genius.
	These days. I mean, magic in quotes, right?
	But people will say, oh, this guy has an IQ of 170.
	And he said, and people are like, whoa, IQ of 170?
	I better listen to this. You know what I mean?
	Maybe he didn't have an IQ of 100.
	I don't know, right? Right.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	Supposedly, the person existing today with the highest IQ on record is a farmer in Ohio.
	Right. He's not a rocket scientist.
	He's not an engineer.
	He's not curing cancer. He's a farmer.
	And I'll send you the link if you want to hear more about that.
	He might be a very good farmer, but he's not curing cancer with his 170 IQ. Right.
	Well, he may be right.
	Maybe the important thing is to farm your own food given what's coming in society.
	Maybe he's actually seen what's coming and he's like, man, I better have some food nearby.
	Maybe he's a prepper and he's like, yeah, smartest guy in the world.
	He's going to be the one guy who survives.
	Cockroach of humanity.
	But yeah, I mean, I've always enjoyed reading about it.
	That's why I did a whole talk with Duke Pesta about this.
	I've enjoyed reading the arguments ascribed.
	To Jesus. And if you have to buff up the arguments with some God glow, it may not be the craziest thing in the world to say that magic.
	It may not be the craziest thing in the world to say that this guy who's right is also divine, because that does prick up people's ears, right?
	And until we have a good way to explain morality to our children, magic Is sanity, in a way.
	And I know I'm sort of, you know, magic in stories is always forever a metaphor for madness.
	But, as I talked about with Dennis Prager, right?
	I mean, you can't get an ought from an is in the general philosophical etymology.
	You can't get an ought from an is.
	Where does morality come from if not God?
	And we need morality to have a society that could get us to science and reason and freedom.
	We needed morality. So maybe magic is the way that we sell morality until...
	We can describe it philosophically, which was my goal with UPB. Yeah, I think you're right.
	And I read UPB and I love it.
	I love the non-aggression principle.
	I follow it. So I think that's going to be the future personally.
	And man, I would love to see you talk to Dr.
	Peterson about it because he's always talking to Sam Harris.
	And personally, I find Sam Harris kind of boring.
	No offense to Sam Harris. But man, I'd love to see Dr.
	Peterson talk to you about the non-aggression principle in UPB for sure.
	Totally an insult to the world, kind of.
	But anyway, all right. Well, yeah, and I actually have a new book coming out shortly.
	It's a very compressed argument for UPB. It includes sample Socratic dialogues and all kinds of cool stuff.
	So I'm very much looking forward to that.
	And I should probably just go on a UPB tour because it has not taken off like wildfire and that's more my fault than anyone else's.
	But anyway, are we resolved?
	It was a great conversation and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this stuff.
	Oh, absolutely. And The Mom and the Brain, if you ever go on a tour for that, that changed my life.
	Oh, yeah, isn't that great?
	Yes. Yes, it did.
	Thank you. Forever.
	If you were here, maybe I'll meet you someday.
	I will take my hair and wash your feet with olive oil, just like in the Bible.
	Is that what happened? Hair?
	Olive oil? Yep. That's right.
	So, basically, you want me to slide on anolium and hurt myself.
	I get it. I knew you were going to turn on me.
	Judas! All right.
	Well, thanks a lot, Michelle.
	Always a great pleasure to chat. Thank you, sir.
	Thanks for the chat. And yeah, see, that's how we do it, right?
	You get your nice definitions up front, and you have a productive conversation, and that's what they call an excellent debate.
	So thanks, everyone, so much. Thanks for your calls.
	Thanks for your honesty, your curiosity, your support of this show.
	Freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
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	Follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
	Don't forget theartoftheargument.com for my book.
	And look for the new one.
	And, oh yeah, I'm going to be speaking.
	I'm going to be speaking, which is September.
	Coming up, September 2018.
	There is on the 14th, the 16th, the Eagle Forum in St.
	Louis. I hope you will check it out.
	We can put a link to it below. But I look forward to seeing everyone there and have yourself a wonderful night.

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