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May 6, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:06:39

The Northman and the Resurrection! Freedomain Wed Night Live!

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	How are you this fine evening on the 4th of May 2022?
	And let me just do a quick recording here, and I think we're good to go.
	And yes, hi there!
	I thought we'd do something a little different today.
	Something a little different like me not being in the studio.
	I have an ambivalent relationship with the studio.
	I know, it's about a video.
	It's better sound. But I like to mix it up a little.
	Sometimes, you know, when I was working on my last book, what I did was I did not type.
	I did not even just dictate.
	I walked and talked and dictated.
	And I find that just changing up the physical environment can be enormously beneficial in loosening the creative juices.
	and since I always want to bring my A-game to you glorious, lovely, beautiful philosophy lovers, whatever I can do to shake things up and make them great for you, I will absolutely do.
	But here we are, of course, in the land of feedback.
	We are in the land of you can ask me questions, you can bring me comments and criticisms and whatever you would like to bring to the table, I am very happy to talk about You might want to just dip into, a Danish professor has recently released a study on mRNA vaccines and the other vaccines and their relationship to all-cause mortality.
	It's probably worth looking into, just to keep yourself up on the latest information that's around.
	So I just wanted to put that out as something to keep your eye on.
	And I'll talk about a couple of things that I'm interested in.
	If you want to talk, just raise your hand.
	And I am happy to take your call.
	Okay, so let's see here.
	What has been on my mind?
	Do you know that in the UK, one in four pregnancies are aborted?
	In the UK, that's really something.
	That's really something. But, you know, this safe, legal, and rare, the rare thing has not seemed to happen, which is really quite tragic.
	Hit me with a Y in the chat if you have seen this movie called The North Men.
	North Men. The North Men.
	Otherwise known as Gay Conan Rips Everyone Else's Throat Out.
	You haven't seen it? Well, I'm afraid I got suckered into a couple of people that I know somewhat liked it, and then I was suckered in even further forgetting my foolish history with the reviewers online.
	And also, you know, some actors in it that I like.
	I like Ethan Hawke.
	I can get by with Nicole Kidman, and I like Willem Dafoe, who's got the grinningest, shark-haired, skull-faced acting known to man.
	And unfortunately, I then dove into, and I knew it would be violent and all that, but man, was it ever just lazy, bloodthirsty trash.
	I very rarely will walk out of a movie, but I did 20 minutes of that, and I was like, Peace out, man.
	I didn't care for any of the characters.
	I didn't care for any of the situations.
	And, you know, tip to filmmakers.
	Don't put weird dog-faced pony-soldier drug scenes in the very beginning of a movie.
	Because we don't know what's going on.
	And, oh my god.
	Oh my god.
	So, when there was Britney Spears doing her croaky-style singing, you know, the Baby!
	You know, the little croak that she does at the end of her singing.
	That sort of became a big thing for a while.
	But then it died away.
	It kind of died off, which was, you know, I think a pretty good thing overall for it to die off because it's kind of an annoying vocal tick.
	But oh my God!
	Oh my God!
	Can you stop with the tough guy voice?
	Holy crap on a stick!
	Oh, it's so annoying.
	I cannot spend an entire movie telling people to clear their damn throats and speak like a normal human being.
	It's a tough guy voice.
	Everyone is a tough.
	Everyone is a tough guy.
	Has this voice. I don't know.
	Did it come out of Duke Nukem?
	Did it come out of people getting punched in the throat repeatedly by mules?
	Is it everyone wants to sound like...
	Clint Eastwood didn't sound like that.
	He had a bit of a whisper thing going, but not a growl thing going.
	Is it Batman?
	Like, he went from playing Bateman to Batman, Christian Bale.
	Oh, my God.
	I mean, this is why I'm not an actor.
	If I was an actor, if a director told me to use that voice, I'd tell him to stick his cliches up his ass and ride off into the sunset on a pony of cultural tropes.
	Oh, my God.
	I mean, nobody talks.
	Have you ever met someone in real life?
	Ever, ever met someone in real life who talks like this?
	And he's a tough guy.
	And he just says to talk like this.
	It's like, what is it?
	You know, when I was in theater school, I took almost like two years of voice training.
	It actually turned out to be very helpful for what I do now.
	A voice training, you know, if you want to broadcast, you want to be a podcaster or a videographer, it takes a voice training, for God's sakes.
	It just takes a voice training. Getting connected to your voice is a really, really important thing.
	And... Oh God, the affectation is monstrous.
	It's monstrous.
	And here's the thing too, you know, a bit of an aging population.
	Hearing is not quite as sharp.
	You know, they have those high-pitched sounds that they play with.
	They don't want teenagers to be around because only teenagers can hear them.
	So when you've got grand-assed, masticating, swelling orchestra from hell, which is basically the Beatles' day in the life playing every single orchestral note known to man because drama, and you've got Somebody talking like this over swelling violins of violence, and it's like, I can't hear a damn thing.
	I can't hear a damn thing. I don't know what the hell's going on.
	Everybody's horrible and unlikable.
	And here's the thing.
	So I foolishly, again, this is one of these Norse mythology or Viking mythologies that's based on Viking history or Viking story, and then It's the root for Shakespeare's Hamlet.
	So, okay, I get it. I get it.
	It's 2022. The population's kind of dumped down.
	I'm not going to get fluid and beautiful iambic, right?
	I'm not going to get to be or not to be.
	I'm not going to get, oh, what a piece of work is man.
	I get it. I get it.
	You've got to dumb things down quite a shade, right?
	But, oh my God.
	Not only, like, why is it in history people have to just speak so wildly different?
	I mean, I've written historical novels, justpoor.com, almostnovel.com, they're totally free, you get to hear my glorious voice acting, it's well worth it, well worth your time investment.
	People just talk like people.
	Now, I get it, so, you know, Shakespeare and so on, but Shakespeare did have common comedy as well as high iambic pentameter, and Shakespeare's Language is the closest that you come to how our thoughts run.
	And, of course, Shakespeare put rhymes and iambic in because they had to produce a show every two weeks and had to memorize things pretty quickly, and it's easier to memorize things that rhyme.
	So that's why you remember song lyrics and not snippets of prose from a book.
	So I get, you're not going to get Hamlet, you're not going to get Shakespeare, but my soul runs only with the fire of vengeance.
	Ha! I mean, literally, this is like, to me, it's the Hooters test, which is kind of a silly test.
	It's like when I'm thinking of dialogue, I think, okay, would anyone say this in Hooters?
	It's kind of an important thing.
	Now, can you imagine, you know, some guys come from a business meeting where he lost the contract to a competitor and he sits down across from you with boobs and wings and says, my heart runs only with vengeance.
	You think he was joking, right?
	You literally think he was doing some weird, bad joke, right?
	I don't know why art has to be so...
	And the further you go back in time, the more separated things need to be from...
	This is an old mockery of Star Wars, where the guy says to Yoda, can you talk like forwards?
	Because he's a total genius, except when it comes to grammar.
	So yeah, I did 20 minutes, and I'm like, okay, this is like...
	This is like torture. This is literally like watching the surgery channel but the sound at 4,000.
	This is torture. This is like murder and rape and child slaughter and to what purpose?
	To what purpose? You know that the son of the king who's killed, this happens at the beginning, it's not really a spoiler.
	Well, I don't know what happened later on because I only watched the beginning.
	You know that the son of the guy who's killed, the guy who's killed isn't particularly noble.
	The guy's son isn't particularly noble, so why do I care whether one bloodthirsty murderer wins over some other bloodthirsty murderer?
	Why do I care? Makes no sense.
	Oh, we'll use our audio. Yeah.
	My soul burns with a fire that is touching my vocal cords.
	The movie lacked depth.
	I guess this is more the cinematographer, right?
	But the cinematographer...
	Oh my god.
	It's like, we're going to Mexico!
	Everything must be yellow. It's the 1930s!
	Everything must look like it's shot through the innards of a Bran Muffet.
	And we're going to Viking land.
	Everything must be blue and cold and there will be no colors at all.
	Even the blood will be blue and cold.
	And it's like, oh my god.
	What? What monstrous.
	What monstrosity. What a monstrosity.
	And, you know, this is this guy's great big passion.
	Now, I think that the Vikings have a fascinating story to tell.
	I really do. The fascinating story to tell about the Vikings is their spontaneous form of social organization.
	Like, you know, there's pirate movies, and it's always, you know, Jack Sparrow dodging his enemies and his girlfriend's poop.
	But in pirates, there's a wonderful self-organization and contracts that occur with pirates.
	And there was entire scholarly books from the libertarian tradition Written on how pirate ships self-organized and how they paid people and who was responsible for what and who's got what share of the booty and so on, right?
	And given that they were often stealing from governments, it's like Robin Hood.
	It's just stealing back, right?
	Just stealing back. So, yeah, it was very disappointing.
	And listen, the gore, okay, I can live with the gore if it's earned.
	When I was in King Lear, I played Gloucester, who physically, you know, the play calls for you to gouge out another man's eyes on stage, which I did with a cane I used to walk with.
	Out, out, vile jelly!
	And so, violence, yes.
	I'm fine with violence as long as it's got a sort of moral dimension to it.
	And this, though, I mean...
	Okay, you can work out and you've got abs.
	And, you know, by the time it was like somebody, some guy chewing some other guy's neck out and baying at the moon and, you know, people behaving like, literally like dogs, like eating off the floor and barking and growling.
	And it's like, yeah, yeah, okay, we got it.
	It's apocalypto with snowflakes.
	All right. So, yeah, just got, yeah, the Iceland, Greenland anarchist communities, the anarchist communities that occurred for a thousand years off and on in Ireland and so on.
	The state, the societies. Lots of stuff to explore.
	That's absolutely fascinating, historically.
	I'm actually mulling over writing a novel set in The Decline of the Roman Empire so I can talk about current issues without getting into any kind of trouble.
	I'm just kidding. But yeah, the Northman was...
	I just, I don't know.
	Somebody has to ask, what's the point?
	Like, what's the point? Like, when I wrote Just Poor, I wanted to write a story about somebody unconsciously destroying his entire life.
	Because there are people out there who do that.
	They unconsciously destroy their entire life.
	Either because it's wrong for them, they didn't earn it, they don't feel like they deserve it.
	Like my theory with Johnny Depp, which is just a theory, is that Johnny Depp was like, yeah, I'm done running from my demons and it's time to turn and face them.
	But unfortunately, I'm too popular and too well paid to do it voluntarily, so I'll just date a demon who will force me to turn around and face my past.
	And now he's publicly confessed because he did not privately acknowledge The pain and suffering he had as a child while being brutalized by a violent mother, and then, of course, he mirrored the pain and suffering by being apparently, or it sounds like, brutalized by a violent woman as an adult.
	So I find, you know, this unconscious self-destruction, you know, I've obviously thought about this with regards to my own public career and so on, but I'm very happy with the choices I've made.
	But I think that, you know, a lot of people, when they...
	Achieve success based upon things they did not earn, become very profitable to people, become very trapped in that lifestyle, and yearn to burn it down.
	Yearn to burn it down.
	I think that's quite fascinating.
	For me, there has to be a point to something you write.
	Almost, I wanted to write how powerful, private, unresolved family disputes can actually lead to an entire war.
	I mean, as you know, the First World War was a war between European royalty, almost all of whom were related.
	It was a family feud. And I really wanted to talk about how unresolved, tragic, powerful personal issues can lead to war and the dominoes.
	The private and the public is not as differentiated as people think.
	And so, yeah, and this was my first time in a movie theater in probably three years.
	And... I didn't make it past 20-25 minutes.
	I'm fairly forgiving when it comes to art, particularly because I was going to go and review it.
	People have been asking for movie reviews, so I wanted to go and review it.
	It takes a lot to dig me out of a movie theater.
	I remember when I watched the movie Casino, which was the last time I watched a Mafia movie, because wasn't there some guy getting his head exploded in a vice, and I was just like, Peace out, man.
	I'm not paying for this. I'm not paying to watch this.
	I'm not paying for just brute physical torture on screen.
	Like, I'm just not going to do it.
	Like, whatever sick stuff people got going on in their heads where they consider this to be art.
	But, you see, even in things like The Godfather and so on, there's like an old-school gentlemanly Vito Corleone, right?
	Famously played by, of course, Brando.
	Video Corleone has, you know, we don't do drugs.
	These are, you know, we have regular vices that people deal with, like gambling and so on, maybe a little prostitution, but drugs is a whole different thing.
	And, you know, he's got his care for his family, his love for his family, and so on.
	And he's a gentle guy, and he's got his standards of honor.
	Okay, so there's good guys and bad guys.
	At least you get to root for the good guy a little bit.
	But, yeah, it was just like, why do I care whether Psycho Conan 1 eats the throat out of Psycho Conan 2?
	Like, why on earth would I have any interest in that whatsoever?
	And that is...
	Like, I'm fine looking at the brutality of the past, because this sort of modern world of relative peace that we in the West live in is extraordinarily unusual for human history as a whole.
	Like, this is very much an outlier.
	So, I'm fine with the brutality...
	Of the past. But if all it is, is just a bunch of psycho brutes attacking another bunch of psycho brutes, and I don't care who wins, who loses, who's better or who worse.
	And of course, that level of violence, I don't know what happened to the rest of the movie, but I assume that the mother turns out to be completely horrible.
	The more violent the story, the more brutal the women are.
	You can see this going on all over the place.
	You can see this in King Lear, of course, with the two predatory sisters and Cordelia, and you can see it in Hamlet with the brutal mother, and you can see it in Macbeth with, of course, Lady Macbeth.
	And in this movie, I assume that the woman, if you've seen it, let me know, but I assume that the mom just turns out to be a completely ghastly and horrible person, that he's trying to avenge To rescue his mother, who turns out to be absolutely horrible.
	And this reality that the more violent the society, the more brutal and betraying the women are.
	Because the violence comes from the mothers, the brutality of the mothers in general, either choosing brutes for fathers or raising their children with extraordinary levels of violence.
	Wherever you see a violent society, you see massive amounts of hatred towards women because...
	Not because the women are more violent than the men, but because the male violence is acknowledged and understood and literally in your face a lot of times.
	Whereas the female violence is at home and hidden and more subterranean and harder for people to see, of course.
	Sorry for giving you so many ways of looking at the same thing.
	But, as I've said a million times, if we don't acknowledge...
	If we don't acknowledge...
	If we don't acknowledge women's role in the cycle of violence, we'll never be able to put an end to it You have a topic.
	Well, I don't know what's going on. I keep inviting people to chat, and then I can't hear them.
	I just checked my speaker, so I know that's working.
	So if you've got a topic or a question or an issue, I am happy to hear it.
	Just raise your hand, and I'll hit the allowed to talk, and then all you need to do is unmute yourself.
	All right. Luke.
	Hello. Hey, how's it going?
	Finally, I managed to unmute myself.
	I had to reset the whole thing.
	Anyways, I think like one or two days ago you talked about how banning abortion raises the value of moral women.
	Could you elaborate on that?
	I didn't really understand what you meant by that.
	Well, I mean, I did a video on it.
	I can just touch on it briefly here for those who want the Coles Notes version or the sort of shrunk down, the shrinkage version, the testicles and the cold version.
	So, I gave a fairly bad answer to a question the other day around, like, why is it that there are selected people want to introduce sexuality to children early, sexual topics to children early.
	In order for cultural values to be transmitted, older women have to get involved in marriage, right?
	So if you have, let's say you have a cultural value called piety, right, piety, honoring God, right?
	So, The later a woman is married, the more she can choose based upon values rather than lust.
	And the later a woman gets married, the more you can differentiate between people who have women who have real virtue and women who don't have real virtue.
	The younger the people get married, the harder it is to reward women for being virtuous, because you're simply rewarding them for being youthful and sexually available rather than Having qualities of moral character and so on.
	So you can't have cultural values that get transmitted when you have...
	Like the younger the sexuality, the fewer cultural values are transmitted, which is why primitive cultures tend not to transmit any cultural values.
	Generally, it's just terrorizing the young, torture, and various gruesome initiation rituals.
	I think there's one where...
	You used to hammer a spike through a young man's testicles to prove the dominance of the tribe over him.
	So I just sort of wanted to mention a slightly more cohesive argument.
	So to introduce sexual topics to children is to accelerate them on the path of sexuality.
	And we know, of course, that So, if you're introducing sexual topics to children earlier,
	you are accelerating their interest in and path towards sexual activity, which means the earlier the sexual activity erupts, the more People will be chosen for lust rather than for moral or cultural values.
	In other words, they will be chosen for their ability to reproduce rather than their ability to be moral mothers.
	So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
	So the more consequences there are to sexuality, in other words, I mean, the consequence of sexuality is children, right?
	I mean, that's what nature has designed us for.
	There was, of course, birth control.
	In the past, and I'm not just talking to those weird sheep splatters they had in the high Middle Ages, but there was birth control.
	There was the rhythm method.
	What is this? An old joke from when I was a kid.
	There used to be, as I'm sure there still is, a song contest called the Eurovision Song Contest.
	And there was an old joke which said, the Italian entry to this year's Eurovision Song Contest is a song called I Can't Get No Contraception, But it's changed after the Pope advised them to pull it out at the last minute.
	So there's the rhythm method and there's oral sex or other forms of sexuality that don't involve dumping semen into egg-adjacent pockets of human flesh.
	But the consequence of sexuality is children.
	Now, the further you separate sexuality from children...
	The more a woman can rely on bringing sexual access to a relationship.
	And sexual access is the highest prize for men.
	Honestly, like, no question.
	Sexual access is the highest prize.
	It doesn't mean that only sexual access is the highest prize.
	But, you know, in the past, in sort of prehistory and so on, like 40% of men didn't reproduce.
	And so, gaining access to a woman, gaining reproductive access to a woman was the highest prize, because that's the entire purpose of Our biological existence is to reproduce because without that, our genes don't continue and all that, right?
	So when a woman has the highest prize, the highest prize is balanced by the enormous consequences, right?
	So the highest prize of sexuality is, evolutionarily speaking, balanced by the incredible consequences of sexuality.
	Producing, first of all, it produces pair bonding, right?
	We get these endorphins where you be pair-bonded with people and a woman of low quality And I mean this by low moral quality, right?
	A woman of low moral quality, you won't bond with her based upon her respect for her character.
	You won't love her based upon her virtues.
	But if she throws the V-bomb at you, if she has sex with you, then men bond with women, women bond with men.
	But the bonding does not occur in a state of psychological security.
	Why do we like moral people?
	Because moral people tend to be safe to be around.
	They don't lie to you. They don't betray you on a whim.
	They don't cheat on you.
	They work things out with you.
	They'll be honorable. Morality is a cave.
	It's a form of security.
	It's a sanctuary.
	Morality is the place that we go, like finding sanctuary in a cathedral.
	It's a place where we go to hide away from the random human beasts and the hyenas that generally run things these days and have, of course, throughout most of human history.
	Love has a feeling of safety to it.
	You can't love and simultaneously be in the experience of anxiety and danger.
	So a man will generally bond with a woman based upon her virtues and her values, and then sexuality comes after that.
	But if the woman is able to have consequence-free or relatively consequence-free sexual access or provide that to a man, the man bonds with her over sexuality.
	And then by the time her personality emerges, if the personality is destructive...
	Well, he's already bonded with her, and he may have already had married her, and he may have already had children with her, and now he's trapped and stuck, and society has really little choice but to say, well, it's too bad that you married a monster.
	It's too bad that you're now bonded with a monster.
	It's too bad that you had sex with a monster.
	It's too bad you might have had a child with a monster.
	Someone's got to provide for that child, monster mom or not, and that person has to be you because actions have consequences.
	Now, when I was younger, We were all left to the woods in the wilds.
	Like, we were all back to a complete state of nature.
	Nobody that I knew, other than, like, sex ed in school and so on, nobody that I knew got any particular moral instruction about sexuality.
	We were all just...
	What was it?
	There was an old headline. And it was a real headline.
	Lack of access to sexual information leaves Canadian teens groping in the dark or something like that, right?
	It was all a state of nature. We all had to reinvent sexual morality because the boomers and the 60s and the 70s and the key parties and the orgies and it all just completely smashed.
	It's a Marxist thing to smash.
	Bourgeois restraints upon sexuality.
	Hey man, don't be so uptight.
	Let loose. Live a little.
	Get around. You always see this in movies.
	The characters just meet and have sex and then they learn their last names maybe later.
	And it's just constantly portrayed.
	It's a constant jumping into bed, constant.
	And why does a woman want to daze you with sexual bondage, right?
	Why does she want to... I mean, this is what cults do.
	Cults give you the love bomb, and a low-quality woman will spread her legs so that you don't look into her heart, right?
	You're looking at her cleavage, you're not looking into her heart.
	And then she'll have sex with you and your body...
	I mean, I think this is particularly true if you come from, you know, some of the more sophisticated regions and so on.
	I think our body is like, oh, okay, so this is the person I'm spending my life with.
	She must be a good person. I'm going to bond because we're going to have kids and we need to stick around and be together to have raised the kids.
	Otherwise, the kids aren't going to live.
	So this is true for men and for women.
	And we know this is true for women, but it's even more true for men.
	So the women...
	We used to keep sexual access away from men until there was a commitment.
	Then, you know, 50s pills, 60s welfare state, 70s abortion, 80s and 90s subsidization of abortion and, of course, all other forms of STDs and so on.
	And so, as a man, you have sex with a woman and you bond with her.
	And then if she turns out to be a monster, you're stuck.
	I mean, you're either stuck emotionally or Because you've emotionally bonded with her and you just feel like the need to work it out, or you're stuck legally because you married her, or you have a child with her, or both.
	And then you wake up from the sexual days.
	The sexual days last about six months, sort of biologically, right?
	And then you wake up. And now the sexual days is there to cement the pair bonding that's happened because of similar values, right?
	Because remember, we evolved in tribes where we all had kind of the same values, right?
	So you weren't going to marry someone of just completely different value set, right?
	Now, of course, you can meet and marry people with completely different, you can meet and have sex with people with completely different value sets, even opposing value sets.
	So the pair bonding is like, okay, you're married, you've had sex, she's pregnant, we're going to throw in a whole bunch of, in the same way that the woman bonds with the baby based upon the bonding hormones.
	The man bonds with the woman based upon the hormones, the bonding hormones that release through sexuality.
	And if the sex happens with no relationship to pair bonding, sorry, with no relationship to values, with no relationship to morality, then you've locked yourself for 20 years in a cage with a beast.
	And I'm not kidding about that.
	That's straight up serious talk.
	If you have sex with a woman, you bond with her.
	And then it turns out that she's not a good person.
	She's not a trustworthy person.
	She's not an honorable woman.
	You're not a reliable, honest woman.
	Then you have locked yourself in a cage.
	Now, the cage may be of varying lengths.
	It could be relatively short.
	It could be after six months you wake up and get out.
	Okay. That's your best case scenario.
	Worst case scenario, you drag it out for years trying to make it work.
	Another worst case scenario, you get married and then you're on the hook for Spousal support, and or you have a baby, then you're on the hook for baby support.
	And so this is why a lot of marriages fail.
	You meet, you have sex, you bond, and you have not evaluated the woman's character, or the man's character for that matter.
	And that's not at all how we evolved.
	It's not at all how we're supposed to pair bond.
	And here's the thing, right?
	Here's the thing. You think back on people you've dated, right?
	We can be honest with each other, right?
	You think back on the people that you've dated.
	If there was no possibility for sex before marriage, if you had to put a ring on it in order to have sex, right?
	If you knew ahead of time, if the woman said, okay...
	No huggy, no kissy till I get a wedding ring.
	But you keep your hands to yourself, right?
	If she had said, oh yeah, we can kiss, absolutely, but no.
	Right? No first base, no second base, no third base, no home, right?
	Nothing. Until we're married.
	And we're married for life.
	Okay, so you look back over the women you've dated.
	And for the women, of course, you can look over the men you've dated.
	Look over the women you've dated.
	If that had been the deal, if that had been the deal from the very beginning, you cannot have sex with me until you have a lifelong public commitment to stay with me forever.
	No sex. Okay.
	So, for most people, you meet...
	I mean, for me it was a little more rapid.
	Because I was older and we wanted to have kids, right?
	But for most people, how does it work?
	Well, it works with...
	You meet, you date, within 6 to 12 months you get engaged, and then within 6 to 12 months you get married.
	So a year to two years, two years from first date to marriage, right?
	So we take an average of that, 18 months, right?
	So... 18 months, you now have to hang out with this person, get to know their family, their siblings, have endless conversations, and in 12 to 24 months, average of 18 months, you'll have sex if you give her a lifelong commitment.
	Okay, look back, look back over the women and the men that you've dated.
	Again, talking to the dudes here, because it was a guy who asked the question, right?
	So just think back. Think back on the women and say to yourself, would I have dated this woman for a year and a half with no sexual access at all?
	No sexual access at all.
	You're barely even alone in the same room.
	No sexual access at all. Would I have dated this woman for 18 months merely based upon some kisses in conversation?
	What do you have? Now, if you understand the real power of that question, you understand exactly what was robbed from you in your youth.
	Robbed from you in your youth by turning you over to hormones and pornography and mainstream media.
	Sex addiction provoke provocations.
	No sexual access.
	Or the reason you postpone sexual access is to find out if you like the woman.
	Do you like her? Is she good-humored?
	Is she even-tempered? Is she positive?
	Is she funny?
	Is she warm? Is she engaging?
	Is she a good conversationalist?
	Is she reliable? Is she competent?
	My God, it must be even worse now.
	I had a number of women I knew when I was younger.
	I didn't date these women.
	That was a bit too much for me.
	I saw a meme the other day.
	It was a prostitute leaning into a guy's car.
	And it was like introverts out at night.
	And the prostitute is, hey, 50 bucks, man.
	50 bucks, honey, anything you want.
	50 bucks, anything you want.
	And the guy who was an introvert was in the car and was saying, can you set up a doctor's appointment for me?
	Because he's too shy to call the doctor.
	I knew women who were too shy to answer the phone sometimes.
	I knew women who couldn't dream of going to a professor to ask for a change in grades based upon some factor.
	I knew women who were who would throw up before exams.
	Like, just very high-strung Neurotic.
	Women score higher in neuroticism, which is not necessarily a bad thing at all.
	I mean, neurotic is really good.
	You know, an over-attention to worrisome detail is really great when you're raising toddlers because that's what keeps them and us and all of us alive, right?
	There's no criticism. It's just sort of a fact, right?
	Is she competent? Because you're not going to raves and banging like Roger Taylor on We Will Rock You when you're married.
	A lot of times... What you're doing?
	You're doing your taxes. You get random bad health news.
	You get a sore tooth.
	It's a lot of stuff that goes on, right?
	The reason you postpone the sexual access is that you find out if you like the person.
	Now, for women it's tough, right?
	Because some women are giving it up, like piñatas, right?
	And other women are withholding sexual access.
	And for a woman who withholds sexual access...
	This used to be a kind of the coven covenant, so to speak.
	The covenant. Which is women could say, no, I'm not going to have sex with you, with the pretty sure knowledge that the woman next door wasn't going to say, sure, come over, big boy.
	But when women are handing out sex like Halloween candy, for the woman to say no is really, really tough.
	Now, I mean, she should, obviously, she should.
	Because she wants to know for sure that the man is there for her.
	Not where she ain't, right?
	The vagina as a whole, it's where she isn't, right?
	So, anything that raises the consequences of sexuality, the responsibility consequences of sexuality, will tend to have women steer more towards moral women, good women.
	I mean, it's a fatal attraction thing, right?
	Glenn Close played this crazy hot woman and...
	Michael Douglas had this wife who was really nice and a good mom and all of that, but he just had this self-destructive danger streak, also known as Catherine Zeta-Jones, in my opinion.
	Sensible women, reliable women.
	I mean, this is the old clerks thing, right?
	Kevin Smith's first film, where there's this hot girl who's crazy, and then there's this other girl who's not quite as hot, but she brings the clerk lasagna and chats with him and is a nice person.
	It's a very deep story in many ways, right?
	Coarse as hell. I mean, his films are coarse as hell.
	But very deep stuff.
	Very, very deep stuff.
	And for men, this last thing I wanted to point out, just if you want to understand what it's like for young women, how difficult it is for them to be chosen for who they are.
	So imagine that everywhere you go, You have to drive up in a half-million-dollar car wearing a million-dollar watch.
	Everywhere you go, you have to drive up in a half-million-dollar car dressed to the nines wearing a million-dollar watch.
	And everyone knows it's a million-dollar watch, some Conor McGregor special, right?
	Everyone knows it's a million dollars, right?
	And everyone knows based on your clothing, everyone knows what kind of car you have.
	Everywhere you go, your staggering wealth is apparent to everyone.
	Okay? A lot of women would be interested in you, right?
	And you couldn't possibly hide how wealthy you were.
	You could dress down.
	Everyone could see immediately.
	In fact, women have been trying to see these things, which is why...
	What is it?
	I saw some interview with some Hollywood starlet who was dressed really skimpily, and then next to her was a guy, some Hollywood star, who was dressed in a suit and a nice tie and all of that, right?
	This is why men like to see some skin and women like to see expensive clothes, right?
	Because one is a symbol of fertility, the other is a symbol of resources.
	So imagine, everywhere you go, everyone knows you're a multimillionaire.
	And everyone wants to be your friend and everyone wants you to buy them drinks and the women are all chatting with you and so on.
	But you feel hollow and rejected inside because who's there for the money and who's there for you?
	Who's there for the money? Because you could lose the money.
	You can't lose yourself. You can lose the money.
	You can't lose yourself. That's like for a young woman.
	A young woman, even if she dresses down, if she's attractive, she's just going to be attractive, even if she dresses down, right?
	And this is part of the burqa phenomenon, which is, okay, the woman has to have values.
	You can't just choose her based on her looks.
	You have to choose her based upon her piety to the Muslim faith.
	And what it does is it rewards women for piety rather than looks, which is why in many of the Islamic cultures only the husband can see the woman's hair.
	It's a reward for the piety.
	It's a reward for the moral values enshrined in the Islamic faith.
	It's a reward for that.
	And this is why in the height of Western civilization, certainly intellectually in terms of scientific advancements and relative peace, at least in Western Europe, the High Victorian Age From the end of the Napoleonic conquests in 1815 to the start of the First World War in 1914, I mean, yeah, Prussia and France had their go, but for the most part, relative peace in Western Europe.
	And women were extraordinarily restrained in their dress, at least in sort of middle to upper classes.
	You couldn't even see a woman's ankles.
	So you had to judge her to some degree based upon her virtues.
	And a woman who presents herself sexually, you know, bare midriff, high shorts.
	It's very much the fashion these days among young women to have these shorts that are basically a headband shucked down from the top to the middle.
	Bare midriff, bare arms, blowsy hair.
	And why are women presenting themselves in that, you know, It's a hooker garp.
	It's sexual worker garp.
	Why are women presenting themselves that way?
	To provoke lust.
	And why do they want to provoke lust?
	So that the man will be attracted to them without examining the quality of their character.
	And loose sexual attire, open flesh showing sexual attire, is always the case in decadent societies.
	Whatever you may think of Islam, it's doing pretty well for A belief system, right?
	In terms of growth and spread.
	So anything which divorces responsibility consequences from sexuality raises the value of women who focus on appearance and the manipulation of cleavage rather than the qualities of character and is catastrophic to the birth rate as a whole.
	So I hope that helps.
	I hope that makes some kind of sense to people.
	If it doesn't, of course, you can ask me more questions.
	But if you have other questions, Hey, we know that it works for other people now, because we got one person in with a question or comment, so if you want to either examine that in more detail or have other questions or comments or issues, I can check in the text here and just see.
	Lady Macbeth would be well played by Jada Pinkett Smith.
	So, Jada Pinkett Smith, they talk about early sexuality, right?
	Early sexuality. So, Jada Pinkett Smith on her podcast has a discussion, and I think, if I remember it rightly, don't quote me on this, but I think she has it with her children in the room.
	So she has a podcast conversation, well, a monologue, I suppose, where she talks about how Jada Smith's own grandmother taught her how to masturbate when Jada Pinkett Smith was nine years old.
	Jada Pinkett Smith's grandmother taught her how to masturbate when Jada Pinkett Smith was nine years old.
	Holy croaky voice, flick the bean tutorials.
	That's just madness. That's absolute, complete, utter and total madness.
	And child abuse to me, in my opinion.
	And the grandmother's logic, again, we don't know what actually happened.
	We only know how she reports it.
	But the grandmother's logic was, well, if you know how to masturbate, you won't be dependent upon a man for pleasure.
	So it's empowering.
	And I guess she went kind of hog-wild on it to the point where she had to kind of train herself out of it.
	So, yeah, that's a monstrous thing to do to a child.
	It's a monstrous thing to do to a child.
	And so, how it plays out in your life, you can kind of see, right?
	Somebody says they think it was 60% of men that didn't reproduce, not 40%.
	Alright, either one is pretty rough.
	And so, here's something that happened in society that worked, right?
	Here's something that happened in society that worked.
	And if you don't get this in society, your society won't function.
	And this is why things are pretty rough right now.
	So society desperately needs a sorting mechanism which allows the less attractive to have families.
	Society desperately needs a sorting mechanism that allows for the less attractive to also fall in love, to get married, to have children.
	Now when you have sexual promiscuity, The top 5-10% of men and the top 70% of women do pretty well.
	I mean, it's rock star status for the top 5-10% of men and the top 70% of women.
	And the top...
	I mean, basically, it's a rotational harem situation.
	It's a very primitive situation.
	Because the most attractive men have...
	Just about any woman that they want.
	And the less attractive men, and as you know, like 80% of men are considered below the median of attractiveness by women.
	And so the top percentage of men get older women, which is a Turkish harem situation.
	And then the bottom 70% of men Have a very tough time getting anyone.
	Now, this is, in general, atheist, secular culture.
	It's different in religious situations and environments.
	But this incel, you know, this incel problem, and the fact that the incels are blamed for being incels, and it's like, no, no, no.
	Women are drawn to the top men.
	That's called hypergamy. And the goal of any rational, reasonable, want-to-keep-things-going, sustainable society is to make sure that there's monogamistic pair bonding so that the top men get taken out of circulation real early, real quick, real firm.
	Top 5-10% of men get snatched up real quick, out of circulation.
	So then the women say, okay, well, the top 5% to 10% of men are taken or about to be taken or I can't compete, so I've got to go.
	You have to sort. You have to sort and find your place in the pecking order of sexual market value.
	You have to. And yeah, the ones go with the ones and the twos go with the twos and the threes go with the threes and maybe you can push things a little bit here and there.
	And there's stuff you can do.
	There's stuff you can do, right? Women can make themselves even more attractive.
	They can use makeup. They can exercise.
	They can do lots of things to make themselves more attractive.
	They can be very funny, good-humored.
	They can be positive. They can be reliable.
	All the things, right? The virtues, right?
	So women can do a lot to make themselves more attractive, even if they're not born sort of physically beautiful.
	Men can do a lot to make themselves more attractive.
	You know, exercise and get better at sports and get better at telling jokes and start to get a good job early so the woman knows that you're a hard worker.
	These are not fixed biologically, right?
	But you start someplace and then you aim at someplace else, right?
	So, the whole purpose of a sustainable society is to make sure that as many people pair up as humanly possible.
	Everyone who wants a wife, everyone who wants a husband will get one.
	And men and women, boys and girls, will all start at the top.
	And I remember even back in boarding school, when I was six, the boys and girls were segregated, but occasionally we would do stuff together.
	But there was a girl, I still remember exactly what she looks like.
	There was a girl who was considered the prettiest girl in the whole school and Out of 500 boys and 500 girls, she was the complete queen of the school.
	The same thing happened in junior high school here in Canada.
	I still remember the girl's name, who was the total queen of the school, because I asked her out.
	And so everyone tries to start at the top, and what you do is you work your way down until someone will have you.
	And that's tough. Because everyone feels special and precious to themselves, and then when you get there in the marketplace, you have to figure out what you can actually get.
	Who can you actually get? You aim for the top and you work your way down.
	That's the way it works. And the reason that you need to have this urgency, and this is more true for women, right?
	Because men propose, women dispose.
	Men are asking, women say yes or no, in general.
	Is that as the men are being snatched up, The higher value men are being snatched up earlier.
	And I'm talking sort of late teens, early twenties when people get married in the past, right?
	So the high value boys, the high value young men are being snatched up earlier.
	And if you don't, let's say that you're a six and a six asks you out, but you feel like you deserve an eight.
	And let's say that you say no to the six.
	Well, the problem is the eights have probably taken.
	The sevens have probably taken.
	The six who asked you out is now taken because he went somewhere else.
	Maybe you've got to settle with a five or a four, right?
	And one thing that's true about women, man, one thing that's absolutely true about women, and I say this with no complaint, no negativity, love women, settling is torture.
	Like, women don't go back.
	They don't go back in time.
	Right, so the first time a woman dates a guy who's got his own place, she then doesn't go back to dating a guy who lives with his parents or lives with a bunch of roommates.
	The first time a woman dates a guy with a car, she doesn't go back to a guy who dates a bus.
	There's no downgrades. Downgrades don't happen for women if they can at all avoid it.
	And if they do, it's bloody torture for them.
	Like sheer torture. And it'll burn in their gut for years.
	So the woman has to do the gamble, right?
	So she's a six. She says, oh, I want an eight.
	Well, of course you want an eight. But the eights want the eight.
	And the eight guy is likely to choose an eight girl.
	Now, again, she can compensate for being, if she's not quite an eight physically, she can do other things to make herself more attractive and so on.
	But what she couldn't do was offer sex, right?
	She couldn't offer sex in the past.
	That was off the table. Ass on the table was off the table.
	So, oh, I can't get the tent, right?
	That she's like snacked, the head football guy is snacked by the head cheerleader of day one, right?
	She keeps her hooks in deep, right?
	Can I get the nine? Maybe could get the eight.
	Working on a seven, but a six has just asked me out.
	But I think I'm an eight, but I'm actually a six.
	A six just asked me out.
	Okay, so you have this agonizing.
	This is why women, when choosing men, have these literally sleepless nights.
	Can I do better? Can I do better?
	There's nothing wrong with it. Perfect is why we're out of the caves, why we have civilization, why we have technology.
	The woman's always asking to herself, oh my God, can I do better?
	Oh my God! What if I aim for higher?
	What if I aim for an eight and end up with a five or a four?
	Because a solid six has asked me out.
	If I aim for an eight, maybe I'll get an eight, maybe I'll be real happy.
	But maybe, just maybe, this is the highest I can get.
	And it's humiliating, and it's torture, and I get that.
	I remember what it was like to be young.
	It's humiliating. Right?
	But you get what you can get.
	And, you know, like sniper fire, the bullet rings are taking the men out of commission.
	Taking the women out of commission.
	Same thing happens for the man.
	Man wants the 10, can't get the 10, for sure.
	She doesn't even look at him in the hallway, right?
	Aims for an 8, maybe he's a 6, maybe, you know, then he asks a 7 out, and she's like, oh, maybe, but it turns out she was just trying to make an 8 jealous or whatever, which didn't work because you're only a 6.
	But then he asks the girl out who's a 6, and she's happy to go out with him, and she brings him lasagna, and she helps him wash his car, and she's really great, and At some point, you look in the mirror and you say, this is the best I can do.
	But it has to be the best she can do as well.
	We're both sixes. This is where we are.
	We're going to get married. And everyone pairs off.
	And everyone pairs off.
	But that requires little to no sex before marriage.
	It requires young monogamy.
	When you have this, nobody marries until their late 20s, early 30s, and so on, Then you get the swarm on the top 5-10% of guys and all the other guys are left out in the cold.
	And they get resentful and they get angry because basically it's like the buffet of sloppy seconds or thirds or tenths or twentieths.
	Everyone knows that the person they're with thinks that that's the best they can do.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	Right? Everyone who's getting paid at a job It's getting paid.
	They think that's the best they can do.
	Otherwise, they'd quit and get another job or whatever, right?
	If you go for a job and it says 40K, you negotiate to 45, you take to 45, that's the best you could do.
	If you thought you could do better, you'd hold out for a job for 50.
	I mean, empirically, practically, everyone who's with everyone, they believe that's the best they can do.
	Otherwise, they'd aim for something better.
	So it just smashes up women.
	I mean, it's great in the short run for sexually predatory men, right?
	But they're also damaging themselves and they're just creating a bunch of feminists and maybe stalkers and, you know, getting fake charges or real charges or whatever, right?
	Leveled against the more accusations at least, right?
	So, yeah, it's really rough.
	Any society that sustains has to pair off children young, has to pair off young men and women young and has to make it stick.
	Because if you have a contingency of, you know, now like the majority of men can't seem to find a woman to settle down with because the women are all chasing the alphas and thinking because they're adding sex to the mix with the alphas that they're going to get the alphas to wife them when they're not.
	They're just getting laid. They're not getting ringed.
	They're not getting wedded. The young men, they look at the women and it's like, hey, I'm a good guy.
	I'm a smart guy. I'm a sensible guy.
	I work out. I'm interesting.
	I've got a good job. I've got my own place.
	And I can't get a woman to, like, because I don't look, I don't have abs, or I don't look like Brad Pitt or whatever, right?
	So there's this massive resentment.
	Because the sorting mechanism is all screwed up.
	And restrictions on abortion will bring the sorting mechanism slightly better into focus.
	Alright, so thanks for those who are waiting and listening.
	Finn B? I've got a mic now.
	I'm sorry? I've got a mic now.
	It's Luke. Oh, you do have a mic.
	Yep. Oh, I thought you didn't.
	I wanted to discuss some evidence for Christianity.
	One that I thought is very compelling is that the apostles and the disciples, they were first-hand witnesses, and they had everything to lose from Jesus not rising from the dead.
	So they're either liars, they're either crazy, or they're actually right.
	And so if they're liars, what's their motivation?
	They didn't gain anything from Jesus rising from the dead.
	And in fact, like 11 of the 12...
	Sorry to interrupt. What do you mean they didn't gain anything from Jesus rising from the dead?
	Christians died brutally as martyrs, right?
	And none of them gained material wealth from it, right?
	Well, I'm so sorry, but if they followed Jesus, material wealth wouldn't be...
	I mean, they did obviously follow Jesus.
	Material wealth wouldn't be their motivation.
	In fact, Jesus specifically rejects the value of material wealth in the gaining of heaven, right?
	Exactly, right. So they wouldn't be following Jesus for material wealth.
	So saying... Well, they didn't get material wealth out of a guy they followed who specifically rejected the value of material wealth and therefore they did as well.
	So saying that people who reject the value of material wealth weren't motivated by money seems more like a tautology.
	That's almost self-definition true.
	Yes, but my point is they have to genuinely believe that they're receiving eternal life if they're going to sacrifice all their possibility at material wealth.
	Well, did they know, and excuse my lack of knowledge of this aspect of Christian theology or history, so I'm kneeling at your feet here to be instructed.
	Did the apostles know that they would be martyred for affirming that Jesus rose from the dead?
	Did they know that ahead of time, or was that something that kind of crept up on them?
	Yeah, Jesus told them that they'll be hated and scorned and persecuted for his name.
	So yes, they knew. Well, hated, scorned, and persecuted doesn't necessarily mean dying a martyr's death.
	I mean, obviously Jesus did, and so probably that's what he meant, but he didn't say, you will be murdered, you will be killed, right?
	I mean, I think he specifically told Peter, you will be killed for this.
	Okay. Okay.
	I accept your knowledge as somebody who's much better studied on this than I am, so please continue.
	Okay, so what I'm saying is that if they're either liars, they're crazy, or they're telling the truth.
	So what I'm putting forth is that they have no motivation to be liars because everything earthly they sacrificed in order to proclaim the gospel.
	And we know that they're not crazy either because we have their writings.
	So we have the ability to examine whether they're crazy or not.
	And, you know, the letters of the apostles of Paul and Peter and John are some of the deepest writings that we have and most profound and influential.
	And so the only option left is that Jesus has to have risen from the dead and the gospel has to be true.
	Okay, so I'm going to inhabit the argument here.
	I want to make sure that I fully understand it.
	Sure. So Jesus rose from the dead after three days, and this was witnessed by the apostles?
	Yep, and 500 others.
	And 500 others, right.
	Now, again, we just focus on the apostles because I don't think the 500 others left much historical record, if any.
	So the argument is that They were told that if they affirmed that Jesus rose from the dead, that they would be persecuted, hated, and Peter, at least, was told that he would be killed, right?
	Yes. And so, why would you say, yes, I saw Jesus rise from the dead, if doing so would mean your certain destruction, or almost certain destruction?
	Well, actually, no, certain destruction.
	Because if they believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then Jesus wouldn't lie to them.
	And therefore, if Jesus says, oh, yeah, if you affirm me, then you're going to get tortured and killed, right?
	That wouldn't be a false statement that he would make because he's the son of God and the most perfect inhabitant of the human form that ever existed, so he wouldn't lie to them about that.
	So if he says, look, if you affirm that I rose from the dead, and again, tell me if I've taken any shortcuts here, but if Jesus says...
	To the apostles, if you affirm that I rose from the dead, you'll be tortured and killed, and then they then affirm that he rose from the dead, and then they are tortured and killed, knowing, without a doubt, at least in their own minds, that this would be the outcome, that the only reason that they would say that Jesus rose from the dead was because they actually Saw him rise from the dead and genuinely believe and they conversed with him and accepted that he had risen from the dead, which was proof of his divinity.
	And so the only options would be that they didn't see him rise from the dead, but they affirmed it even though it guaranteed their torture and death.
	Or they were collectively insane and either hallucinated or had a dream that was so vivid they thought it was real or talked themselves into it or had some sort of psychotic break and all saw or believe that they saw Jesus rose from the dead.
	But the argument against that would be that their letters are coherent and rational and lay out deep and meaningful human truths and therefore wouldn't be like the – you know, you think of the guys who cut their own testicles off to go and join the Halle-Bopp comet, that those guys probably weren't leaving you think of the guys who cut their own testicles off to go and join the Halle-Bopp comet, that those guys probably weren't leaving a whole lot of – they weren't leaving a whole lot of So,
	So, either they saw Jesus rise from the dead, they're lying about it, and therefore guaranteeing their own destruction, or they're crazy.
	Again, I know it's a big argument, and I'm not trying to sort of diminish it by putting it in these blunt terms, but I just wanted to make sure that I follow the argument.
	It sounds like you've got it, yeah.
	Okay, is there anything else That you wanted to add to the argument?
	Yeah, just briefly, I think it would be pretty apparent, not just because Jesus told them, but because, well, they saw what just happened to Jesus, so they knew what the political and religious leaders of the time would do to early Christians.
	So I think it would be very obvious their fate if they were to preach the gospel.
	If they were to affirm the divinity of Jesus...
	And in a polytheistic society, to assert a monotheistic belief.
	Right? Because as you know, in the Roman era, there were these avenues of temples, and there were many gods that were worshipped by many people.
	And one of the things that was troublesome for the Roman authorities was the Christians coming along and saying, no, no, they're all false gods.
	No, they're either demons or devils or delusions.
	There's only one true god.
	Right? The god of the Old Testament whose son manifested in Jesus Christ.
	And this was a problem for the Roman authorities.
	Whatever we think of polytheism, I mean, from a political standpoint, from a sort of managing the population standpoint, it was a fairly significant issue.
	So, I'm sorry, I completely lost track of what you had said earlier.
	My apologies if you could just reiterate.
	I went off on my own little journey there.
	I need to be pulled back.
	Sure, yeah. So I was saying it would be really self-evident, the consequences of preaching the gospel.
	Just because they saw the society around them, they knew that to proclaim Jesus as Lord was to proclaim basically blasphemy against the Roman Emperor and against the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees, who had all the political power in Jerusalem.
	And so they knew they would be persecuted and killed for preaching the gospel.
	Right, right. Okay.
	Now... Can someone believe something to be false?
	And we have to just take the theology out of it for a moment because I respect the faith that you have and I don't want to diminish it by giving you secular examples.
	But it's a fundamental question and it's a huge question.
	I don't have any giant answers for it so I want to know what you think.
	Can people believe utterly false things that go completely against the evidence of their senses?
	And still appear sane?
	The answer that I see is absolutely.
	Yeah, I'll give you an example that's, again, I apologize for the pettiness and the grandeur of Christian theology, but I think it's something we're all familiar with, right?
	So, you know, with Trump, there's the fine people hoax.
	I mean, there's tons of them, right?
	But the one that's most known is the fine people hoax, like this belief that Trump referred to neo-Nazis as very fine people, right?
	And the people who believe that hoax appear very sane, right?
	They dress well. They are articulate.
	They write coherent arguments.
	Not necessarily arguments I agree with, but certainly coherent arguments.
	They have great success in the secular world of the state, or the secular cult of the state or whatever, right?
	They hold professorships.
	They pay their taxes.
	They are able to arrange their own flights.
	They're not covering themselves with feces and locked in an insane asylum.
	They are stable and respected and competent members of the society in which we live, though they believe things that are utterly false.
	And I think it was Kayleigh McEnany who...
	Played the actual tape or played the actual recording of what Trump said about that day.
	And all that seems to happen is that if people stop believing in it, they stop reporting on it.
	And people are still repeating this hoax all over the place.
	And there's the other hoax that...
	Oh, Trump told people to inject bleach to deal with COVID. Like, all these things.
	Absolutely false. Completely and totally false.
	But the people who believe these things in no way appear insane.
	Now, you could sort of say, well, epistemologically, it's completely mental and so on.
	But that is something that I don't know.
	Like, if people believe something that's false...
	And easily demonstrably false, like the fine people hoax.
	You just have to listen to what Trump said.
	He condemned the extremists on both sides.
	He said that there were very fine people on both sides, which I think it's not the neo-Nazi side, but there are people who have arguments that the monuments should be retained, and there are people who have arguments that the monuments should be removed, and there are good-hearted people on both sides of that argument, and yeah, there are extremists who should be condemned totally.
	That's kind of what he was saying. And it's, especially with the internet now, again, for those who are younger, right?
	You don't remember what it was like.
	If somebody says, oh, someone said something on a news program two years ago, I mean, good lord, you couldn't get it.
	Maybe somebody would have a videotape of it somewhere, but even if they did, you couldn't broadcast it.
	Maybe you could go to their house and watch it or whatever, right?
	But this sort of fine people hoax, it's just...
	I mean, it's truly crazy because it literally is like one thing.
	It's like you literally have to watch 20 seconds of tape, and this thing has gone on for like, what, five years now, four years now?
	And it's like one click, and everyone has the complete disproof to their false belief in their pocket.
	At 20 seconds, you can watch it, right?
	Now, are those people crazy?
	The people who believe false things that are easily disproven, and they would swear under oath that these things, that Trump called these neo-Nazis very fine people, they would probably pass a lie detector test.
	I mean, I remember I did this in 2015, 2016.
	I did a whole series of the untruths about Donald Trump, all the things that the media said that he had said or done that wasn't true.
	And these hoaxes that are just out there in society, and this is a general question.
	I'll look into the chat for this as well.
	Are these people crazy?
	I mean, they genuinely believe things that are completely false and unbelievably easy to disprove, and they genuinely, deeply, sincerely, and totally believe these things.
	Are they crazy? What do you think?
	Um... Well, I guess, I think, so I could expand the definition of crazy for the sake of this argument to, you're either crazy or you're wrong, or at least you believe something that's false.
	Is that fair? Well, so the crazy comes with a whole lot of connotations that it's easy to see.
	So I sort of picture the space alien hypothesis, right?
	So imagine...
	That you had no access to the source material, to what Trump actually said that day, right?
	No, you had no access. And you heard people arguing both sides, but you couldn't get a transcript and you couldn't see what Trump said.
	Would you be able to tell who was right and who was wrong based upon the persuasiveness and presentability and rationality of the people involved?
	I would answer that it would be impossible.
	Now, if someone comes up to you wearing their pants on their head and, you know, one scuba flip-flop and one elephant foot on the other leg, they've got their underpants on and they're screaming that they're Napoleon coming back from the dead, you wouldn't believe them, right?
	Because their entire presentation is insane, right?
	There's this old Farsight cartoon of a guy in a scuba mask sitting on the top of a coat rack in a therapist's office.
	I'm sorry? Sorry, somebody just said something.
	I want to make sure I didn't miss something. No?
	Okay. Yeah, it's a guy...
	I can't remember the therapist.
	There's another one where the therapist is writing.
	Some guy is just rambling away on the couch and the therapist is just writing, just plain nuts.
	So there are people who come up with their crazy presentations of information and you can judge them to be crazy simply by looking at them.
	But there are other people who come up and argue with Was it Joe Biden said today that the end of Roe v.
	Wade would mean that gay and straight kids would be segregated in school?
	I don't know. Okay, but if you didn't know anything about anything and you were simply judging based on what?
	The President of the United States.
	He speaks relatively coherently and he was obviously voted in.
	He's a successful politician.
	So there are some people that you look at them and you just go, well, they're nuts, right?
	But there are other people.
	This is kind of like the Battlestar Galactica version 2 where the Cylons are...
	Disguised as human beings, but they're actually these evil robots that want to wipe out humanity.
	There are people who present incredibly well.
	There are people who present incredibly well, very eloquent, they've got three-piece suits on, they're well-shaven, they've got nice haircuts, they're successful, they drove their own car over, and yet they believe the complete opposite of the truth.
	That's why the word crazy to me has a tough...
	Boy, wouldn't it be great if everybody who was wrong was obviously crazy?
	What if everybody who wanted to talk about the fine people hoax or wanted to talk about the Russia collusion conspiracy theory, wouldn't it be great if all of those people had scuba gear on and one elephant foot and had their underpants around their chest or something like that?
	Because then you'd be like, okay, well, obviously they don't even know how to present themselves, so I don't have to take anything they say with any credibility.
	The real problem, of course, is the people with enormous credibility who, for various reasons I can't fathom, mostly to do with political advantage and conformity and so on, they present themselves enormously well and they're completely wrong.
	They persist in their error despite it being enormously easy to correct themselves.
	I don't know what we would call that, but that's a different category.
	Yeah, and at least for the people that believe the fine people hoax and things like that, at least they have some benefit to gain from it.
	They have the approval of their friends and nice society, polite society, but the apostles really didn't have that.
	And I would go back again to we can judge whether We can judge how good their arguments were by just reading what they were, that we still have them today.
	Right, right. Now, then we have a category of people who believe things and believe them to be virtuous, despite the fact that it comes with enormous values.
	I'm not going to put people in the category of the Christian martyrs who obviously had a set of beliefs that had them willing to endure unimaginable torture and death, which I can't even conceive of.
	So again, I'm not trying to diminish the argument.
	I'm just trying to set up the categories.
	So we know people.
	Everybody knows someone like this or has, I think, at some point in their life.
	And I'm trying to make it personal, not to sort of win the argument, just sort of make it visceral.
	I mean, look, you must know people who believe things that are harmful to themselves.
	I mean, it could be marijuana is cool.
	It could be I'm not a drunk, I just like to have a good time.
	It could be I'm not promiscuous, I'm just sexually liberated.
	It could be there's an evil patriarchy that doesn't respect women and all men are pigs.
	Now, women who believe that Of foregoing love and marriage and children and community and family and security and love and succor in their old age.
	And yet, they persisted these beliefs, despite these beliefs being enormously destructive to themselves.
	On the other side, you can see the people who go full monk mode on MGTOW, the men going their own way.
	Who have beliefs about the evils of women combined with the state and, you know, the ridiculous lack of possibility of finding what they call the unicorn, right?
	The woman who is both moral and attractive.
	And the beliefs would be, I mean, they're giving up love and fatherhood and family and children and comfort and succor in their old age and helpmates throughout life and so on.
	Enormously self-destructive beliefs.
	Again, I'm not trying to put these beliefs in the category of the Christian martyrs, but we do know a lot of people who hold beliefs.
	In fact, I would say that this community is somewhat a refuge from the majority of people who hold these beliefs.
	They're incredibly self-destructive, and yet they maintain these beliefs even though these beliefs are incredibly harmful to themselves.
	Are they crazy? In a certain sense, they are crazy.
	They keep doing things despite evidence to the contrary, or at least they can't see it.
	Okay, so we were talking about the people who believe the fine people hoax because it gives them some kind of benefit, and I can understand if you want to get on CNN, you have to repeat the pablum, right?
	But what about, let's take a radical feminist who believes that I don't know, all sex within a marriage is rape and men are pigs and predators.
	Obviously, she can't fall in love or be loved by a man, holding those beliefs.
	And it will probably end her genetic line, right?
	Four billion years in the making or whatever you would believe.
	So, is she crazy?
	She may present herself really well.
	She will have a functional apartment, a house, a car.
	She'll teach at a university, probably.
	She'll pay her taxes.
	She goes to the doctor.
	So she's not like crazy crazy, like crapping on the sidewalk, drug-addicted San Francisco crazy.
	She's not going to be put into a mental asylum.
	She may be on mental health meds or whatever.
	I think a lot of those kind of people are, particularly as they age out of fertility windows.
	But she's not crazy, and yet she's definitely pursuing and valuing beliefs that are harming her enormously.
	Yeah. So maybe I guess, maybe I would alter, in light of this conversation, I would alter the three possibilities.
	You're either, one, lying, two, you're right, or three, the apostles were just wrong for one reason or another, you know, craziness being a subset of being wrong.
	Right. Yeah.
	Let me promote another possibility, which, again, you're the expert in theology, so I put this forward very tentatively and subject to your approval.
	Okay. I was going to talk about myself, but that sounds very grandiose, so I'll just talk about someone else, right?
	So, in my father's family...
	Almost all the men were wiped out in the First World War.
	I actually wrote about this in one of my novels called Almost.
	Almostnovel.com. Please check it out.
	So, the men were all just wiped out.
	Now, they could have fled, right?
	They could have gone to America.
	They could have gone to Argentina.
	They could have done any number of things, but instead...
	They marched into near-certain death for a particular belief system or a sense of honor or a sense of responsibility or whatever it would be called.
	They became cannon fodder for a war which nobody won except the bankers, right?
	So, and it's a big question, and I'm not, you know, it's a very reasonable question to ask about these people, my ancestors.
	I mean, not even that, like great-grandfathers or whatever, right?
	But Were they crazy?
	They destroyed themselves in brutal, tortuous ways when they knew, right?
	I mean, I get at the very beginning of the First World War, everyone was afraid it was going to be over by Christmas and everyone thought there'd be some heroic guy riding up a hill with a sword and a white flag or a British Union Jack or whatever.
	But, you know, when the carnage of the war became clear, I mean...
	Everyone knew when they went over the line, they went out of the trench into no man's land, that, you know, Passchendaele psalm, that they're just going to get ripped apart.
	They're just going to get slaughtered. But they went because they believed in something.
	They went and submitted themselves to certain torture and death.
	And in some ways, the death was even better than the torture because some, you know, must have guessed, there were people even living into the 70s and the 80s, Still stuck in hospitals in iron lungs because they inhaled mustard gas in 1917.
	Were they crazy?
	Well, Stefan, as you've argued previously, going to war and facing death is, you know, better genetic chances than staying home and not fighting because none of the women will sleep with you if you don't go to war.
	But at least you have a – if you win, the women will still sleep with you after, right?
	So you could say they might have even had better chances than the apostles who had even a higher chance of certain death.
	Right. Right.
	Now – Yeah, that probably was an unconscious thing that was occurring, although I think the White Feather campaign only started a little bit later.
	But if, in order for that equation to work, and I remember making the argument, of course, very well, in order for that equation to work, you have to have a reasonable chance of surviving the war.
	Right? If you have very little chance of surviving the war, then the equation goes the other way, and you will...
	Flee the war.
	Right? So, you know, if only one out of five women will become your wife if you flee the war, but you have a 90% chance of dying.
	And again, you know, these are obviously pretty raw numbers that are very dubious, but I think we have an instinctive feel for these things.
	But if you have...
	If you have a 20% chance of breeding with a woman if you flee the war, but only a 10% chance of surviving the war, then fleeing the war genetically makes more sense.
	That generally only works before horrible casualty rates are known.
	Once horrible casualty rates are known, well then, of course, you'd say, well, people have their bonds to their fellow soldiers and they've already sacrificed so much and it's tougher to get out because they're in the army.
	But that argument does sort of go both ways.
	I mean, so it has to be that the odds of the war, the odds of surviving the war have to be better than the odds of women not sleeping with you, if that makes sense.
	But these are people who...
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well, we could apply a very similar equation to the apostles.
	Like, take Paul, for example.
	So he was preaching the gospel, and then the religious leader said, you have to stop or we'll throw you in jail.
	And he kept preaching and they threw him in jail.
	And then he got out of jail, and then he preached, and then they stoned him.
	And then he got up and he preached again, and they beat him up, left him for dead outside the city, and he came back and he preached again.
	And then he was shipwrecked, and then he was in prison, and then he was stoned again.
	And over and over, obviously he knows he's going to keep being persecuted, keep almost dying if not being killed for it.
	And so he has 100% certainty, basically, he will die if he keeps doing this.
	And so he's got to be really, really wrong.
	Yes, and I accept that, and I appreciate the clarification, and I completely accept what you're saying.
	However, this is not only specific to Christianity or to religion, right?
	I mean, Socrates knew that if he continued teaching the young what he was teaching them, that he was probably not very long for this world, right?
	In fact, he'd been threatened before and all of that, right?
	So he continued what he did without – I mean, out of a love of wisdom, we assume, out of a love of knowledge and a belief in philosophy and so on.
	He did – and he's just one of many, many examples of people who were motivated to pursue truth despite significant negative consequences.
	And again, I put myself at the very edge of this periphery.
	It's not like I've been thrown in jail or anything, but I knew that there were significant risks to talking about the topics that I was talking about, and I continued because I love humanity and want people to get along, and we can only meet in the truth.
	And if we're denied the truth, violence becomes almost inevitable.
	So... There's a cause that you can believe in where you're willing to put yourself at significant risk because you value some particular goal.
	And so I think your argument is, but they would only, so I believe, I know that what I was arguing for was the truth, and you saying, well, they knew that they were arguing for the truth as well because they had seen Jesus rise from the dead, and that's why they were willing to make those sacrifices.
	And of course, Socrates would, I think, argue that Philosophy is a great purpose and value of life, and therefore it's worth sacrificing yourself for the pursuit of philosophy because he believed and had personally experienced value philosophy.
	And so there are people who will make massive sacrifices for the sake of a particular cause, and I think your argument is that they would only have done that if they had seen Jesus rise from the dead or had certain knowledge that he was performing miracles.
	Is that right? I guess it's not a proof, but I am saying there's a lot of evidence that that would be a really big reason why they would do that.
	Now, how would that be singular to, say, Christianity?
	because it would seem to me that every new belief system or every new philosophy or every new religion would face significant resistance from established belief systems or religions, and those belief systems would fight back.
	So it would seem to me that all new belief systems that challenge pre-existing structures would face significant persecution and pushback and could only spread if people were willing to make those sacrifices.
	Yeah, I would say it's not a comprehensive proof on that.
	I think there's a lot of other evidences that I could mention a couple.
	But yeah, that alone I would say is not comprehensive.
	So another example is there's over 200 prophecies in the Old Testament that point to Jesus.
	Or there's four independent accounts of Jesus' life and death and resurrection.
	Right. Those are some pretty strong evidences of the truthfulness of the gospel.
	Well, I'll tell you...
	So, I mean, here's the issue that I have, and this is a little bit out of the bounds of the debate, so you can toss it aside if you like.
	The frustration I have, and this is an emotional thing, so it's nothing to do with you.
	You've said everything very well, and I appreciate you calling in.
	Why do some people...
	We get to see Jesus rise from the dead.
	And everyone else has to have faith.
	That strikes me as enormously unfair.
	Now, I know that unfair is a child's word used by adults usually to get things they have not earned.
	But, you know, because I was asked, you know, what's my barrier to belief?
	It's like, well, I'm an empiricist and Why is it that the apostles get to sit with Jesus, get to watch him turn water into wine, get to watch him cure the sick, drive demons into pigs, walk on water, come back from the dead?
	How is the foundation of the entire belief system so massively empirical?
	And then the empiricism, which is the entire foundation as to why the belief system was founded and spread to begin with, why is that empiricism denied to everyone who comes afterwards?
	I find that this is not an argument against you or there's nothing personal to you.
	I'm just expressing my frustration.
	That the religion could not have gotten started if it wasn't empirically verifiable by people in the immediate circumstances and then right after that everyone else just has to take it on faith.
	If God allows empirical proof for the founding of Christianity, why does everyone else just have to live on faith?
	Well, Jesus directly addresses this.
	Well, at least in part, he says if, you know, the disciples receive, or the people that listen and believe and didn't actually see Jesus, he says receive a greater reward because they didn't see him, you know, face to face.
	Well, hang on, though, but I'm sure the apostles went to heaven, right?
	Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
	Is there a bigger reward than going to heaven that I'm not aware of?
	I can pull up the verse if you'd like.
	My understanding is there are different degrees of rewards in heaven.
	Well, the purgatory thing, the path to heaven, I'm aware.
	I wasn't sure, and it's been a long time since I've studied any of this.
	But my sort of understanding was that you get to heaven and, you know, you're In the angels and worshipping in choirs and all of that.
	And I understand that there's certain beliefs around purgatory that you have to earn your way there through ridding yourself of earthly sin and so on, which I think is more of a Catholic thing, but is there a bigger reward?
	Do the apostles not get as close to God as people who rely on faith?
	No, it's...
	They're both in heaven.
	It's not a purgatory thing.
	But people...
	You are...
	You give more glory to God, and you can experience a peculiar kind of joy that the apostles won't get to experience because believers after them believed without seeing.
	So in a sense, they had more faith than the apostles.
	Because it doesn't take much faith to believe if you really see, right?
	If you have sight.
	Well, it's not faith if you see it, right?
	I don't have faith in gravity, right?
	Right, exactly.
	And so, having faith gives God glory and gives you joy in a way that the apostles really couldn't, because they didn't have to have faith in that way.
	Could Christianity have started without the proof of Jesus' miracles?
	Without the miracles, if you couldn't verify that Jesus was Lord, then no, you can't have Christianity.
	It's contingent on the historical resurrection of Christ.
	Right. That's how he would be differentiated from somebody who claimed to be the Son of God, but who was crazy, right?
	Yes. So that's the challenge, right?
	Christianity started in science.
	It started in empiricism.
	It started on the empirical test for the divinity of Jesus called miracles and resurrection.
	And again, I'm not trying to diminish anything.
	It started not on faith, but on reason, sense data, evidence, and proof.
	Is that a fair statement?
	I'm not trying to trap you.
	It started in science.
	Because there was a differentiator, right?
	What's that line from I say you are the Messiah and I should now have followed a few, right?
	Because there were a lot of people claiming to be the Messiah back in the day.
	But Jesus was differentiated through his miracles and his resurrection.
	Now, so Christianity started on science, reason, and evidence.
	On philosophy. And then it changed faith.
	And that's really my major issue.
	If it had always been faith, okay, at least there's consistency.
	But if the only reason that Christianity exists is because of science, but then everybody post-Jesus has to accept it on faith, that seems like a switch in methodology.
	Well, history is not a science, right?
	It's based on evidence, but it's not a science.
	No, no, but for the apostles it was science.
	Yeah, yeah, it was.
	So they get science. So they get science.
	And the whole thing exists because of science.
	Because they saw it. And you're saying that they did see it.
	So it's secondhand science, which is still totally science.
	But that's the challenge.
	God says, I mean, for me, I think it's a challenge for a lot of people, but God says, for you to believe, you must have proof.
	Here's all this proof to the people who found Christianity, right?
	Yeah. But for everyone else, even though to get it all going, everybody needs direct sense, evidence, proof, and data.
	Everyone after that, you don't get any proof at all.
	You might have some evidence, you might have some support, but it's faith.
	I mean, and that's where you have, you know, your own firsthand experience and listening to other people's stories and their testimonies.
	And I don't believe faith is just some blind belief and hope.
	I think faith is founded on personal experience and, you know, seeing what the Holy Spirit does in your life.
	And when you can see the transformation of of people's lives who become Christians and who repent and do a complete 180-degree turn.
	You can see the power of God in their lives.
	Now, and I completely agree with you.
	I mean, absolutely. The stories are legion, right, of the criminals who find God in prison and so on, right?
	Now, I accept those stories, and I think that they're beautiful and born again and wonderful and valuable.
	My salvation story was philosophy.
	And I think the one thing that the Christian salvation stories and turnaround stories have and the salvation stories involving philosophy, at least universally preferable behavior, is that both the philosophy that I talk about and Christianity demand, insist, in many ways require, That you subjugate your mere animal will to universal morality.
	The beautiful thing about Christianity is, and I know beautiful is not an argument, I'm just talking about the wonder of it, is that it elevates us from the mammal.
	The people who believe in the fine people hoax, they repeat it in order to gain power because they're amoral.
	They're not even immoral.
	Immoral would be a step up.
	They're amoral. Whatever do I have to say?
	We saw this recently with the Roe v.
	Wade thing. Everybody said, oh, I don't know what a woman is and there's no such thing as women and there's birthing people and so on.
	But then when Roe v. Wade is threatened, suddenly everybody knows exactly what a woman is because it's just power grabs.
	There's no... There's no moral consistency to any of it.
	There's no contradiction.
	They haven't even evolved to the level of contradiction.
	Does this serve me getting resources?
	Well, if I say these magical words, it's a spell.
	It's magic, literally black magic, right?
	This is why the word spell is in magic and also a spelling of words, right?
	What words do I have to say to get resources?
	Ah, well, if I say that Trump called all neo-Nazis fine people, then look, I get all these resources.
	I get on TV, I get money, I get professorships, I get approval, I might get appointed to some government position, and I avoid the negatives or whatever it is, right?
	So they're just, what words do I have to say to get resources?
	It's the same thing with an amoral man who wants to sleep with a woman.
	It's like, hey, what lies do I have to tell to get her to sleep with me?
	It's not even immoral.
	It's just cause and effect.
	There are magic words I can say which get me things that I want.
	So I'll say them. Of course, right?
	I mean, if you were a farmer and you had a magic spell to bring rain and you desperately needed rain, of course you would speak that magic spell.
	Because you need the rain.
	It's not a moral thing. It's not an immoral thing.
	It's like, well, I need rain. I know a magic spell that will get me rain.
	So here I go, and I'll say the magic spell.
	I'll get rain. It'll be lovely. Wonderful.
	And anybody who didn't do that would be considered crazy, right?
	I mean, if you imagine some farmer, their family's half starving to death because the crops are ridiculously dry, and there's no food, and the cows are falling over, and the children are crying out with hunger, and they don't know how they're going to make it through the next week.
	And then... The wife finds out that the husband has a magic spell that brings rain that would have saved everyone, all of this agony and heartache, and would keep the children alive.
	I mean, she'd shake him by the neck saying, what are you, insane?
	You have a magic spell that brings rain?
	And we're all dying of drought out here, and you haven't said the magic...
	Like, it would be insane. And so for the amoral people, if you have magic words that get you resources...
	Right? I mean, or approval or loyalty or friendship, you know, hate speech is not free speech.
	Oh, look, there's magic words that get me approval.
	Trump said this.
	Russia interfered with the election.
	Oh, magic words that get me approval and resources.
	There's a magic spell. Of course you would say it, right?
	So Christianity, though, says, no, thou shalt not bear false witness.
	Sorry, you don't get the easy animal out of mouthing words to get resources because what you say has to be the truth in order for you to be moral.
	So it takes away the conniving, the manipulation, the control, the bullying, the verbal and then physical violence.
	It's like, no, you've got to tell the truth.
	Just because something gets you resources doesn't mean that it's moral.
	Man shall not live on bread alone.
	It is easier for A camel to pass through the eye of a needle and a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
	So, with Christianity and with philosophy, it organizes your life under an umbrella of universal morality.
	I mean, this was the big step forward of Christianity was to universalize the moral edicts that were mostly or almost purely tribal beforehand.
	And so, from that standpoint, I completely agree with you that the The resurrection of the human spirit, the transformation stories, the born-again stories, the reversal of fortune stories that occur when a man accepts Jesus and believes in Christian morality, which is the closest thing that theology has ever produced, to my knowledge, of universal philosophical morality or what I would call UPB or universally preferable behavior.
	My story of reversal from socialism and Anibalistic needs pursuit and hedonism and so on.
	My resurrection story, my more than three days in the tomb coming back to life story, is philosophy.
	So I completely accept the transformation and that people accept Jesus from a philosophical standpoint, I would say, well, they've accepted morality and they've tamed their animal nature.
	And ascended to what is most human about us, which is our universals.
	And if those universals come in the form of theological moral commandments or universally preferable behavior, I believe that the result is similar, with the exception being that one can be proven, which is my work on universal ethics.
	So I'm not trying to disprove your argument.
	I'm simply saying that I fully accept the transformational nature of Christianity because I know I've gone through my own transformational nature, which is philosophy.
	Yeah. And I know you're not arguing this, but, you know, perhaps if God is real, and maybe it's not 100% provable that he exists.
	I don't know if it is. Maybe it is.
	But even if it's not, God could be real and choose to not make himself provable.
	And I just think we need to be really, really careful because, you know, eternity hangs in the balance.
	Well, you know, one argument that it could be, you know, any sane person hesitates to put himself in the mind of God, because, you know, that's a crazy thing to do, right?
	But if I were to approach somewhat of the penumbra with great humility, I would say that once something is proven, we tend to forget about it.
	And... The reason why God would keep himself hidden is to keep faith and therefore a dedication to virtue alive.
	I don't sit there and test gravity every morning because I've accepted gravity.
	It's not something that I have to have faith in and reaffirm my belief in, right?
	So that which we accept, that which we have proven, we don't sit there and work out 2 plus 2 equals 4 every day because we accept that as true, as valid.
	And I haven't fundamentally revisited morality Since I wrote UPB, like 12 or 13 years ago, because I accept it, and it's gone through a lot of arguments and debates and pushback and so on, and it's emerged with its structure intact and, in fact, strengthened. So if I were to imagine what the purpose of God would be to hide himself from humanity, it'd be like, Oh, come on.
	on.
	If I show myself to you guys, you'll accept me like you accept gravity, and then you'll just forget about me, and therefore you won't be virtuous, and the only way to get you to heaven is to keep you tantalized with possibilities so that you keep revisiting the questions and stay good.
	Yeah, I mean, sounds reasonable.
	Yeah.
	Just a possibility. Okay, is there anything else you wanted to mention?
	I really, really appreciate the conversation.
	This is great stuff, and I think there's a movie about the proofs of Jesus' resurrection, which I have formally scorned, but I'm actually seeking out at the moment.
	I can't remember what it's called, but I was looking for it the other day.
	Yeah, there are several. Right.
	Right. But yeah, there's one last thing I wanted to say, and it's, Stephan, I've just been praying for you and for your salvation, and I will continue to do so, and I just want you to know that I will continue praying for you.
	Thank you, and I can't tell you what that means to me.
	It's a wonderful thing, and in return for the kindness that you have shown me in this call, I will return the kindness that Christian virtue has brought Humbled and awed me over the last five years in particular.
	Christian virtue. My atheist friends, my agnostic friends, when I was under the fiercest attack that I've experienced, and I think that most people will ever experience in their lives, what did they do?
	They vanished. They vanished.
	But my Christian friends were there.
	And I am humbled and And I am in awe of the courage and not full of awe of the lack of courage of my agnostic or atheist friends who scattered with barely a backward glance as a whole.
	But I was still invited to Christian conferences.
	I was still in contact with Christian friends.
	Christian people worked with me and did wonderful, well, wonderful helps.
	And so, again, I'm an empiricist, which means I judge people by their deeds, shall ye know them, as the Bible says.
	And the kindness and moral strength of Christians, and of course, in hindsight, it makes perfect sense, because a lot of atheists seem to forget that to be right is to be persecuted, and But since really it's the foundation of Christianity, it's a little hard to forget for the Christians.
	And so there certainly are people who are persecuted who are deeply immoral.
	But being persecuted in and of itself does not mean that you're wrong.
	And in fact, it may mean that you're extraordinarily right.
	Now, I think it's been so long since scientists were persecuted that the secular world has forgotten about this.
	The scientists who were persecuted...
	Tom Woods has schooled me on some of this stuff, so I say this didn't happen as much as I used to think it happened, and the church was actually quite friendly to a lot of scientists.
	But the common person as a whole would generally be rather alarmed at science shifting their worldview and so on.
	And so, yeah, I think scientists have been, well, not only have they not been persecuted, they've been paid and largely bought out by the state, and have now occupied a privileged position of quasi-aristocracy and control over the rest of us, but Christians looked at me being persecuted and said, you know, that has a bit of a familiar ink to it.
	Can't quite place it, but it has something to do with the origin of my entire faith.
	And so, yeah, the kindness of Christians during a time of significant persecution was not something that I take lightly and never will forget.
	And I really, really, truly appreciate your very kind words about this.
	All right. Any other questions or comments or issues?
	I am happy to hear.
	And thanks, everyone, for joining me tonight.
	Passed out. No, can you hear me now?
	Yes, go ahead, my brother. What's up?
	Oh, I just had to unmute.
	Yeah, so it doesn't need to take very long, what I'm suggesting, but this whole idea that these people are crazy, the ones that are behaving so strangely, could it be that they're not crazy, but the root of it is very low levels of significance, and they feel extremely insignificant.
	So, If they were crazy, then if you told them this crazy stuff and they couldn't tell the difference, then that would justify them being crazy.
	But what if they're not crazy?
	What if they're extremely insignificant inside themselves?
	And so they actually do know what they're listening to doesn't make sense, but they feel too insignificant to challenge it.
	And so they go along with it.
	And then they can even...
	And even going along with something zany like that in a big institution, who they presume is far more significant than they are, that's where they get their significance from.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Can you define a little bit what you mean by significance?
	Because I think your argument hinges on that, but I may have a different view of it than you do.
	Well, the way I put it is there's inner significance, which is basically I am a significant, worthwhile person, which is only dependent on what I think of myself.
	Then there's outer significance, which is, you know, my significance totally depends on what other people think of me.
	Two separate things.
	The ultimate, though, is inner significance that is independent of what other people think of me.
	So people who are very dependent on outer significance because they have almost no inner significance will behave crazy, even though they're not.
	It's a result of very low inner significance, is the way it is.
	I appreciate the argument.
	I think it's a very good one. I would maybe tweak it a little and say that it's love.
	If you have genuinely been loved in your life, there's an old saying, Paul Newman, for those of you who are younger, I think you're old enough to get it, but Paul Newman was a very talented actor and a very charismatic fellow and extraordinarily good-looking and with his piercing blue eyes.
	In fact, he was genuinely frustrated because he'd worked very hard at being a good actor and then people would just comment about how beautiful his eyes were and he's like, but I just put in all this work to do this great acting and Anyway, he was married to a woman named Joanne Woodward, and there was never any hint of infidelity.
	He was never caught with any other women and so on.
	And an interviewer said to him, well, you know, gosh, you're a rich, famous, fantastic-looking, talented guy.
	How come you've never had a whiff of scandal with regards to your marriage?
	He's like, well, why on earth would I go out for hamburger when I have steak at home?
	So... His wife was of such high quality that he wasn't tempted with promiscuity.
	Now, why would somebody want power over others?
	Why would somebody want to be envied and feared and slot themselves into this hierarchy of control and subjugation?
	I think it's because They have not been loved.
	When they say love is the cure, it kind of is.
	Because once you've been loved, genuinely loved for who you are, you haven't manipulated anyone, you genuinely present yourself as who you are, and someone really loves you and you really love that person back, the temptation for power over others, this doesn't arise.
	It doesn't arise in your mind.
	Because you know that if you want power over others, that's not...
	Like, if you want to have coercive power over others and control them and you have to lie to them and bully them and frighten them and threaten them, you know that that's a horrible action that's going to make any sane, moral person not love you.
	In fact, they will probably hate and fear you.
	So if you know for sure that your glorious experience of being loved is going to be utterly shattered by the pursuit of power...
	Why on earth would you want power?
	I mean, the opposite of power is love.
	To be loved for your virtues.
	Because power scrubs you of your virtues and replaces them with vices and horrible things in your heart.
	And so, if you're genuinely loved, and I say this because, of course, I went through most of my life not being loved, and then I experienced genuine love.
	And it...
	A lot of my early writing, a lot of my early struggles was trying to figure out how to use my gifts to better humanity, and I was very tempted by power.
	My very first novel, Revolutions, was all about that, being tempted by power.
	But once you get love, the idea that you would then trade in that love for mere power over others, it's incomprehensible.
	Like, absolutely, it's like, would you want to saw off your healthy leg and replace it I would say that the people who want power are doing so because they've completely given up on being loved.
	Or maybe they never have been loved, or maybe they've never even come close to the experience, or they've never seen anybody Who's in love?
	And of course, if you're in the circles of wanting to dominate and control and bully and threaten and all of that, you're just not going to see people genuinely in love in the same way you don't see virtuous people in hell itself.
	Like, you're not going to see people who are in love.
	There aren't going to be people in there who are going to love you.
	Everyone's just a bonobo trying to claw their way up to some other place and control someone else.
	So I think you're right about this, but I think the significance thing is probably closer to If someone genuinely loves you, then you're massively significant to that other person, and you have only been loved because you're significant enough for yourself to respect yourself by doing good works and believing true things.
	So, I mean, I think you're right. I would maybe shave it down a little instead of significance to say love, because I think that's closer, but again, it's your theory, so you're the final arbiter.
	Yeah, I can actually quite argue that significance is...
	Is more fundamental than love?
	I mean, I could go on and on, but all I can say is that I can argue that point.
	And although, if I could be dissuaded, then that would be fantastic too.
	But to me, what I'm thinking is that significance is fundamental in that when a little child is born, they need to feel significant.
	Because that is how, like, they need to know that they are externally significant to other people.
	So that means they know that they will survive in their feral mind.
	So if they feel loved, cuddled, hugged, picked up, and had eye contact, now that's love.
	But to the child's mind, that love is just a sign that they're significant to the outer group.
	And if they feel significant, Then they know they will not be abandoned.
	So they will be able to then start switching over to internal significance if they're relaxed, if they feel safe.
	Yeah, I mean, you have to matter.
	Right. Like, you know, one of the reasons I just saw, I have a little smartwatch I got recently, and I just saw, like, last week I did almost nine hours of exercise.
	Like, okay, that's probably a little bit too much.
	It's probably a little excessive. But one of the reasons that I want to stay healthy is that, you know, I've I'm father to a 13-year-old girl.
	I'm husband to a wonderful wife.
	I have a great community of people in my life and a great community of friends online that we talk about philosophy with, and I think I'm doing some genuine and deep good in the world.
	Because I have significance, I take care of my body, I take care of my soul, I take care of my mind and try to do my good deeds and be brave without being foolhardy and so on.
	So, I feel that I matter.
	I know that I matter to people and I know that I matter to the world and therefore I want to take care of myself.
	And because the pursuit of power irradiates the soul, irradiates possibilities of virtue or being loved, if you don't feel important enough or valuable enough to yourself to take care of your soul, then you might as well pursue power because no one's going to love you anyway.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, power, to me, power is a form of external significance.
	Whereas we all want to be internally significant where it's generated from within us and it's completely independent of outside.
	But if that is stalled or way too low, then, for example, power is just a stand-in, but it's temporary.
	So when we wake up in the morning, Whatever amount of internal significance we have is always there when we wake up in the morning.
	It's like putting concrete down.
	But whatever remainder that we have of external, where we rely on external significance, that is something that's like RAM in a computer.
	It disappears every day and every morning we've got to get up and we have to build that up from scratch.
	So a highly disordered person Most of his day is going to be focused on gaining external significance.
	That's why I see that grandparents and grandchildren get along so well.
	They have this special relationship because a little child is desperate for significance.
	Not desperate, but it's in their feral lizard brains.
	They're really focused on that.
	A grandparent It has switched over to internal significance.
	So they don't need external significance.
	Their cup is full and all they want, their joy, is giving to others.
	That's why they get along so well.
	No, I think that's great.
	And I would also add that I think by significance, the people in your life who matter the most are the people that you can't give things to or take them away.
	So in politics, it's all about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.
	I can give you the subsidy.
	I can put a tariff on your political opponents or whatever it is.
	And so the people that are in your life, for the benefits you can provide them or the punishments you can inflict upon them.
	And you don't want to be in relationships of punishment and reward.
	You want to be in relationships where somebody takes a deep appreciation of you for who you are.
	And they're not being bribed or threatened to give you some sort of positive feedback.
	So the power to me seems like a very pitiful substitute for love.
	And this is one of the reasons why the separation of the sexes and the hostility that is being generated between potential love partners for life is producing a power lust.
	And you can see, of course, that a lot of the activists who are out there who are protesting this and protesting that, A lot of times, I mean, you can look at them and you can just see like this giant tragedy.
	There's this massive hole in their heart where love and virtue should be.
	That they exist in this state of panic and easily manipulated and hair-triggered and violent and destructive.
	And it's all so horrible.
	And it all just boils down to nobody wanted them.
	And nobody wants them. Nobody loves them.
	They haven't generated enough virtue to be rewarded with the involuntary response of love from the virtuous people around them.
	They probably don't have anybody virtuous around them.
	And this crying out, it's a toddler shaking the bars of the crib.
	This crying out, this vengeance, it's striking back against the universe that is inflicting such agony on them in their solitude and their Lack of self-regard.
	In fact, they're self-hatred.
	I mean, what kind of people are out there using violence to protect the right to kill the unborn?
	Well, I mean, if you have that relationship to the unborn, what was your infancy like?
	What was your own babyhood like?
	How were you taken care of and loved?
	Were you humanized by close and affectionate contact, by a Consistent caregiver.
	Well, no, I mean, of course not.
	Of course not. It's very tragic.
	All right. Any other last questions or comments before we shut it down for the night?
	And thank you, Mark. It's a great, great comment.
	Great, great, great insight.
	Raise your hand. I need to sniff your armpits.
	Okay, like an Aborigines armpit.
	All right, we have our good friend who starts with the Z.
	If you would like to unmute, I'm happy to hear.
	Hello?
	Yes, my friend, what's on your mind?
	Hi, Steph. I actually just wanted to comment a little bit on the religious conversation that was going on earlier.
	One aspect is that there are actually considered to be different levels of heaven and hell.
	Hell I knew. Yeah, hell I knew, and I don't think it's straight out.
	I think Dante was describing something, not inventing it.
	So the different levels of hell I completely understand.
	I wasn't sure about the different levels of heaven, so if you want to Explain those.
	I'd be happy to hear. Well, I mean, so I actually grew up in kind of an interesting situation where I'm from Iran originally.
	I'm sorry, it's called Persia.
	Have you not heard? Persia, my friend.
	I don't call it Persia for a specific reason.
	Because you are a prince on the run.
	Sorry, go ahead. No, it's because the Persians were like one group of Iranians.
	And they just happened to, you know, dominate all the others in the region.
	And then that was the Persian Empire.
	And I don't know that I'm necessarily of that ancestry.
	So that's why I call it Iran instead of Persia.
	But a lot of Iranians are, like, afraid to say they're from Iran.
	So that's why they say they're from Persia.
	Well, it's just sexier.
	That too, yeah. And it's funny because now I hear a lot of people from the Middle East that aren't from Iran saying they're Persian.
	No, I mean, Persian is sexy and you're wearing some diaphanous thing and Iran is just some guy chasing you with a stick because you danced accidentally on the street.
	Yeah. I don't know if you remember, there was a comedy skit a while back where it's like, There was like the Iran and it was a shoe and the Iraq.
	It was like, you know, kind of imitating one of those Steve Jobs.
	Anyways, but yeah, so, you know, most of my family is Muslim, like, or at least, you know, on paper, not necessarily in practice.
	My father is basically just a religious at this point.
	And my mother, she kind of like out of a I guess hatred of her childhood converted to Catholicism.
	I mean, she wouldn't say that, obviously, but I think that that was kind of like the driving force.
	Well, Jesus would say whatever road gets you to the truth, right?
	Yeah, I guess so.
	But yeah, so I got exposure to both religions, and it's actually really interesting how similar the two religions are.
	I mean, I know a lot of people know that they're both Abrahamic religions and whatever.
	Well, and a lot of people don't know that, of course, the Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet, right?
	A lot of people think that there's some massive opposition.
	But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, yeah.
	And actually, even, it's kind of funny, because one of the biggest points of contention is, like, whether Jesus is God's son.
	And, you know, after everything I've really, like, all the things I've studied and looked into, I've kind of realized that's more of a semantic argument than an actual, like, religious argument.
	Because Christians don't actually believe that You know, God whipped out a penis and, like, had sex with Mary.
	They just believe that, you know, she had this virgin birth and it was God that caused her to become pregnant.
	And, you know, Muslims, their issue with calling Jesus God's son is because it carries some implication that God participates in sexual intercourse.
	So, yeah.
	But, anyway, so, yeah, I know...
	I listened to, like, the entire Koran audiobook.
	There were moments where I fell asleep, admittedly, but...
	Yeah, so they do talk about how there's actually, like, different stages to heaven as well.
	And I've also heard Christians talk about, you know, how there's, like, positions in heaven where you're closer to God.
	So I just...
	Yeah, yeah.
	So there's like first class and coach and...
	Yeah, exactly.
	Pretty much. So, yeah.
	But... That was the main thing.
	I just, like, for some reason got the urge to share that.
	No, I appreciate that. Thank you.
	Thank you. Very interesting. All right.
	Well, I appreciate everyone's time tonight.
	Thank you so much for joining.
	And it was nice to be able to Stroll around a little while having the greatest conversation on the planet with you gorgeous, sexy Persians and others.
	Not of the Persian origin, so have a great evening.
	Please don't forget to help out the show if you could.
	I would hugely appreciate it.
	Oh, my friends, what a couple of years it's been.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	You can join the wonderful Locals community at freedomain.locals.com and I really, really appreciate everyone's time tonight.
	Love you guys so much. Thank you for Gracing me with your time and your thoughts and your conversation and your energy, it is a massive privilege which I never, ever take for granted.
	Have a super evening. Lots of love from up here.

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