Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Why I Messed with ATHEISTS! Twitter/X Space

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July 19, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:41:55

Why I Messed with ATHEISTS! Twitter/X Space

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	Good evening.
	Good evening.
	Welcome, everybody.
	18th of July, 2025.
	It's 7 p.m.
	And it's time for our regular chat and yap fest called Friday Night Live with Stéphane Molyneux.
	We are here to talk religion, atheism, philosophy, and whatever is on your gorgeous brains out there, the collective brain wave storm of the Free Domain Radio Listeners.
	And should we start off with some spice?
	Yeah, maybe.
	Maybe.
	All right.
	Onitsuka.
	Do you want to unmute?
	I'm all ears.
	I don't know why I had to scream that.
	It just feels that way.
	It lags a little bit when I'm made a speaker in one of these faces.
	So I have to like wait a second before I actually start hearing you.
	But thank you for having me on, Mr. Molydue.
	Before I ask a question, because I have a question about a tweet you made earlier this week.
	And you've been seeing the, I'm sure, the inspiration for a few of your spaces you've had this week.
	I just wanted to say, I wanted to thank you for all the work you've done.
	I've been a follower of yours for, you know, following your work, I should say, for years now, like ever since I was in middle school.
	And it was partly you who introduced me to atheism when I was an atheist.
	I'm no longer an atheist.
	I'm now a Christian, but I still have all of your work since being a Christian and very much appreciate all the work you do in philosophy and ethics and et cetera.
	So I just wanted to say that before I got to my question.
	I appreciate that, but go ahead.
	Yeah.
	So my question is about, you made a tweet say, ask me atheists, what reason do you have not to lie?
	And I had two questions following that is first is, do you still consider yourself an atheist?
	And if so, what is your reason or is your contention with this suite that there is no universal reason for atheists not to lie?
	Or simply, are you just showing that most atheists have never actually dealt with the question of universal principles and universal bans on certain behavior?
	Sure.
	I appreciate that.
	Do you mind?
	I hate to be rude because I know I nag other people for this, but I'm going to answer your question with a question, although I will promise to get to the answer.
	Have you ever been coached in a really challenging sport?
	Not a sport, but I did speech and debate in high school and was coached pretty early in that.
	Okay.
	Now, does a coach focus on your strengths or your weaknesses?
	Weaknesses, of course.
	Of course, right?
	So when I was being coached in tennis, I started playing tennis when I was, I don't know, five or six years old or something like that.
	And when I was being coached, I had some weakness in my backhand and I had some weakness in my serve.
	And my forehand was a cannon.
	It was great.
	And so, of course, the coach focused on my backhand and focused on my serve.
	Now, one of the concerns I have with the atheist community, just to sort of give you a little bit of the meta background of what it is that I'm doing here, one of the concerns I have with the atheist community is you got lazy, got soft, because they are hitting the Christians or the religious people where there is the greatest vulnerability, which is in the metaphysics, really, the nature of the existence of God and so on.
	So they're hitting where they have the strongest arguments and religious people have the weakest arguments.
	Now, I understand that.
	And what I've been trying to model to Christians and also to put out the challenge to atheists, because if all you do is play your strengths to other people's weaknesses, you get an inflated sense of your own ability.
	Right.
	So if I notice that someone's backhand is really bad and I just keep hammering it at their backhand and they have not figured out that my backhand is really bad, then I'll think I'm a better player than I am because the moment I come across somebody with a good backhand and they notice that my backhand is weak, I lose games like crazy, right?
	So sorry for the slightly labored analogy, but does that sort of make sense so far?
	No, in fact, that confirms kind of what my suspicion of what the impetus for the tweet really was, was kind of hitting atheists in their weaker area and trying to have a productive conversation about from the atheist worldview, what is really, you know, the view on lying as a general, as like a universally bad thing.
	Right.
	I'm being a good coach.
	So what I'm doing is I'm going to the atheists and I'm saying, I'm not going to serve to your strengths.
	I'm going to serve to your weakness.
	So you get better and you figure out some of the limitations of your own worldview and you stop dunking using, you know, Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and other people's arguments, you know, the Sky Daddy and unicorns and so on.
	And in fact, I would say I was really quite disappointed in the atheists as a whole.
	They seemed to be a little bit more intellectual when I was younger.
	It could, of course, be a filtering mechanism on X, but it really was universal.
	They just had terrible arguments, aggressive arguments and so on.
	And so allowing atheists for decades to hit the religious where the atheists are strongest and the religious are the weakest, you know, turnabout is fair play.
	And so to ask atheists for the reasons why they wouldn't lie is really interesting.
	And again, I'm not dodging your question.
	I know you're asking, am I an atheist and so on?
	So we'll get to that.
	I just want to sort of give you the backstory behind what it is that I was doing.
	So what is the most, and this is a real question for you, right?
	I don't want to just make this a pure monologue.
	So what is the most honest answer that an atheist could give as to why he shouldn't lie?
	Frankly, in my personal view, I don't think that there is a universal principle against lying.
	I think there are situations, and at least in atheist worldview, I think there are situations where you can say lying is obviously the wrong choice here, but I don't think like Christians, like Muslims, like Jews, that there is a metaphysical reason to just not lie.
	Right.
	So what is the most honest answer that an atheist could give to the question, why shouldn't you lie?
	I would say the most honest answer is that there isn't why.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	And if you had honesty, this is back to Socrates.
	Nobody, I mean, most atheists don't know about my secular proof of ethics, my rational proof of secular ethics, universally preferable behavior, which we'll get to in terms of my answer.
	But most atheists don't know that.
	In fact, most atheists virulently hate UPB.
	I've actually had much more hostility from atheists regarding UPB than I ever have from Christians.
	Christians find it fascinating that there can be a rational proof of the basic edicts of God's commandments.
	In the same way, in the sort of late medieval scholastic period, a lot of the people in the church were fascinated and, in fact, positive towards the argument that science could prove some of natural phenomenon in a way that they felt glorified God even more.
	If there's a mathematical perfection and beauty and symmetry and synchronicity to the universe, that's more evidence of God's plan.
	So they didn't hate physics or chemistry or biology or anything like that back in the day.
	So they had obviously some tangles with Darwin.
	But so I found that Christians did not view my rational proof of secular ethics, UPB, as anything negative.
	In fact, they viewed it as very positive.
	I had a lot of very interesting conversations and debates with Christians about UPB.
	Atheists, on the other hand, hostile to it because it limits the power of the state, which is their cultish adherence, right?
	Statistically, right?
	So I know that there's an answer as to why you should or shouldn't lie.
	Christians have an answer.
	And I understand, of course, the atheists disagree with that answer, but they have an answer.
	They have an answer.
	And atheists don't.
	They don't have an answer.
	And the most honest thing an atheist could do would be to say, I don't have a good answer for that.
	I mean, you'd have the self-reflection, hopefully, as an atheist.
	I don't know if it's like this sort of lack of inner voice.
	I posted earlier this morning about how atheists seem to be utterly lacking in the capacity for self-criticism.
	And self-criticism is related to an internal dialogue to internal criticisms.
	And of course, I posted shortly after I came back to X, which is the sort of big banger multi-million view tweet, which was, you know, 30 to 50% of people have no inner dialogue.
	They have no inner voices.
	And perhaps part of the power of Christianity in particular is you pray, you receive answers.
	Now, of course, if you're religious, you view those answers as coming from the universe, from God.
	If you're not religious, at least you're having a debate with yourself.
	What should I do?
	What would Jesus do?
	What's the right thing to do?
	And you have this argument with yourself.
	And that's a plus.
	So if you were an honest atheist, you would say, I don't have a good answer.
	Now, you'd have an impulse for an answer, right?
	And you'd say, well, it's good for me to not lie because people trust me.
	It's easy to do business.
	People like me.
	They believe me and so on.
	So there's an advantage to that.
	However, however, and I don't know if the atheist just grew up in like hyper-secure suburbs or something like that, but atheism doesn't have a very good mind map of human evil, right?
	Because if you say, I tell the truth because it benefits me, then the question is, if telling the truth is universally beneficial to all people, then why is there lying at all?
	Why is there lying?
	I mean, everybody knows.
	I mean, if you've had kids, right?
	And even if, you know, I've never punished my daughter and so on, but, you know, did you take this candy?
	No.
	Right?
	Who knocked over the lamp?
	He did.
	She did.
	Like, they don't.
	So lying is instinctive and innate, right?
	We're sort of born liars and we have to sort of grow out of it.
	Children generally lie and say they didn't do things or did do things, you know, but it's not, it's not true, right?
	So if lying is just universally beneficial to everyone, like breathing, well, we've evolved to breathe.
	So why did we evolve to lie if lying is not beneficial?
	That's a basic Darwinian question, right?
	Why would we evolve to lie?
	Now, of course, it only takes a moment's thought and not even that, really, just a life not spent staring at your own navel to look out into the world and say there are countless people who do very, very well in terms of money and power, prestige and so on by lying their asses off.
	I mean, particularly under the COVID regime, right?
	I mean, we saw all of this repeatedly.
	I mean, pharmaceutical companies made tens of billions of dollars, probably even more in the long run, by making claims about the vaccine that weren't even tested for and weren't particularly true, right?
	Or at least were highly deceptive, like this relative versus absolute risk thing that they pulled.
	So for, and of course, atheists know, since they believe that religion is false, they look across the world and they see all of these religions making, you know, trillions of dollars and having, you know, billions and billions of adherents and so on.
	And so for atheists to say there's no benefit to lying and looking at religion thinking it's false and seeing that religion is far more powerful than atheism is crazy, right?
	Like, I mean, that takes a level of dissociation and not looking at the world that's really wild.
	And of course, atheists Being into evolution, they would know that nature is equal parts, violence and deception, right?
	I mean, it's camouflage and hiding and laying your eggs in other birds' nests.
	And, you know, it's all just a bunch of deception and falsehood and lying and so on.
	You've got butterflies that look like angry cats when they open their wings.
	And you've got the tigers, they lean down and it looks like they're looking up.
	So they, you know, whatever.
	So an atheist would say, well, it can't be just a social benefit because if I say, if the principle is do that which benefits you materially, then lying benefits billions of people.
	In fact, the vast majority of mankind survives and flourishes off lying because telling the absolute truth is almost certain suicide in the world.
	I came close, not to suicide, but destruction.
	So that's part of the sort of self-talk that you would have before posting an answer.
	Like before I post an answer, somebody asks me a tough question.
	You've asked me a tough question.
	As you can see, I just filibuster.
	I'll get there.
	But I sit there and say, okay, does this answer make sense?
	Is there a counter-argument to it, right?
	So if you're going to say, well, I as an atheist tell the truth because that's what benefits me, then your principle is you should do what benefits you.
	Socially or materially or in some other manner, right?
	Okay, so politicians get great praise socially.
	They make huge amounts of money.
	You can look at, you know, everybody knows this massive disparity between the salary of $150,000 or $200,000 a year and their net worth of $10 or $20 million, you know, the famous sort of Pelosi trades and stuff like that, right?
	So massive amounts of social prestige, wealth, fame, success comes to people who lie their ass off.
	People who lie everyone into war, they make a lot of money.
	They get a lot of power.
	They expand their control over the domestic population, which they like.
	So if you're going to say, well, I lie based upon the principle that you should do that which is beneficial to you, well, liars benefit enormously.
	So that is not a reason to tell the truth, right?
	Because the principle isn't you have to tell the truth.
	Why do you have to tell the truth?
	Because you have to tell the truth.
	That would be tautological.
	So then, of course, atheists say, oh, I feel so bad when I lie.
	I just, I feel so wretched.
	I feel so bad when I lie.
	And I'm like, well, that's not a principle because some people really enjoy lying and they're good at being con men and they lie getting into politics and they are sadists or cruel people or have no conscience or whatever it is.
	They have no particular adherence to the truth and they get a huge amount of resources.
	I mean, you can think of sort of the really cheesy 1980s buffon-haired late-night television evangelists, you know, swaggered and so on and, you know, crying and thumping and speaking in tongues.
	And, you know, the donations are pouring in, right?
	The 700 Club, which was an old TV show.
	Jim Backer and his wife, mascara-bound Caterpillar Eyelash Tammy.
	It was called the 700 Club because of the first 700 people who lined up to donate to keep the show going at the very beginning.
	So they did very well and they made a lot of money.
	And, you know, were they adhering to most of the, or a good portion of what's in the Bible?
	I mean, certainly questionable, right?
	So there are tons of people who enjoy conning.
	They're very good at it.
	They remember everything, right?
	So saying, I don't like lying, that's just hedonism.
	Well, I shouldn't do something because I don't like it.
	Well, that's not an argument because some people don't like telling the truth.
	They prefer to lie.
	So again, this is not any kind of principle and it is just hedonism, right?
	Not doing something because you don't like it.
	If it's work, well, I don't want to get a job because I don't like working.
	Well, that would be somebody who's lazy, right?
	So that's not a principle at all.
	Other people are saying, well, you know, it's just too complicated to lie.
	You have to remember too many different things.
	You have to remember all these stories.
	It's like, okay, so you don't lie because you're incompetent at it.
	That's not a very good answer.
	I don't lie because I'm bad at it.
	It's terrible.
	Because then, of course, there are people who are, you know, fantastic, you know, absolute diamond encrusted, gold medal willing, gold medal winning Bill Clinton levels of falsehood skill.
	Amazing, right?
	Okay, so they should do it because they're really good at it.
	So I don't obviously go through all of the justifications, but of course, then they're saying, well, I mean, if you need somebody rewarding you or punishing you in order to have you tell the truth, you're not a good person.
	It's like, but they're looking at social benefits as a reward.
	And the punishment is they feel bad, but they don't lie.
	Sorry, they feel bad when they lie or they're bad at it.
	So they're incompetent.
	So it's awkward and uncomfortable.
	So they're looking, again, at rewards and punishments.
	So I was just curious if when I asked a question about telling the truth, whether atheists would tell the truth, which is to say, we don't have a theory of secular ethics yet.
	We don't.
	We don't like God's given ethics.
	We don't like the Ten Commandments.
	We don't believe in God.
	Fine.
	Okay, then your responsibility is, as I've mentioned for the last 20 years, is you have to create a system of secular ethics then.
	And they haven't, right?
	Atheism has been a strong force in society, arguably late 1950s.
	You could put it a little bit later, but two generations plus, you know, 70, 75 years, three quarters of a century.
	And of course, it's been talked about before then, but in terms of you could sort of 1957 onwards, if you want to look at Atlas Schruck or something like that, a real case for atheism.
	So the atheists should say, we don't have a theory of ethics yet.
	We don't have a, I mean, you can't just talk about evolution because evolution is amoral.
	And you can't say, well, you know, you've got to tell the truth within the clan that's trying to lie outside the clan as some religions have it.
	Well, no, because you create social coherence or cohesion within the clan by lying to each other about your noble mission and a God favors you and all this sort of nonsense, right?
	So the honest answer to atheists who are asked a question about whether you should tell the truth is, or why you should tell the truth, is like, we don't actually have a good reason.
	You know, it's something we should really work on, but it would be honest to say we don't have an answer.
	Now, that would then perhaps lead them to UPB or something like that, but they don't have an answer.
	So, the fascinating thing for me, this is sort of the meta experiment that I was running, is my theory was, my genuine theory was, if I ask atheists why they don't lie, they will lie their asses off as a result.
	Because they can't admit fault.
	They can't self-criticize.
	They cannot self-criticize.
	This was constant.
	I honestly cannot remember a single time of thousands and thousands of posts that went under this tweet where an atheist was like, you know, this is a problem with the movement.
	Like I literally posted the atheists are the most rabid group against free speech.
	Christians are very pro-free speech.
	Atheists are more than twice as likely to be anti-free speech.
	That's pretty important.
	That's pretty important.
	Not one person said, ooh, that is kind of troubling.
	Ooh, that is kind of disturbing.
	80, 85% of atheists are hard leftists.
	I mean, by that, I say they support the current Democrat Party, which is hard left of the U.S., not even soft left, hard left.
	It's not the JFK party.
	It's now a real extremist semi-communist party.
	And that's totalitarian.
	You know, 90 plus percent of atheists are pro-abortion.
	90% plus atheists are, you know, have swallowed the whole catastrophic anthropogenic global warming stuff, despite the fact that it's been 50 years and not one of their predictions has come true.
	And everyone knows that computer models are not the same as science.
	It's like saying that a video game is physics.
	No, it's just a programmed thing.
	And you can sort of go down the list.
	Pro-statist.
	And of course, the biggest shameful stuff that happened over COVID was atheist support.
	90% of atheists took the vaccine, as opposed to 57% of white evangelical Christians.
	And by supporting the Democrat Party so rapidly, atheists in America were also, of course, supporting, not even indirectly, but supporting the fact that, man, it's brutal.
	Half of Democrats wanted internment camps for the unvaccinated.
	A third of them wanted to take kids away from parents regarding vaccination thing.
	Half of Democrats wanted people fined or imprisoned for even questioning the efficacy of the vaccs.
	And these are the absolute totalitarians that atheists have thrown their weight behind, have thrown their intellectual vigor, rigor, and power behind.
	Now, I posted all of this repeatedly on that thread.
	Just curious.
	Because if I was part of a group that allied itself so overwhelmingly, like 90% is a 0.9 correlation.
	You never get that in the social sciences.
	You never get that.
	I mean, you get maybe a 0.6 with IQ and life outcomes.
	Like it's really, it's almost impossible to get a 0.9 correlation between atheism and hard left or atheism and big government policies.
	So it's functionally all.
	It's functionally all.
	Because other people may not support the Democrat Party because they're atheists, because they're communists or something or something more extreme.
	Right?
	So it's functionally all atheists.
	If you've got a 0.9 correlation, that's functionally all.
	So when I kept posting, and I kept posting very deliberately, very clearly, I kept posting all of these absolutely appalling and horrible stats, curious and wondering to see if it gave atheists any pause at all.
	Any pause at all.
	Now, these are atheists who follow me.
	So they certainly, I don't support these things that I was talking about.
	I was very anti-lockdown and so on.
	So you've got atheists who follow me or have heard about me.
	So this is the most liberty, property rights, non-aggression principle group of atheists you're going to find.
	And it didn't slow them down a bit.
	They didn't even notice.
	They didn't comment.
	They just went right back to, well, Christians are bad.
	It's like, it's not the point, man.
	If I ask you to answer a question, saying someone else's answer didn't correctly doesn't answer the question.
	It's a total dodge.
	And it was, frankly, you know, it's funny because in an abstract sense, I knew all of this, this complete lack of capacity for self-criticism, this knee-jerk response to just lie your ass off and pretend you're telling the truth and lying to yourself, right?
	And I kind of knew this in an abstract sense because I did hand this great gift to atheism 20 years ago, which was a rational proof of secular ethics, which has stood the test of time and all debates and all formats.
	And it is as robust a theory as you're ever going to get in the realm of philosophy.
	And they hated it.
	And so I kind of knew all of this.
	And I know this soft underbelly of atheism, which is fundamentally the same as Satanism, which is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
	I am the judge.
	I am the arbiter of what is right and wrong.
	I'm going to do what I want.
	And, you know, F you, if you try and hold me to some exterior standard, I'm going to do what benefits me, whether it's social approval, whether it's cheaper business relationships.
	I'm going to do what I like, which is to tell the truth, because if I don't tell the truth, I feel bad.
	And of course, I knew that was a lie because all the atheists who were saying they know why they shouldn't lie were lying.
	I mean, that's the beautiful wrapped-in-a-bow meta-narrative of what I was up to for the last couple of days, is I wanted to ask the atheists, why shouldn't you lie, knowing that they were going to come right in and lie?
	And they did.
	And if you lie, you can't progress, right?
	If you lie, you cannot progress because you actually are doing the opposite of the truth.
	And the pivot to the attack upon Christianity was a way of covering up those lies.
	Of course, and, you know, I mean, they're much more likely to criticize Christianity than, say, Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or something Else, right?
	So that was really fascinating to have my sort of abstract theories about how atheists were going to respond.
	And it's kind of cool being back on X because I have access to a much wider and larger group of people, right?
	So on the other platforms, I was that, it was like a jazz club.
	I mean, small, intimate.
	I really enjoyed those years talking.
	And we still do that, like Sunday mornings at 11 a.m.
	We're still doing subscriber-only conversations.
	So I'm not going to say it was a trap because it's an open question.
	Why should you not lie?
	And every atheist who came in lied, claimed to have knowledge they didn't have, which meant they had faith in a truth they did not have.
	They pretended a knowledge they did not possess and resisted all attempts to correct them.
	In other words, they criticize the Christians or other religious groups for claiming to know something that they don't know.
	The existence of God, the divinity of Jesus, and so on, right?
	And the atheists say, how dare you?
	How dare you pretend to have a knowledge you don't have?
	Oh, sorry, one sec.
	I got to go talk to staff and pretend I have a knowledge about secular ethics that I don't have.
	See this mirror image, right?
	So yes, I remain a strong atheist.
	I've talked about this with Dr. Murphy in a show we did.
	We recorded it last week.
	It just came out this week.
	So, I mean, because I can't overturn the arguments against the existence of God.
	I remain a strong atheist.
	And although, as I mentioned with Dr. Murphy, I am going to church.
	I have done a whole series on Bible verses.
	And some of the best people in my life.
	Yeah, I think some of the best.
	I can't think of, I mean, the best people in my life tend to be Christians.
	I mean, and obviously philosophers and philosophy people and so on, right?
	So, yeah, because that's not up to me.
	It's not up to me.
	It is up to reason and evidence.
	And again, I'm opening my heart to the evidence.
	We'll see what happens.
	But yeah, I remain a strong atheist, of course.
	I mean, I can't overturn that.
	But my goal, of course, was to shake the complacency and vanity.
	Because if all you do is compare your imaginary, pure, idealistic, scientific, and rational syllogisms and thoughts to what is, of course, at its essence, a faith-based mission like religion, then you're going to feel like you're in the right and they're in the wrong.
	And I understand.
	But if that's all, if that's the only place you stay, if you never get somebody serving to your soft spot, you never grow.
	And it really was fascinating.
	Honestly, I'm telling you, this is going to be studied for centuries.
	Like this tweet and its response, I was very conscious of this when I write every response.
	It's going to be poured over for centuries.
	I'm not kidding about that.
	I mean, I know most people won't believe me.
	It doesn't matter.
	I've got 20 years in the history of philosophy.
	I know how this stuff works.
	Yeah, it's going to be studied because to have all of these people attack others, like Christians, for claiming a knowledge they don't have, while themselves claiming a knowledge they don't have, for responding to a tweet, why tell the truth by lying and never admitting it, is just absolutely fascinating.
	It's fascinating stuff.
	And I really do thank all the atheists who came in.
	And I hope that the atheists get some humility.
	You know, so one of the things that's great about Christianity is the humility.
	And I hope that the atheists come in and recognize that they don't have good answers for ethics.
	They do not have good answers for universal ethics.
	Now, with regards to lying, and I'm so sorry, I've given an absolutely long speech.
	You've been waiting very patiently before I get to sort of my answer.
	Is there anything that you wanted to add to what it is that I'm saying or any comments you have?
	I did just have a comment because I think you kind of identified a lot of things that I think ended up pushing me to Christianity.
	I'll be honest with you and very upfront with you.
	I'm not equipped to have, you know, like or be convincing other atheists that they should also become Christians because fundamentally what ended up pushing me over the edge was something that is fully just an experience that I can't, you know, rationally prove or logically deduce.
	But I did notice myself this change and a lot of it actually came from interacting with your work and then the people that you would speak to.
	People like Dr. Murphy, who I actually need to watch your two's conversation that's in my backlog to watch, actually.
	Because I've followed both of you for quite a while now.
	But I have noticed that, you know, as I became more right-wing, but still an atheist, that most atheists were left-wing.
	They supported things that were, to me, very inhumane, evil, just anti-civilization and anti-Western civilization, which I came to have a great appreciation for.
	And noticed that really Christianity provided a lot of good benefits to society that even though I could not personally believe in Christianity at that time, I acknowledged that it provided a lot of benefits.
	It was instrumental in making Western civilization what it is today.
	And I think that ultimately, I think that's why you see fewer kind of right-wing atheists.
	I think most of them have either also become Christian from people in that era or just don't talk about the topic anymore because it's not advantageous.
	Because all it's going to attract is left-wingers who then are going to be mad at them for saying, you know, I don't think we should import the entire third world into our country.
	And then that's Another thing I've noticed about a lot of atheists, because they have this left-wing view, they're very naive about nature, about ethics, about society as a whole.
	And that's why they think it's a satisfying answer to say, well, I don't like lying.
	So therefore, lying is bad.
	Because they truly are.
	Most of them are just hedonists.
	Well, it's a luxury belief that comes out of a kind of security where you're not facing evil on any kind of continual basis.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, I was just going to say, I think the greatest proof of this is in how they justify homosexual behavior often.
	They say, well, we can see animals displaying homosexual behavior.
	Therefore, homosexuality is good because it's in nature.
	And everything in nature is, of course, natural and good.
	And they often make these appeals that nature itself is good.
	Well, and I'm sorry, just my perspective on this is that homosexuality does not violate the non-aggression principle.
	So assuming it's adult and consensual.
	But here's the thing, too.
	So if they say nature is good, animals are deceptive in nature all the time.
	So if nature is good and animals operate on deception, right?
	They creep up on each other, they jump, they camouflage, they pretend to be other kinds of animals and so on, right?
	So if nature operates on deception and nature is good, then why wouldn't atheists operate on deception as well?
	But they said we have a separate standard from nature in some areas, but not others.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, no, I was actually going to bring that up in that since we both know from evolution that deceptive behavior is actually good evolutionary.
	It's a thing that many animals have evolved to be good.
	That's stealing.
	Stealing.
	And stealing is fantastic in nature.
	If you can steal, like if some other creature produces the egg and then you can steal the egg, that's fantastic.
	If you can, you know, if you're a hummer crab and you can steal the best shell, even fight someone.
	So if you can rip another animal off, it's fantastic.
	Theft is the easiest way to get resources.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Sorry, think of jackals, right?
	They don't have to hunt in the same way that lions do.
	So lions do the hunting and the jackets pick up the remains.
	But go on.
	Yes, no.
	And I certainly think that's like further of this, that fundamentally they're operating by a hedonist worldview and a perspective that certainly appeals to natural, what is natural.
	Right, right.
	Okay, so I appreciate those thoughts.
	And my answer, and this is in my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics of FreedomBank.com slash books.
	So the question is, can lying be universally preferable behavior?
	So if we were to say lying, you put it through the machinery, right?
	You put it through the algorithm.
	It's a pretty simple algorithm.
	Can it be universalized?
	And if you try to universalize it, is it self-contradictory?
	So can lying be universally preferable behavior?
	If you say lying is universally preferable behavior, what happens is you're saying everybody should want to lie and be lied to at the same time.
	Everybody should want to lie and be lied to at the same time.
	But if you want to be lied to, it's not a lie.
	You know, you go see a movie, like I went to go and see Superman, and I know it's not real.
	I know it's all fake.
	I know it's CGI.
	I know that's not really Superman.
	I know that's not really Lex Luther.
	I mean, I know that they're not fighting, you know, giant gremlins in New York and Metropolis or whatever.
	I know.
	So they're lying to me, but it's not like, it's called the suspension of disparity.
	I want to be lied to.
	In fact, if they don't lie to me, well, I might jump out of the movie theater early and get my money back.
	So if you want to be lied to, you know, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.
	If you want to be lied to, then it's not a lie.
	So lying cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	Now I say, not lying, can that be universally preferable behavior?
	Is it possible for everyone to not lie at the same time?
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	Does it pass the coma test?
	Somebody who is in a coma, they're not lying, right?
	So not lying can be universally preferable behavior.
	And then the only question is, is it UPB or is it what called APA?
	So UPB is universally preferable behavior.
	APA is aesthetically preferable actions.
	Aesthetically preferable actions are things that are good and universalizable, but not enforced through violence.
	So if somebody assaults you, they're imposing the idea that assault is good on you by force.
	If somebody lies to you, they're not forcing you.
	It's like being late.
	It's like being rude.
	Again, assuming this is not a contract situation where they're stealing from you through contracts or anything, just, you know, social lies or whatever, right?
	So if somebody's continually late, they're not using force against you.
	So being on time can be universalized, but it's not enforced through violence.
	And therefore, you don't have the right to defend yourself against it through violence.
	If somebody's going to assault you or murder you or rape you or whatever it is, then they're violently imposing that principle on you and you have the right to violently defend yourself.
	That's universally preferable behavior.
	Lying, you know, if somebody says, oh, I caught a fish two feet long and it was in fact only 18 inches long, do you get to like take out your blunderbuss and shoot them?
	Of course not, right?
	I mean, you may not like it.
	It may be sort of negative for you or you may just be like, oh, all fishermen exaggerate and so on.
	Or like a man's height, a man adds an inch or two to every estimate.
	But it's not enforced on you by force.
	So lying is aesthetically negative behavior.
	And therefore, it's a good thing to not do because it can't be universalized.
	Telling the truth, telling the truth can't be universally preferable behavior either because it can't be, it doesn't pass the coma test.
	People who are asleep aren't telling the truth and so on.
	So just not lying, like respecting property rights, a negative action.
	Don't rape, don't assault, don't murder, don't steal, right?
	These are all negative things.
	And so somebody who's asleep, somebody who's in a coma, is not doing those things.
	So it's not, they're not doing evil.
	So you can't say telling the truth is universally preferable behavior Because that can't be universalized.
	You can't tell all the truth of everything at all times.
	Everyone can't be both telling and listening to the truth at the same time because you can't talk and listen as well.
	So it can't be universalized.
	But not lying can be universalized.
	So that's my answer, if that makes sense.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	I'm not sure if he's still with us or not.
	If we lost him.
	But.
	All right.
	We did lose someone.
	All right.
	Eric, behalf of B or B, the man with the vaupal sword.
	What's on your mind, my friend?
	I know there's a bit of a delay, so I'll bam for a second until you burst your syllables into my eardrums.
	What's on your mind?
	Going what?
	All right.
	Eric is not with us.
	Oh my gosh, we'd run out of people too.
	I've answered everything so perfectly.
	Look at that.
	40 minutes into the show.
	It's been perfect.
	Sheer perfection.
	I don't know if Eric's going to come back or not.
	But yeah, if you have questions or comments, criticisms, whatever is on your mind, I'm obviously thrilled and happy to hear about it.
	Oh, and by the by, freedomain.com slash donate.
	If you would like to help out the show, freedomain.com slash donate, I would appreciate that.
	All right, we've got some people.
	Oh my gosh, this interface is driving me mad.
	Try light.
	What's on your mind, my friend?
	Unmute or forever hold your peace.
	Hey, Stefan.
	Hello.
	Yeah, so first of all, I want to thank you for the discourse that you've stirred up for the past few days.
	It's got me thinking about morality in a way that I really never have.
	So thank you for that.
	My question is, it's sort of a moral quandary that's popping up on the right.
	I've heard people that I respect, like Mike Cernovich and Tim Poole, espouse this idea that you should only, or I guess you're not morally obligated to defend free speech of someone who would not defend your free speech.
	And I'm kind of curious where you would fall.
	So you're not morally obligated.
	So I'm going to put this through the UPB algorithm.
	So is it possible to defend free speech as a principle?
	So the moral principle is defend free speech.
	Okay.
	Can it be universalized?
	Is it possible for everyone at all times to defend free speech?
	No.
	Because then nobody's giving speeches.
	There's no actual free speech to defend, really, right?
	And so it's not possible to universalize.
	Is it a positive to defend free speech?
	I think so.
	I think, yeah, certainly it would be a positive.
	It would be aesthetically preferable in the same way, like it would be polite, being on time, being diplomatic, and so on.
	So I think it's a good thing.
	Now, the big question, and this is a huge challenge between the left and the right, is that the right has empathy and the left has attack.
	And this is not just my theory.
	This is actually fairly well studied.
	So the people who are on the right, if they're asked to describe the leftist mindset and what people on the left believe, they can do a pretty good job.
	They can even steel man the left's case.
	People on the left, in general, can't do that.
	If you don't agree with someone on the left, you're a white supremacist, Nazi, bigot, racist, homophobe, whatever it is, right?
	Like that all they have in general is attack.
	And of course, you saw that in my conversations with the atheists who would very much be on the left, that when I disagreed with them or pushed back, all they had was escalations and verbal abuse and attacking Christians.
	Like they didn't have a theory of mind that they could be wrong, which is kind of like, in my view, obviously, just as an amateur, it's kind of narcissistic, right?
	To have a worldview that you can't be wrong, right?
	So when it comes to, and I don't want to speak obviously for Tim Poole or Mike Sunovich, but I would imagine that the argument goes something like this.
	The left can't empathize, so the only way they're going to change is if they suffer.
	And, you know, if people won't listen to reason and they don't have empathy, the only way they change is suffering.
	Now, you don't want to inflict that suffering.
	You don't want to go and, you know, punch them in the head or anything like that.
	But why would you come between someone and their suffering if suffering is the only way they're going to learn?
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	So, yeah, I mean, and this is just, it's a huge problem.
	And I generally associate people who cannot steel man somebody else's argument.
	I assume that they do that.
	They can't do that because they have no inner dialogue, right?
	If you don't wake up at least a couple of times during the week, and of course, you know, when I'm facing this tsunami of steph, you're wrong, you're a jerk, you're this, you're that, you're, you know, when I'm facing that, you know, I'll be honest with you, every now and then I'm like, am I wrong?
	What if I'm the bad guy?
	Am I wrong?
	And it's important to do that because that's how you course correct.
	Like if you're driving down the street before the age of GPS and I, oh, did I, I feel like I've been driving.
	It said 10 minutes.
	I think it's been 15 minutes.
	Like if you just, you know, off the edge of the world, right?
	You just drive into the ocean and go underwater, right?
	So people who can question whether they're in the right are the ones most likely to be in the right.
	And people who can't question whether they're in the right and can only attack people who question them, sadly, you know, how do we learn?
	We learn through reason.
	We learn through experience.
	We learn through self-reflection or we learn through pain.
	And if, I don't know if you've ever watched, I think this is an important show for people to watch.
	And I really don't recommend shows much other than Brunotus, which is great, and the new, the Battlesagalactica, but not the old one, the middle.
	But there's a really important show called Intervention.
	And in Intervention, the general premise of the show is somebody's got a horrible addiction.
	And usually it's drugs or alcohol, could be other things, could be gambling, but somebody has a horrible addiction.
	They've tried everything.
	The person won't change.
	So the purpose is, and this is a real thing in what goes on in sort of psychosocial situations, is that they invite the person over and then all their friends and family are there.
	Oh man, what are you doing?
	What are you doing?
	Oh, there's some kind of intervention, isn't it?
	Well, F that, I'm outright.
	And they have a moderator there, like usually a psychologist or social worker or somebody who knows about these things.
	And everyone goes and says, here's how your addiction is negatively affecting me.
	And then they say, if you don't go and get help, we're cutting you off.
	Like you are, I would say dead twist is a bit of a dramatic phrase, but if you don't go and get the help that you need, then we are not going to have anything to do with you going forward.
	You're out, whether it's family or not, right?
	Difu, I guess it would be if it's a parent.
	So this show is really, really important because they've tried everything to get the person to go into rehab or to deal with their issues or their problems.
	They've tried everything.
	And it's not working.
	And so they eventually say, look, you either learn because your entire social circle, your family circle is going to disappear or you're going to die.
	Because if you have another OD or whatever it is, you're going to die.
	Or if it's gambling addict, you know, if you can't pay off the mafia, he's going to end up, you know, sleeping with the fishes, so to speak.
	So these are people who are saying, we're going to apply negative stimuli to you until you change.
	Now, we're not going to beat you up, but we are going to withdraw.
	We're going to withdraw social support from you until you learn.
	And it's a really, really important thing because if you've not dealt with addicts, I mean, again, I don't, I think the atheists are the intransigent ones with no inner dialogue, at least based upon the conversations.
	It's a pretty big data set.
	Thousands and like it did.
	The tweet did like almost 7 million views and had thousands and thousands and thousands of responses.
	It's a pretty good sample set.
	And so I think with regards to the free speech issue, if people who have shut down, deplatformed, attacked, phoned in bomb threats, if they haven't learned the errors of their ways, if they're addicted to this mindset of use violence to get what you want, use deception and fraud and bullying and threats to get what you want.
	I don't, when people have done evil, I will obviously try to counsel them.
	If they don't listen, which they're perfectly free to not do, if they don't listen, then I don't step between them and their evils anymore.
	Like, I don't step between them and the consequences of their actions, right?
	So it's the old thing that if you say to someone, you should quit drinking, you're going to lose everything.
	And then they don't listen to you and they call you a jerk and attack you and try and get you fired and so on.
	Then if they end up living in their car, it's like, well, that's a shame.
	I don't mean to get all Seinfeld.
	Well, that's a shame.
	And it's a shame.
	But I don't care because I'm not going to put that person up.
	I do this, turn the other cheek, be the other, be the bigger person.
	To me, I'm not saying that the turn the other cheek is useful.
	If someone hits you, you want to make sure it's not an accident or a mistake or whatever.
	So you turn them the other cheek.
	If they hit you again, eye for an eye, right?
	But the be the bigger person and save people from the consequences of their own unrelenting evildoing, that's just propaganda from bad people so they can continue to get resources after they've called you an asshole.
	So that's my thought on it, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	Thanks.
	I'll ruminate on that.
	It obviously kind of pulls at my, oh, you know, defend free speech no matter what kind of heartstrings.
	But I think your answer makes a lot of sense.
	So thanks for the time.
	I appreciate that.
	I'm sorry, just before you go, have you ever had someone in your life that just wouldn't listen to reason and wouldn't do the right thing?
	Yes, absolutely.
	I actually dealt with addiction in my life, my brother, but he's actually come around.
	It took a long time, but definitely has seen that.
	I obviously don't speak about anything you're not comfortable with, but just out of curiosity, do you know what it was that brought him around?
	It was God, actually.
	Oh.
	And you know what?
	If people get off life-destroying addictions through faith, I can't say anything against that in a million years.
	I can't say anything.
	So please congratulate him for me if that helps.
	And I really appreciate your time today.
	Thank you so much.
	All right.
	Azrik.
	a sorry it looks like you You're going to keyboard on the forehead on the keyboard name.
	If you want to unmute, my friend, I'm all ears.
	What's on your mind?
	Hey, Stefan.
	Not an atheist by any stretch, but I did find your post interesting.
	But one thing I do have particular umbrage with is this idea that Christianity is kind of like the basis of our morality and civilization.
	And I think it runs contrary to the things that you've been advocating for years, such as, you know, personal property, private property, that's banned in Acts 4 and Acts 5.
	They would kill people.
	I'm sorry, you got to slow down.
	That's banned in Acts 4 and Acts 5.
	Can you tell me more?
	Private property is banned and tell me more about what you mean.
	They were to sell all of their possessions.
	They weren't supposed to own everything.
	Everything was supposed to be.
	No, no, it wasn't banned.
	No, no, no.
	No, no, no.
	Jesus said, all who would follow me, sell all of your possessions, give all your money to the poor.
	But he didn't ban private property like it should be illegal.
	That's in the Gospels.
	I'm talking about Acts.
	Acts of X. You've got Acts.
	Okay, go ahead.
	So he said that the government should ban people from owning private property and throw them in jail if they exercised any kind of property rights.
	The early church, yes.
	And specifically.
	I don't believe you for a moment.
	I don't.
	No.
	Sorry.
	I don't believe it.
	I don't.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm not saying you're wrong.
	I'm just a statement of personal incredulity.
	I don't believe.
	And again, I'm not an expert on this by any means, but I can't for the life of me imagine that the church said anybody who owns private property should be thrown in jail.
	And the reason I say that is my ancestors from 1066 onwards, we Came over as military leaders and knights in the Norman Conquests, Battle of Hastings, 1066, and we were rewarded with lands in Ireland, which we kept for almost a thousand years, 900 years.
	And then it all went south because we had an addict in the family.
	But anyway, probably for the best.
	But I can't imagine that the church said that the king should arrest all of the nobles for exercising private property rights over their lands.
	And also the king should be thrown in jail by who I don't know exactly because he exercised private property rights over his kingdom.
	So I just can't see how that could possibly have been advocated for by the church, because if they got any traction with that, they would have been run out of the country at best.
	I definitely feel that.
	And certainly, you know, when you're talking about medieval Europe and things of this nature, there was not biblical behavior, right?
	Dueling culture, right?
	That's taught nowhere in the Bible.
	That's a pre-Christian holdover that moved into the Christian times.
	But specifically, you know, Acts chapter 4 and Acts chapter 5, it goes into great detail.
	I would recommend that you look into that.
	So are you saying that the early church wanted to ban all private property, which is a later argument of communism?
	Correct.
	And I would say that that's probably where Marx got it from.
	All right.
	I mean, I know that Marx's family, I think his father was Lutheran, but there's Jewish background there as well.
	So, okay.
	So that's not coming from Jesus or God directly, is it?
	It's coming from the early church.
	And if you know Acts of the Apostles, this is after Pentecost.
	So this is after when they're filled with the Holy Spirit and start moving as the church.
	Okay.
	So is it something that you believe is a valid moral precept that private property should be banned?
	No, I think that that's communism.
	I think that it's silly as William Bradford...
	Yeah, as William Bradford, you know, he wrote on Plymouth, you know, that people tried this, you know, and they nearly starved to death.
	Oh, yeah.
	So for those who don't know, and I did a whole show on this, I'll just keep it very brief.
	When a lot of the pilgrims came to America, they tried a whole socialist, no one owned anything, and they almost died to a man and woman.
	And then they finally had to resurrect private property, and then they began to flourish.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah.
	And so, you know, here's kind of where I take umbrage is so that's one example that I can give, but our civilization, you know, is not based upon Judaism, not based upon the Bible.
	It's based upon our people, right?
	I mean, we had civilization long before Christianity.
	And so this idea to try to tie the two together, you know, I just think that it's a little silly.
	I mean, a little silly is not really much of an argument, right?
	So, well, when you say the people, so where did we get, let's say, I don't know, pick a country in Europe.
	Is that what you're talking about?
	Like the UK, right?
	Let's talk about England, right?
	So if England didn't have significant, obviously, you would accept that there's significant influence from Christianity, right?
	I would say that there were some, sure.
	But as Thomas Jefferson writes, the Angles and the Anglo-Saxons had common law before Christianity.
	They had laws.
	They had morals.
	They had.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	I get that.
	But Christianity took over, right?
	Christianity did take over.
	It was a foreign occupation.
	Yes.
	Sure.
	But I mean, everything's a foreign occupation to the locals when the next blue-haired tribe comes over the horizon, right?
	Everyone gets occupied.
	Everyone wins and loses battles.
	And the sort of surge of humanity throughout most of human history going back and forth across the lands is a pretty constant tide.
	So, okay, yes.
	So England was conquered, I guess, obviously by the Romans, by other people, then by the Romans.
	And through the conquering of the Romans, they got Christianity, which then stuck around after Rome fell in the sort of fifth or sixth century AD.
	And it maintained itself in the sort of 1500 years ever since, at least, you know, maybe 50 years going back, it really began to fall off.
	So it had a big influence.
	And of course, yeah, there was common law.
	Of course, for those of you who don't know, in Ireland, there were stateless societies, societies with no government.
	With very powerful and complex and very interesting sets of common law.
	And so is your issue that people say we get our morals from Christianity because you think it's false or you just don't like the Christianity one?
	Well, I think what I take particular umbrage with is that Christianity is the defining feature of our civilization.
	I don't think it is.
	And part of the reason for that, if you allow me just very briefly, there was lots of literature in Rome, Greece.
	If you go to LOEB classics, you know, you could look at all of the ancient literature and you could see that when Christianity took over at the Theodosian codes, right, literature drops off a cliff, right?
	So free speech, you know, something that you promote quite often, that gets banned.
	You know, speech gets heavily restricted.
	It's only through the church that speech is allowed to be done.
	And it was a period known as the Dark Ages, right, where there wasn't a lot of literature being produced.
	The plays weren't being done.
	Philosophy in large numbers wasn't being done.
	There's exceptions to the rule, of course.
	But then, you know, what ended up happening was we had something called the Renaissance, which is, You know, rebirth, right?
	And what happened during that time?
	We turned away from the church and looked to the civilizations of the past, such as Rome, Greece.
	I mean, after all, the United States is built upon, you know, the Roman model.
	And so, you know, the thing that I see is that Christianity is not the basis of our civilization.
	Certainly, it's a faith that a lot of people hold within the civilization, but it's not based upon Christianity.
	I mean, I'm sorry to be such a nitpicker, but based upon most people's current view of what morality is, is fundamentally Christian.
	So the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and altruism or self-sacrifice or working for the benefit of the common good.
	A lot of these things come out of Christianity and not actually specifically in Greek or Roman philosophies.
	Greek or Roman philosophies were very much, you know, be excellent in the pursuit of the good for yourself.
	And there was no universalism in either Greek or Roman philosophy as a whole.
	And we know that because of the prevalence of slavery and so on.
	So to me, I think the universalism of Christianity, which is fairly unique in religions in that you have moral obligations to everyone at all times, whether they're Christian or not, it's not insular.
	It's not inward looking that way.
	And so, or not relativistic that way.
	So to me, the rational empiricism of the Greek or Roman civilizations combined with the universalism of Christianity produced, I think, a lot of the science and so on of the modern world.
	And the church was not hostile, as you know, to the Greeks in particular.
	I mean, Aristotle was referred to as the philosopher.
	And of course, when the Greeks came back through the Saracens, through the Muslims, through the Arabs, the Greeks were kept during the Dark Ages.
	When they returned, then there was this combination of Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophies that produced, I think, really the foundations of the modern world.
	So I would agree that it's not exclusively Christian for sure.
	It's strongly influenced by, and I think that the empiricism and syllogisms and rationality, particularly the Aristotelian and the practical politics of the Roman era, combined with the universal morals of Christianity, produced, I think, most of the foundations of the modern world.
	So again, sorry, that's a real brief sprint through things, but I wouldn't, obviously, and I'm not saying you would say that we should eliminate Christianity in terms of its influence.
	That's not possible.
	My particular concern, and it is a very deep concern, just to obviously get very serious for a moment, a very deep concern is that the church is not sustaining.
	The church is not sustaining.
	Now, the idea that we could go back to pagan gods to me is not credible.
	And yeah, well, because it's not going to happen.
	We're not going to go back to Odin and Lothar and Loki.
	I mean, that's not going to happen, right?
	Because there's no movement that way.
	And in order for gods to be acceptable, people have to have vivid examples of those things in their lives.
	And it's not, I mean, I tell you what.
	I mean, if you were to, if you and I were to make a bet and, you know, you pay me a million dollars if there is not a flourishing worship of Odin in 20 years, or I pay you if there is, I would absolutely make that bet because I'd just be taking money.
	But so I don't view that.
	Maybe that's, I'm not going to argue about that.
	I'm not going to argue about that.
	Hang on.
	If that's your big project, honestly, I think it's a waste of time, but it's your life to spend however you see fit.
	It's not something I would do.
	But what I will say is that the church attendance is falling generation by generation, and the next generation is going to be extremely irreligious for the most part.
	Again, lots of pockets of faith and fundamentalism.
	But I think that certainly Christianity is not able to sustain itself.
	I think that the role of Christianity in mass migration has been quite a shock to people.
	And I think that the wokeness that has come into the church and the falling away of the more foundational principles of Christianity for the sake of pleasing what the women want to some degree as well.
	I think that's causing a lot of problems.
	So I don't think that there's a way to go back to Christianity being the foundation of the morals of the West, which is one of the reasons why, again, I work very hard to write and to promote my book on universal ethics from a rational secular standpoint.
	So I don't think we can go back to where we were, whether it's Christianity or some early religion.
	I don't think that we're going to go back to worshiping, you know, Hephaestus and Zeus and all of that.
	I don't think that's going to happen.
	So I think we just have to press on.
	And what has to be, the only thing that can replace it is either going to be a much more irrational mindset, whether it's on the left or something else, or we're going to throw a lot in with philosophy and try and reason our way forward.
	And I think that's the best answer.
	I'm not saying I'd put a lot of money on it, but I've certainly kind of bet my whole life on it.
	So hopefully that helps.
	Well, I really appreciate your comments and your thoughts.
	Very interesting.
	And I, you know, for those of you who don't know, the sort of history of these sorts of ideas was my education.
	All right.
	Psychonaut.
	Psychonaut.
	Uhuh.
	Monkey, psychonaut monkey, this is your time to shine.
	Expand your neurons into my ear hairs.
	But I cannot hear you.
	But I cannot hear you.
	Now you can because I just learned how to use this platform.
	So I'm trying to understand your position.
	Are you like an atheist that's like flirting with theism or like where are you coming from?
	Are you a theist now or what?
	Why does that matter to you?
	I mean, I'm happy to answer the question.
	I'm just curious why that matters.
	I'm wondering what your statement is In your last tweet, that you seem to say that there is no morality aside from God.
	Is that what you mean?
	Sorry, can you read the tweet?
	I'm not sure what you're referring to.
	Okay.
	The tweet about this whole chat.
	What?
	Or did you post multiple tweets?
	I have been tweeting.
	I've definitely been tweeting.
	I've definitely been tweeting.
	Let me look at my last tweet and see.
	It was about lying.
	Oh, yeah.
	What's the reason for not lying if there is no God or something like that?
	Right?
	See if I can find it.
	You do tweet a lot.
	I do.
	And it's funny, you know, because people are like, like, I'm carrying on multiple conversations with multiple people.
	And not everything applies to everyone, of course, right?
	And I know that there's subtweets and all of that, but...
	Thank you.
	Okay, so let's say that you got the, and of course, I do use some theological terms.
	I do use the word sin, which I think is not.
	Sin is just a grave moral evil or a grave moral crime.
	And so.
	I also want you to define evil, if you could.
	Okay, well, one step at a time.
	Why is it important to you with regards to my arguments, what my perspective is?
	Right?
	So if I'm saying to you, two and two make four, would you inquire as to my mindset?
	Or would you try to evaluate whether two and two make four?
	Well, if your mindset, if your mindset determines the answer, like your mindset.
	No, my mindset does not determine my answer because I post reason and evidence.
	So why would my mindset change my answer?
	I'm only asking about your answer.
	And I'm inquiring about your answer through your answer.
	Which answer?
	Which answer?
	All right.
	I'm going to have to look it up.
	See if I can do that without leaving the shit.
	Okay.
	You do that.
	Honestly, I will come back to you.
	Did you go find it?
	Oh, did you find it?
	It's right here.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	You said, what reason do atheists have not to lie?
	Right.
	And I said, that's a dumb question, essentially.
	Which is rude, right?
	Yeah, it is.
	It means kind of an asshole.
	I mean, you can't have an asshole with that, right?
	I mean, you're calling me dumb, right?
	Yeah, admittedly.
	And now I'm trying to honestly engage and not be rude.
	But why would you just call me dumb?
	I mean, this just seems kind of weird.
	Is it not a valid question to say that if you don't have a divine God commanding you for virtue, that you have to have some other reason for virtue?
	Well, why is that a dumb question?
	Can you honestly steal man like the other?
	Sorry, I'm pretty sure your ears work, man.
	Did you hear me ask you a question?
	This is so weird.
	I don't like what is happening in the world these days.
	I ask a question, people just don't fucking answer.
	Is it a dumb question?
	Since Christians get their moral commandments from God, if you don't believe in God, what is your basis for ethics?
	Why is that a dumb question?
	Is that based on the idea that God is a basis of reality?
	No, no.
	Why is that a dumb question?
	That's what I want to know.
	Don't answer me with another question.
	I'm asking you to answer a question.
	Why is it a dumb question to ask of atheists since the entire basis of human morality prior to atheism was that God commands virtue, God is all good, God commands virtue, God rewards and punishes you with heaven and hell respectively based upon your commitment to virtue, as is defined by the life and commandments of Jesus and the Ten Commandments and a bunch of other stuff.
	So if the entire history of human morality prior to relatively modern atheism is that morals come from divine commandments, if you don't believe in God, you don't have those divine commandments as the basis of your virtue.
	Therefore, what is the basis of your virtue?
	I'm still not sure why that's a dumb question.
	I'm happy to be schooled if I'm completely wrong and I am, in fact, dumb.
	I'm certainly happy.
	This could always be the case, but I'm still not sure why it's a dumb question.
	Thank you.
	I mean, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what you're saying.
	Maybe I was being too hasty when I said dumb question.
	No, no, no.
	You must know the topic.
	I already admitted that I'm still talking.
	I already talked.
	Okay, you're just going to steamroll.
	Okay, you're going to be steaming.
	No, I was talking.
	I'm not steamrolling.
	You're interrupting me.
	I was talking.
	So you know the topic well enough to call me dumb.
	Despite the fact that I studied this stuff at the graduate school level, despite the fact that I've been over 40 years in philosophy, despite the fact that I run the world's biggest philosophy show, the biggest philosophy show the world has ever seen, I'm asking a fundamental philosophical question, and you have the nerve to call me dumb.
	That's fine.
	So I'm asking what is dumb about the question and just try and answer the question.
	don't go off in some tangent.
	And we get silence.
	Yeah, that's kind of typical, right?
	So people come all kinds of tough.
	Ooh, they're all kinds of tough.
	It's a dumb question.
	It's like, oh, tell me why it's dumb.
	Well, what's your perspective?
	It's sad, man.
	People need some humility.
	Atlas, my friend, what's on your mind?
	Hey.
	Hello.
	Stevon, it's Atlas again.
	Hello.
	Hey, I was curious, are you able to do a, or do you have the numbers with you?
	Like, what is the demographic breakdown of the left and like what the composition is of the say these the feminists and then the beta male feminists that are just trying Like,
	uh they're just barely they're just trying to pass on their the beta male feminist or pretending kind of like that cuttlefish, pretending to be an ally to the females in order to basically sleep with them.
	I'm sure, but what do you mean by the demographics?
	Like uh kind of like there's like a demographic split between like the left is definitely dominated by women because uh sorry about unmarried women.
	Unmarried women.
	Yeah, you're right.
	And I was just curious if you if you happen to have like the demographic breakdown of like what it what is the left composed of I mean, I don't know obviously in any particular detail, but certainly unmarried women are overwhelmingly left.
	Atheists, of course, overwhelmingly left.
	You can look at the map, of course, of who votes, Democrat, and so on.
	So white males are mostly on the right.
	And that's why white males are demonized.
	And, you know, it's hard to get jobs.
	It's hard to found families.
	You know, it's all that.
	It's just a huge, huge issue.
	But in general, I sort of divide the world into the makers and the takers.
	And this is, you know, not specific to any particular group.
	This is just my way of talking about it or understanding it.
	There's the makers and the takers, the people who produce value and the people who take value.
	And in general, the people who take value are on the left and the people who make value as a whole are on the right.
	Now, the way that the takers take stuff is not through force because they're not particularly strong or particularly competent at this kind of stuff because, you know, force is risky.
	Manipulation is the name of the game, right?
	So, well, they need the force of the state.
	So what they do, I was actually just thinking about this today.
	It's good synchronicity, I hope.
	And we do have room for another caller if anybody wants to bring it in.
	But the way that it works is you say, if there is a difference in outcomes between particular groups in society, those groups that are coming up short will say that the only reason we're coming up short is because of, say, sexism, right?
	So if women get 75 cents or 80 cents on the dollar relative to men, then the women will say, the only reason for that is that men hate us.
	It's sexist.
	It's unjust.
	And therefore, you've got to take from the men and give to us because it's unfair and it's unjust and it's wrong and blah, blah, blah.
	Right.
	So that is, it's just a, and it only really works with the state, or I guess it could work with charity and so on.
	Or like single moms, they need a bunch of resources because they chose to have kids with the wrong man.
	And so and so they say, I'm sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say, it almost seems like the vulnerable woman, she's there for the resources.
	And the leftist atheist is there to try to be a predator on that woman.
	You know what I mean?
	In kind of a sleazy way.
	Like, so does that make sense?
	Like, there's no such thing as a real male feminist.
	Like all these, all these rape allegations come out towards all the, like the most, the, these men who, who proclaim the loudest to be a feminist ally inevitably turn out to be the, have the rape allegations fired towards them.
	You know, well, I mean, those are the ones, hang on, those, but those are the ones we hear about the most.
	I'm not saying it's entirely unrelated, but obviously, as you know, it's not the majority.
	I think Rolo Tomasi would refer to it as like the sneaky fucker strategy.
	He's a blunt guy.
	He's a blunt guy, for sure.
	So I don't know about the atheists.
	It's a good question.
	So the atheists, what is going on with them?
	Why they would be dominated by the atheist seems to be dominated by males, but the females are there for the resources to be extracted.
	Yeah.
	So sorry, I was just there.
	So the single moms, what they do, the way that they try to get resources is they say, it wasn't my fault.
	I'm a noble, brave, struggling single mother.
	I'm a helpless victim, damsel, innocent to the nth degree, betrayed by a perfidious, nasty, ugly, vicious man.
	There was no signs, you know, I'm crying.
	My kids are hungry.
	I've been abandoned.
	You know, all of this kind of stuff.
	You know, woe is me and so on.
	So they go rubber bones and then they play the victim as if women haven't evolved.
	Like we couldn't have developed the brains that we have if women did not have the ability to choose good providers.
	Like if we didn't evolve, if women didn't evolve with the instinct to be able to tell good men from bad men, we couldn't have evolved.
	Like the female instinct, women can't say, well, you've got to believe all women and trust all women.
	We've got these female instincts and it's like the intuition and so on.
	And it's like, you know, that means way too many single moms for that to be true.
	Yeah, I personally called, I called a woman out trying to say, you know, trying to believe, put her belief in female intuition.
	And I just asked her like, well, if female intuition is a thing, why are there so many failed relationships?
	Well, I think that female intuition is a thing, but it's at war with lust, right?
	So for women, sorry, for men, it's the hot crazy matrix, right?
	You know all of this stuff, so I'll just keep it brief.
	So for men, it's like what's good for my balls versus what's good for my children.
	Now, hopefully you can get the two in one package or whatever, right?
	But well, yeah.
	So, you know, you've got some hot crazy woman.
	Maybe she's great in bed, but she'd be a terrible mom for your children, right?
	So men have this, you know, satisfy my lust versus build a solid family, right?
	The crazy girl who's hot and the good girl who's not, right?
	The Ginger, the Marianne, you know, you sort of name it.
	There's, there's all of these.
	I'm happily married.
	So I'm very thankful to have my wife.
	And it was because of your listening to your philosophy show for since when was it?
	2010.
	Wow.
	That's you're good.
	I appreciate that.
	I'm back in the red room.
	So yeah, so men have that good in bed, good wife, right?
	The poor and the motherfucker.
	The Donald complex.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, I mean, that's obviously some Italian wound-up stuff from way back.
	But women have the same issue, which is, will he be a good provider or is he a dangerous screw that's exciting?
	The beta bucks, alpha fucks, or the chads and the dads.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
	So the woman wants excitement because excitement is our selected.
	And if the women feel that they're in a situation of danger, they're more likely to go for an aggressive man because they're going to need to have aggressive kids and all of that.
	If a woman is in a place of security, then she's more likely to go for a more stable provider who's not going to be quite as exciting, at least in the short run.
	But it's also less likely to, you know, what's that old joke?
	You know, the guy says, why does she have two black eyes?
	Well, I had to tell her twice.
	Right.
	So women face that same issue.
	Now, the reason that women cross their legs, grit their teeth, and go for this more stable provider is that if they go for the bad boy and they get pregnant, then a huge disaster occurs to them and their family.
	They're kind of kicked out of polite society and their parents lose all of their social standing and it's just a complete mess and disaster all around.
	But the welfare state has changed all of that.
	So women can indulge their lust without feeling their kids are going to grow up hungry and their family is going to be disgraced.
	So unfortunately, it's just changed the equation completely.
	So women play the victim, they get the welfare state, and then they can indulge lust at the expense of what's good for their children from here to, well, when the money runs out.
	And I don't want to take up very much of your time, but are you familiar with Rolo Tomasi's fourth book that he did on religion and as pointing out some very fundamental problems with what's going on in modern Christianity?
	No, I interviewed him, I think, 2018 or something like that, but I haven't seen it after that.
	But it's like, I went and did my best to try to live among Christians and become, like, I was even baptized, but I, by the by, it took me doing mushrooms to pull the atheist stick out of my ass so that I could, I could, so this is the one, the one anecdotal story you've got of the positive outcome.
	So I, I took mushrooms and had an enlightening experience and pulled the ever-critical atheist criticizing stick out of my ass.
	And it allowed me to marry my wife.
	You know, first ask my wife out because I knew she was a Christian, but I also, yeah.
	And that then anyway, but my experience in Christianity was a very close parallel to the problem of modern Christianity is pumping.
	It is a beta male factory.
	Like it, it, the modern day church is just as gynocentric of, you know, it's, it's, it's circular logic.
	Like if, if, uh, it's this, only men are allowed to have responsibility.
	So if your wife cheats on you, you weren't be, you know, you blame the victim, but you weren't being the man that God wanted you to be.
	Right.
	And I've seen, I've seen this kind of stuff firsthand.
	Like a very close friend of mine who was in the church just had his life destroyed because he was taking marriage advice from inside the church.
	And of course, the women get extra doses of forgiveness while the men get extra heaps of responsibility for a situation they can't, you know, they don't have legal authority over their wives, even though they're supposed to pretend that they do.
	And I think you would be fascinated if you read what's going on in the fourth book because I've lived, I've witnessed what's going on in that book firsthand.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	I will add it to the list.
	I'm right now working on my own book, but I will definitely add that to the list.
	And I appreciate that.
	And congratulations on your marriage.
	That's wonderful to hear.
	And thank you for calling in.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Legionnaire Anon.
	I would like to hear from you.
	I just kind of wanted to ask before why was your camera upside down, but now I see that it's normal again.
	Oh, that's it.
	Yeah, that's it.
	All right.
	No, no, no.
	That's fine.
	If there was a technical essay, if there was a technical issue, I'm glad that it's been sorted out.
	All right.
	Happy to talk more.
	If you have any other questions or comments, I'm happy to get those as well.
	And let me just see if I have stuff stayed here.
	Somebody said, have you abandoned UPB?
	It's so funny how people bring these things in like it's my choice.
	You know, I'm just going to abandon it like, you know, kicking someone out of a moving car.
	It's like, I don't have, I don't have a choice about that.
	Like, if it's true, it's true.
	It's not up to me.
	Have you abandoned gravity?
	It's like, not really up to me.
	This guy wrote 11 hours ago, aren't churches and priests just substitutes for the state and experts?
	It's like, that's got to be one of the most amazing, one of the most amazing reversals of course effect that I've ever heard of in my life.
	All right.
	Zinvi or are you Zin the Sixths?
	I'm not sure.
	What's in your mind?
	Fill my brain with your brain.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	Yes, did you have something you wanted to mention?
	Can you hear me?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Oh, sorry for the technical issue there.
	Can you get a little closer to your mic?
	You're pretty quiet.
	Is this better?
	Yeah, thanks.
	Go ahead.
	Okay.
	oh, he's gone.
	He's gone.
	Probably hit the wrong button.
	Let's just see if he comes back at all.
	Let's see if he comes back at all.
	Let's see here.
	Oh, yes.
	Lady Liberty on X. This was great.
	I see these messages.
	I don't believe anybody, right?
	It's like, oh, I used to watch him ages ago.
	Then he got his accounts shut down and he turned into a complete psycho and started only blaming atheists.
	He went from history lessons to refusing to admit Christians do anything wrong and now just acts like a weirdo.
	And I always sort of feel like I never want to interrupt someone when they're arguing with their invisible friends because it has nothing to do with me at all.
	All right, let's give Zin the Six one more try.
	What's in your mind?
	don't forget to stay close to the mic and unmute.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Is that better?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Sorry about that.
	If you were a Christian, which denomination do you think you would choose?
	Oh, if I were to be religious?
	Well, specifically Christian.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I would choose the one that I grew up in.
	The Anglican church, to me, was pretty magnificent and pretty wonderful and pretty great.
	I love the songs and I was in the choir, of course, and I thought some of the lectures were very good.
	And it has a certain dignity and decorum.
	I can't do the snake handling, speaking in tongues stuff.
	I can't do the Pentecostal Council stuff.
	I can't do the Baptist stuff.
	I have a tough time with the Catholic stuff.
	But, I mean, we've been to Greek Orthodox Churches.
	My wife is Greek.
	Well, I mean, a Greek background, I suppose you could say.
	And so we've done all of that.
	But to me, there's, you know, I mean, there is that coming home familiarity and dignity and poise of the Anglican Church in England.
	But of course, that's when I was a kid.
	Who knows where it's at now?
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah.
	Now, the Anglican Church has a top-down approach similar to the Catholic Church.
	And since you're a libertarian, I'm surprised.
	I understand that you would want something with reverence and traditional hymns, but I would have expected something like non-denominational.
	Sorry, hang on.
	So why, if I'm a libertarian, why would I not want a top-down church?
	Well, because, well, to be honest, I thought anything with a top-down approach would come to kind of be opposed to.
	Why?
	My sense.
	No, I'm sorry.
	I'm not trying to be a troll here.
	I mean, there's an old statement.
	I'm actually technically an anarcho-capitalist, but there's an old statement.
	I think it was Bakunin who said, people think that because I'm an anarchist, I despise all authority and hierarchy.
	It's like, no, I rely upon the authority of the shoemaker to fix my shoes.
	I rely upon the authority of the dentist to fix my teeth.
	And the fact that if it's a voluntary hierarchy, there's nothing wrong with that.
	I mean, I've joined corporate.
	I mean, I founded a corporation where I was the chief technical officer, and I determined the technical direction, and I hired people, and I fired people, and I set the budget.
	And, you know, I was very much in control.
	And I wouldn't consider that any negative towards libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism because it was all voluntary and peaceful, if that makes sense.
	Now, could you share your hesitation with the Catholic Church?
	Because you don't have anything necessarily against hierarchies.
	Is it the theological basis of the church?
	I can't get to the Pope as infallible.
	That is, to me, a very dangerous proposition.
	Yeah, so I'm a reform Protestant, and so I'm sure you understand that the Catholic would report, well, not everything that they say is fallible, only on special occasions when they speak from the office, which has only happened a few times, as they would claim.
	Just to steal man there.
	Well, yes, but I mean, the papal edicts and so on, like these sort of regular updates to the faith that come from a very powerful central figure.
	I mean, again, I know you have the Archbishop of Canterbury and so on and all of that, but I prefer...
	He doesn't claim to be impalable.
	He's just part of the debate.
	Yeah.
	He doesn't claim to have the power of speaking infallibly, to be more precise with it.
	Yeah, I understand.
	I think because I don't believe in direct communication from God to any one individual, I think that that to me is a pretty dangerous hierarchy.
	To even infuse any mortal human being with the idea that he is connected to omniscience and omnipotence and can't be wrong.
	Ah, you know, sorry.
	I just, my Anglo-Saxon empiricism just, maybe it's the old Irish hatred of the king thing.
	I don't know.
	It's like, no, no, no, I can't get to, I can't get to the divine right of statements.
	Yeah, well, speaking of that, there's something very appealing about the Presbyterian church because on two different occasions, they resisted the Roman Empire invasion into their country and also resisted the Catholic Church influence.
	And I think that's pretty cool.
	Listen, I'm not going to argue if it works for you.
	This is not any kind of universal statement of morals or ethics or anything like that.
	But if it works for you, I'm not going to nag you into joining something with slightly different stained glass.
	But that would be my hesitations about it.
	Oh, I appreciate your time.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	Appreciate the call.
	Take care.
	Take care.
	All right.
	Free will.
	Free Willie.
	Oh, wait.
	That's for the only Stiff Ann's page.
	Will, if you want to unmute, you can be our caller of the night.
	Oh, goodness.
	Hi there.
	Bring us home.
	Thanks for having me on.
	You can hear me.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Oh, thank you.
	Oh, so first of all, thanks for having me on.
	I've been watching you off and on since like 2011.
	Off.
	Off?
	There is only on.
	And I'm just kidding.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	Go ahead.
	You're the one who sealed the deal for me with Trump back in like January 2016, watching some of your videos on him.
	It was great.
	Very great.
	Doing a lot of good work.
	Sir.
	And I wanted to speak on the whole atheism and being dishonest and how could you possibly excuse just or how can you hold yourself to honesty as an atheist?
	What are the reasons?
	What are the reasons to tell the truth?
	Yeah, what are the reasons to tell the truth?
	I'm honestly not an atheist.
	I'm a Christian.
	I'm 33, but when I was around 16, 17, I was reading Ayn Rand.
	I can recall myself saying more than once or twice, I'm an atheist.
	Almost, well, anyways, basically I lying is a sort of violence against other individuals because you're violating their sense of reality and the relationship with their world around them in a way that they didn't consent to.
	Yeah, okay, but that simply shifts, that simply shifts the issue.
	It doesn't solve the issue.
	So from a Darwinian standpoint, evolution rewards those who get the most resources for the least effort.
	Is that fair to say?
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Okay.
	Is lying a great way to get the most resources for the least effort?
	I mean, yeah, if you have like a large enough contingent of liars who are all lying in step or like, you know, have a sort of thing of a plan going on that others that aren't aware of lying are just going to be.
	I'm getting lost in a little bit of a word maze here.
	So of course, if all of society are liars, then there's no society, right?
	If they're all lying and cheating and defrauding and so on, right?
	So I get all of that.
	But if let me tell you how it evolves.
	Sorry to be annoying and ew.
	Let me tell you, but it's important, right?
	And you may have heard this before, but I haven't talked about it in years and years.
	So I'm going to mention it briefly here.
	So if there's no thief in the society, then nobody protects their property, right?
	Nobody locks, nobody, you know, if something goes missing, they just assume they misplaced it.
	And, right?
	So if there's no thieves in the society, nobody protects their stuff.
	And what that does is it raises the incentive for there to be thieves in the society because nobody's protecting their stuff.
	If there's only one thief in the society of a million people, he's going to have a pretty easy time of it.
	Right.
	And so then that is an incentive for more and more thieves to show up from a Darwinian most resources for the least effort.
	Now, then what happens is at some point, people are like, well, damn, my stuff keeps getting stolen.
	This is bad.
	And they start to take countermeasures.
	They pass laws.
	They have courts.
	They make it illegal.
	There are vigilante mobs that, you know, if you're a horse thief, right?
	You'll get strung up from a tree or something like that.
	Right.
	So then you make it too costly.
	Now it is no longer, from a cost-benefit standpoint, now it is no longer efficient to steal stuff because if you steal stuff, maybe you get a free horse and maybe you get killed.
	So they're trying to make it more costly.
	Now, you follow me so far that if there's too many thieves, the society doesn't do well, but people fight back and they kill off the thieves.
	Like, you know, in England in particular, for hundreds of years, they killed off the one or 2% of real sociopaths and psychopaths, which is why England ended up as a very polite, somewhat frigid society and doesn't really understand evil anymore, which is a real shame.
	I'm dealing with a real problem right now.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So there's a, think of it as predator prey, right?
	If there's only prey, it makes it's really great for the predator to come along because the prey isn't afraid of anything.
	Like you think of the dodos, right?
	The dodo bird, they just didn't, they didn't know any people.
	They didn't have any predators, so you could just walk up to them, break their neck, and the others would just go, oh, his neck got broken.
	I think I'll just continue to peck at whatever I'm pecking at.
	And then they went extinct, right?
	So if there's just a way to prey.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Sorry to interrupt, but with the dodos, I mean, just recently I heard, I didn't read about it, just heard in a fucking, sorry to swear, a little short, that the dodos, we showed up in, where was it?
	The like the Mauritius Islands, and it was the dogs that went after the dodos.
	Certainly we hunted them as well because it's like, I mean, easy, easy food, whatever, for whatever reason, went after them.
	But it was also, they landed in, I mean, I'm dovetailing with you, not disagreeing or anything.
	It was a bird that landed in an island that had no predators whatsoever forever for them.
	And to the point where they went from being a bird that landed on an island to a big, fat, flightless bird that was helpless.
	Well, and of course, normally what would happen is if, let's say, dogs got to the island, the dogs would hunt the dodos, and the dodos would then get harder to hunt, then the dogs would starve to death, and then the dodos would replenish their part.
	And so you'd end up with a balance, right?
	If the predators are too good, they kill off all the prey, and then the predators die.
	So predators have to have built-in incompetence and limits on what they can do.
	Sorry, I'm in the middle of making a case here.
	Can you At least let me finish the sentence.
	This talking in my ear shit is really annoying.
	Yeah, just hold, I'll give you space, man.
	I'm trying to make a case, and you're like, but, but, hey, hey, man, but, but, hey, man, but, but.
	I'll try not to do that when you talk, okay?
	Because it's really distracting.
	So, this is why predators can't be too efficient, because if predators are too efficient, they kill all the prey, and then the prey can't replenish, and then the predators starve to death.
	So, you need that.
	So, it's the same thing with thieves and victims, right?
	If there's no thieves, the first guy to come up with stealing, not that it was something that was invented, right?
	But he does really, really well.
	And then he's like, hey, man, he says to his family, his friends, you should just steal stuff, man.
	It's really, it's really efficient.
	And then they start stealing more.
	And then the countermeasures are taken and then a balance in society.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	No, I just wanted to point.
	I'm really sorry for interrupting you.
	I just wanted to follow up that the dogs in the case, from what I've read, they were brought by people so they could still turn back to us for food and all of that because we were still there regardless of the dodos.
	Yeah, they didn't drop the dogs off and then just leave.
	So they kept replenishing the dogs with the dogs, if the dodo wasn't their only food source.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, that's all I'm doing.
	Wow, you really are.
	I just wanted to drop.
	I'm not sure that the dog's thing is really important to the equation.
	No, okay.
	Okay.
	All right.
	It's your thing.
	So if you're a thief, you face negative consequences if you keep stealing.
	People are going to kill you or drive you out or ostracize you or something like that.
	So what you want to do as a thief is you want to make it so that everyone else follows property rights and it's good for them to follow property rights, but people have to let you take from them and that's good too.
	And that's called taxation, right?
	Or the tithe or whatever it's going to be.
	So sorry, go ahead.
	No, I'm sorry.
	I was just agreeing.
	Okay.
	So what you want to do, and morality basically was invented as a plunder system.
	So morality is always the same across the world, which is you, my subjects, must not steal from each other, but I can take from you by force.
	For you guys to steal from each other is really bad.
	For me to steal from you is really good.
	And that's how societies, you know, with almost no exceptions, have generally formed themselves with.
	So the origin of morality is exploitation.
	And so the problem is with UPB, I'm trying to take a system that was developed for exploitation and turn it to actual virtue, which is a very volatile process, frankly.
	It's like trying to wrestle a gun from a criminal, so to speak, right?
	They're pretty volatile about that stuff.
	So I think that's the big challenge.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	No, no, sorry.
	If anything, I'm just going to hop off here.
	Thank you for having me on.
	My pleasure, man.
	It was a lot of fun.
	Thank you again.
	My pleasure.
	It's a very interesting topic.
	And you know what we're going to call this show?
	We're going to call this show, don't forget about the dogs.
	Whatever you do, dogs are key.
	Dogs are essential.
	Just kidding.
	No, I appreciate the conversation.
	All right.
	Well, thank you everyone so much for a glorious evening of rapidly fascinating philosophy.
	I really do appreciate it.
	And I appreciate all the haters and the ragers and all of that.
	It's absolutely fantastic.
	Absolutely fantastic.
	And I do love you all for giving me this kind of feedback.
	It is a philosophical experiment of the first order to have this kind of conversation.
	It has never existed before in human history, and it will never exist in the same way ever again, simply because after this, we'll have the example of this.
	And therefore, we live in an absolutely unique time in the history of philosophy based upon these conversations.
	And I very humbly, you know, this really is a conversation.
	And I very humbly and gratefully appreciate everyone who participates, who contributes the most positive to the most negative.
	It is all fantastic.
	And I really, really appreciate that.
	So have yourself wonderful leaving.
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	Take care of my friends.
	I'll talk to you soon.
	Bye.
	My Sunday, 11 a.m.
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