Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - 'The Who' Drummer Time Traveler?!? Twitter/X Space

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Aug. 11, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:58:37

'The Who' Drummer Time Traveler?!? Twitter/X Space

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	All right.
	So, right.
	Good afternoon, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	It is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom.
	Hope you are enjoying a glorious, gorgeous, lovely weekend.
	And we're here to talk philosophy.
	We are here to take questions.
	I'm here to solve problems and chew gum.
	And I'm all out of gum.
	That's right.
	I wish actually I did an entire show or a portion of a show many years ago with tough guy Duke Nukem Voice.
	I was breastfeeding using black and dagger tools.
	But I decided that I've decided I should never really do that again because it's a little too tough for the old vocal cords.
	I end up with a sort of Paul Young style year off from singing.
	So I hope you're having a glorious day.
	And I'm certainly happy to take your questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems.
	And I'm not trying to lure the, I'm not trying to lure the atheists back in, but I have questions.
	I'm not trying to lure the atheist back in particularly, but I do have questions.
	And one of the questions, I suppose, which it certainly took me quite a while to figure out in my own life, an embarrassingly long period of time, perhaps.
	But one of the basic questions I think that it's important for atheists to have in their minds and to hopefully answer in the world is this.
	So if you don't believe in God, what higher goals or purposes do you sacrifice your pleasures for?
	Because, you know, there's a real tension in life for me.
	Maybe there are, it's less for other people, but there's a real tension in life.
	There's a lot of complicated tensions in life.
	One of them, obviously, is just basically around sort of food and exercise, right?
	So I did a call-in show this morning and I was like, oh, I've got a little bit of time.
	I could write another chapter of my new book, which I'm loving, by the way.
	I could write another chapter of my new book, but that means sitting.
	And if I do an X space, I mean, could have done any number of things, right?
	But if I'm doing an X space, at least I can walk around because I kind of got it all set up so that I can walk around.
	I think philosophy and sitting are anathema to each other.
	You got to walk about, I think, to think the best.
	So with regards to food and exercise and so on, it's like, I like sweet, salty, sugary things, and I can't eat them that much, right?
	I think I actually was out with some friends the other night and we went to a board game cafe, which was a great deal of fun.
	And I had a panini and salad, I know, panini and soup.
	And then I was like, you know what?
	I haven't had a dessert in months, like a full dessert at a restaurant.
	So I ordered a piece of cheesecake and then, you know, bring six forks for everyone to eat and share the cheesecake and all of that.
	But it's rare.
	It's rare for me.
	I almost never have dessert.
	I love dessert, but I can't do it.
	So there's this tension.
	Now, of course, I could theoretically just do what some of the more extreme people do.
	And I could say, ah, you know, I'm just going to live on 1,200 calories a day.
	And there's some people who believe that extends their lifespan.
	Okay, I could.
	I could.
	But I don't think that would be much fun.
	So there's this tension.
	I want to eat more.
	And of course, when you grow up in a scarcity household, your urge is to eat as much as possible as often as possible.
	Because there are genuinely good times when I didn't know where the next meal was coming from.
	And so I'd hang around friends' places hoping to be at least offered a snack or two and maybe, maybe, maybe just be offered to stay for dinner and all that kind of good stuff.
	But it didn't.
	So my urge is to eat.
	I remember the first time I went to Ponderosa with a friend of mine and his mom paid.
	And it was like all you can eat.
	And I was like, really?
	You want to take a hungry, undernourished kid and you want to give him an all-you-can-eat buffet?
	Challenge accepted.
	And I think they would have had better luck from a profitability standpoint if Genghis Khan's horde had torn through instead of my 13-year-old self.
	Because, you know, especially when you're a boy, especially when you're hitting puberty, man, it is.
	It is a nom-nom fest.
	talking to my friends who have teenage boys.
	They're like, yes, just basically taking groceries and throwing them down a well.
	Because they're like, you just ate a whole pizza.
	How can you still be hungry?
	Dinner's in half an hour.
	You don't need anything yet.
	So, yeah, there's those kinds of tensions.
	I love to exercise, particularly as I get older.
	I have to be more careful.
	I have to be more careful.
	I mean, I used to just be able to hurl myself all over the tennis court and the squash court and so on.
	I played an hour of pickleball with my wife yesterday and, you know, shots that, you know, 10 years ago, I would have absolutely lunged for.
	I'm like, maybe I'll let that one go.
	Because you have to balance things, at least I do, as you age, because you want to be able to keep exercising.
	And I've had a couple of instances where I push myself too far.
	And sometimes it can be months of reduced activity.
	I had once with a knee thing, I had it once with a shoulder blade thing.
	And man, it's brutal.
	You know, just one lunge, one thing, you know, too far.
	You know, I was out walking with my daughter the other day and we came across a long running, you know, long jump pit.
	And she does this amazing long jump.
	She's like a bird.
	And she's like, Dad, you should do it.
	And I'm like, I'd love to.
	But I think of what that would do to my knees.
	You know, I'm going to be 59 next month, right?
	And I'm like, well, that would be great.
	Now, I still will sprint.
	I will still sprint with her, like full-on sprint, because I hate the idea.
	It's like 90% of people never sprint after the age of 30.
	I think that's pretty bad.
	It's pretty bad.
	But, you know, I want to move a lot.
	I want to, you know, and I still, I still feel young, right?
	It's the problem.
	You don't, your personality doesn't really age.
	Hopefully you get wiser, but I don't feel young.
	But I know that my body is, of course, how could it be?
	It's 35 years past its prime.
	So it's, you know, pretty good.
	I can still do, I can hike, I can do 20,000 steps.
	I can do a full workout.
	I can, you know, play hour, hour and a half of racket sports, but it's with some moderation.
	It's with some moderation.
	Even when it comes to playing racket sports, I have this debate within myself, this tension within myself.
	My body says to me, listen, you get to do all this intellectual stuff.
	Just let me play.
	Don't try and strategize.
	Don't try and, ooh, I'll fake and I'll do this and I'll like, just let me play.
	You play all the time in your brain.
	Let the body play.
	And I have to sort of get out of my own way and let my body play.
	And it generally goes much better if I just let my body play and stop trying to control and direct things.
	So there's this tension in life.
	There's things that I want to do that are good for the world.
	There are things that I want to do that are good for the family.
	There are things that I want to do that are good for the friends.
	There are things that I want to do that are good for the self.
	So there's this tension where you balance larger goals with immediate pleasures.
	I don't want to be a self-sacrificial, empty servant of philosophy who self-immolates by telling too much truth to a pretty jumpy and aggressive world.
	But at the same time, I don't want to be cucked to the point where I consider it revolutionary to remind people that two and two make four.
	So lots of tensions in there.
	And of course, with the Christian life, with the Christian world, there are lots of tensions there.
	I'm sure I don't need to explain them.
	And I'm just curious, what are the atheists' tensions?
	What are the atheists' tensions?
	There are tensions on social media.
	What can you say that's important?
	And what can you say that's important and absolutely unacceptable, right?
	There's lots of tensions there, right?
	I want maximum truth, right?
	Like I want maximum exercise, which means pulling back as I age on what I commit to.
	I want maximum truth, which means sometimes pulling punches to hopefully get things across later, if at all.
	So these are all big old challenging questions and problems.
	And I suppose that's my question with atheists is where's the tension between the personal and the social, between the hedonistic, which is important, you've got to have pleasure in life, and the willingness to accept suffering for a greater good.
	Where is that in the atheist lexicon?
	What are they willing to sacrifice and for what goal and for why?
	I consider, and I've had, you know, enormous doubts about my abilities Over the years, which is great, which is great.
	I mean, having doubts about your abilities is really, really important because if you're certain about your abilities, almost for certain, you are underachieving.
	So I've had massive doubts about my abilities over the years, which is why I constantly want to test my conjectures or hypotheses against reason and evidence.
	And this is why I really enjoy having conversations with you all about, you know, sharpening the steel of philosophy, so to speak.
	It's why it's important, I think, to be back on X and disagreeing with a lot of people to make sure that I'm right.
	And of course, the odds that little old me was going to solve the major problems of philosophy and be the first philosopher to focus on childhood.
	I'm the first major philosopher to focus on the ethics of parenting and of childhood, which is insane when you think about a 3,000-year history of philosophy.
	And of course, psychologists have done it and so on, but it's not the same as a moral philosopher doing it.
	So I put that question out and I'm certainly happy to hear.
	And, you know, when I put these questions out and I say, well, when I say men contribute this in a relationship, what do women contribute?
	It's funny because a lot of people think that that means I'm saying women don't contribute anything.
	Well, no, I don't.
	It's hard for me to speak for women.
	I'm not a woman, of course.
	And so when I say that I know this is what men contribute, help me understand what women contribute.
	It's not because they don't think women contribute anything.
	It's not like, oh, yeah, what do women contribute?
	It's not anything.
	It's tell me what it is.
	Tell me from the female perspective what it is that you contribute because what the man contributes, you know, risking rejection, asking girls out, planning the date, picking her up, paying for things and driving her home and then trying to get a kiss, maybe, like all of that sort of stuff.
	And then, you know, you've got to propose on one knee and you've got to buy an engagement ring and then you buy a wedding ring.
	And usually it's a man, whether it's the fiancé or his father, often it's a man who pays for the wedding.
	And then the man, you know, goes to work in particular when the woman is home.
	And so, you know, I understand what the men contribute.
	Just, you know, help me understand what the women contribute.
	And of course, I know what it is in my marriage.
	In my marriage, I've been married for like 23 years.
	And I know what my wife contributes, but I'm not going to pretend that my wife and I are the average.
	And just because I know what my wife contributes means that I know what everyone contributes.
	And also, if there are really good answers coming in, that's fantastic.
	If the answers are, I contribute myself, I am the table, or I have your children, he's like, well, that's, you know, I suffer through childbirth.
	And it's like, no, men destroy their bodies through working for a living, right?
	Either if they're doing active labor, then they tend to harm their bodies and bones and joints and all of that, because that's pretty tough.
	On the body, even if they're sitting in an office, like you commute and you sit in an office, I mean, that's really bad for your body as well, right?
	That's sort of turning into that slow question mark of spina-bifida, plasticine, curly cube, pipe stem nonsense that passes through posture these days, of which I am not entirely innocent.
	I say this with great humility, but this is why I prefer to walk the sit than sit to do a show.
	But yeah, men, men wreck their bodies to provide for their families.
	And what's a couple of pregnancies compared to 40 years or more of labor?
	Or, you know, and even if the labor is just sitting doing something, typing, it's still pretty rough on the body.
	I mean, my wife loved being pregnant, so it's not, and there are women I know who just love being pregnant.
	Of course, it's uncomfortable, but so is working out.
	Doesn't mean you don't love it.
	So that's what I'm asking.
	And if a woman reads what I write, or an atheist reads what I write, and if when I famously asked relatively recently on X, which is like, I don't know, close to 8 million impressions and a delightful ratio, as my daughter pointed out.
	But if I say to an atheist, why do you tell the truth?
	Why don't you lie?
	If you don't believe in God, and if they say, You know what?
	I don't actually have a great reason.
	I should really think about that.
	That's really good.
	Everyone rushes in with an answer that's terrible.
	It's always like ready, fire, aim.
	I'm not even ready.
	Fire, ready, aim, shoot from the hip.
	And if a woman is like, oh, yeah, you know what?
	From a male perspective, they do seem to provide a lot and take a lot of risks and incur a lot of expenses.
	What is it that I'm providing in return?
	And I should make sure that I do provide value in return.
	And then, of course, you get all of these people who say, Hey, man, relationships aren't transactional.
	That's bullshit.
	That is a complete and total lie.
	Of course, relationships are transactional.
	The only non-transactional relationship is when you're a baby or a toddler and you're getting a free lunch of bagged milk from the dirty pillows, right?
	So that is the only non-transactional relationship you're going to be involved in is baby toddler.
	Now, of course, if you had really bad baby toddlerhood, you're going to end up with this yearning, this unfulfilled avoidance of grieving.
	Well, maybe I can get someone else to provide for me in the way that mom should have when I was a baby.
	That's really bad.
	That's really bad.
	So then you get people, oh, it's not transactional.
	Well, people who say things aren't transactional always want something from you.
	And the only reason they say things aren't transactional is because they don't want to actually be on the hook for providing any value in return.
	But if you're not providing equal value in a relationship, you're being exploited or you're exploiting others.
	If you're providing less value, you're exploiting others.
	If others are providing less value, then they're exploiting you.
	And exploitation cannot last in a relationship.
	You know, relationships are long, man.
	I mean, I've only been married for, you know, a little under a quarter century.
	And, you know, hopefully we've got another 30 years to go.
	I think you're making it to that age, late 80s.
	That'd be nice.
	But, you know, we've got more to go than we've already passed.
	And the more to go stuff is going to have its own particular difficulties as we sort of age and get creaky and decrepit.
	And, you know, you never know what's coming over the horizon.
	You could just wake up with knuckles the size of bowling balls and have arthritis or, you know, brain issues.
	Or like, you know, you don't know what the heck is going to go on.
	So, I mean, you can do what you can to eat well and exercise, but it's only all you can do is slow down the freight train that's going to knock you into the choir invisible.
	So it's a long, long time.
	And if a relationship is imbalanced, if one person's getting a lot more than the other, it just can't last.
	It certainly can't last in terms of happiness because we have this calculation engine for fairness that goes on.
	And they've done lots of studies on this kind of stuff where they give people abstract mathematical problems.
	They can't figure them out at the moment.
	They put it into so-and-so is paying for drinks and so-and-so gets so many appetizers.
	People get it right away.
	So that's the question.
	What do you sacrifice yourself for and why?
	And how do you balance these tensions if you're an atheist?
	Because when you're an atheist, you've taken one major factor off the table.
	One major, major factor.
	I mean, the central factor for Christians is how to be godly in a godless world, how to be virtuous in a fallen world, how to promote virtue when Satan runs the planet.
	It's all a big, old, big, old tension, big old stress.
	And that's not necessarily bad.
	Tension and stress are not bad because you either have the tension and stress of achievement and struggle, or you have the tension and stress of regret and feeling like you've wasted your life.
	I mean, even Leonardo da Vinci, I think one of the most accomplished men in history at the end of his life said, Oh, I so regret how much time I've wasted and how little use I put to the gifts that God gave me.
	So that's not fun.
	So, yeah, these are all interesting questions.
	And asking a question does not in any way imply.
	I mean, I can understand why people think that.
	Like, if I say, well, what do women contribute?
	He says, oh, he doesn't think they contribute anything.
	And I understand why people think that's why I try to put it as neutrally as possible.
	And, you know, like when I asked the other day, I said men used to show, oh, men would show self-discipline by buying a diamond or some other extravagant gesture.
	And women used to show self-discipline by being virgins.
	But only one side of the equation has been dropped.
	Women no longer are expected to be virgins, but men are still expected to buy rings and engagement rings, wedding rings, and pay for weddings and so on, right?
	So as far as self-discipline goes, the women have wriggled out from that requirement and the men have not as a whole.
	And why?
	Why do you think that is?
	So anyway, I think these are interesting questions.
	I don't imagine that a lot of atheists, a lot of atheists' rage quit my ex-account when I pointed out that all of their arguments as to why be honest, which is based on hedonism and the expectation of gain, and the whole point of morality is to have you do things that you don't want to do.
	The whole point of dieting is to have you eat things you don't want to eat and not eat things you do want to eat.
	The whole point of morality is to anti-hedonism.
	If the virtuous were the fun, we wouldn't need morality at all.
	We wouldn't need morality at all.
	I mean, there's no big stern lecture, let's say, for teenage boys, right?
	And say, well, you know, you're 18 now.
	You really should try to get interested in the opposite sex.
	You really should try getting interested in romance and dating and sexuality.
	And I mean, that's just no big lecture that young men, if memory serves, that young men need to be interested in girls dating romance, sex, and so on, right?
	That's just a big old hormonal thing that happens.
	You need, in fact, the morals to say you should probably restrain yourself for the sake of a longer-term, happier, and more fulfilling relationship, to not just go for looks, but to go for qualities of character and virtue that's going to sustain the relationship over time.
	So, yeah, the whole point of virtue is it's anti-hedonistic.
	And this is as true of Christianity or other religions as it is of philosophy, that morality is there to tell us to do the things we don't want to do and to not do the things we do want to do.
	What is good for the soul or the conscience or society as opposed to what feels good in the moment in the same way that there's a war, which I was referring to earlier, between exercise and energy conservation.
	We want to sit on the couch, but it's good for us to exercise.
	Between the tongue and the body, right?
	The tongue likes things that are bad for the body.
	The body likes things that are less pleasant for the tongue.
	And personal pleasures versus sacrificing for greater goods is a tension in life.
	And you have to find a way to balance these things.
	And how do the atheists balance it?
	What are the obligations of atheists that are difficult and unpleasant for them?
	Of course, a lot of atheists would say, well, opposing religion, but that's usually kind of fun because they get to play smart guy.
	And, you know, obviously there are challenges with the metaphysics and epistemology of religion.
	But where religion loses in epistemology and metaphysics, atheism loses in ethics and politics.
	So that's my question.
	What are the sacrifices that atheists make in order to pursue a larger goal that goes against hedonism?
	Because from an evolutionary standpoint, it's mostly negative to pursue larger social or moral goals at the expense of even perhaps personal survival or reproduction, so to speak.
	All right.
	Thank you for your patience.
	I'm happy to take your calls now.
	T-Bone.
	Boy, I think it was it, T. Payne.
	He's a rapper and singer.
	Does a fantastic version of war pigs.
	And Ermoly is my friend, if you want to unmute.
	What's on your mind?
	Hey, thank you.
	And I'm glad that you're back on that.
	So I appreciate this.
	I wanted to see if you could expound on your idea that you were one of the first philosophers to go into childreing, because I think there's a lot in the Old Testament and a lot in the Republic that kind of covered those items.
	So I just wanted to see if you wanted to switch that out.
	Right.
	So I would not count Old Testament as philosophy.
	That's theology.
	So that's a different discipline.
	With regards to Plato, yeah, he certainly did talk about family formation and so on, but he did not talk about it in terms of abstract universal virtues.
	He talked about it in terms of what he thought was optimum for the maintenance of a totalitarian society.
	Of course, I've got a whole four-hour presentation on Plato, which you can find at fdrpodcasts.com, fdrpodcasts.com, And you can just do a social Plato.
	So Plato had as his ideal a totalitarian society.
	And so he talked about the best way to raise children so that they would be most easily controlled by the totalitarian rulers.
	And so a lack of family bonds, raising children in common, and not even knowing who your parents were was his ideal, which means, of course, that incest was an inevitability in a fairly tightly controlled and fairly small community.
	You were going to end up with incest.
	So his prescriptions for child raising were like entirely corrupt and immoral and kind of evil, right?
	In that you couldn't even figure out who your own children were, which was, again, the resulting incest would be pretty bad.
	So he did not bring philosophical rigor to the question of ethics in child raising.
	He simply said, this is the most optimum way to raise children so that they can be controlled by, like he had the gold, the silver, and the bronze people and so on.
	So that the philosopher kings, the elites would find it most easy to control children.
	And I think that you and I would both recognize that as pretty base, evil, and corrupt.
	Yeah, I would agree with that.
	I was just going off the idea you were the first to do it.
	But I think.
	And if you give a distinction to theology versus philosophy, I'm going to go along with that as well.
	But I appreciate your feedback on allowing you to speak.
	Okay, sorry, your audio was pretty bad.
	So I appreciate that.
	And listen, philosophy is not the what.
	Philosophy is the why.
	So there is the practice of farming, which says, I don't know, you got to rotate your crops from time to time.
	You got to let your little fields lie fallow from time to time, throw up a scarecrow.
	And, you know, you got to take the cow manure and dump it on the soil to get.
	So that's the practice of farming.
	But that's not the science of farming.
	So the practice is the what.
	And the philosophy is the why.
	So if you were to say, don't hit your children because it makes them upset, that's a what.
	That's not a why.
	I mean, you're giving a reason, don't make them upset, but it's not a philosophical reason because it's based on emotion rather than reason and sort of factual evidence.
	So of course, in my book, Peaceful Parenting, available for free at peacefulparenting.com, don't forget to check out the AI as well to ask questions.
	Peaceful parenting is divided into a number of sections.
	There's theory, practice, and then the scientific evidence behind peaceful parenting.
	So with regards to, say, something like spanking, there's a theory, which is spanking is the initiation of the use of force because it's violence not used in immediate self-defense.
	The practice is, here's how you can parent without spanking.
	And then the evidence is, here's the evidence as to why spanking is bad, scientific, testable, reproducible evidence.
	So, yeah, theory, practice, evidence.
	And so when there have been philosophers who say, I mean, of course, Rousseau talked a lot about a childhood, but he did not do so philosophically.
	There is a book by Thomas More that I read quite a bit when I was younger called Utopia, which is his description of the best or the ideal society.
	And the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance makes a similar case with regards to education.
	But these are just checklists of nice things to have, good things to have, things that the author likes, that is only going to convince the people who already agree with you.
	So if you think the family is bad and that children should be raised with no knowledge of who their parents are, should be raised in common, then you're going to like what Plato has to say.
	If you don't like that and you think that children should know who raises them and so on, then you're not going to like what Plato says.
	So the preaching to the choir aspect is always a big challenge with regards to philosophy, or I suppose theology for that matter, because philosophy does not have the great reward and punishment that theology has or Christian theology has, which is the promise of heaven and the threat of hell.
	I mean, all philosophy can do is say, well, if you do the right thing, you're probably going to be more happy than unhappy, but there's going to be periods of time where doing the right thing is going to make you seriously unhappy.
	And there is no reward after death for you doing the right thing.
	And one of the reasons why I skew more towards philosophy than theology is that's not enough.
	It's not enough.
	Like we all know Christians who are petty and fail to forgive.
	We all know people who pretend to be religious in order to gain money.
	We all know people who promise wealth and success rather than a struggle and virtue in the realm of religion.
	And we all know religions that have utterly corrupt virtues and morals.
	So even the threat of hell and the reward of heaven, eternal bliss and eternal torture, is not enough to make people good.
	And so this is why I focus on peaceful parenting and childhood and all these other kinds of things.
	So the purpose of philosophy is to change your mind if your mind is capable of being changed, which is not very common.
	But the purpose of philosophy is to change your mind when you really, really, really don't agree.
	And we did this last night.
	I had a fellow call in.
	We're talking about the problem of consciousness, and his big issue was that science, he said, science can't prove consciousness.
	And then we finally got to an agreement where I said, since the scientific method is a product of consciousness, it is proof of consciousness by default, by effect, in the same way that a shadow is the proof of something blocking the light.
	Fabric of will.
	Don't mean to startle you, brother.
	Thank you for your patience.
	I'm trying to keep my responses short to keep your contributions longer.
	All right.
	Do you want to unmute?
	I'm happy to hear.
	Awesome.
	Yes.
	So, yeah.
	So I just want to point out, firstly, well, I'm glad you're back on X for sure 100% about that.
	But I just want to mention a bit of a hiccup that I had.
	I don't know, I mean, how this is going to land, but it's just something that's kind of a yearning-burning, if you will.
	I just noticed as a U.S. citizen, and I didn't notice this like earlier on, but that some of your critiques, like of the DMV, stuff like that, which are legitimate, but I didn't realize that, like, for instance, Canada, they don't have a DMV.
	They have, well, I'm not going to educate you about where you live, but just, I guess, for other people and to maybe reiterate it for myself, there's like, I guess, what is it, provincial or.
	Okay, I need you to get to a question, please.
	Just get to a question.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	So my question is: why do you focus?
	Why do you focus on the U.S. politics so much when you do your critiques and you don't also at least focus a little bit more on also the Canadian, the negative politics in Canada?
	I mean, maybe you haven't listened for a while and it's totally fine.
	Yeah, it's totally fine if you haven't, but I've been off politics for about half a decade.
	So asking me why I don't focus on this or that aspect of politics.
	Hang on, hang on, still talking.
	Yeah, so there's no reason why you would necessarily know that, but I have been off politics.
	I mean, I'll occasionally made something in sort of passing about economics and stuff like that.
	But in terms of sort of the true news and sort of core political analysis, I have been off that.
	I haven't done a true news about politics or a truth about politics for, I guess it's been over five years now.
	So again, I'm asking why I focus on this or that when I haven't focused on it at all for half a decade, it's no problem.
	And there's no reason why you would necessarily know that if you haven't been around the conversation for a while, but that would be my response.
	All right.
	HSPM, high school, prime meet.
	Just making acronym filler here.
	Hey, speaking of filler, have you unmuted?
	Can I hear your questions or comments?
	Hey, Steph, can you hear me?
	Yeah, kind of.
	Can you get a little closer to the mic?
	Is this better?
	It's no, but yeah, just in general, I would just ask people, just get a headset.
	Honestly, they're like 20 bucks, and it just makes it so much easier for everyone you're calling into.
	I'm sorry?
	I'm wearing a headset, which is why I ask.
	Honestly, I don't think you are.
	Or if you are, it's not what the phone is picking up.
	Or if you are wearing a headset, it's a Bluetooth one from like 12 years ago because the sound is pretty terrible, but we'll figure it out and we'll survive.
	So go ahead with your question.
	Okay, I have a question about one of your latest tweets about which one is worse, porn for men or romance novels for women.
	Why did you tweet that and why did you use these specific words?
	I think you're going to have to be a little bit more specific in your question.
	Like, why did I tweet that?
	If you could help me understand your question in a bit more detail, I'd appreciate that.
	I asked the question because I didn't understand the tweet what you were trying to achieve with it, which is why I was puzzled by it and now ask the question.
	Okay.
	When you say, what am I supposed to achieve about it?
	If I say to you, what do you want for dinner?
	What am I supposed to achieve from that?
	What do I achieve by asking you what you want for dinner?
	Then you know what I want for dinner and you can or may not take that into account when choosing one spot to make for dinner.
	Okay.
	So when I ask a question, what I'm trying to achieve is people's perspective or responses on the answer.
	So I'm not sure what, I mean, that's pretty obvious, isn't it?
	Like if I ask you, if I ask you what you want for dinner and you say, what are you trying to achieve by that?
	It's like, well, I'm trying to achieve finding out what you want for dinner.
	So I'm trying to achieve people's understanding of these two issues.
	So again, I'm sorry if I'm being dense here.
	I'm not sure what you, when I ask a question of people, what I'm trying to achieve is an understanding of their answers.
	So, but that's kind of implicit, isn't it?
	Yes, it is.
	And maybe I'm just being vague.
	What are you going to do with the answers?
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
	I'm not exactly sure what I mean either.
	Okay, good.
	Well, as long as we're both on the same page, as far as that goes.
	Okay, so I put out, of course, a lot of tweets since I came back a couple of months ago.
	This is the one that you wanted to ask about.
	So what is important about this tweet for you?
	It's the only one I did not understand and I did not have an answer to.
	So when you say you don't understand it, help me know.
	I don't want to project what you don't understand into what it is that you're saying.
	Okay, so let me ask you this.
	Do you think that pornography can be bad for men?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Why?
	Why do you think that it not?
	Why do you think that is, but why do you think pornography can be bad for men?
	Well, there are conflicting studies done, but basically the short version is that it desensitizes a man to the normal emotional sex a healthy couple has.
	And you see all sorts of extreme sex, highly stylized sex that it's not part of a normal, healthy sexual relationship.
	Yeah, like it's a superstimulus.
	It can cause erectile dysfunction.
	It can cause you to not want to go out and find a partner, which is actually to have, you know, fall in love, get married, have kids, all that kind of stuff.
	It is highly addictive.
	It's kind of like junk food.
	It's immediate pleasure at the expense of long-term negative consequences.
	And now, of course, I also, I don't want to have entirely one-sided.
	There are studies that also show that the presence of pornography can serve to lower sexual crimes in the real world.
	I suppose with the argument that, you know, really weird or degenerate people can get their kicks alone rather than having to go out and prey on the community.
	So there's that aspect to things as well.
	Okay.
	So when I say which is worse, a porn for men, I'm saying that there are negatives for pornography for men.
	So that part of the equation, I think you understand, right?
	Yes, I agree with that.
	Okay.
	Now, have you ever read a romance novel that is designed for women?
	Yes, I read 50 Shades of Grey.
	Okay.
	Now, do you think that 50 Shades of Gray could have negative consequences for women?
	Okay.
	And what do you think those could be?
	Roughly the same.
	They create an unhealthy excess stimulus that is not part of the normal healthy relationship.
	Most guys don't have billions and a half a doctor and can play piano perfectly well.
	And most guys don't want to be their wife.
	Okay, so when I ask, which do you think is worse porn for men or romance novels for women?
	What's hard to understand about the purpose of that question, which is I'm curious whether people understand that there's negatives for both or which might be worse and what their thoughts are.
	Well, I found myself answering romance novels for women, but I didn't know why.
	And, you know, I don't know why either, but I think that's very interesting.
	And just for those of you who don't know, and this is nothing negative to do with Harlequin, but Harlequin, I don't even know if they're still around, but many, many, many years ago, I applied for a job at Harlequin.
	And prior to going into do the job, I think it was Proofreader or something like that, because I had a couple of years of English degree under my belt.
	I read, I don't know, probably half a dozen Harlequin novels.
	Of course, I've read and reviewed all three of the 50 Shades of Grade books and other things that I've read.
	So I'm not obviously any kind of expert, but I certainly have read probably more than most men with regards to romance novels for women.
	And so I think that certainly I think it's the case that a lot of people who say, gee, you know, pornography is pretty bad.
	Now, of course, there's a lot of female consumers of pornography and so on, right?
	So this is a bit of a sort of cliché porn from men and fantasy novels or romance novels for women.
	But I don't know that women are quite as aware of the negative effects of superstimulus for them.
	I think men are generally aware of the negative effects of superstimulus, right?
	And of course, pornography provides for men a sort of superstimulus.
	I don't know that women are quite as aware of the negative effects of superstimulus for them.
	In that if you look at, what's it, Jamie Dornan, who's known as the body, right?
	He's such a good-looking guy with a fantastic physique.
	So I don't know that women are as aware of the superstimulus of the general romance novel hero being tall, dark, gorgeous, abs, millions of dollars, every skill known to man.
	They go to a Portuguese restaurant.
	He just orders in fluent Portuguese and the waitresses all drool over him and he's incredibly disciplined, yet emotionally available, you know, like this sort of superstimuli.
	I mean, women want men who are successful, but being a successful man means that you have to be very good at turning off your empathy.
	Because if you're a successful man, you're competing against others, usually men.
	They want to win.
	You want to win.
	And you have to want to win and not let their desire to win interfere with your resolution, right?
	If you're running a race and there's a million dollar prize, everybody in the race wants a million dollar prize, you have to turn off your empathy and focus selfishly on your own goals and pleasures.
	When I, as a philosopher, ask questions that are uncomfortable to the general public, I have to be able to ignore their discomfort in order to be able to ask my questions, right?
	So there is a lot to do with being able to turn off your empathy in order to be successful.
	But a lot of women want a man to be endlessly empathetic and also very successful.
	And these two do not go hand.
	You cannot succeed as a man or as a woman, really, but let's just say, I mean, even if there's some super Alpha studmuffin who's around and one woman gets to date him, then all the other women are jealous and she has to be okay with that and not sacrifice her happiness for their jealousy.
	And so, yeah, all success requires selective empathy.
	I mean, I want people to listen to what it is that I'm doing rather than what everyone else is doing.
	And Lord knows there are millions of podcasts around the world.
	I want people to listen to what I'm doing.
	And that's going to be negative to everyone else who wants people to listen.
	So, so yeah, I don't know that women are as concerned about the issues of super stimuli and how that diminishes your capacity for normal things, right?
	So, if all you eat are like, you know, heavily processed foods with huge amounts of sort of salt, sugar, fat, and all that injected into it, then if you're just going to have a plain salad, like I'm trying to train my palate and have been for the last couple of years to be more into normal tastes, right?
	So, instead of ordering a salad with the dressing in it, I will order a salad with the dressing on the side.
	And sometimes I'll just eat the salad without any dressing.
	Or, you know, maybe just a tiny sprinkle here and there.
	And so, I don't know that we have a conversation as a society about superstimulus.
	And I do think that women are a bit more susceptible, or in some cases, a lot more susceptible to the superstimulus than men are.
	And of course, everybody knows this famous OK Cupid study from, I think it was 2018, where when men rated women's attractiveness, it was almost a perfect bell curve.
	But when women rated men's attractiveness, it was heavily skewed to the left, that there were almost no men that women found attractive.
	And women found the vast majority of men to be below average or significantly below average in terms of attractiveness.
	Now, that is pure evidence of superstimulus.
	If you have gotten used to heavily processed sugar, salt, fat foods, then normal tasting foods, normal foods don't taste very good to you.
	And if you said most food tastes like crap, that would not be the sign of a healthy, mature, well-regulated palate.
	And so I don't know that there's much of a conversation in society about women's consumption of superstimuli.
	And that's not just in terms of their view of males.
	That's also in terms of their view of females.
	I mean, you see people like Elizabeth Hurley or Salma Hayek and so on.
	These are women in their 50s who, you know, have these fantastic figures and so on.
	And I think women look at that.
	That's a form of superstimulus.
	Obviously, they have great genes.
	They have great trainers.
	They can afford their own personal chefs.
	They get paid millions of dollars to look that way.
	And, you know, they work three, four hours a day to look that way.
	And I have no problem with them looking that way.
	I mean, more power to them, but that's not particularly realistic.
	You know, I've watched a little bit of the show Reacher.
	I won't get into the plot or anything like that, but there's this complete Duke Nukem stereotype cardboard giant muscles and abs guy who's six foot five, you know, bullet neck, giant biceps.
	Like when he holds his biceps up to a woman's head, his bicep is as wide as her face.
	And, you know, hey, you know, great, great physique, more power to him.
	But you never see him working out.
	And you see this all the time in movies, right?
	You see this all the time where people have these unhealthy lifestyles.
	You know, they drink too much, they smoke too much, they're unhealthy, and yet they have these flawless physiques.
	And I always find that kind of funny.
	You know, there's some guy who's like an alcoholic, he takes off his shirt, he has perfect abs.
	And it's like, no, he doesn't.
	Alcoholics don't have perfect abs.
	So that kind of super stimulus.
	So men look at that super stimulus and say, well, that's not particularly realistic.
	Certainly this Reacher character never goes to the gym, but to have a physique like that, it's at least three hours a day in the gym, at least.
	And, you know, incredibly strict eating and possibly courting dehydration to get those sort of paper thin, ab, that paper-thin ab revealing skin.
	And that's not a realistic option, right?
	So women will complain that their Barbies were unrealistic, but there aren't many men or boys who say, I have to look like He-Man, Master of the Universe, and so on.
	So I don't know that there's much of a conversation about superstimuli for women.
	And I think also that women having the superstimuli problem, that everyone is compared to, you know, Christian Gray or Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice or, you know, Matthew McConaughey with his, you know, flawless physique and all of that.
	And so I don't know that, like when men look at this stuff, I think we have a certain reality processing that kicks in.
	And I think that's partly because men are a little bit more objective reality focused than women, and also because men's preferences get shamed all the time.
	So, I mean, we live to have our preferences shamed.
	But I don't know that there's as much of a conversation as a whole about women's addiction to superstimuli.
	And because of that, I think, you know, if I look sort of look back at why I asked it, I'm like, well, there are things that are damaging to men.
	Pornography would be one of them.
	And there are things that are damaging to women, but all we ever really talk about are the things that are damaging to men.
	And if women's expectations and addiction to super stimuli remain, then the birth rate is going to continue to collapse.
	So, sort of looking back on it, I think it would be something like that.
	And I appreciate you asking the question if that helps.
	Yes, and I would also like to reiterate that the production of porn is also very damaging to the actors, which is another reason not to watch it.
	Well, that's true.
	Of course, the people in pornography generally have horrendous childhoods, and there's a lot of abuse and drugs and violence.
	And the production of female fantasy novels, of course, doesn't go through the same kind of corruption and horror.
	So I certainly appreciate that point.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
	Yeah, I recently watched Breacher and I had the same ideas about say they eat some sort of candy bar.
	And I was like, no way a guy with abs like that is going to be an or a piece of pie.
	There's some recurring gloves thing about a piece of pie.
	Like, no, I live pretty well.
	I'm six foot two, 216 pounds.
	I have abs.
	I don't eat pie or candy.
	You're the guy who has my abs.
	Damn it.
	I've been looking for them everywhere.
	I've been looking for them in my 30s and my 40s.
	And it turns out you're the one who has them.
	But that's it.
	I'm going to have an international ab redistribution agency.
	The UN is going to get involved and they're going to solar beam your abs to me because it's about time I had more than one.
	All right.
	Well, thanks, man.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I feel nervousness with the next caller whose name is Math.
	I have math anxiety, but I'll do my best.
	I'll do my best.
	And what's on your mind, my friend, if you want to unmute?
	I didn't have a particular subject until I looked at your Twitter.
	It says you are saying that you rather have Bitcoin than the current financial model.
	Can you say why?
	Well, I'd like to know what you know about Bitcoin.
	About 2010, I guess, when it was created, I started getting familiar with it.
	And I was reading all these books about, who's that guy?
	I think Warren Buffett learned from him.
	Benjamin, I forget his name.
	But anyway, it was about investing.
	And it was the first idea they kind of latched onto was the idea that you got to buy low and sell high.
	So from that perspective, Bitcoin looked amazing to me because it was 0.00 some cents, whatever.
	And at that time, I guess I was too young.
	So I didn't invest right away, even though I was making my cousin, hey, we should invest on 50 bucks or whatever.
	I guess I would be a billionaire now if I only.
	Sorry, sorry.
	Hang on.
	So it wasn't that you were too young.
	I mean, if Bitcoin was a fraction of a penny or a penny, it wasn't that you could take the money to go to a movie and invest it, right?
	I didn't understand your question.
	Well, you said you were too young to invest in 2010, but you weren't.
	I was too clueless.
	Like I was too, I was lacking knowledge.
	It's how to do it.
	No, and I'm not trying to nag you about that.
	It's just that I always want as much from myself and from everyone else as much accuracy as humanly possible.
	So when you said you were too young to invest, that's not true.
	Yes, the young word is wrong.
	It's that I was clueless.
	I didn't know how to do.
	Okay, so you studied it in 2010 when it was pennies, a Bitcoin, but you didn't buy any.
	Okay.
	Later on, I bought some.
	I made some money from it and Litecoin and all these little cryptos.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So you're fairly knowledgeable about crypto, right?
	Yeah.
	I would say I'm a little knowledgeable.
	I'm not super knowledgeable about the technology.
	I've just been around, I would say.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So in your mind, what are the disadvantages of Bitcoin versus crypto?
	Well, no, no, no.
	I'm not comparing Bitcoin To crypto.
	I'm saying.
	I'm so sorry.
	That was, I'm sorry, my brain fart.
	I apologize.
	I don't know what happened there.
	Wires crossed or something like that.
	What is your perception of the negatives of Bitcoin versus, say, fiat currency?
	Right.
	So, you know, there was a time in which we lived under a gold standard, right?
	So the idea was that at a certain point, the government said, well, the gold standard is not good because, and the argument there was that a deflationary currency, from what I understand, at least, I'm not a financial specialist, but a deflationary currency does not allow for a certain amount of growth that you would want to have year to year in your country.
	So you would allow for, which is what they do today, central banks do that, which is they allow for 2% inflation a year.
	Or their goal is 2% inflation a year, right?
	Well, what I'm saying is the argument behind it for the target of 2% inflation was based on the lack of growth under a deflationary currency, such as gold.
	So I think, I don't know if they did it for the good of the government.
	Sorry, sorry.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	You're saying all these things and moving on like they're not at all controversial, right?
	Okay, so what governments claim and what the facts are are rarely the same.
	Can we agree on that?
	I agree.
	Okay.
	So there was, of course, enormous growth under a gold-backed currency.
	I mean, the entire Industrial Revolution in general was based upon gold-backed currencies like the pound sterling and so on, right?
	And that was the biggest time of economic growth in world history, six, seven percent a year.
	So, I mean, obviously, there were interruptions to the Franco-Prussian War, the Civil War of the United States, and so on, which was pretty bad for the currency and human life as a whole.
	But it wasn't like, oh, no, we can't grow with gold-backed currency.
	It wasn't that at all.
	In fact, most governments launched into central banking, or at least a lot of Western governments launched into central banking in the First World War.
	And that's because they were out of gold, right?
	Yes, which I guess I agree with that 100%.
	Yes.
	Obviously, governments will try to get away from any kind of standard.
	And I'm not against having to.
	Yeah, they want to be able to print money rather than raise taxes because raising taxes annoys people and gets them mad at the government.
	But if you just print money, then the shopkeepers raise their prices and everyone gets mad at the shopkeepers instead of the government.
	So it's better for the government to inflate rather than to tax.
	Well, see, you know, I used to follow you about, was it about that same time?
	And so you got into Bitcoin a little later, I guess, 2012, 13, something like that.
	Maybe?
	Yeah, but go ahead.
	It doesn't really matter.
	Right.
	But the point is, well, I just like to get down to basics when I look at things.
	So I agree with you that you could have growth even with a gold-backed currency.
	And you don't necessarily have to have a debt-based system.
	It's just the way that the governments have chose to fund themselves.
	And I don't, when I see those $37 trillion national debt clocks, like I'm looking at it, I'm like, well, who owns the debt?
	In the case of the United States, 70% of it is owned by essentially institutions and people that have money in those institutions, for example, mutual funds or hedge funds or whatever financial institutions.
	It's still 70% nationally owned.
	So it's all owned by the 70% of it is publicly owned by its own people.
	So in that sense, you know, people say, oh, that's printing money, but it's actually these bonds are owned by its own citizens.
	It's not as bad as people try to, you know, show it or explain it away.
	So, sorry, are you saying that the debt is largely illusory?
	No, it exists.
	People owe the money to themselves.
	It exists, but the government getting its funding from these private institutions Isn't bad on the face of it.
	Like, it's not like they're printing money that doesn't exist or it's not covered by assets.
	The government of the United States, or I would say the nation of the United States, has way more assets than 30%.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on again.
	Sorry, you're just saying all this stuff.
	Okay.
	So, 40% of the U.S. dollars that have ever been created were created since COVID, right?
	Sure.
	That's a number I'm not familiar with.
	Okay.
	So have the assets of the U.S. government grown by 40%?
	No.
	Or have the, so, so, there has been more money created than there are assets to back it, which is basically what is causing inflation.
	I agree with you.
	Yeah.
	Sure, maybe.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Like, I'm not familiar with the 40% number.
	That's something that's, you know, I didn't, I didn't see that big.
	Well, I mean, just, but just think of all the money that they, I mean, taxes went down, of course, over COVID.
	Right.
	A lot of people stayed at home.
	A lot of businesses shut down.
	And they mailed out all of these checks to people, all of that, right?
	So they didn't raise taxes to do that, right?
	So the way the reason that the government wants the power to print money is it has then the power to give the illusion of adding value.
	Right.
	So if I said to you, hey, man, I'm going to give you $500.
	I just need you to give me $600 first.
	Would that be a good deal?
	Repeat that question again.
	If I said to you, hey, man, I want to give you $500.
	All you have to do is give me $600.
	That's not a good idea to counterfeiter and I give you $500 of freshly counterfeited notes, then you feel like you're wealthier, right?
	And of course, if you get to spend that money first, then you get to spend that money before the inflationary aspect of the extra $500 occurs.
	But with the case of the government, is what I'm trying to say is they have assets to back it up.
	That's why they can pay down the debt, quote-unquote, debt, right?
	Because they have assets.
	We have a standard for what we're doing.
	Okay, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Assets is a very big class from an economics standpoint, right?
	So when you say that the U.S. government has assets, what are you referring to?
	Everything.
	They have land, they have roads, they have government operations, you know, whatever.
	Like, I don't know if the post-war cases are.
	So you mean fixed cash?
	You mean fixed assets and capital assets and things that are tangible in the world, right?
	Yes.
	Not just on the books of the government, but just assets across the nation.
	You can say the post office, if it's a national, if it's a public entity, that's an asset.
	It could be the roads.
	It could even technically be a land, like land ownership of the government could still be an asset.
	Okay.
	And what?
	Do you think that the government would face any legal barriers to selling roads or the post office?
	Sure.
	but are they selling them to pay down debt?
	I'm assuming that the government can sell pretty much any asset.
	I don't know.
	Well, that's why I'm asking you.
	Hang on, hang on.
	But that's why I'm asking you.
	I'm asking you, do you think that the government would face any legal challenges or problems with its unions or courts or anything like that if it said, let's say it said, I'm going to sell the post office?
	I don't know.
	Well, the post office has within it multi-year contracts that are extremely injurious to the profitability of the post office.
	So nobody would want to buy the post office if it had to still continue to provide health care and pensions and job security and all of this garbage that the post office employees get.
	So nobody's going to buy it.
	So the only way that somebody would be able to buy the post office, I think, again, this is my guess.
	There could be other factors, but a major one would be the only reason that people would buy the post office is if they got to shred all of the collective agreements and ditch the union, right?
	I don't understand the argument because I'm not familiar with the legal circumstances of this.
	I'm just saying that what is Bitcoin?
	Okay, let me explain it.
	Let me explain it.
	Hang on.
	No, no, no, because if you don't understand what I'm saying, you've got to give me a chance to explain it, right?
	Sure.
	All right.
	So if I say to you, I want to sell you my car, but you can only drive it five miles a week, would you buy it?
	No.
	Right.
	Because it's too restrictive.
	Sure.
	And you don't get to operate it as your own thing.
	Yes.
	So you'd say, listen, man, I could buy your car, but I'm not going to agree to only drive it five miles a week, right?
	Yes.
	So the post office has thousands and thousands of pages of collectively bargained agreements and job security and pensions and healthcare and time off and crazy stuff that massively benefits the workers, right?
	Well, it's a government entity.
	Of course, it's going to, you know, government employees get paid like 40% sometimes more than private employees if you count all of the, hang on, still talking.
	So if you count all of the benefits, government employees tend to outearn private sector employees, at least on the average.
	So if you're going to say, well, the government has an asset called the post office, then it has to be sellable.
	But if nobody will buy it with its current legal structure and it can't change the legal structure, then it's not an asset.
	It would in fact be a liability because the post office loses billions and billions of dollars, right?
	So if you've got an entity that you claim is an asset that costs you billions of dollars a year and you can't sell it, it's not an asset.
	Right.
	So you're arguing about the accessibility of the assets of the government, but I'm yet to hear about what backs up Bitcoin.
	What is the value of Bitcoin backed up by it?
	What assets?
	Okay, don't do that.
	No, no, no, no.
	Do not do that in a conversation, man.
	Do not just switch topics.
	That's incredibly rude.
	No, that is a switch of topics.
	You try to get lost in details, and I don't want to get lost in details.
	Okay, don't, don't, don't, don't insult me.
	What do you mean?
	So you made a claim that the government has assets.
	They do.
	Okay.
	I pointed out that the government faces immense legal challenges selling its assets, which means you can't really count them as assets.
	Okay, that's your argument.
	What is Bitcoin?
	No, no, that's not my argument.
	That's a fact.
	Right.
	So Bitcoin is more fiat than what the government issues because it has no assets.
	Okay, no, now, see, now you're not, you're not conceding points.
	I don't have conversations with people who don't concede points.
	What is the point that I have to concede?
	Okay, I'm dumping him.
	This is just another example of people who don't listen.
	And I don't talk to people who don't listen.
	So just to reiterate, he said the government has all of these assets.
	And I point out that an asset has to be liquid in order to sell it.
	And I even gave him the example of a car that I want to sell him that he can only drive for five miles a week.
	So if you cannot sell an asset, it cannot be considered an asset.
	In fact, it's a liability if the asset is actually costing you billions of dollars a year and you can't sell it.
	It's a liability, not an asset, because who would want to spend a huge amount of money to buy the post office if they couldn't change any of the contracts and therefore they would then be on the hook for losing billions of dollars a year.
	So it's not an asset.
	In the same way, if you tried to sell the roads, there would be a whole bunch of legal challenges and problems.
	So the fact that the government is supposed to have all of these assets is not particularly relevant if you can't sell the assets in any reasonable or practical timeframe, if endless legal challenges, or if nobody will buy it because they can't get out of the contracts.
	I mean, the way that you shed contracts in a private entity generally is you might go through chapter 11, you might go through some sort of bankruptcy process or proceeding, which may allow you to, depends on what the courts say, but it may allow you to renegotiate contracts.
	It doesn't sometimes give you that option and so on, right?
	So yeah, if he's saying, well, the government has all these assets and I make this whole series of arguments as to how they're not really assets because they're not particularly liquid and nobody wants to buy them and they can't get out of the contracts and they're actually losing, then I'm saying it's not an asset.
	And then he switches topics immediately.
	So, I mean, just for those of you who are curious, the way that you have a civilized conversation is if you make a claim, no, let's reverse it because it can happen the other way too, right?
	If I make a claim and then you disprove it, that has to change something in the conversation.
	I mean, imagine if you and I are driving to Vegas and we're supposed to go southwest, right?
	And I say, whoa, whoa, bro, we're supposed to go southwest, but we're actually going northeast.
	And he's like, uh-huh.
	Okay, moving on to the next topic.
	And he puts on a song and starts talking about it, still continues to drive northeast.
	It's like, well, you just ignored the fact that we're driving in the wrong direction.
	So if you're going to make, if you're going to have a conversation with people, especially if it's going to be a kind of debate, which is fine and they're fun.
	But if it's going to be a debate, then if you make a claim and that claim is disproven, that should change something.
	Like if you say, well, government has all these assets and I make a pretty strong case that it doesn't, be like, ooh, that's a big change.
	But if you then jump to another topic without acknowledging anything and then say, well, that's just your opinion, or, well, you haven't proven anything.
	Or what am I supposed to have changed?
	It's like, well, then you're just not listening.
	And it's ego-based rather than information-based.
	You're looking to be right or win rather than have a productive conversation in hot pursuit of that dodgy hair known as the truth.
	All right.
	Pindelsin?
	Pindelsin?
	Pemberton.
	Pindelsin, if you want to unmute, I'm all here.
	Yes, go ahead.
	Perfect.
	I have a question going back to the men versus women aspects, like for porn.
	But before we get to that, just real quick on the gold thing.
	It was my understanding that we switch off of gold because other countries could like buy it and that could like threaten the United States, that a thing?
	Or was that just BS?
	You mean other countries could buy gold?
	Could buy, like could turn their debt into our gold, basically, and take our gold.
	Oh, yeah.
	So if the government is overspending and it needs to sell its gold to pay for the overspending, then sure, there would be a transfer of hard capital, such as gold, to other countries.
	And they definitely wanted to avoid that.
	And this is why, you know, the two big confiscations and liquidations of the under FDR in the 30s and under Nixon in 1971.
	Yeah, those are big issues for sure.
	But anyway, go on.
	Okay.
	So let's go back to the porn question, if we could.
	So I have an issue with the comparison for porn versus men versus like romance novels for women.
	I do harbor a belief that like men seek sex and women seek mostly like attention.
	So like more, might a more accurate question be like, which super stimuli is worse, porn for men or like social media or like dating apps for women?
	Or is like my initial supposition flawed?
	Anyway, appreciate your time and consideration.
	No, that's a, that's a, and some people had mentioned that, and I think that's a very good, I think that's a very good point in that women will say outrageous things with full makeup and filters on, almost always in their car for some reason.
	And maybe that's another status single status signal if it's an expensive car.
	But yeah, that certainly I think that is the case.
	And I don't know, maybe you do, what kind of studies have been done on women and social media addiction?
	Do you know of any?
	I'm sure some work has at least has been done on that.
	Do you know of any?
	I'm sure there has been.
	I'm just kind of skeptical of most of those just because there's been like such a lot of controversy over whether or not these studies are backed by good science or like just paid for.
	Well, and of course, in general, any study that denigrates anyone other than white males tends to vanish into the ether as a whole.
	So anything that comes out that's negative towards women will generally vanish.
	But no, I think that's a very good point.
	And I will make a note here that I'll look into that and see if I can find any research.
	But I do think that that maybe I'm sort of showing my age that it was romance novels rather than social media.
	But I think that's a very good point to raise.
	Thank you so much.
	Thanks, man.
	Appreciate it.
	Unstoppable method.
	You're up.
	And I don't expect to be able to interrupt you at all.
	So what is on your mind?
	Hi there.
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So yesterday we had a bit of a back and forth on consciousness and some stuff like that.
	But I had a different question today with regards to your experience or your view on religion.
	I think you mentioned that you have been going to church, but you have not converted or believed yet because you don't have an experience.
	And some atheists, like they have arguments.
	So the question would be, what kind of experience do you think you would need to have for that?
	Because I think some atheists would say stuff like, oh, even if God came down in a, You know, it was a caravan or something huge.
	And then God came down in front of me and told me, I would just think it's I'm hallucinating, right?
	So I think that's more or less the question.
	Oh, so I get it.
	So at least I think I get it.
	And tell me if I didn't.
	So it's your question, what would be a standard by which I would accept the possibility of the existence of God?
	What experience or evidence would I need to see?
	Yeah, exactly.
	I think some, yeah, some people say that even if they had that kind of evidence, I think it was Richard Dawkins.
	He will say, oh, it's just clear I'm hallucinating because that can be true.
	So yeah, that's the kind of question I would want to raise to you.
	What's your well, I mean, so one of the ways that I would really move towards the acceptance of a being who was omniscient, who knew everything, past, present, and future, would be to be provided with knowledge that could not exist in any other way.
	So if I heard a if a being came down before me and wrote down the exact price of Apple stock at 2.13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, tomorrow, I guess Monday afternoon, that would be knowledge that could not exist in any, there would be no technology that could provide that knowledge because that would be to pierce the veil of time.
	So if I were provided certain knowledge of future details, then that would be almost certain evidence for the existence of omniscience.
	And, you know, I guess you could say, well, what if it's really advanced being that has a time travel machine and so on?
	But you could come up with sort of any number of standards by which you would accept omniscience.
	So for instance, I had a dream this morning, a very vivid dream.
	It doesn't really matter what it was.
	Let's just say I was surfing on the gas clouds of Jupiter, right?
	So I was having a dream this morning that I was surfing on the gas clouds of Jupiter.
	Beautiful, amazing dream, right?
	Now, let's say I never told anyone that.
	And a being came to me and said, you had this dream about surfing on the gas clouds of Jupiter.
	Now, again, you could say maybe they have some really advanced brain scanning device that can figure out what I'm dreaming or something like that.
	So you could come up with most things.
	I actually view time travel as completely impossible.
	So I would view future knowledge as almost certain proof of omniscience.
	So, or if I had, here's something even better.
	If I had a childhood memory that I never told anyone.
	So I have a vivid memory as a child of lying on the ground.
	I had a little toy train and I was having it chugged along the carpet and I was feeling very sad that it was chugging away and lonely.
	And, you know, this is just a vivid memory that I have about being a sort of five or six years old.
	And I don't think I ever told anyone that.
	So if some being came to me and said, you had this vivid memory when you were five or six of having a toy red engine that you were pushing along the carpet and feeling very sad and sorrowful and nostalgic that the train was chugging off to nowhere and so on.
	Well, that would be pretty hard for anything but an omniscient entity to have that knowledge would be, I can't think of any way in which a non-omniscient entity could have that knowledge because that would have to be both time travel and brain scans and, you know, and I don't view time travel as even remotely possible.
	And so that would be evidence if there was, for instance, some way to provide knowledge that no human being has as yet, right?
	So let's say that I was given by some entity a certain cure for cancer.
	Well, of course, that could be some space alien or something like that, but it certainly would be evidence of non-human knowledge.
	So if I saw things that were impossible according to the laws of physics, but again, that could be really advanced technology and so on.
	But I could certainly see that there would be standards by which I would say there's no possible way that any material entity could have this knowledge.
	And Therefore, I would assume that an incorporeal being with omniscience who existed outside of time is the only being that could have this knowledge.
	And that would certainly be, I can't say 100% because you'd have to look for potential exceptions.
	But certainly when it came to things like time travel, I would accept that as a proof of an intelligence that was beyond the material, if that makes sense.
	I think that definitely does a very clear answer, I think.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	Anything else?
	Yeah, so I've lashed myself to the mast of reason and evidence.
	That's the thing.
	Now, I obviously, I mean, I'm fairly, I always want to be honest with the audience.
	I'm invested, man.
	I am invested.
	I have suffered an inordinate amount of the course of my life in the pursuit and the promulgation of philosophy, of reason and evidence.
	And so if reason and evidence is not the path to truth, but rather it is faith, then I have become, or I have been, a kind of pointless masochist for over 40 years.
	So I'm just telling you that I have a pretty high bar to abandoning reason and evidence because it would make my whole life a lie and it would make all of the suffering that right now is justified because I accept the validity only of reason and evidence in the pursuit of truth.
	It would make all of the suffering that I have experienced for over 40 years, it would make it woefully, woundingly, pointlessly self-inflicted.
	And I also then would have led people astray if reason and evidence turned out to be a false metric for the achievement of valid knowledge.
	Then not only would I have tortured myself pointlessly and suffered pointlessly and enormously for decades, but I also would have used a very public platform, which is what I have here, a very public platform to influence millions and millions of people in the wrong direction.
	I mean, that would be pretty bad.
	I got to tell you, that would be pretty freaking awful.
	And I'm just being honest about that because I'm invested, man.
	I'm invested.
	And if all of your entire life savings are in a stock, you kind of want it to work.
	You kind of want it to succeed.
	And so I'll just tell you that straight up.
	And the reason I'm saying that is everybody knows it anyway, but I know it too.
	I know the confirmation bias that I have with regards to reason and evidence.
	And by evidence, I mean empirical sense data, universal, reproducible scientific evidence.
	So, yeah, reason and evidence, I've committed.
	I have suffered.
	I have had my roller coaster of a life, all the pluses and minuses, almost solely due to my focus and commitment to reason and evidence.
	And it would take a lot to dislodge that.
	Now, again, here's the challenge, though.
	If God came to me and gave me reason to believe in God, I would still be a believer in God through reason and evidence.
	But there's just no way.
	There's no way that I'm going to abandon reason and evidence after this much commitment and suffering for the cause and also seeing how well it works both in my personal life and for the world as a whole.
	So I just want to be real honest about that, that it would take something extraordinary to fulfill the requirements of reason and evidence.
	If that comes along, fantastic.
	But then I would be believing in something not based on faith, but based on reason and evidence.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes, it does.
	And I think it's consistent with what you said about your experiences with atheists versus your experiences with Christians in the context of your platforming and persecution in recent years.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	Well, thanks.
	Always welcome to have.
	I really did enjoy the conversation about consciousness and I just published it this morning.
	So I really do appreciate that.
	You're certainly welcome back anytime.
	You've got great, great thoughts, observations, and questions.
	All right.
	The eternal summer, known as Neverfall.
	Are we back?
	Did you make it in?
	You'll need to unmute if you wish to talk.
	If anybody else wants to jump in, you're welcome to, in case bro here.
	Oh, hello.
	Hey, were you talking to me or somebody else?
	Well, it's your name, Neverfall.
	Yeah, but I didn't hear the name.
	I'm sorry.
	No problem.
	What's on your mind?
	So you were talking about divinity and so Arthur C. Clarke says that divinity is just technology that we don't understand yet.
	And you kind of touched on it when you said, Well, if someone, you know, showed me time travel, then I would probably think that that was like an omniscient being.
	But I think there's enough evidence that says time travel is actually possible if you go down that rabbit hole.
	Um, there's kids that like have experimented.
	There's a kid who stole a city's power plant's power to funnel all of their city's power into his time machine and look it all up.
	Um, a member of the who, his van disappeared.
	He was experimenting with time travel.
	The Philadelphia experiment.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So, real quick, I just don't know what you mean by the who.
	Do you mean the band, the who?
	Yeah, the band, the who.
	So, their drummer, I believe it was.
	He and his van like disappeared off the face of the earth.
	He was experimenting with time travel.
	The Philadelphia experiment, that's a CIA program, and there's plenty of documents you can look up on the Freedom of Information Act.
	I mean, I'm just saying there's enough evidence that say these things are possible.
	Invisibility is a thing.
	They have plenty of technologies that can make things invisible these days.
	The cure for cancer, that exists as well.
	A girl just won a science fair, a native girl, at her high school for showing that she has a native cure that kills cancer cells in vitro.
	Additionally, there's a machine that will put out between 1,000 hertz and 300,000, 100,000 hertz and 300,000 hertz that they can show on video kills cancer cells.
	I just think it's a really low bar to say that divinity exists based on seeing technology when Arthur C. Clarke says divinity is only technology we don't understand yet.
	There is no science that supports any sort of God whatsoever.
	So, I'm just saying, like, we need to start realizing it's exactly what you said: that technology we don't understand is all that a God could possibly ever be.
	If a alien, if a god appeared in front of me today or anyone who is an atheist, they wouldn't say what the previous guy said, they would say that's an EP or that's an alien.
	They definitely wouldn't say, oh, that's some excuse that I can't explain.
	Logic, as you described earlier, would bring you to ETs and aliens because there's evidence of those.
	So, there's zero evidence of gods, but there's evidence of UFOs and ETs all over the internet.
	So, we have to start believing more evidence-based things and logic-based things than scripture-based things.
	But all I'm planning there, appreciate your space, bud.
	Are you sticking around or are you bailing?
	No, I'm hanging out.
	I'm just not going to talk about it.
	Okay, good, good.
	Okay, I mean, I don't think you're trolling, but you realize a lot of the stuff that you're talking about sounds kind of nuts, right?
	No, it doesn't.
	Like, if you just because the main exists to talk about it does, it doesn't.
	No, it does.
	No, it doesn't.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	There are agents standing in front of Congress saying that we are in possession of non-human biological entities.
	That's evidence, man.
	Whether you want to believe that evidence or not, we have to hear say, Hang on, hang on.
	You got to slow your roll, man.
	It's got to be important.
	No, no, it means it has to be a conversation.
	I have to be able to ask questions because if you're just talking, it's a monologue, which is rude.
	So, you're saying government agencies saying stuff is proof?
	No, I'm saying there's evidence all over the internet beyond that.
	I'm saying once you actually get in front of Congress and you're willing to put your own reputation at risk, hey, the government is in possession of non-human biological entities.
	I mean, dude, who gets to decide what are the facts?
	The facts are around this world.
	Like, there's Sumerian history that says we were created as a work slave force.
	So, like, who decides whether what they said is true or not?
	So, I'm just saying, like, there's evidence.
	You can look on the internet at the Phoenix lighting.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	You're deciding.
	You're saying this stuff is true.
	No, I'm using logic.
	I know that humans cannot levitate an aircraft carrier.
	I know we can't do that.
	We do not have the technology that will allow us to fly 30,000 miles per hour and then into ocean without disintegrating that object.
	We do not have that technology.
	Okay, you know, you do realize, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	You do realize that it's very hard to follow what you're saying, right?
	It shouldn't be.
	You can just Google all Google evidence.
	Let me, let me, let me let me have my say.
	Let me have my say.
	I'm trying to help you here.
	I really am.
	I'm trying because you care very passionately about these topics, right?
	Do you?
	Oh, that's a shame.
	I think maybe he bailed on the conversation.
	No, this is half.
	You literally just said, let me talk, let me talk, let me talk.
	So I muted myself.
	Okay, then I asked you, and then I asked you a question.
	You actually started to ask me a question, and then you went to a different question.
	So I was waiting on the original question.
	No, I asked you, I said, you care a lot about these topics.
	Is that right?
	I care a lot about truth, fact, and logic, yes.
	And I don't think that gods are logical when there's zero evidence that gods exist.
	None.
	But there is evidence that UFOs and ETs possibly exist.
	I'm just saying one has evidence, the other one doesn't.
	And we're having a conversation about logic here.
	Like the internet has changed the way we ingest information and the way we digest information.
	This is very new.
	So I don't expect anyone to just change their mind overnight.
	But the fact is, there are hundreds of thousands of documents that ETs and UFOs absolutely exist.
	If you interview most of the public, they all, most of the public believes they do exist.
	So I'm saying these aren't far-fetched ideas.
	The mainstream media wants you to think they're far-fetched ideas.
	They just aren't, man.
	If you look at native populations all over the world, they all believe in star people, all of them.
	People.
	That's what they say.
	Star people came down and bestowed gifts upon them.
	Sumerians, the culture that invented writing the alphabet, the wheel, they are telling you that our DNA was genetically enhanced to make a slave worker force to mine resources for them.
	That's what they say.
	I'm not saying I believe these things.
	I'm saying there's evidence out there that contradicts what divinity and what religion are telling you.
	There is zero evidence any God has ever existed, man.
	But there is evidence that technology has existed.
	I'm just saying we have to get to a logical point where we're willing to accept all of the information on the internet, just not the bits that confirm our confirmation bias.
	That's just how it is.
	Evidence, if this was a court of law, I think.
	Okay, but hang on, bro, bro.
	Bro, bro.
	Slow down.
	Slow down.
	Like, I'm just curious.
	Are you interested in having a conversation or you just want to rip on your monologue?
	You weren't saying anything.
	So I was talking.
	When you're ready to talk, I was trying not to interrupt you.
	So one of the things that you can do if you want to convince people and have a conversation is you can say, you know, here's what I think.
	What do you think?
	Or here's my evidence.
	What's your counter evidence?
	As opposed to just monologue, monologue, monologue.
	Right, but that's not how I see it.
	I don't see this as how I think.
	I see this as how experts think.
	And I think there's a lot of people out there who want to believe what's inside their own brain instead of what experts think.
	Do you see what I'm saying?
	So like, if I'm deferring to what an expert thinks, I'm doing the right thing.
	I'm not using my own ego to make a decision about my own opinion.
	So hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	So would you agree that experts disagree with each other?
	Yes.
	So I choose the best expert.
	Well, is it possible that you choose the expert that agrees with your confirmation bias?
	No.
	That's not possible.
	It's completely impossible.
	So you're the only person on the planet with no confirmation bias.
	No, I have confirmation bias in some things, but on this topic, I do not.
	Which topic?
	So when I'm talking about divinity and I believe NASA, or I believe, you know, a scientist who's been in space, that's believing the best experts, the best possible experts.
	So the people who've been in space and they're the ones who can speak on these things, these are the people that we have to defer to because we're not experts.
	We can't just.
	And sorry, but which I don't know.
	Hang on, hang on.
	You've mentioned like 20 different topics, right?
	From time travel by Keith Moon to cancer cures to slave populations from Sumerians.
	So when you say we have to defer to people who've been to space, what topic are you asking that we defer to?
	The topic of divinity.
	So people who've been to space.
	I don't even understand time.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	No, this is not monologue time.
	This is dialogue time.
	So the people who've been to space have proven that there's no God because they've been to space.
	Is that right?
	No, I'm saying there's no evidence of God.
	You could not prove that God exists in a court of law.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, you and I are of the same opinion about that.
	My issue that I brought up, though, was with time travel.
	Now, when you start talking about experts and having to believe experts, was one of the things you said was that the drummer for the band The Who and his van vanished.
	Is that right?
	Are you going to try to get gotchas here, dude?
	It's not going to work, bro.
	I'm just letting you know I'm not that guy.
	So you want to pick out the phone?
	Hang on, hang on.
	No, no, no.
	Philadelphia.
	No, it doesn't.
	It doesn't pick out, bro.
	When I mentioned the Philadelphia, bro, bro, bro, bro.
	People don't understand how conversation.
	Okay, so I'm going to have to mute the guy.
	I'm not trying to get gotchas.
	I've always found this kind of weird when people do this.
	Dude, you are.
	That's exactly what you're doing.
	So you're saying Keith Moon's an expert?
	That's about what you're about to say.
	Bro, hang on.
	Give me a chance to respond.
	So how is quoting something?
	Hang on, still, still, still, still talking.
	So how is quoting you back an example of pulling a gotcha?
	Because you fucking cherry-picked it, dude.
	I said three different fucking things and you.
	Okay, so obviously this is somebody who's got some severe emotional disturbances.
	So I'm sorry for, I mean, I'm genuinely curious.
	Listen, I have no issue with people who've got, quote, far-out ideas.
	I'm aware that to a lot of people, simply a consistent application of the non-aggression principle is kind of like a far-out idea.
	So I'm sorry for, I'm genuinely curious.
	Like, I mean, what the standard of proof is, what the standard of reason is.
	And so, I mean, when he brought up the drummer, I assume it's not Keith Moon, who was a rampant alcoholic who died of alcohol poisoning, if I remember correctly.
	But if he mentioned that the drummer for The Who and his van vanished, and that's evidence of time travel, I would like to know the steps by which that occurs.
	So when people say stuff and then you ask them to explain it, and then they start, sorry, they get a rage and start swearing at you.
	That's a shame.
	And listen, in general, I really do want to help people to get difficult ideas across to others.
	You know, challenging ideas, radical ideas, unusual ideas.
	But you do have to acknowledge their unusualness, right?
	So if you want to go, and you should, if you haven't already, you should read my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	And the reason you should read it, obviously, because I think it's a great book that proves secular ethics.
	But also, I start off by saying I can completely understand why you'd be skeptical that I've solved this age-old problem.
	You know, like I don't have a PhD in philosophy from Stanford.
	I mean, I studied philosophy at the graduate level.
	My graduate school thesis was about the history of philosophy, but I'm not a sort of big-named And known philosopher, particularly when I first wrote this book, which was back at the beginning of my public career.
	So I think if you do want people to accept unusual ideas, what you do is you acknowledge that the ideas are unusual.
	Because if you kind of get in people's face with your pressured speech megaphone of this, that, and the other, and you don't stop, and you just, then you look like you don't have social skills.
	You look like you don't understand how unusual your perspective is, which means that you're stuck in an echo chamber and don't speak outside of it.
	And I think that's a real shame because if you really do care, this is why I asked the guy you really care about these ideas and these arguments.
	Well, if you really do care about these ideas or these arguments, then you should try to make it as easy as possible for people to follow what it is that you're saying.
	And what you do want to do, I think, is acknowledge that this is going to sound kind of nutty and you know you understand and you thought these ideas were nutty when you've you know just align yourself with the people you're trying to talk to it's not manipulative it's just it's just honest all right let's do one more dude dude guy mcpants boaty mcboke face what's on your mind my friend if you want to unmute i'm all ears and just for the last caller too like you're frustrated if you ever hear this again i doubt you will but if you do or those for
	The frustration is because he really cares about these ideas, but he keeps running into rejection, which I think is probably a repetition compulsion that stems from childhood rejection and so on.
	Like a lot of times people are just acting out bad or strange childhood stuff that they haven't processed rather than being in the hot pursuit of actual ideas.
	So his frustration and his rage, you know, if I say these ideas seem or appear kind of nuts, I'm not saying the ideas are nuts.
	I think they seem kind of nuts.
	Like when I talk about a stateless society and people are like, well, that's just nuts.
	I'm like, yeah, I get it.
	I mean, I understand.
	It took me 20 years of study to get there.
	Other people, of course, had gotten there before me, but I wasn't aware of that.
	So acknowledging the unusual nature of your ideas is very important in helping to convince people of what you care about, of what you, and when you can convince people of what you care about, the world becomes a friendlier and better place overall.
	If what you care about is good.
	All right.
	Dude McDude guy.
	I think he is not here.
	Oh, no.
	I'm here.
	It's weird.
	It cuts out when you're having people talk.
	But I just wanted to say, well, first off, I wanted to thank you.
	You are one of the people who helped convince me that becoming a parent was something worthwhile.
	You and Carl Benjamin have my thanks.
	I now have three sons.
	It's amazing.
	I think anyone who holds my previous position of antinatalist really needs to reconsider a lot of things in their life.
	Well, thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	And congratulations.
	That's absolutely wonderful to hear.
	Thank you.
	The other thing I wanted to say is I'm kind of shocked to hear your previous caller rely so much on expert testimony after we've seen so much failing from so many experts.
	I was going to ask him if he took the vaccine, but he unfortunately didn't last that long in the convo because, yeah, I was kind of curious about that too.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	I mean, you can list numerous examples.
	And I myself am actually a published author or a published scientist in the field of geology.
	Sorry, in the field of what?
	You know, neither.
	Geology.
	I thought you said theology.
	And I was like, wait, the science of what?
	Okay, sorry.
	Go ahead.
	No, no, no.
	Geology.
	So I published a little ditty talking about potential evidence that climate change is not what people think it is and received a lot of wrath from peers as a result.
	Yeah, the usual horse's head in the bed, right?
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	You know, I actually was mailed a package full of human feces and then had to get my packages dealt with by an opening.
	You know, it's funny because my father was a geologist.
	My late father was a geologist.
	And I don't think he ever embraced anything quite so controversial.
	So good for you.
	But I'm sorry that it placed that way.
	I mean, plate tectonics was equally controversial at its debut.
	But that's kind of what I've...
	know i went from being a um angsty teenager who was uh you know at that peak of i know everything and i've you know descended into the valley of ignorance and and that's something i've i've come to understand is that expert opinions change rapidly all the time um there is no you know definitive expert truth on many topics i'm sure there are some but i mean you can look at monetary policy if you want to look at something reese Right, right.
	I mean, I would have more faith in expertise if the experts were in the free market.
	That's an excellent point that I hadn't even considered.
	Because they have skin in the game, right?
	So everybody knows that funding follows the scientific opinion follows the funding.
	And if you can throw hundreds of millions of dollars, you can very easily build scientific consensus.
	And well, they did that with sugar, smoking.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	Yeah, they did that with sugar.
	They did that with smoking.
	And asbestos was safe.
	And thalidomide was safe and all kinds of stuff.
	So I don't view scientific consensus as valid when coming from any government paid source.
	I just assume it's propaganda with a pocket protector.
	I mean, and your previous scholar again had, you know, there's the government has motivations for producing documents and testimonies for, you know, non-human technologies simply as a means of distraction is one good example.
	Well, that's very true.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I think it's been fairly well established that JFK shooting leaks would come out every time there was something that the government was being criticized for, and it would have everyone scurry off to do their conspiracy theory stuff and all of that.
	So, and here's the thing, too.
	Like, what I know about historical development is that we can't get to the moon again because people don't know how.
	And so, when the government takes things over, the progress stops or reverses.
	I mean, think where education would be if the government hadn't taken it over in the mid-19th century, like the mid-19th century.
	What was it?
	A teacher, 30 students, and a blackboard.
	Now, ooh, maybe it's a whiteboard.
	That's what they call progress, right?
	But it's still the same brain-numbingly boring, useless stuff despite immense advantages and advances in technology.
	So, whenever the government touches something, it gets frozen in time, as most of human history was frozen in time because governments and royalty and lords controlled just about everything.
	So, there's no way that space aliens are coming here with hostile intent.
	Well, they may come here to liberate us from our governments, which would be a very interesting phenomenon.
	I actually wrote a short story about this called Space Aliens from Luxembourg, but they're going to come here with malls.
	They're going to come here with a voluntary, peaceful, free market, stateless society, because there's no way technology is ever going to advance under government control.
	Like, you think of Star Trek, that was during the heady times of the space program, where massive progress was being made.
	And everyone thought, well, that's just going to continue.
	But the only reason that progress was made was because they brought a bunch of scientists and engineers in from the free market who had good work ethic.
	But then it stops in the same way that when you first socialize or the government first takes over medicine, you get all these doctors who grew up in the free market who still have that work ethic.
	But the next generation are terrible for the most part because they just don't have the same sort of environment.
	So it's like when the injury comes out, the plane still keeps coasting for a while, but then it crashes.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, I was on the doctor topic.
	I was going to say that or if they're from a foreign degree male, like protections in their country, doctors.
	Yeah.
	And they say there's a big doctor shortage.
	It's like, well, maybe with a little less immigration, we wouldn't have this big doctor shortage.
	Anyway.
	But yeah, so I view if something's coming from the free market, then I view it as much more credible than if it comes from some government scientist.
	I assume that government scientists is just part of politics.
	And I assume that everyone who's in charge of these funds and this funding and regulatory agencies and the oversight agencies, they're all just a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths who enjoy exerting their will over others without having to earn it through credibility.
	So I just dismiss it in general.
	And the funny thing is the last caller, too, is interesting because, listen, I have no objection to the existence of space aliens.
	I mean, it would be crazy to think that literally it would be deranged.
	It would be an appalling ignorance of statistics to think that 100 billion stars in 100 billion galaxies that we're the only life form.
	I mean, it's impossible that this is the case.
	I mean, there are tons of other planets.
	Theoretically, you know, Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, it's essentially infinite.
	And the idea that there are no other planets with water, O2, CO2, or maybe it's silicon-based life forms, the idea that there are no other planets that are in the Goldilocks zone that's suitable for life with some sort of self-correcting stabilizing mechanism like we have with O2 and CO2 and plants and animals.
	The idea that there's no other life in the universe is beyond incomprehensible.
	So of course there's alien life.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I was going to say, you know, speaking of experts, the Big Bang theory was recently overturned.
	The new prevailing theory is, you know, somewhat of a potential that the universe is truly infinite.
	And then if you do exist in a truly infinite universe, you know, it becomes the monkeys in the typewriter problem.
	There is every possibility right now that there is another three-domain radio out there on some other very Earth-like planet, another dude guy McPants having the same conversation, but he just disagrees with.
	Right.
	Yeah, it could be.
	And none of that is other dimensional stuff.
	It's just in an infinity or extendable universe.
	Everything could happen.
	And I've never been particularly fond of the Big Bang theory, which is nothing.
	It's a complete amateur idiot opinion.
	I'm far from having any reasonable knowledge of physics.
	But if the fundamental law of conservation is that matter can't be created or destroyed, only transferred to energy and back, how could the universe have been created?
	And so I'm, of course, of course, there's alien life out there.
	Will it come and visit us someday?
	I mean, I'm not sure because I'm sure you know this better than I do, but I mean, the issue of the speed of light or C being being constant, and I know that there's these theoretical tachyon particles and so on, but the idea that we can go faster than light appears to be not particularly possible.
	And of course, if there's one thing that Brian May, the guitarist of Queen, taught me in the song 39, that you're going to mess up with time when you go near the speed of light.
	Time slows down to the point where people would have to give up their entire social circle in order to go and fly to some other star system, even if you get close to the speed of light.
	And of course, as you start piling more energy into going faster, it just gets converted into mass.
	So I don't know that we're going to be able to do a whole bunch of super duper travel if it's 4.3 light years to the closest star.
	I think it was Alpha Century.
	Now it's not.
	It's been a while since I geeked out on astronomy.
	But yeah, of course, there's absolutely life out there.
	If you think of the age of the universe, 13 billion years, the funny thing is about Star Trek is that every civilization is kind of roughly at the same level of development.
	Like the Romulans and the Klingons and the humans, they're all roughly at the same stage of development.
	That's not going to happen because human development is like 500 years of science out of 14 billion years of the universe and 4 billion years of life.
	There's no way we're going to be anywhere close to each other in terms of development.
	We're going to come across countless planets with single-celled organisms or plants or very primitive organisms.
	And that's going to be interesting, but not that interesting.
	And then there's going to be super advanced civilizations that probably are going to try and hide from us because they don't want to mess us up too much.
	Or perhaps if they see us truly enslaved, they might come and try and help us out or something like that.
	But yeah, I mean, I don't.
	So when this guy's talking about alien life, he's really aggressive about God.
	He's like, yeah, I accept that there's no empirical rational proof for God.
	And then he's really insistent about space aliens.
	And first of all, don't tell me to believe something because the government says it because I've studied history.
	And secondly, don't assume I disagree with you.
	Now, when it comes to the drummer for the who being a time traveler, is there a cure for cancer out there?
	I mean, I'd be kind of surprised if there was, but it's certainly not impossible, right?
	So I view time travel as impossible.
	I really do think the drummer for the who was time traveler, but I think he was using acid to get there, not a fan.
	I won't get fooled again.
	Right, right, right.
	So we agreed on a lot, but one of the things that I always listen for with people who've got really kind of out there are unusual ideas, of which, you know, I'm one, so I'm not, there's nothing wrong with that.
	All new ideas seem far-fetched.
	What I listen for is if they're sprinkling in stuff that's not possible with stuff that is possible but improbable, right?
	So if somebody's like, well, space aliens exist and there's a cure for cancer and there's a square circle, I'm like, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on.
	The two, yes.
	I mean, could there be a cure for cancer that's suppressed?
	Absolutely.
	Could space aliens?
	I mean, there's sure, but there are no square circles.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, no, I was going to say, and there are incentives for, you know, if there is a cure for cancer, there's incentives for it not to be on the market.
	And if space aliens exist, you know, there's incentives to keep them concealed.
	I get where he's coming from as well.
	It's just, it's, I, and I completely agree with what you're saying.
	Usually when someone goes, oh, hey, here's two probable things and an improbable thing, it's a sleight of hand to sneak past you.
	Now, not that that caller was attempting to do so, but it's a rhetorical trick.
	Well, saying there's no proof for God, but there is proof that the drummer for the Who was a time traveler.
	I'm like, I'm not sure that quite the same standards are applying here.
	And listen, I mean, could the U.S. government be in possession of alien DNA?
	I mean, it's not impossible in the same way that a square circle is impossible.
	But time travel, that's not a thing.
	Because everyone who talks about time travel always forgets the time and space travel problem, right?
	So if I want to go back last year, I don't even know.
	You could probably ask an AI, how far away was the Earth from its current position?
	Yeah, it's like billions and billions of miles away, right?
	So if I'm going to flip back to this time last year, I don't just have to flip back in time.
	I have to flip also billions of years in space.
	And no one ever deals with that problem.
	And so I view time travel, even if you could somehow go back through time, which I didn't really, you'd just die because you'd be standing in a void and you would expire.
	So there's no time travel that stays on the same place.
	And that's never really addressed.
	So I view that as functionally impossible.
	But yeah, all the other stuff, I mean, could be, were we created as a slave species by space aliens?
	Well, I suppose I would find that a pretty tough thesis to maintain because if the space aliens are advanced enough to have interstellar travel and to be able to create slave organisms, why wouldn't they just have robots to do their work?
	Or why wouldn't they asteroid mine?
	I mean, any sci-fi where, oh, they come to Earth to extract our resources, it neglects the fact that there's water, ice, gold out there in the universe and comets in greater abundance than it is here.
	Sorry, that's a great point.
	Like the spaceships are literally flying past asteroids with billions of tons of gold, but then they want to go to Fort Knox for the challenge.
	I mean, I think that's pretty funny.
	Right.
	That's a great point.
	I think the predator is actually the only realistic portrayal of an alien species, at least as far as, you know, one that would be hostile.
	Oh, you mean something that might strip itself down of technology and hunt humans?
	Yeah, exactly.
	They'd be a lot more likely to challenge us with spears than they would be.
	Reagan.
	Well, I always have the feeling that those kinds of predators would look a whole lot more like Jeffrey Epstein than we imagine for sort of obvious reasons.
	But yeah, so I mean, I'm like, my mind is wide open to things that are possible.
	I do apply, I apply sort of two factors.
	One is probability and the other is relevance.
	Right.
	So for me, the Big Bang stuff, I mean, I always found it vaguely not believable.
	But when I sort of try to organize my day about doing good in the world and fighting the bad guys and promoting virtue and stuff, what does it matter what happened with the origin of the universe 14 billion years ago?
	I mean, I get it might be some answer to atheists so they can, but the atheists want answers so they can thumb their nose at Christians and pursue their hedonism, not because they really care about the truth, because you can say to atheists all day long that God doesn't exist.
	But as soon as you point out that the government doesn't exist, they turn into absolute rabbit cultists who try and jam Kool-Aid up your nose.
	So yeah, so it's interesting, though.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, I was going to say I agree wholeheartedly on that point.
	You know, when I was an atheist back in the day, it was because I'd read Stranger in a Strange Land, convinced myself that my intelligence was enough that I could be morally superior to everyone around me.
	And that was good enough for me.
	It turns out, you know, I was kind of an asshole and 15.
	So, you know, things have changed.
	Yes.
	I mean, taking the strengths of atheism, applying them to the weaknesses of theism, and then considering yourself an intellectual Titan is a kind of mental masturbatory game that all too many people, myself included, spent a little bit too much time pursuing.
	And for me, it was like, okay, so if there isn't religion, if I'm not religious, we still got to have some ethics, man.
	Otherwise, we're just animals.
	And so I sort of put myself on that goal.
	And the atheists did not.
	Yep.
	And it's, it's, you know, if you want to see the failings of atheism, all you have to do is look at the new atheism movement.
	How all it took was somebody being nice to a woman in an elevator for the thing to eat itself, you know, whole.
	What's that reference to?
	Oh, Elevator Gate.
	A prominent new atheist said, you know, hello, you know, I like you.
	Would you like to, I don't know if it was, would you like to go get drinks or would you like to come back to my room to a young woman of, I want to say, about 20 years of age.
	And then as a result, the, you know, the whole movement started collapsing in on itself.
	That was, it was called Elevator Gate.
	It was a, yes.
	And then that led to a lot of the tumblerisms, which eventually led to, you know, rise of sexism, eventually led to the atheism subreddit being removed from the front page of Reddit, which in part led to Gamergate.
	It's a big, you know, compressed ball of politics and references.
	But yeah, it now I sound like the conspiracy there.
	No, no, I mean, listen, ever since it's been fairly well revealed that the elites injected identity politics into the Occupy Wall Street movement in order to toast it.
	So that's interesting.
	So I'll have a look into that.
	So there was an atheist who propositioned some woman.
	And did she get all kinds of, oh, I can't believe it.
	Well, why would such a thing happen?
	Poor little old me.
	How predatory.
	And then like all the simps went on her side and all of the men's rights people went on the other side and it just detonated the movement.
	Is that right?
	For not having heard about it, you completely described it accurately for my fallibles.
	Oh, Lord, there's a woman in peril.
	Let me ride up and ride over the face of all men to get and rescue her.
	Maybe she'll sleep with me.
	Right.
	She made a YouTube video about it and then it was off to the races for all the simps.
	And then from there, it just evolved into this self-eating movement.
	And I spoke of Carl Benjamin earlier, you know, Sargon of Akkad, he's known as.
	That's when I first started following him long ago, was during that whole situation.
	I think it might have been a little bit later that he started becoming, you know, producing content.
	But, oh, no, it was Thunderfoot.
	Thunderfoot I started following at that.
	You know, speaking of Carl Benjamin, it's probably wrong and feels wrong, but also right to want to have a deep romantic relationship with that man's beard because it is magnificent.
	I say this is a guy who can only get scraggly iron filings along his chin at the best of days, but that is a sweet beard.
	And I wish to sing to it as a medieval, heart sick troubadour.
	But I feel that that may be inappropriate.
	I'm not sure.
	I'm not sure.
	But if he was in an elevator, if he was in an elevator, man, there'd be a whole new Stephbotgate going on.
	Only for the beard, though, not for the beast.
	Well, I shaved this.
	I shaved this morning and I've already got an eighth of an inch of stumble.
	So the next time I grow one out, if I see you in person, I'll let you go.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I've certainly had some listeners when we used to have these meetups.
	And it's like, well, your beard was on time, but you were five minutes late.
	So, and it is, it is really cool.
	I would love to get a full-on handlebar Nietzsche mustache that I have to turn sideways to get through a door, but it just doesn't seem to happen.
	I don't have much hair on my head, nor on my chiny gin chin.
	I'd love to have the kind of beard where I'm so manly, you have to hammer the bristles in and bite them out from the inside.
	But it is not, it is not to be, I must go through life entirely short of facial hair.
	On the plus side, too, I don't have to shave the back of my hand or my chest.
	So there's some pluses there, too.
	I'm like 99% of my way to bodybuilder hairlessness, but I've still got a little bit.
	You know, I actually shaved my chest for the first time.
	I, you know, I had my now wife over my apartment, and she was disappointed when I took off my shirt with how hairy the rest of me was.
	And she said something to me that I'll always remember was, why'd you get rid of the hair?
	Men aren't supposed to be smooth.
	Well, I think gay men are.
	I think gay men are supposed to be smooth because they always seem to be aiming for the pubescent look.
	So she became your wife after you let it regrow.
	Was that the sequence?
	She likes it.
	She understands it doesn't have to be out in the summer, but yeah.
	She's a really interesting lady, too.
	The comments you made earlier about having skin in the game remind me of her because she's, well, not in favor of our current voting system.
	She believes you should only get to vote if you've either made a necessary sacrifice or skin at the game.
	Well, that was, of course, the original American experiment was white, white landowners.
	Landowners.
	Was it 40?
	No, that was just the president.
	But was it 40 at the beginning for everyone or just for the presidency?
	It was 35, I believe, for the presidency.
	I think it was just, you know, white landowning males a good character, if I recall correctly.
	But again, my memory is fallible.
	Right, right.
	Well, that's cool.
	Well, I'm very obviously thrilled to hear about your family.
	I envy your fecundity.
	And it sounds like you have a wonderful marriage.
	And I'm obviously thrilled to hear about that as well.
	Just as we finish up here, could you give a little bit of your journey to fecundity from you were the anti-natalist, right?
	Yes, yes.
	I'd been convinced, you know, the world's evil, terrible place.
	You know, bringing children into it would be a tragedy.
	And then I read, what was it, Man's Search for Meaning?
	I think that's Victor Victor Franklin.
	Frankl?
	Yes.
	And, you know, the realization that people had, you know, children in some of the worst conditions you could imagine, you know, made me realize, you know, what makes me so special.
	And then through studying geology, kind of learning about concepts of deep time, I started realizing that, you know, for me not to reproduce, I would be the only organism in my entire genetic line dating back to the first, you know, multicellular sexual life forms to not reproduce.
	And that kind of, you know, made me realize: okay, I've got duties.
	I've got, how do I put it?
	You know, things that were given to me that I owe to the future.
	And I know a lot of people will tell you, oh, you don't owe anyone anything.
	Well, no, you know, I'm standing in a green yard in a beautiful town that's low crime.
	I owe it to my children to pass them something similar.
	And I owe, you know, the world my children as well.
	So it's, yeah, it just became a gradual process.
	Yeah, I mean, the best way to conquer people.
	My wife was also.
	Yeah, the best, the best way to conquer people is to have them stop thinking about the future.
	And the best way to do that is to tell them, oh, the world's overpopulated.
	And that way, all the thoughtful people stop having kids and the dummies have a lot of kids.
	And sooner or later, there's really nothing left to say.
	Sorry, we're going to talk about your what?
	No, no, I was going to say my wife was also very, you know, she told me, like, look, I want kids.
	I want them now.
	You know, we're going to do this.
	And you're like, hey, drugged me a little bit along for the last few years.
	I can rent a windowless van.
	We can go past the playground.
	No problem, man.
	Because I always always tell the kids in the neighborhood, man, strangers have the best candy.
	Anyway, no, that's that's I'm glad she set you straight.
	I really am.
	No, she's she's uh she's been quite the uh Sherpa on my political journey as well.
	So it's it's funny, too, because I still work at a university.
	I constantly have people, you know, tell me, oh, how can your wife stand you?
	You know, with as conservative as you are and you voted for Trump and you're just this awful person and all this kind of stuff.
	And I'll get real close to their face and I'll go, you don't understand.
	I'm the liberal in my right, right, right.
	Right.
	If only I could aspire to the conservatism that my wife manifests, then I'd actually be the man in the household.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	Yeah, no, it's funny because it's the other thing, too, when people say, Steph, you're bald.
	And it's like, you know, like some women totally dig the bald look, man.
	They just love it.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say, you know, sure, some of her activities have gotten me interviewed by the FBI, but it's been a wonderful trip.
	And I do it all over again if given the option.
	You know, it's been my experience that it's a beautiful thing to develop a close relationship with your local law enforcement.
	You know, find out their kids' birthdays and, you know, with the names of their pets.
	It's a wonderful thing.
	It just, it brings everyone closer together in one windowless office with a swinging light bulb and a pair of electrical pliers.
	Then that's just what I bring.
	The stuff they bring is even more different.
	You wouldn't think they still use the incandescent light, but they really find that the heat help interrogate.
	Oh, yeah.
	And then that slow migraine you get from the swinging fluorescent flicker is really something.
	It's really something.
	Well, that's she staying home with the kids.
	Is that her gig?
	Unfortunately, not particularly.
	She wants to be.
	We're very blessed to have a sitter, and I'm currently pursuing a degree that makes me a little more wide-scale employable so that we can make that happen.
	But yep, we're not quite there yet, but we're working forward.
	Well, that's fantastic.
	And congratulations again.
	Of course, as a geologist, I have to say, rock on, dude, just like the last guy.
	But yeah, welcome to call back anytime.
	A real, a really enjoyable chat.
	And I hope that you'll call back.
	And I'm going to stop here because I got a thing.
	I got a thing on my leg.
	It's crawling out.
	So have a wonderful afternoon, everyone.
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	Lots of love from up here, my friends.
	Thank you for a glorious afternoon of philosophy chat orama.
	I'll talk to you soon.

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