Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - What on EARTH is Real? Twitter/X Space

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 1, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:39:13

What on EARTH is Real? Twitter/X Space

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Yeah, you're coming on, alright.
	Alrighty ready.
	Hi, everybody.
	Good afternoon.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stefan Mulany from Reedemane.
	Oh, nearly at the end of the month.
	It's the 30th of September, 2025.
	I hope you're having a wonderful, juicy, delicious, delightful afternoon.
	And I'm here to talk, here to listen, here to provide, hopefully wise counsel, whatever is on your mind.
	However, philosophy can help you.
	I'm killed and th I'm thrilled, I'm killed in thream.
	I'm thrilled and keen every now and then.
	I just like to mix up the syllables.
	Who dyslexic atheists don't believe in dog.
	Do I have that right?
	I think I do.
	I think you do.
	So if you have questions, comments, issues, challenges, just raise your hand.
	We'll get our jaw boning on.
	And if you are a subscriber, don't forget you get lots of juicy bonuses and benefits, including I'm on I've just released chapter seven of my new book, which I absolutely love to death.
	These are people, I feel like this is a novel that I'm writing about how small decisions at the beginnings of things determine and sometimes shape your entire life, sometimes irrevocably.
	And I I think about this, of course, in terms of the little decisions that I made when I was younger, and how they had these maps to ripple effects on my life as a whole, and because philosophy is about prevention, not cure, like nutrition and exercise are about preventing you from getting ill, not curing you after you're ill.
	I want to remind people just how important it is.
	Every breath you take, every step you take, and every decision you make.
	Shapes things, and sometimes it feels irrevocably.
	Alright.
	Let's get to Le Brainiacs of the operation.
	Raz, if you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear what you have to ask, say or query.
	He comes.
	He goes.
	Oh well, he might have hit the wrong the wrong thing.
	So Zakir Starney was out today talking about, and it's an interesting philosophical question.
	What does it mean to be British?
	What does it mean to be Indian?
	And it's a funny thing because uh George Orwell, I think was born in India, was never referred to as Indian.
	Uh who is it?
	Um born in Japan.
	Uh the Amran guy born in Japan.
	Uh has never been referred to as Japanese.
	But it does seem to go the other way quite a bit.
	All right, I'll pick that up in a sec, because we have David, I uh I love you in Marble, man.
	David, if you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear what's on your mind.
	I was just gonna say congratulations for uh getting back on here.
	Uh I can't imagine, you know, how like if your primary income was entertainment to be blocked for having an opinion that that's really rough.
	So I just came into the chat, I'll happily or I just came into the group.
	Uh so I'll happily like mute myself and wait until I can jump in again if you're cool with that.
	But yeah, it's been uh it's been great having you back here on uh back here on Act and available.
	So keep up the great work.
	Thanks, David.
	I appreciate that.
	And uh I wasn't sorry to be minor nitpicky guy, but I was not banned for having an opinion.
	I was banned for having proof.
	I was banned for having facts, reason, and evidence.
	One of the most volatile topics as you know is the question of the case.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's right.
	That's a better way to put it.
	Yeah, so one of the most hotly contested topics is the realm of IQ.
	Uh IQ, the bell curve, and all of this sort of stuff.
	So the left gains power by uh fostering resentment.
	Uh particularly from the less successful to the more successful.
	And by fostering resentment, they can of course set people against each other and have us fight each other while they expand their rule uh and so on.
	And there's a famous sort of scene or a pretty important scene in Monty Python's Life Of Brian, where the revolutionaries are all fighting with each other while the low Roman soldiers kind of roll their eyes and look at them.
	And IQ is a great peacemaker.
	IQ is a great peacemaker between the classes.
	So if you're a worker, let's say you have an IQ of 1995.
	Nothing wrong.
	Nothing wrong with that, right?
	It's just like height, it's not good or bad.
	But you have an IQ of 1995, and your boss has an IQ of 120.
	Right?
	So that's almost two standard deviations, and that's a huge difference in terms of what you can do.
	No society has ever sustained its political freedoms with IQs 90 or below, and so on, right?
	So the goal of the elites is to lower IQs, which they're doing in a bunch of different ways.
	But it's sort of like when somebody's really good at something, you can often see it directly, right?
	So let's say you're in a band, and you know, one guy's a really great singer, and you know, great stage presence, works the crowd, sexy, whatever, like some amalgam of Sting and Freddie Mercury and like whoever, right?
	And so yeah, so hang on.
	So who should be the singer?
	Well, the guy who's really good at singing, but you can hear that.
	So who should be the boss?
	Well, the guy who's really good at running the business.
	And the guy who's really good at running the business ends up as the boss.
	But you can't see it in the same way that you can hear a good singer, or you know, if if you're um when I produce plays and movies, I would audition actors, and you'd say, okay, is this the right look for the character?
	And then can this person act?
	And you can sort of see that, and then that's very vivid.
	IQ is harder to see because you only see its general effects.
	And so there's a boss and there's workers, and in general, the boss is much smarter than the workers.
	And but what the boss is doing in the back office, you can't really see.
	So I remember when I worked in a hardware store, so Bailey's home hardware, I think it was called back in when Dom Mills Mall was still a thing back in the 80s.
	And uh we had a boss who spent all his time in this little cubby hole office at the top of the stairs in the back of the store.
	And he wasn't out there cutting keys or mixing paint or cutting glass or helping customers or anything like that.
	He was uh just gone.
	And and so the the workers all see what each other are doing, but they don't see what the boss is doing.
	So it's easy for them to think that the boss is just overhead.
	Because they think that the business runs on uh cutting keys on cutting glass on mixing paint and all that other kind of stuff, but the business doesn't run on that.
	The business runs on having the rental space, ordering all of the materials, uh paying the taxes, having an accounting system and a payroll system, and dealing with the recalcitrant suppliers and making sure that the checks get cashed, there's enough money in the bank account.
	That's what the business really runs on, because without all of that, there's no business.
	So that all has to be there, and then if that's all there, somebody's built the whole store around you and is paying the taxes and complying with the regulations and running the payroll system and and paying the rent, and right, then you have a store, but what happens is the workers look around and say, Well, what we're doing, mixing paint, cutting keys, that's the real work.
	And our boss is not doing that, therefore our boss is not contributing.
	And it's a sort of mildly higher order of thinking to recognize that if you're a waiter in a restaurant, somebody has to build the restaurant around you, order the food, hire the chefs, manage it all, pay the taxes, and then you carrying around food makes money, but you carrying around food doesn't make any money, because if you try that in the woods, it's not going to work.
	So uh talking about IQ, IQ is sort of the natural enemy of the left, because if you are uh the drummer and you can't sing, and then there's a guy who's a great singer, maybe you want to be the front man, but you you know you can hear the guy sing really well and work the crowd really well and and all of that.
	So while you might have some resentment, if you want the band to succeed, you have to be the drummer and he has to be the singer.
	I mean, you know, uh it was sort of famous in in in Queen, the bassist John Deacon couldn't sing.
	He didn't even do backup vocals.
	I think there's a picture of him or in the video for somebody to love that, but he didn't sing.
	He couldn't sing.
	And so he was the bassist and Freddie Mercury was the singer, and the others, you know, Did sort of live or backing vocals or whatever it is.
	But Freddie was the best singer and the best front man, so he was the singer and the front man.
	So to hide IQ from people is to have the ability to foment hostility, hatred, resentment.
	Ah, the boss isn't doing anything.
	He's just useless overhead.
	Because you see what the other workers are doing.
	You're on some factory line.
	You can see what the other works uh workers are doing, and you don't think about the fact that the business exists at all in the first place.
	So the left hates the topic of IQ because IQ brings peace to everyone.
	So you would mention that if IQ was hidden.
	Would you would you like to see you'd mentioned because IQ is hidden, like you you do have to study someone, and I I do appreciate that there are people that can recognize greatness, and there are people that cannot, and there are people that can recognize greatness and perform it, and people that can recognize it and not.
	But so would you would you ever want to see something that's like an IQ sticker like on our, you know, next to our next to our names up here.
	No, I I mean I I think that would be fine in a way, but I think it would encourage or discourage people from engaging in intellectual conversations because I wouldn't want uh my IQ has been estimated by a researcher at 160 to 170.
	So let's say it's somewhere in there.
	It could be higher, it could be lower, whatever, right?
	And and that's just general.
	I mean, in terms of verbal and analytic, it's uh it's pretty high.
	But I would never like let's say that I have my IQ 165, and I've actually seen some people that actually put their IQ in their name, right?
	So let's say it's 165.
	But I wouldn't want anyone to say, oh my gosh, he's got an IQ of 165.
	I can't debate with him, I can't reason with and I wouldn't want that because I think we all have to participate in the philosophical conversations.
	I mean, some people may be maybe I'm a bit better at leading them or whatever, right?
	But so, but what I do want people to understand is that the bosses in a free market environment contribute a lot.
	And it's funny because I've known both sides.
	So when I was first started working in sort of the worker boss environment, the workers looked at the boss like you couldn't pay me enough to do that job.
	That job sucks.
	You know, everyone yells at you, and you you've got to fight with people who don't even want to take your phone calls, and you've got to get uh people to pay you for stuff, and you got you gotta get people to deliver to you the stuff, and you gotta deal with accountants and lawyers and taxes, and you know, like you couldn't pay me.
	I just want to I want to get in, I want to do my job, and I want to go home.
	I mean, I remember I spent uh a week or two one summer as a house painter, you know, sort of crime and punishment style.
	And I remember the boss of the crew was uh on the phone, he used the phone of the house we were in.
	He was on the phone yelling at people to pay us, yelling at people to get the paint uh delivered, uh, yelling at people who were trying to cancel with very short notice, a paint job, yeah, all of that kind of stuff.
	It's pretty stressful.
	And I was like, I just want to put on my ghetto blaster, I want to, you know, play some simple minds, and I just want to hum along and and paint.
	That's it's I don't want to be on the phone yelling at people to get things done.
	And so people were like, man, you couldn't pay me enough to do that job.
	But that kind of changed uh after the 80s, and I guess it's because of the wave of socialists kind of came into the educational sphere, and then people were surly and mean and negative, and you know, it because not just IQ, you can be, you know, smart as a whip.
	But if you think that all work is exploitation, you know, there's this weird thing that goes on in the left these days where it's like I can't believe that we have to get up and work and I can't believe it's like because you're not a baby.
	Babies have, you know, milk rained down from the giant fun bags of the mom or whatever, and and you know, you get changed and moved around and fed and and warmed and cuddled, and it's like, because you're a baby, but adults, we have to, you know, we have to earn our daily bread in one way or another.
	So it's sort of a rebellion against reality.
	But yeah, definitely in the 90s, the real edge that I always had in my career, one of the reasons I was very successful in my business career is that I did not resent having to work.
	And of course, also having done horrible, brutal, nasty, dangerous physical labor for me to get to work in an office was like, oh god, I kiss, I kiss this wiry gray carpet every time I come in that I'm not having to take a flamethrower to frozen earth to get through the permafrost to dig for gold in minus 35 degree weather.
	Like to me, it's like you could never, I wouldn't I never complained about working in an office.
	It was it was fantastic.
	So yeah, that resentment stuff will really mess people up.
	And uh, of course, if you resent having to work or you resent having a boss, then you don't move up.
	And then you, you know, because everybody who starts has terrible bosses because really good bosses don't manage new hires, right?
	Really good bosses manage really experienced people.
	And once you sort of break through that, yeah, once you break through that layer or that level and you get to the good bosses, you're like, man, these guys give you really good advice.
	They give you really great help.
	And I always said this to my employees.
	I managed like, I don't know, 35 or 40 people at one point in my career.
	And I said, listen, you're paying, you're paying me.
	Like, you my paycheck comes out of your paycheck.
	So utilize me.
	If you've got a problem, you've got a difficulty, you want me to deal with someone who's difficult, I will happily dive in and have those challenging conversations, and I will, you know, uh, I will make sure I get you a raise and I will uh make sure that you have as happy and productive a work environment as possible.
	And the one or two times in my career where I came into existing work structures, there was usually, you know, one fairly toxic person or two toxic people, and I just have to fire them, and everyone's like, oh, thank you.
	This is it's so much more fun to come to work now and all of that.
	So uh yeah, just add positivity.
	Sorry, you were gonna say.
	Uh I was just gonna say, yeah, we had a similar uh we've had a similar history.
	I worked for uh simple painting company that I was glad that I wasn't in charge of anything.
	And then I uh I ran a winter maintenance contract, and I remember um, you know, I I never had to fire anybody, but uh, you know, uh it it if you you really if you have a consistently good attitude and your your people know that you can solve their problems, because that's your job when you're in charge, right?
	You're you're there to make sure the workers can work.
	And as long as you do that, you you always get, you know, 10%.
	Well, at least I always did.
	Uh uh get 10% out of a team and uh that kind of thing.
	But I'm curious, though, to jump back to IQ.
	So do you think that the left uh or both sides, do you think both sides kind of try to pull the rage, anger, and and low IQ stuff?
	You mean both left and right?
	Correct.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So on the left, they want to erase IQ because it explains group disparities, right?
	Uh IQ and other biological factors.
	Again, you never judge an individual by group statistics, but you know, men and women, higher and lower IQ, ethnicities and so on, like in very sort of broad zoom out terms, it goes a long way to explain the differences in outcomes.
	And that's just that that that's not resentment, right?
	If you sort of look at the NBA, you know, how many how many Chinese guys are there in the NBA?
	But nobody sits there and thinks, well, you know, the NBA owners are have this horrible racial hatred towards Chinese guys or or something like that.
	That's not that's not the way uh that it is.
	And so it just it just cools temperatures.
	It just cools temperatures and has people appreciate and understand.
	Like, there are bands that I really like.
	You know, I remember having dreams, I had a dream once many years ago about being the lead singer for Queen.
	Like, that'd be a lot of fun.
	But I can't sing like one percent as well as Freddie Mercury, so if I were the lead singer for Queen, there'd be no queen, right?
	So relinquishing the reins to the best riders is beneficial to everyone in society, like it just posted today.
	Like if the NBA were sort of forced to draft short people, there'd be no NBA.
	Like it would nobody would pay to go and watch it, they'd, you know, whatever, right?
	And so it's just a way of calming things down and saying, look, the reason he's the boss, well, the reason he gets paid more is because he delivers more value.
	Now, if you can figure out a way to deliver as much value then you two can be the boss.
	And if you can deliver more value than your boss, you'll probably become your boss's boss or something like that.
	So and I already because I always used to tell uh my employees like I I don't I don't pay you, right?
	I I don't pay you and I don't pay myself.
	We're all paid by the customer.
	So if there's something that's better for the customer, absolutely let me know.
	And that's uh the way that you end up getting pay.
	I I don't pay you.
	It's not about pleasing me.
	Uh it's not about whether I like you or not.
	I judge as best I can the value that you're providing to the customers.
	And if you can provide more value to the customer, I will absolutely pass those benefits along to you.
	So on the left, they don't like the IQ topic because it cools hostilities and tensions and has people accept, you know, like uh I'm I'm like a shade under six feet, and I'm you know, mildly stocky, I suppose.
	Like I have a sort of fairly solid Anglo-Saxon build.
	So I'm not going to be a jockey, right?
	Like a horse jockey, because you gotta be like 90 pounds.
	Uh I'm not gonna be a basketball guy.
	I'm not gonna be a hair model, and I'm not gonna be an opera singer, I'm not gonna be ballet dancer, like all these there's all these lists of things that I just I just can't do it last to a large degree because of physiognomy, physiology, and so on, and that's that's fine.
	That's like I mean, there's things I can do, and there's things that I I can't do.
	It's not it's not because everyone's excluding me or hating me or whatever it is.
	Now, that certainly has to happen, I guess, with deplatforming, but that's so I'm trying to cool social hostilities and uh cool the temperatures uh of these kinds of things.
	And so on the left, they don't like it because they like provoking conflict.
	Uh on the right, though, there is the the challenge of the soul.
	And the soul is equal from person to person in its foundational essence.
	And so they have trouble differentiating higher or lower quality because of the concept of the soul on the right and on the concept of uh the need to foment conflict on the left, they dislike the topic as well.
	Alright, so anything else you wanted to mention?
	Uh I'll keep in the same vein of IQ.
	Uh are there any like um you know, like uh statistics of uh violence and theft and that kind of thing along uh the IQ bands?
	Yeah, so I did a show with Dr. Kevin Beaver, who's not responsible for anything that I'm saying, obviously, right?
	But I did a show many years ago uh on the sort of etiology of crime with Dr. Kevin Beaver, who's done some fantastic work, and he's found that the sweet spot for criminality, so to speak, is about IQ 85.
	And uh that does seem to be a sweet spot for criminality, and that's of course a significant challenge.
	Now, of course, of course, of course, I just you know I have to put these caveats in because I don't want anyone jumping to collusions.
	The majority of people who have an IQ of 85 are not criminal, right?
	But in terms of the sort of bell curve of criminality, it tends to peek around um IQ 85.
	Yeah, okay.
	Okay, okay.
	Well, thanks, man.
	I appreciate that.
	We got a bunch of other people who want to chat.
	I'm happy to hear.
	Raz, did you want to try again, or are you just pecking at the wrong button like an obsessive bird?
	Raz, Raz, Raz.
	All that rares.
	Going once, go on twice.
	Look at that.
	Working in a queen joke there.
	Yes, no.
	Yes, no.
	Mute unmute.
	Going once, going twice.
	Alright.
	So I'm gonna have to block because I don't know why he keeps asking for these kinds of things and then not doing them.
	All right.
	Ask yourself.
	That's a good philosophical perspective.
	What's on your mind?
	Ask yourself.
	You might need to unmute, but you have been you have been chosen.
	Oh, okay.
	All right.
	Uh loud and clear?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Okay.
	Um, well, we spoke last time.
	It was just about is and odd.
	Uh I wasn't really persuaded that you had found a way to resolve the problem.
	I also am not sure that we think of the problem in the same way, though, so I suspect it could be semantic.
	I had asked you to sum up your view, but then my mic cut out.
	Uh so I don't know if you want to repeat it, or if you want me to well, maybe it'd be good for you to repeat it.
	Well, I guess I can just I appreciate you calling back.
	Uh I ask uh I ask you the question, is a debate an is or an ought.
	I'm not really sure how to answer that.
	Well, a rock is an is, not an ought, right?
	Uh well, I think that we say that a proposition would No, no, hang on, hang on.
	Sorry, I we can't start by talking cross purposes, so you can reject my question, but please don't ignore it.
	Is a rock an is or an ought?
	I think the question's loaded.
	I don't think it's either.
	I think it's a noun.
	I think propositions are.
	Okay, uh does a rock exist.
	If it's sorry, I'm not trying to avoid your question.
	If you want to talk about the proposition, a rock exists, that would be an issue.
	No, no, does a rock do rocks exist?
	I think so.
	What do you mean you think so?
	I don't understand.
	Sorry, what do you mean you think so?
	There's a whole field called geology.
	My father was a geologist, he studied rocks.
	What do you think he was fantasizing?
	No.
	Okay, so do rocks exist?
	I think so.
	Okay, why don't so why don't you know?
	I didn't say I don't know.
	I just think some of those terms like knowledge, we don't know, we'd have to unpack what we mean.
	No, it's not unpacking.
	Does a rock exist?
	I think so.
	So you don't know.
	It's gonna depend how you use knowledge.
	That's a fraught philosophical concept.
	There's different notions of the phone.
	No, it's not.
	No, no, it's really not.
	There are complexity.
	Hang on, there are there are complex physical concepts.
	But does a rock exist?
	It's not one of them.
	You asked if I know that a rock exists.
	Knowledge is a complex philosophical concept.
	Okay, let me ask you this.
	Did things exist before there was human consciousness?
	I think so.
	But you don't know.
	I think we're going in a circle.
	What do you think I'm gonna say to that?
	Well, I think so is a statement of probability or possibility.
	It is not a statement of certainty.
	Well okay, but I've said the same thing.
	Let me ask you another question then.
	Do you think that I exist?
	Okay, I'm happy to answer that, but I'm just I'm kind of worried you're gonna ask me a lot of questions, and then we're not gonna get to the initial objection that I was sort of bringing up the last time that I came on.
	No, I'm trying to establish whether anything exists outside of your consciousness.
	Because if I'm a fantasy of your consciousness, I'm not sure how we can have a debate if you're kind of arguing with a dream or some sort of avatar in a matrix world or something like that.
	So I'm trying to understand if you accept that things exist outside of your consciousness.
	Okay, we we might have a bit of a fundamental disagreement, because I think that's not really a fair approach, I guess.
	I kind of I want the initial thing that I can't do.
	Okay, so you don't know if rocks exist, but you think I'm being unfair.
	Do you think fairness is more complicated than rocks?
	I think you're kind of going for cheap dunks.
	Like, would you be able to repeat what my initial criticism was, just to make it clear that you're actually engaging with it.
	I'm sorry.
	So now you think that cheap dunks exist, but not rocks.
	Are you certain that it's cheap dunks, which is an evaluation of my, I guess, moral purpose in having the conversation.
	So you're certain that I'm doing cheap dunks, but you're not certain that I exist.
	I don't think that I said anything about certainty, but I think that you're kind of gonna burn out the clock on this and hang up on the phone.
	No, no, I'm asking I'm asking this is basic.
	This is basic philosophical questions.
	Do you because if you don't know that rocks exist, then you don't think that I exist, you're not certain that I exist.
	You're not certain that the microphone exists, you're not certain that your arm exists.
	Like that's a radical thing.
	So you want to get it.
	If you want to like talk about so firstly, I want my initial thing addressed.
	I think this is not my initial thing.
	I don't I also don't mind talking about knowledge.
	Like if you want my view, I'm a contextualist.
	You know what contextualism is?
	Uh I feel free to describe it.
	I'm sure I may know it by another name, but go for it.
	Yeah, which I'm which I'm not sorry, just to be clear, I'm not trying to cheap dunk on you.
	I'm just not I'm just trying to suggest I do have a view about knowledge.
	I have some some idea, right?
	Um Yeah, so contextualism basically, like if you read the SEP entry on it for anyone who wants to read more, there's these kind of problems that we get with knowledge.
	Like people will want to say in different contexts that they know things that seem incompatible.
	Like if you ask someone, do you know what you had for breakfast?
	Or do you know that a rock exists?
	I think that most people will want to say, yes, I know what I had for breakfast, yes, I know that rocks exist.
	But then if you ask something like, do you know that you're not a brain in a vat?
	A lot of people say, well, I'm not sure.
	But if you know you're if you know a rock exists, you know you're not a brain of that.
	And if you don't know whether you're a brain of that, then you're not sure whether a rock exists.
	So contextualism sort of comes in as a solution that says, okay, well, the problem here is that epistemic language is actually indexed to content, context, or at least could be indexed to context so as to make it make more sense.
	So the idea is a epistemic context is some set of starting propositions, and to say you know something is to say that it's roughly that it's like validly deducible from the starting set under some relevant logic or something like that.
	So you might say deducible from you said that I didn't catch that the start of something or that from deducible from the So there's sorry, there is a bit of technical terminology there.
	So like the starting set, that's just the set of propositions that you're taking for granted in a given epistemic context.
	So you might have a mundane context, like the rock or the breakfast conversation with your grandma.
	And in that kind of context, you get a ton of stuff in the starting set.
	You get like the uniformity of causation, you get that like other minds exist, that the external world exists, that um science is reliable, sense perception is reliable.
	So if you have all that, it's fairly easy to deduce that you know a rock exists.
	But in a really skeptical context, you know, maybe you're talking to your philosophy professor, they would look at you like you're kind of silly if they said, Hey, do you know whether you're a brain Novat?
	And you said, Well, of course I'm not a brain Novat.
	I can see I'm not a brain Navat, because it's kind of implicit in that conversation that we're not.
	Well, no, hang on for granted.
	You wouldn't just say, I can see that I'm not a brain and a vet.
	I'm right now I'm just explaining what contextualism is, because you asked my view.
	Do so do we share uh understanding of of what it is?
	It's basically a semantic for uh for epistemic language, where we say for any kind of knowledge statement, like I know X or X is justified, we say that we we interpret that with respect to a context, and it's going to be justified in a given context, right?
	So a statement might be justified in a mundane context and not justified in a skeptical context.
	So it's a s sort of relativistic, which you might not like about it.
	Well, don't tell me what I do and don't like because it was just a guess.
	I'm not going to talk about it.
	No, no, you said I'm not accusing it.
	You might like, hang on.
	Yeah, which you might say you're a bit of a well.
	I'm just saying you that might be your view.
	It also might not be.
	I'm not trying to ascribe it to you.
	You're not going to be able to do that.
	Come on, man.
	Which you might not like is is indicating that my response is based on some emotional preference rather than.
	No, no, no.
	No, no announce.
	No, no, you no, you might have a view that's different.
	That is a reasonable view.
	I I suspect you might not agree with that statement, but that's not to imply you might not agree because you're wrong or stupid.
	That and that's all I was correcting.
	You're free to go on.
	I just didn't want you to think I'm implying it.
	You said you should own what you said.
	You didn't say you didn't say you might have an argument against that.
	You said you might not like it.
	Okay, well, I'm happy to correct the language.
	You you might disagree with that.
	Would that be more fair?
	Well, that's that's fair, yeah.
	Okay, sure.
	And it's not an accident that you put it the other way.
	Okay.
	So what it also wasn't intentionally negative.
	I wasn't trying to be a dick or unfair.
	All right.
	I can't read your intentions.
	I can only read your language.
	So what you're saying is that if you accept sense data and you accept empirical evidence and you accept reason, then you can say that a rock exists.
	I'm saying if you don't accept those things, then you can't.
	I'm saying that on contextualism, a knowledge statement, an epistemic statement is going to be relative to a context.
	So in a mundane context, you might know something like that.
	In a skeptical context, you might not.
	Now, do you think that mundane is a negative word or a neutral word or a positive word?
	Neutral.
	It's it's just a matter of what kind of context we're in.
	It's fine to be in a mundane context when you're talking to everyday people or even some sometimes philosophically.
	But sometimes we want to I don't know, sometimes we're in a skeptical context.
	I mean I'm not shitting on one context or the other, though.
	I mean, generally people would say it's a negative word.
	I'm general.
	Right.
	I'm also happy to change that word.
	Just to be clear.
	It's just that there seems to be a lot of um uh almost like language program I'm not saying it's coming from you.
	I'm just saying that there seems to be a lot of like if if uh somebody were to say, what do you think of this movie and somebody were to say, Oh, I thought it was pretty mundane, uh, that would be a criticism, right?
	Yeah, I think that's fair.
	I I just want to say a general thing about our conversation, which is I think that I might use language in a way that makes you think that I'm saying something negative when that's not my intention.
	So if you think that I'm implying something, or maybe maybe it's I I don't know.
	I'm just I'm happy to correct and change language to clarify any of that.
	Because I'm really not trying to unfairly ascribe views to you or to like cast shade on your position or anything like that.
	It's just the way I say things.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Alright.
	So if you are a radical skeptic, or let's say a foundational skeptic, because to me, skepticism is a part of the bell curve.
	It's the Aristotelian mean.
	You don't want to take everything at face value.
	Neither do you want to be skeptical of everything.
	I view that as the Aristotelian because skepticism is supposed to guide you towards the truth.
	And if you just believe everything, I'm not saying you, but if if a person named Bob, let's say, if Bob just believes everything that he's told, then he can't get to the truth.
	However, if Bob doesn't believe anything that happens to him or comes in through the evidence of the senses, then Bob also cannot get to the truth.
	Now, of course, the purpose of philosophy, philosophy is the study of wisdom.
	And so philosophy needs to establish truth.
	Because if you don't have the truth, you can't possibly be wise.
	If there's no such thing as truth, then there cannot be any such thing as wisdom.
	Would you agree with those broad strokes?
	Um I'm not entirely sure.
	In all honesty, I would need to think about it.
	I'm I'm happy for you to continue.
	I'm not trying to steal the reins here, but I just want to say one.
	But you've been studying this for a long time.
	Do you believe that truth is possible to achieve for the human mind?
	Which would be an accurate statement of things as they are outside of consciousness.
	Like if I point at an oak tree and I say that's an oak tree, and let's say it is an oak tree, uh, that would be a true statement.
	That's an oak tree.
	Do you believe that the human mind is capable of achieving truth?
	I think that it's I don't I I don't you might not like my answer, which is not to imply anything.
	Please please don't do that.
	Please, please don't do that.
	We already went through this, bro.
	That is an insulting statement, so please revoid it.
	Uh how how do you what do you what you might disagree?
	How do you want me to phrase it?
	Well, just don't talk about what I like and I don't like.
	Okay.
	Well, I'm not the philosophy.
	It's not about what I like or I don't like.
	Okay, you might not agree.
	I I just I'm still triggered by the start of it.
	Don't talk about what I may or may not.
	Just give me your answer.
	Don't you don't need to keep referencing my state of mind or feelings in order to try an answer.
	I'm triggered.
	Okay, well, deal with your triggers, and let's just have the answer.
	Do you believe that the mind is capable of achieving truth?
	I feel like I want to say what I actually care about.
	And if I can't, I don't I don't know that I want to continue.
	Like I want to talk about what I look, there's there's two things.
	And I I'm happy to have you continue with the truth line after if if you want to.
	I just I feel like I'm being uh boxed in in a way where I can't express what I actually think.
	Two things.
	At the start of the conversation, you were asking me conversations about or ask me things about what I think, as if there's very obvious answers.
	And I was a bit cagey about answering.
	But I hope you understand now that that's because I think there's nuance to these concepts like knowledge or truth.
	And I think that the answer to something like that is probably going to depend on how we mean those terms, and we'd have to hash that out.
	So that's one thing.
	I just want to flag that.
	And the other thing is that I don't really think that you've summarized or in any way actually dealt with my initial problem on the is ought gap.
	And I want to get around to that rather than what I kind of worry is going to happen, which is I think we're gonna go down this road where you're I don't know if it's gonna be about knowledge or what, but I think you're gonna find somewhere where you disagree and then call me silly and then never talk about the is ought thing, which is like I almost just want to reset.
	No, I'm making a prediction about what will happen.
	So that's also kind of insulting.
	Like you just can't stop it, right?
	You have this compulsion to be insulting.
	Because I think I might believe it.
	I would just hang on, I would disagree with your argument.
	I would try and point out counter-arguments, I would try and reason from first principles with reference to reason and evidence.
	But I have not called you silly.
	I would not call you silly.
	So saying that my response would be to call you silly is insulting.
	I didn't say It would be, I said I sort of have a fear that it's going to go in that direction and that we're not gonna get to the topic that I originally came for.
	Do you think I'm being dishonest?
	I think that you don't want to answer questions.
	No, because you asked me uh about the is or dichotomy, and I said, is a debate an is or an ought?
	And we couldn't get to that one, so then I wanted to go to something more basic, which is the I need to define what is an is so that we can differentiate it from an ought.
	So I said, is does a rock exist?
	And we couldn't get there.
	I couldn't get a straight answer from you or a clear answer on whether you think a rock exists.
	And then I said, Do you think that things existed before human consciousness came along?
	Which is a statement of science, right?
	Science has decisively proven that things existed before human consciousness came along.
	We just look at carbon dating or the fact that life evolved over the last four billion years, the universe is fifteen billion or so years old.
	So I'm just wondering if you accept science and reason and evidence, because if you don't accept science, reason and evidence, I don't know how we can have a debate.
	So you said I don't want to answer questions, and I I would actually kind of grant that.
	I don't, but it's not that I in principle have an objection to answering questions.
	And I I do actually think that with the rock thing I clarified what I meant with contextualism, and that should kind of indicate what my answer is, and I'm happy to go over that.
	But the reason I don't is because I really want to talk about the original topic.
	I don't think that you know what my concern is with the is aught thing, and I just want you to understand what my concern is and then respond to my concern.
	Yeah, but why would I have a conversation with someone who doesn't even know that things existed before human consciousness came along?
	That's fair.
	If you now, to be fair, if you just said I don't want to address your concern for whatever reason, that would be okay actually.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	See, again, you're going back to some weird emotional thing.
	It's not that I don't want to.
	It's impossible.
	Uh, okay, that's confusing to me.
	But let's look.
	I j I just want to reset and I just want do you understand what my initial objection is, or my concern with the is odd gap.
	Do you mean from the last conversation?
	Yes, yeah.
	No, I don't have any uh memory of what your general issue was.
	I have like a thousand conversations a month, it feels like, so I don't have any memory of the conversation we had.
	I don't know, when was it?
	When did we last change?
	I don't know, maybe like maybe like a month ago.
	Basically, this this is it though.
	And I again I'm happy to address your concerns around knowledge and stuff.
	I just am worried that we won't get to it, and I want to talk about the main thing before again, I'm not trying to project onto you.
	I do have look, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna go on.
	The initial the initial problem that I came for is just you think that you have resolved this problem, and I think maybe you have under some framing of that problem, but the way that I think about the problem and that you'll see it written about standardly in philosophy, like if you read the SEP entry, for instance, on Hume's moral philosophy where it came from.
	I've done a whole show on David Hume, so yeah, I get it.
	I wasn't implying you don't know about Hume, but I don't think.
	Well you said if you read or if you understand.
	So I'm sorry, to be clear, yeah, to be clear, the you there is Oh, did his mic go out again?
	Hello, hello.
	Oh, what a shame.
	I think I think we've lost him.
	Okay, so um I will I'm obviously not going to finish the debate because uh you can't debate with people who don't accept that there's objective truth.
	You can't debate with people who are gonna deny the evidence of the senses because you have to debate using the evidence of the senses, right?
	In this case it would be using his hearing to transmit my thoughts and my argument.
	And so uh if people don't accept that you exist, that reality exists, that there's objective facts out there in the universe, or if people are so anti-science, like this is a weird kind of narcissistic uh solipsistic uh self-referencing, if you think that uh or if you won't accept the basic proven factual reality, that existence existed before the human mind did.
	Now, of course, if there are things that are real and true and facts, you know, stars, planets, uh gravity wells, photons, atoms, electrons, whatever, uh, physical properties and laws.
	If you don't accept that there are things pr that preceded and are outside and beyond human consciousness, then you have no reference point for the truth.
	And if you can't have a reference point for do rocks exist, exist means have physical properties independent of human consciousness.
	Do rocks exist?
	Well, there are rocks that are infinitely older, well, not infinitely, but you know, there are rocks that are, you know, billions of years older than human consciousness.
	So obviously rocks existed before uh human consciousness.
	So I don't have abstract discussions with people who can't even admit the basic fact that a rock exists.
	Because if somebody cannot say a rock exists, he says, well, I think a rock exists.
	Well, that's not how they live.
	It's not, I mean, this guy, you know, booted up his phone, called in, dialed in, had his mic ready, and all of this stuff had to be factual and real and objective.
	And the only way that Bro is alive and able to have a conversation is because he has accepted the basic facts of reality, that human beings need nutrition, uh, that human beings need sleep, uh, that human beings need uh water or liquids to hydrate and all of that sort of stuff.
	So he's accepted these basic facts of reality, because if he's like, well, I think I need food, but I'm not sure, uh, right, then he would, you know, getting food is kind of an inconvenience, right?
	I mean, it's just like it's like refueling your car.
	It's a lot more efficient to not eat.
	So the only reason that he's alive and able to have this conversation is he has accepted basic facts about reality and so on, right?
	And so why would I want to debate an abstract concept, such as the ought versus the is, with someone who doesn't accept that rocks exist, doesn't accept that existence exists, doesn't accept the clear scientific evidence,
	both in terms of physics, carbon dating, and biology, that more complicated things evolve out of less complicated things, and there were, you know, I think human beings have been dated back provisionally there's a skull in China recently about a million, a million years old.
	So if somebody isn't going to accept that there's a reality outside of human consciousness, then why would I have a conversation about abstractions?
	And like a lot of people who are I would say kind of emotionally based, because he kept referencing uh my emotions rather than my arguments.
	Uh like a lot of people who are emotionally based, you can't have facts about objectivity, and they tend to be kind of uh snarky.
	And I don't really appreciate that.
	I think that the is ought dichotomy is a fascinating problem.
	And of course I poured a lot of effort into it into working with and solving it.
	I actually did, I think it was a premium show where I worked through the argument for the is ought dichotomy, the argument that that there is no foundational is ought dichotomy, when I asked him the question, is a debate an is or an ought?
	Now, a debate clearly is not an is, right?
	So uh the the line of questioning was going to be something like, does a rock exist?
	Yes, a rock exists.
	Does a debate exist?
	No, because a debate is uh a relationship.
	It's a mutual conversation, hopefully aimed at getting to the truth.
	And so if a rock is an is, and the purpose of debate is to get to the truth, then a debate by definition is an ought, not an is.
	It's not an is in the way that the rock is.
	A debate or a conversation is an ought.
	I mean, even if you come in and you're not having a debate and you say it's raining outside, uh, assuming that you're an honest person, you ought to tell the truth, right?
	You ought not to say it's sunny if it's raining or it's raining if it's sunny.
	And so uh that was going to be the approach for dealing with the is ought, that somebody who's having a debate is accepting an ought.
	Somebody who's having a debate is accepting an ought.
	And that was going to be the purpose, but and maybe he kind of got that unconsciously or something like that, but uh basically he um he would not accept that rocks exist.
	Now, I'll tell you my emotional response, right?
	So deal with the rational thing.
	The emotional response is I get claustrophobic and creeped out by people like this.
	And I'm not saying this is on him, I'm just telling you my emotional response.
	So when somebody is calling in to correct me, in other words, Steph, you're wrong, or I don't accept your argument, or your argument fails, then they're saying my argument is not true.
	Okay.
	But they won't even say a rock exists.
	Right?
	And that's why I thought it was kind of funny that he was passing these moral judgments on me, but he's not even sure that a rock exists, and that's bizarre to me.
	If you can't accept that a rock exists, how can you be snarky and judge me as being uh foolish or deficient or misunderstanding or projecting or whatever it is, right?
	If you can't accept the simple things, how can you prove the complex things?
	If you don't know that a rock exists, how can you know?
	I can't remember what term he used, but I it was some term that was sort of negative towards me.
	And I really feel gross and and uh a little dirty and uh weirded out, because it it feels like an assault upon reason.
	And I mean, I wrote a whole book called Out of the Argument, saying that, you know, the debate, the argument, reason is civilization.
	And if we don't have that, right, the opposite of reason is Charlie Kirk getting shot through the neck.
	Not that I'm saying this guy advocates for that, but that's the inevitable result of giving up on reason.
	Because if he's not certain of anything, right, this this guy, if he wasn't certain of anything, then why would he call me?
	I mean, bro doesn't even know that a rock exists, then why would he call me?
	It's just manipulative and weird, and to me it's kind of like a virus trying to attack your brain.
	I I get a fight or flight response to this kind of assault upon rationality because it's so contradictory and manipulative, and it is contradictory and manipulative.
	So he doesn't know that a rock exists, but he knows that I'm wrong.
	Now, I think if you were to say to a 18-month-year-old, right, if you were to mime putting a rock into the 18-month-old hand, and you would say, Do you have a rock?
	They'd shake their head.
	And if you were to put a real rock into the 18-month-old hand and say, Do you have a rock?
	the baby would say, I do.
	Yes, would not, if he was pre-verbal or whatever, right?
	So a baby knows the difference between a rock and not a rock.
	And this is one of the big challenges of philosophy is how can we explain what a baby knows, right?
	There's a thing called object constancy, right?
	You have a ball, and the baby rolls the ball under the couch by accident.
	Uh when the baby is very young, the baby will just ignore the ball like it doesn't even exist.
	But when the baby gets older, they'll reach under the couch to get the ball because they know that even though they can't see the ball, the ball still exists.
	That's called object constancy.
	And that works.
	That's a real thing.
	I've never once in my life rolled a ball under a couch, looked under the couch, and there's no ball.
	Like it just it beamed out, it transported, it despawned, it went to the back rooms, right?
	That's not how reality works.
	So philosophy has the big challenge of explaining how a baby knows that a rock exists.
	If you say to a two-year-old, pass the catch-up, they will pass you the catch-up.
	They know that the catch-up exists, they know what you're referring to, they know that they have to reach out, they don't try and do it through their minds, they don't try and, you know, telekinesis that catch-up all over, they recognize that it's there, they pick it up, they know what you're talking about, and they hand it over.
	So how can philosophy prove what babies and toddlers know?
	I mean, that's an interesting challenge.
	Now, I don't think it's fair to say, well, babies and toddlers, they just in they exist in a state of mundane naivety, and it's like, no, no, because they're they're right.
	And it's what we need to survive.
	We need certainty to survive.
	And intelligent people need at least as much certainty as less intelligent people.
	And one of the things that intelligent people can do, this is sort of a midwit thing, I think, is that they can talk themselves into all kinds of confusion.
	You know, that meme of like the mouth-breathing guy, rock, rocks are real, right?
	And then the midwit who's like, well, rock, rock's quote, reality depends upon contextualism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And then like the Jedi guy on the right of the high IQ says, rocks are real, right?
	That's the sort of that's the meme I think that is uh it's kind of cooking along in this kind of area.
	And it is an assault.
	And I I view it as a viral assault because if this guy, and I would, You know, view him as kind of an enemy of philosophy, to be honest, because I'm trying to tell people what is real and true and good, and he's trying to tell people that there's nothing real and true and good.
	And he's attacking people's certainty, which I consider something like something that attacks your bone strength will cause you brittle bones and will cause you great harm.
	And I view it in that way.
	But all right, shake it off.
	Shake off the creepy assault on uh the functionality of the brain, the attempt to toxif toxic the brain's natural and healthy perception of reality, and we will move on to Monsieur or Madame good ever.
	Good ever.
	What is on your mind, my friend?
	Stefan, I uh appreciate you very much.
	And also I have a question unrelated to the previous topic.
	So it's a fine of it.
	I'm I'm happy to shake that one up, baby.
	Go on.
	All right.
	Um so my kind of topic and question is how like what kind of questions should I ask people, or what what information should I know about people to decide if they're good people or if they're people that I should um like if they're if they have the possibility to be moral.
	I don't I'm not sure if uh it makes sense what I'm trying to should.
	Yeah, well, I mean, this is what I do with atheists all the time is what is virtue and how do you know?
	Right?
	It's a basic Socratic question, right?
	Right.
	What is virtue?
	I mean it's the same thing I was asking the last guy.
	What is truth and how do you know?
	And so yeah, if if people if you you're meeting people and so on and say, um, you know, what what is virtue?
	And how do you know?
	Yeah, well, of course, Christians and other religious people will say virtue is this and this and this, how do you know because God has commanded it and decreed it and so on, which is a better answer than nihilism, for sure.
	But yeah, what is what is uh virtue and uh how do you know?
	I mean, those are very interesting and foundational questions, and I think foundational it's one of the things that my wife and I talked about very early on in our dating relationship, you know, what is goodness, uh what is truth, right?
	Because if people say truth is just whatever I make it up, right, which is kind of what a lot of people say.
	If people say, well, truth is just whatever I want it to be or whatever I make up, you can't ever resolve a conflict because they won't ever bend their in a sense demonic will to objective truth, reason, and evidence.
	So uh so I think that's important.
	Uh what is truth, what is virtue, how do you know?
	What do you think?
	They have to have a framework of truth and reality and virtue, so that they can be reasoned with, especially when tempers are running high, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I feel like for if I ask people what is virtue, I mean a lot of people I would hang, like I hang on around are atheists, and it's something they like they would say like it uh I mean the obvious answer for them would be, yeah, it's objective.
	There's no there's no morality.
	And I've I have this friend that I tried actually showing you PB with he's a physicist, and it it's like it's almost like a try it's uh getting him into or getting him to read uh objectivism,
	um like the objectivist metaphysics, and it's he has a lot of trouble with it for some reason, and I'm not sure how someone that's into physics that's like very into rationality is rejecting morality, and that's kind of also where this question is.
	Well, hang on, just your does your physics friend or your friend the physicist, does he work for a university or the government or some kind of government-funded agency?
	Uh no, he's uh programmer.
	Oh, he's a programmer in the private sector.
	Yes.
	Okay, got it, got it.
	Okay, so it's funny because the atheists say that the Christians are wrong.
	And of course, when you say the Christians are wrong, and you put a lot of effort into establishing and proving and showing how wrong the Christians are, then what you're saying is that truth is better than falsehood, right?
	The Christians believe in something that isn't true, and that's wrong or bad or negative.
	Would you agree with that?
	That's what the atheists are doing.
	That the Christians.
	Um the Christians are wrong or incorrect or it's negative for the Christians to believe in something that is not true for the atheists.
	Um that that's the Christians are believing into something that's wrong, that they're believing something that's wrong.
	That that's that that's bad, basically.
	Or am I?
	Well, yeah, so atheists say, do they not, that the Christians believe in a God that doesn't exist, and therefore the Christians are wrong.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So they're saying that to be wrong is bad, and it's infinitely preferable to be good and right and truthful and accurate, right?
	Yes.
	Okay, to which, I mean, this is sort of my big question on X that got like, I don't know, eight and a half million views, and it's like, okay, but why is let's say the Christians are lying.
	Let's say that they're lying.
	I don't think they are, but let's say that the Christians are lying.
	I think they genuinely believe what they believe, but let's say the Christians are lying, what's wrong with that?
	And and the atheists uh uh uh they don't have an answer.
	Like, why?
	What's wrong with what's wrong with lying?
	Now, if they're gonna say, well, lying is immoral, say, well, why?
	Why, why?
	I mean, nature is full of people who lie, and politics is full of people who lie and make an absolute fortune and love being politicians and are happy to have all the power they have, right?
	So why is it wrong?
	Nature rewards lying continually.
	I mean, camouflage is a form of lying.
	Hey, this is not me, I'm just a the grass, right?
	Uh the um uh uh the the predators hide themselves and pretend that they're not predators, they're just you know, upwind and they're like tigers in the tall grass or something like that.
	And so um there are there are creatures that pretend to be other creatures in order to uh ward off uh other other creatures and so on, right?
	There are um I think it's butterflies or moths, I think it's moths, that have a wing a wing span that looks like the eyes of an owl, and so that keeps other creatures abey.
	No, they're not, they're lying who are lying.
	So uh nature, evolution and all that, they that rewards lying like crazy.
	And so Christian the the the atheists say to Christians, you're wrong, and if I've proven you wrong and you maintain your belief, you're lying about there being a God, and that's bad, it's like, okay, well that that's the fan, but but why?
	Why why is it bad?
	And atheists can't answer, which means it's basically just an assault on Christianity, but why would you want to assault Christianity if you don't actually believe or have a proof that lying is wrong?
	Well, because you don't like moral moral rules.
	The attack is not upon Christianity, the attack is actually upon moral rules, which is why atheists not only have not embraced UPB, but they won't even engage with it.
	Like I did a very short proof of UPB on X after I asked the qu the atheists these questions, and they didn't engage with it at all.
	Now they can't say, well, you know, boy, I'm not gonna read a 300-page book by some guy I've never even heard of.
	There's not a bunch of academics saying that Steph is the most brilliant philosopher since philosophy was invented, blah, blah, blah.
	So, but I like it literally took about 30 or 40, I timed it, right?
	30 or 40 seconds to read.
	And it was a proof of secular ethics, and they did not uh they did not want it.
	So that's just the reality that atheists say that Christians are wrong and that it's bad to believe things that aren't true or to lie, but the atheists can't even say why lying is bad, because they don't have a moral standard.
	So it's what they dislike is is ethics.
	They're about tearing down virtues.
	Because and I I made this case in one of my books not too long ago, that atheists are just basically detonating churches without giving anyone any place to go.
	Well, that just comes out of a hatred of the church.
	It's not because you think the church is wrong.
	If you thought the church was wrong, you'd build another shelter before detonating the church, right?
	And everyone who's an atheist knows that Western morals come from Christianity.
	And if you want to criticize Christianity, okay, then where are ethics gonna come from?
	That's the problem you need to solve.
	But if knowing that religion is the foundation of Western morals, and in fact the foundation of morals all over the world, if you detonate religion without creating a moral system that is secular, you are not detonating religion, you're just detonating morals as a whole.
	And that's demonic.
	Uh this is uh atheism and Satanism, as they're currently practiced, Are uh very close together because atheism detonates religious morality and then viciously attacks any substitute or ignores it.
	Atheism confidently states that it has a set of virtues and ethics which are absolutely self-contradictory, hedonistic, wrong, boring.
	They say, oh, well, I don't I don't lie because I don't like to lie.
	It's like that's just hedonism.
	How do you deal with the people who do like to lie, of which there are many?
	Right?
	So saying I don't like to is like, you know, it's like somebody saying, well, there's no such thing as nutrition because I don't like to eat candy.
	It's like, well, what about the people who do?
	I mean, what about even if it's true?
	Or they say, well, society functions better when people don't lie.
	And it's like, not for the liars, a lot of liars make a huge amount of money.
	Or the objectivists even say that well, that which serves man's survival is the good and reason is the good, therefore reason is virtuous.
	And it's like, but lying makes a lot of people a lot of money.
	And the atheists have the Genghis Khan problem, which is that if biological success, if you take away morals, then what really matters is evolution, genetics, and biological success.
	And of course, Genghis Khan, the evil transmong rapist, uh, he succeeded in space, right?
	So uh yeah, I would I would ask, what is the good?
	And it takes a lot of courage to say I don't know.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, yeah.
	The um like what he would answer is he would he would say, yeah, I mean, um, it is hedonism, that's like uh it is hedonism that's driving me, like that's that's my morals, basically, and he wants to do the good things, basically, but he he doesn't.
	I can't really show him how you can have objective morals because he thinks even like as he believes he d I don't think he ever hated on Christianity.
	That's something he didn't do.
	Uh and he's not.
	I never used hated, but does he think that Christianity is wrong?
	Oh, um, just like factually wrong.
	Yeah, okay.
	So Christianity is wrong.
	And does he think that people should believe things that are false or wrong?
	Oh, no, he sh he says he you shouldn't.
	That's what they do in them.
	Because they're wrong.
	Yeah, but so what?
	Why why?
	Why not?
	I mean, there are uh people who are religious, for instance, people who are religious have a much higher birth rate than atheists, right?
	Yes.
	So in terms of evolutionary survival, Christianity is um is infinitely better in terms of evolutionary survival, Christianity is infinitely better than atheism.
	Atheists would die out in a couple of generations, Christians are around for, you know, so far two thousand years, and if you look at sort of Judaism, it's 5,000 years or whatever, right?
	So what what is what is wrong with believing things that are false if believing things that are false gives you a higher birth rate and believing things that are true has you wiped out in a couple of generations?
	That's retarded.
	Why is it bad?
	Yeah.
	This uh this kind of baffles me if someone like uh if I get that question, because I'm not sure how to like how how do I how should I explain that believing in something that's wrong, even though it's advantageous that it's that it's uh I don't know, I don't know how to explain that it's bad.
	Maybe this is like uh Well, and but but that's the question, right?
	So you have to create a demand for anyone to value your supply.
	Right?
	This is um I mean there's Say's law which says that supply creates its own demand.
	People didn't know that they wanted tablets, computer tablets until they were computer tablets.
	But if I if if a drug came along, like everybody wants to live longer and be healthier.
	So let's say I invented a drug that had people live for 500 years in perfect health, right?
	Would people want that?
	Of course.
	Right, they would want that.
	And so, but but that's people right now think if you make it to a hundred in reasonable health, that's pretty good.
	Like nobody nobody goes to somebody's funeral if the person lived to be a hundred and says, oh, they they've gone too soon, they died so young, right?
	To be like, eh, good long life, cross my fingers, I hope I get there too.
	So one of the purposes of what I do on X and other places is to tell atheists you don't have an answer, and you need one.
	Because you've no right to call Christians wrong or bad, or no right to correct Christians unless you say the truth is better than falsehood.
	But if you want to say the truth is better than falsehood, you have to ask, answer the question, why is it better than falsehood?
	Because God says thou shalt not bear false witness.
	God says that.
	And if you're an atheist, you don't believe that God commands thou shalt not bear false witness.
	So what's wrong with lying?
	So you see, they correct Christians, which is a moral perspective, but they have no morality.
	That's contradictory, which means they just have an emotional dislike or distaste for Christianity, which generally is coming from the enemies of Christianity, which, you know, we sort of know the the generally not not it's not that long a list, right?
	But that's that's where it's coming from.
	But of course, if people are unwilling to say, I don't have an answer, then it doesn't matter.
	Then atheists are even more superstitious than Christians.
	Because Christians have wrestled with the existence of God since well, before there was Christianity, really.
	I mean, Jews wrestled with it, and Babylonians and and uh the Taoists uh have wrestled with it, and pre Socratics wrestled with it.
	So they've wrestled with the existence of God.
	As I pointed out on the next atheists can't even conceive that the government doesn't exist, but then they bitch at uh Christians for believing that God exists.
	But uh Christians wrestle with this, they wrestle with the problems of fate, they wrestle with the problems of existence of God, they wrestle with the evil in a world designed by a good God, they wrestle with these things.
	What are atheists wrestling with?
	Are they saying, Well, guys, come on, man, we just we totally got rid of the entire foundation of Western ethics.
	We better come up with something quick, otherwise we're just sadistic.
	Like, don't even if you say that this person is addicted to drugs, you don't just yank them off the drugs, because they could have a heart attack and die.
	You try to transition them off drugs slowly, or you provide something that's alternative to that, right?
	And so uh atheists aren't sitting there saying, okay, so we just we just totally torched the entire foundation of Western morality.
	So now we're gonna live in an amoral universe.
	An amoral universe benefits the cruel, right?
	Like this guy I talked to before, he's oh I don't know if a rock exists.
	It's like, okay, great.
	You don't even know if a rock exists, but a thief knows for sure that he wants to take your stuff.
	So you don't even know if money exists.
	You don't even know if gold exists.
	Okay, but you're just handing over the world to people who are both wrong and certain.
	And so that's the challenge.
	But atheists, again, for reasons I don't exactly understand, because I've been working on the problem of ethics ever since I became an atheist.
	But atheists don't they don't even know that what they've done.
	They don't even understand what they've done.
	I don't and I I've been telling atheists this for uh, you know, decades.
	They don't even understand what they've done.
	They don't understand that they have destroyed morality in the West without creating a viable substitute.
	And then uh and this is straight out of Nietzsche, right?
	If if God is dead, then the will to power is all that matters.
	So they've turned Western civilization from a moral endeavor in the pursuit of virtue to a free-for-all of cold-hearted will to power cruelty.
	And they didn't not aware of it, maybe they're aware of it, maybe they're not, I don't know, I don't know.
	But I think they just did not like morality.
	And hating morality and destroying its substrate without providing an alternative is an act of moral sabotage that's pretty close to ethical terrorism.
	And so this is why when atheists come swarming me and saying, Well, I know why I don't lie and I keep proving them wrong, and then I give them the answer, they don't care.
	They don't care.
	They don't they they don't even recognize uh what they've done.
	I I again I'm maybe atheism has to do with uh complete blindness to consequences or a complete blindness to self knowledge or a complete lack of conscience.
	Maybe maybe uh people who are religious have a conscience and that's why they believe in God, and maybe atheists are kind of sociopathic, don't have a conscience and therefore don't believe in God because they never feel bad for anything that they do, right?
	If somebody has a conscience, they feel bad for doing something wrong, they're gonna go, wow, I have a conscience.
	That's makes me different from an animal, an animal doesn't feel bad about doing something, quote, wrong.
	That makes me fundamentally different from an animal, which means, gosh, maybe I was created in the image of something higher.
	Why would I have a conscience?
	But maybe atheists are just, you know, cold hearted people without a conscience, and they're like, I'm just an animal.
	Like, why would I why would I believe in God?
	Right?
	But maybe maybe the path to God leads through the conscience.
	Now I've lived both ways.
	I've lived without a conscience and I've lived with a conscience.
	And uh it's uh it's a very different, it's a very different kind of life.
	I'm sorry for this long speech.
	I hope it touches on something of value to you.
	No, it does.
	It does.
	Um yeah, I I guess like uh because I I was I was keeping um in the back like in the back of my head, uh like my friend and what he would be saying to what uh like to what you were saying, and he uh I um something you would say uh like I I would like I would notice that I would have I would know like I would also point out some of these contradictions he would have and his kind of him being um considering
	morality subjective and he would just be indifferent to the arguments, like you wouldn't you wouldn't really care, I guess, even though it like and I and I can't really square that in my mind because if you're uh into mathematics and physics,
	then why wouldn't contradictions bother you and said it bothersome and in not that it bothers him in mathematics and physics, but not in like in things like morality makes no sense to me, like this mindset.
	Yeah, what's is it more important to be good or to have a solid knowledge of mathematics and physics, right?
	It's more important to be good, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, uh I don't know.
	I don't know, it's like uh like that's kind of that's kind of bothered baffles me that mindset.
	Yeah, honestly, I I I I last thing I'd want to do is is tell people who they couldn't, could and could not hang out with, because you know it's a very personal decision and so on.
	But if I were in your shoes, I'd be leery about this guy.
	Because when people tell you they don't care about ethics, uh they're kind of shitty to have around.
	They don't care about virtue.
	What do they care about right and wrong, good and evil, uh, truth and falsehood, uh it doesn't matter.
	And and the reason I'm saying that is I mean, maybe they'll be in a situation where there'll be ethics demanded of them, and they'll completely fail and fold and crumble, which could be negative for you.
	But even more importantly, are you married?
	I am not married.
	You are not married, okay.
	Do you want to be married?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So you want to be married to a virtuous woman, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Is a virtuous woman gonna like this weird amoral, creepy physicist dude.
	No, she would not.
	No, she would not.
	So she's gonna your friend is cock blocking you from a good woman.
	And that's the price you pay for hanging around with amoral people, because good people don't want to spend time with you.
	There's a price.
	There's a price.
	Yeah, there definitely is.
	And I was I was like, I g I guess this conversation was like my last um kind of chance, because uh or l a last chance I'm giving him because uh and also the reading about uh kind of uh how do I say the um Iran metaphysics?
	Since I don't want to like throw it.
	Yeah, yeah, Iran's metaphysics, yeah.
	Oh, I ran a physics, my part.
	I thought you said Iran.
	Okay, got it.
	Rand's metaphysics.
	Oh, sorry.
	Um yeah.
	So if he doesn't accept that, I would just I'm probably like not gonna hang out with him because uh I I really because uh I I don't know, I I wanted I feel like there should be I felt obliged to be a little bit loyal to him since I did um since he is a friend and maybe and I want really wanted to try to see if I could convince him,
	but it doesn't seem like it's ri if people generally, I mean, I I sort of went through a conscience-free phase uh in my life.
	Uh it doesn't I don't want to get into details about me, but basically I would say from the age of 11 to 13, uh I lived without a conscience.
	And that kind of freaked me out.
	And then I started like it.
	I I had a um I had a uh a conversation the other day with someone, and doesn't really matter who.
	And And he was saying, I want to increase or improve my empathy.
	What should I do?
	And so of course I said, you know, spend more time with your kids, that will help.
	And I said, so one of the basic things to do with empathy is to imagine what it's like on the other side.
	So when I'm having a conversation, one of the reasons I'm good at having conversations and can get to people's core issues very quickly, is because I imagine deeply what it's like to be them.
	Even in, you know, you're sitting across the table from your friend, imagine what it's like sitting in his skull looking through his eyes looking at you.
	Right?
	I was talking about this with my wife the other day.
	Like every single day, every day, right?
	If I'm sitting down with my family, I go through the mental exercise of saying, what's it like to be sitting across the table looking at me?
	And and putting yourself in other people's minds, in other people's heads, in other people's shoes, is really important.
	And if people can't do that, it's almost impossible to have productive discussions with them.
	Because they'll just I mean, that's sort of hearkening back to the earlier caller, right?
	Where he's kind of straw manning, well, you're not gonna you might not like this answer, like that's an insult, right?
	Because he's saying that my feelings matter.
	And what he's doing is he's confessing that it's his feelings that matter, which is why he said he was triggered.
	So think of what it's like being across the table from you and looking at you.
	And if people can't do that for whatever reason, if they can't think what it's like to be on the other side of the table, if they can't put themselves in your mindset, you there's no relationship.
	You're just you're just sharing space and syllables.
	You're just mingling oxygen and CO2.
	Uh, that's about it.
	And so if you have a friend and something is really important to you, like you say, listen, man, this amoral stuff, it really troubles me.
	It really troubles me.
	Because let's say you could say this to your friend, right?
	Not saying you should, I'm just saying you could, right?
	You say this to your friends and say, listen, Bob, this amoral thing you've got going on, that there's no such thing as truth, no such thing as virtue.
	Like, bro, I want to get married, and I want to get married to a good woman who believes in virtue.
	And if she sees your creepy amoral ass, she's gonna run the other way.
	But even if we pass that barrier somehow, I mean, I'm gonna have kids, and I'm gonna need to teach my kids truth from falsehood, right from wrong, good from evil.
	Right, truth and falsehood, that's your epistemology, right and wrong, those are your aesthetics, and good and evil, those are your morals.
	I need to teach my kids this stuff.
	And I don't want you snorting when I'm trying to teach them moral lessons.
	You know, and if they enjoy hanging out with you, which I'm sure they would, you're a fun guy, I don't want you rolling your eyes every time they bring up right and wrong, good and evil, truth and falsehood.
	Ah, that stuff's just cultural, ah, that's not really true, ah, that's not objective, you know, every culture believes in it.
	Like, you're gonna erode the entire purpose of my parenting, bro.
	And also, if you don't believe in morals, I can't trust you to tell the truth.
	I can't trust you to be honest, I can't trust you to be good.
	Because you're just gonna do whatever feels good or right in the moment.
	And if you can't behave in a consistent manner, in a consistently moral manner, which can only happen if you believe in morals.
	I mean, would you hire, I would say to this guy, would you hire a graduate student who said, you know, I mean, the scientific method has some value, but you know, I mean, basically, you know, reading chicken entrails and tea leaves on the bottom of a teacup is just as good.
	Consulting my spleen, uh uh guessing, uh reading equations in the vague shapes of clouds, that's just as good as science.
	You wouldn't hire that person because they would not consistently pursue the scientific method, because they believed that it was not of any particular value, it was just one of s many solutions.
	Oh, one solution among many, so he would not consistently do science, he'd be doing weird voodoo shit instead.
	So, yeah, I mean you are not doing any good to your friend by pretending he can be a good person without believing in morality.
	You cannot be good without believing in morality.
	Now, you can say, well, but I like to lie, I I like to tell the truth.
	I prefer telling the truth.
	Okay, fine, but it's just a preference.
	And what that means is that you prefer to tell the truth, but not on any principle, but only on hedonism, which means you prefer it because you like it, it makes you feel good.
	But what if telling the truth makes you feel bad?
	Because that's kind of what we Need morals for, and morals are for when we damn well don't want to do stuff.
	I mean, if everybody could just eat whatever the hell they wanted, we wouldn't or felt tasted good and felt good, and oh, that cheesecake is so good, way better than that broccoli, man, that stuff sucks, Satan Boogers.
	We wouldn't need the discipline of nutrition if people just ate whatever the hell they wanted, and that was what was good for them.
	And so people, atheists will say, Well, I tell the truth because I like it that way.
	I prefer it that way.
	It's like, well, what when you what about when you don't?
	Because man alive, brother, brothers and sisters, you know this from my example.
	Telling the truth blows chunks at times.
	Telling the truth sucks intergalactic arse on a regular basis.
	And can be very dangerous.
	Even a Socratic inquiry towards the truth, like Charlie Kirk got his neck blown out with a sniper bullet.
	So people say, well, I like to tell the truth.
	It's like, yeah, that's good.
	So what?
	What about when you don't?
	Well, I always like to tell the truth.
	That's just a lie.
	You caught him in their first lie.
	Nobody always likes to tell the truth.
	I don't know what's like telling the truth.
	But I have a principle.
	So you're not doing any favors to your friend by continuing to harangue with him about morality if you simply won't accept there's any such thing, if that makes sense.
	It does make sense, and I feel like I'd like uh I'd be how do I say it?
	I'd be um discrediting morality as well by giving arguments he's rejecting or um things like that.
	And um Okay, last question is we've got a bunch of people who want to talk, so go ahead.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Uh I'll finish up fast.
	Uh um the thing about placing myself in in his shoes.
	I I do like I feel like he doesn't do that, but um but uh last thing very good.
	No, but can you do can you do it for him?
	Can you look from his mindset at you?
	Can you put yourself in his mindset and say, like, I uh let me give you an example, and I'm sorry to hot back on the previous conversation, but it's very instructive if you heard it.
	So I imagine, because I put myself in the other person's shoes, and I say, okay, what would it be like for me to not know that things exist?
	What would it be like for me to not know that a rock exists?
	I I mean, I'm having the conversation, I'm sort of walking around, right?
	Now I'm walking around a table, I'm walking around the kitchen counter, my family's not home.
	So I'm walking around.
	Now, could I walk around if I didn't know where the kitchen counter ended?
	I'd be glitching skate three style, right?
	I like to get in and have some sort of epileptic CGI attack, right?
	So I put myself in the mindset and say, okay, what would it be like if I didn't know that things existed before people?
	That there was a universe that existed before people.
	What would it be like if I could dismiss scientific evidence and carbon dating?
	You know, like the reason he I the reason I used rocks and I said this to the guy is like my father's career, he's a PhD in geology, he lectured at the university I attended in Montreal, McGill.
	He gave a big lecture, had me come out, see him give a big lecture, QA, blah, blah, blah.
	He was great up there.
	So uh my father, his entire career is based on the reality of two things.
	One, rocks exist, and two, they existed for a lot longer than people have, right?
	Because he drills down, looks for gold, and he has to accept that rocks existed before they were people, right?
	Because he's looking for gold that is millions of years old, people ain't millions of years old, right?
	Human consciousness is not millions of years old.
	So my entire father's career is based on rocks exist and they're really, really old.
	Older than people.
	Now, what would it be like for me?
	What would it be like in my mind if I genuinely did not know that rocks existed and I genuinely was not certain that they were older than people?
	I would be insane.
	I'm not saying this guy's insane, I'm just saying putting myself in that shoes, if if you genuinely believed that, not if it was just some, you know, emo, fedora wearing talking point.
	If you genuinely didn't know that rocks were real and existed before people, what would that be like?
	Well, obviously, if somebody genuinely didn't Know that anything was real, they'd never be calling into a philosophy show because they wouldn't know if their phone was real, they wouldn't know if I was real, they wouldn't know if the microphone was, they wouldn't, they wouldn't know if their internet bill was real, so they wouldn't pay it, so they wouldn't like they wouldn't be certain of anything.
	So then he's saying nothing is real that I can be certain of, but I'm certain, Steph, that you're being snarky, right?
	So that would just be very manipulative.
	And so it's really important to put yourself in somebody else's mindset.
	And it's really especially important for people who have a conscience to put themselves in the mindset of people who don't have a conscience.
	Because if I were to say, you know, uh there's there's some stupid old Madonna song from some MTV awards, especially French kissed Britney Spears is like, we've moved beyond right and wrong.
	We don't believe in good and evil, we don't believe in right and wrong, something like that, right?
	And I mean, Madonna's the Jessica Rabbit caricature of helium-voiced hedonism, but what would it be like to genuinely not be bothered that there was no such thing as right and wrong?
	Can can you picture that?
	Like in your heart, can you picture what it would be like to not believe in truth or the value of truth or right or wrong or good or evil or anything?
	Can you go into that mindset?
	Yes.
	It's inhuman.
	It is inhuman.
	Because humanity is, if nothing else, our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	And if there's no ideal standards in the realm of right and wrong, then you're just a hedonist.
	And a hedonist is just a human who's reduced himself to the level of a kind of animal.
	So yeah, really empathizing with your friend uh empathizing with that kind of coldness and not being bothered by the fact that there's no such thing as right and wrong, truth or falsehood, good or evil.
	Nightmare.
	Because there'll be nothing about the guy to love, because we love virtue.
	And if you don't even believe in virtue, you're condemning yourself to a life of not having anybody particularly care about you or love you.
	Yeah.
	Gross.
	All right.
	And move on to the next caller.
	I hope that that was helpful, and I thank you for thank you very much.
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	It's great conversations.
	Great conversations.
	All right.
	Let's go bottom to top.
	Donald Donald.
	What's on your mind, my friend?
	Don't forget to earn mute.
	Thanks for uh selecting me, I guess.
	My pleasure.
	Thank you for coming in.
	Yeah, this is a question that you guys are talking about that um, you know, is has been just a whole debate for the last uh 30 minutes, uh particularly in terms of atheists, what they believe, and how do you reconcile that?
	And uh so I remember I don't know when it was, 15 years ago or something.
	I used to uh like consuming the videos where Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and I I can't remember, there were two other oh, yeah, exactly.
	Dawkins.
	Harris and Hitchens.
	Yes, and then yeah.
	And exactly, exactly.
	So I I watched a lot of those videos, and one of the things that I kept hearing being repeated was um what was the phrase?
	Uh religion doesn't have a monopoly on morality.
	Uh religion doesn't have a monopoly on morality.
	And I always found that to actually be lacking, but I no one really stood up to them.
	Um I guess I mean I don't really need to explain why I find that to be lacking.
	But I also sorry, when you say you if you can back off the mic a little bit, you're over harshing a bit.
	But when you say you find that to be lacking, what aspect of that do you find to be lacking?
	Do you find it to be lacking that Christian is it lacking for Christians to say they have a monopoly, or is it lacking for the atheist to say Christianity doesn't have a monopoly?
	Um morality.
	Yeah, well, uh okay, so I'm I'm wearing a headset, so tell me if the mic is still too I'll talk a little bit softer.
	Um, first of all, I wouldn't just uh separate Christianity um and just talk about religion um or the concept of God, because when you're talking about absolute morality and relative morality, I think that um to you know put your thumb down on just one sort of religion,
	uh, and of course there's many interpretations of Christianity, I think that uh allows the sort of atheist to get away with you know uh having, I guess, more areas of attack.
	And so I think at the core of the message is it's can an atheist actually, you know, have morality?
	And I look at these these people um like it like Hitchens and Sam Harrison and these other people, and I I do believe they have you know, these spiritual quests.
	I mean, Sam Harris wrote that one book on on Eastern spirituality, um, and I I'm just uh how much of Hitchens his life was devoted to to this area.
	And a lot of people, you know, also in my circle.
	So which I uh I'm not sure and I'm not doubting you, I'm just not sure what aspects of a spiritual quest Hitchens was on.
	Well, I mean, I believe that Hitchens acted in a way uh as though he uh had a strong fun foundation for right and wrong.
	And and in fact, I would argue that some atheists, and I'm not an atheist by any stretch of the imagination.
	I think a lot of atheists are deluded, um, to be honest, uh, but I think that in their core, um a lot of them are good people and they have sort of this uh superimposed uh you know, dogmatic atheist uh philosophy, but at their core they act as if there is absolute morality.
	And I mean Hitchens, you go back, you know, to the eighties and his um uh his work with the uh you know to try to end uh apartheid in South Africa and uh just his whole career, but I'm not I don't want to speak specifically about those people.
	I just I just mentioned them because they were a large voice in uh you know my generation that represented the sort of atheist, you know, argument.
	Um and and at the same time you also have Christians or religious people, but particularly Christians who who talk about how you know their their belief is in their faith.
	And so in some sense, sorry, it's a bit too abstract for me.
	Christians who say their belief is in their faith.
	I'm not sure what you're referring to there.
	Sorry for if I'm missing something.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So a lot of atheists, um, you know, one of their talking points is they will say they will make fun of you because they will um they will say faith is belief in the absence of evidence.
	And I always found that um uh I I I sort of found that as a kind of a form of projection, because a lot of Christians, uh, you know, especially the more high-minded uh, you know, Christians that didn't just inherit their religion and their belief system, uh, truly have you know the doubt, right?
	Sort of like Mother Teresa's writings, you know, once she died that were published, and uh their belief is sort of a chosen belief.
	So so it's almost like they're agnostic, but they choose to fly.
	You gotta you gotta slow down because there's a lot of lot of concepts you're rolling with.
	So their belief is a chosen belief.
	Do you mean that uh because the the belief generally comes comes from the parents, right?
	Well, a lot yes, but you know, people can uh can come to it through reason, people can come to it, they they can uh turn away from their faith and then re be reborn.
	Um so by overcoming faith, sorry, by overcoming doubt, they're choosing to become to to remain religious.
	Is that I'm sorry, to f it is that what you meant?
	Yes.
	Yes, that that's what what I mean.
	I mean, you have you have the entire um you know book, uh uh uh uh one of the best writing of all time, uh, the book of Ecclesiastes, which is a very agnostic book.
	I mean, even in that book, I think one of the um one of the lines is, and I'm paraphrasing is is something like, Well, you know, what happens to you know, uh, you know, your soul when you die, does it stay in the ground like a dog or does it ascend to heaven?
	I'm I'm paraphrasing.
	But this, you know, so I I think religious people, um, you know, because my whole life, I mean, I've I've talked to obviously religious people, I've I've I've you know watched interviews with uh people who devoted their life to you know Christianity or and and I think religious people really wrestle with this and they wrestle with uh you know the mystery and what is known and what isn't right.
	I I get that.
	I just want to make sure we get to a point here.
	But so religious people wrestle with faith, absolutely.
	So do Christians sorry, do atheists wrestle with the fact that they've detonated Christian morality without providing a rational substitute or replacement.
	Uh I I don't, uh but I I also think it's it's uh maybe a failure Of um, you know, a lot of the uh I'm and I'm uh uh a lot of Christians to not sort of call out to not engage in these higher debates.
	Let's talk about let's talk about you.
	That's the we theorizing about other people is is kind of a hole with no bottom.
	So you were religious, you became an atheist, is that right?
	No, uh I I don't know.
	Uh I I maybe became a uh sort of agnostic.
	I think I I I was I always believed in God, I believe.
	Uh and you know, and I I I have a very strong belief in God and and certain morals.
	So what are the s uh what are the s what is the source of morals for you?
	I mean that's a trick that's a tricky question.
	I mean, I I think it it does come down to uh faith.
	It does come down to the mystery.
	Hang on.
	Sorry, just make sure I understand.
	So religion is the source of morals for you.
	I'm not gonna argue with you, I just want to understand the uh ideology of your belief.
	Yeah, okay.
	I mean, I mean, yes, they yes, rel sometimes when people say religion, they're speaking strictly of organized religion.
	Um but yeah, religion definitely is a hang on so if it's not organized, and I'm not trying to trap you, I'm really not.
	Like I don't know, everyone's gonna jump in today.
	I'm not trying to, I'm just trying to get some answers.
	So if it's not organized religion, because organized religion will give you commandments, right?
	Let's just say Ten Commandments, right?
	Murders, fast false witness, cover the neighbor.
	Yes.
	Uh okay, so if you're not into organized religion, then what is the source of your morals?
	Because morals are specific things.
	Right?
	And and that's why they're specifically written down in religion.
	So if you're not into organized religion but believe in God, where do your morals come from?
	Is it God's commandments?
	Is it dreams?
	Is it visions?
	Is it like I'm trying to understand.
	If it's not if you say, well, I I don't accept anything that's written down, okay, but then where does it come from?
	Uh I'm not saying I don't accept anything, you know, that's written down.
	Um if you're talking you you want me to speak on my personal understanding of morality and and how I've come to sort of have the morality that I have.
	And again, this is not some sort of guinea pig shock experiment.
	I'm generally curious.
	So if you've given up on Christianity as a sort of organized religion, then that means that you don't accept the Ten Commandments, because if you do accept the Ten Commandments, then you certainly would be religious as part of an organized religion.
	So if you don't accept what's written down by organized religion, what are your morals and where do they come from?
	Okay.
	Well, again, I wouldn't say that I don't accept what's what's written down by organized religion.
	I think some people would uh call me Christian, but some people might not.
	And the reason I said that is I thought you said you had you didn't accept organized religion.
	Okay, can we just not do I don't need what I don't need the job you had when you were 12.
	I'm looking at the job you have now.
	Okay.
	So do you accept the Ten Commandments?
	Yeah, I yeah, I I think I I would.
	Sorry, I think I would.
	Yeah, I accept I I accept I I haven't I haven't looked at the Ten Commandments in a long time, but yeah, I I would accept the Ten Commandments, I believe.
	Okay.
	So your your morals come from God.
	I you know, I don't attend church and I and and cat Catholics, I think believe the third commandment isn't asked that you need to attend church.
	I didn't ask whether you attended church, just after the I don't make me bring out my rubber trench and my swinging Gestapo like I'm a whole seller.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So you your morals come from God, and I'm not gonna try and talk you out of them.
	I'm just I just want to know what the source is.
	Yeah, I yeah, I believe I believe my my morals come from God, my understanding of God.
	I don't have uh a incredibly firm uh concrete understanding.
	I don't I don't believe I I know for sure, you know.
	Um sorry, you know what for sure.
	Well, you know, what what happens you know after after someone dies?
	What uh you know what is the grand mystery that's behind the curtain.
	Okay.
	Yeah, but I believe they're tied.
	Okay.
	Well, do you believe that you will be rewarded if you're good and punished if you're bad, either in this life through a bad conscience or bad circumstances, or in the next life with heaven and hell.
	Um, so those are two different questions.
	I believe that I I have I have great hope.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	They're not necessarily two different questions, because there are many religious people who believe that you have negative outcomes in this life if you're bad, and it all of the punishment is not necessarily deferred to the aftermath.
	Yeah.
	Um well, I'll maybe you're okay.
	Uh Let me give you a little example of something.
	I I got into I I can't remember who exactly I was reading.
	Maybe it was Kantian uh deontological um stuff uh where you know there was the argument that there is no such thing as a white lie.
	And at the time I was in Eastern Europe.
	White lie.
	A white life.
	There is no such thing as a white lie.
	And you know, I I I was very successful financially young in life, and I remember while I was reading that, I remember going to check something out at a convenience store, and I took out like a wad of cash, because I was in Eastern Europe, right?
	And uh, because they don't they weren't using credit as much.
	Um and the woman behind the counter said, you know, oh that that's you know, what like I can't remember what she said.
	That's uh you you know, you congratulations or something like that.
	And I told her, yeah, you know, I kind of got lucky uh with some investments and everything like that, and I walked out of the store.
	And I thought about that and I thought about how, you know, the truth really was I didn't get lucky.
	The truth was that I'd been working 80 hours a week since I was in high school, that you know, I had foregone a social life and I did like all these things and and went through all these stresses uh to be where I was, and I gave up all that.
	And had I I mean it would be maybe socially inappropriate or whatever, but had I told her that, and I said, Well, this is actually everything I gave up uh to be where I am financially now.
	Had I told her that, um, you know, maybe it would have been better for her.
	Maybe her self hang on.
	Yeah.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, I really am.
	But that's an element of luck in what you did.
	There are lots of people who work very hard.
	Of course, and that wealth.
	I don't deny it.
	Of course.
	Of course.
	I I definitely don't deny that.
	Not only is there some good fortune, you know, some people started uh businesses right before COVID.
	Right, and they ate their fucking shorts through no fault of their own.
	Okay.
	And some people bought houses right before the housing crash and ended up bankrupt through no fault of their own.
	I I would disagree.
	Some people in the airline stocks right before 9-11 and l and and so and and also the fact you're obviously a very intelligent man, which, you know, that's that's great, but you didn't earn that fundamentally.
	You just happened to be born with a high IQ, right?
	We know that IQ is 80 plus percent genetic.
	Even my late teens, and it only goes upward from there.
	So listen, I'm not saying you didn't work hard, I'm not saying you don't deserve it, didn't earn your success.
	But if you said I got lucky, that's not an entirely false statement.
	It well, it felt it felt false for me.
	Uh it did not ring true for me.
	Oh, I understand.
	But I objectively you just made a post recently, and I'm not gonna try to criticize you or whatever, but about how about how, you know, uh someone, if they marry poorly, if they have a bad situation with their wife, then they're at fault.
	Uh people are ignorant of the lot of stuff.
	You know, when COVID, when COVID hit, the price of oil in the, you know, uh was uh and just kind of funny, but the price of oil was uh almost near U.S. extraction levels, and you know, uh Trump had been present for a while, extraction was up.
	I remember telling people uh, you know, either Biden is gonna win or Trump's gonna win.
	And, you know, if Trump's gonna win, that's gonna be great for the world, world peace and stuff.
	If Biden wins, I'll make a lot of money off of oil.
	Um and you know, you know, Iran's gonna have a lot of money, Russia's gonna have a lot of money, you know, it might not be the best for for the world.
	Uh the uh but another thing, you said most people who buy property, they put in ten years or more of their life uh of their of of their salary, not even their savings, and they haven't even read a book on buying property.
	So uh, you know, I I would uh I I I wouldn't have to put it down to luck.
	Hang on, hang on.
	I mean, I've had a lot of luck, I've had a lot of bad luck as well.
	Uh look, I did I say it was all luck.
	No, no.
	But there's elements of luck.
	So you say, well, you know, if Biden gets in and and if Trump gets in, the oil is this, that, and the other.
	But you understand that if you had an IQ of 80, you wouldn't be saying any of that shit.
	Yeah, I I agree.
	You didn't earn having an IQ of 120 or 130 or whatever you've got.
	I agree.
	I agree with that as well.
	So when you said I think investments, that's not the whole truth, But it's part of the truth.
	Okay.
	As far as you the point of that ultimately wasn't even to go down that tangent.
	The point is is the change in my mind happened.
	I decided I was going to start telling like answering every question and telling the complete truth.
	Within a week or two, I think and within two weeks.
	I mean, I had a lot of conversations with homeless people.
	And whenever a homeless person stopped me, I had to tell them I do have money.
	Uh, but I, you know, give to uh uh well I uh I was g donating a lot to um a well charity, charity water at the time, and I was I would explain to them why they're in a good position compared to some of these other people.
	Eventually, I got in a conversation with this one guy, and he it was it was a great I I you know, I I feared for my life, essentially.
	And it's funny because I almost became a character of the conservative that says, you know, get a job by being by by sticking to this there's no white lie.
	If I would if I was your wife, I'd slap you upside the head with the fit for doing that.
	Like that's stupid.
	Honestly, I was a lot younger.
	And saying I got tons of money on.
	I wasn't going.
	I wasn't I wasn't going to homeless people.
	Just, you know, when they asked me, do you have any money?
	Saying to the saying to a homeless person, I have a lot of cash on me is stupid.
	Oh, I didn't say I have a lot of cash on me.
	I just it's just a did you have any money?
	I said I said yeah.
	Okay, fine.
	Saying Well, this is a no-white lie.
	This goes to no white lie.
	Saying to a homeless person, I have money on me, does that increase or decrease your risk of getting robbed?
	I mean, you know, you you take that to an extreme, you know, does being Charlie Kirk increase or decrease your risk of getting shot in the neck?
	Yes, it does.
	Yeah.
	So that that's a thing.
	And I would argue maybe the most but it's dangerous.
	Now, that doesn't mean that you should or shouldn't do it, but you're not from it's not a neutral thing.
	Like, of course it's not neutral.
	If you'd have said, if you'd have said to the woman in eastern Europe, if you'd have said, you know, I've worked really hard and I've had some good luck.
	That's not dangerous, right?
	No.
	Right.
	And so, but but saying to a homeless person who obviously is homeless because he's made some pretty bad decisions and might be a drug addict and not quite in control of his own actions, so to speak, saying to a homeless person, I have cash on me, may not be wise.
	And it's not necessary.
	It's not like you have I think with Charlie Kirk, uh, he obviously felt that uh telling the truth and having these conversation uh conversations was worth the risk to his life.
	So he made that sort of calculate, and that's partly based upon his faith and and so on, right?
	So uh so he made that calculation and the cost benefit came out in that he was going to continue doing what he did.
	And it would have been nice, of course.
	I think that the university uh where he was speaking had policies against drones, otherwise they might have had drones up there looking at the rooftops and something like that.
	But I don't know that there's a big moral mission in saying to a homeless person, I have cash on me, but I'm not giving it to you.
	I I mean i I mean, in my mind, I I was just thinking there's no such thing as a white lie, and I wanted to uh I I guess this correlates a little bit to incel culture.
	You know, I in those days I spent a lot of time on Reddit.
	Um I was I wasn't an intel myself.
	Um but I I understood the philosophy, and this kind of goes back to the speaker prior to your previous speaker who wouldn't uh agree that rocks existed.
	Yeah.
	Um I I remember uh reading a lot of the philosophies of this and and knowing about let's say the Columbine shooters and the writings they left.
	And I think a lot of people uh uh I think a lot of these these shooters they believe that they're doing good.
	They believe that this person is really Hitler or they're being bullied so much at school, they you know, the every story it's always the same.
	It's um, you know, they go to the administrations, their parents, you know, stop caring about it and this and that.
	If this is the shooter, right?
	I mean, we we won't until the court case is done.
	But my understanding is that he was dating a transitioning person.
	And maybe he believed that uh Charlie Kirk wanted to put which is not true, but let's say he believed, because this was certainly floating around that Charlie Kirk wanted to put all the transgender people to death and stuff like that, so then he's just you know preemptive self-defense that yeah, of course, yeah, keep people can come up with all kinds of stuff to justify violence.
	Yeah, but I I think they people also get deeper and deeper into an echo chamber as society rejects them more and more.
	And so I I felt like there's a sort of moral requirement for us to be the one, the bearer of of of bad news.
	Because I see a lot of girls, let's say, especially with like um, you know, young guys that don't know how to speak to girls, they will just be dismissive, they will lie to that guy.
	And I just put myself in the in in these guys' shoes, uh, and think like, imagine if you get rejected by girls day in and day out, and they always uh are you know saying, oh, you know, I just have a boyfriend, this and that, and you sort of see everybody lying to you.
	And your teachers, by the way, are lying to you because they don't want to, you know, stop the bullies from harassing you, your parents have given up and all this stuff.
	So you that kids' world view is very, very dark, and nobody is going in and telling them, you know, here's this is the real, this is really the way things are, this is what you need to do to improve.
	And that that's sort of arguably you could say that that that was Charlie Kirk was trying to do, and they shot him.
	Exactly.
	That yeah, that's that's what I would argue.
	But I mean, I look at all these people from history, uh, all the heroes from history.
	I mean, they were either uh put in jail or killed, or both.
	And I I think that if you take this uh Christian morality to its extreme, I mean you have to adopt the life of Jesus and and you will be I mean, you will have your cross, you know, to to bear, and you will, you know, that that that will be your life's path.
	You you know, and and um and I think all most Christians just do that to a degree, and they don't do it to its fruition.
	So I I don't I'm not saying I know what's I'm I'm not saying I know what's right, just so you know, I'm not saying I know what's right or you you've accepted that morals come from God and therefore you know what's right.
	Um unless today it's just everybody making total fog.
	So uh I'm not I'm not gonna go back to to fogland, sorry about that.
	Uh John, what's on your mind?
	Uh listen, I uh sorry to cut the last guy off.
	It's an interesting conversation, but uh it was uh going all over the place, and I'm just trying to sort of figure out where the morals come from if somebody's agnostic or atheist.
	So John, if you want to unmute Hi, how are you doing?
	Can you hear me?
	Yeah, a little quiet, but I'm sure we can survive.
	Go ahead.
	Hold on, let me switch to my other airpod.
	Give me five seconds here.
	Sure.
	If I'm gonna be in chatting for two hours, take your time.
	Any better now?
	Uh yeah, go for it.
	Yeah, that last guy has some interesting things to say.
	And he's right about the Kantian thing.
	The can't says that there's you there's no lie that's ever justified.
	Even if someone comes to your house and says, Where's your wife?
	I'm gonna kill her, you have to tell them.
	There's no such thing as defensive falsehood, and there's no such thing as a morally justifiable lie.
	But so go ahead.
	Yeah, I guess I don't I don't know what's stopping that guy from fully committing to Christianity rather than like the vague deism he was interested in.
	Well, I don't know either, but since he's not here, why don't you give me your question because we don't want to theorize about the mindset of somebody who's not in the conversation.
	So go ahead.
	Sure.
	Um what's stopping you from being a Christian?
	Uh that's your question is what's stopping me from being a Christian?
	Correct, yes.
	Well, I mean, 44 years of devotion to reason and evidence and lack of direct empirical evidence, lack of rational consistency, that's the deal as a philosopher, is reason and evidence.
	And uh God has not revealed himself to me.
	I've had no visions, I've seen no miracles, I've seen nothing uh but the prosaic, dare I say mundane, uh practical reality.
	So uh because I am I've lashed myself to the master's reason and evidence, and uh those things I've not had evidence of God and the rationality is inconsistent, and so it's not what's stopping me, it's that what would what would make me believe would have to be some combination of reason and evidence.
	Um let me ask you this.
	Would a if I could prove that something is infallible and pervious and omnipresent, would you concede that that thing would be God?
	Is that a sufficient definition and conditions?
	If you can prove that something is infallible, that means it would be consciousness, right?
	Well, it's matter and space are omnipresent, but we wouldn't call them God, right?
	So are you saying that uh if you can prove that there's a consciousness that is incapable of error and knows everything, uh I would absolutely accept that that would be a God or as close to a God as I could conceive of.
	So yeah, if if you can prove to me that there is that you have access to omniscience, then I would absolutely accept that as what people would call a God for sure.
	Yeah, I think that in order to even and the reveal here, the big reveal here is that I think when when other people say truth, they're referring to God.
	I think that um truth is God.
	And so if you say something is true, you're saying something is like God or of God, right?
	So I mean what do you think?
	No, no, I'm not saying sorry.
	I mean, I'm not saying that.
	Sure, I'm you might say that, I think you'd be wrong, but I'm not saying that.
	Well, why do you think I'm wrong?
	Because like these this comes out of like verses of the Bible, for example, that God is the word and Jesus is the truth.
	But I don't mean that merely metaphorically.
	I mean, if I say two and two makes a four quantity.
	If I say two and two make four, have I proven the existence of God?
	Yes, that's my claim.
	Okay.
	Uh so uh make the claim, make the proof.
	And you can't quote the Bible because that's begging the question, right?
	So you can't say, well, the truth is God because God says the truth is God, whatever that might mean, because we're trying to establish the existence of God, and therefore we can't use the words of God to prove it.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I'm not trying to do this like begging of the question, self-referential Bible verse.
	By two and two make four, you say proves the existence of God, and I'm I'm happy to hear the case.
	Yeah, well, why is why does two plus two equal four?
	Because it's true, correct?
	Yes.
	Well, what do we mean by truth?
	I think we should go into defining it next.
	Sure, truth is consistency with reason and evidence.
	Um reason and evidence?
	That's an interesting definition.
	Why is that an interesting definition?
	I'm not sure what you mean.
	Seems a little snarky, but maybe I'm a bit jumpy.
	No, I'm no, I'm genuinely a little confused.
	So consistency.
	So truth is consistency.
	With reason, yeah.
	And evidence.
	Okay.
	What do you think about um correspondence theory of truth?
	Um see, there's no point telling me these things because it's a general audience we're talking to.
	So uh don't uh don't use both words to explain the concepts.
	Yeah, sure.
	So um, you know, what I tend to think of when I think of truth is this idea that that uh truth is is that which corresponds with reality, right?
	So what does that mean exactly?
	It means that there's this thing, which isn't reality, but it but it corresponds with it, right?
	So you know that doesn't give much explanatory power, but I think it's interesting and has some overlap with what you were stating.
	You know, earlier you said uh what was the verbatim?
	You said um consistency is something and re and consistency, interesting.
	So as a uh interchangeable word for correspondence, you could say consistency, right?
	Yeah, corresponds to reason and evidence conforms with reason and evidence, yeah.
	Uh is it is a shadow cast by reason and evidence.
	But go ahead.
	Sure.
	Now what do we mean by consistency?
	Go ahead.
	Well, um so consistency, first of all, requires that a concept that claims to be true cannot be self-contradictory.
	Right?
	So if I say two and two makes five, that's contradictory, because two and two make four.
	Four is just another way of saying two and two or four times one or whatever it is, it's all the same thing.
	So it would be to say that a thing is both itself and not itself at the same time, which would be irrational, goes against foundational Aristotelian law of logic.
	So a theory of truth has to be consistent.
	Now, if the theory is consistent, in other words, if it's rational, then it is possible to be true.
	And if there is sense data, empirical evidence, measurable facts that correspond with the theory, then the theory conforms to both reason and evidence, and therefore it is valid or true.
	So um reason is true if it's consistent?
	So a the no, the the technical way of putting it is that a truth claim is potentially true if it is consistent and it becomes true if it accords with reason and evidence.
	It conforms to reason and evidence.
	So if it conforms to evidence as well, right?
	So So think of a scientific theory.
	A scientific theory has to first be logical and consistent, because it deh it beh it describes the behavior of matter and energy, which is logical and consistent.
	So if you had a scientific theory that said gases both expand and contract at the same time when heated, that would be an impossibility.
	Gases cannot both expand and contract at the same time.
	If you had a physical theory that says when you let go of a ball in mid-air, the ball falls down and up at the same time, that would be inconsistent.
	Do we agree with that?
	100%.
	Okay.
	So a theory has to be consistent.
	If you base a mathematical theory on the proposition that two and two make five, then the theory cannot be true.
	Do we agree on that?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	So you need rational consistency for something to be true, it's it's potentially true.
	And if you then have empirical evidence, then it is proven.
	So if I say, here's the definition of an oak tree, whatever it is, I don't know, the color of leaf size, bark or whatever, right?
	Here's the definition of an oak tree.
	Is it is it self-contradictory if I correctly define an oak tree?
	No.
	Now, if I say this uh is an oak tree, this is the definition of an oak tree, and then we go out and we find a tree that conforms to my definition of an oak tree, let's say down to the cellular level or whatever we'd want to examine it as, then if I point at something and say that is an oak tree, that is a true statement, because we have a theory or a definition of an oak tree, and it may not be, it may not be sketched out, right?
	It may be primitive tribes can recognize different, obviously different animals for hunting, um, they can recognize different kinds of plants for harvesting or planting or things like that, right?
	So if you have a theory that is rationally consistent, and you have empirical evidence that proves the existence of that which you've theorized, then you have proof, you have truth.
	And so for science, if you say gas is expand when heated, that's your theory.
	You're not saying expands and contracts, you're just saying gases expand when heated, then that would be a theory.
	And then if you go out and you measure, and every single time you measure all over the world, gases do in fact expand when heated, and then maybe you have a theory, of course, heating causes excitation of the atoms, which requires them to move further apart, which causes the right.
	So you have a theory that causes the expansion of the gas.
	So you have a theory, right?
	If you say water can be both a liquid, a solid, and a gas at the same time, under the same circumstances, would that be potentially true?
	If I'm following correctly, yes.
	Okay, so let's try that again.
	If I say water can be both a solid ice, a liquid, what we would call water, and vapor at the same time under the same circumstances, could that be true?
	Oh, not not um in the same temporal context, no.
	Yeah, yeah, it's same time second, same circumstances.
	Right.
	So if I were to say water can be solid, liquid, and vapor at the same time, we wouldn't need to test that, because that's contradictory.
	Water cannot be, I mean, that's all it's still H2O atoms and all that, but water cannot be both a solid, a liquid, and a vapor at the same time.
	Now, if I were to say, let's use Celsius, because it's easier, right?
	If I were to say, well, at zero degrees Celsius, water freezes, and at a hundred degrees Celsius water boils and it moves from liquid to either solid or vapor based upon a cold or a hot temperature, then that would not be inconsistent, because then it would change states based upon an external factor, which would be temperature.
	Uh so that would be a potentially true theory, isn't that right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Now, if we then measured this and we got a whole bunch of water and we got it in a liquid state, and then we froze it to zero and it started to freeze, or we we reduce its temperature to zero and it started to freeze, and then we raised the temperature to a hundred degrees and it started to boil into vapor,
	then we have a theory, and then we have tested it according to empirical evidence, and therefore we have a truth that zero degrees and below, water freezes, hundred degrees and above, it turns to vapor, in the middle it's a liquid uh uh over varying temperature.
	So that would be a valid uh uh proposition, or that would be a valid hypothesis, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, so I would totally agree with you, by the way, with everything you just said.
	Beautiful.
	But I'm making uh a very um uh and poor and distinction, which is you ha okay, what's what makes something true?
	You know, we go on to say there's a claim and then there's reality, and if the two if the two are aligned, then something becomes true, right?
	But truth, right?
	Truth is not found in the claim itself or reality itself.
	It's the adhesive which binds them together, right?
	Yeah, that's the relationship between the claim and reality.
	If the claim conforms with reality, the claim is true.
	Right.
	Now, okay, so now we have a relationship, right?
	So what does that mean?
	What does that mean?
	Now now the only way I can see it making sense, which is uh is is why our words can have meaning and transcend merely sounds, right?
	Is because well, there's there's that adhesive there, there's that continuity there, and that's that's what I call uh a metaphysical or transcendental thing called God.
	But why would that be necessary if we have the capacity to create hypothesis or conjectures?
	We have the capacity to process whether they're rational, which means not self-contradictory, and then we have the capacity to measure that which the theory describes and determine whether it conforms or repudiates the theory, why would we need an additional ingredient called God in the performance of that sequence?
	Yeah, because the claim and the um and reality, those are two different data points.
	Uh the them in themselves, and I understand you may disagree with this on the surface level, do not give us truth, right?
	It's it's the it's the correspondence between the two, which is something different than the two, which then we can you know use to conclude if they're true.
	So what I'm saying is the relationship there, the relationship is something in and of itself, which I call truth.
	Okay.
	Do you believe that animals have the capacity to perceive God?
	Um I have no idea, to be honest with you.
	Because animals certainly have the capacity to pursue relationships.
	I mean, they they pair bond, they have babies, they have relationships with their babies.
	A predator has a relationship with its prey, it wants to eat it, and so on, right?
	So a dog can't do physics, so can't do math, but a dog can catch a frisbee that you throw in the air, because it can jump and calculate and so on.
	So animals certainly process relationships, right?
	I'm not sure what you mean by process exactly.
	Well, I mean, let's look at swans, right?
	Swans pair bond, right?
	And they care for their young, right?
	So they have to be able to recognize other swans.
	They have to in fact be able to recognize their own swan mate, and they have to be able to recognize their own um offspring, right?
	The baby swans.
	Otherwise they couldn't survive, right?
	Um yeah, I'm not I'm I don't I'm not trying to be pedantic here.
	I'm just trying to be specific in my language.
	They they procreate, sure.
	I mean, do they have consciousness?
	I don't, you know, I mean, no, no, I didn't I didn't say that, hang on, no, don't don't straw man me.
	Sure.
	I didn't say they have consciousness.
	I said that they're able to process relationships.
	Because if they couldn't process relationships, right, a rabbit will have sex with another rabbit, not with a rock.
	Right?
	So it's able to differentiate rabbit from rock and have a relationship with the rabbit rather than a rock.
	And you don't see a lot of lions hunting termite mounds, right?
	They hunt a gazelle or whatever, right?
	So animals are able to process relationships, particularly pair-bonded relationships.
	So if a bird has offspring and it needs to be fed, the bird will go off and get well, the bird will build the nest in preparation for the offspring, and then the bird will go and uh get the worms or whatever and store the even though it might be hungry, it will store the worms in its cheek or its throat and then regurgitate them into the beaks of the offspring and so on, right?
	Even at its own discomfort, even if it's hungry, it will fill it feed its offspring before it eats itself, or before it eats for itself.
	So uh animals certainly have the capacity to process relationships, right?
	They understand we wouldn't say they abstractly could describe them, but they they process relationships.
	And that's how most animals survive is through the processing of relationships, right?
	Right.
	I mean, wolf packs is a relationship, right?
	Uh pride of lions is a relationship.
	They hunt in packs, so on, right?
	So if relationships between things in the mind and things in the world are God, then animals are religious.
	Because animals process things in the mind with things in the world.
	They have to, otherwise they couldn't survive.
	I it's interesting, you know, we say animal, you know, so therefore animals are religious.
	No, I I wouldn't say that.
	No, I would say perhaps animals have the uh ability to perceive, right?
	And uh and and have a degree of discernment, right?
	I don't think that would satisfy the conditions of religious per se.
	No, I get that.
	And the the purpose of this is not to come up with a final definition, but to say that, and this is the Socratic reasoning is if you say relationship between things in the mind and things in the world are God, then animals also have a relationship between things in the mind and things in the world.
	It's not language-based and and syllogistical based, but it certainly is a relationship otherwise they couldn't survive, in which case animals perceive God, uh, in which case I'm not sure what eating a cow means.
	I don't know cannibalism of a fellow gods worshiper a creature or something like that, but so that's just one of the challenges uh you would face, and you'd have to refine it in some manner.
	But I'm I'm a big one for uh I'm sure you've heard of this um this uh principle that the simplest explanation is Occam's razor, right?
	The simplest explanation is usually the best, which is also uh characterized as do not unnecessarily multiply entities.
	Right?
	So uh if if I were to say, well, when I throw a ball up in the air, the reason it comes down is there are tiny invisible angels that hate the intrusion of the ball into their celestial realm and therefore gather together and hurl it to the ground.
	That would be something that would not be scientific, right?
	Right.
	And that would be uh false, because there's no evidence for any of that.
	And and the simpler and more elegant and true explanation is gravity, right?
	Can we agree on that?
	Sure.
	So if human beings have the capacity to conceptualize hypotheses, check them for rational consistency, and then check them against the evidence in the world, then that is a process that does not benefit or does not gain anything additional.
	In fact, it would subtract from its elegant simplicity to add God as necessary to the equation.
	Yeah, I mean, we would we would disagree on that.
	I mean, I think that um so for example, we say relationships, right?
	And animals have relationships and relate to their environment, you know.
	Um I would say God is that which allows relationships to occur.
	And yeah, but that's like saying that angels are pushing the ball down.
	It's not necessary.
	Why would you why would you need that?
	I don't think it's analogous.
	So let me give you another example.
	Like, Well, no, I don't need examples.
	I need I need proof.
	I need reasoning.
	If you're going to say that God is that which allows us to compare the contents of our mind to things in reality, when we already have philosophy, reason, our conceptual ability and the senses.
	You know, this is the sort of famous uh Galileo thing where Galileo shows the Pope, I think it was Galileo, shows the Pope the model of the solar system, and then the Pope says, but where's God in this?
	And Galileo says, uh, he's not necessary for the movement of the planets.
	We have gravity, we have inertia, we have momentum, we have centrifugal forces, and so on.
	Uh you don't need to layer God in to the interaction or the equation.
	Sure, you said, you know, for example, you said we have empiricism.
	I don't think that relationships fundamentally relating one thing to another and distinguishing between two different things.
	Like so the factor, like the category of distinction and the category of relationships are are are in sense data.
	I think that's something we bring to two sense data to then chop it up.
	Sorry, something we bring to sense data.
	What do you mean?
	Yeah, so sure.
	So for example, you have, you know, the way, you know, you imagine you're you're looking around your room now, and you see you see the clothes in your closet and you see the door and you see the floor and the walls, and it's like, well, how do I divide it up, right?
	You know, what how do I why do I stop calling my wall wall and start calling it the floor?
	And you're like, well, because you you sense it, you see it, you see the difference, but really the distinguishing factor there is a metaphysical distinction, right?
	If you're looking at a piece of wood, right?
	Hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	So you just calling something a metaphysical distinction does not explain much to me.
	So the reason that I say the floor ends sorry, the wall ends and the floor begins, is maybe there's a baseboard, but it's because it the angle of the material changes for 90 degrees, right?
	It goes from vertical to horizontal.
	So that would be the difference between the wall and the floor.
	And I can I can look at that, I can see it, I can also run my fingers along it, I can uh, you know, I can uh I guess if I had good enough hearing I could yell and detect it from the echo, I can lick it.
	I wouldn't want to, but I could lick the floor and I could check it with that uh sense.
	I I could put honey on the wall and and pepper on the floor, and I could then taste the difference if I wanted, right?
	So every single one of my senses would accord, and it's not contradictory, and therefore that's how I know the difference between the wall and the floor.
	Yeah, but like what okay, so then we would say, okay, what do we what is the wall?
	Well, the wall's a collection of a series of atoms.
	Yeah.
	On a on a very small level, you could say, well, you know, how do you d which atoms separate the wall from the floor?
	But you don't need atoms.
	First of all, philosophy arose and science arose without a modern theory of atoms.
	Democritus was, you know, theorized about this stuff, but the sort of Niels Bohr theory of atoms is much more modern.
	So uh animals know the difference between a wall and a doorway, right?
	Because dogs don't just repeatedly walk into the wall, they they go through the door, right?
	So animals they they don't they can't detect atoms, they don't understand the concept of atoms, of course, but they can still navigate through empirical reality.
	So uh the the wall is the uh vertical structure to shield you from the elements and keep the ceiling or roof on, uh or have something to put the ceiling or roof on, and the floor is something that you walk on, which is sort of the purpose of the room.
	So uh that that would be the definition, so to speak.
	Yeah, I mean, I would just disagree.
	Like, let's say I'm eating fish for dinner, right?
	At what point after I swallow that fish, does it become me when it enters my mouth, when I digest it, right?
	This is a this is a metaphysical distinction we're making.
	So your question is at what point does the fish become you?
	Correct.
	Okay.
	And uh you mean in terms of property or in terms of absorption into your body.
	Well, I mean, yeah, I mean absorption into my body.
	Like what do we what do we consider my body, right?
	Well, uh what do you mean?
	You don't know what your body is?
	Well, uh yeah, that's the question.
	See the things you can wiggle the fingers and the toes, that's your body.
	You know what your body is, right?
	Let's not get to the I don't know what a rock is, right?
	Well, I mean, um once again, I think the the inquiry in mind provides a good example of how distinction is in a physical property.
	If I swallow the fish, when does it become me?
	When does it become transferred into my proteins, for example?
	Well, I mean, there's a continuum there, right?
	So when the fish is at the bottom of the lake, clearly it's not you yet, right?
	Of course.
	Okay.
	And now, a week after you've eaten the fish, right?
	You've pooped out all the things you can't digest and so on, and there's no fish left in your stomach, then it has been absorbed into your body, right?
	Like that part of the fish that you can use and and digest.
	Do we do we agree with that?
	Sure, yeah.
	Okay.
	So this is a problem of slicing, right?
	So we know when it's not you, right?
	It's on the plate or you know, whatever it is, right?
	We know that it's not you.
	It is in the process of becoming you after you swallow it, assuming you don't throw it up.
	At some point, it's, you know, and then there's a process by which the the acids in your stomach break it down and it gets absorbed In some manner, which I don't particularly understand, and then it gets used to your muscles and your growth and so on.
	So at some point it's definitely not you.
	At some point it has been fully absorbed into you, and somewhere in the middle, right?
	But who I mean, it's not like one split single second, right?
	So it's a it's a process, it's a continuum process.
	And so I don't see what the philosophical different difficulty is there.
	I mean, there's not you're asking what's the one single instance of something that doesn't have one single instance.
	It's like saying, when is the exact moment of puberty?
	It's like, well, there is no exact moment of puberty, it's a process.
	There's pre-pubescent, and then there's postpubescent.
	And then there's, you know, a year or two or whatever it is where the process is going on.
	So when you're talking about a process, asking for an exact moment is a contradiction in terms.
	Yeah, I get it.
	I I mean ultimately that's that's um a distinction or a line that I don't have the knowledge to draw, but ultimately.
	No, no, you can't draw it.
	You can't draw it because it's a process.
	Well, I think if you're learning if you're learning a foreign language, at some point you don't know the language, and at some point you do know the language.
	Asking when the exact moment is that you know the language is it's a square peg in a round hole.
	It's the wrong category.
	Like if I shoot a bullet through a window, we can say what's the exact moment the window broke.
	It's like, yeah, the exact moment is when the bullet hit the window, right?
	That's that's an instance.
	But when we're talking about a process, saying what is the exact instance of a lengthy process is uh a category error, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I guess I would disagree with that.
	I would say that, you know, in order in order to even say there's a process, we would have to find out what conditions we mean by process and specify.
	No, no, but we you already did that.
	I'm gonna move on, but yeah, you already did that.
	So I mean, you know, it's just very interesting stuff, and I I appreciate the questions, but if you said you you said you you don't have a fish, you eat the fish, and at some point the fish is absorbed.
	So um that's just the issue that you need to deal with.
	All right, let us do one or two more.
	Appreciate these questions, very interesting.
	No hide.
	No hide.
	What is on your mind, my friend?
	How can philosophy serve you a tasty plate of wisdom today?
	Hey, Stephen.
	Uh I wanted to know your thoughts on survivorship bias of ideas, and it seems to me that there could be a lot of nonsense that helps life move on, even if it's not philosophically correct.
	Sorry, that helps light move on, or sorry, Mr. That Life, move on.
	Okay, got it.
	Go ahead.
	So like it would you subscribe to truth if it means like you you can't pass on your genes and pass on the knowledge.
	Like it, like what's the point of truth if if it can't get passed on, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I mean, are you saying would I speak the kind of truths that would get me gunned down at a public square?
	No, no, I wouldn't.
	Um I I I guess final question.
	I I I wasn't expecting to speak to you today.
	It's good screw.
	Thank you for having me come up.
	Um how do we how do we know when there's if if the again, if the engine is helping produce people and reproduction and building society, I'm sorry, if the engine I'm sorry, I'm sorry if I'm not hearing what you're saying correctly, but go ahead.
	So, like a society birth rates and and people are making babies and they're going to their jobs and they're they're living in this narrative of the society they live in.
	Um, but there's a lot of maybe inconsistencies with how their philosophy is, but it but it but it's creating life and creating production.
	Um that just that to me seems like it's working even if maybe their philosophy is wrong.
	So how do you reconcile if maybe their philosophy is wrong, but oh sure, I think I understand the question.
	Societies have a tension within them, which is that practical truth is necessary for the survival of the society.
	You have to accept that there's a farm, that there's crops that you can plant, that you've got to chase away the birds, you know, that you've got to store up enough for the winter or so you you need practical truths.
	However, the same machinery in the mind that processes practical truths also processes moral truths.
	So practical truths need to be accepted as universal, right?
	It's not like every fourth hail bomb is going to be great for your crops, like all the hail is bad for your crops, blah, blah, blah.
	Right?
	So there has to be a certain amount of pragmatic or practical utility in the thinking of a society in order for that society to survive, in in terms of even just learning how to fight with a sword or forge weaponry or something like that, you need universal physical standards and pragmatism in order to survive as a society.
	In other words, if everybody was psychotic or schizophrenic, the society wouldn't survive because they wouldn't know how to process or deal with actual reality.
	Do we have a rough agreement on that?
	Yes, sir.
	Okay.
	Now the problem is, of course, that societies flourish directly to the degree that they accept and process rational reality and universalize it.
	So if a uh a swordsman, uh a knight, if he believed that his sword would turn soft over the next hill, then he wouldn't go fight there, right?
	Yeah.
	So he has to believe that his sword is going to be strong and sharp everywhere he goes.
	Right?
	So if they're going to fight uh whatever in the Middle East uh in the Crusades or whatever, they wouldn't sit there and say, well, uh gravity is reversed and my sword turns into soft pasta in the Middle East, they would have to accept the physical properties of their sword would be universal everywhere.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Now that is to do with physical reality.
	They also have to accept that the laws have elements of universality to them, the moral laws.
	Right?
	So if murder, thou shalt not murder, like thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not murder.
	They have to accept that that is true every day of the week, no matter where you are, like it's not, oh, on that hill on Thursdays you can kill and it's totally moral.
	So they have to believe or accept that there's a certain level of universality to the morals, otherwise society can't function.
	In other words, if everybody was r radically subjectivist in terms of morals, everybody would just be in a state of nature and you'd just do whatever you could get away with, and there'd be no such thing as a conscience.
	Is that do we have a rough agreement on that?
	Yes, sir.
	Okay.
	So then the challenge is the same machinery of the mind that universalizes physical experiences into universals, also takes moral universals and attempts to extrapolate them.
	So if you have a society with a king, then if you take the practical universal universalization capacities of your mind and extrapolate to it to the king, there's a part of you that thinks the king is just a guy with a piece of metal on his head.
	He's just a dude with a piece of metal on his head, right?
	This sort of, again, in order to over overuse Monty Python, but there's sort of famous scene in Monty Python on the Holy Grail, where somebody says, that must be a king.
	Well, how do you know?
	Well, the traditional medieval answer would be because he's appointed there by God, uh, he is the uh head and soul of the kingdom and uh uh divine right of kings and so on.
	But the answer from the peasant as to why is that a king, is he says, because he hasn't got shit all over him.
	Now, again, that's funny, but it's also kind of bifferally true.
	So everybody who processes reality has to say, every single one of those crows is bad for my crops.
	But that same thing that says every single crow and every single piece of hail is bad for my crops, will also say, hang on, I think that's just a guy like me with a funny hat and a lot of pomp and circumstance, right?
	And so society and the rulers flourish based upon the universality of our mental processing, but the universal and the relative somewhat universality of the moral rules, but if we go too far along that, we begin to doubt the moral distinction between ruler and ruled and think that we're all just people and the same moral rules should apply to everyone.
	And of course, a lot of theology is about just and Kant, too, by the way, was justifying the rule of the king, despite the fact that there's no particular evidence that the king is there's no evidence that the king is divine.
	So yeah, we want to tell the truth for sure, and society flourishes as moral rules extrapolate, but as moral rules extrapolate to become truly universal, the powers that be Get really pissed off and start to uh kill people.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	So is this kind of an argument for kind of like a caste system?
	It we're all people, as you said, one guy doesn't have shit on him, but we we like that order instructor, else there'd be chaos, then everybody would be going all over the place.
	So it sounds kind of like a caste system what you we kind of like that the the they I'm sorry, I don't I'm always surprised what people get out of what I'm saying.
	Why would you say this is an argument for a caste system and what do you mean by a classist?
	So the king, you said the king is like he's a guy with metal on his head, like he's a guy just like me, maybe maybe he's not filthy with cow manure on him.
	Um he's appointed whatever the reason, he's there because of God, a lineage, maybe his great great great grandfather was was uh a uh a thug that took over the kingdom, but it's he was born into something which is kind of like a caste, and then there's the peasants and okay, hang on.
	Is it true that the king is just a guy with a funny hat?
	Universally I mean, like, yeah, I would say it is true.
	Yeah.
	He's just a guy with a funny hat.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And so that that is true.
	Now, societies always have this tension between you have to deal with reality and the laws as if they're objective, but you have to deal with power as if it's categorically different.
	Right?
	I mean, there's this funny thing that the Democrats say from time to time, no one is above the law, and it's like, of course they are.
	Of course they are above the law.
	So that's the tension.
	And society is just veering between the rulers need you to exempt them from the general rule of morality in order to rule you.
	But if you go too far down that road and start creating lots of exceptions to general reality, then you can't process reality and you can't produce that much that's worth stealing for the ruler.
	So they need you to be both pragmatic and insane at the same time, and that tension is really, really difficult.
	So for instance, if if there are a bunch of immigrants, let's say that come to England and they vote for the left, right?
	Then they are have, in general, different behaviors from the domestic population, which tends to vote more conservative.
	So then they say, don't judge anyone collectively while bringing in people precisely because they're going to act in a collective manner in the way that they want.
	So that's just asking that they're saying, well, we're bringing people in in part because they vote for the left.
	But if you are against the left and you have a problem with immigrants, then you're crazy.
	And it's like, but the reason you're bringing them in is because they vote for people I disagree with.
	So if I notice that and point that out, now I'm suddenly a bad guy.
	So how dare you notice or point out group differences, which is the only reason we're bringing those people in.
	Like d like they're just asking you to be both sane and crazy at the same time, and that's really tough.
	So I um I guess.
	Yeah, uh I get I don't take too much of your time, but my original question of there are things that work even if they're a logical, but you're you're or again they go against sound philosophy, but you're saying there is a tension there, and it takes a significant person to create an exception to cause a revolution,
	call him a prophet, call him because there's this order we have to deal with, and we don't want to necessarily risk our lives unless we're maybe schizophrenic enough or or No, no, I mean, so yeah, I mean, so that's almost the question, and I'm obviously not trying to plumb the depth of Charlie Crook's theology, but Charlie Kirk clearly felt that there was a cause that was worth risking his life for.
	Right?
	Because he was out there, certainly doesn't look like he was wearing any bulletproof gear.
	I mean, you can see his nipples.
	So now Charlie Kirk, the argument would be something like, and again, I don't know his particular theology in this area.
	But it would be like, well, it's worth it because my reward is in the afterlife.
	And if I uh if I perish in the service of God's truth and virtue, then that's worth it for me.
	In other words, there is a reward.
	One of the issues with atheists and atheism is that because there isn't an afterlife, you tend not to have courses larger than your own life.
	Which means you would tend to lose out to people who do have courses larger than their own life, people who are willing to die or kill for their beliefs.
	So that is that is a challenge.
	Now, I mean, obviously I'm against violence, uh, the initiation of the use of force and so on, but where people go in terms of promoting the truth is uh every everyone's personal decision.
	And I don't obviously I'm not gonna say to people martyr yourself, I don't.
	But I'm also not gonna say don't speak the truth at all.
	Where everyone falls along that continuum of don't speak the truth at all and then speak the kind of truths that get you killed in the public square, you know, that's that's a personal decision.
	And um I don't all I ask is that people be honest with it, right?
	So I've said the stuff I'm just not gonna talk about.
	And I mean, I'm I'm because I want to do maximum philosophy.
	And you know, looking at the example of Charlie Kirk, there is a limit to the kind of truths that you could talk about without incurring significant physical risk.
	And that's not what I'm going to do.
	I'm aiming for maximum philosophy.
	I'm honest about that.
	Uh I don't say I have limitless courage and will speak up no matter what, right?
	So, you know, just people just have to be honest about that kind of stuff.
	And uh uh I appreciate that question.
	Let's do one last caller and then I will stop.
	Because it's been a good old chitty chat.
	All right.
	H I'm trying to go with people who hasn't uh haven't come before.
	And I I do find it kind of interesting coincidence that the fellow who calls in to criticize about the is it what stuff when the uh always seems to have mysterious microphone failures the moment that the debate is not going his way.
	It's very interesting.
	I'm not sure that there's much honesty there either.
	But HR, what is on your mind, my friend.
	Uh hello, how are you doing?
	Good, how you doing?
	Good, good.
	Thank you for having me, Stevon.
	I appreciate it.
	Uh I just happened to join a few minutes ago.
	I just have a question.
	I I I have to wonder if Charlie Kirk actually thought that this was something that was possibly going to get him killed, because his brand of conservatism is the safe route.
	Of the risk.
	Because he had he had a lot of security.
	Well, oh yeah, he had a lot of security.
	He had a lot of money, too.
	I mean, if you're a public speaker in general, you know, no, no, no.
	No, that there's no amount of security.
	I mean, unless you just stay in a bunker 24-7, which is not what he did, but you can't go out into the world without the risk of being shot or attacked or killed or poisoned or whatever, right?
	They can do just about anything.
	So I just wanted to be clear that the security did not guarantee him uh safety.
	I mean, I know that's the one.
	Well, no, no.
	I've gone out to speak in contentious events.
	I've been chased through the streets of a city, I have had security, uh, I have had attacks, uh, and so on.
	So I'm, you know, even with good security, uh you you can't guarantee anything.
	Well, I mean, it's certainly true that a lot of people are in the kitchen and they can uh but they can pretend to be a uh a white staff, they can go into some kitchen and then can put strychinine in your soup.
	I mean, honestly, th th there's very little that you can do if people genuinely want to take you out as a whole.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	No, 100%.
	I I'm I'm not contending that.
	I just don't think that every single person that speaks in the public is necessarily expecting death.
	And like you said, a bodyguard is not going to stop uh someone who wants to just walk up.
	Everyone who speaks in public is expecting death.
	I'm not sure why would that even need to be said?
	I mean, there's there's people who give uh insurance seminars, I'm pretty sure they're not expected to be gunned down.
	I'm I'm not sure what's going on.
	No, no, no.
	No, but you no, you said you said um that you was speaking in public and he had security and he was but I mean leftists tend to react to in in like visceral ways throwing bottles of urine or feces or stuff like that.
	Like that's that's the kind of thing that he was probably expecting was someone trying to punch him in a in the face like Richard Spencer.
	I very much doubt like what he wasn't.
	We don't I mean, I think he talked about the risks of being shot, if I remember rightly.
	So uh I think that I think we want to give our good friend Charlie Kirk, I think we want to give him maximum courage, because I think he was displaying maximum courage.
	Because uh he did actually talk about the risks of assassination.
	Well, I mean, look, Hamas uh they sacrificed their lives for what they believe.
	I mean, white nationalists have been viciously attacked at events, and they didn't have security.
	I mean, there's all kinds of people that are willing to do this.
	I think the problem is that the validity of what he stood for is questionable at best, given his relationship with uh Zionism and and Israel as a whole.
	Like it's it's a little bit wishy-washy because the guy was devoted to anti-Muslim uh immigration and influence over American politics, but was devoted to the Jewish power structure that I think I know you're well aware of this Because you you've had conversations with white nationalists like ten years ago.
	Okay, and uh we can certainly have that perspective and that view, and I'm not sure what philosophical question you have for me.
	Well, I m mostly I just want I just wanted to question the idea that he was expecting to be uh shot or that he thought that this was like a super dangerous route to go down because you know conservatism is for the most part, it's not something that's gonna get you doxxed and fired.
	It's not something that's gonna get you attacked in the street for having I mean you might get attacked for having a MAGA hat, but it's it's you know, lots of people have them.
	Lots of people are very conservative.
	It's not um a verboden form of politics in our in our culture, right?
	Uh again, I'm I'm not sure what you're saying.
	Uh are you saying that you can walk down the streets of Portland, say, or go to the DNC uh wearing a MAGA hat and you won't face any problems.
	I mean somebody might say something, but I mean I I very much doubt that you would be physically attacked in public for that.
	Yeah, no, I've I mean I've walked around with some pretty I mean people walk around with some pretty provocative shirts and don't have any problems.
	But if you walk around with a swastika, you're almost guaranteed that someone's gonna hit attack you, right?
	Okay.
	So where have you walked around with the MAGA hat?
	And I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just curious.
	Well, I'm I'm Canadian actually, so it really wouldn't make sense for me to have a MAGA hot, but I mean, there's our conservatism is basically the same as American.
	It's very Okay, so what have you have you walked around say a university campus with uh a MAGA hat?
	I mean, because if you're saying it's the same, then you would would you walk around campus with a MAGA hat?
	Well, we in my at my college we had uh you know conservative factions and or uh pro-life organizations um that were allowed to be there.
	They were I mean the this is alongside the the gender uh queer uh you know pronoun stuff that was enforced by the administration, but you can get away with it because it's it's a sort of accepted soft opposition as opposed to something that's actually like seriously opposing the core of the political structure, right?
	It's it's a superfluous critique of the system.
	A release volve, is that sort of what you're saying?
	Yeah, well, it's it's small, it's soft, it's non-threatening, it's kind of controlled and curtailed to to serve a purpose, right?
	I mean, yeah, I mean, you might be talking to the wrong guy because I certainly have to had to give speeches.
	I didn't have to give speeches.
	I chose to give speeches in the face of assassination bomb and death threats, and as I said before, being chased through the streets by uh leftists uh not looking to shake my hand.
	And you know, when people came to see me speak, um people got attacked, uh buses got they had uh they tried to tip over buses, so the leftists they uh threw uh giant batteries at the bus windows and uh and so on.
	And you know, even in Canada when I tried to speak, uh there was uh threats and uh so on, and uh a priest's uh car was attacked, a church was attacked, and so yeah, you just maybe talking to the wrong guy and uh uh about the sort of risks and dangers.
	Yeah, I just want to say to your credit, though, you are a bit uh edgier and willing to go places where I think Charlie Kirk and people like like him probably wouldn't go.
	Um I mean that's why that's why the groupers harassed him for so long, right?
	Is that he was he was kind of a a coward when it came to uh the real the issues that they wanted to talk about, right?
	He would run away from a debate.
	He wouldn't he wouldn't he wasn't willing to talk about certain things despite being the free speech guy.
	Well, you know, if if anybody feels that a public speaker is not covering a particular topic that they want, then those people should go and create shows and platforms and speeches and do what they I mean uh when I wanted to start a philosophy show, I didn't find sort of established prominent and public philosophers and harass them to talk about what I wanted them to talk about.
	I simply created a show of my own.
	So uh I I think if other people are not doing what you want, that's what's called a market opportunity, right?
	If if you want to pick up some cigarettes and there's no store around, that may be uh let's not take cigarettes, not the best example.
	I'm thinking of an old short story about a guy who opened up a tobacconist, uh, but yeah, if you're if you're hungry for lunch and there's no place to buy uh lunch Around where you have your office or whatever, then that's a market opportunity.
	Uh I I I I wouldn't go to a dry cleaner's and and yell at them to turn themselves into a sandwich shop.
	I would simply open a sandwich shop.
	Uh I don't believe in sort of yelling at and harassing other people to do what you want.
	So uh that's a good idea.
	Right, but this is a philosophical thing, sort of.
	I I just want to say that this is a philosophical this is more akin to a socialist showing up at one of your lectures and questioning you about your libertarianism, and then you just shut down and say you're a bad person and I can't talk to you.
	That would that would be more akin to what what he did.
	Like, okay, and and so let's let's say that I did that, then that would be a market opportunity for someone to not do that.
	If if I was doing something that that people think is wrong or bad, then they should go and do it better.
	But you like Charlie Kirk are a free speech advocate.
	So it you see it, there is a clash there.
	There's a there's a contradiction inherent in the behavior.
	Uh, I agree with that.
	And and let's say let's say that there is, right?
	Let's say that there is.
	So then if people feel that, let's say Charlie is deficient in his devotion to free speech, then they should go and remedy that by creating a platform, publicly speaking, and engaging in these topics.
	I mean, nagging people is feminine, and it's not even good feminine, it's it's bad feminine.
	Right.
	I mean I don't nag people to do what I think should be done, I do it.
	Nagging is uh helpless.
	It's it's feminine coded and like bad feminine coded.
	So I don't agree with nagging people and shaming them and yeah, being inconsistent.
	It's like just go and you know, if if there's a a shop selling pizza and and you think that they should sell burgers, go up and up a burger shop.
	Don't sit there and pick it up.
	And harass and harangue and and and you gotta open a burger.
	Just you know, let's say that Charlie was inconsistent, right?
	I've I don't know particularly the details, but I think he had some pretty strong criticism of Israel.
	But let's say that Charlie was being inconsistent.
	Okay, so that's a market opportunity for someone to go out and be more consistent.
	I just I have a problem, you know, there's that old quote from uh Teddy Roosevelt about the guy in the arena and everyone else is just kind of nagging and blaming and shaming and and vetching and all that kind of stuff.
	But it's like get in the arena and if if someone's not doing something well, then shut up, not talking to you, then shut up and go do it better.
	Right?
	If you think modern music sucks, then don't just harass and nag at people who are making go make music.
	Go make better music.
	I think modern philosophy sucks.
	I think they don't address the right things.
	I think that they're avoidant, I think that they're pampered, I think that they're exclusionary, I think that they're ivory tower, I think that they're betraying the people that they force to give the money.
	So I didn't just start nagging all the philosophers.
	I was just like, okay, that's a market opportunity for practical, robust, citizen-focused philosophies.
	I do find that interesting though, that that you would that you would uh you would find it to be like a nagging thing, a very feminine behavior, because I I would see it as as cowardly to run away from a challenge.
	I would say that's the more feminine behavior, isn't it?
	No, if it is feminine to nag someone.
	Because you're saying I want you to do what I think is important.
	No, if you think it's if you think it's important, then do it.
	Yeah, but he people weren't saying you need to talk about this, you need to talk about that.
	They're saying you are saying you were taking the wrong position.
	Here's why you're a shill, here's why your pro your politics are bad for conservatives and bad for a people.
	That's nagging.
	But but why can't you why couldn't he just chat like take the challenge head on?
	If somebody criticized you and you ran away from it, people aren't gonna say, well, Stefan was just being nagged.
	He should he doesn't have to put up with that.
	Like people would see you as a coward if you ran away from a critic, right?
	You I don't view that as cowardly.
	What I view as cowardly is nagging and bitching at people rather than being the solution, right?
	Be the change you want to see in the world.
	I view that as cowardly.
	Nagging at other people to do what you want is like a woman saying, Well, that guy really needs to get beaten up.
	I'm not gonna do it myself.
	I'm just gonna try and goad some guy into beating him up.
	That's what I mean.
	Like it's feminine coded.
	Right?
	I think that there should be this product or service.
	So I'm just gonna nag people about it.
	Not I'm just just go create the product or service yourself.
	Just go and if if you think that that nagging other people to do what you want is is is bad female.
	It's b it's passive.
	It's it's nagging.
	If if you think that Charlie or me or whoever is not addressing some topic, rather than trying to shame, blame, humiliate, oh, you're being inconsistent, oh you'd be like free speech, it's like just go and do it.
	It's a market opportunity.
	If it needs to be done, and this I'm not saying this to you in particular, I'm saying this to everyone.
	The moment you feel the urge to just nag people into doing what you want or you think needs to be done, that's kind of pathetic.
	You should go and do it.
	Go set up your speeches, go start your podcast, go do your thing.
	And and starting to do that.
	Alright, well, I won't nag doing what you want.
	Sorry.
	So I won't nag you anyway.
	I've taken up enough of your time there, Stefan.
	I'll I'll hop off.
	I think I I think I got the answer.
	So that and thank you again.
	Great questions and comments.
	And uh I just I just invite people as a whole.
	Uh, if you think something needs to be done, nagging other people is not the way to go on.
	All right, listen, we've been almost three hours, so I think I'll stop here, but I really do appreciate your comments and questions, and thank you so much, everyone, for calling in free.
	Oh, it's almost the end of the month.
	Free domain.com slash donate.
	If you could put a wee smile on my face, you can subscribe right here on X, free domain.com slash donate to help out the show.
	Really would appreciate it.
	No ads, all free.
	The books are free, everything's free.
	And the price of that is helping to support the show.
	I really do appreciate that.
	Have a glorious, gorgeous, wonderful evening, my friends.
	Take care.
	I'll talk to you soon.

▲