Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - What if Nothing is Real?!? Twitter/X Space

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Oct. 23, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:54:08

What if Nothing is Real?!? Twitter/X Space

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	All right.
	Good evening, everybody.
	22nd of October 2025.
	Do you know it's eight years ago to the day that I did my show on Lord of the Rings with the illustrious Dr. Duke Pesta?
	We've done a bunch of shows together.
	King Lear, Long Day's Journey into Night.
	We've done Hamlet, Screwtape Letters, and a bunch of other books.
	Pretty good.
	Pretty good education in literary analysis.
	I dare say we even did one of my novels called The Present.
	So, and it's funny to think that the 25th, I think it's the 25th, is in a couple of days, well, three days.
	And it is, in fact, the 20th anniversary of when I got my first article published on Lou Rockwell.
	L-E-W.
	Don't give me that OU stuff.
	LewRockwell.com called The State of Society, an examination of alternatives.
	Burned into my brain.
	And I read it as a podcast, read a couple of new articles as a podcast.
	This is back when I, there was like no documentation, man.
	Getting this stuff to work was hell on wheels.
	So I did that.
	And then I just started freebasing, freeforming jazz improvisation in a car that I had along commute, long driving.
	So, all right.
	Well, listen, I got my topics, but it is a call-in show.
	Ooh, sorry, just a little nipple play there.
	And then we're going up here into the ear.
	And Jacques, Black Jacques Shallak, if you have thoughts, comments, issues, challenges, could be about Lord of the Rings, could be about anything.
	I've got my theories.
	I've got my thoughts.
	But if you wanted to unmute, I'm happy to hear what is on your mind this evening.
	What is on your mind, my friend?
	Jacques, you will need to unmute.
	Hey, can you hear me now?
	Yes, sir.
	Hey, thanks for taking my call.
	I'll keep this really quick because I don't necessarily have anything to talk about today.
	I just had a question for you.
	I requested a call.
	I paid like a private call in just due to a family of origin situation that sort of has unraveled pretty quickly and is, I think, quite serious.
	And I was wondering, are you able to do those calls sooner than the schedule that you have?
	Or is that like a pretty hard deadline?
	No, listen.
	If it's very important, if it's an emergency, just email me.
	You can email me, hostho-st at freedomain.com, and we can work out something sooner.
	Yes.
	Okay, sounds good.
	I really appreciate that.
	Thank you very much.
	All right.
	So somebody is, oh, Taylor.
	Hey, Taylor, nice to see you.
	Has asked, did you perchance watch the atrocious Rings of Power on Amazon Prime?
	I did not.
	I wouldn't even hate watch that to appease my worst enemy.
	I would not have anything to do with the absolute woke nuclear shadow of the former material stuff that's going on on Amazon Prime.
	I just, I mean, I did, I guess it went somewhat viral, a couple of mil views, but I did a post because it was Vigo Mortensen's birthday.
	And I know he's a woke idiot, but trust me, I went to theater school.
	Actors are empty vessels that are filled up with the words of others.
	Actors are hollow.
	Actors have no particular personality or identity.
	Actors are clay, right?
	They're just goop and soft and they can be molded and so on.
	And they're good mimics.
	They're good mimics.
	But to be a good mimic, you have to not have much of a character yourself, right?
	And so the fact that the actor who played Aragorn is a woke airhead, absolutely unimportant.
	Absolutely unimportant because we are looking at his interpretation, of course, of Tolkien's great characters and the fact that he can imitate this.
	And what did he broke his toe kicking a helmet in one of the scenes where they're looking for Frodo?
	Oh, no, for Pippin and Mary.
	It's committed.
	He was committed.
	I think he even kept the horses that he rode during that movie.
	So yeah, he's an actor.
	And the other thing, too, like all celebrities go through this filter of will you mouth demonic bullshit in order to maintain your level of fame.
	That's all it is.
	All it is.
	In order to be famous, you have to mouth woke, hateful, sinister propaganda.
	I mean, it's coming out all over the place.
	God, is it?
	John Bon Jovi showed up at the No Kings.
	No Kings, of course, is the slogan of the French Revolution, and we all know what the French Revolution did.
	Or if you don't know, you should definitely subscribe at freedomain.com slash donate, and you should check out.
	I've got almost 12 hours on the French presentation, on the French, a presentation on the French Revolution, the truth about the French Revolution, which says, I mean, this is why it happened.
	I can tell you exactly why it happened.
	But to find that out, again, freedomain.com slash donate.
	And revolutions tend to happen when there's a split in the parenting practices of a civilization.
	When you have a certain number of people who are parented better, and then you have a number of people who continue to be parented brutally, what happens is the kids who are parented brutally end up with rage and resentment at those who are parented better.
	And then their parents basically command those kids in their minds to kill the better parented people.
	So in the French Revolution, it was the people who were parented really badly who killed the people who were parented better.
	And that's why you always have to circle back to, you know, none left behind, right?
	None left behind.
	Because if there are people being parented well and society approves of that, and then there's a whole bunch of people being parented badly and society doesn't seem to give a shit about it, then those people will be full of rage and they will attack.
	And I've got, and that's the general thesis.
	I've got lots of documentary evidence about all of that.
	But yeah, no kings is a French Revolution.
	It's a Marxist thing, right?
	No gods, no masters.
	And it is anti-Christian foundationally.
	I mean, the American Revolution was pro-Christian.
	The French Revolution was anti-Christian.
	And that's what they're aiming for with the new woke stuff.
	I mean, woke just means anti-Christian, anti-white, blah, blah, blah.
	So that's just the reality of the situation.
	If you have questions, of course, you can type them into the chitty chats as well.
	And let me just get to where things are.
	I want to make sure that I am catching in on everybody's questions and comments.
	Just grab that.
	And yeah, if you have questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, I'm happy to hear from you, objections, and so on.
	The guy, John, who called in a couple of weeks ago, who was full of scorn and contempt for my intellectual neighbors, he is back.
	He's back.
	And it's a funny thing, you know?
	So he said, oh, you don't even know the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning.
	And I gave him two examples that actually came out of my book, The Art of the Argument, or The Argument.com.
	And he's like, Yeah, that's right.
	And then I proved to him that rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
	And he's like, Yeah, that's right.
	But now he's back to, well, if I want to teach logical fallacies, I just show your work to my students.
	This I don't understand.
	And, you know, maybe you can help me out.
	Maybe you've known people like this.
	Maybe you can explain it to me.
	I don't understand this foundationally.
	I don't understand.
	If you've had a kind of illumination or you've been wrong about something, and I wasn't rude to the guy, right?
	I did actually just have to ask him to stop insulting me and actually make an argument, but, you know, whatever, right?
	But if you're proven wrong about something, how do you reform your personality just like it was before, right?
	Isn't that a weird thing?
	It's like a woman who says, you're cheating on me, man.
	You're cheating on me.
	And then she finds out you're not cheating on her, but it doesn't make a difference.
	She still keeps saying, you cheated on me, you know?
	Oh, you didn't cheat on me, but you kind of cheated on me, or you mentally cheated on me, or you had an emotional affair in your mind, or you dreamt about it.
	Like, it doesn't matter.
	The facts, facts don't matter.
	And I find that a very deep and weird and chilling perspective and viewpoint.
	I do.
	I find that a deeply weird, chilling perspective.
	Because if facts don't matter, what does it mean to be a human being?
	It's very strange.
	Huh.
	I mean, I was thinking the other day that one of the things that I do when I am in a debate with someone, certainly in person, if somebody's getting all kinds of testy and aggressive about sort of my arguments perspective, and they say, well, I believe in X, right?
	Or X is true or whatever it is, right?
	Society is founded on racism or whatever it is you say, right?
	This always means the West, right?
	It's like, okay, so what counter arguments exist to your position?
	That's really important, right?
	What Counter arguments exist to your position.
	This is a really foundational question to ask someone.
	I mean, you can also ask them: can you steal man my position?
	Can you give me a very strong argument that supports my position?
	But ask them.
	What are the arguments or what is the data that goes against your position?
	and And this is important to find out if somebody has at all a well-rounded view of the argument or the debate or the facts of the issue in question.
	Do they have a well-rounded view?
	Or do they just have a one-sided view and the only other, the only opposing argument is evil!
	Evil.
	So it's very strange.
	All right, so I'll, I don't know, let's see.
	We seem to be a tight crowd tonight for sure.
	It's a tight crowd tonight.
	So I'll sort of give very briefly the general thesis that I have about Lord of the Rings.
	So, I mean, the most fascinating character to me in Lord of the Rings is Sauron.
	Sauron.
	I mean, once physical, because Sauron exists in a tall tower with an eye, you know, the sort of flaming eye that goes on.
	Flaming eye.
	Like, flaming eye should be Milo's autobiography.
	Anyway, love the guy.
	Hope you get better.
	So, Sauron to me is a very interesting thing.
	So, Sauron uses willpower, the sort of ferocious will that he has.
	Sauron uses willpower to command war among the weak-willed.
	And the ring whispers.
	The ring slowly takes over.
	The ring is subtle.
	The ring isn't just this big giant, you know, Thomas Covenant wild gold flaming power spray, right?
	The ring is subtle.
	And Sauron pours his energy into the ring, uses it to control people by subverting and corrupting their minds.
	So, this to me is propaganda.
	What is the ring in Lord of the Rings?
	It's sophistry.
	It's propaganda.
	I mean, how do you take over a nuclear-armed country like South Africa?
	Well, you just keep lying about it, calling it evil, and get a bunch of dim-witted Peter Gabriel artists to condemn it without any understanding or knowledge of the history or the challenges that the country was facing, and you just end up taking it over with words.
	So, instead of training in fighting, right?
	And this is the idea that Sauron pours his energy into the ring, right?
	Instead of training in fighting or combat, which, you know, you're going to get old and so on, sophistry is the war of the weak.
	Propaganda is the combat of the weak, and it works against the weak-willed.
	So, it's always fascinating to me that at the end of Lord of the Rings, and I remember there was a while where I used to read that like every couple of days.
	I just read the fall of Sauron, the end of Lord of the Rings, or at least the end of the battle.
	There's the Sauruman and the Shire afterwards, but the sort of major battle.
	Thank you.
	Pleb, I'll catch you in a sec.
	And in the movie, it's even more vivid, right?
	So, when the tower collapses, right?
	And the tower with the eye at the top is like a broadcast tower.
	It's like a radio tower.
	It's like a television tower.
	It's like a cell phone tower.
	It is how you broadcast and transmit, even in Tolkien state, it's how you broadcast and transmit propaganda.
	And when the propaganda falls, the creatures and the monsters all lose their will and they scatter and they get confused and bewildered like they've just woken up from a hypnotic sleep.
	The enemy of sophistry, the enemy of propaganda is reason and philosophy, which is why a philosopher such as myself get, you know, attacked and ostracized and downplayed and so on.
	But if you look at the ring of power being propaganda, propaganda lives on after people die.
	I mean, we're dealing with propaganda that was around in the French Revolution and before even the propaganda.
	So when you have these immortal kings, right, they can't be killed, then it is that propaganda lives on even after the people have died.
	So you can be dead, but still doing the work of propaganda, the battle, the fight of propaganda.
	So anyway, we'll get into that perhaps in more detail later on in the show.
	Right now, we have Pleb.
	Oh, sorry, let me do a little tick mark here.
	Pleb, if you wanted to give me your thoughts on this or any other subject, I'd be happy to hear.
	Hey, Steph, is my mic sounding good?
	Yeah, it's good.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	So I have a fun question.
	Well, one of my buddies, we've listened to you for a while, and it took us a while to try to, well, it took him more of a while to try to jot down something just to kind of get the gears turning.
	So hopefully X doesn't funky while I read this.
	It's not long.
	Okay.
	So he wrote down the question he wanted me to ask was: in your framework of absolute voluntarism, where all interactions must stem from informed consent to avoid ethical aggression, how do you reconcile the reality that most people, your listeners included, were born into coercive state systems without any opt-in cacience?
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure I followed the question.
	Could you give me a summary?
	I mean, it sounds like a compatibility question, not a moral question.
	So a society founded upon the non-aggression principle can't have hierarchical political power because hierarchical political power carves human beings into two groups and they oppose each other.
	So you have one group called the citizens that go to jail for initiating the use of force or fraud.
	You have another group called the political leaders who are perfectly allowed to use force and fraud.
	And you can't morally or you can't logically have that.
	It's like saying these are lizards, right?
	These 10 species of lizards are all lizards because of X, Y, and Z, right?
	They give eggs, no hair, cold-blooded, whatever, right?
	So these 10 species of lizards are lizards.
	And this one species of lizard that's one of the 10 species of lizards is the opposite of a lizard.
	If you tried to present that like at a biology conference, I got 10 lizards.
	They're all lizards.
	This lizard is the opposite of a lizard.
	It doesn't even need to be 10 species of lizards.
	You just got a, you've got an aquarium with 10 lizards in it.
	These are all lizards.
	This one is the opposite of a lizard, but they're all lizards.
	Like that's just an obvious logical contradiction.
	Something cannot be part of a category, and then the exact opposite of that category as well.
	These are all circles, except for this circle, is the opposite of a circle.
	These are all the color green, according to the wavelength.
	All the color green, except this green is the opposite of green.
	Like none of that makes.
	These people are all sane.
	This guy is the opposite of sane.
	He's part of the same category.
	Like that doesn't make any sense, right?
	And so these are all numbers.
	So you understand, right?
	These are one to ten, right?
	They're all numbers, but number four is the opposite of a number.
	It's like, well, if it's the opposite of a number, what is it doing in the category numbers?
	If it's the opposite of a lizard, what is it doing in the category lizard?
	And so when people have a state-ist society, they're saying 99% of the population, this is evil for 99% of the population, right?
	You can't counterfeit, you can't steal, you can't initiate war, you can't initiate violence for 99% of the population.
	That's evil.
	1% of the population, though, the exact opposite is true.
	I mean, that's screwed up.
	It's so foundationally irrational that it takes absolute tsunamis of propaganda in order to maintain the belief.
	So that's sort of one of the general arguments for a stateless society.
	Now, I think your question is: what is the compatibility between people raised in a statist society with a stateless society or something like that?
	And I'm sorry if I've missed it, but I'm not really sure what the question is.
	No, you pretty much worded it better than I could.
	Okay, but the people who are currently in a statist society will not live to see a stateless society because it's a long, it's a couple of generations away at best, even if we work very hard and are very successful, which there's a lot of blowback, right?
	So we are generations away.
	So you and I, you know, we're not going to live to see a stateless society.
	The best we can do, the best we can do, is to create a statist, sorry, to create a stateless society in our own lives.
	In other words, to have within our own lives people who reject the principle of aggression, people who accept and live the non-aggression principle.
	So, you know, can I not be subject to political coercion?
	Nope.
	There's no place on the planet you can go that you're not subject to political coercion.
	However, can I have people who aren't violent in my personal life?
	That I can do.
	Can I have people who aren't mindlessly aggressive?
	And I don't mean people who can get testy, you can, whatever, you can be annoyed with people, but, you know, people who like scream, yell, verbally abuse and put people down and they're just bullies.
	Okay, so I can't control whether I get taxed, but I can control whether I have people in my life who are coercive or violent or bullies as a whole.
	So I can't create utopia like U-T-O-P-I-A, but I can create utopia, Y-O-U, T-O-P-I-A, utopia.
	And that's better.
	So I would rather be taxed at 50% and have a happy family than be taxed at 0% and have a miserable family life.
	Like a bad, you know, don't get along with my wife.
	We fight all the time.
	And, you know, my kids hate me or whatever it is, right?
	So as far as happiness and virtue and all of that goes, we're fine.
	We're fine.
	We can achieve the fruits and values of virtue without having to be in a stateless society.
	And of course, the argument is that if you raise your children with reason, not coercion, then they will be much more likely to speak the language of reason.
	They will speak the language of reason and they will be able to support a stateless society.
	And the reason for that is that if you raise children according to coercion, according to violence, then you're saying to children that violence is necessary for any functional familial environment.
	You must hit your children, yell at your children, jam them down on timeouts.
	You've got to put them in the naughty corner or the naughty chair or you've got to throw them in their room and lock the door and send them to bed without dinner.
	So you're saying that you need violence to have any kind of functioning social environment as a kid.
	And then of course those kids grow up and they say, well, you know, you got to have a government, otherwise, right?
	It's like, well, it perfectly sits in accordance with how they were raised.
	And very few people can question the virtues and values of how they were raised.
	So that is really the purpose of peaceful parenting, not only to promote virtue in the here and now, but also to lay the foundation for a free society in the future.
	So nobody who's alive is going to have to deal with or adapt to a stateless society.
	What's going to happen is, I mean, the goal, the hope, I mean, all that I can do, I can't control what everybody else does.
	I can say, or anyone else does.
	I can only control what I do.
	The goal and hope is to promote the values of reason and negotiation and non-aggression.
	And through that process, spread the idea that peace works.
	Peace works.
	Right?
	That's what's that old megadeth?
	Peace sells, but who's buying?
	Right?
	So does peace work?
	Does reason work?
	Does voluntarism work?
	If you've lived a value and it has really, really worked, you cannot be talked out of it.
	I mean, if you understand the theory and you understand the practice, like go to somebody who's diabetic who takes insulin and say, insulin doesn't work.
	Are they going to believe you?
	Nope.
	Go to someone who, you know, I did a round of antibiotics this summer.
	I got stung and my hand swelled up and turned red.
	So they gave me a course of antibiotics.
	So my hand de-swelled and got better.
	Oh, antibiotics don't work.
	It's like, no, I understand the theory of antibiotics and I've experienced, as most of us have, the practice of antibiotics.
	Glasses don't work.
	It's like, no, no, things are a little fuzzy, right?
	A little fuzzy.
	Put my glasses on.
	They're less fuzzy.
	No one can tell me.
	So I understand the theory.
	Like they're adjusting so that the light hits the back of my eyes accurately in the way that they used to in my 30s and 40s.
	So I understand the theory and it absolutely works.
	So nobody can come up to me and say glasses never work.
	Because you can literally, you understand the theory, you put them on, right?
	And they work, right?
	So, if you understand the theory and you've actually lived the practice, you can't be talked out of it.
	You know, imagine you go up to the ISS, right, the International Space Station, and you look down, you see the curve of the Earth, the sphere of the Earth, and then you come back down and people say the Earth is flat.
	It's like, no, no, no, I understand the theory, and I've actually seen it with my own eyes.
	Like, nobody can talk you out of it.
	Because if you understand the theory and you've lived the practice, and the theory says it's going to work, and the practice says it's going to work, then, you know, if somebody's our last example, someone's like 300 pounds, right?
	They lose 100 pounds by eating less and exercising.
	And then you say, no, no, no, you should eat more and exercise less in order to lose weight.
	They'll be like, no, no, I did all of that.
	I was gaining weight.
	And then I started eating less and exercising more, and I lost weight.
	You can't talk out of, you can't talk anyone out of genuinely lived experience, particularly when combined with an accurate theory.
	You can't talk scientists out of the inverse square law or equals MC squared, or, you know, the sort of second law of thermodynamics.
	You just can't talk scientists out of that any more than you can talk a mathematician out of two and two make four.
	And so if I say to people, reason and non-aggression is the way to go, morally and practically, and then they reason in their relationships and they don't accept people who are anti-rational and they don't use violence.
	They don't use aggression.
	And it works.
	They're in love.
	They're happy.
	They have good relationships.
	They're at peace.
	And then someone comes and says, no, no, no, we need violence to run society.
	It's like, no, we don't.
	I've lived it.
	You don't need violence to run society.
	I mean, other than immediate self-defense, blah, blah, blah, like, you know, which is not violence.
	I don't really count self-defense as violence any more than I would, you know, it's violent that they took out your appendix when it burst.
	It's like, no, no, it's not violent.
	It's saved your life, right?
	So nobody alive is going to be able to make it to a stateless society, but we can all make it to a non-violent society in terms of how we live and who we spend time with.
	Does that make sense?
	Sorry for the long speech.
	I hope that goes some way towards answering your question.
	Oh, no, that was a great answer.
	Thank you.
	You are very welcome.
	Very welcome.
	Did you have any other questions or comments?
	No, that was it.
	I really appreciate that.
	All right.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you very much.
	Let's, and I'm happy to take more calls and questions that people have.
	It's really, really kind of fascinating.
	It's really kind of fascinating how the genetics and intelligence and all of this kind of stuff has become more mainstream.
	All the stuff that was just like when I was talking about it 10, 15 years ago, wildly crazy, radical, nuts, cancellation, rage, blah, blah, blah.
	And this guy, Cremieu, has a chart.
	Fascinating chart.
	It's done a million views.
	Good for him, man.
	Good for him.
	And he says, smarter people tend to be more outgoing and happy, to have fewer problems falling asleep and staying asleep, to be less manic and to be less psychotic, prone to ADHD, et cetera.
	Our best genetic predictors now reflect these things.
	Right?
	So if you're less intelligent, and this is a measure of G, implied G association, G is the most raw measure of intelligence.
	It's related to IQ, but not identical.
	It's called G for general intelligence.
	So if you're less intelligent, you have a higher risk of psychosis, higher risk of ADHD, excited impulsivity, behavioral problems, manic moods, poor perseverance, manic traits, total number of problems, reward responsiveness, all associated with low.
	And you have autistic traits if you're less intelligent.
	You have sleep problems.
	You have greater emotional impulsivity if you're less intelligent.
	Negative feelings, emotional problems.
	Poor planning is kind of neutral.
	Extroversion is associated with intelligence.
	Positive feelings are associated with intelligence.
	The highest thing associated with intelligence is self-regulation.
	Can you control your impulses?
	Can you defer gratification?
	And somebody wrote, isn't autism usually positively associated with genetic markers for intelligence?
	And Cremio writes back: genetic markers for autism are associated with intelligence.
	Genetic markers for intelligence are not associated with autism, not transitive.
	Which is really fascinating.
	Okay.
	Smarter people are less violent.
	This comes from Steve Stewart Williams, Steve Stew Will.
	The prevalence of violent behavior drops steadily with increasing IQ.
	16.3% of individuals with IQs in the 70 to 79 range reported violent behavior.
	And it goes down to just 2.9% of those with IQs of 120 to 129.
	And this did, I mean, 44,000 views and so on, right?
	And this is dose-dependent.
	It's literally a diagonal staircase down from 16.3% to 2.9% from IQ in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, 110s, and 120s.
	Wild.
	Wild.
	How this is becoming acceptable to talk about.
	Spend some more on X. Sponse M, S-B-O-N-C-E-Y-M.
	Now I'm thinking of Boney M, rah-rah, resputi, and night flight to Venus, the whole thing.
	All right.
	He said, today we reveal COG PGT, the world's most powerful genetic predictor of IQ.
	We achieve a correlation with IQ of 0.51, 0.45 within family.
	Heroicide customers can boost the expected IQ of their children by up to nine points by selecting the embryos with the highest COGPGT score.
	And it's wild.
	And he's got the IQ spread here, right?
	IQ spread in terms of expected IQ, Europeans, East Asians, African, and so on, and they're higher to lower, right, in terms of the gains.
	And this did 1.1 million views.
	Not canceled.
	No rage, no attacks, no bomb threats, no death threats, at least not from what I've seen, right?
	So now you can take a sample of genetics and significantly predict IQ.
	People, I mean, if you haven't been around for a while, people were losing their freaking minds over this stuff 5, 10, 15 years ago.
	When I was in, I mean, I did a whole, I interviewed 17 of world-renowned experts in the field of IQ way back in the day.
	People absolutely lost their minds over this stuff.
	And now?
	American conservatives, since the 1990s, we've talked about the population crisis.
	So American conservatives have lost only 0.1 fertility since the 1990s.
	Isn't that wild?
	Progressives have gone way down from 2.7 down to 1.7, but conservatives have gone from 2.7 to 2.6 and change.
	It's wild.
	And Yuram Hazzoni wrote, which I thought was very powerful.
	He wrote, Conservatives have more children, but the left educates them.
	Which is very powerful as well.
	Oh, this was just a funny meme I showed my wife.
	It's a picture of the cookie monster looking kind of stunned.
	Me trying to remember the plans my wife has told me about 15 times before I go and ask her for the 16th time and have to deal with her attitude.
	It's true.
	I was in one era out of the other, right?
	What chapter did I just print?
	16.
	What chapter did I just print?
	16.
	So I'm supposed to print chapter 16?
	Honestly, that's like half my day.
	Well, half the day, if you don't live in like a single bachelor apartment, most of marriage is just yelling at each other from different floors until one of you dies.
	What?
	Huh?
	No, I'm asking.
	Anyway.
	Wild.
	All right.
	Let me see.
	Yeah, Mike Cernovich had a very great tweet where he was basically saying, he wrote this on October 20th,
	He wrote, If you're a conservative or right-winger, your entire life, especially in public, is organized around OPSEC, operational security, and knowing that a no-kinks protester might murder your family at any moment.
	We're not going to continue living this way.
	And yeah, it is wild.
	I mean, the last time that I tried to do a public speaking event, the venue was attacked.
	We shifted to a church.
	I think they attacked the car of the priest, and there were bomb threats and death threats, and the police did SFA, of course, as you can imagine.
	And that's just the reality, that you just have to live with that level of outright violence.
	And yet the left still continues to talk about being victims, right?
	Wild.
	Wild, wild, wild.
	All right, let me see here.
	I have room for questions, comments.
	We can do a short show tonight.
	I can talk about my book, which I find really interesting.
	I'm so on the fence about this book.
	It's kind of driving me crazy.
	So I have a new book called Dissolution, and I just put out chapter 16 of the book.
	Pardon me.
	And it's driving me crazy.
	Every book before, I've kind of known, I sort of feel that I've known what the story is about.
	And I know what the story is about, but the way of writing it here is so sparse.
	I'm in Hemingway territory, so the book is driving me crazy because I love the book, but I'm not sure if it's too sparse.
	All right.
	Less is more, maybe.
	Let's talk less about the book.
	All right.
	We have a colour, a color.
	Where did you go?
	Yeah.
	There we go.
	And let's get to people who want to chat and let us say yes to Dragan.
	I don't know why I went all Duke Newcombe on you there, but yes.
	Dry gun.
	What is on your mind?
	Yes, sir.
	Go ahead.
	Hey, how's it going?
	Good.
	How you doing?
	Good.
	I guess I want to start by apologizing.
	This is the third time I've talked to you, and I tend to be maybe over provocative to spark debate.
	Kind of got ourself on the wrong foot.
	What do you mean by?
	I appreciate that.
	What do you mean by over-provocative?
	Oh, I guess I'm kind of a troll, I guess you would call it.
	Now, I think of myself not as a troll because I don't troll just to troll.
	I troll to spark a debate.
	Well, but why would you apologize?
	Sorry, why would you apologize for sparking a debate then?
	I'm sorry if I'm missing something.
	Well, I know you get a lot of people, but we've tried to talk twice before and it didn't go well either time.
	I just want to apologize for my part in, you know, whatever.
	I don't know.
	Sorry.
	I appreciate it.
	Listen, I appreciate that.
	Hang on.
	So I appreciate that.
	I'm not trying to bust your balls.
	I'm just trying to understand what are you apologizing for?
	Because if it's like, well, I guess I'm just like to spark debate.
	It's like, well, that's nothing.
	I mean, I like to spark debate, so I don't know what you'd be apologizing for.
	I'm just trying to understand what it is you're apologizing for because I can't accept an apology if I don't even know what it's about.
	And I don't want to disrespect you by pretending to accept something I don't understand.
	Yeah, I know.
	I understand.
	You got a lot of people coming at you.
	You probably don't remember me.
	I'm the two plus two equals five guy.
	Okay, but what are you apologizing for?
	Well, I'm apologizing for my part of not making that conversation happen.
	I mean, we're both calling it.
	Hang on.
	Sorry.
	But what specifically are you apologizing for?
	Whatever went wrong, my part of it.
	But that doesn't mean anything.
	Let me put it to you this way, right?
	Let's say I walk up to Bob and I punch him full in the face for no reason, right?
	And then I say, well, you know, Bob, I just, you know, we had a conflict and I guess I just want to apologize for whatever I did to contribute it or my part in it.
	Like, would that make much sense?
	I guess if Bob was being polite?
	No, I just told you I walked up and I punched Bob in the face, right?
	What would I, I would have to apologize and say, I'm really sorry I came up and I punched you in the face.
	Not something vague like, well, we had this conflict and I'm sorry for whatever I did or my partner.
	And again, I'm not trying to bust your balls.
	I just, if I'm, and I appreciate the apology, I appreciate the sentiment.
	I really do.
	But I still don't know what you're apologizing for.
	What did you, what did you do that you think was wrong?
	Well, I'm not sure.
	Well, then why would you apologize if you don't even know what you did wrong?
	Because the conversation didn't go well.
	But you don't even know why.
	Listen, bro, don't apologize if you don't even know what you did wrong.
	That's not right.
	That's manipulative, isn't it?
	I don't know.
	I guess I heard you talking about that when someone wronged you, you talked about this forgiveness where forgiveness had to be earned and that people had to apologize.
	Right.
	And, you know, I'm not from people tend to be self-biased.
	I could have said something or done something wrong so that I don't really know.
	Yeah.
	So you don't know what you did wrong.
	Well, I think I was over-provocative.
	No, but that doesn't, that does, that's a general category, right?
	Do you, and I'm not getting, I'm not trying to bust your balls.
	I'm just genuinely curious because if you apologize, you apologize when you've done something wrong, don't you?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So what did you do wrong?
	I don't know.
	So then the apology is then hang on.
	Then the apologies, you know, with all due respect, the apology is kind of bullshit, right?
	Well, like with your spouse.
	A lot of times you upset your spouse and you don't really know why.
	You know, you probably did something wrong, but you're just not sensitive enough maybe to know why she's upset.
	So, you know, as a gesture to get the conversation started so you can find out what you did wrong, maybe even.
	Okay, so let me ask you this.
	We talked, I don't know, a week or two ago or whenever it was, right?
	So you felt that the conversation went badly and it's recorded and published, right?
	So you had the chance to go and listen to it again, right?
	Yep.
	And did you do that?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So when you listened to what you were doing in the conversation, did you experience or think that anything you did was wrong, like rude or dismissive, or you kept interrupting, or I don't know.
	I'm just making something up, like whatever it would be, or you wouldn't concede a point when it was obviously proven.
	When you listened again to the conversation, it's kind of a rare thing, right?
	That you have a conflict with someone.
	It's actually recorded.
	You can go back and listen to it.
	I mean, that's kind of cool because, you know, if you get involved in conflicts in a marriage or a boyfriend, girlfriend, or even with friends sometimes, it can get kind of crazy because people just deny stuff and actually record it, right?
	So you went back, you listened to it, which I appreciate.
	So when you went back and you listened to it, what did you hear yourself doing that?
	Let's say if you were doing it again, you would have done differently.
	I just really don't know how to say it different.
	I mean, I was provocative.
	There was a conversation that I thought this is a conversation that I think is the conversation that philosophers should be having, which is the idea of whether there's too many people on earth or not.
	So that's what I led with.
	And I brought it up that you seem to be pushing prenatal or pronatal.
	How do you say it?
	Yeah.
	So you're trying to encourage having more babies, and that would be kind of counterproductive if we are.
	Oh, did we lose them?
	They had too many people on the earth.
	I'm sorry, Jesus.
	You just stood out for a second.
	I didn't think we had too many people in there.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	Sorry, you cut out for a second or two there.
	So you were saying, I'm pronatalist and I'm telling my listeners to have more children.
	And you say you think that's counterproductive because there are too many people in the world.
	If there are too many people in the world, then it would be counterproductive.
	I'm not saying there are or not.
	I'm kind of fascinated with the idea that there are two camps: people who think there are and people who think they aren't.
	And I'm kind of fascinated by who might be right.
	And so I just think it's a very important conversation.
	History will look back, and there will be people that will be wrong and people that will be right.
	And there are people justifying doing pretty, what I would say are pretty awful things in service to the idea that we have too many people on the earth.
	History, I mean, history could look back on these people.
	And let's say we have a crash, a population collapse, collapse, and starvation.
	I'm sorry, what do you mean?
	So, so how did you end up saying, and I bookmarked this?
	We'll come back to that in a sec, if you don't mind.
	How did you end up saying you said that two and two make five in our debate?
	Yeah, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
	I was counseling, keeping an open mind about things that may not appear as they seem.
	And two plus two equaling five came up.
	Right.
	And I asserted, I think, that yes, two plus two commonly equals four, but just that you should always have doubt about things.
	You know, we used to think the sun rotated around the earth.
	Science carried that.
	You know, the best scientists at the time thought that, and they turned out to be wrong.
	I just think there's a certain amount of skepticism that you always should keep to any proposition, I guess.
	And sorry, are you that it may change?
	Hang on, hang on.
	Even the monologue.
	Hang on, bro.
	Let's try and make this a conversation.
	I'm just monologues are sort of boring, right?
	So are you absolutely certain that we should always have skepticism?
	Okay, sure.
	Okay, so there's something that you're something that you are certain of.
	are absolutely certain that we should always have skepticism right well I think you should try to to at the same time be open and Open to anything, but also skeptical of anything.
	Okay, so you're absolutely hang on.
	So you're absolutely certain that you should be open to everything, but also skeptical.
	No, I wouldn't say that because I'm as a skeptic.
	Well, I didn't mean to say it then, because I'm a skeptic.
	So I would say if you go back to Descartes, I think therefore I am that assertion that we can be certain about that, that we are, that you are because you think a person is a person because they think.
	I think other than that, you should probably have a reasonable amount of skeptic to just about anything.
	Okay, okay.
	No, it's very, very interesting conversation.
	I appreciate that.
	So let me understand what you mean by skepticism.
	What do you mean by skepticism?
	Just doubt.
	You're doubting something?
	No, I like saying skepticism.
	It's just a synonym.
	I need a definition, right?
	What is your definition of skepticism?
	Well, it's really hard to define without using creating some kind of circular, but just not believing that something is always that you should hold some doubt in case, given that things have changed over history, things that we thought were pretty certain turned out not to be certain.
	Right.
	So just that you should have a reasonable amount of doubt.
	Okay.
	Now, do you have any difference of categorization?
	I think this is what we were talking about with regards to the numbers thing, right?
	So when people said the world is flat, and now people say the world is a sphere, the world looks flat, obviously, when you're living on it, right?
	The world looks flat.
	And so when people say the world is flat, what they're saying is it looks flat and that's the way that it is.
	And then when we zoom out and we do the math, we find out the world is a sphere.
	It looks, of course, like the sun and the moon go around the earth.
	The moon does.
	The sun does not, right?
	I mean, other than a tiny bit of wobble.
	So the earth goes around the sun.
	So it's getting closer to the truth, right?
	It is more, would you accept this, I want to understand?
	Would you accept that it's more true to say that the sun is the center of the solar system, or is it more true to say that the earth is the center of the solar system?
	I guess the sun.
	Wait, you guess or it is?
	Well, I guess I'm saying I guess with that appropriate amount of skepticism, but yes, I would be fairly certain.
	We'll say like 99.99%.
	Okay, so you're not 100% certain that the Earth is not the center of the solar system.
	Well, only because I, like I said, I keep skepticism to everything except that the card.
	No, no, but I didn't.
	No, hang on.
	I didn't ask you if it's 100% true.
	I said, which is more true?
	Because you said ideas have evolved, things that people thought were true were not true.
	And then there's new things where people understand that it's a better argument, right?
	So, if people look at the world, they're sitting on the world, they say the earth is flat and the sun goes around the earth.
	And that's how it looks, right?
	It's true that the earth looks fat, and it's true that it looks like the sun goes around the earth.
	Does that make sense?
	Oh, did we lose him again?
	I hear you.
	I lost you for a sec.
	Am I back?
	Okay.
	So, is it true that the world looks flat?
	And is it true that it looks like the sun is going around the earth?
	Yes, to both, I think.
	Okay.
	Yeah, because we say the sun is setting, right?
	And honestly, you can, you know, I love watching sunsets.
	I don't really get to watch sunrises that much because I'm kind of a night owl, but I love watching a sunset.
	And I remember being, I think it was in Guatemala or something like that, or Mexico, and I was looking at the ocean and I was watching for that red flat, the green flash, right?
	So the sun's going down.
	And if you've ever watched the sun, you know, it looks like it's resting on the edge of the world.
	In a sense, it looks like it's resting on the flat horizon of the lake.
	And then it goes down, it gets bisected, and then it winks out, and then it vanishes.
	And it looks like the sun is going down.
	We say the sun is going up, the sun is going down.
	That's how it looks, right?
	Now, it is kind of weird, of course, to think not that the sun is going down, but that the earth is turning, right?
	That we are rotating away from the sun, because it looks like the sun is just going down, and it certainly looks like the sun goes around the earth, right?
	However, we know that it's not true.
	We know that the earth goes around the sun.
	We know this because of gravity.
	We know this because of the seasons.
	We know this because of observations.
	We know this because the sun wobbles.
	We know this because of, you know, just we know this because we've seen it in space and so on, right?
	So, you know, it is, I think we have to accept.
	You say, well, ideas get abandoned and they get replaced with new ideas.
	So the question is, why?
	Why does, why do ideas get abandoned and replaced with new ideas?
	The answer, of course, is that the new ideas are more accurate.
	I mean, Newtonian physics is fine for sailing around the world, but if you want to do something interplanetary, you need Einsteinian physics, right?
	So, I mean, Newtonian physics is good enough.
	It's like half an inch between, you know, go sailing from London to New York.
	It doesn't really matter.
	But if you're trying to send a probe past Jupiter, you need Einsteinian physics for that additional layer of accuracy.
	And so it is more true to say that the sun is the center of the solar system than it is to say the earth is the center of the solar system.
	Because if you're going to say, well, I have skepticism because beliefs get replaced, that's, I mean, that's fine.
	I understand that.
	But why do they get replaced?
	Because they're more true.
	Because they're more accurate as a whole.
	Yes.
	So there's still a standard of accuracy.
	You're comparing the beliefs to, right?
	You say, oh, well, looks like the sun goes around the earth, but it's more accurate to say that the earth goes around the sun.
	The sun is not setting, the earth's turning, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So you still say there's a standard of truth that we're getting closer to when we say not that the sun goes around the earth, but that the earth goes around the sun.
	Now we can say it looks like the sun goes around the earth.
	Absolutely.
	It looks like the sun and the moon are the same size, right?
	That old dime held at arm's length.
	It looks like that, but they're not, right?
	And so when you say I'm skeptical because ideas get replaced, they get replaced because they're more accurate.
	And in fact, it is not true to say that the earth is the center of the solar system.
	That is false.
	It is true to say the sun is the center of the solar system.
	Now, again, you could say, based upon the planets, the center of the solar system is a little bit off-center from the very center of the sun.
	And, you know, there's a couple of little details here, right?
	I get that.
	But it is not true to say that the earth is the center of the solar system.
	It is true to say that the sun is the center of the solar system with a couple of caveats here and there to refer sort of some minor gravitational world details.
	But so when you say ideas get replaced, oh, they get replaced because they're more true, which means you have to have a hierarchy or a standard of truth and falsehood.
	Ideas don't get just replaced randomly.
	Ideas get replaced because they're more true.
	And so the fact that they are more true is important.
	So you can't be equally skeptical about all ideas because ideas get replaced because they're closer to the truth.
	Yes, I agree.
	When you talk about an appropriate amount of skepticism, it'd be proportional.
	I mean, something that you're almost certain is true.
	You'd have a very, it'd be 99.9999, you know, and there are things.
	You know, let's take landing on the moon.
	Do you think we landed on the moon?
	Or do you think that was a hoax?
	I do think I do think we landed on the moon, but certainly there is a possibility that it is a wildly elaborate hoax that you can't get past the Van Allen belt.
	And, you know, they have these arguments that, oh, you see them, the astronauts, you can see bubbles.
	And it's like, but that's when they were training underwater to learn how to work in zero gravity and so on.
	I mean, it's, I mean, I don't know.
	I've ever been to Bulgaria.
	Maybe it's some elaborate hoax.
	And so, I mean, I doubt it, right?
	I don't really think that's the case.
	But, but hang on, hang on.
	In that case, Adam.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Sorry.
	No, go ahead.
	I'm 50-50.
	I've heard really good arguments for both.
	And I've looked not really deeply into it, but deep enough that I just, I don't know.
	Yeah, so, okay, but that is a different kind of truth, because what you're saying is, is it true whether we went to the moon or not?
	I believe it's true.
	Other people, I think Owen Benjamin doesn't believe that it's true, other people and so on.
	And I had a debate about the flat earth with a guy who said that the sun is closer to us than Australia, which would actually be kind of comforting.
	I'd like the sun between us and the giant spiders in Australia, but that's a topic for another time.
	So if, I mean, there certainly have been hoaxes and lies and falsehoods and so on in the past.
	I mean, there's this whole revisiting of World War II history that's been occurring for the last 10 or 20 years, sort of Pap Buchanan onwards and so on.
	But so there is things to be doubtful of and things to be skeptical of, of course, right?
	My question is, what can you be certain of?
	And this is why we get to the two and two make four argument.
	So I'm fine being skeptical.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	You know, is there a possibility that we didn't go to the moon?
	Again, I don't know.
	Maybe there's proof.
	I don't know.
	But I mean, let's just say for the sake of argument, yeah, there's a tiny possibility we didn't go to the moon.
	It's all faked and was set up to humiliate the Soviets or it's all nonsense or whatever, right?
	Okay.
	But that is something that could be faked, right?
	But a square circle doesn't exist.
	Two and two make four.
	These are things that can't be faked.
	They're not subject to propaganda.
	They're not subject to being lied about in government schools.
	They're like, that's not a matter of propaganda.
	You know, all men are mortal.
	Socrates is a man.
	Therefore, Socrates is mortal is not a matter of propaganda.
	It's not a matter of probability, right?
	That's the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning.
	Deductive reasoning gives you 100% certainty given the premises and the conclusions.
	And inductive reasoning is a balance of probabilities, right?
	And so we know for certain that a square circle doesn't exist.
	We know for certain that two and two make four.
	And I mean, there's a whole bunch of other things that we know for certain.
	We know, as Descartes pointed out, we know that we exist.
	And let's go back to the immortal thing.
	What was that again?
	the syllogism you just used with Socrates.
	Sure.
	So, So all men are mortal.
	Socrates is a man.
	Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
	Now, if it's true that all men are mortal, and if it's true that Socrates is a man, it is absolutely true that Socrates is mortal.
	It's not a probability thing.
	Yes, but here we are at a time when there are people who are alleging that we are close to maybe becoming immortal.
	Well, yeah, but I understand that.
	But let's say that the premise will change, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	But right now, and this is technical.
	This isn't empirical.
	So you could insert anything into this.
	Right?
	You could say all blue balloons are unicorns.
	If Bob is a blue balloon, Bob is a unicorn.
	I mean, it's a template.
	It's not, you know, it depends upon the validity of the premises.
	Now, if you say all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, you say, oh, no, but now some men are immortal.
	It's like, okay.
	So now you can't say that for certain.
	But we know for sure that the syllogism produces certainty if the premises are correct.
	Or let's go to what you had an issue with before, with two and two make four.
	Now, if you are not certain that two and two make four, I won't debate with you.
	And no sane person would, because it's all bullshit.
	Because you don't know that you exist.
	You don't know that I exist.
	You don't know that the words exist.
	You don't know that reality exists.
	You don't know that the senses are valid.
	Like if you don't know that two and two make four, there's nothing to talk about.
	Because two and two make four, two and two make four is a much more foundational definition than the definitions of words.
	Right.
	So if you say skepticism is important and I say, well, what's your definition of skepticism?
	Right.
	Then that's complicated and we can go back and forth about it.
	Right.
	But if you don't even know that two and two make four and two and two make four is infinitely more objective than your definition of skepticism.
	So if you are skeptical towards that which is more certain than the language you're using, there's nothing to debate because you're saying, I'm not going to be certain of things that are like square circle and deductive reasoning and so on.
	I am not even certain that you exist, but I want to debate you.
	Well, certainty that someone exists is much more clear than the definitions, being certain about the definitions of the words.
	So probably why it went south, and maybe you weren't aware of this, and I'm not saying there's any reason why you would necessarily know all of this, but I wouldn't debate someone who didn't know that two and two make four because it would be a masturbatory exercise of futility.
	Because if you don't know that two and two make four, how on earth can I trust you to know the definitions of the words you're using, which is way more subjective than that?
	True.
	I guess I think you could kind of hold both things that you can have doubts, but still.
	I mean, as a matter of fact, I have a YouTube channel where I do micro essays using AI called George's Ghost.
	And I'm based on George Washington, but George with no E, George's.
	And in one of those micro essays, I deal with this.
	And the example I use is that you have to doubt the truck barreling down the road, but it's still wise to avoid getting in its path.
	But why doubt the truck?
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	But why?
	You have to make it.
	Why doubt the truck?
	Is it like simulation theory?
	Like we could all be a Cartesian brain in a tank or something like that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, but that's.
	But I mean, have you ever read my book?
	Have you ever read my book, Essential Philosophy?
	Not that you have to.
	I'm just curious.
	I actually did.
	Well, I skimmed through it.
	I shouldn't say I read it.
	I skimmed through.
	I listened to TV.
	Erno.
	Which one do you have on?
	You have Essential on Audiobook, right?
	Yeah.
	So I'm going to go back to that.
	And then I skimmed through your.
	Okay.
	So do you remember my argument against simulation theory?
	No.
	So you read stuff, but you just don't.
	I don't know what you do.
	Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
	Okay.
	So my argument against simulation theory very briefly is this.
	Okay.
	So if we say we're in a simulation that's being run by some external being, let's call him, we'll call him Xanthu.
	Xanthru, the matrix maker, right?
	The guy who creates the simulation in our mind.
	Well, Xanthu has to exist in a universe that's not a simulation, right?
	I mean, you put on a VR helmet, it looks real, but there's a real world outside that people actually made the simulation helmet and stuff like that, right?
	So when you have a dream, things seem very real, but there's an outside world that, you know, you're sleeping in to have the dream.
	So if you believe in the simulation theory, you have to believe that there is some external consciousness or creator that is coming up with the simulation that is being applied to you.
	Like there are people outside the matrix.
	In this case, in the movie, there were monsters or robots, sorry, robots outside the matrix that were creating the matrix, right?
	So if you believe in the simulation theory, you believe that there are Xanthu, the alien, is got you plugged into a simulation.
	That's fair to say.
	You'd have to have somebody who's applying the simulation to you, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	Now, why wouldn't it be the case then if you say, well, we're in a simulation, but Xanthu is not, right?
	I mean, I'm sure you're aware of the argument of parsimony or the argument of Occam's razor.
	Do not unnecessarily multiply entities or explanations, right?
	And so when people thought that the Earth was the center of the solar system, you needed a ridiculous number of circles within circles to calculate the position of Mars.
	Whereas if you put the sun at the center, you don't need any of that, right?
	So it's overcomplication is a mark of falsehood.
	So if you're going to say, well, we could be in a simulation run by Xanthu, the alien, but Xanthu is not in a simulation.
	Okay, so then you're saying that there are creatures that are not in simulations, in which case, why not us?
	Like the same standards would apply to us and Xanthu.
	And you say, well, no, but Xanthu himself could be in a simulation run by Bjorgog, run by Zephel Peopleblock.
	So like you just go, or if you have an infinite recursion of everyone's inside a simulation and there's no actual reality out there, then that's just crazy talk, right?
	Because then they're saying that there is no reality.
	There's an infinite layer of simulation stacked on top of each other and there's no final reality.
	That is false just on the basic principle of it's kind of crazy and also parsimony, which is a reduced number of explanations.
	And you've got, you know, do not unnecessarily multiply entities.
	Occam's razor, the simplest explanation is usually the best.
	And so the argument against simulation theory is if you say there's a creature out there that's running the simulation that's in the real world, then you accept that there are entities in the real world.
	So then we're just entities in the real world.
	You don't need that other level.
	You don't need that other layer, particularly when there's absolutely zero proof for it, right?
	But of course, the other thing that's cool about the simulation is that if we are in a simulation, then like Neo in the Matrix, we should be able to stop time.
	We should be able to stop bullets.
	We should be able to fly.
	Like we should be able to move outside the simulation.
	And that's one reasons why we would know it was a simulation.
	It's the clipping principle in video games, right?
	So if you turn on, you know, you bring up your little tilde, you bring up your command console and you say, no, no clipping, then you can walk through walls.
	And that's one of the reasons you know it's not real because in reality, there's no clipping thing that lets me, you know, walk through a wall or, you know, whatever float through the ceiling or things like that, right?
	Or you can put God mode or God mode or 21-year-old female mode.
	You've got this guard mode where bullets don't hurt you and fire doesn't hurt you.
	You can fall from forever.
	I think it's creative mode in Minecraft.
	You can fall forever, you don't get hurt and so on.
	But there's no such thing as that in the real world, right?
	So yeah, simulation theory is not true because of the aforementioned either infinite regression problem or unnecessary multiplication of reality problem.
	Let's go back to the walking through walls.
	That's kind of interesting because I've heard it posited that it's not that it's not possible that we can't walk through walls.
	It would just be overwhelmingly unlikely.
	Along the lines of if you could line up the atoms just right, if all the atoms were lined up just right, because most of matter is space, right?
	You have electrons, you have protons, and I understand it.
	Like I could choke to death.
	So if everybody's in the middle of the day, I could choke to death in the studio if the Brownian motion of all the oxygen cells went to the ceiling and not to me, right?
	I mean, yeah, absolutely.
	I understand that.
	But there's still no option to turn off wall clipping.
	You can't just say, hit a button and then just be able to walk through any walls.
	I mean, could it be some once in 20 lifetimes of the universes phenomenon?
	Yeah, sure.
	Sure.
	I mean, but that's not contradictory to, but there is no option to turn off clipping in the real world the way that there is in a video game.
	Again, it could be incredibly randomly coincidental, but there is no option to turn it off.
	I think it is important to note that the way to disprove a universal positive syllogism is to come up with an example to the contrary.
	Sure.
	So if you set up the argument that no one can walk through walls.
	No, that was my argument, bro.
	What was my argument?
	No, I'm saying.
	No, no, no, no, we deal with my argument.
	Can't just make up your own shit.
	That's a straw man.
	Did I say no one can walk through walls?
	I wasn't, I was just making an example.
	No, I wasn't a single person.
	No, you need to, this is where things go off the rails.
	What was my argument?
	What else?
	You were talking about.
	Yeah, I'm not sure.
	See, I swear you're going to lose people who have any self-respect in conversation.
	I'd be straight up with you, man.
	Because if you don't listen, then you're just waiting for your turn to talk.
	We're not having a dialogue.
	And I don't do shows where I don't have dialogues.
	Because if you want to have a monologue, get your own fucking show, right?
	Don't hijack mine for your own monologues.
	My argument was that there's no way to turn off clipping the way you are in a video game.
	Remember, I said in a video game, you can bring up your little tilde, your command line, turn off clipping, you can walk through walls, but there's no way to do that in the real world.
	That's my argument.
	And that's what you have to address.
	You can't just ignore it.
	That's pretty rude, right?
	Then you're going to have to call me up in a couple of weeks with something else to apologize for, and I don't want you to have to do that.
	Sorry.
	I'm just apologizing now for it.
	You know, I'm like I said, I created this channel.
	I think the world's kind of in bad shape.
	And I address it in these essays.
	And so I'm coming on with your show because I want to try to make the world a better place.
	Okay.
	So how do you know that there are too many people?
	I didn't say that.
	I'm fascinated with the idea that there are people that think there are too many people.
	It seems more likely to me at this point that there's not enough people.
	We seem to be witnessing population collapse all over the world, especially in China, Japan.
	But yet there are still people that seem to think there are too many people.
	We seem to have these depopulation efforts.
	Okay, so if I misunderstood that, my apologies.
	So you said that the world is in a bad place.
	How do you know that?
	Yeah, I think the world's in a bad place.
	Just that's what I observed.
	That's my opinion, I guess.
	You don't think so?
	I think it's true.
	That's my opinion.
	Well, no, you can say something that's both just my opinion and it's true.
	Well, it's my opinion because I think it's true.
	But hang on, hang on.
	Words mean things, right?
	Is there a difference between an opinion and a statement of fact?
	Hmm.
	You know, I guess going back to skepticism, they would differ in percentages of likelihood of being skeptical.
	I mean, here's you're talking about a statement of fact.
	That's probably something that's pretty for sure as where an opinion of mine might be less sure, but we're just talking the difference in the probability of that scenario or that state of affairs being in existence.
	Okay, so if I say two and two make four, that's in the same category, but more certain than I like the sound of a clarinet.
	I happen to find the sound of a carrot clarinet.
	My opinion, the clarinet is really nice, my subjective experience.
	So you're saying that two and two make four is in the same category, just with more certainty.
	Well, two and two make four is deductive, right?
	And whether you like clarinet music's inductive.
	No.
	So no, inductive is a statement of probability.
	You know, I can't say for certain the sun is that we're going to be around tomorrow because there could be a giant evil death star, as I mentioned before, the other side of the sun that's about to blow it up that we can't see for some reason, right?
	So, you know, I'm pretty sure we're going to be around tomorrow.
	I act as if we are, but I, you know, or I personally could get, you know, a meteor could hit my house and take me out, right?
	So a statement of probability, that's inductive reasoning.
	A statement of deductive reasoning is a statement of absolute certainty.
	And so I like the sound of the clarinet is an opinion.
	Now, if I were to say, I think the clarinet is the most pleasing instrument, then that would be something which claimed to be an objective truth based upon my personal preference, right?
	So if I like cheesecake and I say cheesecake is the most tasty food, then I'm taking I like cheesecake and making it a universal, which would be invalid.
	Can we agree with that?
	Some people don't like cheesecake.
	Say that again, please.
	So if I say I like cheesecake, that is a statement of personal preference, right?
	Yes.
	If I say cheesecake is the best tasting food in the world, is that a universal statement?
	I would say yes.
	You're asserting it as a universal, right?
	Okay.
	Is it a valid thing to say that cheesecake is the best tasting food in the world?
	Is it valid?
	Is it true?
	Is it valid to say that?
	Could be.
	You know, maybe you take a world poll and it is.
	I wouldn't think so, but it could be.
	Well, no, because people's palates are different.
	Some people can't taste anything, in which case cheesecake would not be the best for them at all.
	Like you can't say that cheesecake is the best tasting food in the whole world.
	I mean, some people got COVID or, you know, they lost their sense of smell, they lost their sense of taste, and for some people that's permanent.
	And so you can't say that, or some people hate it, hate the taste of it.
	It's too clear, it's too cloyy.
	So you can't say it's now.
	I could say the majority of people probably prefer cheesecake to Brussels spouts or things like that.
	I can say that, right?
	But I can't say cheesecake is the best tasting food in the entire world because it's taking your personal preference and making it universal, which would not be valid, right?
	If I happen to like watching basketball, I can't say basketball is the most fun sport to watch in the whole world.
	I can say I like it, but I can't say for everyone, right?
	But it might be the case, right?
	No, we know it's not the case.
	So, so, like, we, you, you, you saw a poll where they polled everybody and no, I don't have to because the most popular sport in the world is soccer.
	Okay, so you saw data supporting the idea that soccer is the most popular sport in the world?
	Well, sure.
	I mean, based upon the number of adherents, the amount of budget, the number of people who watch it, uh, and so on.
	Uh, so, yeah, soccer is the most popular sport in the world.
	At least it was the last time I checked.
	But, or maybe I say crew queue is the greatest sport in the world.
	So, there's to take a subjective preference and make it universal is not valid.
	It's certainly not valid.
	It's certainly not valid that cheesecake is the best tasting food because I like it, right?
	That's to take my personal taste and say everyone has exactly the same taste as me, which is demon.
	I mean, that's it's impossible to you can't make that statement.
	You can't say that everyone prefers that the food that I like.
	What is the most popular?
	What is the most popular food then?
	I have no idea.
	So, how do you know it's not cheesecake?
	Well, I said cheesecake is, didn't say it was the most popular.
	Again, you have to listen very carefully if you want to have debates, right?
	So, I said, if I were to say cheesecake is the best tasting food in the world, I didn't say most popular, I said the best tasting food in the world.
	I'm saying that there is a subjective thing called taste that is now objective.
	In other words, the subjective is the objective.
	And I can't say the subjective is the objective.
	Now, subjective is a subset of what people believe, right?
	So, wouldn't wouldn't sorry, go ahead.
	Wouldn't the opinion of the population be an indicator of the most popular or the best-tasting food?
	I mean, if it's the best-tasting food and whatever.
	Now, most popular and best-tasting is different, right?
	The best-tasting food in the world would be, I don't know, everyone on the planet tries cheesecake and says this is the best and tries everything else, right?
	They try cheesecake and they try everything else.
	I mean, maybe there's some great dessert in Vietnam I've never tried that I would prefer to cheesecake.
	So, in order for us to say it, we would have to say that cheesecake is the best tasting food in the world, which means everybody would have to try cheesecake and everything else and say cheesecake is the best.
	But to run that experiment is impossible.
	By the time you finished running it, there would be new people born.
	So, you could never say, you could never possibly say that cheesecake is the best tasting food in the world because you could never run that experiment, right?
	You could never really be sure.
	Yeah, you can't be sure, right?
	Right.
	Now, so I like cheesecake is a true statement about my personal preferences, assuming I'm not lying.
	Cheesecake is the best tasting food in the world, is unprovable, and therefore you can't say it that it's true, right?
	Now, cheesecake contains dairy.
	Is that a true statement?
	I don't think that's necessarily true.
	Um, I happen to have food allergies, so I have a lot of uh substitute foods, you know, things I can't have gluten, so I have to be afraid of that.
	But that would be vegan cheesecake or dairy-free cheesecake or lactose-free cheesecake or whatever it is, right?
	So, that would be different.
	But cheesecake made, traditional cheesecake contains dairy.
	You can have something that substitutes for the dairy and so on, but that would be some alteration of what cheesecake is, right?
	Well, that's a really good example of asserting this syllogism that all cheesecake has dairy.
	And then it turns out there's a lot of stuff.
	Hang on, hang on, Ten.
	You've got to fucking listen, bro.
	Did I say all cheesecake?
	Well, I think that's kind of implied when you say cheesecake.
	No, you're not implied.
	No, it's not implied.
	No, hang on.
	It's important, right?
	So, if I say cheesecake contains dairy and I'm talking about traditional cheesecake, the cheesecake that's made with, I mean, with dairy, right?
	Because that's what cheesecake is made from.
	And then if you say, well, I'm going to include in the category cheesecake something that is different from cheesecake in that it uses a non-dairy substitute, like it uses, I don't know, what, coconut milk or almond milk or something like that, right?
	And that would not, that would be an alteration.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So that would be an alteration.
	So I say cheesecake contains dairy.
	And then you say, well, I'm going to include pretend cheesecake that doesn't include dairy.
	That's a leap.
	You said cheesecake contains a dairy.
	Right.
	I didn't say all possible forms of cheesecake, including non-traditional cheesecake that is like, I didn't say cheesecake that is made with something that cheesecake has never historically been made from, right?
	I didn't say, so the category cheesecake is traditional cheesecake.
	Now, if you say, but I'm going to include things that are non-traditional cheesecake and call them cheesecake, right?
	Like let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this.
	When you go to a restaurant, right?
	You said you're gluten intolerant, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So when you go to a restaurant, do you just say, I want pizza?
	No.
	No, of course not.
	What do you say?
	And I'm the gluten-free crust.
	Right.
	So you don't order pizza.
	You order pizza with a gluten-free crust, right?
	So when I say cheesecake, I'm not talking about cheesecake made from almond milk.
	In the same way that when you say pizza, you are not talking about gluten-free pizza.
	That's a modification.
	That's an adjustment, right?
	But this almost gets us back to this conversation you were having about.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	When you say pizza, you don't mean gluten-free pizza because you have to say gluten-free pizza in order to order it, right?
	Okay.
	So when I say cheesecake, I'm not talking about non-dairy cheesecake because my wife is lactose intolerant, right?
	So when she goes to a restaurant, I know this, right?
	Like your gluten, right?
	So my wife is lactose intolerant.
	So when she goes to a restaurant, I don't, let's say she wants cheesecake.
	I don't think she likes it, but let's say she wants cheesecake.
	She will, if there's two cheesecakes, right?
	One says cheesecake and one says dairy-free cheesecake, right?
	Which is she going to order?
	Dairy-free.
	Okay.
	So is dairy-free a separate category from standard cheesecake?
	I think it's debatable.
	No, it's not debatable because you never order pizza.
	You always order gluten-free pizza.
	Yeah, but is it still pizza because it's gluten-free?
	Well, it's not just pizza because if you go to the restaurant and you say, bring me pizza, what are they going to bring you?
	And they bring me regular pizza.
	Right.
	And what you don't want.
	So you have to say, I don't want regular pizza.
	I don't want what is called pizza.
	I need gluten-free pizza.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	Let's try it.
	Let's try it another way.
	Let's try another one, right?
	If I say cheesecake has mass, right?
	So forget the dairy-free cheesecake, which is, again, it's a separate category.
	But let's say, if I say cheesecake has mass, is that a true statement?
	Well, that's you start getting into that.
	I kind of have an engineering scientific background, and I would, and especially given my skeptic bent when you say something like that.
	But you're not skeptical, bro.
	You've got to stop fucking around with these platonic abstractions and look at how you actually live.
	So hang on, no, let me finish.
	So let's say you go to a restaurant.
	Hang on.
	Let's say you go to a restaurant.
	You go to a restaurant.
	So this common sense is so important in philosophy, right?
	You go to a restaurant and you say, I want gluten-free pizza.
	And they say, that'll be 20 bucks, right?
	Right.
	And then they give you an empty box.
	And they say, no, no, this is gluten-free pizza that has no mass.
	No, seriously.
	Would you have a problem?
	Yeah.
	So that's what I'm talking about.
	Build your ideas from how you live.
	Right.
	So when I say cheesecake has mass, is there such a thing as cheesecake with no mass?
	Is there such a thing as pizza that isn't there?
	Maybe, but just because you're ordering pizza.
	I don't know why this is.
	I don't know why, genuinely don't know why this is complicated because you couldn't live if you didn't know this.
	You would not be alive.
	So, all of the things that are required for you to live are why you're here.
	And then you come onto these conversations and you just deny everything that is why you're alive.
	Okay.
	Can you eat food if you don't know if it's there or not?
	In other words, can you open the box that has no pizza in it and eat the pizza?
	No.
	Okay.
	So pizza has a property called mass.
	And if there's no mass, there's no pizza, right?
	There's no such thing as pizza with no mass.
	No, you can't say that.
	I really can.
	Because you're asserting that there's always mass.
	And what?
	That's not necessarily the case.
	I mean, that's probably.
	So you would pay for an empty box of pizza, but no problem, because it could be pizza.
	No, but no, because that's not necessary.
	Just because a cook gives you an empty box and calls it mass-free pizza, that doesn't mean it is, but that doesn't mean mass-free pizza doesn't exist.
	That doesn't mean you're not eating pizza.
	Oh, come on, bro.
	Do you get ever?
	Is there any edge at which you say I'm talking a bunch of shit?
	You can't say that mass-free pizza doesn't exist.
	Does it ever try?
	Is there any barrier where you say, maybe I'm just talking shit here?
	Mass-free pizza.
	You can't say, Steph, that mass-free pizza doesn't exist.
	Mass-free means there's no mass there that doesn't exist.
	So you can't say that pizza that doesn't exist doesn't exist.
	Does that trouble you at all?
	Well, no, because there are some people question whether mass exists at all.
	So if you say that pizza has mass, mass doesn't exist at all.
	Okay, so then you'll, you, you might pay for a pizza that's an empty box, an empty box.
	You might pay for that because you don't know whether mass exists or not.
	And you don't know where you are.
	You don't know whether you exist.
	You don't know if your body exists, but you sure as shit know that you got to be skeptical of everything.
	See, I just, if you're in the place where I don't know if mass exists or not, why would I have a conversation?
	That's crazy.
	Honestly, I'm just telling you metaphysically, that's insane.
	And why would I bother having a conversation with someone who doesn't even know that there's a difference between something that has mass and exists and something that has no mass and doesn't exist?
	It would be the same, except you don't know for sure whether it has mass or not.
	It'd be the same pizza.
	You're just saying it has mass, and there are some scientists that don't know.
	So hang on.
	You think that there's pizza that exists that doesn't have any mass?
	No, I don't know that.
	I'm just saying there are some people that do.
	Let me mean this.
	Let me say there's some people who believe that you should cut your balls off to go and join the Halley Bob Comet.
	That doesn't mean they're right.
	People can believe any kinds of shit.
	You just mingle yourself and say, well, everyone believes everything, therefore I can't know anything.
	I think the most important thing that we have to worry about in this world.
	You can't talk about anything that's fucking important because you don't even know if pizza exists.
	How on earth if you don't even know that pizza exists, if you don't even know that things that have mass exists, why would I listen to you about anything in terms of the hierarchy of and look, I'm trying to tell you why you can't have productive conversations with people.
	Because if you can't even concede that for something to exist, it has to have mass.
	If you can't say, well, if you can't, if you say things like, well, you can't prove to me that pizza with no mass doesn't exist, right?
	Then why would anyone believe, like listen to you about anything else?
	Like, we can't even agree that we live in the same reality.
	We can't even agree that things that exist have mass.
	We can't even agree on anything.
	So why don't you talk about that?
	Hang on, hang on, still talking, still talking.
	So why would I listen to you about anything else?
	We can't even establish the basics.
	Let me ask you this.
	Are you certain that I exist?
	No.
	Absolutely.
	Why the fuck would I talk to you if I could be your imaginary friend?
	Because we can't, listen, we can't listen.
	Listen, listen.
	The reason why I talk to people is to get to the fucking truth.
	That's why I talk to people because that's the purpose of philosophy, to get to the fucking truth.
	Okay, now you deny Hanon.
	You deny the existence of truth.
	You deny the existence of reality.
	So why would I talk to someone if my goal is to get to the truth?
	And therefore, you know, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	You got to get to the truth.
	Then you can get to the good and then you can be virtuous and be happy.
	So if you, hang on, if you can't even accept that I exist, how can we possibly have a conversation?
	That's not true.
	I am not saying that.
	You are putting words in my mouth.
	I asked you if you were certain that I exist and you said no.
	That doesn't mean that I am not absolutely certain.
	Thought we went through this already, but that doesn't mean that I am relatively certain.
	99.999% you can do.
	You said, Are you certain?
	I said, Are you certain that I exist?
	And you said, No.
	I'm not 100% certain.
	Okay, see, why would I have a conversation with someone who doesn't even believe I exist?
	Because I'm 99.9% certain, which means I can participate in this reality.
	No, it means that you have a bullshit rug that you can yank out from any conversation by applying.
	You can't be caught on anything.
	You can't be nailed to anything.
	You can't, you never have to concede anything because you can always pull out this.
	Well, I'm not a hygienist.
	Like, I'm here for truth.
	I'm here for truth.
	I'm here for truth.
	I'm not letting me respond to it.
	Are you going to let me talk a little here?
	Well, I'm making my case.
	You kept interrupting me, but I will let you speak without interruption.
	Oh, I was interrupting you.
	Yeah, I was making a case and you kept interrupting me, but go ahead.
	Listen.
	And you know what?
	You don't even know if I exist.
	How do you know I interrupted you?
	But you're 100% certain of that.
	Brilliant.
	Go ahead.
	The most important thing I think that we have to worry about is staying out of the matrix.
	You know, the pre-modern matrix was the church.
	The modern matrix was the financial system.
	The post-modern matrix is, well, just say postmodernism.
	So we have done a real horrible job of avoiding matrix and the matrix being a means of control that a small amount of people use to control the masses.
	And it is not going to get easier.
	It is going to get much harder as AI fake videos that they can generate.
	So that's the point I'm trying to make.
	You don't even know that people exist.
	Why would anyone listen to you about your analysis of signing?
	You don't even know for certain that people exist.
	I mean, define exist.
	I mean, you just asked that question just the other day of someone.
	You tell me.
	I mean, define pizza, define cheesecake.
	You're setting down a limit for cheesecake.
	Well, if it doesn't have dairy, then it's cheesecake, but it's non-dairy cheesecake.
	So this is a problem with language.
	Where do we draw that line?
	If you assert that all cheesecake has milk, and then I destroy that syllogism by saying, well, you have dairy-free cheesecake.
	And you say, well, that doesn't count.
	You didn't stipulate that that didn't count.
	Well, we moved beyond that.
	This is a remember.
	I went to, does cheesecake have mass?
	And you wouldn't accept that.
	That's because it's been posited that nothing.
	Okay, let me ask you a little bit about the money.
	Let me ask you a little bit because this is just kind of boring to me.
	Let me ask you a little bit about your life.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	What was your childhood like?
	Pretty good.
	I had very good parents.
	We were kind of poor because my dad, my family did a one-income, so my mom could stay on with us.
	So that was kind of ideal in that sense.
	Okay.
	How were you, if you were punished?
	I don't know if you were, but how were you punished if you were punished?
	You know, there was some corporal punishment.
	So you were, and how were you punished in a corporal manner?
	How were you corporally punished?
	Maybe spanked.
	Sorry, maybe?
	Various ways.
	Okay, were you ever sorry to interrupt me?
	Were you ever hit with implements or just sort of barehand?
	Barehanded.
	I don't remember any particular I can't really remember the details, but I can say that corporal punishment was involved.
	And roughly, how often were you spanked?
	Oh, hardly ever.
	Okay.
	And were you ever called names or anything like that?
	Or did you ever experience any verbal harshness?
	You mean from my parents?
	Uh-huh.
	Boy, not really.
	I mean, my parents were extremely supportive, so I can't remember anything like that.
	And my memories are overwhelmingly positive of the fantastic job they did as parents.
	Okay.
	And did you enjoy your time in school?
	Um, yeah, I'm kind of a voracious learner, but I'm sure you're feeling like a lot of times I didn't quite catch that.
	You're kind of a what learner?
	Voracious?
	Voracious learner.
	Very curious.
	Okay, got it.
	All right.
	So you like to learn and you enjoy school.
	I didn't really enjoy school and I enjoyed parts of it, but I really founded more on learning on my own.
	I read a lot.
	Matter of fact.
	And who were your big influences when you were in your teenage years?
	I can't really think of anybody.
	I mean, you read a lot.
	It must have been somebody who influenced you, right?
	You must have been drawn towards something or another.
	I guess I'd have to say Robbie Nash.
	You know who Robbie Nash is?
	No, I don't.
	He's a professional windsurfer.
	I used to windsurf.
	Oh, no, I'm talking intellectually.
	I don't mean in terms of like windsurfing.
	I mean, you're a voracious reader, and there must have been someone that you liked to read.
	One of my favorites was Duran.
	What's his first name?
	Story of Philosophy?
	Oh, Will Durant.
	Will Durant.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And did you?
	I'm sorry?
	I remember reading The Bell Curve when it first came out.
	So that was probably, I don't know, I was probably in my late teens, maybe.
	And did you do any drugs when you were a teenager or at any time in your life?
	You mean drugs or does alcohol count?
	We can include alcohol in that.
	Sure.
	I was really pretty good about avoiding that early on.
	Eventually, I found alcohol and liked it.
	And how long did you drink for?
	What age were you and how much did you drink?
	Probably started when I was 21.
	And I would say I'm a moderate drinker ever since.
	And what field do you work in?
	Well, you said engineering.
	Yeah, I'm kind of a I'm in blue-collar work right now.
	You ever see that show, The Pretender, that has, I've had just a lot of different jobs.
	And was that a decade as a, are you in your 20s or 30s or 40s or something else?
	Just turned 60.
	Oh, you just turned 60.
	Okay.
	And sorry, I thought you said you were in engineering or something like that.
	I was a professional engineer for a while, about a year.
	About a year?
	I'm an inventor.
	I'm a patented inventor.
	So I consider that to be engineering.
	I actually was a professional engineer for about a year.
	You mean like you studied, you got your tin ring and everything, right?
	I didn't get an engineering degree.
	That's kind of my problem.
	I decided to go for the patent instead.
	And I wanted to get into a position between marketing, the legal department, and the engineering department.
	But when you say engineer, do you think when you say engineer, do you think most people think that you were an engineer, like a trained engineer?
	I don't know.
	I have a patent on an engine.
	An engineer is by definition...
	I think we lost him.
	Hopefully he'll come back.
	Oh, he's gone.
	Is he back?
	Is he gone?
	We'll find out.
	Yeah, so it's, I suppose, not a particularly successful engineer if he's in his 60s and doing blue-collar work.
	I suppose things didn't work out super well.
	Yeah, I guess he's gone.
	I don't suppose we'll find out how he came to this radical skeptical position.
	But it's not healthy.
	I'll tell you, I mean, I engaged in a long conversation with this fellow because, you know, there are people in the world to solve problems, and then there are people just in the world to throw sand at the engines or to throw logs on the path.
	We are in the pursuit of truth, and we need to be in the pursuit of truth.
	So I will tell you why I engaged in that conversation for so long, because I consider it like a brain virus.
	It's horrible.
	It's horrible to people.
	See, evil people are certain.
	They're certain, if you've ever dealt with narcissists, people who are antisocial and people who are sociopaths and so on, they're really certain.
	And we have no way to deal with evildoers if we get infected with radical skepticism.
	I will not, and I've sort of added this guy to the list of people who I'm not going to talk to again because I think it was valuable enough, right?
	So, if you're trying to get to sort of, you know, we're in a desperate battle against evil, right?
	We are.
	We're in a desperate battle against evil.
	And if evil wins, they're going to kill us all.
	I mean, honestly, they're going to kill us all.
	I don't even need to doubt this.
	I've seen it historically.
	I've seen it in my own life.
	And so we need to get to some certainty.
	We need to get some robustness.
	We need to get to some strength.
	We need to get to some moral courage.
	And when people come along and I say, just cheesecake to contain dairy, and they're like, well, not non-dairy cheesecake.
	It's like, but that's a separate category.
	That's why I asked him, do you order pizza or do you order gluten-free pizza, which is a separate category?
	So all pizza that is not specifically gluten-free has gluten, right?
	Just please understand that.
	All pizza that is not specifically gluten-free has gluten.
	So when you say pizza, you mean gluten, right?
	If there's two categories of cheesecake, like this is when people work with you to try and get to the truth, or they just are obstructive and annoying, right?
	And it's annoying because, you know, we're in a desperate battle and it's like, pass me the whatever I need to win this battle.
	And they're like, well, I don't even know if you exist, man.
	It's like, I'm going to get killed, right?
	So if there's dessert and there's cheesecake and then there's non-dairy cheesecake, then all cheesecake without non-dairy in front of it has dairy in it in the same way that all pizza that doesn't have gluten-free in front of it has gluten, right?
	So it's not that complicated.
	It's how he lives, right?
	When you are, when people can't admit fault and they can't get to reality and they say things, and this is, I'm always alert to this, right?
	Like I gave him the whole argument against the simulation.
	He completely blew past it, didn't engage with it, didn't rebut it or anything like that, right?
	So then when he says things like, you can't be certain that pizza without mass doesn't exist.
	Well, what is existence?
	What is this?
	Like, this is somebody who's had decades and decades and decades, right?
	He started being a voracious reader or thinker in his teens, or maybe even earlier, right?
	So Bro has had 50 plus years, 40 plus years to come up with these answers, and he's got nothing.
	He doesn't engage with facts.
	And I am always looking for when people are like, okay, well, that's not okay.
	If I'm saying that pizza without mass could exist, when pizza is defined as something that has mass, it has to, right?
	If you get the empty box, it's just how people live, right?
	So the challenge is when children understand something, you have to be able to explain it philosophically.
	And you also have to say, if I wouldn't live that way, if I couldn't live that way, then I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to believe that, right?
	So if you order a pizza, you pay you 25 bucks and you get an empty box, right?
	And then you say, hey, where's my pizza?
	And they say, no, no, no, it's a non-mass pizza.
	And you say, well, I guess I'll pay because I don't really, right?
	You would never live like that.
	You'd say, no, I need my.
	So there's a level of practicality that you have to have in order to stay alive.
	I'll also absolutely guarantee you that this fellow is that there's no one close to him, which is why he lives in isolation, right?
	Because when you interact with people on a regular basis, you have to have shared definitions, right?
	I mean, you have to, right?
	I mean, if my wife and I said, hey, we want to go on vacation, right?
	And then I take her down a coal mine to work 12 hours a day, right?
	She'd be mad at me because it's like, you said vacation.
	That's not a coal mine.
	Well, it could be.
	Some people could find this a vacation.
	Like you have to have shared upon definitions in order to have relationships with social animals and social means shared definitions.
	And so if you don't share any different definitions with anyone, you can't be close to anyone.
	And you can see the sort of prickly distance in the fellows' interactions, right?
	And so, you know, I was willing to abandon the dairy argument, you know, whatever.
	Okay, fine.
	You know, like, although you have to say non-dairy cheesecake and you have to say non-gluten pizza.
	So when I say cheesecake, that means dairy, whatever.
	Okay.
	Does it have mass?
	Now, if you can't even get to someone to say two and two make four and cheesecake has mass, how could you like, how could you possibly have a productive discussion with someone who can't accept basic reality, who doesn't even believe that you exist, who doesn't know anything for certain, who can't define anything for certain.
	If you can't agree upon definitions, you cannot have a conversation.
	It's really, really important to understand.
	And you could see this, like it's just mutual.
	Well, I mean, it's annoying to me, right?
	And I don't want to leave everyone with that sort of bad taste in their mouth of this like assault on our basic capacity to connect, to reason with each other, to share definitions, to gain certainty, to gain virtue, to gain truth, and to oppose evil.
	Right.
	So he's got all these concerns.
	Oh, the world is this.
	The world is the bad things.
	And it's like, how do you know?
	How do you know the world exists?
	You don't even know that pizza exists, right?
	You don't even know a general category.
	You don't know that two and two make four, but you're going to go, what?
	Fight evil?
	I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
	Evil is certain.
	They're certain of their lusts.
	They're certain of their manipulations.
	They're certain of their greed for power.
	They're certain of the prizes that they want to win.
	I mean, do you think that the people who ran the fucking concentration camps in Germany or the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc, the USSR or Cambodia or Cuba or China or North Korea?
	Do you think the people who ran these concentration camps and slaughtered humanity by the tens of millions, do you think that they didn't know whether other people existed?
	Do you think that they just didn't know whether the concentration camps are real?
	Do you think, no, they're certain.
	And this radical skepticism is like an acid that just eats away your capacity to do anything productive with your life, which is why this guy's in his 60s and working a blue-collar job.
	Although he's an engineer and an inventor and it's like, no, this is an isolated, nobody loves this guy.
	I guarantee you that.
	And I'm not saying he's got great positive qualities, obviously very smart and a good debater and so on.
	But you can't be loved if you don't think the other person exists or you don't know for sure the other person exists.
	And if all you do is fight any possible overlapping definitions you can share with someone, then you can't have relationships of any kind.
	And there's a profound scent of isolation that comes off this fellow.
	Now, of course, he might email me and say, no, no, no, I have a wife and children.
	It's like, I don't.
	I mean, I just won't believe it.
	I mean, I know, I mean, I'm almost this guy's age.
	I know how the world works.
	I know how people's minds works.
	If you can't agree on definitions, you can't have a relationship.
	So this sort of radical skepticism is a lot of wounded pride.
	And this is somebody who will not adjust his perspective to match reality.
	And this is why he's not succeeded and is working a blue-collar job, despite his obvious significant intelligence and verbal and language skills.
	I mean, I really wish he'd used these kinds of abilities for good rather than for ill, rather than for dismantling.
	Because, you know, you think of the amount of damage this guy's done over the course of his life to people, right?
	Like taken people who are certain and sure and solid and so on.
	And he's just shot them full of this kind of dissolving acid.
	And most people aren't as skilled at rebutting all of this nonsense as I am because I've got a lot of experience in it.
	But this guy has a compulsion to disassemble people's beliefs and perspectives, other than his own, of course, because he's allowed to have his own perfectly.
	And so this is why I really, really strongly, strongly, strongly recommend to you, don't fuck with people's certainty.
	Don't fuck with, I mean, you know, it's good to have doubt and it's good to be skeptical.
	I get all of that.
	But don't screw with people's metaphysical certainty about existence and syllogistical reasoning and two and two make four.
	Don't fuck with people's general reasoning because you then become kind of an acid in the world that undermines our capacity to resist evil to fall in love.
	So let's say, just for the sake of argument, let's say that I'm right and this guy's wrong, not about everything, but about the sort of general certainty that we need in order to live in the world.
	And of course, this guy, you know, it's funny because I think he's, oh yeah, he has, he's called back in or whatever it is.
	And it's like, no, see, I don't know if he's called back in.
	I don't know.
	I don't know if it's him.
	I don't know if it's, I don't even know if my phone exists.
	I don't know if I can't be certain this guy has called in, right?
	So if I take his position, I see something on the phone that he's called back in, but I don't know.
	It could be a spam, could be an imposter.
	It could be a hallucination.
	Maybe it is a hallucination, right?
	So if I live the way that he says, he's going to get really annoyed.
	And if he tries to live not knowing whether food exists or not, he'll starve to death.
	And if he tries to live like he doesn't know if water exists, he'll dehydrate and die within, you know, three, three, three, right?
	Three minutes of air, three days of water, three weeks of food.
	And so I know for a fact that he's been absolutely certain about mass.
	I know for a fact he's been absolutely certain that he exists.
	Like he doesn't even know that I exist, but he wants to call back in, right?
	So you have to work empirically from how you live.
	Because if you have ideas that you can't survive the application of, they're bullshit ideas.
	And I know for a simple fact that somebody who has radical skepticism, but who knows to dial and call in and knows how to talk and knows this and knows that and knows how to eat and he got sleep and he's got shelter and he's got money and he's got food and right.
	So he's not a radical skeptic of any kind, right?
	He's only a radical skeptic when it comes to dissolving other people's certainties.
	Now, I don't know, and I don't think I'll ever know, and I frankly don't care.
	I don't know what compulsions arose in this guy's life.
	Usually it has to do with frustrated vanity and so on, right?
	But I don't know what compulsions have arisen in this guy's life where he feels the urge to manipulate in this way.
	And the very opening of the call, I mean, the ending of the call was there in the opening of the call, right?
	Where he says, like, I'm really sorry.
	And he says, and I say, for what?
	And he says, I don't know.
	Like, that's just a bullshit manipulation, right?
	Like, we don't even have the same definition of apology.
	Apology is just a sorry sound you make to appease someone.
	Whereas for me, an apology is you admit fault, make restitution, and try and say how it's not going to happen again.
	Now, I've given this guy two tries.
	I think it's two tries.
	So, I mean, that's like, I'm not doing that again because that's just a brain virus to me.
	But if you do disassemble people's certainty, then you have a big problem in that if you are wrong, right?
	I'm just going to add this guy to the caller list.
	Right.
	So if you're wrong about your radical skepticism, then you have really fucked up a lot of people in your life.
	Like, I am very, very conscious of the fact that I have a reasonably big platform and it certainly will be the case throughout all time.
	I mean, it's going to go asymptotic in the future, or at least exponential.
	But I'm very aware of having a fairly large microphone and therefore needing to be very careful about what I put out.
	So I put out non-aggression principle.
	I put out reason.
	I put out evidence.
	I put out love.
	I put out free will.
	I put out definitions of reality and all virtue and so on, right?
	I'm very careful because if I'm wrong, right?
	If I'm wrong, then I've done great harm, which is why when I am wrong, which happens, of course, right?
	I work as hard as I can to correct myself as quickly as possible, right?
	And I don't know if you've had this in your life when you can feel the compulsion.
	Like this guy was just so, oh, he's got to get these ideas.
	And like, it's almost like an assault.
	And of course, as I said, he never has to admit that he's wrong because he can also just, he can just disbelieve in everything.
	So it's a get out of jail free card.
	You can never be cornered.
	You can never be convinced because you can just, yeah, but none of this is real.
	You can just jump out.
	So I don't, right?
	I don't, I mean, would you, would you get involved?
	Let's say that there was some high-stakes poker game.
	Would you get involved with betting against someone and making money on, and if they win, you pay them.
	But if you win, they'll just disbelieve that you exist.
	Right.
	So it doesn't really, it doesn't really work at all.
	And I wouldn't really have, and I find it like, honestly, it's like fighting off a virus, right?
	Chris says he doesn't know if the words he used are real, if they have definition then.
	I've been around that kind of mind virus.
	It is corrosive.
	Yeah.
	So he's saying he doesn't know about the presence or absence of something, but he's an engineer, at least he said he was an engineer, though he wasn't trained as an engineer, which is whatever, right?
	But he says he doesn't know the difference between the presence and absence of something, but sound waves are the presence or absence of sound.
	Therefore, he's relying on the presence and absence of something in order to communicate in order for my ears to hear for him, right?
	He has to use the presence and absence of things just in terms of sound waves in order to communicate.
	Also, he's not certain that two and two make four, but he's certain that I should let him speak, right?
	This is the kind of craziness that goes on.
	Like if he doesn't even know that two and two make four, or he doesn't even know that something that has mass requires mass, like if it's that level of contradiction, that's why I said, like, he said, well, the biggest problem in the world is this.
	Like, you don't even fucking believe the world exists.
	Why would I listen to you about any of this?
	So anyway, I'm sorry.
	I go shake it off.
	I'll go have a nice workout and dump the adrenaline of the central brain assault.
	And yeah, I've given it twice.
	I think that's going to be it for me with our good friend Dragon.
	And it probably is too late for him to undo the damage he's done.
	And it probably is too late for him to find love because love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
	But to have virtue, you have to have certainty.
	You have to have objectivity and you have to have shared definitions.
	If your wife believes something is virtuous and you believe that it's evil, you can't stay in love.
	So the shared definitions are essential and you have to be certain of them.
	I'm certain, 150% certain that I love my wife because I'm certain I know what virtue is.
	I'm certain that I'm virtuous, reasonably so.
	I'm certain that she's virtuous.
	There's no doubt about that.
	And I don't ever wake up in the morning and say, well, there's someone on the other side of the bed, but who knows?
	Maybe I'm a cheesecake.
	All right.
	Thanks, everyone.
	Have a great night.
	Freedomaine.com/slash annotate.
	Lots of love.

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