Good morning, what's going on Anthony dream John center today co-founder of the red man group founder 21 convention 22 convention 21 studios Here today of the episode episode 135 of the red man group the grand return of Stefan Mullinum He's in a returning guest to the show. He's been on several times and he's an alumni speaker of the 21 convention He's also one of the world's most infamous philosophers alive today and his next youtuber had about a million subscribers before he was unfortunately Alex Jones Not too long ago about six seven months ago something like that He's also the founder of free domain calm where you can find him today. You can also find him on alt-tech Bitch shoot gab mines places like that rumble without further ado Please let me welcome back to the red man group mr. Stefan Mullinum. How's it going man? Good Anthony? How you doing? Thanks for having me on Yeah, doing good man. Really glad to have you back on the show.  Oh, yeah, I can't follow you there, man I mean you just you can't type in one extra address. It's just not not possible So but you know people are sort of making the way over and I think as some of the Helatia stuff is coming out particularly about Facebook and Twitter with regards to child particularly childhood child sexual exploitation on those platforms It's it's not not too bad a thing to see that smoking moral crater in the rear view Yeah, I've seen reports that Facebook and Twitter is some of the biggest Delivery methods of like pedo porn in the world See which I was not aware of until I heard about it See you you can find just about everybody in a thousand person selfie during a capital riot But apparently you just you can't deal with with pedo porn on the internet apparently That's completely impossible, which I don't believe for a second, but yeah, so That's it's it's been a transition, but I'm still alive heart still beating mouth still talking reasons still reasoning It's just and if people want to find me they can find me at free domain calm forward slash connect tons and tons of places I post on a regular basis still doing videos in fact I'm doing an investment round table now because the same forces that kind of got me kicked off social media are Also inadvertently driving up the price of crypto, so I've got a bunch of crypto experts We meet a couple of times a week to discuss the market And and what we think about various valuations and so on so it's it's an interesting transition And I I'm a nimble guy. I'm like a mammal at the feet of the dinosaur So I'm willing to dodge and dart and find a new home Yeah, you know on the same issue the poor movement off it I wanted to ask you what did it feel like to just get Alex Jones like that I mean you're on level with someone like Donald Trump and Alex Jones are getting just erased from mainstream internet Anyway, I grew through saying that it's like a Titanic. It's sinking ship and people are getting to lifeboats to other platforms But to see that go down like I have a huge channel, too Obviously we have almost 2,000 videos you had probably like 3,000 or something But I know if I lost my channel today, I'd be like my house burning down almost, you know You have it's over 10 years of work. I put into it and you put even more like 15. Yeah What did I feel like to go through that? so this is a philosophical approach and I want to sort of share this with you share this with your listeners because absolutely life is gonna throw you some serious curveballs And they're gonna be covered in Vaseline. They're gonna be totally unfair.  You will power is Okay, how can I make this the greatest possible good? Even if it's something I wouldn't have chosen myself obviously I wouldn't have chosen that but how can I make this the greatest Possible good now. There's always a way. There's always a way to do it now I started this show in pure philosophy and also I started pretty early on helping listeners with personal issues bringing Philosophical principles to bear on you know parenting on dating on marriage Relationships with parents work issues I just had a call last night with a guy who was suicidal and got him to turn around his thinking because philosophy is really powerful that way It's buoyancy. It's buoyancy in the sort of down current of the world. So for me. It was like, okay, so I've been Deplatform from the major Outlets, okay. What is what does that mean? Well, what it means is that I can go back to my first love Which is pure philosophy.  Oh boy. It just feels like Grand Hague Day all over again And you have actually left politics at this point, right? You put out a video recently about that I left politics around the de-platforming time and that my decision which is to say I'm kind of border politics I felt that there was important things to discuss in the political realm I'm really border politics But I felt a sort of obligation given the size of the audience and the intensity of interest in politics to continue to deliver Political content. So for me, it was like, okay, I'm kind of border of politics and I really want to get back to core Moral philosophy and also I'm writing a book at the moment which we can talk about if you like on peaceful parenting So yeah, nice. Yeah, I can really focus on all that stuff and It's the kind of thing where you what's the best possible choice that I can make in the circumstances to end up with the best possible outcome the kind of land on your feet stuff and I Knew it was going to be tough for the audience because of course talking politics attracts a lot of people in this sort of highly charged political environment But you know, I sort of put this out there to everyone like really really Challenge yourself to say, okay, so this particular Avenue has been blocked. What other avenues? Can I choose that is going to make the blocking of this Avenue? Not such a bad thing or perhaps even a good thing because it's a funny thing about life Anthony It's a really funny thing about life. I really have to fight my vanity and My vanity of course is not based upon my amazing hairdo My vanity is based upon the delusion that I know what's good or bad in life I mean, it's a funny funny thing now, of course something like cancer. Yeah, that's that's bad You know, but you know all the people who win the lottery, you know Of the people who win the lottery like the vast majority of them end up completely destroyed in life Like they're they get divorced or they end up one guy was a cocaine addict He think he was a Canadian he won the lottery was a cocaine addict Of course, he blew his money on coke ended up in prison and he's like man Prison is a way better place for me to be than out there with lots of money So it's really really hard to know What's good or bad in life? It's like what they I think it was a Chinese philosopher who was asked what he thought of the French Revolution He was asked this quite recently and he said it's too soon to tell It's only a couple hundred years. We can't tell What's the fall of Rome a good or a bad thing? Actually, it's a pretty good thing because being a surf was better than being enslaved in the Roman army for 20 years So it's really hard to say. Okay. Oh this thing I didn't want all this deep platforming. It's like and I have to say I don't have the omniscience to know Whether this is a good or a bad thing yet. It's too soon to tell now No, if I sit around the grave of my social media accounts and and cry tears and mourn and think this is the worst thing ever Then by golly, it's that old Hamlet line. There's nothing good or bad But thinking makes it so but if I say, okay, so this avenue is blocked What's another avenue?  And I have to fight my vanity saying oh, this is a bad thing Like in many ways, it's been a positive thing. I'm back to my cool. Love. I'm off the revolving door Groundhog Day of Politics I'm writing a book on peaceful parenting, which I think is gonna have more Effect than yammering about the Lincoln project So yeah, I and you you probably feel like you're not walking on eggshells anymore, right because on YouTube It was always any second you could ban for anything and obviously in the end you worry even with no community strikes But now on gab and rumble on these places you can say whatever you want basically, right? But then the law well, yeah, and of course Everybody flocked to parlor as did I and I had I don't know hundred and twenty thousand people following me on parlor Because you know what they say, you know, just just go build your own Twitter Oh, well, you can't do that So it's it's hard to know it's hard to know what is going to be a positive and a negative Although we have preferences in the moment There's definitely been huge positives for me in this in this transition and yes, I don't even invite people You know, it's sort of like if you're bored in a relationship and then the woman breaks up with you And you're like, oh, that's terrible wait. Is it is it really that you know, I mean is it really that that terrible? It's a tough question to ask and so I just sort of wait wait to see wait to see how things Play out just wait to see how things play out That's that's an important thing in life and don't have the vanity of knowing a believing You know for sure whether something's good or bad in the moment Yeah, it's kind of like the Internet's rapidly changing that to characterize your position. So from doing it, right?  Sorry. Those are redundant. We would argue abortion We would argue just about everything under the sun. I was in the model UN At school making lots of debates and arguments and all of that and here's a strange thing about social media because the argument the debate is the oldest and most civilized form of human conflict because we agree to submit our perspectives to reason and evidence and to adopt the conclusions of reason and evidence as our beliefs and it's a very civilized and Really, it's the only civilized way of interacting now Can you imagine like I'm sure you'd argued with a lot of people over the course of your life? It's kind of what we do on the Internet, right? It's mostly I just get screamed at but argue sometimes, you know So that's an argument. Okay. So can you imagine? Can you imagine? Having an argument about death penalty or abortion or whatever with a friend of yours when you were a teenager And you make a really good point.  I'm getting you fired from your job Can you imagine just how like What? What are you talking about getting me fired from my job for a debate for an argument for facts for reason for evidence? You're insane. It's not even about the it's not even about the job though It's about the consequences, right? Can you imagine losing an argument?  You ask some girl out. She says no and You're like all right, man. I'm gonna get your dad fired Like that that is that is seriously bunny boiling stalker shite and this idea that if you can't answer someone's arguments or you're upset at someone that you're going to Silence them that you're gonna get them fired that you're gonna destroy their source of income or can you imagine if You wanted to ask a girl out as a teenager or any time for that matter and She wouldn't she didn't go out with you and then you said, oh, well, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna start a rumor now that you have herpes. I Mean that would be So evil so deranged so psychostalkery and yet we've come to accept this in our public discourse as a whole We've come to accept, you know, like this woman who was on the Star Wars show, right? She she posted some stuff and you know comparing the dehumanization of the Jews to some of the dehumanization Conservatives right? Yeah, it's a strong point. Is it totally invalid? You know, you could make a case that there's some validity behind it and of course, that's just the cover story You know, a Nazi analogies after they've called Trump Hitler for the last four years and and shocked about Nazi analogies seems a bit specious at the moment But that's it. So people disagreed with her. They didn't like what she said.  They got her fired, right and and all of that I mean, that's that stalker stuff. You don't agree with me. You won't go out with me.  But when I was growing up that kind of behavior would be in the tiny sliver minority of true psychopathic or sociopathic behavior You won't go out with me. I'm gonna spread a rumor. You've got a venereal disease That's insane and yet now in the public square in the public sphere. We'd be like, yeah, that's yeah, of course it Well, that's hate speech. We gotta silence that person. We got to destroy the resource of income We got to try and destroy their reputation and it's like that that's not an argument, you know And hanging on to that can we have a debate about things which is in the political realm is kind of past The point of no return in many ways now But you know when you've got people on mainstream TV saying oh, yeah Republicans should be labeled as domestic terrorists. It's like I'm not sure another PowerPoint is gonna solve this problem at the moment. I'm afraid You know, we actually have a cut. That's a great point. We have a comment from Graham Miller a friend of mine He said the time for argument is over someone here, you know, your thoughts on this to fun There's a spiritual war with souls at stake if someone cannot begin with that premise There's nothing to discuss my main focus here. I'd like you to focus on is a time for argument is over Are you concerned that where the the end of an age where argument and debate is The forefront of how people deal with each other Well, I am concerned about that for sure. I am concerned about that for sure because I Mean if you look look at the impeachment trial, right? I haven't been following it very closely, but I've dipped in here or there, right? So the impeachment trial Has used deliberately edited tape to obscure The reality of what Trump said which was much peacefully go go peacefully, right a lot a lot of times They just kind of dropped that out of the context now avoiding exculptory evidence When you are in hot pursuit of someone's malevolent behavior or impeachable behavior if you Don't turn over exculptory evidence if you selectively edit and deceptively edit statements Made by someone that you're charging Doesn't the case just get thrown out like by any standard of reasonable law It's grounds for mistrial. It's got grounds for charges being dropped if you withhold Exculptory evidence or selectively edit things to make people look bad this selective editing It's been used for me because I've got so much material There's always someplace where someone can cut off what I'm saying or talk about it out of context You know like that. There's some website where people are saying. Oh Steph said I don't view humanity as a single race, right? And and and it just sliced that up right like and so what does it sound like I think that some races are not human That's not what I was talking about. I wasn't talking about race at all I was talking about a predator-prey relationship between criminals and victims and I said of course I know human beings are the same race It's just a biological analogy for looking at predator-prey relationships in criminals and victims and it's not a particularly original thought They're called predators right sex predators or child predators So they'll just slice a little bit It's like going to the Bible where where it says the fool in his heart has said there is no God and Then just saying oh the Bible says there is no God because I'm just gonna slicey dicey that stuff And when people are doing that right then then you have this challenge, right? You have this challenge, which is you have to phrase everything to the point where? nothing even sliced or diced could be taken out of context and Once you're there like once you in that situation where you feel a giant clusterfrag of Completely amoral people are pouring over everything that you say in real time trying to find a slicey dicey thing to get you Once you're there.  You did at the 21 convention I remember it and I took a mental note of it You know when I heard it and you said the cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder and in a way I just called it just digital genocide, but also it's leading to I think real genocide It's gonna really good too. It's got almost 50,000 views in just over a week, which for our channel is like awesome So you can you expand on that statement too though Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder. It's also be on the image of the show Yeah, I mean it is historically this has been the case, you know, there's seven stages of escalation of particularly statist violence and The first thing of course is that you associate Language with criminality, right?  There are lots of people out there who have Absolutely abhorrent views to me and they should be allowed to speak those views because how on earth can we dissect and remove? Terrible errors within society and by remove I simply mean discount right like debate and argue and put them aside In the general social discourse, how can we do that if we don't have The speech visible and prominent if it's out there We don't want like you know your immune system is supposed to be able to figure out which of the bugs and which of the healthy Cells and it's supposed to destroy the bugs and protect the healthy cells But if your immune system can't find the bugs and can't fight them Well, that's what AIDS or something like that where you end up being taken over by every bad bug because you don't have it so to me Criminalizing speech is Absolutely reprehensible and it is a confession of intellectual impotence because you should be able to argue against bad ideas pretty easily And the worst the ideas the more you say offensive or negative the ideas the easier they should be To argue against and so when you silence people as a whole when you criminalize speech as a whole and the criminalization It's interesting right because certainly in America because there is free speech in the Constitution Right, so because there's no such thing as hate speech in America The left in particular has focused on the de-platforming issue because they can't silence people legally So they have to silence them through threats and boycotts and ostracism and outrageous exaggerations and mischaracterizations and so on and it's that it's designed to say that some people are So malevolent in their language, right? And that's kind of a female perspective if that makes sense because you know men tend to fight with Fists and women tend to fight with words and so For for men the worst thing that you can happen is kind of lose a physical fight But you'll often shake hands afterwards because we're used to competing with each other and then shaking hands afterwards But for women what they do tend generally tend to do since they don't fight as much physically They tend to go for reputation. They tend to fight with language and that kind of stuff and so I think as Women have gained more prominence in society, which I think is a great thing one of the things that's happened That's a negative thing because of the power of the state is that speech has become viewed as Criminal in some ways or or people should be destroyed for for certain words certain ideas certain arguments Even if they're fact-based even if they're science-based doesn't really matter You can see this with covert all the time So what happens is if you silence people as a whole it's a big question. Well, what do they do? What do they do when they do platform? What do they do which is why I put out a call like don't radicalize based on deep platforming because that's kind of the trap Right you people get to platform. They radicalize and then the state moves in right so When you silence people as a whole That you can't even hear this person's speech you can't even hear this You're silence then you've erased that person. Now. What happens if that person keeps talking? Well, you already have the principle that that person cannot be heard in society What happens if that person keeps talking?  You know what happens. It's escalation. It's escalation It's escalation and so if you silence people but they keep talking you're going to continue to escalate and the end result Of that is straight-up murder Now what are they really trying is it really about censoring speeches about censoring or killing off how people think because it seems Like censoring speech is a method to do something else.    It's almost like the censorship of speech is not really about the speech It's about the ideas they want to kill off and they want to control people think is that your view? You know rolling the speech. It's certainly a big topic. So if you have something like Criminal speech, I mean this is this is the big hypocrisy of the entire system And I hope everyone's got their helmets on because if you haven't heard this it's gonna blow your mind, right? So this is the incredibly giant hypocrisy that is going on in the world in the West as we as we speak My speech Has liberated people my speech has got people out bad relationships My speech has got people into great relationships My speech has got people to stop circumcising their baby boys My speech has got people to stop hitting their children my speech has contributed to a massive reduction in Violence in society got hundreds of thousands of families could even be millions by now after 15 years Who are not hitting their children who are not brutalizing their children with unnecessary and destructive surgery? so my speech has Added to the peace of this world and the non-violence of this world now When I was growing up Marxists were everywhere, but it's even more the case now There were Marxists in high school. There were Marxists in the universities. There were Marxists in the media and If you look at something like Marxism if you're gonna say that there's a relationship between speech and murder Marxism is number one number one across the world across all humanity We're talking over a hundred million people slaughtered in 83 years from 1917 to 2000 and That's just what people can vaguely figure out. They can't even get it within 10 million to any kind of accuracy So you've got a set of arguments a set of ideas a set of perspectives Not only do they Fairly directly lead to the slaughter of a hundred million people and no matter what people think of me You can't put that on me. You can't put that on my speech Now not only are Marxists celebrated broadcasted and pumped up in academia Hollywood media you name it not only is that the case But taxpayers are forced at gunpoint through the tax system To fund and broadcast Marxists Marxists don't get de-platformed Marxists in fact get tenure in government schools where the media as a whole often filled with Marxists Will propagandize children into going into the sweet death embrace the low to sea to embrace of Marxism through universities and end up In debt propagandized hating their society and unable to function in the remnants of the free market So if you're gonna talk about hate speech, you're gonna talk about speech That is destructive People gonna look at me Are you freaking kidding me people gonna look at me mr. Peaceful parenting guy mr. Science and reason guy and say oh that guy man. That's dangerous destructive speech but let's make sure That we fund the Marxists whose doctrines have led to the deaths of a hundred million people plus in less than a century Let's make sure those guys Get government protection government funding government tenure and Remain unmolested and unopposed in everything that they do But this guy out there talking about no spanking. Oh boy, you know, that's a bad guy We got a silent tip. This is how far things have gone Marxists don't debate They don't debate there is a certain irony in how much you've advocated for peaceful parenting not hitting your children Not circumcising your boys and stuff. You were an advocate of peace philosophically to the extreme And in ways that are really important and I wonder if it's a telling of our time that it, you know Your advocacy for peace like that. It's especially in the home It's a sign that it's highlighting, you know, how far things like you're saying how far things have gotten I haven't thought about the irony before though.   Well, apparently that's an insurrection But tens of thousands of outright Marxists indoctrinating the young in American universities Well, that's just I mean, that's just that's intellectualism and that's just that's that's higher education And it's like if we live in a clown world and it became increasingly difficult to Describe this because you know when people's prop man mindset is so propagandized That even the slightest whiff of reality causes them to go into mental epilepsy It's you know, it's kind of tough.    You've got a cure.  Look, I'll take it. I'm fine. Look look it's wonderful and There's nothing that I prescribed to the world that I haven't already imbibed myself and peaceful parenting on aggressive relationships Ostracism of abusers that I'm it's all stuff.  So I've took and taken all these pills and have a great life But you know, it's pretty tough because you're gonna spend all of your time not administering medicine But trying to overcome propaganda and the mob the more you try and of course for a lot of people The more you try and tell them this pill will cure you the more they believe that you're trying to kill them And then they're like, well, we got to take this guy out because he's trying to get us killed and it's like no No, no trying to save you So it's pretty tough to overcome that level of propaganda and for me when it's like, okay I'm spending more time trying to overcome propaganda than actually advancing ideas. It's like it's kind of boring because That the fact that it's been shown scientifically that When people have a fixed mindset and mindset that they've been propagandized into not something they've arrived at through reason and evidence Just a fixed mindset that when you apply counter evidence to that When you apply counter evidence to a fixed mindset you harden that mindset You actually reinforce bad beliefs with better information. That's just unfortunately. It's just a way I don't think it's a humanity thing. I think it's just a bad education thing That actually reminds me of narcissism when they try to treat narcissists with like clinical NPD It actually backfires you make the narcissist more intelligent more wise to how they're gonna be investigated or discussed and you know Oh, yeah, there was a there was a study. I think it was done in Sweden or some place up up north of Europe and what they did was they they got a booklet and and they Asked people to are and there was an argument, right? I can't reserve abortion or something like that There was an argument a moral argument And what happened was they asked people to argue that moral case And then they asked them to turn a couple of pages and then they asked them to turn a couple of pages back But the pages were stuck together to the point where the opposite moral argument that they had just made showed up and they Asked them to argue that again and the vast majority of people completely Reverse their moral position with no comment. They argued very convincingly for the opposite moral argument that they just made and They had no knowledge of it even afterwards. They're just they're just in the moment Like can I just win this case in the moment with no larger integrity or perspective of any kind and you know when you're dealing with You're trying to construct a Rational world and the only materials you have is Water You can't build anything and and until people try to get some sort of integrity or at least recognize That contradictions are not a good thing It's really it's really tough to build any kind of future in a societal sense in your personal life and your personal Relations you can do wonders, but as far as society goes, you know, people are shapeless.   They're like just like 10 feet from the cave I'm one one one caveman turns to the other and says say thank is is that all of ice closer today? You know because you know that we were down to 10,000 people in the last ice age for all of humanity We were like this close to winking out of existence completely So you got to keep an eye on that glacier man And I mean and and know when to when to hit the road I mean when it was Alex Jones screaming about it in 2009 and it seemed a ways off But in 2021 it seems not so far Still, you know months or years out. Who knows right could happen six months or not happen six years could happen ten years But you know when it happens it happens fast, right? I mean when it get catches you by surprise some people flee We actually had a questionnaire from Graham again. I thought you maybe you won't hit this He said Stefan at what point is it more wise to abandon ship and expatriate from the country instead of remaining and fighting? Well, I think the key is when you can't win Right, I mean, this is that's pretty pretty It's almost a tautology like when should you just stop fighting when you can't win But that's kind of important, right when you can't win and I think When you can't win is when you can't change people anymore face-to-face Right online is one thing but you know face-to-face your brother your cousin your father-in-law like when you can't change anyone's mind face-to-face with all of your direct eye contact and and you know Handshake and and facts and data and all like when you can't shake online, you know It's always kind of loose you goosey, but when you can't change anyone's mind face-to-face I think that's a pretty solid indicator that you can't win anymore We'll put we'll put I Wanted to move off of a cancel culture and politics here. I know we're getting pretty deep into it There's more to discuss here. I want to talk about philosophy. You mentioned you're writing a book on moral philosophy, yeah Before we get into that that I wanted actually discuss I want to get to that But I want to discuss epistemology So this is the branch of philosophy the theory of knowledge how we know things in my understanding What is your take on epistemology and how does it differ from someone like say iron rend for example the objectivism? Now epistemology is I mean, it's a it's an unfortunate Policelabic mouthful of a sentence. It's just how do you know what's true? How do you know what's true? It's just a very interesting thing and I did this sometimes in debates when I'd be online It's a very powerful thing to do right Because cancel culture and I know we're off the topic but just to mention it and sort of bridge the two cancel culture says I know what is true. I know it was right I know what is virtuous to the point where I'm willing to destroy people's lives who disagree with me Well, that's a lot of knowledge, you know And so when people are into this kind of stuff or you get into these ferocious debates online or these attack sessions or whatever It is right You can go a long way. You can do a lot of good. Just ask people. Oh How do you know what is true? Like That's an amazing moment. How do you know? What is true? What is what is your definition of truth? What is truth? Because everybody wants to jump over like they want to go straight into politics or maybe ethics And they want to jump over the two most important things in in philosophy metaphysics is what is real epistemology what is true Those are the two and I did a 17 part introduction to philosophy way back in 2007 or 2008 I kind of laid out the whole case for this. I've been studying this for a long time Gotta ask people what is true? If you don't know what is real You can't know what it's true. If you don't know what is true. You certainly can't know what is good So we also live in an age where we live in a post-truth age, right? I think Scott Adam puts it that way, but it's not a post-truth age. That's the problem It's not it's a it's a it's not a post-truth age It's a post methodology of truth age because people claim things are true all the time people call me a white supremacist They think it's a true statements completely false So they make truth claim statements all the time. We've just lost the methodology of actually thinking about how Things can be true or false. So you ask people what is real? How do you know what is real versus what is not real? That's a big question to big question. How do you know? I mean to take a sort of silly example It's pretty common in rational philosophy. How do you know that your dreams at night are the unreal and your waking life is the real? How do you know? It's a pretty important question. Wouldn't you say how do you know the real from the unreal? How and if you know the real then you're On your way to knowing what is true Because if you know things are real objective rational They exist then you can start to say things that are true. So truth is It's the relationships between concepts in the mind and what they describe in the real world. That's truth, so if we have a definition of animals called, you know, cold-blooded No hair give birth to eggs. So maybe we've got reptiles or something like that, right? If we've got a category They live in water and Land we got amphibians if we've got they grow hair give birth to live young a warm-blooded. We got mammals and so If we say is a wolf a mammal Okay, that's a question. It's a true statement to say that a wolf is a mammal.  Oh, it's warm-blooded. Oh, it gives birth to live young. Okay, that's a mammal So we've got an objective set of characteristics out there in the real world that exists independent of our consciousness Right wolves around longer than we are and so wolves pre-exist humanity Therefore, they're not contingent upon humanity perceiving them or some things are contingent upon humanity perceiving them But I mean they don't exist outside the mind like morals don't exist outside the mind the scientific method doesn't exist outside the mind Numbers as a concept don't exist outside of physical instances. They don't exist outside the mind It doesn't mean they're subjective or relative or anything like that So once you know an objectivism they call them relational entities So they're considered real like you're saying objective, but they relate they exist only in relation to human being like you're saying Right, right. So if you if you look at a bunch of trees and and and shrubs Bushes all cluster together. You can say oh, that's a forest, right? Okay, the trees exist the space between them and the air or what if that exists the roots exist the leaves exist all of that exists Objective independent of her mind in other words if all humanity was gone if we all just got yeeted out of existence tomorrow Would the trees still exist? Well, of course, they would now the concept forest. That's a collective entity That's a collective concept, right now forest as a concept is what we use to describe this gathering of trees and bushes and shrubs or whatever Now the concept forest does not exist in the world But that doesn't mean that the concept is purely subjective because it claims to describe the relationships of real things in the world You know if you go to an atom Nowhere is inscribed proton Electron like these things aren't written down. These are concepts that we have to describe Atoms, but that doesn't mean that it's purely subjective That doesn't mean that an oxygen atom is somehow magically exactly the same as a carbon atom Just because the concept oxygen doesn't exist in the world the concept carbon doesn't exist in the world But it doesn't mean that it's subjective And the idea that things don't exist in the world therefore everything is subjective Well, that's radical subjectivism and it's actually a form of mental illness It is it is directly a form of insanity because if you try to live that consistently you'd be locked up or in fact You'd be dead right because if everything's subjective Why don't you just walk off a building and decide to decide the air can hold you up? Just because the concept gravity doesn't exist in the real world. It doesn't mean that mass doesn't attract mass In fact, we only have the concept gravity Because mass does attract mass so this all sounds very abstract but it's really really important You've got to know what is real and then when you make statements about what is real They're either accurate or they're inaccurate if you say trees are made of whale blubber Well, unless you're dealing with some really freaky Inuit carvings. You're not in fact accurate If you say that whales are made of of wood Whales of the ocean that are alive. You're you're inaccurate, right? You're wrong So once you know what is real then you're gonna create concepts to describe What is real in the world now if those concepts are accurate then it's a true statement if they're inaccurate It's a false statement now Once you know something is true, then you at least begin to gain the virtue called honesty You can't be honest if you don't know what is real and you don't know what is true So anybody who cannot answer those questions online in your life. I don't care wherever anybody who cannot tell you What is real and what is true and the methodology they use to determine those things they cannot be honest Because there's nothing to be honest about they have no idea what truth is you mean it's about as honest as a dog can be All right kind of insult you in your view in your view of philosophy There's a direct connection between epistemology and morality and it sounds like your view of morality is By this yeah, you know book. So morality. Oh Let's see if I can accordion this down into into bite size so people who want more I've got two books on morality one is called essential philosophy You can get that at essential philosophy calm another one is called universally preferable behavior You can get that at free domain calm forward slash books. They're all free and in fact my book on ethics UPB has been translated in Spanish recently. So I hope people will check that out if that's your native language What's the title of the new one the title of the new one is called essential philosophy Oh, that's the new one. Okay, and it deals with the simulation hypothesis It deals with the question of free will and it is a very rapidly compressed version of My argument for morality and it also includes a bunch of Socratic dialogues of people debating these things so that you can get the pros and cons of these things so If truth is a value now if truth is not a value You don't I never want to debate with someone who says truth is not a value Like if they don't know what's real and they don't know or don't care what is true Well a debate is the pursuit of truth And it's sort of like if you if you're hitchhiking to Albuquerque Then you want to get into a car with someone who's heading to Albuquerque Right, you didn't want to hitchhike with someone who's going the opposite way And so if your goal is Albuquerque only accompany people who are going to Albuquerque or at least through Albuquerque, right? So if a debate the purpose of debate is to find some kind of truth So if people don't know what's real now, they don't know what's true. You can't debate with them It's it's a useless exercise. It's a useless exercise. In fact, it's an insult It's an insult to debate to debate with people who don't know what is true So in a debate truth has got to be the goal and people have to know what's real They have to know what's true. These are sort of bare minimum things. They also have to I think I ran how to I think I ran how to saying it was reason only works on the reasonable and people are completely irrational Completely reasonable reason has no effect on them. They have no interest in it. I think that's what you're saying Yeah, and it often has a negative effect on them and it provokes anger Yeah, it provokes anger and rage because you're pointing out that they are not They're not deploying what makes us human. My god, what is it that makes us human? Why are you calling me rather than my goldfish, right? What is it that makes us human? It's our capacity to abstract That's what makes us human that that is the one defining characteristic That we see things in the world and we can abstract universal principles And the real-life examples the real-life examples of that then are people just screaming in the streets The triggering the people that like when Trump when Trump won his nominate or the presidency back in 2016 2017 People screaming literally the streets and eat the right. Well, that all comes from philosophy though This isn't just random people getting upset. It's it's the way they think and what they believe about the world, right? Well, they've been Emotionally brutalized and terrorized into thinking it's the end of the world because a nationalist gets elected And this comes all out of this World War two thing World War two was perceived to come out of nationalism and therefore The any nationalism is bad and and it's all a complete misreading of World War two But I mean that's probably a topic for another time, but this idea that Something feels bad Therefore, it's morally wrong Is not the most elevated human conception, right? This literally is at the realm of bad dog, right? You ever have a dog, right? It's the tone that matters right bad dog You know that the dog gets upset, right? And I'm not saying, you know, don't do that with your dogs and you want to be peaceful doggering as well as peaceful parenting But that's how you train animals is when they do something you don't like you provide a negative stimuli That and that's that's at the level of a circus bear in Russia That's at the level of a tiger not occasionally not biting off either see Frida Roy's head I think one of them died recently, but so Something feels bad. Therefore, it is bad. It is wrong is At the level of pre-consciousness at least pre-human consciousness So the idea oh Trump got elected that that means it's automatically bad and therefore Trump is morally wrong for making me feel bad I mean that that is I mean you can't debate with that and People unfortunately have just been programmed into Well, if it feels bad It is bad and that's that's a kind of moral hedonism that it's the same level of some guy being 400 pounds because he just likes to eat pasta and Candy, right? I mean well exercise feels bad sometime. So I'm never gonna exercise I mean we would recognize that as pure hedonism or somebody who's like well I don't really like going to the dentist. So I'm just not gonna go to the dentist We'd say that's not a wise thing. Well, no going to the dentist feels bad It's like but we don't just exist to avoid feeling bad all the time. I mean that again That's just at the level of being it's almost an insult to animals because animals can't do better than that and so this idea that oh Wow, something feels bad. Can you imagine? I mean a friend of mine got his knee crunched some years ago by in a judo competition and The rehab was brutal, you know He had a nurse come over and then the rehab on his crunched knee was just horrible and he was in tears It was stoic guy was a Scotsman rise of stoic guy and he was kind of in tears That was so painful, but nobody ever would have said well You've just got to avoid that negative stimuli and hobble around with a Twisted-up knee for the rest of your life. No, you got a you got to embrace the sock You got to embrace the hurt because a lot of times through the hurt is knowledge and wisdom and power and We've got this weirdly softy Goopy hedonistic decadent society where people can be so easily programmed into thinking because something feels bad in the Moment, it's somehow morally bad.  I want to get into we see Christians today getting persecuted left and right They're one of the main Somehow they become one of the main enemies of the woke left and the feminist and the these neo Marxist these neo-communists Why do you think that is why is Christianity such a threat to the establishment today? Why are they so why are they being attacked so all of them to not even any particular denomination? I think it's like all of them in America in the West Why is that? Christians are by far the most persecuted group in the world at the moment and once more I reiterate my apology to criticism my apology to criticism to my harsh criticisms of Christianity back in the past But so Christianity is an intensely powerful and it's it's the closest thing to philosophy that I've ever seen out of theology because Christianity Its power is is manyfold, but one of its greatest powers is its universalism the universalism of Christianity Was a huge step from the Judaism that it came out of right as Judaism that it came out of was in group preference Right the original commandment was that thou shalt not murder other Jews Jesus came along and said no no no thou shalt not murder That's universalized this and So going from tribal in-group preference to universal ethics and you combine that with the Socratic method and with Aristotelian ethics You get the amazing universal rights of the modern world and it truly is a you know We are a a Greco-Roman Christian Ethic it's universal There's no penalties for deconversion unlike Islam it's not high barrier to get in unlike Judaism and The ethics apply equally to non-christians as they do to Christians you owe the moral obligations to follow the Ten Commandments equally to non-christians as you do to Christians, which is my argument for ethics universally preferable behavior and The move from tribalism to universalism was a spark that lit The Enlightenment was the foundation of the scientific method the foundation of the scientific method is that physical principles are universal It's kind of tough to get that if you don't even have a moral Universality so the universality of Christianity is very powerful also Christianity gives people something to fight for other than immediate hedonism Which is the path to heaven Getting right with God being along with Jesus and that gives you the moral strength to go through the pain and the difficulty of opposing expansions of secular power because the goal is not Hedonistic comfort in the here and now the goal is getting to heaven and doing the right thing And of course the powers that be don't like people who stand up against what it is that they want to do So Christianity is very powerful as far as that goes Christianity also says that the morality of every human being resides within themselves and their own conscience and thus it opposes Collective judgments. I mean Marxism is entirely based upon determinism, which is anti-christian because Christianity says you have free will because of your soul and It escapes the materialism that is often used as a justification for Determinism right the justification for determinism is hey man every part of your brain every part of your consciousness is a mere physical entity and Physical entities do not have free will therefore you can't have free will because you are just a giant moist robot as Scott Adams says or a machine of Causality and and you can't right Christianity bypasses that or solves that problem Theologically by saying well you have a soul which is not material and that's where your free will comes from Because you have free will and your moral responsibility is individual not collective and you can't judge people Oh, the rich or this oh the the the capitalists are this which is what Marxism does all the time And there is no historical determinism in Christianity It's the will of the individual and Marxism is all about historical determinism. This leads to this leads to this and So Christianity is extraordinarily powerful as a tool against Tyrants and it's no accident that the admixture of Greek-A-Roman philosophy plus Christianity in Europe was the spark that lit the fire of the modern world That comes directly out of that didn't didn't occur in other countries didn't occur in other cultures didn't occur in the Middle East Didn't occur in India didn't occur in China it occurred in the West and that powerful combination of reason Socratic method universality of ethics is Estonishingly powerful and philosophically accurate morals are Universal and Christian's last thing I would say as well Christianity solves the problem of resentment like why is it that societies that succeed Self-destruct why is it that the average life of a country tends to be 250 years in the average life of a reserve currency? World reserve currency tends to be about a hundred years because a Society succeeds because it is free with freedom Comes inequality right you get economic freedom some people are gonna get super rich right it's called the Pareto principle Which is the square root of any group of individuals in a meritocracy in a productive endeavor the square root of those individuals? Produces half the value you got a company of 10,000 people 100 people will produce half the value and of those 100 people tell ten will produce half the value of that in other words Out of 10,000 people fully 25% of the entire value produced by 10,000 people is produced by only 10 people So of course they're gonna want to get their reward. Of course they want to get wealthy Of course they want to have more authority because otherwise you won't get the productivity out of those 10 people We learned that under socialism So when you get a free market you get inequality now the Marxists What they do is they say to all of the people who aren't super wealthy they say to those people You see that guy with the nice house and the beautiful wife And the great car you see that guy, do you know why he has that beautiful house? Do you know where yet why he has that beautiful wife? I feel like I'm in a talking head song in the moment The reason why he has all of that money my friend is that he stole from you. He stole for he exploited you He exploited your ancestors.  I would get back. What is yours?  He stole from you and I'm gonna go steal it back now Christianity solves that problem because Christianity says Resentment is a sin and The important thing is not the gathering of material wealth, but of spiritual wealth So the antidote to the resentment that comes from the inequality bred by the free market in Christianity is focus on getting into heaven Don't worry so much about the rich guy Oh, and by the way, the rich guy's probably a bad guy because it is easier for camel to pass through the eye of a needle And for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven So Christianity solves the problem of resentment that is so ably exploited By the Marxists because the Marxists will go in and they will wedge and turn people against each other I did a whole documentary Centering on this when I was in Hong Kong in 2019 right before COVID I went out and and joined the protesters took a couple of facefuls of tear gas quite an exciting Documentary people should check it out free domain calm forward slash documentaries and What happened when the Chinese when the Communists got into China's they they turned everyone against each other Anybody who had slightly more was portrayed as an exploiter and they fired up everyone's resentment and we all we all feel this You know we are I mean, so I think it was an old New Yorker cartoon two guys sitting in a bar And one guy turns to the other And he says how's your life going and the other guy says, you know, it's not bad But I'm still not sting Because you know when I was growing up sting was like the guy right he was like a good looking and we slender great singer great Musician town is it rich famous, you know, and it was like so, you know, everybody looks at that and says, oh, man I want to get me some of that. I want to get me some of that and What was it? I this is really off-memory that the movie taxi driver There's a bunch of people with a shard of a bathtub and they're saying oh This is when Errol Flynn had more chicks in the bath You can see the level go up and all they're doing is holding a little shard of some Hollywood orgy that they can't ever participate in People get kind of mad and how do you deal with that? How do you deal with what one answer is looking at the bell curve of IQ another answer is the Christian answer? The worst answer of all is the Marxist answer because that will shred you from top to toe Before moving off Christianity, obviously Jesus is more than a heroic figure to Christians They worship him right it's part of the holy trinity in my understanding But do you think there's an element as well of Christians viewing Jesus heroically like that dying for their sins things like that? Because when I think about the way they you know the hatred against Christians today that comes to mind He's a heroic figure. He's like the ultimate heroic figure and their entire worldview, right? There's something there. Well, I mean If he's the son of God, you kind of should worship him, right? I mean, that's the domino that would come down from that belief system And if he was the perfect moral being then, you know, the bracelets that Christians wear what would Jesus do exactly?  Well, it's to Scour for offense and try to destroy. Well, that's not a very good moral rule to have because they're so short-sighted They think somehow this is not going to be turned against them. Of course it is I mean the communists are very clear liberals are the first to get the bullet Just like in the Soviet Union, right? When they the hardcore believers of Leninus or whatever they were in the first to go once these Stalinists took over it Oh, yeah I mean because if you're willing to betray the last system, you're beginning to be willing to betray this system So people don't understand me the people who are really signing their own death warrants are the middle left The hard left, you know, they're gonna fight like like tooth and nail, right? And they'll they'll go down blazing, but you know, that's sort of soft left the middle left the the They're they're creating a system that is gonna go like them faster than just about anyone else damn Now before moving entirely off of I don't want to leave this area yet a discussion Christianity Now a lot of Christians obviously have faith they believe their beliefs are based in the absence of evidence This is cornerstone of how they my understanding of how they understand the world and how they practice their religion So in your view, what is the relationship between reason and faith and obviously too? There's there's millions of highly intelligent Christians. They have PhDs. They're smarter than me new in many cases, right? So why what is the relationship there between reason and faith and epistemology and in your view of philosophy? That's a great question and I'm gonna answer it differently than I would have answered it a couple of years ago because You got to keep growing right otherwise at no point, right? So The choice That I thought was more valid when I was younger was the choice between faith and reason So faith is not just belief without evidence so for instance, I don't have any evidence that There's not a teacup floating around Jupiter or You know, whatever a diamond floating around Jupiter I don't have the evidence that there is or isn't but I could accept that there could be right So faith tends to be belief Not in the absence of evidence but in the presence of counter evidence, right? So one of the arguments is this God all-powerful and all-knowing. Well, if he's all-knowing he can't change the future But if he's if he's all-powerfully can change the future But if he can change the future, he can't be all-knowing because he's got to know the future, right? So if he knows the future, he can't change it So he can't be both all-powerful and all-knowing. These are logical problems that is sort of atheism 101, right? Okay Now so to have faith is to say it's a divine mystery. It goes against reason and evidence I'm gonna believe it anyway now in the past. I looked at the metaphysics and the epistemology and said well, that's not philosophical That's not valid, right? Okay, and you can certainly make that case is a good case to make but What I thought Anthony when I was younger I thought ah, you know The choice is between reason and faith No, that's not actually the choice In the real world as it has played out and that was my naivete and it also is the fundamental Problem of a younger man and a younger woman is to mistake the world for yourself and to say hey man if I'm offered reason Fantastic, I'm sure that's gonna be everyone. I'm sure everyone's gonna love reason just like I do you know and You know reason is gonna be I don't know like Kate Kate Upton in her prime just about everybody's gonna want to get with that so to speak, right? But that's not the way things played out the choice is not between reason and faith the choice is between faith and cult Because faith comes with responsibility.  It is a total cult It indoctrinates people it punishes them for any kind of deviance it rewards them for compliance It trains them as you would train a rabid puppy. It is a brutal cult So here's my Yeah, my take on my take on faith Christian faith in particular my take on the Christian faith is that It does not survive the philosophical tests of metaphysics and epistemology but The faith has people land on universal ethics, which is what we need So it's the question of if you have a doctor Would you rather the doctor give you the right prescription with the wrong methodology? Or would you rather the doctor give you the wrong prescription with the right methodology? Well, I would I just I just want the right medicine I really don't care how the doctor comes about getting it. I just want the medicine that's gonna cure me and It's sort of like if someone says Oh I don't know. I think you need to take this pill because I think that you have this disease or whatever, right? Let's say you don't have this disease, but the pill cures you of some other disease that he didn't even know you have Okay, you're still cured, right? so Faith the Christian faith has you land on universal ethics It has you land on the ethics that I mean my argument for ethics says rape theft assault murder Those are the bad things double-plus on good can't they can rape theft assault murder can never be universally preferable behavior for the simple reason that theft cannot be universally preferable behavior because theft is when you Don't want someone to take your property But if theft is universally preferable behavior, everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time But if you want to be stolen from it's not theft anymore Like, you know if you if you take something from your garage and you put it out on your front lawn saying take me and someone takes it They didn't steal from you because you want them to take your property. It's not theft. You can't call the cops and say hey this guy stole Something from me that I offered up for free and said take me right and carpenters laugh at you, right? So that's a very brief explanation of the ethical theory, but that aligns with Christian ethics So if reason leads you To universally preferable behavior and the Christian faith leads you to universally preferable behavior and the supposed scientific socialist of a Marxism leads you to genocidal tyranny I Gotta throw in with the Christians because although Philosophically, it's the wrong methodology gets you to the right place and that's why both the Christians and myself tend to be opposed because the powers that be survive by pretending That there's more than one morality and we see this all the time, you know, if you are a Black group or Hispanic group you're allowed to have Entire organizations that promote your racial self-interest, right? But if you're a white person and you try and start that group you're an asset Like we see these kinds of double standards all the time when the Democrats Violently protest the results of an election when the Democrats say go out and harass people in the streets and drive them from your Communities when the Democrats say fight like hell Well, they're just passionate about their politics. Don't you know when Trump says fight for your country Protests peacefully. Well, suddenly he's gonna be impeached for inciting an insurrection, right? I mean that this gets so boring to to come up with this These point out these things all the time, but that's the opposite of universally preferable behavior That's when ethics become completely contingent upon the power-seeking group if group a does X Totally virtuous if group B does X totally evil The protests in the Capitol were a violent insurrection even though everybody in that Capitol wanted to continuation of the American system of government They disagreed with the results of the election, but they wanted a continuance of the American system of government absolutely completely and totally They just disagreed with an election not so what's not an insurrection because they didn't want to replace the government and that for sure Is is pretty clear, right? So the BLM and Tifa rioting for months hundreds of people kill billions of dollars of property damage Well, that's just that's the language of the unheard man. That's their protesters, right? But then of course if there's violence from the Trump side and the level of violence is still pretty undetermined Nobody knows what the officer died of as far as I can tell it's not been released and other people who died died from like strokes And heart attacks and medical emergencies. Yeah, it was an exciting day And at a thousand and thousands of people some people didn't have the tickers to take it Which is a real shame, but it's not quite the same as Valley Forge for God's sakes Well, then you got Ashley Babett, too The chick who was killed he's shot by a secret service or Capitol police or what we don't know who shot her They won't release that information. They won't release the circumstances. They won't release the name of the officer Nobody's been charged in the death of Syknyk the the officer who died I mean originally they said he was what bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher now It seems he was tweeting that night to his brother and died at some other point now He's being cremated you can't even do an autopsy. I mean come on so this so the the the office will all say well We've got this moral rule that's an absolute because we like this group They vote Democrat or whatever, but then if this group that doesn't vote Democrat does exactly the same thing They're totally evil. Well University preferable behavior shreds that Christianity shreds that thou shalt not bear false witness or you're going to hell Is a pretty powerful incentive to not lie your ass off in pursuit of political power But there's nothing like that in the left the pursuit of power is the thing That the power is the drug and their addicts and you all know if you've ever dealt with an addict They'll totally emotionally terrorize you they'll lie they'll steal they'll cheat because they gotta have that drug and the only ethic they have is getting that drug and that's power and Christianity Power corrupts this world is run by the devil Control over other human beings thoughts their free will and bars both them and you the possibility of getting into heaven and That's a pretty powerful ethic that goes directly against the Nietzschean will to power that characterizes the modern left Yeah, and you know I find myself in a lot of the same positions you're in my conference Increasingly as Christian speakers at it pastor as reverends just leave Peterson for example another one's Michael Foster pastor And he calls us Michael Foster the pastor calls us co-beligerents Because in the end of the day if we go to the gulags we're going together, right? The left's not gonna care.  I mean so yeah, no with that without a doubt You know our lot is in with the Christians and you know, there's a lot more of them than there are of us And you know, here's the other thing too, right? Here's the other thing too So I criticized Christianity very strongly when I was younger and unjustly to be fair and and again with the apology But you know what happened Christian groups never attacked me Never in fact, I've been invited to speak at Christian conferences and gone and happily made the case for various Christian principles So the love your enemy stuff that the you know, it's it's there. It's real. It's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly powerful Now the groups that have attacked me I Honestly can't think of a single Christian group that has attacked me even though I Have attacked Christianity now I'm a humble enough guy that that moves me to my core That the people I've attacked returned with love and invitation The people I did not attack and in some cases even defended attacked like crazy. I Mean I'm an empiricist man. I go with the facts. I go where the facts lead me and that's powerful stuff for me and and that's that's irrefutable evidence of Some pretty beautiful behavior And that comes out of the Christian commandment and that's I was deeply moving to me man. It's deeply moving to me Yeah, it's certainly a lot better than the treatment we get from the feminists and the woke and the commonest and stuff Yeah, a question. What's been your experience with advocating for peaceful parenting with regard to Christians? How do they respond? There's some debate in this obviously I've seen spare, you know What are these Christians say spare the rods for the child rights, right? There's different ways they can try to rationalize non-peaceful parenting. So what's been your experience? It's been very positive In fact, I would say that the Christians have responded the most positively of the groups that I've talked to about peaceful parenting Libertarians not quite so much and and so on, right? So I think one of the reasons for that is Well, Jesus said of course, whatever you do to the least among you So do you also do to me and the idea of spanking Jesus would be anathema and rightly so and I'm sorry for the vaguely comedic image but that's how ridiculous it would be for a Christian and It's hard to imagine to Jesus beating his own children if ever had children like yeah I can't I can't see that and also spare the rods boil the child You know, it's it's one of the challenges of translation, right?  And so spare the rods boil the child is if you do not Provide moral instruction to your children they will turn to seed and We indubitably know that this is the case because modern government schools Are indoctrinating kids and terrifying them with creepy sexual stuff and and so on, right? I mean the some of the Child sex ed in Ontario was designed by a guy who was I mean absolutely appalling with regards to his relations to two children to put it mildly so yeah, of course if you don't teach your children to be moral they would grow up without the Protuberance consciousness and moral reasoning that characterizes us as fundamentally human So spare the rods boil the child is yeah, if you don't give your children moral instruction they will grow up to be a moral power seekers because Humanity because we're just still ninety nine percent mammal and one percent human So it's pretty easy for the mammal part to overcome the human part, right? so when you make that case and When you say our forced conversions valid will know force in the inflection of an idea Inflicts only fear it doesn't implant the idea It's like beating someone with a tree and trying to turn them into a forest You got to plant it right you got to plant it and grow it and so from my standpoint and you know the circumcision stuff too Like why in earth would God create a foreskin if you were just supposed to saw it off when the baby was a couple of hours old producing lifelong trauma Most Christians don't practice circumcision only in America is it really normal? I think I could South America for example They don't do circumcision the Christians Right, right, but there's still still a lot who do and I think it isn't a front to being made in God's image, right? So I think that it's been in your view is male circumcision evil. Oh, absolutely without a doubt. It's totally evil It's totally evil now. This doesn't mean that everyone who partakes of it is irredeemably evil because there's a lot of propaganda And and all of this and and sometimes it's even done against the the choice of the parents I sort of heard this like the child is just delivered that way But morally. Oh, it's a complete violation of the non-aggression principle It is, you know hacking off a third of the penis of a newborn baby boy It is absolutely and completely and totally immoral Do you believe it's a violation of the oath doctors take? Oh, yes Do you first do no harm the foreskin not only does it not do harm the foreskin is pretty necessary for a life of It's pretty easy to clean and you couldn't imagine Cutting off a woman's breasts because she might get breast cancer down the road and even the whole you know foreskin and cancer and all that Kind of stuff is way overblown and and all of that. So oh, yeah, no without a doubt without a doubt It is an absolute brutal assault on the most vulnerable aspect of the male body and It is done without choice. It is often done without knowledge Informed knowledge of the parents and it is it is a great evil that of course in the future You know, we look back at things like they used to like hamstring Hobbled slaves rather cut the Achilles tendon of a slave who kept running away so that he couldn't run shit And we'd look at that and we say my god That was absolutely inhuman that a violation to cut a healthy part of the body for the sake of dominance and control Well, come on and and the idea that they're what aren't there Hollywood celebrities out there who use skin creams and facial creams made from the foreskin of Circumcised boys. I mean what that is that it's just straight up. I don't know. You couldn't imagine like body parts of Babies being used to to fluff up the beauty vanity of rich celebrities like you couldn't imagine a more satanic transfer of value I Don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't be surprised to be honest. I mean Pito would Hollywood has all much of insane crazies Before moving off epistemology, we're gonna have to wrap up soon, but I did want to ask you more thing about epistemology So I know you disagree with the statement that we live in a post-truth age But we do live in an age of fake news and all kinds of garbage like that For example, even in the self-improvement industry and fitness industry in the manusphere for dating coaching all the stuff Frauds are very prevalent. That's been the case for decades and that's probably gonna be the case for a long long time, right? But my question you is how can people who study the men watching the show the men who study epistemology if they take an interest in it after the Show how can epistemology help them navigate the world and their own personal lives self-improvement understanding fake news How to spot it propaganda even just like you know with trying to improve yourself, you know People selling bullshit courses and stuff. How does epistemology help an individual?  So I'm gonna take that as full permission to Yeah, so philosophy is is skepticism You know like that a whole house show, you know, like everybody lies Yeah, I mean whenever I see a claim.   It's like that bullshit, right? I mean just be Sceptical and have a very high barrier like think of the number of people you've met over the course of your life Like for people like you and I It's in the tens of thousands, right and and think of the number of close friends that you have So the vast majority of people in a sense don't make the cut and it's not because they're bad people It just might be personal compatibilities or geographical location or age or whatever it is time of life So the vast majority think of you know, if you end up getting married, right? You've probably been interested in a whole bunch of women Right and and you know of the hundreds of women you've been interested in and maybe the couple of dozen that You've dated or whatever. However, it's played out for you like one person makes that cut one person makes that cut so 99% percent of everything is crap, right except this show, which is all gold, baby Actually be skeptical about that too, right, but no I mean, this is also the Pareto principle, right? Which is most of the music that people produce even the stuff that's on the radio It's pretty bad, right and it's not gonna last the test of the time It's not gonna be hey Jude of a human or absentee or anything like that So if you see something well first of all if you see something that's too good to be true It is right, but whenever somebody comes to you with something Especially if they're new like if they've built up credibility with you over time like I've been doing this for 15 years I think I got a pretty good reputation. I think I've worked pretty hard to earn it So it doesn't mean believe everything I say It's just mean you gotta you gotta let your guard down after a while, right?  Yeah, hopefully that gets some credibility. I can't control that in the audience I can control what I do, but not what people do with what I do but Yeah, it's just don't you see something you hear something bullshit, right?  Somebody comes to you and says oh you do a lot of talk like they're online they come to you And they say oh, that's a lot of talk. What are you gonna actually do about it?  Yeah, or you know, whatever you see That that's going on in the media. Oh, yeah, I just I mean I don't believe any of it I mean I don't believe any of it and that doesn't mean that there aren't certain people who've earned my trust over time It doesn't mean that everything is a lie, but I'll do Investigations is certainly something like the capital right first 24 hours believe nothing I mean, maybe there's some truth in it and you certainly can believe your own eyes But yeah, just don't don't believe any of it some some someone offers you this is a foolproof way To bed women. It's like well first of all You're just making more feminists, right?  So don't do that and be even if somebody makes some claim like that It's almost certainly not true because you know, it's one thing I've noticed about these dating coaches They're all pretty good-looking guys They all got great hair, you know, that's why I want the only reason I'm not a dating coach by the way But yeah, yes, it's true.  Yeah.  Oh, it's the universe. No, it's not its gonads It's not the universe. It's giving you stuff. It's male hormone is giving you stuff So yeah, just assume that that nothing is true until proven otherwise and but then allow yourself to build up trust with people It's a very logical approach to life. In fact, I think it would be the pinnacle approach to life, right? People making positive claims you have to assume that they need to prove those before you accept them But in our age, it's not how people think last question on epistemology. I promise What is the relationship if any between epistemology how we know things, right? And abusive relationships with BPD woman and or men if you're a girl So a personality disorders basically is there an attack there from those kind of people or is there what's the connection? Yeah, that's it's a very great insight Anthony It's very very well phrased and very very fertile ground so to speak so abusive relationships are fundamentally attacks upon epistemology Because that's what gaslighting is right so gaslighting is it comes from an old movie where a guy tried to make a woman crazy by Constantly interfering with her perception of reality telling her things weren't true that were and were true that weren't so In relationships that I've had in the past that were dysfunctional The woman would say something it'd be kind of shocking something negative or whatever and then You'd bring it up at some later point and she'd be like I never said that I Never said that now.  There were no cell phones You couldn't record anyone but let's say you record it and then you play it back Then she'll say well, I said it but it was you who made me said it made me say it You're responsible for my bad behavior. And so it's an attack upon your your capacity to process reality and if the woman like when if you yell at the woman Then you're an abuser, but if the woman yells at you She's passionate and you made her do it Right that that's an attack on universality. That's obviously a straight-up appeal to hypocrisy It's also Darva right deny attack reverse victim order. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so so when when people Attack your capacity to process reality They are attacking the most fundamental aspect of of who you are as a human being because if you can't process reality correctly You can't ever trust yourself. You can't ever trust other people.  It's like, okay. I think I'm pretty good But this all just hard one scar tissue. This is battle scars You know, this is like don't step in a bear trap because I don't have a foot, you know That's that's how vivid it is to me. So fighting for a truth and reality and against insane gaslighting Well, that was that characterized my youth.  So, you know Don't don't ever doubt like if you remember something clearly and if you you know We want to write it down. Don't ever let people talk you out of your relationship to reality It is a brutal thing to experience and it's also bad for them because it gives them too much power over you Which corrupts them further Yeah, yeah, when I had a BPD experience many years ago, not too many years ago about five years ago It ended but I analyzed it in a speech I gave called marrying Medusa. I don't know if you've seen it It's on YouTube still believe it or not It's got like half a million views on viral but I Analyze the relationship from a philosophic perspective, which is the main point of view I had then and Just I could feel immediately a studying objective is the most like this is a long-term attack on my epistemology She wanted to manipulate my view of reality I think a lot of guys in the man is fear who come out of those relationships feel much the same way But they can't articulate it.  You're the greatest.  So great We got one last question from the audience here, and then we'll wrap up Stefan Do you feel that universal truth can be fully realized apart from Christianity? Well, yeah, I mean, this is why I'm a philosopher not a theologian, right? So universal truth is something that philosophy can Absolutely bring to us. So, you know, I've praised Christianity in terms of its ethics in terms of metaphysics and epistemology There's a big challenges, right? So one of the things that had to happen for the modern world to occur was for the universe to be perceived as Objective and Universal right so that the laws of physics applied everywhere the laws of biology and evolution had to be developed and so on in other words the universe described in the Bible as a universe subject to the will and intervention of God had to be put aside for the scientific method to be Developed because the scientific method doesn't have any stars like unless there's a miracle, right? There's no asterisks there with footnotes like oh, this is the universal law unless it's a miracle So in a sense God had to be removed from the physical universe and his intervention into the physical universe for modern science And therefore the modern world to be developed and so philosophy Because it works rational philosophy works well with defining what is real defining what is true defining what is good It ends up very similar to Christian ethics, but it doesn't have that You know fairly major hiccup of the Dark Ages when Christianity was in its ascendancy and there was a fair amount of Hostility to science now It's not as great and I did a whole show with Tom Woods about this some time ago The hostility to science that's portrayed through atheists was not as strong as it is portrayed and there was a lot of support for sciences but Moving the earth from the center of the universe To orbiting the Sun moving the Sun from the center of the universe orbiting the galaxy and now there is no center of the universe whatsoever These were particular challenges to a fairly literal interpretation of the cosmology of the Bible and it did delay The development of science quite a bit. So yes, I think that universal truth is the province of Philosophy ethics has to a large degree being the province of religion and in the West Christianity And I you know fear dislodging it from Christianity because then you just get the aforementioned Hyena jackal cults that just roam around the countryside taking down anybody with a couple of grains of truth in their bag Yeah, it's almost like, you know, America in the West can't survive without Christianity I've thought a lot men objectivist of the bone similar to that one thing to you You're not objectivist. I know but no, I'm pretty much objectivist in my metaphysics and epistemology There's a parting of the ways with regards to politics and ethics because I ran was a menachist and my argument for ethics is different from I ran's and I think supports the Voluntarism that I propose as the solution to social issues. So but yeah, I mean as far as the basics of truth and reality goes I'm there wouldn't be a dime's worth a difference between me and an objectivist But can America survive in Canada in the West without Christianity it seems like the answer for the time being and for a long time is gonna be no Well, I mean, this is this is the old question. Do you push forward? Do you circle back? Right? This is a big question in society. Do you push forward? Do you circle back? Is there a reasonable situation by which we can bring? Tens of millions of people who are agnostic or atheist back into Christianity I don't know that there's a particular path that way. Do we push on to philosophy? Well, that's certainly been my goal and all of that and We certainly can't survive without truth and you were well, but you know for advocating philosophy You were digitally murdered in public on the internet. I would say so. Yeah, but that's that's not always the worst PR for a philosopher So with Socrates more physically, right? But you know one of the reasons we remember him, so Sophan's been really great at me in the show today. We're a little bit past once we'll wrap up I appreciate your time Everybody make sure you check out freedom main calm check out Hong Kong fight for freedom of the documentaries He has on his website here and connected them on all tech. It's really big obviously. He's not on YouTube anymore He's on bit shoot. He's an odyssey is in library. He's on rumble. He's on gab. He's on mines Any of the platforms are missing parlor, but it's dead for now, right? Yeah, who knows if that's ever coming back but Yeah, all of the stuff is listed there and I would really recommend and if people want to help out the show You know, it's been a rough year. It's not essential. It's been a rough year for everyone free demand calm forward slash donate Great and your books are on Amazon right most of them. They're free, but also an Amazon Yeah, so the art of the argument you can get at the art of the argument calm That's the only one I charge for the rest of them are all free. You can get the art of the argument on Amazon You can also get it on audible.com Oh last thing too. I've got a great audiobook. It's a novel I wrote many years ago about the rise of political violence across Europe the 1920s in the 1930s. It's a great book It's totally free and you can get that at free domain calm forward slash almost because almost is the name Of the book and I'm immensely pleased with that as a novel And if you want to my my original side was artistic not even business or philosophical I was in the national theater school. I took writing courses and wrote novels in place So if people want to see the artistic side of me and I think experience a really great novel for free I hope that you will check it out Sounds good. All right. Thanks man. And thanks for a couple of plugs at the end. It's the only place I'm working with these days. All right Thanks for watching episode 135 today. We'll see you next Saturday Before you leave the video today hit like and leave a comment comments help a lot It's like in the like button 10 times. So I appreciate it. See you then it's to fun Hope to see you back on the show sometime. Thanks man. Take care


Tricia Payness just opened up about self-sabotage and going to therapy and all sorts of stuff. And there's so, so, so much we can take away from this video. So let's chat about it. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution.  Isn't that cool? So make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell, baby. But anyways, so, oh my God. Like, I never thought, I never thought in a million years that I would say this, but I am so proud of Tricia Payness. Like, I am not, I'm just not a fan of her content, like, just in general, but, you know, I just made a video the other day about her and Jason Nash and like all sorts of stuff. And like, this, this to me, this video is the best video I've ever seen of hers. Like, I cannot believe it. I didn't know what I was getting into, but like, you know, I saw the topic of her video about self-sabotage and, you know, why she keeps ruining her own relationships. I'm like, okay, let's see. So anyways, basically, Tricia talks about how, you know, she just talked to her therapist and she uses better help online therapy, this amazing, affordable online therapy app that I am supported by as well. So make sure that you go down in the comment section. And if you can relate to some of the topics that we talk about in this video, like, give therapy a try. And I don't, I don't care if it's through better help or a therapist in your area or anything like that. Tricia did a way better job marketing better help than I did, but she talks about how like, just the convenience factor of it. Like, Philip DeFranco talks about it too. Like, my girlfriend uses it and you can, you can call them, you can text them, you can video chat with them and all, and they're so readily available and they have a questionnaire that you fill out. So they link you up with the right therapist. And they're all 100% licensed as well. So if you can relate to any of this stuff, like, make sure you check out the description below, go sign up for better help. It's very cheap. They have a sliding scale. And so that basically, if you don't make that much money, they don't charge you that much money. And it's really cool. Like, just give it a try. Like, I'm so proud of Tricia for doing this. Like, I, I don't know if I've seen this kind of authenticity from her.  You know what I mean? But like, there's this glow about her. And it's this glow that you get by working with a therapist. And she did a great job in this video talking about the benefit of working with a therapist because we all have people who we talk to, right? Friends or family or whoever it is. But like, with a therapist, you get this completely objective point of view. Like, they don't know you. They don't know your significant other. They don't know your family or anything. It's just you too, right?  I've mentioned before, I keep people around in my life who tell me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear. And a lot of people do not have that in their life when it comes to friends, when it comes to family. So a therapist, they aren't there to knock you down, but they're there to bring some things to your attention that maybe nobody's telling you about and you might not even realize it. So Tricia talks about how that's one of the best aspects of therapy. And she's talking to them and one of the things that she mentions is something that I called in the last video, no props to me, but when I made the video about Tricia and Jason just a couple of days ago, I'll link it up in the description, is like, Jason mentioned a few times, like, we should go to therapy, we should go to therapy, we should go to therapy. And I was saying, they both have individual problems that they need to work on and then they should do couples therapy and Tricia talked about that. We just, we need help. And together we're going to go, they also offer couples counseling too. So together we're gonna try and do this, but we each individually how to work with a therapist, I think first or counselor first, to kind of know what we want and who we are and what we're feeling before we can come together. Like they're both going to be working on themselves and then they're going to do couples therapy. Like that is so, so, so huge. And it's one of the reasons I'm so happy for them.  And I need to check that out. But anyways, so Tricia talks about self-sabotage, right? And she talks about how, you know, she doesn't want to get hurt. Like she's guarded, she's protected. And what she'll do is when she starts to get too close to somebody, she will start self-sabotaging as a way to force them out of the relationship. So that way she doesn't get hurt. And can you relate to this? Cause I know that I can. I've done this a million times in the past. I talked to my clients about this at the treatment center I was working at. This, you know, it was part of self-seeking behavior. We do things like maybe we're a jerk to the other person to force them out of the relationship. And we have to look inside and look deeper and see why do we do this? You know what I mean? And Tricia got some clarity in like, she's afraid of getting hurt. So she's trying to push people away and stuff.  And she tries to bring that personality of hers into the relationship. And what she realizes, even though I don't think her therapist said it, but I tell this to the clients I work with, is very selfish what she was doing to Jason, right? She wasn't thinking about his situation. What she is primarily thinking about is how it affects her. And these are two different people with two different scenarios. One of the reasons my girlfriend and I work out so well is because we're constantly looking at each other's situation and trying to, you know, make that thing work. You know what I mean? Like, for example, I have a son.  Like, but we're constantly working around that kind of stuff and she respects what I have going on in my life. I respect what's going on in her life. So this is a huge thing. So as far as self-sabotage goes, they're like, she brought up a very good point about being afraid of being hurt. So she'll purposely start acting like certain ways to push the other person away. And there's another video I can totally make about this is other people self-sabotage more because, I don't know, they're afraid of being cheated on or afraid of these other things. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which is really interesting as well. By the way, I don't know who Trisha's therapist is, but I love her. I love Trisha's therapist. Or did she say she had a guy therapist? I don't know. That's besides the point. Doesn't matter. But anyways, what her therapist talked to her about too is, is how you can't bring baggage from your last relationships and put them on the new person like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I cannot tell you like, this is gonna go into my broken picker playlist. For those of you who didn't know, I have an entire relationship playlist. So I'm gonna put this video in there. But like, so many people do this. I know that I did this a lot. I used to do this a lot. Like, one of my first or second relationships in my life, back in high school, I was cheated on. I was hurt in one of the most you can be hurt in a relationship is when the other person cheats on you, right? And that was in high school. And I carried that kind of hurt into the next relationship, next relationship, next relationship. And then you carry that with you. And then in the next relationship, more bad stuff happens. So now you're carrying even more baggage. You bring that into the next relationship. Now you're carrying even more. You bring that into the next one. So her therapist helped her talk about like, do not punish him for things that your exes did. Like, absolutely. This is another way that people will sabotage themselves is by keeping guarded, keeping suspicious and stuff like that because of previous relationships. That's why when I talk about relationships with you guys, I keep telling you to like be more mindful of who you're dating. You know what I mean? Especially if you're looking for someone to fill the void in you, you lower your standards way too much. You know what I mean? So you are more likely to date the person who might cheat on you or talk to other men or women behind your back and stuff. So like Trisha, it was brought to Trisha's attention that she had a lot of very irrational fears. And this is a big deal. Like it's important for a therapist to tell you which of your fears are rational, which are irrational. You know what I mean? Especially for anybody who struggles with anxiety, therapy can help you out a lot because like anxiety is awesome because it keeps you safe, you know? People with anxiety have a much longer life than people who don't have anxiety. I've talked about this in other videos. But there's a point where it becomes irrational fears. Like for example, like agoraphobia where people are afraid to go outside and things like that. Social anxiety, a lot of that is based around irrational fears. So it's good to have an objective person because here's another example. Like a lot of us, I made a video about this when I was talking about James Charles, like we get defensive, you know?  Think about the defense that you get in. Like what? You're saying my fears are irrational? But Trisha mentioned how her therapist helped validate her feelings and that really helped her out. You know what I'm saying? Because therapists, like I'm actually in school right now to become a counselor. And like there's certain ways that, you know, we're trained to talk to people. You know what I mean? And not everybody is trained that way. But anyways, the last thing I wanna talk about is this smile Trisha has, this clarity that she has, you know, the things that she's gonna work on, that is all amazing. But I really, really hope she sticks with it for at least six months. What I see a lot of people do is they like talk to a therapist once or maybe if it's in recovery, they go to a meeting once or whatever it is and they think, oh, okay, cool, I'm done. All my problems are solved. I know enough, I know everything. Like no, it's an ongoing process.  So it's important to work with a therapist for the long term and really like see how you're improving and what things that you still have. Because at least by the end of six months, and some people do it much longer than six months, at least by the end of six months, you've kind of narrowed the scope of what you need to work on. And you start to see improvements and things like that. So I'm really happy for Trisha. I'm excited to see how her and Jason's relationship changes because you can really tell when someone's actually working on themselves. You know what I mean? But anyways, let's do this down in the comments below. Are you somebody who has self-sabotaged in the past in relationships or are you somebody who brings in baggage from previous relationships into new ones? All right, let's have a discussion down below in the comments, okay? Also, and don't forget, if you can relate to anything that I was talking about in this video, go ahead and give BetterHelp online therapy a try. The link is down in the description below. I also always put it in my pinned comment.  But that's how I got for you today. So if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you're new here, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos. And a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. And if you would like to check out some sweet, rewired soul merchandise, go ahead and click or tap right there, all right? Thanks so much for watching. Quit self-sabotaging, and I'll see you next time.