No One Can Offend You Without Your Permission with Lou Marinoff

Welcome to the first-ever recording of the Titan Evolution Podcast. I’m here today with my co-host, Carol Carpenter, and our first guest, Lou Marinoff. Lou is an internationally bestselling author, and he is a philosophy professor at the City College of New York. based out of Harlem. Lou, how the hell are you?

I’m just fine. So far, Travis. We’ll see how it goes when the show develops, but it’s a great honor to be with Carol and yourself, especially since this is the first of your new series. Congratulations on launching it. Let’s get it off the pad and into orbit.

Yeah, I couldn’t think of a better first guest to get us all started. Lou has some crazy stories since this is our first show and this might be your first time listening. We’re not kidding. -Doing your true, no-holds-barred, explicit-rated self. If the guests don’t bring it, we’re not going to. So, we’re happy to be here today. Carol, what questions do you have for Lou?

Well, Lou, I’d like to hear a little bit about your background, because I hear you are a professor.

Yes, that’s the truth. I’ve been a professor for about 30 years now, mostly at City College, and for 28 of those years at City College. It’s been a wonderful career and a great institution, but I’ve led an interesting life. I was a musician for many years. I was a table hockey champion in Canada in my youth, which is not easy. I was Canadian Open champion for the second time in a row and eventually won the US Open in my 60s. So, I’ve had a second career as a table hockey champion. It’s a great sport. We could talk about that. I write books. I’ve always written thanks to my mom, my late mom, and she encouraged me from a very early age to write and just publicly speak.

So, I did a lot of that and developed some skills. Who knows? I love the no holds barred approach, Travis. On a good day, this is a philosophy and a no-holds-barred subject. So, we have a basic fit here, Caroline said. I’ve been a musician and classical guitarist. a music teacher or a musician lifelong devotee, not only of Western philosophy but of Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, and Buddhism. So, we could talk. About that too, I gather you’re from Taiwan originally, is that right?

Yes, I am yes.

I’ve been to Taiwan; I have friends. I have friends there also.

Yeah, my family is still there, so yeah, I do get a chance to go back. But COVID put a stop to that. Right now, I think there’s just a 10-day hold, but there was a three-week hold. I know the government mandated 21 days in a hotel room, can’t leave, and I was like, I can’t do that.

That’s worse than Canada.

And it was worse in Canada.

I hadn’t been back in about 2 years, and when I did go back eventually, they had a draconian policy also. I had to get my VAX. I had to upload everything. I registered on two websites, got to the border, presented them with the hard copy with everything I had already uploaded, and then they said OK. But here’s a randomized COVID test. We’re giving it to everybody. All randomized tests, you know. Everybody gets one randomly, and that’s good. Sorry. I got that right, and then I had to see some nurse online who watched me very carefully. Do all that you’ve done. You’ve been there and done that.

Well, my boyfriend from Canada, yes, I’ve already done that, and you have to get the test 72 hours before it.

That’s right.

You missed it, and I missed it by an hour. They questioned me at the border and said, “Where were you?” Were you getting gas? What were you doing? I said, “Well, I just got gas.” I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t; I did expose myself. After about an hour of waiting, they finally let me go. I knew it was incredible, so I had to make sure. The next time I got the test was within 72 hours. By the time I reached the borders,

You’re lucky they let you in. I know people who were turned back because they were an hour late. It’s just a bureaucratic checkbox. Oh, you’re an hour overdue. Come back another time. I mean, they don’t care. They are just; they are carrying out orders.

That argument is very bad, but you’re lucky they let you in. Canadians have a harder time getting in. I was only going for the day when I went in November. I went for the day. I told them I was going for the day, and they said, “Here’s the random test.” It takes two days to get the results, so I didn’t want to wait. I could have got myself. Disqualified, right then? And there I asked, “You know?” Travis, the question I’m going to ask is I wanted to say hello to the immigration agent. I said, “Well if I test positive, you will not know for two days.” I’m going to be back home in New York. You’re going to make me come back and be quarantined. And we’re going to do it. I’m going to I’ll be gone for one day, but I’ll be back the next day. What is the point of taking a test that takes two days to know the result?

There is no logic. There was simply none. Everything makes sense.

Well, I don’t know what. I don’t know what people expected, right? This is the first time the world has collectively acted against a worldwide virus. There was no chance we would get it right. No chance. Everything was going to make sense. And there’s no way. We were all going to have the same policies and procedures. I just got a message from my good friend in New Zealand saying they finally opened up in New Zealand, so now he can start bringing in veterans and people for travel. Still, we’ve got a pretty interesting mix here because of Carol. Is ABC American-born or Chinese? But she owns her motorcycle race team.

And really, she’s Taiwanese.

I’m a typical white guy from northern Minnesota, and Lou is a Canadian-born Jewish man who had to leave the country. Why did you want to get away from Canada? What was going on in the university scene up there? You get kicked out.

Well, no, they would have had I stayed any longer, but I basically took their plan and became a political refugee instead.

They gave him the boot.

You will have noticed the tie-in between COVID and the political question going back a few years. Is this Travis? Yeah, the world is in a completely novel place with COVID, and we still don’t know where it comes from or are not allowed to ask. We don’t know a lot of things, and we’ve never had the government just circle its wagons, and it’s wrecked. The whole sort of emergent global village, the unit, and all the potential good things happening got put on the back burner. And you’re right; no one knows. I am still unsure of how to deal with it properly. And hopefully, we’ll have learned a lot from this, and we won’t have a worse one.

You know, this was hardly transmissible, but it’s killed so many people, but it wasn’t even as fatal as it could have been. If you think back 100 years ago to the Spanish flu, which killed 50 or 60 million people, that must have been the worst nightmare for them. But this is a bad thing, and we’re just very fortunate to be coming out of it now and resuming some form of normalcy. But as a philosopher, I’d have to say there isn’t going to be a new normal. There’s going to be a new abnormal. And that ties in with New Zealand, which you mentioned.

We’ve noticed some of the formerly freest countries in the world have become the most repressive overnight. If you look at the Anglo-phone social democracies, I won’t name names aside from Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. For a long time, they were the freest among the free. But they became the most repressive. In their poll, they may have been well-intentioned in trying to protect their populations, but they went over the top regarding the mandates and punishments and what they’ve been meting out to people. It’s beyond the pale. We had a taste of it here, too, as it went state by state.

So why am I a political refugee from Canada?

I was very fortunate. I’m middle class enough to have had a good education up there. We don’t have private schools up there. We don’t have the Ivy League. We have the big three: McGill University, the University of Toronto, and the University of British Columbia. That’s our carnival Ivy League, but they’re public, and the admission criterion used to be merit.

Everybody gets a K-12 education in Canada and based not on anything but your ability to demonstrate that you’re a good student, you could get admitted. And Canadian universities are, by and large, excellent in that way. So, I was fortunate to win a Commonwealth scholarship to do a Ph.D. in London; I did my Ph.D. at University College, another historic place; and was trained to be a kind of custodian of Western civilization. I mean, my vision was to preserve the best that’s been thought and written and transmit it to the next generation, and maybe to add a few crumbs of knowledge to the mountain. I mean, that’s the ambition.

So, I came back but things got very politicized, as because it happened earlier in the US with affirmative action and preferential hiring. Reverse racism and reverse sexism. All that stuff that happened here. The same, much more pervasively, happened in Canada too. Fortunately for Canadians, we don’t have the legacy of slavery that exists in the US. The Freedom Railroad ended at the border. A lot of African Americans and Caribbean Americans made it across Canada and didn’t encounter that. Do you know the history of slavery?

But, in essence, this meant that feminists were first in line for compensation. They hijacked the Canadian Philosophical Association in the early 90s. Just when I went on the job market and essentially mandated a raise, this is all a quota system so that they would guarantee professorships to women with Ph.D.’s regardless of their publishing record, teaching experience, or anything else just because of the numbers game. Down here, it’s called under-representation.

We could talk about that later. That’s a tremendous myth that needs to be busted. OK, but anyway, I was the wrong gender and color. So, strike two and strike three. I opened my mouth because that’s an occupational hazard for philosophers. And I told them this is plain wrong. I wasn’t the only one, and I was not the only one. That’s all.

From this, an education system has to be based on merit, just like in professional sports, which has to be based on how well you play the game, right? I don’t think the fans care much about the shirt’s color. Who is the race car driver or basketball player? You could do that. Well, if you could perform it at a high level, the fans would pay to watch you, and everybody wins from that, right? And yet, the US has repeatedly produced world-class sports and world-class Olympic teams precisely because it’s not been successfully politicized. But everything else has been OK.

So, I’m just very fortunate that I was able to compete in the US market since I was. I walked out of the Canadian market because it was too rigorous. It’s not easy to get a job as a professor. There were more than 300 applicants for the position at City College that year. I’ve seen ads when I was a chair where we had as many as five or 600 applicants for one job. So, you read everything. You look at everyone’s application. You have read the writing sample. It’s a huge commitment of time. I made the short and the long lists of 20, and then the shortlist of five. It goes on for months, and then five people get invited to campus for a job talk, and then the committee meets and sheds blood in private, and they eventually offer it to somebody. I was fortunate to get the offer, but it was based on what I could contribute to the learning community and on a solid track record. If society works that way, then everybody wins. If it works based on politicization and quota systems, everybody loses. Oh, I agree with that.

My son, when he was attending college, was given a project, and he had to interview people that were entrepreneurs; he interviewed me, and some of the things that I said were not OK for him to repeat. In the classroom, I said being a female entrepreneur is tough, and I got up. But I’m leaving because I despise it. I say this, and I go. I don’t know how your university is going. I feel bad about it, but it’s tough for everybody. It’s just not because I’m female. It’s because it’s tough for everybody. And he goes. I can’t repeat that. And I go, “Why is it true?” And he goes. They’re not going to want to hear it. And how sad is it these days that we can’t say the truth, that it has to be?

Well, this is where the Soviet Union failed. It’s where Communist China failed and had to open up economically. Not politically, but comically, because they also saw that collectivist policies are Marxist-Leninist policies; however, if you adopt them, they fail because they do not create opportunity; they create equality in the sense of equality for disenfranchised and impoverished.

This is really what you said. Is it important if we can’t speak the truth in class? If we can’t, then we are doomed.

The Soviets starved millions of people to death because they tried to grow a second crop of winter wheat based on the Minister of Agriculture’s theory. Lysenko was an anti-Darwinist because Darwin was politically incorrect. OK, and no, it’s true, and they adopted a politically correct theory, but they failed, and now people starve. And if you starve people physically, your country will collapse. If you’re going to starve people intellectually, your country collapses in slower motion but comes to the same bad end.

What worries me is the children and what they’re being taught, because this is our future generation. That worries me.

It should worry you plenty, and when it worries enough people, Carol, I have a remedy for this. For example, I have a few remedies. One remedy for sensitivity training is what I call “insensitivity training.” I’ve developed a workshop, and I teach people how to be insensitive. So, they can walk out into real life and not be triggered by everything they know. It’s an unpleasant thing.

I got censored last year. A couple of years ago, I’ve been censored all my life by academic publishers because they’re all I updated a book that they invited me to publish, a scholarly book on human conflicts, and they read the updated manuscripts and said, “Lou, we can’t publish this.” It makes us uncomfortable. Some of your views make us very uncomfortable, and I wrote back and said, “These are the editors of a very good publishing house.” And I said to them, “Look, it’s not my job as a philosopher to make anybody comfortable.” It’s my job to make people think. And since you stated that you want to be more comfortable, you should consider checking into a palliative care unit because it is their job to make you comfortable.

You know you said in an interview that we had before this one. You said, “No one can offend anyone against their will.” What exactly do you mean?

Well, I’ll get to that in a second. Let me finish if I may; this anecdote is for Caroline because it’s on point.

Please, please, please.

There were a lot of pushbacks against the Canadian hiring policy that favored women, and then they ran out of qualified women. So, they started hiring unqualified women. Then they started importing them from the US in violation of Canadian immigration laws, which said you have to have qualified Canadians first, and the whole thing is like that.

So, I wrote a novel. My farewell gifts are counted, and by the way, I’m very grateful. In the end, I was a little upset at the time, but it came to a much better end. Being in New York City was not a punishment for a philosopher. It was a great place to be. And so, I’ve become naturalized. I became a dual citizen.

And even if you do, Travis, you have no way of knowing. You don’t need to know, but I’m going to tell you it was shocking that one of the last steps in the naturalization process, one of the last steps, is that you have to sign a declaration of loyalty to protect and defend the American Constitution, just as though you were in the military or the judiciary or any other thing. You have to demonstrate you give your word to respect, protect, and defend, and I do. I love it. It’s a great constitution.

And then I had to sign another piece of paper right behind that one, and that piece of paper said, and I quote, I had to sign an oath saying, I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party. You don’t know this because you’re American and to become naturalized, this is a hangover from McCarthy, right? This is going back to the 1950s, and I wanted to say something to them. Again, I had every opportunity to be disqualified. I wanted to say it’s too late. They’re running the universities. What are you talking about? Excuse me for talking about closing the barn door after the horses bolted. They think they’ve Carol; you said you don’t like how your children are being educated.

They’re not; they’re being brainwashed. It’s political indoctrination. It’s not an education.

It’s going to be a disaster. I used to run a public forum, a free public forum in Manhattan once a month in a big Barnes and Noble bookstore. I did it as a public service. We attracted 40–50 people every month, and it was open.

Sometimes we picked the topics; sometimes we just had a free-for-all. It’s in New York City. What do people want to discuss? It’s really important to bring philosophy into public spaces. so that people can air their views without fear, and you can’t do that within corporate rules. You can’t do that on campus. You could do it in a bookstore.

At least back then. And one night, we were talking about the truth, because that’s a perennially important topic, right? You mentioned the truth. You can’t speak the truth anymore. OK, what is the truth? Let’s be clear. So, we had that discussion, and someone said that truth is always relative, right? Truth is relative.

So, I asked them,

How much is 1 + 1 if all truths are relative? How much is 1 + 1, right?

And some people said two.

And listen, if it weren’t true, then the cell phones wouldn’t work. Zoom wouldn’t work. We couldn’t get to the moon and back if one plus one were random; we wouldn’t be able to get very far.

So, but this young lady, who was very well educated, piped up and said “no, no, no.” She said, “I’m not going to agree.” I’m not going to say that 1 + 1 is true. She said it’s not. I’m not going to. I don’t want to say that, and I said, “Why in heaven’s name wouldn’t you want to agree?” That’s 1 + 1 is 2. This is a very well-educated young lady, and she said, “I would not wish to offend anybody who, let’s say, believes that 1 + 1 is three or something else.” So, by saying 1 + 1 is 2, I might offend someone who believes that 1 + 1 is three.

I looked at her. I asked her where she got her degree.

I won’t name the institution because it’s brown.

It’s quite an expensive, upscale place. And I just said to her one thing: they taught you this, and the professors probably believed this, but do you understand the irony that your parents paid a small fortune for intuition and that the bursar’s office at Brown counted every penny? And if they were one penny short, they would have invoiced her for the penny. Do they know what one plus is? And they know what $60,000 a year is times four. They know all this, and they’re not shy about billing your parents. So, you can be taught nonsense. So, wait. People are paying a small fortune to have their children turned into potted plants. It’s bad gameplay.

Oh yeah, I just wish people understood. It is about contribution, and with these kids coming into the world, in professions that they have these ideas. It worries me because they don’t know how to contribute.

Right, and I’m not saying that women shouldn’t be philosophers. Don’t get me wrong either. Back to that, we happen to have on faculty an excellent philosopher of physics. We wanted a philosopher of physics.

It’s a big topic. It’s really interesting and not for everybody. But it’s a really interesting subject. And we searched for the best philosopher physics we could find because that’s how we do things. We’re a little bit swimming against the current, and we hired the best philosopher of physics that we could find. And guess what? She happens to turn out to be a woman, and that’s great. That’s falling too. That’s a plus, but we hired her because she’s really good as a philosopher of physics. That’s the reason why. She’s on top of TI. Merritt is back to merit.

This country was based on merit. That’s why we became the greatest country in the world in so many respects, because of meritocracy and nothing else of meritocracy and nothing else. Opportunity. And here’s the big thing: equal opportunity is necessary. It should be on merit. I was brought up as a classical liberal. I believe in equal opportunity very strongly, but the equal opportunity will never give you equal outcomes if we all run a race. My friends, we can’t all finish first. If we all finished first, it was rigged. It doesn’t prove anything.

I watched them try to do that in what was the movie? It was about four days after Ford versus Ferrari at the end of the Le Man’s race.

They had to slow the leader down to let everyone else catch up, and the goal was to finish all three simultaneously, even coordinate. They couldn’t make it happen. The Ford GT was their first foray into the real world. The big race of Le Mans lasts 24 hours. Ferrari had been on top for years. They called back this guy, who was clearly in the lead and deserved it.

Did the engineers conduct the necessary testing for the R4 GT to finish one, two, and three, but not eleven? And one all at the same time, and because they pulled him back for some strange track rule that I’m not familiar with, perhaps Carol is, but they tried to finish all at the same time, and the guy lost his world record and wasn’t even considered the first because he had to pull back.

Oh no, there isn’t. I can’t even keep up with the Hall of Fame. There is no rule.

I don’t know what the rule was. Someone out there knows what the rule is, though, right? This thing is to be like Travis. I can’t believe you didn’t know the role, but Lou, you mentioned being PC and a few other things. What’s this thing with PCs, and how can no one be offended against their will?

Yeah, the fact that this is now super important that I’ve been reading, I mean writing rather than teaching my students about the has been for a long time. And I’ve tried. I’ve made a couple of YouTube videos. If they got popular enough, they’d be yanked. For sure, they’d be pulled. They’re still up there because they don’t have enough visitors, but here’s the bottom line.

In a civilized society, it doesn’t have to be the US constitution; it could be British law. It could be Canadian. law. It could be Taiwanese law, but this is civilized. Societies are one of the things that make them civilized. Is that they don’t allow citizens to go around harming each other? OK, there’s a remedy. People don’t go out to harm each other on a good day. And if somebody harms somebody, that person, who has perpetrated the harm, is accountable to the justice system for having done it. And there’s going to be some kind of remedy offered to society; there’s going to be a criminal prosecution or a civil prosecution, or both. It is common in this country for harm-doers to be brought to justice and made, in some sense or other, to make some kind of payment back to society or the person harmed. We just don’t tolerate it, and for the most part, if you are harmed, you are an unwilling or unwitting victim of the harm you know. You didn’t consent to be harmed, and under most civilized laws, you cannot consent to be harmed.

They used to have consent to be harmed. They called it dueling. If a bunch of army officers was sitting around the table and said, “You offended me,” or “I demand satisfaction, let’s go out and we’re going to try and kill each other.” They had rules for that, to Marquita, Queensbury, or whatever the dueling pistols or swords were, but that got abolished eventually because they realized this was not a good idea.

It’s very funny that the French and I speak French fluently. I’m very familiar with French culture, but I’d like to warn you that they can be very thin-skinned and have a tendency to lose. They were the first to abolish dueling in the military because they lost more officers in duels than in combat. Left to their own devices, they were knocking each other off like there was no tomorrow.

Every time someone looked the wrong way, if someone was a duel, they lost at least one mathematical genius that way. Galois, who founded group theory, is a huge branch of mathematics. And he wrote in his diary that he had to fight a duel the next morning. He thought he was going to lose. He had a bad feeling about this one, and so he tried to write some notes that mathematicians have been deciphering for decades. He had to work out what he didn’t have time for because he was killed in the duel. So, that was not a good idea, and that was the last time you could, in an institutional sense, get into a driver’s race. If someone is driving a Formula One car, they’re consenting to die too.

We sign waivers like crazy.

You’ve got to sign it. I’m sure more than on the closing of a house. These days, the lawyers are up to your knees deep. So, you’ve got to sign all this. And if you enter a boxing ring or participate in any professional sport where things can go wrong, you could be seriously injured or even killed. You’re going to sign off, so that’s the end.

Military service is the same thing.

So, suppose two people in a bar decide to go out and duke it out in the parking lot, and one of them gets hurt and wants to sue the other, and the guy says, hey, he agreed to fight me. It’s not. It’s not a defense. You cannot harm someone while also harming the person who was harmed. It’s not a defense for you, even if they say I consented. You’re familiar with him and how to fight him. You can’t do that.

That makes me wonder about extracurricular bedroom activities because some things are getting a little bit dicey. Like weapons, whips, chains, handcuffs, tying people up, suffocation, and fantasies. Strangling, like all sorts of just bizarre stuff. And I’m saying bizarre because it’s just not everyday conversation. Not that it’s weird, but like I, I suppose. I don’t know if there’s a waiver that covers that kind of behavior as well.

Well, Travis, you sound like an expert. You probably ought to know. I mean this stuff, but I’ve heard about all this BFM stuff. I go with John Stuart Mill, who wrote the most famous book. It’s called “long liberty.” It’s an essay on liberty and eloquent defense of liberty, and he said that’s the only place we could draw the line.

John Stuart Mill.

The greatest English philosopher. He also served in Parliament. He walked the walk. He read the talk and his essay on Liberty. He is one of the greatest defenders of individual liberty in English, and I urge you to read it. And in it, he enunciates what he calls the harm principle, and he specifically states that the only mandate a government has to restrain someone is to either put you in handcuffs, lock you up, or restrain you. The only reason a state could restrain somebody is if that person is harming others, threatening to harm others, or credibly planning to harm others. Then the state has indeed. But otherwise, if you’re not harming somebody, they would say no, they would say if you’re having fun in the bedroom, you’re both consenting adults or however many you are, and you want, you want to get leather goods, or you want whatever it is.

What are you doing?

No judgment.

No judgment, no judgment.

I’m just saying that my parties are way more than two people.

If you’re consenting, if you are an adult, a consenting adult, and you want to roughhouse in the bedroom, that is within reason. If that line was crossed, there would be a line, and people would be harmed.

They’re getting harmed now by gender therapies. It’s getting harder because I’m being brainwashed to have gender dysphoria. That’s real, irreversible harm, and the state is doing it, and the state should be the one who’s stopping it from being done. So, OK, that’s harm. And there is also inadvertent or impersonal harm. I mean, God forbid you could be struck by lightning; you could have an accident.

You lose control of your car on an icy road and there is snow and ice up there. Or in the winter, people flip their vehicles or whatever. That’s harm. And it’s not that someone did it. It could be an accident. There are many ways of being harmed, and in any case, you were the victim, and you probably didn’t consent to it. You probably didn’t wish it on yourself, or at least that’s the thing about harm. No offense is in a different category because harm is given, and the offense is taken. That’s the formula. If I say something you don’t like, you decide to take offense. That’s your choice, not mine.

Hold on, you mean when you’re saying these nasty things because you’re a nasty person? No little molecules float on your sound waves, and then they hit the person, and that thing just ripples offense through my body. That’s not how. It works.

Go into a lab and try to detect it. This is brilliant. You’re a brilliant empiricist. Travis, you want, let’s go for it. Let’s get some grants, and we’ll go to measure them. Let’s build an offense meter so we can test this out. So, we can verify this in the laboratory when people say they’re offended on a scale of 1 to 10. We’ll take the offending stimulus, and we’ll measure its intensity and its effect. Maybe nanoparticles are going into the body as you suggest.

On a common-sense reading, no. It’s the case that people are behaviorally conditioned to take offense because they’re getting empowered by it. They’re getting rewarded for it by getting to step on somebody’s toes. Normally, they have no right to harm; they harm people by claiming they’re offended.

And so, what it amounts to is that a defense can be offered. We were taught When I was a little kid, my parents incessantly repeated that sticks and stones could break your bones, but names could never hurt you. Unless you choose to let him hurt you. Unless the system rewards you for choosing to let them hurt you, that’s behavioral reinforcement.

So, the system says to me, and I’m learning this from a young age, so, I’m watching other people who claim, oh so and so, offended me. And then that person gets tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. Or they get morally censored or canceled because they said something that the mob doesn’t like; so, we get the mob running our society instead of the law.

So, that’s wonderful, right? That’s a great thing. So, what happens is that if you think about it carefully, and here’s the point, it used to be the case that comedians could get away with this because they could. say things that nobody else could say. They could say stuff about Seinfeld. And if you repeated the joke in the office, you could get far. fired, and the employer was damned if they didn’t. Because if they fired you, you could sue them; if they didn’t fire you, somebody else could sue them for letting you. Tell the joke.

This is just absolutely bizarre where we are going. I watched a little Dave Chappelle clip, but he was up as a comedian, and this is a little bit derailed from what we’re talking about. But he was in Detroit, and I guess he was getting booed, and no one was joining the show, and they demanded their money back, and he said, “Look, I don’t know what you think this is, but I’m just like.” Evel Knievel got paid for the attempt. To be funny, if you don’t like it, I am never giving you your money back, and it goes on and says he’s got a much better delivery than I do. right? But it’s crazy that people are attaching themselves to all these things to wake up and get agitated by being offended. Or join in the victimhood. To perpetuate, I’m not even sure what the goal is anymore.

Ah, the goal is to make everybody angry 24/7, to make everybody hostile to everybody. And to constantly seek scapegoats, people they can blame for all the world’s problems at the moment—people who look like you, Travis, and me without a suntan.

I’m the bad guy here. You’re so white, but you’re not white enough.

Yeah, your fault. No, I’m not. Well, it depends on whom you ask. You see, this is back to you. Go back to what I said to the Canadian feminists. They didn’t, for some reason, like it. I think that it offended them. But I asked them when they said they produced this manifesto. We have the same in the States now, but they produce the same amount. Phesto said there were too many white male professors in Canadian universities.

I’ll slow down too many white male professors in Canadian universities. These are icons, aren’t they? They will publish this, and they Well, no, it’s the policy now. If you’re a Marxist, So, what they said was, that there were too many white male professors. So, I thought, OK, I’m off the hook. I’m Jewish, right? Like I said to them, take a good look at me when I get into the sun. I tan very dark brown. OK, I don’t turn beet red like a lobster. I said I get it. I’m very dark. I’m of Mediterranean descent. OK, and I said,” So, I like my students at City College to crack up. I said I’m not white. I’m off-white, you know? I them. You’re laughing; they laugh. They said they didn’t like it.

I said where you were… I got a little serious with him… I said, “Where were you and Hitler when they passed the Nuremberg laws, kicking all the Jewish professors out of German universities, which they Nazified?” They said there were too many non-Aryan professors in the universities, which means Jews. So, they got rid of some of the best professors. And because they were, they were not white enough. So, I said, make up your mind.

If you could have saved us a lot of trouble. If only you had been around to explain it to the Nazis who said that Jews were white. Maybe we could have saved 6 million lives now. That was not said in jest, but it was a kind of a dagger that got them in the heart. And they said, “We’re really glad you’re leaving Canada.” I was doubly glad. So, I gave. He had a farewell present.

That settles it. Get out.

Yeah, I mean, I was out of there. I gave him a farewell present. I’ll send it to you guys. You’re going to love it. I wrote a novel that was my farewell gift to Canada when I loved it so much that I didn’t plug in.

Which novel, which one?

It was my first novel. It’s called “fair.” New World I self-published it and in May of 1994, I came to City College in September. I started there in September of that year, but May of 94 was my last summer. In Canada, I self-published this novel, and I sold 2000 copies out of a post office box in Vancouver. I’d sent it to all the literary agents in Toronto, four of them. There are all four of them, right? And one of them wrote back and said, “We can’t.” We can’t represent this book if we represent. If this book sells well, then we’re out of a job because they’re going to be offended by it and they’ll never buy a book from us again. I got the same thing in New York too.

So, I’ve been selling this underground and it’s been compared to works by Huxley, Orwell, Swift, and Vonnegut, and no one wants to touch it because it’s logical. What I did was I showed what would happen. If feminists were that radical, I’m talking about mainstream feminism that just wants the equal opportunity for women. I’m totally in favor of that, right? Talking about what they did This book is a future projection of what the world would look like if these completely radical feminists were running it. Well, thirty years later, this is what you have, Travis. You called it crazy. It is crazy, OK, because they’re in charge. That was the novel. It also predicted the future. And I’ll send you guys a copy. You’ll get a good laugh out of it. So, seriously,

No, I subscribe to that belief. That’s why I’m back to it. I’m actually quite angry at our system because I want our children to be freethinkers, and I was blessed with the opportunity to go to a private school, and it was also a non-denominational Christian school. So, I studied creationism and Darwinism. I was given the choice. I was convinced. That is not something that I believe our educational system allows our kids to do. These days, they’re feeding and spoon-feeding our kids. These are these principles and these beliefs, and I hear them being regurgitated by my kids, and I don’t even know. What to say? To them, except that you’ve been lied to.

Yes, well, you’re very fortunate.

And when my science students, who all know more or less about Darwinism, are looking for counterexamples to the way we explain something in philosophy, that’s called a technical term. The underdetermination of theory by data means that if you look at a given phenomenon out there, you look at a data set. You look at an event or whatever.

There are always, in principle, many, many possible explanations that would explain why this happened OK and the real art of finding the truth back to the truth. The real artists will be able to pick which explanation is the true one. Many may be close, but no cigar. Some may be false. So, I tell my students, if you’re a creationist, you have a perfectly good explanation as to why there are dinosaur bones on the earth because God put them there to test your faith. This is what this is, what they taught you, on the creationist view. And if you want to believe that, then it’s perfectly good. An explanation doesn’t prove anything, but it’s a perfectly good explanation, and it opens your mind.

Universities should be places where you learn about all kinds of views. and a place that broadens horizons and opens minds. Instead, they’re teaching people one monolithic doctrine. They call it diversity. Yes, there is a wide range of opinions. That’s all there is to it. Well, because every word means the opposite. Diversity means there’s only one thing allowed to be said and taught, and that’s called diversity, and inclusiveness means we only include the people who are triggered like us. Does anybody who’s not triggered? People who’re not walking around with their minds bent out of shape, they’re going to be excluded.

Diversity, as I hear it, doesn’t include me. It doesn’t include white middle-class Christian males. I’ve been included in a lot of different types of conferences and a lot of different places, and I’ve been told we have enough white guy presenters. And it doesn’t bother me because my feelings don’t get hurt about stuff like that. But the fact that they would exclude someone who can contribute to the conversation at whatever level bothers me.

I was at a networking event. I was the only guy there. There were 17 ladies, which is a great ratio for me. I love that ratio. I got kind of stepped on because someone said, “Well, I’m a single mom, so, I can explain this.” It’s great that you’re a single mom, and I love your experience. But I was the kid of a single mom. I have another valid perspective. Please don’t step on me. Just because you don’t think that my experience can be included or not, I’m not trying to say that I know more than you because I’m not a single mom. I’m not saying that at all, but let’s make it. We are certain of it. Legitimately, including the diverse opinions and experiences and the stories of people, they have other places to intervene because we all have different perspectives and locations.

I love hearing all these opinions because I want to figure out what it is that happened to you that I don’t know about. In your experience, I’m missing something. Is there something I’m missing? Is there something in my experience that you’re missing? How can we get it? How do we be curious? And we learn and move and grow.

Well, you’re very open-minded, which is a credit to you, and as.

Together, what does that look like?

So, we’ve understood that this whole thing is Orwellian in the sense that the slogans are their opposites. So, diversity means monolithic. City and inclusiveness mean we exclude people who don’t look like us or like us. We don’t like the way they think they’re speaking. They don’t think the same, so we can’t include them because that would threaten the diversity that it’s completely well.

I don’t want

You don’t know, I mentioned this, and the viewers should know that the New England ideal is this great.

To be around, even break the same

The mid-nineteenth-century American philosophical movement included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Farrow. I mean, they were out, but they were white males. They were living in Concord, MA in a beautiful community, and the leader of that community was the father of Louisa May Alcott, you know. And he ran this little school of philosophy. She was part of it. Nathaniel Hawthorne was part of it, and if you ever go to Concord, it’s an hour outside of Boston.

They’re all in the cemetery. You can spend a day there. They give you a tour of their homes and the bookstores there. It’s a beautiful place, and they describe themselves as follows: They say we’re a community of like-minded people, two of whom think alike. I said this is it. You are who we are. This is the whole point. We don’t have to. We don’t have to think alike. It’s better if we don’t think alike because then we get true diversity and true inclusiveness. And we broaden back to broadening the horizons.

So, offense? OK, we’ve got to. We have got to say, we talked about harm. We need to talk about offense for 5 minutes, and then I’d like to give you a potential explanation. Travis and Carol also talk about why it is that it’s been so easy to hoodwink. So, many people are based on appearance. Why is a physical appearance so important? Why are whiteness, blackness, Asianness, femaleness, and masculinity all synonymous? This, or why, has become so paramount in the political pecking order. OK, we want to talk about this, but just to settle this thing about offense, if you decide that you don’t like something that somebody says, I mean, you’re entitled to do that. And if you decide that someone said something that you believe is incorrect, then certainly you’re entitled to feel offended if you want to, but it’s not harmed. It’s something that’s being offered to you. You can take it or leave it if you want.

If you have what I call moral agency, I mean, if you have enough self-esteem, psychologists will call it self-esteem. I don’t call it that. I say you’re a moral human being. You have dignity. The nobility is the ultimate privilege of being born human. My friends, we talk about privilege. Excuse me, the real privilege is that you were born human, and it was a long shot. No pun intended. I’m talking about how many competitors there were to fertilize that over. There were trillions and gazillions. There you go. So, what are the chances that you are you?

400 quadrillion to one.

You won the biggest gamble in the universe, and the whole normal response to that would be gratitude. Wow am I ever lucky to be alive and if circumstances militate against you in history, you’re born in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, I can get pretty bad.

OK, it could get very bad, but under no circumstances. Should you take offense? What you should do is get out of harm’s way the best way you can. And yet none of it is an offense. That’s just you deciding to be upset by something.

The ancient Stoics had it right. The Roman Stoics were phenomenal. One of the bumper stickers from Roman Stoicism was Epictetus. He was a freed slave, OK, and he ended up teaching, indirectly, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the great philosopher. And he said, “Marcus Aurelius said Epictetus is the guy I learned the most from by reading his works.” And I mean, Aurelius was an emperor and Epictetus was a freed slave. But Epictetus said, “Hey.” It’s possible to be serene even in a palace, you know? I mean, it’s because when you have all kinds of power and wealth and responsibility, life doesn’t get easier, right? Because this life does not get easier, Epictetus said. People are not upset by circumstances, but by the views, they take of them.

So, stuff happens. What view are you going to take of what just happened? What view of Carol are you going to take? You have the option of taking any number of views on what just happened. If you want to take the view that you’re offended by it, you’ll upset yourself, and no good will come of it. There are lots of other possible views. So, the people who are doing this, like Travis, or people who need an enemy in the morning, have got to get up and blame somebody for their unhappiness. What is their unhappiness? It is caused by their bad ideology. It’s toxic, but they don’t know this because they’ve been brainwashed to believe it. It’s the one true ideology, but they’re the ones who are making themselves unhappy and nobody else.

But as long as they’re empowered to point the finger. Or then they’re going to just increase the unhappiness all around and do real harm to people on the fabricated excuse that you said something I know, like, oh you look offensive. You don’t even have to open your mouth anymore. You could just show up at a conference and they’re all going to wait a second. What’s this white male doing on the stage? We have

You know, that’s offensive.

I’m pretty offensive. I’m going, to be honest. People talk about wanting to be like the Secretary of Defense. I want to be the secretary. of offense because I’m offensive.

So, I gave a certificate. So, people who endorsed my novel knew there was a woman. I’ll tell you a true story about a great Canadian heroine and her son. Her name is Karen Sellick, and she was an attorney. She’s retired now, but I’m still in touch with her, and Karen was an attorney in the province of Ontario, and they started fast-tracking women to the bench because they had a “UN” Because of the under-representation of women on the bench, the normal time for a judge would be 10 years. The average time would be ten years, which is the legal minimum, but ten years is fine. If you were a really good lawyer, then you could get promoted in Canada. They’re not elected, they’re promoted. So, they were promoting women after five years because they wanted to make up for the shortage. They offered her a judgeship because it is not required to have an equal number of women on the bench.

And she declined it. And she said, “On national television.” I saw the broadcast. It was a nightly newscast that went out. She appeared on W5’s show. This woman… what a brave woman she was to get up. I said, “would you like to know why I declined the judgeship?” and they said, “yes,” because they had rehearsed that the question was coming and she said, “OK, she said, had I been offered the judgeship based on my legal expertise or my passion for justice or my track record as an attorney, had I been offered that on?” In other words, based on merit. Right, the M word again. She said I would have accepted the judgeship, but she said I was offered the judgeship for only one reason: because I have a vagina. And she said it was insulting and demeaning and denigrating to me personally to be offered a judgeship on that basis. Or why she said this on national television and what a tremendous privilege it is.

Kudos to her.

Good for her. So, anyway, this novel that I wrote about her is called the most politically incorrect work of art I have ever seen, and she’s certainly qualified. She was well qualified to say that. So, the offense is taken, not given. If you decide to take offense, that’s your decision.

Nobody can defend you against your will. People can harm you against your will, unfortunately. Nobody can defend you against you. So, you’re an accomplice. You’re not an accomplice to being harmed when you’re offended. You’re an accomplice and are offended. That’s the really hard and fast distinction that you decide to take offense to. You could just as well decide not to take offense if you don’t like a book. Don’t read it. You don’t like the podcast? Don’t listen. Don’t you just like TV programs? Change the channel, but if the system rewards you now. It gives you power over people, and I can point the finger and say you offended me; therefore, I can get you fired. That’s very cool. So, people will walk around without prompting.

Oh, I agree.

People will walk around looking to be offended. That’s what triggered means. They’re walking around with their noses permanently out of joint because they get some power over somebody for being offended. All they have to do is say, “You offended me.”

You’re accused and therefore guilty. There’s no due process in this. And then you have to pay the price for somebody else’s state of mind. So, I said to them, “Look, I teach this to my students.” It’s probably a crime against some university administrations. City colleges are public universities. So, while the first amendment applies on campus, it does not apply in the workplace, and so, I teach my students that if you’re offended by something, it’s your choice to be offended, and if you choose not to be offended, you’ll be much happier, and the world will be a much better place. But the way things stand now, it will be common.

Travis and you, Carol, are responsible for everybody else’s state of mind. Because if you say something they don’t like, it’s your fault, right? You offended me. Your fault, Carol. You offended somebody. Your fault So, we are now responsible for everybody else’s state of mind. But no one is responsible for their state of mind. So, people who walk around ready to take offense all the time are no longer responsible for their states of mind. Excuse me, Travis, who’s responsible for your state of mind? I think it’s you.

Yes, I would like to take responsibility.

But Carol, you are you. same question. Are you responsible for your state of mind? At the end of the day? Like where? Does the buck stop?

Oh absolutely.

Of course, of course. It’s in your mind. If you’re not responsible for your state of mind, then someone else is controlling your mind.

So, my wife and I are going through the book, keeping score. I can’t remember the name of the author right now, but it gets to a point in there that talks about emotional psych polls, and it mentioned that the vast majority of things that impact us emotionally last about 90 seconds. If you can hold out for 90 seconds, it’s essentially over, no matter what it is. No matter if it’s joy, happiness, or depression, it’s over. Whatever The thing takes less than 90 seconds.

And if you can weather the storm, it’ll pass. It’s like, so many people love the feeling of whatever it is they’re feeling. Generally, a negative feeling They’ll take it and they’ll work it through their mind and work it again and they’ll go over it and over and over it, essentially, purposely re-damaging themselves because of the way that we’re taught to view cycles. So, if you’re out there and you’re listening to this and you’re like, Talk about the offense. I’ve been offended by this whole episode.

Give it 90 seconds. Don’t repeat it. You’re mad. Give it 90 seconds and see how you feel. Take some ownership of this. If you go through and you look at my bio and look at my background, I’m not going. To go into it in the episode here, you would think that most people would just write me off based on my background. We don’t expect a lot out of you, Travis.

Here’s your welfare to just do whatever. Just don’t make an impact. Don’t cause a problem if nobody is expecting anything from you. And here’s the deal. A lot of the stuff that happens to us is not our fault. It’s not, but I am responsible for it. Track down, attain and receive healing for the events that occurred in my world. And then it’s my responsibility to move forward with my life no matter what happens. Right, it’s not about fault, and even if you do say and do, figure out whose fault it is, and that discovering that fault is not somehow going to fix anything.

You have to take responsibility for your healing and move forward with your life. That’s just how it works for every single person. And that’s just the big difference. Instead of pointing the finger out, it’s saying, what? I am where I am, and I need to move forward with it. How do I do that? Regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the economy, regardless of political opinions, regardless of your income, regardless of the terrible people in your life, if you don’t. Modify it. It all starts with each individual. What do you think about all this, Carol? No, I am I.

I was just listening to Travis. I think it’s probably true. We do have a choice. And at the end, of the day, it’s up to us and he did say it was about circumstances. We aren’t in control of certain circumstances. our families raised us according to our gender, right? We’re not responsible for those things. But we can also, if we disagree with somebody, instead of just flat out disagreeing, hear what the other person has to say. I want to understand why you disagree with me and maybe if you’ll listen to me. I can explain to you, why I have this viewpoint, and we can meet somewhere in between. It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Right. It doesn’t mean that we can’t both have opposing views. It doesn’t mean that because of these things, People can’t get along, and this is where we are right now, as people aren’t getting along because they have opposing views.

Hold on, are you saying you don’t have to have agreement-based relationships?

No, we don’t, dear.

Are you sure? So, what does this look like? You haven’t spoken a lot during this thing. Carol, I want to make sure you get your chance to land this. You are a female motorsports owner in a male-dominated industry. I don’t know if any other girls own motorsports teams. How does this stuff apply to your professional world?

Well, I think. I had a lot of females who wanted to be a part of my track organization, and they approached me and said, “You should hire me,” to which I replied, “Oh really, why?” Should I hire you? Because I’m a female, I said, “Oh well, I don’t hire people because they’re female and somehow that will benefit me.” to have more females, isn’t it? Right, I pick people that are good individuals who are ethically sound and morally right. And you don’t fit the bill. And just because you have a vagina doesn’t automatically get you in. You don’t get the red carpet to come in; you have to be a good individual. I am passionate about the sport and what it wants. I want to teach people because that’s what’s important to me. Not very good. How did they take this?

Why do you?

because it holds a mirror in front of them.

Why do you think that is?

And they have to reflect on the person they are inside. They think they can get through just because they’re female. And I don’t. I don’t pick people because they’re male or female. I picked them because they have a true passion for the sport. It’s for the better of the sport, not for the better of whatever you want or how you want to benefit from it.

It’s very interesting. I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my life. Being an ******* is one of the things I’ve been accused of, and it’s true. I know I’m the villain in some people’s stories, but most of the time when people call me names like that, it’s because I’m holding them accountable for their nonsense and they’re just not ready for it. I get it. I’m getting big if you’re just listening to this. Now watching this, everyone is giving me the big north and south head nod. What do you think about that, Lew? Hold people accountable for their nonsense.

There’s nobody accountable anymore from the top down. That’s one of the problems in our society. That’s exactly what Carol was saying in what you were saying. I recall a time in my childhood when I had a large number of family members, and you could have political differences and it didn’t destroy families. You could have people, husbands, and wives, vote differently and it didn’t destroy families at all.

It wasn’t that important. We went out and expressed our democratic right to vote as we saw fit. And if a husband and wife had different political leanings and they voted differently, that didn’t destroy the marriage at all. It could even make the family stronger in some ways by being, shall we say, diverse and inclusive.

OK, and also you could. You could have that kind of religious difference. You could have interfaith marriages that worked exactly for the same reason, or for that matter, interracial marriages that worked for the same reason. For the same reason, and now we’re getting identity politics, and that whole thing is wiped out by identity politics.

So, what do you think about what you were saying? If you want my take on it, look, there are only two ways to irritate people: either by telling lies about them or by telling the truth about them. OK, and essentially, if you’re telling the truth, people will sometimes get more irritated by it. So, when you hold up that mirror, Carol, as you said, that’s a very apt metaphor. If you hold up a mirror to people, if they don’t like what they’re looking at, then they ought to take a closer look at themselves in the mirror, and maybe work to make some changes.

So, that’s what people don’t want anymore, which is to have a mirror held up to them to see what they look like. They won’t tolerate it. And this is the toxic aftereffect of identity politics, and we need to talk about that a bit more if you want to because it’s what’s driving all of this other stuff that we’ve already identified as being not wholesome for the culture.

Well, I did want to talk a little bit first about your life in the classroom. You identify as a conservative in many college universities, which are pretty liberal, but you’ve won the teacher of the year award. And how does that happen to a conservative professor in the classroom?

Well, I would like to say that it’s not me, but once again it’s the students and the colleagues. The students evaluate the professors at the end of the day. You teach a course. The students are the ones who evaluate you and write comments.

If professors apply to or nominate us, we don’t apply.

You have to get nominated for an outstanding teaching award. They only give out one per year. There are a lot of faculty members and a lot of deserving ones. So, I won the award in 2019, after quite a few years of service, like 25, because my students value an open-minded, open-ended classroom in which they are not afraid to say things they would be afraid to say in other classes.

I make it clear to them that philosophy is a subject about which we will ask questions. We conduct inquiries. We go where the truth leads. So, there is no such thing. I tell them, as a foolish question in philosophy, that every question is important. And what I also tell them is that, of course, if they ask enough questions, they’re bound to get some foolish answers. But there’s no foolish question and I’m at, “Oh wow,” so I could ask. And what they don’t realize is that they’re teaching me half the time because the questions they come up with sometimes are wonderful questions that no other student has. I came up with the idea of asking the Professor, if the Presser’s awake, to think and give a well-considered reply to this student and a well-deserved reply. Sometimes it takes me a day or two. I said, “Wait for a second, I’m going to look this up.” Let me think about this. This is a great question, and I will come back to them. So, they are encouraged to inquire. And that’s what education is supposed to be. Inquiry Not indoctrination, but informed inquiry.

So, that’s one thing. And if they gave me the award, it’s not because they agree with my politics. There are very, very few, and fewer than ever. People who are self-described as conservative now think it’s progressive to the point of being extreme. Extreme progressivism I’m a liberal from the 50s and 60s, but nowadays the left has moved. So, far left. A classical liberal looks like a conservative, right?

I don’t identify with either extreme, Travis, and I don’t think either of you does either. I think we’re talking about why we can’t take what’s best from the left and what’s best from the right and make a better world by taking what’s best and rejecting what’s worst because there is bigotry on the right. I’m not saying there’s institutional racism. That’s a boogeyman. OK, that’s ridiculous, but there are a few bigots in the woodwork. OK, if you go far enough right, you’ll find them, and on the left, you’ve got the other extremists who won’t say what, whether you’re a man or a woman because they’re not a biologist excuse. Do you understand what I mean?

Go and help us all. But what we want to do is, I think, reject the bigotry of the far right and the anti-delusional anti-realism of the far left. And let’s bring liberals and conservatives together on the same platform. And let’s discuss and find common values; that’s the way to go. Forward, and that’s what it means to represent the whole people and not to divide. Unfortunately, there’s so much money and power in the racing industry, the gender industry, and then let’s divide and conquer the industry. Let’s polarize the country even more. industry, it’s counterproductive and anyone.

You’ve got to wonder. If it’s like a diversion for something, because of all this negativity, all this talk about what gender are you? I mean, all of it is what are we diverting attention from? There has to be somebody. Is that correct? A question, yeah.

We’re diverting attention from the most important things and what I teach my students in ethics. And I do this in the intro to the way we do it in light and then in ethics. We do it. So buckle your seatbelts, because more political incorrectness is on the way. and I. So, I asked them, “So, if I tell you that, here’s somebody named Jones.” OK, so I tell you, if I tell you Jones is tall, he is, either way, taller than average or way shorter than average. What does that tell you about Jones? Is moral character affected by the fact that Jones is tall or short? right? Nothing, zero? OK, I say So what if I tell you that Jones has blue eyes, green eyes, or red eyes? Or, or pink cars. Or what does that tell you about Jones’s moral character? What does his eye color tell you about his moral character? Yeah, right. Nonthin’, nada, zero. OK, so I’m playing this game for a while, and you’ll see where it’s going. So, I say, “OK, so, what now, Joneses?” If Jones is a little overweight or joins a little underway, what is that? Nothing. So, none of these factors tells you anything about the person’s moral character, and that’s what’s important. And the same with IQ. What if Jones is a genius? OK, what if Jones is not too quick, OK? On the draw, you get it, but a little slower than average. OK, but what does that tell you nothing? What’s important in a family, in a society, in a country is that its people are of good character. That’s what you want. Of course, you want all this diversity of expertise, interests, and abilities. That’s what makes the whole thing a beautiful mosaic. But what do you want at the core?

 

What’s important? is a pure mind and a good heart. That is what makes people as great as they can be, no matter what they look like. OK, no matter where they come from genetically, that’s not important. So, those are the values that need to be instilled in children and are not being instilled because they’re being taught to focus on all the wrong things. And so, my students learn that I treat them all the same. In terms of the abilities of their minds, it doesn’t matter to me what country they’ve come from, what culture, or what religion they follow. Background, none, or any of that, or how they appear cosmetically, that’s only skin deep. What’s important is the quality of their understanding, and that is independent of all the rest of the stuff that everyone is politicizing to the point of destroying the country. right?

I know that when I turn off the news and I go hang out with real people, it doesn’t matter where I hang out with real people. I’ve been to all 50 States and the candidates of Mexico, Honduras, Belize, Spain, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey. Where else have I been? Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain turned out. I don’t know if you guys. Hold this, hold on to your butts. There are people everywhere. There are families, people that are providing for their families in whatever way they know how to be reasonably safe and secure. They want their kids to have it better than they are to be educated. They want to have a decent-paying job and largely be left alone.

I remember going over to the Middle East for the first time, not knowing what I was going to find based on the news. I was told to be scared and I got over there. I’m at a park and I see a family come in, and the kids ran around and were playing, and they were having fun together. I went into a mall and, inevitably, a mom was pulling a streaming kid because they had to. I don’t know, maybe not get the cookie or whatever.

The thing is, it turns out, people are just people, and the vast majority of discord is only seen on national news networks. All of the bad news that we see in the paper comes from overseas when you’re over there and you’re talking to people about America. They only get the most terrible news coming out of America. It’s the same. If you go on Google Earth right now, you can go into Iran, and you can look around, and you can see people in plain clothes at a carnival eating cotton candy. If everything is so terrible in this country, in America. A lot of people on the left, and I will say that I know what people on the right say too, but I talked to people on the left and they said, “It’s so terrible here, this setting is like Well, how do you feel about immigration and whether we should have open borders like so? People are coming over to America in droves. As a result, they can join in this terrible country that we’ve created. It makes no sense since this country was built on immigration. It doesn’t make any sense.

All of us are from different places. You were born here. Caroline came here. We have millions of people every year trying to get into this country and all kinds of bases because it is the freest country in the world.

I’m dying to get in.

Still, despite all the damage that’s been done, it’s a place where most people want to come to and not leave once, they get here because there is still ample opportunity and a sense from the Constitution that you have certain rights. Irrespective of what you look like or where you come from, you said it. Travis, by the way, how did you get to all 50 states? An incredible accomplishment. I mean, no, I’m serious. That’s amazing. That’s really, that’s quite amazing.

I hit all 50 states about seven years ago. About 33 of them. A lot of cross-country trips, a lot of driving, and then the military through some of the travel things that we went to. I ended up getting to my last five states, which were Vermont, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska. So, thank you. Thank you very much to the United States Navy. Bring me to all of those wonderful places.

That’s just brilliant.

That’s right, we Canadians didn’t take too long getting to Vermont. Let me tell you, it’s right across the border from where you go back. The great state. We all love New England, but here’s the thing: I like it. You have friends all over the world. I mean, I’ve lived in four different countries. I grew up in Canada, lived in the UK, lived in Israel and other Middle East countries, and I’ve lived. Of course, I’ve been in the US for 28 years, but I’ve traveled the world. I have friends in China. We teach all over the place, you know. In my nonprofit, we teach philosophers from all over the world. We just ran a program early in June. We had philosophers from India, Turkey, and Hong Kong. They come to us for training because philosophy is a human thing too, and they’re going to take the tools we give them and they’re going to use philosophy to help people.

And what unites us is the fact that we’re human beings. The rest are just cosmetic differences. Unfortunately, there is. I’m saying this. Unfortunately, money and power are not bad. They’re necessary. If they’re used well, but if they’re used badly, they can divide people. We can make a difference between us. The basis of the conflict instead of the basis of mutual understanding and cooperation, and that’s the big takeaway. I hope from this show, aside from the fact that we’re all as politically incorrect as the day is long. Some of you are worse. Then me, I’m so. I am relieved to be hanging out with you.

You’re welcome. We want to make you feel welcomed here by being our true, authentic selves. And sometimes that means we’re going to cuss, talk ***, and have views that probably don’t align with the current flow of the media right now. I don’t know if being on the media side helps anyone. I know Carol mentioned earlier, but what are we being distracted from? A show of hands in this little shack here. Who remembers OJ Simpson?

Oh my God.

While watching it on TV, slow MO, the slow MO chase scene, who could forget it?

I thought absolutely what was going on in Europe at the same time.

I was in Manhattan Beach at that time.

What kind of war situation was going on?

Lots of oh, that’s right.

That’s right.

Yeah, that was almost not on TV in the slightest because OJ was more interesting.

It was a trust, yeah. It was Clinton, and I arrived in Belgrade while in Serbia. I have friends in Serbia too, and in Croatia, and you know. But when I got there, they still preserved some of the shell holes in the buildings in Belgrade, because Belgrade got shelled as well in that Fiat.

So, they remember, but the bad news sells. This is the mantra, and it’s been true forever. There’s a famous story about Hearst, the original Hearst, and he sent a sketch artist down to Cuba during the Spanish American just before the Spanish American war down there. and he said, “I want.” because they didn’t have photographers back in the day. They had sketch artists send sketch artists down there and said I want some sketches, so I can run them along with the war story, and the sketch artist sent back a telegram saying there was no war, and she sent back a telegram saying you furnish sketches, I will furnish the war.

William Randolph Hearst.

They most likely scuttled the main if you expand on our furnish war. We don’t know what the real story is. You, as a Navy man, are familiar with that story. The drill, you know? Maine, Spain, and all that. But here’s the thing: bad news sells. And there’s something in the human psyche. This is where Freud took it and took a run at it. No one. To my knowledge, it explains it thoroughly, and maybe we’re still waiting for some genius to come along. But everybody in journalism knows that bad news sells. If you start telling people the good news, they’ll soon believe you. So, they all got to outdo each other by telling bad news because that’s what sells.

Yep, booze for sex.

All sins, right? Any senseless?

He claims she said “cells and anything else that is good for you.” Generally, it’s not going to sell in front of the television. Unfortunately, even the advertising. So, instead of saying anything else, I’d like to leave you with a thought. I mean, we’re not going to have to wrap this up in a second, but all of what we’ve said points to something really important that maybe some of your viewers haven’t thought about. And I think it’s worth thinking about. So, it’s this and it’s very simple to say that one of the reasons why people can gin up So, much conflict is based on race and gender. It’s because we depend on our sense of vision a lot, evolutionarily. It has become our most important sense.

If you look at the older versions of mammals, the social mammals running around on all fours with their noses to the ground had a sense of smell. So, that’s why canines are So, good. Felines, rodents, and bears are all different. These different four-legged mammals are pretty socially advanced. They’re depending on their sense of smell, which is acute and doesn’t make as many mistakes as it should. OK, so they say they can smell a lot of things. Whether this is a friend or a foe, or if it’s a female, is she in heat? Is she sexually receptive or not? They don’t rape each other because they rely on pheromones and a very acute sense of smell. When we got up on our hind legs, OK, I mean. Well, listen, I’m not saying it’s better to be a bear, OK?

Awful worst.

I mean, they have their moments, but when we got up on our hind legs, this was like a major shift, and all kinds of things had to change for us to be able to walk around. Right, so they did, but one of the things that changed in a big way was that vision, the sense of vision, took primacy, and the visual cortex is way bigger. Our sense of smell is not very much used unless you’re in the kitchen a lot. Do the dishes you have to do. But basically, it’s a sense of vision. That becomes very acute, and so, people put a lot of weight on it.

Evolutionarily, we’re bred this way. We evolved this way to look around and see what’s going on. Primarily, hearing a second right. The smell is way, way down the list. So basically, we look around. We look around at the world and we make snap judgments based on what we see that could be manipulated. That’s the point. When we look at somebody, the first thing we see is their pigmentation or their hairdo or their gender or their makeup, or all the stuff, because that’s what we’ve evolved to do is to see. And that can work for us, but it can work big time against us if it’s politicized. So, what do we see with our two eyes?

But what we see with the mind when it’s open is the person’s heart. and the person’s inner being. And that’s the best of me. Where the best of us resides is not on the surface. It’s deeper, and we need our minds to see deeper. If we look at each other as human beings, to begin with, then we see deeper and we don’t have to have conflicts. That’s what I wanted your viewers to think about.

I thought I was supposed to be scared of everything. Isn’t that what you’re taught? I’m going to be scared of everything. Do not be afraid to think. It is so great to have you on the show. Lou, I enjoy delving into the oppression of Jewish men being driven out of Canada, which is mind-boggling here. But if you heard this thing today and you like what you listened to, please continue. Like, share, subscribe to all that fun stuff, but more importantly, send us a message. Find us on social media: contact glue. We’re going to have his contact info in the Shoney’s Contact me or Carol to ask us questions. Tell us what you love. Tell us what you hate. Tell me that you hate my beard and you want me to shave it off. Tell us something. Interact with us because if this is just a one-directional thing, we want your feedback if this is just us. This is not just us preaching to you. We want to know what kinds of questions you have.

What kinds of topics do you want us to cover? How deep do you want us to go in some of these conversations? Do you like it? Did it make it uncomfortable? I hope it did. Yeah, I had someone tell me once. I kind of was worried he was a little bit younger, like, Oh, what will the neighbors think? And he said, “Don’t worry about that.” They’ve never had a real thought in their entire life. Please take some time and turn off the noise in your world. Saying you’re busy is not a compliment. Take some time for yourself. And have some real thoughts about some of them. These things question what it is that you’re being told. Believe me or don’t believe me. Don’t believe Lou, don’t believe Lou, definitely believe Carol. Believe Carol, but think of this stuff for yourself and determine for yourself if it’s good. I remember seeing all these racist, terrible racist stories on TV, and I look outside my neighborhood, and I see kids, boys, and girls, all of the different shapes, sizes, and colors. They had a wonderful time together playing because it wasn’t until they were taught to not like and to distrust people that didn’t look like them that they were taught that they just hung out because they were kids in the neighborhood, and they wanted to hang out.

Children are not born with any hatred or prejudices. It’s all been taught to them. It’s also a cat, Carol. Could I ask? Could I ask you? If you’ve heard this before, it’s about Taiwan, where you were. So, when I got to Taipei, I had a very nice tour. I met people, and events went by, but the 101 is. So, 1:01 is huge. That’s that. It is like the mother of all skyscrapers. Now it’s been eclipsed by not the one in Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa.

Burj Khalifa.

Yeah, but then I’ve seen that one too. That’s unbelievable, but so, I will pay one. 01 is just that; it towers over everything else because there’s nothing else downtown, so I pay. That’s not even close. So, this thing is even more gigantic because of what it looks like. And as I said, you guys must be proud of this, because it’s the most. “Oh no, we despise it,” they exclaimed. We can’t stand it. This was discussed when you were targeting your hosts, and they said no, it’s very embarrassing. I said, what’s the problem with it? It’s unclear, but he said. Don’t you see what it looks like? And I looked at it. I said no, I didn’t see it. They said it looked like a giant stack of Chinese takeaway food containers.

No, I didn’t even see it.

If you look, if you see… oh my God, I don’t think it does. If it’s all because it’s designed to, it’s a bunch of stacked It looks like Chinese food containers and all that stuff. These two huge antennas look like chopsticks sticking out of the top. of it.

I never even thought of that. That is hysterical.

I thought I’d leave you with that, just in case.

Oh my God.

Just for kicks.

Well, all I can say is, after this conversation, it’s kind of my mantra not to harm. At the end of the day, Just not harm. Think about people. Be considerate, compassionate, empathetic, and kind. Open-minded It’s what we’re missing now. I fully agree. Thank you so much, Lou, for being our guest today.

Thank you, Carol, for being a fantastic co-host. And remember that no one can offend you against your will.

Thank you so much, guys. What a lot of fun, and we’ll leave Carol with that last word. OK, that mantra, that’s very beautiful.

So, what do you think of Lou, Carol?

I mean, the dude is so full of information, and I have so much knowledge. I was just sitting there, like, madly writing away. Those are really.

Here’s the deal, Carol: You know, Good points. You weren’t even a co-host. You were just like, furiously scribbling notes. You hung me out to dry. I had to do all of the hostings.

I know.

What the hell?

Well, hey OK, hang on. I was going to ask him about the teacher thing, but he was so immersed in that conversation. If Sense is right, then I was kind of holding back and waiting for you.

I am a little bit trigger-happy.

I jumped the gun.

I like to be triggered. No, that’s not right.

Yeah, no.

I like to pull the trigger. No, I don’t know anything about I enjoy talking well. You already know that that’s your fault. I was into talking. into one of these things.

No, I’d love it. I loved it. He was great. person to interview because he dove into those points. That makes it. The biggest impact is that nobody talks about these things anymore, and so I just wanted him to talk because.

Well, he’s well read, well studied, and well practiced on his own.

Oh my gosh, incredibly intelligent.

He doesn’t get some kind of sound bite that the news tells us to memorize and then regurgitate. He goes out and studies and analyzes, and I just love how he creates a classroom environment where he encourages asking questions. Have you seen this? Where, like, people are scared to go.

Ask questions. Yeah, my kids were. In school, nobody wanted to appear stupid, so they wouldn’t ask questions. And curiosity is the key. Yes, yes, and I’m not even scared of looking dumb. The reason we learn.

I’m assuming that if I don’t ask, I’m going to remain dumb, and the only chance I have is to not be done with this too. Ask the question, and I know people are listening right now. Like, well, privacy. You are dumb. That might be true. I’m willing to admit it, and I’m willing to figure it out and find the places where I don’t know everything. There’s not a What did you think about this, Chance? What do you think about that line? No one can offend anyone against their will.

I loved it. That’s why I wanted to, like, hear the whole thing. That’s why I didn’t speak because I wanted to hear What he had to say about it, and it is true at the end of the day, we’re making the choice to be offended by what somebody says. It can’t offend you if you don’t let it. I’ve had an effect. I have said this for a long time.

If I were to slap someone in the face, I don’t think I’ve done it for a long time. They have the choice of how they want to respond. Are they going to slap me back? Are they going to hit me, punch me, kick me, scratch me? Are they going to scream in my face? Who are they? They are going to run away and are going to stand there frozen in shock. all of those things. or options, such as the ability to react or respond to a given situation. Now we’re more primed. Everyone was primed to do something a little bit based on the conditioning. They’ve handled their lives, but if they’ve ever stopped to think about it, they know that they have another option. Then they can change. Of course, this involves self-awareness and self-actualization, and self-analysis of what is going on in this situation. Am I making a mistake? Is this the right choice, and can I do anything differently?

But that’s the question, right? Do people stop to ask that question? Or are they more reactionary? People tend to react more than think.

Well, if they’ve not examined these things about themselves and I’ve done some things right, I’m not perfect. I’m sure there are still times when something comes up and I’m not paying attention or something.

I’m sorry. What? I’m deep in thought and I’m just like, “And then you say,” and you’re like, “Well, you can’t put that back.” In the tube, you can’t go grab it. and pull it back in, like.

But we’re human beings, so, even when everything goes wrong.

When you have a bad reaction or you act poorly, we’re human beings. We’re allowed that particular moment to just go OK. Well, own it, make your apologies if apologies are needed, and move forward, right? It’s OK to be human. It’s OK to make mistakes. It’s OK to react poorly or wrongly. Just own it, take accountability for it. That’s it. And move on, make your apologies and all that. Move forward; that’s all you have to do.

You know,

When I look at my self-examined life and some of the major shifts and changes that I’ve had in my behavior and the way that I look at the world, one of those things changed who I was as a person. I was in my mid-to-late 20s. Three kinds of things kind of happened at the same time. I focused on my finances. I changed my circle of people. which was highly, highly beneficial. And then I stopped just letting my mouth run away from me. I stopped jumping into every opportunity in a public setting for like a joke, thinking I was funny, only to find out that I’m not as funny as I thought, and so, people listening right now are like, “Yeah, we know you’re not.” It’s funny how it’s not what it appears to be.

But until that stuff was pointed out to me until I understood and was able to take that feedback on, I would have kept running my mouth like a mature young man, and like a lot of immature young people do, they just let things fly off the handle and it wasn’t till. Someone explained to me how you’re contributing to the conversation, and I was like “that’s a good question,” but here’s a little checklist I used when I was in your situation. I was like, OK, does something need to be said, something that needs to be said right now by me? Is there something that needs to be said, right now, by me in public?

Now, the only time that I can think of where that doesn’t apply is safety. Right, if it’s life or death, someone is going to get injured. Something to get crazily damaged like you’re going to scream. It doesn’t matter. Yep, now. Well, hey, I’ll take care of that in my goodness. But, analyzing some of that stuff, especially when we’re primed for jackassery, I was young. I was primed for jackassery in public, to the detriment of myself. Yeah, I got a cheap laugh, and it was fun. For a little bit, and then as soon as the moment ended, people’s opinions changed. It’s got a clown. This is not somebody we want to have as the leader.

Well, and every time you open your mouth at that point, do what you have to contribute. Is it valuable? And pretty soon, if you speak too much, nobody listens to you anymore. It’s like the little boy who cried wolf, right? If you talk too much, and you’ve been a ******* per se the whole time, right? They’re going to sit there and go. Oh, he has nothing valuable to offer.

Yeah, they’re going to stop listening. Yeah, what else do we talk about during this? We talked about it a lot. We will, without a doubt. Do you think about harmonizing?

And yes, offense to none.

Fan physics was the big one there. There were really good points made throughout this thing, and I know not everyone can agree, and I don’t want everyone to agree. I want people to think about the things that we’ve talked about. Is it applicable? Are we right? Are we wrong? If we’re right, tell us why you think we’re right. We’re wrong. Tell us. Why do you think that we’re wrong, that we’re full of stupidity and uninformedness? The thing is, communicate with us and let us know. Because if we’ve missed something, and there’s a very good chance that we have missed something, we want to know what we missed. We want to have the chance to grow that opportunity to do better.

Not just what we missed and backed it up. Back it up with facts. Don’t just say I didn’t like how that made me feel. I won’t give up. How did it make you feel? Right, let me take that back. I do give a **** about how it made you feel, but at the end of the day, if you can’t provide some facts or factual information to back that up, I understand it offended you, but you have a choice at that point whether it offends you or not. Don’t listen.

Yeah, well, why did you? Why did you do it? I want to look for the truth. It offends you. And why, for example? If you take offense to these things, we said, “Whatever it is, examine why you’re offended.” Right? Is it because of the way that your program’s growing up studies have proven from essentially birth to 7 years of age? The vast, vast, vast majority, more than 99% of us? We are in receive mode only, which means whatever we’re presented with we use as our operating system. So, if you’re a parent of a young child, you are building your child’s operating system and they’re onboard it without any kind of filter. Discernment of any variety doesn’t take much effect until seven years of age, as proven by Johns Hopkins studies. No, I don’t know everything I know. I’m not going to go into the study. Please hit Google. I can’t. I can’t remember. Yeah, well, which study No, Travis, you assume I’m right, right? And then think about something like, “Why is it the way it is because of what the news has told you to think?” Is it because of your parents’ yelling? At your kid?

Well, it’s not even just the news anymore, is it?

Yeah, yeah, they are.

It’s the news. It’s social media. It’s your friends that subscribe. To that idea, belief, or feeling, whatever is right. This is all part of it, and because you surround yourself with these individuals who all think the same, you all think it’s the truth. Now, if you hung out with a different group of people, they may challenge you on what you think is the truth, and it’s OK to disagree with them, but at least hear them out because they may have valid points.

So, there’s a book, there’s a movie. I think it’s World War Z. Brad Pitt was in it. They were talking. The Zombie Apocalypse and these zombies were different than most zombies and zombie movies. These guys were like zombies racing at full speed. Did you see it? In the movie World War Z, there was a part when they were in Israel. I did. I don’t know if it was Israel at large or if it was Jerusalem. I can’t remember, but they talked about building this big wall. In the film, they build a kind of defense system against the zombies and themselves. Why did you come up with this? I can’t remember the exact name. It’s like the 10th man rolled over the 12th man. Whatever they called it, they said if everyone agrees, it’s up to somebody.

It’s only to be the dissenter to do it on purpose because if everyone agrees, there’s no chance that it’s true. So, he had to say, as the apocalypse was talked about, or as it progressed, I can’t remember the exact movie. Everyone said we were in Israel. We’re going to be fine or we’re in Jerusalem, we’re going to be fine, and he was like, “It’s my job as the 10th man to say.” Well, if we’re all agreeing, then it can’t be fine, and we have to take action now and then. We ended up building a wall. It didn’t hold a spoiler alert. For the movie that’s ten years old or whatever, you have to descend, and if you’re surrounding yourself with people, everyone agrees.

Oh yes, man.

Yes ma’am, yeah.

Yeah, if you’re finding yourself around those people, that means you’re not allowing dissenting opinions into your life. This means you’re creating an emperor who has no clothes scenario where people won’t tell you that you’re naked. Do you understand what I mean?

And you can’t grow. You can’t grow in an environment like that.

Right, you can’t grow. I remember being on an airplane. I was heading out with my wife on our honeymoon. I say anyone close because it was 15 years after we got married. We could finally afford to go to Hawaii. And this is what it was. Whatever year it was, I remember getting on a plane in San Francisco bound for Hawaii. My wife falls asleep. She says she fell asleep almost instantly. She wasn’t moving. I don’t know what was going on, but she wasn’t moving, and I was sitting next to her. And at this time in my life, I hadn’t voted shame on me, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. I hadn’t voted. I hadn’t voted because I had said that everyone and all the politicians were essentially the same. They’re all terrible.

And then my friend challenged me. As well, what do they do about it? And my answer was, “Oh, you caught me.” I didn’t know I didn’t ship right, so I started looking into these. I kind of knew where I fell out, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know what the left had to say. I know what the right has to say. I didn’t know what libertarians had to say, so I followed. The Democrats, the Republicans, and the libertarians. At the time, there were still many candidates. I think Libertarians have decided on Gary Johnson.

And then I watched how it kind of shook out on the left and the right, and when it got down to the final three candidates, it was very interesting what they said, because the Libertarians and Bill Weld and Gary Johnson said specifically who they were, what they stood for, and touted their victories as both Republican. I want to say governors in blue states: Arizona and in Massachusetts if I recall correctly.

And Trump, at the time, on the right, was touting some of the stuff as negative against Democrats. But it was stuff about what he wanted to do and what he believed. But the thing that struck me the most is that Hillary wasn’t touting what she had done in her accomplishments other than the titles that she had accrued over time. It was almost exclusively everything negative against the right and Trump specifically. She was never saying anything good about herself or the publicists, or I’m not sure who is responsible for these things, but it’s very interesting.

So, I was talking to the gal next to me. It’s like, hey, I don’t understand this stuff or from different parts of the country. I’m assuming you have different beliefs. But if you’re interested, I’d like to talk about some of these topics. Because I don’t know, I haven’t decided, I don’t know. I don’t understand, and here’s the deal. I was like if we’re talking about Hillary, our answers had to be Hillary related. Not well, Trump did this. If we’re talking about Trump and it had to be Trump-related, well, that Hillary did this. Whatever we’re talking about, we have to talk about the thing, and we can tap out at any time. We don’t have to continue talking. And she said something we were talking about, like guns and Second Amendment stuff.

And she had said, “Well, it’s easier to get a library card than it is to get a gun,” which is a sound bite from, I think, President Obama’s saying it at the time, and I challenged her. I said that this isn’t that interesting. And she’s like, “What do you mean it’s like?” Well, it appears that something you heard, rather than something you believe, is correct. She’s like, “Yeah, it’s something that I heard.” I was like, do you have a library card? She’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got a library course about that.” You have a library card. Of course, they were like you. I know she wasn’t like that. I was like, “Well, do you have a gun?” And she’s like, “No, I can’t possibly think of any reason why I would have a gun.” I was like, “Well, where do you live?” She’s like I live in the San Francisco Bay area. It’s like OK, I understand. I was like, “Does anyone have a gun?” And she answered pretty quickly. He’s like “no,” and I was like, “wouldn’t it be interesting?”

If you guys got together and you went to an academy or whatever sporting goods store you have out there, I’m not saying buy a gun, don’t buy a gun. See what it takes first-hand for your own experience. What does it take to acquire a gun in this country? And not for any other reason than that you will have the personal edification of knowing whether or not the sound bite is true. And she was like, “I never thought about that,” and we got into it a little bit deeper, and I talked about that. I’m from northern Minnesota; originally from Oklahoma and currently in northern Minnesota. I grew up. You had a county sheriff who largely did things by himself. And they might be across the country. It might It will be 45 minutes at full speed before they can get to you. And if you’ve got an intruder or an animal or whatever problem, you have to be able to protect yourself because it’s 45 minutes late. A lot can happen in 45 minutes. She was like, “Well, I can agree with that,” and I was like, “Well, that’s good.” I’m glad we got to some kind of common ground, but she was willing and open to listening and discussing it. Whether she was right or wrong, whether we agreed or disagreed, we had an open discourse about that stuff. It’s fantastic that she was willing to do that.

She was open to it, though.

I hope she hears this and contacts me like I remember that right? Conversation on my way to Hawaii. His name was that I didn’t know I could get away.

This crazy dude is sitting out, sitting on the airplane next to me, trying to have this discussion. I was just trying to appease him because he was bugging the crap out of me.

That could be true. It could very well be true. But the willingness to have the conversation is what it takes to have any kind of growth.

It boils down to being able to have a conversation. That’s it, and being OK with disagreeing with one another and opening each other’s minds sets up perspectives. I mean, you may not understand why people own guns. You may not understand why you know. I ride a motorcycle, right? because that’s dangerous. You don’t understand. These things are because you quite possibly haven’t done them. I don’t own a gun. Right, I live. We are a little bit on the outskirts, and we do have animals here, and I don’t want to be caught off guard. And I do own guns, and I know that’s probably. I’m going to go to people on both sides, but I’m a female, and the reason I went to go do it was because I got divorced from my husband. I was raising two kids. And I couldn’t fathom not being able. To protect them

Yeah, yeah, we’ve met in person. You’re kind of tiny. You’re not an imposing physical person. I’m not either, depending on me. I’m 5/8. Chubby, like, yeah, you’re Yeah, yeah, I’m not fat. I’m fluffy, Gabriel Iglesias. But it says to my kids and all their friends, like I’m in Timmy, I’m an imposing figure. That’s it. I have a commanding, booming, deep voice, and like Dad, everyone is scared of him. You know, but he’s like other adults. Well, yeah, you have a

Yeah, have a good one. Presence is right, but it doesn’t say I can’t. You have a presence about you, yeah?

I can’t protect myself, but generally speaking, someone of your stature and size and weight is going to be fairly disadvantaged in any physical confrontation almost against any opponent. So, having that option for that personal protection for yourself and your household, I think is important. It’s visible in the news all the time.

I 100% agree with that. I completely agree, and you just have to have it. It has to be for the right purpose. I mean, I don’t take it out swinging around and just for **** and giggles, right? I treat it like the tool it is. It is a serious tool, and it should be used that way. If anything, I hope that just exposing it and bringing it

It would be a deterrent. That’s my hope. I would never want to be forced to use lethal force, but I will protect my family.

It’s a terrible situation to use that as a defense, but having that option is fantastic, not to mention

And that’s why we live here, in the US. After all, we have the freedom to do so. And we have options.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting because I believe in the Second Amendment. I understand that I don’t currently own a gun. I have owned guns. I have shot many guns. expert in pistols and rifles in the military. I can shoot the flies off a fly at 100 yards or whatever. Whatever some nonsense people talk about, having the discussion, I think, matters. I know it’s a hot topic in the country right now, and the reason it’s a hot topic is that we haven’t been able to solve protection. Without guns yet, we haven’t been able to solve that one, nor keep the one-handed ones out of our hands. criminals and a bunch of other terrible things to deal with a tool like

Well, offenses are going on all the time, and we can’t. We can’t protect everybody, and when you defund the police to do it, it may be that you’re more exposed to having something. Having someone harm you are right.

That’s a great place to end this, right? See how the defund the cop movement went in Minneapolis and how Carol was to blame. This was a great first episode. I’m so glad we had them. We have got to have really important discussions. Unfortunately, you mean Lou pretty much. I agreed on everything, so.

I know there are those of you posing. Here’s what’s up with this:

But it’s going to be interesting. This is the first episode you’re hearing. It’s the first episode we’re releasing, but you may discover us when we have ten episodes published like Drop Us a Line. Let us know. What do you think? Grab the social media links, or whatever. In the show notes, send us a message and tell us if you liked it. If you hate it, If you think we’re dumb because of our opinions or viewpoints, be willing to come on the show and defend your side, and we would love to discuss it with you.