 Fairness is the cornerstone of critical thinking. We have an obligation to the other person with whom we disagree to try to represent their argument back to them in the best possible light. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Amir Approved. This time we have an encore. You know, one of the two most recommended guests, Dr. Christopher DiCarlo and my good buddy Cal and the response from last episode, a couple episodes back has been great. You know, people really enjoy the deep, rational conversations that we're having. Excellent. Just for the record, let's be honest. 95-5 maybe. I'll give myself that much credit, but no more than that. It's a triage, chemistry over here. It's a joint effort. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of which. Without actually having joints. Next time. Next time. Round three, joints or shrooms. Shrooms are beautiful. That's right. Ever done them before. Let's try that. On air. On air. But what I want to start off at the beginning of this episode is you've written a book about rational thinking, asking better questions. And I think it doesn't matter where you are in your life right now. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire, a millionaire, a homeless. I think having the tool sets and capabilities of asking better question in my mind is a superpower. And so I kind of want to lead, put this towards you is like, what are steps that people can take today to get these tool sets to ask better questions? Right. I mean, there's quite a few resources out there available. I can't just pimp my own material. But there are plenty of critical thinking websites and challenges online that people can find. There are shows they can listen to because just by listening to shows and opening your mind and broadening your mind, you kind of through osmosis start to pick up those skills, right? Because you know, especially if somebody calls somebody out on bullshit, you know why, you know that they've violated some rule of logic or they've committed some fallacy of reasons somewhere. They might not give, always give a name to the face kind of thing, but they will be able to get it intuitively. And then if they want to more formally structure their reasoning skills, they can go on and they can find, you know, all kinds of stuff. But again, I'm obviously biased. I've taken these skills and kind of distilled them to try to make it as easy as possible for people, not only to read and remember, but to apply. So yeah. Can we actually dissect the ABC DES? I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, sure. So I took what I think are the six most foundational skills or tools of the critical thinking skillset and they just follow the, you know, the mnemonic of A to F. So A is for argument. So right off the bat, we talk about what is an argument? And part of the problem with critical thinking that I'm mentioning in this, the next book that's coming out in May is that the very term critical thinking can scare people because they almost immediately think you're going to criticize me. You're going to find something wrong with me and they get their hackles up about it. And it's almost anxiety invoking to say critical thinking. But I can't call it, I've tried. If you guys can come up with a sweeter, better, more precise term. Constructive thinking. Constructive thinking, right? But you are critiquing ideas, you know, and people need to know that critical is constructive too, as well as destructive. And there's nothing wrong with destructive criticism. If your ideas suck, we need to call you out on that. And we need the tools. The term argument, what does it bring to mind, right? Mommy and daddy are arguing. With a couple over there, they're arguing. And arguing has a negative connotation to it. In critical thinking, argument is a really good thing. In fact, it's the best way in which you can put your ideas together so that people can best understand why it is you believe what you do. They might not have to agree with you, but you make it very clear to them when you put your ideas in the form of an argument. And so that's why I use the... The roof. The knowledge of the house. So your roof is your conclusion and you want your conclusion supported by really strong walls, which are your premises. And those premises have to satisfy the foundational criteria of things like consistency and simplicity and relevance and reliability and sufficiency. And if they do, then you have a fairly sound structure. You have a fairly sound argument. And if you don't and one of those walls is weakened, your premises are not very well researched or you didn't get it from a reliable source, then that wall comes down and maybe so does your roof come down as well. So that analogy I think plays fairly universally around the world for teaching people that arguments are good things and put your ideas into that structure and do the same with others. If you don't quite understand what another person is saying, try to imagine and get them. What is your overall point? You force them. And then fairness is the cornerstone of critical thinking. We have an obligation to the other person with whom we disagree to try to represent their argument back to them in the best possible light. Don't be coy, don't be slimy, don't try to misconstrue it or create a straw man out of it. Steel man it, we're using this term now, steel manning an argument. It shows intellectual maturity for me to be able to tell you what your argument is so that you go, yeah, yeah. In fact, you even put some stuff in there. I didn't even think of. It's funny, you bring it up. Like Chris Voss, he's a V-O-S-S. He has a great book called Never Split the Difference. Oh, okay. And he was an FBI interrogator working for negotiations. Right, right, right. And he has a chapter in the book called That's Right. And one of his best strategies is he wants to reiterate the person's belief system better than he or she can do it to a point to the say, that's right. But this is what I dislike about most arguments and especially with politicians. You see this in the social media space. Somebody says a sentence, somebody picks that one point and instead of understanding the whole point, now we're going down this rabbit hole of like insignificance because somebody is paying attention to a point instead of understanding the whole picture and the whole perspective of what that person's saying. And the sooner we realize that fairness really is. And nobody wins. And it's got to go both ways. It's about civility as well, right? When we've lost touch with that, we've lost that capacity to be civilized towards one another in disagreement. It's easy to get along when we agree, right? Everybody's having a good time, everybody agrees. Once you get disagreement though, you know, and this is what C.S. Lewis called the art of disagreement. We have to relearn that. I'm afraid we're gonna have to reteach that to students that it's okay, we're always going to disagree. We're never always gonna be 100% on board of every detail of every aspect of it. But I think social media and internet has a role to play because funny thing is I was watching old debates between Milton Friedman. I was just about to say that. Oh, the 70s and 60s and 80s. Yeah, and Bob, I'm just looking at how the students behave and asking really articulate questions. And I'm like, fuck, world of a difference now. Oh yeah. Now everyone's shouting at each other. Well, MF Buckley, those guys, they really knew how to have dialogue and disagree without being reduced to an ad hominem, without calling the other person names or whatever. Look at Trump, look at all the names he had for people. Like he immediately goes to the ad hominem, right? Because I guess in his business mind or whatever, that's how you get the gain the upper hand or whatever, right? You demean the other person or some kind of power struggle. I really enjoyed the exercises in the book, how to be a really good pain in the ass. Was it good or great? How to become a really good. Good, pain in the ass. So basically it was a script, somebody having a discussion, and then using the tools, we would break it down and say, well, where is the conclusion, the thesis? What's the roof? What's the supporting, what's the foundation here? And something as simple as that can be replicated in schools. And I thought that was really interesting. I wish this kind of stuff was done more to help people understand. Well, I did take it into the school system in 2016, 2017. I was granted the right with the minister of education at that time, Liz Sandals for Ontario, to go into some high schools for a pilot project. And it went extremely well. But at that time, the ministry of education was dealing with yet another strike with teachers and staff. I don't know if you remember that. But after it was settled, I mean, she was very honest with me. She said, if I come down now after we've settled all this, and I heavy-handedly say, you have to now teach critical thinking, that'll be one more point for them to, up for resistance, right? To say, really? We just got all this settled and now you want us to do X? She said, it's far better to come up from the ground, from the school boards up, get it into the school boards, get them using it, and then that'll influence other school boards. So I've been trying to do that for years now, but it's kind of an uphill battle. It's wild to me that that is not one of the most important classes to be taught in schools, how to think, how to project manage, how to think, how to learn. These are some of the basics. You know, it surprised me, even at the university and college level, where I see our interns, our young people who are working with us, that are still going to school part-time, doing these assignments, there is no structure for them to understand. The ones that are working with us or have come through an internship, they understand how to PM, how to organize people, how to DV at the work, how to do something like simple as cards and scrum. None of this stuff is taught at school, but yet you're given an assignment and you have a month to do it or two months to do it. And if that young person doesn't have the family structure or the connections to understand, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you know what, I saw my parents know how to do a project and this falls into place, this is a project. How the hell are they supposed to know? This is why kids do worse in school than they could potentially be doing so much more if they don't learn things like critical thinking, things like how to project, manage a project. Yeah, we assume students know how to think that they come ready made, they don't. There are rules, there are rules for thinking and when you violate them, we can call you out on those and we should be called out as well. So yeah, argument first, A is for argument, then B, B is for bias, you have to understand that no human is without bias. So understand, do what I call the mirror test, start figuring out what are the natural and the cultural biases that have led to your believing what you now do about a particular issue. And what if you were born somewhere else in the world or even at a different time, do you think you would still have that same belief? Because it's almost impossible that you wouldn't. I mean, you are largely a product of your surroundings and how you were raised. And if some of those beliefs come from very fundamentalist ways of looking at the world, it's gonna be real difficult. Like one example I give is a fundamentalist Christian maintaining that masturbation is a sin. And it's believed in the Catholic faith, the one I was raised. Really? Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's a cardinal sin, it's not just any sin. And the reason why is because in the 1800s with the advent of high level microscopy, they were able to see spermatozoa. And so I think it was Pope Pius, I can't remember what number, 14. Decided those little sperm are little people, they're humunculi. And therefore you can't spill your seed on the ground, it's got one major receptacle. And that's a woman's vagina, definitely not a man's anus. Definitely not a man's anus. What was that? I'm doing rap now, I'm doing spoken word. So if you masturbate, your spermatozoa are going where God did not intend. And so that's why it's a cardinal sin. Now you tell a 13 year old boy that not only can you not do that, but if you do, you do know that God is watching and he's pretty much got a list and he's checking off. And that's a jerk off road to hell right there. So it's like, what kind of damage are you doing to a kid's brain by telling them that? To me, to Richard Dawkins, to Lawrence Krauss, to Sam Harris, that is harm. You are now, that is child abuse. You ought not to tell a child that. Yes, you have a right to believe in your religion and you have a right to practice your religion. But if your religion maintains that, it's fucked up. Oh, well, it could be right. It could be, no, it's wrong. Well, same thing right now. Isn't the Roman Catholic still against homosexuality? Yes. Are they loosening up on that? I don't follow those conglomerates. Francis seems to be more accepting of it, but when you push him hard enough, he'll have to stick with the central tenets of the. Like the craziest thing I heard before is like they condemned condoms. It's not just that they condemn condoms. It got so whacked that there were bishops in Africa who were saying if you used a condom, you were more likely to get AIDS. Like it's gotten way out of hand. That's insane. So I have a certain level of tolerance for religious belief. And so, you know, all of ethics can look like this. If the, you know, the y-axis is harm and the x-axis is time. And we have tolerance up here, you know, a high level of tolerance for low level of harm as we move across time. Then my tolerance is going to be very high. Once the harm starts to rise, the tolerance is going to dip and there's going to be an intersecting point at which we get to say, time out here. No, no, no, you have a right to believe in this, but you then don't have a right for the entailments of that belief that cause harm to other people. So I think we can all agree we're cool with religion in so far as any other belief system. If you're not harming people, it's really not our business, you know? But, and the same I would say for Islam, that we know of cases where women are taking their young daughters to the Middle East, to Africa to have clitoractomies. Yeah, FGM or something. Yeah, female genital mutilation. So how is a 14 year old girl going to speak out against her community and say, you know what? I'm going to opt out on this one when she's pressured, you know, to follow suit, you know? And that's only one specific sect of Islam. It's not all of Islam, right? So then how do we educate? How do we protect that girl, you know? And at the same time respect a group's constitutional right to practice, you know, freedom of conscience, religion. No easy answers, but can we all agree that that is a harmful act that is highly unnecessary? You do not need to remove a woman's clitoris outside of therapeutic reasons, cancer, whatever. There's no, for religious reasons, I gotta say no. No, we can't, we can't do that. And I'll respect your views, but at that point, no. And I think our government actually should have the duty, the obligation to speak up and say, no, you're in Canada now. I don't think we can really honor your going to another country to have this done. She comes back, what kind of complications could there be, right? Some women, some girls have bled to death. Some have had all kinds of uterine complications because of infections. It also brings up a good debate of like circumcision too, right? And circumcision, you let the kid decide when he's 18 or 16 or whatnot, if he wants to take the hood off and go convertible. That's his call. All right, so where were we? We're at C, yeah. So we've, lots and lots of biases. C is for context and you can't take information, isolate it. It's always embedded in a context. Better we appreciate that context. This goes to our story of the gentleman who murdered his daughter. Oh, Robert Latterman. Context. I saw that as a post, some young lady outraged saying, this man should go to hell and this and that. Right. I clicked and I read and I was like, this is interesting, I don't know. It's not as cut and dry, context is king, right? Context is king right here because here we have Tracy Latimer as a 13 year old with severe, I think it was cerebral palsy and constantly having seizures, not very conscious, you know what I mean? Not a consciously aware human being. And he just saw her health diminish and diminish and diminish and she was choking a lot and I guess he had decided in his mind that she had suffered enough and he took it upon himself to euthanize her. The problem with that is plenty of people had been euthanized by their family members and didn't serve time. Oh, really? Yeah, because the judge would see the compassionate grounds. Yeah. I just think it's ridiculous now to put the brother into prison for doing something when the deceased had written fully out, I wish to die, my brother is going to do this for me and so it exonerates him. Tracy couldn't voice whether she wanted to live or not. Therefore the judge had no real option but to convict him on a murder charge. The quotes from this, what is it? The CBC article is interesting to hear. He says, it was pointless to torture her daughter any further, she had already had four operations. If she moved her hip, would it go? She had rods in her back, she had been worked on enough and it goes on. Basically to him it was just one science experiment after another, they wouldn't let the daughter pass away and she was just miserable in pain and not an itch but severe pain. Constantly, yeah, it was not a good state to be in. So they convicted him of murder? Yes, and he served his time and then he got out. And he's a murderer in Man's Planet, what day? It wouldn't be murder one. I don't know what he got. It would be two or a manslaughter. Because euthanasia is legal. Well, that was at a time when it wasn't. Oh, this is an old case. Oh, this is an old school, this is going back to 15 years. And don't forget what else was happening in the States at that time. He was convicted 25 years ago. Okay, okay, okay. Jack Kevorkin, do you remember him? Oh, yeah. So Dr. Death, they called him in the States. He had a machine called the, what do you call it, the Thanatos machine, Greek for death. And it was the same three chemicals that are used in federal penitentiaries when the death sentence, yeah. So the first thing is a kind of a narcotic to kind of, you know, mellow you out and whatnot. The second is a major muscle relax, because when they put the toxin in, your body will naturally see that. Fight, yeah. And then the third one is the toxin. And Kevorkin's machine worked very well. Here's something you don't know. But one of the guys you met at the last talk I gave was a founding member of an underground organization that helped people die. Oh wow. That's a crazy story. Dr. Richard Thane. Oh, really? And him along with John Hostess, you can look this up or you can post a link to this guy. It's funny, you see, you meet a guy, such a sweetheart. Just wanna hug him. Well, they helped rather notable people die, like Canadian poets and people like that, fairly famous people. But it was never written, you know, because of death was just, they died in their sleep or whatever. But no, it was this John Hostess guy. He was helping them do it. I think he helped and ate lives. And then when he himself wanted to die, it was months before Maid or Medical Assistance in Dying was legal in Canada. He had to go to Switzerland to have it done. And Richard Thane went with him. Interesting. Yeah, and death is probably the most serious decision that any person's gonna have to make. And if you can do it consciously, great. That's kind of a bonus. It's the ones who can't. Yes. So in our wills, my wife's in my will, we have what's called an advanced directive. And the advanced directive is to our sons who will be the powers of attorney. Yeah, I just did that with my mom. Oh, okay. She said, if I ever become a potato. Yeah. So you give the kids, you know, you say, you know, check it out, you're bright people. You'll know if we're having a good time or not. Yeah. And make the call, cause. Especially the age too. Like if you're 80, become a potato. That's the thing. Or you develop early onset, you know, dementia, that kind of thing. And you can't fully do that. That's the issue. We might as well jump into this right now before we get to the D and Fs. If we're talking about medical assistance and dying, when I was asked to put in my two cents about the development of it, and then they went ahead and it came back to us. A lot of bioethicists said, this doesn't account for anybody with psychiatric conditions or future conditions. It says, six months imminent death. You got to be within that kind of window for the board to say, okay, we'll grant it. And then there's two ways in which you can take yourself out. Have a doctor administer it. Or they just give you the prescription and you get the script filled and you do it yourself. Oh wow. So there's two ways you can do it. Socrates. A lot of doctors. Yeah, addressing the hemorrhobe and everything. I'd want a photo like that. With a finger, a few people, a few of my interns crying. Yeah. And then the hemlock milkshake. Yeah. So the problem is, is that doctors really don't want to do this. We're finding out. Sure, yeah. They're not thrilled about doing this. They will. Yeah. But that's huge on them, you know, killing somebody. What'd you do today, honey? Oh, I killed a few people. And so I think there should be like nurse practitioners, people who are okay with doing this, who are especially trained to do this kind of work. We should talk to vets to put down animals, how they feel too. I cried more putting down a rat than I did watching both of my parents die. Interesting. Because the rat, its life, its quality of life was coming to an end. It had a tumor. It was having seizures. Wasn't having a good time. And then you have to make that decision for it. But on the way to the vet, when it's looking at you, like it's just another day, and you know it's going to die, that's tough. And now that I have a dog, it's going to be even worse cause it's a far more sentient being, right? Yeah. So that's going to be really tough. When a person knows they're on their way out, Euthanasia literally means in Greek, good death. Oh, it does. Yeah. Oh, cool. So you literally want to have a good death. We want a good life. What did you think of Robin Williams? Apparently he was diagnosed with something, right? Oh, he had a severe form of Parkinson's, did he? Yeah. Yeah. So if he didn't, the way I look at it, if he didn't do it himself then, when he had the faculty and the ability, he may not have been able to do it later. Well, that's our beef is when you have early onset dementia, how do you know where that six month window is? It's unfair. And how cruel is it to know you're losing your capacity for conscious awareness? For an intelligent person, what more cruel fate could await a person than to gradually realize and have their spouses say, you've asked me that, you've asked me that 26 times in a row. Have I? Have I? You can't even feel bad about it. It should be like a checklist, like have we tried this protocol, this protocol until he exhausted everything. Then it's like, yep. But then again, I've seen people in various stages of dementia in Alzheimer's. And even when they've lost their capacity to recognize anybody again, they seem to be having an okay time. They're not in any pain. They're not in any distress. So like video games? You can do all kinds of stuff, but how do we know what their video game console? There's interesting studies on the transcranial stimulation now coming up. Really, really promising research using different frequency DC current. Okay. Really, really interesting studies. One of my buddies was a pioneer in that, a guy named Michael Purzinger. He was up in Sudbury and he did the electromagnetic stuff. And yeah, I mean, people who believe in the sanctity of life and that you shouldn't treat people as they believe as objects, as a means to an end, to put them out of their misery, so to speak, whether they're religious minded or not, believe that it's life's hardships that push us to become better people. And that's why God wants us to do it. Okay, I get that. That's your belief and that's how you see things. And that's fine. The problem with that though is, A, we don't know if any such God exists. And B, we don't really know what's going on in the faculties and the level of reasoning of that person when they're in that state. So who's gonna make that call? And at what point do we say, their life is no longer worth living from my perspective as a person speaking on their behalf. That's a tough call. And I'm not saying it's going to get easier. I think it's gonna be more complicated. My buddy Yuri on here, the specializes in longevity. Yeah, my NACA factors. And so like hypothetically, let's say we're researchers heading, we statistically speaking, we'll have the ability to extend life for a very long time. Well, with telemeric sciences and knowing. Yes, that's exactly it. So let's say hypothetically, within the next 50 years, we'll see the first 100 and 150 year old person through this method. That would be the next milestone for sure. Then the question comes like, let's say we, for a time like you look at progress that we've made in the last 100 years, I can't even imagine we're gonna be in the next 100 years. And so we fast forward 100 years from now and let's say we have the ability for you to live till 300. At what point do people say, well, I've lived my life here, I'm kind of tired. I don't know. My buddy Jim Shea and I are like, we're sticking around as long, at least that's how we feel right now. If I can learn and contribute, those are the two things. As long as I can continue to learn new things and I can continue to contribute one way or another. I'm good. The moment I feel that I can't contribute and I can't learn, I wanna be offed. And I've told my wife that. But it'll come in a combination of ways, right? It'll be regenerative science, figuring out how we can just make better organs, better muscles, better that kind of thing. And it'll be the transhumanism, right? Let's get the artificial parts in there of the ones that are wearing out, right? Replace them with far better materials than- Grow them. Or we can- Well, Aubrey de Grey, that's his strategy. He thinks we're more of a car. So he's like, how do you grow the mitochondria? How do you grow the ribosomes? How do you grow every- Grow a hip, grow an arm? Everything, down to the cellular mechanism, yeah. And grow it better. And grow it better, yeah. Well, we can grow skin now. We're doing skin graphing with growing skin. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So, brave new world, hopefully, you know, the biggest irony of my life is that they'll figure out how to do this, you know, a week after I'm dead. So- I don't think living longer is our problem. I think we need to figure out how to live better before we learn to live longer, which is actually the main point of our conversation. Going back to ABCs. Yeah, do you want me to get back? Yes. Let's finish it off. So D is connected to A. It's how we can diagram our argument. So, or somebody else's argument, whether it's spoken, written, whatever. And it allows us to visually then see what the house looks like and all the component parts. So we know what the conclusion is. That's whatever the person happens to believe, you know? Euthanasia is good, euthanasia is bad, whatever, abortion is good, abortion is bad. That's their conclusion. But then we can see what all of their reasons are and how those reasons relate to that conclusion. And we can do it for our own thinking as well, right? We can write down what it is we think and why it is we think that. So we have a better understanding. So diagramming is like a, I call it the most boring part of the critical thinking skills, but it is so essential because it allows us to literally see what an argument looks like on paper, you know, visually get a good grasp of it so that we can then say it back to the other person if it's not our argument and then critique it much more fairly because we can literally say, is this what you mean? Yeah. We can see it and they go, yep. Yeah. Or if they disagree, we can then revise it and then begin. Yeah. E then is evidence. So many claims required and there's different types of evidence. So you gotta be careful which type of evidence is best for this particular type of topic. And F just involves all of the different types of fallacies that can be committed or errors in reasoning. So I mentioned Trump uses lots of ad hominems, you know, literally Latin for against the man or against the person. Usually that means you've lost the argument. You start criticizing personal characteristics about a person you've lost because you're no longer addressing what they're saying. No, it's like the Persian saying, don't kill the messenger. Yeah. So you're dealing with a relevant. Conservatives did with Jean Cretchen's face. It was Cretchen. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Conservatives of 93 did that. You're not gonna go well. It's any time you demean a person, racism is just a big ad hominem. You're just, you're demeaning another person for irrelevant characteristics that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. So those are the six, you know, argument bias context, diagram, evidence and fallacies. Those are the basic tools within the overall critical thinking skill set. If people learn what those are about and how to utilize them better. And it's like a language though. It's not a quick fix. It's not something you can learn just overnight and apply. It's gonna take a little bit of time. Sure. But at least there's like a heuristic. There is. There is. And by having it with the first six letters of the English alphabet, it's a very handy mnemonic really just if you can remember A to F and what all those are then you can remember how then to apply them. And you know what I mean? The mnemonic just trails down like a tree. And then basically it'll increase the likelihood for us to at least understand the differences between arguments that people might have so that we can better position ourselves to appreciate how have we been biased to believe what we now do? Like have you ever wondered why are there Trumpites at all? Like why would somebody support this guy that we find to be so... Noam Chomsky was talking about that this morning on 89.5 on that show, Alternative Radio. It comes on at 9 a.m. And he was just talking about, he was discussing how as the center is unfolding and unpacking and dying, the fringe is taking over which is why on the left you had a Bernie Sanders and on the right you had a Trump. People are disenfranchised, weak, they're in pain, they're not for the establishment. And you know what? If this guy's gonna poke at the opposition and make fun of the opposition, it's all fun and games, but I trust him more than I trust what's come before him, which is the establishment. So it's the idea of the anti-establishment which is more powerful than all the other facets of that person's character, regardless. So it's like I'm forgiving him of his racism, I'm forgiving him of his ad hominem attacks, I'm forgiving him of all of these other things because you know what? All those other people that were more center, they're like that but worse. That's what the public is believing. And like the right wing of evangelicals if you're wondering how can a Christian support this guy who's so clearly immoral? That broke so many of the 10 commandments. It's because it's the overall good that they think that party is going to be able to do for their particular value system. Self-interest of course. Self-interest, right? He's gonna be pro-life, he's gonna be for this, right? He's gonna be for that. The pro-life argument's interesting. I see both sides. I see where pro-lifers are going, I see where pro-choice is going. But then I also view, I look at human behavior and I look at law, there's philosophy but then there's law and there's no perfect panacea answer for this. But how I view it from a pro-choice standpoint like if you make it or pro-life, if you make it illegal, no matter what, people are gonna fucking do it. Yeah man, that's the problem. No matter what, and it could cause irreparable harm. Like you're not gonna stop people. No, no. So I get where you want, I have friends of mine that they're here because that person didn't get an abortion, they're right. And it's a miracle that they're here. The exact same time, if somebody wants to do some self-harm damage, nothing's stopping them. I know, I kind of look at it like it started a process. Something has started and it's developing. And it's not my call on the process because it's not my body. In general, I'm not thrilled that a process has to be aborted, which is literally stopping it, right? But I don't know the context, I don't have the nuances. I don't, you know what I mean? It's not my call in any way, no matter whether I was religious or non-religious to tell a woman that you have to carry on for the next nine months, that's just not my call. And we have to realize that it's not a perfect world. We have philosophy, we have Star Trek. What would potentially resolve this? If a woman could take a developing fetus out of herself and give it to a guy and say, here you go, you want this to continue? I'll sign off right now. Would that change things? Or if it could just date in a box somewhere? I think support systems though too. Oh yeah, that's all very important, there's no question. And birth control of course, in the preceding stages, this is what Obama talked about when it came down to this issue, right? You got to look at the whole aspect of the issue from birth control all the way through for personal choice and that sort of thing. Mom was a Catholic, mom picketed outside of Henry Morgan Talder's clinics. Henry and I became really good friends. I gave the eulogy at Henry's funeral. You mentioned that last year, that's right. And you know what? Even though my mother was a died in the world Catholic and hated his guts, I get it, right? You got to see the consistency of why she would. In her mind, sperm touches egg as God's call, as not human's call. It's a sentient life. It is, and when you take that, you're taking a soul. You're not just taking a body, you're taking a soul. From the scientific standpoint, I don't buy the fact that, how do we definitely know that it's not sentient? Like what's the trimester? Like second or something, you know what I mean? There seems to be precursor, there's evidence that a precursor for sentience is at least an intact nervous system. So without a nervous system, there really can't be a form of sentience. So when does the nervous system develop? Okay, so very quickly. There's three positions you can have on abortion. Conservative, sperm touches egg, that's it. You don't touch it. Feminist or legalist, head and shoulders have exited the birth canal. It's alive and it has rights. Gradualist, somewhere between sperm and egg and exiting the birth canal. There's problems with all three, right? If it's sperm touches egg, then I tell people I have in one hand a 64-celled zygote that's been in liquid nitrogen and is preserved and is viable and can be transferred embryonically into a woman and become a child. And I have a two-month old. One of these is going to die. You call the shot. Now, if you're a conservative, you have to believe they're equal. So then you flip a coin. Now, if you don't flip a coin, then that means you might be more of a gradualist than you thought. Feminist, legalist approach, head and shoulders exiting birth canal. If that's when you believe a child is alive, a fetus, a baby, whatever you wanna call it is alive, then let's go back to the point at which the next contraction is going to cause birth and 10 seconds before that contraction, a woman says, I've decided I don't want this, inject it with poison and stop its heart now. If you're a legalist feminist, you have to say do what she just said. Now, if you think it's one more contraction and this thing is coming out fully alive, viable, ready to be adopted or given up for adoption, then maybe you're not fully a legalist feminist. Maybe you do believe there are times when we really shouldn't be messing at that point. Now, if you're a gradualist, you got a whole host of problems. I was like, I'll hold off until the third. This one sounds like an easy one. I got this one covered. When is it alive? When does it have rights? When it has a fully intact nervous system in the heartbeats, when it has all of its organs, when it can respond to pain, when it's conscious, if it's consciousness, then we can be killing kids up till they're two. If we're really talking about full conscious awareness of themselves, as Jim Jeffery said, did you guys believe in late-term abortions? And the woman said, how late? He said, I don't know, five years. Because you're right, it takes a while. That's right, like if you think about it. So if you're a gradualist, that doesn't make anything easier. Now you have to say the line in the sand is at 17 weeks, 14 weeks. And I've had heads of obstetrics say 14 weeks, what? 14 weeks. I said, what are you talking about? He said, that's my line in the sand. I said, really, you're telling this right now? And he goes, yep. Cause I was doing bioethics work at McMaster. And I said, that's your code, eh? That's it for you. And he said, 14 weeks. What happens at 14? For him, everything's intact, nervous system, heartbeat, the hands. It's pretty much human-like. It's small, but it's pretty much intact. It's not viable. Probably couldn't survive on its own. But it's very close. And for him, that was the line in the sand. He was a gradualist and he said, that's it. He said, no, that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop another doctor from doing late-term abortion. That's not my call. What is late-term? After 20 weeks. After 20 weeks. I don't know if this is social media fake news, but I've been hearing some crazy stuff about like seven months, eight months, even close to nine months abortions. It's rare. I don't know. I had a cold condition, I don't know. They discover something and I've dealt with couples and this happened. The first two ultrasounds didn't pick it up because the fetus hadn't developed enough. The third ultrasound at 19 weeks picked up that there were no lungs. So it's going to be born to die. Yeah. And what could they do? I mean, you either have the abortion then and some women are like that. I've seen some women say tomorrow or now. I don't want this fetus to feel any more pain than it has to. Yeah. It would be cruel. And I've had others say, we're going to term. Yeah. And we're gonna pray. Oh, wow. And it's in God's hands now. And it's a bioethicist. You don't say, no, you shouldn't do that. You honor that. But this is why I'm more inside of choice. It is choice. Because when you have the law open, you can do A, you can do B. But what a tough decision they have to make. It's a horrible decision to make. What a tough decision they have to make. And now the last thing a bioethicist would ever do is try to convince them to do one thing rather than another. Because context, they're religious. I'm not overly, I'm not a religious person. I don't get to bring my biases into this, right? For the sake of compassion, you got to listen to the whole person. You got to hear what's going on in the world. And you got to assess the situation accordingly. Because if you don't, then your biases are getting the better of your reasoning, which could inflict harm to their particular worldview and their value system. So no easy answers and ethics. I had a friend of mine that was born dead. Really? Yeah. And the mother wouldn't let him go. And she held on to him and held on to him and held on to him. He resuscitated. Yeah. They say it must have been the mother's touch or the heartbeat of the mother or something like that. You know, stuff, but yeah. Oh yeah. He's alive today. Yeah. And we're never gonna solve the abortion issue. Like nobody's ever gonna come up with a magical argument that says, aha, here's the answer. We're not because we just differ so much in our opinions about what it means to be alive and therefore have rights as an individual. Well, the most important thing though is you make optionality. I always give the argument against hardcore socialists. I'm like, you can be a socialist here in a really capitalist system, but semi-capitalist system. I cannot be a capitalist in your system. I can't. My dad ran away from Yugoslavia because the government came in and took his business. And that's why he came to Canada. Exactly. You can still run your business, sure. But under our rules and we have our fingers in them. Under new management. Correct. Correct. That's wild. It is. Think about it. You gotta create systems that everyone can play and you want your answer or your choice. Here you go. You want your choice. Here you go. And those are truly the greatest countries to live in. Yes. The ones that people are highly educated. They have maximum amount of freedom. They have social programs that take care of those less fortunate. And that people give a damn. Like they, you know, when I was in Iceland, I'd see people on the street walk past garbage cans where there might be a bottle at the bottom. They go and get it and put it in the garbage can. They don't let the next person do it. When we had to use the gym, the group before us, it was like five minutes before we went on, bell rings, they all stopped what they're doing and like six of them grab mops and form a line and sweep the gym floor. And then we get it for an hour and five minutes before, something at the bell rings and then we decide six and then we do it for the next. So that's like a social democracy. Yeah. So. But there's this, you know, you look at these places is very homogenous, very low population. Well, Iceland's like less than 400 pounds. And they have a unique identity that they can all raise their hands and say, like for example, Toronto, I love Toronto as a city. I don't consider myself a Torontonian and I don't know what a Toronto identity is. Right. Like what's- I've been saying this for a long time. From a branding perspective, if you were to stop 100 people and ask, what does this city represent? Actually, they're gonna say diversity because it's the easiest, like it's the easy one to pull down, but really and truly like, what is our vision? What is our identity? What is our brand? Sun defined really. So there's no cohesive unity. Right. Right. That's the thing when people talk about like, oh, and it's very tribal. It's like, you're not gonna like everybody. You're not gonna agree with everybody. That's it. And yeah, here's a good segue for that. Saying we are all African got my ass fired. Yeah, you mentioned that last time, yeah. But if we could accept that and understand that we're all related, can this go any distance towards reducing the racism and the hatred of the other? I know we're tribal, you know? Tribalism exists. I'm so about to say that. Racism doesn't exist. Yeah. Are we Ashley racist or are we just tribal? Because now we're xenophobic, which is fear of the foreigner. Correct. Fear of that which is foreign choice. Fear of the unknown. Yeah. So we're xenophobic. Yeah. But all animals are. Oh yeah. They have to be. They end up as a lunch. It's safe to precaution. It's like, I don't know who you are. That's right. But once we get trust, right? Once we know that I don't have to fear you anymore, that's gotta go. The fear's gotta go, right? Because what reason now do you have? So here now, how long do you think it'll be before the world accepts that we are all African? Or do you think it's gonna be centuries? Actually? Yeah. Never in my mind. Really? You don't think there will be a world acceptance that we all came from the same place that we're all related? This is where my belief in like. One. The prophet Gene Roddenberry comes in. Yeah. Almost religious in my belief in Star Trek. Where I say, you know what? Like, I believe, I gotta believe, man, that it's gonna, it's possible. I gotta believe that we're gonna get to that point of like Roddenberry level of enlightenment. Not, none of this new shit in Star Trek, but like the card level. The only way that's gonna happen, I mentioned before is there has to be a global catastrophe. The aliens or something's gonna kill us all. We need an enemy that we can unite together to benefits all of us. Right. The Watchmen. Yeah, sure. Another thing though too is like you mentioned Africa. You know, obviously religious people should kind of be on that side if there was an Adam and Eve, right? We should theoretically come from this. Sure, some of my Christian friends believe that's where they are. Yeah, male or female, right? And whether it's Africa or like, replace Africa for like, I don't know, like any country. Scarborough. Scarborough. Like everyone comes from Scarborough. We're all Scar. That's right. We're all Scarperians. One point of origins, let's say, right? Yeah, sure. I think the identities and philosophies and egos are too ingrained in people. And I think you mentioned transhumanism. I think in the future, I mentioned Star Trek, we will have a new subspecies of Homo sapiens who are genetically modified from the get go using CRISPR, any type of new technology. Cast nine. Correct, they're no longer Homo sapien. They're next version. So they won't even agree that I come from there. There is a TED talk on this. I'm a brand new type of human being. No. That our grandchildren are gonna be a different species pretty much. Like the rate of change, especially in the brain and like the level of autism. And the last little while more humans are like geared to specialize that a few generations from now we're gonna be very, very different. But I'm gonna find that. I'm literally talking about using technology to say how do I create this person to be more myelin in the brain? How do I create? Right. So using whether it's like delivery system by virus or in bacteria, I will genetically modify an egg and a sperm. And I can maybe we'll have certain chambers to semi mimic a womb to a certain level then maybe we can put it into a host. This is a brand new human. It is. Brand new human. And so for them, their identity is like, well, I'm not from Africa. I'm not naturally considered. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I'm genetically modified human being. Well, theoretically then you could make androids. Right? If you could model that process. I think we're eventually gonna get there. We've already seen people like in China, they've used CRISPR for HIV to cut it out. Oh, shit, really? You gotta be careful with the CRISPR because what you cut out, you don't know what the long-term effects might be. Second order thinking, I always mention that. We're not there yet, close. But guys are doing it themselves, right? Some guys. We can order kids. Yeah, yeah. What? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Biohacking. Yeah, yeah. It's huge. I know of biohacking. I didn't know you could do that. But he injected it so that it would turn his muscle, like he didn't have to work out as much. He would convert, tear his muscle down, and build it up quicker. He died, I think. Yeah. That's my thing with any new technology. CRISPR-Cas9, that's called. Yeah, that's the thing with any new technology is you want to wait for like 10th generation or something that's like, especially when you're like snipping my RNA with some bacteria. Yeah, it's like DVD players. Let's just wait. Yeah. You're $1,000 now. Let's just wait. I found the name of that TED Talk. There's actually two by the same gentleman. His name is Juan, J-U-A-N Enrique. And one of the TED Talks is called Will Our Kids Be a Different Species? And then the other one is The Next Species of Humans. Yeah. Yeah, so like going back to Star Trek and the hope that humans will unite, the only way, like I said, the only way to see it is we have to have some kind of external- So calamity. In Roddenberry it was World War III. And World War III was a social war of different classes. Because the, think about it, man, this guy started running this shit in the 60s. Oh, yeah. But basically sometime in this period, in the mid-21st century, the classes are so far apart. And it starts actually in San Francisco. This is bizarre. In California and in San Francisco. Doesn't everything start in California? And the divide is so huge that eventually, like that's what creates a global world war. And after that- The haves and the have-nots? The haves and the have-nots. There's a pretty much a decomposition of like government agencies and world leaders and everything. And then they kind of got a rise back up. And at this point, they've now matured to work together. I wonder if there's any kind of, we know there's a correlation, but I wonder if there's any causal relationship between the erosion of the middle class and the erosion of the middle political. It's not interesting. It's such a strong diversity on both ends now and such an erosion of that middle class. If any society has a nice, fat middle class, everybody tends to be pretty happy. I think this is what Chomsky was saying is that that is exactly what's happening. There's more and more people that are disenfranchised because he started it off with discussing the wealth distribution and how most people are actually in debt. Like the majority of Americans are way in debt. The problem is it's through the blame game. And yeah, like one, people have to understand that we're not in a capitalist system. We're in a crony capitalism. Like the stuff the Wall Street does is fucked up. Like they're beyond criminal. The bailouts that they did, the free money that they got, the buybacks or stocks that they're doing. This is a competition alone now, right? It's all algorithmic. It's high frequency trading. But even getting bailed out by the fucking government and then getting bonuses. Too big to fail, right? And then buying back your own stocks or free money that you have. Too big to fail. It's called the Catalina effect too. They get the first money. So they have a premium on the money. They spend on what they want. Then it trickles down to the rest of the people at a high inflated rate. We'll see at least Iceland when after those guys put them in jail. So good on them. So for me, when I look at like middle class, I think they also been sold, not just middle classes for everybody. They've been sold a bullshit dream. Yeah, we're not actually capitalistic. Especially in the States, it's not. And that's the problem. There's too much lobbying going on. There's too much like, I don't remember where I was reading it, but basically as soon as you get into office as a senator, you're spending four or five hours a day you're saying, getting prepared to meet donors. Like most of your job is to collect money from big donors. It's not to serve the people. It's just like this. You saw Edward Stone's talk, right? On Joe Rogan. I didn't watch the full three hours. I watched a bit of it, yeah. I thought it was interesting. He mentioned how presidents will come in with all of these ideas. And within their first day, they'll sit down with the career politicians, the people running the FBI, the CIA, guys who've been around for a very long time. This is great. Love your ideas. Here's the reality of the situation. This is what the fuck you're doing. And you're just like in that same- You're caught on that system. Which I will give, like I'll throw a little bit of credit in Trump's direction. It's very suspicious that Trump's personality is he doesn't like getting bullied. He likes to be the bully. First thing he did was he got into a big fight with the CIA and the FBI. And then it wasn't until recently with this Edward Snowden conversation that I was like, that's very, very interesting. Have we seen, and I'm too young, but have we seen ever in the history of United States another president being attacked by so many people? There was not a president, but a candidate, Barry Goldwater. And the American Psychiatric Association, the APA, came out against him. That's why it's called the Goldwater effect that you can't psychologically analyze a person without actually having met them and discussed their situation and whatnot. Remember people were saying, Trump's a narcissist. He could be a psychopath. So it was known as this kind of Goldwater aspect that we did it with Barry Goldwater and he lost big time because it was like, he's unstable, he's mentally unstable. And they were saying the same thing about Trump when he took over office. And then they changed their tune and said, no, we now have more than enough evidence to know for sure he's a narcissist. Not all narcissists are psychopaths, but every psychopath is a narcissist. So is he, does he suffer from psychopathy? It's possible. That's actually a really good topic we should talk about. If we find out that the psychopaths and psychopaths can be made, they don't necessarily all have to have a genetic component, but we know- What they're predisposed. We know there is a strong biological component. So if we can make that determination early enough in life, do we owe it to society and to that individual? Then how do we, it befalls us, how then do we treat that individual? Right? Some people maintain it. Well, you just put a bullet behind their ear and you take them out. You take them out of the gene pool because we can't have psychopaths because by and large, the psychopaths are making the world shitty for everybody else. I don't buy that. So that's interesting. You see that recent Netflix documentary on big room yoga? You saw that, right? Good documentary. Good documentary. This guy was clearly a psychopath. But the red flags are there from day one. Oh, I know. You've got to be a moron not to see the fuck in the car. Oh yeah, from day one. He was like, I'm the best. I've created yoga pretty much. This guy was, but you know what? Yeah. As fucked up as he was. And this is what, I hope I'm not like butchering one of the lessons I learned here from sapiens. Like we don't know the long-term impact of the decisions and of the people. Hundreds of years from now, we're going to be like, remember that guy, Bikram Yog? He was the person that brought yoga into North America and the Western Hemisphere. My thinking is these human traits or archetypical designs have been here from the get go. Right. From like basic logical thinking they must serve a purpose in this so-called tribal system that we had or still have. The question is- They're sneaky fuckers. Well, they're the ones who lack empathy, right? There has to be some reason. It could be a mutation. It could be just a basic mutation. And war time, do we need them in war time efforts? Maybe Churchill was a cycle. There's that aboriginal saying, right? You need war time leaders and peace time leaders. There's two different types of leaders. Churchill was a great war leader, but not a good peace time leader. Yeah, man, I know a few people that I can say, you don't want to invite them to your daughter's birthday, but shit, if there was an apocalypse, I'd be going to homies home. I'd be hanging out with that guy. We're also going to look at like people, like you talk about politics. And there are, I would say, a very few that have altruistic reasons to go. Let's say a few. But the majority, they go for their own self-interest. They want to dictate their point of view onto you. That's it. Kind of the opposite of what the Greeks had in mind. Yeah, like that's it. Like there's no other reason. You want to do better for society. I can tell you 10 things on top of my head that you can do right now to have a change today, then go to into politics. But I want to go into politics. Well, this is another problem. You've got a lot of really intelligent people. You've got a lot of great people who don't go into politics as well. You've got a lot of great people who don't go into teaching because it sucks. Think of all the people who have beautiful, checkered backgrounds. That could be great politicians. But you don't have to like, why would I expose myself? Why would I go into that arena and have my personal life picked apart because I'm not that perfect person? But they don't have that default natural behavior of like, I want to put my fucking fist down and be like, this is how I want it done. That's it. And so I think you have to be wired a certain way to succeed in politics. Yeah. Thomas Hobbs said it's probably better to work with one individual, even if that individual is a tyrant because you can know what to expect. To cook in the kitchen. Rather than a board. Because with the board, there's going to be backstabbing and behind the scenes crap that goes on. I think another way for society to become better is I had one of the top candidates for the Libertarian Party a couple of nights ago here, Keith, and the Ontario Libertarian Party's first modus operandi is like, the number one thing they would do is every single, they will itemize every single balance sheet of the federal government. Mm-hmm. It's like, we want to know, okay, we're not going to change taxes, right? We can, that's a different conversation. We want to know where the fuck is the money going? Yeah. Yeah, I'm shocked that in today's day and age with the systems we have in place, that I as a citizen can't go on a government website and know exactly, just like you would as a shareholder in a company. Yeah. P&L and everything. Exactly. Where the pennies go. To me, it makes no sense for an organization to continuously be in the red. How could you keep being in the red? Is Toronto lack like intellectual horsepower? Is the economy gone to shit? Like, we're supposed to be in a booming time, right? Yeah. It has to be transparent. Yeah. If the governments want to... Yeah, that should be the first time. If governments want to avoid big trouble in the future and cycles repeat, people get fed up, they have a low quality of living, they're like, yo, enough's enough. We want to build a more trusted society. A trusted society is a healthy society. It's a unified society. We need transparency. So does that mean we got to get rid of lobby? Lobbying. Lobbying. Lobbying is a mess. Limit it. Socrates said, if you want a democracy, those who lead within the democracy, go into office with the clothes on their back. Yes. We'll pay for your food and your housing. Take care of your family. But you cannot gain by this position. You are there to serve the polis. You shouldn't be coming out of politics with millions more. No. That makes no sense. It's gonna be an honorary job. That's exactly opposite to what the Greeks defined as democracy. And I'll tell you there are gonna be way more altruistic people who will say, you don't want to fuck it. I'm gonna do it. I don't want the money. I don't need the power. I don't do it to prove a point. These are angels of our better nature. These are the people we need leading, driving the ship. That's Pinkersburg, right? So government transparency. I wanna bring up a little bit about the idea of right to bear arms in the United States. And then contrast that to what's happening in Iran and Hong Kong. Okay, sure. So where do you wanna start? Would the things that are happening in Iran and Hong Kong be happening if all of those people were fucking armed to the teeth? I don't think so. Yeah, so when I hear- And I think this is what the Americans know, which is why they're paranoid about their government. Yeah, I think it would still be happening. It'll be different dynamics and- It would be civil war. It would be different. But the government would be a lot more careful in stepping in and going in because they would know that a civil war could break up. A classic example, like Yugoslavian war technically started in 89, then broke in the 90s. But what people don't realize, in the mid-80s it started campaigning to de-arm citizens. Really? So we've been listening to Croatia, yadda, yadda, yadda, all the countries, yeah. So they were taking away guns. Yeah, you're left for like a pistol, the fucking gonna do a pistol, you know what I mean? Nothing. Yeah. What's a pistol gonna do against a tank and RPGs, right? Right. But like people had their own militia, like everyone was army, everyone's trained, it was mandatory military service. So everyone had the mental fortitude and physical and mental skills to use. My mom can take a part of a gun and do everything. Like she's fully trained in the army. But your wife is Vietnamese. She's Vietnamese. And didn't Vietnam win largely because the farmers were just so adept at knowing how to set traps and figuring things out. They were armed to the teeth and they were savvy. They had the help of the Russians. They did? Yeah. They had a motto grab them by the belt because they realized that, you know, they couldn't fight the war. Long range. Right. They would have to get so close that you could grab them by the belt. Yeah. Yeah, that's because the Americans had no way to deal with them. Familiar, yeah. Like jungle warfare. Yeah. Scared the hell out of them. They didn't know where they were going. Like from my view on guns. Have you seen the documentary? It's on Netflix. The Vietnam War. Ken Burns? Oh, it's Brutal Man. I know. It's like hard to hold back tears. When people say government gives you rights, I'm like, what is that? Laughing joke. As a sovereign human being, you're born with rights. You're born with what you want to your religious viewpoints. You're born with freedom of speech. You're born with the sovereign right to defend yourself as a human being. The whole notion that government can grant me rights. You're granting me so I can think. Right. You're granting me so I can protect my family from crazy people. So these are like natural, right? Natural rights. Yeah. Born, natural. And I overlay it to nature. You have two chimp tribes in nature and this is why dogs behave in a certain way. There's something called resource guarding. I gotta guard the females. Very important resource obviously. And I gotta guard my food. And so the next tribe of chimps come or what's gonna happen? They fight, but they use tools. Chimps have tools. Animals have tools. They use it. So they are given their natural right to defend their territory against invaders. Here the government comes around like, no, no, no, no. We don't give you any rights. You can't defend yourself. You have to rely on us. Yeah. And so for me, I think it's a natural, sovereign right for you have to, now how you attain the gun is a different conversation. That's a different conversation. You don't have to, just because you believe in the right to bear arms doesn't mean you believe in the right to be able to walk into a wall and just pick up. I always fuck with people's mind. You realize more people die from car accidents than any guns. Yep. That's the most dangerous weapon I see. And yet we still have more training to get a car than we have to buy a gun. Canada's a little bit more. Right. Canadian gun owners or something. On the way in today, I heard a report on CPC radio. When I go through the States on tour, wherever I'm going, I usually go to a gun shop. Yeah. And I rent whatever model I want, depending on what mood I'm in, go into their range, blast off 60 rounds, take my little target and ski battle. And every time I go into one, I ask, why would I need a handgun? And the reaction is almost always the same, personal protection. What they said on the study from the CBC this morning, less than 1% of people pull their guns for personal protection when a crisis occurs, like a mass shooting or things like that. Yeah. So then it's not really for personal protection. It's out of fear of what might or could happen. It's fear of what might could happen, but also the fact that there's a massive difference when someone like, let's say, has gone through military training and actuals. First, it's the mental fortitude. You pick up the gun, you know, someone's gonna shoot. Well, you've been there. I did a crowd of my goth for a year and a half every single day. I do, I like to pick up a new thing every year. And it's not the fact, cool, anyone can learn techniques is arm and knife or a gun and all that. That's not the benefit. The benefit is having the mental fortitude and you've repeated this pattern before. So when I'm in this situation, I'm not panicking. I've been here before. It's muscle memory. Muscle memory. So it's like the famous Korean thing. What's it called? Udallup. Observe, direct, orient. So I'm observing the situation. I'm analyzing what's going on. I'm making my action plans in my mind. Then I'm going towards it. The problem with somebody like, let's say, you know, I'm an American. So I don't know how easy I heard it's pretty damn easy to get a gun. You walk into Walmart, wherever you grab a pistol, nine millimeter or something. And you have like, you know, whatever, nine rounds, how many rounds it comes in. What training do you have? I know. Yeah. First time shooting a gun, I was shocked. First time hearing a gun, I was shocked at how loud it was. That's what I said. First time shooting a rifle. Yeah. Bing! That was with the fact that I had a. Switzerland's a good example. You have the most armed nation per capita based on their population, but everyone went to the military. It's trained. You have to have training. Yeah. Like when I said we should go shooting, like the group. Yeah. Before we go, if there are those who have never shot before, I'll give them a little tutorial about what to expect because that's usually the biggest freak show. It's the kick, eh? You don't expect the kick. I'm not a flincher, right? Yeah. Because in video games, you know, you see that, but you don't feel it. Oh yeah. So going back to Hong Kong, like you would have a group of people that have guns if it was based on the American model of just getting it that have no expertise, no knowledge. Mm-hmm. So there's a big difference. If we'd also have to assume that if there was a culture of having guns, you would have a lot more people going to gun ranges and having a little bit more expertise. Oh, you'd think. You'd think. Yeah. You'd think it's one thing to go to gun ranges different to be prepared in situations, much different. But would arming the Iranians and nationals in Hong Kong make it better or make it worse? Short run, long run, I don't know. It's gonna make it more deadly. It'd make it more deadly. Well, let's stop it sooner. It would probably, I'm talking out of my ass here, but it would probably prevent it from starting, almost like a nuclear arms rift. You have two factions that, that don't really want this to happen. Nobody wants it to happen. When you know that a percentage, 10% even, of your population is armed to the teeth, just 10%, you're gonna think twice about like getting a little too aggressive with those, with those peaceful protesters. Right. Because you're gonna be like, you know what? Somebody in that peaceful protest is armed. That's not gonna be so peaceful. So was it a huge mistake for Beto O'Rourke to say we're coming for your assault rifles? Do you remember when he said that? Yeah. Like you can't say that. I think God. States, are you out of your mind? If they ever really try to take away guns, it'd be old. It's their hell. Just, it shouldn't even be on the table. Yeah. It shouldn't even be on the table. Yeah. The genie's out of the bottle. Yeah. We gotta deal with it. Yeah. Education. Education. What's the better licensing background checks? We have to be vigilant about this. And we have to get the NRA on board. Those guys, man, they're pretty screwed from within now either. They're imploding. Oh yeah. What's happening? In fighting with, what's his name? Lapierre, whatever his name is. Oh, really? Money being spent. He's making it rain, man. He's taking a lot of money from the NRA on suits and flights and whatnot, so. And did you know the NRA has no computer system? What? It's all paper. Really? On purpose. On purpose. Oh, wow. No computer. Logs. It's crazy. Battlestar Galactica, buddy. All paper. So it takes a long time to get anything done there. But they have so much money. They're such a powerful lobby group. Yeah. You know? It's unfortunate. So they don't send emails? I was a huge fan of the NRA when I was like 14, 13 and whatnot because they were doing good work. They were educating people. They were all for background check. They were nothing like they are now. Like, well, so is the Republican and Democrat party. Exactly. Nothing like the way they are now. And that's unfortunate because if you look at Switzerland, Sweden, different countries of the world, they have guns too. I tell you, Switzerland has more per capita. Per capita. Yeah, more. But yet they don't have near the shootings. Exactly. It's not a gun thing. Yeah, there's a lot of gun owners when we were doing research on this. Really? Yeah. Surprising how many people in Canada own guns. How difficult it is to get a gun here? Well, you have to get your pal. You've got to get your, what's the new version of the firearms. And there's a difference between having a gun and having a hunting rifle. No. Well, there's three costs of guns. Yeah, if you want to hunt, that's a different story. There's long rifle, long gun. And then if you want to go pistol or assault, assault, that's specialized. Assault's too easy to hunt. So if you just want your rifle, it's one day course. Okay. If you want your pistol, another day, you got to add. I love guns. Love them. Always have, when I was 14, I could take apart a 45 automatic and put it back together in less than a minute. Thought I would be a gunsmith. Really? That's how much you love guns. Thought I would be a sniper. Like going to the army, be a sniper, then come out, come to Toronto, join the SWAT team and be a sharpshooter because I was good. Yeah. As much as I love guns and I love guns and I love firing them and target shooting, I'll never have one in my home ever. Interesting. Ever. Even in like a... Even if I moved to the States or it doesn't matter, I'm not going to have one. If I'm in Somalia and we have to go somewhere, I'm packing here, you know? But that's because I might be assaulted by pirates or whomever, but no. In Canada, the US, Europe, places like that, I'll keep them at the gun club, I'll go to the gun club, I'll sign it out, I'll target practice and I will put it back. You don't need to have it in your house, really. Do you know the majority of gun deaths in the States? More than 50%? Suicide. That's it. Really? Yeah. And if we just didn't have them in the home, how many of those people would still be alive right now getting the treatment they needed? We've been before that. How did they get it in the first place? Mental health check for sure, there has to be. But you see, when you're pissed off because your wife's banging the delivery guy or whatnot. Yeah. Like for example, you get epilepsy, you can't drive here. Yeah. Or you want to show somebody. You know what I mean? Like you shouldn't be able to have a gun if you're having fucking seizure. Exactly. But it's the immediacy of reaction. Reaction. So in Canada, female suicides, poison. Number one. Poison. Man? I don't know. Jumping. Hanging. Old school. Lynching, fuck. If we had guns, guys, especially handguns, that number's going to go up. I mean, the evidence is clear on this. Yeah, yeah. We know. It's going to take a while for me to figure out how to do a fucking news. Got to watch on YouTube. Somebody's going to get flagged. What are you doing, honey? About a bad way to die. Listen, if you do it wrong. Is it a bad way to die? If you don't do it right, like Saddam Hussein, his head was ripped off. Really? Because they didn't do it right. Yeah, not good. Like out of the body? And hanging, like with the blood just, like it was a horrible death. Oh, shit. You got to, it's a science to hanging. Yeah. It's a weight ratio. Hang men back in the 1800s, you know? They knew their job. They built the gallows. They tested the gallows. They knew the weight of the guy who was about to be hanged. They made the length at which it breaks his neck, C3 and C4. Everything was calculated. The hangman was a profession. Interesting. You had to know how to do this humanely. They're now thinking of bringing the guillotine back. They think it's far more humane. The guillotine? Far more humane. Then what, drugs? Drugs. What? Guys on death row. Yeah. So Italy supplies some of the drugs. The drugs, yeah. In Italy, they're saying to the states, there's a shortage, we'll try to get you that next month because they're doing it for compassionate reasons. They know why the drugs being ordered, right? Yeah, got it. So then the states are just saying, well, substitute this then. And the one guy, you can look this up. The one guy, they botched it so bad, it induced a heart attack and he died for over an hour because of a massive heart attack that they wouldn't treat him for to bring him back to then kill him. And they try to chop his head off with a guillotine? No, no, no. No. The guillotine. There ain't no coming back, brother. Okay, I was about to say, did it only go halfway? Did it forget to sharpen the blade? The guillotine, many are considering, is a more humane way of doing it. Well, if you think about it, it's immediate. Next chopped off done. You don't feel a thing and you're never coming back. Hanging? Not good. Electrocution's one of the worst. Yeah, that one seems horrible. That's horrific. I'm shocked they did that, man. Now here's the deal with the death by injection. I hear that's pretty bad. And how they screw that up. Yeah. John Hostos. You're like fucking heart attack, shit yourself. The guy who was doing the assistance and death before it was legal in Canada. You know what his technique was? And it never failed. Roofies and helium. So why the fuck they didn't do that then? Roofies and helium. Roofies, you start to fade, you go into a stage of kind of bliss. Bag over the head, helium for one minute, bag off, they're done. Really? They're done. Eight deaths, he did that by that way. Never had a complication for any of them. Now I'm not saying there isn't or couldn't be, but if he could have done that and he figured that out on his own, by the way, I'm not sure if I should say this or not. It's becoming a very popular way for kids to die, right? There's a helium shortage in the world. Globally, yeah. Massively, yeah. And yeah, this hits home because a good friend of mine, that's how his son took his life with helium. And it's online. You can find out how to do it easily enough online. But these convex, like first of all, if we wanna jump into that category, there should be no death penalty. I was gonna bring that up. There should just be no death penalty. We need to figure out why somebody would commit such atrocious acts against others. And try to figure that out. Keep them from harming anybody else for sure. But what's going on in the machinery? What broke down in the machinery that caused this person to act in such a horrific manner towards others? Can they be salvaged? Is redemption possible for a mass murderer? Can Paul Bernardo be redeemed? Could a son of Sam? Well, it goes back to Bundy. It's less about the government and more about the intelligence and consciousness of the people in the public who have to grow and mature as a civilization. We're still immature a lot of us as a society. If we were more mature, we would say, you know what, I don't need this person's life to go to avenge my child. What would be better for my child is if now that this person's caught, if they can be rehabilitated. Like the humble treasure. It's not about even rehabilitating as Chris said, it's figuring out why. For example, with Ted Bundy, he would have sex with dead corpses. Yes. So for me, his actions were like, oh, I wasn't like, oh wow, he really, he thought this out and he choose to do this. I'm like, no, the urge was so great. Oh, the machine's broken. Yeah, the urge was so great in this human being that he had to do it. And so for me, I'm thinking like, whoa. What's wrong with the OS? Yeah. I'm like, what the fuck's going on in his head that no matter what, he's gonna do this. And nothing's topping it more than killing, right? Like when you talk to these serial killers and you find out it's like, there's nothing like killing cause you gotta, like even planning it and then, like he had that VW with the seat that went all the way back. Do you remember Silence of the Lives? Not a long time ago. But he's got the cast on and he's trying to get the couch into the back of his van and that girl sees him and she goes over to offer him help and he makes her get on the one end that goes in the van first. And then he uses the cast to knock her out. That's Ted Bundy, dude. That's exactly his M.O. That's, and he was a pretty boy. So women would say, serial killers aren't this good looking. He's trustworthy and he's knowledgeable and he's kind and oh, look, he has his arm in a sling. How threatening can that be? Well, he did that purposefully to get their defenses down to make them more vulnerable. So, but what about the Humble? You remember the Humble tragedy, right? Truck goes through a stop sign, hits that bus, kills all those hockey kids and whatnot. That was recently that was on the news again, yeah. So what should we do with him? He got eight years, I think, right? Eight years, yeah. What's his life gonna be like? Was he drunk or what? No. Why did he get eight years? Well, nobody knows for sure. Nobody knows, he randomly, yeah. Why do you go through a stop sign? Yeah. Sleep deprivation, you're on that thing. Oh, man. Something. Can't have him eight years, eh? But is that gonna help him? Like, surely his life must be over. Like, in terms of, I just took how many lives because I fucked up big time, right? I messed up. So I give this talk about redemption. Can he be redeemed? And if he can be redeemed, what do we owe it to him as a human being to try to bring him back into humanity? You know, clearly he knows what he did was wrong and atrocious. And, but to put him in jail for what? What's he gonna do rotting in a cell? It's like these scenarios where these young parents, like a mother doesn't pay attention to their daughter or their child, their child passes away, they're going through the grief of that and then the state throws them in prison as well. It's like, really? So the justice system definitely needs reform. Yeah. Like nobody's business. Ideally, in my altruistic future, there is no prisons. In my Star Trek future, I think. Do you remember, well, yeah, in Star Trek, there are prisons, but the prisons don't look anything like they do today. The prisons are very much like, remember that? You see the prison in Scandinavia? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like Scandinavia. It's like living in a house. Yeah, that's right. Michael Moore did a thing on this years ago, like a film. The problem with the prison system in North America is privatized. Where they went to... You have prisons even on the stock market in the United States. It's so fucked up. It's fucked up when you're making money. Yeah. I think it was Norway or something. Norway, I think you're right. They were on an island together, all of these criminals, but it was like this really pimped out Airbnb cottage. And they interviewed this one guy who was out in the forest, who was chopping trees for firewood. They asked him, what did he do to deserve to come here? And he was like, well, I committed a murder. He committed a murder with an axe out of all things. But here's the thing. There's a boat. There's a boat. There's no guards. They can get on the boat and go back at any time to the regular, to the city, but they don't. It's different. Dostoevsky said, you can judge a society by its presence. And what that means is, how well do we treat those who break the rules? That shows a level of civility within us. You have to understand all of the biases that have contributed to an individual's life to make them commit an act that defies and goes against the rules that you have put as the highest values in society, all right? Why? What points of causality have led that person? And so many of these crimes are acts of passion, whereas if they had had more time to have thought about it, same as suicide, they'd never have done it. So then we wanna ruin a person's life by saying, yeah, you messed up, you messed up, so we're gonna put you away. Now, if a person is truly dangerous, they're harmed to themselves or others, they have to be incarcerated to a point where we cannot let them continue freely to commit harm to others. Fine. So then, how do we treat them? How do we fix the machine that's broken? And as an Aboriginal culture, once they have gone through their penance, gone through their sentence, you don't shun them. They're back. Welcome back, brother, all right? Welcome back, sister. You're now back with us. What you did was wrong, but you've now paid for it and you now realize why you did this wrong. For us to get to that, we need to at least have some type of protocol where it's like, okay, let's say you are this character and you won't stop doing these horrendous crimes whatever it may be, or why, how do we create a protocol where we identify, okay, we have some preliminary data for why you behave this way? Whether it's like, we do brain scans, we do psychoanalyze you, whatever it may be, but we have to start at least figuring out, because the more data we get from each person, we can kind of look at patterns. Yes, that's it exactly. But we don't have enough data. We don't have these patterns yet. Or the sophistication to know all of the causal factors. That's why I created this project called the OzTalk project, which looks at all of the natural and all of the cultural biases that can influence a person's decision-making systems to pinpoint a time in which they acted adversely or wrongfully to a value system that was set within a society. If we wanna be fair, and maybe we don't, maybe we don't care about fairness, but if that's your brother or your son or your dad or your mother or whomever, you still love that person. You hate what they're doing. Yeah. You know, you hate that and you don't want them to do that. Okay, so how do we- You love this person. How do we make them not want to do that again? If they're a pedophile, right? If they're a serial killer, whatever it is- The pedophile thing for me is an interesting case. And I know people don't like talk about his taboo, but I wanna fucking bring it up. Yeah, there's a young man that wrote an article. He was about 18, 19 years old and he wrote an article admitting to it. As being a pedophile? As being a pedophile. Really? He was, I mean, to his credit, he was mature enough and aware enough that- He knew it was wrong. He knew it was wrong. I didn't read the whole article. It was a few years ago, but he was looking for help. He was seeking help. Listen, they know- They know it's wrong. But this is once again- A lot of them do justify. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of them do justify. But for me, I'm wondering like, once again, the urge is so strong. And how much is genetic and how much is cultural? It's so strong. So we look at history. Pedophilia has been here since- Oh, boop. Oh yeah, yeah. And since we say that those actions are wrong, okay. But now it's your brother. And it's like, bro, what are you doing? And he's like, I can't help it. And my wife's worked with them, right? Because she works with the kids that have been abused. But she's literally met with them. And they said, I'm going to jail. My sentence starts next Monday and I go away for seven to 10 years. And the day I get out, I'm gonna be doing this all over again. See what I mean? You cannot reform me in that prison. So then my question is, the state is always a tug of war between paternalism and autonomy. Allowing your citizens to be free without having to be a parent to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't do that. We have to stop the pedophile. We can't let them have so much autonomy that they abuse children. So how paternalistic are we going to be on them? Enough to not allow them to harm others. Okay. But now, as individuals within a society, do we have the right to tell that individual, your machine is broken. We know how to fix it, but it's gonna require us to use gene therapy to correct whatever it is that's wrong with your machine that makes you have these urges to be with these kids. Are you okay with that? Now, if the pedophile says yes, and it is possible in the future to change them literally to change their sexual desire from within, does the state ever have the right to usurp the citizens autonomy if they say, no, this is how I was born and I like these kids. So I'm just gonna keep going to jail if you don't mind. Do we then just say, all right, that's your call, bro, but we're gonna keep you in jail forever because we can't trust you to be out and amongst children. Or the punishment is like, let's say they do it, you get the gene therapy. Like it's just an automatic? That's an interesting punishment. What about this? This is where things are gonna go really sideways here, right? And get a little dark. We know Japan is leading the world. I knew we were gonna go here. In the development of sexual devices. Yeah, the robots. The automatons. The automatons, yeah. What if they become so good at making them, they make children robots? I brought up this talking point before. I'm gonna be in Japan in a couple weeks and someone close to me was telling me about this as well, that in some of these comic book shops, whether like three, four or five floors, at every floor you go up, it gets more and more very pornographic. Oh, is there any? Both the comics as well as the dolls. She was telling me how there's the top floor, like the fourth or fifth floor of this one particular, and she just did, it's a ton of them. No women are allowed, only the men are allowed. So her boyfriend and a few other people went, and it's just like, they're children at this point. Really? Yeah, so they're already there and I was gonna get to that because I was hearing this, I don't know, another podcast, but video of what about virtual reality? What about robots? How about if we can't fix it but treat it? You have this urge. You're never gonna hurt an actual human being. Yeah, there's two. Do we wanna foster that? You have an itch, here's the scratch. Exactly. But my rebuttal to that is like one, it's a robot, do what the fuck you want with it. Right. You're not harming anybody. It has no rights. There's no sentient. No sentient, it's just mechanical. Sure. Right, so get your kicks in it. However, it's just propagating. We're perpetuating the ideology that it's okay and then that will that transfer into real cases because the robot just can't do it, the VR can't do it, quite like that kid, right? Or it's like a feedback, like, oh, this is good. This is normalized now, so more people are in it. Right. Now, if you really wanna get dark, we know that during medieval times, people were married around 14, 15. 15, yeah. So. Medieval, like most of human history. Yeah, we know, but just to take as an example what was quite common, especially amongst aristocracy, does that make it right? Are we more right now? Are we more civilized? Are we more woke now than we were during the medieval period in terms of what children's rights are? Because there was no delineation between a child and an adult till quite recently, in Victorian England. We can, pedophilia specifically before puberty. Right, before puberty, yeah. At 13, 14, I don't remember what the term is, but there's another term. Yeah. And a lot of people fall, a lot of men will fall into that category, like teen porn and so on. But pedophilia is specific to pre-pubescent. That's right. But you look at, for example, in science, we know that even now, like the prefrontal cortex is in fully matured, it's like 21. Right, it's like even older for guys, no? Yeah. It's not exact, but let's say around that age group. And you look at biological health of a female. Right. Around the 20s, like early 20s, a female is the most prime, the healthiest eggs. She's given, given from the mother is that's it. That's her genetic lottery. There's no magic ways of you making more eggs. It's all downhill from there, literally. So there is a biological golden gap for the healthiest eggs for women. So that's biology, right? Okay, and that's well past 18. We're talking about like 20, 21, 22. So for me, it's like, you're going back to the medieval stuff. I think context matters. We can't sit here and vilify them, right? I think there's that famous saying, like devices of yesterday are today's virtues and today's virtues will be devices of the future. And longevity was much shorter than as well, right? Yes. That's another thing too. It's like also when people are having kids, there's much later. That's right. Like just society is more difficult. You don't have a tribe to help you out anymore. Also another fact of like- You don't need 15 kids to help out. Well, social economics, right? It's like when you have a career, when you're making money and you have your more self-interest, why am I going to have five kids? I can't, nor do I want to. Well, it was an asset before, now it's a liability. It's a liability. Before the more kids you had- Hence one of the biggest threats to human civilization is birth rates going into the future. 18 million babies only born in China last year for a population of a billion plus. So the decrease in birth rates, yeah. India decreasing, China decreasing. Japan's not having any kids. Japan's not having any kids. They're not even having sex. Canada's not having that many kids. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Interesting fact, it's the duty of a Muslim to have a lot of kids. Is that right? Is that in the Quran or is that in- I think it's in the Quran. Okay. Yeah. There's a lot of how- There's a lot of how- Five wives, four wives? Five wives? It's four wives, but there's a lot of fine print to that. I think one of them is that the wife has to, A, suggest and improve it. And that's in the Hadith or in the Quran? I think it's in the Quran. But basically the wife has to, A, agree to it and promote it and be on board. The second piece of it is that whatever you do for the first- Bro, if you want to have it today, man, you got to be some rich, balling mode. Oh, yeah. You got to have it. You got to be, like, shit. So- Playboys, what's his name? Oh, Hefner. Hefner level to ensure that- Dan Bolzerian. Yeah, Dan Bolzerian would be a good Muslim. He would be able to meet the criterion of the four wives. So as long as each wife, you know, agrees to the next. But it's not fiscally viable for- No, this brings up like a funny thing. My- Another quick thing. Do you know how easy it is to get married and have a divorce in Islam? No, I don't. I'm under Sharia law. I'm under Sharia law. Quite easy. Yeah. I divorce the three times in a mosque and that's- Me and a young lady just need one or two other witnesses and we say we're married from this point on. And then divorce the same. Well, in Sharia law, in Islam, I'm sure that patriarchy is like- Oh, don't get us started. The guy has a good over there. Oh, man. King. No kidding. Do you guys find the Hadith to the Koran similar to the Talmud to the Torah and Jewish? I have no idea. Is it more of like, is it what scholars have discussed about the Koran and the legal law aspects? Is that what it's- From the little I understand of Sharia law, I'm not a big fan. And I don't think it belongs here in polite society. My- If you wanna run your own court system, there are islands that are in international waters. You go do your thing there. This is my thesis for whether it's the Talmud or the Hadith or any religious scripts. I'm like, at one point, some guy or guys got together and decided to write something to benefit themselves. Right. That's it. So using it as a power. That's it and- Well, I will say historically, religions started representing the disenfranchised in the Koran. If you take a look at Judaism, Christianity, including Islam, if you understood the context of what was happening in that area, and then you saw Islam coming, you'd say, Holy shit, that's modernity. It's giving much more rights and privileges to women. During that era, women were literally objects, right? A man could have 10 wives and then remove all 10 next year and get another 10 wives. So most people don't recognize that when it's at four, and these are the conditions, that was a huge pullback from what was actually happening. The thing that people understand, especially in the Middle East, because Islam is pretty different when you go to Asia like Indonesia. Oh yeah, yeah. But Islam in Middle East or the Arabian Peninsula, et cetera, predating Islam where it was more, what do they call the multiple gods? What's it called? Polytheists. Yeah, it was very polytheists. And this goes to Judaism as well and all the Abrahamic religions in the area there. It all goes to tribe and honor. 100%. This religion stuff, it's like on top of, it's cultural first. This, oh, fucking existed way before. Well, we were talking about that before. Reza Aslan talks about it. And when you identify as a Muslim from ex-country, it's a cultural identification. It's a cultural identification. More than a religion. And this is why honor kills exist. It predates oldest religions. It exists in some places and it doesn't exist in other. Correct, correct. General militation exists in some places. It doesn't exist in some areas. You go to a, so an Afghan wedding is more a like to a Greek and Italian wedding than it is to an Arabic wedding. Right. And that's partly because Alexander the Great, one of his last stops was in Afghanistan. And if you take a look at that region and say, well, how far is Afghanistan to Greece? We have our own version of Tiziki, chicken suvaki with white rice and a certain salad. And we dance with our arms in Afghanistan. It's very, very similar. Interesting. Afghans love ancient Greece. Interesting. And Alexander the Great. When I was in Greece for our honeymoon in 92, after two weeks of solid Greek food, I was pining for pasta. Did he go from Italy to Greece? No, straight to Greece. And I walked where Socrates and Aristotle and they all walked and they acropolis and whatnot, but- Acropolis, okay. I think it's overrated. I was just there last year. But just the sheer history of it being a philosophy major, I was doing my PhD at the time, but- It got fucked up, man. I was there, there was the graffiti everywhere. Oh no. And a lot of pollution. A lot of pollution. The whole Athens is fucked. Like the city's fucked. There's a lot of pollution and people drive anything. Anything that can run. That guy was driving a lawn mower. But you go to Acropolis like on top of the hill and you see it's graffiti. The Parthenon. Why not? But they're repairing it all. They're- Slowly, yeah. Using San Blasio repair. So I met a gentleman's old granny, Greek family in Chicago, I visited them. And when this granny saw me, this Greek granny, the first thing she said is, where are you from? I said I'm from Afghanistan and she just grabbed my nose and said, that's a Greek nose, Alexander gave it to you. Really? I like that. I said, yeah, you know your history, yeah. So by the end of the two weeks, I'm pining for pasta. I'm at a restaurant. And I'm gonna get dibsum after this. And I order- Maybe we should get Italian. And I said, did you not? I said, the Romans conquered you. Did they not leave any recipes behind to make a decent sauce? Nothing. They were not impressed. But the thing I loved about Greece was small town large, it didn't matter. When we went to a restaurant and be like, how are you today, sir? I'm not bad. What do you got cooking today? Come, come, right into the kitchen. Just started lifting lids. And I just pointed that, that, what's that? Is that a fit? That, yeah. You go, we'll bring it to you. Like it was just so cool, so laid back. So my Greek friends will hate hearing this, but I love Greek food, but Afghan food is like Greek food, but just better. Oh yeah? Just a little bit better food. Cause where we're located, we got India, Iran, Pakistan, China. So there's just a little bit more salt, a little bit more spices, but it's not as spicy as say Indian cuisine. It's not as, there's not that much noodles or anything like China. It's like Greek food, but with a little bit more kick. Yeah. I'll have to get some Afghan food. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, let's do it. Sick. Cool. Yeah. All right, dim sum. Yes, let's do this. Chris, if people want to contact you or get more information, what's the best resource? CriticalThinkingSolutions.ca. All right guys, please go check out Chris's work. You know, you've heard him. He has so much information and knowledge. And like always, if you're listening to this on iTunes, leave a review. And if you're watching this on YouTube, leave a comment below this video and I'll talk to you guys soon. Take care.