what would you say Trump's IQ really is does 160 seem reasonable no this will be quoted and no 160 is really really high yeah I mean the typical the smart person that you're likely to meet in your life has an IQ around 145 yeah 160 is getting pretty damn rare and Trump's old and IQ goes down with age fluid IQ although crystallized IQ either stays the same or goes up slightly so he isn't the problem solver or the learner that he was when he was 20 no one no one is if you're in good physical shape that helps a lot his IQ is clearly well above average I don't know and he's done complex things in his life and a lot of them and that indicates that there's something to him you know and he hasn't been successful just in one domain he's been successful in multiple complex domains Each of which were quite difficult it's very difficult to be a reality TV star that's successful right it's very difficult to work in the construction business and especially on large projects and I know he's had his economic ups and downs but he stayed in the game for a long time very stressful he's very stress resistant so he's no he's no dummy and I mean it's nice to always think that your political opponent is just stupid but he's done too many complex things for me to assume that he's somehow if he wasn't smart he couldn't have done those things I'm glad you're acknowledging that because when I see the people that are in hysteric mode and just saying he's this evil nutbag who doesn't know what he's doing and all this stuff it just seems like such a lazy way of thinking about it you don't have to like any of the things you may not like the way he speaks or any of that but the idea that somehow this is a dumb person and I think is discounting of just the way humans have to work this is interesting from Super Chat do you well he also won the presidency right with a completely original campaign and it's like and without without spending much money it's like okay is he lucky because is that what you're saying it's just lucky right well I don't think it was just luck it was it was at least maybe well it looked at least to some degree like courage maybe it was just blind throwing caution to the wind you know I don't know if he ever expected that he could possibly win yeah and I'm sure you'd argue it probably had a little something to do with all those things that maybe there was some courage but that he also surrounded himself with people who maybe understood politics more than he did well he can obviously can also obviously read a crowd yeah because he was appealing to crowds and that was partly because he did he did I think try to say what he thought now you could criticize what he thought and that's fine but but he also didn't prepare the same that you know he didn't prepare a speech and then deliver the same one everywhere which I think is I really find that rather reprehensible for people to do that yeah because they're they're parting themselves or someone else writes their speeches which is something I can't even imagine I I can't I can't for what we do I can't even fathom it actually I think this is really interesting do you have any thoughts or insights on how a gay man can handle himself one After figuring out that he's gay to place himself as a man and at the same time different from most men including his father I think this is sort of interesting because I think because you've talked about gender pronouns somehow somehow people think that you're somehow anti-gay or something I've never seen any evidence of that but I think this gets to well I think so one of the things let's take the LGBT community at large let's say okay what are they trying to do well one answer is they're trying to not be discriminated against and the other answer is and maybe it's the same thing they want to be included in the norm okay I'm going to assume the latter because maybe that's why the marriage issue came up all right the thing is you can't be in the center in the norm and on the margin at the same time MH now there's utility in being on the margin you want to be a drag queen you're likely going to be on the margin and that's where your customers are that's where your draw power is that's where your satire is that's where your entertainment is on the margin you want to move to the center you have to go along with the ethic of the center and so what I I would say is well if if marriage is the ideal then if it's worth pursuing as a right then it seems to me to come with the commensurate responsibilities and so to the degree that being in a monogamous long-term emotionally fulfilling honest relationship constitutes the central core of marriage then it seems to me that you're obligated to do that unless you want to be on the margin and and like there's as I said it's not like there's no reason to be on the margin there's Freedom out there you know you're you're you're not normal you're like the Avant guard in art but do you want to be normal that's the question I had a really interesting discussion with Milo about this because he said that the gay community basically is giving up up all of the things that made them so edgy and funny and interesting and irreverent and all that because they're trading it for normaly and I think that's that's sort of what you're talking I think it's a a great conversation there's a lot of richness there that we should well the alternative is to blow apart the center so it doesn't mean anything but that's a bad idea that yeah I think that's a bad idea is there any truth to social psychology's view view of race such as outgroup favoritism Prejudice oh wait did we do this one already we did something we did something close to that I mean there is Tru well in group favoritism I mean of people favor their in group that's what you that's what it means to love your family and and you can't love everyone equally you know I mean you can respond to another person as if they're valuable in a personal encounter yeah but you're you're the center of your experience and then you have your close people and of course you're going to favor them but we we think there was something wrong with you if you didn't now if you're going to favor them you're going to favor other people less so what do you want to just give up close relationships right in the name of equality no I think would be the well hopefully yeah will you now that the some of the [ __ ] posters have gotten in here so here we go will you support the liberation of the oppressed people of kakistan no they have to they have to liberate themselves so I've been blindly supporting these people I want them to be free but you want it to come from within I respect yes I would think that would be that's the way to be truly not oppressed yeah oh this is interesting from Super Chat is there a chance for a new religion that provides all the lesson but doesn't lie about the reality so really kind of molding both of the things that you're talking about it's an that's an open question it better be I mean part of the reason I'm doing these biblical lectures is and I'm going to start with a discussion like this it's like well we've got this book and you know it's a problematic thing and we've been working on it for a long time and if if it isn't worth anything then we've got nothing and we better not have nothing cuz that's not a good thing to have and so maybe there's something to it so let's move forward with that hope that's the idea now you can dispute my claim that the mythological stories let's say in the in in the judeo-christian tradition are somehow foundational I don't believe that you can dispute that claim reasonably merely because of the way things unfolded across history I mean you can say that the enlightenment was the opposite but I don't believe that but you can make that case we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and so I'm trying to figure out what I want to do is make an empirical case for the biblical stories and leave the metaphysical case hanging you know there is an interesting empirical case even to be made for the metaphysics for example we know that mystical experiences can be reliably induced in the lab for example you can use psilocybin to do that and no one knows how to account for that and they're not trivial and the same thing is true of dma and people might say well those are hallucinogens and can you consider those a valid form of experience and the answer to that is we don't know there was a long-term follow-up study of hallucinogen users four or five years ago looked at at 250,000 people and found that as a population they were healthier than the people who hadn't experimented in many many ways including psychologically they even had fewer flashbacks you know and I've known a number of people with with psilocybin in particular who told me in various contexts that one experience with that straightened out their lives in some important way I know it's also been used as a very successful Aid to the sensation of smoking by the researchers down at John's Hopkins I believe so so anyways back to the question every generation has to rescue their dead father from the from the abyss and so that's what we need to do that's what I'm trying to do and and we better be able to do it because without a central narrative we will fractionate and we'll be weak and that will be the end of us because weak people do not survive in this world