Stefan Molyneux and Joe Rogan critique systemic failures—France’s 75% tax proposal, welfare dependency, and paternal absence—linking poverty and sociopathy to broken structures. They debate free will vs. environment, dismissing charity as ineffective compared to market deregulation (e.g., 27 permits for a lemonade stand). Molyneux warns against neurochemical manipulation, comparing it to forced equality, while Rogan muses on its potential. The internet’s double-edged sword emerges: exposing truths like Fallujah’s birth defects but also enabling surveillance (NSA iPhone access). Legalizing drugs in Portugal cut use by 50%, yet U.S. plea bargains and dog-sniffing tech reveal deeper power imbalances. Ultimately, they argue accountability demands dismantling corrupt systems—whether government, corporate, or cultural—before tech can truly liberate humanity. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Lumosity.com.
This is the time of the year we're all looking for ways to build good habits, ladies and gentlemen.
It's New Year's.
It's not really New Year's.
It's bullshit.
Time doesn't give a fuck about you.
How about that?
How about a time doesn't care about the universe, doesn't care about solar systems living and dying?
Time is infinite, and it only exists.
But for us, you need a clock and a calendar.
So get your shit together, you lazy bitch.
Stop using the fact that time isn't real as an excuse and go to lumosity.com.
Lumosity is essentially, it's like a website gym for your brain.
They have brain games that are designed by top scientists to train mental processes.
I say that because there's a Canadian guest on my podcast.
They like to say processes.
Processes.
The Americans will say processes.
Best parts, they're fun, challenging, and they only take a few minutes every day.
One time, you can track your progress online and come back over time, rather.
You can track your progress on time and compare yourself to other people, which is a dick thing to do.
You know, really should just worry about yourself.
Stop, I mean, maybe be inspired by other people, but don't be like, hey, Bob, what was your score on Lumosity?
Mine was better.
I play it.
You can play it on an iPad.
It's pretty cool.
Just sitting around.
You can design these games based on the things that you're looking to acquire.
Whether you're looking to acquire a better memory or you're looking to acquire, you know, if you go to the website itself, there's a bunch of different options like memory.
You can put recalling the location of objects, remembering names after the first introduction, learning new subjects quickly and accurately.
And the beautiful thing about it is it feels like a game.
It's just something fun that you can do that is actually good for your brain.
Go to lumosity.com slash Joe.
That's lumosity.com slash Joe.
And go check it out, you freaks.
It's an awesome way to do something productive that's actually fun in your spare time.
And it's healthy for your brain.
I firmly believe in it.
I use them.
I think that playing chess, playing games, doing things that makes your brain think steps ahead, it uses your brain the same way we use our muscles, the same way we use our cardiovascular system.
We exercise and we get stronger because of it.
I think the same works with your mind.
So read a book, bitch.
All right.
We're also brought to you by Squarespace.
Squarespace is one of my favorite podcast sponsors because we know so many people that have...
Squarespace is an all-in-one platform to design your own website that's super easy.
Click, drag, drop.
It's a super simple interface.
They offer 24-7 support.
Every design automatically includes a unique mobile experience that matches the overall style of your website.
So your content will look great on every device every time.
That's like iPads, Androids, tablets, laptops, Windows, the whole deal.
It's super easy.
And, you know, this is something that a long time ago was virtually impossible.
A long time ago, one of the big things about websites is like you would get a website that would work really well in Internet Explorer, but then you try to use it on Firefox.
It was shit.
It was a real issue for web coders.
Not anymore.
This is the easiest time in the history of the universe for making a website.
For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to squarespace.com and enter the offer code Joe and the number one.
That's Joe and the number one because we are in the month of January.
Squarespace is also putting on a contest now for JRE listeners.
And it's a website design contest.
And here's what you need to do.
Go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, sign up and get 10% off your first purchase.
Then build a website.
It's super easy to do.
And once you've built your badass website, tweet it to hashtag J-R-E Squarespace.
That's one word, hashtag J-R-E Squarespace before January 17th.
And I'm going to pick four winners who have designed the most beautiful websites.
And Squarespace will send these winners a swag bag with items like a Squarespace Apple keyboard, t-shirt, a mole skin, and more.
So visit squarespace.com right now and use the offer code Joe and the number one to build your website and then tweet your website, hashtag J-R-E Squarespace.
We are also brought to you by Onit, O-N-N-I-T.
What is on it?
If you've heard this website, if you heard this podcast and you heard me talk about this website, you're probably totally tired of hearing about it at this point in time.
It's a human optimization website.
And what we try to do at Onit is offer you the best things that we can find as far as strength and conditioning equipment like kettlebells, as far as protein supplements like hemp force and different foods that we sell that are like, we have like buffalo bars and organic coconut oil,
just things that I believe are good for your health and supplements that I believe benefit cognitive function, benefits your ability to perform athletic tasks, gives you a bit more endurance.
There's a lot of science out there that's been done into the science of athletic supplementation.
And, you know, there's not a lot that really work.
It's hard to find something that really works significantly.
One of them that works significantly is called cordyceps mushrooms.
It's a fascinating one that was first figured out by the Chinese Olympic team.
It's based on a mushroom that they noticed these cattle eating these mushrooms in high altitudes, and they became more active when they saw them eating this.
And so they were trying to figure out like, why are they more active when they're eating this mushroom?
Well, they figured out that it actually enhances your body's ability to process oxygen.
It's all fascinating shit.
All the supplements at Anit.com, all of them have a 90-day, 30-pill, 100% money-back guarantee.
So if you're confused or if you're like, man, I don't know if this stuff really works, like New Mood, which is a 5-HDP supplement, which actually is a natural way of boosting serotonin.
And what's interesting about it is that doctors who are putting people on antidepressants oftentimes tell them to not take 5-HTP because then you'll have too much of that good shit in your brain.
unidentified
Which seems to me maybe you should just strike the 5-HTP.
Go to onit.com, O-N-N-I-T, use the code name Rogan and save 10%.
A lot of new stuff if you haven't been there before or if you haven't been there in a while, digestive enzymes and the new primal kettlebells, which are all chimpanzees and zombie kettlebells.
We're already into temperatures and there's a lot of different things.
But no need to go back over all that stuff again.
I'm very excited to talk to you because there's been a lot of things that, first of all, I really enjoyed our first podcast.
Really fun conversation in Toronto.
But there's a lot of things that I read online and I say, hmm, I wonder how Stefan would deal with this.
I wonder what your take on this is because you've got some very strong opinions on where taxes should go and what money should be spent on that benefits the community.
And I agree with a lot of them.
I think they're very fascinating.
The France thing.
Have you seen this France thing where they're jacking up the tax to 75%?
Same way the guy with the sign, the homeless sign in the corner that like smile and he flips it over like it's bent.
You know, could you spare a dollar?
And then he flips it over.
Like, you've got this crafty sign.
Use that mind that made that crafty sign.
Go get a fucking job, you crazy fuck.
You know, Jesus Christ.
If it's possible for you to get a job, and if it's not possible for you to get a job, we as a society should take those people off the street and put them in mental institutions and give them help.
There is this interesting thing around poverty, right?
Because poverty, a lot of times people really feel like, oh, you know, they just had some bad luck.
It's a real shame.
You know, they just, things didn't go quite the right way.
But you know, statistically that the majority of people, like if you take the average of how much people work in a household below the poverty line, you've got two people in a household below the poverty line.
On average, they work 16 hours a week between the two of them.
And I don't mind, hey, wouldn't it be great to only work 16 hours a week, especially if your options are jobs that are kind of crappy, which we all generally start with those jobs that are crappy.
But to me, that's, and that doesn't change whether the economy is good or bad.
So it's not like where they'd like to work more, but they can't find the work.
Or even if you do, I did a call-in show while I was here in California and a guy called in and he said, you know, I just graduated as a pharmacist.
Like a legal pusher.
And for me, it's like, okay, pharmacist in America, if there's one thing that's recession-proof, because when people are down, they take even more pills.
And it took him 10 months to find a job, but he ended up having to take a job on the night shift.
And that's a pharmacist.
Lawyers can't find work in America.
So even professionals are having a huge amount of problems.
Absolutely.
It's terrible.
But it's one of these things I worry about the degree to which when we tell people stuff is really hard, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
You know, like if you keep telling kids growing up in poor neighborhoods, and I was a kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood, so I have some sympathy with this, but it's, you know, if you keep telling people, well, you know, it's really, really tough.
It's really hard to get out.
I wonder if probably, oh, well, you know, it's really tough.
I decided I wanted to be a stand-up comic at 21, and I sort of abandoned everything else I was doing.
I did a lot of shitty jobs for a couple of years.
But before that, I taught martial arts, so I've always had a weird life.
I've always been, I just knew somehow or another, it probably could have been very different if my life was very different, but my life wasn't very happy, you know, with my parents being divorced and moving across the country and always being forced, moved around a lot, always making new friends.
I didn't enjoy school.
I didn't enjoy the experience of going.
I didn't have a desire to learn.
And I knew that whatever I was going to do, it's going to have to be something completely outside of the system.
There was no options for me.
Like the idea of going to, like some people say, well, you know, I really wanted to be a stand-up comic, but, you know, I'm going to do it after I pass the bar.
For me, there was none of that.
There was none of that.
It was like, this is a job that I actually could do.
Just go try to do that.
Because a job, like be a lawyer, be fill in the blank, insurance salesman, whatever the fuck it's going to be.
Well, screw plan B. You know, plan B, everyone says plan B, but plan B is always going to end up going by the wayside because everything you do in life, you strengthen that muscle, you weaken your other muscle.
So, you know, I'm a big fan of if you're going to do it, you know, do it hard, do it, do it full-on tilt boogie, you know, 150%.
And then if you fail, at least you won't say, well, I could have done more, you know, but just go full button.
And then you can always pick up the pieces, start something else later.
But plan B is usually a real disaster.
Like, okay, you can go be an actor, but the important thing is also you've got to have a bad idea.
Every single person who has ever done anything worthwhile or exceptional or difficult or extraordinary, anyone, whether it's great artists or authors or mathematicians or whatever the fuck it is, everyone encounters difficulties.
There is no easy road.
It does not exist.
It is impossible.
Everyone has issues.
If you have time to pursue a hobby, if you have time to do anything in your life, you can better yourself.
And here's one way you never better yourself.
When you come up with excuses for why other people are successful and you're not, that shit is fucking dangerous.
When you give yourself an escape, yeah, well, that's easy for you to say, you know, you do this, you did, trust me, everybody has a hard road.
I wanted to jump out a window several times during my young life.
I wanted to jump in front of a fucking train and just end it because too much pressure.
Not really.
But you know what I'm saying?
Theoretically.
We all go through hard times.
We all go through depression.
We all go through doubt and then moments in your life where it's really fucking difficult and you're trying to figure out what the fuck your path is going to be.
It's hard as shit.
But Stephan and I were talking about this before the podcast starts: that that is what makes you a person.
And those difficult moments are what build your character.
Show me a great man who's the son of a great man.
You know, that's what we're saying.
These kids that are born billionaires, you're fucked.
You're fucked.
You're never going to be a self-made person.
You have a backup trust for your backup trust for your trust.
And you're fucked, man.
I met a guy like this.
His parents own this gigantic chain of high-end stores, and they're unbelievably wealthy.
Like Billionaire Beach in Malibu is this massive community of, you know, 15, 20, $30 million homes.
They bought the next door neighbors' homes on both sides and overpaid for them because they didn't want anybody staying next to them.
They just bought the homes.
Like $30 million, $25 million.
They literally own like 100 houses.
They own homes everywhere.
I'm talking estates in Denver, in the mountains, and in Wyoming at some great ranch.
I mean, they just have fucking, and the guy is a mess.
Well, but, you know, if your kid's looking around and seeing like gold fountains in the living room and, you know, chocolate baths upstairs and so on, then clearly you can't afford it.
And what do you say to your kids?
It's really, really tough.
We have to provide limits because of X, Y, and Z. I mean, a lot of people like to duck out in the we can't afford it excuse, but rich parents don't have that.
So you have these bad sets and then you just get really super motivated to work on everything that's wrong or recognize what went wrong that night and never let it happen again.
And one of the worst traits that a comedian could ever have is to be easily satisfied with yourself.
It's one of the worst.
If you think you're better than you are or you're really satisfied where everything, hey, it's perfect.
No need to work on it.
That's poison.
That's like a terrible, terrible, terrible mindset for a stand-up comedian for that very same reason.
I wish we could just to reprogram people's minds back to consumerism.
You're 100% right.
There's, look, I think everyone looks forward to this utopian time where whatever motivates them, drives them, freaks them out right now can be set aside.
The work is done and you can just sort of like watch the sunset over the pond.
And the problem is this utopian vision of the future that we have is probably a carrot that's on a stick that will just never reach.
And we keep working hard to improve our society and our life and ourselves and our families and our relationships, hoping that one day we'll achieve this ultimate peace that will never come.
If they can dangle that carrot, right, and they can say, well, you see, the communist, in the communist utopia, you won't need to work.
And in the communist utopia or the fascist utopia or, you know, the Peter Joseph robot mommy cities, you won't have to work and everything will be fine.
Or in the religious view, you'll get to go to heaven or you'll achieve transcendental bliss or enough yoga, your butt will be firm and your soul will be at peace.
They will get you to give up freedoms and money and so on in hopes of buying a peace of mind that is fundamentally anti-human in the long run.
The restlessness of our species is the diamond that we get crushed into.
For the existence that we currently provide for ourselves in, yes, I agree 100%.
I think the whole idea about all this is engineering a utopia.
Like Peter Joseph, who I think is a very smart guy, and I like him.
I had him on the podcast.
I enjoy communicating with him.
I think he's very bright.
But what I think is hilarious is that he makes his money as a stockbroker.
I mean, he's talking about this utopian world and he's drawing the very blood that keeps him alive from a vampire system, from this crazy fucking vampire system.
And then, yeah, he did go a little bit, I thought, ballistic in some of the post-debate, let's say, analysis, where I think he veered off a little bit into ad hominems.
But, you know, my basic point is I don't, as long as people do two things, you know, do two things and, you know, we're friends till the end, right?
Respect self-ownership and, you know, property rights and do not initiate force.
And so, look, if these cities built by Jacques Fresco and his merry band of Elven robots, if this is human paradise on earth, I say go for it.
Have fun.
Just don't force people to participate and let people leave as they want.
That's the only thing that matters.
Everything has to be voluntary.
You cannot violate the non-aggression principle.
Everything outside of that is, you know, well, what color drapes do you want?
The ad hominems are very disappointing, aren't they?
Especially when it's just, you could easily have just disagreed and been fine with that and debated your points.
And look, you and I probably don't agree on everything.
There's probably quite a few things that will come up that we have different points of view on.
And that's because we're different human beings.
And it's also because there's not a black and white with these ideas of engineering society.
There's not a black and white.
It's a very, look, if it was very easy and straightforward, it would have been done already.
Okay, it's not.
It's complicated.
There's a lot to being a person.
There's a lot to being a person that contributes to society.
There's a lot to what about society is feeding itself and just feeding more society and more.
What about corporations are just feeding corporations?
And what about them is benefiting humanity?
And if you can sway it towards benefiting humanity, it's always the best choice.
But the idea of engineering it in one foolproof way that makes everyone happy, that's silly.
The people that want to remove capitalism as a whole, like I've met people that have jobs that tell me that people with money are a problem.
And I'll go, well, they can be, but you know how much money Bill Gates gives to charities?
Do you know how much charity work that guy does?
How much money he donates to causes that he feels are excellent?
Millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars is a great benefit from having that guy being wealthy.
Some people who are rich do a good job with it.
Some people.
But you work too.
Everybody works.
Like the person telling me that money's a problem.
Like, don't you have a job?
What do you get paid in your job?
They give you free coconuts?
What do they do?
They give you a use of a shower and a place to sleep at night?
No, they give you fucking money, man.
They give you money.
You're a capitalist.
You're just not as good a capitalist as that guy is.
It doesn't mean that the system is completely fucked.
It doesn't mean that the idea of the system is completely fucked.
It means it can be fucked.
Yeah.
But it also can be.
It's the choice of the people that control it.
If all the world bankers got together today and did ACID and they realized, oh my God, guys, we are fucking up.
We're creating all this drama.
We're going to die anyway.
Listen, if we just pooled our money together into these massive charities to re-engineer societies and put money into poor communities and stop causing war and stop extracting natural resources out of these places for massive profit and massive loss of human life, if that just happened, the entire world would change instantly.
And they literally have the power to do that.
They would just have to all come to some sort of an agreement.
But there's no, yeah, and look, charity is important.
And I'm not a Republican, but one thing that is statistically true is that Republicans give a lot more to charity than Democrats do, which is why Democrats believe that welfare programs are needed because they're fundamentally stingy bastards who don't give anything out.
So they feel everybody needs to be forced to do it.
So, yeah, Democrats get their money from forced union dues and from celebrities and from the entertainment business and so on.
And they're just generally not very generous with regards to local charity.
Has a lot to do with their secularism, right?
Because a lot of the charitable donations come out of religiosity.
But there's no guarantee that charity is the solution.
There's lots of economists who think that Bill Gates would be doing much better good for the world if he'd stayed on at Microsoft and built that company to be even more successful and bigger with more employees and so on, that that would be generating more value to society than giving money.
You know, if you look at India and China just over the last 20 years, it has been the biggest poverty reduction in the history of the known universe.
I mean, it really can't be overemphasized.
Literally, hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty.
In India, it's 50,000 families a month are getting into the middle class out of poverty because they just got rid of socialist policies and let people actually trade and make money and start their businesses.
They cut the red tape and all the licensing requirements and so on.
And of course, in China, they were less totalitarian communist assholes and actually became some reasonable free trade guys.
And out of that process, more people have come out of poverty in the 20 years that they've stopped interfering with people's trading abilities than an entire century of Western aid to third world countries.
So I don't know whether it's getting out of people's way in terms of letting them do what they want to do and build their businesses or whether it's giving them lots of money.
It's a balance between the two.
But I don't know if charity is always the answer.
I think just getting out of people's way is a great way to let them – like what is it in California, Georgia?
Do you need like 27 permits to open a lemonade stand or something like that?
I mean, if you stop doing that kind of stuff, or you don't need 300 hours to become a hairbraider on a beach of training to get a license, just let people do their own thing and let the customer be the decider about what's valuable, what's safe, what's right, what's wrong.
Then I think you do a lot more for poverty in many ways.
There are some people who need charity, but I think most times people just need people out of the way so that they can go and create their own opportunities.
Well, but education is important, but education when you don't have a lot of economic opportunities.
Like if you look at Africa, Africa is one of the few places where in the 20th century, like over the last 50 years, it's declined in net standard of living.
I mean, it's wretched.
I mean, South Africa is now like the rape capital of the world, which you won't see on a lot of brochures.
Oh, it's just unbelievable, the crime rates and so on.
Like if you rent a car in South Africa, they actually have a fire that comes out the side to deter carjackers.
You can push a button and have like little jets of flame to come out to push carjackers back.
And the amount of charity that's been applied in Africa is absolutely huge, but generally it goes government to government, right?
So you give a bunch of money to a bunch of corrupt South African dictators, and then you sell them a whole bunch of arms, and then you wonder why there's not a lot of freedom for the general population.
I think if you can scale back that, I mean, Africans would do fine as well as everyone else if they had the same economic opportunities.
Give people a bunch of education, and you still have a very corrupt and fascistic style of government.
I'm not sure what they can really do with that education other than join the civil service, which seems to happen quite a bit.
So I'm a big one for like scale-back interference in the market.
People will create their own opportunities, you know, the laissez-faire, let them alone, let them trade, let them build their own wealth and all that kind of stuff.
That really is inhibited.
Charity will help people stuck in the sort of hardening amber of fascist, monstrous governments.
And that's needed for the people who are stuck there.
But I think the long-term solution has to be to try and find a way to trade.
Like, let me give you one other, hopefully not too boring example, which is subsidies for agriculture.
Ah, wretched for the third world.
Unbelievably disruptive for the third world.
Because, you know, you give all these subsidies to farmers and the farmers then grow too much crap.
And then what do they do?
They dump it in the third world, which destroys the market for local farmers.
And you give all this food to the government.
The government then hands it out to people they like and don't hand it out to people they don't like, thus reinforcing their power.
And then there's no local farming left.
So just one of these kinds of examples.
If we stop screwing up their economies by selling arms, by dumping food on their markets and all that, and even the foreign aid happens with that too, I think they do fine.
But it's a lot easier to throw money at a problem than to actually try and deal with these immensely corrupt governments.
That's a really unknown but creepy aspect of the United States agriculture system is this subsidies, which causes people to grow food that they're not even going to use, causes people to like, to profit from corn and to put a lot of effort and emphasis into things that they know that they're going to get subsidies from.
It's a real strange sort of power circle that goes on.
Like, there's this tiny sugar industry in the United States, very concentrated economic force.
They get millions and millions and millions of dollars in subsidies, and they've been trying to cut this for years, but everybody, you know, lobby and focus their efforts, right?
And so what happened is when the subsidies went, when the tariffs, the taxes on imports of sugar went way up in the 70s, what did people start doing?
They said, wow, sugar in America is really expensive.
What are we going to switch to?
High fructose corn syrup.
And again, I'm no nutritionist, but there seem to be quite a lot of people out there who think that high fructose corn syrup has a lot to do with the growing weight problem in the United States.
Along with, of course, the fact that you've got dairy farmers and wheat farmers and so on lobbying the government to create these horrible food pyramids where they say, well, low fat is really important.
And then what do they do?
Because if you take fat out of stuff and sugar out of stuff, it takes like carbohydrate.
They take the fat out of the stuff that's in the grocery store and they put sugar or high fructose corn syrup in instead.
And then people are like, well, I guess this does taste good.
Like at breakfast this morning, I picked up a yogurt.
It says low fat, right?
And what's the second ingredient?
It's high fructose corn syrup.
It's like, that is not going to be good.
Give me the fat.
I'll take a shove a whole stick of butter up my nose rather than put that stuff into my system.
When you start talking about economics and you start talking about giving businesses more freedom, people get real nervous because people think of businesses as being these monsters that they get power and then they just start trampling and stealing things.
It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you growing over there?
What are you growing?
I'm growing a robot monster that's going to eat the world.
But okay, corporations are state-created, horrible, semi-fascistic monsters.
They do not exist in the free market.
Corporation has nothing to do with the free market.
You know, we may start a business together and all that in the free market.
It's like, okay, you started a business.
You don't get this legal shield.
You don't get to take profits out of the corporation when it makes money.
And then if it loses money, you don't ever have to put anything back.
You don't have this thing where if the corporation or if you do something illegal, the corporation can get sued or can get fined and so on.
It's a shield that is created to protect the people in charge as a corporations because they give a lot of money to politicians.
Barack Obama's, the only reason he's in power is he took huge amounts of money from the financial sector, more so than anyone else.
Of course, you don't really see this really talked about, but this is why the bailout and all of this happened, particularly under his watch, the tarp and all of that stuff, which was started under Bush, but expanded under Obama.
Corporations did not exist until quite recently.
And in the past, if you were the head of a trading company and your trading company lost money, you could lose your house.
You could like you could, people could come after your personal assets.
So these guys were really careful about their investments.
One, so they got this legal shield.
You know, hey, the corporation makes a billion bucks.
I can take that money out of the corporation and now it's mine.
And if I then do something wrong, the corporation loses a billion bucks, too bad shareholders and employees pay the price.
I mean, it's a wretched, unfair system that has nothing to do with the free market.
Of course, the government always say the corporations are the problem to deflect what's really going on, which is the corporate shield.
And the reasons why they gave this was A, to get the money from the corporate owners, and B, because then they get to tax corporations, and then everyone somehow thinks that there's this thing called a corporation, like this blimp floating around the universe that you can tax for free.
Like they did this fine recently, $900 million on some financial entity for its wrongdoings or whatever.
And people are like, yeah, you know, they find that corporation.
Like somehow the corporation is paying.
There's no corporation.
What happens is the shareholders end up paying.
The employees don't get raises.
The customers end up with service fees.
I mean, there's no corporation to tax.
It's only people.
So anyway, minor rant, but the corporations, they're just, they're part of the state capitalism or what's sometimes called crapitalism, which is just the government and corporations working together.
Technically, that's fascism, but it doesn't have anything to do with the free market.
It's just a modern, bloated monstrosity that's been created.
And it's just people figuring out a way to extract money and manipulating the system to make it easier for them to extract money.
Whether it's extracting money from taxes or whether it's extracting money in the form of political donations, however they're figuring out a way to do it.
And what gets crazy about it is that there's a bunch of human beings that are a part of this thing that really isn't looking out for human beings.
I mean, some people profit, you get money from it, but if you look at the ultimate destruction of these things, like very often they're not looking out for people.
I mean, I started a company with my brother in the 90s.
We grew this company.
We sold it and then we went public.
And the process of going public is like having cocaine injected into your dick, being lashed into a barrel full of psychotic monkeys and thrown off a cliff.
It's completely insane.
You go mental, you focus on the stock price rather than building long-term value, and you can make a fortune from tiny upticks and downticks in the stock price rather than focusing on satisfying your cut.
It really draws your attention away.
It's like you're chatting with your wife and some incredibly stacked woman in a bikini goes by and you don't have your sunglasses on to pretend that you're still staring at her.
And it's like stocks are like continually having these incredible looking women go by while you're trying to focus on the love of your life.
And it's like, you know, your hormones are going one way and your, you know, your heart is going another.
It's completely insane.
It really warps your thinking.
And this is why corporations have given up on R D and focus entirely on marketing and stock pitches because the amount of money you can make is insane.
And it's because so many people's money is being forced into the stock market.
I mean, it's like herding a bunch of sheep off a cliff and saying, well, those sheep seem to be kind of suicidal now, don't they?
It's like, no, it's because like you got your 401k plan.
What happens if you don't put money in your 401k?
Government takes it, right?
What happens if you don't invest in various institutions?
Like if your money gets taken from a union, the union has to invest it in your pension plans and all of that.
Unions have a huge amount of say in what happens in the stock market.
Who wants to be in the stock market?
I don't want to be in the stock market.
Maybe you do because you're thrilled junkie and all that.
But I don't want to be.
I don't want to be in the stock market.
I really, really, the stock market is for people who know what they're doing.
I don't want to be in the stock market.
Nobody I know wants to be in the stock market, but we all have to be in the stock market because it's like it's like that old joke where in Scotland, right, Scotland, Scottish people are supposed to be cheap.
That's the stereotype when I grew up.
And so, you know, an Englishman and a Scotsman are walking down and a thief comes up and says, I'm going to rob you of everything you've got.
And the Scotsman turns to the English guy and says, oh, here's that 20 quid that I owe you.
You know, because it's like, you're going to lose the money.
So you give it, you know, give it to the, so the government's going to take your money by force or you give it to a bunch of parasitical, three-eyed, roach-faced stockbrokers, right?
So it's like, okay, give it to the stockbrokers.
You know, if the guy's going to steal my money, I'll put it on Red 22.
And that's how the stock market works.
So there's way too much money in the stock market.
There should be like 1% of the money that's in the stock market that's there now.
So you've got these massive tsunamis of cash rolling back and forth.
It's going to be the subtitles to some Japanese movie that's going to be in the it's going to be like if you stuck mud in a musket and then just pull that pin back and boom, there you go.
There should be a photo of you like this, like an internet meme, and it just says, you drug a ballerina, you get a weird show.
Stefan Mollenew.
That's so true.
It's a great way of putting it.
And I think what a lot of what you're bitching about and we're both bitching about is it comes down to a couple of things.
It comes down to human beings being born into a system that's already fucked up.
It comes down to managing your own thinking as well, figuring out how to weigh you as an individual who allegedly, and it's another debate, has free will.
That's a huge debate, the free will debate, which is very esoteric and strange.
I don't know.
I'm not qualified.
I would like to have you and Sam Harris discuss the free will debate.
I agree and disagree with both sides.
So I don't know what's correct or what's not when it comes to that.
At the end of it, you can just press a button and both of you get down to your shorts and just start duking it out.
Yeah, that's great.
Yeah, that's just the threat of that is what keeps people gentlemanly, actually.
You know, when people know that there will be no physical violence, they can get very squirrely.
You know, people can get very mouthy.
Again, I don't want to keep harping on rich kids, but have you ever been around like a really spoiled rich kid that likes to yell at people that are working, yell at security or yell.
I have a friend who does security, and there's a famous person I won't name, but her name rhymes with Paris Hilton.
And she was out and she got shitty with my friend, who is essentially, he's a killer.
I mean, he's not working security because he's a cutie pie.
He's working security because he understands how to keep people secure.
Yeah, so people who are rich, they think, well, I'm better.
They're born rich.
You didn't earn that.
Like this guy in my high school, his father, I think, was running the Toronto Stock Exchange or whatever.
And, you know, I was living in this little tiny apartment with my mom and my brother.
And, you know, it was like the matriarchal manners.
It was all like the fallout from like the 60s and 70s feminist revolution, divorce rate was through the roof, and it was all the single momville, like the girlfriend farm for the thug industry.
And we went over to this guy's place to rehearse some play we were working on, and it was just, it went on forever.
And, you know, these are the kids, 16, you know, they get their, they get their sports car and then they show up in school.
And everyone is like oohing and eyeing.
And these guys are preening.
And I get it.
They're 16.
What do they know, right?
What did I know when I was 16?
But that's just an accident.
You know, you just happen to be born there.
You know, like it wasn't like you laser targeted from the stork army and decided to go to that house rather than some other place.
You know, like you're not a guided missile of wise prenatal aiming.
And so we all have that, you know, and it's true.
People who are born pretty or people who are born rich or, you know, people, guys, sometimes you just born tall or you got good athletics.
Or, you know, like I was told when I was a kid, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A-plus.
You know, like I just wasn't trying hard enough.
It wasn't the school's fault.
It wasn't my family's fault.
It wasn't a chaotic or crazy situation where I was growing up.
We weren't poor.
I didn't have to have three jobs.
I just needed to work a little harder, like the other kids did who had good homes and all that.
It's natural.
And we have a very tough time really getting how much our environment has to do with who we become.
Like, okay, I was born with a fairly good brain and fairly good language center.
I try to use that for as much good as I can, but with all the humility of knowing that, you know, I mean, if I'd been hit the wrong way with a ball when I was a kid, I'd be a whole different person.
If I'd been born, as you said, you know, different race, a different country, different culture.
I mean, you know, not a lot of female playwrights in Iran, you know, because it's just bad luck.
Sorry, you know, you really drew the short straw.
We have a very tough time.
And I think that basic humanity that we have is diminishing and it's catastrophic and it's diminishing largely because of single moms.
Because the statistic is that by far the best predictor, I'm waving this pen at you, like trying to talk about empathy.
Let me just do my finger.
The best predictor for the growth of empathy in a human being is the close presence of a father.
This is something that's kind of unknown because we all think that moms are about the nurturing and the emotional development and so on.
But statistically, you know, outside unstructured play plus the presence of a dad is the biggest thing in developing empathy.
You take fathers out of the equation in society.
This is why sociopathy has doubled over the last 15 years.
Well, the problem with phrasing it like that, though, is you say that the issue is single mothers, but the issue is really that the father isn't around.
Whether or not it was the mother's fault, the father's fault, whoever's fault it was that that relationship didn't work out, whether it's mutual or one person has the majority of the blame, it's that the family's broken up.
It's not that the single mom, it's just that family's broken.
Like, I just, I fundamentally, like, intellectually, maybe, I think that men have a lot of value in relationships, but, you know, we are 40, we're smelly, we sit at odd angles, we don't cross our legs, we, you know, we rarely use napkins.
And I cannot understand why we need like 10 times more pillows than people on the bed.
I like during the day when it's anyway, these are things that are confusing to me, but fundamentally.
Women say yes or no to relationships.
So they do get to choose who the man is a lot more than the man gets to choose who the woman is.
I think that ultimately it boils down to once you finally meet each other, do you like each other?
And if the woman likes the man as much as the man likes the woman, it works out.
And if they don't, then it becomes this weird balance of power, this weird shifting sort of a thing.
But I think there's a lot of men that don't want in a relationship and they end it or they pursue and they end it.
I think it's probably, I don't want to be a 50-50.
I don't want to give you a statistic, but I would say there's a good number of men who end relationships and a good number of women who end relationships.
To put all the power in the women's side, I think it's, of course.
Or is it the men are so fucking douchey that the women have no choice?
That the men have given up a long time ago and they just don't want to fucking bother going to the court.
So just shut the fuck up.
I'm going to go out.
And they shut the door.
And then the woman calls the lawyer.
And well, the woman ended that relationship.
Did she?
Or was it mutual?
Just one person decided to make the call to the lawyer, but did the guy already give up to the point where he was just treating her like shit, hoping she would leave.
That's like the old Sam Kinnison joke about marriage.
He goes, you know, he goes, he goes, I don't like to break up with women.
So what I do is I just stay up all night, do Coke for four or five days.
I come home drunk and smelling like pussy until you get to a point where she leaves you.
She leaves you because you're falling apart.
And he goes, and here's the best part.
unidentified
She feels like shit because she left you when you needed her most.
A bunch of football players got together, high school football players, got some underage girl drunk, raped her, and then the guys went to jail and they just got out.
Why is that so horrible?
Well, here's what's so horrible about it.
It was a girl.
It was men that did it to a girl.
If it was a bunch of women who raped a guy, they got him drunk and sucked his dick for an hour and a half, everyone would be laughing about it.
Okay.
It's a sexual act that happens to a woman who can't control herself.
And then you find out that it's a football player group, a group of giant athletes, a group of super strong men who obviously could have physically dominated her as well.
It becomes a horrific act.
If you simply reverse the sexes, it becomes a comedy.
If it's some nerd who gets too drunk in a sorority and they all fuck him for three or four hours and take pictures of his penis, it's a comedy.
But because it's a woman, it's a tragedy.
And the reason why it's a tragedy is because men are physically stronger.
It's really that simple.
So the idea that I think that men want to physically protect women, man, there's a lot of evidence that they don't.
You know, I think it's a giant broad generalization.
I think the nicest men certainly do.
I think I would certainly, if I was seeing a woman that was being physically assaulted or something, I would absolutely risk my health to help her.
I wouldn't be able to live myself if I didn't, especially if I cared about her.
Well, men do, but here's the problem: that statistic.
They're getting raped by men.
So even though men get raped more, they're getting raped by men.
So men are still the fucking problem.
Men are just raping.
They're raping men and they're raping women.
Yeah, they rape men more, but that's just because we keep them pinned up with men.
If we had no prisons and everyone ran free and we just fucking slaughtered people that we are absolutely sure don't contribute to society, whether they're murderers or rapists, we just slaughtered them.
We would have the rape stuff would pretty much die off.
It's keeping men together locked in a box and making them fuck each other.
Yeah, and rape.
Yeah, but it's a lot of people.
The real problem with that, you know, that's the MRA argument against feminism is that men actually get raped more than women.
And it was a horrific scene and very, very tragic.
And if you, you know, if you know someone like that, you know that it is possible for a woman to do it to a man, just like it's possible for a man to do it with a woman.
And by the way, you know, there's good and bad in that.
The good in that is that you can defend yourself against a man.
If someone's, you know, if you're a woman and you're physically weak, but you have a gun, you can say, get the fuck out of my house.
And the guy has to run away because you have a gun.
There's good in that.
But there's also, you know, people, you know, people do horrible things.
They get angry at each other.
And it happens with both sexes, with men and with women.
There's no need to generalize.
It's all just shitty people.
It's all just shitty people and shitty circumstances and a gigantic past of momentum, of terrible decision making that's led you to this really unstable current state that you find yourself in.
And then you add drugs.
You add antidepressants.
You know, I mean, I believe you and I discussed this the last time we talked, but the amount of fucking school shooters that are on antidepressants, like causation does not, you know, people want to pretend there's not like a relation between those two.
But a lot of people also could benefit from being healthier.
This is one of the things we discussed before the podcast started.
How many people that take an antidepressant could have fixed their problem just with a little exercise and diet change, with a little just getting around better people, having a better relationship, being a friendlier person, trying to exercise the stress out of your life both mentally and physically.
And then let's see what kind of emotional and psychological state you're in.
Because the idea that this, we need a holistic approach to the human organism.
And that holistic approach should really have a big impact in what kind of medication we subscribe to people.
I think it should have a massive impact.
And if you find someone and the person is eating fucking donuts all day and they sleep four hours a night and they're constantly drinking Red Bulls and they're depressed.
Or they're a smart person underachieving in some dead-end job and they don't have people around them saying, listen, man, you've got more to offer the world.
Let's just find a way to get you out of the hamster wheel and get you on some flat track.
Yeah, in America, I think, yeah, so 35 or 40 and over one out of four women on antidepressants.
And those are just the people who've gone and gotten diagnosed, right?
Lots of other.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of good things that are happening, I think, in the world with regards to human relationships.
I think that we are getting smarter.
I think we are getting more positive.
I think that we are getting, dare I use the hackneyed Victorian term, more virtuous, better in our relationships.
You know, there's an awareness of beating and emotional abuse and all.
I think that the standards are kind of raising, right?
And, you know, Dr. Phil is like the number one daytime show, and he talks a lot about, you know, how to be reasonably decent human beings in relationships, which is sad that he has to keep saying that.
But so, yeah, I mean, like 30%, as you were saying, 30% of women still are only breastfeeding for the minimum amount of time, six months.
I was reading, this guy, Steven Pinker, I think would be, if you can get him on, he's a really smart guy, great to talk to.
Who's Tim?
I think he's a neurobiologist, neuroscientist.
And he basically was, there's a lot of studies out there that say that sort of personality traits go, like 50% genetic, and maybe they can get 0 to 10% is the parents.
And the rest of it is kind of cultural and so on, right?
And, you know, I'm not going to argue with the science.
I'm not a scientist.
But I will say that I think that parents don't have really that much involvement in kids' lives from a guidance standpoint that much anymore.
I read the statistic the other day that said the average dad has like 20 minutes of conversation with his children every week.
And so, and that, and that's just, that's of the people who are present.
That doesn't count the dads who are absent and so on.
Because, you know, the typical, you know, two-family working, I mean, what's their day like?
I mean, I've seen it.
I've seen it up close.
And this is one of the reasons I wanted to have kids.
Because I saw what happened.
You know, you get up at six o'clock in the morning, you got to get your kids up, breakfast, get them out of the school bus, you go to your work all day, you're sweating bullets to get, pick them up after school daycare or wherever they are, get them home, feed them, do homework, bathe them, you know, get them to bed, and then you start the whole thing again.
It's all just herd management.
It's all just keep them going through the maze and all that.
And I think that, like, I've been a stay-at-home dad.
My daughter is five now.
And there's a lot of little guidance things that happen during the week about how to modify, you know, where they're going, help to help them understand sharing or empathy or understanding how to do win-win negotiations rather than just focus on what they want, which is natural for little kids.
But it's all these tiny little corrections that are scattered throughout the week.
You don't know when they're going to be, but you have to kind of be around for them.
And I think that we don't really have much opportunity for modern parents to really stay involved.
Like we're kind of designed as a species to be around our parents.
You know, they were there with the fields.
The dads would take them.
You went hunting recently.
Dads would take them out hunting and stuff like that.
And that's when you have your conversations and you teach the kids the values and all that kind of stuff.
It's really been supplanted by, you know, government, by daycare, government schools and all of that.
That's who we're kind of bonding with.
That's who we're kind of letting raise our kids.
And I can understand why there's very little influence of parents over children's behavior.
I don't think that's natural.
I think that's just the way society has been structured, or rather, the society we've kind of inherited.
And I really would like to see, I say this on my show all the time to people who call in.
It's like, wow, we're going to have kids, but I got to work.
It's like, you don't, you know, I mean, you went into debt to go to school.
I mean, this is important, just at least for the first couple of years.
You know, my daughter, her brain is like 90% done now.
I need to either stop saying that or embrace the idea of a three-year-old saying it.
It's one of those because I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, oh, shit, when you leave saying, but if you do it in certain circumstances in school and work, it's going to be a problem.
You know, like he is her mighty morph and power ranger.
She thinks he is just the coolest because he's always standing up to Big Invisible Guy, right?
And because for her, prayer is, you know, everyone's standing around and say, oh, you're the best.
Oh, you're the best.
Oh, you're the greatest.
Oh, I love you so much.
Oh, you're the best.
And so, you know, Lucifer gets kind of tired of that and leads the rebellion and all that.
Because, you know, I said, you know, just keep saying it.
And she's, I'm getting tired of it.
It's like, no, no, no, no, keep saying it because it's an eternity of saying that to the guy, right?
And she's like, oh, man, I'm really tired.
I want to sit down.
It's like, now you know how Lucifer felt of it.
Anyway, so she's got this great, she's this great song, which goes basically, Lucifer was right, Lucifer was right, you know, from the songs.
And I'm just waiting because, you know, in Canada, there's some homeschooling, which is kind of ournschooling, what we're doing, but a lot of them are Christians, right?
So we're going to at some point be around a bunch of Christian kids, and she's going to break into this song.
And I'm looking forward to that moment of trying to explain that.
Maybe she's referring to a Beatles song.
I don't know.
I completely bail on her at that point, so I don't know why she gets this.
Well, the real issue is you're going to have to mingle with those Christian parents.
The real issue when you have children, besides raising the children, which is, of course, the primary one, teaching them and everything, is dealing with these other parents.
And seeing, it's really weird when I see people with their kids, you know, see how little they interact with their kids, see how non-appreciative they are of their kids, how they're always distracted or it's the ring of cell phones around the playground.
Sorry, Andrew, she's great because, you know, like I'm trying to teach her eye contact, right?
Because, you know, when she's a kid, you know, I don't know if they can't focus when they look at you, but they tell stories like they're just watching the biggest disco light show on the planet and you're just like some leaf or something.
Yeah, it's fascinating to watch their little brains develop, isn't it?
And watch the way they interact with each other or how they see the world and realize like that.
This is how a person is shaped.
And this is the number one problem that we have as a race is that we don't respect this process.
And that we also don't respect this process in strangers, especially people that we know are fucked.
People in bad neighborhoods, people in bad circumstances, people in abusive families.
We know they're fucked and we don't do anything to stop it.
One thing that I keep harping on is that if we have a resource, whether it's oil or gold, I mean, we protect that resource and, you know, we set up laws and we attach a value to it.
But our number one resource for sure is human beings.
We have created all that you see, whether it's laptops or buildings or cars.
That's all from a human being.
The best way to ensure that that continues to go on is to have less losers in the world.
The best way to have less losers is help out kids, educate kids, get on the ball with them very early and do something as a society, protect them primary.
Before we go into wars, before we go into all this stupid shit that we do to spying on people's fucking emails and looking into their cell phone record, before you do any of that, how about you protect kids first?
That should be of primary importance.
And it should be like one of those things where your kid wants to go out and play.
Just throw a few stats for the audience who hasn't seen it before.
More than 90% of parents of toddlers say they've spanked their child.
Toddlers.
61% of moms, three to five-year-olds, have spanked their child in the past week.
Boys are spanked a lot more than girls.
Boys are also diagnosed with ADHD, which is one of the symptoms of spanking a lot more than girls.
Spanking can continue into the adolescent years.
30 to 40% of people in junior high, kids and junior high are still being spanked.
Moms do spank children a lot more than fathers do, even controlling for time spent with kids and all of that kind of stuff.
Economic status doesn't have a huge amount to do with spanking, but culture does.
So African Americans do a lot more corporal punishment.
Religious conservatives, fundamentalists do a lot more corporal punishment and so on.
And this, to me, is such a fundamental thing.
I'm very much for philosophy that you can do, philosophy that you can act on, values that you can do.
Yeah, I don't like the Federal Reserve.
Think central banking is a monstrous cancer in the eyeball of society, but I can't really do much about it other than rant and rave about it.
But what we can do is do some basics, like stop hitting kids.
You know, that to me is a very fundamental thing.
And in the libertarian community, that's a challenge.
A lot of religious conservatives in the libertarian community, as you know, like on the right among Republicans, there tend to be more religious people on the left, as secularists, less religious people, but more socialists and so on.
And it is really tough, you know, to just get that basic thing across.
We tell kids not to hit each other and we hit kids.
And we've all, I don't know, if you out there, you see bad parenting sometimes when you're out and you act, you actually, and I'll usually say something to the parents because I don't want my, A, I think it's the right thing to do.
I don't want my daughter to see me be all about the ethics and then not talk to people doing something wrong.
But you can see parents hit kids saying, don't hit your sister.
And that the fact that they can do that without their heads exploding from this wormhole contradiction of pretzel logic is just astounding.
But it is something we still have a long way to go in.
I think we're kind of slowly getting there, but we have a long way to go in just let's not hit kids.
I think how much of the world would change if we didn't do that, I think we would be virtually unrecognizable as a culture.
Not only that, it's fundamentally the most fucked up kind of violence because you're doing it to a developing human being who you allegedly love.
You're teaching them that violence is a part of life by the people that they respect the most and that it can be done to you at any time when you don't agree with whatever fucking guidelines and rules they've set up, like licking your hand.
If my daughter was licking my hand, I'd be laughing my ass off.
I would think it's so funny.
The idea that I'd smack her in the mouth is just fucking insane.
But people, they fall into this pattern and they don't realize that violence is violence.
Just because you're not going to hurt the kid that bad, you're just going to spank them.
You think it's no big deal?
Fuck yeah, it's a big deal.
Because that kid, it's a horrific situation.
You're doing something that they can't control.
You're holding their arm, they're moving their body, and then this big hand comes and slaps their ass and they feel pain and they feel confused because you've acted out against them.
You've not only acted out against them, you've done it aggressively, yelling and slapping.
And like, it's a terrible, it's a terrible precedent to set, a terrible idea to plant in a child's mind, and it's unnecessary.
It's just not necessary.
For you to tell me that you can't sit down and reason with your child and do it with love, and yeah, they're going to freak out and fucking flail sometimes and get mad and yell.
And that's because they're a fucking child, you piece of shit.
So I think your perspective is very unique in the fact that you are a stay-at-home dad and you do have the resources to be able to do that.
It's really hard for a lot of people.
And that's what you were talking about before.
That number is pretty crazy, the 20 minutes a week.
I didn't know that it was that low, but honestly, not shocked.
I don't have a regular life, but I've dabbled in regular life.
I've had jobs that take me away for a long period of time during the day.
And I could only imagine what kind of energy you have to devote to a kid if the mother, both the mother and the father, both leave the house all day long, work an eight-hour day, and then come home.
How much is left?
There's not even much time the kid's going to be awake.
How much energy do you have left?
How much focus are you putting on that kid during the day?
We have this idea that the moms have to be there and the dads can be there.
But a study conducted by Dr. Kyle Pruitt found that infants between 7 and 30 months respond more favorably to being picked up by their fathers.
He also found a father's parenting style is beneficial for a child's physical, cognitive, and emotional, and behavioral development.
And mothers tend to reassure toddlers when they become frustrated, while fathers encourage them to manage their frustration.
My daughter's like this, so she's learning to do all these things.
And most of her friends are older because, you know, we're not the youngest parents on the block.
And so a lot of her friends can do stuff better than she can.
She gets frustrated.
And me helping her talk it through that frustration and reminding her that I didn't know how to do this stuff.
And she's trying to do racket sports.
And I remember it took me years to become good at racket sports.
So that's important for kids as well.
I mean, it's really important to remember, you know, the mom and the kid, they used to be the same freaking person.
You know, like she grew her.
It's like my arm, you know, it's not like a separate thing.
Whereas dads have a little bit more objectivity around that.
A longer-term study that this guy did proved that a father's active involvement with his kids from birth to adolescence promotes greater emotional balance, stronger curiosity, a stronger sense of self-assurance.
Additional studies, during the first five years of a child's life, the father's role is more influential than the mother's in how the child learns to manage his or her body, navigate social circumstances and play.
And the last one is this is a 1996 study that I was referring to before by McGill University.
The single most important childhood factor in developing empathy is paternal involvement in childcare.
The study further concluded that children who spend time alone bonding with their children more than twice per week brought up the most compassionate adults.
So they ask the fathers, you know, how often were you involved?
And maybe they even measured them if it's sort of a live study.
And then they measure the compassion, and then they measure a whole bunch of other things.
And if the other things don't change the compassion measure, but then the parental involvement is what moves the needle, then they assume that that's close to causal.
But isn't the issue also that parental involvement, like say if a father is involved a lot in the kid's life, he's also probably likely involved in the relationship with the wife, and maybe the wife would be more happy.
The father and the wife would be more happy, and because of that, they would both be better parents.
So it might not just be that the impact of having a man around does all these things and creates empathy.
It might be the impact of having a successful family as well.
But they were floating at one point and then they came out through the magic chamber.
But I think, you know, I mean, my wife's skills as a parent are fantastic.
But there are some differences between us, you know, and I don't know whether it's biological or whether it's just the way we're raised or whatever.
But, you know, I encourage more risk-taking.
I encourage, you know, if you fall off the horse, get back up on again kind of stuff.
And I think that's just kind of a natural kind of difference.
And I'm also more encouraging of, you know, my daughter is like crazy friendly.
I keep thinking she's going to go up to someone, sometimes an unfriendly world, like a cheese up to a grater, you know, and just kind of get shredded because, you know, we go places and she just goes up to kids and says, hi, would you like to be friends?
And that was one of the things that we got a little bit off topic, but one of the things that I wanted to complete this thought on when you were talking about antidepressants and we were talking about the good and the bad of them.
I think right now, one of the issues that we have with this idea of manipulating human neurochemistry is that it's not really done.
It's not a complete art form yet.
It's not something like dyeing your hair.
Like if your hair is gray and you want to have black hair, you simply go to the market and you buy some hair color and you put it in your hair and now your hair's black.
It really is that fucking easy.
I mean, they've got it down to a science.
You can see guys that are fucking 80 years old and they have jet black hair.
Yeah, but I think we do have the potential, just like we have mastered virtually every other aspect of our world that we live in, whether it's high-speed communication or the ability to, you know, combustion engines, lithium-ion batteries.
One day they're going to figure out how to engineer consciousness.
And you have this, you have this opportunity to take a pill or get a shot or whatever, and you have ultimate clarity and you fucking think much better and you're a better person.
I keep swinging my hands through the air and knocking shit onto my keyboard.
But what I'm saying is if we engineered it past this ape-monkey paradigm that we live in right now, and boom, with one shot, they give you this Buddha thing.
Look, if the entire world took it and then we would engineer consciousness past this stage where we are now and completely restructure society to have no evil, no problems.
We think that we have to have a yang to have a yin, and in our current state, we do.
But is that the ultimate end-all?
Are we not continually evolving?
Is this life that we live now not much easier and safer than it was living in the time of Genghis Khan?
Well, it certainly is.
Well, isn't it arguable that a thousand years from now, it would adapt and change and become something different than it is now?
Yeah, I mean, neuroplasticity and focusing on what I would argue is the old Aristotelian idea that we look for something called eudomania or happiness.
And happiness is, according to Aristotle, happiness is the one thing we seek for its own sake, right?
Like we don't, we get on a bus to go somewhere, right?
We take a cab to get home, and once we're home, we've arrived there and we don't stay on the bus or stay on the cab.
And most things we do in life are there to pursue happiness, right?
And so, yeah, Aristotle said, so how do you achieve happiness?
Well, happiness, he said, is the pursuit of excellence, particularly in virtue.
And now, virtue for Aristotle was a little funky because he was pro-slavery.
So it's it, but you know, they didn't have labor-saving devices other than other human beings.
So I think that we do have the capacity to be quite happy and to achieve a state of not contentment, because I think contentment is for like cows and stuff that they excrete.
But I think to achieve happiness, we pursue virtue, which is, you know, we act to do good.
We fight the bad guys.
We try and reform the people on the fence.
We try and encourage those in pursuit of virtue.
And I mean, let me ask you this question.
How is your conscience, right?
You know, this thing that you accumulate, this sort of unconscious thing that accumulates the good and bad that you've done in your life.
My conscience is pretty easy.
I think I've done some things wrong.
I think I've done a lot of things right.
My conscience is pretty easy.
How's your conscience?
Do you think in the sort of the sum total, you know, that thing you go in front of St. Peter at the end of your life and he tallies up your sort of the good and bad?
And as we talked about before, I think you do a lot of good in the world.
You bring a lot of, I think, good thinkers to people's attention, hopefully myself included.
I think that through your comedies we talked about before, I think you give people a very empathetic relationship to their own physicality and bring sort of some of the secret stuff in people's lives into the open and have them have good humor about it.
So, I think you do a lot of good.
And I think that's, would you say that you're quite happy?
And I think that that good, though, is a very reciprocal, it's a very even relationship between audience and me.
I think I easily get as much out of this podcast as the people who listen to it do.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's so harmonious and one of the reasons why it's so easy to do.
And also one of the reasons why the relationship that I have with the audience when I meet them is like, I think they know that I'm as happy about all this as they are.
And the people that it's benefited their lives and they've been exposed to all these different people like yourself and other interesting people that I've had on the show.
I have also been exposed to those people, been exposed to you, been exposed to whether it's Sam Hatteras or Amit Goswami, the theoretical physicist, or all these different fascinating people that I've had on the podcast, Graham Hancock, Glad Nauseum, Joey Diaz, all these people have made my life a more fascinating life for sure.
So it's been a completely mutual beneficial situation.
So when you say like you've done a lot of good, well, it's done a lot of good for me.
So I really think it's a very win-win, right?
Yeah, it's a completely even exchange.
What I've found is a path that I find to be both fascinating and enjoyable.
And I've gone down that path.
I've been very fortunate to find it and then pursue it.
Well, not only that, the do-no, do the least harm principle.
It's really kind of fucked.
But the reality of farming is that unless you're organically farming in your own garden, you're actually killing more animals per pound of, you know, of grain and per pound of rice than you do per pound of beef.
It's really kind of fucked.
There's some study on it, like how many animals get ground up in those machines that they use to churn up crops and how much displacement they do to the natural habitat of certain animals when you plant crops.
And it's very, it's ideal if you can grow your own stuff.
If you can grow your own stuff and you want to be like a vegan, you want to have the smallest footprint possible, that's the way to do it.
Grow your own stuff and make sure that you don't harm anything in the cultivation of your fruits and vegetables.
But if you don't, boy, you're still participating, whether you believe it or not, you're participating.
And again, if you can do less harm, I think that's great.
After high school, I wanted somebody for school.
I ended up going up to work in Northern Ontario, like past the tree line where you had to fly in to do claim staking and gold panning and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, when you're really in Mother Nature, and this was like, you know, minus 50 degree weather in a tent for months.
I mean, when you're really in Mother Nature, you realize she's kind of a bitch.
Like, she'll just, you know, a fucking tree will fall on your head and that's it for you.
I mean, you know, it's really, you know, one time we got snowed in, like we couldn't get the plane in with supplies.
And you realize, like, you're looking at a box of food and you're like, you know, when we're out of this, it's getting all kinds of like stuck on a mountain looking at people.
I actually was thinking, you know, you see those, these are Looney Tunes cartoons.
So again, for your younger audience members, please ask your parents.
You know, like when someone guy's really hungry and he looks across at some other guy and he turns into like this steaming chicken wing or something.
No, you couldn't, but I was looking, there was one guy who was kind of plump in the camp, and, you know, he actually decided to look well-marbled to me.
There's a story from 1450 that I've told on the podcast once before, but for the this in this line of thinking, there was a series of murders in Paris in 1450 by wolves where wolves, I guess it's not murders.
I guess it's just predatory.
They killed 40 people.
Wolves killed 40 fucking people in Paris in 1450.
And we are no different to them than a caribou or anything else that they can eat.
It's just when we have protected ourselves completely with cities and cars and guns and all these things, then it doesn't become an issue.
And then we look at them and like, oh, beautiful nature.
But that beautiful nature gives zero fucks about you.
Jamie, pull up a photo of a Komodo dragon's mouth.
They used to think that they carry botulism in their saliva.
That used to be what they thought.
But now they realize that what happens is the environment that Komodo dragons live in is so hot and tropical, and that a lot of times they're biting into water buffalo and all these different things that are exposed to moisture.
And it's just the septic nature of their environment because water buffaloes piss and shit in the water that they live in.
And then when this Komodo dragon bites them, he opens up their flesh and the blood gets exposed to all the toxins that they're going to be.
I'm like, man, bears have fucking died in Yosemite, right?
And he was like, no, no bears have died.
And I didn't know that there's two different.
In my head, Yellowstone and Yosemite became the same thing.
Because two people over the last couple of years were killed in Yellowstone by grizzlies.
And just fucking hikers.
Just people wandering around and you run into a bear in the wrong situation and that is a giant 1800 pound monster or 1,200 pound or 800 pound, whatever the fuck it is.
They're bears.
They're enormous.
Think of a giant dog, an 800-pound dog that wants to eat you.
That's something you have to think about when you go swimming anywhere in the world where there's sharks.
You know, you might think that it's not going to happen to you because it hasn't happened to that guy or that guy or this person on the surfboard over there.
One tiger killed three men in a boat of five, swam out to the boat, killed a man, dragged him back to the water, to the beach, jumped back in the water, killed another guy, and did it three times before he either got bored or they got away from it.
You know, there's this weird idea, and I think it comes out of religion that I mean, there's a couple of things that are problematic which come out of religion.
And some of them are obviously kind of obvious, but some of them I think are more subtle.
Like the issue of the soul to me is always really interesting.
Like this, this, in the religious idea, and not all religions, but a lot of religions, you know, you have this eternal part, if you call it the soul, which is uncorruptible.
And so, you know, when they say, you know, that he's a bad guy, but if you really can, if you reach through, if you connect with him, there's, you know, there's good in him somewhere and all that kind of stuff.
I think that's a really dangerous idea.
And it scientifically seems to be entirely false.
You know, like people who are sociopaths don't get better.
They don't reform.
They will become cunning.
But they've tried everything.
They've tried injecting sociopaths with LSD and stuff like that.
And I mean, it's fairly easy to create them if you really traumatize a whole lot of kids.
Then you can, like, a lot of them came out of Ceachescu's Romania because he banned abortion.
And a lot of women who would otherwise have had abortions put these kids into these orphanages where they were fed and taken care of, but nobody ever touched them.
And then I think it was in France.
There was when this came out, a whole bunch of French families adopted these Romanian orphanages kids, and they were strangling their cats, and they were throwing their other kids out of windows and stuff.
And they were just unfixable, completely unfixable.
Usually it's within, if you do this, if it's after two or three years, it's usually irreversible because, you know, the brain development, the development of empathy is like two to three years in their psychopaths.
Empathy is 10 to 12 different brain centers all have to fire in harmony.
And you also have to develop these things called mirror neurons, which are, I think, completely fascinating.
The biological basis of empathy, completely geeky fascinating to me, but since empathy, I think, is the most important resource in the world.
If you have that, all other resources will be taken care of.
But mirror neurons are, if you see someone take a nutshot, you go, oh, you know, like you kind of get it in your body.
Those are mirror neurons, and you can make them or deny them in monkeys very easily, right?
I mean, if you just give them all the food and drink that they need, but you just give them like a simulated mom, like that doesn't actually interact with them, and you isolate them, and you don't even have to traumatize them.
You don't have to hit them.
You don't have to scare them.
If you do that, they get even worse.
But then they grow up with no particular empathy because they don't get that sort of back and forth.
I mean, babies are born with it.
One freaky thing that babies can do is right out of the womb, like right when they're born, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, it will stick its tongue out back at you, which is a completely freaky thing to do when you think about it.
They've never seen a tongue.
They don't know that you have the same.
So, if you develop mirror neurons, then you won't get sociopathy because you'll have empathy, right?
And people who spank fundamentally are acting against empathy, and they're teaching their children to act against empathy because you're doing exactly what your child desperately does not want you to do.
And so you're really screwing with empathy and so on.
And so, the development of the non-development of mirror neurons appears to be something that cannot be corrected later in life.
It's just this, it's like if you don't get exposed to language between like two and five, you just never really learn it.
And this is why when I talk about fixing the world or having a paradise on earth, which relative to what we have now, I think we can have, it's a multi-generational process because if the kids are screwed up that early, it appears to be irreversible.
And all you can do is manage the symptoms, you know, through prison or whatever it is.
But these human predators, it's not in the religious mindset where there's a soul that there's someone good you can get into that you can connect with is biologically completely it seems to be again I'm no expert it seems to be completely incorrect it's like saying if you've got lung cancer throughout your lungs that there's a healthy ghost lung that you just have to connect with to breathe well no your lungs are corrupted they're screwed up they're they're they're not there's no healthy backup lungs that there's no healthy backup personality or brain called the soul but this idea that you can reach through
to the most corrupted and destroyed people and somehow reawaken their humanity, which is necessary for religion, you have to have a soul, I think is really a dangerous thing because it lets us, if you have compassion for sociopaths, they use it to manipulate and control you.
And so it's almost like if you're a sociopath, you'd love to invent the idea of a soul so that people will try and help you and then you can manipulate and control them.
Whereas if you recognize that they're predators, then you just steer clear of them, they lose a lot of their power.
Like a torturer knows what hurts you and likes it.
And they've done actually a bunch of studies where they show people – and this I find it's so incomprehensible.
I try and sort of get it because having empathy for non-empathetic people is a tough thing.
I think it's a necessary process to go through for self-protection and I think for the betterment of the world.
So there are these studies where they sort of hook up these electrodes to people's brains.
They can measure what's going on in their brains.
And they show intentional cruelty films.
Like they show like no cruelty and then accidental cruelty like guy steps on a rake or whatever.
Right?
And then they show intentional cruelty like guy pretending – like stapling another guy's hand or something like that.
And when people see – some people see the intentional cruelty, the same happy centers related to orgasm, related to just feelings of intense bliss show up.
Because this is sadism, taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
I mean that is – that's anti-empathy.
That's like, well, I know that you're attached to your children so I'm going to use your attachment to your children to control and bully you or whatever it is.
You know, like you kidnap some guy's kids or whatever.
And this aspect of human predation is really important.
We are not a species.
We are a whole ecosystem of predator and prey.
And our lack of ability to differentiate between predator and prey in the human species I think is one of the major roots of hierarchical brutalities and wars and all of this kind of stuff.
And I think we really need to throw away the idea of the eternal good within us and recognize that the most dangerous species to human beings are other human beings by far.
I mean just governments alone in the 20th century murdered – not even including war.
Governments murdered 250-plus million people.
They can't even get it down to within 10 million people.
That's a quarter of a billion people murdered just by one human institution populated by sociopaths.
These are incredibly dangerous people.
We're talking about bears and stuff and that's very important.
But the most important and most dangerous predators are human beings and we don't really have a good way of identifying them other than they're on the ballot.
Could you imagine if you had like a bunch of bears that were like really cool and you love to be around them and they're like really fun and they do things for you.
And they help you and they help you move and they provide you with joy.
And then there's other bears that will just fucking eat you if they find you.
Yeah, so that's so science, a proposition about the physical universe, we compare it to an ideal standard called scientific verification or something like that.
Or we compare a proposed action to a moral standard or a moral ideal or something.
That's the one thing we can do that nothing else in the universe that we know of seems to be able to do.
To compare a proposed action, like, I mean, dogs propose an action.
They all get together and they, you know, they all, birds all fly in one direction or another, but they don't compare it to an ideal.
And this comparing things to an ideal, I think, is the fundamental aspect of free will that we have.
And we can either just go through our life and never compare anything that we do to some ideal standard, or we can say about the important things, not, you know, do I have another sip of coffee, but the important stuff, will we compare that to some ideal standard?
Now, people do this all the time, right?
I mean, is this moral?
Is this right?
Is this God's will?
Is this with the law?
Is it against the law?
We compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
And even in school, do you get 100 on the test?
That's the ideal standard.
You get a 50, that's right, not good.
So we're constantly comparing things to an ideal standard.
And I think that is really the essence of choice that we have.
And even if it's not an ideal standard, we're being inspired by what we deem to be successful behavior, whether it's emotionally successful, socially successful, whatever, career, athletics, whatever it is.
We gain some sort of inspiration from that that also enhances our ability to perform the same actions.
And is that free will?
Is it something else?
Is it a combination of all those things?
I think more likely that.
The argument that there is no free will, I think, is a little silly because there is, but it's not the only thing.
I think that's what it is.
I think there's a lot going on when it becomes, when you try to figure out what it is that makes a person act the way they act.
We could put you in a situation and something could occur with your daughter, for say, and you would be like, well, let me explain to you what happened and let me explain to you how I've made these same mistakes myself and this is what I learned from it.
Or you could put a different person in front of a similar four-year-old kid and that person's going, what did I tell you?
Well, it's no, it's comparing to ideal standards, right?
So in the story, in the story we talked about earlier, where I was saying my daughter said, you know, daddy, eye contact, you know, should we have a standard, which is if someone's saying something to you, you should really pay attention to them.
That's the standard, right?
And I've told her about that.
You know, like if she's playing on the iPad and we're trying to have a conversation, I say, can you turn that off while we chat?
Because, you know, I don't want you to be distracted.
She can make, so there's a standard that we have.
And then when we deviate from that standard, we try to realign with that standard.
And I think those are basically the fundamental choices that we have.
What are your standards?
So some guys, like some guys with parenting genuinely believe, like every time I put out the facts about spanking, I just interviewed Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff, a spanking expert, who's given all the facts.
People always, they say, well, you know, but kids these days are spank less and they're running wild and they're having lipstick parties and they're hooking up and they have no more.
So they genuinely believe, well, if I don't hit my kids, it's going to be really bad.
And I think that our futures are fundamentally written by our deepest values, by that which we consider the good.
What your values or your virtues are will be your future, like a train track.
Now, we can't change the effects of our ethics, but we can decide which are valid or invalid ethics.
So, I make the case that, you know, don't hit your kids, non-aggression principle, reasoning, better parenting, better child development, all the science behind it.
Your kids' IQ will be better, their behavior will be better, their social skills will be better, they'll be more peaceful, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I make that case.
I change people's minds about that.
Like, tens of thousands of parents, probably hundreds of thousands by now, stop spanking as a result of the work that I do.
And there's tons of people out there doing the same work.
We give people better ideals, then it's like the wind changes with a boat.
It just will turn that way.
The capacity to evaluate new information and have it change our ideals, I think, is the fundamental essence of that.
Of free will.
When we can either choose to ignore that information, in which case we're just going to keep doing the same thing as history, like a hamster wheel, a revolving door of history, or we can evaluate new information and change our behavior according to some new ideal.
That I think is the only choice we have.
The people who argue against free will only ever argue with people, which is really interesting when you think about it, because they say people are fundamentally indistinguishable from other complex systems like the weather.
But you never see somebody arguing with the weather.
You only ever see people debating or arguing with people.
I had a guy call into my show recently who was telling me that he said, Steph, you're just like a computer.
And I said, Okay, well, why don't you hear?
Here's my computer.
You can continue the debate with the computer.
And he didn't understand what I was talking about.
He said, I'm not going to talk to your computer.
I said, so you only want to talk to me, not the computer.
And he said, well, the computer doesn't understand.
I've got voice recognition.
I'll turn it on.
Go ahead.
Right?
And I said, so you don't want to debate with the computer, only with me.
So you're saying there's something different about me versus the computer.
And have you ever yelled at the rain to stop raining or to change the wind's direction if it's blowing the wrong way?
He said, no, of course not.
And I said, so you cannot say that people are just like everything else in the universe if you will only ever debate people.
You have to accept that there's something fundamentally different with people if you will never debate anything else that you compare people to.
And that's the challenge of the deterministic argument.
We are just physics.
Everything has an antecedent cause, but you only ever debate with human beings.
Well, I think ultimately all human beings are trying to accelerate growth, whether it's financial growth, intellectual growth, technological innovation.
I think we're constantly trying to grow and expand things.
We also fundamentally know that we are imperfect.
So we will either argue our position or try to learn.
One of those two things.
Either try to reinforce ourselves on our own decisions as opposed to your decisions.
Jesus is the Lord and you are incorrect, sir, with your Satan, Satan, Satan song that you teach to your daughter.
You know, what is that about?
Well, that is about two organisms inside of a system that agree upon a dictionary and a vocabulary and definitions for things.
And they're arguing about whose path is a better path.
But ultimately, all of them are trying to be better.
All of them are trying to improve.
And there's no real set guidelines for how to live correctly.
There's no, no one can really prove to you that it's better to be an atheist than it is to be a Christian, or it's better to be a person who likes to exercise than it is to be a guy who sits on the couch.
You sort of have to figure it all out for yourself.
And along the way, you want to justify your own actions and your own decisions by arguing and by trying to debate.
So in a sense, like saying that humans only argue with humans, that doesn't really negate the idea that there is no free will.
In fact, it might actually support it by showing the whole thing is just a system.
And it is just a mathematical algorithm.
And inside that algorithm is a thing called ego.
And ego is the thing that wants you to be correct and wants you to learn and wants you to improve and wants you also to assert dominance and perhaps sexual preference over those around you by showing how clever you can turn a phrase and how easily you can defuse someone and make them look foolish in front of the rest of the group.
All these things are perhaps just more evidence that there is no free will.
I mean I'm obviously playing devil's advocate a bit here, but I think inside that controlled system, I think it is possible that that could be an argument.
Angelette writes about that, actually, in his most recent book about meeting up with a bunch of Mormons and how they become atheists and just a lot of it from his work.
He's a great guy who's very logical and very smart.
And a lot of his questions and his discussions on these things have caused introspective thought in people that perhaps would have just gone along with the program if it wasn't for a guy like Penn.
So Nietzsche, the 19th century sort of philosopher, sort of guy who wrote great aphorisms.
But he said that Socrates' basic argument was reason equals virtue equals happiness.
So if you want to be happy, you have to be virtuous.
How are you virtuous?
You have to have consistent principles, consistent principles.
And there's some support in psychology for this, in that if you have opposing ideas within your own mind, or if you have feelings that say one thing but your intellect says another, then you are going to be unhappy.
Or another way of putting it is to say that all psychological dysfunction results from unacknowledged suffering.
And so, for instance, like so, some people, you know, they're beaten up by their parents, but they're told by their church, honor thy mother and thy father.
So they've got this idea, this ideal, honor thy mother and thy father, but they have an emotional response of outrage at having been abused or neglected or whatever.
These are contradictions.
You've got an ideal that tells you one thing in your heart and your monkey spleen telling you something else.
That if you aggress against an animal, it's going to react in a negative or hostile way.
And so when you have contradictions in your mind, that is going to produce dysfunction in your life, unhappiness in your life.
And so one of the purposes of philosophy is to say, okay, we've got some basic principles.
Let's keep rolling them forward and try and live as consistently as possible.
Like if we used opposite words for things half the time, it would be impossible to communicate.
We have to have consistency in our language to a large degree, not perfectly, of course.
We have to have consistency in our language to be good at communicating, to have any possibility of communicating effectively.
And the degree to which we can have consistency in our thinking, in other words, we don't have contradictions.
We don't have a value here, like don't hit your wife, and then a value here, which says hit your children, that that's going to produce contradictions and suffering and problems.
And so the more consistent your thinking is, the greater chance you have to be happy.
And in the same way, like if you have a consistent methodology for examining the universe, like science, you're going to get a lot further than reading chicken entrails or praying to some non-existent deity.
You're actually going to have a way of organizing your knowledge about the world to create computers and rocket ships and cars and all that kind of stuff.
And so the idea is that the more consistent your thinking, the greater chance you have for happiness.
Now, that doesn't always mean that you'll achieve it because it's great.
Yeah, nobody can guarantee anyone happiness, right?
And in fact, if you've grown up in an irrational culture, and culture sort of by definition is irrational because if it's not culture, it's science or math or logic or something like that.
Then when you achieve the goal of reason and you start working out your beliefs from first principles and being good at philosophy puts you in a lot of conflict with people around you.
And of course, a lot of power structures fundamentally, I think, live or feed off unacknowledged contradictions, right?
So for me to use force to take someone else's property is theft.
For the government to do it is called taxation and considered a virtue.
So there's all these contradictions and definitions that we have.
We hit wives, it's called abuse.
We hit children, it's called discipline.
We just redefine things all the time based upon emotional preferences and prior trauma.
And what philosophy does is it says, well, we've got to resolve this stuff.
We can't just have these little beliefs floating around unattached to each other.
We need a consistent way of organizing our minds and our values and our decisions and all of that stuff.
And we can't just make up different values based on the circumstances.
With the idea being that the more consistent you are, the happier you'll be.
I definitely think that the less contradiction you have in your mind, the happier you'll be.
And it's really hard for a lot of people to eliminate contradiction because they've made so many rationalizations about their actions.
They've made so many rationalizations at the past in order to shield themselves from the sting of that corrective, the need to correct behavior, need to correct some of the things that you've done.
That sting is very difficult for a lot of people to deal with.
So they justify or they'll argue louder to try to – That's – I've got a whole series on YouTube called The Bomb and the Brain, which is – I don't mean – it's fdrurl.com forward slash bib.com.
There's huge amounts of science that really establish how people argue.
How people argue is you get an emotional trigger, like right deep down in the base of your brain, right?
Like where we don't know anything about civilization, like right down in the base of our brain.
You get a fight or flight response.
And what happens then is you come up with a justification for it afterwards.
It's called ex post facto justification, right?
After the fact, you have an emotional response and then people come up with some, frankly, bullshit, some polysyllabic bullshit to justify their emotional reaction.
And they've actually done studies, amazing stuff, where they give people a moral position and they say, do you believe in this?
And then people say yes, and they will give you great arguments as to why.
And then they say, close the book, I want to ask you something else.
And then the book has some special glue thing.
And when they open it up, it's the opposite moral position.
And they ask people to reread that statement and defend it.
So that seems to be the key to experiencing this fight or flight feeling in the middle of an argument is being completely attached or having your ego attached to ideas or a position.
If you are not and you treat it as an intellectual puzzle that you can both solve together, then that stuff doesn't exist.
I've had some really fascinating disagreements with very close friends where we've managed to keep it completely civil, but yet explored some really interesting topics.
But then I've also been involved in conversations with people where they get really insulting, like almost immediately if they disagree with you.
Like I had an argument with a dude about recent findings about the Yeti.
They've found that there is this thing that they thought was a Yeti may very well be an ancient bear or at least the DNA from an ancient bear.
Well, what was fascinating to me in the middle of this heated argument was not that this guy disagreed with my thoughts that this whole thing was probably a big misunderstanding and there's probably some strange looking bear.
But it was how aggressive someone would get about a fucking Yeti.
Like you're raising your voice and you're getting shitty and real snipy and like this is not the way you should get ever with your friends and you're getting this over a fucking Yeti.
I mean, isn't that just people, you know, they don't like to admit that they're wrong because whenever they would admit that they're wrong, they would be mocked or humiliated.
That happens in school all the time.
Like I had a guy, a friend of mine in junior high school, we were in science class, and he used the word orgasm instead of organism.
I don't even remember the sentence, which is a shame, because I bet you it was a really great sentence, because anytime you put the word orgasm into a sentence inadvertently.
If I were to look at, I mean, other than learning how to read, it's the biggest influence and impact.
I mean, I'm only able to do what I do because of the internet.
Because the gatekeepers are gone.
Like, we can talk to people without gatekeepers.
That is, like, the last time this happened in such a fundamental way was like in the 16th century when Martin Luther translated the Bible from Latin to the vernacular, and then people got to get their hands on the Bible.
Whereas before, it was all done in Latin, and nobody knew what the hell was going on other than what the priests told them.
They got a hold of the Bible and basically the text could speak directly to the people and didn't have to go through gatekeepers anymore.
The unfortunate result of that was a couple of hundred years of religious warfare, which then again culminated in the separation of church and state because they just were killing each other.
One of the reasons that the Nazis had such power was that Germany missed the whole Enlightenment because they were just so embroiled in religious warfare.
I mean, there's travelers who went through Germany in the 17th and 18th century and said you could barely see a tree without the fruit of a hanging person on it.
I mean, it was that insanely violent a society based upon religious dogma.
And so Nazism is like this weird medievalism that made it through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Germany and then had the power of the 20th century technology with all the brutality of medieval parenting and brutality.
Like Hitler was beaten so badly, he actually went into a coma once.
He was beaten so badly.
I mean, he was just so, and the kids, they would hang their babies on hooks swathed in bandages that often would have lice in them.
Then the lice would crawl all over the baby's skin and lay eggs.
And so when he referred to the Jews as lice, it connected with something so primal in the German psyche.
And I tell you this, though, the Germans learned an incredible lesson from that.
My mom is German.
And when I grew up, my cousins would come to visit from Germany.
And of course, we were idiot warmonger British boys because, you know, we won the war, right?
Which meant we lost to socialism.
But we won the war.
And so we were all playing war games.
And my German friends' cousins would come over and they'd say, well, we're not allowed to play with guns.
We're not allowed to do any of that stuff.
Because they did finally get, you know, I hope we get this before some other stupid cataclysm on the planet.
They finally got that they needed to change their parenting if they didn't want this crazy stuff to continue.
There's a book I'm reading as an audio book by Lloyd DeMoss called The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
It's actually available for free at freedomandradio.com, where he says, basically, if you want to know where war comes from, you have to focus on child abuse.
That is where all of this stuff gets laid in.
And this is, you can, they've done a huge number of studies.
Robin Grill's written a book called Parenting for a Peaceful World, where he traces, you know, you can tell how quickly democracy comes to a country by how prevalent spanking is.
I mean, there's incredible things.
Like all politics to me is an effect of early family experiences, of early childhood experiences.
And to try and understand how hierarchies can exist without looking at early childhood experiences is impossible.
It's like trying to run the solar system model without putting the sun in the middle.
It just gets ridiculously complicated and so on.
So yeah, so I think that's one of the reasons why I continue to focus on this.
You started with the question about the internet.
And being able to talk directly to people without gatekeepers is an incredible experience and it's the greatest leap forward, I think, in human communication.
And the possibility of virtue, I think, is unbelievably enhanced by this.
There's no way I would have been able to do any of the things that I've done online with some sort of a company backing it and saying this is a good idea.
No one would have said it's a good idea.
No publicist would have said it's a good idea to say the things I've said.
No agent would have advised me to move in that direction.
Wouldn't have happened.
It happened naturally.
It happened on its own.
But I think that the biggest impact for me is not that I've been able to express myself, but that other people have been able to send me information and express themselves to me.
The impact of being able to share information online, store even wrong things.
Like there's a meme that there's a video that went around that has gotten massive traction over the past few days.
It was a man who was on the news and didn't know the camera was on, didn't know that his microphone was on.
He was talking about a missing girl, and he was saying, you know, that, hey, if he finds her, I would fuck her.
I'd fuck her right in her pussyhole.
But it was fake.
And then you see the newscaster go, we're sorry for that unfortunate thing.
But that newscaster was from a previous thing where a woman didn't know that her microphone was on and dropped an F-bomb, just said, fuck.
Oh, fuck.
And so I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we're having some editorial.
We were very sorry that we had editing issues.
Very sorry you had to hear that.
Well, this video has gone viral and it's millions and millions of hits.
I can't tell you how many people have sent it to me on Twitter.
But within a couple of days, it resolves itself and people realize, oh, it's just bullshit.
Couldn't show the coffins, let alone the victims of the imperialism.
And the media, I mean, there's no law that says you can't show Iraqi victims of the war, of which there are over a million.
But nonetheless, you will not get this through the mainstream media.
You'll see the pictures of the guys who died, which is also a great tragedy, the American soldiers who've died.
But you can't see this.
And you can't find out the basic fact that there has been so much radiation damage done to the Iraqis, particularly in Fallujah, that up to a third of children are being born with birth defects.
That people who've gone to study Iraqi cities where these depleted uranium shells have been used say that they've never seen a more genetically compromised, genetically ruined population the whole world over.
And the fact that this information is available at the click of a button to means that people no longer have the excuse of having been propagandized.
You know, some poor bastard who was in Stalinist Russia, you know, in the 1950s.
You know, okay, be a communist or go to the gulag.
You know, that's your choice.
So he's a communist, but you don't say you're a communist by choice then.
It's just like the way you were, like you're in the Hitler Youth.
You're a Nazi.
But you're not a bad kid because you're a Nazi.
That's just what you have to do to survive in the culture.
But now that information is so available, nobody can claim anymore, at least in the West, that they didn't know because it's so immediately available to everyone at all times that if you don't know now, it is an act of choice.
It is not the result of propaganda.
I have a lot more sympathy.
Like a woman called in my show the other day and she said, you know, when my dad beat me and my mom didn't do anything about it, and her mom grew up under China, under Mao and the cultural revolution where people were dropping like flies every time they batted their eyelids wrong.
There's a great story in Saul Chenitsin's The Gulag Apicalago where some minor party functionary is given a speech and everyone gets up and is applauding.
And they're all so terrified of being the first person to stop applauding that they just keep applauding and keep applauding until their hands look like hamburgers and they can't even like it's so incredible.
But nobody wants to stop because the first person who stops is ah comrade you seem to be less enthusiastic and they're just terrified.
This is the world that some people live in.
We don't have that world here in the West and we have access to every kind of information, opposing viewpoints.
You can go on to Al Jazeera.
You can find out what American imperialism or British imperialism looks like or even Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan looks like from the other side.
So there's a great ripping away of the excuse of propaganda and ignorance and a great settling of moral responsibility on people.
Like I was expecting that to happen because my rap sucks.
So it's really great that we're doing this because my music career remains stalled in the doldrums.
But I think that is an incredible opportunity.
It's like, you know, we got this, I do a lot of talk about Bitcoin and stuff like that, where we have the opportunity to have a currency system not controlled by governments, you know, where there's ways of, I mean, these things are just unbelievable opportunities for human communication that doesn't have to go through the prescribed channels and the prescribed gatekeepers and ways of exchanging value.
I mean, you can have an IPO.
I don't know.
In Bitcoin, you can have an IPO and you can start a company without having to spend $4 million on all of the accountants and lawyers that are needed for an IPO in the West.
I mean, the things like that, just incredible, because we have got to get faster at getting better as a species because our technology is going through the roof.
Human knowledge is doubling every 18 months.
Weapons that are inconceivable to even a generation or two ago are readily available.
Yeah, and surveillance technologies.
I mean, God, every time we come up with something good, the assholes take it and use it against us.
Doesn't that drive you crazy?
It's like every time you pull out a gun to fight the mugger, the mugger goes like this and he has the gun.
It's like, damn it.
Can't we have technology that isn't put to the service of assholes?
We have to get faster at getting better as a species because our technology is increasing to the point where if we don't get better quickly, I don't think we're going to have much luck staying free.
Well, I think we are getting better, and I think it is.
We are trying to catch up to this technological capability that we find ourselves in right now.
But I think we are.
I really do.
I mean, it's not just hollow optimism.
I really do believe that we are getting better.
I think that we're commenting on the fact that it's not perfect.
And I think everybody is.
And I think this Glenn Greenwald and all these different Edward Snowden and those people exposing all of the hypocrisy in government and all the all of that is working towards what ultimately will be a very unique time in history.
When they look back at this time, the birth of the internet will be by far one of the biggest events in the history of the human race.
And we'll look at all these different growing phases and all these different challenging events that happen.
And we won't see it as much because we're a part of it right now.
But I think things are just changing.
People are more responsible for their actions.
People are more educated.
Information flows far more freely than ever before.
I mean, I know that a lot of what you do is about getting information out to people, and I think that's great.
I do also think that there's a lot of ethics behind what it is that you do, because it's not like you get a whole bunch of KKK members on here proselytizing about white nationalism.
I think you try to get people with good and useful viewpoints, even if it's just mentally stimulating, that provokes virtue as well.
For me, I really feel a sense of urgency, and I try not to let it, you know, make every day like a race against evil or something like that.
But I, you know, that the technology of control and surveillance and all of that is growing so quickly.
I really do feel like the same medium that can be capable of so much control and surveillance is also what we're using to communicate.
I feel quite a strong urgency that it's a race of us versus them.
And this is why, like, I have like 3,000 shows.
I mean, it's lunatic, right?
But I really do feel, because remember, Freedom and Radio, where quantity is quality.
Well, we're in the craziest time that a human being has ever existed in.
And trying to figure, as far as like technology and information, trying to figure our way through this, you're going to get these things like the NSA surveillance issue.
You're going to get that.
When you find out that they're building this gigantic facility in Utah to store all the information, then slowly but surely it gets out.
You got to have a phone where you can remove the battery and sit down where we know that you're not transmitting this conversation to some nefarious source across the world, which is what they can do.
That is also a part of this weird thing that we're doing.
But ultimately, my thoughts are that if I look at the accountability, here's a perfect example.
Look at General Petraeus.
General Petraeus got caught and removed as the head spy from the CIA being investigated by the FBI.
I mean, the FBI found out that he was having this affair and all this jazz with the reporter, the woman who wrote the book about him.
But how did that happen?
It was cyber.
It happened through the very thing that we're all scared of, where everyone is scared of someone being able to go into your email and find, oh, look, Stefan Mollenew, apparently he's gone to these communist meetings and he wanted to find out what it's all about.
We have some information that maybe you've been thinking about overthrowing the government and then boom, you're in jail.
It's also you have the ability to be honest and express yourself.
You can't be like, you can't be silenced.
Like in the McCarthy era, how did you get your, if, you know, they came after you and said you were a communist and you got kicked out of, you know, whatever job you were doing.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to start a blog?
What are you going to do?
Are you going to get on fucking Twitter and explain yourself in 140 characters?
No, you couldn't do a damn thing.
Now, if you have a situation where perhaps maybe something comes out where you did say something that you regretted or you did do something in the past that maybe wasn't the best, you could describe it in depth in a show, own it, and it would be a complete non-issue.
And in fact, you'd probably grow from this non-issue.
And the listeners would grow from the experience of hearing you honestly talk about whatever it is, whether it's, you know, going to some fucking communist meeting.
I mean, obviously that's not an issue now.
I'm giving McCarthyism terms.
But whatever it could be that would be something that they could hold over you.
And it's almost, it doesn't matter anymore.
You know, it almost doesn't matter.
And I believe that where this is heading is a time, whether it's a decade, two, three, what have you, where there are no secrets.
And it's probably going to be some sort of a technological change in the way we exchange information.
Maybe it's some Google Glass thing that goes to the next level and becomes an implant or whatever the fuck it is.
I really don't think there's going to be any secrets.
I think we're going to laugh one day at the times we used to be able to lie to people.
We're going to laugh at the times we used to be able to tell people that you were going to go to some place, but really you went to some other place.
There's not going to be that anymore.
Your whereabouts will just be information and it's easy to look as a as a Google search.
Well, I think that there's some real benefits to that.
Do you know that there's a whole bunch of lawyers who are now trying to subpoena the NSA for data that will exonerate their clients, hopefully, where they had cell phone records or something that will helpfully exonerate their clients and so on?
I mean, I personally would be more than willing to give up where I'm going and what I'm doing and so on to an organization that was actually there to sort of help and protect me.
I mean, I was just reading on the Drudge Report the other day.
I think it was the FBI or the CIA have just scrubbed from their mission plan anything to do with criminal, like pursuing criminals.
Now it's just been entirely basically protecting the powers that be.
You have no constitutional right to a jury before the trial of your peers because what is it?
95% of people never get a jury trial in the United States because all they do is they get threatened with insane sentences and they just plea down.
I mean, because there's just, you've no hope.
I mean, they've even said that threatening someone with a life sentence for a minor transgression in getting them to plea for something less while threatening them with a life sentence for a minor transgression of the law is not cruel and unusual punishment.
You can't bribe someone with 50 bucks in the legal system, but you can bribe them with reducing something from 20 years to two years.
And somehow 18 years is not a bribe.
So there is no constitutional right to a trial.
There's almost nobody, particularly in drug stuff.
I mean, people just plea down and go to jail.
And a lot of these people are convicted on the hearsay of other people who themselves are giving up whoever they knew in order to get out of crazy jail time and so on.
So it is a monstrous system right now.
I mean, this comes back to the whole war on drug stuff, which is just, I mean, so amazingly evil that it staggers the imagination.
I mean, I can't believe, and it's so fantastic that America is finally looking over to the example of Portugal.
Portugal 10 years ago decriminalized their drugs, and now they have a 50% reduction in drug use.
And they actually get addicts' help.
Addicts should get help.
It's a medical problem.
They need, you know, let's say it's not medical that they got in there, but so what?
They're in there, right?
I mean, even drunk drivers need the jaws of life to get out of a car.
And they get these people the medical help they need.
They don't throw people in jail for personal consumption of mind-altering substances like TV isn't one of those.
And they actually get people help.
And now they're starting to get a couple of things here and there where you can go and buy this stuff legally and so on.
I mean, thank God.
I mean, I thought we were going to be so past what it used to be like before the war on drugs that people, like at least with prohibition, it was only, what, 13 or 14 years in the 30s with prohibition.
And even that brought organized crime over to America.
I thought we'd have this war on drugs for so long that people would have forgotten what it was like beforehand and it would have just gone on forever.
But it does look like there is going to be some relaxation of this stuff.
Some tentative steps are being taken towards it.
And my God, what an incredible thing that's happening because, I mean, the majority of people in prison are there for completely nonviolent offenses.
And one of the things about Holland that's been so fascinating is that their hard drug use is radically down because cannabis is so prevalent and accepted.
When people find out that that was a major motivation for the Vietnam War, it's another thing that you can find out on the internet today is how much money was being made by selling heroin.
People don't even want to believe that.
They're like, oh, come on.
You really think that heroin had a lot to do with the Vietnam War?
For the people who are selling it, it certainly fucking did.
And those people made trillions of dollars.
Like, what do you think?
Where'd that all go?
Did that all just disappear?
Did it turn into mist?
Was it like the super soaker in the 41 below zero air?
Well, yeah, it's a fascinating subject because people automatically want to dismiss it because of the war on drugs and because it's not thought of as a commodity.
It's instead thought of as something that's illegal and just gross and like, oh, drugs, drugs, drugs.
Drugs are money, and money is what everybody wants.
And these fucking people that are over there that are trying to extract resources, whether it's in the form of natural gas or whether it's in the form of oil, that same type of thinking, if you think that that same type of thinking doesn't agree or doesn't work in terms of like trying to make similar amounts of money from illegal drugs, you're crazy and it's so naive.
And drugs are a fantastic way to harass the population.
You know, because the whole idea behind common law is that the law is passive.
Like the law doesn't go out looking for problems.
You know, like if you come key my car, then I call up the cops and then like because you've done me wrong, you know, the law leaps into action.
The law is never supposed to exist without a complaint.
Right.
And if, you know, if you buy drugs from some guy and you like the drugs and he likes your money, there's no complaint.
But the law then becomes proactive and it goes out there looking for problems and nobody's complaining.
And that's when the law becomes tyrannical.
When the law is passive and just waits for a complaint and has clear rules, okay, that's a fairly good thing.
When the law goes from reactive to proactive and starts going out there to look, oh, prostitution, oh, gambling, ooh, drugs, you know, this is all voluntary, consensual stuff.
You know, it may not be healthy in excess, but neither are cheesecakes.
Like I think I, you know, we were talking about, I would totally do that.
Like if I could sit there in my wife's brain for 10 seconds or even half a day or whatever, I think that would be so amazing.
You know, to just with her experience is different than mine.
Another species, I could love it to be in a shock's brain, to be in a, I just, if I could do that and come back and not be completely mental, but still retain the memory of it.
I don't know.
It's kind of an idle thought, but I think it would be really, really fascinating.
They should, if they do ever come up with that technology, they should force it on the people at SeaWorld and get a killer whale's mind and stick it in a person and have them realize.
You know, I've always said I do love nature much as you do.
I do respect nature.
I find it absolutely beautiful and fascinating, amazing.
And I talk about wolves and bears and all this different shit, like as if I hate them all.
But I'm absolutely thrilled that they exist.
I find it amazing.
But one of the things that people who are more interested in animals than they are people, I mean, there's a lot of animal lovers that say just unbelievably ridiculous things sometimes.