Dec. 14, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:21:04
2865 IQ: Costs and Benefits - Saturday Call In Show December 13th, 2014
Why can't other value systems - like God - achieve the same outcomes as Universally Preferable Behavior? You site the work of Charles Murray, Steven Pinker, and Nicholas Wade often when analyzing various topics and I have read books by all three authors - most recently reading "A Troublesome Inheritance" by Nicholas Wade. If what Nicholas Wade proposes in his book is indeed, biologically speaking, the actual narrative of our ancestral past, then how is this incompatible with the more "anthropological" approaches to history, such as Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel? Why can't these two be compatible? Also, a very important question regarding Wade's book, why do you think he titled it "A Troublesome Inheritance?" "Troublesome" for who? Why does it always seem like people with issues are drawn to me for consolation - and then leave me when they don't need me anymore?
Yes, broadcasting to you from that time in life where we are thrilled to be spending our Saturday nights doing philosophy.
Oh yeah, baby!
I used to pay for this in college and now, well, actually, to help the show survive and thrive, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Sign yourself up for, what is it, 20 bucks a month to bring philosophy.
Tens of millions of javelin spears of philosophy straight into people's neofrontal cortex exploding the planet into moral progress.
What is that?
80 cents a day?
70 cents a day?
Mike, you've done the math.
It's pretty good, right?
Pretty cheap?
Pretty cheap way to get Philosophy out there to sign up for a little subscription.
$5 subscription, $0.16 a day.
$10 subscription, $0.32 a day.
$20 subscription, $0.64 a day.
$1.61 a day.
Sorry, $100?
$100 subscription is $3.22 per day.
Yeah, so we really, really appreciate that.
We really need what you have to offer, and we promise to put it to good use.
So, Mike, who do we have on first?
All right, up first today is Elan.
He wrote in and said, Why can't other value systems, i.e.
God, achieve the same outcome as UPB? Sorry, I'm not laughing.
It's a great question.
It's just that there's so much that's embedded and built in to your statement that I'm happy to have you parse it out a little bit more.
Yeah.
Or not.
Yeah, go ahead.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean?
Yeah, sure.
First, I'd like to thank you for inviting me to the show.
But what I mean by that is...
My son is a great advocate of yours.
And he subscribed to the values in the system you are championing.
But I told them, in my religion, I feel we can achieve the same thing.
The outcome is the same.
The reason for the outcome is different.
But the outcome, we can actually achieve exactly the same thing.
He fiercely didn't agree with me.
Right.
Now, you have used some language that is mildly inflammatory, which is not the end of the world.
I just really wanted to point out that I've noticed.
So you said that he subscribes to the belief systems that I champion?
Yeah.
So if a teacher says to your son that two and two make four, does he subscribe to the correctness of the belief system that she is championing, or does he just accept that his teacher is right?
No, no.
My son is a reason person.
He will think for himself.
Right, but what I'm saying is that, look...
People don't subscribe to my beliefs.
At least I hope nobody subscribes to my beliefs.
Not to put myself in too illustrious a company, but any more than I subscribe to Albert Einstein's opinion about the constancy of the speed of light.
I make a rational argument.
Either the argument holds or it doesn't.
But when people personalize my arguments, I know that they're coming from a place of irritation with me and annoyance with me, which sounds like where you're coming from, which I can perfectly understand and I have no problem with, but I think we should at least be honest about that, that there's something about what I'm doing that is bothering you, right?
No, I think you're having a fair point, and it's a mistake the way I put it.
Well, maybe.
Maybe it's a mistake or maybe it was something that was intended to communicate something.
But in general, when people do not respond to an argument but instead personalize the argument, like, Steph, your philosophy or your belief system or your whatever, championing of UPB or whatever, what they're doing is they're trying to make my belief system sound charismatic and therefore subjective.
Because...
I have some charisma and some reasonable sense of humor and reasonable eloquence and so on.
And so the only way, if my belief system was just mine and personal and was subjective, then the only way it could spread is through entertainment, through sophistry, through charisma, through humor, through manipulation, right?
So the moment that people start personalizing my belief system, what I experience and what I think is actually happening is they're saying, Steph, your arguments are bad.
Your show is only successful.
Your arguments are only successful because of your eloquence and charisma, but they don't actually address the arguments.
And I just – we don't have to delve into that.
I just really wanted to point that out, that there is something that bothers you about what I'm doing, I would assume.
First, I agree with what you're saying.
I'd just like to reiterate.
I made an error the way I described it.
I absolutely agree with you.
I think and then I absolutely 100% convinced and know he's doing it on the basis of his reasoning and the way he talked to me, I absolutely agree with you.
Okay.
All right.
So your question is, if I understand it, you have a belief system that arrives at The major bans that universally preferable behavior, which is my advocacy for secular ethics, it arrives at the same major four bans, the ban on rape, on murder, on theft, and on assault, but through a different methodology.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Hang on.
So the outcome will be the same, but the point of reference why I do it will be different.
Because the point of the foundation of the outcome is different to yours.
No, I understand that.
So then there's two possibilities I'm going to put forward.
Obviously you can tell me if there's more or fewer.
So it's one of two things.
Do you ever use like a GPS or anything like that?
Yeah.
Okay, so in the GPS, you can put in options.
Like if I want to drive from here to Detroit, let's say, for some reason.
I like watching smoldering financial wreckage light up the evening sky.
Now, my GPS will say, do you want the fastest route or do you want a route that avoids tolls, let's say?
Like, it'll give me some options about which route I'm going to take.
Now, neither one of those is right or wrong, right?
If I have a little bit more money, I may want to pay some tolls and shorten my driving.
If I have less money, I don't want to spend it, then I'll avoid the tolls and pay more for my drive.
Now, if you and I... end up in the same place morally but the methodology is simply kind of like personal preference but it's still kind of objective like how the GPS works is still objective then I don't see any particular problem however if the methodology that you're employing is not rational or empirical then we have a problem because it doesn't matter if you end up with the same conclusions if
your methodology is not rational Or is anti-empirical, then you are not correct.
Even if you end up with exactly the same answers as I do, then if your methodology is not rational or empirical, you are absolutely incorrect.
Because philosophy is not about the answer, it's about the methodology.
And the correctness is not in the answer, the correctness is in the methodology.
So there's an old philosophical problem, I'll be very brief here, but there's an old philosophical problem Where in Canada, there's a prison called Kingston.
And of course, in, I think, Jamaica, there's a town called Kingston.
And if somebody says to me, you know, what's a major town in Jamaica?
But for some reason, what I hear is, what's a major prison in Canada?
And I say, Kingston.
Well, that is technically or in terms of the sounds, it is the correct answer.
But I'm wrong.
Even though I've said the right words, I'm wrong because I'm answering the wrong question.
And so my question then to you is, well, what is the methodology that you're using to arrive at ethics that would be obviously different from what I'm doing?
Okay.
When I read the universal appropriate behavior, these two things are distinct there to me.
One, it's very hard to manipulate it because it's a clear cut.
You can't hijack it and use it for bad things because it's really, really articulate really well and it's very hard to do so.
But what I'm saying, when you come to God, it is easy to hijack it and in the name of God to do bad things.
I agree.
And that's the difficulty I have with Dan.
It's to articulate the value of God.
If somebody understands it in the way, or the way I understand it, it's very hard from there onward because knowing God and try to animate it or to follow the attribute or trait of God,
you will come to the same outcome as you guys or to what you try, what you and then try to explain to me in a sense of a complete renouncing of any kind of violent.
No, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm guessing from your accent that we mostly have in common the Old Testament.
And if that is the case, I don't see how we can use a God to be even remotely compatible with a ban on murder.
Because in the Old Testament, as I'm sure you're aware, God is a fairly trigger-happy ghost, right?
You know, he's calling in massive airstrikes, continent-wide burnings, and so on, and is initiating against the innocent, even against the unborn, even against the unborn death.
Particularly, of course, the most obvious example is the flood of Noah, right, where God is so angry at people.
I believe the biggest sin they have is having false idols before him, which means giving money to the wrong priests.
But he calls in a universal flood that slaughters everyone except one family and the animals.
And then he creates a rainbow, according to the story, to say, whoa, I'm never doing that again.
It's like, well...
So if you have, as the originator of your morality...
Of thou shalt not murder.
A mass murderer?
Then it's hard to see how bringing God into the mix clarifies or extends the ban simply against murder in any way shape or form.
Okay.
I'll tell you my answer to that.
There's two facets to the answer.
The first and the easy one, in my opinion, when we're talking about killing and death in the Bible, We're talking about people are what you call ethically negative.
So any person in that zone of ethically negative, the metaphor the Bible uses is death.
Because God is not an intervening God.
If you are Outside of the zone of ethically positive, you are now, and you're actually doing something active, you are now moving yourself into ethically negative, and that's the metaphor in the Bible is death, and there's a 23 permutation of them.
So if you want, we can expand on that, but there is a 23 approximately type of A category of being in ethically negative.
So if you go to every type of death, you will see they're addressing a particular kind of aspect, how you're getting to ethically negative.
The second thing is that when the issue with the Bible and God is never attempt to be a best seller.
And then, me and Dan speaking on the universal peripheral behavior is much more easy to understand, where God is much more difficult to understand.
Okay, okay, hang on.
Just before we pile too much theology onto my little cactus of reason and squash it completely.
You said that God is not an intervening God?
No.
It's a value.
So how do we know he exists if he didn't ever intervene?
Okay.
So if you give me about 30 or 40 seconds, I will go with it.
The way I understand it, and I can be wrong, is that to know God, that means, when I say God, it means unconditional truth or reality of truth.
So that means truth with no condition in it.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Are you saying that you're using God as a synonym for philosophical truth?
No, not in the way you guys are using it.
It's slightly different.
Because the way Dan is using it, and the way I understand the argument comes, it's very different.
It's a truth as a value.
You can't say that truth is a synonym for God.
That's begging the question.
Plus it's circular, plus it's a tautology.
Because my question didn't have anything to do with the definition of God.
You said God is non-intervening.
But if God is non-intervening, then he would never have dictated any of his desires or wishes or commandments, or he would never have interfered and sent locusts or fire or water or floods.
He never would have handed Moses the tablets.
He wouldn't have Done any.
He wouldn't have interfered with Job.
He wouldn't have interfered with Abraham.
He wouldn't have inspired Moses.
The entire Bible is based on and is predicated, Old Testament and New, on the fact that God is counter-meddling in things.
Because if he was completely non-intervening, we wouldn't have any stories about him or any idea what he wants.
And he wouldn't even respond to prayers, right?
Okay, first is not responding to prayer.
The response to prayer, you pray, that's the response to prayer.
Prayer does not get any fruit out of it or benefit out of it.
It's the same thing as you.
If I had heard to ethically positive, I would not, as a value, it's not a mechanism to make myself better.
So, the key issue there is that God is not, it's only ethical, imperative things I need to do.
That's knowing God, otherwise there's nothing to know.
It's any other value system humanity have.
Now, when we say God intervening in the Bible, it's a metaphor.
If you see the Bible as a bunch of historical facts, that's the erroneous view of looking at God.
It's not a bunch of historical facts.
It's a philosophy in a sense of what I need to learn from it today, not what's happened in the past.
Okay, but the Bible...
No, no, no, listen, listen.
The Bible is not a philosophical document.
Because a philosophical document has to have premises, syllogisms, maybe even some axioms thrown in.
It has to have arguments that are rationally constructed with reference to evidence.
It has to have universalities.
It generally doesn't have instructions on how to keep your slaves alive.
It doesn't have instructions on the right price to ask for your daughter's sale into sexual slavery.
It generally doesn't have instructions on exactly how many women you should rape and how many men you should murder when you conquer a foreign town.
These are not – the Bible is not even remotely a philosophical document.
I mean compare it to something like Alcibiades and Socrates and others' conversations in the Platonic dialogues or even compare it to some of Nietzsche's work which is again quite allegorical.
But I think that we can't reasonably make the case that the Bible is a philosophical document because it places at its center a rather petulant and violent imaginary being who issues commandments upon threat of Infinite torture and death.
Not so much in the Old Testament.
I know that's more something that our friend Jesus brought in the New Testament.
But do what I say...
Or I'm going to blow up your sheep, make your wife leave you, make your kids sick, give you endless boils as in the story of Job and so on.
That's not a philosophical argument.
I mean, if I said, listen, man, you have to agree with me or I'm going to burn down your house, nobody would say, well, that's a pretty good philosophical argument.
I hadn't really thought of arson as the way that we should bring this to bear.
That would be like, wow, what a crazy guy.
guy.
He's so weirdly insecure that he has to make unbelievable threats against people in order to get those people to accept his position, which of course wouldn't be an acceptance of position, but rather a bowing down to my threats of violence.
So, you know, if the Bible is a metaphor, that's fine.
But if the Bible is a metaphor, then God is a metaphor.
And if God is a metaphor, then I don't even then then we're looking at a work of fiction, which simply we would use to understand the weird psychology of people 5000 years ago, rather than any kind of truth that they would bring to bear on us ethically today.
To understand the psychology of people who have written the Bible, it is 3,000 years old or 2,800 years old.
It's been designed and written by people from that era.
But the thing is that it is a metaphor.
Yes.
And the fundamental issue there, Stefan, is that it also serves as an educational tool as well.
And in an educational tool, there is an acceptance to allow people to follow the outcome for the wrong, not from the best reason,
not from the sake of Adhering to the value, but from getting benefit or preventing the punishment and I understand the psychology of it and But that's kind of belief in God It I hope it will not be the discussion here because that's not interesting because that's not I think how it's originally Intent to be because to get okay Sorry to interrupt sorry to interrupt If the Bible is an educational
document, can you tell me something that the Bible can teach me that does not rely on allegory and does not rely on threat, but rather relies on reason and evidence?
Yes, it's going all the way.
I mean, there is words after words after words are symbolizing in Old Hebrew exactly what you sign.
Okay, then tell me something that the Bible can teach me That is neither allegorical nor threatening.
I'll give you, okay.
Let's start with the first sentence.
In the first two or three chapters of the Bible, I'll give you three sentences.
One is, God create heaven and earth.
So you can think about it, somebody took a chisel and he's a builder and he built a house.
Or you can say, Do not get confused what is God by anything in the universe or the universe is God.
Okay, so hang on, hang on.
No, no, no.
Wait, wait, wait.
I said not allegorical or metaphorical.
Ah, sorry.
So if you say God creates heaven and earth, that is not something that is educational because there's no evidence or proof for anything like that.
And if you say, well, no, but you can take it allegorically, then it falls into the realm of, sorry, assertion, allegory, or threat, right?
Assertion without evidence is not educational.
That's propaganda.
And it relies on threat.
And when people point out the threat, people then often, like yourself, will retreat into metaphor, you know, like, ah, thou shalt not kill.
well, didn't God kill everyone in Noah's flood?
Well, that's a metaphor.
And it's like, well, it's not, it doesn't say that it's a metaphor.
It doesn't say, hey man, don't take this story literally.
The whole, everything that's in italics should be taken metaphorically.
And by the way, the whole thing's in italics.
It puts it forward as a truth statement.
So I don't think it's fair or right or reasonable or accurate to say this story in the Bible is allegorical when it doesn't fit what you want.
Right.
Because it doesn't say in the Bible that this is allegorical and this is not.
So you just get to cloak over whatever you find troublesome with the word allegory.
But there's no, I mean, if it was allegorical, I mean, God would just say it's allegorical, not supposed to be taken literally.
And it says God creates heaven and earth.
You say, well, I can interpret it this way or that way.
No assertion, no allegory, and no threats.
what can I learn from the Bible?
There is heaps of stuff.
Assertion, Capiton, and all I go.
And the reason I say that is assertion is anti-philosophical.
To assert something without reason or evidence is anti-philosophical.
An allegory can be helpful in illuminating a philosophical principle, but it itself is not a philosophical principle.
And a threat is the opposite of philosophy because you are not reasoning someone into a better way of thinking or rational way of thinking.
You're simply demanding that they obey you under threat of punishment, which is the opposite philosophy.
So, assertion, allegory, and threat.
Take those out of the Bible, and what can I learn?
And again, I'm happy to hear.
I mean it's been a while since I read the Beast.
There's two things that I want to bring to your attention.
It is...
For the Bible to reach a lot of people with a different ability to think and to comprehend, you can't avoid to have allegory there.
Because in order for somebody to reason and think, you also need to provide somebody with a task he can comprehend on his own level.
So there is some merit in dealing with allegory.
But what I can learn You know, when you go to the first Ten Commandments in the Bible, it's saying, I'm your God, and then he's giving you all the rest of the commandments.
So there, for example, you can do learn a lot, because the foundation of the outcome of the Ten Commandments, for example, it's the derivative of God.
It's a derivative, but you, as it depends on the person you talk about, now, a person needs to be able to have the ability to criticize it, and the Bible speaks about a few kind of weird dissentings, how the Israeli people argue with Moses, and subject him to criticism and analysis of what he...
It came what we call giving the Torah on the Mount Sinai to the Israeli people.
It is based on reasoning and ability to criticize what he comes, and arguing and not agreeing, or agreeing with what he comes and instructs the people at the time.
So I think there is a lot of understanding there, although it's not as obvious as it looks.
Because I'm your God means it comes from Him.
Now, if you come and tell me, listen, I'm speaking on behalf of God, if I'm educated and I pass through all the education process I have, I will have the risen tools in my head to put you through a subject and criteria and analysis to see if you are violating the value of God or not.
So, that is what I'm saying, is that there is a bit to think of, if you were seeing the Bible is truth, but it's not a truth in a sense of historical essence, it's a truth in a sense of it is a value.
Okay, so hang on, hang on.
It's much more easy to accept it.
I feel you're shooting these sentences at me like sticky webs.
Sorry.
I think I'm getting pinned up against the wall like...
Sorry, if I sound...
Please forgive me if I sound not nice.
No, no, no.
Listen, it's a fine chat and I appreciate the conversation.
But I asked a question, tell me something I can learn from the Bible that is not assertion, allegory, or threat.
And you gave me the Ten Commandments.
No, no, I gave you the first sentence leading to the Ten Commandments to tell you the Ten Commandments is a derivative of knowing God.
No, I understand that, but the Ten Commandments, the first one is, you shall have no other gods before me.
No, that's the second one.
If you read the actual Bible, I'm your God, I took you out of Egypt, that's the first commandment.
The second commandment is a natural mantra.
Okay, so let's say that.
I am your God who took you out of Egypt.
That is not a philosophical statement.
That is an assertion.
There's no proof for it.
No, they take you out of Egypt is the assertion.
No, I am your God.
Philosophically, I am your God is an assertion.
No proof for it.
No, because the few chapters after that, It's dealing with your ability to understand that exact sentence.
To accept that, what we call Hebrew.
Hebrew, it's called crossing.
Crossing means a person across the river in order to understand it.
Okay, no, I get that.
Okay, listen, hang on, hang on.
Let's say I come to your house and I say to you, I am your dentist.
Right?
Yeah.
Would you accept that as a true statement based upon my say-so?
If I wasn't?
No, but I understand, Stephan, but the issue with God, the really problem with God is a person must, on his own thinking of his front cortex, need to understand it by himself.
You can't tell me there is a God.
It doesn't help.
If I don't click with my own brain, on my own volition, And you can help me, you can guide me, you can practice me, whatever.
But if I don't derive and fall in understanding what is unconditional truth by myself, I don't know it.
It's something innate in every person.
You can come to understanding what is unconditional truth, but if you don't cross that bit, everything else will be a disaster because we will never...
You know what I mean?
That bit is really critical for understanding the whole Bible from beginning to end.
So you're saying, if I don't believe it but expect proof, I'm going to be disappointed.
But if I do believe it, it'll all kind of make sense.
No, believe it, I don't understand believe it.
Dan and I, in that regard, when we say believe is what I do.
What I do is my belief, not what I believe is what I do.
Because the subject of my belief is what I did in the end, not what led me to it.
But to know God, it's a cognitive process you have to go.
You have to understand what is unconditional truth mean or reality of truth.
But you can't prove it.
You can assert it and you can cross your fingers and hope that I accept it, but you can't prove it.
And therefore, what you're saying is not philosophical, but it's dangerous because you use words like truth and universality and values and ethics and so on.
These are philosophical terms, and you're kind of hijacking them for an agenda based upon rank superstition.
Thank you.
You know, it bothers me.
Look, if you just want to say, I believe because I believe.
I have no reason, no evidence.
I can't prove that it's true, but it's my particular preference to believe this.
Okay.
Well then, that to me is, at least that's a more honest statement.
But you keep trying to use all these philosophical terms to cover up this rank assertion of superstition.
There's no proof in anything that you're saying.
Stefan, that's exactly the point me and Dan arguing.
You sincerely put it together.
And what I'm saying is, God is not a truth like there is a fact, the table, I sit on a chair now, it is a fact of the chair, I sit on it now.
That's not the kind of factual truth I can prove it, because it's a value.
I can't prove a value, in a sense, because it doesn't have a physical way of me to prove it.
Or I conceptualize it, or my brain can comprehend it, or not.
It's a value.
Wait, wait.
Are you saying that values cannot be proven?
It's a private domain.
It cannot be proven.
It's inside.
I need to realize myself, I can't go and see it externally to me.
Stefan, it's not something I can...
That's why I prove it to you there is a God.
It's an impossible task in that sense.
You keep saying in that sense or in this way, but there are things which we can establish for which we have no particular empirical evidence, right?
So the old syllogism which I used in the last show, all men are mortal.
Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
We don't need to go outside the room we're standing in to know the truth of that.
Or something like the scientific method.
The scientific method does not exist in tangible reality.
It doesn't exist like a tree or a rock or a forehead.
But nonetheless, it is a...
Universal, empirical and rational methodology for determining truth about the universe.
So the fact that something doesn't exist in material form doesn't mean that it can't be validated rationally.
There's tons, of course, of mathematical theorems that may never be implemented in the world in engineering or in any other methodology that's empirical, but they still can be examined for their truth value based upon the rational methodology of mathematics.
But so this is what I mean when you say that you keep it.
Yeah, go ahead.
I absolutely agree with you, but a transcending or what we call the first sentence of creation, which means it's not in the universe and it's not the universe.
It's a transcending.
It's outside of physics.
Therefore, the discipline you apply to it is not relevant to it.
Because it's a value.
Any other value you can't put.
The way you can express gravity in mathematics, you cannot express God in that way, the same way you cannot express any other value this way.
It's not just God, it's any other value.
When you say outside of physics, you're saying the opposite of matter and rationality.
The opposite of matter and rationality...
Is called non-existence and falsehood.
The opposite of rationality is false.
And the opposite of matter is non-existence, which is how we know to walk through a door frame rather than into the wall.
Because we look for where there's no door or a hole in the wall and we go through that.
That means the door is not there.
So the opposite of material presence is non-existence, which is why we can go through the doorway rather than bump into a door when the door is open.
So when you say, well, you see, but God is outside of physics, what you're saying is, well, we have a standard for existence called material presence and or, you know, at least rational consistency.
God is the opposite of that, but then what you're saying is God's existence translates in real terms to the opposite of existence.
And so what you're saying, when you say God exists, but God has defined as the opposite of existence, you're saying the opposite of existence exists, which fails at every conceivable level philosophically.
Okay.
I hear that.
The point is that if we're living in a conditional reality...
What does that mean?
That means the universe...
I mean, we can trace it down to about 15 billion years or something like that.
And the planet one day will be...
I don't know, I read in the...
It's about 3,000 years from now will blow up or something.
So it will not be existing, the planet.
Wait, 3,000?
I think it's a little...
I think the sun's got 10 billion years to go or something like that.
I can't remember, but it's more than 3,000.
I can't remember.
I think it's about...
I read some sort of a theory about we have about 3,000 years to leave the planet.
Because before it will blow up.
So, nothing is fixed.
It's a conditional...
I'm born and I die, and I have a beginning and end, and every other matter, I have a cycle and beginning and end.
God is not subject to that.
He's outside of that, and I can't apply a discipline.
You apply for the world...
Because it's a value.
You can't apply that discipline to value.
Hang on, hang on.
You've just done exactly the same thing again, which is you say, hang on, matter has a beginning and an end.
Now, as far as I know, matter can neither be created or destroyed, but don't transfer it to energy and back again, but let's pretend that that's true.
Let's pretend what you're saying is true, that matter has a beginning and an end, And God does not.
But you've just done exactly the same thing.
Matter is that which exists.
And matter, according to your definition, has a beginning and has an end.
Now, if matter, which is the test of whether something exists or not, has a beginning and an end, and you say that God has neither a beginning nor an end, then you're simply saying God does not exist.
Because matter is that which exists.
And if God has the opposite characteristics of that which exists, God does not exist.
You can keep stripping away all these standards of existence and say somehow that proves the existence of God.
But it doesn't.
If you keep taking away standards, well, he's outside of physics.
He's outside of time.
He is neither created nor destroyed.
He's eternal.
He's omniscient.
He's omnipotent.
He's omnipresent.
Like all you're doing is stripping away standards for how we know whether something exists.
And then somehow when you feel like when you've stripped all these standards away from something that exists, then you somehow have established its existence.
All you've done is define something as the opposite of that which exists and then claim that somehow that makes that exist.
Okay.
I don't apply the same discipline as you apply, because for me, I look at what I call unconditional truth or reality of truth or truth, and for me, as a value, not as a Listen, you don't get to do that.
That's not philosophy.
Listen, if I hand you a lump of coal and I say, that's gold.
Have I turned it into gold?
I have not.
I've simply used a word that is inappropriate to what I'm handing you.
And so you can say, well, I don't use the same methodology as you.
I am focused on unconditional truth and this and that and the other.
No, no, no.
You don't get to use these words like truth and existence and reality.
To just layer over whatever your particular religious prejudices happen to be.
That's not how philosophy works.
I don't get to do it either, by the way.
I mean, I think it's true that everyone should believe that Freddie Mercury is the best singer who ever lived.
But I can't make it so just by saying it so, right?
So when I give you rational arguments and then you say, well, but I use a different methodology.
Well, you're not using a methodology.
What you're doing is you're pillaging from the gold pile of Our philosophy and covering up something that you have no philosophical proof for and claiming you've done something, which is exactly the same as me grabbing a stone from the ground and calling myself a gold miner because I write the word gold on it.
I mean, you're just writing the word truth on stuff, right?
I agree with you.
We don't use...
I agree and I don't agree with you.
I agree with you on what you're saying.
Now, what I don't agree with you is that I don't think, this is where the exact point is.
When I use the word God and when you use the word God and the discipline you apply to make it existing and I apply to make it existing is very, very different.
I don't agree with your definition to say if God exists or not with your way, the way you're going about it.
And what's your understanding of it?
I have a completely different understanding and I go about it in a completely different way.
I'm not so...
And your way is the opposite of philosophy, which means you can't use philosophical terms like existence.
Existence is a philosophical term in terms of metaphysics.
The scientific method to determine existence or non-existence falls into the realm of epistemology or how we know things are true or false.
So you are using all of these philosophical terms while steadfastly opposing any philosophical methodology.
You don't get to do that.
Neither do I. Listen, listen.
If I just say, I don't know, Chinese guys are all shoplifters.
And then people say, well, where's your proof of that?
And you say, well, or I say, well, I just, it's my method.
I have a different methodology.
It's proven because it's an unconditional truth.
And people would say, well, no, if you're going to make a statement like all Chinese people are shoplifters, you either have to prove it or you have to back down from it because you're making a statement about reality and a prejudicial statement about reality and I don't get to say, well, my prejudices are exactly as true as your two and two make four.
I just use a different methodology.
It's like, no, there is only one methodology for determining truth, and that methodology is reason plus evidence.
That's it.
There's no backup.
There's no side pocket.
There's no, you know, plan B called, well, I'm just going to make cloudy assertions and pretend that they're philosophy.
If you want to say that something is true, Then you have to do what scientists do if they claim that their theory is true, if they've got to have a rationally consistent theory and they have to subject it to empirical testing.
They don't get to say, well, my theory that the world is banana-shaped is true, I just use a different methodology.
It's like, well, if you're using a different methodology, it's not true.
It's like saying, well, in my mathematics, two and two make five.
It's just a different methodology from your mathematics.
It's like, no, we don't get that choice.
If you're going to do mathematics, if you're going to do science, you have to do mathematics and you have to do science.
You can't make a statement in opposition to the scientific method and say you're just using a different version of the scientific method and then take all of the language that the scientific method has made powerful, like valid and established and so on, Then I don't get to pillage all the value that science has created and say, well, I'm doing the opposite of science, but just call it slightly different from science.
So I've got to move on to the next caller, and I'm sorry to have cut you off.
I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
You're certainly welcome to call back anytime.
And I'm glad that we had a chance to chat at this level, but that would be my response.
I'm certainly happy to give you the last word, of course.
Yeah, first I enjoyed to talk to you and thank you for giving me the time.
I do still thinking is that I don't understand how you apply a scientific effort to a value.
I don't think it's compatible, and I don't think it's a fair way, or it's a misunderstanding of the word God to apply a scientific discipline of proving it's existing with that kind of discipline.
So if we apply that kind of discipline, of course it doesn't exist in that way.
But if we apply a discipline the way I suggest about that, it's a value and therefore is not subject to a scientific discipline.
It does exist.
All right.
I already talked about my opinions about those, but thank you very much for your call.
Mike, who do we have up next?
All right.
Up next today is JP.
He wrote in and said, Steph, you cite the work of Charles Murray, Stephen Pinker, and Nicholas Wade often when analyzing various topics that have come up in past FDR podcasts.
I've read the books by all three authors and most recently read A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade after you suggested this to me in our last conversation on the show.
If what Nicholas Wade proposes in his book is indeed, biologically speaking, the actual narrative of our ancestral past, then how is this compatible with the more anthropological approach to history such as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel? then how is this compatible with the more anthropological approach Why can't these two be compatible?
Also, a very important question regarding Wade's book, why do you think he titled it A Troublesome Inheritance?
Troublesome for who?
And you're going to have to go into and explain a bit of that, JP, for the people that haven't read the book, but that is the question.
Yeah, just, you know, shoot at all the bushes and let all the...
Politically incorrect grouse rise to the sky.
Yeah, go for it.
Give us some background on what you've read with a troublesome inheritance, which, by the way, doesn't go into IQ differences, but that's neither here nor there.
But yeah, so go into that stuff, and then I can certainly talk a little bit more about Charles Murray.
I know a little bit about guns, germs, and steel, but go ahead.
Sure.
I can't remember exactly what the impetus was in our last conversation.
I don't even remember the question.
I remember we were talking about...
Something, and you brought up that book, so I went ahead and started reading it, and then that led to me reading somebody else's book, and then Charles, going back to Charles Murray, looking online at the criticisms.
Actually, the first thing that made me really want to call in was, I think you had discussed about some implications of IQ and how that may or may not lead to success economically.
And there are some people on the media, Facebook and stuff like that, that I think have taken maybe something that you said and may have misinterpreted or run with it to a conclusion that I think is not at all what either...
Well, definitely not what Nicholas Wade intended, I think, from my interpretation, or you.
So part of this call is I want to clear the air on that to make sure that I'm straight with things that you suggested in the past, and also Nicholas Wade.
Okay, and then the other thing, so with the question is, you...
I had a podcast, I think the one you did just recently, about first principles.
So the reason why I'm not going to go right to the political hot button issues is because I want to make sure we go to those first principles and go to the beginning and kind of weed out, hash out Nicholas Wade's theory correctly and represent it well before I may, if I want to punch holes in it, you know, at least we've hashed it out What he intended to get across.
And I think I understand.
I'm pretty sure.
And I would definitely like...
Okay, enough editorializing.
Let's just get to the facts.
Okay, all right.
Let's just get to the facts.
Go ahead.
Okay, the first thing is I don't see how his approach and Jared Diamond's approach is incompatible.
I think they're perfectly compatible.
And where the environment...
It dictates what genes are selected to be reproduced socially.
So I don't, you know, a lot of the critics, actually all the critics of Nicholas Wade will say, well, it's ridiculous.
It's not genes.
It's not biological.
It's cultural.
But the things I don't understand, it's so easy to see that it seems like they're putting the cart before the horse because genes determines what cultural behavior is.
Well, no.
Hang on.
That's a very big statement to make, right?
Genes determine cultural behavior.
But that's what Wade says in his book.
I've got quotes.
Okay.
I think – no.
I think he would – again, I'm not going to speak for the guy.
I think he would argue – because determine is a very correlation of 1.0 deterministic.
I think that he would say that genes select for cultural behavior.
But I don't think he would say genes determine cultural behavior 100% of the time, because that would be pure determinism, right?
Yeah, could you...
Okay, so genes select for cultural behavior.
I'm just a little confused on...
Could you tell me what the difference is?
I mean, if the genes...
If someone's genes are what causes their...
It has a lot to do with their behavior.
It's like Steven Pinker will say.
Oh, no.
Listen.
Let me give examples, right?
Okay.
And let us fearlessly wade in where angels are terrified to tread.
Okay.
So we talked – okay.
So let's give the big picture.
So in The Troubles and Inheritance, Nicholas Wade makes the argument that race is a very real biological construct.
Okay.
So there are people on the sociological side of things who say that race is a social construct.
In other words, there are zero underlying biological differences of any importance among races or between races.
The major being, of course, Caucasian, Black, and Asian.
That's not the only, but those are sort of the major.
And Hispanic, I guess, more recently.
But...
So there are some people who say that race is never a valid standard for looking at group characteristics.
Now, race is always an invalid characteristic for looking at individual characteristics, right?
So even if there are differences among the races, that has zero impact on the next person I meet from any particular race.
He's talking about median, the median.
Yeah, yeah.
But it does mean something if you are talking about aggregates.
So the example that I would give is let's say that I run – let's go way out on a limb and say I'm running a basketball team, right?
And someone comes up to me and says, hey, Steph, you got to see this Chinese ball player.
He's fantastic, right?
What would I say?
You would say, okay, let me watch him.
Right.
Right.
I wouldn't say, are you kidding me?
Chinese guys on average are shorter than Caucasians and blacks.
So there's no way I'm going to see any Chinese guy in an audition for a basketball.
It's not even called an audition, I'm sure, right?
So I would never prejudge the value of a basketball player based upon his race, right?
Correct.
On the other hand, in aggregate...
Oh, try out.
Thanks, Mike.
It's an audition now.
Belt out something from Cabaret.
It's the gayest basketball league you've ever seen.
And I would actually go and see that much more than I would go and see a basketball game, which is why nobody's ever asked me to run a basketball team.
So...
So I would never say, no, I'm not going to see a Chinese basketball player.
But if we look at basketball as a whole, would we expect there to be the same proportion of Chinese guys as, say, African Americans?
No.
No.
So in terms of judging each individual ballplayer, it has no value to know what their race is.
But when we look at things in aggregate, there are some value, right?
There is some value in that.
So one argument is that race is entirely a social construct, and there's no importance or maybe no characteristics at all that are genetic that differentiate the races.
That's one argument.
Another argument, which is made more by Nicholas Wade, is that there are some pretty salient, fundamental, and pretty important differences between the races.
Now, the challenge with denying That is that you have a great challenge given that the races, you know, tens and tens of thousands of years ago, the races diverged.
I mean, as far as I understand it, we all came out of Africa and then some people headed north and some people headed, you know, north and became sort of Western European Caucasians and some people headed further to Siberia and to where is now Thailand and China and Japan and became Asians and so on.
Now, these are incredibly different environments.
I mean, you compare Kenya to Scotland or compare Kenya to Iceland or compare Kenya to...
Oh, yeah.
I mean, Stefan, you're preaching to the choir.
Sorry, go ahead.
So you're preaching to the choir.
No, no, no.
I'm not trying to agree or disagree with you.
I'm just laying it out for other people because this is a very closeted debate, right?
So a lot of people who are talking about race these days, they have described themselves as being like Galileo under the Pope.
It's just very heretical to talk about race from any purely biological standpoint, particularly when it comes to race and IQ, race and brain size and so on, because that is really alarming stuff to a lot of people.
Because...
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah.
And Nicholas Wade, although Nicholas Wade less, and I have more of a rant on Charles Murray than anybody in this conversation as far as race and genes, but they failed to...
Somehow, they allowed for a bait-and-switch to happen, especially Murray, where somehow intellectual superiority somehow transferred to No, no, no.
I've heard Charles Murray say that this is not the case at all.
Because there's nothing in evolution that can be called superior or inferior.
Hang on, hang on.
Let me just finish my thought.
And before we get to that, let me just sort of finish laying out.
These are not my arguments, just so everyone knows.
So don't shoot the messenger.
I'm simply relaying the arguments that other people have made that I am not competent to evaluate.
So, the basic argument is that when the blacks left Africa and went to other regions, The environment was markedly different.
Now, in particular, the environment, let's just take Northern Europe.
So in Northern Europe, you have the winter from hell, right?
I mean, Canada too, but that's later, right?
So in Africa, food is plentiful and your major threat is other people and animals and so on, right?
And so the need for the deferral of gratification in Africa historically would be lower.
And if you go – and nobody's proven this.
It's just a theory that people have.
As you go further north, what happens is you get this horrible winter.
And in the horrible winter, if you are not good at deferring gratification, you tend to die.
Because you eat your seed crop or you eat too much food and you have to really ration yourself.
Also, you have to get into agriculture because game is not plentiful enough, particularly in the winter, so you need stuff that can store.
And so you get into agriculture and you get into storing and deferring gratification and so on.
And so what happens is, according to that, certain characteristics within the brain tend to get further enhanced, which is the deferral of gratification and There is a selection for more complex intellectual capacity.
And it's even more the case in places like Siberia and even to some degree in China and in Japan where agriculture is even more of a challenge with rice and all of that than it is in Northern Europe.
And so the argument is that there may have been evolutionary pressures That create different capacities or select for different capacities among the races.
And this is one way that people try to explain the fairly, as far as I understand it, again, I'm no expert, the fairly well-tested phenomenon that the average IQ in Africa is 70 to 75.
And the average IQ in Europe tends to be about 100.
And then the average IQ for Asians tends to be 104, 105, 106.
Now, the argument is that if you say that the race is diverged and entered into incredibly different environments with strong evolutionary pressures, and evolution can be incredibly rapid, incredibly rapid, because now they can figure out not just where the genes are different, but even how old those genes are.
And where people in Tibet have gone into the high mountains, their lungs have significantly adapted in less than five years.
For Jews, Ashkenani Jews in America and so on, have the highest, I think, average recorded IQ, which is one of the reasons, according to the theory, that they end up, you know, at the top of banking.
And it's not a cabal.
It's like, it's just the way that the evolution has worked.
But that gene is relatively recent, the gene that's supposed to have enhanced this.
And again, nobody knows for sure.
These are all just theories.
Now, people who say that there really can't be any intellectual discrepancies between the races have a huge problem in terms of science because our brain is our most expensive organ, right?
I mean, what differentiates us from every other creature is And it is what evolution pours the most resources into.
And so if you're going to say that when the split between the races happened, again, off the top of my head, I think it's like 100 or 150,000 years ago, when the split between the races occurred and human beings ended up in vastly different environments,
you would have to make the case that that even though these are vastly different environments requiring significantly different intellectual capacities that the brain was somehow magically shielded from all evolutionary pressures and that to me is a very hard case to make because the whole point of evolution is it is adaptation to local environments and where those local environments are different you would expect different results this is why polar bears are
white and brown bears that live in the woods Let me just finish.
I'm almost done.
So and this has huge impacts on things like reproductive strategies and so on.
So this is why we talked about this R versus K reproductive strategy, which seems to be somewhat race related.
And so the last thing that I'll say, though, is that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with superiority or inferiority.
Not even close.
It's like, is the brown bear superior to the polar bear?
Well, no.
They have simply adapted to different environments.
It is not a matter of better or worse.
It is simply, we would look at it as the amoral adaptation to localized environments.
And Charles Murray's thesis, very briefly...
And he did this with Dick Hernstein, who was a professor of psychology and who unfortunately died of cancer right before the book was published, The Bell Curve.
Their argument, which I think it was chapter 13 in the book, which raised the most ire, their argument is to say...
Excuse me, I'm just getting back over a call.
Their argument is that if you...
And they sort of look back on IQ tests and data...
That started at the turn of the last century.
When blacks started going into the military, everyone gets an IQ test.
And they're saying that the IQ for the American blacks is approximately 85.
It's intermediate between African blacks and Europeans.
And there are some researchers who argue that blacks have...
American blacks have 25% European DNA because of interbreeding and blah, blah, blah.
And so they say, look, if you want to know what the challenges are with the black population in America, if you look at IQ, that explains a lot.
In other words, if you take whites with an IQ of 85 and then compare them to blacks in America who have an average IQ of 85, according to many tests, which, again, I can't verify and I'm just repeating the arguments, then they say they're about the same.
Their income is about the same.
Their level of criminality is about the same.
Right, so...
So they're saying there's a problem with IQ in the black population.
Now, whether that's genetic, whether that's environmental, I've heard both sides of the debate.
I don't have any remotely any expertise to be able to come down on one side or the other.
That's the good news is nobody seems to and there's a very good debate online between...
Dr.
Flynn of the Flynn Effect and Charles Murray.
Charles Murray tends to be a bit more pessimistic about the capacity to raise...
I'm sorry, James Flynn, I think his name is.
Charles Murray seems to be more pessimistic about the raise in IQ. He thinks that there's dysgenics going on in IQ because of the welfare state, whereas James Flynn seems to be more optimistic.
So again, this is a very, very rapid sprint through a very complex topic.
Again, reminding anybody, I don't have...
I don't have any opinions.
I'm simply repeating the arguments that I've heard based upon the questions that you have.
I don't see any contradictions between guns, germs, and steel, which is the idea that certain geographical positive feedback mechanisms vaulted Europeans over some other civilizations.
That and the IQ thing.
But the idea that there is no biological difference between the races...
Does not appear to hold up, particularly in the field of anthropology.
And I don't want to get into any more details because I'm always skating on the edge of any kind of useful information as it stands.
But just to emphasize, it is not, and Charles Murray has always said the following, you cannot judge individuals based upon, even if there are genetic differences between the races, you cannot judge individuals based upon those.
But in aggregate, it may be important information to have.
That's number one.
And number two is it is in no way, shape, or form any argument for black superiority or Asian superiority or white superiority.
It is simply a description of adaptation to local environments that may have had some longer-term genetic effects.
If that's a rough, reasonable summary of what you understand.
Yeah, that's a good recap.
I mean, yeah.
Thanks for...
Yeah, I just think number one is I... I really want to point out that I think what Nicholas Wade has done is very interesting and inspiring.
Not what he's done as being a brave person talking about hot button issues.
No, I'm talking about his writing.
It put a lot in my imagination.
And I just want to say that there's two quotes from his book, The Inheritance, Troublesome Inheritance, that are really interesting.
One is, he says...
Too bad nature has performed this grand 50,000-year experiment, generating scores of fascinating variations on a human theme, only to have evolutionary biologists express disappointment at her efforts.
There's that one.
And then the other one, which I think sets the stage, which makes him, sets him apart from Charles Murray, in my mind, is that he, and it's the last sentence in the book, he says,
So what he implies is this ongoing story of the evolution.
It's not done.
It's not something that's set in stone.
Here are the three, four races, and this is what they're good at, and this is what they're not good at, and that's the end of the story.
And I think that last sentence very clearly...
That puts everything in perspective.
The thing with Charles Murray, and I'm a little bit – I know you quoted him and you said that, well, he makes – he says it over and over again to his critics.
Do not judge the individual.
The thing that I – I don't think he's being – I think he's a little bit disingenuous.
I'll tell you why.
I remember watching an interview of him and he said he was very angered at the fact that political correctness and people in the scientific community who are afraid of being ostracized and stuff for telling the truth will not allow him or don't even want to hear him or have him do this study, which is of utmost importance, which he quotes.
But then he goes ahead and basically damns the whole Western culture with the next book, which is Losing Ground, or I don't know, the one that came after that lately, where he's very...
Oh, hang on.
Are you talking about the one that he did...
On the state of white America, I think it's 1960 to 2010 or something like that.
I think that's it, but I know that's where he was very pessimistic.
Now, how can his work be so important and then have no functional consequence to make things better?
I don't get that.
Wait, hang on.
I want to make sure I understand what you're saying.
So you're saying, how can it be so important but have no functional difference in making things better?
Yeah, important for who?
He's done all this work He's done all this research.
And whether it's true or false, I'm not talking about this.
It's irrelevant.
But I'm thinking about his motives, you know.
But then, for example, with you, Stefan, you believe, and I believe as well, your work is very important.
Because you can point to, this is what my work is.
This is what I've learned.
This is what I've studied.
This is what I've found out.
And this is how you can apply it to make, in a practical sense...
To improve things.
Charles Murray does the same thing.
He thinks this just as highly of his work, but at the end, it's just pessimistic.
Well, you know, the dumb are going to get dumber, and the rich are going to get richer, and it's just going to go opposite ways.
Why is this so darn important, then, if that's his ultimate...
Okay, now I can...
Obviously, I can't speak for Charles Murray.
All we share is a forehead.
So I can't speak for Charles Murray.
The book is Coming Apart, The State of White America.
And he sticks to white for reasons that he explains in the opening chapter.
And so I can't speak for Charles Murray.
But I will tell you that if Charles Murray's and Dick Herrnstein's and other people's arguments...
Are true, if they're true.
So this is the big caveat which everyone will cut out who wants to make me look like a bad guy or whatever, right?
But if they're true, then if there is a genetic basis for difference in intelligence between the races, that is hugely important for society to know.
Hugely, hugely, hugely important for society to know.
Okay, why is that?
Why do you think that is?
No, no, I can answer that.
I can answer that.
Do you want me to answer it?
Charles Murray, I believe that if he was not afraid of any repercussions to his character, to his career, anything like that, and he's already hinted at this, two things to come off the top of my head.
Number one, people should be tested for IQ before people spend resources on them to go to college.
Number one.
Number two, if there's ever any ability to change genetics biologically, you know, in vitro or whatever, you know, down in the future world, that that would be desirable.
We could isolate those genes that are for low IQ and change them.
I've never heard him make those arguments.
Maybe he has, but I don't think that that's why it's important.
Okay, so, no, no, no, from his point of view.
No, I mean, yeah, and again, if he's made those arguments, then that's great.
Now, there are, of course, IQ tests for college already, right?
SATs and all that, right?
So, I mean, not exactly IQ, but...
Yeah, that's right.
So, the reason why, if there is IQ differences between the races...
And by IQ, I mean, which affects things later on?
I mean, one of the challenges when people say, oh, well, IQ, the problem is it's just culturally biased and so on.
Like, nobody's thought of that over the last hundred years or so.
Like, oh my god, it's culturally...
And of course, if it's culturally biased for white people, how on earth do Asians regularly score higher, right?
Because the hierarchy, according to, again, hundreds and hundreds of IQ studies, which I can't validate because I'm not an expert...
Seems to be Asians at the top, and then Caucasians, and then American blacks and Hispanics, and then sub-Saharan blacks, and I think even lower is the aboriginals in the outback of Australia.
I think they're the lowest recorded IQ. It's something like that.
And so that tends to be the hierarchy.
The reason why it's important to know is that if there are IQ differences between the races, then crying racism is Is racist.
That is really important because if white people are constantly accused of racism, institutionalized racism, because other minorities in sort of white founded or Western European founded countries do badly.
Now if they do badly because Whites are just racist and this, that, and the other.
Well, then, you know, that would be one discussion.
And maybe that's a discussion we've been having for the last 50 years.
However, if there are...
And whether it's environmental or genetic is not that important at the moment.
It certainly is important moving forward.
But if the IQ tests, which have been replicated hundreds and hundreds of times...
At least let's talk about America.
If the IQ tests are correct and blacks have an average IQ of 85 or so, I think black women a little higher, black men a little lower, and whites have this whatever IQ of 100.
And again, there's lots of caveats and lots of criticisms.
I'm saying if all of this is true, if it's all true, then that explains the vast majority of the discrepancies between whites and I don't see
If there are these genetic differences in intelligence between the races, if that's true, than saying the only problem with blacks or Hispanics is white racism is incredibly unjust and unfair.
It's like saying the only reason that there aren't more Chinese players in the NBA is because of black racism.
Thank you.
Like if you had no idea, for whatever reason, if you had no idea that I mean, it's a weird thing to say.
If you had no idea that Chinese people or Asians were shorter than whites and African Americans, if you had no idea of that, then you'd say, well, look, the Chinese guys or the Asians are vastly underrepresented in the NBA. Well, then you'd say, well, this must be racism, and you'd have all this affirmative action and this and that and the other.
But you would be You would be working the wrong end of the stick.
You would be mistaken completely.
You'd be like trying to cure a sunburn with a sunlamp.
Wait, but Stefan, you made a big jump.
And you're making a parallel between...
Only one?
That's good.
Stefan, you're making a parallel between...
Putting a basketball in a hoop, which is very correlated to size and height and to IQ with economic success.
It's not exactly parallel.
I don't see how you can just flip over.
One is obvious.
It's so basic and rudimentary.
You're tall.
You can obviously...
Reach, have a better shot possibly, can see over everyone's head, you know, to IQ with economic success, I think you're overvaluing IQ. I really...
No, no, listen, no, no, don't personalize this to me, brother.
No, no, okay, I'm not personalizing in the argument.
IQ, no, listen, IQ is important because it is so predictive.
Look, if IQ only measured, if IQ only measured cultural compatibility, right?
And there were problems with this, so like way back...
On the IQ tests, one of the questions was, what is a regatta?
Right?
Right.
Now, I mean, some black kid from the projects, what the hell is he going to know what a regatta is?
You know, it's like a boat race.
Wait, that was a real question?
Right?
That was an actual question?
I think it was in the language section.
Oh.
So there were cultural problems, and people have been working on ironing out those cultural problems forever, and I think they've done a pretty good job.
From what I can tell, right?
In other words, they have IQ tests that are merely visual-spatial intelligence tests which have no language whatsoever.
In other words, it's patterns within shapes and things like that.
But the problem is that IQ is so predictive of future success.
And IQ, or intelligence, is...
Apparent very early in life.
Very early in life.
Again, according to what I've read, which I cannot say whether I stand or don't stand behind because I'm a podcaster with a training in philosophy, not this stuff.
But there are differences in reasoning that show up within races and between races as early as Two weeks old, three months old, six months old, and so on.
Before, we would assume that cultural stuff had sort of come into play.
Oh, I agree with all that.
And it does correlate very strongly to success in the long term.
Now, success, of course, doesn't always mean economic success.
But the reality is that people who have higher IQs tend to do better.
Again, individually, it doesn't matter.
There's five easy pieces.
This guy, Jack Nicholson, plays this brilliant guy who spends his time working on oil rigs in Alaska.
I guess I actually make some money or whatever.
But it has a strong correlation to success in the aggregate.
Again, not in the individual, but in the aggregate.
These things are all useless for predicting particular individuals.
They are not useless for differentiating groups as a whole.
Sorry, go ahead.
You have to remember that these experiments are all done in the presence of the state.
This is all conjecture on my part.
I'm just kind of imagining these things.
I'm just right now.
If there's a free market, there's no state, the free market becomes the environment.
The free market becomes the selection process, the evolutionary selection, the pressure.
Now, I'm going to make a guess.
If I lived for a thousand years and I came back and there was a free market, free economy, no state, that that difference between IQ and correlating with economic success and what you just stated would be almost null.
I don't see...
How do you know?
What's that?
How do you know?
Because...
Well, I don't know.
I'm saying I'm just kind of doing what, what's his name, did at the end of his book, Nicholas Wade, where he just sort of took a chapter to just sort of spitball about what he thinks.
I mean, he did that.
He said he was going to do that in the last chapter, and he did.
But I don't...
There are too many factors.
There are too many factors to make that leap that IQ is going...
There's a correlation, yes.
There's a correlation...
Now, between IQ that you have and the success.
Not on a personal level, but on an aggregate level.
I understand that.
But there are too many factors.
There are so many things working against the free exchange of ideas, the free exchange of labor, that you can't say that people who have maybe a lower IQ don't have other Aspects of their personality, which would be a very good commodity in a true free market.
I just can't make that leap.
Well, no, listen, no, no, but I think what you're trying to, or what you think I may be implying, which goes back to superiority, is that having a high IQ is better.
Or makes you superior?
Well, how does Murray say, no, having a high IQ is not better, it's not superior, and having a low IQ is not inferior, but the whole world is just going to fall apart and we're all going to go to hell in a handbasket because of low IQ? I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
Well, no, no, no, but remember, no, hang on, remember, he's a libertarian, though.
And again, not to argue for him, which I wouldn't want to do, but if I understand it correctly, one of the reasons he's pessimistic about increasing IQ is because, and this is not something that's just noticed by him, and this is again not even particularly race specific, but the lower IQ people tend to have more kids.
And the higher IQ people who have to pay for the lower IQ people through the welfare state and through public school programs, He's saying that we have a situation wherein,
and this is in the movie Idiocracy, where people of lower IQ have a much greater incentive to breed than people who have a higher IQ. In other words, low IQ breeding is being subsidized and high IQ breeding is being taxed.
And so he's not saying, well, it's just bad no matter what.
He's saying that there are specific government policies that are making, that are not helping in terms of trying to, if there's genetic elements to it, raising the IQ. And even if there aren't, even if it's all entirely environmental, those incentives that are put forward with the government are not helping the situation.
Oh, of course not.
I don't know why he doesn't call – and that's the biggest problem.
If you want to do a project that would change the world, which he claimed, I mean – OK, maybe I'm being a little bit hard on him.
I mean why wouldn't he call out the state, which is the main problem?
I mean that's what's going to cause the falling apart, the collapse.
No, he has – listen.
He has called out the state.
I mean his book – Losing Ground, which I reviewed on this show years ago, his book Losing Ground, where he basically said, before the welfare state, this was the situation for a poor young man and a poor young woman.
And the best situation was finish high school, get married, get a job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he went through all of the welfare state and he said, look, this is the situation now where they're better off to go on welfare, have kids, not get married, and not get a job, and not even finish high school.
And So he, you know, and this was instrumental in, you know, Clinton in the 90s.
Oh, we're going to end welfare as we know it and so on.
And this, of course, didn't happen because politics.
But he has, he's written an entire book on his libertarian beliefs, which I've read.
And he is a very small market and free market guy.
Now, the degree to which in a free society...
In a free society, there will still be an IQ bell curve in the same way that a free society won't make everyone the same height.
I think that one of the reasons I despise the state is the degree to which the state feasts on and perpetuates a lower IQ class of whatever race.
Because you have this weird and completely opposite situation where property taxes go to the local schools, which means that the poorer neighborhoods get the worst schools.
You couldn't design a system more designed to isolate and entrench the poor.
And you couldn't design a system designed to enhance and increase the smart and the wealthy – This is part of what he's saying in terms of coming apart, that we've lost the manufacturing jobs, and we have really terrible government schools, and we also have a system wherein, you know, smart guys used to kind of stay in their local neighborhoods, but now there's a system for Getting smart kids to Ivy League schools or to the upper echelon of education is so efficient that they basically,
all the smart people get scooped out of their neighborhoods and head off to, you know, Yale or Harvard or wherever.
And that creates further problems because they're not there creating jobs in the local neighborhood and so on.
So anyway, it's a big book so I want to sort of summarize it but I don't think he's saying that it's hopeless.
I think he's saying that a lot of this has to do With the government.
And a smaller government, I don't think it would eliminate disparities in IQ and the relationship between IQ and income.
Because what makes a successful business leader would still have to be high intelligence and high EQ. EQ or emotional intelligence is often overlooked as a factor of success.
But...
The ability to defer gratification, to solve complex problems, to communicate easily, to negotiate.
These do require higher intelligence and there is a bell curve in human intelligence.
Take the races out of the equation.
Is not going to eliminate those, but it will benefit everyone on the bell curve by adding to and creating wealth and so on.
And who knows where that will shake out in the long run.
I mean, I would love it if everyone could get to, and I remember, I think it was in Brave New World where they talked about setting up an island of super high IQ people, but it completely failed, whatever.
I'd like for people to be smarter.
I'd like for people to have more opportunities.
And I sure as hell would like to push as much as possible Our intelligence as a species.
One of the reasons why I put out these shows, which are highly complex and sometimes quite technical and often very challenging for people, is that I frankly don't care what people's IQ is.
Very fundamentally, I don't care.
I don't believe that 500 years ago people were just stupid.
And now they're just super smart.
I mean there's some evidence that in the 19th century people were actually smarter.
But what has happened in the 500 years between then and now is that particularly in the realm of science we have a methodology that didn't exist before.
So if you have the right methodology you can harness The intelligence that you have in a way that you can't even imagine if you don't have that methodology.
Like, the dumbest scientist now is infinitely better than the smartest scientist in the 13th century.
In terms of what they can actually, and smart is the wrong word, more productive, more accurate, more true.
Because they just have to follow principles.
They don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Yeah, and it's not like we suddenly just became more productive after 1750 or 1770 or wherever you want to start the Industrial Revolution.
We just, they had some free trade.
And so, like, I genuinely believe that people we think are super smart now, by the time the philosophy we're pushing out here becomes mainstream, they'll look like idiots.
And I've said this on the show a million times before.
They'll look completely and totally and utterly retarded.
Because people will look at...
I don't know.
Let's pick on anyone.
Janet Yellen, right?
They'll look at someone like Janet Yellen and say, how could she get out of bed with the cognitive dissonance of running a strong-arm counterfeit operation and thinking she's a good person?
Like people running the slave trade.
We look back at them now and say...
How on earth could they get out of bed and transfer human beings around like cattle?
And buy and sell them and check their teeth and beat them, right?
I mean, how horrifying is that?
And so, I believe, I think it's a fascinating topic.
I really do.
The race and IQ is fascinating.
Culture and IQ is fascinating.
It is, because I... Bow to evidence.
I'm an empiricist.
And it's also...
I do enjoy it from a payback system.
A payback.
And let me just be completely petty here for a moment.
Well, who's going to kid who?
Not for a moment.
But people on the left are constantly bitching at people on the right for being anti-science.
Anti-science, right?
And if it turns out that there is...
An IQ discrepancy between the races that can't be easily explained away.
Then people who say, well, race is just a social construct and so on, they're anti-science.
They're anti-science.
And if it turns out that these have some...
Because people on the left are always bitching at people on the right for not accepting evolution, right?
And so if this political correctness is a way for people on the left to deny the effects of evolution on racial characteristics, in other words, well, yeah, the skin changed.
Oh, yeah, well, the hair changed.
Oh, yeah, well, the eye color changed.
Oh, yeah, there's a different number of vertebrae.
The jaws are bigger.
That's because – The black man's hips are narrower, which makes them better runners because you've got to run more when you're a hunter-gatherer than when you are a farmer and so on.
Like, oh, yeah, every – you know, so much about the body has changed when the race is diverged and so on.
Oh, except for the brain, our most expensive organ, which had this magic ray shield completely excluding it from evolution of any kind.
Well, that's so irrational as to be...
It's religious.
It is fundamentally religious.
It's about as rational as saying that the world is 6,000 years old because I counted the days in the Bible.
And I like it when hypocrites get their comeuppance.
And I like the people on the left who've been deriding people on the right for being anti-scientific.
The way they recoil...
From what is sometimes called race realism or from some of the biological evidence about differences between the races, they're just close, la la la, make it go away, call everyone a racist the same way that some people in the right call people who question the Bible, you know, communists and horrible people and so on.
It's just fascinating to see the religion of the left come up against some challenges in the racial realm and turn completely into fundamentalists that they've been making fun of for the last six billion years.
Well, is there anything more embarrassing than a statist atheist?
You know what I mean?
It's like...
They use the scientific method and they're champions of that and critical reason, but they don't apply it universally.
They don't apply it to everything.
They only apply it to that.
No, no.
But that's because they're communists, right?
So communists use race to whatever, right?
But what you're referring to, you know, the dualism as far as genes only affect what's superficial and not what's in our minds.
See, that's religious.
That's the remnants of religious thinking that are going to take a long time to Well, it turns the brain into a soul.
It turns the physical brain into a soul which is immune from, like the soul doesn't get cold, the soul doesn't sweat, it's immune from environment.
The soul is a ghost, immune to the environment.
And on the left, and again, please understand, I don't have a dog in the fight, I don't know what the answer is, but if there's truth, and there seems to be some pretty compelling evidence, but if there's truth, That there are brain differences between the races that are very clearly driven by evolutionary pressures from the immediate environment over tens of thousands of years.
Then if people on the left reject that, then they have just become as superstitious as anyone on the right they've ever criticized could ever be.
We have to follow reason and evidence no matter what.
How uncomfortable it might make us.
We follow reason and evidence no matter what.
Do you know why, Stefan, can you imagine why someone would reject that?
I'm not saying they have a right...
No, I'm not saying rationally reject it, but emotionally reject it.
Why someone would reject differences between the races?
Would have a visceral...
I mean, I'm just saying, can you imagine why someone would have an emotional reaction to that?
Oh, I think there'd be lots of reasons why people would, some political and some personal.
So, I mean, there was a guy, I think his name was Richwine, Jason Richwine, who wrote a thesis That said one of the challenges of people, of Hispanics coming in from Mexico is that Hispanics have an IQ of 85 on average, right?
And, you know, this was, you know, he went through his thesis advisor.
They did all of the math and, you know, they went through and he got his thesis.
And then, like, I don't know, years later, somebody found this and it just went insane, right?
And more recently, James...
So James Watson, who with Crick was one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA.
He said a couple of years ago, he said one of the challenges of, I'm paraphrasing here, but he said one of the challenges of foreign aid is that we assume that, you know, everyone we give aid to is the same intelligence.
But in Africa, that doesn't seem to be the case in overall in general, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And I mean, people just went insane over the guy.
I mean, he got fired from his job as a researcher, a medical researcher.
I think he did cancer.
He got fired of his job for like 40 or 50 years.
And now he has to sell his...
He has to sell his Nobel Prize.
Is he shocked?
Is he surprised?
I don't understand how you can have intelligence and be shocked that people would have that reaction to it.
People actually equate intelligence with superiority.
It's not true.
Maybe you and I don't think it's true, but the general public, that's how they think.
So you can't go out and say things that are like that and be like, oh my god, look how they're reacting to it.
I don't understand.
You know, but this is an area where there is a lot of volatility because people, I mean, nobody wants – racism has become such a terrible word.
And, of course, racism is a terrible thing.
It is primitive tribalism and so on where you just think that someone is in every way inferior because of their race.
And then that is irrational and it's wrong and it's immoral.
And a lot of nasty stuff has happened in the name of racism just as a lot of nasty stuff has happened in the name of lots of other isms.
So I think people are concerned for a number of reasons.
One is that, let's say that tomorrow it were conclusively proved that the racists differ in IQ because of genetics, right?
It's not going to happen, but let's say as the genome project marches on and so on, let's say that they can find it out, right?
Right.
I think that what would be of concern to people, which is of concern for me as well, and I think all reasonable, decent people, is would that have people say, well, forget it.
Can't do anything to approve anything.
You know, there's going to be ghettos and the blacks are going to be poor and the Hispanics are going to be poor and the Asians are going to be our overlords, right?
And then people might say, well, forget it, right?
And I think that would be hugely problematic.
Why would they think Asians would be our overlords?
I mean that's another – Asians have other traits according to Nicholas Wade that kept them from being innovative.
So I mean there's two sides to every coin.
I'm making a joke.
I'm just talking about in terms of IQ and economics.
So I was just making a joke, right?
But I would say that you can't make any progress in a problem until the cause is accurately identified.
My concern is – With race relations has always been that we don't know exactly yet.
And I always dislike and vehemently oppose the certainty of an answer in the absence of conclusive evidence.
Oh, people do that all over the place.
They do.
And this is, you know, so when I say, well, religion, when people say, well, God created it, that they think that's an answer when it's not.
And if people say, well, the disparity between the races is simply white racism and that's it.
Well, you know, that's a really tough case to make because there is evidence to the contrary.
It doesn't mean there's no such thing as white racism.
It doesn't mean there's no such thing as black or Hispanic racism or Asian racism or anything.
Those things still exist.
Of course they do and they always will to one degree or another.
But the contrary is also a ridiculous claim.
But racism is also a challenge.
Just saying everything is racism and the races are absolutely identical and everything, the only disparities between the races can only occur because of racism.
I don't, again, I'm no expert.
I don't believe that we have enough information to state that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Of course not.
I agree.
And so I think that we need to keep looking, and we need to keep looking at stuff that's uncomfortable.
It's uncomfortable to me.
But it doesn't have to be uncomfortable, Stefan.
That's what I'm saying.
This is why it's not uncomfortable.
If you did a little thought experiment with me, go back in the past and take a genetic scientist back there.
In the time when we were all in Africa, and the strongest, the most fierce, let's say, the ones that had the genes for aggression survived, reproduced, Then let's say that the chiefs or the head boss man of the Klan in Africa or the tribe said, hey, let's do an experiment.
Let's see who's got the best genes or if we can figure out...
You know, who's superior?
And look at the genetic level.
Let's just say they could do that.
And say, well, here we go.
Here's the gene for, you know, the warrior gene for aggression.
And, you know, these people don't have it.
We have it.
So, you know, this is what makes us superior.
Let's just say that's the language they use, superior.
But they have no way to imagine that The whole paradox of humanity is going to shift as soon as people leave Africa.
They have no idea.
As far as they're concerned, it's, I have the warrior gene, and that's what's going to make me more successful than you, economically, and give me the ability to reproduce and have more wives, etc., etc.
They have no imagination for what could be coming down the line.
Okay, well then, we go ahead and we have, I can only assume that the weaker left Africa, I don't know I mean, who would want to take a hike and go north into the freezing cold unless they lost?
So, I mean, unless they were somehow inferior to the ones who stayed.
Let's just accept that just for the conversation.
I'm not saying that's what happened.
Let's say people went north and...
Wade himself says that the Europeans were, by all means, in measures taken at a time, inferior, just completely backwards, just didn't have the intelligence, compared to the Muslim world and the East.
I mean, East were light years ahead of Europe during the Middle Ages.
Same with the Middle East.
So let's say that same genetic time-traveling scientist went there and said, well, let's see here.
Why are the Europeans so far behind?
The Asians have this great culture and developed this society.
In the Middle East, they have writing and all that stuff.
Let's look at the genes here.
Oh, well, the Asians have a gene for this, this loyalty, this togetherness.
They they're very loyal to the group and they work together.
And the Europeans, you know, oh, they live far apart.
They don't they you know, they don't have that sort of gene.
So here we go.
This is why the Asians are superior.
This is why the Europeans are not as successful.
But then again, at that point in time, it seems like that's how it's always going to be.
That is the world.
That is the name of the game.
And here are the people and here are their genetic traits.
That's the end of the story.
Then you go and all of a sudden things shift again.
But because the Europeans, something happened in their environment which promoted the opposite of what Asia went through.
Something happened that promoted individuality in innovation.
And it was just chance.
It happened.
There's environmental things.
We could sit and wonder what it is.
But then...
The traits that Europeans had that didn't even come up on the radar when that time-traveling genesis studied at the time, all of a sudden becomes the exact traits that push them to the front of economic success in the world.
And so now we're in that right now.
The Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, all that stuff.
So now we have...
The high IQ, the spirit, plus the independent spirit, the spirit of individuality, has put the Europeans so far ahead of the Asians, you know, as far as Nobel Prizes and scientific discovery and innovation and all that stuff.
I mean, but they would have never imagined that would have been the case if you took sort of a litmus test of genetic superiority.
Back in the Middle Ages.
So just like that trait is being rewarded economically, the European trait or maybe the Jewish, the Ashkenazi Jews trait for, you know, whatever it is, deferral gratification, I don't know, is rewarded now.
We don't know what it's going to be like a thousand years from now and what traits will be rewarded.
I mean, I think it's to say that IQ, which rewards sort of abstract thinking is one of them, being able to think fast, being able to...
I think conceptually and stuff like that, to being saying that that's the end-all and end-all, and there's no other...
I mean, it just shows a lack of imagination on the part of the people that think that.
I can't say that.
Like you were saying, Stefan, you can't go ahead and say anything for sure.
And I think everyone's making that same mistake.
Well, here we go.
This is how the world's divided.
These are the races.
These are the genes.
There's the warrior gene.
There's the IQ gene.
And that's how...
Now we've got to think about how we're going to make It's sort of myopic in a sense, like, in the same way that the people back then and a long time ago in Africa, before humanity left Africa, thought, well, here we are.
We're the warriors.
We are superior.
I mean, I just don't see how...
You can take one thing and just...
That which is tested by an IQ test and say this will lead humanity to success.
This is success here economically.
This is reproductive success.
When, in fact, the European world was on the verge of destroying each other.
We were on the verge of extinction.
And that was Westerners, Europeans, high IQ. We're on the verge of blowing each other up with nuclear weapons.
I don't know how that's successful.
I mean...
That's my rant.
I'm sorry.
Well, and the other thing, too, is that, let's say that Europeans and Asians did end up with higher IQs because of adverse conditions.
Well, that's because of an unbelievable amount of suffering.
Right?
It's because so many people died.
Like, why do polar bears have white skins?
Because all of the non-white skinned polar bears died.
Yeah.
I mean, the amount, like, it's hard to say, oh, it's superior because millions and millions of people had to die in order to select for greater cognitive capacity.
I mean, God, I'd rather have stayed in Africa.
I mean, God, it's like, that's no fun.
I just was looking up something here.
I was really, really listening, so I just looked it up and just glassed it.
But Jewish Average IQ, Ashkenani...
115.
8 points higher than the generally accepted IQ of their closest rivals, Northeast Asians.
40% higher than the global average IQ of 79.1.
And this is not constant because Ashkenazi visual spatial IQ scores are only mediocre.
They're actually below average 98 in one study.
But verbal IQ. Verbal IQ. Like, holy shit!
I mean, that's like robot overlords of language.
And, of course, this is why.
I mean, was it 27% of Nobel Prizes have gone to 0.25% of the world's population?
But on the other hand, say, oh, well, that makes them superior.
On the other hand, there does seem to be higher neurosis, instability, and mental illness to some degree among the...
Ashkenani Jews.
So it's, you know, everything is costs and benefits.
Everything is costs and benefits.
Do you ever read Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, you know how he talks?
And this is the most interesting thing.
I love this part of the book.
He talks about acute consciousness.
You remember that?
I can't.
It's been so many years.
Well, he says, I got the quote here.
When we're talking about the flip side of the coin, there's high IQ, genes for high IQ. Let's just say there's a gene for high IQ. Those genes, they have negative...
There's more than one effect for every biological...
You know, forever protein in your body, you know?
And we don't know all those things.
But I'm just kind of entertaining what would be the negative things for IQ, you know, high IQ, which you've already talked about, you know, depression, maybe anxiety.
Anxiety, neuroses.
Neuroses.
Here's one from Dostoevsky.
Ready?
He says, well, he says, well, such a person...
Okay, with people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in general, how's it done?
Why when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being?
Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with his horns down and nothing but a wall to stop him.
Okay, and then he says, I envy such a man till I'm green in the face.
He is stupid.
Then he says, the antithesis of the normal man is the man of acute consciousness.
So he talks about inertia, and I'm assuming that he has experienced this himself.
He's obviously a very intelligent man, but the inertia where you can kind of see the pros and cons of everything and the sort of Uh, the futility of doing a set action, because at the end of the day, like, what's the point?
And it causes inertia, which is a stop of action.
And he says this is, and this was his, one of the main parts of his epic rant in, uh, Notes of Underground, where he wishes he was more simple-minded, that he could be, you know, that, uh, someone who could actually move, not have inertia, get something done and do something.
And this is a lot of echoes of, um, Eric Hoffer is a true believer when he divides people into men of action and men of words.
But this is just me talking to you and sharing this thought.
I mean, it doesn't really mean anything.
No, listen, I mean, you know, it's the old saying that anyone who thinks that money solves problems has never had a lot of money.
Right.
There is this grass is greener thing.
Oh man, if I was smarter, if I was prettier, if I was richer, if I was whatever, younger.
I mean, people have this belief that there's some magical way.
Like, let me...
Okay, can I tell you something completely shallow and ridiculous?
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
So I started losing my hair pretty young, right?
No.
And I had a couple of friends.
Man, they had great hair.
Mm-hmm.
Like...
Like, holy shit, great hair.
Like, hair like...
I remember one guy I was working with, good-looking guy.
He had this beautiful blonde hair.
And, you know, it's parted sort of just off to one side.
It hung down these little locks over his...
Like, they were just half going into Superman's little question mark of their own.
Anyway, so once we were...
This is when I was working up north for gold panning and all that.
And once this guy and I were...
Fighting around, wrestling by the water, and we both ended up in the water, right?
Mm-hmm.
Let me tell you something weird.
This guy had such unbelievable hair that all he did was he just rubbed it with a towel, right?
Really?
And his hair, it's like this Leslie...
Like in one, Leslie Nielsen or whatever his name was, in one of the airplane movies, you know, he gets blown up and then he gets up and his hair is perfect.
Like literally you could, I was fascinated.
I watched this guy's hair dry and it drew back into like a perfectly coiffed, like...
Like Pierce Brosnan or something.
Like no gel, no bed, like it just...
It's like this blonde helmet of godliness on his hair.
And I love the friends who are like, other friends you could look and you're like, it wasn't It wasn't like there was this one guy in my high school.
His hairline was so low.
He had this beard that started an inch below his eyes.
He had these really bushy eyebrows and had his hairline two inches above that.
He could never have let it grown out or he basically would have just been thrown bananas.
I had friends who just had this great hair.
And you knew, like, so you'd look at the picture.
I think it comes through the maternal line.
You look at the picture of their mother's father, or you'd meet maybe their grandparents, because it's when we were pretty young.
And, you know, the mom's dad would have this, like, unbelievable shock of, like, perfect silver hair.
Like the full-on Richard Gere.
Really?
And I'd be like...
Fuck me!
Are you kidding me?
I'm starting to lose my hair when I'm 18 years old or 19 years old or whenever the hell it was.
And these guys are 70!
And they still got their hair!
And I used to think like, oh man, you know, I don't care about it now.
But back then it was like, oh man, you know, what do I have to do?
Who do I have to blow to keep my hair?
Right?
And, of course, I knew if I took enough female hormones, my hair would all grow back, but that would cause a huge amount of trouble.
And I never wanted to get, like, transplants or, you know, I know a guy who's taken Rogaine and has managed to hang on to his hair.
I just don't want to do any of that crap.
But I remember thinking, you know, in the shock of the first, are you kidding me, right?
It's like, oh, man, you know, if I only got to keep my hair...
What a great life.
I had pretty good hair when I was young.
I'm like, oh, what a great life that would be.
Like, that would be a problem-free life.
And of course, that's insane.
But we have this belief that, ah, if I just had this, then everything would be great.
And so we look at, you know, people who've got a lot of money or great singing voices or they're super handsome or pretty or whatever.
It's, ah, you know, what a...
But my God, I mean, the older you get, the great thing that you realize is that Every benefit is just a problem in disguise.
Right.
I have been incredibly benefited by having no hair or little hair.
I mean, it's been incredibly beneficial to me.
How's that?
I mean, oh my god, on so many levels.
First of all, time.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's one.
I mean, how long does it take?
I mean, I remember this...
The woman who played Catherine Janeway on Star Trek, one of the Star Trek movies, I mean, she got together once with Patrick Stewart, the guy who played Jean-Luc Picard, and she said, basically, you get to live twice as long as I do because you won't believe how much time it takes to get my hair done for this TV show.
Because it's always got to look the same from scene to scene.
They've got to keep tucking it in and spraying it down, and it's just crazy, right?
Whereas he's, you know, got nothing to...
So, in terms of time, oh my god, it's fantastic.
It's fantastic.
In terms of keeping me sexually unavailable to really shallow people, I'm not saying I loved it when I was younger, but looking back in hindsight, what a fantastic thing it was.
Because I think Jennifer Aniston was once, I read some interview with her, I'm not going to say why, but let's just say.
And she was saying, you know, well, you know, I want a good looking guy with a full head of hair, right?
Now, I think she's, what, is she in her 40s?
She's still unmarried and she got divorced by Brad Pitt like a decade or so ago and she's had a series of relationships with good looking guys with full heads of hair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, how ridiculous a human being can you be where you say, well, it's literally like saying, well, you know, I'll only date a woman who's at least a DCAP. When you're in your 40s, like, you should have outgrown that stuff by the time you're 14, let alone 40, right?
And hair is the same for men as tits are for women.
This is my fundamental belief, and this is really the essence of philosophy.
No, so...
A guy with a great head of hair is like a woman with big tits.
If, you know, guys like that, and apparently they do.
She's 45 years old.
Thanks, Mike.
He's pretending that he had to look that up.
So I basically have tiny tits.
Now, tiny tits are fine if you're slender, right?
You don't want to be overweight with no boobs.
If you're overweight and you have giant boobs, then that's another matter, I guess, for some men's level of attractiveness.
But if you have no hair and you're slender or at least lean or fit or whatever, I think that's fine.
But if you're overweight and fat, that's like being overweight with small boobs, right?
So that's sort of my basic theory.
And women love guys with great hair and guys love women with big boobs.
Again, that's a general stereotype and all that kind of stuff.
But I lost my boobs.
That's really what I'm trying to say.
Started off with great boobs, lost them in my late teens, or started losing them, and then I think it was all pretty much gone by the time I was 30 or so.
And it's been great because, man, talk to women who've got big boobs.
They have an ambivalent relationship to those chest nuggets, as you can imagine.
The fun bags, the dirty pillows, they have their particular challenges.
I know for a fact that there are women who didn't want to date me because I was balding or bald.
And at the time, of course, it was like, oh, man.
But in hindsight, looking back, oh, my God, would it have been terrible?
It's a weeding-out process.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It is a weeding-out process.
Because, look, any man who won't date a woman because she doesn't have big boobs is not a man that woman wants to date.
Right?
Fundamentally.
I mean, you look over at the women who are hot, and you're like, oh wow, they get all this attention, and wow, that would be great, and so on.
But, the problem is that it's like having a huge amount of money.
Who do you know who your friends are?
Right?
And if you're really physically that attractive, and it doesn't have to be boobs, whatever it is, right?
If you're really physically that attractive, who's into you for you, right?
And so for me, losing my hair was an incredible benefit.
You're not going to have guys that are going to hang around with you just because you get hot chicks with you, too.
That's going to weed out those type of friends.
Yeah, and look, if you want to see a picture of me when I was, I think, 18 or 19, I looked like someone out of a boy band.
I think it's the truth about Stefan Molyneux.
I used that as a thumbnail.
I don't know if you've seen that picture.
I was a good looking kid.
Yeah.
Like, holy crap.
I'd have hit that.
Wait, I think I did.
Was that a teenager?
That was my late teens, I think, yeah.
19 or so.
Yeah.
And, you know, I was like a great looking kid.
Now, if I'd kept those looks, you know, and I mean, I'm still happy with the way I look and all that, but if I'd kept that hair and all of it, I think it would have been much more tempting to be some kind of player, you know, some kind of, you know, and that, you know, I mean, if I met my wife and been some player, well, she wouldn't be my wife, right?
She'd have like, she'd have like slack be gone spray straight into my eyeball or something.
So I just, this is a weird way to sort of, but the IQ and success and this and that, like, I'll give one last example.
Like, I took my daughter today to, we were outside playing in the snow, went to get some hot chocolate.
Now, in the cafe where we got the hot chocolate, the TV was tuned to curling.
Do you have any idea what that is?
Curling is, is it when they have the ball in that sort of handheld whip-like thing and they throw it against the wall?
Yeah.
No, that's, I don't know.
No, I think that's Indiana Jones.
I think.
No, curling is when they've got that weight, and they slide it.
I don't know much about it, but they slide this weight down the ice.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry, you cut off for a sec.
Go ahead.
Oh, they slide this weight down the ice, and there's a guy sort of down on his knees and hands, and he's aiming it, and you have to knock.
Other weights out of circles on the ice and there are guys, the scrubbing I think affects the speed.
They scrub it or then don't scrub it to make it go faster or slower.
Yeah, I don't think I've ever watched that but I think I know what you're talking about.
Well, if you had watched it, you probably would have only watched about 20 to 25 seconds.
Before narcolepsy overcame you and your soul attempted to astral travel to get out of the range of the boringness that is known as curling.
I mean, I don't find sports that I even enjoy playing that exciting to watch.
But that seems to me like watching paint dry in slow motion.
But, you know.
And so...
But there are people, like, screaming.
Like, they're screaming at...
The curling weight as it slowly wends its way across the ice to bounce into something in slow motion.
They're like mental about it.
And they painted themselves the colors of the...
So part of me is like, that's ridiculous.
And part of me is like, wow, must be a cool life to get excited by that stuff.
Yeah, that and sports, like being a spectator for your favorite college football.
I never really got that either.
But I look at people who sit there and they have their favorite team they follow.
They have their regular weekend session with their buddies and watch it or follow it.
And I'm like, it looks like they're having a great time.
And I just...
That looks like a great pastime for them.
Basically, about 90% of human activity is contained in two words.
Are you ready?
Go for it.
I've got to clear my throat for this.
Are you ready?
Yay!
Costume!
Right.
Yeah.
This costume is the best.
This costume is so much better than the other costume.
This costume with the red is infinitely superior to this costume, which has polka dots.
Yay red, bad polka dots.
Yay green, bad blue.
That costume, yay.
That costume, bzzz.
That is human society.
There was a time when I was in second grade and third grade.
This was like 1986 or something.
I was really into my home, the Cleveland Browns, my home sports team.
Any given Sunday, whether they won or lose, if they won, it would make my day.
It was a great day.
It felt like the sun was out and nothing could be better in the world.
And if they lost, I mean, it's like the clouds come over and it's just a miserable sort of day and I'm depressed.
I mean, I used to cry for crying out loud when I was a kid and they lost in the playoffs.
Man, it was heartbreaking.
But then what happened was I noticed that, wait a second, Some of the players from the Browns have been traded, and now they're playing on the other team.
Wait, what?
Wait a second.
We're playing against my favorite heroes of the team back in the day.
All of a sudden, they're all gone, and they're playing on the other team with the other shirts on.
I'm like, wait a second.
It was really confusing to me.
It's like, well, how can I be so passionate about The Browns anymore, they have just completely changed.
Because of the costume!
The costume is the same!
Yay, costume!
And it was no longer like, they represent me.
I used to think they lived in Cleveland and were born and raised there.
I mean, they represent me and where I'm from.
They grow from the same grass as me.
Just passing through.
Just passing through.
It killed everything for me.
I mean, after a while, I just, okay, well, I don't care.
But by that time, I was middle school and I had other interests.
But I remember the feeling I had of the joy of watching, getting into it with my family and stuff.
And I don't have that anymore.
I don't have that feeling anymore.
And that's a loss.
Now you've got something much better, man.
Which is, yay truth!
Fuck costume!
Yay truth!
I don't get to sit in my living room and share about it with like 550 different people.
It's just...
It's different.
So you're saying I should have more debates?
Is that what you're saying?
Yes, more debates with mass people on Skype in lots of faces on the screen.
Yeah, that would be great.
Yeah, and look, I mean, I get it.
Like, I mean, in the, oh God, 90s, I think 92, Toronto won baseball.
I'm going to say the World Cup, but that's wrong.
Yeah, World Series.
World Series, right.
And, uh, I remember I was living in a house with four gay guys and a lesbian.
Nice.
When I was going to, uh, do my, this is, I think I was just starting my master's or that was where I was doing my master's.
And, um, yeah, that'd be right.
I was 26.
It was 22 years ago, 22, 2014, 92.
Yeah, 92.
And I remember I had a sore throat then too, but anyway, and so I couldn't cheer much, but, um, I was sitting there, and I got into it, and I was like, I really want this team to win.
I want this team to win.
Yay, costume!
Local costumes.
Although, I must say that the Toronto—and you can look this up to validate that I'm not insane.
Well, not for this anyway, but for the longest time—because they're Blue Jays, right?
So they've got this picture of a Blue Jay.
I swear to God, I thought it was a dolphin.
I thought Blue Jay maybe was the name of some Toronto dolphin that was in an aquarium nearby, which is a weird name for a dolphin.
But anyway, so...
Does the logo look like a dolphin?
The logo looks like a dolphin.
Look up Toronto Blue Jays.
If you squint and you're retarded and from England, it really does look...
So, Mike, is there anything you'd like to add to my robust sense of...
See, Mike played hockey for a long time.
Mike, you played hockey?
I played hockey for like 15 years, so I'm well-versed in the sports lingo.
Oh, yeah.
It looked like a dolphin.
You know, use that as a logo for copyright reasons.
But if we did, everybody would see that I was a man losing his boobs who thought that Blue Jays had a dolphin as a logo.
That's the entire description for this show.
We'll get three Blue Jays fans here who won't have any idea why this is in the tags.
And you were pretty young though.
Are you talking like you were under 10 years old?
I was 11.
Yeah, I was 11 when I first came to Canada.
Yeah, so I just...
Those sorts of simple pleasures, I guess.
Can I tell you one other story about coming to Canada?
Yeah.
Okay.
Mike, you might want to stay on for this because you might enjoy this too.
So...
In England, there's a game called Rounders, which is similar to baseball, but obviously infinitely superior.
And in Rounders, I'm a good hitter.
Like, I've always been a good hitter for ball games.
I played cricket, I played Rounders, and I played tennis and squash.
But especially with a bat, I'm a good hitter.
And I'm a lefty, right?
So I'm a southpaw for that.
So anyway, in Rounders...
You hit the ball, but if you think you'll hit it better, you get three pitches.
And you can hit the ball, and you don't have to run.
Because if you think you'll hit it better next one, you just don't run, and they get the ball, and they give it to you again, right?
That is not exactly true in baseball.
In baseball, as you may or may not know.
Okay, I think I can guess what happened here.
So...
I am in colony hell school, right?
So when we first came to Canada, we lived with a relative in Whitby and I was in grade 8.
And then when we came to Toronto, they sank me back down to grade 6 because they were really into stay with your peer group and all.
And it was kind of a rough school.
Like I remember in grade 6, the first recess I was at, like everybody just went like howling, like bats out of hell, went howling out into the And the boys all organized this game called Punch the Girls in the Groin.
Oh, I know that game.
I mean, God almighty.
And I was like, which layer of hell have I emerged into?
I guess this was not something.
Anyway, so we played baseball for the first time.
And I always had a problem because I grew up really poor.
I had no glove.
I couldn't afford a glove.
And I couldn't borrow anyone's glove because nobody else was left-handed.
Oh, yeah.
So I'd have to catch it and then take the ball out of the glove, throw the glove down, and then throw the ball with the right hand.
Wait, you batted lefty and you threw with your right hand?
No, no, I threw with my left hand.
But I didn't have a left-handed glove, right?
So a left-handed glove is supposed to be in your right hand because you catch with your right hand so you throw back with your left hand.
But everyone had a left-handed glove because they were all right-handed throwers.
So I'd have to catch the ball with my left-handed glove I'd have to pull the ball out, get the glove off, and then throw the ball.
Because I threw like a spastic Japanese short-circuiting robot girl with my right hand.
But I could throw it with my left hand.
Anyway.
So, I'm 11 years old.
And I am playing baseball for the first time.
And I've already been out in the field where everyone's They want to hit to me because I have to do this switcheroo to throw the ball.
Anyway, so I was not peaking in my athletic status at this point.
But I thought, you know what?
No problem.
I'm going to show these colonists exactly what's what because I know I'm a good hitter.
I'm a good hitter, man.
And so they threw the ball.
Crack!
I had a good hit, man.
It was amazing.
Up straight into the sun like nobody could see it.
Basically just this giant Gestapo interview.
And of course all the kids are yelling, all the boys, run!
Run, you limey bastard!
And I just said, no, no, I think I'll just take the next one!
Are you serious?
Oh, man.
So you have an argument.
You're arguing with the guy.
With the newcomers, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, if we'd been playing cricket, man.
Oh, stuff.
Didn't you watch baseball, though?
Didn't you watch America's baseball?
First time I went out on the ice, I found it incredibly difficult.
Incredibly difficult.
I rented my first pair of skates and I went out on the ice.
I couldn't even stand up.
I couldn't understand it.
Do you know what really helps?
If you take the skate guards off, which apparently you do when you rent skates.
If you take the skate guards off, I must say that after that I found it significantly easier.
Except for all the...
Because I dressed up in my best because the only thing I'd ever seen for skating was figure skating where everybody used to be dressed up.
So I dressed up in my nice long boarding school pants and a nice ruffled shirt.
And...
all the hockey kids as I was sort of grabbing my way along with my skate guards on all the hockey kids came in low with their elbows out and went hey silver pants and down I went so it did take a little bit of getting used to some of the newer modes of interaction and sports in these here colonies but on the plus side it was the worst winter they'd ever had and I just love snow so that was fantastic I have not heard these stories before
I think I'll stop there.
I have to say something.
I didn't believe it, but looking at this Blue Jays logo, I could see where you'd get Dolphin out of that, I must say.
I'm telling you.
I was skeptical.
I'm telling you.
I was skeptical.
I see things that other people are unwilling to see.
Now, if you...
Now, Steph, if you have a couple shots of vodka, punch yourself in the eye and then squint through that eye and look at it.
The logo actually does kind of look like Charles Murray, too, but that's all.
That's the connection there.
That's the connection.
That's a wonderful full circle.
I think his next book is called Dolphin Overlords Should Rule Us All, so that will be a bit of a...
Speciesist!
What time is it?
Shit, have we only done two callers?
We have.
Mike, are you leaving me in charge of the show?
What are you, crazy?
I know, this is not going to laugh.
Anyway, I'll let you get to the next caller, Stefan.
I just wanted to say...
That I have, as far as the IQ, I think the most important thing is the principles.
And I think, yeah, you have definitely, I consider you a very intelligent person, and your principles alone have helped me a lot in my career.
And so, you know, I think, I don't think it takes that much of an intelligence to follow good, solid principles.
I mean, I would imagine it doesn't.
But it might take intelligence to do all the work, conceptual work and all that sort of thing and do all the Einstein work.
But I think once certain principles have been derived and brought down from the people who have the disposition to be able to do it within a lifetime, I think it's vastly helpful to everybody.
Well, I'll tell you this.
I sort of feel the urge not to justify but to sum up where my thinking is with regards to IQ. Whether we include race or not in that is not fundamental to my particular perspective.
I believe that philosophy disproportionately benefits the less intelligent.
Because smart people will figure out a lot of things on the fly.
And I believe that philosophy will vastly disproportionately benefit the less intelligent.
Like, for instance, I believe that the free market benefits the less intelligent.
And by the less intelligent, I don't...
Again, this is not a negative.
It's not a positive or superiority.
How is that score lower on an IQ test?
Yeah, I mean...
Right, that's it.
I mean, if you look at people, let's say, it doesn't matter what race they are, it's people who have an IQ of 80.
Or let's just go with 70.
People have an IQ of 70.
I mean, in the absence of the free market, it's a pretty rough life.
But with a free market...
You know, they get TVs, they get good healthcare, they get jobs, they, you know, there's lots of things, vastly better.
Their best qualities will come to the surface to be the most useful in a free market.
Absolutely, absolutely.
We don't know what those are.
We don't know what they are.
But there is a significant value.
Economic value, there is a significant economic value in people who have a lesser IQ. Whether it's genetic or not, whether it's racial, it doesn't fundamentally matter.
But the less intelligent you are, the more principles you need.
Because smart people can sort of suss things out in the moment and can analyze and are nimble and so on.
And so they'll kind of get by.
Although smart people definitely do better with principles.
But less intelligent people...
We disproportionately benefit from principles.
And I will tell you this, and I've said this before too, I do not consider myself to be innately that intelligent.
And I'm not just making that up, and this isn't any kind of false humility.
Not that I often get accused of false humility.
But when I look back at my mental life before philosophy...
It was an incoherent mess.
I was, as Ayn Rand describes, people without principles.
I was just a big giant grab bag of whatever caught my fancy, whatever I've been exposed to, whatever happened to life like at the moment, whatever bullshit course I was pursuing in order to justify any particular sexual lust or economic desire or whatever it was, right?
Whatever I would talk myself into in the moment to justify whatever it is that I felt like doing on a whim.
I mean I had no distinguishing intellectual capacity of any kind.
I mean I love to write and I remember my In grade 7, I wrote a novel.
Yeah, grade 7 or grade 8, I can't remember.
I wrote a novel called By the Light of an Alien Sun, which was about a...
It wasn't a whole novel.
It was just a science start of a science fiction novel that my teacher actually read to the entire class, wherein there was a very thinly veiled description of a low-gravity kiss fest with a girl whose name rhymed with a girl I liked in class, because she stopped reading because everyone got too embarrassed.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
But...
When I got philosophy, when I got principles, I got intelligent, so to speak.
And so I believe that I would not have any kind of distinguished intellectual career.
Distinguished.
I'm not even sure what I'm doing.
It can probably be called distinguished.
But I would not have had any kind of Public intellectual life in the absence of philosophical principles.
And so when I say that people...
I've never had my IQ tested and I don't think I'll ever bother because it doesn't matter.
Because anybody who would accept my arguments based on having a high IQ would be like someone dating me because I had nice hair.
Like that's not how it works, right?
But...
I view myself as an example of somebody not particularly intelligent who through principles found the value of thought and found the certainty of thought and found the efficaciousness of thought.
And so to me, principles are like experience in building things.
Like I've never built a house.
And can you imagine?
I'm not particularly good with my hands as far as that stuff goes, to say the least.
I mean, I can change a light bulb and batteries and that's about it.
So if I tried to build a house, it would be so incredibly frustrating for me without instruction.
If I just tried to build a house, I mean, I can't imagine I'd get that far in it.
On the other hand, somebody who understands and knows the principles of building a house, even if they've never built a house before...
If they've studied architecture or if they've studied whatever, they've shadowed someone in the trades or they have someone and they're telling them what to do, it's an immensely more pleasurable experience, right?
Infinitely more pleasurable an experience rather than reinventing the wheel yourself and making all the mistakes, having to pull stuff down again, putting things the wrong way around and forgetting certain things and so on, right?
And so for me...
Having a successful life is like building a house.
And most people try to do it just by throwing bricks at the ground.
And they maybe build half a wall and then it falls over and it's just a mess.
And they spend most of their energy just trying to prop up something that should have stayed up because they knew stuff but they didn't know stuff.
And so for me, philosophy is teaching people the principles of how to build a house.
And many, many more people will build houses that way.
Because very few will build them just because they feel like it or they want to, but they don't really know what they're doing.
They're just so frustrated with the mistakes.
And so I genuinely believe that people who are less intelligent, and I put myself in that category, people who are less intelligent will disproportionately benefit from the spread of philosophy.
I mean, I have.
Yeah, so while the race and IQ stuff and all that, I think it's fascinating.
I don't think I could be doing more to try and help the poor or to try to help the less intelligent than doing what it is that I'm doing.
And I believe that the spread of philosophy will vastly disproportionately benefit the poor, which is one of the reasons why the death of philosophy has contributed to an increasing disparity between rich and poor.
And so, even if I were...
We should never stop trying to improve the human condition.
We should never stop trying to help people make the most use out of their minds.
I don't care if everything turns out to be 100% genetic, we should never stop doing that.
Because genes are also influenced epigenetically through experience.
That's another thing.
Yeah, exactly.
And we sure know that children who are raised reasonably will likely end up three to five points more intelligent.
At the minimum.
At the minimum.
So, in putting forward peaceful parenting, we are improving our capacity for IQ. In putting forward principles, we are enhancing people's capacity.
I don't think, obviously, I don't really think listening to this show will raise your IQ, but I do think it will allow you to harness what you have got incredibly more efficiently.
I mean, having a trainer makes a vast difference in how well you do in a sport.
Mm-hmm.
And by trying to be a trainer to people's thinking, it is going to vastly improve their intelligence and their capacity to succeed and achieve in the world.
So, let's say it was 100% genetic.
I would still be doing what I'm doing, and I think it's the best thing that I can do to raise the collective intelligence of the planet.
If it was 100% environmental, I'd still be doing exactly the same thing.
But it would be faster to do what I'm doing.
So I do find the race and IQ stuff very interesting in terms of examining and understanding where society is now.
Potentially, again, nobody has any final answers.
But I think that people's fears about IQ disparities, whether it's Within or between races or among the entire human race doesn't fundamentally matter.
We need to give people as much rational and critical thinking as possible.
And that will raise their intelligence as much as possible.
And more than that, we can't even imagine.
But I do think we need to know where we're starting from.
And so I read with great interest the stuff that is coming down the pipeline.
As far as IQ goes, both race and non-race IQ, I think it's fascinating.
And I think it's something we need to grit our teeth and delve into.
And that way, we can continue to hold high the banner of rational inquiry.
And because, I mean, I used to work in the field of diversity many moons ago.
So, you know, it is a great challenge for me.
Given how I was raised and given the race egalitarianism that is pretty much dogma, it doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means it's put forward without counter-arguments.
It is a great challenge for me to read and to learn this stuff.
It goes against a lot of the grains in which...
But that's the job.
That's the gig.
That's the deal.
We want to be critical thinkers.
We have to look at skepticism around things like global warming.
We have to look even at skepticism around things like evolution, which I find very weird, but I'll still look into it.
And we have to look around race realism and so on.
These things have to be explored.
Where they lead?
I don't know.
But we cannot exclude entire disciplines like biology, evolution, and physical anthropology just because it goes against political correctness.
It doesn't mean that they're right, but it means that they definitely have to be listened to because they're part of the pantheon of human thought.
Anyway, I really, really appreciate the call.
I guess we can time for one more relatively quick one.
We've already been in two and a half hours already.
But yeah, man, call back in anytime.
It was a real pleasure.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Alright, up next is Ed.
Ed wrote in and said, Why does it always seem like people with issues are drawn to me and then leave me when they don't need me anymore?
Friends, relationships alike, this seems to happen quite frequently.
Is it something I'm doing or are most people just using others in their own self-interest?
Can you give me an example?
Uh, yeah, so, I, just a lot of, like, my friends that I hang out with, they're kind of, I'll keep in touch with them, but when there's, like, distance between us, we don't really communicate anymore, and it becomes less and less until it's basically just,
like, once every month or so that we talk, and I never have any deep conversations with them, you know, it's, uh, It's just frustrating because, like, you feel lonely after a while.
I know, like, past girlfriends, too.
Like...
They just, like...
I don't know.
I think you know what I mean.
Well, you've talked about a couple of different things.
I'm not sure what to zero in on.
So people use you as a standing board for their problems and then vanish when those problems are solved?
Or you don't have a lot of deep conversations in general?
It's both.
It's definitely when people feel like their problem's solved.
They'll kind of distance themselves.
But I still want to have those deep conversations because I value them and I Have my own issues that I like to talk to people about and whatnot.
Right, right, okay.
And then they don't really seem to care, you know, and will maintain the distance, I guess.
So for...
Okay, so...
If I understand it rightly, and correct me where I'm wrong, but...
People view deep conversations like...
I cut my hand...
I need to go to an emergency and get stitches, right?
Yeah.
And then next week you're like, hey, let's go back to emergency.
And they're like, no, that's fixed.
Why would I go back to emergency?
I haven't cut my hand again, so why on earth would I go back to emergency, right?
I wouldn't say that I go back to them to talk about their problems after we solve the problem.
It's more like they just don't even want to really talk anymore.
I have a couple friends that went away to college, and we used to be really close friends, and they'd have a lot of problems while they were here, but when they went away, they didn't have to deal with them anymore, and now we don't really talk.
Wait, wait, sorry.
When you say you don't really talk, I'm sorry to interrupt.
Do you mean that you don't really talk at all, or you don't really talk about anything important?
Uh...
It's basically, we don't talk at all, and then when we do, it's nothing important.
So it's frustrating when I do talk to them, because then it's just like, how are you?
What have you been doing?
And it just doesn't get anywhere.
And then as soon as I try to add any depth, they just kind of stray away from it, I guess.
Right, right.
What's your perception of their emotional experience when you try to bring up depth with them?
I think they're not being empathetic towards my own desires in the relationship, I guess.
They don't understand that I might want to actually talk about things that I'm confronting like a lot of stuff I've been listening to you in the past couple months has really helped me and I want to say like you guys are doing a really great job with that and I appreciate it but you know I think about this stuff a lot you know like the anarchy and and that stuff and I like talking to it about them but like they don't seem to understand how important it is to me so
like they'll kind of listen to it for like 10 minutes 15 minutes but then Go to something else that they think is more interesting.
And I don't really...
It's just not the stuff that I really care for talking about as much.
And they don't get that.
Like what?
What do they want to talk about?
Um...
Just, like, girls that they're sleeping with.
It could be anything.
Like, the classes they're taking in college or just...
um my friends that aren't going to college like the their work problems and like the people that they're meeting at work and it's just like it's like trivial you know what what do you think their perception is of depth In other words, what do they associate depth with?
What's their emotional response to depth?
Like, what do you mean by depth?
Like, um...
What do you mean about deep topics, whether it's personal or philosophical or emotional?
When you start talking about something that is more deep or more rich or more important, what is their emotional response to that deep down?
They seem to care.
They don't become hostile when I talk about it, but at the same time, it comes across as like, Okay, yeah, I care because you're my friend or you're my boyfriend or whatever, but I don't know how to help you and I don't think we should talk about it if I can't do anything or I don't really have time to help you because I don't know what you're talking about.
They'll give me cliches like, Well, things will get better or, you know, or, oh, well, you shouldn't worry so much about the economy.
You know, things are okay right now.
You know, it's just stuff like that.
And it just, like, frustrates me that they just leave it at that, you know?
All right.
So, to ask again, what is their emotional experience of these things?
Other than what they experience with me when I talk about it?
No, because you've given me a lot of what they say.
I'm asking not what they say, but what do they feel?
What's their emotional response in their heart of hearts to what it is when you bring up something deep or something challenging?
See, my friends will act genuinely selfless.
Sympathetic and try to help, but it will lead to...
They care and they feel...
I don't know how to explain it.
Okay, no.
This is important because I'm trying to have a deep conversation with you and you're rebuffing me, right?
Yeah.
Because I'm asking you, let's go deep into your friends' hearts, right?
And you're trying to stay shallow in this, right?
Yeah.
Which means I'm kind of talking to your friends, not to you, right?
Yeah.
So, let me try it again.
What do your friends feel when you start talking about things that are deep or rich or important?
Not just to you, but deep or rich or important in general.
What do they feel?
What's their emotion?
I honestly can't say I would know.
I don't know what they're feeling.
I don't Get any impression of their actual emotions.
They might be angry about certain topics.
Well, let's not guess.
They might be space aliens for all we know.
Okay, but it's important that you don't know, right?
Now, we can certainly say that they're not thrilled, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's not like some deep tantric stingasm that they're having over these topics, right?
Yeah, definitely, yeah.
Okay.
So it must be some uncomfortable emotion that they're experiencing if they can stand it for 10 minutes and then have to move on, right?
Mm-hmm.
Are they listening to you when you talk about these things, or are they just kind of glazing and nodding?
Yeah, it's definitely a glaze and nod reaction.
Okay.
So if you don't know what they feel, then you'll take it personally.
This is the great insight of human relations that...
It's incredibly liberating.
If you cannot understand or you don't directly empathize with how other people are feeling when you were talking with them, you will generally take their responses to you personally.
So when I talk about depth, let's say 20 years ago, when I would talk about depth, deep topics with people, There would be a little bit of politeness, a little bit of, well, I guess if you're into this stuff, but then there'd be some rolled eyes and, okay, let's move on or, yeah, we got it or whatever, right?
And I would say, I guess I'm being inappropriate or maybe I'm being boring or maybe I'm not explaining it in the right way or whatever it is, right?
I would take it personally.
Or I might think, well, they're being rude, or I listen to them for two hours talk about their problems with their dog yesterday, and so on, right?
But it would be personal.
And it would be personal because I was lacking empathy as to their true emotional experience of what I was saying and what it implied.
Does this make it...
I'm not saying this is an answer, but do you sort of get it so far?
Yeah, I know what you're saying when you mean that.
I just...
I guess when I listen to them vent or want me to put my input into their problems, I feel like I'm being empathetic.
So that's why I'm confused when you bring that up.
But you're right, because when I give my...
Thoughts into the conversation.
I don't understand what their emotions are.
So you're right on that.
So I'm confused, I guess.
Okay, no, that's good.
Confusion is progress.
And I've talked about this in the show before, so I'll keep it brief.
But for years, I had dreams of the tsunami, of the giant cloud-shredding wave.
I'd be standing on the beach...
And I'd have these dreams that the ocean would gather itself up like a watery Poseidon standing on the floor of the ocean with his head in the clouds charging at me, these giant waves.
And once it took my entire arm off and the wave would be coming at me and it would be staggering and enormous and overwhelming and unsurvivable.
I couldn't possibly survive that amount of liquid energy cascading down upon me from the very heavens.
And I remember watching Deep Impact.
There's a scene where this tsunami happens and I talked about it with my therapist and I journaled about it.
And it took me years to understand what that dream meant.
And When I understood what the dream meant, I've never ever had it again.
And it's the only repetitive dream that I can really think of.
Oh no, I guess I've had the same...
That doesn't matter.
I have another one about college.
But...
The dream was not...
The dream was trying to teach me empathy for depth.
Empathy for what depth does to other people.
The dream was trying to teach me...
Not how the world was going to overwhelm me, but the dream was trying to teach me how philosophy and self-knowledge appear to other people.
The dream was trying to teach me how I show up for other people as a giant wave.
Not me in particular, but how philosophy shows up to other people.
Because philosophy was...
I was in general always willing to sacrifice anything for philosophy, but not many people are, which is why there are fewer philosophers than there should be.
Because everybody in the long run needs to be a philosopher, which doesn't mean they have to be original thinkers, but it does mean that they have to know the difference between truth and falsehood and stand by it.
And what I understood was that I was not understanding what other people were like.
And for other people, philosophy is the erasure of what they call identity.
I was very unformed when I was younger.
I was very amorphous.
I was a ghost in the skin.
I had physical shape, but no real mental or emotional shape, as I talked about in the earlier call.
So because I was so broken up as a child, because I suffered such abuse as a child, there was nothing in me that philosophy could break.
All that I could be was reassembled.
Philosophy couldn't break me because I was already broken, but philosophy could make me from the pieces I was.
So philosophy for me was not a destructive force.
Philosophy for me It was a healing force.
It was an assembling force.
It was a reconstruction, a resurrection force.
I did not fear death from philosophy, a spiritual death or a mental death, because I was already dead.
And so I was like that terminal patient who, knowing that death is imminent, Has no fear of a radical cure.
Yeah, shoot me up with it.
I've heard it's good.
I've got nothing to lose.
And so because I had been so broken up as a child, philosophy had no fear for me.
I was not afraid of it.
It did not threaten me.
But this is not true for most people.
I mean, most people didn't go through the kind of childhood I went through.
But for most people, philosophy is not the only rope that will ever come down the well that might pull them back to the light.
For most people, philosophy is not the last pill that might save you before you turn into a zombie.
I like that.
That really clicks with me because growing up, I feel like I was always...
I only had a small group of friends all throughout grade school and high school.
And pretty much still now, I've only had three or four really close friends.
So I never really had any set perspectives on the world.
Politics, I never even considered...
Voting because I just knew I can't vote for something if I don't know the facts about the party or whatnot.
So I just never voted.
I never had opinions, really.
Solid opinions on it.
I didn't have a self-identity.
When I started listening to your stuff, things just started making more sense.
When you say it gave me the ability to assemble what I need to be and who I am, that That makes a lot of sense.
Oh yeah, like I'm all bricks and no house when I was a kid.
And so philosophy comes along and says, want to make a house?
I'm like, well, I'm just basically standing on a pile of bricks.
A house seems pretty good, right?
Yeah.
Sorry, but that's not how most people, I think, experience philosophy.
Because most people have something to lose.
Now, it may be false, and if they're going to lose it, Through philosophy, it is false.
But it's the only truth they know.
And so, it may be a badly constructed house, but philosophy comes not as a blueprint and an architect to a pile of bricks.
For most people, philosophy comes as a howling storm that will destroy their house.
Yeah.
And they can't admit that to themselves because that would be to destroy the house from the inside out.
If you admit that the storm will destroy your house, you become the storm that destroys the house.
In other words, if you say, well, truth and death will destroy who I am, then you've just destroyed who you are because you've admitted that you're false.
That your identity, that your belief system, that your structure, that your culture, that your religion, that your patriotism, that your tribalism is all a lie.
The moment that you admit that you are afraid of the truth, you have just suicided your identity.
And so, this is why your friends don't say, whoa, philosophy!
God, keep that away from me!
God Almighty!
Deep thinking, self-knowledge, reflection, critical thinking, God, get that shit away from me!
They won't say that.
That's why they put on the polite mask of it's interesting, then boring.
But what would happen to the people you talk to if they dedicated themselves to rational and empirical truth at all costs, no matter what?
What would happen to their lives?
They'd have to change major parts like they're...
careers even in some cases and their plans for like the future I guess like I I can see it like my parents are the hardest because like they're I guess they're so set in their their perspectives you know that and they're so sure of themselves and they're they're extremely obstinate to like anything I'd say about this stuff but like my friends you know I guess they're still,
like, they're only, what, like, 20 years old, so it's different for them, but they're still, like, they had, like, larger groups of friends, whereas, like, I was just, like, they were one of my four friends, you know, whereas they had,
like, 20 friends, you know, or 50, or what, you know, and they had, like, a solid identity for themselves to, like, say, this is what I am, and I guess the less you have of that, the easier it is to digest this stuff.
That's the case for me, at least, I think.
Have you heard yourself speak?
I'm just curious, in terms of recording and playback.
Yeah, I know what you're going to say.
I use words like I guess and I think and stuff like that a lot.
I don't know why I do that.
Well, that's not what I was going to say.
Okay.
You have a kind of monotone.
Yes.
Which I'm trying to figure out.
It's a little hard to follow what you're saying because it's all kind of at the same level and in the same way and it kind of trails off a little and, you know, it's a little hard to connect, if that makes sense.
No, you're right.
I definitely do see that.
And I do...
Ugh, I guess...
It's not a criticism.
I'm not.
It's not.
I'm just...
I was thinking about it.
I wanted to share.
No, no.
It's fine.
I know what you're saying.
I definitely do...
I try to portray the emotions and how I say things, but it doesn't come out.
I've always been, like, afraid of telling people my opinion because...
I felt like growing up in school, I felt like people were always judging me, especially my parents and my peers.
So I was always very reserved.
I never shared what I thought about things with other people until the last two years.
I haven't really...
I've never done that.
When did you first go to...
Did you go to daycare?
When did you first...
Was your mom stay at home?
Or dad?
My mom was, yeah.
So how old were you when you went to school?
It was the usual age.
I think it was like six.
I went into kindergarten full time, like full day.
Okay.
And why am I asking that?
I'm not sure.
Well, it's because you're talking a lot about in school, which is what you remember more of because you were older.
Yeah.
But my question would be, how was this stuff with your mom?
How was your mom's relationship to your emotions, to your enthusiasms, to your excitements and so on, right?
Everything was...
It had to have like a rationality to it.
And not in...
An actual rational sense.
It was her idea of rational.
Like, I like music a lot.
And I play music.
And all through high school, I wanted to go to college for that.
But they would always say, well, what can you do with that?
And they'd always put their two cents in.
And they've always done that.
And it always was like in a discouraging way to what I actually like.
And it could have been with anything.
Like, it's...
It's discouraging because they think they know what's best and I do see certain things that they that I can say that they did but the way they would say it and it just wasn't like it wasn't helpful in the long run.
So I mean it My characterization of it, which you, of course, correct, if it's not correct, is they didn't exactly oppose it, but they kind of took the wind out of your sails.
Yes.
It's not like, a musician, I'll kill you!
Which I'm sure has made many great musicians.
But it was more like, well, you know, it's a challenging life.
It's important to have a plan B. And eventually it's just like, I can't even rebel.
I can't move, right?
Yeah, they got me...
A guitar for Christmas one year, and it's still my favorite thing, but they'd still say things like, well, you can't go to college for that, or where do you think you're going to get with that?
But then they'd encourage it at the same time, so it was very contradictive.
I didn't know if they supported it or if they were just doing it because they knew it was important, but at the same time, it genuinely felt like they disapproved of it.
Well, yeah, maybe it's a fine hobby, but...
Exactly.
Yes, yes.
And how are their enthusiasms?
I mean, I tell you, being a stay-at-home dad is nothing like that to teach you about enthusiasm.
I mean, my daughter runs everywhere.
I've never seen her walk anywhere.
Yeah.
And if she's not running, she's skipping or cartwheeling or jumping from couch to couch.
Like, she just doesn't...
She doesn't walk anywhere.
I mean, that's how, that level of enthusiasm, I'm a pretty enthusiastic guy, but that level of enthusiasm is humbling.
I'm like, well, I'm not running everywhere, what's wrong with me?
You know, I mean, oh yeah, I'm 48, my cough hurts.
Anyway, but...
She's so excited to talk at times that breathing is a hindrance.
Oh yeah, she's so terrified also of being interrupted.
And so enthusiasm, I think, is our natural state.
Thank you.
And I think it's going to be tough for you to deep dive with people if they're resistant and you're not open with your enthusiasm.
I think it's going to fade out.
Almost like you're with enthusiasm to them like your parents are with guitar for you.
Well, you know, it's interesting, but...
It's not make it too big a thing, kind of thing, right?
Yeah.
I mean, the only way to overcome...
I think the only way to positively overcome resistance is through enthusiasm.
And if you have trouble with enthusiasm, you can't lead.
I mean, I think this is pretty common through all leaders.
I mean, leadership is enthusiasm.
You want to blow your mind.
Look up Michael Balmer...
Michael Ballmer.
He was CEO of Microsoft, I think, after Bill Gates left.
He's doing some intro.
Mike, if you can look it up.
He's doing some intro.
He's literally jumping up and down and screaming at the top of his lungs about Microsoft.
Doing some intro to some...
I'm sorry?
Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer, yeah.
What did I say?
He said Michael Ballmer.
It's Steve Ballmer.
I'm sorry.
Steve Ballmer.
And I know the clip that you're talking of.
It's...
It's like I was looking at that and I'm like, good God.
I mean, it's humbling.
I don't know if it's saying, but it's humbling.
And he is like crazy enthusiastic about stuff.
I mean, I'm certainly very enthusiastic about what we're doing here.
Maybe even more important than going from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.
But there is something...
Somewhat irresistible about enthusiasm.
But enthusiasm is also vulnerability.
Because enthusiasm is asking for permission to lead.
And there's very little that's more vulnerable in the world than asking for permission to lead.
Because you're trying to lead your friendships.
And I'm sure there are times when your friendships lead you and so on.
You're asking to be the leader in this.
But if you can't be enthusiastic...
Then you can't effectively ask for leadership and overcome resistance.
And so I would say that enthusiasm is the challenge for you.
Yeah.
If people are genuinely enthusiastic, I'll listen to almost anything.
I mean, it goes both ways.
You know, it's the light side and the Sith Lord side.
I mean, Hitler was pretty goddamn enthusiastic in his speeches too.
It's just, you know...
It's alarming, of course, in general, but it's alarming for a lot of people.
Enthusiasm can go...
I mean, cult leaders are enthusiastic.
I mean, I'm sure I've never heard Jim Jones speak, but apparently they're recordings of the suiciding in Guyana after they shot the congressman.
And enthusiasm, I think, is quite necessary if you want to take a leadership role.
And if you want to take a leadership role in your...
Friendships, then I think you need to have the vulnerability of enthusiasm.
And I think that maybe, at least in terms of how we're talking, I think that may be something to enhance in your communication.
Yeah, yeah, I actually, I got a job, I got a new job like four or five months ago, and that was like, When I got the job, that was already three or four months into listening to your stuff a lot, and I've still been really listening to all your stuff.
It's given me a lot more confidence and a different approach of thinking about how things work and all that.
I've been a lot more enthusiastic, especially there, and it kind of gave me that fresh start with new people that don't already have a preconceived idea of me.
But if you want to commit to your friendships, then don't try and be manipulative.
And I'm not saying you are, but if I were in your shoes, I would say something like this, which to me would be as non-manipulative as possible.
All manipulation is the avoidance of vulnerability.
And to be truly vulnerable with your friends would be to say something like, I have these enthusiasms.
I have these things that I really, really care about in my life.
I care about philosophy.
I care about self-knowledge.
I care about truth.
I do care about the economy.
I am fascinated by it.
It's where my kids and your kids are going to have to grow up.
It matters.
And I want to talk about these things with you more.
I haven't done a great job of sharing how enthusiastic I am because it's scary.
Because I sort of feel like if I say, well, I'm this enthusiastic about stuff, that you're going to find it boring and we're going to have an impasse or something.
I don't know what's going to happen to the friendship.
So I've been kind of playing it safe.
Kind of dipping your toe in, so to speak, or speaking a little and then backing off and so on.
But it's not satisfying for me.
It's bothering me.
Because I think it could be something great that we could talk about.
I have to talk about it all the time.
But I feel like I'm talking about it and then I get scared.
I'm scared.
I'm bored of you.
I'm boring you or you seem to indicate a lack of interest.
And that's scary for me.
You know, my parents weren't particularly helpful in fanning the flames of enthusiasm within me.
And maybe I'm reproducing that here or whatever.
But I'd like to talk more about this stuff.
But I don't want to talk about it at the expense of your happiness or pleasure.
In the relationship, because that would be selfish.
So, what's it like for you when I talk about this stuff?
I mean, what happens for you?
Again, I'm just making it up off the top of my head, but it would be something like that.
I think that would be pretty direct.
But not win-lose.
Yeah.
And that's what I mean by, if you are really committed to your friendships, then don't let Any manipulation get between you, your friend, and the truth.
Don't play it safe.
Don't make decisions for them.
Manipulation also is trying to make decisions for other people.
They may really welcome that kind of conversation, but you're not having that conversation with them.
So you're denying them the opportunity to know who you really are.
Right?
Yeah, that's true.
And that's what I mean by don't have these friendships that...
Are half there.
Have friendships where you're all there.
Which means you're honest, as honest as you can be about everything that is going on for you without imposing a single demand on them.
Right?
And this is real-time relationships.
You talk about what you think and feel in the moment and it's not a demand on other people.
It's simply giving them the reality.
You know, show them your paintings.
They don't have to love them.
They don't even have to like them.
They may hate them.
But show them your paintings.
Show them who you really are.
If you have a problem with your friends, we always want to, we have a tendency to either want to minimize the problem or to dominate the conversation.
You know, you don't listen to me when I talk about what's important to me.
You know, like making them wrong and And so on.
And that's, again, domination is an avoidance of vulnerability, which itself is an avoidance of honesty.
And we avoid honesty for the simple reason that we avoid speaking in Japanese if we're raised in an English-speaking household, because we don't know the language.
And to really commit to your friends is to open your heart to them as wide as you can and Give them the opportunity to respond.
It's an amazing thing.
It's an electric thing.
It's an incredibly powerful thing to do in your friendships, in your relationships, to open your heart and to truly speak your mind with no demands or expectations or judgments of the other person.
You know, if you've got issues with your parents, you sit down, talk to them, say, you know, this stuff's been troubling me.
You know, I'm not saying you're bad people or anything, but I think I would have really loved guitar more, you know, and That doesn't mean that they did anything wrong or that anything has to change, but that's the true nature of your thoughts and experience, right?
Yeah, I definitely see myself when you say that.
When I do have these quote-unquote deep conversations with people, I don't open myself up as much as I kind of give them a statement about...
I don't know, maybe bring up something that just happened in the news...
But then use it as a way to insert my opinions on it.
And that's manipulative.
And I expect them to take the opposing so that I can dominate them because I know I'm right or something.
I don't know.
And also, I don't know that they know how important it is to you.
Yeah, because I don't open myself up.
Right.
And that, again, is the avoidance of rejection.
The avoidance of vulnerability.
And it is in the long run the avoidance of connection.
And most people would take a lifetime of tiny frustration over one moment of clarity.
Risking things for a moment of clarity, which can turn into a lifetime of clarity and connection with people.
But I think it's important to give your friends the respect of who you really are.
And to hide yourself from your friends I don't know.
It's just kind of voluntarily locking yourself out of your own house.
Why?
I mean, I understand the emotional reasons and all that, but fundamentally, don't your friends want to know who you are all the way through?
And don't you want to know who they are all the way through?
I mean, if there's compatibility, great.
And if there's not, then find people who do value you deeply for who you are.
Yeah, I'm like shielding myself from the rejection, but then complaining about no one caring about what I say when I don't even actually tell them how important it is or open up.
I'm like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense probably in the context of early childhood, which is where these habits in general get formed.
So, no, I... I sympathize.
I really do.
I sympathize.
There's a funny thing about parenting that, in a way, there's nothing more dangerous than keeping your kids safe.
You know, there's a lot of this helicopter parenting and so on, and a lot of it comes from women and from moms, right?
I mean, moms carry the kids in their wombs, they breastfeed them, they get up at night sometimes, often when they're sick and so on.
I mean, there's a real connection and unity between mom and And kid, which I don't have.
I mean, I can't have.
I didn't grow her in my belly.
But I'm very aware that if I keep my daughter too safe, she's not going to learn how to handle risk.
And if she can't handle risk, she can't succeed in life.
And there is a lot of well-meaning hypercaution in parenting these days that's kind of crippling.
And I'm not saying you're crippled.
This is a more extreme scenario.
But if my daughter says, I love music, I love guitar, I mean, I'd be like, yeah, go for it.
What can we do?
What lessons do you need?
Can I write some lyrics?
What can we do?
What can you do?
Or what can I help you do?
Because I would trust my daughter enough to know that, first of all, if she puts the 10,000 hours in, she's going to succeed.
As you keep pushing forward in excellence, more and more people are dropping away.
So I would just say, look, if you're going to go for it, go for it.
And if you're not going to go for it, that's fine.
But if you're going to commit, then commit.
Because commitment will eliminate 99% of your competition.
You just keep going and keep doing what you're doing and people fall away.
It's the old 10-year overnight success.
And I trust my daughter enough to know that if she tries to make it and ends up not making it or doesn't like it or whatever, then she'll do something else.
You know, I was never going to be a gold banner full-time.
But I started off doing an English degree.
Then I went to two years of theater school in playwriting and acting.
And then I did an undergraduate in history.
And then I did a graduate degree in history, focusing on my master's on the history of philosophy.
And then I got a job as a computer programmer.
And then I co-founded a company.
And then I was a writer.
I was a novelist.
And I also put on a play I produced.
And...
And then I, after co-founding the company, I grew it and ran it for seven or eight years and sold it.
And then I took a year and a half off and did novel writing.
And then I got another job and I started doing this show.
And it just, it worked out.
I mean, that's the career path of somebody locked in a kaleidoscope who's currently having LSD visions and has a schizophrenic brain.
I get that that's not a linear path, but it all works out.
As long as you take feedback from the market and from your heart, it's all going to work out.
How the hell could I conceivably have guessed any of this stuff?
But the commitment is the success.
Because if you commit to something and you fail at it, that is a success because you walk away without regrets and with all the lessons learned, right?
Yep.
And so when you commit, you really can't fail.
You really can't fail.
The only failure is the failure to commit.
That's all it is.
I mean, I used to listen to this podcast called The Bugle with the guy from The Daily Show who's now got his own show.
And his friend was making some joke and then faltered halfway through.
And the John guy was like, no, no, no, no.
Commit.
Commit to the joke.
Don't stop now.
You can't back down.
That's John Oliver saying that.
It was a real...
It's true.
You know, it's that old Yoda thing, you know?
I'll try.
No.
Do or do not.
There is no try.
And I think that that's very true.
And that is the primal engine of the world, is commitment.
You know, the people who build a hospital, they commit to building a hospital, and they damn well build the hospital.
And all the problems along the way are crazy and horrible and so on.
They just, they commit.
They commit.
And if you continue to commit, the people with lesser commitments fall away, and eventually you get the gold because you're the last person standing.
You just commit.
And you commit until you Love it or hate it.
That's what you do.
You commit until you love it or hate it.
And I was...
I have some good acting ability.
I was never going to be a great actor.
And I couldn't be great at it.
I just didn't want to do it.
And for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here.
But I'm so glad that I went to theater school and committed it.
And then did my acting afterwards and so on.
I was so glad that I did that.
Because...
And there's no what-ifs, there's no regrets, and so on.
And in terms of being honest with my friends, I'm very glad I did all of that.
Very glad I did all of that.
And I don't mean to hijack what you're talking about, but a plan B is planning to fail.
And once you plan to fail, you will.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
And so plan to succeed, and if you fail, plan to succeed at something else without regret.
Without what-ifs.
Oh, I could have been a great actor.
Nope.
I couldn't have been a great actor for a variety of reasons, some of which are good and some of which are just whatever, right?
I mean, I have so many words of my own, spending my life speaking other people's words would not have been a good use of my capacities.
So when it comes, you know, if you grew up in a household where commitment was hedged, then I'm sure you grew up in a household without an excess of significant achievement on the part of your parents and others around.
And there's a whole clan of people who hedge their bets and don't commit and live small.
And I mean, I'm afraid if you're listening to this show, You're already not in that plan anymore.
It doesn't mean you can't, you know, have a great relationship with your family or anything, but that's just not where you're going to go.
If you're listening to this show, you want to break out, right?
You want to launch.
You want to be a rocket.
You want to get someplace.
You want to do something big.
That's just the nature of the beast.
That's what the show is all about.
Yeah.
And so my suggestion is disallow yourself the avoidance of manipulation.
Don't have that in your tool belt.
The moment you're tempted to manipulate, recognize that it's an insult to both of you and an insult to honesty.
And grit your teeth and speak your mind.
Yeah.
I just wanted to add, like, I never really self-reflected as much as, like, after hearing, like, your real-time relationships.
I listened through that and, like, My mom would always be there to listen to me, and I could talk with her about stuff.
And like I said, how she'd respond to my motives in that discouraging way, but trying to be helpful.
But then there was my dad, which would just...
He never really talked to me about anything.
And he still doesn't.
He'll insert himself in my life when he has to prove that I need to do something better or I'm going to do something wrong if I keep doing it this way.
You know what I'm saying?
It...
And I feel very threatened by it almost.
I'm afraid to talk to him because I never have conversations with him and whenever he does talk it's because he's telling me you shouldn't do music or you shouldn't quit your job or you shouldn't go do that.
There's never like a well why did you do that?
Or why do you want to do this?
So it's like A frustrating relationship like that.
And both my parents are like that to an extent.
And do your parents have a life that you want?
I do.
I mean, not in all...
Definitely not in most areas.
I mean...
I liked that my mom was home when I was growing up.
Like, that was really nice to have that.
No, no, I don't mean that.
I just mean in a sort of larger sense.
I mean, if you get your parents' life, will you be happy?
Oh, no, no.
Okay, see, that's important.
And it's so fundamentally important that I really need to underscore this.
Where's a place you don't want to go in the world?
Like a physical place?
Yeah.
The Middle East right now, or Africa, I guess.
Seems a little dangerous.
Liberia, let's say.
Yeah.
Alright.
I'm not comparing your parents' life to an outbreak of Ebola, but just as an analogy, I'm like, hey man, organizing a trip to Liberia.
Are you in?
And you'd be like, ah, not so much really.
And we're like, okay, but here's what you need to do to get to Liberia, right?
Here's all the steps.
I'm going to help you around.
Because it looks like you're not facing the right direction to start heading towards Liberia.
And you're also not packing the stuff.
You're going to need some mosquito repellent.
You're going to need some flamethrowers to clean the surfaces.
You know, you got...
But the reality is, does it really matter what advice I'm giving you on how to get to Liberia if you don't want to go to Liberia?
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
Right, so before you take people's advice, ask if you want their life.
Because whatever advice they're giving you, either it's the advice that they have themselves followed, which if they've ended up in a life you don't want, you don't want to follow that advice.
Or they haven't even followed their own advice, in which case they're advising you on something they've never even experienced.
And especially if they're not saying, do the opposite of what I did.
If they're not even open about that, then...
So under no circumstances should you take advice from someone whose life you don't want.
And again, I know nitpickers are going to be like, oh, so you don't want to be a dentist, so that means you don't have to...
No, that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about big life decisions.
Right?
If people are telling you, don't follow your passions, hedge your bets, keep it as a hobby, but don't ever commit, and they have lives you don't want, I'm afraid that their advice is not going to be helpful, to put it as nicely as possible, right?
Yeah.
Don't evaluate the advice.
First, evaluate the person.
If it's a trip to Liberia...
Their advice on how to get to Liberia isn't going to help you if you don't want to go to Liberia.
And if you don't want the life that someone has, then don't take their advice on how to get there.
In fact, the opposite rule might be helpful, right?
Yeah.
So if I take your advice and invert it, then I might end up with a completely different kind of life.
That sounds pretty good.
And it's tough, you know, because everybody wants to give advice, but very few people want to live a life that can evoke admiration or envy.
And envy is a perfectly helpful emotion.
Envy a thin person and lose weight.
I mean, it's fine.
It's fine as a motivator.
It doesn't last too long, but it's not bad to get you started.
But everybody wants to give advice, and few people want to evoke advice.
That's not a good way of putting it.
Advice should not be a push scenario.
It should be a pull scenario.
In other words, find someone you admire and ask them how they got there.
Find someone whose life is something you're enthusiastic about.
Not that you want their exact life, but something like it.
And find out how they got there.
In other words, people should be pursuing you for advice.
Whereas a lot of people want to just give advice...
In a push environment, without having the life of excitement and challenge and triumph that would make just about anyone want to listen to what they have to say.
Does that make any sense?
No, that really helps.
That's...
Yeah.
And so, again, honesty with your dad would be like, Dad, I just feel like we don't really talk about anything that's that important.
And I also feel like I'm not sure that I want the life that you have, but I'm still getting a lot of advice about how to live.
And I don't know how to square that.
So, you know, as honest as you can be.
Yeah.
Which is scary, sadly, for a lot of people in a lot of situations.
But I don't know.
The only fundamental commitment is to the truth.
Everything else is about yourself, about your thoughts, your feelings.
That's the only fundamental commitment that there is.
I'm not committed to philosophy.
I'm just committed to honesty, which I generally achieve.
Not always, but when I don't, I try to fix it.
But commit to honesty with yourself, with others, and reject manipulation.
Manipulation is a surrender to the prejudices of others.
Yeah, I've always tried manipulating even my own life just to avoid the thing instead of just being honest and upfront.
I want to move out as soon as I can just because I want to get away from it instead of just confronting it while I'm here.
I don't even try.
Well, once you commit to honesty, you'll be astounded at what it will do with your life.
And I think that's really the only thing that So the only thing, it's a very big thing.
But I'm afraid I'm going to have to wind this up because my voice is better, but it's still running kind of rough.
So thank you so much for all your calls.
I've got a minor correction.
You hope so much.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
You're very welcome.
Very welcome.
And I hope you'll listen back to all this.
I will.
I had a correction.
I was talking about Socrates recently, and I said that Socrates went to the Oracle of Delphi.
That's incorrect.
Thank you for people who have corrected me on that.
It was a friend of Socrates who went to the Oracle of Delphi and asked, Who was the wisest man in Athens and then told Socrates that.
It was not Socrates who went directly to the oracle.
It was a friend of Socrates who told him that.
So I just wanted to put out that correction according to the story.
It doesn't materially change the story, but it's an important detail, I guess.
So thank you to those who have sorted that out for me and appreciate having the opportunity to fix that up.
And thanks for a great, great show.
Of course...
We will put the links to the books discussed here below.
Please use the Amazon affiliate links, which we have in the description box below the videos.
I think, Mike, there are some short URLs for those, if you can dig those up in a sec.
And freedomainradio.com slash donate to the show always needs your help to get by and to survive.
And I think it's hugely important what we're doing for the world.
We are sorry that we're so booked far out for these call-in shows, but I really want to make sure...
We give people the proper time and attention that they really, really deserve for being so honest and open in a public space.
So have yourselves a wonderful week, everyone.
Mike, do we have that?
Yeah, the link I just pasted is all bollocksed up, but it's fdrurl.com, Amazon US or Amazon CA or Amazon UK, depending on which Amazon you want to go to, country specific.
But fdrurl.com forward slash Amazon and then US, UK or CA for Canada.
Yeah, use that for your shopping.
I mean, we get a couple of bucks and it's no additional cost to you.
But as always, the most important thing for us is subscriptions and donations and sharing of the videos.
