3039 Freedom of Choice, Straightjacket of Habits - Call In Show - August 1st, 2015
Introduction: Mike’s getting old.Question 1: I constantly have negative thoughts about a lot of the people around me. I recently caught myself have negative thoughts about strangers immediately after looking at them. How can somebody overcome irrationally negative thoughts towards other people and themselves? Question 2: I have learned to use my anger as a tool for success, but unfortunately, playing with this fire occasionally burns me as well. How can I become patient, calm and humorous relation to this insane world?Question 3: As a hypothetical situation: a government is created that is designed to last only 75 years – and then re-create itself based on the relevant policies and issues of the time. What would be the advantages to the individual living in such a situation? How would individual freedoms be affected? What about the infrastructures currently maintained by centralized governments that span generations? Closing: Major General BlahBlahBlah Returns!
Stefan Molyneux from the Radio Domain of Freedomness.
And yes, it is, in fact, your last chance to talk to young Mike.
Young Mike, are you on the phone?
Yeah, I'm on the phone.
Right.
Mike is about to turn 32 years old.
I said, Mike is about to turn 32 years old.
Let me turn down Matlock so I can hear you.
That Raymond Burr, never been replaced.
But no, it's important for people to understand that it's a tough question.
When does middle age start?
Mike, midnight.
That's when middle age starts.
You have to be through this earlier.
I don't quite understand that.
It's kind of like a third of a century.
So, you know, middle age.
For something to be in the middle, there must be at least three parts or at least an odd number of parts, right?
So life's divided into three parts.
32, you make it to 96.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
That's George Burns' territory.
And if you were a little older, you'd know who the hell...
I know George Burns, believe it or not.
George Burns?
Well, put him out!
Anyway.
Jesus Christ.
That's why he's a famous comedian.
It's going to be one of these shows, isn't it?
Is it ever not, one of these shows?
But so Mike is now entering into middle age.
Middle age, Mike.
Okay, a couple of pointers, a couple of tips.
First of all, random shit starts hurting.
No reason.
No reason why.
Stuff you used to be able to do, like lunge, turn quickly, and sleep at a slightly odd position, where you'd wake up and you'd say, oh man, my neck's a little stiff.
Oh, I'm screwed now.
By mid-morning, until you're middle-aged, by mid-morning, a little kink in your neck is completely fine.
But basically, what happens when you get into middle age is that you sleep a little funny and your neck turns into like a concrete accordion at a weird angle for about three weeks.
You know, just one little funny sleep.
Good to know.
Good to know.
Yeah, good to know.
Exercises that you used to be able to do and not even notice about it.
It's not like the...
It's a little tougher to recover.
You don't recover.
You just don't recover.
You don't get better.
There's a certain amount of time after your body says, fuck it, I'm done repairing.
I'm done repairing shit.
You keep breaking stuff, I'm on strike.
I'm done repairing all this stuff.
So my body becomes a government worker?
You're saying that's pretty much how it goes?
Yeah, or basically it's just like the victim in an abusive relationship.
Just give up.
Come to Chicago, teacher.
So that will happen.
That will happen.
It's just, your body just, I don't know what it does.
It's just like, ah, you know, I'm done.
All this rebuilding stuff, forget it.
Hey, we've had a good run.
It's alright.
My body found it exhausting to produce hair after the age of 16.
So let's just say I have a lot of testosterone.
That's really what I'm going for here.
But yeah, welcome to middle-aged Mike.
Maybe we'll do a whole show on this, but I have a list of complaints that pretty much goes on and on forever.
Plus, you remember that sleeping through the night because your bladder is bigger than a thimble?
That's all over.
It's all over.
Forget about it.
Well, you don't sleep through the night anyway.
But if you did, Mike's on a generally random...
it's like we have a branch office of Freedom Main Radio on the Martian moon of Phobos, which revolves very quickly.
We're always open!
Or closed.
Or open.
It's 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
It's breakfast time.
It's 4 a.m.
Time for dinner.
If you ever go to Mike's house, you know what he does?
He takes your watch or anything that tells time And he just crushes it in his hand.
And you now enter into the zone of no time in an attempt to stave off middle age, which now has arrived as of midnight tonight.
So if we have a long show, we will actually hear Mike's arteries suddenly harden.
Midnight...
They just suddenly go from flexible elastics into middle-aged pipe cleaners over the matter of a second or two.
Let me make a promise.
I'm going to try not to actually expire during the call-in show today.
That's my goal.
You selfish bastard.
Do you know what that would do for our ratings?
We don't have ratings.
We're not...
We're not on national television.
We don't have ratings.
You don't have ratings.
What do I get?
Oh, this part of the show was good.
Oh, this part of the show was not good.
I like this part.
This part was terrible.
What do you mean?
Oh, you don't have ratings.
Okay, so you're going to start throwing me under the bus.
All right, Steph.
Okay, here we go.
Man, you will never get a call quicker from Steph than when you've just listened to a new show he's recorded and you have some type of positive praise about it.
Like, it's...
But to him, it's like the bat signal.
The red phone next to him lights up.
He picks it up immediately.
Oh, man...
Well, let me tell you what it's like to receive a show from me.
So, let's say that you receive a show that took me an hour and a half, like it's an hour and a half show.
It's an hour and a half for you to record, but somehow the show winds up being nine hours long.
That's obvious.
That's very clear.
Well, I wouldn't want to go at normal speed because I have to slow it down to more brains, right?
So I have to slow it way the hell down.
But here's what happens, Mike.
You get the little bing.
It's in your inbox.
The show is ready.
And then what happens in Skype window?
Did you like it?
It's being typed from Steph over and over and over again.
It's still downloading.
Okay, but did you like it?
Did you like it?
Did you like it?
Oh, in fairness, you're not that bad.
But I will sometimes be passive-aggressive and not listen for a couple days just to weird you out.
Actually, that's not even passive-aggressive.
That's just outrightly homicidal.
Oh yes, you've worked very hard on this.
I haven't had an opportunity to check it out yet.
But I'm showing you to it sometime between mowing the lawn and going through my mail from the previous week.
Sorry, Steph.
I've got a Netflix account.
You lose.
I don't have a show that I'm watching now.
I used to, I worked through the entire prison break season after you talked about it for an endless amount of time.
And I was like, this is damn good.
And now that I don't have that, I got nothing to watch.
So any good recommendations, let me know, folks.
Actually, Mike just watches Prison Break in hopes of finding a good way to get out of your contract with Freedom Aid Radio.
So if I get tattoos of socialists on my head, will I get out of my Freedom Aid Radio contract?
No!
Is that a Peter Joseph tattoo on my shoulder?
We signed in blood and blazed you in the blood of a pregnant unicorn.
I'm sorry, it's all over.
No, and actually, I'm not watching anything.
I watched The Fall.
I did a review of it.
And I held my nose for the unbelievable man-hating misogyny in the show.
But yeah, I don't have anything that I'm watching at the moment.
So, you know, listeners, if you've got anything good that is easily available on Netflix, just let me know.
Don't give me any can't-see-it-in-Canada stuff, because that's just annoying.
Best show ever!
It's restricted due to your geography.
And don't do any VPN fussing funniness either.
They'll know that.
For everyone that suggests Breaking Bad, yeah, the show about the guy that gets sick, not exactly the show Steph wants to watch right now, so we're not going to do that one, but any other suggestions?
Hey, cancer survivor, want to watch a show about a guy dying of cancer?
No, really, because I thought that'd be my documentary, so no, not really, even though I hear the acting is great and Bryan Cranston is wonderful.
Oh, it is good.
It is really good.
And also, just to continue the Men who are classiness of donation requests, if you love what Mike does.
And Lord knows I do.
The show could not...
We simply couldn't do what we're doing without Mike.
I mean, he does fantastic amounts of research.
Of course, he handles emails.
He sets up the show.
He calls people for interviews, and he gives me feedback that is essential for me staying on course.
You know, the quality of the show, and Mike's been with us for a long time now, And the show has grown, and the quality of the show has grown enormously.
This is why we're kicking up around 4 million views and downloads a month.
A lot of that has to do with what Mike is doing.
And if you appreciate it, and we'll say donate to the show, and I certainly appreciate that.
But if you want to donate to Mike for his birthday, we would appreciate that too.
Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Please do me a favor, though, if you donate to Mike for his birthday...
Please suggest what he buys with it.
That's very, very important.
The more creative and perhaps illegal the suggestions, the more we will enjoy.
I don't need any more dildos!
Damn it, Steph!
I've told you this.
Stop with your covert donation suggestions.
That's because you simply keep refusing to use them all at once.
But no, I mean, send in some suggestions on what you think Mike should buy.
And no, he cannot purchase his freedom.
He remains in the FDR basement.
And we call it basement as a euphemism.
You know, we had someone that called in not too long ago asking if you could sell yourself into slavery.
That was actually a planted call.
Yeah, that was Mike.
That was Mike.
So yeah, he can't purchase his lip teeth because, again, the aforementioned unicorn.
But yeah, send in donations.
Say happy birthday, Mike.
Suggest what he could buy with it.
Oh, midnight!
Yeah!
Am I a pumpkin?
Do I all of a sudden turn into...
Hold off on the house of...
Hold off on...
Hold off...
You know what it is when you're young?
Last thing I'll say about this.
But when you're young, you're basically like, screw you, body.
I'm young, right?
I can stay up all night.
I can drink nothing but...
Mountain Dew and eat nothing but Rice Krispie Square.
Screw you, body.
I can caffeinate you until you're basically humming like a tuning fork with the energy of four sons together in an over-caffeinated, hyper-stimulated, massively alcohol and drugged corpse of youth.
And it's like, screw you.
I can do all of this stuff and still be good-looking and not gain weight.
And the body's like, yeah, I can wait.
Yeah, I know.
I'll be stored.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, smoke that thing.
Yeah, no problem.
I'll be storing all this shit up.
And 32, man.
It's payback.
Payback time.
We've been waiting.
We've been absorbing all these bullets and pretending there are no bullet holes and no bleeding.
But you will spontaneously bleed from every single pore by the time you reach 32.
The boomerang will decapitate your youthful health, and it's all ours from now on.
Boy, I'm feeling optimistic about my future after this run through.
Jesus Christ.
Excellent.
So let's get the last good show in.
While Mike is still here.
If you want to donate for my arthritis meds, I appreciate it.
Thanks, Steph.
Well, up for us today is Michael.
Michael wrote in and said, I consistently have negative thoughts about a lot of the people around me.
I recently caught myself having negative thoughts about strangers immediately after looking at them.
I will see what they look like and immediately analyze what type of person they are and mentally criticize their appearance.
I am actively noticing and working on not being so quick to judge.
I think I know why I am doing this, but I'm curious to see what your opinion or Steph's opinion is on this issue.
I also know that there are some childhood environmental factors that affect this as well.
I also know that some of the thoughts are logical.
I also catch myself criticizing myself.
My question would ultimately be how to overcome the irrationality, negative thoughts towards other people and or yourself.
Now Mike, he was asking you first, right?
I was in there.
I was in there at some point.
Yeah.
Why do you think that might be, Mike?
I don't know.
Does Mike communicate on a regular basis?
I don't know.
That's right.
Is there like a secret handshake?
Does he have a webcam pointed at your scowling email reading face?
Why do you think he's asking you how to overcome the challenges of loving humanity?
Well, as Michael will actually know, you're only allowed to join the Illuminati if your name is Michael.
That's very important.
And, um...
No, all we do in the Illuminati is we criticize other people while negatively criticizing ourselves at the same time.
But no.
Alright, so Mike, are you on the line?
Yes, I am.
Now, did you want an answer for Mike here first, or for me, or what?
What's your pleasure?
I'll go with Mike.
Yeah, I think that's a good pleasure.
You go to the master's.
Might as well get a good answer out of me before I, you know, age very rapidly.
I would say a lot of...
If your judgments tend to be accurate, looking at people, and you're able to make snap judgments as a negative connotation, but micro judgments, you know, the Malcolm Gladwell blink thing, if you're able to do that, my god, that could save you a whole lot of time.
Hassle, frustration, stress.
You know, if you're able to identify someone that may be a dick from across the room, You can move your trajectory so you don't actually cross their path, which is, I hear, pretty useful.
So if your judgments are accurate, you know, that can be a helpful skill.
Yeah, I usually do find them to be pretty accurate, but then again, I feel like it kind of backfires because, like, a lot of people around me I have these negative judgments towards, and they may be accurate, but it just happens so frequently that it just feels like a constant negative thought surrounds me.
who are constantly annoying you, then you can adjust your thoughts, that's certainly one possibility, but there's only a certain amount of distance you can go with that.
only a certain amount of distance you can go with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Right?
I mean, like if you're, if you're in, let's say, reduced circumstances, then you can get used to them and so on.
And if you're not getting as much as you want to eat, you can get used to that.
But at some point, you just need to get some food, right?
So, you know, there's this thing in Hamlet, like there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
And that's nonsense.
You know, that's just not true.
I mean, there's lots of things that are bad outside of what you think.
You can make the best of a bad situation, but that doesn't mean you want that situation in the first place.
So if you are surrounded by people who are annoying you, I'm not sure that lowering your standards is even possible.
You have to either get them to act better or you have to get people in your life who don't annoy you.
Is that fair to say?
Mm-hmm.
The purpose of these emotions is most likely action.
Okay.
I'm kind of in a tough spot, though, because there's only so much control over the environment.
So that kind of removes one of the variables.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on.
What's the limit of your control over your social environment?
What's the limit there?
Well, I'm currently, well, I actually have made quite some change recently.
I moved out from my, my parents are divorced, so I moved out from my mom's house where my sister is living because both of them live extremely, they have extremely hysterical behavior.
And so I was just having constant negative thoughts towards them.
I can go off on the whole thing on that, but I recently got, well actually I got kicked out from them, so now I'm living with my dad.
My dad self-medicates a lot with alcohol, and then I currently have an internship at a government shipyard where basically all the people who couldn't make it in the private sector Go to the shipyard where they can basically get paid and not have any negative repercussions of negative work behavior.
It's very unionized and there's just overall a low quality of people.
I work in the engineering facility and even there it's like these people wouldn't last a day in the private sector.
I mean, I am working there also, but this is just for one summer, just so I can kind of gain some work experience.
But I am moving out as soon as possible.
I'm going to go for a different internship next summer, but this is my only opportunity for an internship, so I decided to take it even knowing, even having my prejudices about a government work environment.
And I have a I've had a lot of shitty friendships, and I've recently kind of just broke them all off in hopes that some better ones will fill the gaps or fill the vacuum.
And I have some decent friends now, ones that I met at school that I... But I don't really...
Like right now, I'm living in my hometown during the summer, and I don't really have any friends around here because I kind of...
I kind of moved away.
I kind of detached, and I also...
Well, they kind of kicked me out, too, so it's...
I feel good about that, but I have made some changes towards trying to get rid of the shitty people out of my environment, but there's limitations on it, I feel.
You sound kind of down.
Yeah, I've been going through a lot.
Anything you want to share?
Yeah, I don't mind sharing.
I have no problem at all sharing.
I just wasn't sure how much you guys want to hear.
Hey, it's your show, man.
This is the listener part of the show, so whatever you want to talk about, I'm happy to hear.
Yeah, that's awesome.
My parents had a shitty relationship from the get-go.
My dad treated my mom like shit from day one.
They met in high school.
They were together for 10 years before marrying, and my mom was telling me a story where they'd be at weddings, and people would be getting around them, and there'd be elderly couples at the wedding saying, oh, Matt, when are you going to ask Kathy to marry you?
And my mom would answer, when he finds the right girl, or something like that.
And then eventually, after 10 years, my mom was like, either you marry me or we're done.
And so they broke up for a couple days, maybe even a month, and then They got back together and decided to get married.
And nothing sows the seeds of future doom in a relationship like an ultimatum.
Yeah.
So eventually, obviously that's an almost worst case scenario for foundation for a relationship.
So that progressed after 20 years decided to have their first kid, my older sister.
And then three years later they had me.
And from the get-go, well, my sister was extremely nice to me and she treated me like her little baby.
This is what I was told when I was younger.
And then as I grew up, she started bullying me constantly and just constant verbal put-downs and just trying to hurt me as much as I can.
This was from a very young age.
I went to a private school.
So my mom was trying to avoid me from being in a shitty environment.
And it turns out that this was an extremely bad environment.
Because I was pretty intelligent and I was really good at using my language skills to hurt people and bring them down because I knew exactly, I knew what triggers to use and what to actually make them, what to say to make them hurt the most.
And I believe this is a trickle down from my parents' shitty relationship to my sister, to my sister to me.
And so all the shit my sister gave me, I took out other people at my school and I caused a lot of harm.
I forced, well, I mean, a big thing that I focused on was people's weight and I called the girl fat and I made her cry and I don't remember exactly what I said but I'm sure it was extremely mean and it wasn't just like you're fat.
It was probably something that was extremely insulting and it hurt her so bad that she had to leave the school and go somewhere else.
I just remember I have all these thoughts of just constantly bullying people and I was in like a I guess the popular group and the only way you rose to the top was by being the best at insulting people so people would try to insult you and you'd take that and you'd insult them better and that's how you kind of went to the top of the ladder and so and I was the same people that was in this group I was friends with till Most of them I was almost friends with until two years ago.
And then last year I kind of separated more.
And then this summer I've completely separated from them.
And this kind of bullying...
Sorry, have they remained that dysfunctional?
Like they've remained still insults of the way you...
No, everyone's kind of grown out more of the insulting, but it still happens.
It's not as intense as what it used to be, but it's kind of grown out of that little, but it's still present, but there's still extremely dysfunctional people.
We used to smoke a lot of weed and drink a lot of beer, and even today, they drink on access.
Now, every day, they smoke a lot and drink a lot, and I stopped smoking and drinking and got out of that environment.
But...
So it wasn't until like middle of high school where I kind of had a wake-up call and was like this isn't the kind of person I want to be so I kind of I immediately like stopped like bullying people and it still happens here and I mean it still happened after that but that was like the main that was like the main like I looked in the headlight or like in the view in front of me and there's like two paths I could go down I could either be keeping a shitty person and I could try to be the best person I could be and It has improved a lot,
and this show is the main reason why I'm staying sane.
I really can't thank you guys enough for what you guys do, because you have saved me.
You can't even count the years that you guys have saved me.
You've put me on such the right track, and obviously it's not completely you, and it's somewhat my decisions, but I really don't know what I would do without your guys' show.
That's great.
It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to hear.
Thank you so much.
So my sister, she's not very intelligent.
I could just say she's not intelligent, but I guess I'll give examples.
She doesn't even know how to read an analog clock.
She doesn't even know how to do basic fractions or decimals.
She can't talk about anything emotional.
Anything she says, it can't be anything emotional.
She has these huge barriers towards speaking about how she feels or anything like that.
And when she does, it usually comes out in a crying storm.
I'm kind of fogging up here.
Yeah, I just completely lost my train of thought out of nowhere.
It's funny because you're talking about your sister's lack of intelligence and then you fog out even while talking about her.
That's how infectious this stuff can be, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I really don't...
Well, you said that your mom and your sister, I think you said that they have sort of hysterical...
Yes.
What does that mean?
What does that look like?
That's not a good way of putting it on my part.
My mom says she tries to be a really good person.
For the most part, she's extremely nice.
Neither of them care about being rational or consistent.
They just go with it and hope that they're on the right path.
They don't have any sort of standards to No, I'd like you to...
Back the truck that drove over female responsibility back a little bit.
Because there's like a little bump there.
It's like, oh, what did we hit?
Female responsibility.
Just keep driving.
No, no, don't turn around.
Don't look in the rearview mirror.
I can't believe I'm doing this.
Was that a wreck?
I mean, you know, she's really, for the most part, she's really nice.
You know, I mean, she's hysterical.
And you said that she enables your sister's bad habits like your sister's bad habits just came out of nowhere.
Right?
And in nowhere are there choices.
Right?
And, oh, she's nice to strangers.
Yeah.
I mean, that's insulting.
I mean, the reason why abuse...
I'm not saying your mom's an abuser.
I'm just talking about abusive people in general.
But the reason that abusive people are nice to strangers is to further humiliate their victims.
Yeah.
I can be nice.
I'm just not being nice to you.
I know exactly how to be nice.
I'm just not going to be nice to you.
My mom was, like, ridiculously charming when it came to, like, waiters and people in stores and all that...
But when it was people she had power over, right?
Yeah, and it kind of, it doesn't help that, like, my parents are pretty well off, so that they can, they provide me with, like, a ton of material stuff, and so that doesn't help because it's the kind of incentive where if I kind of move away from them or kind of grow distance from them, then I won't get as much resources, so...
I'm kind of latched on to that.
Oh, boy.
Oh, you didn't.
So, basically, you're for sale.
Yeah.
And how do you think that's going to work out for you in the long run?
Oh, it's not good, but right now it's...
Well, no, you just said it was bad.
And look, I'm not saying move away.
I'm just like, you know...
I mean, you're being pretty frank, but you've got to be very clear with yourself that, you know, if it's like, well, I like stuff...
So I'll put up with bad behavior because of nice stuff.
Well, that's what it is.
I mean, I'm fully conscious of it, and I... I completely acknowledge it, but it's like, my parents are like, oh, we'll pay for all your groceries at school, no matter how much they cost, we'll buy you a car, we'll buy you a dirt bike.
So it's like all this stuff, and it's like, right now, I can't afford to, well, it'd be probably possible to afford an apartment of my own, but it's much easier to have my parents pay for my school apartment and pay for all my stuff during the summer, or not all my stuff, but pay for a lot of my stuff because it's just convenient for me, and I know that, like, I could just completely detach from them and not take any of the resources, and Hang on, hang on, hang on.
False dichotomy, man, right?
Because you're saying, well, I get a dirt bike and I get a car and I get all this stuff, right?
Or I could take absolutely nothing.
I mean, this is a bit of a false dichotomy, right?
I mean, you could take the minimum that you need to get through school and so on and not other stuff that you don't really need.
You know, I didn't have a dirt bike going through university.
I still did okay.
You know, it wasn't hell.
It's definitely not a prerequisite, but I mean, as of right now, I pay for almost all my stuff.
I mean, obviously, like I said, they paid for my car and my motorcycle, but...
And your groceries and your school.
Yeah, exactly.
And your apartment.
Yeah, so I paid for all my...
So hang on, hang on, hang on.
Car, dirt bike, groceries, school, apartment...
Okay, what are you paying for?
Gumballs?
I'm not sure what you're saying here.
I pay for my clothes and I pay for a lot of toys that I don't need.
Okay, unless you're like Louis XVI, I don't think that your clothes budget is going to be a complete bankbuster, right?
Yeah, it's not.
And toys you don't need, so you pay for very little.
And again, I'm not criticizing.
I agree.
You're kicking up some stuff that just doesn't...
It doesn't follow logically what you're saying, right?
I see what you're saying.
I mean, I'm not sitting here trying to say that all the stuff that they pay for is not necessary for me to be able to survive on my own or whatever, but it is convenient.
And not all the stuff they buy me, like I said, is necessary, but it is like a plus, I guess.
But is it a plus?
Is it a plus?
I mean, I know that's a tough question because when people come along and offer you free stuff, Chicago, right?
I mean, people tend to really swarm.
It's like, wow, the bank truck just spilled over and there's $100 bills flying through the air.
And how many people are like, no, that's going to degrade my work ethic.
I'm staying right here on the couch and continuing to learn Spanglish.
I mean, no, they rush out and try and grab what they can.
But the question is, Is it really the best thing in the long run for you?
That's hard to say.
I really don't feel like it's having a negative effect on my life.
It very well could be, but I personally don't see a direct negative correlation between it.
I work 40 hours a week.
I'm even taking up a second job that I quit for this other job.
I'm going to work back there, so I'm probably working 40 hours a week.
And I build a lot of electrical projects on the side, so it's not like I... I have a really strong work ethic, and I really work hard towards my goals, so it's not like I just sit on the couch and just hang out because I have this stuff.
It's like, this is just stuff on the side, and it's nice to have, but I'm not losing sight of what I want to do in life.
Okay, well, I certainly don't want to make up problems where there aren't any, so we'll put that one aside.
Now, when you look at people and you feel critical of them, what are the criticisms that run through your head?
Just give me an example.
I would say the biggest one I think would probably be weight.
I think when I see someone who's heavily overweight, I think how do you let yourself get like that?
Do you live in the States?
Yeah.
Yeah, because I heard there were a couple of overweight people.
Wyoming?
Texas?
I can't remember which state, but there were.
No, I'm just kidding.
Of course, a third of America within 20 years is projected to be diabetic.
Yeah, I live in northern U.S., so it's not as bad, but it's still really frequent.
But overall, I don't know.
I personally try to live a really healthy life, and I work out a lot.
And I know it's other people's lives to make...
I mean, other people should make their own decisions for their own lives, but I personally don't see why you want to live that kind of life.
Well, the thing is that they're not making decisions for their own lives, because America is half-socialist.
Which means that they're consuming resources that if they weren't fat, they wouldn't be consuming.
Right?
Like they're consuming healthcare resources.
In particular, even the fabric of their clothes has to be bigger.
And they drive up insurance rates for everyone now that you can't get individually personalized insurance anymore.
So it's not, you know, people don't make these decisions in isolation.
In a very free society, then this would obviously be Less important.
But the reality is, too, even if we took all of the financial considerations out of it, people who follow unhealthy lifestyles are just setting up everyone else's heartbreak, right?
Because they're going to get sick young if they've got kids, and they're really fat, then they can't play with those kids really very well.
Yeah.
And, you know, they might...
They're going to die young, or could die young, and leave their kids without parents, and so on.
So, the financial considerations that even outside their circle of friends and family, there are negative repercussions to people's bad health choices.
But even if we take all those financial considerations, in a free society, there'd be much less.
But...
It's still the heartbreak waiting to happen, right?
Somebody's going to have a heart attack.
Somebody's going to have a stroke.
Somebody's going to get diabetes.
And then someone has got multiple sclerosis and has a tough time seeing a doctor because all of these people who made themselves fat are...
We're clogging up the healthcare system.
I'm not saying judge them as bad.
I'm not saying anything like that.
But I wouldn't necessarily say that it's completely irrational to have some resentment towards people who are making really bad healthcare choices, particularly because of the laws of the land.
You're bound up to pay for their health.
Just a tiny rant off to the side.
I met with my daughter.
Like I literally would like to have a bullhorn pointed at just about every parent I see and just yell at them, stop giving your children so much sugar.
Like what is the matter with these people?
I was eating at a place the other day and the kids had these literally like 12 inch tall milkshakes before dinner.
Oh, that's sugar and that's fat.
And then, you know, sure as sunrise, what happens when the food comes?
I'm full.
Yeah, I was at the grocery store the other day and there's a huge bin of chocolate bars.
And they're not just these small Hearst chocolate bars.
They're the size of your laptop.
And I see this kid run over to it, pick one up, which is bigger than the size of his head.
And he looks at his mom and he goes, I want one of these.
And his mom's like, yeah, sure, you can have one of those.
Yeah, just make sure you eat it before we get home.
No, and like everywhere we go.
I mean, I have a tiny weakness for a flat white latte.
You go past Starbucks and you see these kids with these giant juices.
And I don't know on what planet parents look at a juice and say, that's healthy.
Let's take all the sugar in a piece of fruit.
Let's take out all the fiber that slows down that absorption of sugar and inject it straight into our children's eyeballs.
I mean, God almighty, everywhere I go, it's, oh my God, I mean, just like, stop putting Nutella in your children's sandwiches for lunch and thinking that you're giving them nuts and milk.
I mean, what is wrong with people?
So, do you want to hear an example of a recent conflict we had that's the reason why or part of the reason why I moved out or got kicked out?
Well, hang on, no, because we're still on the...
Yes, but I mean, so the overweight thing, I can sort of understand it.
And of course, this ties back into what you said was your big issue.
Now, why do you think fat is the issue?
For some people, it's smoking.
For some people, it's being overweight.
For other people, it's people who take on really risky lifestyles.
You know, like philosopher podcast or whatever.
But why do you think it's fat for you?
I think you know the answer.
How what much?
Does your mother weigh?
Bingo.
Right.
So, my mom...
After having me, my mom gained a lot of weight and...
She was really self-conscious about it, and she would always say, I hate being this overweight.
How much did she gain?
What?
How much did she gain?
At this point, she was probably 20 or 30 pounds overweight.
She was saying, wow, I'm really going to lose this weight.
I used to be a twig in high school, and I hate being overweight.
I'm going to lose it off.
I'm going to change my diet, and then what do you know?
Nothing.
She started a diet thing, lasted a week.
And went back to her old bad habits and then What are our bad habits?
Drinking four giant diet sodas a day.
They're diet, so they're good for you.
Yeah, they're not, right?
Everybody knows that.
That was one of my last things.
I'm not a big pop drinker, but that was one of the last things I had to say goodbye to was diet soft drinks.
I didn't have a lot, but I'd have one a week or whatever.
It's not good for you.
Your body thinks that it's sugar because of the taste.
And the aspartame is questionable and, you know, I'm sorry, it's just one of these things that's best left in the cupboard.
And she also ate a lot of fast food, too.
Right.
So, and then over the course of, like, another few years, it was, like, the same behavior over again.
Like, I'm this much more overweight now.
I want to lose the weight.
I want to work hard to work out and change my diet.
And, well, I'm always like, why don't you just quit drinking soda?
And I was always like...
It was always a huge thing where it wasn't possible.
And eventually, here we are today where she's probably at least 60 pounds overweight, if not more.
It's hard for me to judge it, but she's extremely overweight and is probably more than 60.
But she still drinks soda and stuff and still eats fast food and whatnot.
Any exercise going on?
No, no exercise, because her excuse is that she needs someone to exercise with her.
She needs a partner.
So she can't will anything.
Because you keep using the term habits, and I would suggest that you use the word choices.
Yeah.
Because habit sounds like some exoskeleton robot that moves people around and makes them do stuff.
They just have these habits.
Grrr, grrr, I'm trapped in these habits.
This habit suit is moving me towards the fast food place.
This habit suit is slapping my face away whenever I look at the salad bar, right?
I mean, they're just choices, right?
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree 100%.
I just want to get some facts in here.
More than a third of US adults are obese.
Not overweight, obese.
That's 78.6 million people.
Still better than Mexico.
The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. was $147 billion in 2008 U.S. dollars.
Medical costs for people who are obese is over $1,400 a year higher than those of normal weight.
So it's bad, and you've got to pay, and I've got to pay.
You know, the obese thing is like the single mom thing.
And of course, it's so often related, right?
The biggest problem for poor people...
In America, it's fat, right?
Like, I mean, Bernie Sanders the other day was talking about, well, you know, minimum wage only pays starvation wages.
It's like, man, starvation wages might be a step up for the poor.
Because the biggest problem poor people have is obesity.
And, you know, single moms always say, well, you know, it just happened, you know, the birth control failed and couldn't choose any better.
No, I... I mean, the habit suit jumped them on a penis.
Next thing you know, that pops them up.
And it's the same thing, right?
So yeah, your mom is never gonna lose this weight.
Yeah, and you'll love this too.
She's on a whole bunch of medication because actually it's the slow metabolism that's the problem.
So this means that if she ever gets off those pills, she's gonna blow up even more.
Right.
Yeah, no, I had a friend who used to eat veal parmigiana with pasta, like a big giant honking bowl and then have ice cream.
And he was like, it's my medication that's making me gain weight.
It's like, yeah, it's weird how that medication somehow correlates or combines with a 3,500 calorie dinner and mysteriously you gain weight.
You know, when the pill hits four pounds of fat, weirdly enough, you seem to gain weight.
I don't know.
It's just...
It's sad.
I don't...
I don't...
You know, I've gained...
I gained a little bit of weight, particularly when I was working in my 30s and...
Yeah, nothing major, 20 pounds or whatever.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'll stop this and pull back and whatever, right?
But the vast...
You know, like...
People who are overweight...
You know, this is why it's such an important thing to nip in the bud.
You know, I crept up a little bit and I'm like, oh, okay, change and toss out all the desserts and chips and cookies and chocolate and just stop eating that stuff and exercise more.
It's just, you know, you've got to adjust as you get older because I wasn't doing anything different.
In my 30s than I was in my 20s, I was just in my 30s.
Hey, Mike, remember that?
I'm talking about that, right?
I'm taking notes.
Food that used to pass through you like gamma rays, you know, they just become like, it's like basically getting a cannon of jellyfish shot at your ass.
They just stick and grip.
Hey, I have a subscription to that website.
Cannons of jellyfish for your ass.
Let's see that again in slow motion.
32, blooper, blooper, full Kim Kardashian workup.
No, nothing changed.
It's just my body changed.
My metabolism slowed down.
If you do the same thing in your life, if you don't change anything, aging will just give you a pound or two a year.
You have to be on a downward slope of food and you have to be on an upward slope of exercise in order to maintain your weight because your metabolism slows down, your body gets less efficient.
I didn't really do anything really differently.
It's just that over...
I just gained some weight because my body was aging.
And then you're like, oh, change.
Change all this stuff.
So it is one of these things that is...
Once people have got the weight on, I think I read a study that in terms of losing weight and keeping it off, I think it was about 1% of people were able to do that.
And I don't know, again, I've had Dr.
Robert Lustig on this show talking about sugar.
I'm certainly no nutritionist, but I think it's because people don't get that if you're overweight and you want to lose your weight and keep it off, you have to change everything and never look back.
Everybody knows that kind of deep down.
Like you can't lose some weight and then go back to the way you were.
You'll end up gaining more weight back because as you lose the weight, your body shifts into starvation mode and starts to panic.
And then every extra calorie it gets, it stores as fat because it thinks you're going to run out of food.
And so if you're on a losing weight trajectory and then you resume your old habits...
You end up fatter than when you started, which is what generally happens with these sorts of situations.
I'm sorry, I don't get into all the fat thing, but it is a huge problem in society.
It's very expensive for everyone, and it seems to be getting worse insofar as, you know, like in the 70s and the 80s, there was this anti-fat, this government-driven anti-fat campaign.
You know, fat makes you fat.
You know, it seems to make sense.
It doesn't seem to be quite as true as people think, but fat makes you fat.
And so everybody kind of went crazy on low-fat.
Right?
And the problem with low fat is it's low taste.
So what do you do?
People went low fat.
And of course, as women went back to work, they went low fat and processed food because, you know, it's hard to make food from scratch when both parents are working full time.
And so you went with frozen food and you went with low fat food.
And basically...
What you have to do is you have to then pump things up with sugar or fructose glucose or some of the other 80 different pseudonyms for sugar that is in the American diet.
Partly the result of feminism drove women out of the kitchen into the workforce which means that you end up with frozen food that only tastes good when you add sugar into it.
There are about 600,000 food items in America That you can buy at various grocery stores and so on.
And do you know almost 80% of them have sugar added?
Are you asking me?
No, no.
I mean, I'm just saying.
I said basically it's a rhetorical.
And did you know almost 80% of these foods have sugar added?
I wouldn't be surprised.
I read a lot of labels.
You always see sugar or cane sugar as an added ingredient.
Right.
And so the amount of sugar shock that people's bodies are in is pretty terrifying.
And it's hard to avoid.
I mean, yeah, of course, you can shop around the outside of the store, as they kind of say, but it's just in things you'd never imagine.
Tomato sauce.
Does that really need to be sweet?
I'm just waiting for, like, sugar-encrusted oranges.
You beat the deal.
I mean, it's just wild.
And, of course, the amount of stuff where people say, it's low-fat, and people are like, great!
Then it won't make me fat.
And then you read the second ingredient, it's like sugar.
It's like, well, that's worse for you than fat.
I remember I ate an entire box once of, like, fat-free diet cookies that had all kinds of calories, but they were no fat.
No fat, you see.
So you could eat as many as you want, and it would be totally okay.
It wasn't totally okay.
It wasn't okay at all.
No, but the great thing about those things is that you'll die...
But you won't decompose.
It's basically like Egyptian mummification because you're then so full of formaldehyde or whatever the hell is in those things that even the insects and the maggots are like, no, no, I can't.
I mean, my hips already look pretty big because I'm a maggot.
I can't bite into this sugar-free dead guy's skin because that's garbage.
Human beings have turned into junk food that even the lower invertebrates inject.
Yeah.
Sorry about that little rant.
And it's our selected stuff, right?
I mean, as I've talked about in the Gene Wars presentations, our selected stuff is just, you know, eat whatever tastes good in the moment.
And it's the K-selected people who...
I remember in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, there's a fantastic description of a farmer who, you know, eats his apples and drinks his milk in the morning and goes out and works.
He's just like a K-selected guy where it's all about restraint and But in the R-selected world, it's not about that.
And you probably came out K for whatever reason or grew up K and came out of an R-selected environment.
Sorry if this means nothing to you, but I just want to put it in there.
I'm still working on part three.
I haven't made that connection, but it's something to think about.
So, okay, so the obesity thing, is it common in the people around you?
It's just my mom.
My dad has a really thin figure, and for him, weight has always been a huge thing.
He has a really negative thought towards fat people also.
So when my mom started gaining weight, they kind of went to living in separate beds, kind of, and the relationship just kind of went downhill from there.
When I was younger, I had a little bit of a stomach.
I wasn't overweight or anything like that, but it was just a little bit of a stomach.
My sister would always bully me about my weight.
Eventually, my dad also was like, go aside and start doing laps.
He'd make me run around the house and try to lose the weight.
Which is a terrible way of losing weight, right?
I mean, running is, you know, I've just run for an hour.
I've had a piece of toast with jam.
It's all come back, right?
I mean, exercise is a good supplement, but I think it's just down to food intake.
But anyway, go ahead.
And they kind of, they forced me into sports.
Like, my mom would kind of trick me, and she would, she'd be like, oh, we're going to go to this place, or try this out.
And then when I get there, it'd actually be like a soccer practice, and then I would...
I would have to start playing soccer with the rest of the strangers and it was like a huge thing where I lost a lot of trust because she kind of tricked me into playing these sports or just physically forced me to go play the sports.
So I had no interest in playing basketball or soccer or anything like that but she just kind of forced me into the gym or tricked me into the gym and told me to go play.
This is the woman who says that she couldn't possibly lose weight because she needs a partner, the planets need to align, the Nightingale needs to sing Bohemian Rhapsody, the gym needs to be open at 3 to 3.05am in the morning, and I need to be finally finished mastering Mandarin, then I'll be ready to exercise.
But you, you get tricked into and forced into it, right?
Yeah, and in high school, she even did this up to high school.
My sophomore year, I wanted to do some UFC stuff, and There was a gym that was in my center.
Wait, I'll cut fried chicken?
Hang on.
Just kidding.
I'm just tweaking my...
Sorry.
So she's like, oh yeah, they're going to have a practice night.
You should go down and see if you want to join in.
And she asked me about wrestling.
She's like, oh, do you want to do wrestling?
Well, before this, she asked me if I wanted to do wrestling.
I said, no, I didn't have any interest in doing that.
And then she got me down there and she planned the whole thing out so that there's actually wrestling practices going on.
And she knew some of the people who were...
She knew the coach a little bit.
And she knew some people who were in the wrestling team.
So I got forced down.
And I thought I was the only person that was going to be UFC. But I found out that it was actually wrestling practice that night.
And she said, oh, now you're going to go try wrestling.
How come we're not hitting each other with chairs?
And how come no one's wearing a kilt?
What's going on?
Can we get a chick out here to hold up a sign?
Anything.
Anything.
I want to see who responds to that before I get into the wrestling thing.
I mean...
I did end up getting really good at it.
I went to States and stuff, but it was just the fact that, like, the thing is, her excuse is, like, I actually ended up really liking it, so that kind of justified it, but in the end, it's still just trickery.
It's just, like, she just says one thing and it's actually another.
Yeah, I mean, just, you know, you take your mom out for her birthday and tell her you're going to the Cheesecake Factory and then take her to Curves, right?
I'm sure she'd be really appreciative of it.
You know, it's worth noting, too, you mentioned amateur wrestling, and I know weight is a big issue within the confines of amateur wrestling as well, depending on how much you're going to be in, getting down to the appropriate weight, cutting weight before a meet.
I mean, it's a pretty big thing.
I only did it for two years because after that, I was just becoming too stressful with weight because I was only like 120 pounds my sophomore year, and I had to lose 10 pounds to be in the 110-pound weight class, and I was already like...
Wait, sorry, sophomore year, how old were you?
I was maybe six.
I think I was 15.
You were 15 and you were buck 10.
Wow.
Yeah, I started the season off at 120.
I had to be down to 110 for my weight class.
I'm a pretty short person.
I hope so.
Otherwise, you're officially a javelin.
You are a palm tree.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it was really stressful with weight because, you know, a lot of people would...
I wasn't even part of this.
We'd spend an entire week...
Okay, go ahead.
We would spend one week training, losing the weight.
We'd have our meat on the weekend.
And after the weekend, we'd go to a Chinese buffet and just binge.
And then it was just from one extreme to the other.
It was just pretty unhealthy because it was so stressful losing the weight that it's like...
After going through such extremes to keep the weight off and get down to that weight, then you want to eat as much food as you can afterwards.
Oh, yeah.
For me, it would be like if I'm that hungry and I'm looking at a guy in a onesie, he starts shimmering to start to look like one of those Warner Brothers pieces of chicken with steam coming off him and stuff.
Like, I'm biting.
I don't care.
Call me a cannibal.
I'm going in.
All right.
As far as that sort of criticism goes, I'm of two minds, and I don't have any particularly great answers to it.
And I'm of two minds because I recognize that people who are obese probably didn't have great childhoods.
I assume your mom would be in that category.
I mean, you could be wrong, of course.
So they didn't have great childhoods.
I was just talking about this with my daughter today.
So, you know, I have sympathy because they had bad childhoods, which is a necessary, it seems, but not sufficient requirement for this kind of dysfunction.
And...
How...
Where would you say your mother ranks on the bell curve or smartitude?
Where is she on the IQ curves?
Intellectually, she's probably...
She's probably a 6 or a 7.
Emotionally, she's probably a 4 or a 5.
Actually, probably a 4.
That could be even conservative, too.
So, I don't know.
I was much more into everyone has a choice.
When I was younger, I was even more into everyone has a choice when I began this show.
But as, you know, you continue to square off and try to widen your eyeballs into these sandblasts of endless evidence of people rejecting choice as if it doesn't even exist.
You know, for them, lecturing a lot of people about free will is sort of like trying to convince a worm he can fly.
It just doesn't seem to...
Now, whether they have a choice as to whether it can take or they don't have a choice as to whether they can take, whether they really have choices or not, I don't know.
I mean, I would guess, and it comes back down to something I talked about years ago called the billion dollar test, right?
If somebody offered your mom a billion dollars to eat well for a month, you know, could she do it?
Would she have to quit drinking soda?
Yes.
A billion dollars.
Uh...
Maybe two or three.
Two or three billion dollars?
Yeah.
No, seriously.
She'd do it for a billion, right?
Yeah.
Right.
You tell someone with cerebral palsy to not have cerebral palsy and you give them a billion dollars.
They can't do that, right?
Yeah.
I mean, she does know she has a choice to do it.
She knows it's her choice for being fat.
I mean...
There's some parts where she kind of blames the slow metabolism, but she does acknowledge that it's her choice to do this.
Yeah, you know, it's funny how 30 years of no exercise results in a slow metabolism.
I mean, she's basically devolving into a tree sloth as far as her inner workings go, right?
Yeah.
I mean, if you find her just hanging by her feet in trees eating fruit, you know that she's crossed over, but...
So, I mean, I sympathize because, yeah, it's a tough childhood.
You know, she had a tough childhood.
Sorry, go ahead.
It's also like, I mean, being in public with her is kind of embarrassing, too.
And it sounds mean, but, I mean, you know, it's kind of like, I'm not sure if it's just the fact that it's a sign of, like, dysfunction in the household, or just poor lifestyle choices, but it was pretty embarrassing just being in public with her.
No, no, I get that.
I get that.
It is not fun.
And this probably had something to do with your father as well.
I mean, overweight women have significantly reduced sexual market value.
Yeah.
And it is embarrassing if your dad is attractive and slender and if he's with an obese woman in public, I think people are going to look and say, what does she have on him that he's still there?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is she holding one of his pets hostage?
It's hard to square that circle for a lot of people.
I do want to mention that I think there's also some other bigger topics, too, that are kind of related to this.
I don't think obesity is kind of the biggest issue here.
I mean, it could be, but...
No, I mean, I'm sorry, let me just really briefly finish what I was starting at earlier.
And the reason why we're pausing on this is because it really comes down to this fundamental question of to what degree do you assign people responsibility?
And it is a very complex and challenging question.
And like a lot of really complex and challenging questions, I hate to put it this way, but it kind of comes down to how you feel.
I mean, we can guide it to some degree by...
We can guide it to some degree by our thoughts, and that's valuable.
But, I mean, you don't think that I'm a bad person because I got cancer while living a healthy and weight-appropriate lifestyle.
It's just, you know, bad luck, right?
Plus, you know, obviously the risk factor goes up considerably if you have a very bad childhood.
But you wouldn't look at me and say, you know, that guy was lazy.
He should have willed his way out of getting that disease.
That's just bad luck, right?
You know, 70% of health problems are lifestyle-related, which is a result of choice, and 30% of this just, you know, sorry, you rolled snake eyes and you got something.
And so, when it comes to looking at people who are overweight, we do look at a choice.
And I do look at a choice.
I do.
I mean, having had a really serious illness that was not the result of lifestyle choices, I look at fat people and say, you've got it easy.
All you have to do is stop eating as much and exercise, which was not my cure for what I had.
My cure for what I had was radiation and chemotherapy, not a giant bag load of fun.
And so my sympathy level goes down when people have, to some degree, avoided dealing with the traumas of their childhood.
And then part of me says, oh, well, you know, but maybe they're just not that smart.
But then I think, well, when these not smart people are confronted on their emotional issues, they suddenly seem to become like Lex Luthor-style evil geniuses of emotional defense.
What's it like for you, Mike, trying to penetrate your mother's defensiveness about her need to exercise and eat less?
Well, I was It's really challenging.
I'm always called confrontational if I try to talk about these kind of things.
Right!
It's a great move.
She's like a ninja, right?
Yeah.
I mean, she's literally like the most unrealistic, well, some of the most unrealistic fighters in media are like, here's a battle army of 10,000 droids with lasers, but it's okay because I have a tiny laser sword.
You know, it just doesn't make any sense, right?
But this is how good these people are.
They literally are the Jedi of emotional defenses.
Whatever you shoot from whatever angle, they bat away almost without thinking.
And so when somebody is that agile and good at being emotionally defensive, at blocking any personal responsibility or anything like that, then I can't call them dumb.
The price of being good at emotionally defending yourself from criticism Is that you can't be called dumb anymore.
And then if you can't be called dumb, then I can't just give you the you're too stupid to know quantum physics stuff.
Yeah, and even if you keep pushing her past these defenses, eventually you get to a point where she has a breakdown and it's not even gradual.
It's immediately out of nowhere she'll just start crying.
It's a strategy.
And then if you keep pushing from there, then you're just a mean person because you're not sympathizing with her crying.
And then it's not like, in your recent podcast, or maybe it wasn't recent, but it was one of your podcasts, you said that it's important to tell, the way you tell if crying is manipulative is if they kind of pause you and say, this is too emotional for you right now, I have to take a break, and then they get back to Your concerns and your perspective instead of just like completely dodging it and just...
Wait, hang on.
Your mom...
Wait, your mom is a woman who uses crying to avoid legitimate criticisms?
Hang on, let me just write this shit down.
I don't think I've ever heard of a woman doing that before.
Yeah.
In fact, I think that's why tears are there for a lot of women.
And that's just, yeah, it's a ninja move, right?
I mean, you burst into tears and they're so upset and so on, right?
And then you're supposed to just stop that.
Exactly the same way that when a man is really upset, say in divorce proceedings, a woman stops pressing the issue, right?
Because he's really upset.
He's really sad.
He's really brokenhearted about how much money she's asking for him.
So she's always like, oh yeah, no, you're really sad and you're upset, so I'll stop doing it.
Yeah, exactly like that.
All right.
Anyway, so it comes down to the question of to what degree are you emotionally assigning free will to the people around you?
Now, if you assign them free will and they are doing destructive and harmful things to themselves, to their children, to others, to society, and so on, then you're going to be annoyed a lot of the time.
You know, the price of assigning free will to your immediate environment It's you must populate your immediate environment with successful people or your whole fucking life is going to be chalks on a blackboard, like nails on a blackboard, squeak, horror.
Yeah, I think that really applies to me.
Be with successful people.
Yeah.
Be around successful people.
And listen, man, be around people who care about you.
Listen, I'm telling you this as a parent, which is an annoying card to pull, and I apologize for it, but I think you'll understand why I'm doing it in a sec.
If I ever sensed, like let's say that, I don't know, I don't know, let's just take the easy one.
Let's just say I gained 40 pounds or something, right?
Not in one bicep as is currently happening, but you know, spread all over.
Let's say I gained 40 pounds, and if I ever sensed that my daughter was embarrassed to introduce me or was embarrassed by me lumbering this girth around, do you know what I'd do?
What?
I'd lose the weight.
Yeah.
Because I'd be like, I don't want to embarrass my daughter.
Now, I couldn't say to her, well, you shouldn't be embarrassed because your dad is a giant pear, right?
I mean, that's the way the world is.
I'm not embarrassed because I'm bald.
That's just something that happens, right?
It wasn't like, well, if I just got the right scalp massages with the right amount of platypus foot oil, I'd be fine.
And no, I'm not going to take Rogaine for the rest of my damn life.
It doesn't matter that much to me.
But I would quit the weight gain.
I would lose the weight because my daughter was embarrassed.
Right?
Because I care about her, and I don't want her to be embarrassed.
That would break my heart, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and she doesn't really listen to exactly...
She can't really...
She doesn't really pick up on how I feel either, because even today, when I was picking up some stuff from the house, I had to grab the last few things, so I was moving from her house to my dad's house, and I didn't talk to her, and she called my name, and I said, what?
And then I was like...
And then I kind of walked away, and I came back.
She's like, I have a feeling that you're mad at me.
I was like, no fucking shit I'm mad at you.
Can I not put off any more of a vibe that I'm mad at you?
She puts up a question like, it's a possibility that I'm mad at her.
Oh no, no, but that's a maneuver.
That's not, right?
And the reason that she says it like it's a question is that there can't be any reason for you to be mad at her, but for some incomprehensible hang-up on your part, you're mad at her.
Like if she said, you must be mad at me for this, right?
Then she's admitting that there's some legitimate reason for you to be upset.
But if she says, I get the feeling that you're mad at me, and the unspoken part of that is, and I have no idea why, which means you're completely unjust and you're upset.
Exactly.
Spot on.
Right.
So she does know.
She's an expert emotional manipulator.
Listen, man.
I'll tell you something.
Never, ever, ever, as a man, this is man to man, this is like, you know those Newton machines where the balls go back and forth?
Okay, this is balls to balls, right?
Sorry, back to wrestling.
But this is, listen, man to man, we're pretty good at spatial reasoning.
Let me tell you this, man, I worked in the woods for a long time.
I was gold panning and prospecting and staking claims.
I never got lost.
I've gone hiking with girlfriends before, and they're like, where are we?
I'm like, we're right here.
Because in my brain, I'm like, it's Google Earth, right?
I've got this, like, 400 feet above me, I've got this GPS satellite that's my brain.
Because guys are really good, particularly in unfamiliar territory.
Guys are really good at that, at spatial orientation.
Which is one of the reasons why there are more guy engineers.
This is what men's brains are good at.
And let me tell you this.
A woman always knows what you're feeling.
Like a man never gets lost in the woods, and a woman will always know the emotional map of those around her.
Always.
Because those are the woods they navigate.
Women have evolved to understand, and you could say manipulate and control, although that's not always the case, but women have evolved to And they're enormously dependent upon the resources of those around them.
Because they spend most...
Like the modern women...
Like they have as much to do with how women evolved as your average pear-shaped office worker has to do with a guy chasing a gazelle across a plane for two hours, right?
But how women have evolved is from about the age of 13 until about the age of 40, they're either pregnant or breastfeeding.
Right?
Which means that, yeah, they can do some work, you know, they can pick some veggies or whatever, right?
But they are incredibly dependent upon the resources being brought to them by men.
And as women age, they increasingly lose sexual market value, while men gain sexual market value.
Which is why a lot of women after middle age...
are simply devoted to tearing down any potential self-esteem or spine in their partners.
Right?
So, a woman's job when the man is young is to build him up.
You can do anything you set your mind to.
You're the best.
You're the greatest.
You're Muhammad Ali in his prime, baby.
I've never had such a big penis.
Wait, sorry, but get off the wrestling anyway.
But that's her job when she's young, right?
Get the man pumped up so that he can go out and get her resources.
And then around middle age, traditionally her job depends.
Not all women, right?
But traditionally her job for a lot of women is going to change, which is, holy shit, I'm getting old, fat, wrinkly, and ugly.
And I can't make babies anymore.
Whereas my husband, my boyfriend, my partner, the father of my children, well, he's still looking pretty good because men age like wine, women age like milk.
And, you know, he's got a lot of resources.
And now there are some second wave young hussies sniffing around his tent.
So I need to break him.
Thank you.
I need to break him and emasculate him so that younger women are going to be repulsed by him, even though he has all these resources and some maturity and he can provide for them.
And this is why young women are very enthusiastic about their men's success and middle-aged and older women are often trying to break the man down.
And so, because women are a dependent gender, and have been a dependent gender, because, you know, blame me, it's mother nature, the pregnancy is quite debilitating, and followed by breastfeeding, which is quite debilitating, and years later, Of little sleep and heroic for these women to do it.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
This is like fantastic and heroic stuff.
And then, you know, when they finally stop cranking out the eggs, well, they get a couple of years of hot flashes, of sleepless nights, you know, like it's hard being a woman.
And they also, of course, have the up and downy, upy downy, moody swingies, right, of the monthlies.
But Because they are dependent, they need to navigate and control the emotional lives of those around them.
This is so fundamental to understand.
They are a different species from the male brain.
And this is why it's so, and again, I'm not talking about all women, but this is why it's so hard to break through a woman's defenses because her entire defenses are around getting and keeping resources, in particular after her sexual market value has declined.
Now, there's two ways that women can do this, right?
In the same way that there's two ways that men can get resources.
They can either go out and earn them or they can cajole and steal them, right?
Either through the state or directly or defraud people or whatever, right?
So you can go out and earn shit, or you can just go and steal shit.
In the same way, a woman can get resources because she's loyal, because she's virtuous, because she's dedicated, because she's good, because she's loving, because she's caring, because she's supportive, because she's hardworking.
In which case, it's like, man, take everything.
You are the best thing on two legs.
That's called earning it.
Or, a woman can steal it.
And the way that a woman steals it is through emotional manipulation, through the provocation and pushing the buttons of shame and guilt and obligation and the giant button of male smallness.
I mean, don't let me tell you your experiences.
Tell me if I'm way off base, Mike.
But around your mom, do you feel powerful or powerless?
Um...
I think before listening to this show, I felt powerless.
Now, I don't anymore.
I feel really powerful.
I don't mean powerful with yourself.
I mean powerful with regards to her.
In other words, do you have influence over her?
Will she listen seriously, take your advice, and modify her behavior?
Oh, no.
No.
So with her, you are powerless?
Yeah.
You can't even get her to drop some weight, even though...
Yeah.
It's healthy, it's necessary, it's important, it'll save money, right?
Yeah.
Can I give you one example that might relate to this?
So recently, we got into a huge argument, and she was trying to tell me what philosophy was and basically how it was just your beliefs.
And I told her, no, it's not philosophy at all.
Philosophy is more like a science where it's more evidence-based and factual, and it's not just someone's opinion.
There's principles and stuff behind it.
Nobody says that about physics and math.
It's just your opinions.
And I was like, Mom, I've been studying this for like two years.
I know a little bit more about this than you do, so you might want to just take my advice over yours.
I'm not saying that I'm completely right, but chances are if someone's been studying this for two years, which is quite a while, then they might know a little bit more about you on the subject.
And so we got into a huge argument with that.
Wait, but she's saying that she knew it just because she hadn't studied it?
This is Donnie Kruger, right?
It's got to be easy because I don't know anything about it.
Yeah, exactly.
And I was laughing and smirking because it was so ridiculous to me.
And then she's like, oh, so you're being disrespectful to me.
And she's like, you know what you are?
You're just a 19...
She's like, you can't be disrespectful to me or whatever.
And she's like, you know what you are?
You're just a 19-year-old know-it-all, but really you know nothing.
And I'm like, well, since you were able to...
To tell me that I know nothing.
And that means you probably have the gap in knowledge that I don't have.
So you must be extremely smart.
And the fact that you're telling me that I should respect you while you're using put-downs and being disrespectful to me, if you're so smart, then you should know that you're being hypocritical right now.
Right.
And that is stealing.
I'm telling you man, that is stealing.
Respect is earned.
Exactly.
That's what I told her.
Respect is earned and anybody who demands respect without earning it is a goddamn thief.
And the worst kind of thief as well.
A thief can only take your stuff.
The respect thieves can take your soul, your size, your grandeur, your power, and they can also create this genuine respect-repellent field around you.
Because if people who haven't earned respect demand respect and you provide it to them, that's a sheer sign and a sure sign that everyone who actually could earn your respect has to stay far away from you because they know they'll put you on a collision course with the lies around you should they be in your vicinity, and that's going to be a Krakatoa that's very hard for relationships to survive.
I'm sorry, you were just saying.
Go ahead.
No, I was agreeing with that 100%.
I told her, I'm like, respect is not voluntary.
It's involuntary.
Just like trust.
You don't just willfully trust a stranger.
You build trust, basically.
You lend them money, they pay you back, whatever.
They show up on time, or they just say truthful things.
It's just something that's earned.
Yeah, the only people who demand trust are con artists.
Yeah, makes sense.
So, with regards to size, a woman who has not earned your love...
Must tear down your capacity to love.
Must keep love away from you.
Must keep you small.
Must keep you broken.
Must constantly put you down.
And this, of course, you know, the echoes of modern man-hating feminism is very clear here.
Feminism taught women to be incredibly selfish and to ignore the needs of children and husbands.
Children, of course, want their moms around.
And feminism taught women to be incredibly selfish and And now the children of feminists are growing up.
And the feminists are now scared that the lessons that they taught their children are going to be reflected by their children.
Oh, I'm just going to put my own needs first.
What the hell do your needs matter, Mom?
That's how you raised me.
And so now that we've had this relentless campaign through the media, through art, through academia, through the social justice warriors, you have this relentless campaign to crush men.
Because we're now in the second half of the feminist life cycle.
The first half is teaching women to be selfish, and the second half is teaching men to be selfless, to be without a self, to be without judgment, to be without a spine.
So the first time we say, oh, women, you should do whatever you want.
To hell with the needs of others.
Anybody who tells you that they have needs that you should sacrifice for, they're trying to control you, they're being selfish, they're being mean, patriarchy, blurry, blurry, blurry.
And then, when the sons in particular grow up, having imbibed that philosophy from their mothers, and turn around and say, well, no, I don't want to come over for dinner on Sunday.
It's boring.
I don't really find you that pleasant company.
And you taught me that you shouldn't sacrifice your needs for other people.
So, no.
And now they've got to tear you down.
Now they've got to break you as a man.
Because otherwise, you'll be so full of power The idea of being around powerless and controlling and empty and manipulative people will be anathema, will be repellent.
And so this is, you know, when you say, well, my mom doesn't really understand this or that about me emotionally and so on, I invite you, I'm not telling you, this is not a syllogistic proof, but I invite you, Mike, into the possibility that your mom knows exactly where your buttons are because she made them and put them in.
Yeah, no, I completely agree with you on that.
All right.
Listen, we got another bunch of callers.
Do you mind if we move on?
I know we're sort of jerking right up out of the...
Come up slowly, no faster than the bubbles.
Don't get the bends, right?
But, you know, really, really try and figure out what free will you're assigning to people around you.
And if you believe that the people around you have free will, but they reject any of your feedback, any of your advice, any of your encouragements, any of your criticisms, if you believe they have free will, But they reject any improvements from you, you will lose your free will.
That's the price you pay.
Free will is about having an effect on your life.
Free will is about believing that you're in control of your life.
And if you're surrounded by people who reject any feedback from you, you are not in control of your life and your environment.
So if you assign them free will and they reject any feedback from you, You lose your free will.
This is how the armor robot suit replicates, forms over you, calcifies your exoskeleton, and turns you into a repetition of a past that never worked for anyone.
I'll have to listen to that and really think about that.
Thanks for calling in.
Great set of questions.
Thank you.
Thank you a lot.
Also, Mike, happy birthday.
Oh, thanks, Michael.
Appreciate that.
Have a good one.
Take care, man.
Alright.
Well, Jan wrote in, and his question is, I've learned to use my anger as a tool for success, but unfortunately, playing with this fire occasionally burns me as well, and fires may be sparked randomly.
What is the reason for this, and how may I adopt Stefan's patience, calm, and humorous relation to an insane world?
Well, it's a pretty abstract topic, which is not to say bad in any way, but as an empiricist, I always want to make sure if there's an abstraction that we can start with a concrete example.
Can you give me something that would make sense from that standpoint?
No, it's just everyday activity.
Pretty much when I'm at work, I work with people that are educated in economics and they still read the paper and they think everything is fine and I just see the world coming down and I really am afraid of all this social unrest and everything that's going to happen and I try to talk some sense into them and they just don't respond at all to it.
So you say, you know, we're on an economically unsustainable path or whatever, and they're like, what happens with those conversations?
Yeah, I try to, you know, ask them a little bit about what is really money, like how can fiat currency be sustainable, like if you have Greece falling apart, what do you think when people are going to lose confidence in the US, what's going to happen then?
And And they don't really care and I go around being really stressed about this and people think I'm weird because I can go on these rants about this New World Order stuff and how things are controlled and this stuff really gets to me and they don't understand it and it's very frustrating and I come across as weird I guess.
Right.
And what sort of environment are you in there?
Usually I work in an oil company, so there's pretty well-educated people there.
I try to work out a lot, so I can channel my anger and frustration there and be normal and happy most of the time.
Right.
Well, I don't know.
Have you seen any of the Gene Wars presentations that I've done?
Yeah, I have.
Very interesting stuff.
Right, so you are...
If you're case-elected, it means that you have a brain and...
Sorry, that's probably a bit of a...
Let me finish the sentence.
Sounds pretty bad.
Otherwise...
Tell me more about that stuff!
Right.
Otherwise, you're just one of Bernie Sanders' wet farts of socialist fantasies.
But...
No, it means that you have a brain which contains an amygdala that is constantly scanning for long-term dangers.
Yeah.
Long-term dangers.
And when a K-selected person talks to an R-selected person, like when a wolf chats with a rabbit about running out of food, the rabbit is like, what are you talking about?
There's grass everywhere.
Yeah.
What is the matter with you?
Like, you're crazy.
What the hell are you...
Why on earth are you worrying about where your meal is going to come from next week?
Trust me, man.
The grass is still going to be here.
It's not a problem.
So relax, says the grasshopper.
The aunt of the grasshopper.
You know, relax, man.
Mellow out.
You know, chillax.
Lay back.
What are you getting so upset about, man?
It's beautiful out here on the island.
Look at the sun is up.
You can hear the surf.
Coconuts falling are all around you.
Just crack one open and drink up.
Don't worry.
Tomorrow will take care of itself, man.
Relax.
Easy peasy does it.
Welcome to the island.
It's how we do things here.
And you look all uptight, right?
And you see this, like these comedies aimed at youths, right?
What do they always have, right?
Like the Van Wilder stuff, right?
Like there's the...
There's the National Lampoon stuff, right?
There's the really cool, fun guys, right?
And they're just relaxing, and they're having fun, and they don't care about their studies.
They don't care about the future.
They don't care about their careers, right?
And they're good-looking, and they're fun, and they're relaxed, and everyone looks up to them, and they're funny, right?
Our selected people are funny because they don't have a care in the world, fundamentally, Because they've got no amygdala saying, ah, fiat currency can't be sustained.
The national debt can't be sustained.
When the government runs out of money, there'll be a lot of hungry children, you uncaring fucks.
It doesn't occur for them.
They don't have the physical brain structure to get those emotional cues about long-term problems.
And in those teen movies, and you watch them, and you'll see it everywhere.
In the same way, if you watch The Fall, are selected, are selected.
And what are the studious guys like in those movies?
I don't know if you've ever watched any.
I'm sure you have.
But have you ever seen those movies?
Like the teenage, or the...
It's not really post-teenage, but the college frat boy fun movies?
Yeah, I recognize the characters, but not exactly that movie.
Yeah, but the guys who are studious, they're all really uptight, man.
Yeah.
You know, they don't have any fun.
They don't know how to relax.
And they always give the parts to, like, nebbish-looking actors with weak chins and who are just tremulous with outrage at how much fun everyone is having.
You know, that old idea that a Puritan is someone who's haunted by the possibility that someone somewhere is having fun.
And there are these administrators, right?
And the administrators are always trying to put their rules on people.
It's like the Jeremy Piven character in Old School.
He's got the nebbish glasses.
And he's just annoying, and he's got it in for these guys because they were having fun and having parties and getting laid while he was studying and not having any fun, and he just hates them.
Well, he really wants to be them, but he just hates them, and he uses his petty rules to control these wild, free spirits.
You know, fast forward 15 years.
Well, I think we all know how that turns out, right?
Yeah.
And so, you, by saying, there are problems coming that we must act now to avoid, well, how do people experience this?
Well, it's literally, you're like on Jamaica.
It's like you're on Jamaica.
Everyone's having a beach party, swinging in hammocks, dancing to reggae, and you're coming in screaming in a high-pitched tone, We've got to prepare for the glaciers!
And they're like, what's wrong with this guy?
What's the matter with this guy?
Yeah, smoke some of this, man.
I mean, it's...
I don't know.
I just...
I remember...
And this is, I don't know.
I just remember years ago, I watched some...
He was a comedian on the London stage, and he was trying to do something to music, and the music kept getting faster and slower, and he had to go faster and slower with his moves, and it was really, really funny.
And he tried going offstage to talk to the guy in control of the music, and with a big, thick Jamaican accent, the guy was like, it's a broken mind.
You know, like, hey, it's just broken.
Didn't really care.
But of course, the guy on stage is like, but it's broken.
That was the gig, right?
And it's like, you can't communicate with this different species.
It literally is trying to explain to a tree sloth how a time card works.
You know, coat it in honey, maybe he'll eat it, but that's about it.
You can't recreate the experience of having a K-selected brain for an R-selected person.
Because they don't have the brain capacity to involuntarily feel uneasy about the long-term consequences of what they're doing.
And as society gets more R-selected, it gets fatter.
And it gets more promiscuous.
And there are more single mom parents.
And there's more hostility to the military.
Hostility to the military is not just about cutting funds to the military, it's also about getting Americans, which is, the RSU's foreign wars to kill off the Ks, right?
I mean, they have no loyalty to the Ks.
In fact, the Ks are their enemies.
You know, if the rabbits could call in an airstrike that only hits the wolves, they certainly would, and that's called foreign policy for the most part.
And so I think that you've got to understand, you're dealing with a fundamentally different brain And you can't talk someone into having different genes.
You're trying to convince someone who's short to be tall.
Yeah, that's an excellent point.
Since the people around me, at least the ones I work with are obviously pretty smart and educated, so I expect more from them.
Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
Because it's not fundamentally about intelligence.
I mean, our selected people can be very, very smart.
Certainly are cunning, right?
But they simply...
Let me put it to you this way.
If you were talking to someone who knew for a fact that he was going to die when he was 30, and you were saying to him, man, you've got to put money aside for your retirement.
I mean, what are you going to live on in your old age?
What would he say?
Yeah, that would be irrational.
He'd be like, I'm going to be dead when I'm 30.
The hour selected is a short lifespan.
That's why the R-selected John Maynard Keynes, when he was asked about the long-term effects of his policies, he said, in the long run, we're all dead.
That's a pure R-selected perspective.
Yeah, because that's what a lot of people say, and I get so frustrated and angry.
I'm like, yeah, because they always, you know, how they manipulate with everything is for the children.
Like, we've got to bomb this country to save the children, and everything is for that.
Yeah, the children of the K-selected warriors, they don't give much of a shit about, right?
Yeah, but when it comes down to what you can actually do and set the scene for what's going to happen, they don't want to do it.
They don't come with all these jokes just to throw it away.
Right.
Yeah, listen, don't...
I'm sorry for all these people who don't know what these terms mean.
I just sort of remind you to go listen to the Gene Wars presentations.
Because, like it or not, annoying or not, it's going to be pretty core to what I talk about off and on in this show as we go forward.
This is not going away, everybody.
It's not going away.
It works too well.
And it just can't go away.
But if you're case-elected...
If you're around R-selected people, you will go insane.
Yeah.
Because to behave as an R-selected person in a K-mindset, like if a K-person is acting R, that's mentally ill.
That means, like, that's a significant...
Like, you're broken.
Like, something's really wrong.
Like, if a wolf doesn't plan for the future...
That wolf is like deviating from what survival means.
It's like if a farmer is just eating all his seed crop and killing all his livestock for a giant feast, knowing for sure that he's going to starve to death next year, we'd say that that farmer is mentally ill, right?
Like something's gone wrong with him.
He's crazed with grief or he wants to die or he's got a death wish.
Something's wrong with this guy.
His brain is fucked up, right?
And so, our selected behavior in K-selected people is insanity.
Now, to be fair, K-selected behavior in our selected people is also insanity.
Like the rabbit who says, man, I gotta get up really early tomorrow.
You know why?
Because the grass is running really fast at the moment.
I gotta get up.
I gotta eat my Wheaties.
I gotta exercise.
I gotta be faster, meaner, stronger, leaner.
Because that grass is moving like the wind!
I gotta get up and exercise to go and catch that grass.
It's not just gonna sit there stuck in the ground and let me eat it.
I mean, that would be like You're insane.
Yeah.
It might be the rabbit from 8 Mile talking about a different kind of grass.
That is a multi-layered joke.
Mike, I just want to give you, that is like the German chocolate cake of layered jokes.
That is like so many layers that goes down to like the Paleozoic era.
I just really wanted to point that out.
So, I'm just going to stop for a moment and appreciate the depth and complexity of that joke.
And Kim Basinger.
I read a review of that movie where the guy, because everyone said Kim Basinger is far too glamorous and attractive for the role.
And I think Roger Ebert said, well, you know, if there are ugly people in pretty houses, why can't they be pretty people in low-rent ugly houses?
It's like, because a woman's beauty is a coin.
Anyway.
But...
No, I mean, that would be insane, you know?
I mean, if you're a rabbit in Australia and you're like hoarding, I must gather together the grass because when the snows come, we will be out of grass.
What's the snow thing you keep talking about?
It's Australia, it's been 9,000 degrees of skin cancer, Hugh Jackman nose exploding heat for the last 10,000 years.
What the hell are you talking about?
Are you dreaming of something in your sleep that's making you...
The food is never going anywhere.
So why are you hoarding?
Like hoarding in a situation of plenty is a sign of mental illness.
Hoarding in a situation of scarcity is a sign of mental health.
You see what I'm saying, right?
If you are trying to get our people to become K... I mean, other than a multi-generational thing or whatever, or basically the R gene set recoils when it hits the limits of its resource exploitation, in other words, when fiat currency crashes.
But you can't talk people into it, I don't think.
I mean, I'm obviously trying to enlighten people and get them to be better parents.
There may be a few people who are swayed, but holy crap, right?
I mean, so if you are case-selected and you're around a lot of R-selected people all the time...
You will start to feel insane because that's how they legitimately experience you, because you are worried about things that can't possibly happen according to their mindset.
It's like being at an atheist convention trying to sell demonic possession insurance.
It may work in some places, but it sure ain't going to work there, right?
They'll look at you like, man, you're crazy.
And you're crazy because you think that you can sell it here, not just because you're selling it, but because you think you can sell it here.
You're spot on, that's exactly.
But what would you say is the ratio to this?
Because I only meet our selected people, and I really try to promote silver and Bitcoin.
And to people that really should know this stuff, at least understand it when I tell it to them.
And they don't.
At least they don't buy anything.
Right.
No, so for our selected people, money is grass.
So when you print more money, it's like, okay, so there's more grass.
How's that bad for us?
But for K-selected people, money is like crops.
Actually, that's not exactly right, because if there's more crops, that's not bad either.
For our selected people, money is like grass.
For K-selected people, money is like water that's being poured into their wine.
It's making it valueless.
It's diluting the original value of what they have.
So, I don't know what the ratio is.
It depends on, to some degree, genetics.
It may depend to some degree on culture and on race.
The idea that there are various strains of R versus K selections that occur among races, not because of anything particular to do with race, but just because races evolved to meet particular requirements.
Racial differences have evolved to meet particular requirements in warm versus cold climates.
And you can look up all this stuff if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
I'm certainly no expert on it.
But I don't know what the ratio is, but I can tell you this.
It sure as hell is declining in the West.
And it's declining because there's a welfare state, which rabidly and rabidly promotes our selected breeding as a welfare state, number one.
Number two, there were giant wars that sucked up and destroyed K-selected people, like leaves in a tornado, who just sucked up the K-selected gene sets and shredded them across the West.
The First and Second World War were like the ultimate revenge of the R's.
And I'll talk about this more in the third, but the fact that Chamberlain comes from a very R-selected background and ended up provoking a war that killed off a bunch of K's and the fact that the R-selected population turned from the R-selected Chamberlain to the K-selected Churchill and then dumped him right after the war was complete is not an accident.
So I don't know.
I mean, if you sort of say, well, conservatives versus liberals, that's R versus K, you can look at those proportions.
But Ks are enormously diminishing.
And also, our cultures are coming into K cultures.
And that's, of course, big complaints in Europe, big complaints in America at the moment.
And again, you can't universalize, but there's still trends nonetheless.
And so you find the Ks and...
You know, really, really hold on to them.
And I don't know if it's...
I'm not sure that it's libertarians in particular.
I'm really not sure whether it's libertarians in particular.
I'm still trying to...
I'm still working on where libertarians fit along the RK continuum and what environments may have produced this kind of mindset.
But I don't know.
So I don't think it's...
I think the Ks are getting rarer.
But it's okay, because it's just a pendulum, right?
I mean, the R's will replicate until they destroy the economy, and then the K's will come back.
I know it's ugly, I know it's difficult, I know it's painful, but I don't think that R's are very good at listening to reason, because the reason...
Well, why you listen to reason is because you're afraid of negative outcomes, and the only negative outcomes that the R selected gene set...
What it really cares about is anything which diminishes the spread of the R-selected gene set.
That's it.
And fiat currency and the welfare state and the military-industrial complex support it.
Like it used to be that K-selected people went into business.
But now, R-selected people go into business.
Because it's just about getting as many government contracts and to hell with the long-term success of the company.
And it's about pumping up the stock price and to hell with the long-term success of the company.
It's all R-selected crap.
K-selected people used to go into politics, but now that there are so many damn R-selected people everywhere, you can't be a politician and be K-selected.
Well, we'll find out with Donald Trump, I suppose.
But you have to appeal to so many R-selected people as a politician that you have to be Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
Pure R-selected.
Snot, compressed cocaine are selected gene sets ready for the masses to imbibe.
Yeah, but couldn't they be a cave that really figured out the system and then just very subversive?
I don't think so.
I don't think that caves knowingly destroy their own civilization.
Okay, because I put a lot of time into what the elites are doing, and they are, of course, brilliant in what they do, but as they get exposed, you know, I think it's really easy to pick up on the tricks, and I try to tell people this, and of course, they don't care and don't understand and don't think it's got anything to do with them.
But I see them as, you know, very intelligent.
Again, intelligence is not the issue.
Oh, yeah.
It's not like K is smart and R is dumb.
R is a fantastic adaptation to near-infinite resources, which is why the R gene set likes to provoke the illusion of near-infinite resources so that it replicates itself.
Think of it like this.
You may have the same amount of RAM, but you have different operating systems.
Think of it that way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, and K behavior is very dominant in our environment.
It's maladaptive.
And our behavior in a K environment is very dumb and very maladaptive.
And so neither of them is better or worse.
It's just that, to me, it's the power of the state that makes R versus K so unbelievably destructive.
Because it should be market forces, right?
Like immigration.
It should just be market forces.
That's all it should be.
But because you have the state and its power to create the illusion of infinite resources, it gives such an unfair advantage to the R-selected gene set that its game set match R. We just can't fight it.
Or maybe I'd need to follow more closely on the presentation because I see the world economic system as pretty unsustainable and a lot of stuff that's normal in society which Which is not sustainable, and I think intelligent people should, you know, kind of figure this out.
No, no, but the genes supply the emotional apparatus, right?
And the emotional apparatus of the R versus K is, is what this man is proposing beneficial to the R-selected gene set or to the K-selected gene set?
And if you propose limiting resources, right, the gold standard is It's like a bunch of cement boots to the R-selected mindset.
Because the gold standard says, let's not pretend we have infinite resources.
Borrowing, money printing, bonds, all of the stuff which allows people to spend in the present and defer the payment to the future.
All of that is orgasmic, literally, for the R-selected mindset.
And so when you're talking to people, you're not talking to rational self-interest, you're talking to genetic self-interest.
And the R-selected and the K-selected gene sets control the emotional reactions that people have to value-based arguments.
And when you talk to a R-selected mindset and you say, we've really got to limit Resource consumption and resources are finite and we're overextended.
We need to really pull back on the resources.
The R selected gene set produces a violent, literally violent emotional reaction and revulsion and hostility and hatred and aggression towards any argument regarding the limitation of resources.
You say, ah, well what about environmentalism?
No.
Environmentalism is about limiting K. And giving more power to R. Power over others is pure R. K wants power over the environment.
R wants power over people.
Because R is unreal.
In human society, because human beings are fundamentally K, we can't live on grass, right?
At least in colder climates.
And so, when you're talking to people and you say, we should move to a gold standard, the question is, why do people get so contemptuous while at the same time being so irrational?
Oh, you're just a gold bug, you know?
Oh, you just hate the poor, you know, whatever, right?
Why is it that environmentalists don't talk about limiting resource consumption by going to a gold standard, which would be the most sensible and rational thing for them to do?
Yeah, I present this argument all the time.
And what happens?
They don't understand it because they haven't heard it before and I say the first thing that an environmentalist should be working to oppose is war.
War and central banking, which is two of the sides of the same coin.
Because central banking and massive government debt produces an overconsumption of natural resources in the present.
Yeah, and I come up with all these arguments to, like, this and that wasn't the right thing.
Like, even if whatever you think about 9-11, you know, going into Afghanistan the way they did, and Iraq the way they did was completely crazy.
And all the arguments are there, and they're like, Yeah, yeah, everybody makes mistakes.
And I'm like, no, you can't make mistakes like that.
Bill Clinton is pure R. His wife Hillary Clinton is pure R. And what does she do?
She goes and provokes a war with Syria, which gets more K soldiers killed.
Because that's how R replicates itself.
It knows it's win-lose with K. So whatever R can do to get K killed, it will do.
Wow.
This is really a new perspective on things.
I'm not saying that this is 100% certain and it explains everything, but what it does do is it explains why people have such violent emotional reactions, anti-rational reactions, to perfectly logical arguments that on the surface serve exactly their needs.
It explains because you're talking to the R gene set and when you talk about limiting resources, you're saying to the R gene set, you will die and be replaced by the K. Right?
And so it reacts with fear, rage and hostility and the fundamental impotence of not having a rational counter-argument for the simple reason that you are attempting to murder the R gene set by imposing the gold standard or a Bitcoin standard or whatever, right?
It experiences it as gene death and fights to the death because that's what it literally will be.
You get rid of fiat currency and the R-selected animals will die.
They may have kids, but those kids will grow up K-selected.
And K-selected kids of R-selected parents, and I say this from personal experience, well, it's not a happy marriage, let's put it that way.
Yeah.
I really try to tell my family this stuff as well because, you know, I'm concerned that if things happen and all of that, you know, I would regret not taking action at an earlier stage.
So, you know, they get really fed up with me because I keep going on on this because I'm hoping just to see, like, if they just react, like, 10% would be a good sign for me.
Right.
And if you look at this emotionally...
It helps make sense of just incomprehensible things in society.
Like, you know, plant parenthood videos keep coming out where plant parenthood appears to be doing some, you know, potentially pretty nefarious stuff.
And these are baby parts.
And they are an abortion mill.
And our selected people, what's their relationship to abortion?
Well, how much do rabbits care about their babies versus wolves?
Well, wolves have a very high investment strategy with relatively few children, so they really care about their offspring and will fight to the death to protect them.
But ours, they don't care.
And so the fact that on the left, the Democrats, the progressives, the liberals, they're fine with abortion.
But on the right, children are a treasure because the right has a high investment strategy in kids.
Every kid is a treasure, and that's the K-selected gene set.
The R-selected gene set, it's just a mass of tissue, who cares, right?
And the Ks can't explain it, so they put a soul in there, right?
That's what they have to do to get their emotional K-selected emotional set to resonate with their regard for children.
And Ks will put their kids in Sunday school And ours, you know, they may put their kids in ballet or something, but not values-based stuff.
You know, ours aren't going to get up on Sunday morning, put their kids in their Sunday finest, go sit in a hard pew for values lectures for two hours.
But Ks will, because they're a high investment in kids' strategy.
So, whether you use K and R or whatever it is that you end up using is not that relevant, but just please understand...
That according to all the science that I've read, and it seems to be pretty good, you know, we checked a lot of this stuff out.
It's not perfect, we're not geneticists, but, you know, we worked really hard to check this stuff out because a lot of it did seem pretty far out there.
The science seems pretty clear that you're kind of dealing with a different and opposing species, which is why, you know, words can't turn a rabbit into a wolf.
Yeah.
Does that help?
I guess not a perfect answer, but...
No, it's very helpful.
It amplifies a bit of the concern, like, okay, what's going to happen when things do get very bad?
Aren't the R's going to eat the K's because they know that they saved up the resources and all of that?
I'll try.
Yeah?
So it's probably going to get a lot worse than I'm expecting.
Well, yeah, but the R's are, you know, fundamentally Freddy cats, right?
I mean, like, so they'll try all of this manipulative crap, and if that doesn't work, then they'll just turn society over to the case, and then the cycle will start again, at least until we understand it, or don't have a state.
Yeah, no, that's sort of also a part of my question with the anger part, because that's sort of how I'm fueling myself, and so I'm very happy to engage in, you know, not fights, but, you know, Arguments and stuff like that.
So I really like to discuss this matter with them.
But you won't be able to.
No, that's what I'm afraid of.
No, it's like trying to discuss skin cancer concerns with a deep sea shark.
Why would I care?
Why would I work?
Yeah.
Yeah, because I'm sort of waiting for things to break down.
Like, people come to me and say, oh, look at the gold price, it's going down.
I'm like, yeah.
And I've been saying it's manipulated.
And with the Greek people standing in the ATM queues and the Chinese stock market falling, don't you think the gold price should be going higher?
Isn't that what you would guess?
Like, yeah, maybe guess that.
It's a sign that the price might be manipulated, and then they don't care.
Then they just walk away.
So I'm sort of waiting for these events to start, so they will start picking up and make sense of it all, and then sort of acknowledge and prepare.
Basically, if you're not crazy, you need to be around people who agree with you.
I mean, that's the basic of what I, you know, assuming you're not crazy, it doesn't sound crazy to me, you need to be around people who agree with you.
Because if you're sane and people disagree with you, they're crazy.
And you can only spend so much time around crazy people without some of it rubbing off.
You know, we're social animals.
We're imprinted by everyone around us.
Yeah, I actually wrote down what the last caller was saying, like, thanks for helping me stay sane.
I actually wrote that down to thank you for your show and all of that, because it really helps me out.
Well, I really appreciate that.
And thanks so much for your call.
Let us know how it goes.
And, you know, don't take anything I'm saying with anything other than a giant grain of salt and sort of figure out how this stuff fits and all that.
So thanks very much for calling in.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, if you don't mind.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Stefan.
All right, thanks, Jan.
Alright, well Ben is up next, and Ben wrote in and said, as a hypothetical situation, A government is created that is designed to only last 75 years, and then recreate itself based on the relevant policies and issues of the time.
In such a government, currencies would be based on supply and demand, not the assets held by a centralized treasury.
And currencies could be driven by real community assets, such as food, or they could be cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins or litecoins.
What would be the advantages to the individual living in such a situation?
How would individual freedoms be affected?
What about the infrastructures currently maintained by a centralized government that span generations?
That's from Ben.
All right, Ben.
Why on earth would this matter?
Help me understand why you would take the precious time on this show to talk about something that's so theoretical as a government that's designed to last 75 years.
I mean, help me understand.
Well, okay.
Uh...
I've heard that most governments only last between 250 to 300 years before they start destroying themselves.
So I came up with like this idea.
Well, OK, what if a government was purposely designed to destroy itself after three generations?
And the reason that— Hang on a sec.
Do you mean what if someone did that now, or is that the case in this viewpoint already?
I'm just saying if a government were to be created, let's say a government right this moment, let's say Greece, right this moment, just completely destroyed itself economically altogether, just completely collapsed.
They now can start from scratch and rebuild the government.
And they choose to have, like, in their constitution...
Okay, well, since we're going to repeat this again someday in the future, hundreds of years from now, let's protect ourselves and put in the constitution that every three generations...
We will rebuild the government.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on, hang on.
But why would anyone in three generations listen to that?
Why wouldn't they just take it out or ignore it?
I mean, the way that they do with 90% of the U.S. Constitution now.
First of all, I would think, at least most people I know, and I can't vouch for everyone in the United States, but...
Most people I know here in the United States at least know the First Amendment.
They might not follow it.
They might try to use it to their advantage, but they all know what the First Amendment is.
And for some reason, the further up you go, less People know, you know, what the Second Amendment is, what the Third Amendment is.
I mean, look at something as simple as America's not supposed to go to war unless Congress declares war, right?
Right.
How many times has that happened?
America's been involved in, what, 75 or 80 wars?
I think Congress has declared war maybe three times.
Right.
And I think a lot...
And none of those recently, right?
I think a lot of those end up, you know, a lot of the wars are, you know...
They get more aggressive and more common when the government is on the brink of destruction.
So, I mean, I would think, and, you know, I'm just throwing this out as a possibility, if a government like this...
Sorry, are you saying that the government was on the brink of destruction, say, in 1917 when it declared war on Germany?
No, no.
Well, yeah, I'm saying that it was...
It had a lot of financial issues, and I'm not going to say that it was on the brink of destruction.
I think governments tend to go into war more often when they're having financial issues, when there's a big crisis in the debt.
Right, so if you want to bypass any constitutional restrictions on going to war, just provoke a financial crisis.
It's easy, right?
Just say you can't pay your debts, there's a financial crisis, you go to war.
So I'm just trying to understand how it is that you think that a piece of paper is going to stop political ambitions of people 75 years from now.
I mean, it is just a piece of paper, right?
It's not magic.
It is a piece of paper, yes.
But just like you have currently right now, you have the libertarian movement, where they are paying attention to that piece of paper.
They're going to say something, and they're going to speak out, and they're going to try their best to get that piece of paper, you know, follow that order of the piece of paper.
The libertarians are like the guardians of that piece of paper.
Okay, so let's say, sorry to interrupt, but so you could make the argument, Bastiat was writing, what, 200 or so, 200 plus years ago, but let's just take classical liberalism from, say, 150, 160 years ago.
They've been working to limit the size and power of government.
The Libertarian Party was founded in 1971, I think it was, right?
So they've had, well, quite a lot of years coming up for half a century to try and control the size and power and growth of the American government.
How's it working out?
I would say that it's grown aggressively in the past maybe decade.
In the past ten years, I would say.
No, no.
I don't mean in terms of the number of people who maybe...
I mean the actual, right?
I mean, if you say you're going to fight cancer, the fact that you have more doctors who want to fight cancer is not as important as whether you're actually fighting cancer successfully.
No.
No, you're right.
It's a terrible failure.
Yeah.
It's a terrible failure insofar as, as I've argued before, if libertarians had focused on peaceful parenting, we'd have two generations of peacefully raised children in the hundreds of thousands now who would be far more potent force for good and virtue in this world than a bunch of people who pissed away hundreds of millions of dollars and untold billions of hours trying to we'd have two generations of peacefully raised children in the hundreds of thousands now who would be far more I mean, um...
It doesn't work.
I mean, this idea that you can create some self-destruct sequence for governments a couple of generations into the future, it's not going to work.
It's never worked historically.
It'll never work in the future.
Off the top of your head, can you think of a possible type of government that would Last.
Okay, let me ask you this.
this, can you think of a type of rape that will produce long-lasting love and devotion on the part of the victim?
The rape where the woman's already dead when she's being raped.
Well, that's not producing long-lasting love.
That may be producing reasonably medium-lasting rigor mortis, but it's not going to produce love because she's dead, right?
Right.
So the answer is that there's no possibility of rape producing love.
In other words, there's no possibility of an evil action of a fundamental violation of a moral principle having long-lasting and good effects.
And since government is, in its essence, the violation of self-ownership and property rights, to say the least, it is the initiation of force, the idea of designing a government to produce good is like the idea of tweaking rape to produce love.
You're asking for the impossible.
Yeah, I mean, I see where you're coming from with that.
It's just like, you know, it just seems like nothing works.
Even anarchism, you know, at the fullest.
What do you mean nothing works?
Hang on, what do you mean nothing works?
Well, I mean, it just seems like every, you know, no matter what, there's always, you know...
I want to think that it's just because people are replaying the same cards over and over again and trying to get it right.
Sorry to interrupt.
Maybe you haven't heard many of these shows, but it's not hugely complicated.
People who are raised by violence end up viewing violence as a virtue because we bond to whatever system or person or actions raise us.
And so when people are aggressed against as children, if they're told that they're going to go to hell, if they disobey, then they grow up saying, well, I guess it makes sense if I'm told to go to jail for disobeying the state, because I was told to go to hell for disobeying God, so I guess I go to the jail for disobeying the state.
It makes sense to them, right?
They can't fight against it.
And, of course, the idea that if you don't obey God, then Satan takes over the world, and it's destruction and horror and a war of all against all.
And you say, oh, if you get rid of the government, that's what eroses for people emotionally.
And because they're put into irrational, horrifying, horrible, monstrous, brain-destroying institutions like government schools, and they don't want to be there, and they're seething with resentment and upset and rage for being there, and they're subjected to the taunts and assaults of the lowest forms and most immature forms of those around there because they're basically in prison, what happens is you need a lot of control over people.
When you're fundamentally making them do things they don't want to do, you have to have a lot of control over them.
And so what happens is you push and control children.
You order them around.
You tell them when they can go to the washroom.
You tell them where they've got to sit, what they have to work on, how many words a page they have to write, the subjects they need to focus on, when they need to show up, when they need to go home.
You control every minute aspect of their lives.
And it's even worse now than it was when I was a kid.
You control every aspect of their lives while they're in school and even a huge amount of aspects of their lives when they're not in school because they've got to do homework.
They've got to take this brain-deadening crap home.
And so you put kids in an environment where they don't want to be there, they're traumatized for being there, and up until recently, and still in 18, I think, of the US states, they're still allowed to be hit for being there.
You put these kids in these horrible environments, they don't want to be there, of course you have to control them.
And of course this is the idea, well, you see, if there's not teachers and there's not detentions and there's not beatings and there's not violence and there's not control and there's not humiliation and there's not keeping a tight lid on these people, Well, they're just going to flee.
They're going to run.
They're going to boil over.
They're going to attack each other.
Well, yeah, you put people in prison.
They don't want to be there.
You've got to control them tightly or violence results.
You keep people caged up in countries.
Let's not kid ourselves.
You want to move to another country, it's almost impossible for anybody who's busy to functionally be able to move.
Young people, right?
But once you get a family, I mean, you're You've got a geolocation shock tag on you.
Passport will delay it for a little bit, but you're caged in your country.
You're caged in your country.
And so when people are raised in these kinds of environments where they're bullied, they're controlled, and then at home the parents yell at them or hit them or take their food away or take their treats away or take their toys away or take their privileges away or make them sit in corners or make them go up to their rooms and sit there and think about what you've done.
And they're raised with this control.
And control always erupts when people fundamentally don't want to be someplace.
I don't need to be aggressive with my daughter because she loves my company.
You know, it's summer, so she sleeps in.
She sleeps in most of the time, but particularly in summer because we like to be out late.
Summer, so she sleeps in, wakes up, first thing she does, comes into my study, sits on my lap, tells me about what she dreamt about.
I don't need to control her because she wants to be with me.
She enjoys my company.
Well, I mean, that right there, I would have to say, that right there is a great thing because I don't speak to my father because my father tries to control me as a grown man.
I'm 31 years old, and he tries to dictate how I live my life, so I don't even talk to my father.
So, I mean, I think that's really respectable of you.
And I think your daughter probably, you know, really loves you for that.
I wish I could have a relationship like that with my father.
And I'm really sorry about that.
I mean, that is a terrible situation to be in.
And it is very common that people are controlled even into adulthood by parents who are constantly telling them what to do.
And it's also, to some degree, it's the prevalence of single motherhood and moms as a whole.
Moms are just more cautious and a little bit more hovering, a little bit more controlling.
And that's, you know, and that's not a bad thing.
It's part of the yin and yang of male-female parenting or whatever.
But what works is if you don't control children, if you don't force them to do things that they don't want to do, they grew up relaxed, negotiating, civilized, good-humored.
They won't need a state.
They won't become criminals.
And the very idea of a government will be like, well, why?
Why on earth would we need this?
If you don't control people, they end up much better than if you do control them.
And so, since the government is all about control, you control children and they grow up expecting and, in fact, emotionally needing to be controlled as adults.
And so, if you don't control children, if you don't bully them, if you don't tell them what to do all the time, if you negotiate with them, They don't grow up with a pathological need to be controlled.
And they won't grow up needing a government, and they won't grow up thinking that a government is necessary.
Yes, it works, but it has to start with kids, and this has been my constant focus on this show.
It's trying to get Freedom Labyrinths to focus on the quality of childhood.
I get what you're saying.
The state is the shadow cast by early childhood experiences.
You cannot change the state without changing childhood.
Sorry, go ahead.
I get what you're saying, but it just seems really...
Difficult for it to get to that state because, first of all, every parent wants to parent their children their own way.
Second of all, there's the schools.
Not every parent's going to...
Some parents don't know how to educate their children.
Some parents don't have the knowledge, the education.
They didn't even graduate high school, so they are incapable of giving proper...
Man, I'm not talking to those people.
How would it be possible that people who didn't even graduate high school are going to be foundational agents of social change?
I'm not saying it's impossible.
I'm sure there's some really smart people who never finished high school.
But as a whole, I mean, the fact that when I propose a course of action, you immediately look for the lowest common denominator who can't possibly achieve it tells me more about you than about my ideas.
You focus on the people you can change.
It's like saying, well, I want to run for office as a Republican.
And then you say, well, but you know, there's some people in your district who are really hardcore leftists who will never ever vote for you.
I'm like, well, yeah, I get that.
So I'm not going to talk to them, right?
I'm going to talk to the people who I can sway.
But, I mean, it's just like, I find it...
When it comes to Republican versus Democrat, you know, there's, you know, there's, yeah, I get what you're saying, but you're talking about a whole huge scale, you know, of, you know, like, you know, a whole population in itself.
But so what?
Listen, man, I'm sorry to interrupt, but so what?
I mean, the fact that everybody believed in slavery in the 16th century, okay, then by the 19th, very few, and then by the 20th, at least in the West, none.
So yeah, there's a huge giant mass of very intelligent and educated and powerful people who believe in slavery, so what?
You say the right stuff, you get the message out as energetically and enjoyably as you can, you don't deviate, you don't compromise, and you just plant your ethical flagpole so deep in the ground that the world has to end up rotating around what is right rather than what is convenient.
I mean, you're letting the collective indifference of the species paralyze you from action.
Listen, man.
Most people pass through this world like they would never hear.
Even people who seem really big and important, the movers and shakers of their day.
I view the world of ideas, not the world of money, not the world of politics, not the world of entertainment.
Name me a famous stage actor from the 19th century.
Name me a famous congressman from the 19th century.
You can't.
Very few people can.
These people were the big stars of their day.
I say, name me a philosopher from 2,000 years ago.
You probably know Plato or Aristotle or Socrates.
Yeah.
You probably know a couple of the crazy emperors.
Or sane emperors of the Roman Empire.
Lao Tzu.
Oh, the Chinese philosopher?
Yeah, Chinese philosopher.
I have the Tao Te Ching here in my place.
But name me a very powerful political Mandarin from Lao Tzu's time in China.
You can't.
And these are the big movers and shakers.
Think of the vast masses of people who've crawled across history, leaving no footprints in their wake.
You know, I said this before on the show.
Most people, they fall from the skies of their birth to the water of their death like a javelin passing into death.
And a year later, people can barely remember they were there.
And so, most people hide their way through life.
Most people try and wriggle their way through life like a worm trying to get through rocks.
Not feeling they can change anything and just squishing and bending themselves to accommodate as much as humanly possible and to be as inoffensive as possible and to not provoke any ire from the powers that be because their genes are just saying, ah, just go make a kid.
Don't make any trouble.
Make a kid.
Making trouble won't make a kid.
But making a kid won't make any trouble.
So, I mean, that's just what most people...
It's not a criticism.
It's just a fact that, you know, most people...
Pass through this world without making it better in any fundamental way.
Most people pass through this world making it slightly worse or a lot worse in terms of being negative towards their kids and telling superstitions and patriotisms and warmongering lies to their kids and they don't really delve into self-knowledge and they just pass through life.
Well, I mean, I myself got a vasectomy just because I have a hard enough time making ends meet financially for myself, and honestly, I don't want to, you know, trouble, you know, my children, you know, and stuff like that.
I don't think I would be a good parent, so I just don't even, you know...
Okay, so then the only way you can make the world a better place is through moral courage.
And then when I point out something you can do, you start telling me how it's not possible.
And I'm pushing back against that, my friend, because I don't want you to pass through life like...
I'm not intentionally.
I'm sorry.
I didn't say intentionally.
I'm just pointing it out that it happens.
Okay.
And what I'm concerned about is you say, I think you said you were 31?
Yes, 31.
Right.
So you've got another 50 or 60 years on the planet.
Things go well.
And as you get older, if you don't have kids...
Fine.
Don't have kids.
It's obviously your choice.
But as you get older, you're going to look back, and I guarantee you one thing.
You're going to look back, and you're going to say, what was I so scared of?
I mean, I was thinking about this for reasons that aren't important now.
So, when I left theater school...
I had written a play.
It was an adaptation of Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, a 19th century Russian writer.
It was called Seduction.
And it was my first really good piece of writing.
My first really good piece of writing.
And I worked really hard on that.
I created mind maps of all the characters.
I drew out all their relationships.
I really immersed myself in the subject of the time frame.
And I wrote a really good play.
And I produced the play.
I had a job as a waiter.
And I poured my money and my time and my effort into producing the play.
I hired the actress.
I rented the space.
I did the advertising.
And I made the play happen.
And it ran, I think it was for two weeks.
And there were a couple of nights that were just magic.
Just, oh my god, it was fantastic.
It was like perfect.
And yeah, it was tough.
I had to Fire an actor or two.
I had to get a friend of mine to take on a role that I'd actually written for with him in mind because he was the one who reminded me most of the character.
And he did a pretty good job.
And it was a real challenge.
Now, the whole play took place in a series of gardens.
And I wanted it to look...
I didn't want it to look like a kid's play, you know, with those badly painted sets and Dr.
Seussie crap.
And so my stage manager, this very smart and creative woman...
She got me real trees onto a stage in a theater.
Real, honest to goodness, trees.
Now, the theater had just finished tearing up the floor and had this beautiful, gleaming, glossy, liquid, lacquered wood on it.
And I'll tell you, getting those trees in there tore the living crap out of that wood.
I mean, it looks like we bombed it or taken a plow to it or something.
And we tried our best.
But just heavy trees and so on.
The set was beautiful.
Just beautiful.
And it had like the lights came through the actual leaves.
And we had little fans up there to blow the leaves.
It was rippled.
It was just...
It was gorgeous.
And the guy who owned the theater was meeting me to...
Get the payment.
He was meeting me in the theater.
Now, we moved the trees in.
The next morning, I was going to meet the owner or the guy who managed the theater.
And I didn't sleep the whole night.
I was terrified.
I was terrified because I thought they've just spent, I don't know, how many tens of thousands of dollars to finish this floor and we've just crapped it up.
They're going to demand that I pay for a new floor.
And that means I don't have the money.
I don't have the money.
It means I'm going to have to borrow the money and I can't go back to college.
My life is...
You know what I mean?
You freak out, right?
And I was young.
I was 20 or 21 or whatever.
And...
Anyway, I show up the next morning.
Terrified.
Show up the next morning and...
Guy says, this is the most beautiful set I've ever seen.
I was like, oh, really?
And I said, because it was a bit rough on the floor, so I'm real sorry about that.
We tried our best.
He's like, hey man, theater is messy.
Big lesson for me.
Big lesson for me.
Don't worry.
It's all going to work out.
Now, it could have gone the other way.
Of course it could have, right?
Could have had a real dickwad in there or whatever.
Or a guy who was legitimately upset.
You know, whatever, right?
Right.
But, invariably, in my life, everything I've been worried about didn't come to pass.
Now, some of the negative stuff that did happen, I never anticipated in a million years.
Right?
Right.
So, you know, when I say, well, there's great things that you can do in this world to make the world a better place, particularly with regards to getting people to improve the quality of children's lives, and you're immediately, like, pushing back about how it can't be done.
It's impossible.
There's too many people who have high school education.
I'm just telling you that all you're doing is you're consigning yourself to a life where you'll be gone, and people will be like, hey, was that guy even here?
Oh yeah, there was a guy in that cubicle over there.
Oh, he died?
Man, I don't think I ever learned his last name.
Yeah, he spent some time on some crazy websites.
Some British guy is on his speakers all the time.
He died?
Man, now I feel kind of bad.
The guy worked next to me for 15 years.
I don't think we ever went for lunch.
I don't think I ever learned his last name.
And then like four days from that, some new guy is going to move in and they'll go out to say, hey, we'll take you out for lunch.
And they may learn his last name or they may not learn his last name.
But you're going to be gone and it's going to be like you were never there.
I don't want that for you.
Well, I mean, I try my best to, you know, research my stuff online.
I have listened to a couple of your shows.
I've listened to other shows as well.
I really liked your debate with Peter Joseph.
I don't think he had his stuff fully together.
I try to educate myself so that way I can get the full picture, so that way I can better present myself and, you know, help other people and, you know, get myself, you know, noticed and make my mark, get myself, you know, noticed and make my mark, you know, come up with my own ideas.
I mean, I pretty much saw the collapsible government thing that I was talking about. - Hang on, hang on.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you're giving me a sales job here, right?
I'm just giving you my experience that you say, you give me something that's impossible, which is controlling government 75 years in the future.
I think we pretty much established that's not going to work.
I mean, can't prove it.
It's pretty close to established.
And then you say, well, what can we do?
Right?
If I can't do this, what can we do?
And then I say, well, you can do this.
And you say, you give me all these objections, right?
And then I point out that this is probably going to leave you feeling kind of empty and useless, particularly later on in your life.
And all you'll remember is that you didn't act as much as you could have, because if you're negative towards me giving you a solution, I can't imagine you're a positive force out there in the world.
So then, after I tell you that you pushed back on me giving you a solution, you start giving me this sales job about how knowledgeable and effective you are.
But don't sell me.
I'm going to go with what you did, not what you say.
I wasn't attempting to give you a sales job.
I was simply saying, I do try to educate myself.
That's why I called in to get your opinion and your thoughts.
You've actually given me some more things to think about.
I mean, I felt as if you were attacking me simply because I didn't have children and I was pretty much defending myself saying, well, you know, I am not trying, I'm not like hiding behind a curtain and trying my best to not be unnoticed.
I am trying my best to Put my mark on, you know, people.
And, you know, I do that by educating myself.
I called in asking, you know, and I've actually learned something.
And, I mean, it's not like, I mean, so, it was not intentionally, you know, a sales job.
I was actually just...
No, and I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying that at all.
I've never said you intentionally are trying to do something.
I mean, it was just an honest defense mechanism, and I apologize about that.
And I appreciate that.
Nothing to apologize for.
I'm just pointing out what I've noticed.
I don't know.
Were you listening to the earlier parts of the show?
Yes, I was.
Right.
So, I mean, of course, as you know, I'm a rigid empiricist and really work to give people things that they can do as best as I can with the knowledge and skills that I have.
So they can change their lives in the here and now.
Now, you saying maybe we can design a government that self-destructs in 75 years, people can't do anything about that, right?
It's not an actionable item.
And so you proposed an unactionable, impossible item.
I responded with an actionable, possible item, and you pushed back very hard.
And that's all I'm pointing out, is that there's something you need to look into, that when philosophy moves into something you can act on, you get quite resistant, very resistant, and push back very hard.
And you heard the people earlier on in the show who were saying, you know, your show has made me feel sane, your show has changed my life, and all that.
And if I had the idea of Doing philosophy for the masses, so to speak.
And I'd said, well, you know, lots of people out there only with high school education.
Lots of people out there who aren't going to listen.
Well, those people's lives wouldn't have been changed.
I only have high school education.
I listen to your show.
I don't listen to all of them.
Honestly...
You're a very interesting person, but there are times when you have a very monotone type of voice and it's hard to pay attention.
I like hearing what you have to say.
I remember watching your whole show about RK and explaining RK.
I didn't know anything about the RK evolution until actually you had posted that on YouTube.
So, I mean, you know, and I listen to it, but I can only listen to, I'm trying to sound nice about this.
I can only listen to so much because of your monotone voice.
I apologize for saying that, but you have really fascinating ideas.
I wanted to talk to you because you seem like an interesting person that I can learn from.
And I'm glad I'm actually talking to you now.
Like I said, I know people with just a high school education listen to you because you are very informative.
Well, I appreciate that.
You know, I've been accused of many things.
Being a monotone or boring talker is not, I think, one of the criticisms I've said before, but, you know, that's certainly your experience, and I don't want to gainsay that.
But, yeah, I would just, you know, really try and focus on...
On what you can actually achieve, right?
And, you know, I respect the fact that you listen to the show and the fact that you have a high school education, you know.
I had one of the great people I worked with in the past would sometimes start off his presentation saying, you know, I remain unburdened and unmisinformed by the perils of higher education.
And he had only a high school education and was a really great guy to work with.
So, you know, that may be a mark of honor more than anything else.
But I really appreciate you calling in.
I hope that this has given you some stuff to think about in terms of what you can bring to action.
But actionable stuff.
I think it's too late in the game for theoreticals.
Theoreticals might have worked 50 or 100 years ago, but I think it's so late in the game that we really need boots on the ground philosophy stuff at the moment.
So I hope that you'll mull that over and see if there's any use in that for you.
Will do.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Great conversation.
I appreciate it.
Yes, not a problem.
Okay.
Thanks.
Well, I'm sorry we didn't make it to your middle-aged mic, but I'm sure next time we talk, you'll be on one of those phones that types things out.
What?
What, Stefan?
What?
No, you're holding the cell phone upside down, Mike.
You used to know how to use computers.
Suddenly, it's gone.
What's this thing with the keys on it?
What?
Right.
My typewriter isn't making clacky sounds.
Thanks, everyone, for calling in.
It's always a real pleasure and a treat and an honor, in fact, to talk to people about stuff that is so important in your lives and so important to my life as well.
We are a brave and dynamic and powerful crew, and we're growing.
This legion of the rational is growing, and I'm glad to be adding to our number.
And you should take great pride, I think, in fighting back the fogs of superstition and thinking critically and rationally in your own life.
And to the degree to which this conversation has been part of that, I consider myself incredibly honored and blessed by that.
And thank you everyone so much for listening, for calling in, for supporting the show, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week.
Can I just ask you one thing as a birthday present?
You asked me what I wanted.
Can I have some birthday wishes from Major General blah blah blah?
For those unaware, Major General blah blah blah is one of Steph's voices, which has been my favorite voice for approximately five years.
And it never fails to make me laugh.
He comes from a very old podcast.
There was a guy who was around on the message board way back in the day.
His name was Niels.
And he put Major General Blah Blah Blah, who was responding to criticisms, and he put it to perfect music, like 19th century tiddlywink music, and there was a picture of a guy.
It's on YouTube, so I think we've got it on our channel somewhere.
Somewhere, I think.
Yeah, just...
Alright.
I put you on the spot, but...
No, no, that's fine.
I enjoy the precipice.
I like the challenge.
Yeah.
So, can we have a conversation with me being Major General Blah Blah?
You mean I get to speak to Major General Blah Blah?
You do, in fact.
Oh my goodness.
Are we ready?
I'm ready.
Alright.
Now, it's not a phone call.
Oh no, it's going to be one of those wind-up phones, you know, from like World War I. I see.
So, here's your phone ring.
Are you ready?
Brr, brr.
It's like a dying cricket.
Is it a frog with some type of bowel obstruction?
What's going on here?
Still ringing.
Hello?
Hello!
Hello!
Is this, is this Michael?
Uh, this is Michael.
Hello, Michael!
My name is Major General Blah Blah.
I'm calling from Borneo.
Am I getting through to the colonies?
Borneo?
What are you doing in Borneo?
I'm spreading Christian virtues among the savages, Michael.
How was your day?
I don't think I'm doing anything that important.
How are they accepting the Christian virtues, these savages?
With a lot of spears.
A lot of spears and a lot of punctures in my compatriots.
Michael, I have a question for you.
I'm calling the colonies.
There's only one thing I need to know.
What's that?
Are you still British?
Because you don't sound British.
In fact, you sound like a fairly gay American.
I'm Italian and Polish, born in America.
There's not much British in me.
I say, if I send over one of my queer colonels, would you like some British in you?
He's very good at wrestling.
And also, he would like some colonist help in practicing the luge.
Are you game?
He might bring some savages if you'd like to do some colonial role plays where we get to civilize the savages with baby oil and onesies.
Does that sound like a plan?
I can put them in a crate and ship them over.
Because it's the 19th century, it will only take about 12 to 14 weeks to get there.
At which point you might need to give them some water.
And baby oil.
Also, they like strobe lights.
I don't know why, because they haven't been invented yet, but apparently they like dancing to strobe lights.
I think it's a gay thing.
I can't really explain it, but it seems to be what they're into.
Also, do you know a group of musicians called the Pet Shop Boys?
I do not.
I do not.
Ah, apparently my gay friends are really looking forward to it, because Oscar Wilde is not doing it for them anymore.
He's a lot less wild since he went to prison.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
How did you get my phone number?
Oh, I punched in rapidly aging colonists.
And I got through to you.
Rapidly aging colonists.
Worst dating chat line ever.
Rapidly aging, uncivilized, barbaric colonists who apparently spend most of their time when they're hungry chasing the arse end of a buffalo.
Shit.
With a fork!
And ketchup!
Whatever that is.
I believe it's got added sugar.
Don't drink it.
Don't snort it!
For certain.
So I dialed rapidly aging colonists and I got through to you!
And the future!
I see.
From Bordia.
How are things in the future?
I assume that all of the very hard-won liberties that we have expended so much blood and treasure building up for you young whippersnappers has been ably maintained into the 21st century.
Is that...
Tell me my entire life has not been in vain fighting off all of these barbarians to give you the freedoms which you so nobly deserve and I'm sure have ably maintained.
Um...
How much are your taxes?
Have they gone above 2%?
Tell me no.
Can you still choose your own doctor?
Please tell me I fought for that right in a productive way.
There's this place called Chicago.
It's a very interesting place that's been run by liberals for the last 75 years.
Is it somebody who likes to liberalize things and let people be free to do what they wish?
If do what they wish is to take money from other people, then yes.
Yes, it is.
Oh, so by liberal, you mean political thief.
Yes.
I'm currently engaged in quite a battle with political thieves at the moment.
I'm sorry to hear that they escaped to Chicago, but I'm sure there can't be very many of them left.
They could probably use some of your Christian values.
I'm not sure why that's funny.
I have lost many good men to these political thieves.
And you laugh.
And now, since you laugh, I must cry.
But I cry like a man!
Michael, from the future, do you know how to cry like a man?
Actually, that sounds like whining like a small boxed-in Japanese schoolgirl who also needs water but probably not the strobe lights.
Do you know how to cry like a man?
How do you cry like a man?
Kill, kill, kill!
Death to the political thieves!
You cry like a man because the only way a man cries is with a war cry.
Is with his fists.
You cry with blades.
In fact, if you're sad, the best way to do is make your enemies cry and then you feel happier.
But then you feel sad again when you realize that all the political thieves have relocated to Chicago.
And Puerto Rico.
What are your taxes at the moment, Michael DeMarco?
Oh, God.
I don't know.
I'm married so I get deductions, but it's...
Ah, you're married, which means you get deductions in sex.
Not quite.
Because right out here, we have all the ripe fruit and farm animals we could possibly want to have sex with.
That would be more difficult if we were married.
Unless, of course, we were married to the ripe fruit and farm animals, in which case we would probably get deductions in sex because they would have headaches.
Oh dear, are you enjoying the spoils of war?
Is that what you're telling me?
Unfortunately, the spoils of war do get rather spoiled if you leave them out in the sun, so we must enjoy them quickly.
Otherwise, the pigs get sunburns and don't like it from behind.
And wrestling!
You could probably do this all night, couldn't you?
You should stop, because my voice will not be functioning tomorrow.
But yes, I in fact could do that for a considerable amount of time.
It would be embarrassing to say, I could do that for the rest of my life!
He needs to have his own show.
If you folks want Major General Blah Blah to have his own show, let us know.
I say, listener, if you keep moving around, I shall cut you down!
Like the sapling of doom you are.
What do you think of Skype, Major General Blah Blah?
Skype is a vicious enemy to human communication.
I would hate it so much if there were any other options.
Skype is a totalitarian dictator that facilitates the spread of philosophy.
It's quite a contradiction, really.
Okay.
For the sake of your voice, we'll call it a day.
Fine.
Fine.
This is Major Blah Blah signing off.
Hello, pig.
I've got some oil for your sunburn, but first I'll be rubbing it on myself.
Wait, how did he just turn into Duke Nukem?
Are you like the Terminator dipping into the end of the boiling lava?
All your voices come out in your final moment.
Okay, so please also now remember to donate to Mike's birthday fund.
And also, if you would like to donate for extra pig oil for Major Blah Blah, you can put that in the notes.
And if you donate because of Major General Blah Blah, please feel free to let us know how and why you'd like him to make a reappearance.
And because we are philosophy whores, easily bribable, we will make it happen.
