Dec. 10, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:48:07
3148 Being Clubbed With An Inert Brain - Call in Show - December 9th, 2015
Question 1: Is it moral to willingly contribute to an immoral system? If you start a successful business that adds value to society, a significant portion of that value will be stolen to fund all the immoral things that people in government do. Isn't it better to create as little value as possible in order to reduce their funding?Question 2: Are OSHA and other agencies like the EPA, FDA, and USDA necessary? Do you feel that it is better to have no formal organization, and to allow the workers to sort it out by actions such as simply boycotting the company and instructing others to not engage in business with them as they do not provide safe working conditions to their employees?Question 3: To what magnitude does deceptive language, or "double speak", affect people’s perceptions on these problems, and can we lessen the impact of "double speak" by using forms of it?Question 4: You mention the r/K selection theory and the corresponding gene sets as a possible explanation for behaviors and preferences. Does this modify your view on free will? Ultimately, why does the free will debate matter? Either we all have it or not - or is there a notion of "gradients of freewillism" used to justify the socialist agenda by putting those endowed with the "largest free will" at the top?
Is it moral to willingly contribute to an immoral system?
You start at some business, you're going to pay a lot of taxes.
The taxes are going to be used to fund things that you may find or probably do find morally objectionable.
Should we just hold back, go galt, and let the whole system crash of its own accord?
And that is a great question, and we had a rousing debate about that, which I hope will be pretty motivating to you.
A second caller was EPA, FDA, OSHA, USDA, you know, the alphabet suit of pseudo-protective agencies from the state.
Are they necessary?
Don't they help people?
And we had a good conversation about that.
And also he wanted to know, can we go down to the gutterspeak language of doublespeak and manipulation and so on in order to fight manipulation?
Can you fight sophistry with sophistry or is it a bad idea?
And I certainly had some thoughts about that because it's my big temptation sometimes too.
Should I hit below the belt if they're hitting below the belt?
So we talked about that, which I think was great, and then we had a rousing discussion about RK selection theory, the gene war stuff that I've been talking about.
And if the RK selection theory and corresponding gene sets, if it has some significant effect on behaviors and preferences, doesn't that change things about free will for me?
And it's not particularly a debate about the contents of the free will question, but rather about the degree to which biology may affect free will, and does that limit our choices?
It's a great, great question.
It was a great show.
Please remember, FDRURL.com slash Amazon.
If you're doing some shopping and, of course, the regular or old standby, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help, help, help out of the show, show, show.
He repeated, thank you so much, and here we go.
Alright, up first today is Dan.
Dan wrote in and said, Isn't it better to create as little value as possible in order to reduce their funding?
That's from Dan.
Hey Dan, how's it going?
Pretty good.
How about yourself?
Well, thanks.
Do you want me to ask questions?
Do you want me to give thoughts?
What's your preference?
Sure.
What are your thoughts on my statement?
That there's a contradiction in the first sentence.
You said, is it moral to willingly contribute to an immoral system?
An immoral system, by definition, is initiating the use of force against you, and therefore neither morality nor will applies.
Right.
And I could...
After stating it, you know, I could kind of see that contradiction, but...
It's sort of like, and just for those, sorry, for those who are not familiar with the formulation, is it moral to willingly give your money to a mugger?
Well, you're not willingly giving your money to a mugger, you're buying not being stabbed or shot, right?
And so if the system is immoral, then the first thing you wouldn't want to say is willingly contribute.
So now, of course, what you're saying is that, well, I am willing to give my money to the mugger because I could choose to get shot or stabbed.
Right.
Or I could choose to never leave my house or I could choose to have nothing of value that the robber will steal or something like that.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
I mean, I guess you could look at it in, you know, I only carry 20 bucks around.
So in case I do get robbed, it's not that big of a loss, right?
But I mean, kind of in the context of, I mean, I'm in the US. I don't really know how it goes for other places, and it's kind of similar, right?
But we have an income tax, right?
So it doesn't matter, you know, if I... It is not willing because they're going to take it from me either way, but I guess I could choose to not be as productive as I could possibly be.
You would choose to be a great philosopher who works creating the best burgers in the known universe, right?
Not to that extent, right?
Because I don't think the whole going galt thing is really all that practical or helpful.
Because that's more like a total dropout, right?
And I'm definitely not advocating a dropout.
No, no, no.
The going galt is not.
They all had jobs.
They all...
I mean, they were just underperforming relative to their potential.
They weren't totally dropping out.
They weren't going to live in the woods.
They had jobs, right?
Oh, true, yeah.
And so I think it's not far off from what you're saying, right?
Yeah, no, that's not far off.
That's basically exactly what I'm saying.
And just so people know, I mean, Ayn Rand kind of went galt after Atlas Shrugged, right, from 1957 when Atlas Shrugged was finished after, what, 12 or 13 years of writing it, but it was published.
Until she died in, I think, 82, didn't really do that much.
I mean, she kind of went off the grid as far as productivity went afterwards.
Because I was sort of thinking, well, Ayn Rand didn't go Galt, and I was like, yeah, well, you know, she actually kind of did afterwards, right?
She didn't write another novel after, I guess, well, the two big ones, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the two lesser ones, or earlier ones, Anthem and We the Living.
And she wrote Night of January 13th.
I think it's a play.
But not much.
Okay, so the immoral system.
Okay, compared to what?
I mean, I think we can argue reasonably that the modern West is...
One of the least immoral systems throughout history.
I mean, you and I can have this conversation.
There's freedom of speech.
There's, to some degree, a free market and so on.
So compared to most times throughout human history, this is one of the least immoral systems that has been around, right?
I would agree with that, for sure.
Now, would we have...
One of the least immoral systems around if all the people who had the potential to improve the previous systems had gone galt, had gone off the grid, had decided not to shoulder their, put their shoulders to the burden of rolling the rock of liberty up the hill, so to speak.
Would we have the freedom to have this conversation if those who had come before us who had the capacity to build a freer world had decided to abstain from that responsibility?
Well, I mean, that's a good question.
I'm not advocating a total dropout of society.
I don't want to get into false dichotomy time.
Let's not do that.
I know you're not saying go live in the woods.
I know you're not saying throw yourself off a cliff or stop breathing.
Let's just not do that.
We're talking about somewhere.
I get it.
But you would underperform relative to your potential for fear of funding an immoral system.
Right, right, exactly.
Economically.
Okay, so if the people had underperformed relative to their capacities, whoever you feel was instrumental in building a free society, I mean, if you could say, well, Socrates or Aristotle or some of the Roman codifiers of Roman law, Saint Augustine, who brought...
Some of the Aristotelian rationalism tried to reconcile it with Christian theology.
Some of the Enlightenment thinkers, the Voltaire's and the John Locke's and the David Hume's and so on.
And, you know, just going down the line.
These people, I assume, were not, as they say, leaving things on the table, right?
They were going full tilt boogie.
150% they were exerting their intellectual influence to try to make the world a better place.
And I don't think that they had all of these great things that, I mean, they may have had some things that they couldn't say because of the challenges of the time.
But I think in general, they worked very, they worked to the limit of their capacity within the systems that they had in order to try and build a better and more rational world, as you could argue the founding fathers did and other people.
And so I guess my question is, Is it possible, Dan, that you have inherited freedoms that you're not willing to exert yourself to sustain or maintain?
Yeah, I mean, perhaps to a certain extent.
But I just can't envision any other way to push back against that system, right?
You can't imagine...
What are you talking about?
You can't imagine any other way to push back against the system other than dropping out to one degree or another?
Right, because, I mean, they take from you by force, right?
It's like the only way that they don't...
Dan, Dan, hang on!
It's like you're calling 911 saying, I can't imagine there's any place where emergency calls could be placed.
What do you think I'm doing?
What do you think?
I don't understand you calling me saying, well, Steph, you should just drop out and underperform relative to your capacity so that we don't participate in the system.
Do you feel that I could perform much better than I'm doing?
I tell you this, I'm working at the edge of my capacities pretty much every show.
So when you say you can't, you're calling into my show, we've had like, I don't know, 7 million plus video downloads of philosophy and probably an equivalent or greater number of podcasts.
So, you know, 150 million podcast downloads or video downloads of philosophy, you know, a couple of million book downloads and so on.
And then you're saying, well, Steph, I can't conceive of any way that you can fight the system without dropping out.
You understand?
It's kind of weird to me.
You're calling me up saying, Steph, I can't imagine what it's like to talk to a blonde, blue-eyed guy.
You know, it's like, but we're talking.
Yeah, I can see that argument as well.
I mean, that's the whole reason why I'm having the conversation with you as well, too, right?
If I was really into just dropping out, I wouldn't even have bothered if called, too, right?
Yeah.
So don't drop out.
Speak truth to power.
Read, research, learn how to write, learn how to speak, get your education up in relevant topics.
It doesn't have to be formal.
It can be whatever, right?
But if you think that I'm doing a good job, do a better job than me.
Or do as good a job or do whatever job you're capable of.
And you can do that without a lot of money.
Nobody's saying you've got to go out and buy a TV studio or be Rupert Murdoch or anything, right?
I mean, just three chords and the truth, man.
That's all you've got to do.
So you can certainly bring truth and reason to the world.
If you don't want to make a lot of money, well, podcasting is a pretty good gig if you don't want to make a lot of money.
Mission accomplished.
So I would say that there's tons you can do and it doesn't have anything to do with whether you make a lot of money or not.
I mean, it's nothing wrong with making a lot of money.
And that would be my options.
It's not either or.
Like, how do I... I'm going to fight society by dropping out and all.
Just one less person on the barricades.
It's like saying, well, I'm not going to go to war because what if I trip and fall and the enemy catches my rifle?
I think, well, that's just the risk of doing business in the theater, right?
So go out and try and speak your truth.
And look, if you end up making a lot of money, that simply speaks to the fact that you're providing a lot of value to people.
And so if the government takes some of that money, so what?
If all you want to do In life is open a restaurant.
Create a great space for people to have good food, good wine, good conversation.
And you love the idea of opening a restaurant.
Go open a restaurant.
And if there's the mafia in town and you've got to pay them off a couple of hundred bucks a month, are you really going to let a bunch of assholes in shiny shark suits get between you and your dream?
No, you pursue your dream and you pay the bastards off.
Or, you know, you can do what they're doing currently in...
Sicily, which is they're basically just not paying.
A bunch of restaurateurs got together and said, screw this, we're not doing it.
And the mafia is getting kind of baffled.
Like, this was easy pickets before and now it's not.
And they're not really doing that much, at least the last I read about it, not really doing much about it.
Now, that's not the case with the state.
But pursue your dreams like they don't exist.
You know, I mean, I pay my taxes and I don't think about it again the rest of the year.
You pay the bastards off and you pursue your dreams.
That's sort of one argument.
Now the second argument is a bit more kind of cold-bloodedly biological.
And the other argument goes something like this.
You get resources for yourself and for your family.
And for your friends, if they need them.
You gather resources to take care of your own.
And that's your primary responsibility, is to provide for your family.
And to make sure that your children are well taken care of, that they have hopefully some sort of legacy that makes their transition into adulthood a little bit easier than, say, mine or perhaps yours.
And I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing in the long run, but...
You go get your resources.
You know, if you don't build the restaurant, then you can't leave a restaurant to your kids.
If you don't build a restaurant, then you've got to go and work managing someone else's restaurant where you don't have the kind of power and control and authority that allows you to be a success or failure on your own terms and by your own decisions.
So, you just screw the system, go pay your taxes, and don't curb your ambition for the sake of evil people, because they're just going to end up with a whole lot more resources than you do.
And in the game of life, they basically sweep all the chips off the table into their own evil bellies, and you're left with scraps, and your children are left with scraps, and your family is left with almost nothing, and you've got nothing to leave behind to them, and that's kind of loser-ville.
Right?
I mean, why...
Why would you want to just leave all the resources out there to be gathered up by bad people?
Look, societies have collapsed all the time all over the world.
You're saying, I want to fund the system because the system is bad and the system is evil.
Well, okay.
Granted.
So let's say you withdraw and let's say everyone else withdraws and then society collapses.
Do you really think things are going to get better from there?
Roman Empire has collapsed.
Okay, how about a thousand years of the dark ages?
Does that feel like fun to you?
Not really.
So get out there in the marketplace of ideas.
If you don't want to make a lot of money, don't make a lot of money or don't.
But don't let the evil systems that we've inherited from history and which a lot of people have given a lot of sweat, blood and tears to improve.
Don't let that system stand between you and your potential.
And don't let it stand between you and gathering resources to give to people you love and to the children you might want to raise.
And there is a certain amount of freedom in having, I imagine, enough money to say to hell with the world.
You know, what's called F-you money.
And it gives you a certain amount of freedom, I would imagine, to have the kind of money where you can, say, fund your own presidential campaign and really short-circuit the goopy, relativistic, everyone's the same and anyone who claims otherwise is evil kind of mainstream media.
You know, Tom Likas talks about this on his radio show that at some point, I think it was in the...
Late 90s or early 2000s, he'd accumulated enough wealth that he never had to worry about getting fired.
And so he had a certain amount of liberty as far as that goes.
So accumulating resources, yeah, you pay the bastards off.
Look, they're going to do it anyway.
And if you don't pay your taxes, you know, let's say that you don't pay $1,000 in taxes.
I don't mean illegally.
What I mean is you just cut your earnings or whatever and you cut your taxes.
So let's say the government says, oh dear, we have received $1,000 less in taxes this year.
Do you think they cut their spending by $1,000?
Do you think that your tax protest, so to speak, is going to cut the size and power of the government?
No.
All it does is it passes the bill on to someone else.
Because that's the way the government works.
So you can choose not to participate in the system.
That simply means one of three other things is going to happen.
They're either going to raise taxes on someone else, in which case your moral victory seems a little hollow because you've just passed the buck literally to somebody else.
Number two, they're going to print all the money, which means that that thousand dollars gets printed that you didn't contribute in terms of taxes.
And that means that the poor and those on fixed incomes get hurt the most.
From that situation, or they borrow the money, in which case your children or my children are on the hook for your moral crusade to the tune of the principal plus, you know, 20 or 30 years of interest on top of it.
So it's not like if you don't pay the taxes, they're just going to stop the wars.
I mean, okay, well, if everyone did it, but you know, so what?
If everyone died of a heart attack tomorrow, there'd be lots of Roman lineups at Disney World.
That's not how you plan life, right?
And People aren't going to stop doing that.
So I don't think that, given the system is the way it is, and there's no place to go where you can be outside of that system, you work to fulfill your greatest potential as a human being, right?
What Aristotle called eudomania, or the exercise of intelligence and willpower and virtue to achieve moral excellence.
And you speak truth to power, and you put your words out there, you gather resources for your family, and you live life.
Evil doesn't exist.
That's my suggestion.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I guess I appreciate the pep talk.
Because, I mean, here lately, probably over the past few years, I've just been feeling really down about, you know, everything.
I mean, you understand.
I know all your listeners understand as well, right?
And I just want to do something to fight them, you know, and Talking with you and talking with other people, and I get into these arguments with people all the time about welfare state and healthcare and all this other junk.
Usually what it comes down to is, at the end of the conversation, I tell them, Dan, how do you keep having those conversations?
I assume it's with new people.
Yeah, well, unfortunately, sometimes it's with the same people.
I don't know if they forget.
Wait, after you basically said that they're a bunch of thieves and cowards who hide behind the guns of the state to steal things from you because they're too cowardly to take it from you directly, do you then go out for sushi?
I mean, that seems like kind of a make-or-break moment in a relationship, isn't it?
You're cowards and thieves and predators and parasites and liars.
Let's go bowling!
How does that...
What is the next step after that speed bump that seems kind of like a Grand Canyon?
It comes down to, you know, mutual acquaintances and things like that, right?
And run into people in the various circles.
You're not going to answer, are you?
It sounds like you're just fogging me here.
I'm sorry, what was the question?
What was the question?
Okay.
Well, after you say to people, you're just a bunch of cowards who want to steal from me, but you want to use the state because it's too dangerous to do it yourselves, right?
So once you call people immoral, thieving cowards, then what?
Hmm, is that turkey I smell?
Let's go eat.
How do you keep relationships going after those kinds of accusations?
You're evil!
Hey, any chance your kids could mow my lawn this weekend?
I, you know, got 20 bucks burned in a hole in my pocket and Right, you know, actually that's a good point.
I mean, those are the people I should be withdrawing from, not everyone else.
You know, once you pull the moral pin out of the grenade, it seems kind of tough to, like, then what, you know?
Five, four, three, two, one.
Okay, pass the mashed potatoes, I guess this conversation.
Like, that is kind of a, right?
You're in league with Satan!
But same time next week for cards.
I don't know.
It just seems...
How do you manage that?
I mean, I guess I would question what their motives are.
Because, I mean, they end up coming back around me.
How do you manage that?
Not what their motives are.
Like, if somebody said to me, Steph, you're evil.
You know, I guess we'd have a very short conversation about it.
But that's make or break.
You know, either they prove that I'm doing something immoral, in which case, you know, I make amends, I apologize, I changed my behavior, or they're calling me evil incorrectly, in which case they owe me a giant apology, in fact, pretty much groveling, or they call me evil, they're incorrect, and they don't back down, in which case it's like, well, we're done.
You know, like if your girlfriend walks up to you and says, listen, you dickless wanderer, I hate everything about you.
I hate your four chest hairs.
I hate your one earring that's half grown over.
I hate the fact that you never trim your nose hairs.
I hate your unibrow.
I hate the fact that you comb your hair as if you don't have a bald spot.
I hate the fact that your breath smells like fish farts.
I just, I hate everything about you.
You make love like a pillar of nothingness falling on me.
And you seem to think my clitoris is a nomad that wanders around behind my knees sometimes.
And then it makes some sort of camp under my ear.
You don't have any clue about female anatomy.
You don't have any clue about the female sexual preferences.
I mean, for you foreplayers putting your head between my boobs and making motorboat noises, which frankly just makes me feel dizzy and a little nauseous.
You cook like something just fell out of the back of an ice tray.
And I just hate everything about you.
I hate your taste in music.
I hate your taste in movies.
I hate your taste in everything.
And the fact that you leave porn in an auto loop with the volume up when my mother comes over for tea does not exactly help our relationship at all.
So I hate everything about you.
You're the god-awfulest human being to ever go out with.
And I haven't been sexually satisfied with anything except a cucumber since I started dating you.
Well, then what?
Okay, now that you've got that on your chest, want to fool around?
I can go hunting for this mystery nomad glitters again.
That sounds fun.
I'll bring a spelunking gear, some cables, and a helmet with a light on it.
I mean, where does it go from there?
Well, I mean, I usually don't have these conversations with these people for their benefit.
You know, I know they've got their heads stuck up their ass and there's no way I'm going to change their opinion.
But there's usually someone else around, right?
There's usually someone else listening, someone that I, you know, I might be able to reason with.
And that's the only reason why I can conceivably think of to have these conversations with people.
I don't know what to say because we're not having the same conversation at this point, Dan.
I keep asking you these questions and you keep giving me these non-answers.
So I don't know whether to continue or just move on to the next caller, to be honest with you, because I keep asking you these questions and you keep not answering them.
So I don't know if we're...
I know we're not on the same wavelength at all.
Well, I don't know.
Yeah, I guess we're just not on the same wavelength because I don't know where you go from there.
I mean...
I do.
Elsewhere...
Welcome to Dumpsville.
Population, you.
You know, once you call someone evil, or supporting an evil system, they either have to admit that they're evil or prove you wrong, in which case you owe them an apology.
And if they are in fact supporting evil, they've got to change their ways or get the fuck out.
Yeah, I mean, the problem is that these people are everywhere.
I mean, there's no...
There's no avoiding them.
Well, they're certainly everywhere if you never kick them out.
Right?
I mean, it's like, there are cockroaches everywhere in this apartment.
All I do is I leave cake all over the floor every night and never call a fumigator.
Next thing I come back, I mean, there are roaches everywhere.
So everywhere I go, there are roaches.
It's like, no, where you live, there are roaches because you're not doing anything to get them out.
In fact, you're feeding them with attention and with interaction.
Right.
Yep.
You know, you're like the woman who's, well, all guys beat up on you, right?
I mean, that's just what guys do.
They come home, they're drunk, they lick your ear, and then they try to have sex with you, and if you say no, they beat you up.
I mean, that's just being a dude, right?
Like, well, I guess you're going to find a whole lot of dudes like that if that's what you believe the dudes are, but if you just hang around with people who thirst for the initiation of violence against you, then it's going to seem like they're everywhere, you know?
Because you keep them around.
Right, yeah.
And look, I'm not saying, look, if you want to have relationships, you don't have to bring up politics or philosophy at all.
But once you have, you know, that cat's kind of out of the bag, and it's got to eat something before it goes back in.
And this is the power of philosophy, that once you draw that moral line down the middle of something...
It's there.
And it's kind of a whole lot there.
And if you both then ignore it, then what the hell's the point?
Right?
It's like giving...
Ethics are an ultimatum.
You understand that, right?
Ethics are an ultimatum.
Good and evil are ultimatums.
And if you put out an ultimatum which basically says, listen, I've made the case to you, my friends, that you support the use of force against me.
That is immoral.
That's an ultimatum.
Change or else.
Be good or else.
Or as I like to think in my mind, be good or be gone.
And once you pulled that pin out of the grenade, not a lot of guys with mohawks and goth gear sitting in the back of the Basilica In Rome, and saying at the end of the Pope's sermon, Hey, that wasn't bad.
Made my skin crawl.
How about a rousing rendition of Hail Satan?
And everyone's like, Yeah!
Hail Satan!
We haven't sung that one for a long time.
Let's sing together.
Hail Satan!
Right?
I mean, they don't do that.
Because Satan's kind of the enemy, right?
And if you pull that pin out and you stick around, you just get blown up with avoidance and nothingness, right?
And you can see the effect.
And this is why I'm bugging you about not answering my questions.
Because you make these statements and then you vanish from the conversation.
And then you come up with non-sequitur.
This is the price you have of putting down the moral law with people around you and then pretending nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
Nothing to see here.
We never talked about ethics.
Maybe we can do it again, but it won't mean anything.
Because you have an ultimating called ethics, right?
And then you just pretend nothing happened and you ignore it.
And that's exactly what you're doing in this conversation.
You are losing the ability to have a direct and vivid and connected conversation with someone because you lay down the moral law with the people around you and then just pretend that nothing happened and you become avoidant.
Do you see the parallels, right?
I do, yeah.
Yeah.
That's the price.
That's the price, which is that you and integrity are kind of becoming reverse magnets.
Yeah.
Push them together, you can't do it, right?
So if you want to take pulling out the moral hammer, swinging it wildly, and then pretending you haven't smashed up some delicate crockery, well, you just end up dissociating.
You just end up being outside your own skin.
And you end up not being able to have direct communication with anyone because your relationships are so full of the avoidance of the moral hammer you brought down in the past.
And if...
If you think, or you've made the case for people, like say about the welfare state, that they're supporting an immoral institution, one of you is immoral, right?
Either the initiation of force is good, in which case you're a bad guy for saying less of it, or the initiation of force is bad, in which case they're bad people for wanting more of it.
So why would they want to hang out with you if they genuinely believe what they believe?
See, when you lay down the moral test with people, Argument for morality, as I've called it, pointing out the gun in the room, the violence of the state.
It's a test of other people's integrity as well.
Because when a good person or a person who thinks he's being good is criticized as immoral, if the person is really interested in morality, it will bug the shit out of that person.
It will be like a splinter in the mind's eye.
If someone called me immoral and made a really good case, I literally probably wouldn't be able to sleep until I'd sorted it out, because being moral is kind of important to me.
That's kind of the gig, right?
It doesn't mean being perfect, it just means being moral.
And if you drop the moral hammer on people, and they don't do any follow-up, and it doesn't Bother them to the point where they call you up at 2 o'clock in the morning and say, man, Dan, I've been thinking about what you said.
It is bugging the shit out of me.
I'm dizzy.
I can't eat.
I'm discombobulated.
I'm bewildered, dazed, confused, baffled.
What the hell is going on?
I feel like I just got ripped out of the matrix without anesthetic.
And it wasn't even like the probe was in my ear.
It was some other place even more uncomfortable.
So we got to finish this conversation because it is driving me crazy.
That you have these moral perspectives and I don't know a good way to counter them, right?
If someone is genuinely a good person and you accuse them of immorality, it's on till only one of you is left standing, right?
And so if you're around people and you have these conversations about the welfare state, you point out the violence and blah, blah, blah, right?
And then it just kind of drifts away.
And they're not bothered by an accusation of immorality to the point where they can't let it alone.
They can't, right?
Like, you have these stories that occasionally show up on Dr.
Phil where some woman says, you know, or guys, the guys happens a lot too.
The guy's like, I'm certain my wife's having an affair.
It's all I can think of.
I can't eat.
I can't sleep.
I'm checking her cell phone.
I hacked away in her email accounts.
I found a way to take screenshots of her Facebook account.
I know she's having an affair.
And they're obsessed by it, right?
Like this OCD or hoarding or whatever.
Let's tidy up.
No!
And for people who are genuinely good people, the question of morality versus immorality is something that they can't rest until it's resolved.
Because they really care about it.
And like if somebody said to me, I don't know, Steph, you're a racist, and here's all the evidence, right?
People call me racist, and who cares, right?
I mean, anybody who uses the term racist without clear evidence is just themselves a racist, and who cares, right?
But if somebody said, oh, you know, here's the evidence of racism, right?
And they had a good case, right?
Do you think I'd just shrug it off and say, ah, well, you know, you win some, you lose some.
Sometimes you swing and you connect.
Sometimes it's a swing and a miss.
And I'd be like, oh my God, maybe I am.
That's terrible.
Boy, I really think about that, right?
Here's the evidence, here's the evidence, here's the evidence.
And it would bother me until I had resolved it.
And that's not a particularly conscious process.
That's just what people who care about ethics is what they're like.
So if you've got a bunch of people around you, Dan, who are on the opposite sides of the moral spectrum, and they don't really seem to care about it, and they don't even care to resolve it, Or they don't say, wow, I've never heard these arguments before.
Give me some references.
Give me a book to read.
Give me some websites.
Give me a podcast at freedominradio.com.
Give me something.
Then you're surrounded by people who aren't even moral nihilists.
Because at least a moral nihilist cares about morality enough to take aim and shoot at it.
They're like a moral vacuum.
And I would argue that people...
When faced with accusations of immorality, people who basically don't seem to give a shit about it.
Well, I don't know, what is it, a three-syllable word that rhymes with rociopath?
I don't know.
They're not bothered by accusations of immorality?
That's chilling.
That, to me, is animal-like.
Animals have certain kinds of blood loyalty, but they're not driven by abstract universal moral considerations.
And so it is sub-human, ape-like, tapeworm ethics, which is not any ethics, right?
Eat, sleep, screw.
Eat, sleep, screw, rinse and repeat.
And so my concern is that if you have people around you who see the brilliant Noon and midnight, the sun and darkness of moral choice.
Doesn't bother them, they don't care about it.
I'm concerned that you're surrounded by people who would get kicked out of an ape troop for moral relativism, and that's kind of chilling to me, which is my thoughts.
Yeah, I never really thought about it before, but I can definitely see the disassociation in the relationships I have with some people, for sure.
And there's definitely a lot of tiptoeing around the landmines with some folks as well.
What do you mean with some folks?
You mean you make the choice to tiptoe around the landmines?
Right, yeah, exactly.
And they do the same.
Why do you make that choice?
I don't mind that you do.
I'm just curious why.
I don't know.
Because I get something else out of the relationship, I guess.
You know, superficial stuff, obviously.
I don't necessarily consider these people great friends or anything, but acquaintances.
Well, look, if they're not interested in ethics, they can't be great friends.
Right.
And they can't be...
You can't love them.
Because there's...
Loving somebody who's amoral is like trying to screw a ghost, right?
You just fall into nothingness and bang your dick on the floor.
And look, I mean, to me, again, people can do whatever the hell they want.
There's no moral compulsion or no moral requirement that you speak the truth to everyone at all times, no matter what.
But you must be conscious of it.
You must be aware of Because in the conversation, and you'll hear this when you listen back to him, but in the conversation with me, your dissociation and obliqueness was so automatic, I know that you're not making the choices to stay in relationships where you avoid certain topics consciously knowing the full ramifications and limitations of those relationships.
Where you say, I really want to hang out with someone so I can hide as much of who I am as humanly possible.
I really want to spend time with someone so that 99% of me can't be there and won't be there.
Right, yeah.
It's like, I really want to bang this chick so I'm going to hire my friend called dissociation to have sex with her for me and maybe I can just listen from the next house or whatever, right?
And I think that's the part that needs to be conscious, right?
I have relationships in my life where I don't bring up ethical issues.
Okay, fair enough.
I'm going to get into the hows and the whys and the wherefores.
It's not close relationships, mostly functional relationships, but I'm aware of that.
Fully aware of that.
I say, okay, I'm going to go to my dentist or whatever, nice lady, and talk politics.
Maybe a little bit here and there, but not much.
Because, you know, she's got a drill.
She's well-armed.
But I'm aware of that.
I'm just, okay, here I'm going to a place where I can't speak my mind.
Here I'm going to a place where I'm getting a value called clean teeth.
And please, my dentist is a perfectly nice person in a lot of ways.
I'm going to pick on her.
But here I am doing that.
I'm going to go into this place.
Can't be myself.
Can't be myself.
I have to hide just about everything about who I am.
And if you're aware of that and you're conscious of it, yeah, it's fine.
Right?
If you know you're going underwater, you stop breathing.
My concern is that your lungs are full of seawater and you don't even know.
Yeah, I mean, I think I know a lot of the times, right?
I mean, one example is, you know, a coworker who has like a Bernie Sanders button on their desk or something like that.
I mean, obviously, I know I can't talk politics with that person because they are just insane.
Is this a young person?
Actually, no, they're about my age, which I'm 36, so...
Right.
Is it a woman?
No, it's a male.
Wow.
I work at a tech company, so, you know, we got lots of yippies.
And see, here's the thing.
Like, if you're going to have relationships where ethics don't have any consequences, then don't bring ethics up.
I mean, would you, like, let's say some co-worker is gaining weight.
And let's say you know ahead of time that nothing you ever say to that person is going to make him change life.
His eating habits or his exercise habits.
Then you wouldn't bother having the conversation.
You know it's futile.
It's not going to lead to any change whatsoever in either of you.
Why would you do it?
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, there's been a few times where someone asked me what I thought of something and I told them, yeah, you don't want to know what I think.
Just move along.
Okay, and see, that's fine, right?
You can plead the fifth, right?
I mean, that's perfectly valid, right?
And...
My concern then is you're kind of in this half world, right?
To me, it's ethics, do it or don't.
I'm not a halfway kind of guy, which is why when I succeed, I succeed a lot.
And when I fail, I fail a lot and fail hard.
And, like, I'm the kind of guy that's like, yeah, triple axel.
I'm going to try because either it's going to be a gold medal or Or my teeth are going to be scattered across the skating rink.
I mean, I'm sort of a not one foot on the boat, one foot on the pier kind of guy.
You're all in or you're not.
And that's why when I was an entrepreneur in the software field, I gave it all my...
All my guts and all my glory and all my brains and all my hard work and all my dedication and it worked out really well.
And I was not so great working for other people and doing this.
I think it's working out really well because I am committed to this particular program and there's nothing that I won't do.
No amount of stupid jokes I won't make or smart jokes that I won't make.
No amount of showing people my tits or anything like that that I won't do to keep people entertained and engaged in the realm of philosophy.
So I'm all in.
I'm all in.
And my concern is that if you're not going to do ethics, let's say, at work, then avoid it, but go all in somewhere else.
Go all in somewhere else.
You know, it's an old stupid phrase, and I don't like it particularly, but it does capture something.
Which is go big or go home.
And I'm just sort of concerned that you're kind of in this half Nazgul world of kind of doing ethics and kind of not doing ethics.
So kind of doing ethics, but it has no effect and it doesn't matter that you do or don't, but you keep doing it anyway.
And I'd say then if you're not going to do ethics, then don't do ethics, but go all in somewhere else.
Go all in somewhere else.
You know, the end of your life, Dan, as you know, you're dead either way.
You're dead whether you cared or whether you didn't.
You're dead whether you loved or whether you didn't.
You're dead whether you became a parent or you didn't.
You're dead whether you committed to something or you didn't.
You're dead whether you fought for virtue or cowered in ghost land.
You're dead either way.
But what life will grant you, I guarantee you this, having stared death in the face myself, I will tell you this, Dan, that before you die, assuming that you don't get hit by a meteor or a bus or a Bernie Sanders bus, what life will do to you is it will fill you with the earned remorse of chosen avoidance.
But if you don't give it your all, the price that you pay is the last 20 years of your life will be full of sickly regret.
That's the curse of underperformance.
It doesn't mean you have to achieve greatness, but it means you have to achieve greatness relative to your capacities, whatever they are.
And the pain and the challenge, the fear and the anxiety of achieving greatness relative to your capacities in the here and now can be extremely uncomfortable.
So what?
Quitting smoking is extremely uncomfortable, I imagine, too, as is quitting cocaine.
It's just one of these things that are kind of necessary if you want to get to a ripe old age.
And if you don't give it your all in whatever you choose, then you will be old.
Your life will have been largely spent up.
You will have defined your companions and your family and your compatriots and your tribe By the mutual avoidance of anything that smacks of greatness, commitment to power.
And that will be the tribe that will slowly lower you into the regret-filled acid bath of your twilight years.
You know, I would rather suffer now and be happy later than be happy now and suffer later.
The later may never come for sure, but these days it generally does.
We live to ripe old ages.
And the biggest regrets The biggest regrets are fairly common.
You know, there's something floating around, Mike, if you can look it up.
There's something floating around on the internet.
They've done interviews of people in old age homes and people who take care of the dying.
And the regrets that people have are very repetitive, very common.
And it's really important to recognize Those who did not achieve what they wanted in their lives, it's very important to listen to them.
Because the only good thing that can be gotten out of absence is a repudiation of absence, of avoidance, of playing it small, of playing it safe, of, as you say, tiptoeing around landmines.
Landmines don't blow your legs off.
They're like jetpacks.
And...
The fifth most common regret that people have, as I said, I wish I'd let myself be happier.
I read these chicken soup books.
They're probably not that big now, but they were around when I was younger.
And a woman was writing about her life, and she said, you know, basically, I was married for 50 years, and I wish I had known throughout those 50 years that everything was going to turn out all right.
And that is a very common thing.
Happiness invites the wrath of the gods in many people's minds.
Like, don't show that you're too happy.
Don't be too happy or someone is going to strike you down.
It is the tall poppy that gets cut off.
It is the tall nail, the nail sticking up that gets hammered down.
Don't let yourself be too happy.
Number four, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Number three, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings and people hide their whole lives like they're hoarding for something, like they're squirrels keeping their nuts buried for a winter that never comes.
People hoard their feelings.
They hide themselves.
They suppress themselves.
They erase themselves.
Because when you're with invisible people, you have to not be there to be there.
This is the paradox I'm talking about.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I'm very conscious of this.
What I do...
I can do and do and do.
And Mike and I talk about this, and Stoyan and Mike and I talk about this, and I talk about this with other people, that what I do, well, there's always a show I could be doing, there's always a conversation I could be having, there's always something I could be reading, there's always an interview I could be preparing for, and everything that I do does some good in the world, so it's kind of hard to say no.
But I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I mean...
I had a lot of stuff to do yesterday.
But instead, I took my daughter to a play center for three hours and stubbed the living crap out of my toe, which is now a tiny purple grape at the end of my foot.
I wanted to go for a walk today, and it's like, ooh, spike of pirate death leg.
And I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
You can't take your money with you, but especially when your kids are grown, if you haven't built...
The base of relationship with your kids, it's really hard.
You know, you could build a pyramid from broad to narrow.
You can't build it the other way up, or the other way upside down.
When, it's another thing that I read, when in the same chicken soup for the mother of soul, I think it was called one of these ones, and in it there was a story of a woman whose son was going off to college, and she was looking at one of his baby pictures,
and she said, you know, how much I would give to have her back, to have him back like that just for an hour, you know, cuddling in my leg, gurgling and cooing and finding his feet, and Big Disney eyes of incredible clearness and this connection and this physicality and this, you know, babies are so wonderfully not self-conscious and not manipulative and not embarrassed and not shy and they are so vivid because the world is so vivid to them.
You can see the newness of the world reflecting into them like the world is a song that echoes out of a canyon.
The world comes round new to you like a skateboarder at the bottom of a skate park.
The world goes in new to a baby and comes out new to you and fills your heart with new paint and a fresh smell of spring.
And so, yeah, people work too much and they are not close to the people that they love.
And then the work ends and the last quarter of your life in particular is about your relationship.
So build that base.
And also, I mean...
You work too hard, you just get unproductive.
You know, there's this weird thing of just like, well, work, work, work, and you suddenly...
But when you don't work, it's often when you get the inspiration.
And the number one regret.
Number one regret.
This is for you, Dan.
Number one.
People who are dying, people who are old, people for whom it is genuinely too late.
Number one.
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Number one, regret.
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all.
When people realize that their life is almost over and they look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made or not made.
Health brings a freedom very few realize until they no longer have it.
And I have thrown myself on the rocks of women's indifference and I have thrown myself down the stairs of corporate problems and I have Thrown myself into the quicksand of attempting to engage other people in my acting or my writing and I have failed a lot of it and I regret none of it.
You stop at the small failures, you realize you can digest and shit them out and grow stronger thereby and you just move up to bigger and bigger failures.
Bigger and bigger failures.
And that's my concern.
For you.
For you and for everyone who's listening to this.
We are afraid of being who we are.
Because we think that there might be some reward for being what other people want of us.
For pouring ourself, which are designed to be stone and metal giants astride the world.
Pouring ourselves into tiny rivulets, into the narrow little funeral vases of other people's expectations and conforming to the dusty ash and sand and nothingness of what they want.
Because you see, they lived a life conforming to other people's expectations and so they pass that virus along to you.
And there's this little shaping and this molding.
Oh, there's a little bit of individuation sticking out.
Boom!
Boom!
Let's hammer that down.
Oh, I'm going to do a little bit of withdrawing.
I'm going to do a little bit of punishment.
I'm going to do a little bit of ostracism.
I'm going to frown.
I'm going to sigh.
I'm going to pause.
I'm going to make you uncomfortable until you get the fuck back into your funeral vase that awaits us all.
And don't you dare slop out.
And don't you dare harden.
And don't you dare outgrow your little crypt.
Because I never was myself.
And the virus I'm going to pass along to you is that you must never be yourself because if you achieve what I chickened out of, my cowardice will attack me to the grave and beyond.
And if you surround yourself with people who don't pursue their dreams, who don't have the fundamental moral, aesthetic, intellectual, physical, and emotional strength To try and fail.
You know, there's one sound that I hate in this world.
And you can hear this sound on approximately 94% of YouTube videos.
Oh yes, I've checked.
There is one sound that I hate.
And that sound is when somebody's trying to do a jump or somebody's trying to do a trick on their bike or something with a skateboard.
They're trying to do something and they fail.
And I'm not even going to try and imitate it because it's an ugly sound of soul-shredding death.
And it's the harsh and horrible laugh that people have.
Don't even ask people if they're okay.
Just that horrible, harsh laugh.
That high, hysterical, sociopathic, psychotic laugh of watching someone fail.
Fail army.
Always recruiting and it's very hard to get out.
And so, yeah, we want to listen to the dying.
We want to listen to the dying because they know what life is and they know that the discomfort you're going to feel at being yourself.
And being yourself means not having the expectations that anybody conform to you or anybody accept you.
That is the trick of being yourself.
Being yourself means rejecting.
Rejecting completely.
Our hunger to control other people's reactions to us.
The moment you try to control other people's reactions, you can no longer be yourself because you're managing other people rather than being who you are.
You can't play tennis running back and forth, both sides of the net.
And whenever you try to manage other people's reactions to you, you cease to be who you are.
And you immediately become a manipulator.
You become a tiny little ghostly social fascist who's trying to get other people to feel stuff or get other people to stop feeling stuff or make sure that they are okay with what you're doing or don't criticize or don't have any problems or don't have any negative responses or if you're a comedian that they have positive responses and they laugh and this kind of manipulation.
I mean there's nothing wrong with comedy.
But if you're aiming for laughter, you're not being who you are.
And that's totally fine.
My dentist isn't being who she is when she cleans my teeth.
That's totally fine too.
But giving up.
The conformity is control of others.
People think that conformity is subjugation.
No.
If conformity is not subjugation, at least not in a relatively free society, conformity...
Is controlling others.
You conform to other people's expectations because you wish to control their negative reactions to that which displeases them.
And if your authentic self displeases them, you wish to control their negative reaction by killing your authentic self.
It's a form of self-mutilation driven out of a desire to control others, driven out of not developing the ego strength to handle disapproval.
Not developing the ego strength to handle disapproval.
Love Donald Trump or hate him, that man has the ego strength that comes along literally once in a generation, at least in the political level.
Because politicians pander to people and appease people because they want to control people.
They want you to go and vote for them.
They're no more authentic than a used car salesman trying to dump the last car on the lot.
They will tell you whatever you want to hear so that you will go and vote for them.
And Donald Trump, love him or hate him, that's a once in a generation ego strength that has the capacity to withstand disapproval.
And all human progress is the capacity to withstand disapproval.
And my concern is, Dan, that the degree to which you are not being who you are is the degree to which you are standing in the way of human progress.
And I know that's a lot to put on your shoulders.
But I do think that there's a real case to be made for it.
Because if you bring out ethics and you don't follow through on ethics, if you call people immoral and then continue to hang out with them without resolving that dispute, all you're doing is you're communicating to people that ethics don't matter.
That ethics don't matter.
If I show up at some black guy's house who's a friend of mine and I say, hey...
I'm the newest Grand Wizard Klansman.
And I'm in a full-on, you know, evil Casper pointy-headed bedsheet suit.
And he's like, that's a horribly offensive and racist organization for you to join.
I can't believe that you would do that.
And I take the hat off and say, hey, I'd like some chicken and watermelon.
Is that okay, Vesper?
Vesper?
Well, if he's just like, oh yeah, here's some chicken and watermelon and we just sit around and chat, that would be completely weird.
Because if he's taking a stand on anti-racism, then the fact that I joined the Klan will not be something that vanishes from his head.
But that's the kind of power that you are bringing to bear.
My concern is that people are using you to disarm ethics, not to take account of ethics.
And you yourself are disarming ethics by bringing it up without any follow-through, without it then informing Your decisions about your relationships.
So I just really wanted to mention that.
And, you know, 36, you know, you're probably not even halfway through, right?
Right?
36 is going to take you to 72.
And average life expectancy these days is, you know, probably for someone your age, high 70s.
You're not even halfway through.
And every day that you spend not being yourself means that you have less chance to be yourself.
There is no future where you will materialize because every day you're not yourself, you disintegrate a little bit more.
It's like expecting that the waves that are wearing down rocks are going to build a cathedral.
No, you've got to rip those rocks out of the ground, shape them and build with them because all that's going to happen is entropy to the rocks of the self that face the endless winds and rain and acid of social disapproval.
So Whatever you do gets stronger.
Whatever you avoid gets weaker.
And I'm just concerned that you may be close to terminal in terms of whether you have the capacity to turn back.
And that's the kind of urgency that I want to get across to you in this conversation.
Go and be honest or be honestly dishonest.
I know that sounds like a paradox, but you can.
Go and be honest.
Or go and be honestly dishonest, where you are very consciously deciding to avoid and minimize certain topics, but do so consciously.
And then, for God's sakes, find a place where you can genuinely be yourself and speak your mind without fear.
Right.
I appreciate that.
I definitely don't want any regrets, so I appreciate the kick in the butt with that.
And you know, can I go back to you?
Sorry, I'm going to move on this call, but there's a great song.
I forgot about it for years.
It's called The Gunner's Dream by Pink Floyd.
It's off their final cut, which is their final album, at least it was, back in the day.
And in it, he talks about totalitarianism, sings about totalitarianism.
It's Roger Waters, I think.
And he says, where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears, what's more, No one ever disappears.
You'll never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
And this, you see this in The Wall as well.
One of the great modern masterpieces of music.
In that personal repression is co-joined with political fascism.
And this is why when you are not yourself, you do invite the dark backwings of the Nazgul writers to bring totalitarianism into the world.
Because when you act as if you're a slave, you summon slave masters.
When you act afraid to be yourself, you bring those who will dominate you because they know they can.
When you surrender to social disapproval, you bring to life the terrifying vampires of social manipulation.
It is the people who kneel who are ruled.
It is the people who cower who are bullied.
You know, like the bullies look for the kid who's walking, you know, shuffling, staring at the floor, nervous, badly dressed, badly combed hair, maybe a little smelly.
Somebody who's got the clear marks of unprotected by parents around.
No relationship to adults who are going to give that person any kind of strength, any kind of support, any kind of sucker, any kind of aid.
And the degree to which you are not yourself is the degree to which you will invite bullies and control freaks into your life.
And the degree to which that collectively happens, I think, is the degree to which people begin to court more totalitarian forms of government.
In other words, if you can't speak out loud about your doubts and fears, the standard issues will start kicking in the door sooner or later.
So thank you very much for the call.
I appreciate that.
Let me know how it goes and move on to the next.
Alright, up next is another Dan.
Dan wrote in and said, Are OSHA and other agencies like the EPA, FDA, and USDA ultimately necessary?
Do you feel that it is better to have no formal organization and to allow workers to sort it out by their actions, such as simply boycotting the company and instructing others not to engage in business with them as they do not provide safe working conditions to their employees?
That is from Dan.
So EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or something like that, and FDA, Food and Drug Administration.
So I'm not sure what you mean by necessary.
I mean, that's not a philosophical standard, right?
Moral is a philosophical standard.
Necessary, well, they're certainly not necessary.
Right?
In that reality continues whether they're there or not.
Right?
So I'm not sure what you mean by necessary.
Necessary means...
I don't mean to say...
Sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you just as I... But I don't mean to sound...
Like, what the hell do you mean?
I don't mean to sound combative.
Like, I'm genuinely...
I don't know what you mean by necessary.
Oh, of course.
And to define necessary, that would mean people would not be able to get along without their existence.
Well, what do you mean?
I mean, do you think that there was the EPA in the Stone Age?
I mean, where do you think we came from?
I mean, human beings didn't arise with the OSHA in the 70s or the FDA in the 60s after the thalidomide scandal.
I don't know, the EPA. Oh, the EPA was put in by...
Nixon, I think it was.
So I'm pretty sure, I've looked at some history books, there's some grainy black and white photos from the pre-Nixon era where human beings existed and functioned and had flourishing societies and philosophy and theology and all that.
So I don't know what you mean by people couldn't get by without it.
That's what we did for 99.999% of human history, right?
Well, yeah, I guess that would be too extreme of a way to phrase it.
So I guess what I would really be getting at is Would we be better off without having to have these organizations that more or less force people to have to go along with these regulations?
Okay.
What does better off mean?
I'm sorry to be so annoying, but when you're talking about, let's just talk about America, when you're talking about a collective of 300 million people, I don't know what better off means.
Like years ago, I did an interview with Dr.
Mary Ruart, R.W., Sorry, R-U-W-A-R-T, and you should really go to her website and you should look at her books and you should look at her presentations.
She's made an excellent case, and this is as of a couple of years ago, that if I remember rightly, 5 million people have died as a result of the FDA banning substances which are legal in other countries but which have not achieved FDA approval.
So, and why was the FDA born?
Because of the thalidomide scare, which thalidomide was an anti-nausea medicine that was given to women when they were pregnant that resulted in a couple of dozen birth defects and child deaths.
And so I'm not sure what you mean by better off.
So if the FDA had existed, then some of those babies would not have been born with birth defects.
A couple of dozen babies would not have been born with birth defects.
On the other hand, Five million people would likely still be alive because beta blockers and other things which are legal in other countries and have very proven helpful benefits medicinally, they would be alive.
And, you know, up here in Canada, there's a Cheerios and they said, well, Cheerios is good for your heart.
Apparently there were some studies for that.
But they had to take that off, you see, because they hadn't done a double-blind experiment for 10 years and paid $50 million or whatever hell it takes, right?
So I don't know what you mean by better off.
I mean...
There are a few people who are helped by FDA regulations.
They could certainly be helped in the free market by an equivalent organization, but the FDA has no incentive to pass drugs through the system, right?
They can always ask for one more test.
They can always ask for one more proof because the people who die because the medicine isn't there are not counted as failures of the FDA. Whereas if the FDA lets a medicine through that then ends up killing people, they're in a lot of trouble, right?
So there's, in a free market system, both sides would be in the equation, right?
So they'd say, well, we've got to let these drugs through because, you know, 80 people a day are dying because these drugs aren't there, right?
So there is that positive incentive to get things through.
Now, of course, with the government bureaucracy, There's no positive incentive to get things through.
I mean, if the police fail to solve a murder, what happens?
Well, nothing.
There's no standard of failure.
So I don't know, you know, would people get thrown in jail for taking unproven medications that they're desperate to try because they're terminal?
Well, yeah, and it really is just about whether or not just – if you feel overall because, I mean, like you're saying, there are beneficial aspects.
I wrote down some positives.
For instance, for OSHA, they do provide sensible regulations that keep people safe, and it's based on proven science and all this stuff.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
You've got to get used to economic thinking, right?
Yeah.
You've got to get used to economic thinking.
And sure, okay, so let's say I pass a regulation, you know, there's like 38,000 car deaths in the United States every year, right?
Now, they could easily be stopped.
Because you would pass a law that says no one can drive more than five miles an hour, right?
No, seriously, you laugh, but that would save 38,000 lives.
Dan, don't you care about these 38 mangled lives of people who have to be pulled out of their car wreckage with the jaws of life and they don't even live?
This doesn't even count the people who end up in wheelchairs.
Don't you care about them?
Join me in capping speed limits at 5 miles an hour.
Right, but yeah, so the economic thinking is that would be unreasonable because that would inhibit transportation abilities and trade, right?
So we drive slower, but 38,000 people with mothers and fathers, you know?
I mean, you can look at those, right?
So, okay, some regulations have been passed, and people's lives have been saved.
Absolutely.
No question.
So what?
Because you've got to look at the downside.
You've got to look at the downside.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Let me finish the point, then I'll shut up.
So let's say, this is just off the top of my head, I don't have the data, I don't know if anyone does, but increased regulations, actually this data I do have, that increased regulations since the late 1940s, right, since the end of the Second World War, if regulations had stayed the same way that they were In the late 1940s in America the GDP of America would instead of being 15 or 16 trillion dollars would be 52 or 53 trillion dollars.
Right?
More than three times higher!
There'd be no poverty because people would make so much money that there'd be so much economic activity and people would make so much money that anybody who needed any kind of help would get it.
Because if the average average income In America was $150,000 to $200,000 per family and taxes were much lower.
There would be, and we're just talking regulations, not even the welfare state or the welfare state or anything like war on drugs, just regulations.
So how many great cures for illnesses would there be if that kind of wealth existed in society?
How many more children could people afford?
How many people have not had children because they can't afford them?
So how many lives have been prevented from coming into existence?
How long might people be living?
How productive might they be?
How much leisure time might they have?
And if you look at OSHA regulations, okay, let's say it saved a hundred people a year, right?
Okay, but what about the fact that these regulations, along with a whole bunch of other statist interventions, but these regulations have driven a huge number of manufacturing jobs overseas.
Which means people don't have work, which means they're stressed, which means they have heart attacks, which means they get depressed, which means they get suicidal.
And they have no lives to speak of.
They get fat because they're bored and depressed, got nothing to do with their days.
And they go on welfare, and they go on unemployment insurance, and they go on disability.
And then the government has to pay for the drugs to treat their depression and anxiety, which makes their brains stop working, which makes them crazy and violent sometimes, and makes them commit crimes sometimes, according to some data.
So the idea that, well, all we do is we look at these regulations and we say, well, 100 lives have been saved, so yay, we're up 100 lives.
That's not economic thinking, because if all you ever do is look at the upside of things rather than looking at the hidden costs, you're just not approaching things with any wisdom.
I'm not saying you don't have any wisdom in general.
I'm just saying that in this particular instance, the cost and benefit of safety versus innovation is very complicated.
I don't know the answer to that.
You don't know the answer to that.
No one knows the answer to that.
How much workplace safety is needed?
I don't know.
How fast should cars drive?
Well, five miles an hour.
Nobody gets into a car accident, but it takes you three hours to get to the hospital.
So...
Look, we don't have any car accidents, but 80,000 people a year are dying of heart attacks because they don't get to the hospital.
This is why, where's the balance?
What is the exact right speed for people to be able to drive in various locations?
I don't know.
I don't know.
How much risk should people accept with untested medicines?
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
And the EPA and the FDA and OSHA are all magical government bureaucratic cults pretending to give an answer where there is no objective answer.
You know, there are people who do insane shit all the time.
I mean, you know, when I was a kid, We had these really cool things called skateboards.
And you know what we used to do with them?
We used to go places on skateboards.
Actually, when I was a kid, I lived in this...
Estate is the wrong word.
But it was sort of this area that was like...
The little apartment building had four or five floors that I lived in.
And there were a couple of other apartment buildings.
Some were higher.
And then down back was like the door song.
Out back, they got some bungalows.
And there was this curved ramp that went down...
A big long ramp that went down to take your prams down to the sort of back alley welfare crypt of these bungalows.
And my friends and I, we used to sit on our skateboards and we'd race down and we'd have these little handfuls of sticks.
And your whole point was to try and drop the sticks in front of the other guy's skateboard.
And if you dropped it just the right way at the right time and the stick was just the right size, his skateboard would stop and you'd go flying off it, which was like the best.
It was the coolest thing.
It was like Mario Kart, but live, for real.
And only once did I get injured.
Actually, no, the only time I got injured, that area was where my friends and I had built a go-kart back in the day when people built go-karts with something other than digital shrapnel you find on your screen that you manipulate with your Xbox controller.
And...
And I was just – I was going down and I was – this taught me everything I ever learned about gloating, which is I dropped a stick and some guy went flying off his skateboard and I was like – I turned around and I was like, victory cry, victory cry.
And then I went straight into iron bars with my shins because I was like – and that's shins.
I don't know if you've ever banged them.
It's like, oh, God.
Shoot me.
Just shoot me because this pain is unbearable.
It's like an ice cream headache.
You can control that.
If you can summon that in people's heads, you can control the whole world forever.
So skateboarding was something that we used to get on them and we would go places.
I don't know when skateboarding transmogrified into this weird thing where I want to turn my skateboard into a very quickly rotating Mobius strip and then apparently insert it where my rectum and or testicle should be.
Or it's got wheels, but what I really want to do is put the thing between the wheels on some ramp going...
Some railing going down a huge set of stairs so that I can give myself a concussion and fold my spine up like an accordion in an um-pa-pa band.
So I don't understand the whole skateboarding phenomenon.
It's just like, just get someplace and go fast.
You know, get a dog to pull you.
Just go someplace fast and that's a lot of fun.
But look, I can flip it three times and land on it.
Why?
Why?
But anyway, that's, you know, but people like it.
Now, what risk is Should people take?
I don't know.
I know I don't want to pay for it if they fall on their face because nothing says wise up like a face full of bills from a hospital, right?
But I don't know because, you know, they've tried this bubble wrapping kids, right?
Oh, let's keep them safe.
Let's not let them go outside because there are strangers there.
Well, you know who's inside sitting right next to them on the couch?
Childhood diabetes and obesity and heart disease and fatty liver tissue damage.
So this idea like, well, we keep kids inside so that I can keep my eye on them and because we've got this gynocentric raising of kids these days where nobody can ever get hurt and all it is is short-term management of female anxiety while long-term sclerosis sets in in people's veins.
So I don't know.
What is the level of risk?
You know, some people want to go and run 20 miles a day.
It's bad for you in general.
God help your joints when you turn 40.
But I don't know.
What am I going to do?
Force them not to?
I don't know.
People should just be responsible for the consequences of their own decisions.
And the idea that there's some objective entity out there that can, through the agency of force, balance perfectly risk and reward in society is lunatic.
It's lunatic.
Listen, if you never want to be in a car crash, never drive a car.
Never go outside your home.
It's going to give you some limitations.
But I don't know.
If people want to stay home because they're scared of driving, fine.
And if people want to go out because they like to drive, and if people want to, I don't know, pull a 90210 star and drive themselves into a fence or something, or if people want to...
They can do that.
But, you know, don't make me...
Pay for it, that's all.
So, in terms of like...
That's why I was asking, like, is it beneficial?
Is it necessary?
Well, it's immoral because it's the initiation of the use of force.
But the idea that without the government, workers are not going to be interested in safety and managers are not going to be interested in safety is ridiculous.
Now, what degree of safety should we have?
I don't know.
Because an excess of safety...
It's a deficiency of progress and survival.
Again, could get rid of 38,000 fatalities every year by restricting, I mean, not even 5 miles an hour.
It could be, I don't know, 15 miles an hour or 20 miles an hour.
Or everyone drives a tank and you can go 30 miles an hour.
But you're in a tank.
Okay, well, a lot of traffic jams, a lot of snarled up traffic, and again, it's going to take you two hours to get to the hospital when you have a heart attack.
So people, you know, basically they should have tanks that convert into hearses because half the people who are trying to get to hospital in a hurry are going to die.
Conversely, you could have an army of helicopters instead of ambulances, and people would probably get to the hospital a lot quicker.
But the problem is then you'd have to raise taxes or the bills would be too high, people wouldn't be able to afford their medicines, and then they'd die from not having enough medicines.
The FDA has also approved psychotropic drugs or SSRIs, which I don't even, I mean, people just need to look into this stuff.
I've had Robert Whitaker on this show.
Who's talked about some of the problems behind it, but you can look up Dr.
Peter Bregan, B-R-E-G-G-I-N. This stuff is horrendous in many ways, has really deleterious side effects, and to my knowledge has not been proven better than exercise and talk therapy.
So the FDA has approved all of this crap.
Because if it doesn't, you might actually have to have school reform.
So the FDA has approved a whole bunch of really horrible, dangerous, scary crap.
At the same time, they've kept medicine which could have saved the lives of millions of people off the shelves in America.
So I don't know.
It's immoral.
There's certainly some beneficiaries, and there's a lot of costs.
But the immorality is fundamentally not even the coercion, Dan.
The immorality is what...
The economist Thomas Sowell calls the wisdom of the anointed.
That there's some pencil-necked, loathsome, spotty behind bureaucrats somewhere in Washington or some other place who just know for sure exactly what the risk-reward ratio is that people want across the entire United States completely.
That is unbelievable hubris.
I mean, these people are genuinely, mentally, more than disturbed.
They're mentally insane and sadistic that they know, I don't know, what should the price of labor be?
I don't know, let's have a minimum wage.
No, shut up, you don't know.
You don't know, and only idiots think that you do know, because anybody with any brain at all Is afflicted by a common sense reality disease called humility, which is that I don't know.
I don't know whether people who like doing crazy snowboard tricks, whether it's good for them or not.
I don't know.
Yes, they might break their legs in horrible twist fractures and end up hobbling around like a gingerbread man for the rest of their life.
I don't know.
On the other hand, if you ban it, maybe they just sit around, eat potato chips, playing Mario Kart, and then get diabetes.
I don't know.
I do know that people should be responsible for the choices they make, but I have no idea what thrill junkies need to survive.
You know, like when I went water skiing, I liked water skiing.
I was happy not to fall down.
When my friend went water skiing, he's like, oh, you know what would be great?
Crossing the wake the first time I try.
Hey, would you like to eat a giant popsicle stick called a water ski?
Which will then have to be...
Like, that's what he did.
And I'm like, are you crazy?
And he's like, but he was a thrill junkie.
That's what he did.
When I was on vacation with another friend of mine way back ago in some place, Punta Cana, I think it was.
You know, we're playing volleyball on the beach.
I love volleyball.
We're playing volleyball on the beach.
And, you know...
There's injuries that float around, you know.
I don't even like to see people who've got too bad a sunburn, but anyway.
But then there's injuries, you know, like some guy is like, and you're like, like he falls over and he like, he hobbles off and you're like, oh man, that sucks.
You know, walk it off or, you know, and maybe he's got a sprained ankle or something.
But you know, those are injuries where everybody just goes like, oh, oh, grim, chilled pain.
Beak-winged crow of death slowly fluttering up my icy spine where you're just like, oh man, that is going to spoil my appetite for three days.
And what happened was they were carrying these guys off their jet skis.
And these guys were like in really bad shape.
Like, I mean, like viscous dark blood dripping off their necks.
They were on those, hey, welcome to the end of your vacation stretchers where they have to have their heads bound because, I don't know, they're concerned about some sort of spinal damage and so on.
And these guys were...
Like, I think the medical term is fucked.
Like, I never knew what happened, but it was god-awful, right?
And, you know, the game was over, and everyone was like, oh, thanks for ruining my vacation, invalids.
I mean, it was god-awful.
It was just a horrible thing to see.
And I said, well, what happened?
And they said, they said, these guys were on jet skis and wanted to give each other a high-five as they Drove past, like, towards each other.
They wanted to give each other a high five, right?
And I was thinking, like, how insane is that?
There's no high five that's worth paraplegia.
Like, it's just not.
Like, what are you thinking?
You're probably drunk.
You're going in a jet ski at high speed, driving towards each other, driving close enough in somewhat choppy water, hoping to give each other a high five.
What?
But then I think about some of the risks that I took when I was a teenager, and these guys weren't teenagers anymore.
They should have outgrown that phase, but I took some pretty stupid-ass risks when I was a teenager.
But most chances you don't roll snake eyes.
These guys just happen to roll snake eyes.
Yeah, I've talked about my adventures with a train on a bridge another time.
But, you know, after that, I didn't go back, right?
But now, you know, of course, in hindsight, I'd say, well, that's a really bad idea if these guys roll snake eyes, right?
But I don't know.
You know, one time when I was snorkeling, I swam into a wreck and then found it really hard to swim out because the current was pushing the water through the hole I was trying to get out in.
And I ended up pushing my way out through this jag and ripped my arm up and I had a scar for years just trying to get out again.
You know, it's like probably within 30 seconds of drowning.
I didn't do that again.
And that was just a lack of experience.
Of course, you never go in any place enclosed, particularly if you don't have scuba gear, but you only have a snorkel gear and so on.
So I think everybody's had these kinds of brushes that every now and then at two o'clock in the morning, if you wake up, for some reason you think of it and you get this cold prickle of like, glad I'm alive!
Damn, that was some stupid shit, you know, in hindsight and so on.
So, and I'm sorry for the long answer, but the reality is, Dan, I don't know.
I don't know what the optimum level of safety versus efficacy in medicine is.
I know that life involves risk.
I know that people don't like risk.
And one of the things that government agencies do is they offload the necessity of calculating risk onto some other entity.
In the same way that the welfare state offloads the responsibility for helping people onto some bureaucracy so you don't actually have to track back and find out whether it works.
Or educating the young is offloaded into another government agency called the Department of Public Education or DOPE. And then we just think the problem is solved.
So in the same way people don't want to evaluate their banks, whether their banks are fiscally solid or not.
So they're just like, okay, I'll just get deposit insurance and fuck it.
We'll be fine.
Oh, except for the fact that the economy is going to crater and a quarter of American wealth is going to get destroyed in a one-year period in 2008.
But people want this.
Now, I understand that people...
Can't evaluate whether a bank is solvent or not.
They need a third-party agency to do this, like the Better Business Bureau or, you know, like the PC magazines or whatever.
It's my tech porn.
Even if I don't, oh, there's an Apple Pro.
I'm never going to buy one because it's $1,400.
But I wonder how fast it is.
And wow, that's a lot of cores.
And look at that quantum computer that can't run Call of Duty.
That's really cool.
And Wow, there's this giant new 72-core processor that Intel is coming out for workstations next year.
I wonder how much of that is.
Like, I'm going to go and buy it because, you know, word processing really needs to inspire, right?
So, I don't know.
I have no idea what people's level of risk and reward is, but I do know that nobody wants to evaluate these things for themselves, so they go to a rating agency.
You go to some place that you trust, like Consumer Report or whatever it is, or a credit report system, and you say, okay, how good is this bank?
How solid is this bank?
How secure is this bank?
And you can't delve through all their financial reports, but someone else can, and they can provide that service to you.
And, you know, am I going to get bedbugs from this hotel?
Right?
Well, if it's a one star, maybe.
If it's a five star, probably not.
So you're going to pay for a little peace of mind there.
You've got Yelp, of course.
You've got other forms of ratings.
You've got reputations on eBay and on Amazon.
And I mean, in six million different ways from Sunday, can you get external validation of the legitimacy and reliability of people's claims and so on.
And when it comes to medicine, yeah, there's going to be people who will do it.
And they'll say, look, You pay us 10 bucks a month and we will guarantee you that any of the medicines you take that are on our approved list will be safe and if there's any negative consequences for it, if you have to go to hospital or heaven forbid you die from some adverse reaction, we will pay all of the bills plus a million dollars.
I mean there's a business model for that which is risk management and reward and so on.
And then these people have a real incentive because you see if somebody dies They're personally liable, right?
Like the corporation or, you know, whatever, wouldn't be a corporation in a free market that's a status created entity.
But the question is not, is it necessary?
The question is, what are the costs and benefits for each individual?
For each individual.
So life insurance companies don't want people to die.
So what's happened is life insurance companies have paid for 5 million deaths or let's just say, you know, 4 million deaths or 3 million because not everyone is insured.
Life insurance companies have had to have 3 million or 4 million payouts since the EPA was founded just on a couple of medicines that they've banned.
So they would have a huge incentive to have those medicines in the country so they wouldn't have to pay as many death benefits as they have to pay at the moment.
But they don't have a say on the EPA. Does the EPA suffer any negative consequences if it approves a medicine that is dangerous or does not approve a medicine that is safe?
And there's no negative consequences.
There may be some good publicity, some bad publicity, some director who's got a golden parachute and all the savings he could want might have to quit or something like that.
But at the individual level, there are no negative consequences.
For the FDA or the EPA, right?
Wasn't there some, the EPA flooded out some mine and destroyed a whole river system?
Okay, well, what's their negative consequences?
When BP dumps a bunch of oil, the stock price gets hammered and they've got to pay out billions of dollars.
What are the negative consequences for the EPA when they screw things up?
None.
I mean, the whole Love Canal thing was just another EPA screw-up, which of course is then dumped on the lap of the free market and so on.
So the problem is when you've got coercive compulsion, you've got people fantasizing they know what the risk and reward situation is.
They face no negative consequences for failure and very few rewards for successes.
And so it's definitely the wrong solution.
And the only way to recognize that is to say nobody knows the right solution.
That's something the market is going to have to work out over time.
Right, and about the example you just mentioned with the Animas River, the EPA, there was an article put out, there was a newspaper article in this, I do not have the person's name of it, I have the link for it, but he's quoted as saying that based on his 47 years of experience as a professional geologist, it appears to him that the EPA is setting up the town and the area for a possible super fun blitzkrieg.
So I do believe that they did allow that to be flooded on purpose so that they could then gain the Superfund status.
So in reality, they didn't actually become negatively affected at all.
The EPA actually gained because now they're able to go in there and set up a water reclamation system and make even more money.
Right.
And I'm just going to paste something here that Mike put.
Though the United States is no longer technically a monarchy, the government still enjoys today what is called sovereign immunity from civil and criminal liability.
The sovereign immunity doctrine prevents any entity, governmental or private, from suing the federal government unless the government gives its permission to be sued.
Right.
And as you might expect when the government decides when and if the government can be sued, well, let's just say they have a little bit of a tendency to side with themselves.
And there's a reason why they don't want people to have that power.
You know, there's an old phrase which is, you can't fight City Hall.
The people who, you know, if you were to propose this for private organizations, no oil company can be sued unless it gives permission to be sued, then the leftists would all go insane.
But when the government has that power, it's like, yeah, seems legit to me.
So, I mean, whatever the solution is, it's not coercive and it's certainly not centralized and coercive and monopolistic where there's no negative consequences for failure and often positive consequences for failure.
As you point out, if a government agency is doing a good job, they say, look at all successes.
We can do an even better job if you give us more money.
And if they fail, they say, well, we failed because we didn't have enough money.
Give us more money.
It's the same crap.
Let's do one more of these, and I'll try to be more concise.
God help me next time.
But the next question, what was the next one?
Actually, would you mind me skipping the next question to go to the third question?
It's your calling, baby.
Whatever you want to do.
Excellent.
I feel the third question is more important.
So my third question to you would be, to what magnitude does deceptive language or doublespeak affect people's perceptions on the problems we have in society, and can we lessen the impact of these problems by use of doublespeak?
Oh, you fight fire with fire kind of thing?
I'm going to use sophistry to defeat sophistry?
Yeah, like, I'll give you an example.
If you take the word Democrats, add an N and an F in the right place, you can spell the word demon crafts.
So this is one example where I'd say a person is trying to use rhetoric deceptively to disguise information or to fool a person.
I'd say, oh, well, you're demon crafting.
Yeah, I don't think so.
You know, it's like, I don't know when the pinnacle of philosophical achievement in the West became inserting the word tards into things and thinking that you've won the argument.
Like with the Ron Paul, Paul tards!
Libertards!
Tards!
I can't think, so I'm going to say tard!
Tardis!
Tard!
It's like, oh man, I mean, tard!
It sounds like something that you exclaim when you're passing a spicy samosa sideways through your rectum.
And it's like, oh my god.
It's so sad.
Objective tarts.
Randroids.
Like, okay, we get it.
You can't think.
I understand that.
I get it.
You can't think.
And so you're going to insert a four-letter word in the middle of something else and think you've made an argument.
Philosopher tarts.
It's like, oh my god, it's so sad.
It's so sad.
Like, if I show up to a dance audition with mafia-style concrete blocks on my feet, yes, I'm confessing, I can't dance.
Although, if I do a good audition with that, just think how well I could do without it.
Yeah, it's like the, just saying, or, I love how, I love how Steph just does this and this and this.
It's so precious, like, not an argument!
I disagree with what you say.
Not an argument.
Or I don't read a huge amount of comments and I very rarely reply other than to say thanks.
But there was one that I just couldn't resist today.
I couldn't resist it today.
God help me.
I should.
It's like, you know, a line of coke on a hooker's belly.
It's hard to say no.
So someone typed in, fucking Nazi asshole.
And I replied and said, please don't confuse your porn searches with YouTube comments.
It was just hard to resist.
Anyway.
Or people who say, that's a straw man!
I mean, it literally is like me taking, I don't know, some physics paper and And scrolling back and saying, I give it an F! Look, I beat Einstein!
Because I graded it down with no content whatsoever.
Correlation is not causation.
Just because people have umbrellas out when it's raining doesn't mean that when they take umbrellas out it starts raining.
Yeah, okay, I'm not four anymore.
And what they're basically saying is, I have magic spells that make other people think that I'm thinking.
And it only works on idiots.
This is the problem with people who do this kind of sophistry.
And please, I understand.
I'm not putting you in this category.
But...
When people reply with, you know, stupid word insertions or this kind of, you know, demon craft, is that what you said?
Democrat becomes demon craft?
Santa becomes Satan because he's red and gives you stuff for free, which is communism, right?
Like anagrams and tarting and just saying and straw man and sigh of crisis actors!
I mean, correlation is not causation.
You're just wrong because you're a racist.
Like, all people are saying is, help me, I can't think...
But I want to.
I've fallen and I can't get up.
And it is a confession of impotence.
You know, like someone who goes to a prostitute is saying, can't have a woman have sex with me without paying her.
Okay.
So you've got no game.
You've got a visa.
Okay.
I got it.
Makes sense to me.
I understand.
So, you know, if you hire someone else to take the test for you, you're saying, not very good at the test.
Okay.
I can't really do the test on my own.
And so, people think that there's this medical alert, you know, like, I've fallen and I can't get up because you're a tardition, person, person, right?
Or, you know, well, Ayn Rand was just a fascist, so...
I mean, all they're saying is, I cannot grasp complexity of thought.
I have no clue how to analyze an argument.
And I have no possibility of rebutting anything.
But I want to play with the big people like I can.
You know, it's sort of like you see some big motherfucking burly fireman.
And he's got, you know, literally like this carpet of Italian hair up his ham hock arms, you know?
And like the kind of, like he's hiding some sort of skunk right under his collar because that's how much hair is coming out, right?
And he's like big and swarthy and you just know, like he could carry out one of those what eating Gilbert great moms like over one shoulder, like these 800 pounds women, like he'd be pushing up the fat and it'd be like trying to Carry down a beanbag the size of the moon landing craft.
But he'd be able to do it, like with one hand hopping down.
Like he's that big and he's like, that's the guy who you want.
And trailing behind him is his three-year-old son with a little plastic hatchet and a plastic helmet.
And he's like, Daddy, I want to be a fireman too.
And it's like, I appreciate the ambition.
But even if you want to be a fireman...
I think first getting out of a onesie and perhaps not being in day diapers, at some point, growth and puberty might be helping, reading a little bit, then you'll have to pass a whole bunch of tests, plus you'll need to get to be my size to be of any use whatsoever, despite the fact that people want women to break down doors with their 98-pound frames.
So the way that it works on the internet is there's a bunch of people who think they're firemen because they've got a little plastic helmet and they're in their onesies and they're like, I'm a fireman!
I can think.
I can rebut arguments.
That's so cool.
You're at least 28 years away from doing it if you really start to work hard now.
And puberty is going to be kind of a bitch for you because then you're going to realize how stupid you've been for the last 10 years.
But it's kind of cute that you're doing it but not an argument.
You're not a fireman.
You're somebody playing at being a fireman who's kind of getting in the way.
So, no, I would not recommend that...
That this manipulation occurs.
Because listen, if you're a good person, you're not going to be as good at manipulation as a manipulator, right?
So like I did a convo today with the inestimable Bill Von Whittlehead, and we were sort of talking about, you know, everybody's going ballistic because Trump's saying no immigration from Muslims, right?
And people say, it's unprecedented!
You can't ban an entire category of people who come here, right?
Well, two Democrats come to mind who've done that.
Number one, of course, FDR banned Japanese and Italians and Germans from coming into America during a war!
God, how arselected have we become that this even needs to be said?
And during the hostage crisis, 444 days where a bunch of hostages were kept at the Iranian embassy, American hostages, this crisis just went on and on and on.
Why?
Because Jimmy Carter...
And Jimmy Carter said, okay, well, the retaliation is we're not going to accept any travelers or immigrants from Iran unless there's some sort of medical emergency and they didn't want to deal with the prophet's fine old medical system.
And, of course, everybody's going insane because it's Donald Trump.
Nobody mentions anything about Jimmy Carter or Franklin Delano Roosevelt because they're Republicans, so it doesn't count.
Besides Trump.
Because they're Democrats, so it doesn't count, right?
So this kind of switcheroo of category, you know, if people...
Like, if you're like...
If you've trained your whole life to fight by the Queensbury boxing rules, and that's your thing, right?
Like, you're an honorable person, you don't hit below the belt, no biting, no chloroform, right?
No throwing a woman in cleavage, distracting some guy, and then stomping on his nuts, right?
I mean, if you're not calling in airstrikes or throwing acid in their face, because you've trained your whole life to fight by the rules...
You don't get into the ring with a dirty fighter and say, I'm going to beat him at dirty fighter.
Why?
Because you've spent 10 or 15 or 20 years training to play by the rules and they have spent 10 or 15 or 20 years training to fight dirty.
And there's no way you're going to win.
There's no way you're going to win.
All you have to say is, I don't fight with people who fight dirty.
Like I don't.
You don't honor those who break the rules by pretending that there's any kind of rules-based interaction.
You don't.
You simply don't.
Don't dishonor the rules by pretending that people are either playing by the rules or that not playing by the rules is okay.
Right?
Because the way that it works is that the K-selected people have rules and standards and our selected people know that and they continually use the K-selected rules against the K-selected people while, as Saul Alinsky said, yeah, we'll use their standards against them.
They can't use our own standards against us because we have no standards.
We have no ethics.
We have no morals.
So it's a one-way street of power and subjugation as to them.
And so no, you don't...
And this is what Richard Dawkins said about debating evolution with creationists.
It's like, you know, you don't step in because you don't give creationism the respect of imagining that you can debate scientifically that which is based upon superstition.
And so you don't lower yourself to the tactics of the enemy...
Unless it's a direct physical confrontation.
Which you're in against your will, so to speak, right?
So if some guy jumps you in an alley, then you do whatever it takes to keep yourself safe and survive the encounter, right?
But where you have any kind of choice, you simply don't go in.
And the only possible exception being, of course, where you can demonstrate something to a third party, right?
Like we had a flat earth guy on and Did not exactly convince me, but I thought it was interesting.
I'm always happy to hear a good argument, and he made some interesting arguments, but it can be useful to show other people from a third-party standpoint.
So in this way, right?
So Socrates would debate with people who were not good at debating, but he would do it publicly, which is why he got into such trouble.
At least that's never happened again in history.
And so Plato wrote down that the dialogue's Socrates, where Socrates would debate with people who didn't know how to think, but through that he would demonstrate the power of thought and help other people identify who can't think, the people who can't think, so that they can avoid them.
So that's my suggestion.
You know, the idea that, you know, when two people just end up fighting dirty, most people can't tell that one of them's honorable and is faking it, and the other one, they just, who's better at it?
And the person who's better at it is generally the more experienced.
Right.
So I mean, yeah, that pretty much answers the question really well.
And my next question is kind of a summary or a follow-up to that.
How can we more or less defeat the use of this type of language?
And these certain words, I've come to label them as establishment terms, because as you know, back in, I believe it was the 70s, with the JFK investigation, the Warren Commission, The CIA coined the term conspiracy theorist to marginalize people who are questioning the investigation.
So one of the things that I've tried to do myself to try to combat the use of these establishment terms, on the website Reddit at least, is by making a sub to expose them and try to categorize them.
And that's why I say that it might be beneficial in some instances to not necessarily use the doublespeak or the establishment terms, but to perhaps use them as examples to try to Demonstrate to people how they need to change their mode of thinking or how they're not engaging in critical thought by the use of these marginalizing terms that allows them to just be dismissive rather than entertain new ideas and possibly change their minds.
You're really going to drag me into the conspiracy theory chamber, aren't you?
I mean, I'm trying not to.
No, no, I don't mind that you do.
I don't mind that you do, but people aren't going to like it.
And I have no problem with that.
Of course, I fully understand.
I really dislike the people who engage in these kinds of conspiracy theories because it's so completely unnecessary.
Like the JFK thing, the 9-11 stuff and all of that.
Look, we have governments that destroy entire cultures and countries around the world, that tax people, that create terrible systems of debt and enslavement, that throw people in jail.
And it doesn't matter who the fuck was on the grassy knoll.
You don't need any of that shit to convict the government of moral crimes.
I mean, is it really like, boy, you know, I've heard rumors that Hitler was double-parked at one time in the 1930s.
Early in the 1930s, Hitler was totally double-parked and had boxed in someone who needed to get somewhere in a hurry.
So I'm going to spend the rest of my God-given natural existence trying to find out the facts of Hitler's double-parking in 1931.
Really?
Come on.
Big picture, people.
What?
Big picture.
I don't think we need double parking to convict Hitler of doing some less than savory things.
And in the same way, this idea that, boy, you know, if we could figure out that the government shot JFK, so what?
Christ almighty, we already know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was fabricated.
We know that the beginning of the Spanish-American Civil War was fabricated.
We know that there was a whole series of embargoes and blockades against an oil-dependent Japan that couldn't survive without imports of oil that led to Pearl Harbor.
We know that the government has continually lied about a wide variety of things.
Well, we just lost China to communism, had no idea why.
Maybe it's because you had a bunch of goddamn communists in the State Department that were lying to everyone.
And saying that, oh Mao Zedong, he's an agrarian reformer who really cares about the poor.
No!
He was an out-and-out communist and the State Department in China lied to everyone in the U.S. government.
This is already admitted.
This is already known.
This is already not particularly controversial.
So the idea that we've got to ferret around and try and find some malfeasance that's impossible to establish is ridiculous.
What a massive waste of mental energy.
Initiation of the use of force is immoral.
Government relies on the initiation of use of force.
Hey look, I just saved everybody from reading 6,000 boring books by very confusing people with contradictory information for which there is no clear proof whatsoever.
Done.
You can be done in 10 seconds.
10 seconds!
10 seconds!
And it's a weird kind of aristocratic thing.
Like the government lied to get into the war in Iraq.
Lied to get into the war in Iraq.
Okay.
Thousands and thousands of American servicemen killed.
17 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
So naturally you want to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
God, it's not even an own goal.
And so why is JFK's life So important.
And the lives of American servicemen in Iraq, or the lives of the Iraqis themselves, not important.
Why is it that it has to be a president who's shot for things to matter?
You know, when I played Macbeth, oh, quite a few years ago now, when I played Macbeth, it struck me.
And I tried to communicate this in various ways during the play.
When the play Macbeth opens, Macbeth has just come back from hacking down 150 peasant warriors for the king.
That's not a problem, you see, because they're peasant warriors.
And so Macbeth can hack them limb from limb, be covered in their blood and intestines and striding through like some ancient demon of skinless, sinewy, bloody death.
No problem.
He doesn't lose any sleep over that, but got one mafia-style king, and it's like, oh no, the king is dead.
Who'd have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
I'll never be able to sleep again.
I'm gonna go crazy.
Ah!
Right?
Why, oh why, was the king's life, who ordered the battle that Macbeth slew so many people, and I don't know if it's 150, but it doesn't really matter.
He's a pretty hard-ass, murderous, sociopathic son of a bitch.
Why does the king's life matter?
But the peasant warriors don't matter at all.
Good job slaughtering all of those largely defenseless people with your giant sword and armor, Macbeth.
Good job.
Well, well done being a human combine officer going through the Scottish citizenry and turning them into tiny chunks of plant fertilizer.
Excellent job, Mr.
Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth.
But boy, you got the king who ordered it all.
Oh, man.
That is the worst thing ever.
It's King Lear.
Oh, the king goes mad.
Well, that's really terrible.
Actually, it's kind of terrible.
We talked about it with Frozen.
So, what's with JFK? He was just some drug-addicted, naked-swimming playboy with a hot wife and banging every secretary who bent over to pick up a pencil in a four-mile vicinity.
What the fuck?
Who cares?
He's the guy who started Vietnam!
The guy started Vietnam.
74,000 American dead.
An entire generation laid waste.
Millions of Vietnamese North and South killed, murdered, slaughtered.
No capacity to fight back for the most part.
Agent Orange, napalm, chemical weapons of every kind still causing defects generations later.
But he got shot.
Oh.
Let me pull out the world's tiniest violin to not play at his funeral.
But it's okay, because he was pretty, had a cool kind of screw-you-whitey accent, and some pretty nice hair, and a hot wife, without looking like a bag of decaying socialist weasel bag like Pierre Trudeau.
Anyway, so this idea, it's like...
Well, the 9-11 thing, it was an inside job.
It's like, well, we already know that Al-Qaeda was an inside job.
We already know that ISIS was an inside job.
Do we really need that, too?
That's already known and admitted.
That's not even controversial to anybody who's read anything other than the mainstream media.
CNN. Yeah, that's the problem.
Right, so why?
It's a form of not confronting the obvious.
That's all.
It's a form of avoidance, this conspiracy theory stuff.
It's like, let me muck about in the bowels of the internet and let me become a specialist in six different fields to figure out what temperature steel could melt at and let me review footage of grainy nonsense.
When the government does something shitty, of course it hides the evidence.
I mean, the government was laughing.
And this is not, again, this is not just made up or a theory.
This is actual fact.
The government was laughing about the JFK stuff.
They fucked up the Warren Commission, sure.
That way everybody gets dragged into, everybody who's got some sort of bent towards criticizing those in authority gets dragged into that stuff.
And then every now and then they release a little bit more information like putting chum in the water to attract the sharks.
And then everybody would go scurrying off and it's like, beautiful, fantastic.
Skeptics have been effectively neutralized, sir.
Good job!
That way, no change will occur because people are chasing clues that will never ever materialize into anything.
And let's say tomorrow it turns out that the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1960s ordered a hit on JFK. So what?
What's that going to change?
One more crime on a huge pile of crimes.
Statism responsible for over 250 million deaths in the 20th century.
But boy, put one pretty boy Kennedy on top and suddenly everyone sees the rest of the 250 million bodies?
I don't think so.
So the conspiracy theory is just a huge waste of time and effort and energy.
It's incredibly selfish.
It's incredibly wasteful.
and it distracts people from those of us who are criticizing the real issues which is the initiation of the use of force which is bad parenting and um it's it's um selfish it's self-indulgent people like doing that kind of stuff because it makes them feel superior to others you know anybody who gathers together esoteric and unimportant bits of information that they think are crucial to the future of humanity gets to lord it over and feel superior to other people who are just so stupid man i
I mean, can't they even figure it out?
I mean, they just swallow everything the mainstream narrative says.
I don't even think for themselves.
I'm so much smarter and wiser because I go to a bunch of people's Websites, and I go to a bunch of people's YouTube channels, and I'm like so much better than all these other people who are just like idiots, swallowing the mainstream message like Janet Jameson with deep throat complex.
And it just feels so superior to everyone.
It's like, fuck your superiority.
You're inferior.
Because you don't need any of that stuff.
Just go to people and say, the initiation of force is immoral.
Statism relies upon the initiation of force.
Done.
No.
We have to figure out who's on the grassy knoll.
And we have to figure out at what temperature steel actually melts.
And we have to do this.
And we have to do that.
And it's like, oh my god.
You don't need it.
You don't need it.
And they could not serve the state any better.
Because they make those who question the dominant narrative, you're crazy by association.
Exactly.
Right?
So they're selfishly indulging their own pathetic superiority complexes in order to muddy the waters for those of us who are actually trying to get some goddamn stuff done in the world.
So no, I am not a big fan of this conspiracy theory stuff.
It's self-indulgent.
It muddies the water and it serves those in power and people should just fucking stop it.
I know they won't because they're selfish and they want to feel superior to other people.
But they should.
Right.
I mean, so how do you stop that then?
I mean, because it is a waste of time.
I do agree with you.
I think that a lot of the conspiracy stuff is just wasting its time.
I just made a speech about it.
Well, I mean, to not engage in it completely, yeah, I do agree with that.
But when people – when you try to have rational conversations that are nothing to do with conspiracies, yet people still call you tinfoil hat, what do you – how can you combat that?
What do you mean, how do you combat someone who says, when you put forward a recent and evidenced proposition, and they say you've just got a tinfoil hat on?
What do you mean, how do you combat that?
I don't understand what you mean.
That seems like the insurmountable problem to most of our problems.
No, it's not an insurmountable problem.
If I sit down and play chess with someone, and they start throwing fish at me, well, that's an insurmountable problem.
How do you get them to play chess?
You don't!
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Booyah!
Douglas Adams jokes.
First time since the essay on the fishermen in Newfoundland.
Anyway, so no, I mean, what do you mean?
There's no insurmountable difficulty here.
You just, you don't deal with people who don't deal with facts.
You don't deal with people who don't deal with reason.
You don't insult reason by pretending to reason with people who are irrational.
You can't reason people out of beliefs they were never reasoned into.
You can point out that it's irrational prejudice and bigotry and they're being downright stupid.
And they'll either listen to you with humility and start to pull their brains together using all of their squid-like capacities of reasoning, but most likely they're just going to get angry because remember, dude, I hate to say it, you have to have to remember this.
Most people are idiots.
Most people are idiots.
And so how do you get complex information across to idiots?
You don't, because idiots don't matter in the world.
In the long run, yeah, in the short run, they're in the way.
But in the long run, idiots don't...
Name me someone with an IQ of 95 from the 17th century.
Go!
No answer.
No answer.
They don't show up in history.
They're not even like, you know, those pictures from the 19th century where they've got the crowd watching the regatta and the crowds are just like these little paint splatters, right?
Not like the kids falling into the sausage maker in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie.
I mean, they get no faces.
They just pass through.
They leave no imprint on history.
They're just the ballast.
I mean, you know, George Collins got a great line.
He says, because he is a smart guy.
He said, just think of how stupid the average person is.
Well, half of them are dumber than that.
And it takes a special kind of stupid to think that you're good at philosophy when you've never studied it and never been challenged on it.
Like, it takes a special kind of stupid to say I could totally take Muhammad Ali in his prime.
Because I played boxing on the Atari 400 eight times when I was a kid.
It takes a special kind of stupid to think you're good at something you've never been trained at, never disciplined yourself about.
You know, like you see these little kids, and I was one of them, and they watched a kung fu movie, and what do they do?
They start kicking each other.
And it takes a special kind of stupid to say, I don't know why these kung fu masters study for years to get a black belt.
I can kick people.
I can kick people when they're sleeping.
I can kick people under the table.
I can kick people on the bus.
This is easy.
I mean, I guess I'm just naturally really, really great at kung fu because look, I just kicked...
Oh, look, I can kick myself.
That's pretty cool.
I don't see people in kung fu movies kicking themselves.
I must be even better than the people in kung fu movies.
Perhaps I should put on an exhibition called, I Kick People.
Right?
I mean, it takes a special kind of moron.
To drive everyone out of the karaoke room and think you can open in Vegas.
I mean, and most people have, it's the Donnie Kruger effect, right?
They have no idea how bad they are at thinking.
And that's because they're raised by women.
LAUGHTER And taught by women.
And then by the time that men show up in their lives, it's too late.
No, but they don't know how to think.
And they don't know that they don't know how to think.
Right?
Nothing breeds humility like expertise.
Nothing breeds humility like expertise.
Because once you become good at something, you can appreciate something that's good.
And once you become good at something, you realize how bad you are at everything else.
Like I've devoted my life to communication, to thinking, to studying, to reading, to expostulation, to sophistry, some people think, right?
But I have dedicated my whole life to thinking and communicating in various forms.
And for the most part, some coding.
So because I become good at that, After 45,000 hours of practice, because I've become good at that, I recognize how bad I am at everything else, right?
Hey, play a little piano, but I'm really bad at it.
Play a little bit of guitar, I'm really bad at it.
Sing a little, pretty bad at it, right?
I get that I'm not very good at stuff because I know what it is to be good at something and how much time it takes and how much work it takes.
So when people are like, well, you're just tinfoil hat-tard, right?
It's like, well, it's like, just think of the kid with the little plastic axe thinking he's a fireman, or think of the six-year-old kid kicking another kid thinking he's Bruce Lee.
You're not.
You're not, and they're offended when people point that out.
I'm a fireman!
No!
No!
You're in a pull-up.
You're not even playing at being a fireman.
And so people, they're out there saying, I'm rebutting your argument because you're a poopy head.
Okay, well, you know, have fun with your little toy axe.
We've got to go and put out some fires like big people do.
But they're stupid.
So the idea like this, they're stupid relative to smart people and they're stupid relative to people who've got some experience and some training.
Right?
That's all.
That's all.
They're stupid.
And they might be relatively smart at other things, they're just not good at this thing.
They may be good mechanics, they may be fine dentists, who knows, right?
They're just not good at conceptual, rigorous, rational thought.
You know, I can buy a microscope, does not make me a scientist.
Yeah, yeah, no, you have to know what you're talking about.
You gotta block the lock, you know, so to speak.
Yeah, what happens is that you're surrounded by stupid people and you're trying to figure out how to make them smart.
Yeah.
Am I wrong?
Essentially.
Right.
You can't.
You can't.
And this is not my opinion, this is just science.
IQ doesn't change over life.
You're trying to talk people into being taller than they are.
Right?
It's a great quote from Murray Rothbard, who everyone should read.
He said, it is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is after all a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a dismal science.
But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
And that's what you should think about with this.
No cry, I'll be ignorant.
Fine.
People don't know how to think.
They're ignorant of philosophy.
They're ignorant of the necessary disciplines of the Socratic method.
Fine.
It's totally irresponsible to think you can think when you've never studied it and never put yourself to the test.
So, I hope that helps.
I'm going to move on to the next caller, if that's alright.
Yeah, thank you very much.
It was great talking to you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Up next is Laurent.
He wrote in and said, You mentioned the RK selection theory in the corresponding gene sets as a possible explanation for behaviors and preferences.
Does this modify your view on free will?
Does free will become a last resort filter among possible choices, like a WHERE clause in an SQL query?
Ultimately, why does the free will debate matter?
Either we all have it or not.
Or is there a notion of gradients of freewillism used to justify the socialist agenda by putting those endowed with the largest free will at the top?
That is from Laurent.
Gradients of freewillism.
Yeah.
It's a new jazz band coming to a town near you.
We have a title for the show.
Gradients of freewillism.
Free willy?
It's too cold out.
All right.
Um...
Well, I would certainly argue that free will is enhanced by knowledge.
And, like, when I used to, I was in the business world, we had a salesman who would invite me to come down to do presentations, to do sales presentations, because I knew the software and I was pretty good at explaining the business side.
And this is back in the day before GPSs.
And the guy used to, like, I swear he used to drive the route.
It was his...
His instructions were this exact.
And this is back when, you know, you come to some new city and you've got to get your way to a hotel halfway across town.
It's complicated.
And it's, you know, it's usually late.
You're tired and all that.
But this guy gave such great directions.
It's like he was just some GPS in my ear and I just get to the hotel right every time.
Like he'd literally say, like, turn left where the Max Milk with the flickering sign is.
I'm like, okay, you just drove this and you took down every detail.
Yeah.
And so I had the freedom to get to the hotel quickly because I had great knowledge.
And this is kind of important.
So let's take an example.
Let's say you wake up in some...
You're going to stay with a friend.
And you wake up and you have to pee really badly.
And he's just in some big old...
Horrible mansion, right?
12 floors and, you know, 50 bedrooms or whatever it is.
Some, you know, some Stanley Kubrick kind of hotel with Jack Nicholson roaming the hallways, all facial twitchy and all that.
And you really, really, really got to pee.
But you can't find a bathroom.
You're not free to pee in a toilet because you can't find the bathroom.
Now, of course, if you grew up in the house, you'd know exactly where the toilet is.
You'd go there and you'd pee.
So here's an example.
You're not free to pee because you don't know where the bathroom is.
So a lack of knowledge inhibits your choices.
The RK selection stuff does not inhibit people's choices.
What it does is it expands their choices.
Because the RK selection, very briefly, is that there's two somewhat opposing strategies for reproduction.
Among animals called R&K, and I'm not going to go into the details.
You can go to GeneWars, G-E-N-E, GeneWars, at youtube.com slash freedomainradio for more.
And so, knowing this, if this thesis or theory has validity, it's great.
It means that people have more responsibility for their choices because they have more knowledge.
Like, if I can't find the bathroom in this big old shining...
Hotel, shiny being, not shiny, but the movie.
And I end up just peeing in the kitchen sink.
And the host wakes up and catches me peeing in the kitchen sink like Melissa McCarthy.
Then he's going to say, why are you peeing in my sink?
That's a god-awful rude thing to do.
And if I say, listen, I'm incredibly sorry.
It was either pee myself, pee on the floor...
I could not find a bathroom.
He's like, oh yeah, right.
Sorry, I forgot to tell you.
There's no bathrooms on this floor.
Then he's not going to be mad at me for peeing in the sink, right?
However, if I'm his brother and I grew up in the house and know exactly where the bathroom is and I'm peeing in the sink, okay, I know where the bathroom is.
I'm still peeing in the sink.
Then I'm choosing to pee in the sink rather than me peeing in the sink being a result of a lack of knowledge of where the bathroom is, right?
Can't believe the analogies I use in this show.
But they work.
I think they work, right?
So when you have more knowledge, you have a greater choice.
And you can choose now to go from London to Sydney, Australia in, I don't know, 16 or 18 hours or whatever it is, right?
You couldn't choose that before there were airplanes.
Weeks and weeks of voyage, right?
So we have more choices when we have more knowledge, more power, and so on, right?
So I don't think that where we talk about potential biological influencers on free will...
But that means people have less free will.
It means that, assuming that they accept the knowledge, they have more free will.
And so on.
So I think that, like, for instance, trauma is now...
Everybody knows that childhood trauma means some potential adult dysfunction.
Like the Melissa McCarthy references I watched to the movie Bridesmaids the other day.
Because nothing's more fun than staring into Kristen Wiig's dead eyes for two hours.
But anyway...
In that movie, there is some knowledge and some lack of knowledge, some lack of self-knowledge that occurs.
And she just recoils from people who are friendly to her and so on.
And it's very dysfunctional.
She lacks self-knowledge about her jealousy and her competitiveness and her insecurities and so on.
And, you know, part of the point of the movie, as it is in the case, is she gains some self-knowledge about her own dysfunction.
And she doesn't trust men.
And there's a scene with her mother where her mother talks about how their father ran off with this whore.
And I think Kristen Wiig's character is like, Mom, they've been married for like 14 years or something like that.
She's still a whore, right?
And so the fact that her father betrayed her mother leads her to not trust men.
I mean, this is not even Psych 101.
This is just pretty, pretty obvious.
And so she has these dysfunctional relationships with men where she puts herself forward as a sex object and so on and then complains that they don't seem to want to get to know her.
All I do is spend money on people and it turns out they don't really want to get to know me.
They just like the money.
It's like, well, yeah.
So this is part of pop culture and it's been around for a long time that childhood dysfunction results in potential adult dysfunction, childhood trauma.
So nobody can say now, really, in the West at least, nobody can say, oh, man, I had no idea.
That the fact that my dad left my mom for the nanny, I had no idea that that might have any effect on my view of man.
No, no idea.
Nobody can say that.
Nobody can say that at all.
I mean, that's like saying I had no idea I had to wash my hands after, you know, fingering people's noses in the morgue.
I mean, just things you know, right?
So...
We're still trying to help people understand the degree to which something like spanking will cause adult dysfunction and so on, but now that people have knowledge about the degree to which childhood trauma can create potential adult dysfunction, they have the capacity to do things about it, to journal, to go to therapy, to pursue self-knowledge and so on.
So to spread knowledge is to spread the capacity for choice.
And so those of us who are Out there in the world, maybe you're one of them, out there in the world telling people the truth about things.
The worst tagline for this show ever.
But we're out there generating choice in people.
People say, well, we don't like the world going in a bad direction.
The world is going in a bad direction.
Too much debt, too much war, too much dysfunction, too much social conflict.
And we say, well...
It's because we have allowed an ever-expanding aggregation of violations of the basic moral rule called don't initiate force against others.
The reason the world's going to hell in a handbasket, the reason why, is because violating basic moral principles, which is short-term gain, long-term pain, and the bill is coming due.
The multi-decade, multi-generational bill.
It's coming due.
And so it's not a great mystery as to why the world is going so badly.
It's because initiation of the use of force is being violated in an ever escalating manner, which creates economic and other forms of social inefficiencies and increased conflict and so on.
Because whenever the use of force is being violated, there's a winner and the loser.
And everybody wants to use the gun to make themselves the winner and somebody else the loser, which is why you have these ethnic and religious conflicts over the power of the state these days.
And so it's not that complicated.
And once people know that, then they're not just hopefully sitting there paralyzed with horror and indecision and confusion and hating the world because it's not giving them what they want.
They can say, OK, well, now we know what the problem is.
And obviously the solution is to start minimizing the use of force.
Well, I can't control the government, but at least we can do it with spanking and parenting and so on.
So this gives people's choice.
And this is why this show has its lovers and it has its haters.
It has its lovers because some people, once they understand what to do to make the world a better place, they're enthusiastic.
And there are people, a small minority of people, who when they find out how to make the world a better place, well, they don't want to do it for a variety of reasons.
But now they have the choice and now they're responsible for what they do.
Whereas prior to knowledge, it's hard to argue for responsibility, which is why children have less I've always said that free will results in knowledge and an expansion of knowledge.
Insight and understanding expands one's capacity to choose.
And we certainly do have more choices in the world now than has ever really occurred before in human history.
So we have the greatest capacity for free will and choice, the exercise of free will and choice, than we've ever had before.
So that's where I stand on that.
Does that help in terms of my approach?
Sure, I can only agree with everything you said, but I was more coming from The fact that, for example, in a recent conversation, somebody told me that this non-initiation of the use of force is not a valid starting point because, for example, I didn't respect that myself by raising my kids.
Like, for example, forcing them to go take a bath.
Well, how did you force them to go take a bath?
Well, I put them in the bath and...
Did you pick them up as they were screaming and kicking and did you force them into the bath and did they get bruised and did they stub their toes and did they bang their teeth off on the porcelain?
I mean, how did you force them?
Well, sometimes they didn't want to, so it was more like blackmail.
What do you mean blackmail?
You don't want to take your bath.
You're not going to watch a movie after.
Well, no, that's consequences.
Blackmail is, you know, Take a bath or I'm going to publish pictures of you in a funny outfit on the internet or I guess some sort of threat like, you know, you go have a bath or I'm going to take a knife to your favorite teddy bear or something.
So saying there are going to be consequences, it's not great, but it's not exactly the initiation of force.
Otherwise, you know, come to work or you don't get paid is not the same as mugging someone in an alley, right?
Oh, I agree with that.
That's...
The person who I was talking to was assimilating both things.
Okay, so you simply say, well, no, I was not initiating the use of force.
I was saying there are consequences.
Which is true, you know.
I mean, I go to a store and they say, pay for what you take or we'll call the cops.
Are they initiating force?
No.
They're protecting their property, which if I'm a shoplifter, I'm going to violate their property and thus initiate force or fraud against them.
So, you know, there's better ways, I think, of getting kids to do stuff rather than punishment and consequences, but it's still not the initiation of force to say, you don't get a treat if you don't bathe, right?
I mean, the watching TV or the playing the game, there's optional things, right?
Optional benefits to provide.
So, you're not duty-bound to provide them, and failing to provide them is not like failing to provide them with food and shelter, right?
So, no.
So, people will just make those mistakes.
You just tell them, sorry, you're wrong.
Yes, but then the reply, I sort of replied something like that, maybe not that kind of efficiency, but the reply was, okay, so you also have the possibility not to obey the state by just leaving the country.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's an old argument.
And then you would pull off the internet a list of 10 countries, for example, where there are no taxes.
I think there are like 8 or 10 countries in the world where taxes are so low that, you know, it's like they don't exist.
And you should go to this place.
And to them, it's kind of a similar situation than me having my kids take a bath.
Well, first of all, why should people have to move?
Right?
Like if I just go to my neighbor and I say to my neighbor, you owe me $50,000 because I've just forged your signature on some debt, right?
And they say, well, I don't want to pay you $50,000.
And I say, well, you don't like it.
You can move.
Is that reasonable?
Oh, it's not.
Of course it's not.
Why should I have to move because people are initiating force against me?
I mean, there's a principle called stand your ground, which people can look up, right?
And of course, in America, even if you leave, well, first of all, if you owe the IRS more than 50k, they'll just take your passport.
And if you want to leave, they'll tax you anyway on your worldwide income.
Wherever you go, you're generally going to have to pay taxes.
And, you know, we're social animals.
So the idea that we can just go to some other tribe with no negative consequences is ridiculous.
We're social tribal animals with embedded relationships in our community.
Oh, just go to some other tribe?
No, that's not how things work.
That's not how human tribal animals work, and everybody knows that.
And look, if you say, ah, you see, the animals in the cages in the zoo are totally free because they can go from one cage to another if they want.
That doesn't mean that they're free.
How about there's no cage?
And also the idea that you just run away if your society is facing moral problems.
And economic and political problems will just run away.
Well, no.
See, that's kind of what cowards do or people from the Middle East who don't want to fight for their countries to become free.
That's what cowards do.
Look, if I don't like paying taxes, I will continue to make the moral case against taxation and stand and fight.
For freedom, which is exactly what our ancestors tended to do, and that's why we have some freedoms.
If they'd all run away, wouldn't be any freedoms.
So no, I stand and fight, and stand and make the case.
Well, you should just run away and go some other place.
Yeah, really?
Is that what you want the cops to do?
If some thug is threatening your family, just have him run away and go to some place where there are no thugs?
Sounds like a great plan.
Yeah, but to this particular person I was talking to, it doesn't matter, because actually I think we've got a theme tonight.
Oh, yeah.
We have a theme tonight, which is, how do I argue with people who are irrationally stubborn?
I was exactly thinking that.
You don't.
Hearing the first two calls, it was exactly what I thought.
Yeah, you don't.
And it's funny how this synchronicity sometimes works.
I stop.
You don't.
I stop.
Unless you can make a funny joke like my porn search joke.
Why?
Why would you?
I mean, you know, there's a great Jerry Seinfeld.
He's very good.
He's a comedian.
He's very good with hecklers.
And he's doing a show and some guy from the back screams, I love you, Jerry!
And he says, and I love you too, but I still think we should see other people.
He doesn't get into a conversation with the heckler.
Bernie Sanders will walk off if the Black Lives protesters come up and just give them the stage because he's that kind of jellyfish.
Donald Trump, right?
Donald Trump, just get him out of here.
He doesn't get into a debate.
They're just disruptors.
They're hecklers.
They're noisemakers.
They're not interested in the truth.
All they're trying to do is get you to shut up and they're trying to dominate you.
By clubbing you with their inert brain.
That's all they are.
It's all they are.
It's just this big, hey, my brain's not working, so I might as well use it as a soft, squishy club to get you to shut up.
Hey, if I can get you to eat all the dead parts of my brain, you won't be able to make your mouth noises.
That's all it is.
Yeah, but the problem is that through the recent years, I've been alienating most of the people I know, and it's becoming quite uncomfortable.
Good, good, yeah.
No, what you're doing is you're waking up to the fact that there are only ugly women around you.
And you're like, well, how do I have sex with an ugly woman I hate?
You don't.
Hate fucking is bad for the brain and deadly for the cock.
Right?
So you don't.
You say, okay, well, there's nothing but ugly people around me.
Okay, well, find prettier people.
I mean, I... I wish there was some big great answer I could give you, but we don't have the capacity to, from outside someone's skull, reshape their brain into something that's curious and intelligent.
Just don't have it.
They're most likely dumb people, and if they're not dumb people, they've been rendered dumb by emotional immaturity and prejudice.
So, you know, stop trying to wake people up.
Oh, I stopped.
I stopped.
But sometimes the problem is when you talk to people, I am either not interested in anything because small talk or talking about Tom Cruise, I don't care.
And then people ask me, oh, you never talk to anybody?
And when I open my mouth, then it's slippery because it's often when they mention, oh, did you see that great guy Bernie Sanders talking?
No, no, no, no.
Everybody tells me the same thing.
I know.
People around me are low quality, Steph.
What do I do?
And I can't keep repeating the same thing over and over again.
You can't make people around you better quality.
Have a couple of conversations with them.
Spend a couple of weeks.
Hell, spend a couple of months if the relationship is really important to you.
But then either accept that they're idiots or find smarter people to have conversations with.
I mean, there's no third way.
If you've spent weeks or months of your life trying to get people to listen to some basic shreds of human reason and evidence...
And they're as stupid and reactive and insulting and evasive and manipulative as when you first started.
You have to accept that.
We're empiricists.
Accept that you may be surrounded by tiny-brained, big-mouthed people.
It is often the case that the smaller the brain, the larger the mouth.
Larger the forehead, bigger the brain.
There's some relationship between that, but Look, you may be a diamond born among gravel.
I wouldn't pretend to do that.
Well, you know what?
Don't be falsely humble.
That's a way of trapping you in the slums.
Maybe you are significantly smarter than everyone around you.
Look, if you're listening to this show, it's not a bad place to start.
In terms of your evaluation, maybe you're a very, very smart guy.
Or maybe you're not that smart, but you have the emotional maturity to be open to new ideas.
I go more with the smart thing, but let's go with that if the smart thing makes you uncomfortable.
But what's wrong?
What's wrong with being the smartest guy around?
There's this really tall Chinese basketball player, right?
At some point, at some point, that guy had to say, wow, I'm really tall.
I'm really tall for any ethnicity, but I'm really, really tall for a Chinese person.
You know, it's like the brave French soldier.
Just kidding.
Right?
So at some point, hang on.
At some point, that guy had to say, I'm really tall.
I'm really tall.
And that means that he's not going to have much of a career playing basketball with the 5'2 people in his village.
At some point, Freddie Mercury had to say, Damn, I've got a great singing voice.
Damn, I've got a great singing voice.
So there's not much point me joining the local Christmas choir, or whatever, right?
Like at some point, you have to recognize your talents and abilities and move to an arena that is appropriate to them.
Right?
Sting was a schoolteacher.
And then he said, well, I'd rather shriek in a countertenor way and make millions of dollars, right?
Okay.
Billy Joel was doing Piano Bar because his mom was broke.
He did it for a while and at some point he's like, you know what, I'm not going to play, I'm going to write songs.
And he could do it.
It's entirely possible.
Listen, I tell you this as a guy, I've struggled with this my whole life.
This is going to sound really ridiculous to a lot of people and that's perfectly fine with me, but I'm completely sincere in this.
The odds that I am this good at what I'm doing are so ridiculously small that I struggled with it and occasionally still do for years.
The odds that I, and I said this at the very beginning of my book, UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior.
I said, look, the odds that some guy out there on the internet has solved the problem of rational secular ethics, tiny.
Tiny.
Nonetheless, I think I've done it.
I still think I've done it.
In fact, I know I've done it.
I come from single mom welfare ghetto hell, right?
What are the odds?
What are the odds?
What are the odds that I'd be bringing 150 million points of light in philosophy to the world?
What are the odds?
Infantasmally small, but so what?
The odds of Freddie Mercury being the best frontman in rock and roll history, very small.
And if he'd said, well, the odds are...
I mean, good lord.
I mean, how many people are in bands?
How many people are frontmen in bands?
The odds that I'm the best?
I mean, it's one in 10 billion.
Well, still he did it.
He didn't let the odds against his excellence prevent him from being excellent at what he did.
Right?
The Beatles, somebody has to be the number one band.
Now the odds that your band is going to be the number one band?
Very, very, very tiny.
Yet nonetheless, John, Paul, George, and Ringo pulled it off.
The odds that you're going to be very good at anything are tiny.
But you must be empirical about things.
I am very good at what I do.
I am improbably good at what I do.
And the fact, like, why do I keep doing these shows, in particular these conversations?
Because I come up with cool new ideas every single time, new analogies, new metaphors.
I have a horror of repeating myself.
I have a horror of repeating myself.
And I've, you know, talked over the years with people as like, you know, you've heard their eight stories and they can sometimes be quite florid communicators.
you've heard there are eight stories and okay you've heard I've mentioned this before.
I had a boss once.
He'd tell me the same stories over and over again.
No mention that he'd said them before.
Of course, he's the boss, so a few people want to interrupt him and say, listen, you boring old fart.
We already heard this story three times, like in the last two weeks.
And my horror of repetition means it's a great challenge.
I don't do greatest hits.
I do improv all the time.
All the time.
You know the number of scripted shows is very few and even in the scripted shows I go off book and horrify the researcher.
So the odds are that I'm going to spontaneously generate great ideas, great arguments, entertaining ways of communicating philosophy and motivating a planet The odds are infinitesimally small that I would be able to do that out of all the people in the world.
I'm not saying I'm the only person, but I'm certainly up there in terms of being able to do it in a way that connects with people.
And the odds are that I'd be relatively good at some aspects of economics and self-knowledge and philosophy and ethics and science and just being able to come up with this stuff on the fly.
It's not very likely.
To put it as mildly as humanly possible.
But empirically, that's what's happening.
And so I cannot...
You know, when I say that it's important, although unlikely, for stupid people to know how stupid they are, that's the flip side of saying it's equally important, if not more important, for smart people to know how smart they are.
And I'm concerned that you are not giving yourself the empirical credit that you are due, and therefore you're slumming with idiots.
And that is not helping the world.
It's not even helping the idiots.
It's not helping you, for sure.
I mean, imagine how frustrated Freddie Mercury is with the local choir group of amateurs, right?
I mean, geez, people just...
If you want to know how good he is...
Okay, the...
When he would sing Somebody to Love live, he'd come up with a whole bunch of different intros every single time, all of which are like flawlessly musical and fantastic.
There's a song written by Brian May called The Prophet Song, which is sort of his attempt at Bohemian Rhapsody, not nearly as successful, but an interesting song and a good song to listen to.
When Freddie Mercury would do that song live, there's a whole bit in the middle.
He'd just turn on the reverb, and he would just do different musical improvisations, harmonizing with himself, because it would be on a slow decay reverb.
He would harmonize with himself, and occasionally he'd break into like Frere Jacques and things like that, and he would spontaneously Scat and harmonize with himself flawlessly, musically perfect.
That's how good he was.
It's incredible.
You can find the Prophet's song live.
Just go listen to it.
I have some Queen albums.
Yeah, and the studio stuff is fantastic enough, but the live stuff...
I have the live stuff.
I mean, okay, Brian May's noodley Space Journeys of Guitar Hell, that's not my particular taste, although I'm sure people who are more into guitars than I am into singing would find that.
But he was, like, staggeringly, unbelievably, fantastically good.
I just listened to his call and answers with the crowd, and I mean, just...
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
And...
If he had been, with this level of talent and ability and dedication and work and capacity, if he'd been sitting there trying to get some local amateur Christmas sing-along group, I mean, he'd go mental.
How can I work with these people?
I've got an idea.
Don't work with these people.
Go find Roger Taylor and Brian May and John Deacon.
Called Deacon John in the first album.
Go and play with them because they're excellent at what they do.
They are the best.
You are the best.
How about you get a whole bunch of bestness together and go on tour?
We'll sing to you in Japanese, right?
Go do some crazy stuff.
Go do some gospel.
Go do some soul.
Go do some folk.
Go do some rock.
Go do some whatever.
Just go and do some crazy stuff and let your ya-ya's out.
So recognize that you may be open to the possibility that you may be extraordinary.
Because to deny that is taking a huge risk.
Because look, if you try to be extraordinary and it turns out that you're not, you'll know pretty quick.
But if you are extraordinary and you continue to slum it with idiots, you may never know what you're capable of.
And the world will be robbed of a great potential light thereby.
Is it better for me to talk to the world or is it better for me to continue to have the same old arguments with the same old people that never went anywhere, never progressed, if I had not recognized my own abilities and my own potentials?
Would you be happier?
No.
Would I be happier?
I would have a great and growing sense of waste.
Because I always thought that I had some potential for something extraordinary.
I always thought that.
Did not know it was going to be anything like this.
But, you know, I'm open to the exploration and the possibility.
But false humility is a form of hypocrisy that is even worse than...
Thinking you're greater than you are.
Thinking you're lesser than you are is much more costly to the world than thinking you're greater than you are.
Because you can ignore idiots who leave YouTube comments, but the holes in human achievement that are missing because people downgrade and are skeptical of their own abilities.
That is what I truly miss in the world.
I truly miss the star voyages of people who can surf at the edge of human experience and create new things out of mere sounds to create new cathedrals of thought out of mere syllables.
We need more people like that.
So go big or go home.
You don't know what you're capable of until you keep pushing the limits.
I keep pushing the limits.
I keep bugging Mike and Stein by saying, I can do more.
I can do it better.
I can do it somehow in a way that's even more connecting, more powerful.
And I keep trying to get better every single show.
I make this dedication to myself.
Go further.
Be deeper.
Be bigger.
Be more powerful, be more connected, do something that you haven't done before.
Jazzercise yourself into an even bigger philosophical six-pack.
See, I just did that.
And so far, so good.
And I will not stop continuing to try to improve what I do and how I do it, because I still have no idea how good I could be in the long run.
I'm still working at trying to improve all of that.
I am not lamenting in a corner like a dry little corpse.
I produce things.
I'm a musician.
I write.
I wrote a book.
I'm a software engineer.
I do things, concrete things.
It's just the relationship with people.
And when you talk about idiots, to point out that people may have conversations that end up No, but smarts, hang on.
Well, there are many different kinds of intelligence for one thing.
And because you're smart at one thing, certainly doesn't mean that you're smart at other things, right?
So somebody who has what's called G, or a very strong Genuine, general intelligence it's called.
It's called G because nobody wanted to give it a particular label like wisdom or intelligence or something like that.
But, you know, my rather fragmented recollection of a biography I read of Einstein when I was in my teens is something like this.
Guy was a total genius, of course, when it came to physics.
He had a terrible relationship with his wife.
I mean, I think he just wanted her to slide his dinner under the door of his study so that he didn't have to eat with her.
I mean, a pretty bad relationship with his wife.
Again, this is a long time ago, so I'm sorry if my memory is incorrect or if the information has changed since then.
But if that's a valid memory and an accurate statement, then he was really, really smart at physics and really not smart at physics.
Relationships, or at least his relationship with his wife.
Fantastic problem solving skills in the realm of physical matter and its properties and its emergent properties and all of that.
Very bad problem solving skills when it came to his wife and their relationship.
So intelligence doesn't mean you're fantastically great at everything.
You know, I mean, I couldn't even imagine how long it would take for me to even write any kind of remotely competent physics paper, but it would take me, I would imagine, at least five to ten years of pretty full-time study, right?
And, you know, Brian May, to go back to the guitarist, he was doing a PhD in physics, and he went off to be a rock star, and then after Queen disbanded, I think relatively recently, he went back and he finished his PhD in physics.
But he wasn't doing it while he was on tour with Queen, right?
Because you've got to pick what you're focused on.
So just because somebody's really smart doesn't mean that they can't make very bad arguments in areas they're not experts in or make very bad decisions in areas that they're not experts in.
You know, I mean, obviously Freud was a very intelligent fellow who had no capacity to cure his own addiction to cigars.
So even somebody who has strong knowledge of the unconscious and a strong approach or strong-willed approach to self-knowledge was unable to deal with the addiction that ended up killing him and made the last 20 years of his life a pretty ruinous mess of endless surgeries on his jaw and cheek and so on.
So, specialization is the key to human endeavors.
And, you know, the things that I'm strong at, I am strong at.
And I try to be cognizant of the things that I'm not particularly strong at.
Like, when it comes to scientific properties, I'll use a lot of the same...
Examples because I'm just not fluent enough in science to be able to make up the kind of analogies that I do in philosophy on the fly, which is why gases expand when heated and, you know, I keep getting kicked around the various mammal categories and so on.
But I'll try not to think up those on the fly because I'm not really very good at those kinds of things.
And so I'll try to keep things more limited.
You know, I don't come up with a lot of mathematical analogies.
Fibonacci!
Right?
Just because I don't really know much about mathematics.
So I can come up with And analogies about, you know, the one I did about peeing in the mansion, I can come up with those because, you know, I'm pretty comfortable in the realm of philosophy and I've done a lot of work in poetry and creative writing in terms of the generation of analogies.
I've analyzed a lot of my own dreams so I kind of know how analogies work.
So I can do that stuff.
Analogies and philosophy, yeah, I'm pretty well versed in.
But other areas say, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not fluent in those, which is why I have my particular grab bag of examples that I sort of return to.
Yeah, just because somebody is smart doesn't mean that they're Good at everything, right?
It just means they have the capacity in general to be good at things.
But if they haven't put, like, I'm a smart guy and it takes some intelligence to compose music.
I have only written two songs in my entire life and recorded only one of them.
And so I'm not a good songwriter because I, you know, I haven't Put the time and effort into it because I don't think the world needs another songwriter.
It needs another philosopher or a philosopher to begin with.
So, yeah, that would be, you know, my particular way of looking at it.
People who are, you know, the highest IQ people that are in physics, second highest IQ in philosophy.
And so both physics and philosophy take a lot of intelligence, but that doesn't mean everybody who's a good philosopher is a good physicist or vice versa.
In fact, it would be unlikely that if you were really good at physics, you'd also be really good at philosophy, because to be really good at physics, you have to dedicate a lot of time into becoming good at physics, and that means less time for other things.
So if I may just add a question.
It's got to be quick, because we're running down to three hours on the show.
Go ahead.
It's just still on the freewheel topic, and I know what's wrong, but just to have your opinion on that.
So I was sort of a video where, like, you know, this kind of video that explains why capitalism is so bad and advertisement is so evil.
It's because it manipulates freewheels, so we need governments to tame that.
And steer people away from all this evil.
So I wonder if people feel that, like with this kind of argument, I wonder if people feel that a 30-second commercial is mind control, but 12 straight years of fairly full-time government school is not.
I guess, you know, that's my question.
So if people are concerned about the outside influences of children, children i wonder if children are getting an accurate view of their society and government programs and so on and the police and taxation through state-run government schools or whether the big problem is that someone wants you to play age of empires when you're playing crossy road i you know i i generally if if i if i had to withdraw
like if if my daughter was in public school if i had to withdraw one influence from my daughter in terms of that which would be most likely to affect her thinking towards irrationality, I'm not sure I'd start with um, Frosted Frakes, they're great!
I would start with, um, The government is here to protect you and the welfare state protects the poor and socialized medicine makes sure that people don't die of cancer in the street and the police are your friends and national debt is the price we pay to live in a civilized society and all wars are justified and your government is totally legitimate and anybody who thinks otherwise is bad evil and needs a tinfoil hat.
I think that that kind of repetition in government schools is probably a little bit more influential over the development of children's thinking than the occasional commercial that they see.
So the people who are concerned about commercials, I mean, government school is one giant commercial for semi-fascism, probably a little bit more influential over people's lifelong thinking than what kind of Tamagotchi they're going to get.
Right.
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