3370 Culture Wars: The Battle For Western Civilization | Vox Day and Stefan Molyneux
Politics are downstream from culture and there is a massive propaganda war underway which is determined to undermine the foundations of Western Civilization Vox Day joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss examples of propaganda within media and the distorting effect it has on the perception of reality. Multiple-time Hugo Award nominee Vox Day writes epic fantasy as well as non-fiction about religion, philosophy, and economics. He is a professional game designer who speaks four languages and a three-time Billboard Top 40 Club Play recording artist.Vox Day maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game, which between them average over 2 million pageviews per month.Vox Day's Books: http://www.fdrurl.com/vox-dayVox Day's Blog: http://voxday.blogspot.comCastalia House: http://www.castaliahouse.comSJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Policehttp://www.fdrurl.com/SJW-Always-LieCuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed Americahttp://www.fdrurl.com/cuckservativeA Throne of Boneshttp://www.fdrurl.com/Throne-of-BonesQuantum Mortis: A Man Disruptedhttp://www.fdrurl.com/Quantum-MortisThe Missionarieshttp://www.fdrurl.com/The-MissionariesFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, here with a good friend Vox Dei, an epic fantasy writer.
You may think that's a writer of epic fantasy.
No, he's just epic all around.
A multiple-time Hugo Award nominee, professional game designer, and he also runs the book publisher Castilla House.
His non-fiction books include Social Justice Warriors Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police, A Must Read, and Cuxervatives, How, Quote, Conservatives Betrayed America, also in the category called Must Read.
Vox also maintains a pair of popular blogs, Vox Populi and Alpha Game, which between them average over 2 million, million page views per month.
And you can find his work at voxday.blogspot.com and we'll link to all of this below as well as castiliahouse.com.
Vox, how are you doing, my friend?
I'm doing well.
It's good to see you again.
So, something that I've always often thought about over the last couple of years when I consume a lot of media, partly because it's fun and partly because it's a cultural commentator and so on.
It's kind of the gig.
I used to be sort of a passive consumer.
I mean, I've written a lot of stuff, written like 30 plays, bunch of novels and stuff like that, but I used to be kind of like a passive consumer.
But after I got into philosophy and politics and, you know, Breitbart's famous dictum that politics is downstream from culture, recognizing that culture wars are very important.
I became sort of more alert to what was going on in what I was watching because, you know, Hollywood and a lot of the movies and TV shows, they're very entertaining.
They're very, you know, a great actress and some decent scripts a lot of times.
But there's a lot going on that's underneath the surface.
And since then, I've kind of – I'm kind of of two minds about it.
Like I kind of wish I was back to like early dumb, you know.
Toilet of consuming media.
But now, I'm sort of more aware of what they're doing to me while they're entertaining me.
And I don't know what your process has been with that, but I'm really alert to it now.
And I can't really shut it off.
I think that's a good thing, because it's good to be aware of your environment and what's coming into your head.
But man, alive, it is just relentless, the amount of programming that's going on in this media.
What's your sort of thoughts or experience with this stuff?
Well, I think it's gotten to the point that it's so overt that even if you wanted to remain blind, deaf, and dumb to it, it would be difficult.
I occasionally write on Alpha Game, which is the blog that's more focused on human relations, about the way that the cultural programming is really, really aggressively trying to push interracial dating on viewers.
Now...
I don't think that there's necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with that, with the interracial dating.
If two people are interested, so be it.
But there is something very, very forced and artificial about it when you see a highly, highly improbable It's so absurd.
Over here in Europe we tend to watch English TV. And the racial demographics in England are very different than they are in the United States, and there's a lot fewer blacks or Africans, and there's a lot more Arabs-Asians, right?
But what's remarkable is that on the advertisements, there's this tremendous...
Tremendously high percentage, improbably high percentage of black men and white women in the commercials.
At one point, in fact, there were, I counted something like nine over the course of a single half an hour television show versus seven white on white couples.
And at At one point, my wife joked that that must be all the interracial, you know, the black male, white female couples in England.
Because, I mean, it just doesn't exist.
It's not probable.
And so you have to ask yourself, okay, why are they pushing that?
You know, if nothing else, in that particular case, you know, why do we always see the black male, white female coupling when actually the White male-Asian female coupling is statistically much more likely, especially in England.
But you don't.
Well, and it's interesting because the stats for interracial marriages are not always that great, right?
I mean, the high probability to break up and so on.
And what's interesting about the interracial couple thing, which I see a lot of as well, is it's always prior to kids.
Because, of course, the challenge with interracial couples, as it is with interfaith couples and so on to some degree, is...
How are you going to raise the kids?
In which culture?
In which ethnicity?
And so on.
And these are complicated questions which are difficult to answer.
And I think a lot of sort of interracial romances occur prior to kids being in the picture because then it becomes more complicated.
But they don't usually deal with the challenges of interracial dating, which of course is, you know, that people grew up with different ethnicities.
And according to a lot of the leftists, different ethnicities have different experiences of the world.
And this general push, without dealing with the challenges of it, I think paints a bit too rosy of a picture for what can sometimes and statistically is often more of a challenging relationship.
Well, there's no question.
I mean, you know, I'm tri-racial myself.
I'm European, I'm Mexican, and I'm Native American.
And, you know, there have been – I'm trying to think.
My generation is doing okay with only one divorce.
But my parents are divorced, and a lot of people don't realize how much pressure those sort of differences can make on either a marital or a non-marital relationship.
Now, I don't think that that really had anything to do with my parents' breakup.
They had other pressures that were considerably more.
But...
The fact of the matter is that it's not something that should be celebrated simply because it's...
I mean, it would be like encouraging people to marry alcoholics or encourage people to marry people who are psychologically unstable.
I mean, these are all risk factors for marriages.
And yet here you've got...
And the irony is that That particular combination, black male, white female, is actually the worst and least likely to succeed combination.
In fact, if they were to push black female, white male, that is actually more likely to stay married than a male.
You know, two black people or two white people or two Asians.
And yet you don't see that as much.
So again, it is quite clearly intentional.
And it is quite clearly being pushed.
And even, I was going to say that doing it before children is more typical of the television shows.
On the advertisements, you'll often see the couples with the, you know, the The black male, the black father, the white mother, and then two racially mixed children.
But again, that's complete bollocks because if you go to...
One thing that we noticed when we were at the Paris Disneyland is you saw a lot of...
We saw a lot of white couples with their kids and then you saw a much smaller number of black couples with their kids.
But every single time we saw a white mother with mixed kids, she was there with her mother.
There was only one out of all the couples we saw was the father actually there.
Now, I mean, who knows?
It could have just been a coincidence that that happened to be the pattern that day.
But again, what we're seeing is that the image being pushed by the media, especially in the commercials, is cultural programming.
It is not reflecting reality.
It is an attempt to create reality, which, of course, is what commercials exist to do in the first place.
And it does seem to be that the media that talks about the incompatibility of blacks and whites, which is more so, I think, in America than just about any other place, where there's institutionalized racism, they talk about the cops hunting black youths and black men and so on.
And then you go, so that's a very volatile narrative, the sort of race baiting that goes on.
And then you switch to the commercials where, you know, we're all one big happy family.
It's kind of jarring that these two things occurring at the same time feels a bit schizoid at times.
It's totally incoherent.
But then again, the SJW narrative has always been dynamic.
It's constantly shifting.
I think we've talked about that the only way you can understand the way SJWs interact with each other is to watch a school of fish and watch how they all shift very rapidly in sync and in time.
Because they're constantly changing the narrative and they're constantly having to change their tune.
And that's why they can, at one moment, be singing the it's a small world thing and portraying this idealistic vision of equality and racial sameness and all that sort of thing.
And then in the very next breath, be screaming about Black Lives Matter and how all whites are racists and all cops want to kill black people.
I mean, it's totally incoherent, but let's face it, we're not going to make much headway with anyone pointing out their inconsistencies and hypocrisies because that's been readily apparent to anyone who's paying attention for decades. - Yes.
Well, of course, there's this basic rule of the left, which is that they wish to portray a world wherein all disparate outcomes are the result of prejudice.
All disparate outcomes between ethnicities, between cultures, between genders in particular.
We can sort of circle that one for a while because it's a huge one.
So if...
There are disparate outcomes between ethnicities.
There are disparate outcomes between genders in particular, and the old trope about women owning 75 cents on the dollar or whatever, unless they work for Donald Trump, in which case it's about equal.
But this argument that all disparate outcomes must be the result of prejudice, I think requires that you portray men and women as identical, that there are just as many female, like in movies, there are just as many female scientists as male scientists.
In fact, there are often more I think we're good to go.
But since, of course, reality doesn't actually line up with the narrative, you then have to try and hook people in with entertainment and jokes and good acting and so on and nice sets and pretty people.
You have to lure them in to replace the empirical evidence of their lived experience with the programmed pseudo-evidence of the media so that then you can say, well, you know, your experience has been that women are just as capable and there's just as many female scientists, so then why aren't women capable?
Getting as much in terms of Nobel Prizes or why aren't women at the top of their profession here because on TV, that's what they all seem to be.
Therefore, there must be some sort of prejudice, some sort of sexism, some sort of misogyny going on.
But when you sort of get out of that ghetto of ideology and look at the actual facts in the world, well, yeah, women end up making less than men because they generally make different choices and also because they tend to be clustered more around the center of the IQ bell curve.
Which means they're usually never as ridiculously unintelligent as men, nor as ridiculously intelligent as men.
It's, you know, average.
And also, they like to work part-time.
They have kids.
They make different choices.
They tend to prioritize the relationships over work.
I've got no problem with that, but it's just not going to be as lucrative.
And of course, they're taken out of the workforce if they want to have kids and they want to be decent moms for some time right in the middle when men are really hitting their gas and all that.
So I think this does sort of feed the narrative of pitting us all against each other and putting people into this twisted brain matrix of racism and sexism and homophobia and all that kind of stuff, as long as the East Asians are not visible, right?
As long as like the Japanese and the Chinese are not visible because they break that narrative.
And I think that standpoint, it does serve that sort of pitting us against each other and creating resentment of victim classes.
If they can portray all of this egalitarianism, they then end up at the payoff of people being resentful and feeling like they're being victimized on the other side.
Well, I think at some level, it's even cruder than that.
It's slightly disturbing to see that they are actually successful in convincing people of false facts.
Like, for example, there's a number of studies that have been done or polls that have been taken, and people wildly overestimate the percentage of homosexuals in the population.
And that's because of the media that's been doing.
That's because of television.
Every group of six people has their charming gay friend.
I think the main idea was actually to portray homosexuals as people who live very similar lives to the straight community, which is, as anyone who's in the music or the arts community knows, is completely not true.
But I think that the additional result that they succeeded in Convincing people is that there were a lot more gays than there in fact are.
And another example is Jews in the United States.
It's remarkable when you're watching television, you probably see five, maybe even ten times more Jews, Jewish characters, than you see Southern Baptists or Baptists.
And yet...
The Baptists in the United States are something like 17% of the population.
Jews are 2% and declining.
And so, just from a purely statistical point of view, you would think that you would have a lot more Christians in general.
You'd think you'd have a lot more Baptists specifically.
But for some reason, they consider the Baptists to be a A dangerous population that they don't want to portray very accurately.
And so you've always got your little reference to Hanukkah during the Christmas specials and all that sort of thing.
And again, it would be reasonable.
I suppose that you could cut some slack just because a lot of shows are set in New York City, which does have a high Jewish population.
But if you are looking at the entire United States, it's just...
It's so statistically improbable as to be ridiculous.
Now we start to see a pattern.
They're showing a statistically improbable number of interracial couples, and they're only showing one type of interracial couple, for the most part.
then they're showing an improbable number of homosexuals, they're showing a ridiculously improbable number of Jews, and that's when you start to realize that there is something going on there.
There is some level of cultural programming taking place.
And what's even more disturbing about it is how specific some of these programs are.
For example, a story came out recently talking about the way that Hollywood, for the last 10 years, has been trying to lay the groundwork for Hillary Clinton's presidency.
And so in shows like The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, and a lot more shows, I mean, I think they had as many as 10 different shows that had a character who was essentially a stand-in for Hillary Clinton, a blonde woman who wore pantsuits and was either the president or the secretary of state who would eventually become the president.
And again, what they're trying to do is they're trying to shape reality.
They're trying to affect people's subconscious assumptions and then make their desired reality come to pass.
And the more that you're aware of this, the more difficult it is for them to convince you that that's the way it should be.
On the downside, it does tend to reduce your enjoyment.
just when you see the man behind the curtain, it's not quite as interesting.
And what they're really doing is that because they're doing it so bluntly and so crudely, they're showing their hand.
Well, and let's talk about the Baptists and the Christians, because the portrayal of Christianity in the mainstream, it's the repressed preacher.
It's the Catholic pedophile preacher.
Even if he's not specifically a preacher, it's the conservative who is square and dull and boring and the butt of everyone.
He's not cool.
He's not hideous.
It's the Flanders from the Simpsons and so on, and lots of other examples of this sort of stuff.
So, the degree to which Christians are portrayed in a negative light, compared, of course, to the enormous amount of charitable works and good that Christians do in America, is something quite astonishing.
And it must be sort of how, I don't know, maybe gay people felt about how they were portrayed in the past and so on.
And it's just become so relentlessly negative that It's become one of these cliches.
Like if there's a land developer in a kid's show, he's just going to be driving tractors over bunnies and all development and all capitalism and that sort of level of just bald-faced programming.
And I find it shocking the degree to which it happens with Christian characters.
Yeah, it's really kind of remarkable.
I mean, as an evangelical Christian myself, I don't really take offense at it just because it's so wildly and ludicrously off the mark.
I mean, it...
It simply doesn't describe a single person that I know of the hundreds if not thousands of Christians that I know.
For example, there is one trope that I find particularly annoying because it appears so often in fiction.
And it's so remarkably stupid that it boggles my mind that anyone even writes this because...
It's just not even possible.
But what always happens is the stock Christian character makes some statement that is judgmental about someone.
And it's always either about a woman's promiscuity or a homosexual.
A judgmental comment.
And then, at this point, the atheist stand-in for the author promptly puts himself forward and says, Aha!
You have not read your Bible.
Do you not remember that when Jesus was with the adulterous woman, and what did he say?
And of course, the Christian who has been attending sermons for years on Sundays, and if he's anything like practically all the Christians I know, also attends a weekly Bible study where they Yes.
Read the Bible quite closely.
They may have heard the phrase, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Not only that, but not only do they not know that, but they don't come back with the obvious response from every single Christian that you ever bring up, you know, he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Go forth and sin no more.
Okay?
Yes, Jesus did stop the Pharisees from stoning the woman, but he then turned around to the woman and said, stop doing it.
And so, and it's really rather remarkable because, I mean, just out of curiosity once, I asked about 10 of my Christian friends, you know, I proposed a similar situation.
What would you say?
And every single one of them just immediately said, well, that's fine and all, but you know, you're also supposed to go forth and say no more.
And yet, in the trope in these books, not only has the Christian never ever encountered the idea of not casting the first stone, but of course, couldn't possibly come back with that response because this hypothetical Christian never ever knows the Bible as well as the atheist.
And the thing is, is that this is a common theme that you see all the time, and yet I can tell you firsthand from debating atheists, you know, quite a bit, including atheists who really very, very seriously believe that they knew the Bible very well, I have yet to encounter any atheist who does.
And it's not that they don't know it at all, but they often...
I don't know it very well, and they are often not very familiar, even with the pop Christian theology.
There's one example, for example, I was having a debate with this one particular atheist who claimed that he'd been a Christian and gone to Bible studies and all this sort of thing.
And then it came out in the very beginning of the debate that he wasn't even familiar with the Christian doctrines that appear in the Chronicles of Narnia.
We're not talking about high-level theological discourse here.
We're not going back to Tertullian or anything like that.
It was so comical because it was quite clear that he was living that particular trope we were just discussing.
But then when he encountered reality, he realized, oh, well, you know, wait a minute, maybe I don't know quite as much as I thought.
Sorry to interrupt, but this drives me nuts, too, because this idea that if a Christian passes judgment, that you then can say, ah, you know, judge not, yes, ye be judged, and so on.
Now, I'm no theologian, to put it mildly, but it seems to me that the Christian approach is that you can judge the actions of the person, but the final judgment We're good to go.
But the final dispensation of the ultimate end and judgment of that person's entire life and existence is not for yours to discover because, of course, they could have a deathbed repentance, they could find Jesus later in their life, and only God would know for sure at the end of their lives what all of their choices amount to.
So just because you don't have omniscience doesn't mean you can't judge.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Actually, you could put it even more strongly if you wanted to.
I mean, what you're saying is absolutely correct, but there's another level to it, which is that Christians are not expected to judge those who are outside the church.
So, what that means is, you know, for example, I had a friend, and he had been having an affair, and And he'd been acting really squirrely around me, and I couldn't understand why.
And finally, we were working out together, and I just said, look, why are you acting so squirrely?
What's going on?
There's clearly something going on.
And, of course, I knew about it from my wife.
And I said, does this have anything to do with the affair you're having?
And...
His jaw just dropped.
Hopefully you didn't do that while he was benching a lot.
He ends up with that Clinton exit.
But I said, does it have anything to do with that?
And he said, you knew about that?
I said, yes.
And he said, well...
Aren't you going to lecture me about that?
I said, no, you know you shouldn't be doing it.
I said, you don't need me to tell you that.
I mean, you shouldn't be.
I said, but, you know, I'm still your friend.
And he said, but, you know, it's really bad, right?
I said, well, it is bad, but you're not a Christian.
So, I said, you're not, I said, I'm not going to hold, it's not my job to police your behavior.
I said, if we were both in the church and And you were doing this?
Yeah, I would tell you, you either need to quit this or you need to get out.
Because in the book of James, it lays down a very clear, first you talk to him alone, then you talk to him with a friend, then you talk to the church authorities, and if they still won't stop what they're doing, then you throw them out of the church until they knock it off and are repentant.
But you never hear people talking about that, even though You know, every evangelical Christian that I know It's perfectly familiar with those verses in James, even though I will be the first to point out Christians are really,
really bad about doing any of that because we tend not to like to – I mean, it's kind of ironic that Christians are often considered to be so judgmental because, frankly, we're not anywhere near judgmental enough with each other.
We don't follow the Bible and hold each other accountable the way that we should.
But regardless, it's not a Christian's job to shake his finger and try to make a non-believer feel bad.
I mean, if they don't believe in the fundamental, then why on earth would you expect them to follow the rules?
Doesn't make sense.
Right, right.
So, yeah, evil Christian, we have the stupid dad.
Right.
Right.
The dumb male.
I grew up, I'd come home at lunch and they'd leave it to Beaver and stuff like that was on.
And so I grew up without a dad, but I at least got some positive male role models through the media and through a couple of friends' fathers who were great, great guys.
But I don't know that that's really so common anymore.
I think that people are growing up with, you know, the dad who's distracted, the dad who's clueless, the dad who doesn't know how to do anything, and who is constantly corrected not just by his wife, his long-suffering wife usually, but also by his children.
This elevation of children to the wise acres of the family I've always found to be particularly I mean, yeah, kids have a lot to offer, a lot of great feedback.
But boy, putting them in charge is really flipping the pyramid on its head.
And the number of times...
Well, you see this cliche, you know, with the kid.
The parents try and explain something to the kid in an exaggerated way.
And the kid says, you know, I'm a kid.
I'm not...
Dumb, you know, I'm 12, I'm not 5, you know, and it turns out that the kid knows how to do stuff.
Or the number of times the dad's trying to do something and the kid just walks over and pushes a button and it works magically and so on.
I guess that appeals to the vanity of children, but I think it really gives them a sense of being rudderless and leaderless in a world where there is a lot that kids need to know about the future.
Well, I think it's...
I think that what they're attempting to do is to create fearful creatures that are easily led by an externally provided authority.
It's always been very, very important to totalitarians to try to destroy the nuclear family.
It's always been a goal.
It's amazing how if you look at anything from the early communist programs of Lenin to the various projects of the Nazis, all of them were fundamentally designed to separate the bond between parent and child.
That often involves separating the bond between man and wife.
And it's really a terrible thing to do to a child because when a child has a natural understanding of the relationship between the man and his wife and the authority of the father, the mercy of the mother, then they tend to end up with a fairly healthy psychological background.
They learn to respect authority without fearing it.
They learn that mercy exists, but it's not always going to save you.
The whole wait till your father gets home.
And so, you know, that's the way that civilization is constructed, and that's the way that civilization maintains itself.
It's on the atoms, the atomic structure of the nuclear family.
And upon that, you can build great nations, you can build entire civilizations.
And so, you know, the common theme that we're seeing across all of this is ultimately the target is Western civilization.
You know, when people ask me, you know, are you a libertarian still?
Are you this?
Are you that?
You know, the only two things that I really say anymore is that A, I'm a Christian, and B, I'm a Western civilizationist.
You know, I'm not really overly concerned about I mean, I believe they're very important.
I'm a nationalist in that sense.
But ultimately, the thing that's so important to us is Western civilization, because that's what so many of the great things that we appreciate in terms of art or that we require for us.
Or that we enjoy in terms of technology or that we need in terms of medical care.
They're all the fruits of Western civilization.
And so that's why it's not these things that you're talking about.
It'd be easy to say, oh, what does it matter?
It's a stupid program about a stupid dad.
Who cares?
But the problem is that each of these television shows, each of these commercials, they're all just one more little chip.
At the foundation of Western civilization, and that's why I think it's so important for those of us in the alternative right, or those of us who support Western civilization, regardless of what you call yourself, to constantly oppose those who are attempting to destroy the foundations of Western civilization.
That is, yeah, that is very profound, and there is no other civilization that I would want to exist in.
I mean, that's just a basic reality that I so much enjoy the public process of speaking and reasoning and questioning that that is what the West has, for a various number of reasons, allowed or evolved into.
I just couldn't really function.
I wouldn't want to function in any other civilization.
So it's a bit of a make or break for me.
That's kind of what I'm saying.
But I've seen this as well in movies in the past.
There used to be this...
I don't know if it was a cliche because it just seems so positively reinforcing.
The people who had families were generally happy.
They had their struggles, they had their challenges, but they were generally happy and satisfied with their lives and all that.
And the people who are single were often portrayed as a little bit on the oddball side.
You know, just a little quirky.
In England, or in, I guess, all of Great Britain, they would be referred to as quirky.
Eccentric is the big word.
You know, eccentric means you haven't had your rough edges sanded down by constant interaction with family around you.
And...
That changed, I think, really in the 60s.
And I think partly it changed, of course, governments want women in the workforce because they then get the double tax bonus of taxing women who formerly were providing services that couldn't be taxed as mothers and housewives and also then taxing all the people who have to step in to provide those services, daycare workers and maids and restaurants and cooks and all that kind of stuff.
And something really sort of shifted around the 60s where the family life then became portrayed as toxic and problematic.
You know, the sort of ordinary people, Kramer versus Kramer kind of thing that went on.
And the single people were portrayed as cool and hip and, you know, traveling and doing sculptures and having lots of sex with people who are remarkably STD-free and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
It really switched around.
I was watching a movie on Netflix the other day.
Where there was this, you know, cool, hip couple who were just having a great time sleeping around with everything that moved, including, I think, a shrubbery at one point.
And then they went over to visit some friends of theirs who have kids and the parents were miserable.
And they literally said, they said to this cool, hip, sexy couple, don't have kids.
It's terrible.
Something like that.
It's don't have kids.
At a time when birth rates are really catastrophically low in the West, this portrayal of the single life as the ultimate that you could possibly hope for, which it is maybe for some people until you hit 35 and then it's a whole lot of not having high sexual market value and watching the wallpaper dry.
But this negativity towards family and children and so on, the parents are always stressed and they're always harried and they're always busy and they're always spilling juice on themselves as they rush out the door while their kids are hanging under their legs and so on.
They portray it as so harried and so difficult.
It's almost like not a contraceptive but a sterility agent for the population as a whole.
Oh, there's no question.
And the worst thing about it is that it's a complete and utter lie.
I mean, I can speak for myself, but, you know...
You were in a band?
It must have been fun to be single.
Yeah.
Hey, I was traveling around the world.
I was dating international models.
I think I can honestly say that I don't know how I could possibly have had any more fun in terms of from the...
Hedonistic, secular standard.
And what I can say without any equivocation at all, without any hesitation at all, is that it was nowhere near as satisfying, as joyful, as wonderful, as Marrying my wife and having our children.
Nothing compares to it.
It's kind of like C.S. Lewis once was trying to explain what heaven was like.
He said, how do we explain what heaven is like?
We haven't been there and so forth.
He said, but it's even worse than that.
We can't.
He said, trying for us to even imagine what heaven is like is like trying to explain what sex is like to a child.
He said, you're talking to a child and they cannot believe that anything could possibly be better than chocolate.
I mean, chocolate is so wonderful.
How could you possibly grasp it?
How could anything be better than chocolate?
Meanwhile, the adult's kind of going, well, yeah, I like chocolate and all, but I'd much rather have sex with her.
And if chocolate is involved, so much the better, but not necessarily.
Precisely.
It's kind of like that for the single person in that if you're single, even if you've had a girlfriend or whatever, even if you've had somebody living with you or that sort of thing, you can't truly grasp the depth of you can't truly grasp the depth of wonder and terror and love and fear.
That all gets wrapped up in the fullness of family life.
I'm not talking about one particular element of it or anything.
I'm just talking about the way that it changes you.
I was talking to a friend who was about to get married.
We went to their wedding actually very recently.
And I said, look, it's going to change your life.
Your life is not going to be what it was before.
I said, but what you're going to find out is that you're not going to care and you're not going to mind.
And the thing is, yes, there are bad marriages and people do make stupid decisions both before they get married, who they get married to, and how they behave.
Once they're married.
This is all true.
But we're not talking, we're just talking about, on average, you know, the, I mean, anything, any action that you do, any choice that you make can, can be wise, or it can be foolish, it can go well, or it can go poorly.
But just on the whole, It tends to be a much more satisfying experience.
I'm not just drawing on my own anecdotal experience, but when I look at my friends, when I look at those who got married earlier and have four children, five children, in one case nine children, And I compare it to the experience of those friends who didn't get married until they were older and were unable to have kids or just never found anyone and never did get married.
There's absolutely no question that it's the married couples with the kids who are definitely the happier ones.
You can't even...
You can't really even compare it.
It's not even a fair comparison.
And that's why I think that what you're talking about, the cultural programming, is so poisonously false.
It robs people.
It does.
Absolutely it does.
And the worst thing is the way that I think Sex and the City, in some ways, was possibly the most evil television program of all time.
Because it encouraged so many young women to want to go off to the big city for their adventure and that sort of thing.
And I was talking to a female friend of mine who had been there in New York for three years.
And she was lamenting the fact that she not only wasn't married, but she didn't even see any prospect for getting married.
And I said, look, she's working in New York City.
She was very cute, had a great job, all that sort of thing.
I mean, she was basically living the sort of ideal sex-in-the-city life, working at a publisher and all this kind of stuff.
And it was like a glamorous fashion magazine type thing.
And I said, look, you're never going to find anyone there because everyone you meet there is there to have their big sex-in-the-city adventure.
And, you know, as soon as they have an adventure with you, then they want to move on to the next big experience.
And sure enough, you know, another friend who was also living in New York City at the time, she finally threw up her hands, left, and did manage to get married and have kids before she was too old, which was great.
But...
There's no question that they are robbing people of some of the greatest human experiences that you can have, and they're also robbing an entire generation of 10, 15, 20% of its generational cohort.
How many Einsteins or supermodels or whatever, sports stars, have we lost just because television convinced a bunch of inexperienced young people who didn't know any better that they should spend their 20s and early 30s running around trying to have more sex?
It is really tragic, and I'm with Ann Coulter when she wrote about this several years ago, that Sex and the City is the story of gay men in New York.
They just put tits where the man boobs should be, and that that is how gay men talk, that's how gay men act.
And again, it's not all, I mean, I've had my gay roommates and have seen some of this stuff fairly up close and personal, but it is tragic.
And it is, of course, you know, we've talked about, I've talked about on this show, this sort of Conservative versus liberal, this R versus K selection.
When you sell to people orgasms and variety and so on, and in return, they can give up to you fertility and stability and the capacity for love.
We strip away...
Right.
There's bunny rabbits, female rabbits that have crazy reproductive sex.
They can have given birth to a litter the next day.
You stroke their bat, their butt goes up because they're ready for the next round.
So it turns human beings into this piston-functioning, orifice-seeking, lower-mammalian nothing burgers when we should, of course, and sex is a wonderful part of a healthy relationship.
But we should be trying to connect at a deep and meaningful and value-based and loving level with the sex as the bonus rather than going into this pursuit of the junk food of casual sexed.
It tastes fine at the time, but I think in particular for women...
It does something truly tragic to their hearts and their souls.
Sex is kind of like cocaine in that first rush is phenomenal.
You feel like a tiger, you feel like you can go out and wrestle a bear, and it's just so awesome.
And then it wears off.
And so you want it again, and the effect just doesn't...
You need to keep doing more and more, and then eventually you find yourself...
You know, staying up all night and next thing you know, you're on a train with blood coming out of your nose and you've been wearing the same clothes for two days.
And you're in pursuit.
Like all addictions, you end up avoiding negatives rather than pursuing positives.
Like you're avoiding the crash rather than being in hot pursuit of the high after a while.
It wears you down that way.
Yeah, it gets you nowhere.
You've lost the capacity to truly enjoy it.
You lose the ability to focus on anything else.
You just start chasing your next high.
But the thing is that it's not...
I'm not going to pretend that there's no appeal to it.
There is.
There's a reason why I think it was Billy Graham that once said, if you don't think sin is fun, you're not doing it right.
And they wouldn't call it temptation if it didn't have an appeal to us.
We didn't want to do it.
But the thing is that It's important for people to learn that it's kind of like driving a car fast.
It's fun to drive a car fast.
I like driving cars fast.
But if you...
Start driving a car fast, and then you need to keep going faster and faster and faster, and then you're bored unless you turn the lights off.
It's not going to be all that long before you crash into something pretty hard.
I think that that is what a lot of people are getting sucked into when they're getting drawn, when the cultural programming of the media is convincing them that this mindless pursuit of pleasure is actually the smart when the cultural programming of the media is convincing them that this mindless pursuit of pleasure
Which is, of course, totally contrary to the entire history of not only Christian religion, but also classical philosophy, which even the virtuous pagans taught moderation which even the virtuous pagans taught moderation at most.
Even the Epictetus, who is often viewed as a hedonist, even he encouraged moderation in the pursuit of the pleasurable.
And the lotus eaters in the Odyssey were a warning.
And what we've turned into, to a certain extent, is a lotus-eating population that is destroying itself, that's destroying its civilization, that's destroying even its reproductive capacity and its ability to enjoy pleasure,
simply because we insist on chewing on these—we're told, we're taught that chewing on these leaves is going to— We're good to go.
You can go and find out more of the facts about that.
Because, yeah, I mean, in the ancient world, to be a slave meant fundamentally to be a slave to your passions, to not be in mastery of your passions.
And that tenders.
Socrates said at the end of his life when his sexual desires began to wane that he felt like it was like having a demon leave his body and he could actually concentrate on other things.
So I sort of put a little list here together.
I'm going to put a tiny thesis past you, Vox, and you can tell me what you think.
So I put down...
Some of the stuff that I've noticed that are negative characters, and I'll put them in a little conceptual package and let me know what you think.
So people you fly over tend to be losers, right?
So fly over country, somewhere between New York and San Francisco or Seattle or whatever, right?
This fly over country, they tend to be losers.
Trashy people have infinite founts of wisdom, you know, like the hooker with a heart of gold, the homeless guy who speaks wisdom and so on.
So these aren't people who've had tragically dysfunctional lives and probably horribly abused childhoods and so on.
They have wise, wise trashy people.
Oh, you don't want to be a Republican in a movie these days, man.
If you're a Republican, you might as well be a smoker.
No, I'll go even further.
If you're a Republican in the movie, you might as well be in a war movie and show someone a picture of your girlfriend.
Because, man, that's just a...
So if you're a Republican, that's no good.
If you're a traditionalist, you must be a hypocrite, you know, like in American Beauty, right?
The guy who's the Marine ends up being the gay hypocrite.
He hates homosexuality.
You don't want to be a dad or a male, a white male as a whole.
You can be a minority because then you can be a magical minority again, fountains of wisdom and so on.
Christian, white male and so on.
Ooh, and you really, really don't want to be a vet.
Oh man, you do not want to be a vet because they're all crazy.
Even though, of course, during the Iraq War, it was statistically more dangerous to work on a farm or even drive a taxi than to be a soldier in Iraq.
And most vets are stable people who contribute well to society, but the way that things are portrayed.
So I went through this list and we could go on all day.
But all these people, if they're portrayed in a negative light, tend to vote Republican, tend to vote for the right.
You know, people in the flyover country tend to be more conservative, tend to be more Christians and so on.
Republicans, of course, voting.
Traditionalists are voting for the right.
White males tend to vote for the right.
Christians tend to vote for the right.
And vets, of course, the military is largely composed of people who are more conservative or vote more for the right.
So I just sort of put this list together.
I don't want to get your thoughts because it just seems like it's portraying anybody who's going to vote for the right in a horribly negative light.
Well, yes.
I think that that's part of the cultural programming as well.
I think that they are attempting to bring about the reality that they want by subconsciously programming, especially young people, because all these things are primarily aimed at young people, trying to convince them that if you go that way, then you are stupid and bad and no one will like you.
And you won't be pretty.
Yeah, and you won't be pretty.
Which is kind of ironic, because...
We all know that the right-wing girls are much hotter than the left-wing girls on average.
And they won't go crazy on you.
They won't go all Glenn Close on you.
You're not going to be fatal attractioning yourself trying to run out of some burning building while putting your pants on.
As the sirens arrive, the right-wing girls are not generally going to go completely mental on you.
Well, the funniest thing is, I mean, we've even got the porn stars.
What's this porn thing I keep?
I have to say, that's one thing that you always need to be careful about when you're Twitter friends with Mercedes Carrera.
You never know whether you're going to get some sort of...
Is she running for office?
Sorry.
Well, you never know when you're going to get either some sort of snappy or witty or intelligent comment or something that you really don't want your kids going, hey, what's that?
But the point is that attractive people actually tend to be on the right.
Bisexual market value.
Where do you think all the pretty blondes in California, where do you think they come from?
They all come from Iowa and Minnesota.
And so, I mean, it's kind of funny.
There was a friend of ours, we were being visited by the producer of one of the game companies we were working with.
And we'd had some sort of picnic for the Bible study or something.
It was about I don't know, 25 or 30 couples.
And it was sort of funny because the guy was just walking around because each of the couples had, I think, an average of about four kids.
And he's like, this is like some sort of Aryan Nazi thing.
It's all these pretty blondes and pretty blonde kids.
And I said, this is Minnesota back then, 20 years ago.
But...
And the idea that these were stupid dads and wisecracking kids showing us how to do things, I mean, that picture could not possibly have been more false.
You had a group of highly intelligent men and women who were happily married and Plenty of kids.
And the other irony, too, is that they always portray mothers.
And this is something that you should put on your list.
They always like to portray mothers with three or four kids as being fat and slovenly.
What's eating Gilbert?
Great kind of stuff.
Yeah, and I mean, first of all, you very seldom see a mother with that many children, you know, in the movies or in television, but, you know, the reality is that, in fact, I was talking to a woman about this at the Lido the other day, you know, very, very slender, looked great in a bikini, and And I noticed she had a little kid with her and I said, oh, is that yours?
And she's like, yeah, him and those three over there.
And I noticed that all the really overweight women...
lender women were either young and single or they were like 30s, 40s and had at least three kids.
And like she said, I don't have time to sit down in front of the TV and eat chips.
Well, if you play with your kids, I mean, the amount of calories I burn off as a dad is truly I might as well just set fire to a bunch of leaves and eat them and try to get energy that way.
I spend half my life trying to just get enough fuel to keep up with being a dad.
But I guess that also unconsciously programs women to have fewer kids, right?
Because you say, oh, well, if you have lots of kids, you're going to end up fat.
And then that's going to program women to want fewer kids, which again is part of that whole weird depopulation thing.
I don't know if it comes from radical environmentalism or just general hatred of whites or Westerners and so on, but I guess that does really drive you that way.
And also I was talking in the show the other day, you know, obesity becoming a big problem in America.
Well, that has a lot to do with being a single mom.
Because I want to look good for my wife.
You want to look good for your wife.
They want to look good for us.
So we stay in shape.
We exercise.
We do all that kind of good stuff.
But if you're a single mom and the money is coming in no matter what, well, is there that much of an incentive?
Your sexual market value is pretty low anyway.
Is there that much of an incentive to keep yourself trim?
Yeah.
Arguably, not so much.
And that's another, of course, on the list here, single moms portrayed in a positive way as victims, as people who need help, as noble nuns sacrificing themselves for the welfare and health of their children, you know, other than by not choosing a guy who'd stick around.
But that, again, single moms reliably vote for the left, and therefore they must be portrayed in a positive light.
And if you can imagine putting a script proposal forward, you know, you sit down across, you know, some liberal Hollywood filmmaker, well, I guess kind of a redundant phrase, but you sit there and say, well, I really want to do a cautionary tale on a woman who pursues hedonistic pleasures while her sister ends up getting married and having kids. I really want to do a cautionary tale on a And this woman, you know, has a lot more fun in the beginning while the other woman is tired and staying up and enjoying the richness of being a mom.
But then as time goes along, you know, the woman who was in it for the long haul with the wife and the kids, she ends up being happy.
She's got grandkids, whereas the other woman gets old and bitter and twisted and lonely and has no connections with people and her sexual market value collapses and she really regrets not having children.
If you were to put that kind of movie forward, they'd look at you like what you were saying is completely incomprehensible.
It would never get off the ground no matter how well written it was.
Oh, I absolutely agree.
And, you know, even worse than that, if you, you know, you could use an example of that, there's that mother who just about set the internet on fire, you know, a rather pretty, I think she was probably Filipino or something, but, you know, she's into fitness and whatnot.
And she put up a picture of What's your excuse?
It was in the English newspapers.
The women who had chosen a different path, it was obviously like they were being flayed with acid-tipped whips or something.
The mere fact that she existed and pointed out that, hey, I can be married, I can have three kids, and I can look great.
Why don't you?
Why can't you?
And people don't like to be reminded that they can be better than they are.
And speaking of losing weight, one of my earlier videos with you, my wife was kind of like, Wow, you're getting a bit of a chin there.
So I ended up losing nine pounds just because she decided I should lose some weight.
I still get some comments about my early videos.
I think it's some ridiculous number.
Please hold your thought.
I'll be quick.
But 97% of people who lose weight, they don't keep it off or they gain it back or whatever.
But all you have to do is change everything and stick to it.
It's not really that complicated.
But yeah, some of my earlier videos, I lost 20 or 30 pounds.
I don't know.
Seven or eight years ago.
And you just keep it off.
You just go back to the way you were.
That's all.
And you can do it.
I still get some comments like, wow, you were happier back then.
And it's true.
You've got to just do the right thing, especially as you get older and your metabolism starts to slow down and all the stuff that you used to be able to shrug off just kind of sticks to you now.
But anyway, so yes, you lost a nine pounds.
Good for you.
No, but it's actually great because I'm getting to the point where I'm rapidly approaching the end of my soccer playing career.
Knees getting a little tingly?
I'm now the second oldest in the entire club.
And so, you know, I'm hoping to play three more years.
So, you know, it's just like, hey, you know, if you cut it, that's that much less that you got to carry around for 90 minutes running around.
And so, you know, but the point is that that's what married couples can do for each other.
You know, I mean, it's not like you like to hear it, but...
That's part of caring about someone.
You trust them in a way that you don't necessarily trust other people.
Plus, they can call you out on things.
When you walk into the room and you're carrying a big brownie and a big glass of milk, At midnight, you just get the eye.
Do you really want to eat that?
Do you really feel you need to eat that?
No, it's true.
Before I got married, after I got married, I found out there were two things.
Number one, it is physically possible to make your bed in the morning, even though Reality dictates you're just going to mess it up again at night.
It is possible to make your bed in the morning.
Number two, you probably have heard this too, there are these things called checkups.
Very, very interesting.
You actually go to the doctor before you're hacking up a lung, and they will help you to prevent things.
It's really, really cool, and it's one of the reasons married men live longer.
You're absolutely right.
I hadn't been to the doctor.
I can't remember.
The only time I'd been to the doctor was...
Actually, I never went to the doctor.
I would always go to the hospital because I had broken something sparring.
That you couldn't walk off.
If you walk off, more of your shinbone ends up in the sewer, so you've got to go to the doctor.
I remember one time I got my nose broken in a ring fight.
What does that mean?
It was a martial arts exhibition.
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
And it was sort of a full contact thing.
Our dojo was up against another dojo, and I got my nose broken in it.
And I won, but I got my nose broken.
And so I went to the hospital, and the nearest hospital was the inner city one.
So we walk in, and there's people with knives sticking out of them and bullet wounds.
I just said...
Yeah, I don't think we're going to get any service here.
So my friend just kind of straightened it out for me a bit.
I probably should have gone to the doctor for that one too.
Do you make whistling sounds when you walk upstairs or has it healed okay?
It's not quite.
It's not as straight as it should be.
But who cares?
Already had my kids.
Yeah, whatever.
Is this going to affect my Tinder profile?
I don't think so.
I like to think it gives you more sort of a roguish, rougher, pirate sort of thing or whatever.
But anyhow, the point is that that's something that married couples can do for each other.
I mean, even things like, hey, you might want to get that mole on your back checked out or whatever.
And And again, it's not like TV. Real relationships are not like TV. I mean, in the same way that they seldom get male friendships right.
I mean, one of the only movies that ever got male friendships right was The Hangover.
You know, where the guys are just blatantly lying to the wives and girlfriends for their friend.
Oh, he's fine.
He's fine.
I have no idea where he is.
But, you know, in the same way that they don't get male relationships right, they don't get male-female relationships right either.
I tend to suspect, following the pattern, they probably don't get the female relationships right either, but, you know, I wouldn't know.
Yeah.
Well, they're not interested in what to me is the highest purpose of art, which is to grow empathy and help us understand the degree of similarities that we have, particularly those of us raised in a common cultural background.
And I've said this for years.
I read these books called Famous Fives.
My daughter, I grew up on them and she really enjoys them.
And it's...
You know, common knowledge to people who write fiction and you reread it, you may have noticed it too, but every now and then the character will look at something and think something that they never express to the other characters.
And that's a remarkable thing because, you know, I don't know what you're thinking.
I only know what you're saying.
But with fiction, we can dip into other people's minds in a way that is impossible in real life.
And I've always argued that that helps grow empathy.
To recognize that other people are having thoughts that they don't share helps grow empathy.
It's true.
Actually, some studies have come out that fiction does sort of help grow empathy, which is not sympathy.
That's the maudlin and sentimental form of empathy, but real empathy where you understand the motivations and intentions of others.
A woman who's walking down the street and there's some creepy guy shadowing her, to have empathy for him means that she's aware of the danger.
She was aware that he may have nefarious motives and she's scared of him.
Empathy doesn't always mean sympathy, but a lot of people mistake that.
But the highest calling to me of art is to – it's like that old line, you know, we read to know that we're not alone.
And that, I think, has been really cast by the wayside.
And now it's sort of like the media's relationship to the DNC that sort of came out in the WikiLeaks stuff recently.
Now it's just, okay, which groups do I have to praise in order to get votes for the left and which groups do I have to demonize so that they're considered to be unattractive people?
In society.
And that has as much relationship to art as Pravda has to good reporting.
It is all manipulation, it is all control, and it is all the desperate bleatings of addicts of political power looking to get them to keep their next fix.
It's even worse than that in one regard, because I think a lot of fiction, especially the type of fiction that I see, which is more modern lit and science fiction and fantasy, is that a tremendous amount of...
The novels being produced are basically being written by unhappy, low social-sexual rank people who are attempting to rewrite the script of their lives.
And so, you know, if you look at...
I mean, it's really remarkable.
You mentioned Game of Thrones earlier.
And if you read A Song of Fire and Ice, which is the whole...
What's really astonishing is that apparently married couples don't have sex.
There's a tremendous amount of sex taking place in the book, but virtually none of it is between married people.
There's literally multiples more rape than Then there is examples of actual rapes taking place.
Then there is encounters between a man who is married to the woman.
And I don't think that that's an accident.
I don't think that that is an accident because if you look at the author, he is an overweight little troll who quite clearly has not had a great deal of contact with the opposite sex over the course of his life.
The kind of people you always think that they're writing their book with one hand and you don't want to know what the other hand is up to.
Yeah, and it's actually really alarming when you consider the amount of, you know, as one of my readers once said, George Martin quite clearly thinks that rape is the normal form of sexual interaction between men and women because quite clearly there aren't very many women who would voluntarily want to get that close to him.
Now, whether he's correct about that or not, I don't know.
But the fact is that the nature of human sexuality in those books is, again, completely warped.
I mean, it's just not, it's not even, it's not even remotely credible.
And, you know, when I was writing A Throne of Bones, the first book in my epic fantasy series, that was actually one of the things that I wanted to address, which is, you know, to actually have men who were, you know, attractive to women, you know, because that's attractive to women, you know, because that's the other thing, is that a lot of fiction is written by very low rank, you know, what we call gamma males.
A lot of fiction is written by them, and they have absolutely no idea how to attract a woman.
They have no understanding of why a woman would be attracted to a man.
And so it's so funny, we're actually, we've actually been developing a theory of literature on this.
You can actually predict what color hair, the evil woman, the romantic interest, and the evil temptress will have I think I remember you mentioning this when we last talked.
The redhead, right?
Yeah, and we went and mapped it out.
And it works incredibly well because these are basically...
Grown men that are psychosexually limited in their development.
They're basically kind of stuck at the 13 or 14 year old boy level.
And so, how are they going to produce great art that advances human understanding when they haven't even finished psychologically maturing?
It's not possible.
Well, there used to be...
I mean, I grew up on the classics.
And, you know, my emotional, spiritual respect for Western literature is something I could bore the planet for days on.
But there was to me the active imagination that, you know, rode like a bunch of Cossacks into reality and enhanced it.
It seized reality and it made reality greater and it brought out themes that gave people courage and insight and depth and wisdom and power in making moral choices in particular.
And that tended to come out of people who had really achieved things in life and who weren't recoiling.
And it seems to me, more recently, and I don't know exactly when the turning point was, it definitely wasn't there in the 19th century, but certainly has been there in the later part of the 20th century, where it seems to me that the imagination has become something which is recoiling from reality and creating something other than reality, creating in many ways the opposite reality.
I'm going to watch it backwards because I like happy endings, so I like to watch people not be raped and be reassembled from their component parts.
But there's this aspect of imagination now that is not helping people to stride into the world more confidently and achieve great things, but it's giving them an alternate universe to hide out in, not to prepare them to go back into the world, but almost to stay.
And so when you have this Fiction which is involving such dysfunction and such aggressively negative views of family and rapists everywhere and torture and murder and so on.
And it's not like I, when I was younger, played the lead in Macbeth, so I know a little bit about Shakespeare's darker side.
But of course, you know, that had, spoiler, I think it's okay now, 400 years.
But I think, I mean, that had a happy ending and it showed that I think?
To me, art used to aggressively go out into the world and pave the way for you to achieve great things in the world.
And now, it seems like a lot of fiction is a recoiling from the world, a turning away from the world, and a portrayal of a world that desiccates the spirit rather than energizes it.
Well, a lot of it is being written by people who are locked in their own delusion bubble.
You know, I don't think...
I think that many of these authors would be horrified if they understood the ugliness and the immaturity that they are revealing when they write these things.
There's a fairly popular series of books by a guy named Patrick Rothfuss.
And I've tried three times to read them, and I've never been able to finish the first novel.
Just because I'm an editor, I write this stuff, I feel like I should at least know what some of these popular things are.
And it's actually worrisome that these books are popular because the protagonist constantly lies to himself and everyone else.
He's constantly in a state of, you know, he can't go to be in a class without showing up the teacher.
He's a virgin, he encounters a woman, an older woman for the first time, and he's the best she's ever had.
I mean, it's...
Don't you remember that first time you played tennis?
How great you were?
No.
Similar grip, but not quite the same.
I was talking to someone about it, and he's like, either this is the most unreliable anti-hero in the history of fiction, or this guy has never actually been on a date with a girl, the author himself.
And you're just reading this stuff, and you're just thinking...
On what planet do these people imagine they're orbiting?
I mean, there's no connection.
We're not talking about...
Using a fictional environment to paint great themes like Tolkien did.
And you're not talking even about...
Because I would put Tolkien...
On the fantasy side, I would put Tolkien's stuff up at the top.
On a level below that, you've got the didactic approach of C.S. Lewis, where he's basically teaching fairly simple Christian theology in a memorable and enjoyable way, I think that what we've gone from is teaching useful information through fantastic examples that people would enjoy,
to basically creating these delusion bubbles that people can hide away from reality in and try to convince themselves that they're living in a place that is not painful to them.
Because I think a lot of these people are damaged and crippled people and they're not And so the problem is, instead of Winston Churchill writing books about heroism and that sort of thing, we've got these emotionally undeveloped, psychologically crippled individuals teaching other people how they avoid reality.
And that's not art, and that's also not good for society.
No, I mean, just the thought popped into my mind.
I read a lot about Churchill in writing a historical novel.
And Lord Gort, which is a perfectly Tolkien kind of name.
Lord Gort was, I think it was in the Battle of France in May of 1940, was trying to hold off the Germans while, of course, people were trying to escape over the channel.
And it was a hopeless endeavor.
They were never going to survive it.
And Churchill sent him the message, the eyes of the empire are upon you.
The eyes of the empire are upon you.
I don't know if it's just my heritage or something like that, but it's like, yeah, that could make me want to fight to the death.
Even just that particular thought or image and that kind of motivation...
Is really sadly lacking.
And there's this fantasy now, which I have criticized a lot.
I've done a movie review of Frozen and the Star Wars things, and it's this crazy thing where you have excellence without effort.
Now, the only excellence that exists without effort is sexual market value in particular for young women.
That is the, quote, excellence.
There you have value without effort.
Why?
Because you have eggs.
You know, maybe you have value without effort if you inherit a whole bunch of money in your man or whatever.
But...
This idea where this guy says, it was my first time with an older woman and I was the best.
That's excellence without effort.
And this excellence without effort stuff really drives me crazy because I think it is so paralyzing.
Because all excellence requires enormous amounts of effort.
To become good at anything means being bad at it for a long, long, long time.
I remember when I was a kid.
Five years old, I was in a daycare, and I wanted to paint a picture of kids going down a toboggan.
I grew up in a toboggan on a snowy slope.
I think it was one of the rare years that it actually snowed a tiny little bit in England, and we were so excited.
And I had, you know, in my mind, I knew exactly what I wanted, blonde hair, Flying in the wind, the rosy cheeks, you know, with just that right little bit of apple redness in them and the laughing red lips and the scarf flying out behind them.
All of it, all of it in my head.
And then you pick up these big ham-fisted camel hair brushes, you dip it into your paint and it's like, smudge!
You know, I have blobs and I can't do anything with them because it's watercolor, watered down stuff in the middle of a daycare and there's kids pushing the table and it's like, blurp!
And I remember thinking, man, if I ever want to be a good painter and get the stuff in my head actually on the canvas, it's going to take forever.
It's like when I picked up guitar and I'm like, well, that hurts.
And it sounds terrible.
And I can't change chords without – and I learned to play like three songs and I'm like, the cost benefit doesn't work for me at all.
And so there's other things which, you know, I spent a lot of time being bad at, you know, sort of exploded on the scene 10 years ago.
But I'd spent 20 years before that debating and thinking and reasoning and writing and all that.
So it's like the 10-year overnight success stuff.
But this idea where you keep getting this stuff put forward that you have excellence without effort.
Like Fifty Shades of Grey.
This woman is just fascinating to this...
Giant penis billionaire with helicopters coming out of his ass.
Why?
No effort.
Is she stunningly beautiful?
Does she work out five hours a day?
No.
She just works in a hardware store.
No effort.
It just happens like the woman in this new Star Wars movie.
She can do everything.
She can pilot.
She can take down guys five times her size with jujitsu moves.
Why?
Because she's an orphan.
No effort.
No effort whatsoever.
And the idea that it paralyzes people so much to continually get this impression that you can have excellence without effort.
It makes people sit there and wait for excellence to come for them and it never ever will.
Well, I think that a lot of people today are terrified of failure.
I think that they're really frightened by it.
I talk to people on the blog, I wouldn't say often, but the subject comes up from time to time.
Because people will say, well, you're involved in a lot of stuff, and you seem to be fairly successful at most of the things you do.
And also, I've noticed that the left, when they'll attack me, they'll Constantly try to say, oh, you're a failure here, you're a failure there.
And I always laugh because they're not even pointing at my failures.
I'm like, if you're going to talk about my failures, I can give you a list, a long list of things that I have completely failed at.
Things that I tried to do and just went nowhere.
And companies that we started and didn't go anywhere.
And I'm like, you guys, you're trying to give me a hard time about things.
Those are not the failures.
You've even heard of the failures.
I think that that is something that we need to teach others, is that not only is it okay to fail, you're going to fail.
You must.
One thing I learned from Czernovich, who I believe you talked to recently, it was very important for me, Well, as he said, you know, you got to just get past this whole, you know, middle class pussy, you know, I'm afraid to look like I'm trying.
Yeah.
You know, he said, you know, basically, you're, you know, yeah, okay, I understand, you know, you're from an upper middle class family, and so everything is supposed to come easy and natural and stuff.
And he's like, you know, that's bullshit.
And you know it.
And he said, you know, he said, you work hard, I work hard, we all work hard.
Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn't.
Well, you know, try five different things and then reinforce success and take your effort away from the failure.
But the thing is, and it's totally true, you never know We're good to go.
Castellia has grown up into being the most significant independent science fiction publisher out there.
Oh, and by the way, I have to thank you and your readers.
The Missionaries, which we talked about last time, was not only published, but it's been a huge success.
It was actually number one in the humor category and in the literary satire category on Amazon.
The reviews have been fantastic, and so I want to thank your...
Thank you, viewers, because I'm glad you guys gave it a chance, and I'm really glad that you guys liked it as much as you did.
Oh, well, you know, credit to the author.
I mean, all the advertising in the world can only get people to sit down in your restaurant once they have to like the food, so credit to you and the author.
Sorry, were you just in the middle of something there?
Oh, yeah, sorry.
That was a bit of a tangent.
But getting back to what you were talking about with heroism, one of the scenes that I put in my book, A Throne of Bones, was inspired by an Israeli security guard.
And to me, that was real heroism at work because there was a female suicide bomber, a young one, and she was trying to get into a market that was full of kids and women and children and stuff. and she was trying to get into a market that And the security guard saw the wire under her hand and grabbed her.
And she started shrieking at him about that she had a bomb.
And he looked at her very calmly and said, then we will die here together.
But you are not going in there.
She triggered the bomb, killed him, but he saved the lives of probably anywhere between 10 and 30 people.
And so that just really, that kind of heroism really made an impact on me.
And I wanted to communicate that through the book.
I mean, obviously, it's a very, very different sort of thing because it's a very different sort of environment.
sort of thing because it's a very different sort of environment.
But, you know, those are the kind of lessons that we want to teach people, you know.
But those are the kind of lessons that we want to teach people.
The lessons like Chesty Puller, the famous Marine general, who in Korea, they found out that the Marines were completely surrounded.
And he called his men together and said, we've got the enemy exactly where we want them.
They can't get away from us now.
And sure enough, they fought their way right through them.
And of course, that's a leader.
I was watching a band of brothers with my son the other night.
And it was the episode where they attack the German gun.
The German guns.
There's four 88s.
And he commented how difficult it must be to have all these guys behind you and have all these people shooting at you And having to be the first one to say, follow me.
And we need to teach the younger generation that.
I mean, I'm so glad that Stephen Ambrose got together with the Easy Company and the 101st Airborne, because to me that's such a powerful lesson in the kind of heroism that We increasingly don't understand anymore.
And I hope that the younger generation of soldiers will share their stories from Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth.
I'm totally opposed to those wars.
I think it's absolutely ridiculous that we're there at all.
But that doesn't reflect upon the soldiers who are doing their job, who are not given a vote about where they go.
And so, you know, in the stories that we tell, whether they're fiction, whether they're nonfiction, or whether like the missionaries, they're kind of a blur of the two, you know, we can pass on what we learn to the succeeding generations.
And the great thing about writing is that You and I, we learn from men who lived 2,400, 2,500 years ago when we read Aristophanes, when we read Aristotle, when we read Thucydides.
And it's really remarkable, I think, when you read that chapter on revolution in Thucydides, it kind of freaked me out a bit when I read it because it read like it had been written this century.
And then you realize that it's 2,000 whatever, 2,400 years old or so.
I think it was written around 404 BC. And you realize that human nature has not changed in all that time.
We may have better technology now.
But, and that's why I think it's so important for us to shore up the cultural supports for Western civilization because, you know, without it, we know exactly where we're going to head because that's where we were before.
Without, yeah, without courage.
Everything becomes determinism.
Without courage, the decay and the entropy of civilization occurs against her will, against her whim.
And yeah, my concern is that people are going to finally find their spines when it's too late.
And this is why, you know, I do what I do, you do what you do, which remind people that we need courage now, not later.
Now, you have new stuff coming out of Castalia House before the end of the year.
Let's close off with giving people a nice little preview and teaser of what you've coming out the pipe.
Okay, sounds good.
Well, we've got seven of the nine original There Will Be War anthologies, which were by Jerry Pornell, which were hugely significant for my intellectual development.
I just asked you to say something.
Okay.
Was there a story in this?
I think I remember this when I was in my early teens.
Reading one of these, there was a story where an alien...
Oh, we'll cut this if it's a spoiler.
There's a story where there's an alien who gives the man the capacity to immediately feel his effect upon other people.
Am I in the right neighborhood with that?
Yes, I'm not sure if it's actually in one of these or not, but it's the right kind of, it's that era science.
Okay, okay, got it, got it.
Those are great books.
Anyhow, we're going to finish the old series.
We've just published Volume 6.
All we're missing is Volume 7 and 8.
We revived the whole series last year after a 25-year absence with Volume 10, so we're going to follow that up with Volume 11 as well.
John Wright has a new series that he's going to be introducing called Moth and Cobwebs.
And it's a very interesting, very deep tale of the sort of fairy world that interacts with our own, but that we don't see.
So that's going to be good.
I'm hoping to get my own A Sea of Skulls out soon.
Those are 850 pages each book.
I'm planning to get it out in November.
That's the sequel to A Throne of Bones.
And then...
I'm not sure about this one, but it's actually possible that we're going to be signing the autobiography of Adolf Hitler in Hell.
So we're talking with the author.
I think that we're the leading candidate.
And so it's really going to blow a lot of people's minds, especially because this is a pretty significant author that you wouldn't necessarily expect Castelli to be publishing.
Chapter one, it is a lot warmer than Stalingrad.
There you go.
That's my marketing.
Anyway, go on.
But then we've also got...
I'm really happy about...
We're going to be publishing a couple books by Nick Cole.
And his stuff is fantastic.
And in fact, we're going to be publishing the hardcover and the paperback of Control-Alt-Revolt, which is a funny, awesome book about the game industry.
Yeah.
And it actually got him dropped by HarperCollins because the artificial intelligences are watching a reality show, and when they realize that humans abort their own, they reach the conclusion that humans are going to throw the off switch once they realize that the AIs are sentient, and so they decide they better wipe out humanity first.
Yeah.
Right.
But it's a hilarious, subversive book, and it was so offensive to HarperCollins that they actually severed their ties with him over it.
What!
A negative view of abortion in any way, shape, or form!
Off to the gulag with him!
And of course, the funny thing is that used to be a really terrible thing.
Now it's kind of like a badge of honor.
Rejected by HarperCollins.
Step inside, young man.
Well, the amazing thing was, it really didn't have much to do with the book.
It was just basically the excuse to have the AIs want to wipe out the humans.
And it was actually done in a very humorous fashion because the description of the reality show was almost as cringe-making as the real reality shows that they televise these days.
And then...
So we're going to be publishing Nick Cole, and then we're also going to be publishing a very funny book called Loki's Child, which kind of reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson.
And then we will have a book on Trump coming out soon from Mr.
Chernovich.
Very, very good.
All right.
So, thanks a lot for your time today, this evening.
Voxday.blogspot.com and Castelia House.
I'm going to spell that for people, just in case you're listening to the audio of this.
C-A-S-T-A-L-I-A house.com.
Thanks so much for your time, Vox.
Always a great, great pleasure.
Keep on keeping on, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
