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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:53:47
Joe Rogan Experience #436 - Stefan Molyneux
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Hey, what's up everybody?
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Lumosity.com.
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Stefan Molyneux is here.
Let's not waste any more time.
And cue the music, young Jamie.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night.
All day.
I've been looking forward to doing this podcast with you again for a while.
And I knew exactly what was going to happen, unfortunately, when you got here.
As soon as you sit down, we start talking about so much cool stuff before the podcast even starts.
We need a prequel.
Yeah, man.
We're already into temperatures and there's a lot of different things.
But no need to go back over all that stuff again.
I'm very excited to talk to you because there's been a lot of things that – First of all, I really enjoyed our first podcast.
Really fun conversation in Toronto.
But there's a lot of things that I read online and I say, hmm, I wonder how Stefan would deal with this.
I wonder what your take on this is.
Because you've got some very strong opinions on where taxes should go and what money should be spent on that benefits the community.
And I agree with a lot of them.
I think they're very fascinating. The France thing.
Have you seen this France thing where they're jacking up the tax to 75%?
Yeah, I mean, talk about killing the goose that lays the golden egg, you know?
Wow. And it's sad because everybody seriously thinks that it's going to be somebody else who's taxed.
Exactly. And they keep creeping it down.
It's like, let's go get those rich people and tax them.
And then it's like, you get a mirror.
And it's like, what, me? No, no, no, the rich people.
But now it's getting to the point, like, they could tax all of the rich people in America and it would pay the government for like three days.
I mean, it's all complete nonsense.
It's just a way of setting us against each other.
So we miss the whole reality of what's going on.
It's a piss poor management solution too.
It's a terrible idea to take the people that are earning the most and take a massively disproportionate amount of money from them.
And so, you know, they're talking about like pro athletes and clubs, soccer clubs and corporations and, you know, the very highest of the high.
But still, 75% is fucking ridiculous.
No one deserves to give you 75% of what they've earned.
Maybe a little bit more.
I agree that as a person who's made a good amount of money in my life, I agree that I should pay a lot of taxes.
I don't mind paying a lot of taxes.
I don't mind. But I'm not going to give you more than half.
That's fucking ridiculous!
You can't get more than half.
You're not doing it right.
You're not spending the money right.
You can get more than half when you give me a fucking complete analysis of every penny, where it went, what it benefited.
Or we're actually living in paradise.
You know, like if we're floating on clouds and we get like we shit rainbows and all that.
Then you can get all my tax money and when there's no poverty and the children are all living peacefully and the schools are gorgeous and glowing temples of knowledge, then maybe.
But at the moment, you know, it's like, oh, sorry, do you need more money for this war in Iraq?
I have a slight problem with that.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm all out of money for you, dude.
Same way the guy with the sign, the homeless sign in the corner that like, smile and he flips it over like it's bent.
You know, could you spare a dollar?
And then he flips it over like, you've got this crafty sign.
Use that mind that made that crafty sign.
Go get a fucking job, you crazy fuck.
You know, Jesus Christ. If it's possible for you to get a job, and if it's not possible for you to get a job, we as a society should take those people off the street and put them in mental institutions and give them help.
Well, okay, okay, so...
If. Go ahead, drag me into the topic if you dare, but...
I dare. There is this interesting thing around poverty, right?
Because poverty, a lot of times people really feel like, oh, you know, they just had some bad luck.
It's a real shame, you know?
Things didn't go quite the right way.
But do you know statistically that the majority of people, like if you take the average of how much people work in a household below the poverty line...
You've got two people in a household below the poverty line.
On average, they work 16 hours a week between the two of them.
Now, that is to some degree poverty by choice.
And I don't mind, hey, wouldn't it be great to only work 16 hours a week, especially if your options are jobs that are kind of crappy, which we all generally start with those jobs that are crappy.
But to me that's – and that doesn't change whether the economy is good or bad.
So it's not like whether they'd like to work more or they can't find the work.
So that's just one of those uncomfortable truths.
A lot of poverty is voluntary and it's nice to be poor because it's a whole lot less work.
And people get all the benefits out of not working, which are considerable.
I mean I guess daytime TV is good for a lot of people and – So – but then what happens is then they need money for something.
They get sick and suddenly poverty becomes this huge problem.
But a lot of poverty – it's like monks.
Monks are poor but they don't need charity because they're kind of choosing that lifestyle.
And it's not true of all the poor but on average, a lot of people who are poor are just – they don't particularly like to work.
And again, I don't mind that but accept the consequences of that.
Welcome to my show!
Also, you're dealing with a really down economy where it's difficult to get a job that pays good money.
They're all taken. There's more people looking for jobs than there are jobs.
And it's a real issue for a lot of people that don't really have an education or don't have a particular set of skills.
Or even if you do, I did a call-in show while I was here in California, and a guy called in and he said, you know, I just graduated as a pharmacist.
Like a legal pusher. And for me, it's like, okay, pharmacists in America, if there's one thing that's recession-proof because when people are down, they take even more pills.
And it took him 10 months to find a job, but he ended up having to take a job.
On the night shift. And that's a pharmacist.
Lawyers can't find work in America.
So even professionals are having a huge amount of problems.
Absolutely. It's terrible. But it's one of these things I worry about the degree to which when we tell people stuff is really hard, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
If you keep telling kids growing up in poor neighborhoods – and I was a kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood, so I have some sympathy with this – It's – if you keep telling people, well, it's really, really tough.
It's really hard to get out.
I wonder if – oh, well, it's really tough.
So whatever it is, right? I don't think there's an either or, but I think there's definitely a bit of that.
But you kind of disproved it with your example of a pharmacist who's looking for 10 months for a job in a very lucrative industry.
Yeah. So that sort of disproves it a little bit.
I think you and I are very fortunate in that we can make our money independently.
We can make a living by doing things on the internet, providing content, and for me, doing comedy shows and UFC stuff.
I don't have to be in the regular job market.
I'm very fortunate because of that, but for a lot of people.
Have you ever been in the regular?
Yeah, yeah. I drove limos.
I did construction.
I did a lot of things while I was a struggling comedian.
Right, right, okay. I decided I wanted to be a stand-up comic at 21, and I sort of abandoned everything else I was doing.
I did a lot of shitty jobs for a couple of years.
But before that, I taught martial arts, so I've always had a weird life.
I've always been...
I just knew somehow or another...
It probably could have been very different if my life was very different, but my life wasn't very happy, you know, with my parents being divorced and moving across the country and always being forced, moved around a lot and always making new friends.
I didn't enjoy school. I didn't enjoy the experience of going.
I didn't have a desire to learn.
And I knew that whatever I was going to do, it's going to have to be something completely outside of the system.
There was no options for me.
Like, the idea of going to...
Like, some people say, well, you know, I really wanted to be a stand-up comic, but, you know, I'm going to do it after I pass the bar.
For me, there was none of that.
There was none of that. It was like, this is a job that I actually could do.
Just go try to do that.
Because a job, like, be a lawyer, be, you know, fill in the blank.
Insurance... I can't do it.
You know, but just go full.
And then you can always pick up the pieces, start something else later.
But plan B is usually a real disaster.
Like, okay, you can go be an actor, but the important thing is also you've got to have a...
Have a safety net. A safety net is a noose.
A safety net is a noose. I completely agree with you, and we're going to get attacked for this by people who are unhappy with their choices in life.
And that's a fact. You know, there's a bunch of people that will say, yeah, well, I have a family, so, you know, it's a great idea for you to just go out there and go crazy.
I have people to support... You need to listen.
Stop saying that.
Stop saying any of those things.
Every single person who has ever done anything worthwhile or exceptional or difficult or extraordinary, anyone, whether it's great artists or authors or mathematicians or whatever the fuck it is, everyone encounters difficulties.
There is no easy road.
It does not exist.
It is impossible.
Everyone has issues.
If you have time to pursue a hobby, if you have time to do anything in your life, you can better yourself.
And here's one way you never better yourself.
When you come up with excuses for why other people are successful and you're not.
That shit is fucking dangerous.
When you give yourself an escape.
Yeah, well that's easy for you to say.
You know, you do this. Trust me.
Everybody has a hard road.
I wanted to jump out a window several times during my young life.
I wanted to We all go through hard times.
We all go through depression. We all go through doubt and moments in your life where it's really fucking difficult and you're trying to figure out what the fuck your path is going to be.
It's hard as shit. But Stefan and I were talking about this before the podcast starts that that is what makes you a person.
And those difficult moments are what build your character.
Show me a great man who's the son of a great man.
You know, that's what we're saying. These kids that are born billionaires, you're fucked!
You're fucked. You're never going to be a self-made person.
You have a backup trust for your backup trust for your trust, and you're fucked, man.
I met a guy like this.
His parents own this gigantic chain of high-end stores, and they're unbelievably wealthy.
Like, Billionaire Beach in Malibu is this massive community of, you know, 15, 20, 30 million dollar homes.
They bought the next door neighbor's homes on both sides and overpaid for them because they didn't want anybody staying next to them.
They just bought the homes.
Like $30 million, $25 million.
They literally own like 100 houses.
They own homes everywhere.
I'm talking estates.
In Denver, in the mountains, and in Wyoming, at some great ranch.
I mean, they just have fucking... And the guy is a mess.
You could just slap him in the face.
You could just take his pants off.
He would just panic. He has no confidence.
He's literally not a person.
He's like a cat.
He's like a cat that you have to feed or a dog.
He's a sad, sad person.
Resistance breeds strength in muscles, in character, in mind.
And our muscles hate to exercise.
That's why Lumosity.com is an excellent sponsor.
Yeah, no, but it is, you know, that which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Sort of. Poison is really not good at making us stronger.
Sort of metaphorically, if we could stay out of the pure biochemistry.
But that which is hard for you is what – and all the stuff we hate at the time is the stuff that we love later.
You go like, oh, wow, that really did give me an appreciation for this or whatever.
And the Trastafarians, like the kids whose parents are really rich, it is a huge problem among rich parents.
How do you raise your kids? Because when you're poor or even middle class, your kid says, I want X. And you say, what do you say?
We can't afford it. Yeah.
Well, but, you know, if your kid's looking around and seeing, like, gold fountains in the living room and, you know, chocolate baths upstairs and so on, then clearly you can't afford it.
And what do you say to your kids?
It's really, really tough. So we have to provide limits because of X, Y, and Z. I mean, a lot of people like to duck out in the we-can't-afford-it excuse, but rich parents don't have that, and it's really tough for them to set limits.
It's very hard. And it's also very hard when a child grows up with no doubt.
If you have no doubt as to what your future is going to be, you don't have ambition.
A lot of ambition comes from fear.
And as a comic, some of my best sets ever in stand-up have come after I bombed Like, I bombed.
Oh, yeah. Like, if this keeps going, I've got no career, so I better...
Yeah, well, also, it's a terrible feeling.
You don't want that feeling to reoccur.
So you have these bad sets, and then you just get really super motivated to work on everything that's wrong or recognize what went wrong that night and never let it happen again.
And one of the worst traits that a comedian could ever have is to be easily satisfied with yourself.
It's one of the worst. If you think you're better than you are or you're really satisfied with everything, hey, it's perfect.
No need to work on it. That's poison.
That's like a terrible, terrible, terrible mindset for a stand-up comedian for that very same reason.
It has to be a struggle.
But we're always this way, aren't we?
We're always dissatisfied with something.
We achieve satiety and then we're immediately dissatisfied again.
And I, you know, there's a lot of people who will promise you peace of mind and Zen and this and that.
I actually think that's completely an illusion.
And I think it actually contributes to more dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction is the nature of the beast.
It's why we're doing this and not going ooga booga booga in some caves.
Because we were dissatisfied with the caves.
So we built some huts. We were dissatisfied with the huts.
We built some condos. We're always dissatisfied and therefore we will continue to want to improve things.
That's how things get better. At the moment we're satisfied with something, we immediately set a new challenge and remain unsatisfied in the achievement of that.
And people who try to end that process I think are just trying to end being alive fundamentally.
Trevor Burrus Mr. Molyneux, you're talking too much sense here, sir.
You're confusing people at home.
I wish we could just to reprogram people's minds back to consumerism.
You're 100 percent right. I think everyone looks forward to this utopian time where whatever motivates them, drives them, freaks them out right now can be set aside.
The work is done and you can just sort of like watch the sunset over the pond.
And the problem is this utopian vision of the future that we have is probably a carrot that's on a stick that we'll just never reach.
And we keep working hard to improve our society and our life and ourselves and our families and our relationships, hoping that one day we'll achieve this ultimate peace that will never come.
No, and this is how people get exploited.
If they can dangle that carrot, right, and they can say, well, you see, in the communist utopia, you won't need to work.
And in the communist utopia or the fascist utopia or the Peter Joseph's robot mommy cities, you won't have to work and everything will be fine.
Or in the religious view, you'll get to go to heaven or you'll achieve transcendental bliss or, you know, enough yoga, your butt will be firm and your soul will be at peace.
They will get you to give up freedoms and money and so on in hopes of buying a peace of mind that is fundamentally anti-human in the long run.
The restlessness of our species is the diamond that we get crushed into.
For the existence that we currently provide for ourselves in, yes, I agree 100%.
I think the whole idea about all this is engineering a utopia.
Like Peter Joseph, who I think is a very smart guy, and I like him.
I had him on the podcast. I enjoy communicating with him.
I think he's very bright. But what I think is hilarious is that he makes his money as a stockbroker.
I mean, he's talking about this utopian world, and he's drawing the very blood that keeps him alive from a vampire system, from this crazy fucking vampire system.
No, no, no, but he's a vampire on the inside.
He's working the inside system, so...
He's an inside vampire. You guys had some serious debates, didn't you?
I didn't listen to them.
We've had a couple of flybys, like I did some reviews of the Zeitgeist movies, and then we actually had a debate.
Fairly cordial, definitely butted heads, which is natural.
This is kind of what you want.
Sure. And then, yeah, he did go a little bit, I thought, ballistic in some of the post-debate, let's say, analysis.
Where I think he veered off a little bit into ad hominems.
But my basic point is I don't – as long as people do two things, do two things and we're friends until the end, right?
Respect self-ownership and property rights and do not initiate force.
And so, look, if these cities built by Jacques Fresco and his merry band of elven robots, if this is human paradise on earth, I say go for it.
Have fun. Just don't force people to participate and let people leave as they want.
That's the only thing that matters.
Everything has to be voluntary.
You cannot violate the non-aggression principle.
Everything outside of that is, you know, well, what color drapes do you want?
I don't care. Just don't steal them.
The ad hominems are very disappointing, aren't they?
Especially when it's just – you could easily have just disagreed and been fine with that and debated your points.
And look, you and I probably don't agree on everything.
There's probably quite a few things that will come up that we have different points of view on.
And that's because we're different human beings.
And it's also because there's not a black and white with these ideas of – Engineering society, there's not a black and white.
It's a very – look, if it was very easy and straightforward, it would have been done already.
It's not. It's complicated.
There's a lot to being a person.
There's a lot to being a person that contributes to society.
There's a lot to what about society is feeding itself and just feeding more society and more – what about corporations or just feeding corporations?
And what about – I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
And I'll go, well, they can be, but do you know how much money Bill Gates gives to charities?
Do you know how much charity work that guy does?
How much money he donates to causes that he feels are excellent?
Millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars is a great benefit from having that.
That guy being wealthy.
Some people who are rich do a good job with it.
Some people. But you work too.
Everybody works. Like the person telling me that money is a problem.
Don't you have a job?
What do you get paid in your job? They give you free coconuts?
What do they do? They give you a use of a shower and a place to sleep at night?
No, they give you fucking money, man.
They give you money. You're a capitalist.
You're just not as good a capitalist as that guy is.
It doesn't mean that the system is completely fucked.
It doesn't mean that the idea of the system is completely fucked.
It means it can be fucked.
Yeah. But it also can be.
It's the choice of the people that control it.
If all the world bankers got together today and did acid and they realized, oh my god, guys, we are fucking up.
We're creating all this drama.
We're going to die anyway.
Listen, if we just pooled our money together into these massive charities to re-engineer societies and put money into poor communities and stop causing war and stop extracting natural resources out of these places for massive profit and massive loss of human life.
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
I don't know about that, but I do know that the Democrat donations tend to be far larger to the Democrat Party.
I mean, Democrats get their money from celebrities.
They have these $5 billion plate dinners, whatever, for Barack Obama, whereas the average donation to the Republican Party is like $20.
But the Democrats get their money from unions, and I'd like to talk a little bit about unions and mixed martial arts.
We'll get back to that. Sure. I think that's a really interesting topic.
It's a fascinating topic. Yeah, Democrats get their money from forced union dues and from celebrities and from the entertainment business and so on.
And they're just generally not very generous with regards to local charity.
It has a lot to do with their secularism, right?
because a lot of the charitable donations come out of religiosity.
But there's no guarantee that charity is the solution.
There's lots of economists who think that Bill Gates would be doing much better good for the world if he'd stayed on at Microsoft and built that company to be even more successful and bigger, with more employees and so on, that that would be generating more value to society than giving money.
You know, if you look at India and China just over the last 20 years, it has been the biggest poverty reduction in the history of the known universe.
I mean, it really can't be overemphasized.
Literally hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty.
In India, it's 50,000 families a month are getting into the middle class out of poverty because they just got rid of socialist policies and let people actually trade and make money and start their businesses.
They cut the red tape and all the licensing requirements and so on.
And of course in China, they were less totalitarian communist assholes and actually became some reasonable free trade guys.
And out of that process, more people have come out of poverty in the 20 years that they've stopped interfering with people's trading abilities than an entire century of Western aid to third world countries.
So I don't know whether it's getting out of people's way in terms of letting them do what they want to do and build their businesses or whether it's giving them lots of money.
It's a balance between the two.
But I don't know if charity is always the answer.
I think just getting out of people's way – It's a great way to let them – like what is it in California?
Do you need like 27 permits to open a lemonade stand or something like that?
I mean if you stop doing that kind of stuff or you don't need 300 hours to become a hair braider on a beach of training to get a license, just let people do their own thing and let the customer be the decider about what's valuable, what's safe, what's right, what's wrong.
Then I think you do a lot more for poverty in many ways.
There are some people who need charity but I think most times people just need people out of the way so that they can go and create their own opportunities.
I think that's true for the most part in a lot of ways, but I think that it's hard to undermine what Bill Gates has done for people that can't afford things.
What he's done as far as providing funds for education and a lot of the charitable work they've done, I don't know if that would all have gotten done if he stayed on at Microsoft and made it bigger and better and No, that wouldn't – but other things would have.
Like Microsoft would have grown, would have added shareholder value to people who then would have donated some of that to charity.
He would have created more jobs.
He also would have opened up more overseas offices in Africa and so on, which would have hired people.
And so that would have been more sustaining.
And again, it's not to say there's no place for charity at all.
But the balance between charity and opportunity on how to deal with poverty, you had charity all through the dark ages, all through the middle ages.
People gave money to the church and the church had indigent houses for the poor.
It didn't solve the problem of poverty.
That was solved by free markets and property rights and free trade and all that kind of stuff.
That solved the problem of poverty.
Through that wealth, you get charitable opportunities that weren't there before.
But fundamentally, I think charity is a nice side dish to opportunity.
It's important, but I think if we think that charity is going to create that wealth, all it does is transfer.
And usually it's to a one-time use.
The nice thing with the entrepreneurial stuff, it creates self-sustaining and self-growing economic opportunities.
You know the old thing, give a man a fish and he'll vote for you forever, teach a man to fish, and he'll become a Republican.
I don't know exactly how that goes.
But listen, aren't they teaching people in that sense, though?
They're providing a possibility for education that maybe wouldn't have existed for a lot of poor people.
So in that sense, they are teaching people how to fish.
Well, but education is important, but education when you don't have a lot of economic opportunities.
Like if you look at Africa, Africa is one of the few places where in the 20th century, like over the last 50 years, it's declined in net standard of living.
I mean, it's wretched. I mean, South Africa is now like the rape capital of the world, which you won't see on a lot of brochures.
Yeah. Oh, it's just unbelievable, the crime rates and so on.
Like, if you rent a car in South Africa, they actually have a fire that comes out the side to deter carjackers.
You can push a button and have like little jets of flame to come out to push carjackers back.
And the amount of charity that's been applied in Africa is absolutely huge, but generally it goes government to government, right?
So you give a bunch of money to a bunch of corrupt South African dictators, and then you sell them a whole bunch of arms, and then you wonder why there's not a lot of freedom for the general population.
I think if you can scale back that – I mean Africans would do fine as well as everyone else if they had the same economic opportunities.
Give people a bunch of education.
And you still have a very corrupt and fascistic style of government.
I'm not sure what they can really do with that education other than join the civil service, which seems to happen quite a bit.
So I'm a big one for like scale-back interference in the market.
People will create their own opportunities, you know, the laissez-faire, let them alone, let them trade, let them build their own wealth and all that kind of stuff.
That really is inhibited.
Charity will help people stuck in the sort of hardening amber of fascist monstrous governments.
And that's needed for the people who are stuck there.
But I think the long-term solution has to be to try and find a way to trade.
Let me give you one other hopefully not too boring example, which is subsidies for agriculture.
Wretched for the third world.
Unbelievably disruptive for the third world because you give all these subsidies to farmers and the farmers then grow too much crap.
And then what do they do? They dump it in the third world.
Which destroys the market for local farmers.
And you give all this food to the government.
The government then hands it out to people they like and don't hand it out to people they don't like, thus reinforcing their power.
And then there's no local farming left.
So just one of these kinds of examples.
If we stop screwing up their economies by selling arms, by dumping food on their markets and all that, and even the foreign aid happens with that too, I think they do fine.
But it's a lot easier to throw money at a problem than to actually try and deal with these immensely corrupt governments.
That's a really unknown but creepy aspect of the United States agriculture system is this subsidies, which causes people to grow food that they're not even going to use, causes people to profit from corn and to put a lot of effort and emphasis into things that they know that they're going to get subsidies from.
It's a real strange sort of power circle that goes on.
What it does to people's health is wretched.
Like, there's this tiny sugar industry in the United States, very concentrated economic force.
They get millions and millions and millions of dollars in subsidies, and they've been trying to cut this for years, but everybody, you know, lobby and focus their efforts, right?
And so what happened is when the subsidies went – when the tariffs, the taxes on imports of sugar went way up in the 70s, what did people start doing?
They said, wow, sugar in America is really expensive.
What are we going to switch to?
High fructose corn syrup.
I'm no nutritionist, but there seem to be quite a lot of people out there who think that high fructose corn syrup has a lot to do with the growing weight problem in the United States, along with, of course, the fact that you've got dairy farmers and wheat farmers and so on lobbying the government to create these horrible food pyramids where they say, well, low fat is really important.
And then what do they do? Because if you take fat out of stuff and sugar out of stuff, it takes like cardboard.
They take the fat out of the stuff that's in the grocery store and they put sugar or high fructose corn syrup in instead.
And then people are like, well, I guess this does taste good.
Like at breakfast this morning, I picked up a yogurt.
It says low fat, right?
And what's the second ingredient? It's high fructose corn syrup.
It's like, that is not going to be good.
Give me the fat. I'll shove a whole stick of butter up my nose rather than put that stuff into my system.
Some fat is actually important.
Yeah, you need it for your brain.
You need it for like lots of good stuff.
Essential fatty acids. They're very important for your life.
Where are you going to store your LSD? Yeah.
Exactly. If you don't have the fat, then in a business meeting, how a tentacle is going to come out of people's eyeballs 20 years from now.
That's what I'm talking about. You need a suitcase for that stuff.
I think that's a fat myth.
I don't know. People are just looking for an excuse to get out of work saying they saw an octopus.
That's right. I'm having a flashback, man.
That's why I was so creative the last quarter.
When you start talking about economics and you start talking about giving businesses more freedom, people get real nervous because people think of businesses as being these monsters, that they get power and then they just start trampling and stealing things.
It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you growing over there?
What are you growing? I'm growing a robot monster that's going to eat the world.
Oh, come on, man.
You've got to jump through government hoops and loops.
When have you ever seen a futuristic science fiction movie with a negative portrayal of a corporation?
Come on.
They're always so benevolent, so wonderful, so there to help check them out.
Has there ever been an awesome corporation?
Maybe big?
Look, corporations – okay.
Oh, God.
I'm going to bore your listeners with Econ 101.
But, okay, corporations are state-created, horrible, semi-fascistic monsters.
They do not exist in the free market.
A corporation has nothing to do with the free market.
We may start a business together and all that in the free market.
It's like, okay, you started a business.
You don't get this legal shield.
You don't get to take profits out of the corporation when it makes money.
And then if it loses money, you don't ever have to put anything back.
You don't have this thing where if the corporation or if you do something illegal, the corporation can get sued or can get fined and so on.
It's a shield that is created to protect the people in charge of the corporations because they give a lot of money.
To politicians, Barack Obama.
The only reason he's in power is he took huge amounts of money from the financial sector, more so than anyone else.
Of course, you don't really see this really talked about, but this is why the bailout and all of this happened, particularly under his watch.
The tarp and all of that stuff, which was started under Bush but expanded under Obama.
Corporations did not exist until quite recently.
And in the past, if you were the head of a trading company and your trading company lost money, you could lose your house.
People could come after your personal assets.
So these guys were really careful about their investments.
One, they got this legal shield.
You know, hey, the corporation makes a billion bucks.
I can take that money out of the corporation, and now it's mine.
And if I then do something wrong, the corporation loses a billion bucks.
Too bad.
Shareholders and employees pay the price.
I mean, it's a wretched, unfair system that has nothing to do with the free market.
Of course, the government always say the corporations are the problem to deflect, you know, what's really going on, which is the corporate shield.
And the reasons why they gave this was, A, to get the money from the corporate owners.
And B, because then they get to tax corporations, and then everyone somehow thinks that there's this thing called the corporation, like this blimp floating around the universe that you can tax for free.
Like they did this fine recently, $900 million on some financial entity for its wrongdoings or whatever.
And people are like, yeah, they fined that corporation.
Like somehow the corporation is paying.
There's no corporation. What happens is the shareholders end up paying.
The employees don't get raises.
The customers end up with service fees.
I mean there's no corporation to tax.
There's only people. So anyway, minor rant, but the corporations, they're part of the state capitalism or what's sometimes called crapitalism, which is just the government and corporations working together.
Technically, that's fascism, but it doesn't have anything to do with the free market.
It's just the modern bloated monstrosity that's been created.
And it's just people figuring out a way to extract money and manipulating the system to make it easier for them to extract money.
Whether it's extracting money from taxes or whether it's extracting money in the form of political donations.
However, they're figuring out a way to do it.
And what gets crazy about it is that there's a bunch of human beings that are a part of this thing that really isn't looking out for human beings.
I mean, some people profit.
You get money from it. But if you look at the ultimate destruction of these things, very often they're not looking out for people.
Look, I say this as an insider.
I mean I started a company with my brother in the 90s.
We grew this company. We sold it and then we went public.
And the process of going public?
It's like having cocaine injected into your dick, being lashed into a barrel full of psychotic monkeys and thrown off a cliff.
It's completely insane.
You go mental.
You focus on the stock price rather than building long-term value.
And you can make a fortune from tiny upticks and downticks in the stock price rather than focusing on satisfying your cut.
It really draws your attention away.
It's like you're chatting with your wife and some incredibly stacked woman in a bikini goes by and you don't have your sunglasses on to pretend that you're still staring at her.
Even if you They do. They'll lift your sunglasses up.
That's right. And it's like – Mad dog.
Stocks are like continually having these incredible-looking women go by while you're trying to focus on the love of your life.
And it's like your hormones are going one way and your heart is going another.
It's completely insane.
It really warps your thinking.
And this is why corporations have given up on R&D and focused entirely on marketing and stock pitches because the amount of money you can make is insane.
And it's because so many people's – Money is being forced into the stock market.
I mean it's like herding a bunch of sheep off a cliff and saying, well, those sheep seem to be kind of suicidal now, don't they?
It's like, no! It's because – like you got a 401k plan.
What happens if you don't put money in your 401k?
Government takes it, right?
What happens if you don't invest in various – like if your money gets taken from a union, the union has to invest it in your pension plans and all of that.
Unions have a huge amount of say in what happens in the stock market.
Who wants to be in the stock market?
I don't want to be in the stock market.
Maybe you do because you're a thrill junkie and all that, but I don't want to be in the stock market.
The stock market is for people who know what they're doing.
I don't want to be in the stock market.
Nobody I know wants to be in the stock market, but we all have to be in the stock market because it's like...
It's like that old joke where in Scotland, right?
Scotland, Scottish people are supposed to be cheap.
That's the stereotype when I grew up.
And so an Englishman and a Scotsman are walking down and a thief comes up and says, I'm going to rob you of everything you've got.
And the Scotsman turns to the English guy and says, here's that 20 quid that I owe you.
Because it's like you're going to lose the money, so you give it to the – So the government is going to take your money by force or you give it to a bunch of parasitical, three-eyed, roach-faced stockbrokers, right?
So it's like, okay, give it to the stockbrokers.
You know, if the guy is going to steal my money, I'll put it on Red 22.
And that's how the stock market works.
So there's way too much money in the stock market.
There should be like 1% of the money that's in the stock market that's there now.
So you've got these massive tsunamis of cash rolling back and forth.
You gave me a good coffee here. I just want to mention that.
It's pretty strong. It's caveman coffee.
Hollow to my friend Tate Fletcher.
So I'm going to do three more rants and then face plant into this lovely wood table.
You're going to hang in there because that's got MCT oil and butter.
So you're going to hang in there.
It's going to have a lot more energy. So I'm going to have really strange shit in the morning?
Maybe that will happen. Like nothing nice and S-shaped?
It's going to be like the subtitles to some Japanese movie that's going to be in the toilet.
It's going to be like if you stuck mud in a musket.
And then just pull that pin back and boom, let it go.
So yeah, I mean there's just way too much money in the stock market.
Corporations are taking moral and financial and legal responsibility away from executives.
So this is just natural. You drug a ballerina, you get a weird show.
But it's not the ballerina.
It's just what happens, right? That's a very funny expression.
You drug a ballerina, you get a weird show.
There should be a photo of you like this, like an internet meme, and it just says, you drug a ballerina, you get a weird show.
Stefan Molyneux. That's so true.
It's a great way of putting it. I think a lot of what you're bitching about, and we're both bitching about, it comes down to a couple of things.
It comes down to Human beings being born into a system that's already fucked up.
It comes down to managing your own thinking as well, figuring out how to weigh you as an individual who allegedly, and it's another debate, has free will.
That's a huge debate, the free will debate, which is very esoteric and strange.
I'm not qualified.
I would like to have you and Sam Harris discuss the free will debate.
I agree and disagree with both sides.
So I don't know what's correct or what's not when it comes to football.
I would do that, but only if you would call it like a mixed martial arts fight.
That would be the only thing.
And only if one of us wins with a choke out.
It would be very distracting.
Because in some of my debates, I thought, you know, this debate would go way better if we had a choke out option.
At the end of it, you could just press a button and both of you get down to your shorts and just start duking it out.
Yeah, just the threat of that is what keeps people gentlemanly, actually.
When people know that there will be no physical violence, they can get very squirrely.
People can get very mouthy.
Again, I don't want to keep harping on rich kids, but have you ever been around a really spoiled rich kid that likes to yell at people that are working?
Yell at security or yell – I have a friend who does security, and there's a famous person I won't name, but her name rhymes with Paris Hilton.
And she was out, and she got shitty with my friend, who is essentially a killer.
He's not working security because he's a cutie pie.
He's working security because he understands how to keep people secure, so he knows how to deal with threats.
He knows how to deal with violence.
He's good at disassembling people.
Yeah, and some person is just shitting on him that's remarkably similar to Paris Hilton.
It might not have been Paris Hilton.
Whatever, whatever. But, I mean, why would she get away with that?
Why would anybody think they can get away with that?
It's because they know the threat of violence doesn't exist.
Well, and you know as well, Joe, that there's a huge tendency that people have to mistake accidents of birth for personal virtues.
Yes. It's that old saying like you think that you hit a triple but you were born on third base.
Yeah. So people who are rich, they think, well, I'm better.
They're born rich. You didn't earn that.
Like this guy in my high school, his father I think was running the Toronto Stock Exchange or whatever and I was in this little tiny apartment with my mom and my brother and it's like the matriarchal manners.
It was all like the fallout from like the – The 60s and 70s feminist revolution, divorce rate was through the roof and it was all the single momville, like the girlfriend farm for the thug industry.
And we went over to this guy's place to rehearse some play we were working on and it was just – it went on forever.
And these are the kids, 16.
They get their sports car and they show up in school and everyone is like oohing and aahing and these guys are preening and I get it.
They're 16. What do they know, right?
What did I know when I was 16?
But that's just an accident.
You just happened to be born there.
It wasn't like you laser-targeted from the Stork army and decided to go to that house rather than some other place.
You're not a guided missile of wise prenatal aiming.
And so we all have that.
And it's true. People who are born pretty or people who are born rich or people – guys sometimes who are just born tall or you've got good athletics or – I was told when I was a kid, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. I just wasn't trying hard enough.
It wasn't the school's fault. It wasn't my family's fault.
It wasn't a chaotic or crazy situation where I was growing up.
We weren't poor. I didn't have to have three jobs.
I just needed to work a little harder, like the other kids did who had good homes and all that.
It's natural, and we have a very tough time Absolutely.
Absolutely. I mean if I'd been hit the wrong way with a ball when I was a kid, I'd be a whole different person.
If I'd been born, as you said, different race, different country, different culture.
I mean not a lot of female playwrights in Iran because it's just bad luck.
Sorry. You really drew the short straw.
We have a very tough time and I think that basic humanity that we have is – It's diminishing and it's catastrophic and it's diminishing largely because of single moms.
Wow. Because the statistic is that by far the best predictor – I'm waving this pen at you like trying to talk about empathy.
Let me just use my finger. The best predictor for the growth of empathy in a human being is the close presence of a father.
This is something that's kind of unknown because we all think that moms are about the nurturing and the emotional development and so on.
But statistically, outside unstructured play plus the presence of a dad is the biggest thing in developing empathy.
You take fathers out of the equation in society.
This is why sociopathy has doubled over the last 15 years.
This is basically why we have a welfare state as the destruction of the family.
It's not a welfare state.
It's a single mother state.
It's all making up for not having a provider.
Well, the problem with phrasing it like that though is you say that the issue is single mothers.
But the issue is really that the father isn't around.
Whether or not it was the mother's fault, the father's fault, whoever's fault it was that that relationship didn't work out.
Whether it's mutual or one person has the majority of the blame.
It's that the family is broken up.
It's not that the single mom.
It's just that the family's broken up.
I think we're about the same age.
Is that right? 46. How old are you?
I'm 47. So, we've got a younger person in the room.
Yeah, Jamie's 12. 21.
I didn't know some Italian kids who had that kind of growth on their face.
Yeah, the weird ones. Yeah, the ones who had to shave the backs of their knuckles like after they turned 10.
That's my people. Here's your finger shaver now that you're 10.
Yeah. Okay, so in your generation – how old are you?
31. I just turned yesterday.
Okay, so if you – Oh, happy birthday, sweetie.
Did you really? I did. Happy birthday.
Who asks who out? Is it women ask men out?
Is it mutual men ask men out? This is a completely broad-ended question.
It depends entirely on the game of said individuals.
I know, but generally. I mean, in general.
Generally, guys. Yeah, of course.
Girls don't ask men out.
They don't have to. Okay.
Okay. So then we can't say that single moms is equally shared because the single mom – like men propose, women dispose, right?
I mean men say I want to date you or have sex with you or something.
It sounds like something Al Sharpton would say.
It does rhyme. Yeah.
But I'm afraid I don't have that.
Men propose, women dispose.
Yeah. What do you mean by that?
Well, so men say I want to date you or have sex with you.
I want to go out with you. And the women say yes or no.
Well, men are generally more aggressive and women are generally more desirable.
So that makes us have to go after them.
But as heterosexual men, how can we possibly figure that out, right?
I mean, of course, women are more desirable to us, but, you know, to lesbians.
No, wait, that doesn't make any sense.
But to gay men. Even to them, they just, for whatever reason.
I can't figure out what women see in us at all.
Like I just – I fundamentally – like intellectually maybe I think that men have a lot of value in relationships.
But we are 40.
We're smelly.
We sit at odd angles.
We don't cross our legs.
We rarely use napkins.
We have penises.
I cannot understand why we need like 10 times more pillows than people on the bed like during the day when it's – anyway, these are things that are confusing to me.
But fundamentally, women say yes or no to relationships.
So they do get to choose who the man is a lot more than the man gets to choose who the woman is.
Oh, I don't know about that.
I don't agree with that.
I think that ultimately it boils down to once you finally meet each other, do you like each other?
And if the woman likes the man as much as the man likes the woman, it works out.
And if they don't, then it becomes this weird balance of power, this weird shifting sort of a thing.
But I think there's a lot of men that don't want in a relationship and they end it.
Or, you know, they pursue and they end it.
I think it's probably – I don't want to be a 50-50.
I don't want to give you a statistic, but I would say there's a good number of men who end relationships and a good number of women who end relationships.
To put all the power on the women's side is – I think it's – Well, not all, of course.
See, we disagree on something. No, no, but – We found one.
But we have facts to mediate.
So statistically, it depends on how you measure it, but 70 to 80 percent of marriages are ended by women.
Is that true? Or is it that men are so fucking douchey that the women have no choice?
That the men have given up a long time ago and they just don't want to fucking bother going to the court.
So just shut the fuck up.
I'm going to go out. And they shut the door.
And then the woman calls the lawyer.
Well, the woman ended that relationship.
Did she? Or was it mutual?
Just one person decided to make the call to the lawyer, but did the guy already give up to the point where he was just treating her like shit, hoping she would leave?
That's like the old Sam Kinison joke about marriage.
He goes, you know, he goes, I don't like to break up with women, so what I do is I just stay up all night and do coke for four or five days.
I come home drunk and smelling like pussy until you get to a point where she leaves you.
She leaves you because you're falling apart.
And he goes... And here's the best part.
She feels like shit!
Because she left you when you needed her most!
It's perfect! I was at my lowest ebb, honey.
And then you just...
You could have been there for me.
We could have been a successful team together.
There's weak bitches on both sides.
I agree with that.
I agree with that. But I don't think... Shitty behavior.
I don't think that we give...
I don't think we give women enough responsibility in this area.
I think that men generally want to protect women.
I think that men generally...
Oh, that's crazy. I don't agree with that at all.
You don't think men want to protect women?
They want to protect the ones that they love, but the reason why so many women get sexually assaulted isn't because so many men want to protect them.
Men want to fuck, you know?
And when they get a girl that they like to fuck, they want to hold on to her and make sure nobody else hurts her.
I mean, that's the ape shit.
That's the worst aspects of people.
But the idea that men want to generally protect women, sure, is less than they want to generally protect themselves, though.
And I think less than really would be ideal.
If you look at the balance of power between men and women, the real issue...
It's physical strength.
The real issue is that men can physically do things to women.
Where does rape come from?
Where does violence against women come from?
It comes from people that are capable of committing violence against women and rape.
A woman like Ronda Rousey, UFC champion, doesn't have to worry about some 100-pound dude who smokes cigarettes.
You know what I'm saying? She literally doesn't have to.
She'd be in the room with him and he'd be like, Bitch, I'm going to rape you.
Oh, really? Boom!
Drop him on his head and he'd be unconscious.
I mean, she'd break his arm off.
That's a physical situation that women have to deal with that men don't.
And I think, for sure, we could do a way better job of addressing that.
And I think, you know, like this Steubenville rape case.
You know this case in Ohio? You know this case?
Remind me? A bunch of football players got together, high school football players, got some underage girl drunk, raped her, and then the guys went to jail and they just got out.
Why is it so horrible?
Well, here's what's so horrible about it.
It was a girl. It was men that did it to a girl.
If it was a bunch of women who raped a guy, they got him drunk and sucked his dick for an hour and a half, everyone would be laughing about it, okay?
It's a sexual act that happens to a woman who can't control herself, and then you find out that it's a football player group, a group of giant athletes, a group of super strong men who obviously could have physically dominated her as well.
It becomes a horrific act.
If you simply reverse the sexes, it becomes a comedy.
If it's some nerd who gets too drunk in a sorority and they all fuck him for three or four hours and take pictures of his penis, it's a comedy.
But because it's a woman, It's a tragedy.
And the reason why it's a tragedy is because men are physically stronger.
It's really that simple. So the idea that I think that men want to physically protect women, man, there's a lot of evidence that they don't.
I think it's a giant, broad generalization.
I think the nicest men certainly do.
I think I would certainly, if I was seeing a woman that was being physically assaulted or something, I would absolutely risk my health to help her.
I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't, especially if I cared about her.
Right. Some people don't.
Especially given your training too, right? I mean you know how to do this stuff.
Yeah, well that's also part of it is I know that I have some preparation in that area, which is a very terrifying thing for people who don't.
I've seen people involved in physical altercations who don't know how to defend themselves and it becomes like you're facing a werewolf.
It becomes like the most horrific thing in the world because you're going to get slaughtered and you know you're going to get slaughtered.
And people, they hyperventilate.
They don't know how to deal with the stress.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice as a human being if you don't know how to defend yourself a little bit, and you're a man.
Okay, so... A lot of points.
And we just fucking slaughtered people that we are absolutely sure don't contribute to society, whether they're murderers or rapists.
We just slaughtered them. We would have – the rape stuff would pretty much die off.
It's keeping men together locked in a box and making them fuck each other.
Yeah, men rape. Yeah, but it's men doing it.
The real problem with that – that's the MRA argument against feminism is that men actually get raped more than women.
But by men, it's still a shitty argument.
Well, it's not – I think it's not an argument against feminism.
I think what it is is not something that people generally know.
Oh, I think that's pretty common knowledge.
I was surprised.
Again – Certainly no gauge of everyone.
Also, as you probably know, like 96%, 97%, 98% of workplace deaths are male and all that kind of stuff, right?
So I think – or the fact that 50% of domestic violence recipients are men, right?
Men being battered and they're actually – you can't get – there are no men's battered shelters.
You actually can't get – You can't get security.
You can't get protection. This is America, son.
We don't defend pussies.
Some chicks are kicking your ass.
I say that in all jest.
One of my favorite people ever was murdered by his wife, Phil Hartman.
Oh, yeah. A fellow Toronto native.
Brilliant, brilliant comedian.
And I knew both of them very well.
I knew him and I knew her.
And it was a horrific scene and very, very tragic.
And if you...
If you know someone like that, you know that it is possible for a woman to do it to a man, just like it's possible for a man to do it with a woman.
There's weapons, ladies and gentlemen.
There's knives and there's guns.
Gotta sleep sometime. Yeah.
And by the way, there's good and bad in that.
The good in that is that you can defend yourself against a man.
If you're a woman and you're physically weak but you have a gun, you can say, get the fuck out of my house and the guy has to run away because you have a gun.
There's good in that. But there's also people...
People do horrible things.
They get angry at each other and it happens with both sexes, with men and with women.
There's no need to generalize.
It's all just shitty people.
It's all just shitty people and shitty circumstances and a gigantic past of momentum of terrible decision-making that's led you to this really unstable current state that you find yourself in.
And then you add drugs.
You add antidepressants.
You know, I mean, I believe you and I discussed this the last time we talked, but the amount of fucking school shooters that are on antidepressants, like causation does not, you know, people want to pretend there's not like a relation between those two.
The FDA has black warning, the strongest warning labels on this stuff.
Yeah. Causes suicidal ideation, causes homicidal rage, causes, I mean… On some people.
Yeah. Yeah, some people. But that's what we have to realize.
It's like it's not a black and white thing.
It's some people die from fucking peanuts, okay?
Yeah. Some people can't pet a dog.
They go into a hyperventilating shock.
I mean, some people literally around dogs, their throat will constrict and they can't breathe.
Massively allergic to dander.
Cats, same thing.
People are different.
A lot of people are allergic to weird shit.
But a lot of people also...
could benefit from being healthier?
This is one of the things we discussed before the podcast started.
How many people that take an antidepressant could have fixed their problem just with a little exercise and diet change, with a little just getting around better people, having a better relationship, being a friendlier person, trying to exercise the stress out of your life, both mentally and physically.
And then let's see what kind of emotional and psychological state you're in because the idea that this – we need a holistic approach to the human organism.
And that holistic approach should really have a big impact in what kind of medication we subscribe to people.
I think it should have a massive impact.
And if you find someone and the person is eating fucking donuts all day and they sleep four hours a night and they're constantly drinking Red Bulls and they're depressed.
Huh. Okay, we got to fix this first.
Or they're a smart person underachieving in some dead-end job and they don't have people around them saying, listen, man, you've got more to offer the world.
Let's just find a way to get you out of the hamster wheel and get you on some flat track.
Dead-end jobs, dead-end lives, dead-end relationships are almost just as bad as some physical ailment.
I mean, they literally do suck the fucking life out of you.
We've all experienced it to some degree if we're lucky because it makes us appreciate the good times when you do experience something along those lines.
But I think that, man, you've got to really deal with that first before anything else.
And there's too many people in this world It's not a black and white thing.
There's a lot of variables when it comes to antidepressants, when it comes to medication, when it comes to mental health.
There's a lot of variables. We've done some amazing things to help a lot of people that have really had real issues.
But we've got to figure out who the fuck actually has issues and who doesn't.
And the statistic that you brought up before the podcast was over 41 out of 4 women on antidepressants.
Yeah, in America, I think, yes, 35 or 40 and over 1 out of 4 women on antidepressants.
And those are just the people who've gone and gotten diagnosed, right?
Lots of other... Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of good things that are happening, I think, in the world with regards to human relationships.
I think that we are getting smarter.
I think we are getting more positive.
I think that we are getting, dare I use the hackneyed Victorian term, more virtuous, better in our relationships.
There's an awareness of beating and emotional abuse and all.
I think that the standards are kind of raising, right?
And Dr. Phil is like the number one daytime show, and he talks a lot about how to be Reasonably decent human beings in relationships, which is sad that he has to keep saying that.
Stop screaming at each other.
Stop hitting each other. Stop doing drugs.
Stop yelling at the children. You've got to go to Dr.
Phil to figure out your fucking life.
You're way behind the ball.
There's a lot of other shit you need to cover.
Right. So I think a lot of that stuff has been going really well.
But I think there's a lot of stuff that is not going so well.
I mean a lot of just basic things.
You were talking the other day about breastfeeding.
I remember you were looking up on the – You're looking up on the website.
No, I just take the first website and that's how it works.
That's true. That's the way it works.
That's how you do it. And anything that disagrees with that is nonsense.
I mean, it's just overkill to go to the second one.
Too much work. It wouldn't be first if it wasn't right.
That's the key thing. But so, yeah, I mean, like 30% of women still are only breastfeeding for the minimum amount of time, six months.
I was – this guy, Steven Pinker, I think would be – if you can get him on, he's a really smart guy, great to talk to.
But he's – I think he's a neurobiologist, neuroscientist.
He's – and he basically was – there's a lot of studies out there that say that sort of personality traits go like 50 percent genetic and maybe they can get zero to 10 percent is the parents.
And the rest of it is kind of cultural and so on, right?
And, you know, I'm not going to argue with the science.
I'm not a scientist. But I will say that I think that parents don't have really that much involvement in kids' lives from a guidance standpoint that much anymore.
I read the statistic the other day that said the average dad has like 20 minutes of conversation with his children every week.
Whoa. Average, right?
Right.
And so and that's just that's of the people who are present.
That doesn't count the dads who are absent and so on.
Because, you know, the typical, you know, two family working.
I mean, what's their day like?
I mean, I've seen it.
I've seen it up close.
And this is one of the reasons I wanted to have kids because I saw what happened.
You know, you get up at six o'clock in the morning.
You've got to get your kids up breakfast, get them out to the school bus.
You go to your work all day.
You're sweating bullets to get pick them up at the school daycare or wherever they are.
Get them home, feed them, do homework, bathe them, you know, get them to bed.
And then you start the whole thing again.
It's all just her management.
It's all just keep them going through the maze and all that.
And I think that like I've been a stay at home dad.
My daughter is five now.
And there's a lot of little guidance things that happen during the week about how to modify, you know, where they're going.
Help to help them understand sharing or empathy or understanding how to do win-win negotiations rather than just focus on what they want, which is natural for little kids.
But it's all these tiny little corrections that are scattered throughout the week.
You don't know when they're going to be, but you have to kind of be around for them.
And I think that we don't really have much opportunity for modern parents to really stay involved.
Like we're kind of designed as a species to be around our parents.
You know, they were there with the fields.
The dads would take them. You went hunting recently.
Dads would take them out hunting and stuff like that.
And that's when you have your conversations and you teach the kids the values and all that kind of stuff.
It's really been supplanted by, you know, government, by daycare, government schools and all of that.
That's who we're kind of bonding with.
That's who we're kind of letting raise our kids.
And I can understand why there's very little influence of parents over children's behavior.
I don't think that's natural. I think that's just the way society has been structured or rather the society we've kind of inherited.
And I really would like to see, I say this on my show all the time to people who call in.
It's like, wow, we're going to have kids, but I got to work.
It's like, You don't.
I mean, you went into debt to go to school.
I mean, this is important, just at least for the first couple of years.
My daughter, her brain is like 90% done now.
At five? Yeah. Mine is too, unfortunately.
It's going to be crazy. So now you're really stuck on that train track, right?
We were at a hotel this weekend, and we went skiing, and the three-year-old zipped up her luggage, but she forgot something.
And so my wife says, Honey, you're not going to fit that.
You have to put your boots in there.
And she goes... Oh, shit.
And there's something about seeing a three-year-old go, oh, shit.
And you realize, ooh, okay.
Welcome to the human condition.
First of all, that's obviously me, okay?
I need to either stop saying that or embrace the idea of a three-year-old saying it.
It's one of those, because I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, oh, shit, when you leave saying it.
But if you do it in certain circumstances in school and work, it's going to be a problem.
So I have to figure out what's going on.
My daughter loves Bible stories.
Really? I'm an atheist.
Do you say once upon a time before you tell them?
Oh, I know. She knows their stories.
Okay. Yeah, we call him the big invisible guy.
Do you go old school, Old Testament, or do you go- Oh, we do the whole thing.
Oh, okay. Yeah, I've told her the story of, you know, the guy who's going to kill his son because the big invisible guy.
I say bake him in an ice cream, like bake him in a pie with whipped cream because, you know- That's how you say it.
I don't have a knife to the throat.
I mean, she was four. But she loves the big invisible guy stories.
She loves the Noah one.
She loves the Adam and Eve one with the snake and the apple.
It's all, I mean, these stories, they've stood the test of time.
They're really some of the best stories around.
Who was going to kill his son?
Was it Cain and Abel? No. No, Cain and Abel were the son of Adam and Eve.
They were brothers. Yeah. And they killed each other, right?
Is it Isaac and Abraham?
I think, no, Isaac and, I don't know.
Do we have a web? I think it's Abraham.
Abraham. Yeah, Abraham was going to kill his son, right?
Abraham and Isaac was the son, right? Yeah. And God was asking him to kill his son for him.
Yeah, you know, as a love test.
Yeah, just a test. Because, you know, that's how you know if someone really loves you.
Like, you know, this is why, you know, you give this to your wife.
You know, like, I would murder our offspring for you.
And that's the Hallmark card that really helps your wife understand how much you love her.
Or an ex-boyfriend.
I'll murder your ex-boyfriend.
I will find that way. The ex-boyfriend that beat you up, I'll murder him.
Just to tell you I love you.
And I'm trying to tell the stories in a neutral way.
Again, I have my opinions on all these stories and all that.
But she really likes the stories.
And she's a huge fan of Lucifer.
I mean, Lucifer is the guy.
He is like her superhero.
He is her Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
She thinks he is just the coolest because he's always standing up to Big Invisible Guy, right?
Right. Because for her, prayer is everyone standing around saying, oh, you're the best.
Oh, you're the best. Oh, you're the greatest.
Oh, I love you so much. Oh, you're the best.
And so Lucifer gets kind of tired of that and leads the rebellion and all that.
Because I said, just keep saying it.
And she said, I'm getting tired of it. It's like, no, no, no, keep saying it because it's an eternity of saying that to the guy, right?
Right. And she's like, oh man, I'm really tired.
I want to sit down. It's like, now you know how Lucifer felt.
Anyway, so she's got this great song, which goes basically, Lucifer was right, Lucifer was right, you know, from the songs.
And I'm just waiting, because, you know, in Canada, there's some homeschooling, which is kind of aren't schooling what we're doing, but a lot of them are Christians, right?
So we're going to, at some point, be around a bunch of Christian kids, and she's going to break into this song, and I'm looking forward to that moment of trying to explain that story.
Maybe she's referring to a Beatles song.
I don't know. I completely bail on her at that point.
I don't know where she gets this. Well, the real issue is you're going to have to mingle with those Christian parents.
The real issue when you have children, besides raising the children, which is, of course, the primary one, teaching them and everything, is dealing with these other parents.
And seeing, it's really weird when I see people with their kids, you know, see how little they interact with their kids, see how, like, non-appreciative they are of their kids, how they're always distracted.
Oh, it's the ring of cell phones around the playground.
You know, like, throw your cell phone, go play, go into stupid McDonald's tubes and go play with your kids.
I know a woman who's a psychologist, and she picks up her kid, and she's on her phone while she's picking the kid up.
The kid's trying to talk to her about school, and she's like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and she's texting.
The kid was gone for five hours, and when you're picking him up, you're texting.
It's so attractive to us, though.
It's so easy to do. It's so easy to ignore.
We get so used to the kid being around, and we get so used to our own free time.
Oh, my daughter's really good at that.
Sorry, she's great because, you know, like I'm trying to teach her eye contact, right?
Because, you know, when she's a kid, you know, I don't know if they can't focus when they look at you, but they tell stories like they're just watching the biggest disco light show on the planet and you're just like some leaf or something.
And so I tried to remind her, you know, eye contact when we're talking that kind of stuff, right?
So the other day, of course, and, you know, I try.
Oh, Joe, I try, you know, and I, you know, but every now and then, like I get donations.
My whole show is just donations, right?
No ads or anything. Right.
And so, you know, when a donation comes in, it's like, ooh, kibble!
You know, like, I'm like the rat with the pellet, you know, like, ooh, kibble, what did I get?
And I got this little ka-ching noise that comes in because I'm four.
Anyway, so, you know, the ka-ching noise come in, my daughter was telling me something really important for her and all that, and yeah, she's great.
She's like four, and she's like, Daddy...
Eye contact. Eye contact.
You're absolutely right.
I'm so sorry how rude that was of me.
I apologize. That's hilarious.
Yeah, it's fascinating to watch their little brains develop, isn't it?
And watch the way they interact with each other and how they see the world and realize like that this is how a person is shaped.
And this is the number one problem that we have as a race is that we don't respect this process.
And that we also don't respect this process in strangers, especially people that we know are fucked.
People in bad neighborhoods, people in bad circumstances, people in abusive families.
We know they're fucked and we don't do anything to stop it.
One thing that I keep harping on is that I think we're good to go.
It's all from a human being.
The best way to ensure that that continues to go on is to have less losers in the world.
The best way to have less losers is help out kids, educate kids, get on the ball with them very early, and do something as a society to protect them primary.
Before we go into wars, before we go into all this stupid shit that we do to spying on people's fucking emails and looking into their cell phone record, before you do any of that, how about you protect kids first?
That should be of primary importance.
And it should be like one of those things where your kid wants to go out and play.
Have you done your homework? You haven't done your homework.
You can't play. It's that fucking simple.
You can't have your wars unless you fix the kids.
Okay? And they're so smart.
They're human. I've had a whole bunch of experts on my show who talk about the native intelligence of kids.
Yeah. We're good to go.
The other day she was saying to me, Dad, you know, we've talked a lot.
She's always asked me about the show.
In fact, I should have been taking notes because she's asked me all about you, what's going to be the topic.
And I said, you know what? I have no idea.
I know it's going to be interesting to chat with Joe.
No idea what we're going to talk about.
Those are the best conversations.
Yeah, she's asked all about, you know, where you're from and what you do.
And she's fascinated by mixed martial arts and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. And so she's going to ask me all – and I do some shows on economics.
And so we talked a little bit about that, you know, money and all that.
And I diagram stuff out for her.
And she gets it, really gone through the whole history of the Second World War.
The other day she says, you know what, Daddy?
I think I've decided what I want to do.
I think when I get bigger, I think I just like to work – I want to be the government.
I'd love to be the government because I just – I want to type whatever I want into my bank account.
And I was just like, wow, you just nailed the Federal Reserve, like right there, in a nutshell.
Type whatever I want into my bank account.
That is such a four-year-old logic, but perfect.
Yeah. It is what it is.
They can print their own money.
Yeah, it's beautiful. What a great system.
Yeah. No, and I come out of the sort of libertarian world, right?
So, I mean, I'm an anarchist, but I come out of the libertarian world.
And libertarians very much, as we talked about, non-aggression principle and so on.
And I've been fighting this battle in the libertarian world and in other worlds as well around, you know, things to me as basic as spanking, right?
Yeah. I wasn't sure. We touched on this.
We did. We're both in agreement about this.
Let me just throw a few stats for the audience who hasn't seen it before.
More than 90% of parents of toddlers say they've spanked their child.
Toddlers. 61% of moms, 3 to 5 year olds, have spanked their child in the past week.
Boys are spanked a lot more than girls.
Boys are also diagnosed with ADHD, which is one of the symptoms of spanking, a lot more than girls.
Spanking can continue into the adolescent years.
30 to 40% of people in junior high, kids in junior high, are still being spanked.
Moms do spank children a lot more than fathers do, even controlling for time spent with kids and all of that kind of stuff.
I don't like the Federal Reserve.
I can't really do much about it other than rant and rave about it.
But what we can do is do some basics like stop hitting kids.
That to me is a very fundamental thing.
And in the libertarian community, that's a challenge.
A lot of religious conservatives in the libertarian community, as you know, like on the right and among Republicans, there tend to be more religious people on the left as secularists, less religious people, but more socialists and so on.
And it is really tough to just get that basic thing across.
We tell kids not to hit each other And we have kids and we've all – I don't know if you're out there, you see bad parenting sometimes when you're out and you actually – and I'll usually say something to the parents because I don't want my – A, I think it's the right thing to do.
I don't want my daughter to – See me be all about the ethics and then not talk to people doing something wrong.
But you can see parents hit kids saying, don't hit your sister.
And the fact that they can do that without their heads exploding from this wormhole contradiction of pretzel logic is just astounding.
But it is something we still have a long way to go in.
I think we're kind of slowly getting there, but we have a long way to go in just let's not hit kids.
I think how much of the world would change if we didn't do that, I think we would be virtually unrecognizable as a culture.
I couldn't agree more. I read this article recently on my message board.
I don't have it in front of me so I apologize to whoever posted it.
But it was about a man who got stuck in the financial system of divorce and it was from his perspective.
He committed suicide, lit himself on fire.
I started reading his perspective and they came to his house and he had his initial issue because he slapped his daughter in the mouth so hard that her mouth was bleeding.
And he did it because she was licking his hand.
She kept licking his hand, so he slapped her in the mouth until her mouth was...
And then everything I... I stopped reading right there.
I'm like, I don't want to know this guy.
I don't... I'm sad that he was so fucked up that he committed suicide.
But if I saw a guy slap his daughter in the face because she, you know, was licking his hand, I would have to really suppress my urge to strangle him.
Yeah. I mean, that's violence.
That's violence to someone who cannot defend themselves.
And can't leave. Not only that.
And didn't choose to be there. Not only that, it's fundamentally the most fucked up kind of violence because you're doing it to a developing human being who you allegedly love.
You're teaching them that violence is a part of life by the people that they respect the most and that it can be done to you at any time when you don't agree with whatever fucking guidelines and rules they've set up.
If my daughter was licking my hand, I'd be laughing my ass off.
I would think it's so funny. The idea that I would smack her in the mouth is just fucking insane.
But people, they fall into this pattern and they don't realize that violence is violence.
Just because you're not going to hurt the kid that bad, you're just going to spank him and you think it's no big deal?
Fuck yeah, it's a big deal.
Because that kid, it's a horrific situation.
You're doing something that they can't control.
You're holding their arm. You're moving their body and then this big hand comes and slaps their ass and they feel pain and they feel confused because you've acted out against them.
You've not only acted out against them, you've done it aggressively, yelling and slapping.
It's a terrible precedent to set, a terrible idea to plant in a child's mind.
And it's unnecessary. It's just not necessary.
For you to tell me that you can't sit down and reason with your child and do it with love.
And yeah, they're going to freak out and fucking flail sometimes and get mad and yell.
That's because they're a fucking child, you piece of shit.
You don't smack them. You don't smack anybody.
It's like hitting someone for being short. Hitting your friends.
It's like hitting your friends. Don't hit anybody, man.
Well, and in particular, the moral concentration of black-hearted nastiness.
You hit your wife.
She got to date you.
You had an engagement.
She chose you, and you chose her.
But if you hit your wife, she at least had to test drive you.
And then she can leave at any time.
She's an adult. She's got shelters.
She's got whatever. People will help her.
Hopefully. But kids, they didn't choose you as parents.
Exactly. And they can't leave and they have no options.
And I say this to my daughter.
I say, I know you're not here by choice.
You didn't choose me as a dad.
I choose to have kids. You didn't choose me as a dad.
The way I have to parent is I want to parent like if my daughter did have a choice of any dad in the world that she would choose me.
Ice cream and cookies all day long.
Absolutely. And what about feedback?
I go to my local pizza joint.
Half the time, they give me this comment card to fill out.
How did you like the pizza?
Was it good for you? Was it bad for you?
They want to know. They want to have a good pizza.
And how many times do parents do that with their kids?
Say, how am I doing? You know, how's your experience of my parenting?
You know, what's more important? A fucking slice of pizza or your relationship with your offspring?
You know, ask them how you're doing.
How could today have been better?
What did I do that you liked?
What did I do that you didn't like and all that?
Get that kind of feedback. It's just weird that we don't even think of doing that.
Well, I think your perspective is very unique in the fact that you are a stay-at-home dad and you do have the resources to be able to do that.
It's really hard for a lot of people, and that's what you were talking about before.
That number is pretty crazy.
The 20 minutes a week, I didn't know that it was that low.
Honestly, not shocked.
I don't have a regular life, but I've dabbled in regular life.
I've had jobs that take me away for a long period of time during the day, and I can only imagine what kind of energy you have to devote to a kid if the mother, both the mother and the father, Both leave the house all day long, work an eight-hour day, and then come home.
How much is left? There's not even much time.
The kid's going to be awake. How much energy do you have left?
How much focus are you putting on that kid during the day?
And we have this, again, a couple more stats.
We have this idea that the moms have to be there and the dads can be there.
But a study conducted by Dr.
Kyle Pruitt found that infants between 7 and 30 months respond more favorably to being picked up by their fathers.
He also found a father's parenting style is beneficial for a child's physical, cognitive, and emotional and behavioral development.
Mothers tend to reassure toddlers when they become frustrated, while fathers encourage them to manage their frustration.
My daughter is like this, so she's learning to do all these things.
And most of her friends are older because, you know, we're not the youngest parents on the block.
And so a lot of her friends can do stuff better than she can.
She gets frustrated. And me helping her talk through that frustration and reminding her that I didn't know how to do this stuff.
And, you know, she's trying to do racket sports.
And I remember it took me years to become good at racket sports.
So that's important for kids as well.
I mean, it's really important to remember, you know, the mom and the kid, they used to be the same freaking person.
You know, like she grew her.
It's like my arm, you know.
It's not like a separate thing. Whereas dads have a little bit more objectivity around that.
A longer-term study that this guy did proved that a father's active involvement with his kids from birth to adolescence promotes greater emotional balance, stronger curiosity, a stronger sense of self-assurance.
Additional studies, during the first five years of a child's life, the father's role is more influential than the mother's in how the child learns to manage his or her body, navigate social circumstances and play.
And the last one is this is a 1996 study that I was referring to before by McGill University.
The single most important childhood factor in developing empathy is paternal involvement in childcare.
The study further concluded that children who spend time alone bonding with their children more than twice per week brought up the most compassionate adults.
So how do they measure that?
How is that quantifiable? It seems like a weird – all those statistics seem very odd.
It's like how do you know what caused a person to have more empathy?
How do you know what caused a person to be able to move better?
I mean how do you – how do you prove that?
Again, it's sort of a many-to-many relationship.
So they ask the fathers, you know, how often were you involved?
And maybe they even measure them if it's sort of a life study.
And then they measure the compassion and then they measure a whole bunch of other things.
And if the other things don't change the compassion measure but then the parental involvement is what moves the needle – Then they assume that that's close to causal.
But isn't the issue also that parental involvement, like say if a father is involved a lot in the kid's life, he's also probably likely involved in the relationship with the wife, and maybe the wife would be more happy.
The father and the wife would be more happy, and because of that, they would both be better parents.
So it might not just be that the impact of having a man around does all these things and creates empathy.
It might be the impact of having a successful family as well.
Right, right. And that certainly is true.
And again, I didn't run the studies.
I assume that they've tried. Like whenever you question this, oh, we tried to tease it out this way or that way.
And they do try to find that answer.
But I do think that compassion...
Again, you know, I mean, you're married.
You've got kids floating around and all that.
They're not floating, but they're...
But they were floating at one point, and then they came out through the magic chamber.
But I think, you know, I mean, my wife's skills as a parent are fantastic, but there are some differences between us, you know, and I don't know whether it's biological or whether it's just the way we're raised or whatever, but, you know, I encourage more risk-taking.
I encourage, you know, if you fall off the horse, get back up on again kind of stuff, and I think that's just kind of a natural kind of difference.
And I'm also more encouraging of, you know, my daughter is like crazy friendly.
I keep thinking she's going to go up to someone, sometimes an unfriendly world, like a cheese up to a grater, you know, and just kind of get shredded because, you know, we go places and she just goes up to kids and says, Hi, would you like to be friends?
That's cool, though. Fantastic.
That would be how the whole world would work.
Oh, I love it. Wouldn't that be great? If everybody was on ecstasy, that's how we would interact with each other.
That was one of the things that we got a little bit off topic but one of the things that I wanted to complete this thought on when you were talking about antidepressants and we were talking about the good and the bad of them.
I think right now one of the issues that we have with this idea of manipulating human neurochemistry is that it's not really done.
It's not a complete art form yet.
It's not something like dyeing your hair.
Like if your hair is gray and you want to have black hair, you simply go to the market and you buy some hair color and you put it in your hair and now your hair is black.
It really is that fucking easy.
I mean they've got it down to a science.
You see guys that are fucking 80 years old and they have jet black hair and it looks ridiculous.
The Reagan. Yeah, but I think we do have the potential, just like we have mastered virtually every other aspect of our world that we live in, whether it's high-speed communication or the ability to combustion engines, lithium-ion batteries.
One day they're going to figure out how to engineer consciousness, and you have this… You have this opportunity to take a pill or get a shot or whatever and you have ultimate clarity and you fucking think much better and you're a better person.
I keep swinging my hands through the air and knocking shit onto my keyboard.
I am literally retarded when it comes to that.
I'm looking for something to hand you.
I got nothing. No, we're all right. We're all right.
I got some paper towels here. It didn't really get on anything.
It just got a little bit on my screen.
But I think that one day they're going to have the ability to do what we would like them to be able to do, to figure out how to engineer human consciousness ideally, to make in a pill form or in – I mean in a shot or in some sort of genetic manipulation.
I think that – Is that possible?
Is that bad? Is that going to take away from being a human being?
I think that would be a great tragedy.
Why is that? If it made it awesome, in pill form, life would be fucking literally everything we've been searching for.
No struggle, just boom.
We were just talking. That's like everyone being born with a billion dollars.
Is it though? No resistance.
We have that. We know that to a large degree.
I think that we know that to a large degree.
With our current state of consciousness.
What I'm saying is we engineered it past this ape-monkey paradigm that we live in right now and boom, with one shot, they give you this Buddha thing.
It's called the Buddha shot.
Would you take it? I might probably.
You would? I don't know if everybody else was taking it.
Because you're a natural follower.
Yeah, I'm a follower. I think I would consider it.
I would want to know what the results were.
Would you want your kids to take it?
I would want to know what the results were.
Look, if the entire world took it and then we would engineer consciousness past this stage where we are now and completely restructure society to have no evil, no problems, we think that we have to have a yang to have a yin, and in our current state we do.
But is that the ultimate end-all?
Are we not continually evolving?
Is this life that we live now not much easier and safer than it was living in the time of Genghis Khan?
Well, it certainly is. Well, isn't it arguable that a thousand years from now it would adapt and change and become something different than it is now?
We have the technology. We can rebuild it.
And none of your audience know Six Million Dollar Man references, do they?
I bet a few of them do. A few of them do, right.
Barely alive. That's right.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.
We have the technology. I met him recently.
Very nice guy. Did you really? Wow.
I think he's a pretty fun guy.
But anyway. It was pretty cool to meet him.
I imagine, yeah. Like, holy shit.
How was his handshake? He's very firm.
He's a man. I imagine it would be.
Steve Austin. Lee Majors, great guy.
MMA fan. I think we do have that.
I think we have that.
Okay, so let me ask you a question.
You think we have it now, the ability to engineer consciousness?
I think we have it. Yeah, I mean, neuroplasticity and focusing on what I would argue is the old Aristotelian idea that we look for something called eudomania or happiness.
And happiness is, according to Aristotle, happiness is the one thing we seek for its own sake, right?
Like, we don't... We get on a bus to go somewhere, right?
We take a cab to get home.
And once we're home, we've arrived there and we don't stay on the bus or stay on the cab.
And most things we do in life are there to pursue happiness, right?
Like I came here because it's sunny.
No, I came here for you.
I came here for you. And the sun.
And you. And the sun.
Both together. It makes it very easy.
I really enjoyed our last conversation and I think it was great to get the messages out that I think are really important for people.
And so I came down here because it will make me happy so far.
You and the coffee have made me very happy.
I'm not saying necessarily in that order, but they're both in the mix.
Caveman coffee works. It really is good stuff, I'll tell you that.
I knew that you were going to butter me up.
Yeah, that's how I do it.
I butter people up, literally.
And so, yeah, Aristotle said, so how do you achieve happiness?
Well, happiness, he said, is the pursuit of excellence, particularly in virtue.
And now virtue for Aristotle was a little funky because he was pro-slavery.
So, yeah.
But, you know, they didn't have labor-saving devices other than other human beings.
So I think that we do have the capacity to be quite happy and to achieve a state of not contentment because I think contentment is for, like, cows and stuff that they excrete.
But I think to achieve happiness, we pursue virtue, which is, you know, we act to do good.
We fight the bad guys.
We try and reform the people on the fence.
We try and encourage those in pursuit of virtue.
And I mean, let me ask you this question.
How is your conscience, right?
This thing that you accumulate, this sort of unconscious thing that accumulates the good and bad that you've done in your life.
My conscience is pretty easy.
I think I've done some things wrong.
I think I've done a lot of things right.
My conscience is pretty easy.
How is your conscience? Do you think in sort of the sum total – you know that thing you go in front of St.
Peter at the end of your life and he tallies up sort of the good and bad?
How is your conscience as far as that goes in your life?
Well, fortunately, I engage in not so frequent but quite strong psychedelic activities.
And in doing so – Like roller coasters with your eyes closed?
Yes. Yeah, okay. Got it. Well, the most common one for me is sensory deprivation tank.
I do that all the time. So you face yourself in that environment without distractions, right?
Yes, you certainly do and that's one of the more challenging aspects of it and one of the things that people are most afraid of because of that.
And I certainly have done things wrong.
I certainly have made mistakes and I certainly think that those mistakes have given me more empathy, more understanding, more objectivity and the analysis of those mistakes have made me a better person.
The subsequent reaction to my analysis of those mistakes made me a better person.
You change, you evaluate, you change and all that.
So when you say you're conscious, is your conscience clean?
No. No.
It's fucking littered with bodies.
But the result of that life has made me a far better person.
Bodies, not zombies.
Who I am right now, yes, my conscience is clear.
The way I treat people now, yeah, 100%.
I try to be very nice.
As we talked about before, I think you do a lot of good in the world.
You bring a lot of, I think, good thinkers to people's attention, hopefully myself included.
I think that through your comedies we talked about before, I think you give people a very empathetic relationship to their own physicality and bring sort of some of the secret stuff in people's lives into the open and have them have good humor about it.
So I think you do a lot of good and I think that's – would you say that you're quite happy?
Well, yeah. I'm very happy.
And I think that that good, though, is a very reciprocal – it's a very even relationship between audience and me.
I think I easily get as much out of this podcast as the people who listen to it do.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's so harmonious and one of the reasons why it's so easy to do.
And also one of the reasons why the relationship that I have with the audience when I meet them is like I think they know that I'm as happy about all this as they are and the people that it's benefited their lives and they've been exposed to all these different people like yourself and other interesting people that I've had on the show.
I have also been exposed to those people.
I've been exposed to you. I've been exposed to whether it's Sam Hatteras or Amit Goswami, the theoretical physicist, or all these different fascinating people that I've had on the podcast.
Graham Hancock, Ad Nauseam, Joey Diaz.
All these people have made my life a more fascinating life for sure.
So it's been a completely mutual beneficial situation.
So when you say you've done a lot of good, well, it's done a lot of good for me.
So I really think it's a very even...
Win-win, right? Yeah. It's a completely even exchange.
What I've found is a path that I find to be both fascinating and enjoyable, and I've gone down that path.
I've been very fortunate to find it and then pursue it.
And that's unusual for your profession, right?
I mean it's not like there are a lot of comedians who do – or public figures and so on who bring intellectuals to a mainstream audience.
I mean – Well, that's because I've kind of resisted the idea of being pigeonholed into one sort of occupation.
I mean what I do is just – I'm a person and there's a bunch of things that I enjoy.
One of the things that I enjoy is hunting, this thing that I've really become fascinated with lately.
That's for a lot of people.
It's repulsive. I've had incredible insults.
I mean where do they think they come from?
Well, not only that. There's the – Do the least harm principle.
It's really kind of fucked.
But the reality of farming is that unless you're organically farming in your own garden, We're good to go.
It's very – it's ideal if you can grow your own stuff.
If you can grow your own stuff and you want to be like a vegan, you want to have like the smallest footprint possible, that's the way to do it.
Grow your own stuff and make sure that you don't harm anything in the cultivation of your fruits and vegetables.
But if you don't, boy, you're still participating whether you believe it or not.
You're participating. You're participating in slaughter.
Well, yeah. I mean, I have some sympathy.
And again, if you can do less harm, I think that's great.
After high school, I wanted some money for school.
I ended up going up to work in northern Ontario, like past the tree line where you had to fly in to do claim staking and gold panning and all that kind of stuff.
You know, when you're really in Mother Nature, and this was like, you know, minus 50 degree weather in a tent for months.
I mean, when you're really in Mother Nature, you realize she's kind of a bitch.
She doesn't give a fuck about you and she'll let you freeze to death.
Like, she'll just, you know, a fucking tree will fall on your head and that's it for you.
I mean, you know, it's really, you know, one time we got snowed in.
Like, we couldn't get the plane in with supplies.
And you realize like you're looking at a box of food and you're like, you know, when we're out of this, it's getting all kinds of like stuck on a mountain looking at people.
I actually was thinking, you know, you see those, these are Looney Tunes cartoons.
So again, for your younger audience members, please ask your parents.
You know, like some guy is really hungry and he looks across at some other guy and he turns into like this steaming chicken wing or something like that.
You couldn't do that today. You couldn't make that cartoon today.
No, you couldn't. But I was looking. There was one guy who was kind of plump in the camp and, you know, he actually just started to look well marbled to me.
Like I didn't think of him as fat anymore.
I thought of him as nutritious.
When things get ugly, people do tend to start leaning towards survival.
Yeah, and a lot of times, like, we like nature because we are a comfortable distance from it.
You know, like, we've got our air conditioning, we've got our antibiotics, we've got, you know, the people in the Middle Ages, you know, they were really close to nature and we died like flies.
Mm-hmm. You know, like childbirth was fatal to like half the women.
How about the whole, every fucking story has a big bad wolf in it.
And the reason being is that wolves were fucking killing people on a regular basis.
Until people figured out firearms, wolves were killing people like crazy.
It was a really common thing for people to get killed by wolves.
You know, one stupid ass flea comes across in a rat from the Middle East and suddenly a third of Europe is dying from the Black Death.
I mean nature is great to visit but it's not a fucking Ansel Adams poster.
I mean she is a sociopathic bitch who will wipe you out as soon as look at you.
There's a story from 1450 that I've told on the podcast once before but for the – in this line of thinking.
There's a series of murders in Paris in 1450 by wolves.
I guess it's not murders.
I guess it's just predatory.
They killed 40 people.
Wolves killed 40 fucking people in Paris in 1450.
And we are no different to them than a caribou or anything else that they can eat.
It's just when we have protected ourselves completely with cities and cars and guns and all these things, then it doesn't become an issue.
And then we look at them and like, oh, beautiful nature.
But that beautiful nature gives zero fucks about you.
Yeah. And will absolutely eat your baby in front of you.
Oh, yeah. They have no problem with it, whether it's a fox.
In London, they actually have had issues recently where foxes have broken into children's bedrooms and attacked the children while they're sleeping.
Or rats inside. Babies in Harlem.
I mean, rats will just eat the baby's face off.
I mean, they're just monstrous.
It's so heartless, and it's all about survival.
And we've eradicated that.
And I love it. I love being at the top of the food chain.
I'm sorry that we had to kill a whole bunch of stuff to get here, but at the beginning, it was us or them.
I'm glad that some comet came and took the heads off the dinosaurs, because otherwise, we'd just be little rodents that they're eating.
I'm sorry that we're on top of a big pile of bodies, but I'd rather be on top than in them.
I have no problem with killing dinosaurs.
I have no problem with the meteor that killed – or the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
I'm happy that it happened.
It's like the big mammalian airstrike from outer space.
Let's make some room in the food chain.
We got to grow, people. We got a podcast to do in four billion years.
I used to have this bit about these people that I talked to once that were working to save the Komodo dragon.
They were going to the Komodo Islands.
They were doing this work to make sure the Komodo dragon populations are good and healthy.
I'm like – What?
Why would you want those heartless fucking monsters?
Get a few of them, stick them in the zoo, shoot the rest of them in the head.
They're fucking evil.
These are evil reptiles.
Oh, they're so evil. Tell me, tell me why.
They're horrible monsters.
I don't know much about Komodo dragons. They're the biggest lizards on the planet, and they eat water buffalo, people, anything on that island.
They eat buffaloes? Oh, fuck yeah, they do.
They eat them by biting them.
They're huge. They're enormous.
You've never seen a Komodo dragon? Jamie, pull up a photo of a Komodo dragon's mouth.
They used to think that they carried botulism in their saliva.
That used to be what they thought.
But now they realize that what happens is the environment that Komodo dragons live in is so hot and tropical and that a lot of times they're biting into water buffalo and all these different things that are exposed to moisture.
And it's just the septic nature of their environment because water buffaloes piss and shit in the water that they live in.
And then when this Komodo dragon bites them, he opens up their flesh and the blood gets exposed to all the toxins.
And then it sits in the teeth waiting for whatever the next bite.
So they're not actually venomous.
They're just like disgustingly unclean.
Look at that image.
The evil saliva.
One of them, though, bit Sharon Stone's husband on the foot, this dumb fuck.
He got into a cage with a Komodo dragon and he had white socks on and the thing thought his foot was a rabbit.
So it clamped down on his foot and wouldn't let go.
And he almost lost his foot.
It's really, they're really fucking dangerous.
Okay, let's go back to that part where he got into a cage with a Komodo dragon.
Oh, it's so cute!
I would do it if I was in a tank.
Oh, man. And I had a samurai sword.
Yeah. Get the fuck out of here.
Those things are horrifying.
But these people that I met were, like, really dedicating all of their time and effort.
And I'm like, that is fascinating, but those fucking lizards don't give a shit about you, buddy.
Now, I can understand it if there's some big ecosystem thing.
Yes. You know, like, where they got rid of the predators in Australia, I think it was, and then basically the rabbits just ate the entire continent.
So I can, like, if there's some balance in nature thing, you know, I think that's fine, but...
I am very, very glad to not be around wild animals.
You know, like when I was working up north, we had to be armed because, I mean, there are bears who might not have had a meal in like a month.
Yes. And they don't care.
Like they'll just come and rip your face off and eat it.
And that's, you know, wolves and all that.
We really had to be careful out there.
And this, you know, so all the people who are like nature is basically cuddly.
It's like, That's great.
That's because you go hiking in Yellowstone on clearly marked paths when people have cleared all the predators away.
And, you know, not even Yellowstone.
Yosemite maybe because they have black bears.
But Alex Honnold, do you know who he is?
He's the climber.
He's one of the world's best free climbers.
He's on 60 Minutes or something.
Yes. Yeah, yeah. I saw that one. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. And just fucking hikers.
Just people wandering around and you run into a bear in the wrong situation and that is a giant 1,800 pound monster or 1,200 pound or 800 pound, whatever the fuck it is.
They're bears. They're enormous.
Think of a giant dog, an 800 pound dog that wants to eat you.
Yeah. It's going to eat you.
You're fucked. And you can't get away.
You can't get away. They can push over the trees.
They can climb up. You cannot get away from those guys.
They can run up trees.
They run straight up a tree.
I mean, black bears especially can run up a tree like a cat.
Yeah. Oh, and I remember being in a tent, again, in the middle of nowhere.
I was with this...
Tiny Japanese woman who was, like, incredibly strong.
She was literally, like, made of muscle.
It was astounding. Anyway, but...
And we were in this tent, and I heard this, you know, snuffling around.
And, you know, we did all that. We hung the food and the trees and all that.
You don't ever want any food around, obviously, when you're sleeping and this kind of stuff.
And, I mean, you literally think, this is, like, this is my last 20 seconds on this planet.
You know, this is it.
You know, this thing... Because, you know, even if you're armed, there's only so much you can do.
Well, you have to get off a shot very quickly, and you have to hope that it scares the bear away.
Because if you just shoot them, unless you have a really high-powered rifle, like a pistol, like a.38, a shotgun's not good enough.
It's not going to kill him. But what it will do is it will annoy him to the point where he'll kill you quicker, so there won't be a lot of suffering.
So, you know, it'll rip your own head off, and you won't get to see your own demise.
You might be better off putting a gun in your mouth. Probably, yeah.
That might be the move. But the problem is then they can't identify you with dental records because your teeth are sprayed out all over the forest.
So stuff like that gives you a pretty healthy appreciation for the bears killed dogs near the camp and stuff.
It's seriously dangerous stuff out there.
I'm very happy to live in a civilized area where I can go visit nature and nature is absolutely beautiful when it is not trying to kill you.
It's like the ocean is beautiful.
I love scuba diving and snortling.
That's flying over the coral.
As long as nothing is taking your leg off, it's a beautiful, beautiful experience.
But that taking the leg off thing is a pretty important part of the equation and people forget it who spend a lot of time in cities.
Yeah, people do forget it.
That taking your leg off is a real thing.
That's something you have to think about when you go swimming anywhere in the world where there's sharks.
You know, you might think that it's not going to happen to you because it hasn't happened to that guy or that guy or this person on the surfboard over there.
Look, this person's snorkeling.
I'm fine. No, you're not.
You're rolling the dice.
You're getting... It's like if you go into the woods, the idea that somehow or another these millions of sharks are going to avoid you, likely yes, because there's so much real estate.
But it's like if we knew that werewolves were real, but there was only one of them, and it was out in the woods, how often would you go in the woods?
When it was a full moon, you would never fucking go in the woods because you'd go, fuck, what if I picked the wrong night in the wrong place and I get out there and the wolfman is right there and he eats me?
Well, the fucking sharks are sharks all day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The wolfman is only the wolfman once a month.
And you know that we're not that terrified of nature because all the kids' toys are like cute predators.
You know that old song, if you go down to the woods tonight, you're in for a big surprise?
Because the teddy bears are having a picnic.
But the real end of that story is...
Isn't it funny that a teddy bear is like a – that is so common.
It's a completely common toy.
But it's only common now.
I don't think they had bear toys when bears could kill you.
I bet you're right. Now that there's no bears around, they can be cute and cuddly and you can have the Lion King and all of that because nobody's around lions.
But in Africa, people still get regularly eaten by lions.
I bet you there are not a lot of lion toys lying around that are cute and cuddly.
I bet you're right. And if you think about some of the animals that we have – what's the term?
Anthropomorphism, is that it? When you take a person – You project human characteristics onto a non-human thing.
Think about like Tony the Tiger.
They're great. He's talking about your children.
He's a fucking asshole.
They're great to eat.
Why are you making him cute?
They're tigers. Because we don't have any tigers around.
They're in zoos and you take pictures.
There's a fun fact about India.
There's a place called the Sundarbans where tigers have killed 300,000 people over the last 200 years.
300,000 people have been killed by tigers in the Sundarbans.
It's so incredible. I had a bit about it on one of my past comedy specials because it's such a ridiculous statistic.
One tiger killed three men in a boat of five, swam out to the boat, killed a man, dragged him back to the water, to the beach, jumped back in the water, killed another guy, and did it three times before he either got bored or they got away from him.
Or full. Yeah. I mean, they swim incredibly fast and they're really aggressive.
And they've got these teeth that can tell where your jugular is.
Yes, they're sensitive. Yeah, I mean, that's some sensitive stuff.
Yeah, they adjust. Well, that's what they're designed for.
I mean, they are literally designed to clean up.
Anything that's slow, they're there as population control.
That's what they're there for. And also making sure the herd stays strong.
Get rid of the slowest and the sickest and the oldest and keep the herd strong.
We don't like to think of it that way, but again, this is the yin and the yang.
If you gave the tigers a pill and made everything groovy and there's no more need to hunt, what would we have?
Would we have nature? But the real question is if we are going to engineer that, but what are we going to do with the natural world?
What are we going to do with the bears and the tigers and the crocodiles?
Well, I mean, of course, the natural human predators.
There's this weird idea, and I think it comes out of religion that – I mean there's a couple of things that are problematic which come out of religion.
And some of them are obviously kind of obvious, but some of them I think are more subtle.
Like the issue of the soul to me is always really interesting.
Like there's this – in the religious idea, and not all religions but a lot of religions, you have this eternal part of you called the soul, which is uncorruptible.
And so when they say that he's a bad guy but if you really – if you reach through, if you connect with him, there's good in him somewhere and all that kind of stuff.
I think that's a really dangerous idea and it scientifically seems to be entirely false.
Like people who are sociopaths don't get better.
They don't reform. They will become cunning and they've tried everything.
They've tried injecting sociopaths with LSD and – They should try bullets.
Well – Bullets are the cure for sociopaths and murders.
They're pretty common, like one in 25 people.
I've come across them.
Yeah, I've certainly come across them too.
And these are the human predators.
And I mean it's fairly easy to create them if you really traumatize a whole lot of kids.
A lot of them came out of Ceausescu's Romania because he banned abortion.
And a lot of women who would otherwise have had abortions put these kids into these orphanages where they were fed and taken care of but nobody ever touched them.
And then I think it was in France that was – when this came out, a whole bunch of French families adopted these Romanian orphanages' kids and they were strangling their cats and they were throwing their other kids out of windows and stuff and they were just – and they were unfixable, completely unfixable.
From the jump? I mean like how old were they when they adopted them?
Usually it's within – if you do this – if it's after two or three years, it's usually irreversible because the brain development, the development of – Oh my god.
So two to three years and they're psychopaths.
Empathy is – 10 to 12 different brain centers all have to fire in harmony.
And you also have to develop these things called mirror neurons, which are, I think, completely fascinating.
The biological basis of empathy, completely geeky, fascinating to me.
But since empathy, I think, is the most important resource in the world, if you have that, all other resources will be taken care of.
But mirror neurons are, if you see someone take a nut shot, You go, oh, you know, like you kind of get it in your body.
Those are mirror neurons.
And you can make them or deny them in monkeys very easily, right?
I mean if you just give them all the food and drink that they need but you just give them like a simulated mom like that doesn't actually interact with them and you isolate them.
And you don't even have to traumatize them.
You don't have to hit them.
You don't have to scare them.
If you do that, they get even worse.
But then they grow up with no particular empathy because they don't get that sort of back and forth.
I mean babies are born with it.
One freaky thing that babies can do is right out of the womb, like right when they're born, if you stick your tongue out at a baby, it will stick its tongue out back at you, which is a completely freaky thing.
to do when you think about it.
They've never seen a tongue. They don't know that you have the same.
So if you develop mirror neurons, then you won't get sociopathy because you'll have empathy, right?
And people who spank fundamentally are acting against empathy and they're teaching their children to act against empathy because you're doing exactly what your child desperately does not want you to do.
And so you're really screwing with empathy and so on.
And so the development of – the non-development of mirror neurons appears to be something that cannot be corrected later in life.
It's just this – it's like if you don't get exposed to language between like two and five, you just never really learn it.
Wow, that's so crazy.
And this is why when I talk about fixing the world or having a paradise on earth, which relative to what we have now I think we can have, it's a multigenerational process because if the kids are screwed up that early, it appears to be irreversible and all you can do is manage the symptoms through – Prison or whatever it is.
But these human predators, it's not – in the religious mindset where there's a soul that there's someone good you can get into that you can connect with is biologically completely – it seems to be – again, I'm no expert.
It seems to be completely incorrect.
It's like saying if you've got lung cancer throughout your lungs that there's a healthy ghost lung that you just have to connect with to breathe well.
No, your lungs are corrupted.
They're screwed up. They're not – There's no healthy backup personality or brain called the soul, but this idea that you can reach through to the most corrupted and destroyed people and somehow reawaken their humanity, which is necessary for religion.
You have to have a soul.
I think it's really a dangerous thing because it lets us – if you have compassion for sociopaths, they use it to manipulate and control you.
So it's almost like if you're a sociopath, you'd love to invent the idea of a soul so that people will try and help you and then you can manipulate and control them.
Whereas if you recognize that they're predators, then you just steer clear of them.
They lose a lot of their power. Well, sometimes it's very difficult to find them.
It's very difficult to identify them.
That's one of the problems. They're comedians.
They're camouflaged, right? Yeah.
And there's one of the ways that you can is by when people behave around you that seems like really fake and weird.
It's like they have like a fake weird friendship with you or a fake weird interaction with you.
One of the reasons why they have this fake weird thing is because they don't understand regular friendships, loves, and relationships.
So it all comes off as odd to them because they're doing make-believe all the time.
They're imitating what they've seen around them.
They know what's important to other people, but they don't feel that it's important to themselves.
It's the best way to describe it right there.
Right? Like a torturer knows what hurts you and likes it.
And they've done actually a bunch of studies where they show people- And this I find it's so incomprehensible.
I try and sort of get it because having empathy for non-empathetic people is a tough thing.
I think it's a necessary process to go through for self-protection and I think for the betterment of the world.
So there are these studies where they sort of hook up these electrodes to people's brains that can measure what's going on in their brains.
And they show intentional cruelty films.
Like they show like no cruelty and then accidental cruelty, like guy steps on a rake or whatever, right?
And then they show intentional cruelty, like guy pretending, like stapling another guy's hand or something like that.
And when people see – some people see the intentional cruelty, the same happy centers related to orgasm, related to just feelings of intense bliss show up because this is sadism, taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
I mean that is – that's anti-empathy.
That's like, well, I know that you're attached to your children, so I'm going to use your attachment to your children to control and bully you or whatever it is, like you kidnap some guy's kids or whatever.
And this aspect of human predation is really important.
We are not a species.
We are a whole ecosystem of predator and prey.
And our lack of ability to differentiate between predator and prey in the human species I think is one of the major roots of hierarchical brutalities and wars and all of this kind of stuff.
And I think we really need to throw away the idea of the eternal good within us and recognize that the most dangerous species to human beings or other human beings by far...
I mean, just governments alone in the 20th century murdered, not even including war, governments murdered 250-plus million people.
They can't even get it down to within 10 million people.
That's a quarter of a billion people murdered just by one human institution populated by sociopaths.
These are incredibly dangerous people.
We're talking about bears and stuff and that's very important but the most important and most dangerous predators are human beings and we don't really have a good way of identifying them other than they're on the ballot.
Oh, sorry, little anarchist propaganda there.
Could you imagine if you had like a bunch of bears that were like really cool?
And you love to be around them.
And they're, like, really fun.
They do things for you.
And they help you. And they help you move.
And they provide you with joy.
And then there's other bears that will just fucking eat you if they find you.
Or it's like that Battlestar Galactica thing, like the Cylons.
They look like people, but they're aliens.
And this is something that is – we really got it as a species up our, like, radar for this kind of stuff.
Because imagine if we could see these guys, like if they had some disco ball or whatever, right?
A turkey tester pops up when they're psycho. And then it'd be like, okay, well, here's someone I'm not going to lend money to or be friends with or have kids with or, you know, we could – this gene or whatever, even if it's genetic, we could eliminate that within a generation or two.
But as long as – and of course, if they're physically attractive or wealthy or powerful as well, I mean, they're just – it's like – Ambrosia for a lot of people, right?
Anyway, so this is sort of a pet thing of mine.
It's just really helped people to understand that there's really bad people out there.
And even if we say they don't have free will, so what?
We don't say that bears are morally responsible for eating people, but we don't hang out with them, right?
Well, I don't buy that, the free will thing.
Of course you have free will. It's just like how much free will do you have?
How much decision-making does your consciousness have?
If you believe you don't have free will, guess what?
But then there's a bunch of people.
Well, there's factors that go into every decision that you make and those factors are genetic and environmental and this and that and that.
And if you factor it all together, it's not about free will.
It's not about your free decision making. Maybe or maybe not.
I mean it's a very slippery argument in both ways on both sides actually.
Yeah. I mean … For me – because people always say, well, define free will.
I've given some thought to it and I got a series on YouTube about this.
It's YouTube.com forward slash free domain radio if people want to check it out.
But to me, free will is our capacity to compare something proposed with an ideal standard.
That to me is really the essence of free will.
So – So composed to an ideal standard meaning that's what you gauge your reactions and actions on.
Yeah, so science, a proposition about the physical universe, we compare it to an ideal standard called scientific verification or something like that.
Or we compare a proposed action to a moral standard or a moral ideal or something.
That's the one thing we can do that… Nothing else in the universe that we know of seems to be able to do.
To compare a proposed action – like, I mean, dogs propose an action.
They all get together and they – birds all fly in one direction or another.
But they don't compare it to an ideal.
And this comparing things to an ideal I think is the fundamental aspect of – Will we compare that to some ideal standard?
Now, people do this all the time, right?
I mean, is this moral?
Is this right? Is this God's will?
Is this with the law? Is it against the law?
We compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
Even in school, do you get 100 on the test?
That's the ideal standard. If you get a 50, that's right, not good.
So we're constantly comparing things to an ideal standard and I think that is really the essence of choice that we have.
And even if it's not an ideal standard, we're being inspired by what we deem to be successful behavior, whether it's emotionally successful, socially successful, whatever, career, athletics, whatever it is.
We gain some sort of inspiration from that that also enhances our ability to perform the same actions.
And is that free will?
Phew. Is it something else?
Is it a combination of all those things?
I think more likely that. The argument that there is no free will I think is a little silly because there is but it's not the only thing.
I think that's what it is. I think there's a lot going on when it becomes – when you try to figure out what it is that makes a person act the way they act.
We could put you in a situation and something could occur with your daughter per se and you would be like, well – Let me explain to you what happened, and let me explain to you how I've made these same mistakes myself, and this is what I learned from it.
Or you could put a different person in front of a similar four-year-old kid, and that person's going, what did I tell you?
Get your fucking hands off of that!
Come here, sit down! If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times!
Turn around, smack! What is it that causes one to be you and one to be another person in the same scenario with a completely different result?
Well, no, it's comparing to ideal standards, right?
Part of it. Part of it for sure.
Should we have a standard, which is if someone's saying something to you, you should really pay attention to them.
That's the standard, right? And I've told her about that.
If she's playing on the iPad and we're trying to have a conversation, I say, can you turn that off while we chat?
Because I don't want you to be distracted.
So there's a standard that we have.
And then when we deviate from that standard, we try to realign with that standard.
And I think those are basically the fundamental choices that we have.
What are your standards? People always – they say, well, you know, but kids these days are spankless and they're running wild and they're having lipstick parties and they're, you know, hooking up and they have no – so they genuinely believe, well, if I don't hit my kids, it's going to be really bad.
And I think that our futures are fundamentally written by our deepest values, by that which we consider the good.
What your values or your virtues are will be your future, like a train track.
Now, we can't change the effects of our ethics, but we can decide which are valid or invalid ethics.
So I make the case that don't hit your kids, non-aggression principle, reasoning, better parenting, better child development, all the science behind it.
Your kid's IQ will be better.
Their behavior will be better.
Their social skills will be better.
They'll be more peaceful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I make that case.
I change people's minds about that.
Like tens of thousands of parents, probably hundreds of thousands by now have stopped spanking as a result of the work that I do, and there's tons of people out there doing the same work.
We give people better ideals, then it's like the wind changes with a boat.
They'll turn that way.
The capacity to evaluate new information and have it change our ideals, I think, is the fundamental essence of that.
Of free will. When we can either choose to ignore that information, in which case we're just going to keep doing the same thing as history, like a hamster wheel, a revolving door of history, or we can evaluate new information and change our behavior according to some new ideal.
That, I think, is the only choice we have.
The people who argue against free will only ever argue with people, which is really interesting when you think about it because they say people are fundamentally indistinguishable from other complex systems like the weather.
But you never see somebody arguing with the weather.
You only ever see people debating or arguing with people.
I had a guy call into my show recently who was telling me that he said, Steph, you're just like a computer.
And I said, okay, well, why don't you hear?
Here's my computer. You can continue the debate with the computer.
And he didn't understand what I was talking about.
He said, I'm not going to talk to your computer.
I said, so you only want to talk to me, not the computer.
And he said, well, the computer doesn't understand.
I've got voice recognition. I'll turn it on.
Go ahead. And I said, so you don't want to debate with the computer only with me.
So you're saying there's something different about me versus the computer.
And have you ever yelled at the rain to stop raining or to change the wind's direction if it's blowing the wrong way?
He said, no, of course not.
And I said, so you cannot say that people are just like everything else in the universe if you will only ever debate people.
You have to accept that there's something fundamentally different with people if you will never debate anything else that you compare people to.
And that's the challenge of the deterministic argument.
We are just physics.
Everything has an antecedent cause but you only ever debate with human beings.
That's a strange argument.
I don't understand where you're going with that.
Of course, because human beings are the only ones that debate back.
The whole idea of a debate is you talk and they talk and you differ on opinions.
But they say that you debate back like two television sets pointed at each other.
It's all prescripted.
There's nothing new that can come in.
Everything has a prior course based on physics.
That's what people who believe that there is no free will say.
That's what you're saying.
Yeah.
But I don't debate with the TV.
I know that the TV is going to – I mean there are idiots who yell at movies, but they don't imagine it's going to change it.
But isn't that whole debate in and of itself, isn't that whole debate just an exchange of information and an exchange in a controlled system, the system of the human race?
But you debate with someone to change their mind, right?
Well, I think ultimately all human beings are trying to accelerate growth, whether it's financial growth, intellectual growth, technological innovation.
I think we're constantly trying to grow and expand things.
We also fundamentally know that we are imperfect.
So we will either argue our position or try to learn.
One of those two things, either try to reinforce ourselves on our own decisions as opposed to your decisions.
Jesus is the Lord and you are incorrect, sir, with your Satan, Satan, Satan song that you teach to your daughter.
What is that about?
Well, that is about two organisms inside of a system that agree upon a dictionary and a vocabulary and definitions for things, and they're arguing about whose path is a better path.
But ultimately, all of them are trying to be better.
All of them are trying to improve, and there's no real set...
how to live correctly.
There's no, no one can really prove to you that it's better to be an atheist than it is to be a Christian, or it's better to be a person who likes to exercise than it is to be a guy who sits on the couch.
You sort of have to figure it all out for yourself.
And along the way, you want to justify your own actions and your own decisions by arguing and by, by trying to debate.
So in a sense, like saying that humans only argue with humans, that doesn't really negate the idea that there is no free will.
In fact, it might actually support it by showing the whole thing is just a system and it is just a mathematical algorithm.
And inside that algorithm is a thing called ego.
And ego is the thing that wants you to be correct and wants you to learn and wants you to improve and wants you also to assert dominance and perhaps sexual preference over those around you by showing how clever you can turn a phrase and how easily you can diffuse someone and make them look foolish in front of the rest of the group.
You know, All these things are perhaps just more evidence that there is no free will.
I mean I'm obviously playing devil's advocate a bit here but I think inside that controlled system I think it is possible that that could be an argument.
Let's go because you said something that It's really, really important that I would like to challenge.
Maybe it's successful or not.
But you said nobody can say whether it's better to believe in a deity or not believe in a deity and so on, right?
What I mean by that is that you can't tell someone who's happy being a Christian that it's better to be an atheist.
They're not going to believe you. Because let's say that they go into atheism.
It's going to cause problems in their family relationships.
It's going to cause problems in their community.
It's going to cause problems in their church, and then they get hit by a bus.
They die unhappy and alone.
I have friends who are Mormons for the longest time, and then in their 40s, they abandon it.
That's rough. They are – But I would make the case.
Nietzsche, the 19th century sort of philosopher, sort of guy who wrote great aphorisms.
But he said that Socrates' basic argument was reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
So if you want to be happy, you have to be virtuous.
How are you virtuous?
You have to have consistent principles, consistent principles.
And there's some support in psychology for this in that if you have opposing ideas within your own mind, Or if you have feelings that say one thing but your intellect says another, then you are going to be unhappy.
Or another way of putting it is to say that all psychological dysfunction results from unacknowledged suffering.
And so for instance, like so some people, you know, they're beaten up by their parents, but they're told by their church, honor thy mother and thy father.
So they've got this idea, this ideal, honor thy mother and thy father, but they have an emotional response of outrage at having been abused or neglected or whatever.
These are contradictions.
You've got an ideal that tells you one thing in your heart and your monkey spleen telling you something else, that if you aggress against an animal, it's going to react in a negative or hostile way.
And so when you have contradictions in your mind, that is going to produce dysfunction in your life, unhappiness in your life.
And so one of the purposes of philosophy is to say, okay, we've got some basic principles.
Let's keep rolling them forward and try and live as consistently as possible.
Like if we used opposite words for things half the time, it would be impossible to communicate.
We have to have consistency in our language to a large degree, not perfectly of course.
We have to have consistency in our language to be good at communicating, to have any possibility of communicating effectively.
And the degree to which we can have consistency in our thinking – in other words, we don't have contradictions.
We don't have a value here like don't hit your wife and then a value here which says hit your children.
That's going to produce contradictions and suffering and problems.
And so the more consistent your thinking is, the greater chance you have to be happy.
And in the same way, like if you have a consistent methodology for examining the universe like science, you're going to get a lot further than reading chicken entrails or praying to some non-existent deity.
You're actually going to have a way of organizing your knowledge about the world to create computers and rocket ships and cars and all that kind of stuff.
And so the idea is that the more consistent you're thinking, the greater chance you have for happiness.
Now, that doesn't always mean that you'll achieve it because if you're… It's a great statement though, the way you're saying it, the greater chance you'll have for happiness.
Nobody can guarantee anyone happiness, right?
And in fact, if you've grown up in an irrational culture, and culture sort of by definition is irrational because if it's not culture, it's science or math or logic or something like that.
Then when you achieve the goal of reason and you start working out your beliefs from first principles and being good at philosophy puts you in a lot of conflict with people around you.
And of course, a lot of power structures fundamentally, I think, live or feed off unacknowledged contradictions.
So for me to use force to take someone else's property is theft.
For the government to do it is called taxation and considered a virtue.
So there's all these contradictions and definitions that we have.
We hit wives, it's called abuse.
We hit children, it's called discipline.
We just redefine things all the time based upon emotional preferences and prior trauma.
And what philosophy does is it says, well, we've got to resolve this stuff.
We can't just have these little beliefs floating around unattached to each other.
We need a consistent way of organizing our minds and our values and our decisions and all of that stuff.
We can't just make up different values based on the circumstances with the idea being that the more consistent you are, the happier you'll be.
I definitely think that the less contradiction you have in your mind, the happier you'll be.
And it's really hard for a lot of people to eliminate contradiction because they've made so many rationalizations about their actions.
They've made so many rationalizations at the past in order to shield themselves from the sting of that corrective, the need to correct behavior, need to correct some of the things that you've done.
That sting is very difficult for a lot of people to deal with.
So they justify or they'll argue louder.
I've got a whole series on YouTube called The Bomb and the Brain, which is fdrurl.com forward slash b-i-b.
There's huge amounts of science that really establish how people argue.
How people argue is you get an emotional trigger, like right deep down in the base of your brain, right?
Like where we don't know anything about civilization, right down in the base of our brain.
You get a fight or flight response.
And what happens then is...
ex post facto justification, right?
After the fact, you have an emotional response and then people come up with some, frankly, bullshit, some polysyllabic bullshit to justify their emotional reaction.
And they've actually done studies, amazing stuff, where they give people a moral position and they say, do you believe in this?
And then people say, yes, and they will give you great arguments as to why.
Wow. So it says, I oppose abortion.
And people say, well, here's all the reasons I oppose abortion.
They close the book. They talk to them about something else for 15 minutes.
They say, oh, we didn't get the recording right.
Can you open it? And then it says, now I oppose abortion.
And the majority of people, like two-thirds of people, will give you great arguments for both and not notice the contradiction.
So that seems to be the key to – Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I had an argument with a dude about recent findings about the Yeti.
They've found that there is this thing that they thought was a Yeti may very well be an ancient bear or at least the DNA from an ancient bear.
We have a theme. You know that, right?
It's like the bear show. The bear show.
This is because we're just like bears.
We're going to walk out of this room and just be mauled.
Some freak escape from the zoo thing.
This is going to be a hugely ironic podcast.
What was fascinating to me in the middle of this heated argument was not that this guy disagreed with my thoughts that...
This whole thing was probably a big misunderstanding and there's probably some strange looking bear.
But it was how aggressive someone would get about a fucking Yeti.
You're raising your voice and you're getting shitty and real snipey.
This is not the way you should get ever with your friends and you're getting this over a fucking Yeti.
Yeah. If it's over the ethics of violence or something, that's at least an important topic.
But whether there's Bigfoot or not?
Well, not only that. It was over fucking DNA evidence.
I mean this is all pretty straightforward stuff.
Like they found that there's some – what they thought was extinct polar bear, some hybrid type of polar bear.
They thought it was extinct for 40,000 plus years and they've got DNA that came from something that was killed a long time ago.
I think it was in the 1900s or something.
And they say, oh, well, this thing matches up with this DNA. What we might be dealing with when these people are seeing Yetis is actually just polar bears.
It's really simple. It's just an idea and it's just – I didn't do the fucking research.
He didn't do the fucking research.
So like getting upset about it is so weird.
But that's what it is.
It triggers that fight or flight thing and then once they realize they're in some sort of a debate and perhaps… Perhaps they don't engage in enough competition.
Perhaps they don't engage in enough athletic endeavors where they strain their body and get rid of some of that fucking monkey juice.
And get used to failure. And get used to losing.
That's another thing. Some people do not like to lose at anything.
Like they won't even – they won't bowl because if they lose, they get sick.
They won't play checkers.
They won't do anything. But that's – I mean isn't that always just childhood stuff, Joe?
I mean isn't that just people – They don't like to admit that they're wrong because whenever they would admit that they're wrong, they would be mocked or humiliated.
That happens in school all the time.
Like I had a guy, a friend of mine in junior high school, we were in science class and he used the word orgasm instead of organism.
I don't even remember the sentence, which is a shame because I bet you it was a really great sentence because anytime you put the word orgasm into a sentence inadvertently, It's funny.
Yeah. I think it's premature elaboration is the phrase.
But anytime you do that, it's funny.
But literally for the whole year, he was the cum guy.
Like he was the orgasm guy.
And it's like how comfortable do you feel making stupid mistakes like that if that is the environment that you're in?
Then you're just not going to – like families will so often stereotype people.
Like you drop three plates and then for the next 50 years, you're the clumsy one.
And then you become paranoid about all this kind of stuff.
Yes. And it becomes something that's in the forefront of your mind.
Don't drop the plates. Don't drop the plates.
And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because then people don't remember the million times you carried a plate successfully.
But 20 years later, you drop a plate.
Oh, well, he's a clumsy one.
And people hate being – I hate being stereotyped like that.
And if you carry that idea in your head, it does create weight and it gets momentum behind it.
It's with everything. Like, if you're playing basketball, don't miss a shot, don't miss a shot.
What are you thinking about? You're thinking about missing the shot.
You don't even think about making it.
You're thinking about missing it more than you're thinking about making it.
You're feeling the failure already before you've even attempted it because it's become a predominant pattern in your way of thinking.
Yeah. Yeah, and wouldn't, I mean, I'd love to know, you know, like the twins experiment and so on.
I would love to know Which parts of me are me and which part of me are environment or which part of me are genetics?
Like, put me somewhere else.
It's indistinguishable. I know. I mean, wouldn't that be fascinating?
It would be, but it's not.
I mean, you are a series of events that have taken place over 46 years of life and 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year and just so much.
There's so many calculations.
And here's an interesting question to you because you...
Predominantly ply your trade on the internet.
How much of an impact has the internet had on who you are as a person?
Just the free-flowing of information over the last 20 years, since we're the same age, thinking of 94-ish, where it really popped out, how much of an impact has it had on you?
Oh, it's... No, it is – if I were to look at – I mean other than learning how to read, it's the biggest influence and impact.
I mean I'm only able to do what I do because of the internet.
Because the gatekeepers are gone.
Like we can talk to people without gatekeepers.
That is – like the last time this happened in such a fundamental way was like in the 16th century when Martin Luther – They translated the Bible from Latin to the vernacular, and then people got to get their hands on the Bible.
Whereas before, it was all done in Latin, and nobody knew what the hell was going on other than what the priests told them.
They got a hold of the Bible, and basically the text could speak directly to the people and didn't have to go through it gatekeepers anymore.
The unfortunate result of that was a couple of hundred years of religious warfare, which then again culminated in the separation of church and state because they just were killing each other.
And Lutheranism. Yeah, and Lutheranism and Zwingaliism and Calvinism and Anabaptism and all that kind of stuff.
Anabaptism where you have to have an adult baptism.
Do you know how they dealt with this in Germany?
Oh, you're an Anabaptist.
We'll drown you because you're just into adult baptism.
I mean, it was just brutal. One of the reasons that the Nazis had such power was that Germany missed the whole Enlightenment because they were just so embroiled in religious warfare.
I mean, there's travelers who went through Germany in the 17th and 18th century and said you could barely see a tree without the fruit of a hanging person on it.
I mean, it was that insanely violent a society based upon religious dogma.
And so Nazism is like this weird medievalism that made it through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Germany and then had the power of the 20th century technology with all the brutality of medieval parenting and brutalities.
So anyway. That's where a lot of the strict discipline as well, the military discipline, the goose-stepping, all that came from.
Oh, and Hitler's screaming. Alice Miller has written great stuff about this.
Like Hitler was beaten so badly, he actually went into a coma once.
He was beaten so badly.
I mean he was just so – And the kids, they would hang their babies on hooks, swathed in bandages that often would have lice in them.
Then the lice would crawl all over the baby's skin and lay eggs.
And so when he referred to the Jews as lice, it connected with something so primal in the German psyche.
And I tell you this, though, the Germans learned an incredible lesson from that.
My mom is German, and when I grew up, My cousins would come to visit from Germany.
And of course, we were idiot warmonger British boys because we won the war, right?
Which meant we lost to socialism.
But we won the war.
And so we were all playing war games.
And my German friends' cousins would come over and they'd say, well, we're not allowed to play with guns.
We're not allowed to do any of that stuff.
Because they did finally get – I hope we get this before some other stupid cataclysm on the planet.
They finally got that they needed to change their parenting if they didn't want this crazy stuff to continue.
There's a book I'm reading. It's an audiobook by Lloyd DeMoss called The Origins of War in Child Abuse.
It's actually available for free at freedominradio.com.
Where he says basically if you want to know where war comes from, you have to focus on child abuse.
That is where all of this stuff gets laid in.
And this is – you can – they've done a huge number of studies.
Robin Grills has written a book called Parenting for a Peaceful World where he traces – you can tell how quickly democracy comes to a country by how the prevalent spanking is.
I mean there's incredible things.
Like all politics to me is an effect of – I think that's one of the reasons why I continue to focus on this.
You started with the question about the internet.
Being able to talk directly to people without gatekeepers is...
An incredible experience and is the greatest leap forward, I think, in human communication.
And the possibility of virtue, I think, is unbelievably enhanced by this.
I agree with you. And I also agree with you that I am unrecognizable to myself of the past because of the internet.
And I think my understanding… Tell me.
I mean, you've got one of the biggest shows around.
I mean, would that have happened without… No.
I mean no.
It's impossible. It would have never happened.
I would have never been able to do this.
I would have been fired a long time ago.
There's no way I would have been able to do any of the things that I've done online with some sort of a company backing it and saying this is a good idea.
No one would have said it's a good idea.
No publicist would have said it's a good idea to say the things I've said.
No agent would have advised me to move in that direction.
It wouldn't have happened. It happened naturally.
It happened on its own. But I think that the biggest impact for me is not that I've been able to express myself, but that other people have been able to send me information and express themselves to me.
The impact of being able to share information online, store even wrong things.
There's a video that went around that has gotten massive traction over the past few days.
It was a man who Who was on the news and didn't know the camera was on.
Didn't know that his microphone was on.
He was talking about a missing girl.
And he was saying, you know, that, hey, if he finds her, I would fuck her.
I'd fuck her right in her pussy hole.
But it was fake.
And then you see the newscaster go, we're sorry for that unfortunate thing.
But that newscaster was from a previous thing where a woman didn't know that her microphone was on and dropped an F-bomb.
Just said, fuck. Oh, fuck.
And I'm sorry. Ladies and gentlemen, we're having some editorial.
We were very sorry that we had editing issues.
Very sorry you had to hear that.
Well, this video has gone viral and it's millions and millions of hits.
I can't tell you how many people send it to me on Twitter.
But within a couple of days, it resolves itself and people realize, oh, it's just bullshit.
Okay, here we go. So wait, how is it fake?
Was it fake? It's just an actor.
Some guy pretended and spliced it in.
He put his footage of him saying this horrible thing.
But it wasn't really a missing girl.
It was all fake. And there's a fake Fox broadcast label and all that jazz.
But it gets exposed. It does get exposed.
And that's what's unique about the times.
And it's also that something can just spread.
It just has to be impactful and interesting, whether good or bad.
I mean, there's this incredible thing which is happening in America as well where you can actually see bodies of imperialism.
You can go online and you can see the bodies of the Iraqis or the bodies of the Afghanis or whatever.
That's unprecedented. I mean, you never get that through the media.
Well, not only that, it was made illegal.
Through the Bush administration in the United States, you couldn't show coffins.
You couldn't show the coffins, let alone the victims of the imperialism.
And the media, I mean, there's no law that says you can't show Iraqi victims of the war, which there are over a million.
But nonetheless, you will not get this through the mainstream media.
You'll see the pictures of the guys who died, which is also a great tragedy, the American soldiers who died.
But you can't see this.
And you can't find out the basic fact that there has been so much radiation damage done to the Iraqis, particularly in Fallujah, that up to a third of children are being born with birth defects.
That people who've gone to study Iraqi cities where these depleted uranium shells have been used say that they've never seen a more genetically compromised, genetically ruined population the whole world over.
And the fact that this information is available at the click of a button to me means that people no longer have the excuse of having been propagandized.
You know, some poor bastard who was in Stalinist Russia, you know, in the 1950s, you know, OK, be a communist or go to the gulag.
You know, that's your choice.
So he's a communist, but you don't say you're a communist by choice then.
It's just like the way you – it's like you're in the Hitler Youth.
You're a Nazi. But you're not a bad kid because you're a Nazi.
That's just what you have to do to survive in the culture.
But now that information is so available, nobody can claim anymore, at least in the West, that they didn't know.
Because it's so immediately available to everyone at all times that if you don't know now, it is an act of choice.
It is not the result of propaganda.
I have a lot more sympathy.
Like a woman called in my show the other day and she said, you know, my dad beat me and my mom didn't do anything about it.
And her mom grew up under...
China, under Mao and the Cultural Revolution, where people were dropping like flies every time they batted their eyelids wrong.
There's a great story in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag, Apikalago, where some minor party functionary is given a speech, and everyone gets up and is applauding.
And they're all so terrified of being the first person to stop applauding that they just keep applauding and keep applauding until their hands look like hamburgers and they can't even – like it's so incredible.
But nobody wants to stop because the first person who stops is our comrade.
You seem to be less enthusiastic and they're just terrified.
This is the world that some people live in.
We don't have that world here in the West and we have access to every kind of information, opposing viewpoints.
You can go on to Al Jazeera.
You can find out. What American imperialism or British imperialism looks like or even Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan looks like from the other side.
So there's a great ripping away of the excuse of propaganda and ignorance and a great settling of moral responsibility on people.
Yeah, it's a very unique time as far as exposing evil and distributing information.
A very, very unique time.
I don't think there's ever been anything like it.
And I think you and I are both two perfect examples.
And also that we can find each other and be able to do this.
I mean, how would have this happened?
How would our friendship happen?
How would we have had these three-hour conversations?
Even if we didn't have podcasts and we got to meet each other, we'd have to agree to sit down and talk for three hours.
And then it's like, who would benefit from that?
You and I would certainly benefit from it.
We would enjoy it, but no one else would get it.
It's not like something that would just get out to millions and millions of people almost instantaneously.
Forever. And grow constantly.
Our last show went to number one on iTunes.
I was expecting that to happen because my rap sucks.
So it's really great that we're doing this because my music career remains stalled in the doldrums.
But I think that is an incredible opportunity.
It's like we got this – I do a lot of talk about Bitcoin and stuff like that where we have the opportunity to have a currency system not controlled by governments where there's ways of – I mean these things are just unbelievable opportunities for human communication that doesn't have to go through the prescribed channels and the prescribed gatekeepers and ways of exchanging value.
I mean, you can have an IPO. In Bitcoin, you can have an IPO and you can start a company without having to spend $4 million on all of the accountants and lawyers that are needed for an IPO in the West.
Things like that, just incredible because we have got to get faster at getting better as a species because our technology is going through the roof.
Human knowledge is doubling every 18 months.
Weapons that are inconceivable to even a generation or two ago are readily available.
And being printed on 3D printers.
Yeah, and surveillance technologies.
I mean, God, every time we come up with something good, the assholes take it and use it against us.
Doesn't that drive you crazy?
It's like every time you pull out a gun to fight the mugger, the mugger does like this and he has the gun.
It's like, damn it! Can't we have technology that isn't put to the service of assholes?
We have to get faster at getting better as a species because our technology is increasing to the point where if we don't get better quickly, I don't think we're going to have much luck staying free.
Well, I think we are getting better and I think it is – we are trying to catch up to this technological capability that we find ourselves in right now.
But I think we are.
I really do. I mean it's not just hollow optimism.
I really do believe that we are getting better.
I think that we're commenting on the fact that it's not perfect.
And I think everybody is.
And I think this Glenn Greenwald and all these different – Edward Snowden and those people exposing all of the hypocrisy in government and all the – all of that is working towards what ultimately will be a very unique time in history.
When they look back at this time, the birth of the internet will be by far one of the biggest events in the history of the human race.
And we'll look at all these different growing phases and all these different challenging events that happen and we won't see it as much because we're a part of it right now.
I think things are just changing.
People are more responsible for their actions.
People are more educated.
Information flows far more freely than ever before.
It's happening. It's all happening right now.
But I don't know about you.
I mean, I know that a lot of what you do is about getting information out to people and I think that's great.
I do also think that there's a lot of ethics behind what it is that you do because it's not like you get a whole bunch of KKK members on here proselytizing about white nationalism.
I think you try to get people with good and useful viewpoints, even if it's just mentally stimulating, that promotes virtue as well.
For me, I really feel...
I try not to let it make every day like a race against evil or something like that.
But the technology of control and surveillance and all of that is growing so quickly.
I really do feel like the same medium that can be capable of so much control and surveillance is also what we're using to communicate.
I feel quite a strong urgency that it's a race of us versus them.
And this is why I have like 3,000 shows.
I mean it's lunatic, right?
But I really do feel – because remember, freedom in radio, where quantity is quality.
But I really feel that this is important.
Well, you're selling yourself short. You have a lot to say.
I mean you could do 3,000 shows because you have 3,000 shows worth of things to say.
You're not trying to stuff in nonsense. Hopefully 3,001 was this.
Yes.
Because if this is the last show, we've got something to say on that.
No, we're good.
But do you feel that there is – I don't feel it's inevitable that the good people win.
I think that's a lot to do with really working at getting the message out.
I think there's a battle.
I think there always is.
And I think that battle exists because you need a yin to have a yang.
You need a push and a pull.
You need an evil and a good. You need an ideal to subscribe to or aspire to.
And you also need a really negative thing to avoid.
I've learned personally from the failures of other people and I think that's an important lesson.
You've learned from people who've gotten hooked on drugs.
I've learned from people who have ruined their life because of alcoholism or gambling or whatever the fuck it's been.
These are all there also as life lessons and it's a very, very, very, very fascinating trip that we're on.
I do have a sense of urgency but for the most part it's really a sense of stimulation, of excitement and of I like the fight.
Yes. I think that if I'd been born later, it wouldn't have been as much fun.
I like being in the fight where it is now because it seems so overwhelming.
I mean, what if we got two microphones and one bad haircut and one great polish?
We're in the craziest time that a human being has ever existed in.
And trying to figure, as far as like technology and information, trying to figure our way through this.
You're going to get these things like the NSA surveillance issue.
You're going to get that. When you find out that they're building this gigantic facility in Utah to store all the information, and slowly but surely it gets out.
They've already started doing it.
And then, you know, all of this exists because of capabilities.
They can turn your cell phone on remotely. I mean, isn't that insane?
They have 100% control of it.
They can turn your camera on.
They can turn your phone on. You don't even see it.
You don't even know it's on. It can be in sleep mode.
Amber Lyon told us that when she went to other countries, they wouldn't let anybody talk to them if they had an iPhone.
You had to have an Android or some other phone where they could remove the battery.
They wouldn't talk to you.
Wow. They were like, what do you think we're stupid?
Get that fucking crazy spy device out of here.
Like there's no such thing as an iPhone to them.
That's a spy device. You got to have a phone where you can remove the battery and sit down where we know that you're not transmitting this conversation to some nefarious source across the world, which is what they can do.
That is also a part of this weird thing that we're doing.
But ultimately, my thoughts are that if I look at the accountability, here's a perfect example.
Look at General Petraeus.
General Petraeus got caught and removed as the head spy from the CIA being investigated by the FBI. I mean the FBI found out that he was having this affair and all this jazz with the reporter, the woman who wrote the book about him.
But how did that happen?
It was cyber. It happened through the very thing that we're all scared of, where everyone is scared of someone being able to go into your email and find, oh, look, Stephen Molyneux, apparently he's gone to these communist meetings, and he wanted to find out what it's all about.
We have some information that maybe you've been thinking about overthrowing the government, and then, boom, you're in jail.
Like, look, I was just talking. These are theoretical ideas.
I'm an anarchist, but not really.
I'm not raising guns or anything.
This is what happened to the head spook.
Oh, yeah. No, when someone calls in my show and they say that their name's Jack, I don't say hi to them.
Really? I don't say hi, Jack.
Nope, nope. I say hi, listener.
No, because hi, Jack is...
Oh, hi, Jack. That's good.
You're going to get red flagged.
Yeah. No, and I still do it, but I'm conscious of the fact that when I say something is the bomb, this could be pink.
It could be flagged, and Microsoft and Skype are in deep with these guys, and It's – it is there.
I mean we do have to struggle through this stuff and I don't feel particularly concerned.
I think I've hit like with three or four million downloads a month.
I think I've hit enough trajectory that I just can't be targeted in that kind of way very easily anymore.
But yeah, definitely at the beginning, there was a little bit of, oh, I'm still pretty small.
But just also, you have the ability to be honest and express yourself.
You can't be silenced.
In the McCarthy era, how did you get your...
They came after you and said you were a communist and you got kicked out of whatever job you were doing.
What are you going to do? Are you going to start a blog?
What are you going to do? Are you going to get on fucking Twitter and explain yourself in 140 characters?
No, you couldn't do a damn thing.
Now, if you have a situation where perhaps maybe...
something comes out where you did say something that you regretted or you did do something in the past that maybe wasn't the best you could describe it in depth in a show own it and it wouldn't be it would be a complete non-issue and in fact you'd probably grow from this non-issue and the listeners would grow from the experience of hearing you honestly talk about whatever it is whether it's you know going to some fucking communist meeting i mean obviously that's not an issue now so i'm I'm giving McCarthyism terms.
But whatever it could be that would be something that they could hold over you, it doesn't matter anymore.
It almost doesn't matter.
And I believe that where this is heading is a time, whether it's a decade, two, three, what have you, where there are no secrets.
It's probably going to be some sort of a technological change in the way we exchange information.
Maybe it's some Google Glass thing that goes to the next level and becomes an implant or whatever the fuck it is.
I really don't think there's going to be any secrets.
I think we're going to laugh one day at the times we used to be able to lie to people.
We're going to laugh at the times you used to be able to tell people that you were going to go to some place, but really you went to some other place.
There's not going to be that anymore.
Your whereabouts will just be information, and it's easy to look as a Google search.
Well, I think that there's some real benefits to that.
Do you know that there's a whole bunch of lawyers who are now trying to subpoena the NSA for data that will exonerate their clients, hopefully, where they had cell phone records or something that will hopefully exonerate their clients and so on?
I mean, I personally would be more than willing to give up where I'm going and what I'm doing and so on to an organization that was actually there to sort of help and protect me.
I mean, I was just reading on the Drudge Report the other day.
I think it was the FBI or the CIA have just scrubbed from their mission plan anything to do with criminal – like pursuing criminals.
Now it's just been entirely basically protecting the powers that be.
That's so crazy.
Really?
It's natural though.
Just scrambling for control.
Well, look, the police have no duty to protect.
That's been shown many, many times.
You have no constitutional right to a jury before the trial of your peers because – what is it?
95 percent of people never get a jury trial in the United States because all they do is they get threatened with insane sentences and they just plea down.
I mean because there's just – you've no hope.
I mean they've even said that threatening someone with a life sentence for a minor transgression – But getting them to plea for something less while threatening them with a life sentence for a minor transgression of the law is not cruel and unusual punishment.
You can't bribe someone with 50 bucks in the legal system, but you can bribe them with reducing something from 20 years to two years, and somehow 18 years is not a bribe.
So there is no constitutional right to a trial.
There's almost nobody, particularly in drug stuff.
I mean, people just plea down and go to jail.
And a lot of these people are convicted on the hearsay of other people who themselves are giving up whoever they knew in order to get out of crazy jail time and so on.
So it is a monstrous system right now.
I mean, this comes back to the whole war on drug stuff, which is just so amazingly evil that it staggers the imagination.
I mean, I can't believe – and it's so fantastic that America is finally looking over to the example of Portugal.
Portugal 10 years ago decriminalized their drugs and now they have a 50 percent reduction in drug use and they actually get addicts' help.
Addicts should get help. It's a medical problem.
They need – let's say it's not medical that they got in there, but so what?
They're in there, right? I mean even drunk drivers need the jaws of life to get out of a car and they get these people the medical help they need.
They don't throw people in jail for personal consumption of mind-altering substances like TV isn't one of those.
And they actually get people help.
And now they're starting to get a couple of things here and there where you can go and buy this stuff legally and so on.
I mean, thank God.
I mean, I thought we were going to be so past what it used to be like before the war on drugs that people like at least with prohibition, it was only what, 13 or 14 years in the 30s with prohibition.
And even that brought organized crime over to America.
I thought we'd have this war on drugs for so long that people would have forgotten what it was like beforehand and it would have just gone on forever.
But it does look like there is going to be some relaxation of this stuff.
Some tentative steps are being taken towards it.
And my God, what an incredible thing that's happening because, I mean, the majority of people in prison are there for completely nonviolent offenses.
Do you know what they did in Colorado with the legal marijuana?
You're allowed to buy it and sell it retail?
Yvette was the first guy who bought, right?
Yes. Yvette was the first guy who bought.
And one day, they made over a million dollars.
The first day, 12 stores made over a million dollars in Colorado.
Wow. And by the way, that money is going to be taxed.
And it's going to be going back to the people.
And that's going to benefit people.
That stimulates the economy.
It's actually good. And it makes people nicer.
It's going to calm a lot of people down.
Well. Put people in a more sensitive mood.
So much. I mean, let's say you could just legalize all this stuff tomorrow.
What an incredible thing it would be.
First of all, there'd be less incentive.
One of the reasons people get hooked is because people offer them free drugs because it's so profitable once they are hooked.
It's also forbidden.
So it seems it's enticing.
One of the things about Holland that's been so fascinating is that their hard drug use is radically down because cannabis is so prevalent and accepted.
So I'm actually going to go speak in Amsterdam.
I'm speaking to this huge crowd in Amsterdam about cryptocurrencies in April.
Cryptocurrencies? Yeah, Bitcoin and stuff like that.
Why is that crypto? Oh, because it's encrypted.
It's anonymous. It's not open, clear text or whatever.
I thought it was like secret. Well, kind of secret, right?
In that you can't be identified if you take some basic steps in your economic transactions.
And what a blessing that is for a lot of people, even people who are doing the right stuff.
Like a third of the world's economy, a third of the whole world's economy is black or gray market.
It's huge. That's so crazy.
It is. When people find out that that was a major motivation for the Vietnam War, it's another thing you can find out on the internet today, is how much money was being made by selling heroin.
People don't even want to believe that.
They're like, oh, come on.
You really think that heroin had a lot to do with the Vietnam War?
For the people who were selling it, it certainly fucking did.
And those people made trillions of dollars.
Right. Like, what do you think?
Where did that all go? Did that all just disappear?
Did it turn into mist? Was it like the super soaker in the 41 below zero air?
What the fuck happened?
What happened to all that money? Like the poppies in Afghanistan.
Exactly. Do people think that the poppies in Afghanistan are completely irrelevant to the war?
It's not. I mean, anyway. Yeah, it's a fascinating subject because people automatically want to dismiss it because of the war on drugs and because it's not thought of as a commodity.
It's instead thought of as something that's illegal and just gross and like, oh, drugs, drugs, drugs.
Drugs are money and money is what everybody wants.
And these fucking people that are over there that are trying to extract resources, whether it's in the form of natural gas or whether it's in the form of oil, that same type of thinking, if you think that that same type of thinking doesn't agree or doesn't work in terms of like trying to make similar amounts of money from illegal drugs, you're crazy and it's so naive.
And drugs are a fantastic way to harass the population.
Because the whole idea behind common law is that the law is passive.
The law doesn't go out looking for problems.
If you come key my car, then I call up the cops.
And then, because you've done me wrong, the law leaps into action.
The law is never supposed to exist without a complaint.
And if you buy drugs from some guy and you like the drugs and he likes your money, there's no complaint.
But the law then becomes proactive and it goes out there looking for problems and nobody's complaining.
And that's when the law becomes tyrannical.
When the law is passive and just waits for a complaint and has clear rules, okay, that's a fairly good thing.
When the law goes from reactive to proactive and starts going out there to look, oh, prostitution, oh, gambling, oh, drugs, you know, this is all voluntary consensual stuff.
It may not be healthy in excess, but neither are cheesecakes.
Who gives a shit, right? Well, how about the fact that people are being arrested now for having secret compartments in their car?
Yeah, I read about that! Yeah, not even having drugs.
Having zero drugs, but having a secret compartment in their car, they can strip your car down, search it.
Even if they find nothing, they're not in trouble.
Well, and they get these stupid drug-sniffing dogs.
They're completely retarded. I mean, oh, did you find something, boy?
Oh, did you find something? The dog starts going like this because of the tone of voice of the cop, and they suddenly think that this is somehow some justification.
Well, they're actually very good at training dogs to find drugs.
But they can also be encouraged by the policeman who wants to harass someone, right?
They can be if they're trained poorly, but if they react in a very strong way, I mean, their sense of smell is impossible for us to even fathom.
I don't know how dogs put up with people.
Because we smell so bad?
Yeah. They've got to love us something fierce because we are skanky as hell.
We think of smell as a bad thing and they don't.
They sniff other dogs' shit.
It doesn't bother them.
Maybe that's why they love us is we smell like shit.
They like that. But dogs can actually smell cancer.
They can take vials. Yeah, they've trained dogs.
They've taken vials of tissue.
And have cancerous tissue in certain vials and had a whole row of many, many, many choices.
And the dog went down the row and went right to it over and over again.
So they can actually smell cancer on people.
They can smell sick people.
Wow. I didn't know that.
Yeah. We can't even – I mean they can smell fear.
They can smell adrenaline rushes.
They can smell when you're thinking about doing something.
There's a lot of reasons to have those senses, those senses of smell.
Yeah. I mean animals have them in a very, very strong way.
If animals smell you in the woods, they fucking run.
I mean they smell you.
They know your intentions almost.
I mean there's information that comes out of your scent that we just – our noses are stupid.
Our noses – oh, it's pot roast.
Oh, I smell gas.
Our noses are broken.
They're so clumsy.
A great analogy for how incompetent our noses are in comparison to a dog is skunks.
Because we can smell skunk scent in one part per billion.
We can smell skunk scent, a little bit of spray, way the fuck down the block.
And we'll be like, what is that?
That's how a dog is.
For everything.
A dog can smell everything like that.
They can smell all kinds of things and tiny amounts of it in the air.
And we can find people in the woods, man.
A guy runs through the woods.
And a dog knows where the guy went based on his body touching the ground in certain places.
Wow.
And it's your fucking shoe and your shoe...
How much scent is your shoe giving off?
But the dog can smell that and find you.
Would you... I've thought about this sometimes.
Like I was... I went to exercise before the show and so my wife was laying out some stuff because she has a better clothing sense.
I'd be here in like a mess t-shirt.
Like this? Yeah, something like that.
Caveman coffee. And I was thinking if you could like just – I don't know, like 10 seconds in someone else's consciousness.
Do you think that would be like the most – or 10 seconds in a dog's brain.
I think it would just be like if I could do that and come back and not be insane – Like, I think I, you know, we were talking about, I would totally do that.
Like, if I could sit there in my wife's brain for 10 seconds, or even half a day or whatever, I think that would be so amazing.
You know, to just, with her experiences different than mine, another species, I could love to be in a shark's brain, to be in a, I just, if I could do that and come back and not be completely mental, but still retain the memory of it, I don't know.
It's kind of an idle thought, but I think it would be really, really fascinating.
You know what they should do? If they do ever come up with that technology, they should force it on the people at SeaWorld and get a killer whale's mind and stick it in a person and have them realize.
Oh, I'd love to fucking bite that person's leg off. If I didn't like herring so much, you bastards!
Just what kind of torture they're existing in on a daily basis.
Yeah, make them. Make them do it and see if they come back and still want to run SeaWorld.
Oh, I don't know. Or zoos or anything like that.
Oh, but of course, zoos we have to have because it's the only place you'll let Komodo dragons exist, right?
That's it. Or some rich guy's yard.
Some rich guy's got a big fucking big fence.
With a big Komodo-sized barbecue there for special guests, right?
Well, that's my thoughts on animals.
I've always said I do love nature as much as you do.
I do respect nature.
I find it absolutely beautiful and fascinating, amazing.
And I talk... About wolves and bears and all this different shit, like as if I hate them all.
But I'm absolutely thrilled that they exist.
I find it amazing. But one of the things that people who are more interested in animals than they are people, I mean there's a lot of animal lovers that say just unbelievably ridiculous things sometimes.
Like we can't find cures for childhood cancers because of bunnies.
You can't test stuff on bunnies.
These are just people whose kids have never been sick.
I don't care how many bunnies it takes.
Sorry, I have a little bit more allegiance to the genetic closeness.
I think there is a bit too much that way.
Human life is still pretty significant relative to animals.
Well, yeah, I call it team people.
I'm on team people. I've always been on team people.
Team biped. Yeah, it doesn't mean I hate the other teams, but if the shit goes down, I'm with the people.
If rabbits start fucking running through the streets killing babies, I'm shooting rabbits.
Absolutely. I'm not going to say, well, you know, they were here first.
I think you should totally sell tickets to your dreams.
Because you know you're going to dream about that tonight.
Like you had that dream about giving roses to the guy.
Now you can have a dream about rabbits running through the streets killing people.
It's possible. Yeah. It's very possible.
Damn it. Bunnies.
Well, I've had many, many animal dreams.
I have a vast amount of respect for animals.
And I've also been around them.
I've seen a couple of mountain lions.
I've been around a lot of coyotes.
Coyotes are the creepiest fuckers ever.
You know, I was in my yard the other day, and I think it was a coyote.
Might have been a mountain lion, but something was chasing a deer.
And I just randomly happened to be there when it happened.
And this deer was fucking big.
You know, like, you know, maybe 100 plus pounds.
Whatever it was. Because I could hear it running.
And I'm outside. It's 2 o'clock in the morning.
I'm just chilling outside. And I just happened to be really close to this happening.
So this animal just fucking runs through the back of my yard.
Like white eyes and all that, yeah. I didn't see it.
I saw a silhouette because it was really dark out.
But it was fucking running and it was heavy.
And behind it was something chasing it.
Something trying to eat it. And I'm pretty sure it was a coyote.
And when I just feel that and hear that and know that, I find it thrilling, I find it fascinating, but I also find it quite terrifying.
That's the food chain. There's something about as big as me, and it's running away from something about as big as me.
Oh, yeah. I mean, if grass could make horror movies, they'd all be called the deer.
You know, the fucking cows, you know?
Ah, dude! He didn't even kill him.
He just bit the top of his head off.
Oh, that's bleeding and screaming.
Some ripped out by the roots.
Yeah. Monstrous.
Yeah. You're right. You're right.
100%. Listen, I think we're out of time.
I think we... We didn't do three hours, did we?
Yeah, we just crushed through it.
Yeah, we didn't talk about a lot of the things that I wanted to talk about.
Did that feel quick? It always feels quick, man.
Yeah. I keep telling, you know, as I tell my girlfriends, you know, it's longer than it feels.
These conversations are fascinating.
You know, they do feel quick.
They go by. But three hours seems to be the right amount.
You don't have any, like, chat room?
Because people are watching? They watch this live, right?
Yeah, this is live on Ustream right now.
Ustream... It's live right now, so there's a bunch of people watching it live.
More people will catch it on YouTube, but the most will see it either as an MP3. And they're going to say, like, relative to the last show, this has delicious, buttery audio.
Yeah, there's more deliciousness to it, for sure.
We had some caveman coffee with butter last time we were stuck in a hotel in Toronto.
Try it. And the stevia, too. Put in a pitch for the stevia, because that is like cocaine for my sweet tooth.
That is just fantastic. And it's not dangerous.
I mean, you need a tiny amount of it to sweeten things as well, and it doesn't spike your sugar.
It doesn't fuck with your insulin levels.
It's actually not bad for you.
Listen, man, we've got to do this more often.
I really enjoy this very much.
I'll be back here in March. Maybe we'll do another one.
Fuck yeah! Sit down, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you, sir. Really appreciate it.
Thank you so much. A lot of fun. Even more fun than the last one.
And you can catch Stefan online at freedomainradio.com.
And it's fdrurl.com forward slash iTunes for my feed.
And you might as well give my – I'm sure most of my listeners know your feed as well.
Free Domain Radio is your iTunes feed?
Yes. FDRURL.com forward slash Free Domain Radio will get people to the iTunes feed.
It's a redirect. And you have a vast amount of content out there.
Yeah, free books and all that sort of stuff.
So I hope people will check it out. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your Twitter is the same, Stefan Molyneux, right?
Just Free Domain Radio. But it's also Stefan Molyneux, right?
I think we have one, yeah. Yeah, you follow me, buddy.
I'm looking at you right now. So there's a Free Domain Radio one?
I will defer to what you're looking at on the screen.
That seems true. Is there a Free Domain Radio one as well?
I think there is, yeah. Mike is going to kill me if I get this wrong.
Oh, you have a guy that does it. Yeah, yeah, he does it.
I do all my Twitter shit.
So if you have a guy, that guy might get mad at you, put up dick pictures and shit.
No, just if I get the feed wrong, he's going to be like, I can't believe you do this in seven years and you can't give people your Twitter feed.
What the hell is wrong with you? If you can't spell Stefan Molyneux, I understand.
I'm sorry, I'm just pretty. M-O-L-Y-N-E-U-X. That's a crafty name, ladies and gentlemen.
It's an F, not a P-H. S-T-E-F, as in Frank A-N. Yeah, freedomainradio.com is where people should go.
They get free books and podcasts and no commercials and all that kind of stuff.
Alright, comedy-wise, I will be at the Stand Up Live in Phoenix this weekend with the lovely and talented Tom Segura.
Very excited about that.
And go see Joe Rogan.
You gave me tickets to the last live show.
It's gut-bustingly funny.
Thank you very much. You have to go.
It's incredible. It's like an ab workout.
You come out with tears in your eyes and ripples in your stomach.
I'm glad you had a good time, man.
Thanks to our sponsors as well.
Thank you to Lumosity, which is one of our favorite sponsors.
It is literally a gym online for your...
Fucking brain. Go there.
Check it out. Get in there.
It says, do not talk about any direct benefits you've experienced since playing Lumosity.
Hmm. Don't talk about direct benefits.
I won't talk about direct benefits.
But I'll tell you, I enjoy it.
I like it. It's also very easy to do and fun.
So go to Lumosity.com and enjoy the shit out of that, ladies and gentlemen.
What else can I tell you about Lumosity?
That's all I'm supposed to tell you, I think.
Squarespace.com is our favorite website when it comes to doing things like creating a website of your own online.
I do not think there is a better choice.
Squarespace.com They can create a real, you can create a really slick, professional-looking website for yourself.
You can do it all online.
Go to squarespace.com.
Enter in the code JOE and the number one.
That's JOE and the number one for the month of January.
And you will save 10% off your first purchase.
And we're also doing a contest at Squarespace.
So if you use the hashtag JRESquarespace and tweet them one of your websites, you can win some cool shit.
Thanks also to Onnit.com.
That's O-N-N-I-T. Makers of Alpha Brain and Shroom Tech Sport and all that goodness.
Go there. Use the code word ROGAN and save yourself 10% off any and all supplements.
Tomorrow we'll be back with author Scott Sigler.
Very cool guy and very interesting guy.
And it was fun talking to him the last time.
And then on Wednesday, Dr.
Mark Gordon is going to talk to us about traumatic brain injuries and hormones and all kinds of cool shit.
So we will see you soon.
Big love and big kiss.
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