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Jan. 11, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:55
Farewell to Neil Peart...
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Messages pouring in from friends and people who loved the band Rush.
I saw them three times.
A great show, great musicians, incredibly skilled.
I mean, seeing Geddy Lee with his foot pedal bass playing two keyboards and singing into three microphones all at the same time while demon-armed Neil Peart blisters up a staccato river dance drum beat of almost infinite complexity...
Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for Rush, died Tuesday, January the 7th.
It's now Friday the 10th.
I guess the news was kept quite quiet.
It's hit me pretty hard, as it's hit a lot of people pretty hard.
Which, you know, made some fantastic music.
Had been a little bit out of the limelight for some time, although they did do a tour, I think, in 2015.
But he died at the age of 67.
The cause was brain cancer.
I don't know if it's the same brain cancer as hit Gord Downie, maybe.
And Neil Peart had been battling this brain cancer, glioblastoma, for three and a half years, close to four years.
Now, of course... When the news came out Friday afternoon, fellow band members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson called Pert their friend, soul brother, and bandmate over 45 years.
Just think about a 45-year career of pounding the skins is incredible.
Said he had been incredibly brave in his battle with glioblastoma.
And he himself was influenced by, of course, some of the great jazz drummers.
He had significant influence on younger drummers and musicians, former police drummer Stuart Copeland.
Who I think later went into soundtracks, told Rolling Stone in 2015, Neil is the most air drum to drummer of all time.
Neil pushes that band, which has a lot of musicality, a lot of ideas crammed into every eight bars, but he keeps throb, which is the important thing, and he can do that all while doing all kinds of cool shit.
They finished their final tour rush in 2015 and, I mean, gosh, Neil Peart had some forms of arthritis.
He had shoulder problems.
He had a crippling foot infection that had him almost unable to walk.
And, you know, it's important to remember, man, drums are an incredibly demanding instrument to play.
There are stories, I think, of when Queen was touring Japan in the 70s that Their drummer, Roger Taylor, would say basically he just lazed around in the hotel room all day preparing for this marathon ordeal of drumming at night and that he would dread, you know, White Man or the hard rock songs that would come up because they were so physically taxing and physically demanding.
And it's brutal on the body and the fact that he made it into his 60s was incredible.
He wanted to spend more time with his wife and his second daughter.
The first daughter we'll get to is a really tragic story.
And you don't get to be a drummer of that power of flexibility and precision without being a perfectionist.
And if you can't...
So you know the gap between what you're capable of and what you're actually doing.
And that's why he finished in 2015 and was done with The Road and basically retired, like you said, like an athlete.
And again, to make it into your 60s as a drummer is amazing.
That kind of drummer. It's different if you're the sort of slow tap back of the Louis Armstrong drummer, but this kind of...
You know, he attacked the drums the way that the singer for Oasis attacked his songs with often difficult physical results.
So he recognized, Neil Peart recognized that he couldn't keep it up anymore, and he stopped.
And it's funny because, man, Geddy Lee, who, his name's Gary, he called himself Geddy because his heavily accented mother pronounced Gary as Geddy.
And so he was the son, Geddy Lee the singer and bassist and keyboardist.
Was the son of Holocaust survivors, actually, and he's an atheist like Neil Peart was.
I don't know about Alex Lifeson, but that atheism that really came of age in the 70s and 80s, a book that I read was given to me by the same fellow who introduced me to Rush and Ayn Rand called Atheism, The Case Against God, was very powerful, and that atheism introduced, I think, significantly by the left to take down barriers between atheism The leftist power lust and the Christianity that stood between them and political power.
That was very powerful.
Geddy Lee considered himself culturally Jewish or he referred to himself as racially Jewish rather than religious.
He's not religious at all and this is quite common among North American Jews, but the band was formed, I think, in 68, and the first album, the original drummer was John Ratzi, but he had to retire, or at least didn't want to do road tours because he had diabetes, and I guess it was pretty challenging.
And... They really did some wild stuff early on, sort of like Yes with the Fantasylands and the fantasy covers.
In 1976 they came out with the album 2112, and the entire first side is a rock opera set in 2112, and Neil Peart was significantly influenced by Ayn Rand and Objectivism.
And then later disavowed it to a large degree, called himself a bleeding-hot libertarian.
And I think in 2012, he endorsed the Democrat Party in the United States.
Neil Peart got American citizenship in the, I think, mid-2000s.
And they went full-on Tolkien, full-on objectivist, full-on Randy in many ways, full-on sci-fi.
And then there was 82 subdivisions, which was more of the personal challenge of growing up and the desire for conformity or the need for conformity and to be yourself.
Neil Peart was sort of famous.
He permed his hair, he wore big giant capes, and he got in trouble with a teacher for...
Fastidiously and perhaps OCD-style drumming on everything he'd get his hands on, so she forced him to sit and drum for an hour, at which point he recreated all of the drum riffs from the movie Tommy.
So, Neil Peart was a very literate man, a great lyricist.
Lyrics are very, very hard to write, and he was a great lyricist and wrote a number of books, in particular his His travels after the most unholy tragedies that can be imagined.
The guy's worth 42 million bucks, but none of that can buy back what happened.
So August 10, 1997, Bert's 19-year-old daughter, Selina, died In a single car accident on the long drive to her university in Toronto.
Now this is a mystery, and I don't know what happened to it, and if you know, please let me know in the comments below.
But this was like, I think about 1, 1.15 p.m.
in the afternoon on a Sunday.
She's driving.
There's no traffic.
I don't know if there was any bad weather.
But a single car accident means that she had, I think, a 97 Jeep.
She drove off the road, the car flipped a number of times, and she died.
I don't know if any substances were involved.
I don't know if there was suicidality.
I don't know anything to do with that.
There was an investigation, but I couldn't find any of the results.
That is, and she was, of course, it makes me emotional because I have an only daughter.
So this girl, Selina, was their only daughter.
She was studying graphics design and she drove her car off the road.
It flipped and she died. Terrible, horrifying enough.
Five months later, Selina's mother, this was Neil Peart's common-law wife, who he'd been with for 23 years, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
And she did not last, I think, even a year.
And she succumbed.
Actually, no, I think it was a year.
No, she died less than a year after her daughter died.
And whether that shock and the cortisol and the stress and the horror and the nihilism that comes along with that...
See, there's no word for people who lose their children.
Like, you lose your parents, you're an orphan.
If you lose your spouse, you're a widow.
But there's no word for people who lose their children and it is to have to bury your own child.
It's something I can't even...
I can't even imagine just how terrible and terrifying that is.
You know, Neil Peart's out there driving around.
He drove like 50,000 miles on his motorcycle.
He did a lot of trips. I think he did a cycling trip in Africa.
He did endless trips on his motorcycle.
I guess fleeing the Grim Reaper.
And said that, you know, he would see old people and realize that he would never be a...
A grandfather, because, you know, he would burst into tears based on that, which, again, completely understandable.
So, Neil Peart remarried in 2000, and then in 2001 went back to Rush.
They did produce some more albums.
Geddy Lee put out a solo album in 2000 called My Favorite Headache, I think.
It's a very odd name for an album, but...
The highlight of their creativity, you know, they're very similar to the band Yes, not just because no sane mortal human being can sing along with that without his balls and a vice because John Anderson And Geddy Lee both have this squeaky hobbit countertenor.
Well, Geddy Lee's is more piercing and shrieky, and John Anderson is a warmer form of almost a countertenor.
But yeah, it's really, really tough.
You know, New World Man, you can get perhaps subdivisions you can get.
Red Barchetta, you can't get it all.
Again, unless you repeatedly punch yourself in the nets.
And Ugedi's, of course, vocal range diminished enormously over time.
It's interesting because when you had to fill a club without a lot of amplification, deeper voices were more popular, the sort of baritones of Sinatra.
When high voices plus amplification had to fill stadiums, I remember going to see Billy Idol, and it was tough for him to fill, because the higher voices, the more piercing tenor voices, or even counter-tenor voices, or alto, I think Geddy Lee got up to, they can really fill a stadium much better with electrical amplification.
So it's a...
The Creative Peak had a lot of musical card deck shuffle, as in, it's like, if you listen to I've Seen All Good People by Yes, or you listen to Roundabout to some degree, but if you listen to Yes songs...
Yours is No Disgrace and Long Distance...
Well, then what happens is they're constantly changing tone and tempo.
That happened even later in their songs.
Tiqua does that as well.
It's sort of a semi-reggae inspired song.
And this constant shifting of speed, of tone, of musical style characterized, yes, characterized Rush, at least a lot of their songs.
And it's funny because Rush, they did a parody song with Bob and Doug McKenzie, two comedians, and it was their only song, I think, to crack the top 50, even though it was just a complete parody song, because their other songs usually weren't quite as commercially valuable.
And... That kind of virtuosity where you're changing tempo and speeds and styles rapid-fire throughout a song has largely gone by the wayside.
Queen did it to some degree, well, King Crimson to some degree, and Rush and Yes to a large degree.
That nimble change throughout songs has really gone by the wayside.
Led Zeppelin did it to some degree as well.
I miss it. I miss it.
I'm really torn because I love the music of my youth, but I find it very painful to listen to sometimes.
The reasons I'll get into later.
So that's sort of some of the news and the weather about it.
And I know why it's hitting me as it's hitting other people.
But let me just get a couple of thoughts out of the way first.
So first and foremost, I... I don't like...
I really don't like it when people say, the cause was brain cancer, which Pert had been quietly battling for three and a half years.
You know, he battled cancer.
He finally succumbed to cancer.
The cancer won and so on.
I mean, other than being healthy and trying to keep a positive attitude, being healthy beforehand and trying to keep a positive attitude about it, I gotta tell you straight up, you don't fucking battle cancer.
You... Keep your spirits up.
You succumb to your treatment.
And you cross your fingers like hell.
I was diagnosed shortly after my daughter was born.
Well, a couple of years after my daughter was born with lymphoma.
And I took the treatment.
And I crossed my fingers.
And I tried to stay positive.
And I did. And you hope like hell.
It's not a battle. Like you're fighting a mountain lion where you have some control over it.
There are so many variables in cancer, which is a multi-variant disease, that I don't like it because it's like, well, you fight and then you give up, or you fight and then you lose.
And I said this at the time, I don't like this phraseology because for people who succumb quickly...
Now, he said this about his wife.
He said that after their daughter died, or his common-law wife, after their daughter died in this terrible car crash, He said that his wife basically just gave up and succumbed to the disease out of a kind of nihilism.
Maybe there's truth to that, but I do think that there's so much with cancer that's out of people's control.
I mean, the brain cancer that he had kind of seeps into your brain so they can cut it out, but they can't cut out your brain.
Well, I guess they can, but then...
Well, I'm not going to make a joke about voting for the left.
It's a bit more serious than that, although that's pretty damn serious.
I just don't like this, because it indicates that some people fight and win and some people lose, and I was bloody lucky, and his wife was unlucky, and he had it hard.
I mean, three and a half years with that kind of brain cancer is incredible.
So, why is it hard to listen to this kind of music from my youth?
When I was young, I suffered enormously at home.
I was incredibly bored and alienated at school.
But I held out and pursued a giant supernova, fiery globe of hope that all of the rational capacities that I was developing, all of the arguments, all of the empiricism, all of the syllogisms that I was developing, That there was going to be a place where I could stand astride the world and bark out my barbaric syllogisms from the rooftop of the world and change things.
And I didn't imagine that this was going to be just me.
I thought it would be a much larger movement.
I thought that there would be a real battle between light and darkness, between reason and sophistry, between rationality and subjectivism.
I... Really thought that I would be striding like a colossus into the arena of society and doing battle with the black forces of anti-rationality.
But that's not really how it plays out.
That's not really how it's played out.
And that's been really heartbreaking.
That's been really heartbreaking. There's a scene in the original Matrix where the white-haired girl who considers herself a warrior, she is a warrior, And she just gets unplugged.
And she says, no, not like this.
In other words, I'm not going to end like this.
And then she just, there's no fight.
She just gets unplugged.
Well, this is the deplatforming.
This is the demonetization. This is all of that stuff.
It's not a fair fight.
You imagine that you're going to go in the ring and you train and you're going to go up against some particular enemy, a black knight or George Foreman in his prime or whatever you want to call it.
And then... There's supposed to be this big prize fight that you've trained for 10 years or 20 years to win.
But it never really comes to pass.
Because you get slipped a mickey, you get drugged, you pass out, and you wake up in an alley two days after the fight and you lost by default.
You train for a long time and there's no clean fight.
It turns out maybe even that it was your trainer or your friends or somebody in league with the enemy who slipped you the mickey, who drugged you, who lost by default because no one could find you.
And you just, you never have the fight.
You vanish from the fight and you lose by default and that's kind of, to some degree, what's happening with social media these days.
So when I listen to that music and I listen to some music, some Rush tonight, And it was very bittersweet.
Of course, there is the mortality aspect that the people who seemed young when you were even younger are now dead, and that's just fewer people between you and the end.
But it is a sad thing because when I go back in time and I remember the hope and the energy in which I flung myself into the development of my faculties and capacities as a teenager, as a young man, Even up until relatively recently,
in what I do here, I see a savage and blistering rocket sled of optimism that people will hear reason, they will listen to reason, they will adhere to reason, and you will have a voice, in particular in the early days of social media, when you could say What was important without fear of vanishing?
That there's an undo spell that certain words will just have you vanish from the human conversation.
So it's kind of painful.
It's kind of painful. I am also, I don't know, I'm quite concerned I suppose about the fetishization of talent I've done this myself.
I mean, I like to sing, and in particular, there are singers who can just do the most astounding things vocally.
And, you know, they're born with that.
And most of them don't take singing lessons, certainly the rock and pop singers.
And this...
I remember a friend of mine once said when I was admiring a particular singer, he said, he was just born with that voice.
Like, how could you really admire it?
It's like admiring someone for being really, really tall.
It's a good point. Neil Peart took piano lessons.
He didn't care. He tried some other instruments.
He didn't care. And then his parents noticed him just incessantly, perpetually drumming.
So it's kind of built in. It's kind of inborn.
They bought him a drum set when he was 13, and they said, if you...
Can keep this up for a year?
They bought him a little drum set.
And then they said, listen, if you can keep this up for a year, if you stay interested in a year, we will get you a full drum kit.
And he did. And he started taking lessons.
And then he went to England for 18 months to try and get a professional career going.
It didn't work. He did some local bands.
He ended up selling diesel parts or tractor parts with his dad for a while until he auditioned for...
Rush. And when he went to audition for Rush, he showed up in shorts.
He thought the audition went really terribly.
And he got along with Geddy Lee, though not so much with Alex Lifeson.
But they ended up taking him.
Just two weeks before, they toured and started opening for much bigger bands.
And... Was it Moth the Hoople?
Uriah Heep? I can't remember. 11,000 people to go from almost nothing to 11,000 people.
This fetishization of talent is...
A real problem. I think it distances us.
You know, we call them rock gods.
They're so phenomenally talented that they almost seem like another species.
And I think it's a way of distancing ourselves from our own potential.
Because we can all achieve virtue, we can all achieve goodness, we can all be honest, we can all live with integrity, but we can't all have the inbuilt natural rhythm, the fast flex muscles, the physical stamina, the dedication, the interest, the fascination, the innate ability to be someone like Neil Peart.
We can't. And worshipping that level of talent, I think, which we can't achieve.
You know, I mean, there's a reason why he's considered what after John Bonham and Keith Moon Like the third greatest rock drummer or whatever.
But there's a reason. That's three out of, you know, how many bands are there.
Well, just play that. You ever play that game where, you know, it's first letter or last letter.
You say, oh, the band is ABC. Oh, the next band is The Cars.
Oh, the next band is Steppenwolf.
Oh, the next band is The Fugees.
So, like, you know, you just go first and last letter.
Bands and bands and bands.
That's just the ones we know.
And all the people who've tried and all of the people who've failed.
You know, millions and millions of drummers in the world.
What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?
Homeless. So, all the drummers in the world, he's number three, or however you want to rank it.
I'm number one for many people, and he certainly had a longer career than those guys.
But... You can't reproduce that.
You can't be that. You can worship it as a sort of stellar talent, but I wonder if it makes us feel small.
I wonder if it makes us feel diminished.
I wonder if it gets us off the hook to worship people that much.
So, with regards to integrity, you know, he wrote a lot about integrity, Neil Peart, and not compromising.
And the New World Man and all that.
The same cynical guy who had great musical talent but was too cynical to succeed.
There was a place we used to drive by called New World Kitchen.
And, you know, occasionally he would just burst into song.
A really nice singing voice.
I envied it at the time.
He would burst into a song. It's a new world kitchen.
And, again, I remember that danger of cynicism.
Boy, cynicism undoes and undermines so much talent.
It's like a scything devil that undercuts potential.
But integrity.
Did he have integrity?
Well... He accepted objectivism, which is reason, self-esteem, capitalism.
Ayn Rand was once asked to define objectivism while standing on one foot.
She stood on one foot and said, reason.
Well, reason, morality, capitalism.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was...
Reason, objectivity, capitalism, something like that.
But, you know, the sort of major principles, the objective...
Existence exists was the sort of foundational axiom that the world exists outside your consciousness and reason is your best tool for comprehending it.
And individualism is the inevitable result of the sovereignty of our own reason relative to objective reality.
Reason, individualism, capitalism.
Reason, individualism, capitalism.
Sorry, it's been like 30 years since I've read it.
So, okay, so Neil Peart writes about that and does spread objectivism to a lot of people, myself included.
And then later, he's like, oh no, that was like 40 years ago.
That was just youthful enthusiasm, blah, blah.
He's outgrown it. Okay, but what does that even mean?
How do you outgrow something you can't disprove?
That's what's so frustrating about this, oh, well, yes, when I was younger.
How do you outgrow what you can't disprove?
It's like saying I've outgrown gravity, or I've outgrown the need to be rational, or I've outgrown science.
I mean, if you can't disprove it, you can't outgrow it.
And this is really frustrating. I remember standing in a balcony, standing on a balcony with a friend of mine, a great friend of mine, who now teaches econ.
He is the guy who introduced me to objectivism.
This is when I was still 100% objectivist.
I'm still 90% objectivist, but I guess the ethics and politics I've altered on.
I mean, I won't say I've outgrown.
Yeah, I think I've disproven those things.
I hadn't asked him about objectivism in years, and I was really, really scared to ask him, because if I'd gotten this, oh yes, well it was an interesting perspective, but I've outgrown it, blah, blah, blah, you really then do feel kind of abandoned and left behind.
That your youthful ideals are something to be outgrown and sullied by A wizened, compromised maturity, and that is a terrifying thought.
It's a terrifying thought that you can't stay pure in this world.
It's a terrifying thought that you can't stay honest in this world.
I wrote in a novel a child thinking to himself, it's terrifying how little truth you're allowed in an adult universe.
How little integrity, how little honesty you're allowed.
I never did ask him that.
I'm glad I didn't.
I'm glad I didn't.
I never did ask him because your integrity, you must keep precious to yourself.
You must keep committed to yourself.
Now, Neil Peart also to me is an interesting example of workaholism.
Boy, Rush was a hard-working band.
No wonder Geddy Lee half-wrecked his voice.
I mean, not To the level of Meat Loaf, or not to the level of Whitney Houston, but yeah, he did Half Wreck His Voice.
In one span, they did like five studio albums in four years, alongside with touring sometimes doing 300 shows per year.
And they issued opening acts for quite some time.
They do these three-hour monster shows with Geddy Lee, you know, soaring four octaves above Mortal Man and...
And Neil Peart drumming to the point where his arms are going to swastika windmill off the stage or something like that.
I mean, that's crazy.
That's crazy how little parenting could have been going on, how little relationship building could have been going on.
That workaholism is really It's really terrifying.
And it arises to some degree, of course, your enthusiasm of being, wow, I'm being paid to do, and people want to come and see, and it's a real high.
But my God, you're also surrounded by people who don't profit if you stay home.
It's one of the reasons why I have really tried to stay out of a larger organization, or have a retinue, or have an entourage, or be surrounded by people who don't lose money if I take a day off to think rather than produce, produce, produce.
It's like this woman, I read this story, I've said this before, but I read this story, the Globe and Mail used to have this great back page where, I don't know if they still do, Globe and Mail is trash now, but back in the day, like 30, 40 years ago,
they had this back page and people would write about their lives and there was this woman saying that she finished her career at some corporation and she was cleaning out the files and getting rid of what wasn't needed anymore and she came across some old newsletter that she did like 20 years before in her filing cabinet And she says, nobody remembers this newsletter anymore, but my daughter sure as hell remembers the night I didn't come to her dance recital because I was finishing this newsletter.
Whew! Boy, that'll put a stake through the restless, Protestant heart of workaholism pretty damn quick, right?
Because Neil Peart's talents, his abilities, his genius...
His money didn't save him from astonishing levels of tragedy.
Didn't save him from whatever the hell happened with his daughter and then how it seemed to domino down his wife.
It's like Phil Collins. Phil Collins' body is ruined now.
You can barely hold a drumstick because he's just pounded himself into oblivion.
And he said, oh, well, Phil Collins has said, oh, well, we didn't really mean to get that big.
And I'm sorry if everyone got so upset.
And, you know, I regret and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, oh, that's rough. Stephen King, after his accident where he was hit by a truck, pretty much driven by the physical embodiment of one of his trashy characters, It's really important that you don't surround yourself with people who profit from you if you can at all avoid it because they will not have your best interests at heart.
So, what does this mean?
An amazingly talented man, an amazingly literate man, and a man who did come back from unimaginable heartbreak to live another 20 years.
His daughter died in 97, his wife died in 98, he made it to 2020, just about.
And did produce more.
He did produce more.
But what we produce doesn't sustain us, other than the bare minimum to keep us alive.
What we produce does not sustain us.
It's always the tension between human being and human doing.
When you're acting, when you're creating, when you're selling, you're producing, you are not at peace.
And that's fine. We're not designed to be perpetually at peace.
We're not a statue. Or a mountain.
We are designed to be in motion.
But you can't connect with people in particular while you're producing because you are connecting with what you are producing.
And E.M. Forster's injunction, only connect, only connect, only connect.
It's so important. I did my first live dial-in show or call-in show last night.
There was a woman that called in who sounded all kinds of nuts.
And I saw, I saw in...
In the chat window, people are like, oh, she's crazy, oh, drop her, oh, next caller, oh, this is boring, oh, oh, oh.
And I spent an hour with this woman just trying to connect.
Because, you know, I half dated this girl in high school.
I went through a real metamorphosis going from a nondescript to a handsome guy in a series of circumstances I've written about in a novel.
And I became, you know, quite the youthful stud muffin.
And this girl and I, we went for this walk.
We hung out. We never could quite get that connection going.
I didn't realize later it's because she had endured an unimaginable tragedy in her personal life.
Because, you know, when you're young, it's all about you and your pimples and not other people's broken hearts.
But... I met up with her some years later, many years later.
And she was married, but she told me she said she was in a cafe in Europe and she saw a man walk by and her heart just leapt out to him that he was the one that she was supposed to spend her life with.
And she didn't act on it.
She said, I'm married. I went back to my husband, Anna Karenina style.
And I've tried to remain satisfied with him, but I think about this other man all the time.
Maybe that was some kind of connection or some movement or you could say a sort of drive-by soul connect.
And to think that she had the deepest connection or the most compatibility with the guy she saw for an instant walking past her in a cafe.
Maybe if she would have pursued it, it would have been nothing.
But you can probably think of this in your life, right?
You can think of... That one great conversation when you're really connected.
I remember in a breakup talk with a girl that I was dating, that we actually finally connected just as we were breaking up.
And I remember thinking, that's such a shame.
Why would we connect just as we are breaking up?
And I made a vow to live a life where the connection would count.
And it wouldn't be something that...
You know when you're a kid, occasionally there are these Wild, fantastic storms that shake the house.
And, you know, light up the sky like your entire environment is walking up the red carpet at the Oscars and those Scorsese flashlights are going off in your brain.
And it lights up to the point where there's this electric day for five or ten seconds and sometimes...
Like some sort of epileptic electrical Spider-Man, the lightning is crawling across the sky in rivulets of pure power.
And you remember those moments from when you were a child.
You remember those incredible storms.
Or I still remember playing tennis with my mother when I was 13 years old and seeing the most Incredible sunset.
I still remember it vividly.
I ran home to get the camera to come back and take the picture.
It was still pretty good, but it wasn't quite as good.
Fretted with golden fire, as Hamlet says, that's what it was.
And I remember that.
And we all remember these particular moments.
Intense cold, intense heat, intense exhaustion, intense satisfaction, a great orgasm, a fantastic meal.
And people, this is what they have.
Briefly in their life, oh that great conversation, that time when we really did connect and then they get distracted by the nothingness of news and sports and ailments and bills and annoyances and this is why the saying says most people live lives of quiet desperation because they get these little connections And then they break and they vanish.
You know, like a time when you're walking through the woods and you walk through a spiderweb and you get that body chill and you claw it off your face, Indiana Jones style, and then you move on and we remember these vivid things and we remember these vivid connections and then they pass us by and they vanish.
We must produce in order to consume, we must work in order to live, and our relationship to work is important, but do you live to work or do you work to live?
Because life is in our connections with each other.
From the very beginning of this show, I have counseled honesty.
I have a whole book on this called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love.
It's available for free at freedomain.com.
Connect, connect, connect.
Eye contact, honesty, openness, vulnerability.
I'm connecting with you here.
I mean, my emotions are playing across my face like clouds across the moon, and I'm not fighting them, I'm not pumping them, they just are.
Neil Peart produced incredible drumming.
He wrote great lyrics.
The band together produced amazing music.
They toured, they created a lot of happiness and excitement, but I am also concerned that they diminished people by a focus on the deification of irreproducible talents.
Did they produce a lot of virtue in the world?
Did they produce a lot of goodness in the world?
I would say no. I would say no.
Canada is going through paroxysms of mass immigration.
Prominent Canadians aren't talking about it.
These guys have more than enough FU money.
They have more than enough Fame and accumulated goodwill.
They could say something about it.
It's like Ricky Gervais. Everybody was excited that he did this thing at the Golden Globes where he told off the Hollywood elite and so on.
Yeah, but he's got this Netflix series which is about a guy who's depressed because his wife died called Afterlife.
England is going through paroxysms of mass migration and cultural upheaval and so on.
He could have done something on that, but nobody does.
Everybody shuts the hell up.
Well, almost everybody.
Because I'm not interested in the goods I produce.
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