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July 11, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:11:10

Freedomain Call In Show 10 Jul 2020: THE MIND/BODY SPLIT!

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	Well, good evening. This is Stefan Molyneux.
	It is the 10th of July, 2020, and...
	Well, yeah, I guess for those of you who wanted to follow me on Twitter, not so much.
	This week, a couple days ago, I was summarily booted off Twitter for reasons that at least pass my understanding something to do with bots or platform manipulation or something like that.
	And I just wanted to say to everyone that I appreciate your kind words of support.
	I appreciate... Your words of encouragement.
	That means a lot to me.
	It matters to me.
	And we will, of course, continue.
	I have put out a statement, What I Believe, which is sort of an expansion of, well, I guess a clarification of a whole bunch of stuff I talked about over the years.
	And hopefully that will help put some of the crazy rumors to rest.
	And we will continue.
	I have some very interesting and exciting things planned for today.
	Summer and fall, I'll keep you posted as things go along.
	But now, this evening, it being just after 7 o'clock on a Friday night, it's time to talk to you, the great listeners, and figure out what's going on in your lives, in your world, and how philosophy can help.
	So, James, if you would like to kick it in, let's get it rolling.
	Sure. So the first question we have, actually, if there's anything you can tease or talk about, what's coming next?
	You know, especially because of the D-platform.
	I know you had your statement and everything.
	You just mentioned things are coming, but is there anything you can talk about right away or just sort of, what's your plans?
	What's your thoughts on that? Well, I'm going to play my cards a little bit closer to my chest than normal for reasons that I'm sure are fairly clear to everyone.
	But, yeah, I have some cool stuff in the works, and that's why your support, of course, means so much to me.
	I wish I could sort of tell more about it.
	But given the number of sharks circling the boat, I think it's probably a better idea to play my cards a little closer to my chest than normal.
	So, sorry to be annoying, but I'm going to stay mum on that stuff.
	Totally fine. I figured if you had wanted to talk about it, you would have already.
	So there's another question, kind of interesting, sort of an opinion question.
	Who called it better, George Orwell or Ayn Rand, and why?
	Well, that's a very, very good question.
	So, for those of you who don't know, I'll just give you the brief synopsis of the two works.
	George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was a fairly self-loathing socialist who tried to do some, I think, pretty decent and honorable things.
	He tried to figure out what life was really like for the poor.
	And for that, you can read his great book about being a plongeur and other things, which was down and out in Paris.
	I remember the book very vividly.
	I listen to audiobooks a lot of times these days, save the old post-50 eyesight.
	And I remember there was a tramp that he was talking about, and he was saying, there are so many theories as to why these tramps move from place to place.
	why why why why is it that they have some sort of wanderlust are they trying to outrun a bad conscience of a uh restless people fundamentally and spiritually and so on and he said but that's all that's all nonsense the real reason why tramps move from place to place is that they get arrested if they stay in the same place and it was one of these moments where i was reading in a book and i was like you know that's where you start looking for human motivation what
	When people seem confusing or people seem baffling, you look for whatever gun is in the room.
	So it's not like they have some basic wanderlust and they're just gypsies at heart and they just love to roam around.
	It's like, no, if they stay in a town for more than a day or two or three, they will get arrested as vagrants.
	And I just remember that being a really striking moment when...
	He was talking about that and it really this is many many decades ago now that I read it and I remember thinking I'm going to look first for the force in the situation rather than for some It's an unguessable, unimaginable form of human motivation to figure out why people do what they do.
	Are they responding to force in the environment?
	Or should I go completely Jungian psychological on them?
	And I found it pretty valuable to look at the first rather than the latter.
	And I also really loved this down and out in Paris and London.
	Although, again, the man, George Orwell himself...
	Was, you know, wretchedly unhealthy.
	I think he was a chain smoker.
	He had tuberculosis, and he took extraordinarily bad care of himself, did not really get any exercise, ate badly, and his personal hygiene habits were terrible, and he had a pretty rough time in boarding school.
	He's got a whole essay on boarding school that, again, is well worth reading.
	And he then, of The anti-fascists in the Spanish Revolution, and you should read Homage to Catalonia, H-O-M-A-G-E. I'm sure you know that, Homage to Catalonia.
	And the course was somewhat murky, to put it mildly, and he was, you know, he shot people.
	He shot a man and watched him...
	Die in horrible agony and horrible cries and so on.
	And so he had a very odd psychology.
	And many years ago, in a book club on Free Domain, I talked about that 1984 is really the mind of a murderer, you know, crime and punishment, Raskolnikov style.
	My dear Radion Romanovich.
	But then, of course, Animal Farm.
	He got the idea for that book while watching a man beat a cow, I think it was, or a horse.
	And that also reminds me of the terrifying scene in one of Dostoevsky's novels about the men who were beating the horse.
	I think that's in Crime and Punishment.
	It's a terrifying scene, which I'm sure impressed upon Fyodor Dostoevsky when he was very young, just how cruel human beings could be.
	And then, of course, he basically, I think he retreated to the Outer Hebrides or some distant place in the UK to write 1984, which when he sent the manuscript to his publisher, the publisher said it was just about the most terrifying work he'd ever read, which, of course, makes perfect sense.
	And he got 1984 by reversing the digits of the year he wrote it, which was 1948.
	And then he died shortly thereafter.
	And... A terrifyingly great writer.
	I mean, 1984 is one of these books that's so packed full of terrifying ideas.
	It's like you squeeze accordion the entire oeuvre of Stephen King into one short fact squeal of existential totalitarian horror and came up with that book.
	And of course, you know, I'm sorry if you haven't read it, I'm going to talk about the ending, but it is a brutally terrifying and tragic ending.
	Because we're so used to these stories, and I'll compare this to Atlas Shrugged in a moment, we're so used to these stories where there's great evil in the world, but the good guys end up winning.
	The good guys end up doing their thing.
	The good guys end up turning it around.
	But not in 1984.
	Winston Smith and Julia, his lover, who's one of these terrifying social justice warrior cynics, You know, like a lot of the leftist women that I've sort of read or heard about are into some pretty abusive stuff in the bedroom.
	And it's a sad kind of commentary.
	And his girlfriend works producing pornography for the proletariat.
	But she's very cynical with regards to the party.
	but she has this cold, viper-sexualized cynicism about the whole business.
	And of course, they think that they're getting away with things, and they think they're meeting down in the proletariat area.
	And at least once or twice a year, I think of the scene wherein Winston Smith is sitting in his bed, and, oh gosh, the actor Hurt played Winston Smith and was, again, terrifyingly the actor Hurt played Winston Smith and was, again, terrifyingly good.
	It was a brutal scene.
	It was the last movie, I think, that Richard Burton made playing O'Brien.
	He's the kind of guy, Hurt, who inhales cigarette smoke and exhales and nothing comes out because it all just sinks into his scarvy lungs.
	I think he's dead now. I think he died somewhat recently, tragically, without ever having had children, which he regretted enormously later on in his life.
	And in the book, and I guess in the movie too, there's this obese proletariat woman who's out there hanging laundry.
	And Winston Smith looks down at her and says, she's beautiful.
	And Julia, his lover, says, she's a meter across the hips, easily.
	And he says, that's her style of beauty.
	And she was singing, the proletariat woman was singing some earthy ditty of the lower classes and so on.
	And I do remember thinking about that.
	What is the style of beauty?
	And what does he mean when he says, she's beautiful?
	She has a robust, earthy connection to fertility, to the world, to her work, to the people in her life.
	She's connected. She has a certain serenity.
	And in the midst of totalitarianism, which is torture for the intellectuals, she is singing and humming.
	I also remember being struck in the book by how they use pornography to control The masses, again, all prescient and all completely chilling, and of course the telescreen, which is the two-way video into your environment.
	I guess our telescreens are smaller and carried in our butt pockets for the most part.
	So in 1984, of course, Winston Smith loses.
	They think they're getting away with stuff, but they've been spied upon and watched the whole time.
	And they are tortured.
	They are tortured into giving each other...
	into surrendering their love, their passion, their rebellion, their resistance.
	And as O'Brien says, if you want a vision of the future, look at a boot stamping into the human face forever.
	And it is a terrifying book.
	And it used to be required reading, of course.
	And I remember, because Ingsoc, English socialism, you didn't really hear much about the word socialism in the book, although it is a description of socialism, and of course a very chillingly accurate description of socialism.
	And, I mean, that's one of the things that I've been thinking about lately, of course, is how preventable is any of this?
	It's a big question. And we all have to look into our hearts and into history to try and figure out where the future goes.
	I can't help but think of all of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who struggled hard to avoid the end of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Roman Empire.
	Maybe they slowed it down a bit.
	Maybe they delayed it a bit.
	But there is this inevitability to corrupt, state-sucking self-interest that I think is really, really hard to turn around.
	But again, we have all of these amazing tools.
	I've had a couple taken from me lately.
	But we do have these amazing tools for communication, so we persevere as best we can.
	So I do think...
	That the capacity and willingness of sadists to simply destroy human beings does keep humanity pretty squarely in line.
	Most of human history has been a sadistic torture chamber of conformity with almost no chance to resist, to speak out, to speak back, to organize, to communicate.
	And the salami process of slicing and dicing communities into fragmented and opposing schisms has been so expertly manipulated by the hard left that what was, I guess, an emerging movement in 2016 has largely shattered and self-isolated for the most part.
	So... That is a situation where the bad guys win, and the good guys are destroyed.
	And there's a speech in it, I'm going to paraphrase, and I'm sure I'm getting some things in the book wrong.
	It's been probably...
	I used to read it every decade, just as I used to read The Fountainhead every decade, but I've been kind of busy over the last little while.
	But there is a speech that the party leader O'Brien gives to Winston Smith, He's talking about rebels in past dictatorships.
	And he says something like this.
	He says, we made terrible mistakes in the past when we had rebels on our hands.
	Because we would either kill them secretly and turn them into martyrs, or we would torture them and then we would bring them out, have them spew out some confession of treason or insurrection or reactionary anti-state behavior, and then we would hang them or we would shoot them.
	But nobody believed. They're recantations.
	Nobody believed that they were actually sorry or regretful.
	They just recognized that they'd been tortured, been forced to say things they didn't believe, and then they would be executed.
	So neither executing them silently nor getting them to bray out confessions and then executing them did much good.
	But we've learned a lot more since then, of course.
	We've been creative. We've been experimenting.
	And now we realize that all we have to do It's to expose them to the worst thing in the world for them.
	And it's different for everyone.
	It could be spiders. It could be, in your case, Winston.
	It happens to be rats, which we know.
	It could be fire. It could be acid.
	It could be castration.
	Whatever the worst thing is in the world for someone, we find that out pretty quickly.
	We expose them to that repeatedly until...
	They break. And then we don't kill them.
	We don't even keep them imprisoned.
	We turn them out into the world, broken, hollowed-out reflections of totalitarian will, and let them do what they will.
	And this is the way that you prevent insurrection from spreading or growing.
	You don't separate it.
	You don't humiliate it and then kill it.
	You break it utterly and return it from whence it came.
	And... Because Winston Smith loves Julia, when the cage of rats descends upon his head, he doesn't know how to stop it until he realizes.
	And he says, do it to Julia.
	Do it to Julia.
	And he screams it, do it to Julia.
	Do it to my girlfriend, don't do it to me.
	And he then ends up loving the government, loving Big Brother, as the statement goes.
	And the victory of brutality, the victory of hierarchy, the victory of the erasure of a human being.
	I mean, it's...
	Almost perfect. And I think one of the reasons the book is a challenge is not only is it horrifically prescient in how we are controlled, but also it doesn't give you any solutions.
	It doesn't give you any effective strategies for fighting back.
	So that book is very challenging.
	Powerful. But also, it disarms you in a way.
	I mean, you almost couldn't write a book more pro-socialist even though it claims to be anti-socialist in some ways because socialism is unstoppable and unfightable.
	And the powers that be win.
	Just as in Russia, which had three decades or so head start on China, Russia, with its history of Christianity, did eventually break the back of communism, whereas China, without a history of Christianity, or not much of one, is having a very tough time with that.
	Now, Atlas Shrugged It's one of the three great anti-collectivist stories out of Ayn Rand.
	The first, We the Living. The good guys lose.
	In the second, The Fountainhead, the good guys, it's a draw.
	But in the third, in Atlas Shrugged, the good guys win.
	And it doesn't matter what I say about the novel, and it doesn't matter if I give spoilers because, A, it's been out forever.
	And B, it doesn't matter.
	Just read it. Or there's a good version of it on audible.com.
	And that is one of the greatest murder mysteries or mystery stories in the history of literature.
	And It is, of course, boringly predictable, as I've said on the show before, about how many people are like, oh, but she doesn't write really realistic characters, and her dialogue is wooden, and blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, she was a movie writer in the 30s and 40s, and of course they have that kind of, well, this kind of dialogue, well, this is how you speak, and it's not particularly naturalistic.
	The naturalistic movement came out of the British socialists in the 1950s, the kitchen sink dramas, and look back at anger and all of that.
	Shirley Valentine came later.
	Just all this kitchen sink stuff where it was supposed to be a complete mirror to reality.
	And that was very new in literature.
	Literature was never supposed to be holding up a mirror to reality.
	Good heavens. I mean, saying that Ayn Rand's dialogue is not realistic is like going to Shakespeare and saying nobody talks in iambic pentameter.
	It's like you're kind of missing the point.
	It's like looking at a...
	At a painting of the Venus de Milo and saying, look, women don't stand in clamshells.
	It's a literalness that is truly crushing to the human imagination.
	And that kind of literalness, where people think statues are somehow history come back to life, rather than in many ways a warning against them, A history that was pretty fatal to hundreds of thousands of Americans, particularly in the Civil War and so on.
	People get very literary about these kinds of things, and it's a real shame that we've lost our appreciation of art.
	But no, Atlas Shrugged is one of the greatest books ever written, and it is staggeringly suspenseful.
	It is Quite moving, quite moving in many ways.
	And a great mystery.
	I'm not going to give too many spoilers, but it's a great mystery.
	And Ayn Rand herself said that she got the idea for the story when she was reading, I think she was reading a book about a strike or something like that.
	And she was saying, you know, it's always the people at the bottom who go on strike.
	It's always like the floor sweepers and the janitors.
	So the people at the bottom who go on strike.
	What if the people at the top went on strike?
	And that sort of the original title for the novel was not Atlas Shrugged, but the strike.
	And of course, Atlas Shrugged is much better as a title.
	And in that one, more and more people go on strike.
	And it's the theory of accelerationism.
	If Trump wins in November, which I have some doubts, but if Trump wins in November, then we'll see what the second term looks like.
	If Trump loses in November, then the radical socialization of the American economy will accelerate to the point where productivity will collapse, the welfare state will be at an end within a relatively short period of time, I think, and we'll see.
	We'll see what can be rebuilt from there.
	But, I mean, Ayn Rand, of course, she didn't really conceive of the demographic dynamism that was going on in America, right?
	She didn't really conceive of the 1965 Hart-Seller Act, where the demographics were going to shift, because the book was finished.
	In 1957, I think it was.
	So the demographics had remained stable in America, you know, 90% white, 10% black for hundreds of years, and she didn't really see or process going forward what happened with the demographics, which was, of course, a little bit hard to see and was promised that it wasn't going to alter demographics and all that.
	But the good people going on strike...
	It certainly happens.
	It certainly does happen.
	I mean, it happens under communism because the incentive system is so screwed up that everybody kind of goes on strike except for the politicos, right?
	Because you will often get punished for doing a better job.
	If you're a fast worker, your co-workers will get mad at you for raising the standards, all this kind of stuff.
	Like, I mean, there is a strike that occurs under communism that happens almost inevitably of its own accord because the incentives are so screwed up.
	And this harkens back to what I was talking about.
	You know, the tramps, why do they wander?
	Well, because they're forced to, because they get thrown in jail if they don't keep moving.
	And that's when I was looking at the Soviet Union.
	I've used this analogy a bunch of times.
	You don't just say, well, somebody under Stalin was just a lazy factory worker.
	It's like, no, there was no incentives. The incentives were all screwed up.
	And that's why, you know, when I talk to the MGTOW guys, I'm like, it's not female nature.
	It's not female nature that's going on at the present.
	It is... The incentives are all screwed up.
	And that changes people's behavior.
	You know, like the single mom phenomenon, that's not single moms just being mean or selfish or petty or whatever.
	It's like the incentives are all screwed up.
	And yeah, yeah, I get it. There are some people who can surmount incentives and so on, but those people are pretty rare and one could argue somewhat self-destructive in a system where the incentives are so screwed up.
	So... There is no perpetuation of liberty without willpower, without honesty, without communication.
	And, I mean, of course, the ninth-mayed scenario is that the liberties enjoyed in the West over the past 200 years or so are a complete counter-historical blip in the human experience.
	And because they threaten so many existing power structures around the world.
	The world has evolved on tyranny and liberty and the productivity of liberty and the happiness of liberty and the excitement of liberty and the creativity of liberty.
	The Western experiment has cast deep shadows around the world for existing power structures.
	And the best thing that can happen for those power structures in other cultures and other countries and other continents is for them to demonize the West and work as hard as they can to undermine it.
	So that then they can say, oh, yeah, yeah, no, freedom was tried.
	It was just terrible.
	It was, you know, it ended in chaos.
	It's like, let's not do that again, right?
	This whole free speech thing, the separation of church and state, political liberties, property rights.
	Oh, it was tried and it was a complete disaster.
	And it's a way of inoculating the hierarchies of the world from the radical experiments of Western freedom that have characterized the last 200 years in the West.
	And it's a very...
	Powerful example that people are holding up.
	So you want to be like the West?
	Do you remember what happened to them?
	And they will say, after this, therefore, because of this, right?
	Which means they had catastrophic self-destructive tendencies as a result of freedom.
	Not the freedoms in the West threatened the power structures around the world and therefore they were undermined.
	And then this was forever held up as an inoculation against returning to those kinds of liberties.
	And say, well, after the liberties came the catastrophes and therefore the catastrophes came because of the liberties.
	And therefore human beings should never try these liberties again.
	Because the more they can associate liberties with disaster, the more they can hold on to their own power structures and their own power base.
	Which is of course what they want to do.
	So... The West was a great and terrifying experiment in liberty.
	Wonderful for many of the people involved.
	Terrible for the elites, the power structures around the world.
	And it didn't actually last for a very long time, really, when you think about it.
	The founding of America, late 18th century.
	And you maybe could argue it lasted about 80 years until the Civil War.
	About 80 years.
	The whole revolution and small government, limited government, no income tax.
	I mean, the fundamental liberties in America, it took about 80 years for the political power structures to break out through the bonds of the Constitution.
	And then a couple of decades after that, you started to get income tax, central banking, lying into foreign wars, empire.
	America has been at peace for only a few years of its...
	Close to three-century or two-and-a-half-century history.
	I mean, it's really quite tragic.
	And again, just another example of how statism will never work in the long run.
	A small state...
	Gosh, I did this on Reason TV years ago.
	A small state produces huge wealth, which allows for a large state to use that wealth as collateral to grow beyond its means, and you are sort of feeding the beast that eats you in those situations.
	So... And of course, you know, I mean, the mid to late 19th century was when governments took over education.
	And once that happens, you're doomed.
	As far as freedom goes, it's just a matter of time.
	And that's taken 150 years or so, but once the government's taken over education, you're doomed.
	Like back in 2011... Universities are getting subsidies of like $10,000 to $100,000 per degree from the taxpayers.
	Direct subsidies. Direct payments from the taxpayers.
	And so the universities were no longer in the business of bringing knowledge to people, but rather bringing tax dollars to their coffers, so to speak.
	And so you can't really criticize the state that much if the state is...
	I mean, that's what I've always tried to work on, is staying as independent as possible.
	Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as the old saying goes.
	And if the government is paying you, you can't really experiment with radical ideas of liberty, and you can't take You know, the great momentum of the abolitionistic movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, the great momentum of the abolitionistic movement would have been to move from the end of slavery to the end of statism.
	The end of slavery was the great gift that England in particular, the British Empire in particular, but it was one of the great gifts that the West gave to the world, the greatest really in many ways.
	And if that had kept going, but the biblical justifications for the end of slavery, of which there are many, there are some counterexamples, but there are many, the biblical justifications were of course turned to some degree by the render unto God, what is God's render unto Caesar, what is Caesar's?
	And the principle of self-ownership, the principle of not enslaving others, according to their life is slavery, according to their time is taxation.
	And the whole movement of the end of slavery shifted it from direct ownership to tax serfdom, which ended up being so much more economically productive for the state that it could grow and grow and grow to these giant monoliths of semi-totalitarianism that currently have their boot on the face of humanity.
	I think that 1984 is more accurate in the short to medium run, but I think Atlas Shrugged is more accurate in the long run.
	Because things will wind down.
	In Zimbabwe, there are tens of millions of people in Zimbabwe, which used to be a very prosperous country, that are currently facing food insecurity.
	And one of the deputy ministers in Zimbabwe was recently on a show talking about, well, the reason that their economy is doing badly is because the British, who left 40 years ago, didn't teach them enough about the economy.
	But that's why Zimbabwe is doing badly.
	So the productive will go into hiding.
	The productive nasty people will go into the state.
	The productive nice people will go into hiding.
	We'll work below their potential.
	The rulers will panic and attempt to whip people into frenzies of productivity as they did with the five-year plans under Stalin and Khrushchev and Well, all the way up to Gorbachev, Brezhnev.
	But you can't beat a cow into producing more milk.
	I mean, you could try. You'll get some, maybe, strangled productivity, but at some point they will, you know, because the elites is kind of tough, right?
	They make lots of promises to gain power, they push the bill down the road, the bill comes due, and then they provoke a lot of conflict so that people don't You know, like some guy takes a lot of loans out in his sporting goods store, can't pay his loans back.
	Eventually he's just tempted to set fire to the store to get the insurance money, right?
	But that's making a lot of loans, borrowing a lot of money, making a lot of promises.
	You can't maintain those things.
	And so you provoke conflict so that people don't notice that they're not getting paid.
	We'll see. It's like the whole COVID thing right now is pretty wild.
	A lot of states are seeing somewhat of a resurgence.
	It's kind of contradictory information.
	Is it more testing? Is it more cases?
	What's the death rate? It's still pretty low.
	And people are just like, well, we've got to shut down again.
	It's like, what is the plan?
	That's not a plan. It's not a plan to shut down the economy to control the virus, and then every time you reopen it, you shut it down again?
	That doesn't make any sense.
	But we don't have the ability to see concentrated suffering.
	We don't mind the diffuse suffering, like all the kids who aren't getting their medications, all of the surgeries that are being delayed and postponed, all of the dental checkups and all of the regular checkups and all of that.
	That's all being postponed.
	But those deaths, those illnesses, they're all diffused and spread out and hard to track, as opposed to the Blathering death scape that Cuomo's order for nursing homes to take in COVID-19 positive patients produced.
	So, I think that in the long run, reality reasserts itself.
	But in the short run, power...
	You know, there's still so much to mine, right?
	There's still so much to mine.
	I mean, everybody's retirement savings plans are still open for the pillaging of the states, the governments as a whole in the West are going to want to go after that.
	This doesn't count as politics, by the way.
	It's this literary analysis, just so everyone knows I'm not totally breaking my vow to stay off sort of current events in politics, but this is an analysis based upon these two great works of political theory or political manifestation.
	I think that Orwell had almost no peers in the description of Sociopathy of power lust.
	But Ayn Rand was utterly brilliant at portrayals of moral corruption.
	Or it's almost like the Atlas Shrugged is to transition into the 1984 universe if the strike hadn't occurred.
	So as to which one is more accurate...
	I brace for short-term 1984, but I hope for long-term Atlas Shrugged, if that makes any sense.
	All right, that's the end of the lengthy ramble.
	It's a great question, though. All right, thank you for that.
	It's very thought-provoking. Once somebody has sort of a follow-on to Rand, if you would say a few words about Rand's ideal, he hasn't heard you talk about it, and he thinks it would be pretty interesting.
	Well, so, I mean, Rand had a variety of ideals.
	Are you talking philosophical, political, aesthetic, artistic?
	I guess if you could just ask the person for, I mean, don't corner me into two hours on Rand's ideals without any sort of clarification.
	I mean, you can have it if you want, but it might be worth clarifying.
	He's had it in caps, so I'm thinking it's something just she wrote, but if you're not familiar with that, then we can just move on.
	No, no, I'm happy to talk about Rand, for sure.
	Oh, it's a play. It's a play that she wrote called Ideal.
	Ideal? No, maybe.
	The only play that I know of that she wrote was The Night of January 22nd, I think it was.
	But, you know, maybe it's something new.
	Maybe it's something I never saw.
	So I'm afraid I can't speak to that.
	But I will certainly have to look it up.
	I do remember that a Nine Rand play came out that had set in her drawer, I think.
	But maybe that's it. But no, I'm sorry.
	I did see Night of January 22nd, I think it is, January 23rd.
	It's very interesting and very...
	It's a very creative play.
	It's a play where the audience is cast as the jury, and in fact, jury members are picked from the audience, and the ending of the play changes depending on whether the person is found guilty or innocent.
	And I did see it at, not the Stratford Festival, but the Shore Festival, I think it was, many decades ago.
	It was quite well produced, and it's a very interesting and creative play.
	Alright, so let's move on.
	Sure. So here's a question from a listener.
	What are Steph's thoughts on an ANCAP society forming online as cryptocurrency and work and school from home are becoming more popular?
	Well, you can't really have an NCAP society online because you're all still subject to the state as a whole.
	But this is sort of, I think, the idea behind agorism, if I remember rightly.
	And I'm sorry if I'm drifting astray.
	It's been quite a while since I've discussed the topic.
	And agorism was the idea that you try and live as much as possible without using state functions or without getting involved in state commerce and regulations, all legally and so on, but, you know, more barter and so on.
	And so I do think that there is value.
	Again, I'm always counseling people stay inside the law and talk to accountants and lawyers and all that kind of stuff.
	But I do think that there is a great deal of value in trying to live your life with minimal...
	Interaction with the state, if that makes any sense.
	And the people who do want to get online and trade and build businesses and build communities and so on, based upon voluntary principles, I mean, it certainly is pretty much the closest thing we're going to get to a stateless society in any foreseeable future.
	So I think it's a great way to experiment.
	And the other thing, of course, that you can do is you can figure out particular ways of Enforcing social rules absent calling the cops or using the court system or anything like that.
	So I think it's a great way to experiment with how you get things done in the absence of appeals to the state.
	And I think from there, anything you can do to validate as much as possible your own moral theories is probably well worth exploring.
	Because if you have trouble validating them, then you might want to re-examine the moral theories.
	If you find ways to validate them, that gives you more confidence and also helps spread the ways in which you have been able to do that.
	And I think that's a pretty positive thing.
	So, yeah, I think it's very interesting and positive development that the Internet has brought us, I think.
	Well, I suppose.
	No, that's all right.
	Sorry about that. I suppose that this follow-on question from another listener on that one topic is pretty...
	You've pretty much sort of touched on it, but I'll just read it off just to be clear.
	Do you think that the powers that be, government, bankers, etc., would stop something like that?
	Would they let people, quote, out of the system?
	Yeah, I mean, that's...
	It's a good question. I mean, it really depends how many people there are.
	It really depends how many people there are.
	I mean, everybody knows these theories.
	I don't know how true they are, but everybody knows these theories about Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, that they were trying to create some basket of commodities or oil-backed or gold-backed currency and the central banking system wasn't going to let them out of their grip and that's why they were destroyed as countries and so on.
	So I think if you're doing something big in public, you're kind of putting crosshairs on your forehead, so to speak.
	So I think it still remains a fairly unviable proposition for many people.
	I mean, one of the great things about this, though...
	I mean, so let's look at this listenership, right?
	This glorious cabal of philosophically minded people.
	I mean, most of the people that I've talked to in my various conversations who are interested in free domain, philosophy and so on, they have managed to weather the storm of Coronavirus shutdowns relatively well.
	Relatively well. It's one of these things that I have thought over the years with a certain amount of irony, very occasionally bitter irony, but for the most part, I guess somewhat amused irony, which is that there's a huge amount of money in the public sector.
	Right? I mean, there's a lot of job security.
	They get, you know, one and a half times salary a lot of times and benefits up the yin-yang.
	And so... But there's not a lot of people who work for the government who listen to this show, right?
	Or if they do, I guess it's a form of masochism maybe, or maybe they're planning to get out and all that.
	And listen, if you work for the government and you listen to this show, this is not a big hate on you.
	I get that, right? I mean, it's a Murray Rothbard standard where if you're providing a service that otherwise would be provided by...
	The market, you know, like let's say you build roads for the government.
	Well, roads would need to be built by the free market, so it's not a terrible thing that you're doing or anything like that.
	So this is not a big hate-on to the few people who work for the government listening to this.
	But it has always been kind of like, ugh, you know, like, I mean, donations are tricky because a lot of the people who listen to this show, it's like that old line from that song, you know, we're in or we're out of the money.
	Yeah. And it's a little upy-downy for people, right?
	Certainly can be for me. And so, when times are good, you can get some donations.
	When times are bad, I'm like, listen, no criticism.
	I completely understand it.
	I really do. And nothing but love for me here.
	I'm sort of pointing out a phenomenon.
	But, yeah, there are a lot of people who make a lot of money, either through the government or through sort of high-end finance or stuff that benefits from a lot of government power, And they're not necessarily big fans of the show.
	Now, that has created some issues for my listeners over the years.
	But one of the things I think that has happened is because people have found alternative ways of getting money or alternative ways of having an income or having some sort of money stream, then the COVID, I think, has hit this community less hard than it's hit most communities.
	Now, again, it hasn't hit the government community hugely because it's not like people have been laid off in droves and aren't getting a paycheck or anything like that.
	But at some point, I mean, my God, what was it?
	The government spend last month was, I think, 100 times up.
	Not 100%, 100 times up from the same time last year.
	That is truly mad.
	I mean, the entire modern American economy, as I talked about with Peter Schiff not too long ago, and I really did appreciate Peter's very kind words of view.
	Peter, it's very kind for you to talk about my banding in such sympathetic ways.
	It's very nice of you. Thank you. I do appreciate it.
	But, I mean, it was a bubble before COVID. Now it's just completely helium, cocaine-laced fuzziness.
	And so even the great bastions of economic security known as the government government, Industry, that, all of those are going to be diminishing over time.
	I mean, it doesn't look to me that society is going back to normal anytime soon.
	And by normal, I don't mean pre-COVID, that's not going to happen at all.
	What I mean by normal is I don't think that it's going back to stability.
	You know, to be perfectly honest, again, it's not politics, just talking about the effects of this virus, right?
	Because... This stop and start, stop and start stuff, it really, really makes people crazy.
	I mean, just as a sort of stupid personal analogy, I've had this over the last couple of years.
	I gave a speech in St. Louis a couple of Septembers ago, two Septembers ago, I think, and I was running down the hallway chasing my daughter and had a pair of new sneakers on.
	And you know those new sneakers sometimes have those giant squid sucker cups on the bottom.
	They just hit plastic or formica or marble and they just stopped dead.
	And I crushed my knee when I went down because I went down pretty hard.
	And it took 8-10 months to get back to normal.
	And during that time, I couldn't really run.
	I had to be careful of it all.
	It was tough to bend. And then I went to all of these physiotherapists that were useless as tits on a ball because they're all like, oh, try this exercise.
	Oh, your knees are a little loose.
	Oh, try this. Oh, let's put some ultrasound.
	None of it did any good. It was all completely useless.
	What actually helped eventually was just finding weird spots on my leg and massaging the heck out of it until tears of blood ran down from my eyeballs.
	And that was the only way that I could fix the knee.
	And I've had that happen a couple of times before.
	You get some sort of soft tissue injury and people try all this gentle stuff with it and it just sits there going, don't care, still going to be painful.
	And then eventually you just find whatever weird spot it is.
	And it's never particularly proximate.
	But you find some weird spot, you massage the hell out of it, and it hurts like hell.
	And then you're better within a day or two.
	So I did eventually find that after listening to the experts for unfortunately far too long.
	But anyway, so since then, it's just been, you know, I guess it's in your 50s, right?
	So if you don't run for 10 months, it's harder to get back into it, right?
	Now, I guess when I was younger, it wasn't such a big deal.
	Like, when I was younger, I could not play tennis for a year, go out and play hard tennis, and I'd be fine.
	But, you know, now that I'm in my 50s, and not even early 50s, like I'm in 54 this year, right?
	I have to ease into things a little bit more.
	I can't just be like, well, I haven't run for a while, but here I'm going to go sprint.
	I have to kind of warm up and ease into things a little bit more.
	Because I also have this annoying thing in my body where...
	It doesn't complain at the time.
	Like, it won't tell me anything's wrong at the time.
	But a day later, it's like, throb, throb, throb.
	It's like, could you not have told me that at the time?
	Or is that just too helpful?
	So, the reason I'm saying all of this is I have this dot-stop stuff.
	Where I'd be like, oh, I feel better.
	And I'd go and do something.
	I'd be like, oh, no, I'm not.
	No. Damn. And it would really get annoying as hell.
	I mean, frankly, I'm not a very hot-tempered person.
	Although Russia Today referred to me as a firebrand, which I think is not the worst description, I guess, I could imagine.
	It was so weird reading an article.
	I think it was on my YouTube band or my Twitter band.
	Reading an article in a mainstream media outlet, Russia Today.
	And it's like, you know what? This is actually not wildly inaccurate.
	It's like it's actually somewhat in the realm of reality.
	It's so, so strange.
	Anyway, so I had to start something with my life, you know, like, oh, yeah, it's better.
	Oh, no, no, it's not.
	Oh, man, come on. It's so annoying, right?
	And it's the same thing with the economy as a whole, to go from some micro-nonsense like my knee to macro-savagery such as COVID. The start-stop stuff is really going to be disorienting for people, and it's going to start demotivating them.
	And, you know, you run a restaurant, you start it, oh no, sorry, you have to stop it again.
	You have a gym. You prepare everything.
	You keep people on because they say you're going to be opening in six weeks.
	Oh, no, it's turned into 12 weeks.
	Oh, you're open. Oh, no, you've got to close again.
	People are just going to go. And it's actually more destructive than just saying, sorry, you're screwed as an entrepreneur.
	Like if they just say, you know, you're screwed, there's not going to be any gyms.
	You'd be like, okay, well, I'll just shut it down.
	And, you know, but this stagger stuff, like you almost couldn't bleed out small business owners any more effectively if you damn well tried.
	And only people who are nursing from the near-infinite tit of government money can pass these kinds of laws and not really understand.
	You break the backs of the small to medium-sized entrepreneurs in the West, your economy is...
	I mean, it's foobar. Really, really quickly.
	That's fracked up before, beyond all recognition.
	Which was the most surprising trivia pursuit hint that I ever got in my life.
	So, it's like when I had a...
	Okay, here's really a tiny little...
	So, when I was in grade 8, I went up to an English teacher and said, What does the word phallic mean?
	Because I'd read it in a book and I couldn't figure out what it meant.
	And, you know, the poor young lady went completely red.
	Like, how on earth do you answer that?
	But she did a great job, to her eternal credit.
	And I understood it.
	And then I apologized for what I had just asked.
	Hey, what does phallic mean?
	What does phallic sound like?
	The shaggy-haired bus driver from The Symptons as a little kid.
	Constantly breaking voice. So...
	This stoppy-starty stuff is really brutal.
	And for those of you out there who've managed to find some other way of making money than, you know, massive service provision to people or having a paycheck or, I mean, this stoppy-starty stuff, it's really tough.
	It's the worst possible thing for the economy.
	And that's what people, I think, aren't really getting.
	It is like the worst possible thing for the economy.
	Because a business that succeeds is good.
	A business that fails is bad.
	But a business that starts and stops and succeeds and fails and opens and closes, that's the worst thing of all.
	That is the worst thing of all.
	Like, you get married and you love your wife, wonderful.
	You have a really messed up relationship with a crappy partner, you end it.
	And I got stuck off and on like a flying amber in one of these for like seven years in my 20s.
	The relationship is pretty good.
	We get along pretty well.
	But something's not quite...
	You know, that's deadly stuff.
	You know, get out of the tub or go down the drain.
	But the circling the drain and swimming like mad is really, really brutal.
	And it is going to destroy people's entrepreneurial spirits for like a generation at least.
	And who knows if we even have a generation left.
	Probably not, right? And so the people in this community, I think most of you, and listen, my heart goes out enormously to people who are suffering enormously through this.
	And as you know, I didn't solicit donations for month after month after month because, you know, I just recognized all of that.
	And, you know, thanks to those of you who did chip in, hugely appreciated, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	But... It is going to be very, very tough.
	People are going to... They're incredibly stressed because they don't know.
	You know, if you're an entrepreneur...
	And I've been doing this crazy stuff for like...
	Gosh, almost 30 years now.
	If you're an entrepreneur and things aren't going well...
	You're just one...
	Person, one factor in a relatively functional economy.
	I mean, you can just go out and spend money on marketing.
	You can put out more advertising.
	You can go door to door.
	You can do whatever, right? To build your business, to build your brand.
	There's a lot that you can do to affect how things go.
	But if you're in this stoppy, sturdy, Kafkaesque nightmare of Weirdly specific regulations.
	You hate to shut it down because also, you see this thing too, when you're an entrepreneur, if everyone's suffering, you kind of want to be the last man standing, right?
	So if there are 10 gyms in your town and 8 of them go out of business, man, when the gyms come back, you're going to mint, right?
	You're going to make serious coin.
	So you don't want to be one of the eight.
	You want to be one of the two. So just hanging in there and holding on and, oof, you know, it's really, really rough.
	And I don't know.
	I don't know. Is it that they just don't want to see suffering?
	Is they just, they don't want, I don't know, they just don't want people to get mad at China, as I've sort of theorized about in the past.
	It's tough to tell. It's tough to tell, but we used to send tens of millions of young men off to war.
	But we can't handle a virus with a fairly low fatality rate.
	Now, there are some people, and you should look this up.
	I think The Atlantic did an article on this not too long ago.
	There are some people, about 5% of COVID cases, they really do get hosed.
	They get brain fog.
	They get chronic fatigue.
	They get all the symptoms that mimic stuff like Epstein-Barr.
	And again, it's just my particular opinion.
	I'm no doctor. But it's pretty nasty.
	And they get stuck in this stuffy-starty stuff as well.
	Oh, I feel better. I'm going to have a workout.
	Oh, no. Now I can't get out of bed for three days.
	And there are some people that go on 40, 60, 80 days where they're not bad enough usually to hospitalize, but they're not well enough to resume their normal activities.
	And it's tough.
	You know, that chronic stuff?
	Oh, man, it's tough.
	It's tough emotionally.
	It's tough for your family. It's tough for your friends who call you up and, how are you doing?
	Oh, I'm okay.
	I don't think I'm any better.
	It gets really tough to continue to stretch out your sympathy into the fourth or fifth month.
	And, you know, I mean, we all could be perfect angels and do it, but nonetheless, it is tough.
	And then there is this, are you malingering?
	Are you faking it? Do you have some other condition?
	Everybody else seems to be getting better and so on.
	But we know this thing has the receptors that go into just about every human cell.
	And so I think this stuff can really drift around and clog things up in your body.
	So, yeah, for those people, that's really rough.
	That's really, really rough.
	And that's another big economic problem.
	So, yeah, it's...
	Trying to get out of the non-standard economy, I think, has been a pretty good idea, a pretty good thing to do lately, and I do applaud those of you who have done it.
	And, of course, if you have tips or tricks or you want advice, you know, the Discord server through subscribestar.com forward slash free domain is a pretty good place to go.
	Lots of great people out there helping each other.
	I'm sorry I haven't had much time lately to chat in there, but I do definitely skim it a couple of times a day, and it's really, really great to see all those conversations.
	So don't be afraid to ask for help.
	There are lots of wonderful people on that server.
	So anyway, I hope that that did some circle swath of the general topic as a whole, and I'm happy to hear another question.
	Alright, so we have a question to you.
	What are your thoughts on Carl Rogers?
	Was Rogers influential in any way to you?
	Carl Rogers?
	I wouldn't say so, in particular.
	So, Carl Rogers, I'm just, let me, I'm going to just triple make sure, right?
	We'll get his general dates, because it's been a while since I've looked.
	So he's the American psychologist.
	Very famous. Yeah, he died in 87.
	And... So this is just from Simply Psychology.
	Carl Rogers, 1902 to 1987, was a humanistic psychologist who agreed with the main assumptions of Abraham Maslow.
	That's Maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff.
	However, Rogers added that for a person to, quote, grow, they need an environment that provides them with genuineness, openness and self-disclosure, acceptance being seen with unconditional positive regard, and empathy being listened to and understood.
	Without these, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should, much like a tree will not grow without sunlight and water.
	So, they say here, Rogers believed that every person could achieve their goals, wishes, and desires in life, when, or rather if they did so, self-actualization took place.
	So, what did he...
	He rejected this.
	So, Skinner was this guy who was heavily deterministic.
	He rejected the deterministic nature of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism and maintained that we behave as we do because of the way we perceive our situation.
	Quote, So this tendency to self-actualize, to fulfill one's potential, achieve the highest level of human beingness we can, it's a little bit like Aristotelian stuff, but like a flower that will grow to its full potential if the conditions are right, but which is constrained by its environment so people will flourish and reach their potential if the environment is good enough.
	Okay.
	when you get a plethora of analogies.
	And listen, I'm fine with analogies as a whole, but they're not proof at all.
	Rogers believes that people are inherently good and creative.
	They become destructive only when a poor self-concept or external constraints override their valuing process.
	They must be in a state of congruence.
	Self-actualization occurs when a person's ideal self is congruent with their actual behavior, so who they would like to be with their self-image, and so on.
	So, five characteristics of the fully functioning person.
	One, open to experience.
	Both positive and negative emotions accepted.
	Negative feelings are not denied, but worked through, rather than resorting to ego defense mechanisms.
	So, yeah, I think that's a good thing.
	Existential living, in touch with different experiences as they occur in life, avoiding prejudging and preconceptions.
	Being able to live and fully appreciate the present, not always looking back to the past or forwards to the future, i.e.
	living for the moment. I mean, I think that's a balance.
	We have to learn from the past, we have to plan for the future, but we don't want to sacrifice the present.
	It's one of these Aristotelian balance things.
	Three, trust feelings. Feelings, instincts, and gut reactions are paid attention to and trusted.
	People's own decisions are the right ones, and we should trust ourselves to make the right choices.
	Yeah, I mean, emotions are very important, and I think that's one of the things that I've tried to bridge.
	I was talking about this with my daughter the other day, the mind-body dichotomy throughout all of Western philosophy, and so the feelings-thought dichotomy is really wild.
	I'll just give you a brief excerpt of what I was talking about with Isabella.
	Um... So the couple of pounds of wetware that we have in our brains...
	We can, through our brains, reach 15 billion years back to the dawn of the universe.
	13 billion years back to the dawn of the universe.
	15 billion years across the breadth of the universe.
	We can see through time.
	We can design spaceships that fly expertly past Jupiter.
	We can design bath escapes that take us to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seven miles down.
	It takes an hour for a pebble to drop that, if you drop it into the water at the top.
	So our brains are so immensely vast from the inside.
	It's like those weird little Minecraft tricks where somebody builds a small house, but you go inside and it's a giant house.
	Our brains are so unimaginably vast from the inside, but from the outside, it's a couple of pounds of invisible meat.
	And that's so bizarre.
	it's so absolutely completely and totally bizarre to be looking out from the inside of our brains and be able to see just about every aspect of the universe, from atoms to galaxies, to see through time and across billions of light years from this little, tiny, pulsating piece tiny, pulsating piece of meat that we've got to stuff sandwiches into from time to time so we can keep processing physics.
	And every night we have these wild visions and we defy the laws of physics in dreams.
	So the mind-body dichotomy is how on earth can the brain produce the mind? .
	And this idea that the mind is so much larger than the brain I think is the root of our idea of our conception of God.
	That God as a conscious entity is far larger than the universe, but our brains are far larger than the universe in what we can conceive of and what we can understand.
	But they're a tiny speck On a throwaway planet on the edge of a minor galaxy in the middle of nowhere, we have these tiny little meat specks that can conceive the entire universe.
	It's really, really bizarre.
	It is... Well, it's like in C.S. Lewis, Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, right?
	You go through the back of the closet and it's another world.
	It's a whole new world.
	It's another world.
	And seeing out from the inside of the brain is so vast and so powerful and so deep and so wide and so complex and so detailed.
	And yet, looking from the outside in, it's a couple of pounds of messy meat.
	There shouldn't be anything in there other than dinner for a cannibal.
	But inside there, you know, we can still wander the halls of the minds of J.R.R. Tolkien or Arthur C. Clarke or Jules Verne or Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or Chaucer or whoever wrote Beowulf put first-year college students to sleep on a regular basis.
	We can still go back through some of the named and nameless authors of the Bible.
	And see the world through their eyes.
	We can go through Plato's view of the last days of Socrates.
	Those minds stretch for thousands of years and across billions of other minds.
	They haven't died.
	In fact, we still live to a large degree amid the neurons of the brains of philosophers long dead.
	We are sliding down the bladed death tube of Marxism to some degree.
	We think we think for ourselves, but largely we're programmed by philosophical arguments or exclamations from people long dead.
	It's a long Marxist zombie arm that reaches from the London Library to the present.
	We live not in the world, we live in the minds of others.
	I mean, come on, look around, look around you.
	You live in a room designed by an architect, built by other people.
	The architect may be long dead, the builders may be long retired, they may have died also.
	You are living in the minds of others.
	You turn on the TV, you're listening to me.
	Right now, I'm weaving a tale of perception and depth that is rewiring parts of your brain to a more stellar and accurate perception.
	You get into a car and drive somewhere.
	You are living and being carried across the world in the mind of a man who doesn't even know you.
	Switch on the light. The electricity is coursing through, not the wires, but the brain of someone who came up with the generator, the transmitter, and the wiring.
	We don't live in the world, and we haven't for a long, long time.
	We live in the mind.
	We live in the products of the mind.
	We use the products of the mind.
	The cell phone, the computer, the television, the air conditioner, the shoes, the The concrete, the pavement, the elevators.
	All we do is step from one brain to another, from one mind to another.
	We have not lived in nature, really, for centuries as a whole.
	We have retreated from nature into the mind of man.
	We don't live in the natural world, we live in the unnatural world of thought, not the natural world of animals, plants.
	Hell, you lift up an umbrella.
	You are shielded from the rain by the simple design of a man on another continent who never will know you at all and won't even know that you're using his umbrella.
	So we don't live in the world.
	We live in the mind. We step from thought to thought.
	Like we're in some Mercy Street Peter Gabriel song.
	All of the buildings and all of the cars were once just a dream in somebody's head.
	I mean, I'm talking into a microphone, I'm listening to an earpiece.
	I'm actually looking at a door.
	A door that fits.
	A handle that turns, hinges that don't squeak.
	Because of the countless interactions of the countless minds it takes to produce the mental simulacrum of reality that we call civilization.
	And even when we see the natural world, it's usually a black and white, heavily tinted Ansel Adams print that is hung on a wall.
	And we think we have, part of our brains think that we have a window into the world from there, but we don't.
	We have a window into the mind of Ansel Adams and the photography that he did.
	And the process and methodology by which those pictures get reproduced for mass consumption.
	So the mind-body dichotomy is kind of wild.
	We live in our bodies, which are all natural.
	But we move through an entirely artificial mindscape of everybody else's thoughts.
	I want to realize that everywhere you look in the world, just about, is the product of someone's mind.
	And you are walking through somebody else's cerebellum.
	You are walking through somebody else's eyeballs.
	You are walking through somebody else's unconscious.
	And their inspiration.
	That has been created and forged and flamed into material existence by sheer will and entrepreneurship.
	Just have a look at the color of the wall of the room that you're sitting in or walking through.
	Somebody designed that color.
	Somebody figured out exactly how to mix the paints.
	That used to be my job when I worked in a hardware store.
	I love mixing paints. Somebody painted it.
	Somebody put the tape along the edge so it didn't bleed onto the ceiling or the floorboards.
	That color was designed by somebody, painted by someone, so even the color that surrounds you is someone's mind.
	It's not...
	Of course it's reality, and it's objective, and I'm not trying to sort of say we live...
	Man is the dream of the dolphin.
	You know, I'm not trying to say we live in some mindscape, but when you look at it, We live in the products of thought.
	We communicate through the products of thought.
	And that mind-body dichotomy, where our brains are these tiny little specks that can encompass the entire universe, it's really, really freaky.
	But accurate.
	And, I mean, I don't think that reality is freaky, but it is important to remember because it helps us value all of the market that has brought us everything that keeps it all going.
	So when it comes to feelings, yeah, feelings are very important, but just this idea that we're just going to make the right decisions and all of that, it's an attempt to substitute, and this is the problem I had with Carl Rogers and why I didn't read him too much, is that it is this instinctualism, this worship of the id, this worship of the animalistic side, this worship of the lizard brain, this worship of the instincts.
	It is an attempt to substitute feelings for philosophy.
	Now, philosophy should not be at war with feelings, and feelings should certainly inform philosophy, of course.
	How can you seek happiness, which is a feeling, if you reject feelings?
	You have no goal.
	You have nothing to...
	Aim at. Nothing to pursue without desire.
	Desire is a feeling. Happiness or the satisfaction of desire is a feeling.
	We need feelings. The purpose of philosophy is the achievement of happiness as a feeling.
	But feelings can't be the start, the middle, and the end point of all of that.
	I mean, it's like saying that, well, the purpose of Nutrition and exercise and all that medicine.
	The purpose of all that is good health.
	Well, how do you achieve that? Well, you pursue stuff that feels good and, you know, you'll make the right decisions and it'll all come to you and then you'll end up healthy.
	It's like, nope, that's not how life works.
	That's not how life works.
	Not how life works at all.
	Doing what feels right usually means sitting on the couch and eating a piece of cheesecake.
	And that's not the way things go.
	You need to have discipline.
	You need to have a structure.
	You need to have a plan. And a lot of psychology, this is true from sort of Jung onwards, mid-third to 1930s to 1970s for sure, It was the attempt, okay, how do we live?
	Oh, you know, self-actualization, which is kind of the narcissism of feelings and rather than, okay, what is true, what is real, what is true, what is good, what is actionable?
	Well, that's the job of philosophy.
	And when people gave up God and they rejected philosophy, they ended up with this narcissism of petty self-regard that passed for self-actualization and therefore some sort of movement of humanism and all that kind of stuff, right?
	I don't know. And just, you know, philosophers make short shrift of things like, don't judge.
	Like, oh, you just made a judgment, right?
	Do you judge negatively people who judge?
	No. Well, then why are you saying don't do it?
	Well, it's just not advantageous.
	Oh, so is it better to be advantageous or better to be not advantageous?
	Oh, it's better to be advantageous.
	Well, you just judge something as being better than something else.
	But that's not what I mean.
	Like, this is round and round boring bullshit, right, that people come up with.
	And none of these are syllogisms.
	None of these are past the Socratic test.
	None of these do any of that stuff.
	So with Carl Rogers, I mean, it's more into Albert Ellis and his sort of more rational-centered therapy where you use the Socratic method.
	This is a little bit like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is identify the contradictory thoughts, identify the irrational positions, and then work to bring reason and truth to them.
	And that's a way of knocking down things that are in your way.
	It still doesn't tell you where to go.
	You can fix the car. It doesn't tell you where you're going to drive, right?
	And So, to me, for those of you who weren't around in the 70s, and I was reading a lot of the stuff in the late 70s when I was in sort of early to mid-teens, I was reading like...
	This guy, I did read some Alice.
	It was very important. I read a lot of Jung.
	A little bit later, I'm not going to claim I was into my early teens or anything like that.
	But there was this whole wildly narcissistic self-help movement that was going on in the 70s and the early 80s.
	You know, this whole self-esteem thing.
	And... Just be positive around people and be accepting and be this and be that.
	It's all just nice saccharine sugar shit that rots your teeth.
	You kind of need your teeth to bite and tear and chew and speak and articulate.
	There's lots of sounds you can't make without a teeth.
	Teeth is one of them.
	And This gelding of the moral strength of philosophy and substituting this weak-ass cuck-based feminine hyper-acceptance and hyper-positivity and self-actualization and extreme states of mere humanness who live in the moment, blah, blah, blah, right? It was just a way of turning people's moral centers into their squishy middles.
	So that they wouldn't take on the powers that be.
	Hey, if I can make you really interested in your own emotional processes and have you nurture them like you're raising baby ducklings to robust adulthood, then you won't notice that the government is taking over more and more of the economy.
	So, yeah, this navel-gazing stuff, I had some particular issues with it in particular.
	And, yeah, trust feelings.
	Listen to feelings. Feelings are there to help inform your life, but they are not substitutes for thought.
	And so, yeah, so for Rogers, fully functioning people are well-adjusted, well-balanced, and interesting to know.
	Often such people are high achievers in society.
	And it just was...
	I don't know. It was a way of distracting people from the communists, in my humble opinion.
	So hopefully that helps.
	Alright, so next we have a listener who would like to talk about her question.
	She writes, what advice do you have for staying sane in these crazy times?
	Your comments on the start-stop of the economy and society wearing down, and people prompted this question.
	I definitely feel that weariness and disorientation, and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on how to relieve those feelings, what kinds of relationships and activities would be good to try, since COVID-fied society isn't really avoidable?
	Sorry, I just missed...
	I'm sorry about that.
	I heard the words, but I just...
	I really missed a little bit what was meant to the last...
	Just read the last sentence or two again.
	Oh, sure. So she's writing, I definitely feel that weariness and disorientation, and was wondering if you have any thoughts on how to relieve the feelings of weariness and disorientation.
	In other words, what kinds of relationships and activities would be good to try, since you can't really avoid the COVID society, in a sense.
	Wait, was there somebody asking a question, or...?
	That was not our caller.
	I'm sorry. Okay, that's fine. That's fine.
	I think she's unmuting just now.
	Hi. It's me.
	Hey, did you want to talk a little bit more?
	I want to make sure I get the question in as much detail as possible.
	Yes, absolutely. Well basically like what you said about the whole everything just stopping and starting all the time and kind of creating this confusion and disorientation.
	I'm definitely feeling that for you know a long time and so I just wanted to hear your thoughts on like how have you sort of dealt with these feelings if you had them or what advice would you have for someone who's trying to get a little more like clarity or I don't know, like, I guess stability may be too much to ask for, but I just want to hear your thoughts for it.
	You said, sorry, this is one word that I missed.
	You said your feelings of what?
	Like just feeling disoriented and kind of like anxious about everything going on.
	Right, right, right.
	Well, look, I wish I had some magic pill, obviously, right?
	But so, you know, I don't think I'm going to be able to say anything that's going to stabilize the planet in.
	But to me, at least, recognizing that there are going to be some aspects of your life that are just out of your control.
	You know, I mean, if you are running a business and you're dependent upon the goodwill of some Bureaucrat to say, sure, you can go ahead now, right?
	And you can open up again and so on.
	I mean, there's things you can do. I guess you could petition, you can talk to people, you can post and all that.
	But the amount of control that you have over your elected representatives is pretty low.
	Certainly as an individual, and I assume that you're not some big powerful lobby group or whatever, right?
	So it is really tough.
	It is really tough.
	And to me, it's really important to ration how much...
	Energy you spend on trying to control things that you can't really control.
	It's kind of trite and obvious, but it is in these pretty hysterical times.
	Four months still till the election.
	God help us, right? And so I would say that...
	You just try and divide things into things I can do something about that I care about.
	And that's where you want to spend your time and your energy.
	Things you can do something about that you care about.
	I could do something about philosophy, right?
	Yeah, it was a tough week, but I can have a conversation with you guys, and it's great.
	It's really good.
	Feel better. And so I can do something about that.
	I can do something about helping to spread some philosophy.
	I can do something about having some good conversations.
	And I can control whether or not I... Have this conversation or not.
	So there's something I can control that is going to have an effect on how my week goes, hopefully a positive effect on how other people's week goes and so on, right?
	So there's things that you can control that matter to you, and that's where I think you should spend as much energy as you can.
	There's things that you can't control that don't matter to you.
	Okay, that's obviously a no-brainer.
	I don't spend much time, if any, on those.
	And there's stuff that matters to you that you can't control.
	And I think it's important to stay informed about those things because whether you can control something or not might change or it might be worth trying to affect it in some way or whatever, right?
	But I think...
	I don't know. That, I think, is an important thing.
	We have to retract from the world the sensitivities when there are brutalities out there that we can't control.
	And this is true for social media.
	It's true for in-person stuff.
	There are a lot of kind of mean and hysterical people out there.
	And I think it's really important to try and refrain from engaging too much In a conversation which polarizes where you're not really going to be able to control anything or anyone.
	And I don't mean control anyone directly.
	I mean control whether there's a possibility of a positive outcome in the conversation, right?
	I mean, I have this, or I guess I had this, you know, I was engaging with people on Twitter where it would become pretty evident pretty quickly whether somebody was just going to be hopelessly negative or whether there was some possibility that I could learn something or they could learn something and so on, right?
	And so I think there's a sanity part.
	So what is it that drives us crazy?
	Well, it's a lot of things, obviously.
	I've studied this quite a bit, given the family history that I have.
	What is it that drives us crazy?
	Well, if you...
	Try to, you know, if you have a stick shift car and you try to put it in the gear and then you try and go really fast, it's just going to burn out the motor, right?
	Whereas if you try getting it going in the gear, then you're not going to move very fast at all.
	So using the wrong gear in the wrong situation is going to burn out the motor or you're not going to get far at all.
	So you've got to get the right gear into the right situation.
	And so when you care about something and you can do something about it, that's the right gear.
	And if you try to...
	Like, if you're using your brain in the wrong way, then it's going to burn out on you in the same way that if you use your car engine in the wrong way, it's going to burn out on you.
	And so... It's really important to recognize that your brain evolved for a particular capacity.
	Stuff you care about that you can do something about.
	That's what matters. Stuff you care about that you can do something about.
	I think this is particularly true of those of us who came from Heavy farming cultures.
	Because, you know, care about your family, care about your belly, care about your capacity to survive the winter.
	You can do something about it, but you better do it for every month except the coldest, right?
	You can plot, you can plan, you can sow, you can reap, you can hunt, you can salt, you can jam, you can pickle, you can all this kind of stuff, right?
	And so you care about yourself, your family, and your tribe and all of that, and you can do something about it.
	And that's kind of how we evolved.
	We, you know, when I was a kid, there was a famous saying, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
	Wishes are very dangerous.
	Wishing something to be different is a bad idea.
	Now, wishing something to be different that you can change, yeah, I'm thirsty, I can go get myself a drink of water.
	That's fine. Obviously, right?
	But try not to Burn out your mind engaging with people who aren't going to change.
	I mean, I know that I do that.
	Obviously, I don't think I've changed any of my debate opponent's minds in any particular way, but that's different because it's public debate and you're really trying to aim to change the minds of people who are listening in and all that kind of stuff.
	But really, really try to get your mind into the right gear.
	Something you care about that you can have an effect on.
	Because you weaken your resolution by continually trying to change things that can't change.
	Now, inanimate things we can change quite a bit.
	A while ago, I was playing some Frisbee golf for the first time.
	And... One of my Frisbee golf things...
	Frisbees, sorry. One of my Frisbees went into...
	A pond. And it was, you know, so ponds, they're cool and all that.
	And I learned a lot about ponds from my daughter, right?
	She's fascinated by semi-aquatic creatures.
	I would never want her to be in a situation where she would have to change.
	She would have to choose between keeping me and a salamander.
	I would not want her to be in that position because I'm pretty sure I know which way she's lean.
	But This was one of these ponds where they have that pillowy, totally squishy bottom, and I find that so repulsive.
	Give me a hard sandy bottom, give me rocks, and even the ones that poke my toes do not give me that billowy, squishy, Michael Moore back fat gushiness down at the bottom, because you just know down there there's like leeches and things like that.
	So I was like, it was too far out to go.
	And, you know, I wouldn't mind just jumping straight over the squishiness, swimming in and getting it and so on, but I was only halfway through the course and all that, so...
	Just make me sound like I'm some big vacation guy.
	This is just like a one-time thing.
	I've never played it again. But...
	So, I had a spare Frisbee, went, finished the course, came back, and it was still kind of far out, and I was like, nope, I'm not leaving it here.
	You know, it's also plastic. I don't know if it's good for the environment or whatever, right?
	So, I splashed it for a while, but it's still too far out, and I can't reach it.
	I almost step into the squishy stuff and all that.
	I wasn't going in barefoot, because you never know what's down there.
	I once, when I was... When I was a kid wading through the Don River, I stepped on something totally sharp and I ended up cutting hell out of the bottom of my foot and I had to have a whole bunch of stitches on the bottom of my foot.
	You can still see the marks here like 40 years later or whatever.
	So I'm not stepping into some pond.
	I don't know what's down there. Anyway, so my daughter and I call them tickle sticks because we used to jab them at each other and tickle each other when she was little.
	They're big, tall reeds, right?
	So I managed to pull off a reed and used it to drag the Frisbee towards myself, and then with a ridiculous glow of low-rent satisfaction, I took it back and returned it.
	So that's an example.
	I couldn't do anything about it.
	Left, came back. Okay, now I can do something about it.
	So then you get that satisfaction to be able to act on something that matters to you that you can do something about.
	Before it mattered to me I couldn't do anything about it, so I didn't just stare at it, right?
	Because that's using your brain in the wrong gear.
	So try to hit that overlapping Venn diagram, you know, like those two overlapping circles.
	Can I do something about it?
	And is it meaningful to me?
	Now, whether you can do something about it with regards to people is up to them.
	It's not up to you. It's not up to you.
	It's like pushing a piece of string that's on a table.
	You can't, right? You pull it, that's one thing.
	You push it, you can't move the other end directly.
	So whether people will let you reason with them, whether people will be open to information, that's up to them.
	That's not up to you. Now, you can have an influence on it and how you approach things and so on, right?
	I mean, it always surprises me when I see myself described as, you know, volatile or mean or a firebrand or stuff like that.
	I think I'm a pretty nice, reasonable guy, but anyway.
	So really, really try to focus on that.
	Can you do something about it?
	And does it matter to you?
	And if you focus on that kind of stuff, I think that's your best shot at trying to stay sane.
	But yeah, don't burn out your motor trying to climb the walls of sheer ice of other people's anti-rational indifference.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, definitely. I think it definitely helps with just kind of like the overall feeling of I think that everybody feels probably at this moment and can certainly help me help Figure out some things in my life, like my job or anything like that, that might help me feel less like I'm just like, kind of like you said, just like getting sunk down into this icky gooey bottom of a pond.
	Yeah, and you've got to have people in your life who are happy to see you.
	Yeah. And that you're happy to see.
	That's a great strength in life.
	People in your life who are happy to see you and that you're happy to see, that's like a superpower or something like that.
	That's like bulletproof, faster than a locomotive, more powerful than a speeding engine or whatever, right?
	So really try and get people in your life and keep them in your life who...
	You know, because there's a funny thing about modern life, man.
	It's a funny thing. I don't know if you've noticed this.
	Sometimes it's just me, but I've heard about this from other people.
	You know, these bungee relationships are really disorienting.
	Bungee relationships are like, Hey, hi, how are you?
	I'm your very best friend. You'll never do anything wrong.
	Oh, you did something I disagree with.
	Bye. It's just people come in and out like a bungee, like down, right?
	This has come from an old Scott Adams cartoon about the bungee boss.
	This kind of comes in, initiates a whole bunch of change and then vanishes.
	And these bungee relationships are really disorienting.
	And I don't think we're particularly built for that kind of stuff.
	It happens, of course, with boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, with one-night stands and all that kind of stuff.
	But even just, you know, friendships as a whole, there's this sort of vast oceanic indifference to the continuity of relationships out there.
	That is not, I think, particularly great.
	I've talked to a number of people on this show and just in personal life who are like, oh yeah, I was friends with this guy for 20 years.
	I didn't return his call one time and we never spoke again.
	You know, I don't mean to laugh, but it's like, it's literally stuff like that.
	Oh yeah, this guy was best man at my wedding.
	He moved an hour away and we've never really spoken since or we've never gotten together since, you know?
	And I think it is kind of important to hang on to these relationships if you can.
	I'm still in touch with a guy I was roommates with in college, which was over 30 years ago.
	Just do what you can to keep continuity in your life.
	You know, reach out, make the calls, touch base, get caught up.
	It is important.
	And if you have that kind of continuity...
	In your life, that's using your sort of social mechanism in the right way.
	Because we were evolved for these permanent relationships, you know, for better and for worse, right?
	I mean, we evolved in pretty small villages, pretty small tribal communities, hunter-gatherers or farmers or whatever, and you kind of have a pretty solid set of companions your whole life.
	Now, there was definitely problems with that, and it was kind of conservative to a fault and so on, but...
	I don't think these come-and-go bungee relationships are particularly good for us as well.
	And I think every time it happens, it pulls a little bit more Velcro off our capacity to bond with boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, friends, and so on.
	So, yeah, do what you can to maintain those relationships.
	And if there's someone you haven't talked to or seen in a while, I think it's worth reaching out and talking and seeing and seeing if there's any...
	Anything there to connect with, again, because I think that stuff is important as well because certainly the online world is very fickle and very volatile.
	I've found out that over the last 10 days, right?
	But I do think that...
	Do try and...
	Hang on to people you've got stuff in common with and stalk them and emerge from the backseat of their car in the middle of a parking lot.
	I'm kidding. But just try and find some way to stay in touch with people, especially people you've had a relationship with in the past that's kind of drifted.
	I think that can be kind of helpful and important, if that helps.
	Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Stefan.
	You are very welcome, and best of luck to you.
	All right, another Q or two.
	Really nice to chat with you guys tonight, by the way.
	A really great pleasure. Alright, I have another question for you then.
	This caller writes in, actually wrote tonight, the other day I logged on to a social media site for the first time in close to a decade.
	I noticed very quickly that many people I grew up with were rabidly posting leftist propaganda.
	I then looked over about 100 people that I'd known over the years and it was the same.
	This is particularly startling because I live in a low population region in the western United States.
	Is the time for talk over?
	Is the end of Western civilization near?
	Should I be fleeing to Poland or something?
	I do not wish for my kids to experience war.
	Yeah, that is a big question.
	That is a big, big question.
	I don't think that we get out of this level of propaganda perfectly peacefully.
	And I don't know how long that's been the case, but I suspect it's been the case for quite a long time.
	There is a kind of relentlessness and an escalation to this kind of propaganda.
	See, propaganda is when you feel that there's nothing else left to learn, you're in perfect possession of all of the answers, and everyone who disagrees with you is evil.
	Now, I can hear my critic's voice in my head, which is usually a good thing to have.
	It's a good thing to internalize. People say, ah, yes, but you say that, you know, the against me argument and so on.
	It's like, yeah, but that is about the use of force.
	And that is a very gentle and peaceful way to bring these topics up and in a way to try and avoid these kinds of social escalations and conflicts and so on, right?
	Yeah, how long do you hold out?
	How long do you stay? You know, the big answer used to be go to America, right?
	That used to be the big answer for the world, really, as a whole.
	It's a huge thing. Last 200 years, man, where do you go?
	Go to America. And then maybe people thought there would be a lunar base or someplace on Mars you could go to, but...
	No, we lost all of that.
	We didn't get science.
	We got social programs.
	So I don't have any answer to that.
	It's a personal decision, obviously.
	I know nobody wants me to tell them what to do, not that I could.
	But it's a personal decision based upon how much you enjoy the battle.
	It's based upon whether your finances can survive.
	And by battle, I don't mean obviously physical fighting or anything like that, just sort of intellectual battle and so on.
	There is, of course, hope.
	And the hope is that, as I talked about with Chaz...
	The hope is that people get to see what collectivism, what socialism, what communism looks like in its formational stage.
	You know, I mean, the Soviet experiment started in 1917, and they were still telling lies about it up into the 1960s and the 1970s.
	It was tougher to sell lies after the 1960s, after Khrushchev revealed the cult of personality of Stalin and so on.
	Certainly in the 1930s, the Was it Ticket to Moscow?
	There were these movies that Ayn Rand was exoriating.
	And Nixon and McCarthy were exoriating just how much pro-Soviet propaganda there was coming out of.
	Hollywood and so on, right?
	And so, if you sort of think 1917 to maybe 1967, I mean, it's half a century before some truths about these things began to dribble out.
	And it was the strangest thing, you know, just the little coincidences that happened.
	I was in grade 8.
	So, what does that make me?
	14 or something? I was in grade 8.
	And in my French teacher's classroom, I was watching a pretty bad movie with Matt, someone or other, I can't remember his last name, called Tex.
	But we'd started watching it, and she let us continue watching it over lunch, and I ended up finishing it.
	I was like, oh, it's a pretty bad movie.
	Pretty bad movie. And anyway, so then sitting, I turned to get up and leave, myself and a couple of other students have been watching it.
	And there on the windowsill was a book called A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
	And I was kind of curious.
	A Day in the Life of Ivan Dinizovich.
	I thought, okay, this is like a window into the Soviet Union written by a guy who was there.
	I didn't know it was about concentration camps or gulags or anything like that.
	And I picked it up, and I began to read it, and the man's language is staggeringly great.
	It's so crisp, it's so vivid, it's so sensual, it's so detailed.
	The words come alive like chilly Soviet golems.
	And they kind of climb up your nose and lift the blinds so you can see what was.
	And the misery of that world and the hopelessness of that day and the helplessness of everyone caught in that machinery.
	The machinery of the mind, right?
	You're not trapped in communism.
	You're trapped in a mind.
	You're trapped in a thought process that manifests as a gulag.
	You're trapped in a brain. And that moment of just starting to read that book...
	Because the previous year there had been a school trip to Moscow, which I desperately wanted to go on.
	Couldn't possibly do it. I think it was $1,500 back in the day, which, you know, didn't matter how much it was.
	There's no way. We weren't making rent at that time, right?
	I desperately wanted to go to Russia to Moscow to see, to see what it was.
	I've always been curious about the nature of a supposed enemy.
	What is it like? It's what James O'Keefe is so interesting about when he goes to the Antifa street fighting sessions.
	You get to see. You get to see.
	Hang on, let me finish the thought.
	I'm sorry for rambling so long, but I'll be real brief.
	So, I, this was, gosh, I was 14 in 1980, right?
	1979, 1980, whatever it was, right?
	And this, so 1980, that's 63 years since the foundation of the Soviet Empire, right?
	And it still had a ways to go.
	So 63 years, I got a literary view in the day of a life, in the day in the life of Ivan Denisovich.
	And, I mean, obviously it changed me enormously, and I said this on Parler, you should follow me on Parler, and Gab, and Mines, and so on, and Steemit, and you name it.
	And don't forget to follow me on Bitchute and LBRY. Very important for the videos.
	But I said this.
	One of the reasons I'm so anti-totalitarian is I grew up on these stories of my mother's life under both the Nazis and under the communists, right?
	Under the Nazis, her family, who were all writers and intellectuals, was suppressed.
	And under the war that the Nazis started, her mother, my grandmother, died.
	And then firebombing of Dresden.
	And my mother had to flirt and sit on the lap and God knows what else with the Russian tank commander so that he wouldn't destroy the village he was hiding out in.
	Because, of course, much like the Poles, right?
	With the Poles, the Germans and then the Russians smashed back and forth across the country shooting everyone who wore glasses, right?
	And it was the same thing in Germany.
	And so my mother, having seen both the horrors of Nazism and the horrors of communism, I've heard some of these stories.
	Not too many, but they were very vivid, very powerful, of course.
	And I could see the shadow of totalitarianism, even in her own rather histrionic and violent personality.
	But given the fires in which she was forged, and given the medication that was doubtless forced upon her when she was institutionalized, it is...
	Not impossible to understand how she became the person that she became.
	We do have the chance to see more vividly and more immediately what the formation of socialism looks like.
	And it's my hope that that will be enough to pierce the propaganda that people have received and that the empirical evidence of what's right in front of their eyes will do something to shatter the Bindfog of propaganda.
	I think it's a fairly decent shot and certainly something we've never had before in history.
	So, sorry about that. Go ahead with your thought.
	Oh, I apologize. I didn't mean to interrupt.
	Speaking of World War II... In my opinion, historically, at least, the people that run first in crisis situations survive, and those that don't, don't.
	So, are there indicators that you're watching for on when to make a move?
	Yeah. Um, I don't, yeah.
	It's hard to say.
	It's hard to say. There still is a big bedrock of common sense out there in the world and in the West.
	And you may not see a whole lot of it in social media, but it definitely is out there.
	There's a lot of resolution for people in America that it's not going to become a socialist country.
	And that is a pretty powerful chunk of people out there.
	And, you know, again, it's my hope.
	It's all peaceful and legal and so on.
	Obviously, I can't make any guarantees because history is a bit of a slippery eel and a rather electrified one at that.
	So, I would say, I mean, yeah, I think certainly if conversations as a whole become functionally impossible, that would be a pretty good indication that...
	The time for arguments is past.
	Like, if you can't have any real possibility of a public conversation, you know, it's funny because people don't usually remember this as well, but under Hitler, you know, for all of his monstrous evils, you know, you were free to leave up until the war.
	But then, of course, there was America to go to, right?
	This is always the question. It's okay, well, where do you go, right?
	You say Poland or whatever, where do you go, right?
	It's always a big question.
	Going to America, America was, other than, obviously, well, no, even...
	Even in the 20th century, it's a pretty violent place.
	What with the First World War and Second World War and Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria.
	But there was certainly a sense of peace.
	After the Second World War, there was a sense of at least some peace outside of the fight in Vietnam and I guess Korea.
	The draft was in Korea too, if I remember rightly, but...
	There was at least some possibility you could go there and find some sort of peace.
	It's pretty hard to figure out where in the world you can go to get that kind of peace now because the reach of the...
	The powers that be is pretty extensive.
	So I wouldn't say that there's any particular tripwire that I'm looking for.
	But I'm going to keep talking until there is not really any practical possibility of conversation.
	And then I'll just have to make my decisions from there.
	And of course, I've been keeping my eye on that over the last 10 days, as you can imagine.
	Yeah. Where would you go?
	Is it Poland for you? I don't know.
	I don't know. Honestly, there's lots of different options and lots of different possibilities.
	So I haven't...
	I mean, I'm really not at that stage where I'm like making bug out plans.
	But yeah, I mean, there's pluses and minuses to a lot of different places.
	It's kind of tough for me to judge Poland for being there for 10 days once.
	So that's an interesting question.
	Now you've got me thinking about it.
	I really should. But no, what are your thoughts on it?
	I mean, yeah, I don't really know, to be honest.
	I'm lost and, you know, it's kind of sad to see things go this way.
	I mean, the area I live in, you know, as of last year, there was still people driving down the road with Confederate flags, you know, so it's weird for things to have shifted so quickly and so easily.
	It's amazing the effect the media has had.
	Yeah, well, it's a dangerous world out there at the moment.
	It's a dangerous world to have counter-narratives, right, to any of that stuff.
	It's, you know, I mean, as people have been pointing out, I mean, back in 2012, Bernie Sanders went to the Mount Rushmore and said it was magnificent, and CNN was covering a year or two earlier Barack Obama going out to the same...
	National Monument in Mount Rushmore and it was magnificent and now it's just a bunch of white slave owners.
	It's like boom. Amazing.
	Amazing. But this is one of the things to go back to 1984.
	It just We are now at war with East Asia.
	We've always been at war with East Asia.
	Just the narrative can change and history can be burned and positions can completely reverse and Mount Rushmore just a couple of years ago was a noble, beautiful American monument and now it's just, you know, evil whiteys and it's, you know, there's no continuity and no history and this pillaging at the moment, it's, yeah, it's like, remember those bungee relationships I was talking about?
	It's like, now we have it with the past as a whole and it's pretty strange.
	It's pretty strange and Yeah, I mean, it's wild, really, when you think about it.
	Of course, as the great Dr.
	Thomas Sowell has pointed out, more whites were taken to Africa as slaves than blacks were ever taken to America.
	America had slavery for a grand total of 84 years, and there's still slavery in the world at the moment, in India and in the Middle East and other places, and Yet the original sin that, you know, people used to get their original sin out of Christianity and then Christianity faded away and now the Marxists are giving it to everyone in perpetuity and people just seem to be greedy for it.
	Like, I don't know what this thirst for self-abasement, this thirst for self-hatred, this thirst for self-contempt, it's...
	It's very strange to me.
	Why would you want to drink in deep a narrative that so castigated your civilization?
	What would make you so thirsty for that self-abasement?
	It's very, very odd to me.
	I'll have to puzzle it out at some point.
	I have some thoughts, but I don't want to swamp them in this aspect of the conversation.
	Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to answer me, and I obviously appreciate all you do.
	It's horrifying what you're going through right now with all the banishing of Stefan.
	I don't appreciate it.
	Well, thank you. I very much appreciate that.
	All right. One more cue.
	How are you guys enjoying your evening?
	It's very pleasant to me.
	I have a question from, I think, the last call-in that we didn't get to.
	A bit of a shift from our tone so far.
	So the caller writes, or the listener writes rather, I recall how Steph mentioned he was scared of a Great Dane, or at least a big dog as a kid, from the last call-in.
	What made you like dogs again?
	And do you have a favorite breed or mix?
	Hmm. Ah, yes.
	Okay. So, when I was a little kid...
	Oh, it's backstory time, everybody.
	When I was a little kid, my mother had a best friend named Valerie.
	And Valerie had a husband who was a pilot for British Airways.
	I think it was British Airways, some airline in England.
	Before it was Freddie Leica, but British Airways.
	And this is back when I don't think pilots get paid that much anymore, other than perhaps to rescue Harrison Ford from his own crash landings.
	But back in the day, man, these people had some serious money.
	Oh my gosh. I don't know how my mother and this woman became friends, and she later came to visit us when we were in Canada.
	But this woman and her husband, oh my gosh.
	So a couple of things I remember. They're a huge house.
	First of all, they had...
	Oh, I don't know. I don't know if anyone's interested in this kind of stuff.
	But here, I'm going to record it for posterity before, you know, if and when I die.
	It will all be lost in the sands of time and nobody will remember any of that.
	So they had in there...
	And in their big backyard was an enclosed swimming pool now in England.
	Back in the day, an enclosed swimming pool.
	It had one of these semi-circular, like the top half of a culvert, but it was kind of rippled, plastic-thick plastic, and it went over this amazing pool.
	And I was... I would go swimming in that pool hour after hour after hour.
	I've never... I never have any idea where my mother was during all of these times.
	But, you know, now, of course, you'd never let a kid that young...
	I was maybe, I don't know, six, seven, eight, or whatever.
	You'd never let a kid that young...
	In a pool on their own.
	But I would be in there. I had a little rubber shark, and I'd play around with it forever.
	And there was another kid there, and I remember, for some reason, I remember this woman had a very extensive bookshelf.
	And I remember two books that I read from her bookshelf.
	Number one was a movie about a crash landing of an airplane in the Andes, and the book was called Alive.
	And it basically ended up with cannibalism, so I was reading that when I was a little kid.
	And another, the title, of course, I cannot remember for the life of me, it was about an Israeli pilot Who was a jet fighter pilot and I just remember horrific descriptions of melting flesh when his airplane got hit by a rocket and he couldn't get out and I just remember that being extraordinarily vivid but also I remember one of the best parties I was ever at was when I was like, I don't know, six years old.
	And it was a New Year's Eve party.
	Everybody was in this big giant party room, in this big giant house.
	And it was dancing and people were having fun.
	And people gave me these little rolled up streamers to throw across the room.
	And it was just a completely glorious and fun-filled evening.
	And this was also...
	They didn't just have a swimming pool.
	They also had a pond.
	And that was the pond wherein I first collected tadpoles and kept them in a jar and grew them just as my daughter is growing them now.
	We actually grew over 70 toads and released them in a variety of places.
	It was very, very cool. But...
	So the reason I'm telling you all this is it was by this house that I was walking in the woods.
	I don't know if the woods were there or not.
	And this was the Great Dane that kept me up against the tree.
	And I was looking up into this thing, slavering mouth and terrifying.
	But, so here's the thing.
	So that was my negative experience with a dog.
	And As I got bigger, and the dogs weren't quite as big, when I would go and visit my late father, who just died a couple of months ago, had a whole bunch of sisters.
	Three sisters. And one of them was married to the guy who delivered me, whose name is Basil, and that's why my middle name is Basil.
	And they had a lovely cottage in Athlone, and I would go there in the summers to spend a couple of weeks with them in Ireland.
	Now, they had an absolutely delightful dog.
	It was a Cockro Spaniel named Brandy, and it had its tail removed, and I'm never quite sure why dogs had their tail removed, but this one did have its tail removed, but you could see the little stump wagging like crazy.
	And this was a truly wonderful dog, very friendly.
	I would spend hours playing with the dog, roll them with the dog.
	It was very affectionate, never growled, never barked, and that gave me a wonderfully warm feeling towards dogs.
	I remember when I was six visiting my father in South Africa.
	And we did quite a lot of traveling around.
	I still remember being in the backseat of a car.
	It was a really old Ford, pale blue, that my father drove that half the time you just have to push it to get it started.
	My father was not much of a spender, even though I think he made some fairly good money as a geologist.
	But I remember we were in a national park and my father, who was a photographer as well, wanted to get close to a herd of elephants.
	And so he kept moving the car up, moving the car up, moving the car up.
	And then the bull elephant, who wanted to protect his herd, turned and charged at the car.
	And I remember thinking, oh, that's not good.
	And I also remember to this very day and probably to my dying day, I remember the...
	of the car as we went into hyper-reverse because there was no room to turn around.
	The bull elephant, the giant bull elephant was coming too fast.
	Of course, these things can crush a car like you stepping on a peanut, right?
	And I just remember that massive wine and this incredibly giant creature charging down on us in this little old beat-up car when we were out in the middle of nowhere.
	And I also remember my father would...
	He had this wonderful fudge that he made, but he would always make me eat a full tomato before I'd get the fudge, which, you know, in hindsight, was not a bad deal.
	It was very good. My father made some damn good fudge.
	I wish I had that recipe.
	Actually, I probably don't, because I think I enjoy still way less than I did 10 years ago.
	Anyway... So, I had, when I was traveling in Africa, we stayed with some friends of my father's who had these wonderful dogs who loved having their hair combed backwards.
	And every time, this is back when I had hair, of course, as a kid, and every time I would pick up the brush to brush my hair, they would literally jump at you because they would be so eager to have their hair brushed backwards.
	I don't know why they loved it.
	I don't know why it mattered to them.
	I don't think it had anything to do with fleas.
	It was a pretty tidy household.
	It was a priest who had this household in Cape Town.
	And... Those dogs were also incredibly delightful.
	Now, I also remember coming from a big hike with my father through the mountains and coming out, I think, at the base of Soweto or maybe some other shantytown and being sat upon by a pack of wild dogs, and they were very scary.
	And I remember very vividly my father kicking dogs left, right, and center and, you know, just having to get through this pack of dogs.
	It was fairly alarming.
	But for the most part, I had wonderful relationships with dogs.
	I do love dogs' playfulness.
	I love their enthusiasm.
	As far as favorites go, I will always have a warm spot for Cocker Spaniels.
	I do love Golden Labs and Golden Retrievers because I knew some of those growing up.
	Now, I grew up in apartments, never lived in a house really, so I never had any capacity to have dogs.
	I had pets like hamsters and mice and so on.
	But I had friends who had dogs and always loved, I loved walking dogs.
	When I was, I think, 15, I went to spend a summer with a friend of my father's in Newfoundland, and he had a...
	A collie. I think a lassie.
	A lassie dog. A collie.
	And I used to go jogging with that collie, and that collie was a big furball and very affectionate and a great deal of fun.
	I love playing with dogs.
	I love their focus, their attention, their concentration.
	You know, you're holding the ball, you move it, and their eyes dart and follow you, and they're just...
	Just absolutely delightful, delightful creatures.
	And I do prefer them in some ways to cats.
	Cats are more cuddly, although a cuddly dog is a good thing.
	But they are...
	You know, there's this meme.
	It actually makes me kind of emotional even to think about it.
	Like, we don't deserve dogs.
	You know, just how loyal they are and how well they remember, how enthusiastic and happy they are.
	If you treat them well when you see them and so on, they are just wonderful.
	Now, when I'm out there walking with my daughter, and we're kind of in the middle of nowhere sometimes, if their dog comes bounding along, I'm nervous.
	Like, I do not like dogs that I don't know.
	I don't dislike them or anything, but I'm cautious, right?
	I don't know, especially now.
	You could carry COVID or whatever.
	It's unlikely, but they could.
	So I'm still a little nervous around dogs that I don't know.
	And, you know, like every now and then, you know, the dog seems to be wagging his tail.
	You go up and say, how you doing?
	Or how's it going? Or good boy or whatever.
	And then you start to get that low subsonic growl that's like, step back, human.
	At which point I do very much.
	And my daughter's had a couple of enthusiastic dogs jump up on her.
	And that makes her pretty, pretty alarmed.
	Although she does, her favorite dogs are huskies.
	She just loves those blue-eyed huskies.
	And so she's quite committed to getting dogs as a teenager, which is startlingly soon.
	I can't believe she's already 11 and a half.
	Absolutely mind-blowing. I posted this.
	I got an email from someone who was missing some of my YouTube stuff and said, you know, what was that wonderful...
	I'd like to get a hold of that wonderful conversation you did years ago with David Friedman on unschooling.
	So I uploaded that and somebody put the comment on Bitchute, I think it was.
	It's like, oh yeah, your daughter was like 11 months old when you made this video.
	And I'm like, holy crap.
	Because she's like too big to sit in my lap now.
	It's just an amazing thing.
	It's just an amazing, amazing thing.
	So I think that having had all those positive experience with dogs...
	Has been great. There are some dogs I'm not big fans of, like those squished up Shiatsu's.
	Shitsis? Shinsis?
	Shutsis? I can't remember what they're called.
	The ones with the sort of squished up faces that pant like they're somebody losing their deep space life package somewhere north of Mars.
	Not big fans. Pugs.
	Yeah, they're pugs, but there's also a Shinzen or something like that.
	I can't remember. Do you know what I mean?
	Shih Tzu? Shih Tzu.
	Is that it? Is it Shih Tzu?
	Shih Tzu? Shih Tzu.
	Yeah, something like that.
	Chihuahuas are cute, but to me it's like anything that a decent-sized rodent could take down doesn't really strike me as a dog too much.
	And Alsatians are cool, very alert dogs, and German Shepherds are cool, very alert dogs, but they do have a kind of aggression to them.
	This always made me a bit nervous, although I haven't had any bad experiences with them.
	In particular, of course, anything that's a puppy is just about to die for.
	There's very little more fun in life than lying on the ground and having puppies swarm all over you.
	If you could freeze frame that moment and live in bliss for six months, you probably would, right?
	That's a joyful thing.
	And so I am absolutely delighted and charmed by dogs.
	I hate to say rabbit enthusiasm because that sounds pretty bad, but they're almost bottomless enthusiasm for affection and fun and excitement and all of that.
	And they are, you know, man's best friend.
	They are boon companions and they are wonderful creatures to have around.
	What about you? But enough about me.
	Is there somebody on the line who wants to talk dog?
	Dogs or cats? No, just dogs.
	Your choice. Your choice.
	We did have someone asking if you are going to get any cats because he said he remembered this.
	You said Izzy liked kitties when she was younger, but she's more switched over to dogs now.
	Is that the thing? Well, no.
	She wants to get dogs and cats and just about everything else.
	So as far as pets goes, I mean, I like pets.
	Don't get me wrong. I'm a bit of a night owl.
	So dogs, because they get up and they're very enthusiastic very early in the morning, a little bit of a challenge for old StephBot here.
	And also travel.
	I think if you stay home more, I think dogs are a wonderful thing to get.
	But I think if you travel, it's pretty rough on the dogs because you are their tribe.
	You are their entire pack.
	And so if you're on the road, I think it's pretty tough for dogs.
	Cats, they don't quite care as much.
	But I guess I'm always a little bit nervous about cats getting aggressive or angry or upset and peeing on everything because...
	I think we've all known those people who've had some pretty aggressive cats in their lives, and it's just like, I never want to visit their house because, I mean, the smell is just appalling.
	And it's almost impossible to get out.
	Cat pee is just basically like Satan sweat that stains the soul of a house from here to eternity.
	So I do like cats very much.
	So with regards to pets, I guess we haven't gone for a while since COVID, but what we used to do We would go fairly regularly to an animal shelter near our house, and I would give them a donation,
	and we would bring some cat treats in, and we would spend an hour or two playing with the cats and the dogs and all of that, and that was great fun, and it was good for them, and it was good for the cats, so they got some company and all of that, get some donations to the people who ran the cat shelter, and they don't really talk that much about my charitable work, but that's not really particularly important at this time, but...
	But yeah, so that's sort of how we would get our fill of pets.
	And there were a couple of cat cafes around, pretty far away, but they were sometimes fun to go and visit, so...
	I do love pets.
	And, you know, when I get older, if travel diminishes further, then I would be very, very happy to get.
	I do think I would prefer a dog to a cat.
	If I had to choose, if you can get a dog that gets along with a cat, I think that's great as well.
	But goldfish still remain incomprehensible to me.
	I'm just telling you that right now.
	I just do not get fish tanks at all.
	It just makes no sense to me.
	So that's my pet.
	That's my pet story. Yeah, I've not had pets since I've lived with my family back when I was a teenager.
	But the main reason I've not gotten something like a dog, aside from the fact that I'm renting, is when I was working all day, you know?
	Right. And then it's like, well, you know, if I have a little puppy, you got to watch him.
	You know, if it's just me working eight, nine, whatever hours a day, it's like, well, you know, the poor dog, you know?
	Yeah, because they're social animals, right?
	It's really cruel for a dog to leave it alone.
	Like, they go a little crazy. I think so.
	Yeah, they're total... I mean, cats are not so bad, but dogs, they go a little crazy.
	Plus, there's always the spay or don't spay thing.
	That's kind of a rough question for a dude or dude-esque, I suppose.
	Those are pretty rough, but...
	I think if you have kids and you're home a lot, I think pets are, you know, absolutely wonderful.
	And I think there's so much fun for kids.
	And I've always enjoyed playing, particularly with dogs.
	I literally can play, like, sticks and ball for, like, hours.
	And just because the joy that the animal is taking in it, the joy that I'm taking in it, the enthusiasm, it's just beautiful.
	And, of course, you know, when you're involved in something rhythmic like that, you know, you can get some good thinking done and all that.
	And... You know, dogs, there's so much to learn from dogs, too.
	Like, they're so enthusiastic.
	They wear their hearts on their sleeve, and they're so grateful.
	You know, you do something that they want, and they're just, you know, walkies, you know, they just go completely mental, and just love it, and I've always really, really enjoyed that.
	I really, you know, the people you can't read, the people you don't know if they're happy or not, the really cynical people, the emos, the goths, and so on, because you kind of know what they're feeling, but...
	I've just always really liked the confidence and enthusiasm that comes from...
	I mean, you guys usually know how I'm feeling, right?
	I mean, I'm pretty... I wear my heart on my sleeve pretty solidly.
	So I've always really loved what dogs do with regards to that enthusiasm.
	And I always thought, you know, we love dogs because they're so open with their affections.
	And that's why I always thought, you know, as long as I keep operating out of a place of love, things can't go too, too badly.
	Yeah, yeah. And I especially like it when...
	When owners really care enough about their dogs, about their dogs to have them really, like, they're the lead of the pack, so the dog's not losing its mind with anxiety or, you know, jumping on other people and stuff, you know?
	Yeah, it's funny.
	I had a call with a guy many years ago, and he had a very interesting experience in that He was at a party with his dogs.
	He brought his dogs to some backyard party.
	And his girlfriend snapped at him.
	And he kind of jumped back.
	And about half an hour later, his dog bit him for the first time ever.
	And we were trying to puzzle that one out.
	And I said, I think it's because you cowered back from another human so you got devalued in the pack.
	In your dog's mind.
	Anyway, it's just an odd little memory that popped up.
	I don't think it ever got published, but it was a very interesting conversation.
	Now, I did enjoy having hamsters as pets when I was a kid, because again, they're very cuddly and all of that, but the hamsters, I don't think they get spayed or anything, and I do remember a hamster...
	I was having babies and I reached in to pet the hamster.
	I didn't even know she was pregnant. She had babies and I reached in and touched her and she freaked out and she started trying to stuff the babies into her cheeks.
	I guess she thought there was a predator or maybe she was disoriented or something like that.
	I thought she was eating them and it was the most...
	I thought she was eating her own babies.
	She was actually just keeping them safe.
	She spat them out later, which was kind of unsettling.
	Like they got to get... They got to get born twice!
	But I do remember that as a pretty vivid moment of learning quite a lot about maternal protection and thinking that I just had some demon cannibal hamster that was eating its own young or whatever.
	It's a pretty vivid moment when I was five or six.
	But yeah, we had hamsters.
	They're pretty cool pets.
	Oh gosh, I remember.
	This is again, you know, I was surrounded by the horrors of the Second World War when I was a kid, right?
	So I There was this elderly French couple who lived upstairs from, like, so we had these kind of, you know, the staircases that go sort of forward, left, back, up, like a little square going up, right?
	So we would, we were on the second floor.
	So you'd go up the stairs, take a left, and we would be there.
	And then you'd go up one more flight of stairs, and there was this elderly French couple who were very nice and spoke heavily accented English, but very, very nice people.
	They would occasionally invite me in for tea.
	My best friend for a while was this Turkish fellow named Zirdar.
	And he was learning English.
	And he was... I don't want to say he was funny like it was some sort of clown or anything like that.
	But he would...
	If he wanted to play in the dark, he would say, Stefan, off the light!
	Off the light! I remember he would always say that.
	I also remember then they said, Stefan, would you like some milk?
	And I always love milk. I'm a cow-based life form even to this day.
	And because they were Turkish, right?
	They gave me milk thick with sugar.
	And I was so startled because I guess they stir sugar into the milk.
	At least that's what they did. Maybe there's some part of Turkish culture or whatever.
	And they gave me this thick sugared milk.
	And I was like, I remember sipping it and being utterly disgusted by it.
	It's like, you know that there's sugar in here already because it's lactose, right?
	But my friend Serdar was great.
	And anyway, this French couple...
	I wanted to show them my hamster.
	And I went up and knocked on the door and the woman opened.
	And I held up and said, look!
	And she screamed and ran.
	And her husband said, I'm so sorry, but she had terrible experiences with rats during the war.
	I'm like, holy shit.
	I am not even living in the present.
	I'm living in this tombstone of World War II with my mom and her stories and her histories.
	And I'm sure the Turkish people have their own stories and this poor French couple.
	And it's like we were just in this retirement home for...
	War sufferers or something like that.
	I remember that.
	Yeah, I remember that really vividly.
	And then I remember thinking she has nothing to apologize for.
	I remember because she was very, very sorry.
	It's like, really, honestly, you have nothing to apologize for because nobody likes rats.
	You know, the fact, but it was so visceral.
	And again, one of these stories, she's long dead now.
	Of course, she was, I guess, in her 60s.
	Back in the 70s, hers would be long dead now.
	And of course, you know, probably nobody alive knows what happened to her.
	In France, with the rats.
	But I bet you it was something pretty, pretty bad.
	I mean, who knows if there were bodies and the rats were eating them, or God knows, right?
	Who knows if she had to jump up on a bunk bed to get away from the rats and spend a sleepless night shoveling them off so that they wouldn't chew on her legs, or who knows?
	Who knows? Just horrifying stuff that's out there in history, and we're doing our best to keep it from recurring.
	So, sorry, we're going from hamsters to death by rats.
	Hey, you know, it ties into 1984, back at the beginning, Room 101.
	All right, shall we shut it down?
	That was a great, great evening's chat, everyone.
	Thank you so much for dropping by.
	Such a great pleasure to have these conversations with you, and I hope they're helpful to you.
	I certainly find them interesting, and I really do appreciate having the chance to Pour all of this stuff out of the general reservoir of my brain.
	It's good for you, I think.
	It's good for the world. It's certainly good for me.
	And I appreciate it.
	So, you know, please send your thoughts in.
	Please drop your questions in.
	You can go to the Discord server through subscribestar.com forward slash free domain.
	You can support me at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Yeah, we're going to have to spend some money to secure everything here because there just seemed to be this wave of unpersoning that's going through the systems at the moment.
	So we're doing some very great and important work to keep ourselves as...
	I guess Bulletproof is humanly possible, but it's not super cheap, so if you could help out, freedomain.com forward slash donate, I would really, really appreciate that, and have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
	We're going to hold off on the...
	We were doing shows for a while there, Sundays, 11 a.m., Eastern Standard.
	We may go back to those.
	I've just got a huge pile of work, as you imagine, rewiring everything with YouTube down to other places is quite a bit of work, and...
	So, I will not be doing the Sunday AM calls for the foreseeable future, but I do want to get back to two calls a week.
	So, if you want to drop by the Discord server and let us know what you think would be interesting for you or useful for you or, I guess, timely for you about when we could get together.
	I really appreciate that. And, yeah, let's take a break from some of the old doom and gloom.
	Next week, and let's do another trivia night.
	That was a great deal of fun, and my daughter's been putting some stuff together for that.
	So, Lots of love from here.
	Appreciate everybody's very kind messages, support.
	Love you guys so, so much.
	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful weekend.

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