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Aug. 10, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:22:39
Jordan Peterson & Free Will! Freedomain Call In Show Aug 8 2020
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Good evening, everybody. Welcome to your August.
It is an August assembly of people fascinated by philosophy here on the 7th of August.
Look at that! We're past the halfway mark of basically the year that's been sent to us by the last chapter of the Bible, Revelations.
It just seems getting worse.
I think next we get land sharks, lava demons, waking nightmares.
I assume that everybody's babysitter is going to be an it clown, and we just kind of go for it.
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Alright, sounds great. Well, we have somebody who hasn't submitted their question, but is willing to have a chatty chat, so I'll bring you in.
Go for it. Alright, so when it comes to moving to a new place, making new connections and meeting people, so far I've thought about joining churches and volunteering locally, and I was wondering if you had any other ideas to sort of accelerate that process and make it easier.
Because most of us, you know, you grow up in a neighborhood, you have your friends, then you go to school where you kind of had ready-made companions, so to speak, and then, you know, after high school, you probably go to college, and so you have people all around you over the course of your life who are all trying to make friends themselves and, you know, all going through that same, a lot of them, of course, through that social anxiety of how do you make friends and all that.
And it's kind of funny, you know, because a lot of people, they can sort of get into their early to mid-twenties, and they've never had to, in a sense, start from a blank slate or start from scratch.
And I remember when I, so after high school, I went to go and work in Thunder Bay, or as it's known in Canada, Thunder Bay.
And I was in Thunder Bay.
I was based in Thunder Bay, although we went into the bush a lot, but probably eight months, nine months.
And man, it's tough to meet people.
It's really tough to meet people.
I mean, I would go to bars, maybe chat with women.
I had a girlfriend at the time.
She came up to visit.
But it's tough to meet people.
I remember I would go to Lakehead University.
I got a gym membership there.
And I would go to work out there.
And I remember chatting with a guy about movies in the sauna.
And... Depends on what kind of sauna you're in.
Some of them are towels. Some of them are like not so much with the towels.
I've always been a bit of a towel guy.
I don't like to show off. But I remember chatting with this guy.
Like, oh yeah, we should hit a movie sometime or whatever.
And then realizing, of course, that we're mostly naked.
And he probably thinks I'm asking him out on a date.
But I wasn't. Obviously, I was just, you know, hey, I'm new to town.
And the other thing too, when you move to places where there's a small town, or a small town, Thunder Bay is not too small, about 100,000 people when I was there.
But I remember they had really good live bands in Thunder Bay.
I don't know what it was, but I remember a live band came and could do just about every 80s song known to man.
And I just remember the singer, I quite like Tears for Fears, and you know...
Welcome to your life.
There's no turning back.
Everybody wants to rule the world.
And the way the singer did Welcome to...
Like the ooh was just...
I don't know. This is a tiny memory from when I was 19 or 20, but I just remember thinking, man, that guy can sing really well.
And just did really great live bands.
I remember one woman who had a really high squeaky voice saying that she sang like Papa Smurf castrato, which I thought was actually kind of funny, but...
Yeah, it's tough to meet people because, of course, in small towns, everyone's grown up together.
They all have relationships going back, you know, 10 years, 20 years or whatever.
And so you do feel a little bit like, you know, the uncouth outsider elbowing into a pretty tight inner circle.
So, you know, it's really important to remember, you know, and some people, of course, will try and find friendships through work and so on.
Maybe that can work. It kind of depends on the industry that you're in.
But it's tough to break in from the outside.
And, you know, if there are nice people around, they'll say, oh, new guy in town, let's invite him over or sort of get to know him or whatever and open up the circle.
But it can be tough.
So I just want to point out to people that if you're on the conveyor belt where you just get endless friendships served up to you on a platter like a buffet because of usually because of school and so on or family or neighborhoods or whatever, there may come a time, as I guess the case with you, that you're going to have to find a way in from the outside.
And it's not the easiest thing because the odds that they're going to like you as much, you're going to like them as much, not super high.
So is that somewhat the situation you're in?
Did I sort of skirt around it fairly well or what?
Yeah, I actually did grow up in a small town.
And so, you know, a lot of friendships just organically from that and work and some tech events and that kind of thing.
And yeah, I'm in my mid-20s now.
And yeah, Now I've moved like 16 hours away.
So I'm in a spot where...
And I work remote, so it's not like I'm going to have...
Oh, yeah. Well, that's another thing too.
Sorry to interrupt. I'm just asking you a question.
Now, did you move to a small-ish town or where are you?
I mean, I don't mean where are you physically.
I just mean like in terms of the size of the town.
Yeah. There's about 10,000 people in the, it's a small city, and then the metro area is about 40,000.
I'm sorry, did you refer to 10,000 people as a small city?
You and I may be having slightly different gauges here.
Well, it's technically a city, but yeah, it's kind of a town.
There's a city in Timmins that just goes on and on and on, like the city limits go like, I don't know how many dozens of miles outside the city, but it's pretty small where you are, like 10,000 is pretty small, right?
Yeah, it's pretty small, and it's an old city.
A lot of the houses are over 100 years old, so it's pretty compact and close together.
What's the age demographics that you're looking at?
Because when you said Old City, I'm thinking like, I don't know, like Fort Lauderdale or something.
No, no, I mean the age demographics of the people in the city.
Is there a lot of young people around it?
Not a whole lot of young people.
I think the median age is like 33 or 34.
So you have to try and find your way into...
Okay, I'm going to sound really negative on small towns here, and I don't mean that.
There's some really, really nice aspects to small towns, you know, John Cougar style, but you're going to have to try and find people who you're going to want to hang out with when you're the one who's moved away from where you are, but they're not the people who've moved away from where they are, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm assuming a lot of people around here are locals.
There is a little bit of tourism.
There's a mountain not far away.
But still, I mean, tourists don't generally...
Oh, no, then you're like, hey, I met this great girl in Aruba.
She's from Sweden, and I'm going to waste the next two years of my life, right?
Okay. All right.
Yeah, now, so how long have you been there?
And how are your social skills for meeting new people?
people?
Because there's social skills like people you already know and then there's social skills for meeting new people.
Um, it's, when it comes to meeting new people, it can go either way depending on the situation.
If it's a situation I'm comfortable with, I'm decent.
If it's a situation I'm not so comfortable with, I am kind of closed off.
Churches, for instance, some are pretty comfortable, some are not to me, and it just sort of depends on that.
I'd say probably average, maybe a little above.
I mean, I guess it's a fairly blunt question.
If you were to sort of give me the elevator pitch for you as a friend, right?
Like what values or attributes would you bring to a friendship?
Oh, well, I'm helpful.
I check in on people.
I work on cars and computers and all that kind of stuff.
I'm always happy to help and teach people that kind of thing.
I'm there for somebody to listen to if they have something on their mind.
I'm more than happy to listen to them and ask them about how they're doing.
So that's sort of the helpful side of things.
things.
What about the fun side of things?
Like activities and stuff?
I...
I mean, I like car racing and shooting guns, hiking, you know, and motorsports.
That's pretty much it for, you know, the main hobbies that come to mind kind of deal.
I'm not a big one when it comes to...
Right, right.
right okay and what's your longest friendship so far um somewhere around 15 years i want to say certainly That's certainly pretty good.
That's solid, respectable.
And I guess you've been there, it's kind of new, so you haven't had a huge amount of time to sort out the best ways to get in touch with people yet, right?
Well, I mean, you can go to the shooting range, obviously, and you can find people that way.
They're probably likely to be very polite and quite assertive, as you know from this set of things.
And, yeah, I mean, you can certainly meet a lot of like-minded people with regards to, you know, probably the values that we would all share if you go to a nice church.
And, you know, of course, if you're on the Discord server as you are, you know, you might be able to find some people, maybe not in the same town, that might be rolling the dice and expecting, you know, 320s in a row, but maybe something not too, too far away, that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, I could see that kind of stuff.
It may be too small for there to be like a car collector's club or anything like that, but...
Maybe there could be a motorcycle club if you want to pick up a dirt bike or something like that and sort of head out.
My sort of experience has been like if you get around clubs where there's sort of like-minded interests, I mean, it's just so easy to fall into conversation with people and find people who are compatible.
That's good to keep in mind.
Yeah, I've owned dirt bikes for years and actually sold them before I moved.
But yeah, I can always buy another one.
And there's a big ATV community around here.
So that's a good idea.
Yeah, dirt bike people, ATV people, in my experience, are very, very nice.
Very nice people. I did a lot of dirt biking when I was younger.
And so, yeah, they tend to be very, you know, very solid people, decent people, nice people.
And, yeah, you could certainly do a lot worse in that kind of community.
All right.
So do you want to keep us posted about how it goes?
Amen.
Thank you.
Fantastic, fantastic. Yeah, I can.
You've got friendships for 15 years, you've got well-defined values, just go and, you know, obviously you hang out with people who share the similar hobbies.
Because hobbies are kind of like the tip of the iceberg for the personality as a whole.
And, I mean, the cliché.
So, I mean, there's very interesting work that's been done on stereotypes, which I actually find sort of quite fascinating.
I've been meaning to talk about this for a while, so let me tell you about one of my hobbies and shoehorn it in here, but...
You know, stereotypes are pretty cool.
The other day, I happened to be flipping channels, which I very rarely do, but I did in this situation.
And there's, I don't even remember what it's, Building Alaska or something like that.
It's on Home Garden Television.
And it's a bunch of people who are building homes in, like, middle of nowhere, Alaska land.
Like, you have to build in winter because in the summer it's all swamp and you can't get in there.
You can't get any machinery in there.
I have no idea how you get in there at all, maybe by boat or whatever.
And so all of the people who were there, you know, they're all solid, good-natured people and they're all working together to build this house in the snow, which is, of course, super slippery.
It's very cold and, you know, there's danger, right?
It's one of the things I remember from working up north that, I mean, if you get into an injury situation, you are, I mean, gosh, I mean, that was at least a day away from a hospital.
And so you really, you have to be pretty careful.
A lot of consequences, right?
And so these kinds of stereotypes, like you meet a guy, you know, with a get-or-done weathered baseball cap who's going fishing, you kind of know a lot about him already.
And you're probably not going to be too surprised, for better and for worse.
I mean, usually that's for better.
You know, if you see someone who's, you know, I saw this comedian once on one of these talent shows, like these America's Got Talent or Britain's Got Talent, and he was a comedian, and he had that sort of shock of goth hair and white makeup with the raccoon eyes and all of that, and you know.
You know he's not about to head off fishing, at least not in that kind of get-up.
People are usually advertising their values very clearly, just based upon particular appearance, you know, like the guys who have the soul patch or, you know, one particular kind of guys, you know, the guys who are particularly concerned with how they look, but are dressed for sort of functional labor.
There's going to be a lot of solidity to that kind of stuff.
And of course, if you think about it over the course of your life, and I'm sort of curious what you guys think, Has it been the case for you that you have...
I don't want to say jumped to conclusions.
You've extracted conclusions based upon the way people that present themselves and then found out that you are largely wrong or entirely wrong.
It does occasionally happen, you know, where people are kind of chameleoned into some other presentation.
But, you know, for the most part, it is...
It's very accurate and the stereotypes that we have about people are usually the accurate ones.
Because, of course, if this way of presenting yourself and the values embedded in your presentation, it's a way of making sure that you don't waste time dating incompatible people.
So, you know, people who present themselves in a particular kind of way, they are broadcasting their values and their virtues Or lack thereof if it's, you know, the opposite side of the fence.
And it's very efficient.
It's a very efficient way.
Like if you're an outdoorsy kind of guy, you probably want an outdoorsy kind of girl.
So, you know, you're not going to bring up some, you know, Real Housewives of Santa Clara or whatever woman in high heels to try and go through the gator-infested swamp with you on an airboat.
It's just not the way it's really going to work out.
So, I would say, you know, yeah, you can kind of judge a book by its cover in many ways.
And there's a lot of people who say, oh, you know, like you can, and a lot of media kind of messes with that, you know, like, The guy in the get-or-done cap turns out to be excellent at playing violin.
You know, a fiddle. Fiddle, yes.
Violin, probably, no. But I have sort of found, you know, cruising past half a century, that the stereotypes are pretty accurate, they're pretty efficient, and they work.
And that's kind of why we've developed those things.
So, you know, if you're aware of that kind of stuff, it doesn't mean you can't, obviously, you can't accept it.
Something that doesn't fit into the particular stereotype, but for the most part, You're going to be pretty accurate.
You know, like trying to find a normal weight guy over 50 on a Harley is probably going to be kind of tough.
Could happen. Could happen.
But, you know, probably won't.
Yeah, so I think just...
And you can look up the research on stereotypes and how accurate they are in terms of being able to predict things about people.
It's what I sort of say to people. If you want to be around normal people...
Just try and look normal. You know, it's always been one of these things like, what is so complicated about looking normal or average?
Like, I don't have anything particularly unusual in my presentation, although my ideas, my arguments are unusual relative to the mainstream, but I would say just try and present yourself You know, certainly don't fake anything, but present yourself in a manner that kind of works with the group that you're working with and, you know, just be efficient with regards to judging people by stereotypes.
It's actually kind of efficient.
All right, well, keep us posted and best of luck in your new job.
And, you know, I wanted to mention this again because I was talking about this with my daughter today, just, you know, as we sort of grind into, what is this now?
March, April, May, June, July.
I mean, you know, five, six months for a lot of people for lockdown.
And, you know, loneliness is a real scourge out there.
I am, obviously, very blessed to have this community, to have my wife, my daughter, just wonderful people to be quarantined with, so to speak.
But, you know, there are a lot of people out there who...
Are lonely. And I was saying to my daughter just how, you know, sometimes, you know, I think this is a little bit more true for women than for men.
Like, lonely women will go to the doctor, even if they don't feel particularly bad, probably not now, but in the past, just so they'd have someone to chat with, you know, someone who might check something on their back or whatever it is.
There's a little bit of human touch and all that because, you know, everybody says I, like me, I am an individual and so on, but In my experience, I think it's kind of true, we are mixed, we are blended of people, and the atomic isolation that occurs with the mere isolated eye is something that's kind of inhuman in a way, right?
Because we are social animals and we're designed to sort of blend into some sort of group.
And that doesn't mean lose your identity, but our identity is composed of the people around us.
And there are some people who are finding out, you know, our dog nature, not our cat nature, because they're isolated.
At home, they're working from home, and there's no parties to go to, and there's no discos or bars or whatever to go to, and you can't even, like if you've got some reading to do.
I used to do this many years ago.
I remember there used to be...
Oh boy, this is going back away.
The Daily Planet, I think it was called.
It was an old restaurant. I don't think it's around anymore.
I had Young and Eggleston. And I remember just jumping on the bus, going up to that.
And I read Voltaire while having a fairly frugal dinner, but it was very, very good food there.
And it was really nice.
And I also remember running into a woman I dated once.
She was a stage manager for one of my plays that I wrote and directed.
And I ran into her because I was at a coffee shop down on Queen Street and I was there reading David Copperfield.
And, you know, sometimes it's nice.
Just be out of the house and, you know, maybe you can find someone to chat with.
Or if not, you're just sort of around people.
It's kind of nice, right?
And so, yeah, just, you know, please remember, if you have people that you know are kind of isolated, you know, a little call, a little sort of how you're doing kind of thing.
And hopefully this will remind people that it is kind of important to not be too isolated in your life.
It is kind of important to have people Look, it's better to be alone than to be in bad company.
I really, really believe that to be the case.
But it's better to be in good company than to be alone.
So again, if you know people, you know, maybe it's people you've had a split with and maybe they've learned better or you've learned better and it's worth a reach out, not a reach around, but a reach out.
And see how they're doing. It might be a time to mend fences.
It might be a time to break down barriers.
It might be a time to reconnect with people and see if wisdom has overtaken what is sometimes not the best reason for splits.
But yeah, just if you can.
And reach out and give these people a bit of contact.
Especially if you're living with people and it's easy to forget just how...
Isolated. This China virus has made people.
It's pretty rough.
And it's also bad for their health.
You know, loneliness is like a pack of cigarettes a day as far as your health goes.
And it's just a real brief reminder.
It's my public service announcement to just do what you can to reach out to people and give them a, hey, how's it going?
All right. That's it for that little bit.
bit.
If we have another question or comment or combo, I'd be happy to jump in.
We do have somebody who asks just a straightforward question.
Why do we feel jealousy?
Actually, a very underrated song by Queen.
I just wanted to mention that called Jealousy.
Beautifully sung. Oh my gosh.
Anyway. So, jealousy.
A very, very interesting emotion.
And I certainly have had my share.
I certainly have had my share of jealousy over the course of my life.
So, jealousy to me is the pain or the discomfort that comes from the gap between where you are and where you could be.
between where you are and where you could be and it is a way of raising your ambition I mean if you are a relatively healthy person I think mentally healthy you don't aspire to be something you just couldn't be You know, like, I've never aspired to be some tenor who wrestles his way through Mozart's Requiem in the high sub-counter-tenor stratosphere of, you know, human vocal capacities.
So, you know, I mean, I'm a, you know, decent, okay-ish amateur singer, kind of a baritone or whatever, and...
You know, I'm never going to make a living as a singer, but, you know, I like to belt out a tune once in a while.
And so I don't sit there and say, oh, man, I really missed the boat when it came to, you know, my life's calling.
I could have been a singer or whatever. Or, you know, gymnast or dancer.
No, it's not, right?
But I always did envy people who were sort of out there speaking their mind, telling the truth, making a difference, that kind of stuff.
And so I think the envy is kind of like a compass.
It points you to where deep down you know you could get to.
It points you deep down to where you know you could get to.
Again, if...
And again, I'm sort of talking about healthy people because a lot of unhealthy people, they envy like the trust fund kids who are posting pictures of themselves getting onto private jets and flying off to the Fire Island to, you know, I guess almost see a concert or whatever, right?
And so if it's pointing you in some particularly bad direction, like, oh, I envy that guy who's got the abs or whatever it is, right?
Then that can be a bit of a pied piper, like take you off a cliff kind of thing.
But I think if you sort of look at your own envy and say, well, what is it that I envy?
Who is it that I envy? And what is it that I envy about that person?
And that to me is a very good spur.
You know, like what is the spur that we have to fulfill our potential?
And you can't really do much better in life than to pursue your greatest potential for the greatest good.
I mean, that's about... This is all the way back to Aristotle, right?
The pursuit of excellence, particularly in morals, is the very best path to happiness, or eudomania, as he called it.
And so, if you have a potential that you're not realizing...
You will often feel a little bit empty, a little bit depressed, and you will feel diminishing returns on whatever you're using as a dopamine hit to distract yourself from your potential, to avoid your potential, kind of Henry V style.
So if you do find yourself running a little bit out of energy, running a little bit out of motivation, running a little bit out of happiness, and finding whatever substitutes you have for genuine moral achievement in your life begin to diminish, that usually is...
A spur to yourself to say, okay, well I guess I've got to get serious about the pursuit of excellence in, you know, moral excellence being the ideal, but you know, whatever excellence it is that you could manifest or bring to life in your life.
So it's important to look at your envy and to say, what is it informing me about my potential?
Looking at your jealousy. What is it that it is informing me about My potential.
And if you have been suckered into shallow Jealousy.
To be jealous of people who've inherited money, I understand it.
It's very, very tempting, for sure, because it looks like they have an easy life, it looks like they have a good life, and it's not really the case.
I mean, gosh, this Amber Heard-Johnny Depp libel case that's going on, I mean, there's a libel suit that's going on in the UK, I think it's finished now, and they're just waiting for the judgment, which probably will take a while.
And he's suing her for, I think, $50 million for an interview she gave where she talked about, I think, being abused.
And I think he was of the opinion that it implied it was him.
And it's all just my opinion, but, you know, this Johnny Depp guy, I mean, a very good-looking, exotic kind of guy.
He got his start many years ago on a show called 21 Jump Street where he improbably played, or he played in a probably young undercover cop.
And... He's had a truly remarkable career, a wide range of roles, all the way from What's Eating Gilbert Grape to Edward Scissorhands to The Pirates of the Caribbean, and he's done a whole bunch of other movies where he plays.
He usually plays some of the Tim Burton quirky stuff and all that.
He was in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and so on.
And Alice in Wonderland.
And yeah, he plays these very, very quirky kind of characters.
And I mean, he's had a staggeringly successful career.
So, you know, good-looking guy, very talented.
He's in a band, I think, called the Hollywood Vampires.
And, you know, he's married, long-term relationship.
He's got kids. And then he unfortunately met Amber Heard, who herself comes from a violent family history.
Her father was abusive. And whether it's Simon the Boxer from his side, her side, or both, there are, of course, these allegations of abuse.
And, you know, Johnny Depp made $650 million American.
What's like a billion dollars Canadian?
Nobody makes $650 million.
And it's gone.
It's gone. Now, he's suing his business managers and his business managers say, no, it was his crazy spending.
And he's like, you guys haven't paid by taxes.
And I don't even know how many years.
Apparently, he owes like $100 million.
To the IRS. And my sort of theory is that poor Johnny Depp, a lot of creative people aren't that particularly good with money.
But poor Johnny Depp, why does he have to go To all of these lengths to uncover just how disastrous his relationship was where, you know, there was some bottle-throwing incident.
He got the tip of his finger cut off and he wrote horrible things about her on the wall in the blood of his half-severed finger.
Like, just a complete nightmare existence of, you know, you can see the drugs and the alcohol and all of that.
Just a complete disaster of a life.
But, I mean, the guy's cornered now, right?
If he owes $100 million, To the IRS and he doesn't have any money.
Well, where the hell is he going to get $100 million?
Well, he's got to get $100 million by acting in a bunch of movies.
But if he's perceived to be a wife-beater...
Then people aren't really going to go and watch his movies, right?
Because you have to have a likability factor, a Q factor, right?
A likability factor. In order to make a lot of money as a movie star, people have to like you.
And this is sort of what Ellen DeGeneres is facing right now because she's got this motto.
She's a talk show host and a comedian and all that.
And she's got this motto, be kind to each other, be nice to each other.
And, you know, reports pouring out that she has this unbelievably racist, sexist, toxic, horrendous work environment and all that.
So if she loses her likability factor, well, she can't really make much money milking her charisma if it's perceived to be, you know, fraudulent, right?
So poor Johnny Depp, you know, and I say poor, you know, I mean...
He's obviously, he had a rough childhood, man.
I mean, he got into his mom's drugs, I think, when he was in his early teens and all of that.
It was pretty bad.
You know, it's like the singer for Love Will Tear Us Apart Again, right?
I mean, that singer volunteered when he was in his teens at an old age home and he and his friends used to just grab medications for the old people and just wolf them down.
And the guy, you know, had to go, he passed out, he had to get his stomach pumped and all that.
He had terrible epilepsy. He ended up killing himself at the age of 20, 21, I think it is, partly because of epilepsy, I guess partly because of a bad marriage and all of that.
It's just, you know, it's a brutal life.
But you look at these kinds of people, you say, oh, hang on, Amber Heard, she's very pretty, but...
You know, miserable existence, right?
And you look at Johnny Depp, you say, gosh, you know, wealthy and good-looking and talented and famous and successful and you name it, right?
And he's just living this nightmare existence of, like, sheer Dante-esque horror in his personal relationships.
And now he's trapped in this, well, not trapped, but I guess he chose to pursue this nightmarish lawsuit because he wants to clear his name so that he can make money so he doesn't go to jail for non-payment of taxes.
And it's, you know, what a terrible situation to be in.
I think he's in his 50s now, something in the mid-50s, early 50s, something like that.
But what a nightmare situation to be in, to have to go through this trial, to have all your dirty laundry yanked out, to have, you know, people associate you more and more with this kind of horror show and to be facing a hundred million dollar tax bill.
That's kind of considerable.
And then to not even be able to make movies because you've been labeled, he says of course falsely, but you've been labeled as a wife beater.
And so, I mean, a lot of people I'm sure over the years have envied this guy, you know, he dates all these beautiful women, he's got this great career, a good looking guy and money and fame and all that kind of stuff, red carpet treatment and And all of that.
But, you know, you lift the lid on this kind of stuff.
And, you know, it's just a complete nightmare.
Like Marlon Brando, when I was younger, I mean, he was certainly past his prime when I was younger.
But when I was in theater school, I had a big giant poster of Marlon Brando because he was such a fantastic actor.
You say, oh, a good-looking guy when he was younger and, you know, dates all these beautiful women and he's got his own private island and an incredible career and everybody's dying to work with him and You know, even when Scorsese was making Apocalypse Now, you know, they flew Marlon Brando out to be Mr.
Kurtz, and the guy hadn't even read the book when he shows up.
And it's just like, you know, he had this habit of, oh, you know, and I think Johnny Depp did this too.
It's like, oh, just, I can't be bothered to learn the script.
Just have some guy hold up the lines that I'm supposed to say, and I'll do it that way.
And Marlon Brando was like, no, no, no, I'm just trying to be spontaneous.
It's like, no, come on.
You're a lazy fat bastard who's a terrible parent.
And his kids all got involved.
Almost all his kids got involved in horrible legal situations.
I think one of them killed themselves.
They're just a complete nightmare of an existence.
And so the only thing that we can productively envy, I think, is a virtue and courage and integrity and all of that.
But man... If you have envy as something that spurs you to be better, to achieve excellence in some particular manner, the idea will be moral excellence, then I think it's a very productive thing to go through.
But it can also be a Pied Piper that leads you off to a shallow thing.
Because, you know, a lot of people think, oh, you know, I lose these 20 pounds, I get hair transplants, you know, whatever, I'm going to be so much happier.
My mom had this too. My mom always felt that her nose was too big.
And, oh, that's not going to help the rumors about my Jewishness, is it?
Anyway, but nonetheless, my mom always felt that her nose was too big.
And so she saved up her money and she got a nose job.
And it really was quite shocking because, man, that bruises the eyes off.
It looks like you have two black eyes and all of that.
And she got her nose.
Well, it wasn't broken or anything, but she...
And I really didn't notice it.
It didn't really matter to me, but...
She got her nose fixed.
And... What happened?
Well, nothing. Nothing changed.
She didn't end up marrying a millionaire.
She didn't end up with better men in her life.
None of these... It's like the boob job situation.
Oh, I've got a boob job or whatever, right?
Or... What was it? Kanye West.
Kanye West... Oh, I hate being bipolar.
It's excellent. But Kanye West got addicted to painkillers, to opiates, if I remember rightly.
Because... Why? Because...
He didn't want to be perceived as fat, so he got liposuction, which was very painful, and as a result of getting liposuction, he got addicted to these drugs, which was bad, obviously very bad, and not good at all for his mental stability now, and now it looks like his marriage is on real shaky ground, and, you know, it's just a...
it's a mess. And this guy, what is he, a billionaire now, or something like that?
Music and clothing lines, and I'm sure he's got sneaker lines and stuff like that.
And... You know, addicted to opiates for a time and so insecure that he feels he needs liposuction in order to go out on stage, you know, like Biggie Smalls wasn't a thing or anything like that.
You know, just peel back this kind of stuff.
Or, you know, Kim Kardashian, you know, this good-looking half-anime character.
What will it be her...
If this one craters, what will it be her third marriage?
Or something like that.
And... Just a mess.
Just a mess. And again, not all famous people are miserable or anything like that, but it certainly is no guarantee of any kind of happiness.
Excellence in your work is really important, and excellence in your morals is more important.
But really aiming for excellence in your work is very, very important.
And I do.
I mean, I do aim for excellence in what it is that I do.
And I'm constantly critiquing myself and how to get better and all of that.
I'm like the Michael Jordan.
I still practice speeches when I've got no mic around.
And I'm like Michael Jordan, who's just out there continually shooting hoops, even though he's been doing it for 15, 20 years, right?
You've just got to keep practicing, keep thinking and keep mulling things over and always try to improve.
Because, you know, if you get good enough, you too.
It can be deplatformed. So, that is my thought.
Jealousy is like this finger-crooking come hither that can lead you down a dark path if it's envy towards shallow things or appearance things or whatever.
Or it can lead you to something truly great.
You know, like I always aim for the top.
Always aim for the top if you believe that you can get there with any sort of reasonable thing.
So, I didn't read Dickens like, this is a great novelist.
I read Dickens like, hey, how can I become a great novelist?
And again, for those of you who are listening to this and interested, or if you're not interested, try it out anyway.
I'm doing audiobook readings of my novel almost, which I wrote about 20 years ago.
No, 19 years ago. And it's a great book.
It's a great book. And it's the story of a British family and a German family from World War I to World War II. It's all British history and German history and the road to World War II. And it's family dysfunction and grand historical events.
It's really, it's an epic, epic book.
And it's very long. It's very long.
It's like Lord of the Rings long. And I'm very pleased with it.
And it's fascinating for me to read it again because I haven't read it in, I guess, about 18 years.
And I've been meaning to do it, do some of it.
And I've done some of it before in the past.
I read the audiobook, I don't know, about 10 or 12 years ago.
But I'm doing full proper audiobook reading now.
And you can get it at freedomain.com forward slash blog.
You know, just scroll down and it's all there or it's being posted as well to subscribe.
So it's being posted on the Discord server, I think, as well, too.
And if you're on the Discord server, you give me feedback on it.
I really, really would appreciate that.
But so I was looking at Shakespeare and Dickens and so on, not like, wow, these guys are really good at what they do, which of course they are, but like, okay, what can I learn so that I can aim for that?
But again, it's ridiculously high ambition, but why not?
Why not? It's better to fail at something high than succeed at something low, in my opinion, because even if you fail at something high, you're probably still in the middle somewhere.
And that's higher than you're going to be if you aimed low.
So that's sort of my thoughts about that.
And I hope that helps.
And if the listener has any other questions or comments, I'm happy to hear them.
them but let's move on shall we all right so we have a listener who like to chat about this i believe So he writes... I have a theory that in order for us to figure out reality and whether or not free will or determinism is the correct path to life, we need to figure out the problem of consciousness.
The reason for this is that we have yet to figure that out, though we have some theories.
I believe in order to figure out reality and what is objectively true, we must figure out consciousness.
I would like to know Steph's thoughts.
Well, you're on the wire, right?
You're here? Are you here?
Is he here or is it just a cue that he sent in?
Yes. No, I'm here.
I like that. He's here. No, I'm here.
Are you here? No, I'm here. Can you hear me?
No, there. Okay, all right, all right.
We've got Brownie in motion in the conversation already.
Excellent, excellent. Well, tell me a little bit about your history with these concepts or ideas.
Honestly, nothing. It's just kind of something that I've been thinking about lately because I've been wanting to Wanting to learn more about free will and determination.
And I know it's something that is highly contentious because you had a conversation with Jay Dyer about this with the theory with religion and whether or not God's real and whether or not free will is correct or whether determinism is or not.
I don't think that we can actually figure those things out and have a correct answer to those until we figure out what actually causes consciousness, what actually starts it.
Because we know how life developed generally, and it was just...
Okay, sorry. I'm not sure how many of these things I disagree with, which doesn't mean you're wrong.
Obviously, I'm just saying things. I'm not sure how many things I disagree with I should let pile up.
Otherwise, it's going to be a real wall of things.
So do you mind if we stop here and start picking this one apart?
No, that's fine. All right.
So the three major things that I disagree with sort of last to earliest.
First of all, how we developed wasn't random.
Because natural selection is not random, right?
So you can say some of the mutations are random for sure, right?
Or they're effectively random.
I mean, obviously they're not random like God rolls dice.
But mutations are positively selected, as you know, based upon their adaptive value for success in reproduction, in the gaining of food, or whatever it is, right?
And so... It's not random, right?
And I want to sort of make that clear.
Again, maybe some of the mutations are effectively random, but how they're positively selected for success in evolution, that's not random at all, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I clarify something real quick?
Okay, see, I guess what I meant to say by that is life when it first started.
Like, way back hundreds of millions years ago.
Like, when the first zygote or whatever, the first germ appeared and it started splitting that.
Oh, just the primordial soup, electrification, zappo, zappo, frankenstein, single-cell thing.
Okay, got it, got it. Yeah. Okay, no, not your apologies at all.
That's fine. I think it's billions, not hundreds of millions.
I think it's three or four billion. Oh, no, that's the age of the Earth.
It could be hundreds. Anyway. Now the second thing is we have to figure out where consciousness came from in order to determine whether determinism or free will is correct.
Did I get that one correct?
Correct. I believe that free will is a correct thing.
However, I don't think we can objectively say what is until we figure it out.
Well, you could be right, of course, right?
But my particular take on this would be that if there is no such thing as free will, then there's no such thing as correct.
So the moment somebody starts asking whether something is correct or incorrect, true or false, valid or invalid, in accordance with reality or against reality, then that's already a free will asked and answered.
Because if there's determinism, then there is no alternative to what is, and therefore there cannot be anything that is correct or incorrect, because there is no alternative.
It's sort of like saying, is Mount Everest correct or incorrect?
It's like, the question wouldn't make any sense, because Mount Everest is the result of purely physical forces Of, you know, heat and pressure, and I don't know if, like, there were continents that crashed into each other and raised it up, probably something like that, right?
And so because, or saying, is that cloud correct or incorrect?
Well, the cloud is not a product of consciousness.
The cloud is simply, you know, water vapor forming in particular air currents coalescing together around dust or whatever happens there.
It's been a while since I did the cycle of water.
But we couldn't say, is the cloud correct or incorrect?
Because it's a product of purely material forces with no free will involved, right?
Same thing with, you know, is the size of this lake true or false?
It doesn't make any sense because the size of the lake is, again, assuming it's a naturally formed lake, it's not a product of consciousness.
So the moment you bring in correct versus incorrect, You're saying that there's potential states that differentiate from each other and we should choose the state called correctness or truth versus incorrectness or falsehood, right?
And so the moment the word correct comes in, you've automatically discarded the concept of determinism.
Okay. Which you're certainly welcome to disagree with.
I mean, I'm just telling you this is the argument from my standpoint.
No, it makes sense. I don't know too much about the topics.
It's just kind of something that I've been thinking about a little bit.
So I'm trying to get your ideas on that because I just bought a few books to try and inform myself because I am highly ignorant on the topic.
Well, I don't know that you're ignorant because these are things that are just self-contained arguments, so to speak, right?
Do we need to know the origin of consciousness in order to determine whether that's free will or not?
I wouldn't say so at all.
Because, first of all, we may never know the origin of consciousness.
And secondly, we don't need to know what a cloud is to know that there is or is not a cloud in the sky.
We don't need to know the history of the Earth or the geological pressures that produced Mount Everest to know whether Mount Everest is there or not or to measure its height or anything like that.
So simply working with the empiricism of today, of the moment, We can determine an enormous amount because to say that, to me at least, something as fundamental as determinism versus free will, that that would require that we, in a sense, go back in time and figure out the origins of the bicameral mind or whatever it is.
I mean, that to me would be to say, well, we then can't use philosophy to determine whether free will is valid or determinism is valid because we have to wait for Time travel or, you know, some way of recreating the origins of the human mind, which is to say that really one of the most important questions, if not the most important question of philosophy, which is do we have a choice?
Do we have a choice? Is there such a thing as free will?
Is there any such thing as a preferred state?
Because if there isn't any such thing as a preferred state or a preferable state, Then we are just rocks bouncing down a hill, crashing into each other, and pretending we can choose where we land when we can't.
Where we land as rocks, if we're just rocks crashing down a hillside, bumping into each other, we may not be able to predict exactly where we're going to land, but when you see a bunch of rocks sliding down a hill, we don't know exactly where they're going to land.
But we know that they're not choosing where they land.
That it's simply the accumulation of rocks, bouncing, gravity, air friction, rotation, whatever it's going to be, the surface they land on.
There's going to be a lot of factors that are going to produce where the rock ends up.
And again, we may not be able to predict it, We know it's going to be lower if they're still bouncing down, but we don't know exactly where they're going to land and what rotation they're going to be and where they're going to finally settle.
But we know that the rocks are not choosing anything.
So even though it's a physical process that's too complex for us to predict in the moment, we know for sure, for sure, that the rocks aren't choosing anything.
So the question philosophy is around the value.
It's centered around the value of preferred states.
Truth is better than falsehood.
Accuracy is better than error.
Consistency is better than contradiction.
Reason and evidence are better than faith and superstition.
This is the essence of philosophy.
And even if your philosophy is based upon personal revelation or reading chicken entrails spread out on a rock or tea leaves or praying to a cat god, even if that is your philosophy, There still is a preferred state.
Even in theology, there is a preferred state called conformity with the will and virtue of God.
In medicine there is a preferred state, health.
In exercise there is a preferred state, strength or agility or accuracy.
In piano there is a preferred state called accurate reproduction of notes or composition of notes.
In every field of human endeavor there is a preferred state and philosophy the preferred state is truth.
Now, my methodology is reason and evidence.
Other people, who I would not consider philosophers, have other approaches.
But there still is a preferred state in almost every human endeavor that you can think of.
I mean, even down to like city planning.
What is the preferred state? Well, you know, a livable, functional, sustainable, green city, right?
That's conducive to the happiness of the lives, if it's a happiness or whatever.
So there's preferred states that are everywhere.
You and I have a preferred state.
In this conversation, which is to achieve some enlightenment with each other, and the preferred way that we do that is to have a negotiation.
I'm not going to say, well, I'm going to take your cat hostage until you agree with me, but that's not a philosophical methodology.
I guess that's kind of like a cat mafia methodology, but everything that we can think of.
With regards to what we want to do as human beings, it's a preferred state.
I'm thirsty. I'm going to go to the fridge and get some water.
My preferred state is to not be thirsty and to do that I have to drink something, right?
So, for everything that we do, there is a preferred state and philosophy is the discipline of Analyzing preferred states because whatever helps you achieve that preferred state is the good.
Reason and evidence leading to truth.
Whatever interferes or moves you away from that preferred state is the bad.
In exercise, whatever moves you towards strength and flexibility and dexterity or whatever it is, is the good.
Whatever leads you away from that is the bad.
Same thing with practice.
I remember when I was a teenager, I played a lot of soccer and I would go like every Sunday.
We could play soccer, play a lot of baseball and so on.
But in these disciplines, I played merely for recreation.
I never took a shred of training.
I never did anything outside of just playing these games for fun.
And I remember after years and years of playing soccer, a group came by who had been training in soccer, and we had played them some years before, and we had beaten them soundly.
And then this team had gone away, and they had, obviously it wasn't just for us, but they had trained.
I was a soccer coach for a little while with kids and all of that, but they had run their sprints, their wind sprints, they had practiced their Passing their strategy, and so after a couple of years where we had just been playing for fun, this team came that we had beaten in the past and kicked their asses like 16-year-old boys against a women's soccer team.
Like, they just beat us, and it wasn't even close, right?
And now, I didn't particularly mind because I was never aiming to be a soccer player.
I just wanted to play for fun, and I enjoyed it, and...
But it was very clear to me at that point, you know, that sort of 10,000 hours thing, it was very clear to me that if you, you know, my improved state was around, you know, friendship and health and we'd all go to the ice cream shop afterwards and have an ice cream and, you know, talk about our lives and argue about abortion and the death penalty and everything else we could think of.
But it was fun.
It was just a great way to go out, run around, kick the ball and all of that.
So my preferred state there was health and companionship.
It was not becoming a better soccer player.
The other team's preferred state was to become a better soccer player.
And so for me, I was achieving my optimum goal of health and companionship because if somebody had come to me and said, let's do, you know, we're going to go and play soccer for an hour, but, you know, half of that is going to be wind sprints and practices.
I'd be like, forget it. I don't want to do any of that.
Now, with tennis, that was a very different matter.
With tennis, I took lessons.
I practiced a lot.
I was in leagues. I, you know, and I got a lot Because I was really, really interested in becoming good at tennis.
It was the same thing with the swim team.
I think I came in 6th or 7th in Ontario because I would get up and I would practice and all of that.
And so with all of that stuff...
There's a preferred state, even if it's not excellence, but rather, you know, again, sort of health or whatever, right?
So all of this preferred state stuff is really, really important.
If determinism is, quote, true, then there's no such thing as truth.
Because truth requires there to be an alternative which is not preferred.
And so we can reason through these things quite easily.
And if I look at something that is deterministic...
Like, you know, you turn on the television, right?
And I suffered through like six hours of CEO testimony of, you know, various tech companies in Congress the other day.
And I disagreed with a lot that was being said, but I didn't have a debate with my television because I recognized that the television is not an entity that has free will, even though there's a face on it, even though there's voices, even though it actually has an audio input that I turn off, but whatever, right? Because, you know, if you turn it on, you can do voice commands like Siri style, right?
Or Alexa style. But even though the television has characteristics of a human being, you know, it has, it speaks, right?
It has audio output. It has audio input, which I could turn on if I want.
But I would never engage in debate with my television because I recognize that the television doesn't have any free will.
It doesn't have any consciousness. It doesn't have any preferred state.
I mean, you turn the television off, it doesn't say, oh, I was watching that.
I mean, you switch channels, they don't say, oh, I don't want to watch sports or whatever, right?
The TV is just a dead, dumb instrument to distract and entertain you, right?
So, the thing with determinists as a whole, the fundamental issue, is that they say, Human beings are the same as everything else in the universe.
A human being is the same as the weather.
It's the same as the ocean.
It's the same as geological processes.
We can't predict it all in great detail.
Can't predict the weather. But nobody thinks that's because the weather changes its mind or is whimsical or, you know, is bait and switch and fooling you and saying, aha, sure you want to have your wedding on this day.
Oh, just kidding. Go to Raid, right?
It's going to hail. Frozen frogs down on your bridesmaids' dresses, right?
So, determinists say human beings are the same as everything else in the universe.
It's just blind matter, it's physical forces, there's no difference, right?
There's no difference between a human being and a television, right?
But a determinist would also say debating with a television is insane.
But debating with a human being makes perfect sense.
So, this is the fundamental contradiction around determinism.
You cannot say that human beings are the same as everything else in the universe, but it would be insane to debate with anything but a human being.
Because then you're saying, by your actions, that human beings are different from the universe.
So I did this debate on UPB with this Stephen Woodward.
I think his name was Rationality Rules, right?
Now, if I had said, let's have this debate, and...
I think he's on the determinist side of things, right?
But if I had simply started playing my audiobook of universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which you get for free at freedomain.com, if I had simply started playing the audiobook, he would have considered that very rude.
And I would have said, no, no, just debate with the computer playing the audiobook.
He would have said, well, that's crazy.
I can't debate with a computer that's just reading an audiobook.
And I'd say, oh, is that because it's predetermined?
And it has no free will?
The answer would to some degree come back, well, yeah, I can't debate with a computer because a computer doesn't have any free will.
It's like, but if I'm the same as a computer and I don't have free will either, then why on earth would you debate with me?
Because if you're putting all human beings into the category of blind mechanistic processes, there's no choice, there's no preferred state, there's no mind to change, it's all just an illusion, then you're saying a human being is exactly the same as a computer But then if I say, oh, just debate with a computer rather than me, they'd say, well, no, no.
A computer is not a substitute for you.
I cannot debate with a computer, but I can debate with you.
Then it's like, aha, well, then I'm not a computer.
Because, you know, otherwise it's like the choice between a Mac and an IBM computer, right?
I mean, okay, there may be some aesthetic preferences or, you know, you may have less of an affinity for viruses and malware or whatever, in which case you'd probably go with a Mac.
But nobody would say that that's a fundamental difference, right?
You know, you can produce a movie on...
Either a Mac or a PC, right?
Okay? They're not fundamentally different.
There'll be aesthetic differences. But nobody's saying, well, the difference between a Mac and a PC is a Mac has free will and a PC doesn't.
I mean, nobody thinks that at all, right?
And so this is the fundamental problem with determinism that no determinist has ever been able to address.
Because you can't address it. I mean, it's simple.
It's simple and easy. I can't say...
It'd be like if I said to you, you know, here's five chocolates that are identical.
There's no difference between these five chocolates.
And then you say, okay, eat the second one.
I say, oh God, I can't eat that one.
That's poison. That will kill me.
I say, well, what about the others?
Oh no, the others are just chocolates, right?
But that number two out of five, that's poison that will kill you.
Okay, I can't have it both ways.
I can't say these chocolates are all identical, but one of them has the opposite properties rather than pleasing you and giving you, you know, sugar and taste and maybe a tiny shred of nutrition and caffeine.
It's going to kill you. I can't say these chocolates are identical but one of them has the opposite property of all the other chocolates and you can't say.
Human beings are exactly the same as everything else in the universe.
But they possess unique characteristics that make it only sane to debate human beings rather than anything else, right?
They just can't do it.
And for more on this, I've got a free book, Essential Philosophy.
You can get it at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
I go to their arguments in more detail.
But so we don't need to know the origins of consciousness.
We don't need to know the exact physical process by which consciousness arises and any of that.
We don't need to know the origins and sources.
And we don't need to know any of these things because we can simply puzzle through the arguments of free will versus determinism In the present.
And what you'll find, it's the last point I'll make, and what you'll find very quickly, and I've been debating determinists for 35 years, right?
So, I mean, I've done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these debates.
I mean, a lot of which have been recorded on this very podcast.
Not this one, but you understand?
FDRpodcast.com, just do a search for determinism or determinists or free will.
And you'll very, very quickly find that determinism and free will are the same position.
And it's a free will position.
Because I would say to a determinist, you know, crazy people think that the radio is talking to them and that somebody's having a conversation.
I remember when I was a kid, we'd come to Canada, so I was probably 12 or 13.
There was... A store called Eaton's, run by a very ancient and venerated economic family that then there were, I think, four kids who just destroyed it all by saying, hey, who wants sales?
Who needs sales? Just everyday low prices or whatever, right?
And this is what the Eaton Center of Toronto was named after.
And so we were in Eaton's, and there was a robot there.
This was over Christmas time, and there was a robot there.
And I remember my mother got involved in a very involved philosophical debate with this robot.
Now, of course, it wasn't a robot.
It was some guy, either inside the robot, who had a radio connection to the robot, who was speaking back to my mother.
And my mother took great pleasure, and she actually was quite a show woman, so to speak, because my mother got involved in a very tricky debate regarding free will with this robot.
Now, again, it wasn't a robot, obviously.
The AI is still nowhere near anywhere where it could be, where you could pass the Turing test, where you don't know whether you're talking to a human being or a robot.
And what you'll very quickly find out when you debate determinists is that if my mother believed that it was a robot, she wouldn't have debated the robot.
Because this is back when TRS-80s were cool, right?
When a 2K PET was like cutting-edge technology.
So there's absolutely no... So my mother knew, of course, that it was not a real robot.
But she enjoyed the debate and enjoyed the showmanship of the debate as a fairly large crowd gathered to listen to my mother interrogate Socratic-style This robot about the nature of free will and choice and this that and the other and you know to her credit you know I've certainly said some negative and accurate things about my mother to her credit This was a glimpse of the possibility of my mother.
This is a glimpse of who my mother could have been with her intelligence, her looks, her charisma in another universe, in another time, with different choices and different stimuli as a child and all of that.
I got a glimpse of what a powerful and public and engaging and charismatic figure my mother could have been.
Because, yeah, a crowd of 100 or 200 people gathered around, and my mother was entertaining them with a conversation with this robot, and they were laughing, and she was enjoying the attention, and not in a sucky way, but, you know, in a sort of positive and reflect back to the crowd, something positive and intellectual kind of way.
And it really was. It was a beautiful scene, a beautiful scene in my childhood, and something, of course, it's heartbreaking, of course, when you look at everything that bookended it.
But my mother, of course, would not have debated with a robot.
And I remember showing her the program, oh gosh, what was it called?
I think it began with an E. I'm sure someone will remember.
But there was a program that was written for computers many, many years ago, which pretended to be a therapist to you.
You'd type to it and it would type back, you'd type to it and type back.
But it was all, you know, very pre-programmed Zork style, you know.
And, you know, there was only a certain number of responses.
So nobody thought that was a real therapist and it didn't replace the profession, so to speak.
And so... What you'll quickly find out when you talk to determinists is you'll say, oh, well, if there's determinism, then there's no such thing as a preferred state.
Oh, no, no, I believe in a preferred state, says the determinist.
Okay. Okay, if there's determinism, then there's no such thing as the capacity for people to change their minds.
Oh, no, no, no, people can change their minds.
Oh, okay.
If you're a determinist, then there can't be any such thing as truth, because there's no possibility of error, right?
Because there's no preferred states.
Oh, no, because I believe in preferred states and truth, and that I can still debate, I can still get you to change your mind, I can still argue for preferred states, I can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right? Okay. And then the question I've asked countless determinists over the years is, okay, well, what the hell is the difference between determinism and free will?
What is the difference if you can debate, if you get morality, if you have preferred states, if you have truth being infinitely preferable to error, and if people are responsible for what they choose, and if people are responsible for the contents of their minds, and if you can change people's minds, okay, well, then I'm a determinist too!
Because you and I have exactly the same approach to consciousness and debating and arguing and truth and falsehood and preferred states and non-preferred states.
We're exactly the same, except you take everything that I do, but you claim as determinism.
So it's like, okay, well, I'm a determinist too.
Because as a determinist, I don't have to change anything that I'm doing.
Like, what practical thing changes if you call yourself a determinist?
And the answer is, well, nothing. In which case, who cares?
It's all bullshit. None of it adds up to anything because they do exactly what free will advocates do.
They just call it determinism.
It's like, okay, well, then... There's not a dime's worth of difference between us, so what on earth are we arguing about?
So anyway, that's just another sort of point that I've made over the years or experienced over the years, if that makes sense.
Oh, did I put him to sleep?
Are you still muted, my friend?
Wait, are you back? No?
Okay. Well, let's do another cue or two, if you'd like, and let's move on to the next.
Eliza! Oh, I couldn't remember.
Have you ever tried it? It's actually kind of funny because it's very, you know, there's certain styles of therapy where the therapist is supposed to say very neutral, very blank, and simply ask you more questions and ask you more questions, which is to me like a doctor who continually asks for prescriptions, sorry, who continually asks for symptoms and never gives you a prescription.
But yeah, Eliza, you can look that up.
It's actually, you know, it's a fun way to spend 10 minutes.
So we do have a bit of a pushback to what you were saying before about the inputs with arguing with the television.
And this is something that I think that determinists have brought up before.
But if you could just maybe respond to this directly, even though we've talked about before.
You don't get to argue with the television because of the method of manipulating it.
I'm sorry, I'm not reading this properly.
So the argument assumes that a method for manipulating a person and TV are the same.
So he thinks... He said he's not a termist, but he thinks there's a flaw in the argument.
Or he could be misunderstanding.
You know, whether it's auditory inputs from a human being or infrared or IR blasters for televisions, I mean, that would make any sense.
Because you could certainly argue with the television if the television...
Has Skype on it, and you're actually debating with a human being, right?
Then you could argue, so to speak, you're talking, quote, to the television, but you're not arguing with the television, you're arguing with the human being on the other side.
And so you would still be using the exact same inputs as you would if you were just arguing with the television, because the television would have a microphone that you would be using, and the television will have speakers that you'll be hearing the other person from.
So to argue with a human being over...
in a television would use exactly the same inputs and outputs as you would just by arguing with the television, but one would be considered sane and the other would be considered insane, even though the exact same input and output would be used.
Got it.
So we have a question.
If they're assuming that the person who asked that doesn't want to jump in and follow up with that.
Give him a few seconds. No, I did give him a few seconds.
Oh, he says thanks. Okay, I think he's satisfied.
Yeah, I got it, got it. So, when you were talking about, in a previous Colin show, the past couple weeks, you were talking about kids and UPB and stuff.
He wanted to ask, he's on the call right now, but he wanted to ask you to go a bit, you know, into more detail about how do you respond when kids do lie, steal, and so on.
How do you respond to them without yourself breaking your feet?
Okay, so the question is, let me make sure I understand this.
So kids will lie and they will steal.
Absolutely no doubt. It would be weird if they didn't.
I did. James, did you lie and steal as a child?
Okay, so give me one example.
Yeah, I certainly did.
Oh, gosh. Well, stealing, I was probably, shoot, around 9 or 10.
The stealing was...
God. Oh my God.
No, but stealing was...
My father had this coin jar.
And I would just, you know, dip into the coin jar.
And, you know, it's not my money, right?
And I was 8, 9, or 10 and go out and buy candy or something like that.
It's free money, man.
It's free money. Yeah, yeah.
Central banking. Free money.
Yeah. My brother caught me once.
I don't think he ratted me out, but he did say, you shouldn't be doing that.
So, you know, I guess kudos to my brother for that one.
I think I may have stopped, or I may have continued a little bit beyond, but my conscience caught up with me at some point.
And then the lying one was, I mean, this is kind of...
Well, there's probably a better example.
The one that comes to mind is my father demanding to...
No, if I had done my homework and I'd say I didn't do my homework, but he wouldn't follow up with that.
This was back when, you know, me not doing my homework was sort of trouble for him, but he wasn't actually...
It was like, I would just say, you know, it's like lying, but just to avoid punishment in the moment.
But still, even with that caveat, yeah, that was a bit of a lie.
Not quite... As experimental, maybe.
That's the one that comes to mind. Right. And of course, you know, you weren't asked whether you wanted to go to school.
Your father wasn't asked whether he should pay for it.
You weren't asked whether homework...
Homework has no value. Like, statistically, the homework is just family conflict bullshit busywork.
Homework has never been shown to increase learning, IQ, educational capacities, or anything like that.
Homework is... It's just the government's way of putting its dead skeletal claw into any family conciliation and turning family members against each other and causing lots of friction and unhappiness.
It's just, it's a mess.
And it's total bullshit.
It's just make work garbage.
So I have no problem when it comes to lying with regards to homework.
Not the kids out there should do this.
Not that any kids are listening to this.
But just as a whole, it's all complete nonsense.
So yeah. Yeah, because I would occasionally take quarters from my mother's purse to go and play an arcade game, again, in the aforementioned Don Mills Mall.
I remember there was a Coles bookstore over there, and a friend of mine's mom actually worked there.
And I was obsessed with sharks, and for many years I actually put in a job application to a shark research institute in Sarasota, Florida, but unfortunately couldn't do the cross-border hiring thing.
And I ordered a book On sharks.
And I didn't have enough money to buy it, but I could put a deposit down.
And I put a small deposit down.
And then I had another couple of bucks.
I think it was like an $8 book.
And I had put 50 cents or a buck down.
I had another couple of bucks. And they phoned me.
And... I'm like, oh, the book's here!
And I ran across, and I lived across the parking lot.
Like, there's the street, and there's the apartment building, Don Mills Road, parking lot, Cole's Bookstore.
And so I basically hung up the phone, and I was there within two and a half to three minutes, and they literally couldn't believe it.
Like, what are you, because there were no cell phones back then.
It's like, how on earth did you get here this quickly, right?
It's like, it's a shark book.
I'm very excited. But...
I would... So when I wanted to play a video game, I would think about it.
And, you know, it was some ray-traced game with, like, you shot things in a trench or whatever.
I can't remember it. I'm sure somebody will remember it.
Starcastle I quite enjoyed as well.
But anyway, for me, it wouldn't be like I just want to go play a video game.
I would have to have a whole scenario.
Like, I couldn't just have a simple video game thing.
It would be like... So what would happen is it would be like I'd pretend to myself.
That'd be like 11 or whatever.
And I'd pretend for myself...
The call has come in. I must defend the galaxy against these space intruders.
And, you know, first I must steal from the monster the resources I need to power up the turrets for the space combat or whatever.
Like, it wouldn't just be, oh, I need a quarter.
I'm going to steal from my mom. It'd be like I'd just go and sneak and find a way to get it and not get caught.
And it was a whole elaborate...
Break out of prison, get the resources, man the turret.
It was a whole... I've got to get across the street and all of that.
And so I wouldn't just go play.
I'd get like 20 minutes of engagement out of like a two-minute video game because, you know, get your quarter and you get the whole scenario start to end.
And I'd have to hit a certain score in order to defend the galaxy and all that.
So it was pretty wild.
Yeah. Yeah, I would.
But you see, it's the thing, right?
You want to steal not so much that it's completely bloody obvious.
So I wouldn't steal much at all.
You know, it's not like my mom would count her quarters or anything like that.
So yeah, lying and stealing.
So the question is, how do you deal with kids without reference to UBB? Is that right?
No, I think...
Maybe it comes back, like as an example, comes back to spanking, which would be a UPB violation in itself.
So since the kids, there have been debates in the server that go on about, you know, how do you respond to children when they break UPB or they're testing out the limits of morality and that kind of stuff.
And some people have argued.
I don't agree with this.
That because a child breaks UPB, you are not found by UPB. No, that's not...
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not saying that's what this person is asking, but that's a very extreme example of sort of in that line.
What do you do as a parent to bring that child in line with UPB Without yourself saying, okay, well, I don't think this is what the person is saying.
I completely understand why people would have that perspective because I've talked about with my daughter and with other kids that I've known saying, okay, well, if you're going to lie, does that mean I get to lie?
Or is that the new rule now I can lie?
But that's theoretical, right?
That's not something that you would then say without telling your kid, oh, I can just start lying now, right?
Because that would be like...
So there's a couple of reasons why you wouldn't want to do that.
So first of all, children arise from a state of nature.
They start as pure mammal.
No higher consciousness.
So if someone comes up and pees on you, that's assault and they would go to jail.
But if your baby pees on you, that's called I had apple juice, right?
I mean, so, you know, that's like that old...
It was an ad-lib line, I think, from the late Patrick Swayze in a movie.
Gosh, I can't remember what it was called.
It was set in India.
And he's changing a diaper.
The kid pees in his eyes like, hey, he's going to be a fireman.
You know, like, that's a funny line.
Again, he was a chain-smoking son of a gun, but a pretty funny guy.
It's always amazing to me just how people can look so healthy...
And be so unhealthy.
It's the Baryshnikov thing, where he just looks like he's so lean and so limber and such a great dancer.
But the guy smoked like four packs a day, if I remember rightly.
Not Patrick Swayze, but Mikhail Baryshnikov.
But yeah, it's always just kind of amazed me.
It's like Freddie Mercury, slender and well-shaped, but a menthol smoker, I think.
And it's tragic how many singers are smokers.
So... So first, yeah, I mean, you've got to understand you're in a different moral relationship with children because you're raising them from a state of nature to a state of civility, right?
So it's not the same as dealing with an adult.
So if an adult lies to you, then you no longer have the moral obligation to lie, to tell the truth to them.
There may be reasons that you want to instruct them, or if you're teaching that person morals, maybe they arose in some state of nature, and so there may be some reason you explain it to you.
But in general, If an adult lies to you, to me, you know, thou shalt not bear false witness is not an absolute commandment.
It is a relationship commandment.
If someone lies to you, you are not obligated to tell them the truth.
Now, of course, if you're under oath or whatever, it's a different matter, right?
But I'm just talking about sort of the moral obligations.
Any more than if someone...
Once you to ship them a certain good and they don't pay you, then you're not obligated to ship them that good.
If they pay you, then you are, but if they don't, then they're not, right?
So with children, you can say the logical consequence of you lying is that I don't have to tell the truth to you Would that be okay with you?
Now, hopefully your child is going to say, well, I don't want that.
I do want you as a father or a mother to tell the truth to me.
It's like, okay, well, then the price to have me tell the truth to you is you have to tell the truth to me.
Otherwise, you have no standard and I have a high standard and that's not fair.
And, you know, you can say this, you know, if you're going to trade candy with someone and then you hand them your candy and then they just run off, How would you feel?
Oh, I'd be mad. I'd chase them down.
I'd demand the candy back. It's like, yeah, because you had a deal, right?
I will trade. I will give you this candy, and you have to give me your candy.
Like, I'll give you my Twix bar, and you give me the KitKat bar.
And if you give the kid the Twix bar, and they don't give you the KitKat, they've just run off.
Now they have the KitKat and the Twix bar, and you've got nothing.
Right? So that's bad, right?
So you did something which is part of a deal that didn't hold up their end of the deal.
It's the same thing with truth. Like if you tell me the truth, I'll tell you the truth.
A logical consequence of you not telling me the truth is I don't have to tell you the truth.
But it's not like you don't tell the kid that and just start lying and then have them try and Figure out what the consequences are like.
That's too complicated for a kid and it's not fair, right?
You've got to explicitly tell them that, right?
And so another analogy would be that let's say you have a teenage child, a son.
He's 15 years old and he's perfectly fluent in English and French, right?
He's perfectly fluent in English and French.
Now you ask him, but you don't speak French, right?
So your kid took French in school or whatever, right?
Or just loved it as a hobby.
And so you only speak English.
Your son speaks English and French.
So you ask him a question in English.
You know, did you put a ding in my car?
Now he starts answering you in French.
Well, he's avoiding, right?
Because he knows you don't speak French, he's being evasive, he's not giving you a straight answer.
You say, no, no, no, English, English, right?
And you know, he just keeps talking in French.
That clearly is an act of aggression, right?
Because he's not speaking your language, right?
Or in the same way, if you speak English and French and your child only speaks English and he asks you a question, you answer him French, well, you haven't taught him French or he doesn't know French, so it's kind of unfair to answer him in a language he doesn't understand.
It's the same thing with UPB. You can't answer your child in a language that your child doesn't understand.
Now, if you have a friend who keeps flaking on you, who we're going to get to, we're going to go see a movie, 7 o'clock, Friday night.
Yes! And you sit there waiting and they don't show up and this happens repeatedly, then you don't have to necessarily sit there and explain everything.
You just stop inviting them, right?
Because they're old enough to To figure it out themselves.
Oh, you know, I kept flaking on this guy.
He's not inviting me to movies anymore.
I guess I did that to myself, right?
So as with adults to adults, you're not obligated to explain everything, but because you are a parent and you are trying to instruct a child, you can't refrain from explaining what's going on to the child.
Now, When your child gets older, and I would say this is in between teenage years, let's say, for some reason, I hope this won't happen with peaceful parenting and reasonable parenting, but let's say that your child continues to lie.
Well, then you have to go from theory to practice, right?
And you have to, okay, if theory is not enough to teach people the consequences, the negative consequences of bad behavior, then you have to go into practice, right?
And this is what's called tough love, right?
So if your child is constantly lying to you, Right?
And let's say you pay your child, you know, I don't know, 10 bucks a month allowance, right?
And they get into their teenage years, whatever sum, I don't know what teenage allowance is these days, right?
I used to get two bucks a week.
I don't know what it is these days, right?
And it was pretty inconsistent when I get it, but you know, every now and then, right?
But if your child is Expecting their allowance, but they haven't been telling you the truth.
Then you say, yeah, I'll pay your allowance on Friday.
And then your kid makes plans.
They're going to take that allowance. They're going to go out with their friends.
They're going to do whatever, right? And then Friday comes and they say, can I have my allowance?
And you say, no.
They're going to get angry, right?
Of course, right? Because they'd be like, I got plans.
You said you were going to give it to me.
And it's like, yeah, I lied.
How do you like it? Boom, right?
Now, hopefully theory is enough to teach the child, but if there's not theory, you need to teach them through consequences, right?
That's really, really important because the world is not going to treat your children as tenderly as you are as a parent, right?
So you've got to transition from yourself as the parent to the world, right?
And if your kid doesn't show up for work, Then they're not going to get a paycheck, right?
So if they make a commitment to show up to work and they don't show up to work, then they're not going to get paid.
They're going to get fired, right?
So if your child is not able to translate theory into practice, or they're, I guess, experimenting with changing practice rather than theory, in other words, they still have an intellectual commitment to telling the truth, but they lie in practice, then you have to start reproducing the world.
In other words, you have to no longer...
be in prevention mode but in cure mode.
You have to start Recreating the way that the world treats them.
This is kind of true for, you know, if you've got kids at home because of COVID and all that.
Well, as a parent, you have to start reproducing how their friends would behave, right?
So, you know, when your kid is, quote, misbehaving, you don't ostracize them, you don't stop playing with them, you talk it out, or, you know, if they're too young, you ignore it because it doesn't really matter or whatever, right?
Because they're still in a state of pre-morality.
But... If your child is being difficult and pleasant, annoying, then just say, I don't want to play.
I don't want to play because I'm annoyed, right?
It doesn't mean that the child's being annoying, it's just RTR, like I feel annoyed, I feel frustrated, right?
Because you do have to start, like in the real world, we all know this, right?
In the real world, If you find someone annoying, you don't hang out with them.
And even as a teenager, like we all had this, you know, you have some club, some group.
For me, it was a little bicycle group or whatever, right?
And there's one kid who wants to join, but they're annoying.
So you don't usually explain a huge amount.
You just don't invite them anymore.
And they usually, I mean, almost always, they'll sort of get the hint and figure out some other place or other thing to do in the same way.
That if you ask a girl out, she doesn't want to go out with you, she doesn't usually say, because you're ugly and low status, and I'd be embarrassed to be seen with you, she's like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm busy that night, or whatever, and she does that a couple of times, and you kind of get the hint, right?
So, if you've got kids that are home or whatever, if they're not getting that kind of feedback on their behavior from their peers, you kind of have to reproduce that for them, and that's kind of important.
So, yeah, so with regards to...
UPB, yeah. The consequence, like, is it logically okay for you if I don't tell the truth, given that you're not telling the truth to me?
And if the child says, no, I don't, that's not okay.
I do want you to tell the truth.
If you're like, okay, well then, let's have a deal where we both tell the truth.
But no, you don't just get to start lying to your kid because you're trying to instruct them on something.
In the same way that if you're trying to teach your child French, you don't just start speaking, and they're just starting out, you don't just start speaking fluent French and hope that they pick it up.
You kind of got to step them through it.
it does that does that make sense all right I say that makes sense to me I was going to say, even without the COVID thing, if you're parents who are pursuing homeschooling, that sort of thing, would have to do a similar kind of thing you're talking about with reflecting that kind of peer-ish experience.
Type of response.
You've talked about that before with Izzy when she was much younger.
And listen, I mean, I was never...
Occasionally, like, I could be, you know, in games, I'll sort of play around and try and cheat or whatever.
And Izzy found this quite delightful when she was younger.
And now she's like, you know, just don't be too annoying.
And that's a fair point to make, right?
Because the joke has run its course and, you know, it's important to be more consistent now and not sort of pretend to try and get away with stuff and all that.
In the same way that you present silly arguments to your kid and have them rebut it, you can sort of present cheating to your kid and have them figure it out.
And that's good training because there are lots of cheats in life and you want them to be able to figure out cheats and be assertive with them.
So I think it's good and fun practice.
But yeah, it changes over time, of course, right?
And if she does something that's annoying to me, then I need to sort of tell her why and all of that.
Whereas when she was younger... There wasn't really anything she could do that was annoying to me because she didn't have that kind of responsibility as yet or higher or better standards of behavior.
So, yeah, you do have to be very honest with your children.
and the more you cover things up, then the more you are creating a false sense of adulthood for them.
All right, very good.
So we have another question, if you are ready.
Bye.
Alright, so this question is about abortion.
So this person asks, is abortion acceptable under any circumstances?
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by acceptable.
That is one of these questions that has a certain subjectivist flavor to it.
Right. Well, he's on the line.
If you would like to flush that one out, just flush that one out a little bit.
Yeah, go for it. Can I talk?
Go ahead. Thank you.
Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Look, we're both fellow survivors of non-aboritions.
We already have a bit of a bias already, right?
Yes. So, acceptable, I mean, in the sense of law, but not law in the sense of legislation created by the state.
Of course, in the U.S., it's acceptable as mandated by law.
But I mean, from the perspective of UPB or private property.
It would be right to violate that being if that being is a living being, if that being is a human being in that sense.
sense.
Right.
Well, without a doubt, abortion is the initiation of the use of force that ends a life.
And I just want to be real clear about that up front.
There seems to be no way around that.
So abortion is the initiation of the use of force.
Either you take a, you know, and whether it's a morning after pill.
Oh, well, it prevents the implantation.
Okay, I get that there's some fuzzy stuff around that.
But let's just talk about the typical abortion.
A DNC or whatever that's going on, you know, 6, 8, 12, 14 weeks or whatever.
So without a doubt, it is the initiation of the use of force.
You are going in with invasive chemical procedures, invasive scalpels, whatever, scrapers, and you are removing a life form from its only source of nutrition, and that life form is a human life form.
And so it is the initiation of the use of force.
And it does end a human life form.
And that is, you know, just very, very, very boldly and blankly, I can't see any way around that.
Now, there are complications, which we'll get into in a second, but is that something that sits relatively well with you?
Okay, so that's the first thing, right?
So... the question then becomes first of all if it is a voluntary pregnancy Then abortion is very unlikely in the case of a healthy child, right? So if the woman is really trying to get pregnant and the woman really wants a baby and the baby is healthy, then abortion becomes something that is not an issue, right?
So because that's a voluntary and chosen and preferred relationship of the mother to children.
The fetus, right? So we can take that one off the table as far.
Like, nobody sits there and says, I'm dying to get pregnant.
I really want a baby. Oh, I'm pregnant.
I'm going to get an abortion, right?
That would be crazy, right?
So where it is a voluntary and positively chosen relationship, abortion is not an issue.
Can we also at least settle somewhere near that position?
Okay, so abortion then becomes an issue when the relationship is not chosen.
Now, there are two kinds of not chosen, really.
The first is...
Well, I guess...
No, there's three. Three kinds of not chosen.
So, from the most defensible to the least defensible...
Of course, rape, right?
Rape, you know, the violence, or even if it's not necessarily violent, non-chosen, like the woman is passed out, she's drunk, or whether the man copulates with her, or the man rapes her, in which case the relationship with the fetus is not chosen, and that's a different category, of course, from the woman who wants a baby, right?
So that's... We're entering into where the murky territory generally is, and I sort of acknowledge that.
Now, the second... Is when the woman does not want to get pregnant, but she is engaged, and she engages in birth control responsibly, but the birth control fails.
And, you know, it could be an IUD, it could be the pill, it could be, you know, a condom, although condoms are pretty dicey to begin with.
But whatever, like this, of the 17 different birth control options available to women, she doesn't want a baby, she's taking birth control responsibly, And she gets pregnant.
So there's a situation, right?
Now the third, which is the least defensible of all, and, you know, we've had enough conversation on this show to know how this plays out.
She says she doesn't want the baby, but she engaged in unprotected sex where there was a very high likelihood of her getting pregnant.
And that becomes all kinds of like, what the hell?
You know, it's like, well, I don't want to commit suicide, but I'm going to spin the barrel In Russian roulette, pull it six times and, oh, look at that, I'm dead, right?
So it all becomes very convoluted and confusing around that.
Plus, of course, there's never a guarantee that the woman is telling the truth, right?
I mean, it's not just specific to women, it's no guarantee the man is telling the truth, right?
So the man who wants to knock up his girlfriend Might say, oh gosh, the condom broke, but maybe he did something to sabotage the condom ahead of time.
The woman can say, no, I'm on birth control, but maybe she, quote, forgot, consciously or unconsciously, to take the birth control pill, and she gets pregnant, right?
Or the woman says, oh gosh, you know, the condom broke, don't worry, I'll take a morning after pill, and then she forgets to take it, or whatever, takes it with spicy food, or I don't know, whatever might cause there to be problems.
And then she has a pregnancy.
Now she may claim that she doesn't want it.
Anyway, there's all kinds of convoluted stuff because we don't have any magic mirror into the true motivation in the minds of others.
So we kind of have to go at face value, and face value is sometimes very less than skin deep and all that.
So we're really looking into the situation of...
Let's go with the most defensible, unchosen relationship, which is straight-up rape, right?
Now, what are your thoughts on whether rape could be considered morally acceptable as abortion as a solution to an unwanted pregnancy as a result of rape?
Right.
So I understand that for most women that especially because you can aggravate that case even more by saying that the pregnancy had complications.
and now he's threatening the life of the mother.
But I understand that even in the direst of the situations, You would still have this position where the baby is a victim as the mother is a victim of the rape because the children had not chosen and was...
As a victim, really, for the situation, it was not his option to be there in any moment.
So I understand that this would be a situation where morally you could choose to preserve the life of the mother instead of the child because otherwise both would die.
No, no, no, hang on. I get all of that.
We'll get to that in a sec, but let's just stick with the rape one for now.
Sure. But I still think that I understand that even in the situation of a rape, even morally I would think about according to property rights, it is a violation caused by the perpetrator, the raper, that is the one Placing both victims in this situation.
So killing the baby is just aggravating.
The problem is increasing the violation.
So it's wrong. I certainly understand that as well.
The difference being, of course, as you know, that the woman has to carry and care for and nurture that baby for nine months.
And that's unique as far as this stuff goes, right?
And so saying to the woman that you have to nurture the baby, give birth to the baby of your rapist.
And whether she keeps the baby or not, I get all of that.
But the problem is that the mother is hostage to the baby.
And that's the nine-month journey or eight-month or however, like once after she figures it out or whatever.
And so that is the big challenge because is it a violation of Of the woman's right to bodily autonomy to, in a sense, be forced to grow the baby of her rapist, right?
That is, and again, we know, not that, you know, this stuff's all genetic, but there are some genetic components to criminality.
So is it a violation of the woman's bodily autonomy to grow the baby of her rapist?
It's a pretty strong case to be made that it is, right?
That she is being hijacked by something that she doesn't want to be in her body.
The question would be if the baby can pay for that with that.
And the answer that I have for that is no.
And I could assume an example, an analogy for that would be something like...
Of course, it's silly because there's no good analogy that can be made to pregnancy in all cases.
But it would be something like you...
You make somebody unconscious and then use that person as a tool, as like a rock would say, and throw that person against another.
So there's nothing you can do against this unconscious individual that would be right because it was not his action that caused.
Since the baby is not acting, he's not acting.
Part of the violation.
He doesn't have duty on that violation.
No, I get that. You don't have to convince me that the baby is not to blame.
Of course the baby is not to blame.
Let me ask you this question, though, which is a more close analogy.
Let's say that The rapist falls ill and the rapist needs a donor kidney and only his rape victim is a match.
Can you force her to give up her kidney in order to save the life of the rapist?
In other words, can you force her to act against her own bodily autonomy in order to maintain the life of something or someone?
No, but I don't think that's a proper analogy.
As I said, it's complicated to find analogies in this case because it's not a relation between organ that she has.
We're talking about a different being.
It would be something could her be forced to donate an organ from somebody else's.
Which is more akin to the case.
And that would be no, also because you cannot involve somebody else in that.
No, but you're saying that she cannot be compelled to keep someone else alive using her own body.
You cannot do that?
No, no, hang on, hang on. But these are two separate issues.
It's a deadlock. So one is, can the woman be compelled to keep someone else alive using the products of her own body?
And I think the answer to that is no, right?
Okay, so if...
Now, let's say that it's not the rapist, it's just someone.
So if the woman doesn't donate a part of her body, kidney or bits of her liver or whatever it is, if the woman cannot be compelled to donate her body to keep another human being alive, then that is much closer in analogy to the fetus,
right? Perhaps if I place it in this other view, this can become a little clearer, perhaps.
Imagine that you're driving on a driveway, on a freeway, it doesn't matter, and you hit by accident somebody that was in the wrong place.
Not necessarily in the wrong place, it's an accident.
Let's not get in the details who is the responsible, but let's pretend you are the responsible for that situation.
And this person is now lying unconscious on the sidewalk.
You're not obligated to carry this person to the hospital to take care.
But if you don't, he's going to die.
So if he dies, the responsibility is in your hands because part of the action was initiated by you.
So you see, there's no obligation in doing that.
There's no obligation in carrying the...
The ill individual to the hospital to save his life.
But if he dies, you kill him.
So it's more or less like you're trying to reduce the responsibility of a violation that you would otherwise cause even in a higher degree.
So that's why I understand that even though the mother doesn't have the responsibility of carrying the pregnancy to the end, But at the same time, not doing so would kill the baby, and that would be a violation of the baby's self-property.
Well, but the baby doesn't have self-property if the baby is reliant upon the mother to keep it alive, in that we cannot compel people to keep others alive.
And to sort of give a silly example against a stretch, if you say we can compel people to keep others alive, If through our inaction they will die, then this is the argument for old age pensions, it's the argument for socialized medicine, it's the argument for unemployment insurance, all of these things, right?
Like, you have to be compelled through force to keep other people alive, because if you don't give up the resources that will keep them alive, you are then responsible for their death.
Well, if the welfare state ends tomorrow, people will die.
If socialized healthcare ends tomorrow, people will die from that.
There's no question of that, right?
So if we say, in order to keep a person alive, you must give up resources to keep those people alive, there's a direct analogy then between something like the welfare state and something like forcing the woman to keep the baby alive against her will and wishes.
and choice again if we're talking about rape.
In those cases where those elderly people are dependent on something, you would have the option of partaking in that or not.
And the state that they are is a consequence of their natural development, like life goes like that.
No, but the welfare state is not a chosen situation, right?
The welfare state is coercive.
No, of course, but the relation that I'm tracing here is that you caused, at least in part, the situation of this accident where the man was injured.
We started with the rape thing, right? So the woman did not cause the rape.
Okay, so that's the one we're trying to...
No, of course. That's the general one that we have to start with, right?
Because that's the most challenging one from the defense of the baby standpoint, right?
It's the worst case scenario.
In that same case, I don't understand.
sorry to go back to the car analogy let's say that a guy who's drunk drives into your car you get injured and he gets injured are you obligated to keep him alive i'm not the perpetrator in that case so no because because Because if he dies, I'm not responsible.
So you are not responsible for the baby being in your womb.
No. You did not put it there.
You did not choose it there.
And it's there very much against your will.
And so you're certainly not the perpetrator.
They say, okay, well, the baby is innocent.
It's like, yes, but you are still, you did not invite that baby into your body, even by rolling the dice and, you know, having unprotected sex or condom breaks or something.
The baby is there specifically against your will.
And you say, well, the baby is innocent.
So I get all of that. But nonetheless, if we say you have to be compelled to keep other human beings alive, then to me, that is, again, a similar argument to the welfare state.
Say, oh, well, somebody gets diabetes, it's no fault of their own.
Well, it's not their fault. And so you should be compelled to keep that person alive.
Someone's kid gets leukemia.
Well, it's not their fault, but you should then be compelled to keep that child alive.
It becomes a very short step from this sort of situation to a justification for the welfare state, which is obviously a big concern.
The question here is this particular word, compelling.
I don't see this as compelling to take care of the ill individual, in this case, because You are in part responsible.
Of course, in the mother is a different situation, but I can get perhaps to a better analogy where this makes more sense.
But in the sense of you're injuring somebody, you're not compelled in saving them.
You're just accepting your responsibility in not aggravating your own situation.
As if your situation is already bad and if you leave it be or unfold by time, it's going to be getting worse by the second.
I think it's Murray Rothbard that has a part in his book about About the nap, where he says that if you invited somebody, and of course, again, we can swap the situation for somebody that was uninvited to your house, to a dinner, it doesn't matter, and then a huge storm, snowstorm starts outside.
You cannot force that individual outside because it would lead to killing him.
So it would be effectively...
Doing harm to that person without her consent.
But we can scale that for a person that is delivered in your house without your consent.
And now if you remove him from your house, you would necessarily kill him.
That would be... You don't have the...
You're not forced to feed that individual, necessarily, but you should not kill it.
As you know, a woman has to take very specific actions to maintain a healthy pregnancy.
She has to eat extra.
She should go to the doctor.
She may need to take folic acid or other vitamins.
She has to have ultrasounds.
She has to have things monitored.
So it's a little bit different from letting a guy take a sandwich from your fridge, so to speak.
I mean, it's very sort of involved, plus the baby is growing within her, plus then she has the medical risk of childbirth.
To me, the house analogy is a kind of typically male analogy, not to be overly sexist or anything, but it's kind of a typical male analogy.
Whereas, you know, for a woman, I mean, growing a baby in her womb is just about the most intimate act that can occur.
It's even more intimate than sexuality because, you know, unless you're very long-lasting, your sex ain't going to last for nine months, right?
So it is a very different situation from having somebody in your house.
And, you know, I think the general answer to me is that the less chosen...
The fetus is, the more right the woman might have to terminate the pregnancy.
However, that having been said, the ideal solution to me is that people who genuinely care for the health of the baby and the survival of the baby I believe that the woman has the right to terminate the pregnancy to the degree to which she did not want the pregnancy,
did not act in a way where the pregnancy was going to happen.
The greater her rejection and just rejection of the fetus, the greater her right to terminate the baby's life.
However, that having been said, there are lots of people, and I'm among those people, Who would really, really want that baby to survive, right?
So, right now, people are blocked from acting in ways that would help the baby to survive.
And what I mean by that is, generally, you're not allowed to pay a woman To bring a baby.
I mean, outside of surrogacy and all of that, right?
You're not allowed to pay a woman to bring the child to term.
Because for all of the people who really, really want that fetus to survive, who have resources to be able to do it, what they could do is they could say to this woman, look, we care so much about this baby surviving.
We will pay you $100,000 to give birth to this baby.
We'll make sure it finds a good home, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Now, that's a positive thing.
Way of dealing with the issue of abortion and so on.
And that particular approach is something that I think in a free society would be the most common approach.
And all of those people who really want to keep the baby alive should do so in the same way that, you know, if your neighbor's kid gets leukemia in a free society, she can't pay her bills or whatever, the mom or the dad can't pay the bills.
What happens is people go around the neighborhood and say, I care about your child.
I won't force anyone to pay for the child, but we care enough for that child that we will all chip in.
You know, your hundred neighbors will chip in a thousand dollars a piece and you'll have enough money for the treatment to save your child's life, or at least give your child a good chance of survival.
And so to me, We're kind of looking at it half in a free society, half not in a free society.
Because right now, as far as I understand it, you can't pay women to bring a child to term.
And you certainly can't, quote, buy the baby, which is not really what I'm talking about.
Although, you know, maybe that could be part of it.
Because some people have an excess of fertility, women who are pregnant, if they don't want the baby.
And some people have a deficiency of fertility, like 10% of fertility.
Married couples have significant issues or genuine infertility and can't have babies or have a great deal of difficulty having babies.
There are women who are older who've missed their fertility window who still desperately want to become mothers, but you can't have a transaction in this way.
And if you look at something like the end of slavery, slavery was ended in a number of different ways, but a significant portion of Of ending slavery was buying the slaves.
Just buying the slaves and then emancipated them for manumission, right?
Setting them free. In fact, this happened in the 1860s in England and it didn't finish paying off this bill I think until the 1980s, right?
So like 130 years or something like that to pay the bill for freeing So, you know, if slavery can be ended by buying the slaves, surely abortion can be ended by buying the fetus, so to speak.
And to me, that would be one way in which some of these moral questions, which are, you know, I can't get to the point where I can point a gun at a woman's head for having an abortion if she was raped.
I can't get there. I know that's not an argument.
I'm just telling you emotionally, because if abortion is illegal, right, then a woman who's raped who has an abortion, well, will you throw her in jail and shoot her if she resists arrest, right?
I can't get there. There's something that just happened, I think it was yesterday.
So a couple paid a woman to be the surrogate mother for their baby, but unfortunately, tragically, When the ultrasound was done, the fetus was deemed to be extraordinarily high in genetic abnormalities and mutations.
So, like the internal organs were in the wrong place.
There was just a wide variety of significant birth defects in the fetus.
Now, the couple who had this woman as the surrogate, they offered her $10,000 to have an abortion, but she refused.
And then she decided to keep the baby.
There were a number of other children in the household already.
And the baby survived.
It consumed an extraordinarily high number of or high amount of medical resources and just died, I think, yesterday, shortly after her eighth birthday.
And there was a picture.
And, you know, again, tragically, you could see the birth defects in the child.
And... That's a big question too, which is, what if the baby is Down syndrome or the baby has significant genetic abnormalities, which may in fact prevent the parents from having enough money to have another child?
These all become very significant questions.
In this case, the abortion was prevented, even though the woman was offered $10,000 to have the abortion, I guess eight or nine years ago, but the abortion was prevented because the woman wanted the baby enough to give birth to the child, and she says that she celebrated the eight short years she had with the child.
The child died as a result of these genetic defects and abnormalities, and she said, you know, she had a good eight years and all of that.
She doesn't regret that. So the desire for the child's life, to me, would play out in a...
What was it?
Oh, no, sorry. She didn't adopt.
But Sarah Palin, I believe, had a child with Down syndrome and kept the child and all of that.
Whereas, I think, in Iceland, they've largely eliminated this Down syndrome because of abortions of children who have...
or fetuses who have Down syndrome and so on.
Now, these are all big, challenging questions, which is, I can't, you know, let's say that there's a child with significant birth defects, which are going to require millions of dollars of health care.
Well, that's a big question.
Can I inflict that upon parents who may have a terrible time with that child, who may have a miserable time, who may go bankrupt, who may lose their house, and the child isn't going to survive?
You know, these are tough calls.
These are tough calls.
And to me, I just can't plant the flag on, well, the baby survives no matter what, no matter what the resources, because then you really are forcing people.
And it's not just the parents. You know, this woman who kept the child with the birth defects, I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to assume that she relied on government health care and so on to some degree at least.
So now taxpayers are on the hook to pay for this kind of stuff and it's pretty easy to make these decisions when you don't personally have to foot the bill for these millions of dollars in health care costs to keep this bill.
Well, that's a huge net negative to the public person.
And again, if it's individuals, that's voluntary.
But if it's collective and it's tax-based, that's not.
So, you know, we're kind of looking at all of the stuff in a statist society.
And again, in a stateless society, which is, I think, where the...
There aren't these kinds of laws.
There isn't this kind of jail.
There may be economic ostracism and so on that would occur, which I've talked about in my books on this.
But I think that by far, if the majority of people want the fetuses to stay alive and become viable births, then they will pay for the mother to retain the pregnancy.
In a sense...
This woman gave up $10,000 to keep the baby, right?
Because they were going to pay her $10,000, so she gave up.
She was $10,000 poorer, in a sense, by having this baby who died shortly after her eighth birthday.
But in a free society, if nobody cares about the viability of the babies, then abortions are going to happen, and that's just how it's going to play out.
And the best way you would do that is try and change people's minds.
If only a tiny minority of people care about the baby, then it wouldn't matter in a current society because nobody would vote for outlawing abortion.
But if the majority of people really care about the viability and survival of fetuses, and I would be among that number significantly, then they will put resources into Having that child come to term.
Now, it could be direct cash payments.
It could be an annuity.
It could be simply offering to take the child off the woman's hands if she doesn't want to keep the child and then paying for or paying for health care costs or medical costs.
It could be any number of ways in which these things could occur.
You could get a special medal.
You could, I don't know, like whether you could get a special baby crib checkmark on Twitter or something.
I don't know, whatever, right? There would be ways of dealing with this outside of the sort of brute force situation of the state as it stands because I have a very tough time arguing for morality with the current system of pointing guns at people who disobey the law because I think that these kinds of situations are so complex that you need a whole bunch of incentives and disincentives to try and guide society as a whole towards the most just outcome.
I know that sounds maybe a little bit like a weasel out but that's I would like to see more fetuses live, a hell of a lot more fetuses live, but it's really challenging because if you start paying women to do it, then are they just going to have babies in order to make money?
Well, I don't know. That's not the best way for children to get a start in life and all that.
And again, given that some of this may be genetic, maybe you're promoting a kind of selfish gene, so to speak, into the population.
It's all very Very challenging and very complicated, but I think in a free society, most people would prefer for babies to survive, and I think there'd be very strong mechanisms in place to ensure that.
But again, I'm not comfortable if a woman has an abortion, throwing her in jail, or I'm not comfortable if she's about to have an abortion, throwing her in jail and having all of that stress.
Because, you know, everything you do to stress out the mom...
It has a direct effect upon the health of the baby, right?
Because she's kind of like got a hostage, so to speak, right?
Except that the hostage is so directly wired into her body that even the stress of Holding a baby in your belly that was the offspring of rape is going to be so stressful and ghastly for the woman in so many situations.
She's going to flood that baby with cortisol and stress hormones and she's going to get depressed and she's not going to take care of herself.
And so even though she's not initiating force against the baby, it could have a very, very negative effect on the baby's development.
And, you know, saying to a woman, well, you know, it's a rape baby, but just buck up and be positive.
It's kind of a tough...
I mean, it's a tough...
It's a tough case to make for her, right?
So it is a very unique situation if the woman is stressed, unhappy, miserable, angry, fearful, traumatized, and all of that.
I mean all of that flows directly into the baby's system I think to significant ill effect over time.
I totally agree with that.
And I like the way that you bring up the part of the solution for this conundrum that the law creates, which is in the morality.
I started learning about with you and with Hans-Ema Hoppe about the law, about property rights.
And while listening to Jordan Peterson, I was stuck with this idea, okay, the law is property rights, there's no doubt about that, but how we solve this situation where so many do not understand, don't care, have different temperaments that are not aligned with understanding this analytical position of understanding everything that property rights bundle with.
Eventually, a doctor, a theologian, told me that, and that was not understood by the first time, but it keeps coming back often and often, this idea that the law only serves when civilization is already civilized.
People are already lost.
So at the end of civilization, there is law.
So for civilization, law is not enough.
So there must be something higher of reference that guides us.
And only morality gives this solution for this problem of killing, not killing the baby.
That is not killing the baby in a perfect world where he is going to be carried away.
And this bad situation is going to be perfect.
And this is a totally different topic that I would love to discuss.
I think you're right.
And I really should become more familiar with Dr.
Hoppe's arguments.
But throwing the woman in jail for having an abortion or for contemplating an abortion, so to speak, or making plans to or arriving at the clinic or whatever...
Well, you're still victimizing a victim, right?
So we don't want to kill the baby because that's victimizing a victim, but we throw the woman in jail who's the victim of rape.
We're still victimizing a victim.
and we're still initiating the use of force, so to speak, because, well, we're certainly using force, right?
I mean, but it becomes very complicated, and the more complicated these things get, the less we need the blunt hammer of the state power to try and resolve these issues.
I mean, and I certainly would agree with you that law is no substitute for morality, of course, right?
Law is supposed to catch the weird outliers that arise far outside the bell curve of society as a whole.
Like, if you think of a bell curve, the only way that society can really work is if it's this sort of tall Washington Monument obelisk where it's centered around the middle, right?
The middle being, you know, the bourgeois respect for morality.
Now, there are some super smart people like the sort of Raskolnikovs or the Napoleons or like the super smart, super ambitious, super powerful people who are like, I am above petty morality.
I am beyond good and evil.
And you're going to get a few of those people at the high end.
And then you're going to get, you know, a few people at the low end who are, you know, just traumatized or dumb or whatever and just don't get the social contract or don't care about the social contract and they just won't respect the law.
But those have to be a tiny minority of people in society and the law can deal with those, right?
It's the difference between, you know, you can swat a couple of mosquitoes and But you can't deal with a storm of locusts.
Like, as an individual, right?
And we're sort of facing this in society as a whole, right?
The amount of criminality that's occurring is beyond the tipping point of what the law can handle, which is why everybody expecting the law to run around and deal with these rioters and all of this stuff is just not going to work, right?
So... So, yeah.
So why is it that there is the question of abortion to begin with?
Well, rape is rare.
Rape is like 1% or 2% of abortions.
And this is assuming that all the claims of rape are true, which is certainly not the case.
But, you know, it's a very, very tiny minority.
So obviously, if you could get rid of the other stuff and you're dealing with only 1% or 2% of the current rate of abortions, I think everybody would consider that a good thing.
So what's all the other stuff coming from?
Well, all the other stuff is coming from the welfare state and socialist redistribution to a large degree because the way it used to work, as you know, is that before the welfare state, if a teenage girl got pregnant, then the parents would have to pay for raising the child and no man would marry her.
And so everybody knew this and so you had chaperones and, you know, boys and girls of a teenage age, the hormones were understood and, you know, you've got to marry the girl before you get sex.
And the parents would very strongly step in and enforce this kind of stuff because birth control was unreliable and there was no welfare state.
So if your kid got pregnant, you either had to try and find some way to have the child aborted, you'd have to have the kid go off on some journey to some foreign place where they'd have the child and then return as if nothing happened and you'd never speak of it again.
It was all kind of weird and shifty and crazy and everybody would be suspicious.
Oh yes, they went away to the south of France for six months.
We know what that's all about, right?
And so the shame, the expense, the ostracism would accrue to The family who let their child get pregnant, knocked up as the old phrase used to be, right?
And the boy might be shamed and all of that.
And so social shaming plus direct cost to the parents who allowed a daughter to get pregnant would accrue to the point where the parents are looking at $200,000 to raise a child or they just make sure that their daughter doesn't hang out with the wrong boys unaccompanied, right?
Okay, well then they'll deal with that, right?
And that's why, you know, the 50s, if you sort of look back at that, You know, Greasers versus the Prep Girls that's in the movie Grease.
Well, you know, Danny Zuko is exactly the kind of guy that Sandy should never be around, right?
And there is that joke about this.
I think it's Rizzo who says, I feel like a broken typewriter.
Why? I missed a period.
I skipped a period, right? And this fear, this terror of pregnancy, whereas it's really changed now because the parents don't pay for the child.
It's put on the collected purse of the welfare state and therefore their incentive to intervene has massively diminished because the woman can flourish and make more money without a husband then having a job or sometimes even with a husband and having children if he's working because she's on the receiving end of taxes, not paying it. So, all the incentives have become screwed up to the point we're talking about abortion now in a situation where the state is paying for unwed mothers.
It's like... It's trying to...
You know, I guess it's trying to bring dietary advice to a buffet where people believe that eating makes them healthier.
It's like, what are you talking about?
Why on earth would I reduce my food consumption?
Because eating well makes me healthy and the food is all free.
Like, you're just fighting too much of an uphill battle.
So, in a free society... The incentives shift, I think, to the point where, you know, I've used the analogy before, but it's like, how on earth does a free society deal with smallpox?
You might ask, you know, at the turn of the last century, right?
But smallpox is eradicated.
And, you know, of course, you know, it's not like unwanted pregnancies would be completely eradicated, but the incentives would align to the point where a tiny, tiny percentage of the number of abortions that are occurring now would occur in the future.
and we would say, well, it seems like a big problem when the incentives were all wrong, but it's not such a big problem now that a free market has aligned the incentives in the right way.
Cesar Lewis has a whole chapter about chastity in his Christianity, Pure and Simple, talking about that and how Pure and Simple, talking about that and how this old-fashioned idea makes total sense in the Western culture, or the lack of nowadays.
right? Yeah, I mean, if there's something I was thinking about today was how conservative COVID is making society.
It's pretty wild when you think about it, right?
COVID is making society very conservative because people are now scared of hookups, right?
They're scared of random dating on the internet.
They are not out drinking all night.
They're not going to all these crazy parties and taking drugs, you know, because it has a certain kind of conservative element.
I mean, to be a baby being born during COVID... It has some advantages to it, right?
Because, you know, oftentimes mom is home, maybe dad is working from home and so on, and so you're not being dumped in a daycare.
And for kids who are being homeschooled, they're actually having good values.
If the parents have good values, they're being transmitted through homeschooling rather than scrubbed away through government schooling.
There is a certain amount of, you know, stop screwing around, settle down, find one partner, get married, be responsible, and don't party, and all of that.
And as I said earlier, I didn't say this earlier, but I remarked upon the solitary people, people are also now recognizing that you need others, you need community, you need stable relationships, your friends aren't going to cut it for the rest of your life.
Just having a gaggle of friends, that's great.
I had them, you have them.
Having a gaggle of friends in your early, mid-20s or even your late 20s, yeah, it's a ball, right?
But your friends aren't around during COVID. Maybe your roommates are or whatever, but your friends aren't around during COVID because you've got to isolate to a large degree, right?
But your family is still around, your immediate family, if you're married or whatever, they're still around.
And recognizing that you cannot build...
Your social unit based upon transitory friendships, well, most friendships throughout the course of your life are transitory because people get married, they get busy with their careers, they become parents and don't really have time for you, they move away and all that kind of stuff, whereas your family is with you.
I mean, they're with you, man. I'm quarantined with, to me, two of the best people in the world, my wife and my daughter.
And so there is a kind of Christian fundamentalist lack of frivolity and commitment to community and children and chastity that is kind of occurring at the moment.
I mean, with regards to mere rampant sexuality, the same thing happened to the homosexual community in the 80s with regards to AIDS.
Freddie Mercury was interviewed and said, oh, no, everybody just sits around playing Scrabble.
Nobody's having any sex anymore because it's just too bloody dangerous, right?
And so there is a conservative element and, you know, the malls are closed and people don't care as much about jewelry and finery and foppery and all of this kind of transitory glitter garbage that passes for rational consumption in a decadent society.
There is a back to basics that is going on in the world and there is a reminder of the value Of the old conservative approach to life, you know, like a suspicion of communism and stable borders and no mass immigration and not as much, if any, casual sex and don't waste your life on partying and don't do drugs and all of this kind of stuff.
It is funny just how the Chinese communist virus is provoking, to some degree, a resurgence in respect for more conservative values and Christian values, really.
that's just one of these wild, unexpected side consequences of this general disaster.
And even that point, the U.S. also has a humiliation about how hard at the time of the war it was.
It has a lot of similarities at this moment.
I see so many friends of mine that were atheists or agnostics that were born in a Christian family.
That are now coming back due to difficulties or to realizations or even due to maturing and becoming more mature.
Sorry, my pronunciation of this word is probably wrong.
There's a guy here in Montreal, a fellow Canadian, that is a personal friend of J.R. Peterson that talks a lot about that too and makes analysis of all the symbolism regarding that, that I think would be very interesting.
He's somewhat related to J.D.R., but not much.
They're kind of friends and foes of some sort.
His name is Jonathan Bajot.
He's very interesting because he talks precisely about this relation that we're living in this perhaps return to this idea that we lost in our tradition and what makes us Westerns.
It's the antidote to the psychotic unreality of infinite money that has characterized the last 60 or 70 years of Western society.
We're living in a complete psychotic dream of infinite resources and Slamming up against something that you can't buy your way out of is insanely difficult for society, but insanely healthy for people's minds.
We now have something we can't just will away.
We can't politic it away.
We can't sophist it away.
We can't buy it away. I mean, we can wallpaper the world with money to cover up the financial hole being dug by government's response to COVID, but Here's something that is beyond rhetoric.
Here is something that is beyond bullshit.
And that is a very powerful reminder of the fragile limited nature of our species.
And I hope, I hope, I hope, of course, that people get used to investing in community, get used to investing in friends, stop with stupid time-wasting activities, because normally a sense of profound limitation only begins to hit you in later middle age.
And now, profound limitation, fundamental limitation is being inflicted upon the world stage and people recognize that there is a mortality in the universe far beyond our will to wish away.
There are limitations in the universe far beyond our will to wish away.
That is a profoundly healthy way to attempt to wake up from the psychotic nightmare of infinite resources characterized by endless debt, treadmill, central banking, pseudo-societies.
Yep, memento mori.
Remember that. You're going to die.
And by the by, just for those of you who don't know, I don't have any inside scoop in this, but I've been reading reports that, you know, poor Dr.
Peterson. My God, what a year and a half this man is.
He's had health issues since 2016 or so.
But Jordan Peterson, of course, as you know, became addicted to benzodiazepines and anti-anxiety medication to the point where he was unable to sleep and it was feeling like ants were crawling all over his body, was going through literal hell at the same time, of course. I think Corsal 2, his wife, developing what appeared to be terminal cancer, which I believe has now gone into remission.
I think it was her kidney. And he did not get the help that he needed, and so his daughter got him to Russia, I think through her husband.
He was put into an induced coma in order to help wean him off the benzodiazepine addiction, and he is slowly regaining his health.
Which is all tragic and awful and while I certainly have my differences with Dr.
to Peterson.
He is a very thought-provoking and intelligent and erudite person who, of course, burst upon the world stage and inflicted a whole series of scar tissue questions where easy answers had been before.
And I've certainly learned a lot from him, and I know a lot of people have, and massive kudos and respect for all the bullets he took in standing up to the collectivist nature of hard leftism and, you know, massive props to the guy for all that he did in those regards.
But quite tragically, as if the hits just keep on coming, he now has succumbed to COVID.
He's now in a Serbian hospital.
I don't know how he got from Russia to Serbia, but that apparently is the latest.
He's in a Serbian hospital, and he was loaded up with medications to help with COVID. His symptoms were not too bad.
I don't think he even had much of a cough, but they loaded him up with antivirals and other things.
things.
I don't think it was hydrochloroquine and zinc and the other one that I can never remember, but he was loaded up with medications that were supposed to help with coronavirus.
And unfortunately, these medications, or maybe it's just the ongoing effect of coronavirus, have caused his health to take a precipitous crash again.
And he is now battling for the second time in a year pneumonia, and it is really just tragic.
So I certainly hope that you will join me in wishing the very best for this tragically afflicted family and sending good wishes and good thoughts his way and to Mikailas and to his wife and to, you know, he has a grandson, at least as far as I know, A granddaughter. Maybe he's got other ones as well.
But, you know, this is a...
A powerful, heroic figure with his flaws, like we all have, but what he is facing, what his family is facing, is a whole cascading series of truly life-challenging disasters, and I hope that you will join me in wishing him the best, and I'm sure that the family will not find it amiss if you drop them a positive line, and I certainly wish the very best for the family, I wish the very best for Dr.
Peterson, and I'm sure that he will recover.
He is made of some very stern and strong stuff.
And the tales that he will bring back and the depth that he will bring back from this precipice will be truly something to behold.
So I did actually watch an interview he did with His daughter, with regards to his recovery, and there certainly was, of course, a fragility in the question of, like, why would you take life advice from somebody who became an addict with all the knowledge he had as a professional and as a psychologist with regards to the dangers of benzodiazepines and so on.
And, you know, he said, you know, you can listen to the message, not the messenger, and that's, you know, that's fair.
That's fair to some degree, but...
I think that, I mean, I hope that he will, obviously I hope he gets better, and I hope and I believe that he will return with some extraordinarily powerful messages with regards to the value of life and the imminent danger of mortality that surrounds us all.
As you remember, you too shall die, this too shall pass, this being both suffering and life.
Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us, or joining me tonight, and I guess us.
Thank you, James, as always, for being the rock upon which this show is built from a technical and show organization standpoint.
He is a true friend to philosophy and to myself, and I hugely appreciate everything that he does, and I hope that you will send him a message to that effect as well, because it is massively important.
Appreciate it. Thank you, everyone, so much for your continued support of the show in these wildly challenging times.
freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Of course, things have been a little dry as of late for reasons that I'm sure you understand, but we will soldier on.
Your support would certainly be most gratefully appreciated.
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Hey, look at that. Less than three months to the election in the U.S., at which point the world will take a hard fork One way or another.
So have yourselves a wonderful evening.
Lots of love from up here.
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