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July 20, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:33
WHY RELATIONSHIPS DIE Freedomain Locals Livestream
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well. Welcome, welcome.
Of course, thank you so much to all of the local subscribers who are keeping the things running.
Who are keeping things running.
Appreciate that so much.
And throw your questions in.
I mean, I have a couple of comments, a couple of wee things to chat about.
Locals? Yeah, locals are a pretty good way to donate.
You can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
And PayPal, boy, PayPal was cancelled like, I don't know, a year and a half ago or something more.
November of 2018?
Anyway, so yes, Locals is fine.
FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
There are a whole bunch of different places that you can see me and donate to me, and I would really, really appreciate that.
And I had a really, really interesting call.
So let me ask you this.
If people are coming in with questions...
Let me just ask you this.
Have you experienced, from the people in your life, could be friends, could be family, could be just about anything, have you experienced sabotage, what you would consider to be sabotage?
I'm not saying conscious sabotage, you know, like somebody stabbing your tires or anything like that.
I mean, people who just...
You know, there's so many different ways that people interfere with what it is that you want to do and how it is that you want to grow.
And... This guy I was talking to last night There was a pretty reasonable set of evidence that his brothers, his family, was sabotaging him.
And sabotage can be kind of interesting.
So, in terms of when I first started the show in 2005, 16 years ago, this show can finally drive.
And in two years it can be drafted.
Actually, in one year it can sign up for the Marine Corps with parental permission.
In real-time relationships, you talk about wanting to change someone's In real-time relationships, you talk about wanting to change someone versus helping each other paint your painting of life.
How can you tell you're with someone in the latter category, and what do those positive painting consulting conversations sound like?
Thank you. It's a great question, Michael.
And I'll do the sabotage thing another time.
I'll just talk about how people sabotage at the beginning of my relationship with philosophy, at least my public relationship with philosophy.
Generally, what they did was they were...
Silent and neutral and disengaged whenever I would talk about my enthusiasms.
So yeah, how do you know that conversations are going?
So most conversations that you have in life are feeling your way to landmines.
I mean personal conversations or conversations with people you want to have an honest or real conversation with.
They're feeling their way through a landmine.
And what I mean by that is...
I'll give you an example. So a woman I dated in my early 30s, her father had died young and she had this Wild worship of her father.
And it's funny because she showed me a picture of where he was placed.
And it was actually, this is back when you could call things by their proper names.
And her father was ensconced in a place called the so-and-so's home for incurables, right?
I think he had cancer or something like that.
And they just said, this is the home for the incurables.
Whereas now you couldn't say anything like that because it would be considered too politically...
Too on the nose, too honest, too out with the reels and in with the feels, right?
That's the modern world, out with the reels and in with the feels.
And she had this worship of her father.
Now, her father seemed to be an okay guy, from what she told me.
Fairly unremarkable. He was a good-looking guy.
He worked in the trades and, you know, had a family and all that and died.
And she, although he had died...
More than 20 years ago, still talked about him a lot, and it just seemed something was off about it.
I mean, my father died last year, and I have barely talked about him since.
So there was something kind of just off about it.
And sort of in hindsight, I kind of got that she wanted to elevate herself by talking about how wonderful her father was.
In other words, it wasn't so much that she thought he was wonderful.
It was that she felt that she would come across as a better person by talking about how wonderful her father was.
And you'll often hear this with people.
They talk about how wonderful their families are.
To make you look at them in a more positive or a better light, and it's not particularly great, but it happens.
Anyway, so, I mean...
She showed me a picture of herself as a girl and her father looking at each other and she says, what do you see?
What do you see in this picture? What do you see passing between?
It's like 20, 25 years ago the guy died.
I'm sorry, this Hamlet stretching the grief out forever just seems kind of strange.
It's really struck me when somebody says to Hamlet, well, You lost a father.
Your father lost a father. His father lost a father.
You've got to find some way to continue.
Are you completely shocked by the cycle of life?
Anyway, so I just started to say, you know, I'm just kind of curious why this is such an intense issue for you.
Guy's been dead over 20 years.
And yet, this is kind of what you bring early to the relationship.
And just, boom, you know, just frozen out, right?
So a lot of...
A lot of relationships that you're going to have with people, it's the same thing when you're talking politics or the same thing when you're talking IQ or the same thing when you're talking...
I mean, just about anything these days, you're just kind of feeling your way forward like a squid trying to figure out where there's no electrical probes at the bottom of the fish tank or something.
You're just trying to feel your way out to find out where somebody's offense triggers are.
And this is one of the horrible things that cancel culture...
What leftism and identity politics has done is it's made us all prisoners of our own internal censorship because, let's say, I mean, you know this from my American listeners, let's say you're at work and the subject of Trump comes up, you know, you gotta worry, you gotta be concerned.
Are you gonna provoke someone who's gonna report you to HR for microaggression or whatever it is, right?
Or, you know, now a meritocracy is considered racist.
Like if you say, well, we should just judge whoever's the best at things and hire based on skills and abilities rather than skin color, that's considered to be, I think, white supremacy or racism now.
So even just saying, I think the best person should get the job, that's now a microaggression or whatever it is, right?
So most relationships that you're going to get involved in are just...
TikTok, waiting for the landmine, waiting for the shock and horror, waiting for the recoiling.
Everybody's been so programmed to be so triggered that we don't have a human community anymore.
We don't have neighborhoods.
We don't have any kind of human communities anymore because everyone is so waiting to get triggered.
Everyone is so waiting to be a bully.
Everyone has been so bullied by woke culture that now they're just looking to bully others to level up and all the virtue signaling.
And now, of course, it's the case with vaccinations as well.
Are you vaccinated?
What do you think of the vaccine?
Well, it's not a vaccine.
Anyway, so.
So with relationships that last.
I mean, you can have intimacy or you can have offense.
Those are the choices that you have in your life and in your relationships.
You can have intimacy or you can be offended.
You simply cannot have both.
And I don't know, honestly don't know, why people would choose to Be offended rather than have the joys of falling in love.
Because falling in love is when you trust someone enough to know that they're not crazy, that they're not a bully, that they're not some sort of creep or weirdo.
And you then just want to know what they think.
And you're just curious about what they think.
And I don't think...
I mean, I've known my wife almost 20 years now.
We've been married over 19.
So I... I honestly don't think she's ever said anything that offends me.
I can't think of anything.
I'm pretty hard to offend.
Okay, censorship offends me, but that's the weaponization of offense already.
So relationships work well and have long-term growth and potential when you're just curious about the other person and you refuse to fall into the easy...
One-upmanship of being offended or being in the right or being upset or withdrawing affection or, you know, just manipulating them or anything like that.
I said this in the call last night.
It just went out on Locals.
You can find it. It's not just for supporters.
It's for everyone who signs up for free, even for Locals, freedemand.locals.com.
And it's called Two Women...
Red flags. And I said this in the call.
I said, look, there's three ways that you can resolve disputes in a relationship.
And you're going to always have disputes.
Whether you do or don't is not an option.
You're always going to have disputes, disagreements in a relationship that need to be resolved one side or the other.
It's not like, I like green.
I guess it's like, I like green, you like blue.
What color should we paint the bedroom?
Well, I like green, you like blue doesn't have to be resolved.
But when you have to choose a color for the bedroom, then you have to resolve something, right?
So I said there's three ways that...
Relationships can be...
Conflicts can be resolved.
Number one, sweet reason.
Reason and evidence. Number two, manipulation.
And number three, violence.
And that's all you have. That's in society, in relationships, everything in society, in your relationships, in the world, in your country, in your neighborhood, in your housing association, your HOA. You've got sweet reason, manipulation, violence. That's it.
That's the only thing. There's the only...
Unholy trinity or holy slash unholy trinity, we have to resolve things in the world.
And so, in a relationship where you can be honest and the other person isn't going to jump to conclusions that you are a bad person, or, you know, like when my father died, to be honest, I didn't feel that much.
I mean, my father, as a category...
You know, fatherhood, parenting is a verb, not a noun, right?
He was my father biologically, but he did not father me.
He did not parent me much, really, at all.
I would see him in summers when I was a kid.
Sometimes we would go for a week or two to Ireland, where I was born, and he would be there, and we'd spend a little bit of time there.
And once when I was six, and once when I was sixteen, I went and spent a couple of months with him In Africa, and he tootled me around quite a bit of Africa because he was a geologist.
And then I saw him at various family gatherings over the years, but he never sort of sat me down and gave me wisdom or Help me with my life or anything like that.
So, of course, you know, if you're with someone who's judgy and wants to one-up you and wants to have that self-righteous throne of casting aspersions and so on, right?
Then you say, you know, my father died.
I actually feel that much about it.
I don't really feel that much about it.
And that person's going to be like, oh, that's cold, or oh my, so cold-hearted, or like they're just going to immediately go into the judging mode.
And then what's happened is your honesty has been weaponized against you, right?
So you've expressed a vulnerability, not feeling sad about your father dying, or not feeling particularly sad about your father dying.
It's a vulnerable thing to say.
It opens you to criticism, right?
And so if you're honest and you open yourself to that criticism, there are some people who are going to slam you for it.
You know, like I mean for the Americans, you say, I thought Trump had some good points.
I thought Trump had some good points.
He was not a very effective president, but he had some good points.
I mean, then you're opening yourself up to, oh yes, that means you're a racist or whatever it is, right?
So... In relationships that work, in relationships that grow, if you feel that it's just a series of, well, I've got to avoid this topic, and I've got to, oh, I found out this topic is pretty bad, oh, she gets really upset about this topic, or he doesn't like talking about this, then what happens is you start off with a pretty wide range of potential topics.
And what happens is, I mean, why relationships go out, it's like a fire in the rain, right?
I mean, you've got a fire... In your fire grate or whatever, outside, and it rains.
Now, the fire doesn't go out immediately unless it's some torrential downpour.
It's just a normal rain. The fire doesn't go out immediately.
What happens? Well, it just kind of diminishes, it diminishes, it diminishes, it diminishes, and then that last raindrop hits that last flicker, and then you've got some embers, and then you've got cold ash, and it's done.
And that's what happens in relationships.
You want to know why relationships fail?
I mean, not just romantic relationships, but any relationship, really.
Why do they fail? Well, they fail because...
The topics that you are allowed get narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower until you really don't have anything left to talk about and then what happens is your sense of life, your sense of mortality, your sense of frustration, your sense of anger at being so controlled and bullied for spontaneous topics of conversation erupts and you can't stand the person anymore.
Because you're like, okay, well, it's like these concessions in life, right?
Okay, well, I guess we won't talk about that.
Okay, that's fine. It's just one topic we won't talk about.
Okay, two topics.
Okay, three. Oh, I can't talk about how her sister misbehaves.
Oh, I can't talk about how her mom drinks too much.
Oh, I can't talk about his spacing out because of video games.
And then just topics get smaller and smaller, and then eventually you're just like, oh my God, I'm silenced in this relationship.
There's no possibility of intimacy because I have to check every single thought that I have to find out if it's acceptable or not.
And the list of prohibited topics gets so long.
That you're disgusted at the other person.
You're enraged. You're frustrated.
You hate yourself for conceding and silencing this.
And then you just bail.
You're just like, I can't do it.
I cannot take this anymore.
And then you get out. Or you go have an affair.
Or you go have an affair with someone who will listen to you.
or you spend all your time online with people who are willing to let you talk and think and speak your mind and you either have emotional affairs or you have physical affairs or you just spend all your time on message boards or whatever and your relationship further deteriorates and you can't talk about why you can't talk you can't talk and say look you just get upset with various things and I'm painted into a corner.
I'm boxed in. Every time I have a spontaneous thought, I have to run through the checklist, which is now a hundred items, of things I can't talk about, of positions I can't hold, of feelings I can't have, of opinions that are...
Inappropriate. And this is true with feminists, this is true with sometimes the men's rights guys as well, the MGTOW guys and so on.
No. And eventually you just get so crazed with silence and suppression and you realize that you're in a tyranny that you've chosen.
You're in a tyranny at home.
You're in a voluntary enslavement, voluntary censorship, and then you just...
Just blow up. And you can wallpaper over that silence with sex for a while, but eventually even that's just gross, right?
So, yeah, I mean, look, the fact that I didn't feel too much about my father's death, maybe there is a coldness there, maybe this is a rational response to a relationship that barely existed, or maybe there is a lot of feeling deep down that I just don't have access to at the moment.
Sometimes it can tell. I remember Richard Feynman, the physicist, I remember reading his autobiography many years ago, And I think his wife died of some illness and it wasn't until two years later he was passing by a store and he saw a dress in a shop similar to one that she wore and just burst into tears.
Grief is just a funny thing.
It just happens on its own.
It's like a flower unfolding.
You've just got to watch it happen and just go with it as it happens.
But if somebody says, they jump to a conclusion, right?
So jumping to a conclusion is the opposite of being in love.
Jumping to a conclusion is the opposite of being in a relationship.
And so if someone says, I don't like mass immigration, and then you say, oh, you're just a racist.
You've jumped to a conclusion. There's no curiosity.
There's no exploration.
There's no conversation.
And that's just killed any possibility of intimacy or understanding or the cross-pollination of wisdom that comes out of curiosity, right?
The three biggest words in a relationship, not I love you, not let's have sex, although they're important.
The three biggest words in a relationship are, tell me more.
Oh, you don't really feel much when your father died?
Tell me more. I'd like to hear more.
Tell me more. Just tell me more.
Oh, you don't like mass immigration?
Tell me more. Oh, you thought Trump had some good points?
Tell me more. Tell me more.
Oh, you don't want to take the vaccine?
Tell me more. That's a relationship where people aren't just Low-IQ offense robots, right?
Where they're just bouncing around judging people and feeling superior because they've bullied someone as they themselves were bullied through the educational system as a child.
So a relationship that works is where you're just curious about the other person and you won't jump to conclusions.
You know, if someone I know were to say something to me that I would find genuinely shocking, I don't know...
The communist dictator Pol Pot had some good points, right?
Let's say the communist dictator Pol Pot, some friend, I can't imagine them saying this, but if they did, the communist dictator Pol Pot had some good points, right?
I'd be like, tell me more.
You're a friend, so I'm not just going to, if you were someone on Twitter, or, yes, old Twitter, someone on Parler or whatever, then I would say, that's, you know, would you say that about Hitler kind of thing?
And I think as a proportion of the Cambodian population Pol Pot killed, Well, a lot of people, the killing fields and so on.
But if it was somebody I knew and respected and cared for, I would say, tell me more.
And I would be genuinely curious to find out why they would say a thing that to me would be kind of off the reservation, right?
So, you just listen to live streams instead of your family, right?
Right, right, right.
Blue walls, green furniture.
That's very good. That's how your last relationship dissolved.
Yes. And you, this is my suggestion.
You know, I never tell people what to do, but this is my suggestion about a possible productive way to start.
If you're in a new, let's say you're in a new dating relationship, then don't hedge what you say.
And if the other person gets offended, then ask them why they're offended.
Oh, because this means you're a ha.
It's like, okay, well, you know, we've been on a couple of dates.
You've already made your mind up about who I am.
So there's nowhere to go from here.
Like once people have already come to a conclusion about you, how on earth are you supposed to have a relationship that's going to last for 50 years?
50 years can't be sustained with an ever-shrinking number of topics that you can talk about until you end up talking about the weather.
And even then the weather gets problematic because maybe one of you is global warming and the other one isn't, right?
So you can't talk about anything.
And then what happens? You just get so bored.
You just get so mind-numbingly bored in the relationship.
I don't know. So, you just be frank and honest and open, and if the person gets offended, then you can just save yourself a whole lot of time.
Well, if what I'm saying is offensive to you, I don't want to offend you, I don't want you to be offended, and I'm generally a bigger one for curiosity in relationships.
I will never be offended by anything you say.
Because words won't kill anybody.
I will never be offended by anything you say.
But if you find what I say offensive, I just find that very boring.
And I don't find that particularly interesting.
And if you're going to jump to conclusions about me on the first date or the second date, then there's nowhere for us to grow.
And, you know, I wish you the very best.
And I guess you'll have to find someone who thinks exactly like you do so that you never get offended, right?
Not curious about UFOs.
That's a very good point.
Good for you. Good for you.
Very, very good point. Very, very good point.
Lycor. Low IQ offense robots.
L-I-Q-O-R. Lycor.
So, I think that's very interesting.
That's a very interesting point.
Alan Bro, I appreciate that.
So, I will tell you that Because I'm saying, well, you know...
So, if somebody said to me, I saw a UFO. If somebody I didn't know, I would most likely dismiss it.
But if somebody...
I mean, let's say my wife came to me and said, I saw something in the sky I can't explain.
I would say, tell me more.
If a friend of mine came and said, I was abducted by space aliens.
Honestly, I would say, tell me more.
Absolutely. But you guys don't know, because this happened way before I was a public figure.
So... In the 1970s, there were a whole bunch of quasi-mystical crazes that went on in the world, like just nutty stuff.
A whole bunch of quasi-mystical stuff that went on.
There was a psychic phenomenon, ESP. I actually got into the Toronto Sun newspaper for Bending Spoons.
And so, mind-bending power with my friend Jamie.
Anyway, so...
I've been through all of that.
I've read all the books. There was a very great deal of mysticism about, you know, if you take a razor blade and you put it under a pyramid in the morning, it will be sharpened.
And I explored all of this.
There was telekinesis was a very big thing in the 70s.
And UFOs and all of these things.
Ancient aliens, like the whole thing.
And I was like, hey, I'm open to it.
I'm curious. I remember doing telekinesis experiments.
I remember lying in my bed, listening to my very first...
45 LP, which was 10 cc's The Things We Do For Love.
And it got to the end, because there was a little needle that would use scale across and play the music.
It got to the end doing...
And I tried with all of my might to lift the needle and put it back in the holder, because I was open.
I'm curious. Hey, man. You can move things with your mind.
You can bend spoons. Yeah, tell me more.
My mom was very much into psychic phenomenon and, you know, I'm a kid.
I'm open to what she's got to say.
UFOs, big thing, right? And I bought a telescope.
I mapped sunspots.
I mapped the moon.
I tried to find twinkling lights in the night sky and point my telescope at them to see if I could see any of the rotating.
I've been through the whole thing, man.
I read books about it, I explored about it, and I went through the whole thing.
So I have been curious about it.
But curiosity, I mean, it's good to have an open mind, but not to the point where your brain falls out, right?
It's good to have an open mind, but not to the point where your brain falls out.
So you have to come to some conclusions.
And many years ago, I guest-hosted the Corbett Report, James Corbett.
And I made the case, of course, that if there were UFOs, and let's say that we gave everybody in the world and their dog high-definition cameras with 60 frames a second and 1080p or 4K, then we would know.
Very quickly we would know for sure whether there were UFOs, but of course nothing conclusive has come up.
So yeah, you absolutely be curious, but that doesn't mean you can never come to conclusions.
I mean, when I first heard about communism, I was curious.
Of course I was. It could be a better system.
When I first heard about capitalism, very curious, right?
So, you definitely do want to be curious, but not to the point where you never form conclusions, right?
So, it's like science.
Science is one of the great empirical proofs of reason, evidence, and empiricism.
And so with science, if somebody comes with a pretty wild hypothesis or conjecture, I can do fusion in a jar.
It's like, I'm curious.
Tell me more. But if you can't reproduce it, if it contradicts the basic properties of matter and energy, then you don't have to be, I wonder if, right?
I wonder if the earth is banana-shaped, right?
I mean, curiosity, yes, but not to the lack of judgment, right?
So judgment, you've got, again, Aristotelian means the general place to go to in all but non-aggression principle violations, right?
You don't want an average of axe murdering, right?
So with curiosity, you don't want to have no curiosity and just jump to conclusions all the time, but at the same time, you don't want to be endlessly curious and never have any conclusions at all.
You want to be somewhere in the middle, right?
Currently working through RTR. Great book.
Haven't ever heard anyone take quite a straightforwardly moral and logical approach to personalities.
We'll say something nice on Goodreads when I'm done.
Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Thank you. Let's see here.
Uri Geller. Yeah, Uri Geller was the big, big thing and all that.
Oh, absolutely. Reiki, crystal healing.
Oh, absolutely. Your point about simply stating your opinions hit me like a brick.
My parents are not curious and jump to conclusions, and I hedge almost all of my expressed opinions.
You'll have plenty of time to not express your opinions in the virtual eternity after you're dead.
After you're dead, you will be silent.
After you're dead, you will take all your secrets to the grave.
After you're dead, none of your unexpressed opinions will ever flower into life.
Scatter ye seeds while ye may.
You will have an eternity in which to say nothing.
Say what you can, what you dare, what you should, and sometimes what you must now.
The grave will open up, swallow you like Pac-Man with a glowing dot, and you will have all of eternity to not express your opinions, to not be honest, to not be open.
People who jump to conclusions...
The way that primitive society works is happenstance is ascribed to willpower and hysterical judgment is imposed to prevent understanding and to manage anxiety.
So if you have a A tribe that lives on some geological fault line, and then there's somebody happens to be dancing, and then there's an earthquake, they say, the dancing angered the gods in the ground, the earthquake is punishment dancing, so no dancing!
They're jumping to a conclusion.
They don't have any facts, they don't have any reason, they don't have any evidence, they simply jump to conclusion.
It's a very low IQ phenomenon, just to jump to conclusions, right?
Why are blacks poor? Slavery!
Just jumping to conclusions, no curiosity.
No curiosity. So, That's how primitive societies work.
They just jump to conclusions.
And they don't have any evidence.
And what happens is things get more and more and more restricted to the point where the society simply cannot evolve at all.
The 40,000 years of aborigines in Australia had exactly the same culture pretty much from the beginning of the 40,000 years to the end of the 40,000 years when the Europeans came.
I did whole speeches on this.
You can find them when I did my European tour with Lauren.
Sorry, my European tour.
That's a fantasy.
My Australian tour with Lauren Southern.
I mean, you're in a primitive tribe of dangerous and superstitious people if they simply jump to conclusions.
You gave me this piece of information.
You're a racist. You're a fascist.
You're a neo-Nazi. You're far-right.
They're just jumping to conclusions.
It is exactly the same as the people who say the earthquake happened because someone was dancing.
And they simply restrict and restrict and restrict.
And all they're doing is managing their own anxiety.
Right? So if you live on a fault line...
And there's earthquakes all the time.
You feel anxious about earthquakes.
So what you do is you come up with these bizarre rituals that have nothing to do with the earthquakes to manage your anxiety about the earthquakes.
But what that means, of course, is you'll never move.
Like, if you understand, it's not dancing that causes the earthquakes.
It's not picking your nose that causes the earthquakes.
The earthquakes happen for things we don't understand, for reasons that we can't control.
So you know what? Let's move!
To some other place where there's not as many earthquakes, right?
So the superstition paralyzes you, keeps you in a bad situation.
It's the vast majority of human history.
It's the vast majority of human relationships.
And I'm telling you, when you get older, you will look back and you will say, I cannot believe, I cannot believe how much of my precious, short, essential, important, irreplaceable time I wasted Punching myself in the face and biting my tongue.
Because now I'm going to die.
I'm going to be silenced anyway.
And all I did was carry a little coffin in place of my tongue for most of my life.
Why did you skip my question?
Now, see, that's interesting.
Look there. We have an example of somebody jumping to a conclusion.
Somebody is jumping to a conclusion right there.
It just shows you how little people listen, right?
No offense, my brother. I'm glad you're here.
I'm glad you're pointing it out. But how do you know I skipped my question?
Right? You're jumping to a conclusion.
Why did you skip my question?
Maybe I didn't see it.
Maybe I read it but didn't want to answer it.
Maybe I haven't skipped it, right?
So... You say, oh, I have a question you didn't answer.
Just, you know, that would be a neutral, but why did you skip my question?
You understand, that's an accusation with no evidence, and it's jumping to a conclusion rather than being curious.
Why didn't you? Or you could say, well, I'm being curious why you skipped my question, but you don't know if I skipped my question.
I mean, this is the tiny example, right?
Okay, so, but that's fine.
I don't mind that. Well, who was it?
Oz. Okay, let me just go back here and have a quick look.
Thanks, regards, Oz.
Oh, so he wrote, can you tell me more about lysenkoism and what happens when politics mix with science?
I find it really hard to find any deeper information on how lysenkoism actually worked and how it looked at the time.
I didn't see that question, sorry, and I have no idea what lysenkoism is.
I think it's got something to do with lysanthropy.
Just kidding. I have no idea what that is.
Sorry. Can't help you out.
All right. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, of course, people who are illegal immigrants in America can get the vaccine without showing any ID. And so they don't have a database of who doesn't have the vaccine, as far as I know, because...
How long have we been running for?
About 45 minutes?
No, 40 minutes or so. I think the line along the bottom is how long I have left.
So if you have any other questions or comments, let me just go.
I just don't want to go on a monologue, which I could do anytime if you guys have questions or comments.
Let's see here. Do you have more than one notebook?
Because it seems like, and there's no reason why they would, but every notebook has a different configuration for the arrow keys and the shift key and so on.
And sometimes it feels like half my day is going from one notebook to another and the keys are all different places so the shift doesn't work and I'm, oh, backspace, oh this, oh that, oh correct, oh edit.
You know, it's just, it's one of the things that you have to remember how convenient everything is.
Like we can just sit down and have this conversation.
But you have to kind of remember how convenient everything is in order to remember some of the inconveniences that can...
Do you have any pets?
We did.
We did. When I was a kid, I had...
Hamsters and mice.
It's kind of funny. During the phase of losing my teeth, I looked into my mouse cage one day.
I must have been maybe eight.
And I thought that the mouse was gnawing on a tooth.
I thought that the mouse was gnawing on a tooth.
And I was horrified.
Did the mouse somehow escape and get one of my teeth that I'd lost and put it in its cage?
It was a very strange moment for me.
I remember it quite vividly so many years later.
So I pulled the mouse away and pulled it out, and it was a corn.
It was a corn. It's a piece of corn.
I thought it was a tooth. Anyway, I also remember a pretty horrifying time when we bred our hamsters.
And, well, I would find other kids who had won hamsters.
And I remember one time in the bathroom, the hamster who'd had the babies...
Freaked out, got nervous about something and started stuffing the babies.
I thought she was eating her babies, but she was stuffing her babies into her cheek to protect them.
And I thought she was eating her babies and pulling the babies from it.
Ah! Freaking out completely.
I was like, this is the most horrifying. I mean, of course, the babies are fine and all of that.
But yeah, so when I was a kid, but we lived in apartments so we couldn't really have dogs.
I did... A homestead, a wounded bird.
And I wrote about this in my novel, Almost.
So much of Almost comes out of things I've heard or things I've lived.
But yeah, so I would, if I found a baby bird that was wounded, I would try and bring it back to life.
We found a kitten and also brought it back from the edge of starvation.
I remember feeding it. I would put the milk on my fingertip and it would suck the milk off my fingertip and so on.
Then we got droppers and all of that.
So I had a sort of series of semi-wild, quote, pass-through pets as a kid.
I've always loved dogs.
My aunts and uncles had dogs in Ireland and I just loved them so much.
Dogs are just completely wonderful.
We barely deserve them as companions.
Cats are sort of fun, but they don't really do much, although they're good for cuddling and it lowers blood pressure.
But cats, you really roll the dice, right?
Because you might get a lap cat or you might just get some hissy death cat that hates you and then you've got 15 years and all of that.
And I actually have some friends right now who are in the downward decline side of pet ownership, you know, because, you know, when they're puppies, for instance, they're super cute and energetic and wonderful and you want to get a pet as early as possible to bond with and all of that.
But the last couple of years, you know, with the hip problems, with throat problems, with, you know, various ailments and illnesses and vet bills mounting and all of that, it's like you pay, man, you pay for the joy of the puppy with the old age stuff.
So the only pet that we had...
My daughter collects creatures all the time.
She collects creatures all the time.
I think it's wonderful. And I'm out there half the time with her hunting.
She has raised probably 300, 400 tadpoles this year.
And she just released them this morning.
And she's caught birds.
She catches pigeons and feeds them for a while.
We have rescued baby birds.
And mostly they don't make it.
But occasionally they will.
And we return them to the wild.
She caught a chipmunk once.
I mean, she's just very, very keen on these animals, which I think is wonderful, but they're not sort of pets.
And we did have a lizard for a while, a crested gecko, because she loves lizards.
It didn't do much. I'm sorry.
It got a little boring. So we found somebody else who was desperate for it and we gave it away.
I like dogs.
Here's the problem with dogs. I'm not a morning person in dogs.
You've got to get up and take them out and all of that.
And if travel ever resumes for me, which I hope it will at some point, then having pets is a real drag if you travel a lot, right?
It's very unfair to dogs if they bond with you and then you dump them in a kennel for a month or two, right?
So... So no, not many.
No, none at the moment. Are you into hi-fi?
Do you mean music? Yes.
Yes, I am. But I had a...
I think, well, it's either a result of being hit by my mother when I was younger, or maybe chemo, but I have a little bit of tinnitus in this ear, and the hearing is about half down, so I still got great hearing this ear, and it's about half, like, this is FM, this is AM, so I can't enjoy music quite as much as I used to, but I just crank it up on one side or whatever and all that, so.
Let me just see here, more questions.
Huh, it doesn't scroll very well. Pets are great for developing empathy in young children, especially cats.
Yeah. Alright. I was reading today that China threatened to nuke Japan at the start of the Olympics if they intervene to defend Taiwan against an invasion.
Well, what can I tell you?
It's quite a mystery.
Quite a mystery how...
The virus that originated right by a bioweapons lab in China happens to target people who are obese, which is a lot of people in America, of course, and other places in the West.
And it happens to target older people.
And, of course, there are older people in Japan.
There are a whole zombie brigade that simply won't die because they're so healthy, right?
So the fact that China is making its muscle moves on the world stage post-Trump and post-COVID, you know, well, that's kind of inevitable.
And what can I tell you?
I mean, I did a whole documentary, which you can find at freedomain.com forward slash documentaries on how dangerous China was literally while COVID was circulating in the air to begin with.
So I did that whole thing. I must read Almost One Day.
You'll have to listen to it. It's only available as an audiobook.
freedomain.com forward slash almost.
I also rescued a bird, an injured pigeon, and saved it from being a cat's lunch.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Let's see here.
So many people have gotten trendy pet puppies during lockdown.
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.
What would you value more in an employee?
Willingness to work more overtime doing higher quality work on normal less hours or doing higher quality work.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of working harder.
I'm a big fan of working smarter.
So when I was in the software field, I was Chief Technical Officer.
One of the programs I developed was called the Database Builder.
And what it did was we would have to make adjustments to our database and to our interface and to our queries and reports and everything for various clients who wanted to store different kinds of information.
So I wrote a program where you would input, could even be in a spreadsheet, all the changes that you want and then it would go through and it would make changes to the tables.
To the queries, to the forms, to the reports, to the web interface, because the web interface ran off a database that mapped the actual contents of the database.
And so that helped save us huge amounts of hours.
I also was a very big one for, rather than Clients saying, I want you to develop this report for me.
I wrote a wizard that allowed clients to choose and develop their own reports with various fields and sorting mechanisms and grouping mechanisms so you could group by month or location or whatever it is.
Same thing with, we did query by form where you get a mirror of the screen you're looking at and then you can enter in your search criteria and it will filter the underlying data set.
So I wrote a program that dynamically built a query by form in the memory of the computer And therefore, we didn't have to have any additional programming or coding.
You could double-click on any number field in my database, and it would bring up a calculator.
You could double-click on any date field, and it would bring up a calendar.
And I wrote a code to make sure that that property was applied everywhere in the database automatically.
And I also wrote code to say, okay, if this field is on the form, does it have a valid drop-down?
Does it match the query? Does it match the database?
Is it the right data type? So I wrote huge amounts of validation code and database building code and everything that I could automate in the production of these databases, I automated.
And it was a fair amount of work, to put it mildly, but it was very powerful.
We went to China.
We got the translation of our system into Chinese and because the web interface read off the database properties and I'd included multi-language labels for the text fields or the data fields, I was able to...
Show the Chinese interface, the Mandarin interface to our database in less than one day.
Once I got the translation, I was able to completely convert the web interface to be full Mandarin in less than one day.
Because once you have things set up right, the amount of productivity you can have is astonishing.
So that to me is just working smarter.
It's taking anything which can be automated And automating it.
And this is why I have a wonderful programmer who has helped me automate posting to social media, helped me automate sharing videos online, helped me automate the publishing of podcasts, just because anything that you can possibly automate must and should be automated.
And so it's become very fine art to produce these kinds of things at the moment.
I would rather have an employee who identified Problems came up with solutions that saved time.
So very early on in my business career, somebody was saying to me, you know, if you save me 10 hours one time, that's great.
But if you save me one hour a month going forward, that's way better because that's basically an infinity of savings.
So I think rather...
So as anybody who identified issues...
I mean, I had a programmer.
We had a...
A problem with our reporting mechanism that you had to be logged in on the server, the Windows NT server.
You had to be logged in in order to be able to produce it.
So he came up with a solution, which was to say, I'm going to read from your database log.
My database log had every field, every label, the location of the label, the location of the field.
And he said, I'll just take all of that, and I will recreate the reports in rich text format.
And he spent a week or two doing that, and it was much faster.
It wasn't quite as pretty, but it was a very elegant solution to the issue, and people like that, I mean, you can't beat them in terms of productivity.
What is a good way to make new and better friends?
Just be honest. Be as honest as you possibly can with the people in your life.
And those who love you, you will never have to fake for.
And those who find your honesty off-putting or offensive or uninteresting or whatever, you'll just save time.
Friendship is all about efficiency, right?
I mean, who I am is splayed out all over the internet.
And so it's pretty hard for people to not know where I stand on a variety of things.
And so the friends that I have, I won't have people in my life that I have to hide anything from.
Like, I just won't. I mean, life's too short.
Life's too short. So just radical honesty is the way to go, and it will be very efficient.
I mean, you'll get a lot of rejection, but, you know, the important thing to remember is most people aren't rejecting you.
Most people are rejecting rejection from those around them.
Sorry, that sounds like a bit of a brain twister, but...
So, let's say you have some perspective or opinion that somebody finds offensive.
Trump had some good points or whatever it is, right?
They're not rejecting you.
They are saying, I don't want to know these points because if Trump did have some good points, then I have to shut up around the people around me who hate Trump.
Or I'll say it and they'll hate me or whatever.
So they're simply trying to avoid information that would cause them to be rejected by the people around them.
Because most relationships are enslavements of brittle and blind and volatile and bullying conformity.
And so people are like, don't tell me this!
Don't tell me. I don't want to know this information.
Not because they're rejecting you.
They just don't want to be rejected by those around them.
So it really has very little to do with you.
How did locals screw up scrolling so bad?
You know, this is just a...
This is a beta, right?
Not everyone, I think, has this ability.
Ah, let's see here.
People asking, should I get a vaccine for COVID and why?
Why? Well, of course, you wouldn't want to take any medical advice from a philosopher any more than you'd want to take philosophy advice from a doctor.
So you could do your research, look into the facts, and you have to make your own informed decision.
Most vaccines take more than a decade.
And that's regular old vaccines, where they just take a half-dead or dead version of the virus and put it in your bloodstream so that your immune system recognizes it when it encounters the live one.
And they take like 10 years.
This thing was, what, nine months?
And it's a whole new technology.
All right. Any tips for effective reading?
I have so much I want to read, but I'm a slow reader.
I don't want to go too fast to miss anything valuable in the text.
Ten pages in an hour.
Reading is tough these days, man.
Long-form reading is tough. I'm going through...
With my daughter, we've read a bunch of books recently, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, and now we're going through...
The Great Gatsby. And so reading with someone, reading aloud, can help.
I find audiobooks to be very good that way.
I'm a voracious consumer of audiobooks.
And you should probably check out the Dark Horse podcast with Brett Weinstein.
It's pretty good. So...
I don't know. I would say maybe try a different way.
There's another thing, too. If you have text, you can get text to speech.
I used to have to do them on my own.
So, yeah, you can do speech to text.
So I've taken some ancient Greek philosophical texts that are available for free through the e-libraries.
Or just text files. And you can do...
And they're pretty good now. You can do...
Convert text to speech.
And then you can just listen to them.
Maybe that's a better way for you to learn.
That's certainly something. Because I find I don't really have much time to sit and read.
But if I'm doing chores or whatever, I can listen to stuff.
And that can be very helpful.
Let's see here. I'll start a podcast, sure.
Maybe Steph will kick me for advertising.
No, that's fine. Loving the text stories.
I've written a Perl script that turns text files into HTML. There's immense joy in scripting and watching the computer do all the work.
Oh, my God. I can't even tell you.
I would literally get cocaine-like dopamine joy from getting the progress bar to go faster.
You know, when you start with a progress bar, the progress bar is that thing that scrolls across in Windows.
You know, you've got a copying or whatever, right?
And I would write code that would...
It would say, you know, it would do percentage, and then it would say how much time is remaining, right?
You know, you copy and paste in Windows and Mac, it's the same thing.
And if I could push that to be faster, dopamine joy.
Like, it was one of the great highs of programming.
And I remember getting a process that took more than an hour down to six minutes.
By doing server-side scripting rather than client-side scripting.
And I mean, like, oh my God, if I could have got it down to six seconds, I think I would have orgasmed into another dimension.
Update on Bitcoin? Yeah, would you guys be interested in an update on Bitcoin?
So right now what's happening is you've got algorithms, I believe, I don't know, I think what's happening now is you've got algorithms that are buying and selling Bitcoin in order to stabilize the price.
Because if there's not a certain price stability, it's going to be tough to sell Bitcoin to your clients.
But if you say Bitcoin has been priced stable, it's not nearly as volatile.
So when it dips, they buy.
When it rises, they sell.
And I believe that the large funds that are invested in Bitcoin are trying to stabilize the price.
So that they can go to the clients and then have an upward surge going forward.
How can a man like me with a low IQ deal with the low self-esteem and failures of having a low IQ? Okay, I don't really believe that you have a low IQ if you listen to this show, number one.
Number two, it's not a failure.
Am I a failure for being bald?
No. Of course not.
Am I a failure for aging?
No, of course not. Right?
I'm not. Because these are things beyond my willpower.
They're beyond my control. They're beyond my power.
So work on wisdom, because having greater wisdom, having a low IQ, is not a barrier to becoming wise.
In fact, there are some people with lower IQs who are much wiser than people with high IQs, certainly in my experience.
So, let's say you do have a low IQ, you wouldn't take that as a personal failure or anything like that.
You would simply say, oh, this is a physical characteristic I have.
So, what should I do to try and turn that from a bad into a good?
So, when I started losing my hair, one of the things I started to do was work out more.
Because you can be bald.
Or you could be fat, but you can't be both, right?
And so losing hair has actually caused me to gain muscle mass, has caused me to gain health.
My resting heart rate is ridiculously low, and I've got good cardio endurance and good weight and strength endurance and all that.
You know the guns, right? So, that's, you know, try and turn from the negative to the positive.
So, okay, well, maybe I have a lower IQ, so what I'll really work on is gaining wisdom and virtue in that way, for which low IQ is no barrier, and you can end up turning the weakness into a strength, so to speak.
That's super important. You are not in control of what nature hands you, but you certainly are in control of how you deal with it and how you respond to it.
Let's see here. Oh, so people talking to anything else?
Jump to recent messages.
We've got another couple of minutes. We are limited to an hour here.
Oh, not even a couple. All right.
Let's see if we've got another question or two.
I think I may do one of these in Telegram this afternoon.
My wife and daughter are doing something, so I just love chatting with the listeners so much that...
When I accepted I was not cut out intellectually for a career in STEM, I decided to start a cleaning business, which has been a success so far.
Yeah, you never know what the hell's going on in life, you know, in some ways.
I mean, you want to control what you can control and so on.
But the things that I wanted when I was younger, I'm so glad now that I didn't get them.
You know, you think of all the women that you wanted and maybe you dated some and it didn't work out and you're very heartbroken.
Every woman I dated who was not my wife, I'm glad, dumped me or I dumped them.
I'm so happy. All the women who aren't my wife who said no if I would ask them out.
And of course there weren't many. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that they said no because it led me to my wife.
I wanted to be an actor and a playwright and a movie star when I was younger.
Now I'm starring in hoaxedmovie.com, hoaxedmovie.com.
But of course, if I had gotten what I wanted...
And been successful in the theater industry or in the movie industry, then I would not have been able to bring all of my philosophy to the world because I would be too busy doing that and I would be too confined by not having to talk about a variety of subjects for fear of...
I mean, can you imagine being... I mean, look at John Cena, right?
Imagine being a movie star and talking negatively about Chinese communism.
I mean, you'd be doomed. All right.
That's all. I like the flaccid armchair energy.
So, yeah, we're done.
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