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May 8, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:07
HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY 2022!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
So, Happy Mother's Day 2022.
I hope you are enjoying it.
I hope that you are calling up your mother if you love her and telling her all of the wonderful things that she did and thanking her for the greatest gift of all, which is this beautiful life that we get to live.
So, I thought I'd change tracks a little bit.
I've talked a lot about how Amazingly privileged.
I genuinely and deeply feel every day to be in the presence of my wife and my daughter.
My wife, the most wonderful mother that could ever exist that I can imagine.
And my daughter, like the most delightful person, along with my wife and you guys, of course, to spend time with.
So I thought I would go through an interesting exercise.
So I've talked about my mother over the years, the negative aspects of her mothering and her character and her choices.
But I thought today, and this may be an interesting challenge for you if you've had a challenging mother, I thought it would be interesting to try and talk about the positive aspects of my mother, the things that I value, the things that I Became a better person by being exposed to it.
Because, you know, when you do okay in this life, when you come from a bad background and you do okay, you hear along the ways, and it's kind of annoying at times, but, you know, it's there.
You hear along the ways.
What do you hear? You hear, oh, well, gosh, your mother must have done something right because you turned out all right.
Now, of course, I've worked hard to become a better person based upon my origin story.
And I'm not going to diminish that.
But of course, there's a part of me that wants to take 100% pride for it.
But I think I have to be clear with myself and say, okay, yeah, there were some positive things my mother gave me.
So I thought I'd share a few of those with you.
Not because you're particularly interested in my mother and 40 years ago, but because I think it's an interesting exercise to look through the positive things that you got.
You know, you look at the night sky, it looks pretty black.
But there are stars, and there are comets, and there's the faint Milky Way, and there is the gibbous moon, and that's important to see as well.
It's not all just...
What is it they say?
The night sky is just a container with holes poked in it so we can breathe.
That's something medieval, I think.
So, some memories of my mother and things that were positive.
Things that were positive.
So my mother got me into tennis about the age of five or six.
And I played for a good long time and I still play.
And there was a public facility nearby that was free to play tennis.
I mean, I think in peak hours you had to pay a little bit, but it was free for us for the most part.
And then they began gradually cranking up their rates and became more and more expensive.
And single mother income, very little child support and so on.
I mean, I grew up fairly ferociously poor, having to feed the meter of the heater, whatever pennies and nickels we could find to get scraps of heat over the winter or less.
Like, it was rough, man.
It was tight. It was tight, baby!
So my mother got increasingly annoyed and a little outraged at these rising prices.
And she's like, you know, we pay taxes.
Why are we paying all these extra fees to use the tennis court?
So... We tried moving our time to playing tennis so we wouldn't pay, but they just ended up capturing every time we could play with fees and increasing those fees.
So what we did was she would get me out of bed sometimes 6, 6.30 in the morning.
Because she wanted to play tennis, and she wasn't going to pay these outrageous fees for something we were already paying taxes for.
So she would get me up in the morning, and I liked to play tennis, so I was fine with it.
She would get me up in the morning, and we would go out to the tennis court.
And if you've ever seen tennis courts, they have these crazy high fences, and they have their windbreakers on the fences and so on.
And my mother would sling a backpack full of tennis rackets and balls on her back, And she would climb over these really high fences and then I would climb over these really high fences.
We'd play 45 minutes to an hour of tennis.
We'd climb back out and then she would go to work and I would go to school.
That was an interesting lesson for me.
You know, where there's a will, there's a way.
And if something seems fundamentally unfair, and, you know, I think there's a reasonable case to be made that it was, look at your options.
Now, Were we breaking a rule?
Yes, we were breaking a rule. But we were breaking a rule like Robin Hood broke a rule that was sort of my perception at the time.
And it's not totally different now.
But I think that keep your eyes peeled for injustices and find ways around them is a really, really important lesson.
And... Okay, yeah, it was a little manic.
It was a little hypersensitive to justice and so on.
But that essential sense of what's fair, you know, we all have a gut sense of what's fair in this world, what's right in this world.
And when you really feel that that sense of justice is being exploited, I think it's reasonable to look for alternatives and so on, right?
So that was a very interesting lesson that my mother taught me.
Now, another lesson that my mother taught me was that if you have the capacity to contribute to the world and you know just about everybody does have the capacity to contribute to the world usually in a very positive way and to different degrees of capacities and so on but there's a real hunger she really taught me that there's an incredible hunger to contribute in a positive sense of the world now my mother said there's two ways that you can contribute to the world one is you can contribute to the world The other is that you can kind of bully people into accepting your quote contributions,
which they'll then kind of, kind of toss out.
Sort of reminds me of The Simpsons.
I remember reading years ago that the creators of The Simpsons would get scripts mailed to them in envelopes, but they specifically, they would keep those envelopes and never open them because they didn't want ideas from people.
They had all their own ideas, right?
It's like if there's a Brad Pitt movie, there's not much point sending in your resume to replace Brad Pitt because they already have Brad Pitt and they already have their writers who they like.
so they would get their envelopes with scripts in the more show ideas in them and they would keep them but never open them and that way if someone ever if they ever coincidentally came up with a plot or story idea and someone sued them for theft of intellectual property they could say no no no we've got your contribution we never opened it we never opened it so so we're fine
so if you want to contribute to the simpsons you can either work really hard and develop your contacts and then go in and be a writer for the simpsons or you can just sit at home mail something in which will never get opened and never get looked at for very specific legal reasons Yes.
So, my mother very much wanted to contribute.
Now, there was one area that she genuinely did contribute in a way that nobody else in my young life did.
Which was my writing.
So for those of you who don't know, I mean I started as a polemicist to some degree, but even earlier I wrote my first novel when I was 11, I wrote most of another novel when I was in my teens, and then I wrote Another novel around the age of 20.
And then I wrote my first sort of real novel, one that I think really matters around the age of 22 or 23.
And then you can get my novels for free, justpoor.com, almostnovel.com.
And FDRURL.com forward slash TGOA for The God of Atheists are three of my novels that you can listen to and read as audio books or text.
Really great stuff. I strongly urge you to.
It's really deep and humane stuff.
But she really did.
Because her father was a writer, her brother was a writer, her uncle was a writer.
I mean, on the...
German side of my family, and real writers, like people who won national awards for poetry.
One of my uncles won an award for the history of trade unionism in Germany.
So, like, real writers. And, of course, all of them on the run and on the hiding in World War II. And, I mean, World War II was the conflict that completely broke my mother.
And she just didn't have fingers, or the world didn't have fingers enough to sort of claw her back and reassemble her into any kind of coherent state.
And, because she was born in 1937 in Berlin.
So, her youth, her childhood was the war and...
What happened to her with the Russians is beyond imagination.
People can just get broken and they just can't put themselves back together again.
Because one of the first things that gets broken is your capacity to put yourself back together, to have an observing ego, to step outside yourself, look at yourself and compare your actions to any kind of better standards, to any kind of ideal standards.
And when people lose their minds, often that's the first thing to go, that observing ego that lets you course correct.
And then you really are driving blind and expecting someone to be a good driver while driving blind is unrealistic and unreasonable.
So... She was.
She was broken by the war.
And I'm not sure that I can think of many people in my mother's environment or circumstances who wouldn't have been broken.
And particularly, she was a very beautiful woman and a beautiful child, of course.
And again, what happened to any kind of female during the closing year or two of World War II is the beggar's imagination.
So, you know, can you blame someone For being broken by a piano falling from a great height on them.
Not really. It wasn't her fault that she was born in that situation.
It wasn't her fault that she was female.
It wasn't her fault that she was attractive.
It wasn't her fault that the invading soldiers pillaged everything that moved.
It wasn't her fault and if I put myself back in that time I certainly wouldn't have any guarantees that I wouldn't have been broken as well because I had a crazy environment in a relatively sane world.
Everything was insane and evil in my mother's world and when you are in hell And when you're in hell as a child, the future is an eternity.
You know, when you're a kid and somebody says, we'll go next week, it might as well be next year.
You know, oh, you'll get an allowance on your next birthday.
It's like, okay, so I'll get a raise in 10 years.
Time just goes on forever.
So when you're born into hell, hell stretches everywhere you can see and for all time forward that you can see.
Who wouldn't be broken by that?
The whole point of hell is to break you.
The whole point of war is to break people.
So, she was broken by the war.
And because I was in a situation of domestic violence but social relative peace, I had something to compare to.
My mother didn't. So, because she came from a family of famous writers and intellectuals, when I began writing, she took great interest in it.
To all her credit, right?
To all her credit. When I wrote my third novel, which is called The Jealous War, about the First World War and about how war infects you like a jealous, crazy lover and then prevents you from loving anything else other than war, which is hatred.
And, you know, she helped me with the German.
There was German soldiers in it.
She gave me the translations.
She gave me insights into German culture that helped me with that.
So she actually really dug in and she really helped me with that book.
And she was...
Very key. Now, one of her relatives had had copyright issues, so she strongly urged me to copyright things and all of that.
So, I mean, she took me very seriously as a writer, and that was important for me.
It wasn't going on really any other place.
I remember giving my novels, one of my novels, to a friend of mine, the one about the First World War.
And he... So sad.
You know, he went up to...
He ended up working in Alaska for about four months.
Like, really remote in Alaska.
He ended up working in Alaska.
And he came back.
I said, did you get a chance to read?
He's like, no, I never had time.
It's like, come on, man. You're working in a camp in Alaska.
Of course you have time, right?
So other people kind of...
And when I was doing a play, I gave the play to a relative of mine saying, could you give me some feedback because I'm pouring all of my summer earnings into producing this play that I wrote and I'd really like to get some feedback.
Well, it's set by that person's bed the whole summer.
They never cracked it, never opened it, never looked at it.
So getting people to take interest in your writing is very tough.
I was a good writer, man.
I was accepted to the National Theatre School on the basis of my writing because I went there for almost two years for acting and playwriting.
I graduated from one of the top schools for writing in all of Canada.
And so, yeah, I mean, pretty good writer.
But getting anyone to sort of get interested in taking it seriously was not possible.
And I think my writing is, I mean, my writing for sure, my fiction is...
Very humane and very ferociously positive towards life, ferociously optimistic, with a grim acknowledgement of the reality of evildoers, but And I think for the people who are kind of depressed, a lot of people are kind of dysthymic and kind of negative and sour on the world and hopeless in a way.
And so when they come across, you know, it's like walking out of a, you know, you've watched some film noir movie, extended movie marathon in some dark theater and you come out in a bright sunlight, it hurts your eyes.
And I think that sometimes my writing would have that effect on my friends who kind of in hindsight were A bit on the negative side and the effervescence and enthusiasm of my writing I think is difficult for people.
It is difficult for people. I know that.
And, I mean, when I had my novel, The God of Atheists, when it was reviewed by somebody who had a PhD in literature, he said, the great Canadian novel has finally been written.
A moral, powerful, positive novel has finally been written that can put the Canadian literary scene on the map.
I mean, you can't get a better review than that, and it's a pretty wild thing to have read.
My mother, though, she dug in and she took my writing seriously and gave me lots of good feedback.
Occasionally it was annoying, like if there was a passage that was kind of stale or sterile or uninspired, you know.
When you're writing, there's this eruption of language and possibilities and scenes and people and...
For me, I can do a couple of hours in that, and then literally mid-sentence, it just goes, just stops, just dries up.
It's the same thing I've never been able to write while even having half a light beer.
Like, it doesn't work for me. And so, if I was writing past where the fertility window was, where the creative window was, if I was writing past that, it would get stale and stilted and mechanistic and so on.
And my mother would, you know, very delicately say, well, here I can see you got tired.
And she was mildly annoying because she was completely right.
It's like, I wanted to finish the scene, but I pushed past the creative juice, and I might as well have just been urinating in sand as for all the quality I was producing.
And that's something I've learned, that if you have to stop mid-sentence, like, don't even write.
Like, once the creativity dries up, and it will...
The fertility just, you run out, right?
You can't drive past the empty on your car.
And I've literally stopped writing mid-sentence when I feel it dries up and I don't have the juice even to finish the sentence.
It's like, okay, I'll finish the sentence tomorrow when the juice has returned because you need to refill.
That's an empty and refill. So yeah, she took my writing very seriously and she really dug into it.
And she took my poetry very seriously, although she doesn't have as much poetry experience.
Certainly, the famous poet in her family was in German, which is a very, very different kind of structure for writing than English is.
But, yeah, took my plays seriously and just would read, would read with great care and with great attention and had good feedback.
And that was, of course, kind of heartbreaking as well, realizing that I write at a fairly sophisticated level.
And realizing that this woman who I kind of knew was intelligent, but you don't really see it that much.
Because, you know, when you're a kid, your parents are interacting with you, hopefully at your level, so you don't get to see, you know, the tip of the iceberg is your level, and then everything else they can do is the bottom of the iceberg, like the nine-tenths you can't see.
And so realizing just what a careful and smart reader and editor she was, But it's kind of heartbreaking, you know, especially seeing the circumstances in which she lived, which was really tragic.
Although I tried my very best to help her, it was impossible for reasons.
I'll get into another time. I don't want this to be a positive.
Exposition. So my mother, where she could contribute, which was in my writing, contributed enormously and was the foundation of the rocket that helped me move up and forward in what it is that I was doing.
With regards to philosophy, she viewed my interest in philosophy as a very significant threat.
That was not a positive experience.
She said, basically, Ayn Rand became your mother and I was pushed aside.
And, again, those are the kind of insights.
I didn't even think of it that way, but...
There's some truth to that.
And so when it came to philosophy, it was much more of a guarded response, to put it mildly.
But with regards to my writing, she...
And of course, she really could appreciate the positivity in humanity and depth in what it is that I was doing with my writing, which was a very positive thing as well.
She wasn't trying to lead me down some dark path to some sort of twisted postmodernist, you know, like the modern novels are almost just complete.
They're either... Literary trash, but entertaining brain junk food.
Or they're literarily wonderful, but unbelievably toxic injections of negativity and horror directly into your spinal cord.
So you either get high quality assaults on your will to live, or you get low quality entertainment that makes you feel like you've just eaten four Big Macs for breakfast.
Look at me being mildly literary about litteriness.
So, I mean, it's...
Frederick Forsyth or The Goldfinch, you know, or Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie McDonald.
So, yeah, the writing, very important.
Very important. You know...
When you do something that you really feel is of quality, but everyone else is indifferent to it, it's a real challenge.
Straight up, it's a real challenge when you do things that you believe are of quality, but other people are indifferent to it.
I mean, gosh, I was doing things that I genuinely believed were of real quality, but everyone was kind of indifferent to it for about 25 years, really, about 25 years.
About 25 years, and I'll tell that whole story one day, but my mother, I think, was one of the fuels that kept me going for that amount of time.
Once I started doing public philosophy and so on, then I became big, and people took great interest, positive and negative, in what it is that I was doing.
But I really think, looking back on it, that it was my mother who gave me the fuel To traverse that quarter-century desert to importance and relevance because she took it very seriously and she recognized the quality and it really does only take one person to believe in you for you to continue.
Now, what would have happened without that?
The quality of what I was doing was undeniable to me.
Like, I'm an empiricist, which means that I go with the evidence of my senses rather than the opinions of others.
And the evidence of my senses...
It was clear that what I was doing was really good and important and of great value.
So, how it would have continued or not?
Because during those 25 years I was still working on writing and so on.
So, yeah, I... I mean, I'm listening now.
I recently recorded the 20 to 67th chapters of Just Poor, and I've been listening to that recently.
As I sort of doze off to sleep, I'll listen.
And I love that book more now than the 30 years ago that I wrote it.
You know, when you sing and then you hear yourself back, it's like...
You know, but 30 years later, I'm listening to this stuff back and it's like, well, it's really good.
Because, again, I'm an empiricist, so I have to go with that.
But she gave me a lot of fuel.
And I will be enormously grateful for that forever, as I hope the world will be if you like my novels.
So... That was a very positive thing that she did.
Now, there's a cynical part of me that says, well, you know, it's just because she comes from a literary family, she liked the vanity of me being a writer, and she loved her father enormously, and he was a writer, and so...
You know, I can't dig into the motives of 40 years ago.
I mean, I could, but what's the point, right?
40 plus years ago. I mean, it's coming on for, let's see.
Yeah, 45 years.
No, no, no. Sorry.
Yeah, it was about 45 years ago that I started.
Well, no, actually, it was almost a half a century ago because I wrote my first short stories when I was about six years old when I was in Africa.
So yeah, half a century.
So she did contribute enormously to that.
I'll be forever grateful. And she gave me a lot of fuel for that quarter century desert of indifference to keep working and keep going and keep doing.
Now, the occasional girlfriend I had, I would share my novels and I got a lot of enthusiasm from that.
I remember one One girlfriend reading rapidly through just poor and biting her nails as she came to some of the big moral decisions.
And when the good characters made the right decisions, she'd say, yes!
You know, it was really, that was very, very nice, very positive.
So I got some of that, which was great.
But my mother was really the foundation, the base of all of that.
And more credit to her.
She also taught me how much people want to contribute.
So she wanted to contribute to my business career when I was an entrepreneur and co-founded a software company and grew it.
She really wanted to contribute to that.
So she would cut out things from the newspaper and she'd come in.
Now, at this point, this was many years after, many years later.
I was in my 30s by this point.
And so I learned, I got the visceral sense of how much she wanted to contribute.
Really, really wanted to contribute, wanted to be of value.
Don't we all want to be of value to others, to be valued by others, to be important to them, to bring positive things to their lives?
Even my mother, who had little ability to do that by this time in her life, she had then been institutionalized, she was on, I guess, a lot of meds, and she hadn't worked in forever, and so her capacity to contribute was, well, there was really nothing there, but... But the urge, the desire, the hunger to contribute was really there.
And that taught me a lot as well.
It also taught me a lot. I know this sounds like a bit of a cheat, like, oh, she taught me things by doing things the wrong way.
But there's that as well. Because she was part of a social club wherein there was this fantastically rich guy somewhere in the vicinity.
And so she was consistently telling me to contact this rich guy for investment and so on.
And I... I didn't want to.
The company was doing fine, and I didn't want to just use some context to go to some rich guy and say, invest with no knowledge of his portfolio or his skill set and what I was doing, his capacity to evaluate, his desire to.
It just felt a little bit like going hat in hand, and we were doing fine with the company anyway.
But she would really, you know, she would like, you've got to phone this person who knows this person who knows this person, and she really, really wanted to contribute.
And to be fair, she did.
She gave us the German translations.
We paid her good money to give us the German translations for our software, which was great.
And she did it again. Some pretty technical stuff, and she really dug in and did it.
And that thirst to contribute.
Enormous, enormous thirst to contribute.
And then she had it in her head that All business with just one blob.
You know, that's what I hate to laugh, but all business is one blob.
Oh, you're doing environmental software.
I have an idea for a TV remote.
And it's like, but that's a hardware thing.
It's a totally different distribution channel.
It's a totally different architecture.
It's a totally different marketing channel.
You need completely different salespeople.
Like, there's no synergy there at all.
But she would be like, she would come in and, you know, she would say, oh, but this TV remote is becoming obsolete.
And if you came up with a new TV remote and something she'd cut out of a newspaper.
And she just was really fierce in her thirst to contribute.
And I recognize that as sort of foundational moral drive.
And I think if you look deep in your heart, it might be right at the top of your heart if you're already contributing...
You really do want to make the lives of the people around you better and to give them great ideas and to have them improve.
And I think, I hope, you're surrounded by those people.
If not, you should probably try and find a way to be surrounded by people that you want the best for.
So learning and really seeing just how much she wanted to contribute, even in her relatively decrepit state, and what a sort of primal drive and desire that is.
Sort of led me to believe that, you know, if somebody is really not doing well in life and they rouse themselves to try and contribute, however awkwardly and inappropriately in some ways, and, you know, when we would hesitate about her contributions, you know, then you get the escalation of the temper and so on, but that thirst and desire to just be of value to people, to just contribute to people.
I realized, of course, that if my mother...
Who's not really been happy for decades.
But if my mother was still driven by and motivated by that desire to contribute, that I really had to take that into account when it came to aiming at happiness in my own life.
That I had to aim to take the primal thirst to contribute into account when aiming for happiness, as we all do in my own life.
That I really had to find a way to contribute to the world.
And in a positive way doesn't mean that everyone likes you.
I mean, I was aware of that, of course, right?
I mean, in the business world, you know that every success of yours is a failure for 20 other people or 20 other companies, right?
If you're in a RFP, a request for proposal, and you secure some big contract with a company, as we did on a regular basis, the other 20 companies or people who wanted that contract are going to be unhappy.
Just as we were unhappy when we didn't get it.
So knowing that contributing to the world is part and parcel.
Success is frustration for other people.
And when you contribute morally to the world, when you contribute...
I've got a great theory of ethics called universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which is available for free at freedomain.com forward slash books.
So, when you contribute volunteerism to relationships, when you contribute peaceful parent to the world, when you contribute a secular system of ethics that requires neither the guns of the government nor the commandments of God, for those who don't accept either, well you've contributed a lot of good to the world but when you contribute a lot of good to the world the people who profit from the absence of good in the world or the infliction of evil in the world are going to be angry and annoyed at you and they're going to lash back and they're going to fight back
and of course they're going to cheat and they're going to lie and call your names because they're not good people if they were good people they would reason and if they would reason they would come to more rational conclusions and wouldn't need the sword of slander right so knowing that to contribute in a moral sense to the world i think is the greatest contribution that If my mother had succeeded in her contributions to my business life, well, we could have made some money.
We could have hired some more people, and there's positive things in that, and there's a noble thing to do in business.
But it wouldn't have contributed to the moral good of the world.
It would have contributed to the economic efficiency of the world and the profitability of investments and we'd be able to hire more people who could have, you know, the people we hired, they got married, they had families, they, you know, they had kids and it's wonderful to see all of that resources, you know.
Entrepreneurship being transmogrified, transformed into the next generation is a beautiful thing to see.
But It would not have been the same as a moral contribution.
A moral contribution is the highest and the most dangerous thing that you can do in the world.
And all of the historical, unprecedented exceptionalism of the relative peace and plenty and security and freedom that we live in in many places in the West, that is the result of people who braved extraordinarily dangerous to contribute morally to the world.
The world is run by not the most moral forces in the world, and they really like their power, they like their control, and anything you do to push back that power and control is going to be kind of a negative experience for them, and again, they don't fight fair, they fight dirty, and that's just the way it is, the way it always has been.
That thirst to contribute, I think, is really, really important.
And my mother has that in a variety of areas, however inexperately and so on.
But also having been on the receiving end of somebody's desire to contribute without competence, without skill, made me sort of realize that my thirst to contribute to the world, and I think if you have abilities, it does come with responsibilities.
They can't be coerced responsibilities, but if you have abilities to make the world a better place, If you don't exercise them, you're doing a grave disservice to the world and a grave disservice to yourself.
The two are one and the same.
If you have the ability to make the world a better place or make some people's lives in the world a better place and you fail to exercise it, then you are also failing to hand over or hand on the gifts that you have received, right?
Which is people making sacrifices and taking negativity in order to make the world a better place.
Nobody can compel you to do it.
But it's like if you have a magic fingertip that Heals people with cancer, and you're just like, no, I don't want to do that.
It's like, okay, nobody can force you to do it, but it's going to have a very grave cost to your self-respect and self-esteem and happiness, self-regard, if you don't do it.
Again, can you do it 24-7?
No, you've got to take care of yourself.
You've got to live a long life. You've got to exercise, eat well, enjoy the happiness that your talents can give you, so you can't do it 24-7.
That would be wrong. And unsustainable.
That's killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
But if you have the ability to bring positivity to the world and you don't do it, you refrain from doing it out of fear, out of conformity to low-quality people in your life, out of fear of blowback, which is a very real fear, and I understand that, then the world is a worse-off place.
You're not honoring the people who gave you the moral goods that you enjoy.
And that you could exercise at far less cost than they had to pay.
I mean, one of my ancestors was best friends with John Locke, and they were hunted all over Ireland for speaking out against one of the king's decrees.
And it was a pretty brutal time.
The guy could have been hauled up and beheaded very easily for these.
So I'm not facing beheading.
Some lies. And you won't be happy with yourself if you Run from manageable dangers.
But recognizing that, yes, we want to contribute to the world, as my mom taught me, but recognizing that you have to develop significant skill in order to contribute to the world in a way that is positive and meaningful and sustainable and isn't going to be viewed as just an annoying intrusion, right?
So if you've ever been in business meetings, you know, there's always some business meeting where somebody just states the blindingly obvious, you know, like, well, we really need to reduce costs and increase our profitability.
It's like... Yes, okay.
I mean, I don't go to some, you know, oncologist research center and say, we really need to reduce the prevalence of cancer and prevent its recurrence.
It's like, yeah.
Thank you for stating the mission of my entire life, which I accepted when I was a teenager and, right?
The stating the blinding of the obvious and then getting annoyed when people dismiss it as unimportant, irrelevant, and a waste of everyone's time.
Yeah, that is, we really need to sell more products in a more efficient manner.
So, well, enough about Elon Musk and Bitcoin.
Knowing that we all have a fundamental hunger, I think we do, because I've never met anyone who doesn't.
And even the people who are cynical, even the people who are negative, even the people who are sort of black holes of soul-sucking self-regard, those people also believe that by spreading their cynicism and their women are hypergamous, you know, it's a unicorn, and right...
The people who, they also believe that they're contributing to the world because they believe that their cynicism is empirical accuracy about the nature of the world, and thus by spreading their cynicism, they're preventing people from believing they can fly falling off buildings to their death, right?
So even the people who spread their negativity believe that they are doing it to help the world.
For sure. I mean, I'm being negative about unskilled demands to be taken as a contributor by others, right?
But that's because it will make people unhappy, and it will also make people avoid them, right?
If you're continually driving at people, unhelpful, blindingly obvious suggestions, without taking the feedback as to why it's not helpful, people will just avoid you.
And then you'll be alone, and with social animals, and solitude is the new smoking, right?
Solitude and sitting are the new smoking.
It kills you young, man.
It kills you young. So, this one, I mean, I don't think I ever saw Kevin Samuels doing a stand-up show, and I try, with today's exception, to do stand-up shows often.
I even try to do walkabout shows.
I have a little portable setup, and I can do walkabout shows because I want to be around for a long time.
So, knowing that if I wanted to contribute to the world, that I needed to gain significant skill.
You know, that 25-year desert.
Of me starting to recognize my skill set and finally being able to apply it due to technology on a world stage was very, very important because it gave me the chance to develop my skill set to the point where I could really hit the ground running.
You know, this 25-year overnight success is Huey Lewis.
Huey Lewis was 10 years, I think.
So I think that was really, really helpful and really important, which is why when I listen back to early shows, as I occasionally do, the quality's all there because, again, I'd spent 25 years.
You know, if you spend 25 years practicing an instrument for a couple hours a day, yeah, you're going to be pretty good.
At least I hope so. Especially if you love it.
So, yeah, I think my mother really teaching me that Everybody wants to contribute, but it's hard to contribute, especially when other people are experts in a particular area.
It's really, really hard to contribute.
This is the Elizabeth Holmes thing, right?
I'm a high school dropout, but I can revolutionize the entire medical industry with youth, skinniness, prettiness, Steve Jobs, V-necks, Steve Jobs, turtlenecks, and a deep voice, Barry White. turtlenecks, and a deep voice, Barry White.
Goes entrepreneurial in a female's body.
It's pretty wild.
So, yeah, she taught me that for sure.
She also taught me that if you want to provide quality but you don't provide quality, you drive people away.
And that was an important lesson as well.
She also taught me, of course, that avoiding self-criticism is a real ticket to hell.
Avoiding self-criticism, avoiding feedback from other people is...
Well, so it's a challenge, though, because a lot of people will criticize you to put you down because they're afraid of how important or positive or great or...
Good that you could be.
The sort of cult of the low is really a powerful thing.
To break through it is like you ever see those movies or shows where people are trapped under ice and they kind of thump their way up to get to the surface.
They dive in some lake in a hole.
They can't find the hole back and so on like that scene in The Hobbit and how to get 19 hours out of an 80-page book.
But Breaking out of the cult of the low is really tough.
So a lot of people will, like my friends in the cult of the low, avoided my novels because the novels are great.
And they didn't want to see that capacity for greatness because that puts demands on them to break out of the cult of the low.
And it wasn't quite trailer parks, but it also wasn't quite the opposite of trailer parks.
I call them the matriarchal manners.
It's where all the single mothers cluster in rent-controlled.
Cockroach-infested apartments cooking their hamburger helper, watching their trash TV, and never opening the Reader's Digest books they got on some subscription that some pretty guy sold them 15 years ago.
It's a very low-rent, trashy existence with people who are capable of much, much better.
Because I know I would occasionally dip into conversations with my...
Low rent friends' parents, all my friends' low rent parents' center, they would show insights and possibilities like flashes of forked lightning seemingly out of a clear blue sky.
It was amazing to see just how much potential is buried under the cult of the low.
So sometimes people will give you feedback on what you're doing because...
They want to keep you negative and hostile towards your own potential because if you shine and inhabit your own potential, that makes the cult of the low not a rational adaptation to a corrupt world.
It's all a scheme. It's all rigged.
You can't get ahead unless you know this or you're born rich and everybody slays in this cult of the low.
Evolution threatens the dinosaurs, and the cult of the low is threatened by anybody who breaks out.
Anybody who breaks out of that low-rent prison is like, you know the door's open, right?
It's not even a door. There's no bars on the windows.
There's no guards. You're all in here of your own accord.
You can just open the door and walk the hell out.
That's really threatening. So while self-criticism is essential to growth, you really have to be very careful who you allow to criticize you.
People who aren't successes in their life don't get any access to criticizing me.
And my successes, that could be any number of standards, right?
Any number of standards, right? But people who aren't successes in what they criticize me in...
I mean, they don't have any access.
They don't have the number. Like I did, I don't listen.
I don't care. I mean...
And it's funny, you know, because whenever you put things out on the internet, people will criticize you like crazy, right?
Even if you hitchhike with your thumb up, everyone's going to tell you it should be your little finger and scream at you, or at least some people are, no matter what you do.
You really have to have a high fence for criticism.
And, I mean, you learned this from...
I remember when I was...
I did two years of English literature...
at York University before I went to the National Theatre School for acting and playwriting where before they learned my politics they said I should stay in acting because I was that good and forget about the playwriting which was good too they liked but anyway I had a professor I still remember his name actually I remember the name of most of my professors back then but I had a professor who we were studying Billy Budd and he was asking questions about it and people hadn't read the book And he basically just said,
okay, hands up if you haven't read the story.
And about half the class put their hand up.
And he's like, okay, well, look, I'm not going to pretend to have a conversation here with, you know, because the reading was assigned.
And he got, you know, his cheeks got raised angry.
And I, you know, at the time, of course, that just feels like, oh, a teacher's bad, right?
I get it. I get it now.
I haven't had for a long time.
He's like, I'm not going to pretend to teach a class when at least half of you haven't, and this is half who admit, maybe more, right, hadn't read the material, right?
And... I hadn't either, by the way.
I just couldn't make my way through that story.
It's not as bad as Tolstoy, but not far off.
But he just got up and he left, right?
And... Perfectly sensible thing to do.
Why would you? And so, you know, people, you know, live streams.
There was somebody the other day who was, like, criticizing UPB or...
And that's fine, you know.
Have you read the book? Okay, well, if you haven't read the book, then the book is free.
And if you care enough about ethics and want to criticize UPB, then...
Or raise sort of foundational issues with it.
Have you read the book? I made the book free so I could discard people who wouldn't read it, right?
Yeah. And look, it's not like you have to read the book.
That's fine. But if you want to criticize a theory and you haven't read the book, I don't care.
I don't care. And so it's like the people I knew who didn't read my books when I was younger didn't have a habit of reading books, certainly not novels, and certainly not novels of sophisticated and deep and complex themes.
They didn't, right? I mean, I'm plowing my way through my Dostoevsky and my Turgenev, and I guess I made some James, though not a huge amount because it was kind of rough.
But yeah, I'm reading, and I did whole, you know, The Rise of the Novel.
I loved that course that I took in university all the way from Defoe onwards.
And so I'm just a chewing-through literature kind of guy.
I always have been to read Shakespeare for fun.
And so if people who...
People who live on a regular diet of sitting with their mom, eating hot dogs and watching Murder, She Wrote, don't appreciate my literature.
It's fine. Nothing wrong with Murder, She Wrote.
Hot dogs, well, okay, there's something wrong with hot dogs, I think.
It's fine, but then their indifference is inevitable.
Their indifference is natural.
People who get triggered by what it is that I do and what it is that I say...
Triggered is really important.
If you get triggered by something that I say, some argument I make, some facts, some data, some expert I interview, if you get triggered by that, what a wonderful opportunity for self-knowledge.
And of course, I saw my mother getting triggered and acting out hostility based upon getting triggered.
When getting triggered, we all get triggered, of course, right?
But when you get triggered, that's your heart opening saying, learn something.
Learn why you're triggered. Because being triggered is almost always where you are controlled by propaganda, right?
So propagandists will layer in endless amounts of verbal abuse and insults and praise and rejection and ostracism and love.
Like all cults, right?
They give you the love bomb.
If you believe this, you'll be loved forever.
And if you question it, we're going to cast you out and hate you and all of that, right?
So triggered is simply a landmine where you've been programmed to serve the powerful.
All triggered is. All triggered is is a landmine.
You've stepped on where you've been served to...
And you can disarm that landmine and you can explore and so on, which is the opposite of what the powerful want.
But it's all triggered is.
Triggered is where propaganda meets the truth.
And there's a matter-antimatter explosion.
People then just say, well, I'm not going to deal with...
I'm not going to deal with the horrors of having been programmed against reality to serve lies and illusions.
I'm not going to deal with the horror that my education was mostly manipulation into servitude.
I'm not going to deal with that horror of how many people participated and inflicted the subjugation of my sovereign consciousness to rank power serving lies.
I'm not going to deal with the horror of the truth of my origin story, origin reality.
So instead, I'm just going to get angry at somebody whose courage pointed out my programmed cowardice.
And if it's programmed, it's not really cowardice, it's cowardice once you've been triggered and lashed out.
So seeing people as I did growing up, my mother one of them, who viewed being triggered as a just cause for aggression and sometimes violence is like, okay, so they have been programmed into a hostility towards reality and they then attack reality or the truth or the truth tellers rather than deal with how much they were programmed.
Being programmed is fundamentally anti-human.
It turns you from a human being into the cliche of the NPC and the robot.
It's a horrifying thing to do to somebody.
It is really the most appalling and worst kind of abuse that there is in the world.
Because some abuse, you know, your dad hits you with a belt or your mom punches you or something.
Okay, it hurts, the hurt fades, and it's really recognizable and clear to you that that was a bad or wrong thing to do, also because they hide it, right?
But the programming and the propaganda that goes into children is sanctioned by the school boards.
It's sanctioned by the media.
It's sanctioned by Hollywood.
It's sanctioned by everyone and everything all the time.
It's not something that's done like sexual abuse in closets and in the dark and with swearing you or threatening you to secrecy.
And it's right out there in the open.
And it's everyone all the time, just about every circumstance.
And that's the nature. That's the Plato's cave, right?
So I talked about in Hoaxed, HoaxedMovie.com.
You should go and watch it. So, it's a horrible thing to replace someone's free, joyful, and sovereign consciousness with landmines against any step towards the light, any step out of the cave, any step towards the truth, towards the reality.
You've taken away, it's the MPC meme, you've taken away people's Birthright of sovereign thought and replaced it with emotional scar tissue that has them veer away from any rational, moral truth that they might encounter.
And of course, the reason why the programming has gotten so more intense lately is because the internet has allowed to break down the triggering.
And triggering is just a massive scar tissue where your sovereign consciousness was beaten into near-death and it exists in a near-death state and it wants to rise it wants to fight back it wants to contribute but it has to be heavily chained down and continually aggressed against by the program propaganda of we'll love you if you believe this we'll hate you if you don't it's not an argument it just wires into our basic social conditioning as social animals propaganda doesn't work on cats but it works on dogs it's sort of the way of the world So,
yeah, this Mother's Day, I wanted to talk about some of the positive contributions that my mother had to my life and to recognize and honor the things that she did for motives that I could ascribe to negative causes, but I don't have any proof, so I'll err on the sunny side of the fence and say, Thanks, Mom. You know, Happy Mother's Day.
You're still around. I hope that you found some happiness in the decades since we have had any contact.
I hope that you found some peace as you age out.
And I really do want to thank you enormously for being the bedrock and the fuel and the food that kept me going for a quarter century before I could contribute and had Since you gave me the fuel to survive the quarter century across the desert, by the time I was able to contribute, I had a lot to contribute because of all of that waiting.
Thank you so much.
Happy Mother's Day to you, Mom.
Happy Mother's Day to everyone.
I love you guys so much.
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