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May 28, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:09

The Evils of Superman!

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	So we'll try a little guess that song.
	Alright, I'll do the one line.
	Tell me if you can get it. Woke up in my clothes again this morning Don't know exactly where I am Well, I should heed my doctor's warning He does the best with me he can He claims I suffer from delusion But I'm so confident,
	I'm sane. It must be an optical illusion.
	Well, how can you explain?
	Shadows in the rain.
	Anybody? Boy, that's an oldie.
	It's an oldie now. Nothing seemed old when it was new.
	Just like me. All right.
	Anybody? Bueller?
	Anybody? That's right.
	It's the police. 1980 Zenyatta Mondatta, Shadows in the Rain.
	But no mortal man outside of Geddy Lee can...
	Actually, Singh did two versions.
	So he did a version on one of his solo albums, and then he did the original version on Zenyatta Mondatta, which was pretty good.
	Shouldn't be any background noise.
	People should be muted by default.
	So... Yeah, so listen, this show is for you.
	I just, I guess a little bit of housekeeping to begin with.
	So I released a show on my locals platform today.
	It probably will make its way to the feed at some point.
	And the basic argument is when they took God away from you, they gave you this delusion called romantic love.
	In exchange. And it's a really satanic deal.
	And so the show is available for everyone.
	You don't have to subscribe or pay.
	freedomain.locals.com.
	I hope that you will check that out.
	If you are on freedomain.locals.com, you can also sign up if you'd like.
	I'd really appreciate that. You can sign up and support the show and you get access to dozens of premium podcasts and my book, my new book that I just...
	Here's a sad story.
	Here's a sad story. Pennywise, pound foolish.
	You all know that phrase, Pennywise, pound foolish.
	Well, that's... That's me.
	So this microphone, I got a nice new mic, a nice new amp and all that, and always aiming to improve the quality of the show.
	So anyway, I had a short XLR cable that went from the amp to the mic.
	And the cable was so short, like I have a computer in front of me here, right?
	So the cable is so short that if I want to use the computer, I have to unplug the microphone and move the microphone aside.
	I can't just move the microphone aside because the cable is too short.
	And so, I don't know, we could tour goes like, oh, I should get a longer cable.
	I was like, well, I have a cable.
	What's the problem? It works.
	I just have to unplug it and so on.
	Tragic, man. So I did a really passionate hour and a half audiobook reading.
	Now, an hour and a half audiobook's all I can do in a day because so many characters have really tough voices to do.
	And so it's a real challenge to do the vocals, so to speak.
	So I did an hour and a half, really happy with it, like nailed it, just got the passion, got the emotion and all of that.
	And then so I'm recording the video of the audiobook, which sounds like an odd thing to do.
	I get it, right? But I personally, like when I love a song, I would love to see the video of it being created, like the video of the singer doing his thing or the drummer doing his thing or whatever.
	And also because I can have eye contact with the camera and eye contact with the camera like it's a person because that's the best way to communicate.
	So I did eye contact with the camera.
	It really helps me to recognize that I'm talking to a person because it's a novel, right?
	It's a fiction, right? So I got the video and I got the audio.
	They're recorded separately.
	I splice them together. Now, of course, I don't do an hour-and-a-half audiobook reading with no errors, right?
	Sometimes I misread. Sometimes I get the wrong intention.
	Sometimes I choose the wrong...
	I have the wrong person, the wrong voice.
	You know, if you've got four people all having an argument overlapping and they all have different accents and one's male and some two are female and other, I suppose.
	So anyway, I did an hour and a half audiobook recording and I transferred everything to the computer to do the edits.
	So to edit out, like when I make a mistake, I just leave a 10-second pause and start again and that way I can edit it out.
	And so I... Get everything into the editing studio program, and I'm like playing things back, and it's like, oh man, there's no audio.
	Now, you know where this is going, right?
	So I can keep it brief. There's no audio.
	My God. So, I like to check the audio settings, I reboot the computer, I make sure the output is coming, and then...
	I moved the microphone aside, and I'm like, ah, that's funny, I don't remember unplugging that cord, but I'm sure I did.
	So anyway, long story short, turns out I'd recorded the entire hour and a half of the audiobook reading without the mic cable attached.
	But at least I saved myself 12 books.
	You know, when you grow up poor, I don't know if you've had this, like, when you grow up poor, it's hard to shake, man.
	It's hard to shake.
	It's hard to shake. Now, of course, I scarcely place myself among the rich these days, but, you know, it's hard to shake that.
	I don't know if you've had that, where you come into a little bit of coin and it's just like, nope, must hoard it.
	Must hoard it. It's going to go.
	It's going to be gone. But that was for the want of $12.
	But here's the funny thing.
	Here's the funny thing, though. I used to have this when I was writing on computers.
	Sometimes you would lose your writing, right?
	There'd be a problem, power failure.
	There'd be, you know, something wouldn't save correctly.
	The floppy disk would mess up.
	But the funny thing is that I learned a long time ago that it's not like the universe is telling you to re-record it or anything like that, although I have had to do some re-recordings.
	I can do just about anything from an acting standpoint except the bland delivery of information, exposition, and so on.
	I find that very tough because I don't really know the emotional content to it.
	I remember when I played the doctor in The Elephant Man.
	He has a lot of sort of neutral speeches.
	Anthony Hopkins played him in the movie, and I just had so much trouble just having a neutral speech that delivered information to the audience without having any particular emotional intention or passion or, you know, because I'm always like, well, you want to write about the peaks of passion in people's lives, so...
	Anyway, I did end up re-recording it and...
	Interestingly enough, some of the characters were frustrated and angry, and I was able to use the re-recording to get the frustration and anger of myself into the characters, which is kind of what you want to do in a method style.
	When I studied acting, I studied sort of the Uterhagen method to the method acting, right?
	You try and recall your own memories and adapt them to the character and so on.
	So, although it was frustrating, it did turn out to be a better recording.
	So... Oh yeah, somebody says it often happens that I decide to buy something and then spend hours hovering over the place order button because I feel bad about it.
	Oh, oh man, don't even get me started about online purchases because for me, I'm like, okay.
	I do need to buy something that costs $3.99, but I bet you there's a coupon out there somewhere that will save me a dollar.
	And it's like, hmm, that is not super helpful, super objective to do it that way.
	You know what? Sorry, here I have what we turned the video on, right?
	Let me make sure I've got the right video.
	Settings, what is my video?
	Norman! Norman! All right, let's just roll the dice and see what kind of video we get.
	You know, I got to tell you, back in the day, when I was still doing this more current event stuff, this shooting, the monster, this Hispanic kid, I think he was, who went in and slaughtered, you know, what is it, 19 kids and two teachers and whatever.
	Man, oh man. The government herds people into, well, forces kids into gun-free zones, ignores the fact that this guy had threatened to shoot up this school when he was 18.
	This was in 2018, I think it was, when he was 14.
	And somehow gets a hold of a $2,000 rifle and an $800 sight, despite the fact that he's a part-time worker at Wendy's who was relentlessly marked for his poverty.
	So the government forces kids into a gun-free zone, doesn't take care of the kid who's openly murderous in the past, And what was going on with Discord and the ex-FBI agents, something worth looking into.
	And then, apparently, the police just wouldn't go in.
	Why? Because they were afraid of getting shot.
	Like, that's a fireman saying, well, I really don't want to get burnt.
	I don't want any excess or exposure to fire.
	That's bad, right? And so, yep, they force the kids into a gun-free zone.
	They don't take care of the shooter.
	And they then prevent the parents from going in to rescue their own children and give the guy, what, an hour to do his bloody deeds?
	But, you know, without the state, how could we possibly be protected?
	It's not possible.
	Anyway, so I do hold truth about it, but that's not my thing.
	I feel like I need to build a fortress of wealth to protect me from the poor person I used to be growing up.
	Fortress of wealth is not the end of the world.
	Fortress of wealth is not a bad thing to have at all.
	It's just hard to know how to keep it these days, right?
	Because inflation and it's not like the crypto is all kinds of wonderful and it's not like the NASDAQ or the S&P 500 is all kinds of wonderful.
	But hey, people get what they vote for.
	And if they won't learn from reason, they will have to learn from experience, as I have said before.
	Okay, so if you have a question, a comment, a criticism, anything that is on your mind, I am very happy, overjoyed, overjoyed, I tell you, to facilitate.
	So just raise your hand if you could, and then I am happy to Hear what you have to say and respond as best I can.
	And yeah, don't forget my new novel, The Future, which is a glorious picture of what I think we're all aiming to achieve through reason and evidence.
	And it is my book on peaceful parenting.
	It is my book on how we get there.
	And I hope that you will check it out.
	It's available at freedomain.locals.com to anybody who subscribes, which is like a couple of bucks a month.
	And you get a full feed you can put into any podcatcher.
	And I think I'm three-quarters of my way through the audiobook reading.
	I think it's about 16 hours, and there's probably another seven to go.
	And it's funny, you know, when you go back and listen to things that you did in the past, or you read things that you did in the past, oftentimes there's this kind of self-criticism aspect that can be kind of strong, which I have, of course, like everyone.
	But... I'll tell you, man.
	Bringing this book to life in the audiobook, I'm like, I'm not sure I'm going to do any better at any point.
	Talk about a steel man against freedom.
	I do my very best to make the steel man against peaceful parenting, against stateless society, against reason and evidence, and I'm not sure I'm going to do any better.
	Hopefully I will. That would be nice.
	Hopefully I will, but I'm not entirely sure I will do any better down the road.
	All right. Going once, going twice.
	If you have questions, if you have comments, I am happy to hear.
	It's the same. Yes, you can get it there as well on SS. Yeah, for sure.
	Hello. Hey, how's it going?
	Hi, how are you? I'm well.
	How are you doing, man? Pretty good.
	Thank you. Oh, just by the way, I can't find the button to raise my hand.
	It's like the format's changed, so I just...
	I think you have to lift your index finger.
	Turn it to the...
	Okay, never mind. Just kidding. Go ahead. Yeah.
	I was wondering if I could ask you a question on what are your thoughts about the most recent sort of...
	I don't know if you're really up on it too much, but the most recent research, especially coming out of Johns Hopkins on psychedelics with psilocybin in particular.
	It's quite... Remarkable research in terms of how beneficial it can be for curing things like addiction to alcohol or to cigarettes like nicotine.
	That sort of stuff. And depression.
	And it's just blowing everything away that we have at the moment in terms of drugs that can be used to treat all sorts of these sort of problems that people have.
	And they're not even...
	not even where they have to repeatedly repeatedly follow up with them it's like a one one dose you get the dose it's a big dose and generally people have pretty much the same response which is that it's a remarkable experience one of the most meaningful in their life and a lot of their problems like whether they were depressed or addicted and something had a bad relationship they it seems to be that it almost rewires their brain And I think they've shown this with the scans.
	And I'm just surprised that there's not a little bit more talk about this at all, because compared to some of the other drugs that they have available, It seems to me that things like psilocybin are a much better alternative, much less damaging, and they're non-addictive.
	And I was just wondering what you would think about that.
	Yeah, I mean, so this is the...
	It's PTSD as well.
	Is this the same stuff that's used to treat PTSD? Did you mention that?
	Yes, PTSD too.
	That's also included, yes.
	Yeah, and I'll be perfectly honest with you, and this is, of course, completely uninformed medically.
	It's uninformed in terms of the data, so this is just knee-jerk reaction emphasis on jerk.
	I dislike it, and I'm enormously suspicious of it.
	And the reason I'm saying that is it comes back to the idea...
	Let's just talk about depression, right?
	Again, completely amateur opinions.
	They mean nothing. Talk to your doctor.
	Don't take anything I say with any seriousness and don't act on anything I say, right?
	This is just total personal opinion.
	So, with depression, the argument is that there's something wrong with your brain, not your environment.
	Or anxiety. There's something wrong with your brain, not the environment, right?
	And PTSD is a separate category, so we'll get to that in a sec.
	So my concern in particular is that I think that when people are anxious, maybe there's something in their environment that makes them anxious.
	I mean, I've had, as you know, over the last 16 years, and before that, just in general conversation, I've had hundreds and hundreds of conversations, probably a thousand or more now, maybe more than that, of people delving deep into...
	The challenges in their personal lives that manifest in emotional challenges like depression, anxiety, even suicidality, right?
	Now, every single person, again, it's not science, just my opinion, and with some legitimate and genuine experience here in talking with people about these things, every single person that I've ever talked to who has some emotional dysregulation can...
	With reasonably simple questions, can find the source of that in their environment and therefore their environment needs to be changed.
	In other words, if you have your hand resting on a heart plate that's on and slowly starting to burn your hand, do you take drugs to diminish the pain?
	Of course, the argument there would be, well, no, because the purpose of the pain in your hand is to get your hand off the heart plate.
	So, if there are people who have this, you know, to me at least, largely mythical brain chemistry imbalance, right?
	This is what they said about the psychotropics, right?
	Oh, there's a brain chemistry imbalance, a brain imbalance, and these fix that.
	And it's like, okay, can you measure the brain imbalance?
	Can you do a test for it? Can you find it?
	No! Can you show it on a scan?
	Can you get it in a blood test?
	Can you draw any kind of brain fluid and find this?
	No! Okay.
	So, that is...
	To me, at least, somewhat mythical.
	I do accept that at extreme depression, antidepressants can help turn things around.
	But this idea that there's something wrong with your brain that chemicals need to fix is, to me, one of the most destructive arguments around.
	I'm not saying it's impossible.
	Look, obviously, if you have a brain tumor, a conversation with a therapist is not going to fix any mood changes or aggression.
	If you have hormonal imbalances, if you have some atypical neurodivergent problem that's biological in basis, if you are anxious because you're very low in testosterone, or if you're moody because you're low in estrogen, or whatever, I don't know, these are all just things that I probably just made up,
	right? So yes, get yourself a full physical workup and so on, but the idea that Emotional challenges, things that are difficult and unpleasant emotionally, are the result of something wrong with your brain that needs to be fixed with chemicals or drugs.
	I dislike enormously.
	Enormously, because I think that the body is not a random instrument that just makes your life shitty for no reason at all.
	The body, especially the unconscious and the emotional apparatus, The body is trying to tell you something.
	If you're anxious, it's like, okay, there's something that threatens your flourishing within your environment.
	This is the first place I would look after you've ruled out medical stuff, right?
	This is the first place that I would look.
	If you're depressed, it's like there's somebody around you who's committed to your failure and you're not aware of it.
	Again, there could be lots of different reasons to be depressed, but there's one that could be, right?
	And so... I think it's a grave insult to our evolution and to the genius of our unconscious.
	Our unconscious, as you know, operates at up to 8,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
	And the unconscious is always trying to tell us stuff that is helpful, that is useful.
	And if we say, well, my unconscious is simply the manifestation of a broken brain and the way that I fix it is with drugs.
	Or, I guess in the past it used to be...
	Electro-convulsive therapy, ECT. So that's how I'm going to fix it.
	Again, my approach, my history, my conversations with people has been, well, if you're depressed, yeah, it goes back to your childhood and usually, almost always, the shitty people from your childhood, if they were shitty, are still in your life and still weighing you down and still causing problems and still undermining you and sabotaging you and draining you and exploiting you and And there's no amount of fucking drugs that is going to change that.
	But what it does is it covers up the symptoms.
	So that's my major issue.
	That the presumptive position is your brain is broken, your environment is fine, so we just need to shock the hell out of your brain with something or other.
	Whether it's electricity in the past or whether it's benzodiazepines or whether it's psychotropics of other kinds or whether it's, in this case, psylobicin or whatever you were talking about, this sort of psychedelic drug and so on.
	Well, because to me, a lot of emotional dysregulation is a moral issue.
	There are malevolent, destructive, evil, immoral people in your environment who are weighing you down, who are endangering your future, who are threatening your success, your flourishing, maybe your life itself.
	And your emotions are saying, wake up!
	There's danger here! So if you and I were in a cave...
	Oh, shut up. You and I are in a cave in the middle of the night back in the Stone Age, right?
	And... I hear a growl from outside.
	And my heart starts pounding and I jump up and you say, hey man, no need to be anxious.
	Just smoke this, man, and you'll be totally relaxed.
	It's like, well no, the anxiety is there because there's a potential predator right outside the cave.
	So there is a premise built in to this approach to emotional dysregulation.
	Which is that your brain is broken.
	We can fix it. And if people think that's just the be-all and end-all, what if you are surrounded?
	Like, you know, I've said this before with people who have SAD, like social anxiety disorder.
	Maybe you have something. Maybe you're just surrounded by assholes.
	Maybe you do have destructive, irrational, anti-rational, manipulative, exploitive people in your life.
	Maybe you do have evil people in your life who are committed to your destruction.
	In which case, drugging your sense of alertness, anxiety, and danger would entirely be the wrong thing to do.
	So I hope that makes some sense.
	Again, all opinion, but I'm happy to hear what you think of this.
	Yes, but I completely agree with you in terms of how important it is to fix these sorts of issues with self-knowledge and realizing that What is causing it in your environment?
	And I think a lot of the time it is toxic people.
	And that's definitely one of the most important things I've learned from you recently is identifying people that are bringing you down, that are pulling you down, and friends and family members, et cetera, all of that.
	But I think that your description of the psychedelics is a little bit off because from my reading of it and my experience, too, and I know people who have done psychedelics as well, and it's not...
	It's not a comparable drug to something like...
	I'm sorry, I just lost you.
	Is your audio back on? Yeah, I'm back.
	Yeah, sorry, go ahead. It's not like a...
	Sorry, I'm sorry about that.
	It's not like a comparable drug to something like marijuana or an opioid or one of these sort of mood blockers.
	I think that what it does in a large way is...
	Somebody who's maybe not able to realize what's wrong in their life, but they have all these negative feelings associated with maybe there's bad people in their life and they're just too blind to see it or they're in denial.
	I think a lot of the time when people take something like psilocybin in a large dose, more what happens is that They come to this horrible conclusion, and that's why it's quite a painful experience emotionally, of what's really causing the trouble in their life.
	So it's almost like a fast track way to look at things with even more sobriety than you might have.
	Because a lot of people are going to listen to things like what you will say.
	And I think it's ridiculous not to listen openly, but a lot of people will listen and they'll be closed-minded and they'll just deny it.
	And like you talked about with these people during COVID, they have these defense mechanisms that go up and they don't know about them and it's all sort of unconscious reaction.
	And I think that one of the things that these psychedelic drugs do, and not all the time, and it depends who's on them obviously, but one of the things that they do is they kind of pull down these biases that you have so you can look at things in a more objective and honest way.
	And that has been my experience.
	I've tried them, that has been my experience with them, and it actually has led me to some very positive conclusions.
	Okay, so hang on a sec.
	We're very painful to get to, too. Look, I hear what you're saying, and...
	Sorry, that's a rather useless communication phrase.
	Like, I couldn't respond if I hadn't heard what you're saying.
	Here's my issue. If you have not surmounted your own defenses of your own volition using your own willpower, but you said, well, the only way I can break down my defenses to the truth is to get myself stoned to the orbit of Uranus...
	Then you have confessed to yourself that your resistance, your defenses, your avoidance of the truth is far too powerful for you to overcome on your own.
	You cannot pierce your own defenses, and really what that means is that you can't challenge the self-interest that manipulative people have implanted within you.
	You can't do it on your own.
	You can't do it in therapy.
	You can't do it with resolution.
	You can't do it with morality.
	You can't do it with willpower.
	You need the drug in order to combat the destructive impulses implanted in you from other people.
	And I think that weakens you.
	I think that weakens you.
	Like, I mean, look, if you have something super heavy to lift, you get a jack or a forklift trough or something, because you say, well, I can't lift that on my own.
	So if you can't be skillfully guided to the overcoming of the defenses you have against the truth, In other words, the avoidance of the truth that is implanted in you by others for whom the truth would interfere with their exploitation of you.
	If you say, well, I really need to get injected with this or smoke this or whatever to take this pill, then you're saying, other people in my life are so strong that I can't possibly overcome their negative or destructive or evil influence over me whatsoever.
	Without a bucket load of drugs.
	And I think while it might give you some temporary relief and it might give you some insight, my concern is you've just planted a big stake in the ground saying, I can't do it unaided.
	That's a good point. And I definitely wouldn't advocate that as the sole method to self-knowledge or as even a viable one for all people.
	It's just that if you look at the data, if you look at the Research coming out, the universal response has been that it's not that you have to continue to take these drugs.
	It's that you take, let's say, one strong dose of psilocybin mushrooms, which would be like, I think, five grams, and you don't have to follow up on that.
	It's a one and done in almost all cases.
	And the efficacy rate for things like addiction to cigarettes, it's something like 80%.
	Same with alcohol, which is unprecedented.
	And it's a non-follow-up And the same sort of thing happens with people who are on their deathbeds with cancer.
	And people have this death anxiety, as I'm sure everyone does at some point.
	And they found that when they give them that sort of dose, just one time, their death anxiety drops dramatically.
	Oh, listen, let's drop the deathbed stuff I don't care about.
	And what I mean by that is I have no issue with, if you're on your deathbed, I don't care if you take a Apollo 13 worth of cocaine straight up the ass.
	Like, you're dying, whatever.
	I mean, I've often said, you know, when I get really, really old, heroin is supposed to be a thousand times better than your best orgasm, and your orgasms are pretty damn good, so it's tempting.
	So I have no issues with the deathbed stuff.
	I mean, that's, you know, your life is almost over, and it's not like you've got to, you know, if somebody wants to take up smoking on their deathbed, who cares, right?
	Sorry, go ahead. I just think that you're kind of miscategorizing it because with something like smoking or cocaine or heroin, it definitely has its effect while you're on it, really.
	And then it has a whole bunch of side effects after you're off with withdrawal and stuff.
	Okay, so here's how I... This is my basic reason for being skeptical about this.
	This is an argument that I've lived through personally.
	So I know that philosophy, as I talk about it, does a huge amount of good in the world.
	I get the emails, you hear the people talking about it in my call-in shows.
	Philosophy saves people's lives and rescues people from abusive relationships and so on, right?
	And this started very early on in the show with call-in shows, with conversations with people.
	Now, I don't know if you know the black-hearted history of all of this, but the moment I actually started really helping people get out of destructive and abusive and exploitive situations, And simply by saying they don't have to be in those situations.
	I've never told anyone to do anything.
	I never do. But, you know, reminding people that they don't have to be in destructive and abusive relationships, no matter what, right?
	So the moments that I actually started helping people reduce the malevolent influences in their life, What happened to me?
	Well, I was attacked by everyone and their dog, right?
	Why? Because you're threatening the interests of evil people, and so they're going to attack you and all that, right?
	And those attacks were, you know, pretty harsh, and they certainly got my attention for a little while.
	So, here's my issue.
	If these drugs, the mushrooms and so on, if they were helping people to really wake up to the malevolent influences in their life that were causing them a lot of anguish, anxiety, depression, whatever, a lot of mental unhappiness.
	If the mushrooms were really waking people up to the malevolent influences in their life that, as far as I'm concerned, are almost always the cause of these kinds of things, outside the deathbed and all that, right?
	Well, then you would hear about these drugs, you know.
	You said you can't believe that people don't talk about them.
	Well, you would hear about these drugs and you know what you would hear about them?
	That only cult leaders administer them.
	And it's completely evil and immoral, and it's totally wrong, and it messes people up, and there would be a fight to make it illegal, and anyone who practiced it would get threatened.
	If it really did wake people up to malevolent influences in their life, you would hear about it as something that was evil and destructive and to be avoided.
	So the fact that evil people aren't upset that much, if at all, by the fact that these drugs are being administered tells me that they don't wake people up to evil doers in their life.
	Well, wouldn't you say that there has been a, maybe a sort of, say, 50, 60-year campaign to do just that?
	They came onto the scene, especially like LSD mushrooms, they came onto the scene around the 50s and the 60s.
	And then there was this campaign from the U.S. government in particular to demonize them as horrible class, I think class one drugs, like up there with heroin, with no real evidence.
	And for no reason other than they're saying, oh, it's making people go crazy.
	We can't have this on the streets.
	And wouldn't you say that that's kind of some evidence of that, that maybe it's making people look at the government, was making the people at the time look at the government a little bit differently?
	Not that I'm a big fan.
	Oh, no, no.
	Come on.
	The drug takers in the 60s were latent leftist totalitarians who only argued for free speech until they gained the leaves of power, then used it to shut everyone else down.
	And look, LSD can be extraordinarily destructive.
	It can produce psychosis.
	It does sit around in the fat cells, as far as I know, and can reemerge at just about any points.
	You can't drive on it.
	You can't make good decisions on it.
	And people have had serious mental damage from these extreme kinds of drugs.
	So, look, and that's not any argument for, you know, being in favor of some of the other drugs that are used out there for mental illness these days.
	I'm not a fan of the war on drugs.
	The war on drugs is immoral.
	Taking drugs is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, but they do mess people up.
	And weed, of course, is between 10 and 20 times stronger now than it was in the 60s and 70s.
	They've really worked to concentrate the THC levels and so on.
	So it has become an extraordinarily dangerous drug.
	Plus, of course, as you know, and this is largely as a result of the war on drugs, a lot of people, they're just, oh, I'm going to order some drugs off the internet.
	And then it turns out they've got fentanyl in them and they just heart explodes or whatever, right?
	So there has been a certain amount of demonizations.
	Some of that demonization though is because these drugs can be extraordinarily dangerous and can mess up people's lives.
	In particular, I would say not necessarily the psychedelic properties but because it alleviates the symptoms of being surrounded by malevolent people without waking you up to your need to not interact with malevolent people.
	I would agree with you on that, especially with things like marijuana.
	I think it's a very destructive drug, especially for teenagers.
	But just in my experience, and what I've been reading about, especially from Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, I don't think that it's legitimate to put...
	Psychedelics, in particular, psilocybin.
	I don't want to get into acid and all that, because they don't really do much on that.
	I wouldn't put that in the same box as marijuana.
	I just ask, maybe look empirically at the evidence, and then I see what you're saying, and I actually agree with pretty much all of it.
	But it is pretty...
	Powerful empirical evidence in terms of the positive impacts it's having in the laboratory settings.
	And they're doing this very carefully and incrementally.
	And I think to just categorize it as, you know, drugs and put it in a box with all sorts of other psychotropics and, you know, nasty drugs that you don't want people using, obviously, would be a little bit, you know, It'd be a bit quick to do that.
	I appreciate the conversation.
	And just so you sort of understand where I'm coming from, I'm not saying, I mean, maybe they're better for people than the SSRIs.
	I'm not a fan of the SSRIs.
	I'm not trying to advocate for them at all.
	No, no, no. Me neither. But here's the issue, right?
	When someone has a mental health issue, purely amateur outside opinion, somebody has a mental health issue, The first question I would ask is, are you loved?
	Were you loved? Did you suffer from abuse, neglect, violence, dysfunction, dysregulation of your home environment?
	Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating well?
	Do you exercise? Are you healthy?
	These are all questions. Your feet.
	And if we look at that environment and we say, like a guy I met when I was hiking once in Alaska, a guy I met when I was hiking once in Alaska who was in the Army, and he said, my knees are wrecked. I said, oh, well, because they put me on 80-pound packs and you just march and march and march and climb and climb and climb, and your knees hurt.
	And they say, oh, here's some painkillers.
	And you just keep marching and your knees, they just, they buy and burn.
	They just use and destroy.
	Use people up. So, if a man is carrying an 80-pound pack that he doesn't have to carry, and you say, take these painkillers, then he's going to find carrying that 80-pound pack a lot easier.
	A lot easier, right?
	Right? And so if he's finding carrying that 80-pound pack a lot easier, he's much less likely to shrug it off.
	So if your emotional dysregulation is caused by evil and malevolence in your environment, that continues.
	If that is the case and you mask the symptoms, then you're actually perpetuating the abuse.
	That's my concern.
	Now, if somebody does have a physical issue, yes, deal with the physical issue.
	If their life is surrounded by wonderful, positive, healthy people and they're still anxious and depressed and this stuff helps them, fantastic.
	I've just, I've never heard of such a thing.
	And I'm not saying it's impossible.
	I'm just saying it seems kind of unlikely.
	All right.
	Well, listen, thanks.
	Thanks for the question.
	I will look into the data more.
	And I'm certainly, look, I have no doubt about the positivity of your approach and the fact that you want to help people.
	And I'm very glad that you brought the topic up and I appreciate it.
	You're bringing it to the audience as a whole.
	And I'm, you know, since you asked my sort of feedback and response, I have no opposition to these things on principle in terms of like.
	like, if they do help people and so on, but if there's no moral element to the treatment of mental dysfunction, I think it will miss the park, it will miss the solution more often than it will hit.
	All right. Thank you very much.
	Let me just go back here to the caller Q. So funny, hey?
	They kept asking Trump about what you've been endorsed by Q. Wasn't Hillary endorsed by the Communist Party?
	I don't think anyone really brought that one up too much, but that's...
	Trump should have said that. Why aren't you asking Hillary about the communists?
	It seemed to be a little more dangerous than Q. All right.
	Raise your hand if you would like to chat, and I am all ears for you.
	Yes, sir. Hey, Stefan.
	Welcome back. How are you doing, friend? I'm doing great.
	I would like to debate with you the role of magic systems in stories.
	Now, a claim that you've been making is that magic often represents madness, right?
	Yes. After researching literary theory for a very long time, I've reached a different conclusion.
	Now, first I'd like to discuss why I think stories matter.
	Now, in my research on philosophy, what I've concluded is that philosophy is often too abstract for a lot of people to understand.
	I believe that stories, what we do is we abstract out patterns of behavior, put them into characters, and have them acted out.
	And that this is the reason stories have value.
	So I believe that in a well-written story, magic systems are a visual metaphor for a particular concept the author is trying to explore.
	Sorry, that's a tough thing to abstract, and if you could give me a concrete example of how that fulfills what you're talking about.
	I'm an empiricist, so if you could toss my aging brain a few examples, that would help.
	Okay. So, the most powerful model of philosophy that I've come across in my research is It comes from the TV show Avatar The Last Airbender, which is heavily influenced by Eastern philosophies such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.
	Is there anything that we could share?
	I don't know anything about that show other than I think it was an M. Night Shyamalan movie that I never watched.
	Is there anything that would be a little bit more anything I've done a review on or anything Frozen or Harry Potter or Star Wars or whatever?
	Yeah. Well, for example, you know, okay, why don't we talk about Batman then?
	Because this is something I've been thinking about lately and I've been watching one of the shows anyway.
	But Batman is not a magical character, is he?
	No, but one of your arguments against superhero stories in particular is a notion that you need superpowers to be a hero.
	But he doesn't have superpowers.
	He's other than money. Yes, but his rogues gallery do.
	Do they have superpowers? No, there's no magic in...
	I don't think. I mean, there's technology that seems kind of magical, but that's sort of like Star Wars.
	But I'm not an expert on the Batman universe, but it's not magic in the way that, you know, Frozen is where women can create ice bridges out of boobs or something.
	Hmm. Okay.
	Okay. One of my favorites is, you know, Lore of the Rings.
	I really loved the video that you did on how the one ring represents sophistry.
	Mm-hmm. Something I mention every now and then to people is about the tragedy of Boromir and how the idea of we can take this weapon and use it against our enemies and achieve virtue that way ends up being a tragic failure and everyone who tries to use the ring for a good purpose becomes twisted by it and how the story itself is a It's a way of expressing that the thirst for power,
	or particularly the use of sophistry to gain power, will corrupt and destroy you.
	Okay, so there's two layers of madness in stories.
	I'm not saying that like it's a fact.
	Let me sort of make the case.
	So there is a normal environment with magic in it.
	So Frozen would be an example of some vague northern European, Denmark or whatever it is, right?
	Some vague northern European country where there's a whole bunch of not magic and then there's magic, right?
	Harry Potter would be an example of a normal world, right?
	The aunt and uncle that he lives with under the stairs.
	That's like a normal world of non-magic and then there's magic in it, right?
	Okay.
	And so that to me is certainly closer to the madness thing because you have a normal world and then there's magic.
	Now, Lord of the Rings is a sort of separate category in that Lord of the Rings is a world with magic in it that is seen and understood by everyone, right?
	So the Dursleys or whatever it is, like the Harry Potter's aunt and uncle, they don't see the magic, right?
	And it's very much an exception.
	It's sort of wound into the fabric of the world.
	But in Lord of the Rings, everyone has a magical cloak or a magical sword or a magical ring, and magic is everywhere.
	And there's even Gandalf in the Shire when he does his fireworks.
	There's all these things that couldn't possibly be done, and you need the wizard to make the fireworks.
	So, in a world...
	Boy, don't I sound like a movie announcer.
	In a world where...
	But in a world where magic is part of the universe, everyone accepts it, then it's not any individual's madness that would be the case.
	I mean, the case with Harry Potter is that Harry Potter is a violent, evil child who murdered his parents, does violence against his cousin...
	And therefore ends up at an institution and his belief that he's in a wizard school is just part of his florid psychosis because there's a non-magical world and then there's a magical world that's very separate from it and there's very little crossover between the two.
	Something like Lord of the Rings, where magic is embedded throughout the entire world.
	Like the Force in Star Wars is like a magical element that is sort of wound into the universe and everyone accepts.
	And therefore, it's less likely to be a direct expression of an individual's madness.
	Maybe the writer's madness, for sure.
	But the individual's madness is less expressed in a world where it's not, in a sense, magic, but just...
	Deviant physics or alternative energies or like the force, right?
	Nobody really explains it. It binds the universe together, whatever that means, right?
	Some sort of Fifty Shades of Grey bondage electronic whiplash or something, right?
	So I don't want to sound like I'm using sophistry here, but I would divide...
	The presentation of magic into it's an extension of physics that everyone understands and accepts versus it's something that there's a real bifurcation.
	There's the non-magical world and then there's the magical world.
	And if in those situations, it's much more likely that it's madness.
	So again, we can still talk about Lord of the Rings stuff, but I just wanted to sort of divvy that a bit.
	Okay. But it seems to me that you're insisting that this, you know, with Harry Potter, that is the interpretation.
	Well, no. Interpretation by its very nature is – that is an interpretation.
	Interpretation is – I mean, I did English literature at the university level for a couple of years, so interpretation is you can make a strong case for, but – The proof level is at the level of civil, not criminal, right?
	It's preponderance of evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt because you can't ever directly establish that your theory of what's going on in the novel is absolutely true.
	Even if the writer completely agrees with you, the writer could be wrong because so much of writing is inspiration and unconscious and so on, right?
	Or divinely inspired if that's your...
	No, I wouldn't say that this interpretation of Harry Potter is the absolute truth about Harry Potter.
	I think it's a way of framing what's going on, because I don't like, I really don't like the people, I mean, sure, you've noticed this as well, the people who tend to get more into magical universes tend to be less empowered in their real life.
	There's something that's vampiric about magical universes in a way that's not the case with more pragmatic universes, right?
	The people who are really into Lord of the Rings, say, are a different breed of animal than the people who are really into Top Gun, right?
	Now, the people who are really more into Lord of the Rings, they tend to have more imagination, they tend to be a little bit more dreamy, and they tend to be less motivated to achieve things in the real world as opposed to people who are into, you know, Wall Street was the big movie in the 80s for the people who liked trading and all of that, or Working Girl was another one for people who were kind of ambitious.
	So some... Movies will empower you to achieve things in the real world and other movies, at least there's a pattern, which is not a proof, but there's a pattern where the people who are more into those movies tend to get less done in the real world.
	And that to me is a very interesting question.
	Are they a way of giving people a sense of achievement without actually having to achieve anything?
	That's sort of my superhero thing or the video game thing.
	Oh, look, I got an achievement.
	And they actually call them now like achievements and so on, right?
	Yeah. Right.
	So they're using achievements or interactions in a virtual world as a substitute for achievement in the physical world.
	Well, I think so. Yeah, I think so.
	And what they're saying is, this is the best that can be achieved.
	This is the best I can do.
	And, I mean, I think it's, to some degree, when you see the rise of anti-white hiring practices, you see more white males get into...
	Star Wars, video games, Battlestar Galactica, or whatever it is, although that's kind of old by now.
	And I think it is, because for some people, you can't find a woman, you can't, because the quality of women is diminishing, you can't get a job, because maybe you're a white male, you can't get a house, because immigration and limited supply is driving the price up too much.
	So I'm just going to...
	Finish Elden Ring. Whatever it is, right?
	So I think there is that aspect of things.
	Well, it's similar to the argument you were just having about, you know, psychological drugs.
	It's people have a lack, there's something wrong in the environment, and they're trying to manipulate their brain chemistry as an alternative to actually resolving the problem in the environment.
	Well, and video games make more sense than drugs, to me, because if the problems in the environment, which is not obviously just a white male phenomenon, but there's lots of people having lots of problems in their environment.
	The problems in the environment, as individuals, you can't solve them.
	I mean, this is the big Trump question.
	Can we get an outsider to come into Washington and drain the swamp?
	Well, I think we sort of found the answer to that, right?
	So, as an individual, if you're facing an environment, you can't solve the problems.
	Then it makes, in a sense, more sense to go into the video game thing as well.
	However, my question is, if you get into really magical stories and it actually prevents you from doing things you could do to solve it, right?
	So if you're a young man and you can't get a job, maybe start a company.
	I know that's a big ask and it's a big thing and, you know, there's challenges to that.
	But, you know, I worked for...
	Three months at a programming job and then started a company because there wasn't much upward trajectory in the company that I was in, particularly for white males.
	So I guess if you get stopped in the world and you can't move on finding your success in imaginary worlds, okay, that's whatever, right?
	That's a decent substitute, right?
	Right. But if finding achievement in the alternative worlds has you push less to achieve in your life when achievement is still possible, and I think that it is, I think then it becomes more vampiric.
	Okay. That makes sense.
	Now, sorry, and we started...
	Sorry, we just started...
	I wanted to just touch back on where we started, which was the magic thing.
	Okay. So the real question is, why do you need magic in a story?
	Why do you need magic in a story?
	Now... The general theory about Lord of the Rings is that, of course, it was written by somebody who'd suffered in World War I, who was watching the world convulse and destroy itself in World War II, and that what happens in the Shire at the end with Saruman's orcs is an analogy for what happened towards the end of the war in England.
	Right, so... This was an analogous way, and of course, you know, when you watch the movies and you see the ring and the power the ring has in battle at the beginning of the first movie, and you see the shockwave going out, it absolutely looks like a nuclear blast, and I don't think that's an accident,
	right? Weapons got so powerful, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons got so powerful at the end of the Second World War that they conformed to that Arthur C. Clarke dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
	Like, the idea that you can drop a bomb and destroy an entire city is truly stunning to people, right?
	And, you know, the ring, also you could look at that as the orbit of the electrons that sort of fuel the nuclear power and so on.
	So he could have written a story, and I did write a story about World War I to World War II and the problems in society.
	It's called Almost. You can get it at almostnovel.com.
	It's free. So I, in a sense, wrote the live version of Lord of the Rings.
	Like, I wrote the version of Lord of the Rings that J.R.R. Tolkien would have written if he hadn't I've been a fantasist, so to speak, because he was talking about power and corruption and degradation and the fall of a society, and so was I. But I was using the real world.
	He was using Middle Earth. So the question is, why have magic in a story?
	Well, magic is exciting. Why is magic exciting?
	Why... What did Harry Potter have to do to earn his powers?
	And the answer is nothing. He just had to be born, right?
	He had these extraordinary powers.
	And you see this all. What did Superman have to do to gain his powers?
	He just had to be born on Krypton and transplanted to Earth, right?
	So what did he do?
	At least Batman, I don't know.
	He didn't inherit the money.
	He made it, right? So at least he's sort of like Elon Musk with a belt pack or something, right?
	So... What do you need the magic for?
	And Neo in The Matrix, right?
	He has, obviously, magical abilities because he's in a manipulated, self-generated computer simulation environment.
	So once he learns how to master the hacks of the system, so to speak, like the green flowing letters, okay, then he has these magical powers.
	How did he get them? Well, Neo, of course, is just an anagram for one.
	Neo is the one, right?
	It's just another way of saying Neo.
	So that's my sort of fundamental issue is...
	When you have a story where somebody has these powers and they did not earn them.
	And the same thing is true of Luke Skywalker.
	He has this power of the force because of his father, because of the lineage and all that, right?
	So when you have someone who just has these powers, it's exciting.
	Like Wonder Woman when she, you know, in the new Wonder Woman where she has the bracers and she just has these incredible powers and it's exciting for sure.
	The question is why is it exciting?
	You know, one of the movies that I saw when I was and influenced me quite a bit, as it did many people in terms of exercise, was the movie Rocky, like the original Rocky with ex-porn star Sylvester Stallone.
	Now, Rocky was interesting because he was a loser and a violent guy and a criminal who then and, you know, the training sequences are kind of legendary and they're very famous.
	Bill Conti's theme, you know, that was incredible stuff.
	And you saw this guy going from, you know, pudgy criminal loser to like lean boxing guy.
	And he worked.
	And this was an incredibly famous sequence and sequence of sequences with him training and running.
	And, you know, it's kind of funny because they actually they didn't have any money to make the movie.
	So they just had him film through and people are yelling at him and throwing stuff at him.
	And that's actually was just happening in the real world.
	Like when Dustin Hoffman ran into the cab on the street.
	I'm walking here! You know, totally broke character with the voice when he was playing Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, I think it was called, with Jon Voight.
	So there are lots of movies where...
	Somebody gains their skills over patient time.
	And you can even see, I saw a mini documentary on, I think it was YouTube, where a guy said, I just want to become good at table tennis, like at ping pong.
	And he spent a year, right?
	Did all these exercises. And you can see him going, like he goes through the year, goes and progresses through the year.
	Now, it's very exciting for us to think that you can leap over all of that stuff.
	You can just overleap that stuff.
	That you don't have to work for it.
	It's just going to happen to you.
	And you just have to be courageous as you're being pulled by the four horsemen of fate across the landscape.
	Like, you know, Bilbo just wakes up and there's people just banging on his door and it's like, we've got to go on an adventure.
	And it's like, okay, he has the choice to go, yes or no, but they're just pulling him along on the adventure.
	Then he just happens to find this ring that gives him all these powers and all of that.
	So... It's really tempting to think we don't have to work for it and it's just we're the one and it gives us these goosebumps and it's very exciting.
	Like Harry is just in this completely miserable situation and then an owl comes and he goes to this magical place where he's got all these powers and he's hugely respected.
	So he goes from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high but based on nothing real, nothing actual achievable.
	What do you say to kids who are being abused and beaten and locked in the stairs?
	Wait for the owl! Well, that's not going to help them.
	They're not going to fix anything, right?
	So the magic, to me, is a kind of madness, and the madness is I can achieve excellence by just waiting and things happening to me, and it's going to just happen.
	You know, there's actually a great show called One Punch Man that kind of explores that.
	So there's this guy who exercises to become a hero, and he becomes by far the strongest human, and it saps any and all passion from his life.
	Like he just becomes, you know, he is unbelievably bored.
	He's kind of hoping that someone can injure him.
	He calls himself a superhero for fun.
	But see, that story bothers me as well.
	And I'm going to sound like the most negative Nelly around, so to just be honest with my emotional experience, it's like, that's annoying to me too, because that's like saying, well, you could achieve excellence, but it's totally boring, so why bother?
	And it's just like, oh, could we just give people a step-by-step thing that...
	You know, it was going to go forward because, I mean, you know what it's like.
	There's always a stronger guy around.
	And then even if you're the strongest guy for like five minutes, there's some younger, stronger guy.
	And then you're on the declining end of your anabolic health and your strength and your musculature.
	So you've got to maintain that.
	Like, oh, I'm the most beautiful woman in the world.
	It's like, oh, no, I have a pimple.
	Oh, and I'm getting to be 28.
	And there's a 22-year-old who's glowing and so...
	Even if you are, there's still to maintain, right?
	You've got to maintain that. The fastest runner is the fastest runner this year, but next year he's getting older and there's some other young guy and how do you maintain that, right?
	I can agree with you on that front, but the linchpin of that show's narrative is that he finds satisfaction not through power, but essentially through relationships, right?
	So even if we had a person who had this, you know, no limits...
	And essentially that meaning in life can be found through interactions with other people, something to that effect.
	Right, right. And what's interesting as well to me is if you sort of look at Lord of the Rings, I think it's fair to say that Lord of the Rings is about destruction of magic.
	It's about the destruction of magic.
	Because the world in the past was super magical.
	I mean, you had the Balrogs, and you had the Mithrandir, and you had all of the, I can't remember what the name of all the wizards, and everyone had all these magical powers, and the elves were everywhere, and there are these seven rings of power, and then the eleven rings of the Nazgul were everywhere, the giant eagle.
	And in the past, the world was super magical.
	And in Lord of the Rings, the magic is largely undone by the destruction of the ring in Mount Doom.
	And the elves are leaving.
	And who leaves with them?
	Well, Mithrandir, Gandalf leaves with them.
	And there is this sense that the magic is leaving.
	The magic is leaving the world.
	And with the destruction of Saruman, of course, very powerful magic.
	The destruction of Sauron, very powerful magic.
	The destruction of the ring. And all of the other rings are either leaving or falling into disuse.
	And there is the end of...
	And that to me is why it's Middle Earth and why you could sort of get a sense that there was going to be a flow forward through to modern civilization where the magic was forgotten.
	And he makes hints about that, you know, when he says that, oh, you're not going to see any hobbits now because they're really, really good at hiding and stuff.
	There is some continuity to the world to the present.
	As long as people believe in magic, they don't build machines, right?
	As long as people believe that rain dances work, they don't build irrigation systems, right?
	As long as people believe that human sacrifice works to cure illness, they don't study modern medicine.
	And so the destruction of magic is the foundation of the modern world.
	The destruction of the Age of Miracles was part and parcel of the foundation of the scientific method and the growth of science in the modern world.
	So you can see very much, I mean, all the way back to the Silmarillion where everything is magic, like super magic all over the place.
	It's magic everywhere.
	And there is this decline – And I think it's rare. I can't think of a particular story.
	I read a lot of fantasy when I was in my teens, but I can't remember a story where the magic grows, I suppose, in the world as a whole.
	Generally, there's this sense of decline of magic.
	And as sorrowful, I mean, I always felt kind of sad.
	Oh, the elves are leaving, but they're so pretty and they sing so well.
	You know, I felt it was sad that the elves were leaving Middle-earth when I first read the story.
	And if you look at The Hobbit, of course, I mean, Smorg is a famous, powerful, magical creature who then dies.
	And so I think that there is this murder of magic is quite a consistent theme in a lot of the fantasy books that I've read, that you end up at the end of the story, the end of the series, with less magic than you had, certainly in the prequels and definitely at the beginning of the stories.
	And that to me is hammering back the madness.
	In a sense, if the elves are insane, which to some degree they are, I mean, because they're unreal creatures, right?
	And unreality is an analogy for insanity.
	Because if somebody genuinely believes he's an elf, he's mentally ill, right?
	If somebody genuinely believes he's an orc, he's mentally ill.
	So they are manifestations of mental illness.
	And it's almost like, Tolkien is trying to make the world sane by having it say goodbye to magic and embrace raw...
	Aragorn, what's he got?
	He's got muscles. That's all he's got.
	That's all he's got. Muscles and a sword.
	He's got no glowing thing.
	He's got no magic. Like, when...
	In the stone giant mountain pass in The Hobbit, Gandalf, when they get attacked by these goblins, Gandalf's got the flash and the bang and the goblins blow back and he's got all this cool magic and stuff and he takes on the Balrog and so on.
	I mean, what is... Aragorn has body odor and a sword.
	That's all he's got. This is his two weapons.
	And maybe he can flick people with his beard and his wet hair or whatever, right?
	And there's an outtake from Lord of the Rings where the actor playing Aragorn kicks one of the helmets and literally breaks his toe.
	And of course, I mean, that's an outtake and all of that.
	But Aragorn's got nothing. And Aragorn ends up in charge.
	Like at the beginning, the people in charge are Sauron and Saruman and Gandalf.
	It's all magic, right? Aragorn has nothing.
	He's like bare-forked, disposable mail with great dreadlocks.
	And at the end of it, Aragorn's in charge and all the magical creatures are leaving.
	And it's almost like he's just slowly pulling you to sanity by saying, yeah, magic's cool, but it's unreal and you've got to let it go.
	That is an interesting interpretation that I've never heard before.
	I think I just came up with it.
	I mean, you could also interpret it as a sort of longing for the past that, you know, we're seeing a lot of that recently of, you know, the modern world sucks and we're longing for this magic that's gone now.
	Oh yeah, you've seen these memes, you know, like they'll show something from the 50s, right?
	And it'll be like a guy with his wife and three kids and a car and a nice house and it's like, this guy worked in a factory.
	Never forget what they've taken from you.
	Yeah, there absolutely is.
	The challenge, of course, being that when you go back into the past...
	It just leads back to the present again, right?
	To go back to the 50s, what would you change?
	I mean, people tried to change.
	I mean, change it. I think, in particular, Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy tried to change the trajectory of, you know, communist infiltration and so on.
	And so, yeah, it's tough.
	I mean, how far back in the past do you have to go?
	I'd go back to the 1860s and stop them trying to impose Protestant conformity on everyone through the government educational system.
	But, you know, that's a long way back.
	And who knows, right?
	So... Okay.
	To bring the conversation back to Superman, I think the way that I kind of view it is, you know, in any Pareto distribution, right, there's a small group of people who have developed their talents to such an extreme level that the rest of us cannot possibly compete.
	Yeah, no, that certainly is the case, yeah.
	And so you could say that talent is unearned because you're just born with it.
	And yes, you have to develop it, but we know how to destroy intelligence and talent.
	We can't really manufacture it, right?
	Okay, so no, please finish your thought.
	I've talked a lot, so go ahead. Okay.
	So with Superman, something that I see, you know, the...
	I don't have much of a respect for most of the movies, but the cartoons, some of them are really surprisingly well done.
	A lot of criminals mock Superman, calling him a Boy Scout.
	One of his struggles is, I have all this power, who do I help?
	What's the level of responsibility I have?
	It's similar to Spider-Man, which is more explicit about it.
	But with Superman, it's sort of, if someone has all the power What is the level of responsibility they have to society and what's the ethic behind that?
	And I think some of the most interesting exploration of that in the cartoons was there's an alternate, I suppose, reality where Lex Luthor becomes president and Superman kills him.
	Outright, you know, violates his rule, and essentially how the Justice League become tyrants, and then their Batman finds a way into our world, and they're trying to impose, you know, their totalitarian views on our society by, you know, taking the Justice League's place, right? And the way that Superman has them defeated is he works with Lex Luthor to make a weapon to essentially defeat their Superman, and essentially all this happened because in their world, the Flash died.
	By Luthor. And so then he becomes president.
	It's like, I am not.
	Superman's like, I've had enough.
	Right? In particular, before he kills Luthor, Luthor says something to the effect of, you know, yeah, you can arrest me for doing all this stuff, but we all know that I'm going to beat it no matter what you do.
	And you are my greatest accomplice.
	That, you know, you get to play the hero in defeating me.
	And so it's like, you're welcome.
	And he's like, you know what? If this is what being a hero leads to, I want none of it.
	And then he, you know, melts him.
	Right. And so at the end, when they're defeated, you know, the Flash tries, you know, figures out that, oh, it was my death that precipitated all this in their world.
	And he tries to convince Superman to stop, you know, using the standard arguments of why he shouldn't stop.
	And when it's done, Superman says to him, you know, You were never going to convince him.
	And I've had those temptations for a very long time, and they're pretty strong.
	So I knew that once he submitted that temptation, there was no coming back.
	So I think there is a moral component to the Superman narrative beyond just the, you know, it'd be nice to have, remove all limits.
	Yeah, but Superman is annoying as hell.
	Sorry, that's a terrible rebuttal, and it's not even much of a rebuttal, but I'll sort of explain to you what I mean.
	So Superman has an incredible platform.
	He's got awesome powers.
	He can fly, fasten the speeding locomotive.
	I mean, I know it changed from the 30s when he first came in, and basically he just became a god.
	Originally he was just like a dude on steroids, but then he became a god.
	And this is the Superman movie that I would write.
	Superman teaches peaceful parenting.
	Because, you know, there's a million people trimming the tree of evil to every one person hacking at the root, right?
	So the old saying goes, right? So Superman, after a while, don't you just get kind of tired of the evil people coming off the conveyor belt of abusive parenting and we want to get to the root of it?
	Shouldn't Superman just teach peaceful parenting?
	See, here's the funny thing.
	That's kind of a joke because it seems like the least exciting thing in the world.
	Trust me, it's very exciting to teach peaceful parenting.
	Very exciting indeed.
	Because all he's doing is he's playing whack-a-mole with the effects of evil.
	Like the conveyor belt of bad childhoods that produce – and they play around with this in The Dark Knight, right?
	Where the Joker, Heath Ledger's Joker, has a different story why he's messed up every single time, right?
	And so, of course, as an unreliable narrator, you don't know the truth.
	I would say that for all of the superhero movies, they're all about, oh, you can punch this bad guy and you can beat up that bad guy and you can kill that bad guy.
	But you know what? You turn around, there's another 500 fucking bad guys coming off the conveyor belt tomorrow of bad parenting.
	And so, to me, Superman's such a genius.
	He's so powerful. He's so famous.
	It's like, okay, why doesn't he go out there and do peaceful parenting?
	Now, there's a funny thing, too, because in one of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies...
	Kindergarten cop, I think it is.
	There's a bit of crossover here because he plays a cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher.
	And he does, well, beat up a parent who's abusing the son.
	Now, beating up the parent is not necessarily the best solution at all, but at least it's self-defense third party on behalf of a kid who can't defend himself.
	But yeah, none of these superheroes tackle parenting.
	None of these superheroes that I can see or know of, and it's almost like they need the criminals so that they can be the superheroes.
	Because when you say, well, Superman should teach peaceful parenting, he's like, my God, that's the most boring comic ever.
	And Superman feels that way too.
	Superman is like, why would I want to teach peaceful parenting?
	Compared to fighting Lex Luthor or the Penguin.
	I mean, the Penguin is, oh, that's Batman, right?
	That's Yeah, I think the only one I know is Lex Luthor.
	Oh, no, the three other people from – in the Superman 2, there are three other people from Krypton who come in the big giant shard.
	So the question is, why don't they ever deal with peaceful parenting?
	Why don't they ever try and fix the problem at its source?
	Right? They're like plumbers making a bunch of money from leaks when all they have to do is turn off the spigot at the main area and everything's soft, right?
	And so it's almost like they need the criminals in order to feel like superheroes and have a mission and have all of this drama and excitement.
	And so they don't want to cut off the supply of criminals because what then would they do?
	They have nothing to do. They'd just be some guy who could lift a truck.
	I think that is the best objection to superhero stories that I've heard.
	And I would take it a step further and suggest that the statist mindset has infected people so deeply that the writers don't even consider that as an option.
	Right. That we've all been taught that top down of violent control is the way to solve social problems, particularly violence.
	And that they are acting out that delusion through their stories.
	I think you could definitely make that case and substantiate it.
	Yeah, they certainly, because it's always the mayor begging Superman or Batman to fix something or do something and save the city and so on.
	And this is why these stories, and of course, the never-ending story, right?
	It's like, hey, I beat this bad guy.
	It's like that Moe and the drunk guy from The Simpsons.
	He throws him out of the tavern, turns around, he's back in the tavern.
	It's like, yeah, okay, can we do something to...
	Stop the conveyor belt?
	The bad guys? Nope.
	Because they need the bad guys.
	This is the Jungian thing, right?
	That the hero and the villain are two sides of the same coin, the criminal and the cop, right?
	Does the cop really want to get rid of the criminals?
	Well, certainly not in the last shooting, they didn't.
	So this is what's annoying about Superman.
	It's like, you know, you could solve this very easily.
	And why don't you? Because you like the drama, you like the fight, and you need the villains.
	And that's a problem.
	Because he needs the villains and is addicted to the fights, children have to continue suffering.
	Yes, and one of the most chilling presentations I've heard you do was one in which you argued, you know, through brain scans, we can identify child abuse anywhere.
	Yeah, easy peasy. We can stop child abuse in its tracks, and in fact, the state, it's not that they...
	It's that they create criminals so that they can hunt them down and justify their existence that way.
	Well, it's the argument that the people who own all the horses don't fund the motor car.
	Like, they don't fund the development of the motor car.
	And the people who protect you from criminals have zero incentive to end the production of criminals because that's the market that drives the demand, right?
	That's the supply. The supply of criminals drives the demand for the state.
	And so they have no interest in getting rid of, I mean, that'd be like a restaurant developing a pill to eliminate hunger.
	And like one pill would feed you and taste better than a restaurant meal.
	Restaurants would never, ever invest in that in the same way that slave owners didn't invest in labor-saving devices.
	So yeah, expecting the state, but you know, the superheroes are outside the state.
	But can you imagine? This is back to the previous caller talking about the psychotropics, oh sorry, the psychedelics and silo bison and all that to help with this.
	Okay, well, can you imagine if there was a Superman comic where Superman very clearly identified abusive habits, put kids through the adverse childhood experience score, and talked about voluntary family relationships, and you don't need to spend any time with abusers.
	Can you imagine the response of the abusive parents to that comic?
	I think a thermonuclear, you'd be able to see that outrage from Jupiter.
	And that's another reason why they don't do it, right?
	I mean, if you're a reporter, do you really want to try and figure out who was on the Epstein flight list and who was on the Gillian Maxwell client list?
	Or do you want to say, toothpaste is racist?
	It's like, well, it's pretty easy to figure out which one's safer and less challenging to do.
	Okay. Yeah, I agree that a...
	Direct interpretation of those stories is definitely dangerous, that you can stop crime with a I guess, superior police, superior military, superior force, right?
	Because when you abstract it out, that's what it can represent.
	But I do think an indirect interpretation could still be useful.
	So, for example, with Batman's Rogues Gallery, I've started noticing that each one kind of represents a different vice.
	Sorry, a different what? Vice.
	Vice, yeah, yeah. Oh, like the seven deadly sins?
	Well, no, that's not the model I would use to describe it.
	It would be like, you know, Joker represents the philosophy of Cain, of someone who slays their own ideal and who wants to watch the world burn as a way of punishing God for the existence of being.
	That's something Jordan Peterson talks about quite a bit in his lecture series on the Bible.
	So Penguin could represent entitlement because his family lost their fortune because they were foolish in how they spent their money, and he feels the world owes me.
	I am owed the success my family used to have, and so I'm going to steal what I'm owed.
	As you pointed out in ethical discussions, if someone steals my bike, I'm entitled to steal it back because it was originally mine.
	So if society owes me, then I'm entitled to take it.
	Mr. Freeze would represent grief.
	He lost his wife and kind of went off the rails as a result of that.
	Riddler represents the intellect and how his ego – the ego of the intellect tends to fall in love with his own design, the third thing Jordan Peterson talks about a lot, and how if he surrenders his ego, he could become a productive person.
	And so for that reason, even though the direct premise is definitely screwed up, I think there's alternative interpretations that are more abstract that people can still find useful things out of.
	Okay, I appreciate the comments.
	I think we've got other people who want to chat.
	Always a great pleasure to chat with you, and we will get going on that other thing that we talked about before, and we'll get around to it.
	I just have to finish my audiobook first.
	All right. Thanks so much.
	I wanted to mention something just before we get to the next caller, which I had talked about with...
	I think you can undo your video.
	That'd be great. I talked about this with my daughter today, of all things.
	We were talking about how...
	Unstructured play for kids is one of the roots of developing empathy.
	And the fact that kids have so little unstructured play these days is one of the reasons why kids are not developing empathy in the way that they used to.
	So knowing that unstructured play helps develop empathy doesn't really give us the answer as to why that is the case.
	Why do they... Why does that happen?
	I think the answer is...
	I don't know, but I think the answer is...
	And hit me with a why if you did have lots of unstructured play as a kid.
	Hit me with a why in the chat if you did have that kind of stuff going on when you were a kid.
	Yeah, I think it's a little bit of an older person thing.
	When I was a kid... With no money.
	And you'd come home from school and you'd go out.
	I lived on, it was called an estate, like a council estate.
	There were a whole bunch of apartment buildings, some wife beater t-shirt inhabiting welfare guys down in the back bungalow row.
	And you would go out of your apartment, you'd go down the stairs, you'd go out into the estate, and there would be kids.
	And you'd find someone to play with.
	It was easy, right? There was always a game going on.
	But there was always a negotiation about what to play, right?
	Do you want to play this? And there were different ages, of course, so you had to have something that accommodated the younger kids but was still interesting to the older kids.
	And sometimes we'd spend as much time debating what we should play as we did actually playing something.
	But what was interesting about that is that I said to my daughter, look, there's no such thing as a leader, right?
	There's no such thing as a leader as a singular category.
	This thing does not exist at all.
	No such thing as a leader. Because everyone is a leader and also a follower.
	So I guess I'm the leader of this show, right?
	Don't have a boss and so on.
	But I have to follow what's interesting to you guys, why I do these call-in shows, because I want to know what's interesting to you and where I can apply my abilities to help serve you the best.
	Because without you, I'm nothing, right?
	I need people to listen.
	I need people to support and donate the show, which you can do, of course, at freedebade.com forward slash donate.
	So I am a leader and I'm also a follower.
	Now, how did I learn how to become a leader and to become a follower?
	Well, through unstructured play as a child.
	So when I was, you know, if I wanted to play soccer and somebody else wanted to play war, who wins?
	I can make my case.
	He can make his case. Now, everyone's aware if you've got, you know, if you want to succeed in getting your way and all of that, which we all do, that if I win this time, I got to not win next time.
	Because if you just constantly want things your way, you just get called bossy.
	You know, who made you the ruler of us?
	Who voted you king, right?
	Like, we did your thing last time.
	Let's do my thing this time, right?
	So you have to be a leader in that you have to try and get your way to play the game that you want to play.
	but you also have to be a follower in that you have to subsume yourself to the will of somebody else.
	Because if you try to get things your way all the time, all the quality kids will leave and just like roll their eyes and say, oh my God, he's just always wanted his own way and I don't want to have anything to do with that.
	And the only people you'll be left with are the drips, you know, the people with no particular will or strength and just follow you around.
	And they're not that much fun to play with because they don't have much energy or enthusiasm or motivation.
	So when you have unstructured play, you have leadership.
	And you have followership.
	And, you know, Elon Musk, oh, he's a leader.
	Yeah, he's a leader. He's CEO of this and that and the other, right?
	But he's also got to follow the SEC rules.
	He's got to please his shareholders, who are currently kind of rebelling against the drop in Tesla prices.
	He pursues the mirage of Twitter free speech, while Bill Gates apparently seems to fund dark money to attack Elon Musk.
	And Elon Musk is now assembling a super team of pitbull lawyers to go after anybody for the inevitable defamation and all that.
	So Elon Musk is a leader, but he has to also be a follower.
	He has to please his shareholders.
	He has to please his employees, particularly the most productive senior employees.
	So learning how to be a leader and a follower is really important.
	If everyone thinks leadership is like a king just standing there shouting commands, that's not a leader.
	That's Caligula.
	That's like an insane person.
	And a lot of people don't have the ego to be a follower.
	Right, so I'm playing some Minecraft with my daughter.
	I haven't played. I played some before, but she's introducing me back to the game and wants to play together, which I think is wonderful.
	It's her last couple of years of childhood.
	She's going to be 14 this year, right?
	So let's get that time in while we can before the grandkids come along.
	So, when she says, how do you want to do this or what do you want to do, what do I say?
	I say, you are the expert in Minecraft.
	I follow your lead.
	I'm absolutely, you know, I was out with some friends the other day and we went here and there.
	And then I said to all the kids, okay, who can find their way back to the car?
	Without an adult leading the way, right?
	Because we were a long way from the car.
	And it became kind of an exciting game.
	And they said, well, is it this way?
	No, no, no, you guys are in charge.
	We're just the tail of the kite.
	We're just following you. And so trying to promote kids to positions of leadership is important because when you're a kid, you just spend your whole time following, right?
	And being taught stuff and all of that.
	But my daughter has expertise.
	She gives me drawing lessons and she is an expert at drawing now.
	She's fantastic at it, in my opinion.
	And so she teaches me and I'm like, I put the ego aside.
	I don't have to be in charge. I'm happy to learn from her because she is an expert in a variety of things that I want to learn from her.
	I want to give the experience of teaching me and I like to learn that way.
	And so... Being or learning or knowing how to be a leader and how being a leader always involves being a follower at the same time.
	Juggling those two roles.
	You get your way and same thing in a marriage, right?
	If you're the kind of guy who always wants to get his way in the marriage, you're either going to marry a woman who is so absent she's going to strangle you in your sleep or somebody who's just going to get frustrated and angry and drop you, right?
	So you get your way. And it's a pendulum, right?
	You get your way and then you have to let the other person get their way.
	That's the basic empathy thing.
	And these things only work in voluntary relationships.
	And the most voluntary relationship is unstructured childhood play.
	Unstructured childhood play.
	Because if you're going to Chuck E. Cheese, you're going to Chuck E. Cheese.
	You're going to do a little dance with Chuck E. Cheese.
	You're going to do some video games.
	You're going to crawl around in the tubes.
	You're going to have some pizza. Actually, I'm like...
	When my daughter and I used to go to Chuck E. Cheese, I really liked it.
	It's a good salad bar, a good salad bar there, man.
	Some really great stuff. So, when you're in this structural play, the follower leader stuff Doesn't really happen.
	And that leads you to be fundamentally unprepared for life as an adult.
	So if you are an employee, then you need to show leadership skills.
	You need to get the other employees to do what you want.
	And then to do that, you also need to have follower skills.
	So that you can relinquish the reign so that other people don't feel dominated and bullied and they can get their way at times as well.
	So I was just really trying to puzzle this out.
	Like, why is this unstructured play so important for empathy and for success as adulthood?
	And the fact that I was talking about this with a friend of mine just today, actually, which was, you know...
	When you were kids, you just went out and played.
	You'd be miles away in the woods.
	You're catching frogs. You're building forts.
	You're doing all this kind of stuff. And then for me, my mom had this big, big-ass cowbell that she'd ring out the window of the apartment.
	We lived on the second floor.
	I remember crawling over the garages to go into a room where she'd lock the TV because I wanted to watch some shows where she was out.
	And so... My mom would, like, and you just listen to the cowbell or the old thing you'd play out there till the streetlights come on, right?
	And this has made parenting way more expensive because this was all, we all had to do stuff for free.
	Like, my friends and I, when we were broke in our early teens, you know, we all divvied up and we all bought one book of Dungeons& Dragons, right?
	We bought the Player's Handbook, we bought the Dungeon Master's Guide, we bought the Monster Manual, and then later we got the Fiendfolio.
	And then we bought Caves of Chaos and we played that for a long time to where I lost my first dwarf, Sereg, to that son of a bitch of a minotaur.
	Oh no, Bugbear! Bugbear!
	And then we finally managed to defeat the minotaur.
	And so we had to do that because we had no money.
	And so in Dungeons& Dragons, the dungeon master is kind of a leader in that they're describing the world, but also has to be a follower in that The people have to enjoy your dungeon.
	They have to find it interesting and challenging and realistic and engaging.
	And even in the negotiation of how you deal with monsters and how you plan and what you do, you have to be a leader and you have to be a follower.
	You can't always get your own way, and this is true of all leaders.
	All leaders who, and outside the military and, you know, stuff where you have absolute command and no free market.
	Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to sort of share that idea and that this sort of unstructured play is really, really important.
	So, let's see here.
	I wasn't allowed to walk to school until grade 8.
	I think that woman who let her kids walk to the playground is still, like two years later, still being ground through the legal system.
	That's pretty rough.
	I hated playing kickball at school because there were always the same kids leading.
	Right. And, you know, I'm sorry that that didn't, maybe you were able to find a way to overcome this, right?
	But that's the challenge. You're going to have those bossy kids.
	And those bossy kids, you're going to have to organize a rebellion and just say, no, you guys are too bossy.
	We're going to go play our own kickball.
	We're going to play our own whatever it is, right?
	So let's see here.
	Play dates aren't necessarily constructive.
	I've had a peer as a kid that I ended up wrapping into his bed cover to hear him scream.
	I have only half an idea why I'd have done that.
	Kid didn't mean well with me. I don't really understand that.
	Sorry. But see, play dates also are parents hovering around.
	Parents hovering around. Parents navigating.
	Parents negotiating. Hey, put that down.
	Don't climb that. Don't go upstairs.
	Don't do this. Right?
	The pure unstructured, just Lord of the Flies stuff out there in the woods.
	That's the stuff that I think really, really works.
	All right. If you have, I've got time for another question or issue or comment or criticism and such a, I tell you guys, fantastic audience.
	I absolutely love you guys. Thank you for bringing such great stuff to philosophy.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	So if you have, you can raise your hand if you want to have a question or comment or it can be a flyby or anything that you would like.
	I'm all ears. Yes, I can.
	How are you doing, my friend? Awesome.
	Long-time listener and donor.
	Thank you so much. I'm wondering if you've ever heard of this book called The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
	I certainly have.
	I have not read it.
	No, my roommate when I was in college and we're still in touch was, he ended up with like two PhDs and he taught me a lot about biology and all of that.
	So he was a fan.
	I think he explained it to me once, 30 years ago or more.
	And so I know Richard Dawkins has said, you know, it's either genius or insane.
	I can't figure it out. But no, I've not read it.
	So if you want to give an exposition to tell us what it's about, I'd appreciate that.
	Excellent. Okay, so the main idea is that up until basically the end of the Bronze Age, sometime during the Bronze Age collapse, people were mostly unconscious.
	And then after that period, they became conscious.
	He gives a lot of evidence for it, and I could go into that, but I'm just wondering if you have enough to go on there to comment about it or not.
	I'm so sorry. My apologies.
	I completely gapped out there for a second, and this very rarely happens, and so I kneeled before you an abject apology.
	Could you just repeat that last sentence?
	Okay, all right. So, the idea is that before the end of the Bronze Age collapse, people were basically...
	They lived unconsciously.
	No, I got all of that. It was really, honestly, just the last sentence that I missed.
	So, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I just wanted to know if that's enough for you to go on and offer your thoughts on that, or if you needed a little bit more detail.
	Well, I mean, look, certainly there must have been a time where we emerged from unconsciousness, right?
	And the... Neofrontal cortex, the rational, right?
	I've called it the post-monkey beta expansion pack, right?
	I mean, this aspect that allows us to go against our instincts and to develop and understand universal principles based upon immediate sense evidence.
	It's incredible, right?
	I mean, it's an incredible thing.
	It's really, we're the only ones that do it.
	And... Abstract language, concepts, and so on.
	So yeah, this emerged out of something.
	This emerged out of something, and generally I have found that the less intelligent people are, the more they are run by their unconscious.
	And I remember years ago watching an Ann Coulter presentation on some priest's show where she was talking about the destructive impact of single mothers.
	Statistically, she bought all the statistics and all the data and so on.
	And then in the audience were all of these single moms who say, well, I'm doing a great job.
	My kid is doing really well and you're wrong.
	And she would, well, that's nice, but the data is the data, right?
	It's not about you. And there are a large number of people, like a surprising number of people, And you ask them this theoretical question, right?
	You ask them this theoretical question and you say, if you hadn't eaten today, what would your experience be?
	Now, if I ask you that question, I say, okay, if you hadn't eaten at all today, how would you feel?
	Hungry. Hungry, yeah. You'd feel hungry.
	You might feel tired, a little grumpy, a little hangry or whatever, right?
	But you wouldn't believe the number of people out there, and they're probably not in your circle, they're not so much in my circle, but it's a huge number of people out there.
	You ask them, if you hadn't eaten today, how would you feel?
	And do you know what they say? They say, no, but I did eat today.
	And you say, no, no, no. I know that you ate today.
	But imagine that you hadn't eaten today.
	If you hadn't eaten today, how would you feel?
	They say, no, no, no. I ate today.
	Look, I had oatmeal for breakfast.
	I had two eggs for lunch.
	I had pizza for dinner.
	I did eat, so I don't know what you're talking about.
	No, no, no. They can't get it.
	They literally cannot get the theoretical.
	They could use language, but they cannot get the theoretical.
	And it's really important to remember that this is a lot of people out there in the world, right?
	Yeah. And, you know, it's not really their fault.
	It's just the way that their brains process or don't process particular things.
	So I think that the more you can propose theoreticals, understand theoreticals, you know, and these kinds of things, I think that, you know, you could say it's more advanced, certainly more complicated.
	It's a more complicated kind of thinking.
	But yeah, there's a lot of people who just cannot get the theoreticals at all.
	Like if you say... Honestly, if you say men are taller than women on average, they literally will think that a rebuttal is to say, well, wait, my sister is taller than her husband.
	They have no...
	I don't know if it's bad...
	I think it's bad education for the most part.
	It's just terrible education for the most part.
	But they just can't get...
	Yeah.
	that if you're ill and you don't know it because you're going to spread the disease more, it's like, okay, now we have a vaccine that completely suppresses your symptoms, but still allows you to spread it.
	And then most people would say, I mean, logically we'd say, well, isn't that the worst case scenario that you have an illness?
	You don't, it's asymptomatic transmission is the worst thing ever.
	Then why are we having a vaccine that suppresses symptoms, but still we can transmit things?
	Isn't that like creating, like asymptomatic transmission didn't turn out to be a real thing much at all.
	And at least in the studies I've seen coming out of Wuhan, that they did like half a million people.
	I couldn't find a single instance of asymptomatic transmission.
	But for sure, for sure, if we accept everything they say about the vaccines, the vaccines have created asymptomatic transmission.
	So, but they can't, they can't process it.
	Or the seen versus the unseen, right?
	Like, I mean, this is the big thing in economics, right?
	So I talked about this way back at the beginning of 2020, saying we are going to end up with much more damage from the lockdowns than we do...
	In terms of life safe, right?
	Because you're basically suspending all healthcare and people are going to get depressed.
	Alcoholics are going to get more access to alcohol.
	People are going to work from home. They're going to gain weight.
	They're going to get sick.
	People are going to be stuck with their abusers.
	And so for me, it's like, that's very clear.
	But what they hear is they say, people hear, well, lockdown will prevent the spread of viruses, save this many lives.
	And there's no... But on the other hand, there's no...
	Unseen. Like, oh, we spent $5 million to create 100 government jobs.
	Wow, that's great. We're up 100 jobs.
	And they don't see all the jobs that weren't created because the $5 million were taken from the hands of the capitalists or the entrepreneurs or whatever, right?
	So, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, I wanted to try and point you in a little bit different direction, just because...
	No, please do. This is your convo.
	I'm just rambling, so go for it.
	Okay, so you used to do these dream interpretations, and I really love those and I miss them.
	I would love to hear some more.
	The reason I ask you about this book is because I'm just wondering what you think about the idea that in the past we used to have maybe a more direct connection to the unconscious or the subconscious and that maybe dreams are kind of a remnant of that older way of thinking or existing.
	Well, I think that's undoubtable because, I mean, you see animals, you can see them dreaming all the time.
	Cats chase mice in their dreams and dogs bark and chase things in their dreams.
	So a dream is a form of dress rehearsal for things.
	And I think that the conscious mind is the softest aspect of the human mind.
	It's the part that gives us the greatest power and, of course, it is our greatest weakness.
	I say, of course, like that's an argument.
	So let me just very briefly make the case.
	So have you ever had it where...
	You're uncertain about the moral quality of someone in your life, and you find yourself talking in and out of a good or bad opinion of them based upon things you remember or something they said or maybe something they did in the present.
	You say, oh, well, I thought that was not such a great guy, but he did this good thing, so I guess he's all right, and then he does a bad thing.
	You say, oh, well, you know, that was pretty bad.
	Maybe he isn't such a good guy.
	So you can talk yourself in and out of that.
	But where I think the real moral radar is, is in the unconscious.
	Now, I think if you have something like UPB or religion where you can really process and analyze these things and get feedback, but the identification of evil generally is like a goose bump or a negative feeling.
	There's a great description in Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald of an evil guy who comes into a party.
	And I think we've all been around these kind of people at one time or another, just like, wow, that is a black soul.
	Like, that is just a guy who just nothing good really is ever going to come out of.
	Or if it does, it's just lured you into something really bad.
	And so I think that evil people have a great desire to push us up into the neofrontal cortex, into the seat of reason and analysis and language, because then we're a lot easier to manipulate.
	Whereas, if we're down in our instincts and our gut and our lizard brain, we're a lot harder to manipulate, which is why I think ideology tends to separate the conscious mind from the unconscious mind.
	Because in the conscious mind you can say something like, you know, the communists would say something like, well, we can just have a new kind of human being, a completely new kind of human being who's ideological.
	A guy who, you know, like Boxer the horse in Animal Farm is just going to work and work and no profit and no advancement.
	They're going to work for the good of all and we're just going to have a completely new kind of guy.
	And the way that we're going to organize humanity is according to class, not the way that we evolved, which is according to proximate Genetics, right?
	Our family and our tribe and all of that, right?
	So we're just going to scoop out the unconscious completely.
	We're just going to replace it with an ideologically perfect human being.
	And there's not going to be any genetic in-group preference.
	There's not going to be any sense of profit or loss.
	There's not going to be any sense of ambition or reward or punishment, or maybe punishment, but certainly not any reward.
	Like if you work harder, you get more money, you get more resources and all that.
	So if you say that to the lizard brain, right?
	The lizard brain is like, bullshit.
	Well, come on. Don't be ridiculous.
	You can't just... Take out three billion years of evolution and replace it with a copy of the Communist Manifesto.
	That's never going to work.
	Never going to work. Because the lizard brain doesn't respond to propaganda.
	The lizard brain doesn't respond to sophistry.
	It doesn't respond to ideology.
	Ideology is all up in here where we can talk ourselves in and out of things.
	Yeah, maybe we can just create a new Soviet man, a new communist man, and everything's going to be perfect and wonderful and great, and we can get rid of self-interest, and we can get rid of working for advantage, and we can get rid of genetic proximity preference, and, you know, all is going to be wonderful, right?
	Yeah. And it's the same thing with diversity to some degree, right?
	So the gut and the instincts is, if you get people out of their head and get them sort of into their body, and this is one of the great things that happened to me in theater school, was I did a lot of movement classes, a lot of dance classes, a lot of tai chi, a lot of physical training classes.
	is like it pounded my brain down into my body and had me really work much more with my instincts than my hyper-conscious British empirical mind would ever have really pursued.
	So I do think that the bifurcation between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind is a great wedge issue that evil uses to separate us from our instincts because our instincts are used to sniff out evil in a very positive and powerful way.
	But evil can talk us into and out of a whole bunch of things at the top of our heads that our spine and our guts and our balls would never accept.
	And I think that separation is pretty tragic.
	Yeah, I mean, and look how quickly it showed up.
	Sophistry was a thing, you know, what...
	300 BC? 400 BC? Well, I mean, I think it's been around as long as we've had this language brain, but yeah, it certainly was very clearly identified back then.
	Yeah. And all of the things where we say, I can define who I am.
	I can put a different label on myself and I can redefine who I am, which is happening in a wide variety of spheres in the West in particular at the moment.
	So the lizard brain says what?
	No, you can't. No, you can't stick a label called apple on an orange and it becomes an orange.
	It becomes an apple. You can't stick apple on an orange.
	You can't just change the label of something and think that you've changed its essence.
	Because the Aristotelian approach is that the concept is derived from the essence of the thing.
	Now, in Plato, it's a different matter, right?
	But in Aristotle, which is certainly my approach, close enough too, that you identify the essence of something, and that's where the concept comes from.
	So the essence of a ball is a shape and a purpose and maybe a color or whatever, and that's a children's ball, a play ball, a soccer ball, a basketball, that they have an essence, right?
	And because the concept is derived from the essence of You can't wag the dog.
	You can't say, well, I've changed the label, and therefore I've changed the essence.
	Human beings work for material advantage.
	And if you say, oh no, now you're a new Soviet man, and therefore that won't be the case, you say, well, no.
	That's not how things work.
	You can't just change the label and change the thing.
	The label is derived from the thing.
	You're going the opposite way.
	I mean, if you call something round or square, you've just made a mistake.
	If you say that two and two make five, you've just made a mistake.
	You can't just redefine it and just – and so – and the belief that you can use words to completely redefine basic reality, well, this is back to magic, right?
	That you have magical spells and you magic words that you can speak and then you can turn a man into a horse.
	You can shoot a fireball from your fingertips.
	You can create an earthquake.
	You can summon the rain through your language.
	That's madness.
	And it used to be very clearly delineated and defined as madness.
	If there's some guy who says, I'm Napoleon, and he's not Napoleon.
	Some guy in the modern world says, I'm Napoleon or I'm Jesus Christ or whatever.
	Well, they're not Napoleon because Napoleon is dead and they can be short and they can dress in a funny sideways hat and put on a military uniform and put their hand inside their jacket pocket or jacket gap between buttons.
	They're not Napoleon. And the idea that you can call yourself Napoleon and dress like Napoleon and become Napoleon, that's a sign of mental illness.
	And we have this whole thing now where you can just use the language and you can just redefine anything.
	And anybody who doesn't accept your redefinition is just a horrible person who must be destroyed.
	Well, that's the aggression that's implicit in mental illness.
	In mental illness, you know, there's lots of illnesses that aren't aggressive.
	But mental illness, in my experience, I know that sounds bad, mental illness in the experience of the people I've had who are mentally ill, tends to have an extraordinary amount of aggression to it in that there is a demand that you go along with whatever definition is occurring today.
	And if you don't, you can be attacked.
	And that's very dangerous.
	Extraordinarily dangerous. All right.
	Well, thank you everyone so much for a wonderful and delightful evening of Talking Philosophy.
	I like this platform.
	It's very, very good. So I hope that you will stick around.
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	And also, yeah, if you have dreams, bring them in.
	It's been years since I've done a dream analysis and I love them.
	So if you have a dream that you're stuck with, that's particularly repetitive and negative, we can unpack it and liberate you from that, as I have done with myself on a number of occasions.
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	Have yourselves a fantastic evening.
	Lots of love from up here. Talk to you soon.

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