All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 7, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:55
Elon Musk's End Game!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, hello, hello, my friends.
Good afternoon, good evening to my European friends and those all over the globe.
How are you? Ah, you know, let's start with a little bit of nice news.
Somebody wrote to me after a call-in.
He said, sure, she said, Hey Steph, I'm writing you this with tears in my eyes from joy.
Today I can say that my deep depression is cured and my trauma are significantly less affecting my life.
And this is thanks to you and my therapist.
I run five to six times a week.
I run my math five to six times a week, if that's me, for over four months.
And today I can read in a week what I couldn't do in months.
My English got really better.
I'm performing well in my psychology studies.
Thank you so much. I'm again ambitious to spread the virtue and help others, and this is because of you, so-and-so from such and such a place.
So that's very nice, and, you know, that's beautiful.
It's beautiful what we're doing in the world.
Good morning from Sydney.
I assume the place, not the person?
And I'm sorry, I'm doing a show a little bit earlier.
A, wanted to chat with the European listeners, and B, believe it or not, I'm in a sports tournament tonight.
So... That's going to be fun.
All right. Let me put on my slightly less goggle-eyed glasses and let's get on.
Hit me with your question sticks.
And I am happy.
I'm going to just dip over to freedomand.locals.com.
In order to get the questions from the fine, glorious, meaty-headed listeners.
Sorry, that meant to be a bit more of a compliment than it turned out to be.
All right. What suggestions has your daughter made for you to improve?
Good question. So...
To, I suppose, turn away from the world towards the people who actually love me.
I was kind of a planet-facing entity there for, I don't know, 13 or 14 years.
And to turn away from the world as a target for energy and concentration and to lean a little bit more into the beautiful sails of the people who love me.
To remember that...
You're mortal and you're one against billions in some ways.
It sort of feels like that way.
And to remember that if you think you're the only person who can do things, then you never leave room for other people to step in and do it too, right?
Nobody is irreplaceable, right?
I mean, you are somebody hugely crucial at work.
And you die, and they replace you in a week or two.
I mean, we all have to be replaceable because time replaces us all, so all of that.
She's taught me to enjoy the process of playing more than the winning or losing.
I'm a little bit of a competitor, and I'm pretty energetic when it comes to victory.
I think it's a bit of a male-female thing to enjoy.
Males enjoy the results.
Women enjoy the process more.
And there's lots to be learned from either side of things.
So she's taught me to really enjoy the process of playing and the fun of the play rather than the victory or loss.
And so that's also been great as well.
So yeah, just go. So what qualities do you admire most about your daughter?
Um... Even-tempered.
She and my wife are both that way.
I'm not too bad that way, but I can be a little rollercoastery from time to time.
And so she's very even-tempered and she's incredibly thoughtful and very loyal.
I think that's a good thing.
She's taught me a lot about female-female friendships.
Very interesting thing to look at and all of that.
Yeah, good-natured, good-humored, and confident without being abrasive.
I feel that's a lesson I could use a little more of from time to time.
And, I mean, things that it's hard to admire, but I appreciate that she has.
I mean, she's very, very, very, very smart.
I mean, I think you can imagine all of that.
And I admire that, but it's not like it's a personal...
I admire her virtues. I appreciate the things that are instinctive.
And she's a real fighter.
When she believes that she's in the right, and she often is, then she just won't give an inch and will go down flailing, so to speak, where she doesn't go down.
But yeah, no, she really will.
And it's sort of a patient process, right?
She'll just plant herself there.
She's not trying to tackle you.
She's not trying to take you down. She's planted there.
And if you want to move her, you have to give good reason and evidence.
And then you've got a pretty good shot.
But if not, so...
So let's see here. Friedemain was just curious why you chose to include the very detailed sex scene between Alder and his wife in The God of Atheists.
It seemed a bit out of place to me compared to the rest of the book and I'm not sure that it added to my knowledge of the characters.
Love the book. Okay, yeah, that's a fine question.
It's actually a comedy sex scene because...
So Alder is a guy who lives...
He's a university professor and he's Rudy's thesis advisor.
Now, Alder is very abstract, very intellectual, and early in the book, I write about him, nine times out of ten, the life of the mind arises out of the grave of the heart.
And he has disconnected himself from his emotions in order to pursue the life of the mind and also because our emotions have a strong moral quality to them.
He has detached himself from his emotions so that he can talk himself in and out of just about anything, which is one of the reasons why his son is so Socratic and critical and questioning of his own father, of Alder himself.
Now, I wanted to show the price of disconnecting from your lizard brain, disconnecting from your body, disconnecting from, I mean, the flesh, the altered, that is the base of our entire skyrockets of intellect.
And so... We see a lot of the upside with Alder, right?
I mean, he's very analytical. He's very clever.
He can be very funny.
And he's high status.
He's got a lot of kids who want to be his students and young people who want to be his protégés.
He doesn't work that much.
He gets very well paid. So we see a lot of the upside.
And I also wanted to include the downside.
Of that level of hyper-intellectualism.
Now, the downside is that he can't connect with his son, and the downside is he can't have any kind of good sex with his wife because he's just too analytical and too detached.
There's a scene in a Woody Allen movie where...
The woman is having sex and she's talking something about, and paraphrasing here, you know, like there's two kinds of people in the world.
There are tortoises and there are rabbits.
And I'm trying to figure out who in my life is a tortoise and who in my life is a rabbit and so on.
Very disconnected to the point of almost like PTSD from what's going on.
So, with Alter, I wanted to show the price of hyper-intellectualism.
And listen, as far as hyper-intellectualism goes, I've danced around the edge of that volcano my whole life.
My whole life has been dancing around that Joe versus the volcano edge of plunging into hyper-intellectualism.
Of escaping like a piece of soap in a prison shower scene gripped too hard up into the platonic realm of ideals and abstractions, the life of the mind so often arises from the grave of the heart.
Why do we have such hyper-intellectualism?
Why do we detach and reverse ourselves from our connection with our physicality, with our body and so on?
Well, mostly the conceptual mind is a scar tissue.
So you think of a bullet striking a thick piece of metal.
A bullet striking a thick piece of metal.
You've got a hollow in one end and you've got an extrusion, something pushed out on the other.
The intellect, in many ways, is the extrusion, the stuffed-out part.
That arises out of the impact of abuse on the body.
We are almost driven out of our own bodies when we are abused as children because our bodies are used to cause us pain, right?
So if you're hit, it's your body's pain mechanisms and the fear that is associated with that that is used to punish you.
If you are screamed at, then your fight or flight mechanism and your fear of physical ostracism and therefore historically usually death from your parents, the breaking of the bond and so on, all of that occurs and that's an automatic process.
Your fear of humiliation is used to punish you in schools.
Gosh, where was it? I think it might have been Australia or something like that, where kids were brought up to the front of the school and asked about their vaccination status, and if they weren't vaccinated, why they weren't vaccinated, and so on. So your fear of humiliation, a fear of punishment.
And so your...
Neurological system, your pain pleasure mechanisms that are almost all completely outside of the control of your consciousness, particularly when you're a child.
You can get some control over them later in life.
So the body is used to punish you.
The body is used to brutalize you.
All abuse comes through the body.
You say, ah yes, but verbal abuse occurs in the mind.
Yes, but the humiliation, fear and anxiety that people fear or feel out of verbal abuse is an autonomic nervous system process, a fight or flight mechanism.
So when the body is used to punish you, what's your relationship?
To your body. Well, your body is your vulnerability.
Your body is your chink in your armor.
And you have a desperate desire.
This is what dissociation is.
You have a desperate desire to escape your physical sensations because your physical sensations are used to punish you.
I mean, waterboarding, your desire for breath, is used to punish you.
Physical pain torture is designed to use your nerve endings to punish you.
So your body is turned into your enemy, when of course the body should be your greatest home companion and security and castle and friend to the intellect.
So, in The God of Atheists, I wanted to write about people whose bodies are used to punish them.
And that's why I say the life of the mind arises out of the grave of the heart.
You have to kill your body, your sensations, in order to survive.
And this causes you to dissociate from your body and spiral up into the platonic realm, spiral up into the noumenal realm, the realm of forms, the nirvana, someplace where you are a mind without a body.
Why would you want to be a mind without a body?
Why? Why on earth would you want to be a mind without a body?
Because your body is the rack upon which your mind is tortured.
Your body is the rack upon which your mind is tortured.
And just as somebody would be desperate to escape being tortured physically, if you could get out of a torture prison, of course you would.
You would claw your way through the brick walls to get out of a torture prison, particularly when that torture prison appears very solidly and very realistically to have no end.
To have no end. This is the death spiral of the Jim Morrison in Paris in 1970-71.
The death spiral.
Why do addicts so often overdose?
Because they know basically deep down that there is going to be no end to their addiction and that struggling to stay afloat in a rising sea of opioids or other addictions is all they have left to look forward to in their life and they don't want that life anymore.
They don't think there could be any other life.
By the time he was 27, I mean, gosh, I mean, Jim Morrison had been on drugs pretty consistently for close to 15 years.
So, I mean, he had no original wiring left.
His brain was completely fried.
His whole system was completely fried.
He had no functional chance of regaining any kind of sobriety because particularly as a teenager, he'd done so many drugs that his brain development was right.
So you say, well, why?
Gosh, I mean, he was handsome and...
Rich and talented and famous.
Why? Because his past was a torture chamber, his body was used as a torture chamber, and he was verbally abused by his father.
His parents didn't hit him, but his parents verbally abused him enormously, terribly.
His father was, of course, in the military, in the Navy, and got very high up.
And somebody high up in the military is, by definition, a past master at verbal abuse.
That's sort of the way it works in the military.
So, he could not handle his verbal abuse, fell into drugs, and then with his screaming and screeching and horrifying castigations of the world around him, he turned the verbal abuse he'd received from his father onto the world as a whole, and therefore he became, in many ways, his father, which was unbearable to him.
His whole personality was split.
And shattered and then he just...
Why would you want to live like that?
If you just knew that...
I mean, this is why the spies have the cyanide tablets or the cyanide tooth, right?
The tooth with the cyanide inside so they can bite down hard on that tooth, release the cyanide and die.
Because if you knew that your life was going to be torture for the next years, decades, whatever, right?
Half century, I mean, most people would choose to kill themselves and that's kind of what went down.
So I just wanted to show in a fairly humorous way That disconnecting from the body kills intimacy, it kills honesty, it kills love, it kills relationships, and it kills the joys of sexuality.
So, yeah, I really wanted to.
This is the postmodern guy.
Postmodernism is, my body has been used to torture me, and therefore I wish to escape the body.
Why do you want contradictions to be true?
Because your body is consistently—empiricism is pain, right?
Empiricism is pain for people who are abused.
Empiricism is pain because the empirical evidence is, I'm in great pain.
My bond is being threatened.
I'm falling into a sea of endless agony and so on, right?
Now, the solution, of course, is not to blame your body, which is only trying to help and protect you, but it's a lot easier to blame your body for the pain caused to you through the process of being abused than it is to morally judge and hold accountable your abusers.
So people use the body as literally as a scapegoat to attack and punish and escape the body and say, well, the problem with being abused are my physical sensations, and the only way I can escape those physical sensations is to dissociate into hyper-intellectualism.
So, using the body as a proxy moral agent, right?
It's not my abusers who are hurting me, it's my body who's hurting me.
It's like, well, yeah, but the abusers know your body's going to hurt you, and that's why they do what they do.
So, that is...
And, of course, the lack of connection he has with his wife, the lack of connection he has with his family, appreciates how his relationship works.
Plays out with his son, right?
I mean, they go on this camping trip and it's just, it's really tragic.
You know, it's a tragic comic novel, The God of Atheists.
And you can get it at fdrurl.com slash TGOA. You can get it for free.
So, no, the whole book is about what is the God of Atheists?
The God of Atheists is vanity.
And vanity arises out of You can manipulate your view of yourself according to your own particular preferences rather than according to objective and universal standards.
Objective and universal standards come out of the body.
So the reason you abuse children is to drive empiricism and objectivity out of their minds directly.
By associating objective reality and the empirical experience of being in a body with endless pain and torture, you drive people out of their body, they're disconnected from their body, they're disconnected from reality, they're disconnected from empiricism, and then it's easy as shit to just push them around and bully them and bribe them and, you know, they just make up whatever they want.
And you can make up whatever you want for people, and because they're disconnected from their body, they will believe it.
All right. In a world...
What is that?
There was a whole time where there were movies.
In a world where...
In a town where...
In a world where the welfare state is harming all areas of life, how can good men attract a woman if women evolve to be war brides and are subsidized and unable to choose the bad boys who are the modern successors to warlords?
I mean, gosh, I mean, to attract a woman, to attract a good woman, you have to be a really, really good man.
And you have to fight against your natural male instincts.
See, in a situation where, in a town where, in a situation where, In a situation where our selected sexuality, which is pump and dump, promiscuity, grinder and tinder dates and all of that, spread your seed, spray and pray.
I mean, it's a frog's form of reproduction, right?
Just spray your seed in the water and see what it lands on.
Or don't even bother to stick around and see what it lands on.
So when you're tempted into our selected sexuality, It's very hard to have high standards.
It's very hard to say no to a sexually available, physically attractive woman because you say no, this is going to interfere with my capacity to pair bond with a moral woman.
It's very hard to say no.
So, I mean, we have our selected reproductive strategies, the spray and pray stuff, arise out of infinite resources and uncontrollable dangers, right?
So if you live in the tropics, you have pretty much infinite resources.
You have food and animals and fish all over the place.
You're never going to run out of food, really.
But the harm that you get, there's not really much you could do about it.
In general, it's...
Illness, right? Because in a tropical climate, winter doesn't kill off the viruses, so they evolve to be more prevalent, more deadly.
You've got mosquitoes carrying viruses all over the place.
So... In a situation where there are excess resources and you can't do much about the dangers, then just having a lot of kids and, you know, this is a win by numbers, right?
Win by numbers. In a case-selected environment, you are scarce on resources, but there are things you can do practically to survive, the main one being get enough resources together to survive the winter.
So, the problem with the West, well, one of the many problems with the West is you have through Debt through money printing, you have the illusion of infinite resources, which are selected, but you have a culture in general that has evolved from case-selected resources, all the ice people, basically if you have to face a lot of winter, like you think of the East Asians in Siberia and Europeans in Northern Europe and so on.
So you have a culture that evolved through case selection that the case selection empathy was turned pathological.
Altruism was turned pathological, created the welfare state.
The welfare state is now putting our selected pressures on a case-selected population, and it's really tearing society apart.
And again, these are all big generalities and so on.
So you just have to say no to the bad girls and wait for the good girls, because the good girls are saying no to the bad boys and waiting for the good boys.
Freedom, any insight on the sexual repression of the boomers and its effects on today's culture?
Sexual repression of the boomers?
Are you kidding me?
Do you mean the lack of sexual repression of the boomers?
The boomers just broke through with the welfare state and with the birth control pill.
The boomers just broke through with massive waves of our selected promiscuity.
I mean, I remember the 70s, man.
It was just hideous.
How should men react to the vast majority of women only sleeping with a small percentage of men and the unrealistic standards that women have because of this practice?
I think that you should be very thankful for the small number of our selected alphas who are mock-tagging the women you don't want to mate with.
You don't want to date. You don't want to get involved with.
You don't want to... Marry.
They are doing God's own work to tag the women who would make terrible partners, terrible wives, and even worse mothers.
So let's, you know, pour one out for the self-destructive chads who are whittling their penises down to toothpicks in order to spin women around so that they can not walk in a straight line and you can figure out who not to date.
All right, so let's see here.
Hi, Steph. Is porn speech?
Do you think there's any validity to arguments made about Gap not being a free-speed platform because it doesn't allow porn?
Well, I mean, pornography, of course, is the production of material with a specific designation to titillate and allow people to, I guess, masturbate and achieve orgasm and so on.
And so I don't view it as speech in the same way that, you know, is using the most abominable curse words is that speech.
Well, I won't have cursing people around my daughter.
I mean, I occasionally will curse, but not with my daughter.
So... There are times where, well, there are situations wherein Like, unbelievable levels of horrible cursing is not free speech because it has an influence on children.
And pornography is incredibly destructive, particularly to children, and children are getting into it earlier and earlier these days.
So I do not think that where you have things available for children, and just about everything on the internet is available for children, then the destructive effects of pornography, to me, would not...
You know, it's all fire in a crowded theater.
You know, well, how about, I don't know, gang bangs to a 10-year-old, right?
I mean, what does that do to... I mean, Billie Eilish talked about this and all, so...
All right. I don't...
Nobody knows what the dropping sperm count is about, but I do think it has something to do with the hyper-feminized society.
I'm a 44-year-old white male with no kids.
I can attract women in their early to mid-30s.
Many of the women I meet are Asian.
How would you prioritize the preference for having white kids with the risk of having none by excluding non-whites?
I mean, marry, marry, of course, whoever you want.
It depends, right? In certain areas, like in California, for instance, there are a lot of white, Asian, mixed-race children and people.
And, yeah, I mean, I have a friend who's mixed white and Asian, and it can be a little tough.
It can be a little tough to sort of find where you land, to find your people, so to speak.
So... I would say that it can be fairly challenging.
I think it's better to be a father than to not be a father, and I certainly wouldn't prioritize having a white kid over being a dad.
So if someone you fall in love with and you share values, that's the most important thing.
All right. Have you ever read the book Calame K, which was supposed to be one of Iran's favorite books along with Victor Hugo's novels?
It's a fantastic book. I never have read that book, I'm afraid.
I'm actually quite busy writing a book.
I'm at, I don't know, close to 50,000 words on my new novel, which I'm very pleased with.
All right, so let's see here.
I don't know how to prepare for an exam when you haven't got it.
I mean, if the teacher hasn't given you any particular cues on how to prepare, then just write as honestly as you can within the bounds of, you know, whatever is acceptable in universities these days.
Hey Steph, I recently got into a great relationship with a virtuous, wonderful woman.
One problem is that she completely wants to replace my wardrobe.
My wardrobe is full of band t-shirts and various fandoms.
She states that I dress like I'm still 16 and she wants to be with a grown man.
She is late 30s and I am my mid-30s.
I also have long hair and she'd prefer me to cut it.
Your words do ring in my head.
Be as attractive to your partner as possible.
I feel like I might be giving away too much of my identity.
Thanks. I'm completely with her.
Yeah. Yeah, so many years ago I saw a lecture On nutrition, of all things.
And there was a guy in it.
I think I saw this lecture in the early 2000s, about 20 years ago.
And there was a guy in it.
He dressed way younger than his age.
So he was in his mid-30s, and he was dressing like I would dress when I would go to discos when I was 16 or 17 years old.
Like I'd be out there dancing until the wee hours and all of that and having a great time out there, making sure I had the capacity to develop tinnitus later on in life.
The speakers were blasty.
But... So...
To be in your mid-30s, to have long hair and wear band t-shirts, I'm not talking about at home, but if that's your general outfit, yes, you should absolutely listen to her.
You should dress in a more mature fashion because she doesn't want to be embarrassed about you.
What are you signaling if in your mid-30s you're dressing in...
Look, I mean, I'll wear a band t-shirt and some shorts around the house or whatever, especially if I'm doing some yard work or some house maintenance or whatever...
But when we go out, you know, like I went out for dinner last night with my wife and yes, dressed in a nice shirt with a collar and put some long pants on, of course, and all of that.
So yes, that is exactly what you should be doing.
She wants to be out there and be proud of being with you.
And if you look like...
You're in Guns N' Roses circa 1997 or one of their roadies, she's not going to feel proud because whether you like it or not, people are going to judge you by your appearances.
And if your appearance is grungy and unclean and unkempt and so on, then no, listen to her.
You know, I think in your mid-30s, it's time when you're out there in public to stop being...
An advertising billboard for degenerate bands that promote our selected garbage.
So yes, I'm sorry.
Giving away too much of your identity.
Your identity is with her now.
And if she wants you to dress a certain way...
Dress a certain way. So here's the thing.
If she's a good woman, you say she is, right?
Wonderful. So if she's a good woman, when you make your compromises, she will also make her compromises.
There will come a time where you want to do something, or you want her to be a certain way, or you want her to change something.
And if you have led the way by changing what she wants you to change, then she will reciprocate by changing what you want to change.
And that way you grow differently.
Together. Now, giving away too much of your identity, advertising for degenerate bands, and I assume that they're degenerate bands, you're probably not wearing a whole lot of Duke Ellings and stuff, right?
Maybe a little early Joe Jackson, but yeah, advertising bands is not having an identity.
I don't understand what that means at all.
Being a billboard to sell albums, I don't see how that's an identity.
Oh, my identity is my music.
No, it's not. That's just your tastes.
And a lot of your tastes have to do with memories of things when you were younger.
A lot of things that you do, which are manifestations of your taste, are just based upon whichever social group happened to accept you at some particular point in your life.
And it's very easy to get stuck there.
I went with a woman I was seeing at the time who was very astute to see this guy.
And she's like, oh, you know exactly what year that guy got emotionally stuck in?
Yeah, probably 1986, right?
And she was right.
You're advertising to people where you are emotionally stuck if you don't progress in certain things.
You're advertising to people where you're emotionally stuck.
And I would imagine that something in your teens...
If your teens were your happiest time...
That's not great, right?
That means that you're not finding ways to get enough happiness in the present.
And your identity is to be loved by this woman.
And if she wants you to put different clothing on, assuming it's not, I don't know, a chainmail tutu or something equally uncomfortable, if she wants you to dress more appropriate to your age...
Just do it. Your identity is your values, your morals, your knowledge, your love for her, her love for you.
That's your identity. Not shilling for Guns N' Roses or something.
That's not your identity. That's just you acting as free advertisement for a band that usually produces and promotes really terrible stuff.
What do you think the consequences will be of many parents giving unlimited iPad and screen time to their children from babyhood?
Well, I mean, I think that the most fundamental thing which will occur is a complete lack of empathy.
There's no negotiating, right?
You're sitting there playing, I don't know, some video game, some flick and flack video game on a tablet.
You don't need to negotiate. You don't need to figure out how to play with others.
I mean, one of the great things, I mean, I hated it at the time, but one of the great things that happened for me when I was a kid was being completely a broke-ass guy.
And being a broke-ass guy, my friends and I would have to go around garbage picking, we'd have to assemble our own bikes, and we'd have to figure out what to do that didn't cost any money, and that meant a lot of negotiating.
Right? I had a friend of mine who always wanted to go window shopping.
Like, let's go downtown and look at the stores in the window.
Or look at the windows of the stores.
And I was like, I don't want to do that.
Why would I want to torture myself with something I can't afford?
Like, I don't want to go.
But we had to try and figure out what to do without any money.
So sometimes we'd chip in and we'd buy a couple of tins of beans and somebody would borrow a...
A little saucepan or pot from home and we'd go out into the woods and we'd have a cookout, right?
We'd cook some beans on some fire and all of that and have our beans.
And what do you do?
You end up having to negotiate and you end up having to have a lot of conversations.
Now, negotiation is when you can't achieve fun without the other person participating.
I mean, going to eat beans alone and...
In the woods makes you feel like a loser hobo, but if you've got a bunch of friends and you're sort of chilling and shooting the shit and eating your beans, then it feels better, feels okay.
So trying to figure out how to have fun without spending any money and fun which involves other people, right?
We used to have, my friends and I used to do this thing in my sort of mid to late teens.
We'd have a, we called them the decadenters.
So decadenters are when we would all pool our money together and we would go to the store and And we would buy just the most expensive stuff we could find.
But because we were buying it all together, it ended up being fairly cheap, all things considered.
And my friend had...
It was a kind of stove that you put fire underneath and it was like you cooked over marble or something like that and...
We would have great steaks, and we would cook up shrimp, and we would all get together and make a great dessert, and it was...
Oh, and we would buy...
I remember this very clearly.
There was a second cup, I think it was second cup, or some coffee shop where you could buy this Ethiopian coffee that was just completely fantastic.
And we would mix up the coffee in with a bodum.
And so we would have just these, you know, fantastic salads and then some steak and shrimp and we'd make some dessert and then we'd have this incredible coffee.
And that was super luxury.
But it really wasn't too much.
You know, maybe 10 bucks, 12 bucks a head.
I mean, this is, of course, back when things were a lot cheaper.
And we would just...
Because we lived these lives of scarcity and we would all just get together and we would just have these great meals where everything tasted fantastic.
And I've never been much of a cook, but some of my friends were really good at it, particularly with the meat.
And you just have these, you know, Fezziwig.
My friend said, you know, life is Scrooge, but we Fezziwig with each other.
You know, like Fezziwig is the character who's just a really great boss in A Christmas Carol.
And you go for that kind of plenty and that kind of access.
But these are all challenges. Nowadays, everybody just goes out for meals and stuff like that.
But even when it comes to food with kids, right?
I mean, you go to a restaurant, you don't need to negotiate what the kid's going to eat because everyone can order their own thing.
A lot of parents will end up doing that because they don't want to have conflict with their kids.
So, iPad and screen time, you're selfishly consuming a playmate that has no will or thoughts or opinions of its own.
Like, oh, you want to play Candy Crush?
Okay, we'll play Candy Crush. It's never ending negotiations.
You never need to step into anybody else's shoes.
You never need to convince people too much.
And that's going to be rough, man.
It's going to be really rough because if you lack empathy, you either exploit it Or you're an exploiter.
Lack of empathy is just a pecking order.
Empathy is when you go for win-win.
There's no win-win between the lion and the zebra.
Either the zebra gets away or the lion eats the zebra.
The lion starves or the zebra dies.
So it's a predator-prey relationship.
And if you lack empathy, the kind of empathy that you develop through years of negotiating, in my case, because we had no money, years of negotiating what to do, then you have a tough time, man, in life because you're either going to be out there exploiting people because you haven't developed win-win negotiations or you're being exploited.
And I think it's going to be rough.
Alright. How do we balance letting kids follow their passions in their education and requiring them to learn subjects that they have no interest in?
So, yeah. I mean, so connecting the threads of...
Abstract knowledge to concrete results, right?
I mean, if a kid is, let's say that you're unvaccinated, or if your kid is like, well, I need to study science, it'd be like, science may have kept us okay, because, you know, we knew enough to look into what was being proposed, go Santis.
So you've got to find a way to connect things that they're learning because the big question is, when am I ever going to use this?
Perfectly valid question, perfectly sensible question.
You do not want to dismiss that question.
So a kid says, well, okay, when am I going to use this?
When am I going to use this? And you have to find a way to connect what you're teaching to some utility.
Now, that utility could be a long ways down the road, but you have to find some way to connect that.
And if you can't connect that, then you have a big challenge.
Because otherwise, you're just saying, do it because.
Right now, you may say, well, do it because it's in the government curriculum and I have to and so on.
In which case, okay, we're doing it so you don't end up being forced back into government schools or something like that.
But you've got to give them an answer when they say, when am I ever going to learn this?
What's the use of any of this?
Alright, let's see here.
What does it say about couples who unintentionally dress alike, similar color scheme and types of clothing?
I don't know. They have similar tastes, which is probably why they're a couple.
I don't really know. All right.
Let's see here. Let's go back to freedomain.locals.com and circle.
I'm going to circle back. Sacky style.
Sacky style. Let's see here.
What did I miss? Oh, yes.
You did that. Any insights into sleep paralysis, my friend?
Got a lot of those as a kid.
He was also abducted by gray aliens as a kid in his sleep.
Can these be classified as normal nightmares?
I don't know. I don't know.
It doesn't seem to me to be normal, because lots of people who have nightmares who don't have sleep paralysis, but just about everyone who has sleep paralysis has nightmares, it seems.
I don't know if they could be classified as normal nightmares.
They seem like such a strong reaction.
Remember, you know, and again, I'm not saying anything about your friend, I don't know, but you know, a lot of bad things can happen to kids at nighttime.
I'm not just talking about the obvious, you know, child rapes and molestation and so on, but also, you know, the parents who are like, oh, there's going to be a monster in the closet that's going to get you if you try and get out of bed or whatever, like this kind of just fill you full of fear, right?
So I think the kids who've had either inculcated or direct experiences for a lot of fearful situations as kids are probably more likely to end up with that kind of extreme reaction, but I don't know for sure.
What has been your favorite five-year period in your life?
I mean, I'm really enjoying things right now.
It's great. Thanks again for this privilege and this honor.
It's sort of like saying, what's your favorite phase of parenting?
Well, when my kid was very little, I loved that phase.
When they got older, I loved that phase.
Now I love this phase.
She's going to be 14 this month.
Love this phase. So every phase of life has its real pleasures and its real minuses.
You know, what I do like is that...
I don't have to wonder who I'm going to be with and what I'm going to do.
When I was younger, the question is, okay, what am I going to do and who am I going to do it with?
Now I know what I'm going to do for the rest of my life, this, and I know who I'm going to do it with for as long as the universe graces us with our time together.
I've listened to Andrew Tate, and I don't understand why he is so popular.
He simply plays up the masculine and shows up his wealth.
I think there's a little bit more to it than that.
I think he's a fairly astute analyzer of certain trends and motives.
I don't think he's a particularly good debater, but then, you know, it's always easier to...
Nick at people from the sidelines.
But yeah, yeah, I mean, to be muscular, to be wealthy, and so on, well, that's the R-selected goal and ideal, right?
To bed a lot of women, to be muscular, to be wealthy, to have a lot of resources.
I mean, all of that, that's the R-selected.
To, you know, to be a good father, to be a good community member, to be a good husband, to be a good moral person, well, that's not really quite as appealing.
And so he's, not him in particular, but people like that.
Are selling a solution to unhappiness, right?
It's a big question in life, right?
What's the solution to your unhappiness if you're unhappy?
And, you know, everybody's unhappy from time to time, but I'm talking about people who have sort of more of a chronic, dysthymic, low-grade situation.
What's the answer?
What's the answer to your happiness?
Well, I say you have to put yourself forward as somebody who's really happy and positive, right?
Right? It could be a total front, right?
Wasn't there some guy who claimed to be a bodybuilder and not use...
Like, I'm just getting it off this particular diet and so on.
The name Atlas is floating in my mind, but I could be wrong about that.
He was some bodybuilder, and it turned out he was totally juiced and all of that.
So, yeah, it's just kind of selling a lot.
And people will try and give you this...
Assertive, this will solve your problems.
And usually, again, not talking about Andrew Tate, I have no idea what his business model is, but in general, people put forward, well, you see, the problem, the reason you're unhappy is you don't lift.
And if you lift, you'll be happy.
I'm a big fan of exercise myself.
I lift a couple of times a week, and I think it's great.
Does it make you happy? Nope.
Not in and of itself. It's certainly better than nothing, for sure.
Or they say, if you make a lot of money, then you'll be happy.
I'll ask those crypto guys who keep washing up the beach, right?
So, no, that doesn't work either.
Or, you know, you've got to bet a lot of women.
You bet a lot of women, you'll be happy.
You'll be a player. You'll be confident.
You'll be in demand. You know that, right?
But after you've kicked the 20th woman out of your bed who's looking for a daddy substitute because she was unloved, you probably feel a little bit like you're trolling the flesh wastes of early child abuse and you're probably going to feel like a complete and total asshole and you probably should.
So that ain't going to make you happy either.
So everybody's desperate for a solution to unhappiness that just doesn't involve being a good person.
Please, God, give me a way out of my unhappiness.
It just doesn't involve me having to be a virtuous, good, honest, decent, courageous person.
Please, please, just give me something that I can chase away from just being a moral person.
I mean, I've always said the truth.
I've always told you guys the truth at the very beginning of this show.
That I believe that being moral is the only way to be sustainably happy.
It's really tough.
It's tougher than anything you'll ever do.
But the rewards are greater than anything you can experience.
I mean, I wish there was a shortcut.
If I knew a shortcut, I'd probably be a multi-zillionaire or something, right?
But no, I've always really wanted to tell the truth to everyone, and I've tried lots of different ways to be happy, right?
And, yeah, I mean, when I was playing Macbeth, I got really super buff.
Like I was spending three hours a day in the gym doing short, high rep weights, and I got really buff.
And I was doing the lead in a Shakespeare play and lots of fans and really buff and all that.
Didn't make me happy.
Again, it's not terrible.
These aren't awful things, right?
I've been heavier.
I've been lighter.
Doesn't make me particularly happier in general.
I think as you age, it's important to keep your weight down so you don't end up with joint problems because chronic pain will make you unhappy pretty quickly.
But all of the great things that I have in my life that give me true depth, meaning, and happiness and joy are all based upon either the statue of virtue or the shadow it casts.
That's all. That's all of it.
My relationship with the audience.
I have a great relationship with you guys.
Love you to death because I don't lie to you.
I'm not trying to tell you something that isn't true.
I'm not trying to give you a path that hasn't worked for me.
And because I've been doing this for 16 plus 17 years now, I think I have some credibility if you know what I'm talking about.
I come from a mentally ill family with abuse and neglect and addictions and divorces everywhere and I've now been happily married to a wonderful woman for 20 years.
It'll be 20 years soon. So we've known each other at 21.
I mean, you guys have heard my relationship with my daughter.
We're not faking anything. We're not pretending.
That's just how we interact.
I mean, she's just a blast, and we love each other enormously.
And so I think that I've shown the effects of what moral virtue can do in the world, but nobody wants it.
I mean, if it's any consolation, neither do I want it from time to time.
There have certainly been times where it's like, wow, this...
Quite a price to be paid here, you know, and sometimes where it hasn't felt particularly worth it in, you know, very short bursts and so on.
That's the same with everything. You know, there are times when you're a sports guy and you're like, ah, the last thing I want to do is practice today.
And there are times when you're dieting or just exercising in general and you just don't want to do it.
And so, I mean, that's natural. I don't freak out about that.
But, yeah, so there are just endless, endless waves of people Who are offering you a path to happiness that allows you to step over or around the requirements for virtue, honesty, courage, and integrity.
I think they're all drug dealers, frankly.
I think that they're offering you something which may give you happiness.
See, if you want to be happy and somebody tells you, here's a way to do it where you don't have to be morally good, Then you feel a huge relief, right?
Wouldn't you? I mean, wouldn't you feel like a huge relief?
I mean, imagine if it turned out that honesty and integrity and empiricism and science and facts and reality weren't, you know, what was important in life and weren't, you know, consistency and universality weren't necessary for philosophy, well, then I could apologize for all prior statements I'd made that offended people and I could go and rejoin the world and, you know, take my place in the pantheon of the present, right?
Yeah. It's just that's not really an option if you value integrity and I'd rather, you know, have the people in my life who love me, including me, than have the whole world and the empty applause of people relieved to be relinquished of the need to be virtuous.
So if you have a deep suspicion that the reason you're unhappy is because you're not good...
Or not living with integrity.
And someone comes along and says, you know, bet a lot of women, get a six-pack, make some money, and you'll be happy.
It's like, whew, oh, thank goodness.
Well, I can do all of that. I'm in control of that, and no one's going to get super mad at me about that, and I'm not going to alienate people about that.
And so you just, you feel a certain surge of happiness because somebody's let you off the hook of actually having to be a good person.
So you feel this huge surge of relief, and then you mistake that for happiness.
It's just relief. If you were walking down the street and a bullet just hit a wall three inches from you, you'd be incredibly happy to be alive and unharmed.
But you don't want people shooting at you every day to get that feeling, right?
That's just relief that you weren't harmed.
It's not joy at what you've built.
So... The almost bottomless human hunger, which is frankly satanic in its essence, the almost bottomless human hunger for happiness without the requirement of virtue drives unbelievable hell-sent levels and layers of the modern economy.
And it has driven that economy throughout most of human history, but in the present, it's just massive.
Massive. You know, well, you know, if you...
If you lose 20 pounds, put on a lot of makeup and become a TikTok star, you'll be happy.
And of course, you know, the TikTok stars are not happy.
They're stressed and they bail out on a regular basis and so on, right?
So... For women it's, you know, beauty and thinness and makeup and attention, right?
I mean, I saw some video the other day where women were asked, would you rather have a steady, good boyfriend or would you give up Instagram?
Like, would you give up Instagram in order to get a steady, loyal boyfriend?
Boyfriend or Instagram? And the women all chose Instagram because they want addiction.
They're addicted to attention, not flourishing and thriving under the benevolent son of love.
So given our hunger to have happiness without the requirements of virtue, the whole economy has adjusted itself to that supply and demand situation.
The demand for happiness without virtue is worldwide almost infinite and bottomless.
And if you look at the people who are selling solutions to unhappiness that don't involve virtue, that's just about everyone.
It's the fashion industry, it's the movie industry, and it's politics, too.
I want to help the poor, but I don't want to get involved, right?
Because once you start getting involved with actually helping the poor, you realize that the poor are a pretty bloody difficult group to help, because they're addicted to underachievement as well as a way of protecting their abusive parents, usually.
The economy, the political system, our entire way of interacting with each other is all founded on, I'm going to give you the drug called being happy, and that way you get to bypass the requirements to exercise your virtue.
Magic weight loss in a pill, doctors baffled, right?
Your location here.
But you can't be happy in a sustainable way without being virtuous.
It's sort of like, you know, the people constantly talking about, there's a double standard for men and women.
It's like, yeah, yeah, of course, right?
Lord knows women never benefit from that double standard.
Family court, sentencing guidelines, safe jobs, etc., etc.
Longevity, better health.
So, you say, "Oh, you know, well, a woman who sleeps with 20 guys is considered a slut, whereas a guy who sleeps with 20 girls is considered a stud." But that's kind of like saying that somebody who lifts weights is considered stronger than somebody who just drops them.
Because dropping weights is pretty easy.
Just let go. Don't have to hold them up.
Somebody can hand you any amount of weight pretty much and you can just drop it and it's fine, right?
Because it's really not at all tough for a woman to get a man to sleep with him.
But for a man to get a woman to sleep with him is more of a challenge.
So we just tend to respond more to things that are more of a challenge.
Yeah. So, I mean, if a man beats 20 women in arm wrestling, we don't consider him as strong.
But if a woman beats 20 men in arm wrestling, we consider him strong.
It's like, well, yeah, because 40% less upper body strength on average means that it's tougher for a woman to do it.
So that which is tougher, we have some more admiration for us.
All right. Let me get caught up here.
Great questions, guys. Great questions.
Hopefully the answers are not too shabby either.
Yeah, so if you don't grow up with a father, you mostly end up with cliches of masculinity, right?
So you grow up with a father, you have a sort of deep and intimate understanding of masculinity.
You get to see your father in all of his moods and his ups and his downs and you get advice from him and you see him learn over the course of his life and so on.
But if you don't have a father, you are drawn towards cliches, right?
It's like the worse your ideas are, the more you want to inflict them on children, right?
Worst mistake the West ever made was turning over the education of children to the state.
Because then you have a captive audience and if you have really terrible ideas, you need to inflict them on children when children are helpless and captive and can't talk back.
And then you need to attack any adult who questions or opposes these bad ideas as some hateful blah blah blah evil bigot whatever, right?
And that's inevitable. If you have really good ideas, you can be out there writing and debating them among free adults.
But the worse your ideas, the more appalling and self-contradictory and exploitive your ideas, the earlier you want to inflict them on children.
So yeah, whenever I see people swarming towards children's classrooms to inflict their ideas, I'm like, well, by definition, those ideas have to be terrible.
All right. Let's see.
Steph, what music have you been listening to the most in 2022?
I've seen some top 50 albums for year lists and not too many would be considered classic albums.
I found myself going back to albums from 10 to 20 years ago.
So, I'm introducing some of my favorite music to my daughter, and she is introducing some of her favorite music to me, which is a really great cross-pollination.
I've been listening to a lot of The Doors lately, because I'm really, really struggling to understand our capacity for demonology, and The Doors, and Jim Morrison, because I've been listening to an autobiography from Audible, and...
So I've been listening to Doors, really trying to figure out how well this fits into the question of potential demonology.
I'm not saying I can believe in demons now or anything like that, but in terms of the analogy and the metaphors of how it works, it's why I did that analysis of When the Music's Over, not too long ago, or 5 to 1, baby, 1 in 5, no one here gets out of life.
Some of the most... Passionate and degraded and really demonic lyrical and musical performances out there.
It's, I think, 5 to 1.
And now, when Jim Morrison came up with the lyrics for 5 to 1, 5 to 1, baby, 1 in 5, no one here gets out alive.
You get yours, baby, I'll get mine.
Gonna make it, baby, in our prime, the way he growls that, especially live, which is fantastic.
Now, It's probably a coincidence, but I don't think so.
One in five, baby.
One in five.
Five to one. Now, Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist, asked Jim Morrison, what is one in five?
One in five what? What is one in five?
And Jim Morrison said, well, that's for me to know and you to find out.
He never did reveal what one in five was.
Not too hard to figure out, though.
One in five is the exact number of males who are sexually abused as children.
One in three girls, one in five boys.
And we know Jim Morrison, or at least his self-reports were, that he was sexually abused as a child.
And I assume it was pretty awful because he ended up an addict to anal sex.
So he was probably anally raped as a child for...
Some period of time and probably quite a long time and he went to his mother for help and he was a chubby kid too, right?
Chubbiness often is a way of keeping people at bay for a sexual attraction.
So I've been listening to a lot of the Doors and of course the musicianship is quite good and I didn't like his voice that much when I was younger because I was used to the Freddie Mercury angelic purity but I'm really beginning to appreciate his voice more going forward and Jim Morrison himself said that he didn't have a great voice, didn't really like it. So, what I've been listening to, I haven't been listening to too much music when I was, especially when I'm writing, sometimes I will put on instrumental music.
To help with the character or the situation or the environment.
But I have found with the new book, there's no music that does it for me.
I just have to really concentrate on the visuals.
And I've actually found that walking around and voice dictating and even today I was writing and I did weights while I was writing just because I'm dealing with a very physical set of characters in one side of the equation.
And so, yeah, I'm not into music too much at the moment these days.
I did put on an old song that I liked.
From Christenberg called The Risen Lord.
I found myself quite moved by that.
alright yeah 61% drop in sperm counts since 1972 yeah Yeah, I don't know. I mean, could it be hyper-masturbation?
I don't know. Let's see here.
Somebody says, actually, by the hyper-feminization of civilization is a plausible theory, in America especially.
We've also...
Oh, sorry, I just lost that.
I don't know why this interface is like this, but that's all right.
We prosper so much, many physical activities in the striving or working for what you get has decreased.
So, Liver King was the juiced guy.
Yes, thank you, Liver King was the juiced guy.
So... When I was a kid, actually, I think it was shortly after it came out, so I'm going to look this up and find out what the story was.
So there was a famous writer called Desmond Morris, and he wrote a book called The Naked Ape and Human Zoo.
So The Human Zoo was a book I read when I was a kid.
When on earth did that come out?
Published in 1969.
Okay, well, I was only three in 1969.
But I certainly read it when I was in the single digits.
So... And I used this knowledge.
Yeah, fuck off Wikipedia.
I used this knowledge in my novel...
The future, where the tribe that live in the wilderness have great skepticism and hostility towards the people who live in cities.
So the human zoo, the basic argument was that, look, if you look at a zoo, you've got animals enclosed in a natural environment, free from all predation, where they have an excess of resources and no real struggles.
And they go mental. I remember there was this very vivid image or description of a monkey attempting to copulate with a water bowl or something like that.
And so sexual fetishes, neurotic behavior, excessive hair pulling, tripo-trachomania or something like that, that if you look at animals in zoos, they exhibit all forms of deviant and crazed behavior because they're far outside their they exhibit all forms of deviant and crazed behavior because they're far outside their natural environment and the pressures that shaped And if you look at cities, you see very similar phenomena, right?
Which is that, I mean, maybe the reason space aliens have never met us is that they never survived their cities.
I don't know.
Life just hits this crossroad where you get enough comfort and enough abstraction from reality and that abstraction from reality drives insanity and insanity drives death.
That's the wages of sin or death, right, according to the Bible.
So the human zoo had a very big influence on me when I was growing up, and...
I think people who stay in cities are probably not among the wisest of our companions in this journey of life.
So, the feminization of life has a lot to do with city living.
City living is kind of feminine in a way because the city and the government take care of you in the way that a husband used to.
So, I think that's it.
Living King built his whole brand on a lie, right?
Yeah. And Joe Rogan has said to Dwayne Johnson, to The Rock, like, come on, man, there's no way you're not juicing, right?
You look like this in your 50s?
I mean, come on, man. All right.
Yeah, Rogan does, I think, TRT. Dreams and stuff like that, so.
All right, let's see here.
Oh, that song analysis was amazing.
Oh, thank you. Sperm counts drop has been attributed to toxins in the environment, but I suspect it's more than simply that.
Yeah, look, the body is a very big, deep, and complicated mystery in so many different ways.
The body is a very big, deep, and complicated mystery.
The purpose of sperm, of course, is to further life.
How many people are furthering life these days?
All right, so let's see here.
Twitter files, what is Elon's endgame here?
Well, I think it's just to get to the truth and to reveal what has been going on behind the machinations of social media.
Our censorship.
What is going on?
Is it organic?
Right, so there's a basic reality about free markets that I talked about years ago.
I'll just touch on it briefly here because it's important to social media censorship.
The basic reality of free markets is that licensure and tariffs and restrictions on trade and so on are never, ever, ever, ever, ever, they're never demanded by customers.
You know, when the Rockefellers, right?
When Rockefeller comes along and saves the whales.
People don't give him credit for that, right?
But because he invented kerosene, which was much cheaper than whale oil, people stopped hunting whales to provide whale oil to light lamps at night.
The customers never sit there and say, wow, this incredibly productive guy has come in and has really driven down the price of lighting and heating my home.
That's horrible. I have to go to the government to prevent him from saving me all this money, right?
Never happens that way.
What happens is, someone like Rockefeller comes along, and he's, you know, one of these Pareto principal guys who just has this magic touch when it comes to productivity.
And He comes along and the customers love him and vote for him with their dollars.
And his competitors get really angry.
Of course, right? And its competitors, his competitors run to the government and they say, oh, this is terrible, this is monopolistic, gouging, this is...
And it's never, the customers never complain about lower prices and better service.
It's always the people who can't compete who run to the government and bribe or threaten or collude with the government to start imposing licenses and restrictions and breaking up companies, you know, like the gas station S-O-E-S-S-O. Well, S-O is just the acronym for Standard Oil.
It was one of the... Very productive oil companies that was broken up so that less competent people could compete, right?
You know, if you're an asshole in a singing competition, you're very happy to have somebody punch the best singer in the throat so that you can get the prize, right?
So... I would imagine that Elon Musk, having faced these kinds of things in the course of his life, is probably aware that most moral crusades don't come organically from the population, but instead are the result of special interests willing to gain an unjust advantage by avoiding the marketplace.
You don't run to the government because you're embracing the market.
So my guess is that what he wants to do is he's very dedicated towards free speech, of course, and I think that's one of the things he loves about America, as do I. So I think what he's trying to do is he's saying, okay, let's look at this free speech restrictions and the deplatforming and the account deletions and so on.
Do they come organically from the people or are they a result of special interest machinations behind the scenes?
Well... I can't think of a single free speech restriction over the course of my studying of free speech restrictions.
I can't think of a single free speech restriction that did not come from some special interest lobbying the government or the government doing something behind the scenes or maybe in front of the scenes to restrict speech.
They don't come from the people.
Free speech restrictions, just like restrictions on trade, organically do not evolve from the population as a whole.
They require immense amounts of propaganda and the propaganda is designed to cover up the Special interests that are maneuvering to go against the popular will of the people.
In the same way that you have to invent this whole propaganda standard called the robber barons!
The robber barons just out there preying upon people and stealing from people and monopolistic pricing and blah.
Well, all of that propaganda is to cover up the fact that you have special interest groups that are working hard to diminish or destroy the organic movements of people's money and preferences and resources in the free market.
It's the same thing with free speech.
Free speech restrictions, I mean, it's a very simple thing to propagandize.
It's simple and easy and boring and lazy and barely worthy of even mentioning here.
But, of course, the way that you restrict free speech is, oh, so-and-so said this terrible thing, and if you defend him, you're defending that terrible thing.
And, of course, that terrible thing is never lying people into a war or lying about an election.
That's never the terrible thing.
It's always like, well, so-and-so said something outrageous.
Should they have the right to say that?
And if you say yes, then they say, well, then you must support that outrageous thing.
Now, whatever outrageous thing, right, the reason why you'd want that out in the public square is so that it can be pushed back and disproven, right?
So whatever outrageous thing that you just find unconscionable, and there are things out there, of course, that I find outrageous and unconscionable, and the reason you want those out in the public square is that, though, there are people who are going to believe crazy things no matter what, and there are going to be people who reject crazy things no matter what.
The problem is all the people in the middle, and the solution is to have a robust debate where the ideas that are false and wrong and bad or whatever, right, get regularly exposed, and the people in the If you ban that speech, all you do is create a subculture that is inward-looking, that is an echo chamber, and that never gets disassembled by more competent people in the mainstream so that the people in the middle can see the bad ideas, the false ideas, and reject them.
You shine a light on the things that you want to expose and diminish.
Now, things being disproven won't eliminate the people who are going to believe false things no matter what.
And it won't help those people who are going to reject false things no matter what.
But the people in the middle, which could be a small, like it could be a flat bell curve, it could be a very tall bell curve, but the people in the middle need to see the arguments from both sides to make sure that what's being banned, or what people want to ban, you have to really make sure that it's false, right?
Now, it being false doesn't mean that you should ban things.
Because once you break that precedent, so we're going to ban things that we perceive to be false.
Well, that requires a godlike level of vanity regarding epistemology that only an insane person would have.
Like, only an insane person would say, I have the power to know what is true and false, and therefore I'm going to ban that which is false.
Now, of course, if you genuinely had the ability to know, not just now in time, but through all time, what is true and what is false, the last thing you'd be doing is working at some shitty basement-dwelling content moderation job in some flat-ass social media hellscape of a nonsense.
If you actually knew what was true and false...
Deeply in human nature and deeply in epistemology and metaphysics and across all of time, well, you'd be the richest person on the planet because you would know which business models were going to succeed, which business models were going to fail.
You would be able to invest.
You'd know when the price of the yen was going to go up and when the price of the Australian dollar was going to go down and you'd be able to arbitrage yourself into a massive amount.
If you knew what was true and what was false and what was right and what was wrong, the last thing you'd be doing is...
Tapping for minimum wage in the basement of a social media company, you'd be out there making an unbelievable, absolute, complete, and total fortune in the free market.
So the idea that there are people who...
But the idea of this hate speech, all of that is simply promoted so that people can censor others.
It's not coming organically from the people.
The people do want to see bad, crazy ideas, and they want to see them disproven.
I love when bad, crazy ideas are attacked and disproven.
I think that's wonderful. But people don't want to see those bad ideas suppressed.
I mean, I grew up in the age of Maury, and I grew up in the age of, like, you know, the KKK on Geraldo, right?
So, yeah, people want to see the spectacle of crazy ideas meeting calm, competent, and sane ideas.
Thinkers and debaters and reasoners.
That only strengthens... When you see bad ideas get taken down, you gain an important skill, which is to see how it's done, to learn.
So just banning those ideas doesn't solve the problem of extremism.
It just makes more extremism.
It requires a degree of human vanity that is...
Right within the circle of mental illness, like only crazy people believe that they know what's true and know what's false and can ban people's speech based upon that, right?
And of course, all it would take is for one of those people to be wrong, which they are on a regular basis, and then you'd have to just dismantle the whole thing.
No, no, no. Free speech restrictions never come from the people as a whole.
They always come from special interests who wish to push bad ideas without opposition.
Absolutely, absolutely the case.
So with Twitter, I assume that his end game is to show that speech suppression, at least on the platform that he's in charge of, which, you know, could be more of a crime scene than anything else these days, but...
I assume that his endgame is to show that speech restrictions do not come from the people.
They do not come from moral standards.
They do not come from universal ethics.
They come from special interest groups putting extraordinary pressure on organizations for ideological purposes and so on, right?
We are thinking about the Waldorf School for our daughter, who seemed to be four years old.
Any ideas about the anthropology?
Anthropo... What the heck is that word?
Anthropo... These are like my original reading glasses from like, I don't know, 12 years ago.
Wait, 12? Gosh, more.
Anyway. Any ideas about the anthroposophical approach?
Anthroposophical approach? I have no idea what that is.
I'm generally a big fan of homeschooling.
That's the closest to how we evolved, and that's a pretty good way to do it.
Alright, we've got a little bit more time here.
Okay. Move from the city to a farm, from leftist artist to a rightist farmer.
Now, metaposition, big shift, very cool to go through.
When you have to deal with tangible reality and math actually means something, like if you don't have the money, you can't pay the bills, you tend to get out of the abstracts and into your body, right?
A child abuse drives you out of your body, material reality brings you back.
And this is why abusers want to keep you as far away from material reality.
Like, people who abuse come up with things like postmodernism, relativism, subjectivism, and all of that.
They come up with these things in order to keep you from empiricism, to keep you from reason and evidence, which draws you back to your body, because in the body...
These are the footprints, the bloody footprints of the crimes of the abuser.
So, abusers want to invent all of this abstract, baffle-gab, postmodern bullshit in order so the reality of empiricism and reason and evidence in your body, right?
I mean, it was no accident that when I got back into my body, so to speak, I discovered the crimes of my parents.
In your body is the evidence of the crimes of your parents.
And therefore the abusers, and certainly the French philosophers and a lot of the German philosophers are outright abusers.
Yeah, they just invent all this baffle-gap language to keep you out there among the stars so that you're so far away that you can't see the crimes and the bodies and the shadows left by their fists and genitalia on the scars of your heart.
All right. My theory on sperm count drop is that it's an effective artificial selection.
Women's hormones are primed to choose more feminine partners while on the pill.
Do this for a few generations and men will be more feminine and sperm count will naturally drop accordingly.
I don't think we've had enough time for anything like that to occur.
A couple of generations is nothing from an evolutionary standpoint.
All right. Yeah, there's a study showing that women prefer more feminine men when women are on the pill.
Yeah, I mean, women don't particularly know what they want.
All they know is what the hormones in their system want.
All right. Let's see here.
Jump to recent messages.
Boing! There we go. All right.
Yes, you can, in fact, tip me on this live stream.
I appreciate that. Come on, these are pretty good thoughts.
All right. You said once that your therapist betrayed you.
Care to elaborate how she did that?
I won't, in fact, if that's right with you.
I won't. All right.
Are we done?
Oh my gosh. We've reached the end of philosophy.
We're done. Well, that's it.
We've reached all the very end.
Let me just go back here. I'm sure that there's more.
There's more. I have a speech on accountability, but I think I'll wait for that.
All right. Somebody's typing.
If this is a good question...
Can you speak on why people are ambivalent?
I find it really annoying. So ambivalence is not...
I don't care. Ambivalence is very strong opposing forces within you, right?
So the reason that people are ambivalent is that they have two very strong-willed and oppositional people who've been an authority over them when they're children, and so they fail to develop much of an autonomy, much of...
Their own capacity to evaluate facts and make decisions, and so what they do is they appease people.
Now, if you have two people, so you think of a dad and a mom, they got divorced, they hate each other and so on, right?
So, looking good today, Steph.
I'm sorry, are you saying there's a day that I don't look good?
Actually, yeah, Hong Kong documentary.
Anyway, so... If you've got oppositional people in your life, then you have to try and please both people.
You can't. And so you tend to have strong opinions one way and then strong opinions the other way, and you're kind of lost in the middle.
So very few people are able to elbow aside inflicted voices and develop their own approach to reality, which is kind of what philosophy is trying to help us all do.
But I think that's the...
Yeah, I don't know why you keep asking this military history question.
I have no idea how to answer that.
Sorry. Have you seen the series called The Chosen?
It's a free recent series about the life of Jesus.
I did start watching that.
A friend of mine recommended it to me.
I didn't find it particularly grabbing.
It seemed very autobiographical and very detail-oriented, and I prefer more philosophical stories.
So this is why I'm working on a new book rather than consuming that.
So no, I didn't really get into it.
And, you know, people could say, well, you know, give it a couple of episodes and so on.
It's like, maybe, maybe.
But if there's other stuff out there that's good, that would be great.
All right. Well, listen, guys, thank you so much for a great chat this afternoon.
A deep and abiding pleasure to have these conversations.
You guys really are, I genuinely believe, the greatest audience in the history of the planet.
And thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do this.
Please don't forget... Oh yeah, there's a little bit of news, so I spent some time yesterday, I created a whole feed for my 19-part History of Philosophers series, which I will complete at some point.
I'm just really neck-deep in this book at the moment, and I can't do both at the same time.
The book just kind of took over.
You know, sometimes I can guide my unconscious, sometimes I just have to write it.
So... If you are a subscriber, either on Telegram or on Locals, if you are a subscriber, then you get the feed.
And what that means is you don't have to hunt through the post to find the, you just paste the feed into your podcast program and it will download everything and it's all there for you.
And I'm really incredibly pleased and proud with my History of Philosophers series.
It was, I thought it was going to be great and it was even better than I thought.
So thank you Unconscious and thank you Community.
For the support, so you can get that at freedemand.locals.com.
If you want to use the promo code, all caps, UPB2022, you get a free month.
You get my last book, The Future, and this book will go out the same way.
And yeah, thanks guys. Lots of love.
Have yourself a completely wonderful and splendiferous day, as a friend of mine used to say.
And I will talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection