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Dec. 18, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:29:48

Why People Drink! Freedomain Livestream 18 Dec 2022

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	Hello, good morning.
	Hi, it's Steph. How you doing?
	Oh gosh, we're getting very close to the magic season of Christmas.
	I hope you guys are having a wonderful time.
	And just, you know, I guess as a warm-up, as a question, how many of you live with chronic pain?
	I'm just kind of curious about that.
	And how many of you Have to deal with or live with chronic pain.
	Oh, your dad does? It's rough, right?
	I don't, I don't, but I'm just curious how many people out there.
	And if you could give your age range, I'd be curious about that.
	It's a tragic and fascinating situation.
	No, you're 46.
	Somebody says it. Oh, chronic knee issues.
	Oof. Yeah, yeah.
	You're 40 years old.
	Lupus 49. Oh, that's tough.
	Oh, that's tough. I'm sorry.
	50-something young, early 20s none.
	Nope, 60. My dad is 60, worked hard his whole life.
	Yeah, it's just a really interesting phenomenon, and massive sympathy goes out to the people who are living with chronic pain, but it's a crab and a half, I think.
	I don't have any chronic health issues, and I don't really have any chronic pain.
	I did bang my knee up playing with my daughter.
	I was giving a speech in St.
	Louis, and I was running down a hallway.
	I had some new sneakers on, and I was chasing my daughter, and I guess maybe the floor had just been waxed.
	It was one of these tile floors, and my knee just...
	I came down and the sneaker gripped like a codependent and I just went down and banged hell out of my knee.
	I went to a bunch of physiotherapists who actually gave me nothing of value and I eventually just got one of these massage guns and just gritted my teeth and, you know, put a stick between my teeth and just massaged the living crap out of my knee until all the pain went away.
	But yeah, that was kind of rough.
	It's kind of rough. But yeah, so I think that was the longest.
	I could still, you know, obviously walk around and so on, but it was a little tough.
	Because the other thing too, you get into your 50s, this is a little bookmark for the people who are coming up on the ranks of the years.
	Get ready for the time when you just don't heal that much anymore.
	It's a funny thing. You know, I mean, I got some cuts.
	I don't know if you can see them. I got some cuts from the ducks the other day.
	And, um, they, they, they flew, we, they flew into a place that I had to go and retrieve them, uh, relatively rapidly.
	And they, uh, they kind of panicked and, and, uh, I can't really, can I twist it around to see this anyway?
	So no biggie, but I got some scratches.
	So scratches heal and all that, but like this, you know, tendon stuff and, and, and muscle stuff and so on.
	I have to use this, uh, massage gun.
	Uh, if I, like I played two hours, uh, pretty, pretty straight hard pickleball a couple of nights ago.
	And, uh, When I got up the next morning, I'm like, I have been ridden hard and put away wet.
	So I had to use this massage gun for like 10-15 minutes just to get all the blood flowing again.
	Those things were deadly.
	I don't know, you're talking about massage guns?
	I think they're fantastic. Because of course, over COVID, I like a good massage.
	And over COVID, I couldn't really get them.
	Yeah. Hi, Steph.
	I'm 40 years old, 49 years old today.
	Virtual piece of cake. Oh, happy birthday to you, man.
	Happy birthday. You are one of these people, a friend of mine growing up, one of these people whose birthday is tragically close to Christmas, right?
	So I hope you got two presents, but it's nice having a birthday not too close for Christmas so you get a Christmas called you.
	Not that. Somebody says here, broke my back when I was 30.
	Now 37, pained 24-7 from it.
	Worked hard with physical therapists and only used pain med sparingly.
	30-day supply lasted a few years.
	Diet, exercise, and most of all, proper sleep.
	Did wonders. Yeah, the singer, John Anderson, I think, broke his back as well, or his neck, while he was hanging Christmas lights a couple years back, and...
	It's funny because, you know, I mean, he's a great singer and a good songwriter, but one of the least charismatic performers I've ever seen in my life.
	Like, I went to go, I've seen him twice in concert, once in a big venue, once in a smaller venue, and he's like Men at Work style, just stand around and sing.
	I think he did better.
	No, this was about 30 years ago I saw Yes Live, this sort of the post-90210 stuff.
	And, yeah, they named their album the album number in the catalog.
	So, yeah, he's really just about the least charismatic performer I've ever seen.
	I mean, I'm not saying every performer has to get sort of Freddie Mercury levels of energy and connection and playfulness and all of that, but he could actually even sing higher than he did on the albums, which is really quite unusual and an amazing voice.
	Oh, you just saw him live a few weeks ago.
	Yeah, I saw he was touring with just his guitar and telling stories and all of that.
	But yeah, he's an amazing singer.
	And when you listen to the sort of second half of Friends of Mr.
	Cairo, when it goes into the soft part, which I actually thought was two songs for quite a while.
	I love that album. Yeah, the album is Friends of Mystic High is a great album.
	John and Vangelis. Vangelis is the guy who did the theme from that running movie that was really boring.
	Not the theme, but the movie, Chariots of Fire.
	But I thought it was two songs.
	Great. Back to School, fun song.
	The second side of State of Independence, a fantastic sort of Middle Eastern flavored song that was covered, I think, by Chrissy Hynde at one point.
	And just wonderful, wonderful stuff.
	Let's see here. Sorry, just catching up.
	I have a big topic for today, if you want to.
	Later on the soundtrack. Was Vangelis at Peak Talent?
	Yeah, that was great too. Fauci Twitter files releasing today.
	We'll just find out what we already know, but people will...
	What people will not do is key, so programmed.
	Yeah, I was talking about this.
	I had a big social gathering yesterday and was talking about this with some friends.
	They were of the opinion that, you know, it's the argument that it's easier to fool people than for them to admit that they were fools, right?
	And if you dangle in front of people, here's an easy way to do good.
	Most people will snap at it.
	And of course, doing good, at least in the current world and throughout most of human history, doing good is horrible.
	Doing good in the world.
	I don't mean in your personal relationships.
	That can be horrible too.
	But the purpose of doing good in your personal relationships is to have yourself surrounded by people where doing good is rewarded and a positive thing and a great thing.
	But doing good in society is...
	The punishments have increased because our capacity to do good has increased.
	And so doing good in society is a difficult and horrible thing at times.
	And I mean, there are great rewards in terms of a good relationship with your conscience and the capacity to love and be loved and all of that.
	So the personal rewards are...
	It's beyond fantastic, but because we don't have gatekeepers in the world anymore, keeping those who oppose the spread of power from the public square.
	I mean, there was no public square when I was growing up.
	There was no public square.
	You had to get published.
	There was no internet. You had to get published, and the gatekeepers...
	Whenever you have a bottleneck in access to changing people's minds...
	The ideologues install themselves in that bottleneck and relentlessly keep everyone else who opposes their narrative away from the public square.
	So the bottleneck was the hiring people in universities, the bottleneck was the hiring people in government schools, the bottleneck was the publishing industry, the movie makers, the musicians, the people who allowed music into the public square.
	So they would promote people with terrible messages and they would demote people with healthy, positive messages.
	And, of course, they were, Mr.
	Gene Simmons, like, the government says it, just obey the government.
	It's like, well, that's because the people he likes, I don't know, on the left or whatever, when they weren't in control of government.
	They were very anti-establishment, but now they are in control of government.
	They seem to be very pro-obedience.
	We're not gonna take...
	Oh wait, no, actually we are. I know, different...
	Dees and I had a different guy, but...
	So, when I was talking with my friends last night, we were having a good old round-the-dinner-table chat, and with the inevitable...
	You keep thinking it's thunder, but it's just kids playing upstairs, which is a blast.
	But... The question was, you know, why are people ever going to admit that there were reasonable questions to be asked about these mRNA shots?
	So my argument was, it's not that people have been fooled, it's that nobody wants to look in the mirror and say, I was fairly easily tricked into hating or scorning or rejecting or acting badly against my fellow man.
	I mean, there are studies out that the unvaccinated are more or as much despised as the most despised minorities.
	And of course, nobody should despise minorities and nobody should despise people who are unvaccinated.
	But to look in the mirror and say, oof...
	I guess I now know what I would have done at pivotal moments in human history.
	I now know that I would have sided with the bad guys or at least been easily trained into hating my fellow man.
	That's a really tough thing to look in the mirror and see.
	That's very tough. And I think that's one of the big issues that people are going to have going forward.
	Now the CDC, I think, is admitting that there is a relationship between the shots and blood clots.
	So yeah, the people who didn't had good reason Wise in many ways, and some were not, or some of the people who avoided or refused or attacked the vaccines were completely mental, and I think pretty horrible in terms of their predictions of rampant death among the vaccinated, and it's not happened.
	But it was wise, I think, to be sceptical.
	You can have science or you can have government-funded whatever.
	And maybe the difference is people who've read Atlas Shrugged and people who haven't.
	Like, if you've read Atlas Shrugged, you know the story of Dr.
	Robert Stadler, who is a government scientist and ending up consumed by his own scientific invention.
	But it's not science.
	If it's run by the government, it becomes very quickly money-making propaganda and bullying and punishment.
	I mean, the reason why scientists fell into line so easily was that there were certain key figures in government and all throughout the West that controlled funding, that controlled careers, that controlled access to being a scientist.
	And the moment you get someone with that degree of power controlling untold billions of dollars of scientific funding, science is corrupted.
	Science was originally supposed to be like Bitcoin.
	It was decentralized.
	And they fiat currency, the Bitcoin of science, by putting the government in charge of scientific careers.
	Well, you put the government in charge of accreditation.
	At the moment the government is in charge of accreditation, then the gatekeepers are going to swarm to promote accreditation among those who agree with them and keep accreditation away from...
	I mean, when I was in graduate school...
	I don't mean to blow my own horn, but I was recognized as a star.
	One of my essays was read out to the class by a professor, a class of a couple of hundred people, saying this is one of the few perfect essays he's ever seen ever.
	In his career, and I was really recognized, me and one other guy really recognized as a star, but the other guy was on the left, and he was really promoted, and I was not on the left.
	I was still a minarchist at that point, but I was not on the left, and yeah, it took me forever to get a graduate school advisor, and it was really a tough row.
	So, you know, you're swimming against the current if you're going against the narrative, and so accreditation, and then funding, and all of that, and The moment that you give the government power over science, it's not science anymore.
	It's not science because...
	And I'm not blaming any individual.
	It's really, really important. I mean, this is my perspective.
	You may or may not blame particular individuals, but if the system is really terrible, if the system has all the wrong incentives, then blaming individuals...
	It's really tough. We as human beings, we are addicted to power.
	And I don't, you know, there's a reason we became top of the food chain, apex predators, the reason we were pretty much in charge of the planet, because we are addicted to power.
	Now, we are addicted to dominance, we're addicted to power, and we're addicted to manipulation in pursuit of those ends.
	And it's not a curse among human beings.
	All animals are addicted to power and domination.
	All of them. And even if they're prey species, they're addicted to domination in the reproductive game.
	In other words, elbow. You can see frogs having terrible fights in order to get a hold of mating opportunities for the females.
	So... All of this stuff is foundational to our success as a species.
	We succeeded because we are the most addicted to power and domination and manipulation.
	Now, if you're in a free market situation, then power comes out of service to customers.
	I mean, I'm in the ultimate free market situation here.
	I'm not even charging for this, right?
	I'm relying on... Oh, and you can, by the way, tip me if you want on our little Sunday service here.
	But... You have to provide value to customers in a voluntary way in order to gain resources in a free market to get paid for anything or to get donations.
	So our pursuit of power is transformed by the free market into the pursuit of service to others, making their lives better or preventing their lives from becoming worse or giving them some pleasure that's positive.
	That's in the free market.
	Our manipulation...
	In the free market, manipulation is not lying people into deadly things, like lying them into war or lying them into horrible, deadly things.
	Manipulation in the free market takes the relatively benign form of advertising, which is, you know, hey, you might like this product, can't force you to do anything, but you might like this product.
	And... Trying to convince someone to try your product.
	I mean, ads can be intrusive and annoying, but that's also because, you know, the population is pretty dumped down by bad schools and too much media to the point where you really can't have sophisticated, clever ads, which you used to be able to have in the past more.
	But then ads, of course, have become another form of social programming.
	But... Manipulation is not lying people into believing in some horrible deity that requires them to sacrifice their children.
	I mean, that's manipulation in a coercive environment.
	Manipulation in the free market is getting on your knees basically and begging people to at least try your product and see if they like it.
	And most people will say no to all of that.
	I think there's an average of...
	Is it 17 impressions of an ad before somebody may or may not try the product?
	So that's manipulation.
	Dominance in the free market...
	So dominance in a coercive environment is...
	I kill you, you kill me, I beat you up, you beat me up, and all of that, right?
	That's dominance in a coercive environment.
	Dominance in a free market environment...
	Is when you're competing against others to get the customer's resources, to trade with the customer, right?
	So when I was in the business world, it was called an RFP, a request for proposal.
	I would go on these endless tours, which were a lot of fun.
	I was a young guy and single.
	It was a lot of fun to go on these tours and stay at nice hotels and speak at conferences and give presentations to clients and all of that.
	And it was actually good prep for my Truth About series of the PowerPoints, fabled PowerPoints of yore.
	And so what would happen is we would inform the clients how we could help them.
	And the only people who were rich enough to afford my software were Fortune 500 clients, so we'd really hit those.
	And I did that in Europe.
	I did that in Asia, in China in particular.
	I did that all throughout North America.
	Hashtag, except Mexico.
	And they weren't that interested in environmental stuff at that time.
	So I would go and do these presentations and then we would inform them, oh, there is a better way of handling your pollution and making sure that you minimize your air and groundwater and wastewater effusions or effluents.
	So we would inform them that all of this stuff was available and then they would go to, they say, wow, we're going to put out an RFP, we're going to research the market and then there was people we would compete with and We would aim to get the, you know, Fluid Bean competition with other people providing similar services, and we would try and win.
	Great. That's what you want, right?
	So that competition is all peaceful, and it drives excellence.
	It drives customer satisfaction.
	It drives innovation, right?
	So it's not murderous.
	It's not destructive. It is productive.
	And we actually ended up hiring.
	We did so well, we hired away some people from competitors who wanted to join us because we were doing so well.
	So in the free market, our desire for dominance is transferred to dominating nature, right?
	Clearing out land and building nice houses and building beautiful bridges and...
	That's dominance. Competing against other entities to get the customer dollars.
	Manipulation is trying to convince people.
	Makeup is manipulation.
	It's a simulation of sexual arousal on the part of women.
	To bypass male judgment faculties and get straight to the money-giving hormones that lie beneath, fairly close to the surface of all males, certainly human males.
	When you have, as science, in the free market, anyone could join.
	Everyone could join. Like, there are tons of stories of people...
	I write about this, actually, in my novel, Just Poor.
	JustPoorNovel.com. You should check it out.
	It's one of my greatest books, and probably one of the greatest books I'll ever write.
	Because I don't quite have that creative...
	I have much more rigor in my writing, but I don't have just quite that edge of creative, wow, that happened in that book and in almost.
	But... And in the God of Atheists.
	But I write about this in my novel Just Poor, just about how many brilliant people there were out in the middle of nowhere contributing to science.
	Some farmer who had some particular brilliance in the field would study and read and they would all write back and forth and they didn't care if you were a farmer.
	They just cared if you can contribute something.
	So there was this It was the internet of its time, before bottlenecks, before credentialism, before the indoctrination that you're required to prove, to swear your loyalty to bullshit in order to get your PhD, the piled higher and deeper.
	The crap that was called piled higher and deeper may still be called that.
	So, yeah, back when you had a free market in science, in that anyone could join, they didn't care about your credentials, they didn't care about your education, they didn't care about your training, it could be helpful, but you would see people, like the most famous scientists we know, and you go through their letters and they're writing to just about anyone and everyone.
	There was a free market, of course, prior to massive copyrights.
	The reason we have a classical music genre is that, and the reason why it tended to be focused in Central Europe, is that Central Europe didn't have all of these crushing copyright things to limit the spread and playing on other people's music, adaptations and building upon other people's music.
	England had this kind of thing, so there's very little classical music that comes out of England, and most of it comes out of the continent, because there was a free market market.
	in music.
	And so you could compose and you could play upon other people's, build upon other people's music without fear of being dragged into court and having your life wrecked and all that.
	So there was reason, right?
	I don't trust individuals.
	I mean, other than obviously you guys, people in my circle and so on.
	I don't trust individuals because throughout history, individuals mostly are like water.
	They just adapt themselves to whatever fashionable container is held before them, right?
	You pour water into a mug.
	By gosh, it looks like a mug, right?
	Into a test tube. By God, it looks like a test tube.
	And most people have no particular beliefs, no particular spine.
	They'll just be poured into, by culture, by parents, by schools, into just some fashionable container.
	And they will take the shape of that.
	I read about that in my free book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion.
	It's my first philosophical book.
	You can get that at freedomain.com slash books, all for free.
	And so, I don't trust people to have any particular integrity in Spine.
	In the future, that will be the case, but right now, most people have lost strong religion, and most people have not gained what I think is even stronger philosophy.
	They've lost God, they haven't gained UPB, and so they're just...
	Like early mammals under the feet of dinosaurs.
	They're just trying to survive and get through and tell themselves that they're the good guys because nobody wants to look in the mirror and say, I'm the bad guy.
	Except maybe Billy Irish, I suppose.
	So I'm not going to trust people.
	So when people say, trust science, it's like, okay, well, science is a process with many mistakes.
	Many, many... Remember fusion in a jar?
	Remember all those doctors who said that smoking wasn't bad for you?
	Remember all those people who said that eggs and bacon were going to kill you?
	Remember all those people who said red meat was really bad?
	Remember all those people who said that...
	SSRI medication for decreased whatever in the brain was the way to cure and it turns out that that's not even remotely true.
	So think all of these missteps and so on.
	Human beings are fallible and you need a scientific method to point out that fallibility.
	People will always cut corners for fame.
	People will always be tempted to follow the leader.
	People respond to incentives and will not destroy an entire career for the sake of some Abstract principle because we're not designed to pursue abstract principles.
	We're designed to survive.
	And if pursuing an abstract principle such as integrity and honesty and so on is going to destroy your capacity to earn an income and provide for your family, like 99 people out of A hundred.
	And I don't blame anyone for this.
	I don't view it as a negative.
	It's why we're all here. If everybody had stood on principle, we all would have been killed by the warlords and witch doctors of the past and we wouldn't even be here as a species.
	So the fact that people, that we're all evolutionarily speaking, we're designed for survival, not integrity.
	We're designed for staying alive, reproducing and feeding our young, not for some abstract moral principles of perfection.
	So I just know that.
	It's just because I accept evolution, so I accept that we survived by surviving.
	We didn't survive by being good.
	Now, I'd like to have a society where the two are one and the same, being good and surviving are one and the same, which is why I wrote about that in my novel, The Future.
	You can get it at freedomain.locals.com for subscribers.
	But that's what we're for.
	So when you talk about trust science, I mean, why on earth would I... You can't trust an abstract principle.
	Science is an abstract principle.
	You can't trust an abstract principle.
	It's like saying, trust logic.
	It's like, well, I can't trust an abstract principle.
	I can trust. Trust is only required by individuals.
	And so what I do is I don't trust science.
	I don't trust logic. I trust human nature.
	Human nature is... Pretty solid, pretty fixed, because everyone across the world evolved to survive, and because we want to survive more than we want to be good or have integrity or be honest or be virtuous, but we want all these things,
	so all the elites do, all across from Polynesian islands to the Roman Empire to ancient Chinese dynasties or whatever, What they do is they say that being good is obeying us, and therefore you get to survive, and you get to pat yourself on the back and feel like you're a good person.
	And that's part of survival, right?
	Because if you say, well, I have to obey this dynasty, or I have to obey Genghis Khan because, you know, he'll have me killed if I don't, Then you tend to get kind of depressed, right?
	And if you tend to get kind of depressed, it's pretty hard to attract a mate.
	And if you lose all your charisma because you see the world as it actually is, then that is going to kill your reproductive chances.
	So we also adapted to believing that we are good because we are told we are good for compliance.
	That's just an adaptation.
	In other words, the people who could not gaslight themselves and lie to themselves and say, Yeah, I'm complying with the guy who's got a sword to my neck, and it's virtuous to do that, right?
	Because if it was virtuous, then he wouldn't be holding a sword to your neck if you're trying to convince you of the virtue of it.
	The people who couldn't do that fell into depression and either were too depressed to feed their children or too depressed to attract a mate and have children, and that level of looking at the world as it is and seeing it as it is, I got scrubbed out of the gene pool whenever it would erupt from time to time, and it would erupt from time to time just in the random world.
	Evolution and genetics of personality, you get the skeptics and the questioners, and then they get dealt with very harshly as lessons to everyone else.
	So, I mean, the idea of trusting logic or trusting the science is like, no, I trust individuals.
	At the moment, I trust them to respond to incentives.
	It's what I trust people to do. I trust people to respond to incentives.
	So when you've got people in charge of billions and billions of dollars of government funding who have particular ideological bents, you can trust people.
	Again, some exceptions, and we can call them noble, absolutely, for sure.
	But you can trust the vast majority of people.
	Just get in line.
	Get in line. And it may torture them privately, but so what?
	I mean, evolution doesn't care about what tortures you privately.
	It only cares whether you have enough resources to both have and keep alive your children.
	And this is why parents teach their children to comply because there's really not much point having children if those children are going to get ostracized or like sexually or tribally going to get ostracized and your genes don't get passed along.
	Then you have one generation that doesn't keep going which you taught the truth to.
	And now I think there are more possibilities.
	Let's see here. Sorry, that was a fairly lengthy speech, not even one I planned.
	But yeah, people would just respond to incentives.
	So I don't look at individuals, I just look at the incentives, right?
	I just look at the incentives.
	I didn't need to know much about the vaccines.
	I mean, I studied them at all.
	I didn't really need to know much about the vaccines.
	I just was aware that the manufacturers wanted immunity for From liability.
	That's all they needed, right? That's all they needed.
	And it's a wild thing, too, to think that the state can just sign a contract to take away your right to sue for damage from a manufacturer.
	I mean, it seems to be a pretty foundational right.
	They just, just sign it away.
	Just sign it away. Alright.
	What do you think of the term conspiracy theorist from a philosophical context?
	Well, the word conspiracy theorist was invented by intelligence agencies to discredit people noticing obvious patterns.
	This is not an organic thing.
	It didn't just arrive because people found a need for that.
	The word conspiracy theorist was invented by intelligence agencies to cover up their own machinations.
	I mean, a theory is a perfectly valid thing to have.
	Is there such a thing as conspiracy?
	I'm sorry, it's just kind of funny, right?
	Don't be so conspiratorial.
	Conspiracies don't exist. It's like, well, I mean, in America and most countries, you know that conspiracy exists in the law.
	There is a charge called conspiracy, which is when you get together with a bunch of other things, other people to do bad things.
	Conspiracy theory. Okay, so do you dislike that people have theories?
	That you've got to get rid of just about everything you use.
	Everything, right? All of the buildings and all of the cars were once just a dream in somebody's head.
	So... And do you think that there's no such thing as conspiracy?
	Well, then you better reform the law and take out the pretty wide swath of charges involving conspiracy that actually exist in the law.
	So... Yeah, it's just a...
	It's a magic wand to wave away...
	When you live in a coercive environment, for a lot of people all they're doing is trying to manage their anxiety and their instincts are trying to keep them away from things that are going to interfere with their ability to thrive and survive as best they can in that environment.
	So they need a magic wand to wave away ideas that are going to make them anxious and depressed.
	Now, they can't sit there and say, well, I can't learn the truth because that will make me anxious and depressed because even saying that is going to make you anxious and depressed for most people, right?
	I seem to have this, I don't know, strange robustness with regards to this, but I know for most people...
	So they can't say that.
	So there was a desperate need, and this all came out of the JFK stuff, right?
	So there was this desperate need for people to have a magic wand to wave away basic patterns and facts about the world that would make them anxious and depressed without saying, I want to wave away basic facts about the world I live in because it's going to make me depressed because that would make them depressed.
	It has to be something where you feel like a smart person, a wise person, a good person, a moral person, a skeptical and intelligent person for waving away pretty obvious patterns that exist in the world.
	And so there was, at the same time as a great hunger was there for the magic words to wave away Pretty obvious collusion conspiracies.
	The media and whoever runs it all, they all just handed this out, conspiracy theory and so on.
	So, yeah. It's a conspiracy theorist.
	And yes, every time there's any kind of public dump of information, what do we see?
	Conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy.
	So, you know, what's the difference between a conspiracy theory and proven facts ignored by the media?
	A couple of months these days, right?
	Used to be years and used to be decades, right?
	All right. Let's see here.
	Hi, Steph. Why do so many people lack any semblance of discretion with strangers nowadays, especially in professional settings?
	I can't scroll through LinkedIn without every other post being some woman talking about her abortion experience or a screed about destigmatizing an STD they caught.
	It's nothing private anymore.
	I think... In general, men have a stronger barrier between the private and the public.
	And one of the reasons for that is...
	See, if you really speak your vulnerabilities as a man...
	If you open up, then you're...
	It's male fragility and you're just about to lash out and it's dangerous, right?
	And if you don't do that...
	If you keep your emotions more private and so on...
	Then you're emotionally unavailable and it's a trait of toxic masculinity.
	So you're either... Destabilized and crazy and about to lash out or you're a brick wall with no emotional expression and that's toxic.
	So, men...
	I'm just writing about this in my novel, of course.
	I just passed 65,000 words and I'm in the last third.
	So, this novel is a love story set in the men's rights movement and men are not rewarded.
	In fact, they're punished for showing vulnerability and asking for fairness, right?
	I was reading this report the other day that People studying and practicing psychology, 30 and under, only 5% of them are men.
	5% of them are men.
	Now, I haven't looked into this, but I'm pretty positive there's not a giant sense of panic in the psychology movement or the psychology profession saying, my gosh, we are alienating these men.
	We're not reaching out to these men.
	We've got to find a way to be more friendly to men.
	Why are there only 5% of the men in our profession?
	No, they're not doing any of that.
	And yet, if women choose not to enter an arena for various reasons, like women like to work more with people than with things, so if there aren't enough women in a field that women find lucrative and valuable, then this will be a huge crisis.
	And being a psychologist is a pretty sweet gig, right?
	I mean, so there won't be any sorry about that.
	So if men were to complain about this, then this would be considered a toxic attack upon female solidarity or some sort of right.
	So some of the magic words that you use to just wave away people's concerns.
	And of course, I mean, the challenge, of course, is that you really could make the case in the field of psychology.
	There are some, I mean, you would certainly say that some women would want to deal with female psychologists for various reasons if they've been abused and so on by men.
	And so the idea that in the field of psychology, the idea that you just have almost no men, well, men with problems, don't they want to talk to men sometimes?
	Well, again, that doesn't exist.
	That's not an issue. That's not something that needs to be fixed.
	There's no hand-wringing about any of that.
	So, when women, what men would consider an overshare, when women, quote, overshare, well, they get support, they get rewards, they, oh, it's so brave and so noble and so honest, and, you know, it's about time we talked about this, and thank you for sharing your life journey and all that, right? Whereas if men talk about these things, it's like, dude, that is so inappropriate, that is an overshare.
	My gosh, don't you have any sense of propriety, right?
	So, I guess responding to incentives, right?
	Alright. What's your take on people who want to get you drunk or constantly fill your drinks but aren't drinking themselves?
	Is that a way of dominating or making sure you're, quote, safe?
	I've had that happen twice in the last four years of family-type gatherings.
	In both cases, they were older men.
	One severely depressed, the other generally submissive to his wife.
	Not a nice guy, not nice guy type...
	So, my guess is that people who want to get you drunk are looking to avoid conscious family conflicts.
	I write about this in my novel, The Future, that most relationships are...
	One minute away from crisis.
	Hanging by a thread. Most relationships are one minute away, sometimes only 30 seconds away from crisis.
	Take an extreme example, right?
	I was talking about this many, many, many years ago.
	Imagine a family dinner, Thanksgiving dinner, something like that.
	And at that family dinner, There's a niece.
	Your niece. And she speaks up and she says, Uncle Bob touched me inappropriately when I was a child.
	That's an extreme example.
	Now, I want you to picture that scenario happening.
	And when you dig down into the honest dungeons of your heart, I want you to imagine who the family is going to be more upset with.
	Right? Who is the family going to be more upset with?
	Are they going to be upset with Bob for molesting his niece, or are they going to be upset at the niece for disturbing the peace?
	Well, I mean, I think in general, we know the answer.
	That could be something else. It could be something else.
	It could be something like you could have a nephew who says, I'm really angry that the family still circumcises boys.
	Really, you took a third of my penis skin off with a razor when I was a baby.
	Like, this is sick. Or the kid who's like, man, you put me into a school system that was completely messed up and just screwed with my head and turned me against myself and turned me against my life.
	Like, I'm really mad at that.
	Or I don't like the fact that you hit me when I was a kid.
	Or, you know, mom used to drink too much and didn't really have any time for us.
	Or dad traveled and worked all the time and I don't really feel like we have much of a relationship.
	Whatever it could be, right?
	It could be any number of things.
	Can families handle those kinds of disagreements, those kinds of revelations, that kind of honesty?
	Not many.
	Not many can handle that.
	So, when you have family gatherings, everyone's aware that the whole family gathering is 30 seconds away from completely falling apart.
	Again, not all, but some.
	Many, I think. So, The whole purpose of these big gatherings is to keep people from speaking those 30 seconds worth of words that will cause the whole house of cards to collapse and maybe it can be rebuilt and all of that, but people have lost their ability to handle a conflict in a productive way because that's what suppression of free speech does.
	It kills people's ability to learn how to manage conflict in a productive way.
	When people become fragile and the bombs in the brain are set up to the point where contradictory information causes them a psychological death spiral, then they have to manage other people because the words genuinely feel like assault.
	So when you're told that words are evil rather than deeds, then you have to manage.
	It's then self-defense to de-platform people who are lobbying evil language and causing violence and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So, with family gatherings, for most families, there are literally dozens of topics that have to be suppressed.
	And, in general, it's the women who want to suppress these topics more than the men.
	For the men, You know, clear the air, get it all out there.
	What's that old saying from Shep?
	Better out than in. So, yeah, I think the men don't mind as much.
	I mean, some men do, of course, right?
	But I think women are slightly less comfortable with these kinds of conflicts.
	And so when you look at family gatherings, or you look at social gatherings a lot of times, And you used to see this more in plays and in movies, right?
	So there's a famous play by Ibsen called Ghosts, and it's well worth a read if you can see it acted well live.
	Fantastic. And there's a secret in the family, and you see this a lot of times.
	There's a secret in the family, and until the secret is revealed in the family, the family cannot be at peace.
	But then after the secret is revealed, there's a certain moment of peace afterwards, and you don't know where it goes.
	So this used to be the case in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
	Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
	It's Albie, I think. So Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
	Played terrifyingly by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
	Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a play about a couple who have terrible fights and a terrible secret.
	And they're called George and Martha because you've got to take a ding at the founding father, right?
	So in the play...
	The great secret is revealed.
	And then there's some peace at the end.
	Some relaxation of tensions.
	It's very stressful to have to lie all the time.
	It's very stressful. Let's see what would be another one.
	Well, an odd one, which is a movie, is the one with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, and it's about a woman who ends up in an institution, and she doesn't have a big secret.
	She doesn't have a big secret, which is sort of an unusual one with regards to that.
	But another one where there's a big secret?
	Oh, well, of course, I'm blanking out on some of these names, but the one with Timothy Hutton and Mary Tyler Moore.
	Ordinary people. Yeah, that's a big secret, and the secret is revealed.
	There's another play by John Osborne called Look Back in Anger.
	Where there's a secret, the secret is revealed, and then there's peace at the end, right?
	So it used to be it's very stressful to have a secret.
	There's great conflict when the secret is revealed, but there's peace on the other side of it.
	And these have really fallen out of favor.
	It's really fallen out of favor.
	It's sort of been degraded to, I'm angry about something, but when I finally express that anger and really tear into someone, then I feel better.
	It's become this sort of weird catharsis thing, which is not true.
	Catharsis is not a valid theory of art.
	Aristotle's theory of catharsis is, you know, if you're feeling a lot of grief and you go and see a very sad play, then you cry out all your grief and it's cathartic and you end up released from that emotion and so on.
	And it tends not to be the case.
	It tends to be the case that if you're feeling terrified of life and you watch all these horror movies, it doesn't make you better because your unconscious is interpreting the horror movie as real life.
	So you're just surrounding yourself by more and more horror and you are exaggerating that kind of stuff.
	So you're reinforcing it within yourself.
	Yeah, just if you, in social gatherings, it's really interesting to sit back and be an observer, right?
	So as a guy who writes fiction and poetry, but fiction really in particular, I'm always listening to a conversation and I'm also listening about the conversation because I, you know, I'm not going to try and recreate conversations that I've had in my life in a book, but I'm looking at the patterns of conversation.
	I'm looking at the patterns of conversation.
	So... When you, you know, one of the things that happens really tragically often is women complaining about their husbands, complaining about their children.
	You see this all the time, especially on social media.
	Oh, my kids are driving me to drink.
	Oh, I can't wait for my kids to get back to school.
	Oh, my husband's on a business trip.
	How lovely. Oh, my wife, you know, there's this meme on social media which is, The woman is saying, I'm so mad at him, I'm just not going to talk to him all day.
	And the man lying in a hammock saying, today has been really, really peaceful and nice for some reason.
	Just terrible, terrible stuff.
	Just reinforcing all of this toxic stuff.
	I mean, it's part of a don't-have-children agenda by portraying having children as horrible and portraying being married as a nagging treadmill of dissatisfaction and all that.
	It's just horrible. It's stripping people of the capacity to fall in love and all of that.
	Yeah, so the drinking, and this has to do even with people who get stuck in time.
	Again, I have one character in my novel named Arlo, who my daughter refers to as Cheese Man, but I have a character, Arlo, who is stuck in time.
	People who are stuck in time.
	And he's not a druggie.
	He does weed from time to time.
	He's not a druggie, but he's stuck in time.
	And this happens a little bit more to men.
	We don't have the clock ticking. And balding can be your clock ticking and so on.
	But, you know, he's got thick hair.
	He's very handsome and works out a lot.
	He's actually more pretty than handsome.
	He's one of these good-looking guys who can't grow a beard.
	So it's a bit more on the soy boy pretty scale.
	But he's very pretty. And he just wants to live for the day.
	He wants to live for now. He's into rock climbing.
	He wants to go surfing in Bali.
	He works at a zoo running the lemur encounter exhibition with kids.
	So he's great with kids. He makes them laugh.
	And, of course, the moms all love him because he's so pretty.
	And so he's just living for the now.
	And you get a lot of people, particularly when they're bound in this cycle of underachievement, and there's a terrifying scene in the movie Reality Bites.
	Jeanine Garofalo is mocked for still working at The Gap in her late 20s, her character, and it's really, really tender, really sensitive, really raw for her.
	People kind of freak out about this kind of stuff.
	So people who get stuck in life, they just do the same thing over and over again, right?
	They go to work. They watch a couple of movies.
	They get together with their friends.
	They drink on weekends.
	They play some hockey. And they don't advance in their life.
	They don't move forward. They don't take on new challenges.
	They don't expand their careers.
	They don't learn more. They don't get involved in getting married and having kids.
	And, you know, the general cycle of a productive and positive life is you constantly keep growing.
	If you ain't growing, you're dying.
	And if you're not rising, you are falling like nothing else.
	It's just the way we are. I mean, we build upon, build upon, build upon.
	It's just the way we are. And you can fight that, but it doesn't change your nature.
	So people who get stuck, and drugs and alcohol usually facilitate that.
	You can get stuck in a cynical group, and ideology, it really kills you.
	Because ideology is the end of curiosity.
	Ideology is this big flaming moat which says, you don't go any further from here.
	Any question past this is pure evil.
	Why are there differences between groups and society?
	Bigotry and discrimination. You even question that.
	You even go anywhere else for any possible complimentary answer.
	We will destroy you.
	Ideology is where anybody who wanders off gets sniped from a high tower, usually from academia or from the media and so on, right?
	So you've got to stay on the plantation.
	You've got to stay right here. Any further than this is death, right?
	Here be dragons, right?
	So ideology does this.
	It just prevents you from growing.
	It prevents you from questioning and it gives you easy answers because they're so easy they're certainly wrong.
	And there's great power in limiting people's curiosity because then they're enslaved to your delineation of the nature of the world, right?
	So when people stop growing, then they need to drug their growing anxiety.
	You can stop growing in life.
	You can stop challenging yourself in life.
	Like I'm writing, for the first time in my life, I'm writing a contemporary serious novel.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I wrote a contemporary comedy novel called The God of Atheists, which, by the way, is pretty funny.
	But I'm trying something completely new.
	I've written a bunch of historical novels.
	I wrote one science fiction, which was blindingly new for me, which I wrote about a year ago.
	And I'm writing a very contemporary, serious novel about the fall of civilization.
	Because people wanted a prequel to the future.
	I'm calling this, of course, the present.
	And how and why it all falls apart and what happens to individuals caught in the machinery.
	It's new. I want to do things new.
	I don't know how Stephen King writes the same damn book over and over again.
	It's beyond me. Nicholas Sparks or Jean Le Carre or Tom Clancy or, you know, I don't know how they write the same book over and over again.
	It would drive me mad.
	It would depress the hell out of me to just do the same.
	Same show. How can people do the same show over and over again, right?
	We need to stage an intervention, says Dr.
	Phil. Okay, great show.
	20 years, the same thing. So I'm just, I need to roam.
	I'm a gypsy. I need to go to new territory.
	I need to, as I'm talking about things like in these shows, the reason I keep doing these shows is I'm not doing the same show.
	The reason I keep doing call-in shows is they're not the same call-in show.
	There's different ways to approach it.
	There's different issues to deal with.
	There's different ways to illuminate.
	Things for the caller and for the audience.
	And so with this book, I wanted to capture the world as it is.
	I want to just have a big flashbulb photograph of the world as it is and then where it's going to go.
	And it's a big, ambitious, fairly brutal But certainly it's the best characterization dialogue because it's so real to me.
	I literally see the people in my brain and I feel like I'm more transcribing their conversations.
	Because again, I've had the great gift of having...
	How many writers of fiction have had the great gift of having thousands of conversations with people about the very depth of their motivations and histories?
	I've had a window into the human soul that...
	Nobody really has had before.
	And of course you could say, well, therapists and so on.
	Yes, but therapists are not public figures.
	It's all private. It's all confidential.
	It's all internal, as it should be.
	And so there are some therapists who've written stories, but also they don't have the philosophical side of things.
	Yeah. If you've been a public figure, you get to see a view of society that is both extraordinarily elevated and extraordinarily depressed at the same time.
	Very positive and very negative.
	You get to see real extremes when you're a public figure.
	So, yeah, the people who get stuck in their lives...
	They very much end up having to self-medicate.
	They self-medicate through food.
	They self-medicate through compulsive sexuality.
	They self-medicate through masturbation.
	They self-medicate through drugs and drinking and so on.
	They may self-medicate through exercise.
	Because if your social circle, if your circle of life, whatever it is, if it demands that you not grow, then your anxiety will grow.
	And then you have to self-medicate that.
	So this could be another way of these people medicating others in order to not trip over the minds of potential growth.
	Let's see. What are your thoughts on having guilty pleasure media you enjoy?
	I was re-watching Pulp Fiction the other day, a movie that I've loved for 25 years, and I couldn't help but realize this movie has no virtue.
	Really? Come on, you had to have noticed that before.
	I've always thought of it as a guilty pleasure, but now I can't find redeeming value in watching it and turned it off halfway through.
	Do you have any guilty pleasures that you can still enjoy, or have you come around on a movie and realize this is actually trash and unhealthy?
	I mean, I generally have accumulated enough knowledge about the world and the people in it that the process of viewing a movie, like I went to see Avatar, which I'll do a review on, it's incredibly toxic.
	You can't miss it these days if you have, you know, decent self-knowledge and philosophical knowledge.
	I mean, this is my job, so I'm not expecting everyone to have the same views, of course, right, or the same...
	Automatic process, but guilty pleasures.
	I mean, I still enjoy, you know, I play every couple of weeks, I'll fire up Serious Sam 3 and make another five minutes into the game.
	No, Serious Sam 4, which is a completely mindless but fun shooter.
	And I think it's just kind of good for my brain to be that twitchy and that reactive as people saw I played The Last Doom and so on.
	I don't think I played it all the way through, but I played Doom.
	And yeah, I think those things, just straight up reaction times, getting right down into your lizard brain, I actually think it's kind of good for my brain because my brain is very abstract.
	And so connecting to the body, connecting to the senses, correcting to direct physicality, I think is really good for me and therefore good for me.
	For everything else that I do.
	So, yeah, guilty pleasures.
	I mean, is it serious?
	No. Well, even though it's called Serious Sam or whatever, right?
	So, I will do that kind of stuff.
	All right. On my flight today, a purple-haired 20-something-year-old lady had a full-blown gas mask on.
	Unbelievable. Yeah.
	Yeah. Hypochondria is a very real phenomenon.
	And it generally tends to be slightly more on the female side.
	But hypochondria, if you seriously fearmonger people about invisible airborne viruses that will kill them, I mean, long COVID, I mean, some of the women who, and some of the people,
	I think, again, I think it was more women, they said, well, I have long COVID, and they were tested, and they don't even have the antibodies to COVID. They have long COVID, but apparently they were never even exposed to COVID. There is a 12-week exercise program I was reading about the other day that claims to be able to cure long COVID. Of course,
	Ailments after any viral infection can be fairly long-lasting, but you scare people enough We have a tipping point into paranoia.
	And this is well known, I think, by psyops, psychological programmers of humanity.
	And I'm not making this up.
	There was psyop, here's how we're going to get this done, the whole pandemic thing.
	This isn't out there.
	This is not a theory. So there's a tipping point.
	So we have a rational sense of caution.
	And if plied with enough fear, we tip over into paranoia.
	And we're not built for continual exposure to negative stimuli.
	We're not built for that because we didn't evolve with that.
	A fight-or-flight mechanism is supposed to last for five minutes, maybe, max, maybe an hour if you're in battle.
	A fight-or-flight mechanism is supposed to be pretty concentrated, right?
	I mean, you're chased by a bear and I mean, either you get away or you don't, right?
	I mean, that's the deal. You either get away from the bear or you don't.
	If you get away from the bear, you calm down.
	If you don't get away from the bear, it doesn't matter because you're dead.
	So, we do have, certainly the colder climate, people have a certain amount of anxiety over resource management because we had to find a way to survive the winter, right?
	And have enough food and all that.
	But... We are not designed for continual negative stimuli.
	It blows our circuits.
	And this is, again, well-known.
	This is why you have to put people in this continual state of fear with regards to global warming, with regards to, I mean, guess when I was a kid, nuclear war, and you just have to keep them as a constant state of anxiety.
	by, you know, there are all these institutional horrors all throughout society which constantly need to be battled and you have to be a warrior for equality and it's just, I mean, exhausting.
	And it does burn people out and it's designed to burn people out.
	It's one of the reasons I was very skeptical about the environmental movement.
	I mean, yes, everybody wants a clean environment, of course.
	So the first thing that you should do is get rid of the national debt because the national debt is the consumption of nature's scarce resources ahead of schedule, right?
	If you borrow a billion dollars and spend it, then you've just consumed a whole bunch of resources that you don't have the money to pay for, and that's really bad for the environment.
	So, of course, the environmental movement should have pushed for a gold-backed dollar because that limits deficit financing, deficit spending, and money printing, and they should have focused on national debts.
	And the elimination of national debts and the elimination of fiat currency would be Without a doubt, without a remotely single doubt, the very best thing that could possibly happen for environmental protection.
	I mean, other little things like make sure that you don't have taxi licenses so that people find it more profitable to not own cars and so on.
	But, I mean, very, very clear.
	A gold-backed currency or some commodity-backed currency, no national debts.
	By far...
	The very best thing that you could possibly do for the environment.
	But they've never even talked about that.
	Never even talked about it. It's never been a thing at all.
	Although it's the most obvious thing that you could do to protect the environment.
	But they don't want to do that, right?
	So it's nothing to do with protecting the environment.
	I've had these conversations like 40 years ago.
	Oh, you're really into the environment.
	Wow, you must really hate the national debt.
	What? Why? Because the national debt is the consumption of nature-scarce resources way ahead of schedule.
	It is a massive over-consumption of nature-scarce resources to borrow and spend in the moment.
	What? Completely incomprehensible.
	Now, of course, it's fine that they may not be even versed in the basics of economics, but if you point out something, right, something obvious, and you say, well, this would be the best way to reduce the consumption of scarce resources would be to eliminate fiat currency and government debt.
	Now, they may say, whoa, that just blew my mind, man.
	Tell me more. You've all been in that situation, I'm sure, where you tell someone who's dedicated to a course a better way to achieve it, and they're like, whoa, I'm really dedicated to this course, man.
	Tell me more about how to achieve this wonderful course.
	But, I mean, in the, I don't know, hundreds of conversations, I mean, I was in the environmental field, and the hundreds of conversations I've had with people over the years who claim to be truly dedicated to the environmental protection, environmental issues, when I point out the simple, basic, obvious facts, they have no interest in it.
	They don't want to know.
	So, you know, it's all in the service of power, so.
	Yeah, so, I mean, people who have a tendency towards anxiety, you pound them in the ears and in the eyes for years about imminent danger.
	It's going to short circuit.
	It's a form of abuse.
	So let's see here.
	Let's see here.
	Yeah, heavier objects fall fast, I said.
	Scientific consensus for 2,000 years.
	Yeah, and it took, was it Leonardo da Vinci?
	Was it him? Who went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped an orange and a cannonball.
	Both fell at the same time.
	Same speed. Girl interrupted. Thank you.
	That's the movie. Let's see here.
	Your new book already sounds amazing.
	Very interesting idea. Well, thank you.
	Steph, why do females root for the underdog, even when it's clearly stupid and pointless?
	Thank you. So again, very briefly, we've talked about this before.
	So when you look at motivations, particularly between the sexes, look at evolution.
	Women would have children of widely varying ages.
	Women who survived, right?
	So you'd start having children in your late teens, maybe.
	You'd have children into your early to mid-30s, and maybe even later.
	And so you'd have children who would be, you know, 10, 15 years apart, spread in age.
	And... Your younger children would get fewer resources than your older children.
	If you set out, let's say you set out a table of food and you've got a three-year-old and you've got a 15-year-old, right?
	Who's going to get more food? Well, the 15-year-old is going to get more food.
	Now, the 15-year-old needs more food, but the 15-year-old is going to be in that chaos of mid-teens, not overly empathetic and so on.
	And so you have to make sure that things are fair.
	You have to make sure that the people who are older, more competent, more intelligent, give up their resources for the people, the children, the toddlers, who are less competent, less intelligent, less strong, and so on, right?
	I mean, imagine that you put a big...
	You've got two hungry kids, one's five and one's fifteen.
	You put a plate of food at the end of the garden and say, whoever gets there first gets the food.
	Well, the five-year-old will never win that.
	Never. Never win that.
	So you have to make sure that income gets redistributed from the stronger to the weaker.
	You have to. I mean, you have to.
	Or to put it another way, any...
	Any female, any mother who was in charge of resource distribution among her children, who let it be a pure meritocracy, half her children would die off.
	They wouldn't get enough food.
	They wouldn't get enough shelter. If there's a warm spot in the hut or the cabin or whatever in the house, if there's a warm spot by the fire and you say to all of your kids, whoever is the biggest and strongest, because that's what would happen, gets the warm spot, well then the kids who were younger and needed more heat would die off.
	So women, when they see a disparity...
	Between strength and resources, right?
	In other words, the strongest person is getting all the resources.
	They feel the great anxiety about that.
	And it's beautiful. It's why we're alive.
	You've got to love this stuff. Don't hate women for the system that we're all stuck in.
	Please, don't hate women for the system we're all stuck in.
	We'll just let the system win and rob you of love for things that aren't women's fault.
	They're instinctively drawn to equalize resources because they want their children of varying ages to survive.
	There's nothing wrong with that.
	It's a beautiful, wonderful, positive thing.
	It's why we're all here. Now, you combine that with the power of the state and propaganda and manipulation and government education and media, and then they just get played, which is why you see all of this stuff.
	It's all focused on women, right?
	These excluded, these marginalized groups, these vulnerable groups, they're just keying into women's instinctive desire to equalize resources among unequal people, their children.
	I mean, and you know this is the case, because how many women, if the husband comes home with a $10,000 bonus, how many women say, oh, well, your neighbor, this guy's not doing so well, let's give him half.
	I don't want to say that. So they want competition and meritocracy among men.
	Now, maybe the neighbor's wife wants that or whatever, right?
	But it's only with their children.
	It's not with other men.
	I mean, there aren't a lot of women who will say, well, this guy's really unattractive.
	But I'm going to give them a chance because I should share and share alike and equalize, right?
	No, no, because they want meritocracy and competition when it comes to mate selection and there are men out there in the workplace, but for their children.
	So anyone who can present themselves as a helpless child to women will get resources through the power of the state because women will just instinctively respond to that.
	And it takes a lot of self-knowledge to realize you're being played and manipulated and all that.
	So, yeah, it's quite common.
	All right, some parents...
	Great questions, by the way, guys.
	I want to sort of pause and thank you for that.
	Some parents seem to be unable to admit their mistakes or take responsibility for their past actions.
	I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh. It's a very serious question.
	What are you talking about, unable?
	I have no idea. What do you mean unable?
	How do you know they're unable?
	Just because someone consistently doesn't do something doesn't mean that they're unable.
	Okay, some seem to be unable to admit their mistakes or take responsibility for their past actions.
	If I cared about my children's futures, I'd easily admit my past mistakes.
	Don't do it. Why? Because I did it.
	Now I have deep regrets to this day and you can still see the consequences in my life.
	If you still indulge in bad habits as a parent, the least you could say is don't do like I do, right?
	Yes, for sure. For sure.
	But yeah, I mean, this question came up on the locals forum.
	It's a great question, which is, you know, I make the case that if you make enough bad decisions, you become functionally unable to make good decisions.
	Now, again, I know this sort of contradicts with unable, but functionally unable, in other words, it could theoretically happen, but it never seems to happen.
	So, if a parent is unable to admit...
	Let's say it's a dad. If the dad is unable to admit his mistakes...
	I just do this for pronoun convenience.
	If the dad is unable to admit his mistakes, why is that the case?
	Because he has, for many decades, refused to admit his mistakes.
	When you make a mistake, you have a choice.
	I said this to my daughter when she was three or four.
	It's an old Spanish proverb that habits start as cobwebs and end up as chains.
	If you... Lie your way out of a problem.
	You're caught at something and you just lie your way out of it.
	If you get away with it, you've just reinforced the value of lying.
	You say, well, lying is now a valuable and positive thing for me, which is why, as a parent, if your kids lie to you, you have to be very, very strong in pushing back on that.
	And at the beginning, before they're fully moral beings, you have to just make it more difficult for them to lie than to tell the truth, and eventually they'll understand the value of truth, and of course you have to tell the truth to them, and even when it's inconvenient to you, and so on, right?
	So whatever you do, you're just reinforcing that muscle, right?
	I mean, a friend of mine, I mentioned this many years ago, a friend of mine, really great guy, he became my roommate.
	He's in a lot of trouble at home.
	And again, I kicked my mom out when I was 15 and took roommates in to pay the bills.
	And this guy, he had a brother and his brother would watch TV and just...
	Curl, right? Just curl, not his hair, curl muscles.
	He had weights by the TV and curl.
	And so he had a completely anemic body with these absolutely giant bicep muscles.
	Maybe you want to mix that up.
	I mean, there's don't skip leg day and then there's don't skip anything other than biceps day.
	So that was the muscle he developed.
	So when I see someone who, let's say a parent who won't admit mistakes, okay, they have a lifelong habit of not admitting mistakes.
	And it's worked for them.
	Why do they keep doing it?
	Because it works. Because it works is why system design is so important.
	Why asking people to be moral in an evil system is wrong because you're then blaming individuals for the system.
	We are evolved like every other species.
	Here's my evolutionary theme to the show.
	We are evolved because it works.
	Why do women wear makeup?
	Because it works. Because it gets them access to higher quality men and more resources.
	Why do people work?
	Because it works. It gets you money, it gets you resources.
	Why do some people stay home?
	I was talking to a friend of mine who's in business and he's like, it's really hard to get good workers these days because everyone just spent a couple of years on COVID money.
	Why do women divorce men when they're just dissatisfied and don't fix the marriage?
	Because it works. They get money, they get resources, they get support, they get you-go-girl empowerment, they get access to their kids, they get to torture the man that they believe has betrayed them by not making them perfectly happy all the time, because it works.
	That's what people do. Why did people not work hard in the Soviet Union, right?
	You work in a factory and you want to work hard.
	Why didn't you work hard? Because you'd be punished for working hard.
	I mean, you certainly wouldn't be rewarded.
	You'd end up with more exposure to injury, more exposure to repetitive strain problems, and your co-workers would get mad at you for making them look bad.
	So 99.9% of people didn't work hard.
	Why would they? Because it doesn't work.
	It works to not work hard.
	In a meritocracy, it works to work hard.
	In communism, socialism, it works to not work hard.
	So most people will do that.
	Most people, again, they're water, they can form, because that's how we survived.
	So if a dad won't admit his mistakes, it's like, well, not admitting his mistakes has worked really well for him.
	He doesn't think about the ethics of it, because most people are like, because it works.
	I mean, I remember many years ago trying to help a family that I knew who had a very disruptive kid and they wanted me to talk to her and she wanted to talk to me and so we talked together and I said, why do you do X? And she said, because it works.
	She was like five, because it works.
	Kids are just exploring what works because evolutionarily we have to do what works.
	How important is it to get children involved in youth sports?
	Do you encourage your own daughter to get involved in youth sports?
	So, I think it can be important.
	I think teamwork is important, and certainly the exercise is important.
	Learning how to be a good loser was not my first instinct as a kid, was not to be a good loser.
	I mean, I had a lot of frustrations at home and all of that, but I had to learn how to be a good loser.
	And my daughter has really helped me with that.
	Not that I was a sucky loser in my 50s, but she really helped remind me that it's the process of play that's important, not just the outcome, which she's right about.
	She's right about it. So, wonderful, concise points.
	Well, thank you. Could be a while back and all that.
	I think if you can, but here's the thing.
	You can encourage them, but if they don't want to get involved in youth sports, you can't force them, right?
	You can't force them, because then you're costing more.
	Avatar, the best sleep of your life.
	Avatar is like being waterboarded candy, blue candy, for three hours straight.
	Like, it's pretty, but I might deliver your brain.
	What's your policy regarding pocket money for children?
	At what point should they try to make their own money to buy bigger things like bicycles, electronics, and so on?
	I know some parents buy expensive items for their children, but some encourage summer work.
	It seems beneficial in the long term, but it can create envy and resentment towards the other children and their own parents in the short term.
	So pocket money. So when my daughter was younger, we bought her things, and when she got older, we gave her a small allowance, and if she wanted something, I would offer to pay half, Because, you know, you have to know whether you really want something.
	If something's free, everyone wants it.
	So there's no conservation mechanism that's going on there.
	No sense of how to manage your resources, which is really important in life.
	You've got to learn how to manage your resources, all of your resources, your emotional energy, your financials, your language and all that, your enthusiasm, your exposure to negative stimuli.
	You've got to manage all these resources.
	So what happened was then when she had to pay half, then she would find restraint and she's become a super saver.
	You can't get it apart with money.
	I was that way when I was her age as well.
	I just hated to spend.
	I still really don't like to spend except on this lovely show and you lovely audience.
	So what happened then was we said, okay, so you get allowance just because you're a kid and all of that.
	But then she started to say, we're going to pay you for chores.
	Okay. And at some point she said, you know what?
	I don't feel right doing this.
	I'll do the chores, but don't pay me.
	I mean, it doesn't feel right to pay me for doing chores.
	I want to contribute that way.
	And so she voluntarily gave up her allowance.
	Honestly, it came out of nowhere. She wanted to give up her allowance and so on.
	And now she does some work and she gets paid for some of that and so on.
	But yes, I think she's got a good...
	She's a little bit...
	She doesn't like it now, even when we spend money on her.
	So if she's interested in something, I'll say, oh, you know, we could...
	I mean, her birthday, in fact, is going to be a couple of days.
	She's going to be 14 on December the 19th.
	So if you'd like to spend any birthday, it's just at freedomain.locals.com.
	I'm sure she would appreciate that.
	But...
	And she says, no, I don't want you to spend money and blah, blah, blah.
	And I'm like, no, come on.
	I mean, you don't have crazy expensive hobbies.
	You're not into hockey, which is thousands of dollars a year.
	Like, I'm happy to, you know, I'm still a parent and all that.
	So getting her to spend money is a challenge now and she's very good that way, so...
	Steph, you helped me lose weight. Thank you.
	Rule number one, don't keep peanut butter in the house.
	Do you know, actually, my wife turned me on to almond butter.
	Took me a little bit of adjustment, but I've heard bad things through digestion with peanut butter.
	So I was a big peanut butter guy, although I generally would have no sugar peanut butter.
	But I find almond butter to be quite nice.
	Do you think that familial trauma was part of the violence and trauma of early human evolution during the transition from animal to something smarter?
	Could it have been possible, in your opinion, that we evolved actually peacefully initially and that some abusive people dominated and threw us all into a cycle of abuse that people will either escape through a momentous efforts in self-knowledge or stay trapped within?
	It's a great question. I don't believe in the noble savage at all.
	I mean, I remember getting in massive trouble for this in Australia.
	I only gave speeches in Australia about the actual life of the Aboriginals and I did the research on all of the anthropological papers and all of the papers examining.
	I was talking about 50% mortality.
	They would kill half of their children often by holding them down and pouring sand into their mouths.
	They used rape as a weapon of war.
	They would attack.
	Young men with spears and try and spear them and they would nail genitalia and just adult circumcision with sharp rocks and just appalling, horrifying stuff.
	And people got really mad at me because, you know, white guilt and all that, you know, all this nonsense, right?
	So I've not come across a tribe that was peaceful in the past.
	I just...
	So in a state of evolution...
	You need absolute in-group preferences for tribalism, and the only way really to get absolute in-group preferences is to be violent towards children.
	In other words, to kill off the children who don't conform and comply and threaten the others with death for not conforming or complying, then you end up with a, quote, tight-knit, inward-facing tribalistic society, which, well, it's a problem, right?
	And again, I talked about this on my Australian tour some years ago.
	So, in the West as a whole, like, why did we become so technologically advanced and so on, right?
	Well, one of the reasons is that we just killed slightly fewer of the people who disagreed with us, right?
	So, the people in primitive tribes, anyone who disagrees with you, they're just going to get killed in any sort of foundational way, whether you disagree with the superstitions of the tribe or you disagree with the leadership of the tribe, or you're just going to get killed.
	Now in the West, slightly less.
	We killed slightly fewer of our dissidents.
	And therefore you get progress.
	So it's a real tension. There's a real tension between tribes.
	You can get more tribal cohesion, but then you stop your progress.
	Which is why the aboriginals in Australia, like 40,000 years, not really much progress.
	So they had a lot of control over their children, a lot of violence towards their children.
	That promotes cohesion, which makes you stronger against other tribes.
	But the problem is, if there's a tribe, often overseas or somewhere else, if there's a tribe that allows for more disagreement, that doesn't kill off all their dissidents, then they progress.
	They progress, sorry.
	They progress.
	Sorry, that's an awkward way to put it.
	I mean, it's the same thing when I did my documentary on China.
	Hong Kong and China. I was sort of pointing out that China, an incredibly advanced civilization going back thousands of years, they had IQ tests for bureaucrats, they had paper currency, they had written language thousands of years before the Europeans did.
	Wonderful, amazing progress.
	But hyperconformity.
	And that hyperconformity meant that they had a certain amount of stability, but then when the chaotic Europeans came along, the Europeans kicked their asses, because the Europeans allowed more disagreement, allowed more dissidents, and therefore they progressed.
	So cohesion gives you stability within the tribe, but has you vulnerable to less cohesive tribes outside who have progressed into cannons and ships and gunpowder and rifles and all this kind of stuff, which you haven't because there's too much conformity.
	So conformity breeds stability, but stability breeds vulnerability to tribes that are less conformist.
	So it's a real conundrum, evolutionarily speaking.
	Yeah. But I don't think any historical groups have been found to have treated their children well.
	Why do people use the phrase agree to disagree when they disagree with you?
	It's just an admission that they lack the capacity to form a coherent argument.
	No, agree to disagree means I can't disprove you, but I'm not going to change my views.
	I can't disprove your arguments.
	Agree to disagree is deplatforming you from reason and evidence, right?
	Alright, I'm more of a Sun Butter fan myself.
	I don't know what Sun Butter is, but it's not a good name for a punk band.
	Hey Steph, what is philosophy? I heard you put it in an easily understandable way the other day.
	Philosophy is learning from wisdom first principles as opposed to learning through pain and experience.
	Does this sound right? Also, what are first principles?
	Oh, philosophy is the pursuit of truth.
	Philosophy is the pursuit of truth.
	Now you could say philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and certainly wisdom is a subsection of truth.
	Something can be true, but unwise.
	Something cannot be wise and false, right?
	So wisdom is a subsection of truth as a whole.
	So for instance, it is true that you can charge a grizzly bear.
	Is it wise to do so?
	It is not, right? So something can be true and unwise, but there's no such thing as wisdom that is false.
	Philosophy is the pursuit of truth.
	First principles are the building blocks of everything else.
	It's the foundation of your pursuit of truth.
	First, truth is the study of the nature of reality.
	And once you've understood the nature of reality, then you can study the nature of morality.
	The reason you have to study reality first is that reality is objective and universal, and morality has to be objective and universal, otherwise it's not moral.
	It's just aesthetics or preference or I like peanut butter or I like sun butter or whatever that is, right?
	Or I like, God help you, Marmite, Vegemite or whatever it is.
	So, yeah, first principles are you can't overturn these principles without overturning reality.
	And since reality can't be overturned, you can't will reality out of existence.
	So first principles are the universals of the basis of your pursuit of truth that cannot be overturned without denying reality as a whole.
	So if I hold up a pen, can this pen be a pen and an elephant at the same time?
	The answer is no. So this is the law of identity.
	This is a pen. I am different from the pen.
	And the pen is not, it can't be both me and the pen at the same time.
	Now you could melt down the pen and you could turn it into goop, in which case it's an X pen, the goop remains, right?
	So the form of a thing is itself.
	And so the law of identity, a pen is a pen, law of non-contradiction, right?
	A pen can't be both a pen and a non-pen at the same time.
	So, if you say that the pen can be a pen and an elephant at the same time, you're attempting to overthrow reality.
	Because the law of physics says that this can't be a pen and an elephant at the same time.
	I mean, I guess the pen could be eaten by the elephant, but then the pen is simply in the elephant, it's not the elephant, right?
	So first principles are acceptance of theoretical abstractions that are perfectly welded to the nature of reality, and therefore you cannot overthrow those abstractions without trying to overthrow reality itself, which you can't do.
	It is physically impossible, right?
	Right? So if somebody says to me, I don't believe that you exist, then they are attempting to communicate to me that I do not exist.
	If they say, we can't trust our senses, they are attempting to use my senses to convince me that I can't trust my senses.
	So first principles are when you take the evidence of the senses, you abstract those into universals, and any attempt to overthrow those universals, law of identity, non-contradiction, and so on, any attempt to overthrow those universals is an attempt to overthrow the nature of reality itself, which you can't do. I mean, I guess you could try to do it, but that would simply mean that you were insane.
	Somebody who has no capacity to process reality or believes that he can fly or he can eat fire for nutrition or somebody who believes he is both a pen and Napoleon and an elephant at the same time is not going to be involved in any rational debate.
	They're going to be trying to smear their own feces on a wall in an asylum somewhere.
	So first principles are beliefs so welded to the objectivity of sense data that you cannot overthrow them without also attempting to overthrow objective reality itself, which you can't do.
	So that's what first principles are.
	All right, let's see here.
	Can you see the questions in the comment section or do you need them reposted on the live chat?
	Yes, if you could repost them in the live chat.
	Sorry, thank you. These questions are so great, I completely escaped the fact that I also asked for them on Locals.
	Can an argument based on a value judgment be valid?
	I don't know what you mean by value judgment.
	If you could define that, I would appreciate it.
	Thank you. Let's see here.
	Do psychopaths have any limits?
	Sure, they are limited by the nature of reality and objectivity.
	A psychopath cannot will that he himself be a pen and an elephant at the same time or so on.
	So yes, psychopaths do have limits.
	And this is why psychopaths focus on people, because people can be manipulated, reality can't.
	Nature to be commanded must be obeyed, but for people to obey you, they must be commanded, right?
	That's the inverse, right? Nature to be commanded must be obeyed, and people to obey you must be commanded.
	And I talked about this in my biggest video was the story of your enslavement.
	I talked about you can bully a person into giving you resources, but you can't bully a dead tree into giving you fruit.
	Ah, let's see here.
	Your shows got me through the darkest days and have helped me into the sunshine.
	I'm still in recovery, but thanks to you, I'm good and aiming at the better than I was before stage.
	Thanks isn't enough. I'll send you the Cadillac when I'm able.
	Thank you. It's impossible to shove a Cadillac up your nose.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	Fox and Scorpion thing, which I mentioned responding to your free market remnant slash illusion observation.
	I'm sorry, I'll have to do that separately.
	I didn't see a fox and scorpion thing.
	I know psycho-sociopaths don't care about others, but I thought they had a super-elevated level of selfishness and self-centeredness.
	They, politicians, know they're destroying the host, economy slash faith and fear.
	Can they just not view far enough ahead to see the pitchforks coming, or are they truly limitless in their greed to selfishness, avarice feelings, secure in their ability to lie themselves out of any situation?
	Well, so right now, as society is running its course and the economy is sort of running out of steam, they're in a grab as many resources because winter is coming.
	I think that's what a lot of the pandemic was.
	Let's see here. I have trouble reconciling empiricism with a priori.
	For example, Austrian economics is rationalistic, deductive.
	How does empiricism come into play with something like Austrian economics?
	You know, I could answer that, but I have a feeling, or I could try to answer that, but I really have a feeling that what would happen is I would not hit the nail on the head as far as answering that question.
	So if you could rephrase or give me a little bit more information on that so I could answer that more clearly, I would appreciate that.
	I mean, we have five minutes left, so I may not get to it, but I will do it as a...
	As a solo show. It's a great question.
	When I go for a nice brisk walk, I like to have something to chat about if I'm on my own.
	Any favorite Christmas traditions you celebrate with your family?
	I love Christmas. I worship and adore Christmas.
	I love the presents.
	I love the food.
	A little too much sometimes.
	I love the Christmas tree.
	I love hanging the ornaments. I love the music.
	It is an absolutely beautiful tradition.
	Time of year. It's a time for connection, a time for meaning, a time for depth, a time for reaping the rewards of virtue.
	Virtue gets you sucked in the face a whole lot, but one of the benefits is that you get to chat with loved ones over the holidays in particular.
	As people have time off, everything slows down.
	I remember in the business world, it was wonderful because when you're doing big high-ticket item sales, nobody ever buys anything between Christmas and New Year's, or really the month of December is kind of a write-off.
	And so you'd have a certain amount of time to just recharge over Christmas.
	So it's a beautiful, beautiful time.
	Mr. Molyneux, do psychopaths always see everything as external?
	It seems like those with high moral compass look inwards often and see the world as an extension of themselves.
	Okay, being wrong, this is my theory.
	Thanks, as always. First of all, we're talking about something very abstract, so my perspective is not going to disprove anything that you say because these are all models or ways of looking at the world.
	This is not empirical proof.
	Maybe this could come from brain scans or something, but...
	Somebody earlier, I forgot to mention, psychopaths don't care about others.
	No, no, no. Psychopaths very much care about others.
	Because others is how they get their resources.
	If you say, psychopaths look at other people like a farmer looks at livestock.
	There's human livestock, tax livestock.
	We're tax farms, right? There's not a map of the world.
	There's not countries. There's tax farms.
	So a farmer cares very much about his livestock.
	So, yeah, don't imagine that psychopaths don't care about you.
	They very much care about you because they want the meat and milk that you can produce, right?
	So, if a farmer's cows die, he's brokenhearted because, I mean, obviously he has some emotional attachment, but because he could starve to death, right?
	I mean, it could go really badly, evolutionarily speaking.
	No, they very much will care about you, which is why psychopaths put so much effort into trying to convince you, figuring out your weaknesses and what's going to make you tick and how to get what they want out of you.
	They really laser in and focus and examine you enormously, so they really do care about you.
	They just don't care about you With regards to you caring about yourself.
	The farmers build fences around their chickens and they build fences around their cows because they don't want the cows to get eaten.
	But that's not because the cows don't want to get eaten.
	It's because if the cows get eaten, the farmers don't get the meat and milk they want.
	Do you think things like a child called it or psyops to trick people into missing less obvious forms of child abuse?
	Yeah, certainly there's a lot of being drawn to the extremes that has the more subtle forms there.
	I don't know about a psyop, but I certainly think that that's the case, yeah?
	It happens that way. My husband and I... Can I do this in two minutes?
	Probably not. Let me just copy this.
	This is the question about your daughter who's currently seven months old.
	We want to set her up for success when it comes to finding friends among her peers.
	Given how many parents prefer corporal punishment these days, our concern is keeping her safe by not exposing her to that den of dysfunction.
	From past shows, you've done...
	It sounds like your daughter has managed to find other children she enjoys spending time with.
	Do you have any tips or strategies you found useful?
	Oh, yeah. No, I mean, I straight up will say I meet new parents and so on.
	I'd be like, yeah, we're a punishment-free household.
	And if they're like, oh, that's the worst way to raise children, it's like, okay, moving on.
	Yeah, just straight up be honest about what you're doing.
	Are all farmers psychopaths?
	No, of course not, right? Because they're dealing with livestock who are non-human, so it's a different sort of relationship.
	But yeah, just be honest about what your parenting approach is, and if people are curious and so on.
	But yeah, like I'm straight up, people are like, oh, you know, I always get these comments, your daughter's so mature, she's so good-natured, she's so wonderful, she's so good with children.
	And I say, well, yeah, I mean, we have a punishment-free household.
	We never yell at her.
	We never spank her.
	We never have taken away anything of hers.
	Never locked her in her room. Never went to bed without dinner.
	I don't yell at her. I don't punish her.
	I reason with her. And so that has all of this wonderful stuff that...
	That comes out of all of that. So, I'm going to have to stop here.
	I'm afraid we've got a hard stop at 90 minutes.
	Wow, this flew by. You guys are, like, literally the greatest audience.
	I'm so sorry that I didn't get to the questions on Locals.
	I will do those. Hopefully, later today, if not today, then tomorrow morning.
	So, lots of love from up here.
	I hope you guys are having a wonderful Christmas.
	We'll stay in touch, of course, over Christmas as a whole.
	I hope that you will check out my book at freedomain.locals.com.
	You can use the promo code ALLCAPSUPB2022 for free access.
	Just go and enjoy it, justporanovel.com, freedomain.com slash documentaries, almostnovel.com, some great work there.
	Love you guys to death. Thank you so much for this amazing life.

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