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Jan. 2, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:45
Locals Subscriber Questions - 31 Dec 2022!
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Alrighty, alrighty. Questions from subscribers on Locals.
You can join at freedomain.locals.com and you can use the promo code UPB2022 for a free month's access.
So, hey Steph, I know you went to an all-boys boarding school.
Were there any other straight guys who acted gay as a joke?
Of course, it's more of a modern phenomenon.
I go to an all-boys Catholic high school.
I don't understand why all these straight guys think acting gay is hilarious.
I personally have never understood that phenomenon as a whole, and no.
But of course, I mean, I went when I was six, right?
So it wasn't really a thing.
I don't think I even knew what gay was at that age.
So it's not been a thing among any of my friends, but I do know that it is considered...
Actually, I guess... Oh yeah, I remember playing cards when I was maybe 17, playing cards with a guy who...
I went bust. We were playing for quarters, right?
I went bust and he gave me some money and he said it was for sexual favors.
So I guess I remember that.
But no, it was not really a thing in sort of my life.
Although, again, I do sort of understand that it's kind of a thing.
For a lot of people, a lot of young men.
I don't know why. Honestly, I couldn't imagine.
The lives of young men is so vastly different from the life that I grew up with that I would be hesitant to try and figure that one out, but I'm certainly happy to hear.
What are your study slash writing habits?
Rephrase what gets you in a state of flow for maximum productivity.
So, for me, it has a lot to do with the time of day.
I used to write at night, late at night, then I started writing in the afternoons, and now I'm more of a morning writer.
And I sort of try and bridge the gap between nightly dreams and sort of the daily dreams of writing.
So for me, I try not to reread what I've written.
So the way that I do it is I, at least with my current book, I have an outline, which is what I want to do.
And I play a little bit.
It's sort of like if you're into jazz, if you're a jazz musician, you have a melody, and then you play around with the melody quite a bit, right?
And that's sort of the way that I... I'll have a theme, but I'll allow myself some...
Creativity and different ways of following the plot and story of the novel.
And it also gives me a chance to let the characters, in a sense, introduce themselves to me.
So I have a plan, I'll do a first draft, and then I will read it back with more care and just sort of fix any obvious errors or problems.
And then I just plow on to the next one.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go from start to end.
And then I have a full picture of the story.
And then what I can do is I can go back and put in all of the necessary precursors to the story, right?
So if a character says something surprising, like two days ago I was writing about one character and something very surprising came up.
So what I'll need to do is go back and put in the precursors to that, the premonitions, right?
That sort of make it make sense.
So, that's sort of my process.
And then when the entire book is finished, I'll read it start to end and try and sort of fix any other issues that may be there and put in the spice, you know, put in the trills and so on, the little visual descriptions.
I remember when I had a writing teacher I guess about 20 plus years ago, I had a writing teacher and my first writing teacher absolutely hated my work.
I just didn't laugh about it now.
It was a bit rough at the time, but I absolutely hated my work.
And the second writing teacher absolutely loved my work.
Which is kind of a presage for how it was going to be perceived in the public as a whole.
But my second writing teacher, she told me, you put in little flashes of color.
Like, she loved my book.
It was the God of Atheists that we were working on.
And she said, you know, maybe have a woman with a red backpack walking across the quad in the university.
And putting in those little flashes of color and sense detail can really bring it.
To life. And because my aim in this book, this is called The Present.
This is a prequel to the future.
My aim in this book is I want...
You know when you watch a documentary, particularly when people don't know that they're being filmed, they have a way of talking that is so natural, that sort of fly on the wall, you can hear people.
They have a way of talking that's so natural.
And I'm really striving very hard to try and capture that.
I've always had pretty stylized and fairly heightened language.
I'm consciously tamping back on the character's ability to use analogies and metaphors and have that sort of scintillating, coruscating language.
And I'm really just trying to make it fly on the wall that most people, of course, can't communicate in deep analogies and metaphors and imagery and all that.
And these people have that challenge.
So I really am working hard to try and get that.
The other thing that I do is try to find...
And sometimes I do this.
I used to have to do this all the time.
But now what I do is I try to find the right music.
And the right music for me tends to be...
I used to have a better ability to concentrate regardless of lyrics.
But since I've sort of become more conscious of the programming aspect of Lyrics in songs, I have to usually choose instrumental stuff or stuff with sort of murky lyrics or, you know, not lyrics that are vivid.
And so for this book, the album that I've gone to most is a 1979, I think it was, album by a British composer who mixes classical with modern.
His name is Mike Batt, B-A-T-T, and the album is Tarot Suite, and it's a pretty good album, and a lot of it's instrumental.
So I will sort of put that on a loop, and it can give me a lot of energy and vividness.
For the future, I did classical for the modern world.
And then I did old slide, Delta Blues guitar, but no lyrics for Roman and the Tribe and so on.
So music can help as far as that goes.
So that's my sort of creative process as a whole.
All right, so let's see here.
And just, you know, let yourself play.
Could you kindly give an overview of your successful rehabilitation of your knee injury?
Thanks. Oh, yeah. Wow, that was strange, right?
I mean, I was at a disco when I was 20 or 21, and this was New Year's Eve, and I just wrecked my knee.
I wrecked my knee doing disco moves.
But, yeah, this one, I was in St.
Louis for a speech, and I was chasing my daughter down a hallway, and I had...
New sneakers on, and the hallway was really, it was a very sort of shiny floor, and my sneaker just went down and stopped, and I just stumbled, and, you know, my knee went into the ground.
It wasn't a huge issue. I could still walk and all of that, but it just took forever.
So what happened was I just kind of swelled up, and I just couldn't bend it properly, and so on.
So I tried going to two different rehab places, and they were both completely useless.
They gave me exercises and so on.
So, yeah, I sort of followed their advice.
I got ultrasound and some sort of sound stimulation and so on.
And it didn't really do much of anything.
So, again, none of this is advice for anyone else.
I'm just telling you sort of my experience and what I did.
And so I was never particularly sure whether I should be resting it or using it.
And then one of the women who was the rehab lady, she said, you know, maybe give it a couple of days and then really start to work it.
So I did that. The exercises she gave me were not particularly helpful.
So what eventually I did was I just went out and I bought a massage gun.
And I just, you know, almost put flannel between my teeth and just went in with the massage gun and just attacked wherever it was tight and tender and sore and just massaged the living crap out of it and that solved it like in a day.
It was really wild. And then I had some, once it was loosened, what I did was I have a little set of weights and a little weight machine in the basement.
And it allows me to do leg extensions, you know, where you sit and you extend your legs.
And so when I started doing those, my knee was actually crunchy, like it would make these crunchy sounds, which was not particularly appealing.
So I just kept doing it.
I continued to do the sort of knee extensions or leg extensions, and that solved the problem.
I still feel a little bit nervous to run full tilt, but it solved the issue in all practical ways.
Now I'm sort of back to normal and can do like an hour of racket sports, no problem, and all that.
So that was my...
I don't know why it seems so hard to just tell people to.
I mean, maybe I'm just unusual in that massage solves the problem, but I've had that a couple of times where I've just been sort of delicate towards a soft tissue injury and then just found that grueling massage tends to sort it out.
So I hope that helps in terms of understanding at least what I did.
Why do people talk negatively about consumerism?
Well, the reason that they talk negatively about consumerism is because if you can't compete, let's say that you're a male and you know that women are attracted to displays of wealth, right? Women are attracted to displays of wealth.
Let's say that for whatever reason, maybe because of ideology, maybe because you're just not particularly competent, maybe because you're a spendthrift or have a gambling addiction or something like that, you just can't accumulate enough resources to show off to women.
And women are biologically programmed to respond to displays of excess resources with attraction because the excess resources are necessary to pay for the costs of children.
So if you can't compete We're the man who's displaying his resources.
Then what you will do is you will attempt to turn consumerism or flashy displays of excess resources into something that's crass and negative and bad for the environment and so on.
And this way you're attempting to realign women's view of materialism from the positive, which is sort of the biological evolutionary process, to a negative, to have women judge men who display excess resources in a negative fashion as being a to have women judge men who display excess resources in a negative Because excess resources is good for the environment if the environment is your children need to
But if you can convince women that excess resource display is a bad thing, then your lack of resources becomes a plus and another man's excess resources becomes a negative.
Whenever you're looking at sort of widespread phenomenon...
I think the thing to do is to simply look at it as an attempt to sway reproductive choices.
It's the first thing you want to do, an attempt to sway reproductive choices.
Marx was famously bad at managing money.
His mother said she wished he would accumulate some capital rather than just writing about it.
And so, because he's bad at managing money, he wants to make money evil and all that sort of stuff.
Let's see. Why did the Greeks make so many naked statues?
Is it like ancient porn?
I assume it has something to do with that, as you probably know.
Greece, ancient Greece, the Olympics were originally sort of greased naked.
Men, I assume, of spectacular physique and so on.
So there is a lot of sexual indulgence that occurs when...
You have a society characterized by excess wealth.
Now, the excess wealth of the ancient Greeks was built on a fairly rapacious pillaging and so on, empire.
And slavery, of course, right?
And this is not to pick on the ancient Greeks.
All of the ancient societies and some of the even modern societies work that way.
So you end up with a fair amount of potential indulgence.
Decadence, right? Decadence is when you can indulge in flights of fancy.
You can indulge in anti-irrational behaviors.
It's a marker of status, right?
It's a marker of status, right?
So, when you look at, again, you can look at things as far as sexual selection goes, as I said before.
The other thing you can do, of course, is you look at people's behavior and you say, how does this serve status?
How does this serve status?
So, of course, in the past...
When people worked for a living hard out in the sun, having a tan and being slender and or muscular, or both, was considered a mark of low status.
Now, when people work in offices, being outside and having the time and money to go to the gym is considered a mark of status.
You just always want to look at this status stuff.
For a wealthy woman who could eat anything she wants, being thin is a mark of status.
It's a mark of self-control, and so on.
And so when you have a wealthy society, people start looking towards, they sort of mutate towards displays of status that have nothing to do with, in particular, what would be in a state of scarcity, right?
Being slightly overweight is a mark of status.
In a state of plenty, being underweight is a mark of status.
People are just status-driven.
I'm not complaining about that.
I mean, that's sort of why we're all here, and it's just part of our evolution.
And so recreational sexuality becomes much more common in a state of excess, right?
When you have more wealth than you really need to survive, then recreational sexuality, and I assume that the ancient Greek statues have something to do with that.
How and why might we have evolved to enjoy music?
That's a great question. Now, of course, music is not confined in any way, shape, or form to human beings.
Birds do it, and whales do it.
And so on. So I have a couple of thoughts about that.
So human beings are better at remembering...
Okay, think of all the songs you can sing.
Think of all the lyrics you know.
And think of all the poems, written poems that you know.
And I would imagine that's probably like a thousand to one songs to...
A written language, right?
So we are so constituted that when we wire language together with music, it's much easier to remember.
And so the tribal myths and the unifying stories that would knit a tribe together and make them want to fight for each other that much more, especially before written language, which is most of human history.
If you were able to have songs, then you're going to have more tribal cohesion and tribal unity and be able to develop more of a tribal history and a tribal identity, which gives people a collective fantasy to fight for, which is very powerful.
If you don't have any particular tribal unity, then betrayal to other tribes and simply seeking your own survival at an individual level is much more likely, much more possible.
Although other tribes will not view you very well if you defect from your own tribe to try and join them because then they'll realize you don't have any loyalty and so on.
So songs serve the stories which serve tribal loyalty, which serves collective survival.
So I think there's that. Of course, in war, drums and chants have a sort of semi-hypnotic effect, which allows tribal cohesion and phalanx-style marching in time and the sort of blood rush and the adrenaline and so on.
So I think music certainly helps release tribal battle.
Energies and enthusiasms.
I think also singing in particular, there's two aspects to singing I think that are important.
The first of course is that it shows good fine motor control.
You think of that trill that Freddie Mercury does after the falsetto bit in Somebody to Love, which he actually pulled off live, which to me was remarkable.
I think I've only ever been able to do that once in my life.
And so that level of vocal control, fine motor control, shows Intelligence.
Of course, intelligence is shown by the ability to create music.
Intelligence is shown by the ability to remember music and to remember lyrics.
So it's sort of primitive IQ test, so to speak.
And the other thing, too, is that, boy, you know, nothing's more exhausting than living with people who are deluded about themselves.
Oof! Because, you know, you're going to have to spend forever just propping up that delusion and they get really touchy and angry and they're constantly volatile if that delusion is questioned.
Living with people, I mean, unless you happen to share that delusion, which is a different matter, but living with people who are deluded is exhausting.
And so if somebody thinks that he's a good singer when he's not, that is a sign that it's not someone you want to have kids with.
And if somebody thinks that they're not a good singer when they are a good singer, then that shows excessive humility, which is going to be a negative for a woman who wants the man to be able to compete with other men in the acquisition of resources.
So just a couple of thoughts off the top of my head, but I think that has something to do with it.
If you were trying to make art in the world today, what kind of art would you create?
I don't know what to say.
I have a bunch of novels and poems and so on, so you can just read those.
I'm a new subscriber to your Locals.
I've been following you for years, however.
I'm glad I could find you still producing content.
Ah, me too. I'm currently about halfway through your History of Philosophers series.
You mentioned in either your Plato or Socrates episode that philosophy hasn't produced anything of value in over a thousand years or so.
Okay, sorry to be minorly annoying, and thank you for your support and encouragement.
It's not that philosophy has produced no value.
It's that philosophy, compared to something like physics or chemistry or geology or biology and so on, philosophy has yet to answer its most essential questions in a manner that society accepts as a whole.
I mean, the Earth is a sphere.
There are still a few people who think that it's flat, but, you know, society as a whole accepts that the world is a sphere, that the Earth goes around the Sun, and so on.
They accept these things.
So if you look at something like physics or astronomy, it's solved sort of the basic questions and the basic issues.
There are still some people who think that the Earth is 6,000 years old, but most people accept that it's at least twice that, right?
So most disciplines have, rational, objective disciplines, have solved Basic problems, but philosophy still hasn't gotten to what is real, what is truth, like what is reality, what is truth, what is virtue.
This has not been solved.
And so philosophy is one of the oldest disciplines.
It's the oldest objective rational discipline.
It even predates science because modern scientific method only came out thousands of years after philosophy first came up.
Even if you were to backtrack it to Aristotle, there is still, of course, prior to Aristotle was Plato, prior to Plato was Socrates, prior to Socrates were the pre-Socratics, which I talk about in the series, and so philosophy still hasn't answered in a way that is generally acceptable what is real,
what is true, what is good. And even if we understand that what is good is pretty tricky, I mean, UPB was a heck of a brain sweat to come up with, but What is true?
What is real? I understand that we're dealing with the political need for collectivist delusions, we're dealing with superstition, we're dealing with a lot of things, but philosophy has not been able to answer these questions in a manner that satisfies the general population.
So I'm not saying philosophy has produced no value.
I'm just saying that relative to other disciplines, its central questions remain unanswered, even though it's the oldest discipline that claims to be rational and objective and has achieved the least certainty in the mind of the general population.
So just to point that out.
All right.
The listener says, after thinking on this idea for a while, I had a thought that maybe it's possible that what genuinely started out in its attempt to understand the world around us ended up as more of a blood sport or a method to argue your point until the other person concedes.
an art of argumentation, so to speak.
With that said, would it be fair to say the Stoics, like Seneca and Diogenes, cannibalistic and incestual proclivities aside, are the ones we should be praising as the real movers and shakers of the philosopher's original intent?
Would you consider making a show and or series on learning more about the Stoics?
What are the Stoics in relation to the philosophers?
I get the idea that the Stoics were against the pretense of much of what the big philosophers of the time were trying to do.
Diogenes' plucked chicken story comes to mind.
Well, yeah, I mean, I certainly would be happy to do a show on the Stoics at some point.
But the history of philosophers...
is the history of particular impulses and movements in the history of philosophy as a whole, and of course the people who created and manifest them.
It's not a story of what we ought to study, it's a story of what is.
And as a story of what is, I try not to play favorites.
Obviously I've talked about the people I like more, but I try not to play favorites too much.
I'm trying to describe What is?
So if I were to say, well, the Stoics had it down, man, they were the guys, and so on, well, first of all, I'd be a Stoic, and then wouldn't really have anything original to add.
It's the difference between being a critic and being a writer.
And critics are important, and I get that, although critics almost always are motivated by something other than the love of art and truth and humanity.
But I have no particular interest in being a critic alone or an evaluator, a judger, of the creativity of art.
I mean, if you can write great songs, why on earth would you be satisfied being a cover band, right?
I mean, Queen did their Elvis covers, but they, I guess Freddie Mercury did the great pretender and a great job too.
And telling insight into his psyche that this was the only song he really covered other than the really early Larry Lurick stuff.
But I don't want to Say who's right in the past, in particular.
Because I want to create my own arguments as to...
I mean, the history of philosophy, this is why I think show 17, I railed against how horrifying a project it was.
That's why I'm taking a break.
It's just the history of manipulated, controlled error.
It's just appalling.
All right. Let's see here.
How to get over not being able to out-compete your own father.
Well, I would say it'd be great.
I mean, it depends what you're competing him in.
First of all, you can find something that you're better at and focus on that.
Like, whatever you find in life, you should find what you're best at and focus on that.
I think I'm best at doing this kind of stuff.
I'm focusing on this. I'm certainly better at this than my father was, although my father, of course, was better at getting divorced and raising his voice and knuckling children's heads and being a geologist than I am.
So focus on your own specialty for sure.
If your father is just magically better at everything than you, I mean, that's kind of hard to imagine because there's always some specialty that you can focus on.
Be careful if your father...
I mean, is your father out-competing you?
Is your father... Attempting to assuage his own fears of mortality by out-competing you.
Like, I remember when my daughter, you know, when your kids are very little, you're better at them than everything.
And then my daughter became better at me than something.
She's better at drawing than I am.
She's better at Rocket League than I am.
She's better at Among Us than I am.
There's things that she's just better at.
She's better at enjoying friendly competition than I was.
She's taught me a lot about that, and I've been very good.
I was just thanking her for that the other day.
So knowing that your children are better than you at things gives you a real shadow of your own mortality.
It's a really deep shadow of your own mortality because you realize that they're better than you at things because they're there to replace you.
And they're there to replace you because you're going to be gone.
So if you have a father who's hyper-competitive, he's probably in hot denial of his own mortality, in which case you might want to have a conversation with him about that because trying to play whack-a-mole with the symptoms of a deep problem is usually a giant waste of time.
Let's see here. Do you plan on doing a book review on I'm Glad My Mom Died?
Yeah, I might. I mean, I've talked about it a little bit here and there, and you guys can let me know what you think as far as all this goes, but it's certainly possible.
All right, so I'll stop here.
Thank you again so much for great, great questions, and your support just absolutely means the world to me.
If you haven't supported the show, You know, you could.
I published this today, before the end of the year.
You can go to freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
I'd really appreciate that. Lots of love from up here.
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