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March 9, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:30:25
Are We Doomed?
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Welcome to Wednesday Night Live!
What is it? 8th of March!
Funny story this afternoon.
Funny, funny. So I'm back on the call-in shows.
I was off them for a while.
I'm back on...
I'm just working on the third draft of my new novel called The Present.
I have a science fiction novel called The Future, and then I have a novel about contemporary society called The Present.
All the creativity goes into the novels and zero...
Apparently into the titles.
That's fine. That's fine.
I mean, how much more black can the album cover, Billy?
And the answer is not more black.
Can't be more black. You should have seen what I wanted to put on the album cover.
It wasn't a glove I can assure you.
Anyway, so I'm like, okay, I'll do a call-in show.
And if you have call-in topics, something that philosophy could help you with, call in, C-A-L-L-I-N, call in at freedomman.com.
Just shoot me an email. We'll set it up.
So a nice young lady emails me and says, you know, a couple of marital issues.
It'd be great if I could talk about them with you and all that.
And, you know... She's a mom and she's about to be a new mom, so yeah.
Especially whenever there are kids involved and it's a marital situation, I'm down for that.
So I set myself up for, you know, hopefully some fairly good banter about marriage and so on.
Well, we got abortions, we got drug abuse, prostitution, and being rescued from sex trafficking.
I mean, good, man. It's honest stuff.
It's powerful stuff.
So that was my afternoon.
What I thought would be a cozy 90 minutes of marital stuff was three hours of a powerful journey.
So we'll get that out at some point soon.
But that was quite something.
That was quite something, let me tell you.
All right. Let me see.
But yeah, so your questions have to match that level of drama.
I'm just not going to take them. Just kidding.
You can say whatever is on your mind.
Whatever is on your mind.
All right. Speaking of which, let's see.
What is on your mind? What would be...
Whoa. What happened there?
Where'd my video go?
That doesn't appear to be much video over there on that side.
Well, I guess turn it off, turn it on, and it works just fine again.
All right. Thank you for the tip, my friend.
I really, really appreciate that.
I'm halfway through the future.
Is there a podcast link to the present?
Yes. No, there's no podcast.
Sorry, you wouldn't know this, of course, but I was just finishing up.
I'm just finishing up draft three.
After draft three, I consider it done.
And when it's done, I start the audiobook.
So I will probably start the audiobook next week.
Next week. All right. Actually, there's one thing I needed to do here as well.
So start the audiobook next week.
I will release the audiobook as I go along.
So you can pick it up from there, but I'm looking forward to this audiobook for sure.
Sorry, I just needed to print out more pages.
I completely forgot about that. Yeah, so we will start the audiobook next week.
I'll release it as I go, so you can go from there.
All right, let's get back to your questions.
Why? Why do you keep kicking out and coming back?
Why? Why? There you go.
Oh, we're back. Alright. Let's see here.
Photo of baby Izzy was adorable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, question.
In the event of a global financial crisis, is the United States in a better position to recover since it retains more economic instruments?
How does this compare with a country like Russia that has national debt under 15% and domestic energy production, or Japan that has an aged population with a national debt over 200%?
A national debt over 200%?
Do you mean, oh yeah, that's 200% of GDP. No, more than that, right?
No, yeah, maybe 200%.
I think Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio.
I thought Asians were good at math.
It's just a myth, apparently.
Yeah, global financial crisis.
So it depends what you mean by a financial crisis.
So if a financial crisis is just, you know, bad policies, bad incentives, government control the currency, things just go badly from there, then yes, the US is, I think, in a decent position.
But if you look at the financial crisis as something that is engineered to destroy Christendom, so to speak, or the sort of formerly Protestant countries and so on...
Then the screws will continue to be tightened, right?
So if the purpose of the financial crisis is to crush America as a sort of beacon of freedom and resentment around the world, then it will just keep getting targeted until it is destroyed.
So... It's one thing to be in an accident, right?
It's another thing to be targeted, right?
And so, you know, can you survive controversy?
Sure. Unless the controversy is kind of purposefully created in order to attempt to destroy you, in which case it's going to be much tougher.
Hey, Steph, I'd like to hear what you think on the harm pornography does to people in relationships, especially those who are exposed to it from a really young age.
I don't know that.
I did an interview with a fellow who was, you know, he's had to quit porn and so on.
So I don't know because I think it's such a new phenomenon to have, you know, this level of hardcore pornography available to young people.
Billy Eilish talked about how it really messed her up and so on.
So I don't know.
Advice on how to deal with this situation?
Again, somebody can find it or post it to me, but do your research and figure out what you can do about it.
But it's a really unprecedented experiment.
There was a scene in an old TV series called Freaks and Geeks.
There's a scene where the older boy corrupts the younger children by giving them pornography.
That was like you had to have the real, not in your pocket, touch of a button kind of stuff.
So this is a truly wild and fairly demonic experiment to have sexual material available at...
Two children who were obviously young.
I think it's pretty bad at any age.
So I don't know.
I don't know what the studies are going to be.
I don't think that they'll be very honest studies.
And I do believe that it's R versus K selection, right?
So this is sort of something that I worked on years ago.
You should look for Gene Wars, G-E-N-E Wars.
FDR Podcast is the way to find my old shows and videos.
After your podcast, just do a search for Gene Wars.
R versus K selection. So R selection is when you just reproduce like crazy, you don't really care about your offspring, and you just consume resources until you run out of resources, right?
This is rabbits and so on, right?
K selection is fewer children, more training and investment in your offspring and management of resources.
And I think, I'm pretty sure that the exposure to sexually explicit material, which now is also in schools, right?
There was a stream, I think it was DeSantis was in Florida, was doing a stream, I think just today, where he was showing some of the sexually explicit materials available in school libraries for children.
And the networks had to turn it off because it was too sexually explicit for adults to see in the privacy of their own home on television.
It would have gone against, I think, FCC rules for sexual material.
And if it is something that...
You can't broadcast on television.
How on earth is it available to children?
It's a wild and deep and great and horrifying mystery.
So it's a huge experiment.
I obviously don't think it's going to go very well.
I think it's going to produce people who are just kind of are selected and so on, right?
So, yeah, it's pretty wild.
All right. Somebody writes, me and my wife...
Are currently holding our parents accountable for the trauma they caused us in our childhood.
My dad has outright ignored me reaching out.
My mom did engage but won't accept anything.
My wife's mom won't admit violence but her dad is admitting he was violent but wants to brush it away.
Do you have any advice on how to deal with this situation?
Thank you for everything. Sorry for not donating this time.
I subscribe and try to donate when I can't afford it.
I appreciate that.
If you're subscribing, don't feel the need to tip me here.
Obviously, it's greatly appreciated, but if you are a subscriber, that's counted, and I appreciate that enormously, so thank you.
Right. It's a great question.
That is a great, great question.
This is what I said to the woman today.
So hit me with a Y. Hit me with the letter Y. Or you can type out why the question if you want.
Hit me with the letter Y if you believe that I separated from my family.
Hit me with Y if you think that's the case.
Thank you.
Alright. For those who say no, what do you think?
I mean, it certainly is true that with regards to my family of origin, I haven't had any contact with them for 20 plus years.
But, I mean, somebody emailed me to say that my father was dead and so on.
But, yeah, so why do you think I did not separate from my family?
They rejected you. They left you.
You're hella curious. And they weren't.
No intimacy on their part.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I... At no point in my life have I ever said to my family of origin...
I'm never talking to you again.
Have nothing to do with me. I don't want you in my life or anything like that.
Never said anything like that to my family of origin.
No. And, you know, this is all so long ago for me, but I understand for the people going through the process, it's really important.
It's really vivid. So...
No. I never...
I never said to my family, I'm separating from you.
I want to have nothing to do with you.
I never said that. I never had a formal break.
I never rejected them.
I simply had standards.
I said, well, no, you're not allowed to tell me I'm crazy.
You're not allowed to tell me I'm wrong automatically.
You're not allowed to avoid topics that I really want to talk about.
You're not allowed to yell at me.
You're not allowed to be physically intimidating.
You're not allowed to... I had to accept these things when I was a kid.
I don't have to accept them as an adult.
I had to live with these things as a kid.
I don't have to live with them as an adult.
Right? So, my mother would...
My mother would come in and tell me all about these crazy legal cases she was always pursuing and all of that.
And I would say, okay, well, you know, we've listened to that, but I, you know, I feel like just about every time we get together, it's just all about this legal stuff.
And I don't really get to talk about anything and all of that, right?
So she got really angry.
She raised her voice and so on.
I said, no, no, no, I'm not doing that.
I had to do that as a kid. I don't have to do that now.
You do not get to raise your voice.
I will not accept that. I will not have it in my life.
life. I will not have it in my life. So she would then storm out, right?
And then she'd call me a day or two later and she'd pretend like nothing happened.
Inviting me into this world of unreality, right?
I said, no. Listen, you raised your voice at me when I expressed a legitimate preference.
I don't appreciate that.
You need to apologize. Oh, you misinterpreted.
Oh, that's right. Okay, well...
When you're ready to apologize, we can talk.
You should call me a couple of days later, pretending like nothing happened.
Say, no, no, no. You still need to apologize to me, right?
And it's called the broken record technique.
Like you just repeat things until people either listen or they don't.
Just repeat things, right?
No, no. I'm not doing this.
No, you insulted me.
You raised your voice. You yelled at me.
you need to apologize.
And I just kept repeating that until she stopped calling.
Again, it's one of the reasons why my conscience is so clear.
I never said, you can never call me.
I never said, I never want to talk to you again.
I never, right? And with my father, I told him what had happened to me as a child.
And then he would call and leave me messages.
Well, I did this and I went there.
Right? Okay, so he wouldn't address any of these things.
Say, oh no, I really want to address this stuff.
right so just have standards you know hey I have a coffee sales
It's $5,000. Here's $10.
No sale. I'm not mad.
I don't need to fix people. It's just no sale.
What did you say when they wanted to see you as an adult?
Well, I mean, they have always known exactly what to do.
I mean, I was clear. This is the stuff, here are my standards.
This is what I want to talk about, here are my standards, right?
So, if someone says to you...
Whatever the most offensive word is, right?
The most offensive word you can think of.
Let's just say it's flibber to gibbet, right?
If somebody says to you, I can't be in a conversation with you if you repeatedly use the word flibber to gibbet, right?
And let's say you call that person up and you scream flibber to gibbet over and over again and then hang up.
Do you expect a call back? No.
Because they've given you a standard.
Do not say this incredibly offensive word flibber to gibbet.
It's a standard I have.
And then you keep screaming that word.
Are you reaching out to them?
Are you trying to get in contact? So I said, no, I mean, you've got to have real conversations with me, and you can't call me crazy, and you can't gaslight me, and you can't, right?
It doesn't mean I'm always right, you know, but you can't just say I'm wrong for having a perspective or opinion, right?
So, I mean, I would get occasional messages, but it would be like nothing happened.
Okay, well. Yeah, I don't talk about sibling stuff because it's not really...
It's not his choice.
My sort of semi-prominence.
So, somebody asks, did you stop replying if they reached out?
No, no, my door is always open.
To anyone from my past, my door is always open.
My door is always open.
If people want to talk to me and be real and, you know, be curious and be honest and so on, and apologize for past wrongs, and if there are past wrongs that I've done, ask me for those.
I can't mind read. So, yeah, I mean, door is always open.
And door has been open for 25 years.
So, I can't make people be honest.
I can't make them be curious. I can't make them do the right thing.
You know, this is one of the reasons why if you have dysfunctional people in your life, right?
If you have dysfunctional people in your life, When you meet someone healthy and deep and loving and wonderful and passionate and caring and all of that, somebody who's thoughtful and all that, I mean, your eyes are open, man.
You can't go back to sleep then.
You can't close your eyes again.
You can't unsee what has been seen.
I mean, I had family members say, oh, I don't really want to get to know your fiancé.
You're just going to get divorced anyway.
Bye-bye. Like, again, that's like, why would I want someone around who's not, like, who believes my marriage is going to fail?
Why on earth would I want someone around?
I don't know. It's weird. I guess it's people who never think that you have a choice.
I don't know. It's just strange. I just don't understand.
I don't understand. Like, I'll never understand why people put money above relationships.
I'll never understand that. I will never understand why people put money above relationships.
Ever. Ever.
And I could get into details.
I won't, but I think everyone's had this experience where people have just put money above relationships.
It could be something in the business world.
It could be cottages that need to be...
The big famous one up here in Canada is cottages that need to be divvied up.
It could be an inheritance.
It could be any number of things.
It could be some insurance policy.
But why...
I don't understand.
Why do people put money above relationships?
There's not even that much money, too.
$10,000, $30,000, $50,000.
It's not a huge amount of money, like over the course of your whole life, right?
I don't understand why people put money above relationships and are willing to sacrifice lifelong relationships for a relatively small amount of money.
Or even any amount of money for that, right?
Because you get older, what's the money going to do for you, right?
Just ask Bruce Willis. Right.
All right, somebody says, How would that be different from an or else situation?
I'm not sure if you're talking to me or not.
Can you clarify that? Sir?
As soon as I was honest with my brother about our differences in values, I stopped getting invited over.
Yeah, a family of origin is your history.
Your family that you build, that's your present and that's your future, right?
And, like, I would never ever, in a zillion years, sacrifice the future for the sake of the past, right?
I would never sacrifice the quality of my relationship with my wife in order to try and maintain some relationship with my mother.
If my relationship with my mother is interfering with the quality of my marital relationship or my parenting relationship or anything like that with my daughter, sorry, I mean, That's, you know, the unchosen relationships should never trump the chosen relationships, right?
Somebody says, I cut off my narcissistic mom once I saw her doing the same thing to my kids, so now she manipulates the remaining family I still have left.
Yeah, I wouldn't accept that.
I'm not telling you what to do.
I'm just telling you I wouldn't accept that.
I would just say to people, no, she's destructive and it's her only.
Because if you stay in relationships with people who are still in relationships with destructive people, those destructive people will use those relationships to get to you.
So I'm just like, I'm sorry, but you have to make a choice.
You have to make a choice. Like, I choose the destructive person.
It's like, okay, well, I'm sorry about that.
And should you change your mind? My door is always open, but...
I've seen my family destroyed by arguments over money.
Oh God, isn't it terrible?
Isn't it just terrible?
Because the scars and the wounds to the relationship last the rest of your life.
And then the money comes and goes.
And at the end of your life, all you'll remember is the scars and the wounds of the distance.
And the money will be absolutely meaningless to you.
His arguments over money is crazy.
It's crazy.
I mean, I think everyone's seen Inheritance go bad one time or another.
It's just awful.
It's just awful. All right.
So hit me up with your questions.
I might dip into the pool of questions that I had.
It's like this cooking show.
You know, I pre-baked this.
Right? So... Let me get to my questions.
If you have questions. For call-in shows, it seems you sometimes really connect with the guest and other times less so.
What do you think makes the difference?
So some people, when they get insights, they connect with the person giving them the insights.
Other people, when they get insights, they kind of want to go off into a closet, into the dark and think about those insights themselves.
Sometimes insights connect and other times insights become something that distracts the person.
They have to go off and think about it.
So I think that's the difference.
All right, let me just get to these questions.
Questions?
Yeah, freedomain.locals.com.
I also post a bunch of stuff there too, which I think would be of interest to you as a whole, like the shorter videos and so on, so I hope that you will check that out, freedomain.locals.com.
Alright, sorry. Somewhere buried in here were a bunch of questions that I asked people and I wanted to make sure that I was going to get them answered.
There we go. March 6th.
Jeez, only two days ago. It really feels like it should be longer.
feels like it should be longer all right let me just see if there are questions up here
okay where did i put my Wait, did I just...
I didn't just shut this down, did I? Oh, no.
It's right over here. When I go away, it seems to vanish.
All right. Steph, any advice on how to get rid of recurring dreams?
Okay. Hit me with a Y if you want me to talk about my own experience or an N if you want me to be theoretical.
Y for my experience, N for theoretical.
Because I don't want to make it about me, but sometimes sharing about yourself.
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Y and both.
Nice, nice. You guys must be great fun to negotiate with.
So, okay, so my biggest recurring dream occurred, gosh, in my late 20s to early 30s.
And it was dreams of towering tsunami destructive water.
I'd be on a beach, giant waves, like 500 feet high, impossible waves, just come and smash and destroy.
I remember after being smashed by one of these waves, I was floating at the ocean, my entire arm was ripped off, I just remember.
So I would survive it, be enormously maimed.
And this is before...
I did anything to do with public philosophy.
I was getting out of a relationship.
It wasn't a terrible relationship, but I proposed and we were going to get married, but I just...
Recognize, with the help of a friend's girlfriend, chance comment.
You'd think somebody engaged would be happier, right?
So I ended up not staying in that relationship.
No hate. It wasn't anything desperately bad.
It wasn't anything hugely problematic.
It just wasn't kind of the right thing.
And I went through these dreams of just elemental waves, towering waves, Tearing me apart, tearing the world apart, tearing towns apart, and trying to find a way to survive.
And... I was trying to empathize with the effects of my potential on the world as a whole.
I mean... For those of you who've seen me on the downside of my public attention, you know, in my sort of height of power and reach, you know, I was able to move mountains.
And it was an enormous effect on the world, as you can sort of see from the blowback, right?
The blowback is the impact crater and the blowback, you know, the write-ups on me are...
Harsher than write-ups on child murderers like Che Guevara.
I really hit just about every nerve that can be hit in the world.
And the effects of my drive for truth and my willingness to speak the truth and also my willingness to speak the truth in a way that wasn't easily dismissible.
Like, oh, he's some crank, he's some crazy guy, whatever, right?
He believes in the flat earth too or whatever, right?
So, you know, my education, my reading, my skills in different areas, and my friendly and relentless dedication to the truth was something that the world could not easily dismiss, and what you can't dismiss, but it's upsetting to you when you're in a very primitive state of mind, you just attack, right?
So, my unconscious is saying, you have all of this potential, but you need to understand how the world is going to receive you.
And the world is going to receive you like a giant wave that destroys everything.
So, I'm not saying I understood all of that in the moment, at the time.
But, you know, there are...
There is a premonition in your unconscious about what your future is going to be because your unconscious alone knows your true potential.
Because down there in the furnace, if you're unconscious, they know what beasts they're building.
They know what machinery they're putting together.
They know what electricity they're charging up.
They know what elemental forces are down there.
It's kind of tough in the conscious mind to know because, you know, a conscious mind, you're like, oh, I stubbed my toe.
The conscious mind is like, oh, I got some mail.
I should open it. The conscious mind is like, oh, I'm having trouble formatting this video.
It's like doing all this...
Detritus, persons from Pollack, zippity-doo-dah, little stuff all the time, right?
But deep down in there, massive billow, furnaces if you're unconscious, machinery and gods and futures and tectonic plates and universes move and coalesce and grind together and produce sparks and glory and terror and horror and beauty down there in the massive machinery.
Of the masticating unconscious.
That is what's going on.
So my future was...
And I wrote about this...
Oh gosh, what would I have been?
My early 30s, right?
My early 30s, just when the internet was really kind of starting out.
I wrote about a guy who hooked up a camera to his computer and spoke to the world as a whole.
Long before this was even remotely possible, I did all of that.
So, I'm going to see here.
It's been a while.
It's been a while.
Let me just see if I can dig up my speech.
This is a bitter grad student.
.
This is from my novel, The God of Atheists.
You can get this at fdrurl.com slash tgoa.
fdrural.com slash TGOA.
This is a Birograd student who's doing a podcast.
Bye.
Rudy was not an absolutist, but something about Gordon had gotten to him.
One night when he could not sleep, he got up and spoke the following into his computer.
I know it's all bullshit, but it smells anyway.
I sometimes feel the most god-awful depression.
Not in my soul, because that's being deconstructed, nor in my loins, which are the keystone of my male dominance, or my heart, which is damned off by Western materialism, but somewhere important in my being, somewhere down in the marrow, something is clamoring at me.
I know it's all a kind of shell game and I need to spend every waking hour cursing, spitting on and undermining my culture in the hopes of being paid a middle class salary to teach those who come after me to do the same.
But there's something about all this mess and come on people, admit it.
It is a mess. Something we need to look at a bit more carefully.
A lot of you out there have been helped by me.
I sent you off into the deserts of your thesis, armed with just enough food and water to get back, if you ration yourself fiercely.
I always knew that there was nothing in my advice.
I've always just had a knack for wet fingering the prevailing social winds, but there is something in me.
Something... I want to know where the winds come from.
It's all very Magellan and Peter Pan, but there it is.
Someone recently came to me and had what I could really call a great idea.
Capital G, capital I. This thing would blow your mind, people.
But there is no hope of getting anywhere here.
I tried upshifting it to postmodernism, but I couldn't.
Brothers and sisters, I just couldn't.
For the first time in my life, I was unable to translate something alive into postmodernism, which I now classify as a dead language like Latin.
POMO, postmodernism, cannot contain this great idea.
All it can contain is what we already believe, which is that there is nothing to believe.
And we are so certain that there is nothing to believe.
We think we're open-minded, but it's just a slack emptiness.
We hate anyone who's certain.
We do, my brothers in the secret vessels of our hearts.
We hate certainty and confidence and love cynicism and empty charm.
Oh, we're so funny.
We are. We know all the hideous recesses of modern culture.
We sing of obscure things and in so doing we say that what is important is not truth or courage or nobility but the theme song from some 1950s sitcom.
We are a cancer in the throat of the modern world.
We have invented a language through which we cannot be detected.
We have swarmed the halls of academia, camping in the highest places of thought in our cluttered and twisted tent cities.
We carry a self-hatred so deep that we cannot see it, not in ourselves and not in others.
We go through each day like a pantomime.
We are scared of shadows in the halls and hate the world for not making our lies true.
We ask every question, but are we right?
What if the world does exist?
What if language is supposed to have meaning?
What if there are such things as truth and goodness?
Where in that shining city is there room for us rodents?
Every time an anchor is thrown overboard, we chew the rope.
Every time a man reaches up to climb, we attack his ankles.
We are a pestilence of perfection.
We live for finding flaws.
Every advantage, every virtue is eclipsed by a deficiency.
We cripple heroes for their tiny flaws.
Our standards are not goals but weapons.
We are an asset.
We undermine what we cannot achieve.
We shadowbox our enemies into exhaustion.
We feed on the natural doubt of the honest thinker.
We never prove.
We only imply.
We never say, just infer.
We never explain, just embarrass.
None of us have any idea what truth is.
We've no clue what we are saying.
We just play with the words we accept without thought.
We parade for each other, pretending at rebellion, but we never challenge and are never exposed.
We are paid to be thinkers, but never come to any conclusions.
When society picks its teams, we're not even picked last.
We don't even know where the field is.
We may as well be on the dark side of the moon making hand gestures in spacesuits, our face plates painted over.
We have no utility, and so are nothing but arrogance.
We have no truth, and so are nothing but scornful assertion.
We have no honor, so are self-righteous backstabbing villains.
We have no purpose, so we scorn all certainty.
We make all the noise we can to cover up our awful silence.
We bite the hand that feeds us and call it education.
We corrupt the young and call it education.
We erode the foundations of our society and call it education.
We only criticize and call it education.
We work for evil and call it education.
We have a hateful kid who dares the honest kid to strike him.
We are the natural plagues of society invading a world unaware of our danger.
We have taken over the pillars of learning, the first and last defenses, and now slither through the shadows of the last days.
The entire point of our lives is hiding.
We are ghosts, visible only in clanks and shadows.
We damn truth because truth would damn us.
What was our birthing?
Why are we drawn to speak of ideas that we believe do not exist?
Why do we lower the earth to make a false tower?
I think it's quite simple.
Well, at least it wasn't my case.
Rudy's voice caught.
I was curious and asked many questions.
For every child, a question stops somewhere.
The sky is blue because of X. X is because of Y. Y from Z. Z just is.
But I was never happy with that end point.
Always and forever, there had to be something more.
But that is at the very edge of society, of family, of loved ones near and dear.
To sail beyond visible land requires more navigation than I possessed.
The why of what is right is what everything is built on.
If you sail beyond that, if you take one step past the painted horizon, then you dissolve into air.
And that is where real terror lies.
We are social beings, but we are also beings who yearn for truth.
I yearned for truth.
I went that one step past the line of no more.
And so, society dissolved.
My family, which was my society at the time, sifted into puffs of dust.
My father's authority, nothing.
He did not know what or why he ordered.
My mother's heart, she loved and grieved for what she did not understand.
I became arrogant.
I believed that I had gone past all trappings into the truth, which was that everything is will.
I was ordered for the sake of order.
There was nothing of my benefit in it, any of it.
I must wear a coat when it's cold, but to apologize for speaking out of turn?
To not shoplift?
Lie? Not lie?
Good God! My parents told me not to lie while having no idea why lying was wrong!
It hurt people.
My father is a dentist! Is there a worse lie than punishing for lying without knowing why it is wrong?
So rather than being instructed, I was just being commanded.
It was a dare, the crying of uncle under a bully's knee.
No one had any real idea why I should or shouldn't do things.
It was habit, convenience, and power, of course.
Power. And I wouldn't have minded even that, except that it was...
It was a coward's power.
A bully is more honest.
You can hate the bully.
He doesn't pretend to represent right.
But my father, my teachers, all our petty little leaders, they all said, submit to the good, not me!
But then when I asked, they had no idea what the good was.
So what the fuck was it but power?
Go to hell with it.
My heart becomes a thin desert of stark shadows.
Anyone who claims right is now my enemy.
Every fuck who pumps and preens and drapes pretty ethics on the thick shit of power is my eternal foe.
I will rip the gilding from every empty altar.
I will become cancer to see if the body should live.
I was not alone in this attack.
Thank you.
I thought I was.
But to my left, to my right, was a sea of ghost riders.
We all sensed something false and self-serving.
It was all a form of advertising.
This or that is no more the right than Coke or Pepsi.
Every pronouncement is propaganda.
I hope that was wrong.
This was our great secret.
And who among us would not welcome the restoration of righteousness?
If there is such a thing as goodness, then our parents are saved.
The world is saved.
We are saved!
Even if they did not understand why, they still did the good and all is not power and control.
But we cannot find goodness.
It is gone from our times.
It has been emptied from the words of our elders.
We've been fooled once.
We are hardened against trust.
But in our hatred, have we lost the capacity to keep looking?
We fell from illusion because we demanded truth.
Have we now lost even the possibility of looking for truth?
We have learned that leeches made us sick.
Now we say that medicine is without worth.
Yet still we study to be healers.
We have become what we despised.
In our pursuit of predators we have become but teeth and claws.
We say we do not believe in truth but pursue knowledge nonetheless.
We have become as false as those whose blindness first spurred us on this path.
They said, this is the good, but knew nothing of right.
We say, this is knowledge, but know nothing of truth.
But we may be wrong, brothers and sisters.
This path we walked past the line of nothing more.
This path that has led us into the grey desert of indifferent opinions, where we can only nod at each other in silent passing.
This path may have become something we defend as our very homes, not as a route to something else.
We found our maps were false and became lost.
Is there a journey now to defend our disorientation?
Would we rather curse all maps and stay lost?
Do we love our false lessons so much that we will falsify the world to save them?
Maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know.
.
Maybe it was a false line.
This line from false to nothing.
False. Yes, it was all bullshit, but that doesn't mean that it always must be bullshit.
If we've given up looking for truth, let's all just turn in our library cards, empty our cubicles, rise up from our basement bedrooms, take the jobs our training has prepared for us and say with one proud, honest, accurate voice.
Would you like fries with that?
It's a great book. It's a great book.
You should really check it out.
It's free. It's free.
The God of Atheists.
So yeah, the recurring dreams.
You've got to unpack what's going on and what's mostly going on is your size and your power and your effect on the world, if you're honest.
All right. All right.
Steph, any advice on dealing with meaninglessness as a struggling student?
Thank you so much for sharing knowledge and reason all these years.
Yeah. Do you know what a synonym for meaninglessness is?
What is a synonym?
The synonym for obedience is meaninglessness.
Obedience and meaninglessness are two sides of the same coin.
We are born to do more than obey.
To obey is to betray your potential.
Now, I'm not talking about obeying physics or obeying UPB, right?
That's not obedience. That's enlightenment.
But to obey others will hollow out your soul.
We are not here to be shadows cast by more energetic and aggressive people.
We are not here to be mere marionettes pumped up and down by the thin strings of culture.
So, what are you studying and why?
Why? Okay, if you want to be a doctor, you want to be a lawyer, you want to be an engineer, okay, you've got to go to school for these things.
I don't think that's the way it should be, but that's the way it is.
What are you studying and why?
What are you studying and why?
What's the purpose of it?
Thank you.
you What's the purpose? One of the reasons I studied...
I started in English literature, two years of that.
I did almost two years of the National Theatre School.
I did two years of undergraduate history and I did a graduate degree in history.
Now, I switched from English to history because I knew I wanted to write historical novels and I thought history would be good for that.
But history, my God.
I mean, if there's one thing about the rise of the Internet, the rise of the modern media, the rise of shareable information in everyone's ass, you know, the idea that your ass could contain the entire sum of human knowledge is really amazing.
You've got your cell phone in your back pocket.
I don't recommend carrying it there.
I'm not a big fan of the cell phone radiation.
But the idea that you could ass all of human knowledge, Q&A, you've got a question, ask your ass.
But, well, you get it.
I mean, the lies that are out there that are easily disprovable, right?
Trump referred to white supremacists as fine people.
Easily disprovable lie.
Lies that are out there about me.
Easily disprovable. Just listen to the show.
I've actually put it all together for people.
People still believe lies.
Imagine how history is.
Brian Sicknick, beaten to death by the fire extinguisher on January the 6th.
He's walking around hours later.
People are able to deny what's right in front of them, and you think anything's true about history, even when things are recorded and instantly shareable.
Recorded and instantly... You can send Trump's entire speech.
People still believe the Russia collusion conspiracy theory hoax.
People believe that Trump overfed koi fish in Japan.
People believe that Trump told people to drink disinfectant.
People believe... I mean, it's all demonstrably false, all easily disproven.
So you can beam the truth to someone's ass in half a second.
People still believe massive levels of lies.
People can just will reality away.
The vampire of unbelief drops from no jugulars in the vicinity for the most part.
So meaningless as a struggling student, what are you studying for?
True knowledge is rarely learned.
It is almost always invented. True knowledge is almost never learned.
It is almost always invented.
So what are you studying for?
Are you obeying?
Are you on the train tracks of other people's expectations?
Are you just obeying people?
Are you just following courses? Are you just avoiding life by hiding out in a library?
Alright, let's see here.
Yeah, so maybe, maybe, if...
Yes, you've reached the end of the present.
It's a bit of a surprise ending.
Alright. Yeah, just start.
You will never...
I mean, it's fine. Look, if you want to be a good tennis player and there's a tennis master out there and he's going to tell you how to play and give you good advice on how to hold the racket, that's fine.
Yeah, absolutely. It's great.
We're not designed to spend a quarter century learning at the knee of other people.
We're designed to go out there, conquer the world, think for ourselves, create things.
Create things. Today is International Women's Day.
Yeah, well, that's only because a lot of women these days seem to span continents, wouldn't you say?
It gives me the creeps and makes me angry, International Women's Day, as someone says, and not just because of all the stores and businesses are closed here.
I resent the observance because I feel like it is a case of a privileged class playing the victim.
Is there something else about International Women's Day that is at all redeeming?
Um, well, international, it's like having the word social in the title or peoples.
It just means communism slash socialism, right?
The international is the communist anthem, right?
So, yeah, Women's Day.
It implies, of course, that women are ignored all the rest of the time, right?
All the rest of the time, women just get ignored.
And... Okay, when as a man have, let's say you provide for your family, right?
When as a man have you been thanked for providing for your family?
When has your wife sat down and said, you know, I mean, I know you really didn't want to go to work today.
I know you didn't sleep that well last night, man.
You just got up and you went to work.
I really thank you so much for providing all the resources that allow me to stay home and raise these wonderful children, right?
How often do you get a card from your kids saying, thanks for going to work and paying the bills.
Thanks for keeping the lights on.
Thanks for keeping a roof over our head.
Thanks for there being food in the fridge, right?
Because, I mean, you thank your wife, right?
You thank your wife and you say, gosh, you know, there's a great meal.
The house is beautiful and thank you so much, right?
How often as a man does society say to you, damn, you guys pay most of the taxes.
You know, we couldn't have old age pensions.
We couldn't have the welfare state.
We couldn't have... Any of this stuff, if you guys were working really hard and paying your taxes.
Oh, and by the way, thanks for building all the sewage systems and the HVAC systems and the air conditioners and the buildings and the airplanes and the cars and the boats and the roads and the canals.
Thank you so much for building all of that stuff.
You guys, what make our comfort as non-males, our comfort is possible because of you guys working so hard to sacrifice yourself for a lot of this stuff, right?
You don't get thanked as a man.
You don't. So, the people who are at the bottom of the society are the people you don't have to thank.
If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you can't criticize.
Well, if you want to know who you rule over, look at who you don't have to thank.
Does a master thank the slave?
No. Not at all.
Look at who you don't have to thank.
I mean, you don't even have to thank your waiter.
It's kind of nice to you, but you don't have to.
He's going to have to bring you the food anyway, because you're paying him, right?
So hierarchy, politeness is a mark of horizontalism, right?
But whoever you don't have to thank, whoever you can exploit and take for granted, whoever's contributions you don't need to acknowledge, those are the people at the bottom of society.
And that's men as a whole.
All right.
Steph, you've interviewed people from across the spectrum, from Chomsky to Vox Dei.
Over the years, do any interviewees stick out to you as far as being able to challenge your views?
All of my... I mean, I hate to say, well, everyone, because it sounds like...
But no, everyone... I wanted to interview them because I wasn't exactly sure what they were going to say.
And I liked Chomsky.
I liked interviewing Vox Dei.
Of course, I got a lot out of the...
I think it was 17 or 18 world experts in human intelligence that I interviewed for the IQ series.
Fantastic. It was enlightening.
Talked to... Well, I won't go through all the lists, but everybody knows...
Everybody taught me something that I didn't know, either through preparation or in the conversation as a whole, so that's why I enjoyed it.
Alright, so let's see here.
In Latin America, International Women's Day is enthusiastically and also violently celebrated.
Femicide statistics and gory stories are shamelessly used to shock people into compliance.
Yeah. Now, so a study, I think it was in America, found that the wage gap was 84 cents on the dollar.
Women earned 84 cents on the dollar, right?
So we got a 16 cent difference.
On aggregate, right?
But when they normalized by age, by hours worked, by occupation chosen, by level of education and so on, when they normalized by all of this stuff, they took out the variables that are not unjust but the result of female choice.
When they normalized a 16-cent gap in the wage gap between men and women...
How many cents was left over?
They normalize all of this stuff.
In other words, if a man had made the same decisions as a woman, what would the pay gap be?
How many pennies or how many cents were there narrowed down from the 16 to what?
Throw out some guesses here.
Throw out some guesses here.
What do you got? Negative five cents.
Well, no, they're not counting tax transfers.
That would absolutely make it way negative, right?
What do we got here? Two cents minus 15 cents, 3.08 minus two, 50 cents, 50 cents.
No, it's a penny. It's a penny.
So when you take in confounding factors that are the result of female choice, the wage gap drops from 16 cents to one penny, which is, of course, a rounding error and statistically irrelevant and so on, right?
So... Yeah, that's just the way it is.
Gosh darn, I don't want to stop watching.
This is amazing. Oh, this is the speech that I gave, Randy's speech.
I haven't started the God of atheists, but man, I'm looking forward to it now.
Yes, you absolutely should. Is there any meaning or insight when you stop having dreams at night?
I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. I've never had that happen, so I don't really know.
What a great student.
Somebody says, I'm a med student.
Was that the same person who had issues before?
I mean, I think we've seen pretty clearly with the pandemic that medical students are generally selected for compliance and obedience, right?
Yes. A meaninglessness.
Okay. So yes, it is the same.
So you're a medical student? Yeah, you know it's really tough.
It's really tough these days.
Every institution is set up with good intentions and often housed initially by decent people.
So you look at licensing boards and so on.
I know that it's people rent-seeking and trying to obviously gain more income than they would in the free market, but a lot of times, like the FDA and the CDC and all of that, so they're initially set up with some decent intentions and some fairly decent people in those organizations.
And then, usually a generation to a generation and a half, sometimes it's two, but usually not that much.
It's just replaced. The sort of noble intentions and the decent people are just replaced by the worst people known to man.
And that's always going to happen.
Whatever, you know, people are always tempted by, oh, the government should do this, the government should do that.
Okay, well, you of course have to accept that whatever you want the government to do, the power that you give will always be taken over by the worst conceivable people as a whole.
So, yeah, med student, it's tough, man.
I mean, it's tough. There's a lot of hoops you have to jump through, and they are a lot of times selecting for compliance.
And then you are under the...
A thrall of the regulatory agencies and that, I mean, that's pretty brutal.
I think everyone's seen the stuff where the doctors are just afraid to deal with counter narratives to the pandemic thing and so on, right?
So it's really, really tough.
Again, be a doctor or don't be a doctor.
That's not my choice on all that.
I'm sure you'll be able to go on, but...
Sometimes you just kind of have to hold your nose and get through stuff.
I know that's not particularly helpful, but if the meaning is in being a doctor, if you want to go out and help people and make them better and prevent illness and return people to health, that's a noble and wonderful thing to do.
I mean, my... Scar here is a guy who did great surgery on my neck.
So you can do...
And sometimes you just have to go through some crappy stuff.
You know, there's times where I'm editing my five billionth podcast or whatever and cleaning up some of the audio if somebody's got bad audio and, you know, looking for breaks that I can cut.
And it's just like... Right?
I mean, it's like if I have to do this again one more time in my life, I will jump out a window.
And you say, okay, but it's for a larger picture, right?
That this... You know, podcast goes out to really help people and make the world a better place and so on.
So try and, you know, eyes on the prize and recognize that there are going to be times where it's just boring and maddening and you'd, you know, rather chew your own arm off than do it again.
about. So, Steph, to become an engineer or doctor etc how do you think the education
path to become an engineer or doctor should be?
Well, I would, sorry let me just pause here for a second.
Maybe she'll take that out. Well, first of all, it should be talent, it should be proof of work, and it should be mentorship, sort of a journeyman kind of thing where you apprentice under somebody else.
That's the way it should be. Ideally, a lot of the early American engineers had no formal education.
One of the most famous engineers in 19th century America was a Scotsman who was actually blind.
Proof of work, not proof of compliance, obedience, and so on, right?
In other words, the customers should choose who is an engineer, not some licensing board.
Love that speech, especially the ending.
Powerful. Thank you. The coup shaman violently entered the Capitol.
Nope, he was escorted by police inside in new footage.
Now, of course, the police were saying it's complex, right?
The police were saying, well, there were so many people in, we decided not to confront and blah, blah, blah.
So, who knows, right?
Butchers provide proof of stake.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Nothing like a good homonym joke.
All right. We are thanked once annually on International Men's Day.
Yeah, could you imagine? It's called National Steak and Blowjob Day.
It's celebrated March 14th, one month after Valentine's Day.
Steak and Blowjob Day.
It's important not to get those two confused.
or is it? All right, let me get to your questions here.
Engineering licensure is a total racket.
You can work as an unlicensed engineer for big business due to the industry exemptions, but if you want to be an independent engineer, oh no, you need lots of licensure requirements.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Why is libertarianism and autism linked?
I saw in Jonathan Haidt's work that libertarians have a high ability in systematizing.
Could this be and why?
Well, look, I can't ever competently or legally or in any way diagnose anything like autism.
But I'll tell you this.
I'll tell you this.
Pathological altruism has become such the norm that people who are objective are often classified as entirely lacking in empathy, right?
So this pathological altruism, we have to help everyone all the time no matter what, unless they're white males, right?
That's just become the norm, right?
So if somebody says, look...
We have to cut the welfare state.
Like, we can't sustain it. We have to, whatever, cut military spending.
We have to cut old-age pensions.
We can't possibly afford it, right?
But people are going to be really sad.
They're going to be really upset. It's like, yeah, but we can't afford it.
It's like, you heartless, autistic bastard.
No empathy. It's like, I do have empathy.
I do have empathy. But we need to ration, right?
I mean, this comes out of Oh, let's do, should we do one more?
Let's do one more. Oh, let's do one more.
One more, Milo. I write them better than I can say them, I think, on the fly.
So let me, all right, let me do this.
This is a speech from my novel, The Future.
You can get that at freedomain.locals.com.
You can use the promo code, goalcaps, UBB2022, to get it for free.
So, David is, this is a little bit of a spoiler here, nothing major.
David is the guy who was in charge of some of the DROs in the modern civilization, in the Civ, they call it.
Roman is a guy, his ancestors were banished and they live in the woods, right?
They live in the wilderness, they live way outside the city and so on, right?
Um... So this is the case for coercive parenting.
And he's criticizing Roman, the savage.
He's the noble savage. He's criticizing the city.
And he says...
Ian had a big lesson after cataclysms.
Cataclysms were sort of the end of the current civilization.
All the ideologies that grew out of the grave of God.
The idea that we can remake mankind in the image of some universal abstractions that did not evolve with his body.
We can remake you so that you don't care about profit or your own family.
All such obvious stupidity.
Set a man against what gives him life.
What he evolved to do.
And you own him. Until your ownership kills him.
Like that disease where they got rid of all the symptoms but couldn't control the infection.
Basic question to ask.
Why do people cough and take to bed when they get sick?
There's no implicit reason for it.
Well, it's because it's a signal to other people that you're sick.
So they need to stay away.
Tribes that evolved without symptoms cross-infected each other into an early grave.
It's an evolutionary dead end.
Symptoms are horrible, but the alternative is death.
Get rid of symptoms.
You just spread disease.
His voice rose.
The avoidance of personal suffering, necessary suffering, is the root of all evil.
And your civilization is striving to eliminate suffering.
Just like all civilizations before which tell people they shouldn't have to dig a well to get water.
Just turn a tap! You shouldn't have to grow your food.
You should just tap a keyboard and have a robot cough it into your mouth like a mama bird.
You probably got it to the point where you just have to think of the food and you crap it out in five minutes.
Congratulations! You have eliminated humanity.
Roman leaned up and stretched his back.
As the sun rose, his face looked older, wearier.
"'But it would be prejudiced to call it utterly unwise,' thought David.
Roman said,"'And here's the funniest thing, maybe.
"'When there's a solar flare, or you run out of power,"'or you get too dumb and lazy to fix your machines,"'when the barbarians of your own softness sack your cities.' You will come out here to us on your knees and beg for survival.
I know why you're here, my friend.
You are here to take our children, who damn well know how to survive in the real world, and lock them up in your fantasy cities.
Maybe we live on a kind of desert island.
But you want to bind them to a ship that is bound to sink.
It's not going to happen.
The older man's eyes narrowed.
We are not some rejects, some outcasts, too uncivilized to live in your cracking paradise.
We are here by choice in preparation for what is to come, because we are actual scholars of human history.
We are not science fantasists who imagine that somehow, miraculously, we get to escape the cycle this time.
We are mortal, you are mortal, and only insane people believe that exceptions to mortality apply to them alone.
All civilizations die, as will yours.
We will preside over your funeral and carry on.
You will not.
David started to speak, but Roman held his hand up once more.
David felt himself chafing against the older man's imaginary authority, in particular with his own daughter sitting beside him.
But he felt that Rowan was blowing up his own words like David used to blow up balloons for Alice, and it was better to let them pop.
"'You have become less of a man, my friend, by turning over all your labour to the machines and the computers.' In fact, I would barely categorize you as a man any more than I would categorize a fat king as a man.
Not doing your own work is like letting another man kiss your bride.
It turns you into a eunuch.
When was the last time you lifted anything other than weights, the lazy man's pretend labor?
Roman leaned forward. And I will tell you something that will shock you.
You don't know, at least on the top of your mind, why your daughter returned to this man.
I'm guessing she don't even know herself, do you, Alice?
Alice stood up and cleared her throat.
I wanted to leave my father to you.
Roman nodded slowly.
Is that right? Because you wanted to save all our children from their terrible lives?
Yes! Roman nodded again.
That's not true. Hey!
protested David. The older man shrugged.
I'm not saying the girl is a liar, but what she's saying is not true.
He paused for a moment, rubbing his chin in the sandpaper sound of stubble drifted across the early morning air.
She came as bait.
That's what she says. She didn't tell you because she knew you wouldn't let her come.
But none of this is true, not in any real way.
David Scowl, stop talking about the issue and just tell us what you imagine.
Alice, you know we don't have any technology.
At least you don't think we do, right?
Alice didn't know whether to nod or shake her head.
"'I don't think you do,' she said cautiously.
Roman grunted with evident satisfaction.
"'So if you were coming to the mountain as bait, and you know we don't have any remote viewing crap, then we would have had to have someone nearby watching the mountain to see you come, and some way to communicate with the rest of us.
So we must have been close by for your plan to even work.' But if we were close, you didn't need to come as bait.
You could have just told your daddy that you thought we might be watching the mountain to see if you would return.
It's a pretty story, but it's not true.
If we were close, you could have just found us easily.
Turns out we were. So it looks like your plan kind of worked, but it's not the real plan, not a real motive.
David frowned. The older man's words were a kind of maze, but it did vaguely feel like they led somewhere.
So, what is the truth?
He asked. That's a big question.
said Roman rather pompously, David thought.
The older man said, The truth is that females respond to assertiveness, to dominance.
She came back because she liked my son.
She stayed because she is drawn to us.
We have dropped our lives into her mind as she is responding, as she should.
Oh, gross! cried Alice vehemently, and a slight laughter ran around the clearing.
Roman smiled. Also a typical female response to condemn what she is drawn to.
He raised his hand.
Don't get me wrong. I know she's young.
I'm not suggesting anything untoward.
But this is your problem.
And I say this man to man, father to father.
You have lost track of what is most human.
My son exercised dominance over your daughter and she was compelled to return.
You with this peaceful parenting.
You do not exercise dominance over your daughter, so she does not view you as an authority figure, but just a kind of big buddy.
Again, his lip curled in disgust.
She makes fun of you, right?
David nodded. And you lecture her when she does something you disagree with, right?
No punishments, no raised voice, no spanking, no fear.
David nodded again.
Roman smiled grimly.
And you can afford to be her big buddy.
Because you live in a world without danger.
She doesn't need to fear the consequences of her actions because her actions have no consequences.
Rowan's voice rose on the last three words.
He gestured at the trees, at silent, implacable, sociopathic nature.
At here, you make a mistake.
You die. Or you get an injury, which means you die slowly.
It's a kindness to be harsh with your children, because it prepares them for the harsh world that we live in.
Roman's eyes narrowed, and his voice changed its tone.
Do you know why you have the intelligence to make your slave machinery?
Do you even know how we evolved?
He opened his right hand and pounded the base of his left fist into it.
We evolved through unspeakable and unending brutality, particularly the northern people.
We grew our brains because people who did not plan for winter, the stupid, the greedy, the short-sighted, died over the course of that winter.
Like those pink, soft Roman city-dwellers.
People who had no food in late winter went knocking and begging at the doors of their neighbours, holding up hungry children's tears in their eyes.
And you know what their neighbours did?
Do you know why we have any brains at all?
His voice lowered to almost a whisper, causing David and Alice to lean forward together.
"'Their neighbours slammed their doors in their faces.' They locked their doors and fastened their windows and picked up an axe if need be to chop down their stupid greedy neighbours to make sure they had enough food for their own children.
And those children saw the neighbours being driven into the snow and cut in pieces if necessary and maybe they buried those bodies around the houses.
And when the spring came...
Do you think that those children ever forgot that lesson?
Do you think those children ever failed to prepare for the length of winter?
Do you think we would ever have evolved the intelligence and forethought to make the machines that make us lazy if our ancestors had lived like us rather than you?
A few pieces of genuine spittle flew from Roman's mouth.
Alice blinked in surprise, trying to remember if she'd ever seen such intensity in anything, or any one, outside of crazed historical documentaries.
Roman said,''And you've taken all these brains, the product of hundreds of thousands of years of blinding suffering and harshness, and you've turned them into unsustainable laziness.'' And when your daughter saw my son, she realized that she was seeing a true male for the first time in her entire life.
Alright, so, yeah.
There is a lot of harshness out there.
And we've lost that harshness.
We've lost those absolutes. We think we can just make up anything we want, create anything we want, print any money we want, borrow any money we want.
And anyone who brings any kind of basic reality to society as a whole these days, anyone who brings any kind of basic reality or limitation is perceived as cold-hearted and autistic and unempathetic.
And it's like, no. Empathetic to the future means denial in the present, right?
Alright. Somebody says, I use a handful of concepts from four years of engineering school education.
Everything else is job specific.
Well, you'll notice that in the computer field, you don't need to be a computer scientist with accreditation in order to program a computer.
I mean, I built an entire software company from the ground up.
It was very successful for a while.
And I have no programming training other than one punch card thing in junior high school, which was complete nonsense.
So, no, I taught myself.
You think of the people at the top of the industry, most of them are self-taught.
All right, let me see here.
Thank you.
.
Oh good, you guys are chatting with each other.
And again, if you would like to tip, I'm very grateful.
I love your character Roman.
I don't know why, but I do. Yeah, I love him too, because he's frank.
He's honest. And he thinks deeply in a way that is old school.
I mean, seriously, old school.
Because he's saying, look, there's all this harshness in the world.
You guys raising your kids in cities?
Well, the cities are going to fail because they always do in history.
You think that we being harsh with our children is bad for our kids?
No. You're being cruel to your kids by raising them in an unsustainable way.
You've got to steal, man. Everything you can.
Give your enemies their very best arguments.
Pretty good argument. Alright, let's see here.
In relation to recurring dreams, what do you think about recurring themes in dreams?
Like, I'm always losing something of friends and have to find it.
Yeah, so I would imagine that that has to do with not pursuing self-knowledge as much as you should or could.
What's up with the rise of walkable 15-minute cities and anti-car movement?
It's just people who want to control others.
Yeah, so... Well, as you know, the thirst to...
The pretense of saving mankind is almost always the thirst to rule mankind, right?
So, just bullying and control, and they'll never be satisfied, right?
They'll never... Oh, okay, that's enough control.
Now we'll let people be free. Because they think that they'll feel better by controlling others.
By controlling others, they feel worse, more isolated.
And so, like all addicts, they just escalate to self-destruction.
Of course, it's not just them who go down, right?
So... Do you think personal-owned private trucks should be banned off the roads?
No, you know I'm a voluntarist, right?
You were talking about Thanatos the other stream.
Do you think 19th century Russian literature expresses Thanatos or maybe pessimism?
So, 19th century Russian literature, with a few exceptions, only one or two exceptions, They knew that their society was heading to catastrophe.
This is the horror of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and Freud.
They knew the society was heading towards disaster, and they felt powerless to stop it.
So, Dostoevsky felt helpless to stop it because he believed that the solution was a moral conscience which was abandoned by the materialistic leftists.
So he felt helpless to stop it.
Nietzsche felt helpless to stop it because it's human nature to pursue power.
And to lie and falsify things in the pursuit of power is inevitable.
And it works.
It's done because it works, right?
Why do people use propaganda?
Because it works. And so there was no solution to the naked mammalian power-seeking and dominance and falsifying of things.
And people say, well, why are there so many lies in the media?
Because it's profitable. Because it gets political power.
Political power controls trillions of dollars.
Why do people do it? Because it works.
It's like some kid I talked to years ago who was really mean to her parents and I said, why do you do it?
She said, because it works. She said, because it works.
Right, because it works. That's the mammal answer.
Is it right? Is it moral? Is it good?
That's the ethical answer.
It's the God answer. It's the Jesus answer.
Does it work? Does it get me the political power that I want?
Ooh, some things about the election seemed hinky.
Did it work? Did it get political power?
I mean, it's now fairly well recognized that JFK stole the election from Nixon.
Did it work? Did they get the power?
Yeah, it worked. The 19th century was terrifying to people because if you move from is it right to does it work, then you are opening up the levers of power to the most cold-hearted, demonic and sociopathic people among you, who don't care about other people's feelings, who just...
Seek power and never imagine that they'll be on the receiving end of that bullet, or was that they're on the controlling end.
They lack empathy with themselves, with the future, with others, right?
So, yeah, the great unholy trinity of pessimism, or the holy trinity, depending on how you phrase it, of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Freud.
And Freud, because of his articulation, false, I think, of the superego and the ego, was pessimistic.
And all of this impacted by the materialism of the Industrial Revolution plus the Darwinism, which has been called the single best idea in human history, and I think certainly a very powerful one.
But, survival of the fittest, right?
Evolution never asks, is it right?
Evolution only asks, does it work?
That's all evolution is. Does it work?
And the species that has things work the best dominates, wins, becomes the alpha predator, the apex predator, mankind, right?
So when you have evolution saying that, well, the only reason we have brains is because evolution is constantly asking, does it work?
And then we try and reverse this cause and effect by saying, well, is it right?
And Nietzsche's skepticism that morality was invented by the weak in order to restrain and control the strong.
The weak can't compete with the strong, so they invent a morality that has a strong self-correct, self-inflict, self-censor, self-control, self-destroy, really.
I can't beat the strong man.
maybe I can make him feel guilty and he'll give me resources.
So they knew, I mean read The Possessed by Dostoevsky which was the foreshadow
of the Russian Revolution.
I wrote my own novel set in this time period.
You can get it at freedomainnft.com.
They're called Revolutions, about...
Why things were going so badly in Russia, and Russia was one of the greatest disasters in all of world history.
The rise and victory of communism in Russia, 70 million people slaughtered, and a third of the world fell into dictatorship.
Just horrifying how awful this was.
And a lot of these great thinkers and great artists, they saw it coming.
I read Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.
The despair that's in the cherry orchard by Chekhov and the woodsman, another place, the demon.
So, they all saw it coming, but they didn't know how to stop it.
There was a time when I started, when it could have been stopped, but that would have required
a real push for peaceful parenting and self-knowledge.
There was a time when I started when it could have been stopped.
When you are less than a generation away from disaster, fixing the parenting doesn't really stop it.
At least the odds of stopping it are very low.
This year, it will be 18 years since I started.
The beginning of the show to now.
My show can vote, almost.
So, peaceful parenting could have fixed things
at the beginning, which is why I was attacked so hard and so early.
Almost as soon as I went full-time on the show, just bang, bang, bang, attack, attack, attack, cult leader, cult leader, cult leader, and so on, right?
Because if peaceful parenting had won out, then we would have a generation of kids raised peacefully
and those people would then be moving into positions of authority and
power within another half a generation and things could be fixed.
That didn't happen and I obviously have only some control over that.
I try to promote it as much as possible.
I took a lot of bullets for the course.
I did endless conversations talking about childhood and did presentations and the truth about spanking and truth about circumcision.
And I worked super hard to promote Peaceful Parenting.
And I know that a lot of you out there helped with that as well, which I think is beautiful and wonderful.
And thank you so much. And for individuals, it works and solves things beautifully.
So I think that by the time the great thinkers were really examining the materialism and the atheism and the will to power stuff, it was probably too late for parenting to solve the issue and they didn't really focus much on the parenting.
I think it's too late for parenting to solve the issue now because it just didn't become a thing.
Whoa! That's some delightful color.
Yeah, I guess we'll...
Nice.
That's delightful.
Hello! Cyberpunk staff is on the list.
Beautiful.
That's very psychedelic, let me tell you.
Hang on a sec.
I think I can fix that.
Oooh.
There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear.
All right, what do we got here?
There's a man with a gun over there telling me I've got to beware.
Yeah, I get.
Camera not available. I get it.
I get it. Uh-huh.
Interesting. All right, so if I reset the color, yes.
Wow, that is some funky stuff, man.
HDR off. HDR on.
Autofocus. On.
Auto white balance. Sure.
What the hell?
Oh my gosh, that is something else.
Turn off the image settings.
That is some funky stuff, man.
That is some wild colors.
Uh... No idea, man.
80s sci-fi stuff.
New colors make you look younger.
Lines make you look like a barcode.
Oh, that's just delightful.
That is really something.
Who knows what voodoo is occurring down in the rebels.
But you can hear me fine.
Is that right? You can hear me all right? I've got to take a screenshot of this.
Let me just get my snipping tool here.
It's just fantastic.
Audio is good. Yeah, yeah.
Wow, that is cool, man.
I am... Well, let me tell you what life is like in the afterlife, where I've become a purple ostrich egg post-Fallout, Steph.
So here...
Father, you must be around here somewhere, because I have passed through.
Break on through to the other side.
All right. I can do this for so long, and trust me, it would be a long time, but...
Yeah, neon disco laser staff is back in the house.
So, yeah, just to finish up, I obviously had great hopes for peaceful parenting in the beginning, and I know that for the individuals who pursued it, but peaceful parenting undoes so much of the power structure that exists in the world that I had to be attacked.
For various reasons, which are only somewhat under my control, people did not take up my banner, people did not, you know, Darwin had Darwin's bulldog, you know, the guy who just went out and did his, you know, put out his thesis and put out his argument and so on.
And so I didn't have that kind of support.
Definitely from you guys, it's fantastic and wonderful.
I and Peaceful Parenting did not have that kind of support, so we'll just have to wait for the next cycle of history, which is kind of why my last two novels, The Present and The Future, are about.
We're just going to have to wait for the next cycle of history in order to be able to make a go of it and have
peaceful parenting win.
People were, you know, they've just kind of chosen to go through hell rather than to learn through reason and learn
through evidence.
So, I certainly did my best.
I'm not sure I could have done much more than what I did.
And I'm sure everyone here did their honorable best, which I'm enormously grateful for and thankful for.
At least we have the record of our trying and the information is out there and so on.
But yeah, we didn't make this cycle of history for a wide variety of reasons.
And hopefully we'll make, I'm sure we'll make the next cycle of history, but not this one.
All right. Well, I will stop here.
Thank you, everyone, so much for dropping by.
If you'd like to donate, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
I'm back on Subscribestar.
If you would like to help me out there, I would really appreciate it.
When you subscribe through Subscribestar, you get access to the most populated FDR community that's out there.
You'll get that when you subscribe.
So, subscribestar.com slash freedomain.
We'd really appreciate it. Have yourself an absolutely lovely evening and I will obviously just enjoy my pink disco ball look here for a little while and take care.
Lots of love. I'll talk to you soon.
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