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May 8, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:23:35
5174 Pussies and Domination!

Freedomain Livestream with Stefan Molyneux - 1 May 2023!

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Sorry, I'm a little late today.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain, of course.
Just a giant F you to Logitech, who just creates some of the worst software known to man.
Hardware's pretty good.
But yeah, Logitech software is just crap.
It just doesn't recognize or do the audio enhancement and stuff like that.
And it really is just a pathetic house of cards built up by assumed non-merit hires, to put it mildly.
So I will cast that aside.
I would cast that aside, and we will talk together.
And first and foremost, of course, if you have questions, issues, problems, anything that you would like to chat about, or criticisms, anything that is on your mind, I am more than happy to hear.
Just have a raise your hand situation, and I will unmute you in the most meritorious fashion known to man or other kind, and you can
Hook into the Borg Brain of Philosophy known as Free Domain.
I'll just give you guys a moment in case you have that inkling or that impulse.
Just raise your hand.
I think you right-click and raise hand.
Otherwise, I do have an interesting topic, I think, but I wanted to give you the chance.
I'm working on the artificial intelligence presentation, which I am really enjoying.
It's very interesting.
I've got a great researcher working on it.
And if you would like to help out the show, help out the research, help out the costs,
Of it all, I would really appreciate that.
You can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate to do that.
And of course, as always, greatly needed and greatly appreciated.
Thank you so much for your kindness in allowing me to continue to do this work with your help.
And remember, it's not just for now, it's for all time.
I'm telling you, that is the goal of the show, is to be available to the world for all time.
All right.
That having been said, let us get to the, as the old John Anderson song used to go, straight to the heart of the matter.
All right, let's get in, let's get it on, let's get it moving.
Hit me with a why.
in the chat.
Hit me with a Y if you have El Gato.
Do you have a cat?
I'm just curious.
I want to know how horrifying it's going to be for everyone, what I'm about to talk about now.
Or if you want, you can give me the number of cats, right?
0, 1, 2, infinity, sideways, 8, anything that you've got.
But I'm curious about something.
11 cats.
I have my doubts.
I have my doubts that you have 11 cats.
Although, I did actually know someone who had 17 cats.
I remember she said, well, I had 18, but I mean, I gave one away.
And a friend of mine said, well, of course, because I mean, 18 would be crazy.
18 would be crazy.
You had 19.
All right.
Do y'all know?
Hit me with a Y if you know what Toxoplasmosis is.
Not only is it the name for a great Kraftwerk-style 80s band, but it's really something.
It's a really wild thing that occurs with cats if you get ill.
Alright.
So, did you know that Toxoplasma gondii parasite can alter
A human's sexual desires.
Did you know that?
This is a common parasite that is derived from cats and it alters people's sexual preferences so that they get more turned on by risky and dangerous sexual practices including bondage.
Could be up to 40 million people in the U.S.
are infected by this.
The paper was published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in 2016, and it's a big study.
It's a big butt study.
36,000 subjects.
There's a clear link between an infection with Toxoplasma gondii and arousal due to, and I quote, fear, danger, and sexual submission.
So here's the abstract.
Behavioral patterns, including sexual behavioral patterns, are usually understood as biological adaptations increasing the fitness of their carriers.
Many parasites, so-called manipulators, are also known to induce changes in the behavior of their hosts to increase their own fitness.
Such changes are also induced by a parasite of cats, Toxoplasma gondii.
The most remarkable change is the fatal attraction phenomenon, the switch of infected mice's and rats' native fear of the smell of cats towards an attraction to this smell.
The stimuli that activate fear-related circuits in healthy rodents starts to also activate sex-related circuits in the infected animals.
An analogy of the fatal attraction phenomenon has also been observed in infected humans.
Therefore, we tried to test a hypothesis that sexual arousal by fear, violence, and danger-related stimuli occurs more frequently in toxoplasma-infected subjects.
A cross-sectional cohort study performed on 36,564 subjects, 5,087 toxoplasma-free and 741 toxoplasma-infected, showed that infected and non-infected subjects differ in their sexual behavior, fantasies, and preferences when age, health, and the size of the place where they spent their childhood were controlled.
In agreement with our a priori hypothesis, infected subjects are more often aroused by their own fear, danger, and sexual submission, though they practice more conventional sexual activities than toxoplasma-free subjects.
We suggest that the later changes can be related to a decrease in the personality trait of novelty-seeking in infected subjects, which is potentially a side effect of increased concentration of dopamine in their brain.
So, did you know?
I'm, I'm like, I'm here, man.
I'm here for you.
I am here for you as a whole.
And thanks, shout out to Roeg Nationalist for this.
But... Do you see?
See, I've never, you know, I'm not gonna start digging down into the Warren's tunnels and dungeons of my own sexual preferences, but I will say this, that I find it completely bizarre that people are turned on by violence, bondage, aggression, and so on.
I just find that, honestly, it's too bizarre for words.
Now, I've never had a cat, and I've never really been around cats very much.
My daughter used to like to go to the animal shelter.
We'd pet a couple of cats, but I've never really been... I like cats.
I think they're, you know, soothing and cool and all that.
They're kind of boring relative to dogs, but they're, you know, they're fine.
But I do remember being really blown away.
Like, just blown away.
By the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Like I did book reviews, I interviewed people about this.
I just found it completely bizarre.
Just how many women, like this has become, if not the best selling, one of the best selling books of all time, based upon women buying this stuff.
and fantasizing about being beaten and of course women have lots of fantasies about rape and so on.
It's not an inconsiderable number.
And of course fantasy is vastly different from the evil of the action but I don't quite get that.
Now it seems to me that the prevalence of pet culture has vastly increased since I was a little kid.
When I was a little kid
People had pets but it wasn't like a big thing.
The pet fetish, the pet culture thing has gone truly nuts.
Like you can see these ads on social media which is for Mother's Day you can buy a mug that you can pretend has come from
A dog to his dog mom and the mug is like, uh, I love being, I love you as my dog mom.
If I had another dog mom, I'd butt her in the butt and run back to you and stuff like all of this kind of nonsense, right?
I mean, it's really, it's really sad.
It's really, really sad.
Just, and you know, it used to be that you would get.
Pictures of your children and get them etched in that weird 3D crystal stuff in the cube of Zircona or whatever it is.
And now, like I saw an ad which is like, your most beautiful memories!
And it was a dog.
It was a dog.
A dog's head being carved into this weird Superman Fortress of Solitude crystal crap.
And it's just really, really sad.
It's just really, really sad.
So, I just, I wonder if, you know, the fall of child-bearing coinciding with the rise of cat fetish stuff, I mean, not fetish like sexual, but just, you know, the fetishization of cats
relative to, you know, children and family, has also coincided with this rise of the bondage, sadomasochism, submission, domination, fetish that has also occurring within society.
I mean, obviously it has something to do with the spread of radical pornography, but maybe the spread of radical pornography, more extreme forms of pornography, has something to do with this cat thing as well.
But yeah, 40 million
Americans infected potentially with this stuff and some proportion of them getting off on some real Macy Gray edge kink nonsense.
That's pretty wild, man.
Now, I mean, we understand how it works with mice, right?
So mice want to spread.
I mean, sorry, the bug wants to spread.
from mouse to mouse and the best way to do that is to make mice less afraid of cats so that the cat can get infected and spread it to more mice and spread it around and so on.
So yeah, just this reduction of fear, this reduction of caution.
And I guess in humans, and I guess maybe in mice and rats as well, there's this associated lust after rough trade, right?
This fetish, I'm not even going to try.
For some reason, I can't do this word today.
I can't do with you the word today.
This fetish towards violence and sexuality.
And I wonder, you know, it would almost be like, it would almost be like, I mean, let me, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
Hit me with a why.
No, give me a one to 10.
Let's do this.
Give me a one to 10.
If you've dated a woman or a man who's just into stuff that is way beyond your comfort zone.
Or way beyond a sane and rational person's comfort zone?
Eleven!
This one goes up to eleven!
Zero?
Yep, okay.
Because what do they call it?
They call it a sort of plain vanilla sex, right?
We got a six, a zero.
Yeah, I'm just, I'm curious.
What is it like out there?
I've never dated a woman like that.
Ten.
Oh, that's a woman.
Yeah, so the guy was into some serious hot wax on the nipple stuff, or I guess ten.
Even that's probably pretty tame these days, right?
Okay.
Yeah, so you all have visited the Stranger in a Strange Land nipple clamp planet, right?
Alright.
Yeah, I was just kind of curious.
I mean, it's a pretty wild thing.
And so I guess the biological aspect of it would be something like this, which is
that this bug this bug needs women to stay single so that they get more cats so the bug can spread and so in a way I mean it's not designed for this because it's you know sort of cat owning and all of this and and single women is too new to really have evolved much I think but the way it would work is the more single the women stay the more cats they have the more this bug can spread
Therefore, if you infect the women with freaky, off-putting, sexual extremist preferences, then a man won't settle down with them, a man won't date them for very long, so they stay single, which means they get more cats, which means this bug spreads even further.
It would be something like that.
Oh, the guy says he's a guy.
My mom's family is Danish.
Okay.
Oh, you know what I hate about Denmark?
Every time people talk about being Danish, I want a sugary baked treat.
It's just horrendous.
Somebody says, I'm thinking about asking my doctor to get tested.
Yeah, I can't give any medical advice, but it doesn't seem to me the worst, the worst idea in the world.
So yeah, I just, I thought that was interesting.
And you know, for the people out there, you know, if you're dating and
You meet a woman who's got cats, it might be worth asking if she's ever been tested and all that kind of stuff.
And if she starts breaking out the beat me, eat me licorice whip in the bedroom, it might be worth realizing that you're not dealing so much with a pussy preference as you are a cat parasite.
And that seems to me an important line to recognize in the world as a whole.
So yeah, it's really, really something.
And, uh, does seem to be having an effect on the culture.
Having an effect on the culture.
I don't know.
I mean, do, do cat women like it freaky?
Is there something like that?
Don't know.
I don't know.
You might want to watch the guy, I think he's the president of Azerbaijan.
A BBC reporter said, hey man, you're censoring free speech.
Oh, can you give me an example?
No!
And then, of course, he replies back, let's talk about Julian Assange.
How many years did he spend in the Ecuadorian embassy?
And for what?
It's a reflection.
Is it a reflection of free media in your country?
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
All right, so that is the major thing that I wanted to talk about today that I found to be particularly of interest to me, and I think hopefully to you as well.
Somebody says here,
Could it be that birth control and no-fault divorce have lowered the quality of women, making them less dateable, because they lack dateability?
They've become lonely and get a cat, which only qualms loneliness for so long, so they're becoming increasingly sexually deviant to make up for lack of personality?
No, I don't think so, because it would be in common.
If it's in common with the mice and the rats, then it would be not something that would be human-adapted.
I mean, it could be, of course, the case that single moms or single women need to escalate what they offer a man sexually in order to try and maintain the interest, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they would have to escalate to freaky levels, to freakiness levels.
I suppose the case could be made that that would be true, but I think you'd need more research on that.
All right, so cats and bondage, that's the topic of the day.
And if you have comments, issues, questions, problems, I'm going to give you guys a moment.
Otherwise, this might be a dip in, dip out kind of situation.
So if you'd like to raise your hand, if you have a question or comment, I would be more than happy to listen in and help out if I can.
So this is a practice that more and more people are doing.
Let's say it's not a common thing, but I think it will be more and more common.
This is the embryo selection.
Prior to implantation, according to some genetic patterns that are preferred by the parents, let's say, associated with good health and even higher intelligence.
So this is not genetic editing, which you discussed in another show.
I agree, at least today.
It seems ethically unacceptable, but it does involve discarding those embryos that are not selected.
So I just wanted to ask you what you think about this, because this is just the beginning.
Perhaps in five or ten years it will be possible to
Using this technology, this somewhat new technology that has been used only in animals, we will be able to get stem cells from almost any cell and then create as many ovules as possible.
Then we will be able to select embryos, but not just between 10 or 15.
We can select between hundreds of thousands.
If you also take into account the cheapening of the genetic mapping, I think it will be so cheap and so advantageous.
Maybe more and more people will do that and we will end up with people that reject this technology.
Thanks a lot.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by my thoughts about it.
I mean, it seems kind of inevitable that... I mean, people are always searching for reproductive excellence.
I mean, we do this all the time when we choose a woman or a man who's, you know, tall, attractive, or pretty, with great hair, great skin.
So, we do this at a visual level all the time.
And I know that for people with IVFs I think you get a bunch of eggs, you get the, I mean this is my understanding of it, you get a bunch of eggs in a petri dish and you put the sperm in and you see which eggs get fertilized in the most healthy way, you take the healthiest egg or two, I don't know if they do two at a time anymore, and then you put the fertilized egg back into the
The womb.
And then the other embryos are discarded or maybe kept for research or whatever it is.
So that's a practice I think that's been going on for quite a while.
And you're saying that that's going to get bigger, like you might have hundreds of eggs that you could... Yeah, so that's a difference of degree, not of kind.
I don't particularly like it, but at the same time, there are a lot of people who desperately want to become parents.
And I've known some of these people, right?
They desperately want to become parents, but for some reason or another, they're having real trouble conceiving.
Like, 10% of married couples have significant problems conceiving, and it's often on the part of the female, because male is just, you know, sperm and delivery mechanism of the female.
Plumbing is much more complicated for reproduction.
There are people who only with the aid of fertility technology and so on can have babies and they really really want to become parents and that's the way they go about it.
So I think people that desperate to become parents are probably going to be pretty good parents.
And so I think that, to me, I don't have a big issue with a fertilized egg that's unviable being discarded.
I don't think that I would feel comfortable banning what is not a violation of the non-aggression principle to discard an unviable fetus.
Well, then every miscarriage would be a murder, and I don't feel that that is the case.
Nature discards unviable
Fetuses or fertilized eggs that aren't going to work out, nature discards those all the time.
Like, you know, between a quarter and a third, depending on how you measure it, of pregnancies are miscarried.
So you really are replicating processes already in nature, which is choosing somebody of high reproductive fitness, choosing them hopefully at an age where their eggs are the healthiest and so on, and then what you're doing is
you are allowing nature to choose the most viable fetuses to bring to term.
So doing that, enhancing that process, and of course most, you know, women are born with millions of eggs and usually only have a couple of kids, so the vast majority of eggs are never, either never fertilized, well most of them are never fertilized, a small number are fertilized and it doesn't work out.
So you're really taking nature's process and applying
I think so.
Sort of supplementing or reproducing in a more sophisticated way the effects of nature so that people can become parents.
And I've said this before so I won't go into the argument again.
I talked about it a couple of weeks ago which was I'm fine with genetic editing to the point where you remove negatives.
I'm not so fine with genetic editing where you're trying to introduce positives because that's really messing with the formula.
That works.
So yes, remove negatives, but I think the pushing of enhancements is dangerous and destructive, potentially, and we don't know the effects and so on.
So yeah, those are my thoughts.
Tell me what you think.
Sorry, but this is the difference.
This is not editing.
This is just selection.
No, I'm aware.
I'm aware of that.
I'm aware.
You said it's not editing, and I didn't talk about editing.
I was just talking, as I talked about a month or two ago, that I'm even fine with gene editing as long as it's the removal of a negative.
But no, I know this is not the same as gene editing, but yeah, I don't mind.
It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle, it's not fraud, and I think it should be taken out.
Of course, the point is to get people to choose their right partners and try and have kids young so that fertility issues are much less common, and so on.
I get that.
Sorry, why do you say it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle?
Because this is
We're not talking about embryos that will be aborted anyway.
These are potentially millions and millions of embryos that are viable but will not be selected.
No, but they're not viable because they're not in a womb, right?
I mean, you can't grow human babies in a Petri dish, right?
I mean, so you have the egg and you have the sperm, and the egg has been fertilized by the sperm, but until you put it into a womb, the fertilized egg is not viable, is that right?
And you can only put, you know, if you get ten eggs that are fertilized, you can't put all ten back in the womb, because then you have the problems of, you know, like, that's a ridiculous pregnancy, the woman's going to look like the Michelin man on steroids.
So, the fetus is not viable until it's in a womb, and you can't overload the womb, so some are going to have to be discarded.
But I don't view them as viable pregnancies in the same way that they would be if they were in a womb.
Okay, I get it.
Thanks so much.
You're very welcome.
It's an interesting topic.
I mean, it's funny because there's not much that a philosopher can say about these kinds of things.
I think with abortion it's a bit of a different matter.
But, you know, I mean, if you've known people, and again, I don't want to sort of get into personal details with people that I know, but, you know, a lot of people can spend a lot of years and a lot of money trying to have a baby.
And, you know, it's pretty painful for those people because they see people who don't really want to have their kids popping out kid after kid and treating them badly.
It's sort of like when you know you'd be the best boyfriend in the world, but all the great women around you just keep dating jerks or, you know, whatever.
It's kind of frustrating.
So, yeah, I think that's...
It's an interesting brave new frontier of medicine and so on, and the people who are that hungry to become parents, I kind of think that they would be, for the most part, they would be good parents.
And if they have the resources and intelligence to pursue this kind of thing, then you're having smart people who are going to be good parents having the opportunity to have children.
And I think that's a win for us.
I think it's a win for society as a whole.
I mean, it's funny because if people are concerned about things like, you know, gene editing and embryo selection, and again, it's right to be concerned, I'm fine with that.
When you think of all of the things that people do to manipulate and control fertility, I mean obviously birth control is a manipulation of fertility, the welfare state is a manipulation of fertility, child support, alimony can be, in particular child support, but child support plus alimony is a manipulation
of fertility.
All the propaganda that convinces women to go and get some useless art degree, get heavily involved in debt, and then have some usually fairly dead-end clerical job with a huge amount of debt, that's a manipulation of fertility, because men don't very often want to date women who have a lot of debt.
I mean, I remember chatting with a woman at a gym and asking her out, and then she said that she was, you know, kind of burdened by, I don't know, the modern equivalent would be something like
30, $35,000 worth of credit card debt and credit card debt is real cancer, right?
Because the rates are just nuts.
And she was, you know, just really, as she said, it's going to take me years to dig myself out of it.
And what happened, I think she had a boyfriend who ran up credit card debt and didn't tell her some, some nonsense like that.
And yeah, my perspective was, you know, gosh, that's a real shame.
I'm sorry that you dated that guy, but I'm not going to date you because if, you know, I was making some pretty good coin at the time and I'm like, you know, if I want to go on vacation or, you know, I want to go and see a nice play or have a nice dinner out or whatever, you're going to be still trying to dig yourself out of this debt.
Yeah, I mean, I've spent time, not a huge amount of time over the course of my life as a whole, but I have spent about 18 months once living really lean just to get out of debt.
And boy, it's not fun, man.
It's not a lot of fun.
And I just wouldn't want to go through that again.
And of course, you know, if we got married or whatever and she still had the debt, then I would then be responsible for the debt.
So if you think of all of the ways in which we screw around with sperm and eggs and make women more attractive, less attractive, like I saw this graph not too long ago, where young men, the teenage boys are becoming much more conservative and teenage girls are becoming much more liberal.
That's a lot of propaganda that is really going to mess with fertility.
So, to me, I just want a free market.
I just want a free market and I don't want coercive wealth transfers.
It seems to be a bridge too far, a dream too big for humanity to materialize, but
Let's just have respected property rights, the non-aggression principle.
And people who are concerned, oh my gosh, there's gene editing.
It's like, well, there's reproductive editing with propaganda, the welfare state, debt, you name it.
And people don't seem to be quite as concerned about that.
So yeah, it's really quite tragic.
All right, well, thanks for an interesting topic.
I'm happy to hear any other comments or issues.
So again, I know it can be a bit of a startled, squirrel, shy group.
So, yes.
I was just wondering, have you read the book called Peak by Anders Ericsson?
It's about high performers, people who are experts in their field.
I have not, but I'm happy to hear about it.
Well, it's just interesting.
So before I read it, I just freaked back on it.
Before I read it, I used to think that
People who were experts, like you could get an example of someone like Freddie Mercury or Beethoven, these super high performers in their field, that they're more or less genetically endowed with some sort of gift that predisposes them towards expertise in a certain field or whatever they're going to go into.
And when I started the book, I was pretty set in that way of thinking.
And after I read the book, he made a very, very compelling case and he's
We're good.
He doesn't see any evidence for genetics having much to do with that, other than maybe getting you there to begin with.
Like in the case of basketball, you have to have a certain body type.
But other than that, it's not like Michael Jordan has a gene that other people don't, or that he's just a little bit different than other people are.
He thinks it comes down to the way that people practice and the mindset that they have.
And I've heard you talk about this a fair bit, and I was just wondering what you thought of that.
Well, I mean, to start with Freddie Mercury.
Freddie Mercury had perfect pitch.
He had a naturally glorious singing voice.
He never took any vocal training because he wanted sort of a raw singing voice.
And he could do, you know, blues growls.
He could do rock and roll singing.
He could do folk singing.
He could do the most astounding falsettos.
And he also had a great live presence.
And from reports from when he was born in Zanzibar and then went to boarding school I think in India and joined a group playing piano back in India, oh in India when he was in boarding school and people would say that he could hear a song and again this is apocryphal but maybe it's true, he could hear a song and then play it back right away.
And that's a very rare gift.
So, the idea that anybody can become Freddie Mercury is not true.
That's just false.
I mean, first of all, you need the voice, and the voice is something you're born with.
And again, singers can improve and so on, but you have to be born with a voice.
I have a pleasant speaking voice, I don't have a great singing voice, although when I was in theater school for almost two years, I took a lot of singing lessons.
Did that allow my singing to improve?
Yeah, a little, for sure.
But did it make me into, you know, Ben Heppner?
Absolutely not, right?
Because you just, you have physical limitations of what your voice can do.
So as far as that goes, I think that
That's a tougher case to make.
And again, with singing in particular, there is just that instrumental thing.
Like, you just have to have the physical instrument to be able to do it.
I do think about, when you see a lot of famous guitarists, they do have these long spider hands, which I assume allows them to spread their fingers and do more difficult and widespread chords and so on.
Having perfect pitch, I think, is a genetic thing.
I don't know that you can train yourself to have perfect pitch.
I've known some people with perfect pitch and
They just get it and they know it, and I don't know enough to know.
I don't know if anybody does, whether that's genetic or not.
Sorry to interrupt.
No, no, go ahead.
That's a convo.
You're not interrupted.
Go for it.
In the book, he did actually go over a perfect pitch.
Mozart, I believe it was Mozart, had perfect pitch, and this was something that was super rare.
Nowadays, there's been tons of experiments, and now there's whole
Courses you can put your little kids in, and they found that you can literally train any child, if you start at a very young age, to have perfect pitch.
That was something that was really surprising for me in the book.
And they did this whole study in Japan that started where they took a whole bunch of children, and some of them took longer to learn it, but in the end, after a few years, two or three years, starting about the age of three, they could all have perfect pitch.
And that was something that he mentioned in the book.
Right, but in order to... So what you're saying is that there are some people born with perfect pitch and other people take significant training over many years to develop it?
I don't think so.
So from what I got from the book, there was no evidence that anyone's born with it, but some people are more predisposed to pick it up.
No, no, I mean, I don't know what... Yeah, because we're not born with musical notation or A, B, G or whatever it is, right?
We're not born with that.
I mean, that's like any more than we're born knowing what English looks like as a written language.
But some people do achieve perfect pitch much easier than other people.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, that was true.
Right.
So if it's like, let's say that some people can get it in three months and some people get it in three years.
Again, I'm just putting a sort of rough gauge, right?
So yeah, some people it takes significantly longer to get it, right?
And would that not be an effective barrier to doing it though?
Like if you just kind of get perfect pitch relatively quickly and easily and other people take years and years of training, wouldn't that be just enough of a barrier?
Because those people who take, maybe it takes years and years of training for them to get perfect pitch, but they're really good at shooting baskets fairly quickly.
Again, if somebody trained me in basketball, even in my 50s, I would significantly improve in basketball.
But the people who just have a natural ability to do that, and the height and all of that, you tend to work at that which gives you the greatest payoff.
So people who have, you know, the long skinny strong fingers are going to find picking up the guitar a lot easier than people with short stubby or weakened fingers or just generally weak fingers.
And so they're going to be more drawn.
They're going to get higher rewards out of the pursuit of learning guitar.
I mean, for me, I started writing short stories when I was six years old and I was able to, I got a lot of, um,
I made a lot of progress in the writing of short stories.
When I started studying philosophy, I made a lot of progress because I think I have a natural bent towards that, or whether that's natural innate or natural just because I was raised by anti-rational people and I just saw how bad that was.
It's sort of hard to know, but I got a lot of traction.
In philosophy.
And when I first started acting, I got a lot of positive feedback on acting, so I was like one out of a thousand people who had auditioned to get into the National Theatre School and so on.
But it wasn't like I was bad when I first started acting.
It was like, oh, no, this is actually fairly easy.
I'm fairly compelling on stage and pretty, I mean, people who've listened to my audiobooks know, like, it's not, I'm not too bad at doing different characters and different voices and all of that, which is fairly believable.
So.
You tend to pursue that where you get the most traction and have the greatest reward, and that has something to do with innate abilities and physical characteristics, though I agree with you, it's not everything.
Right, and I think that that makes sense.
That's sort of where I would lie, because the book was more about what differentiates the very best people from sort of the good people.
So if I keep – violin was a big part of the book, because violin is such a difficult instrument to learn, and to be an expert is incredibly difficult.
Oh, I know that.
I did ten years on the violin, and it's a beast.
Yeah, there you go.
He went over, I think it was the Vienna School for Music, and what he looked at was who went on to play in the top orchestras and who didn't, and who just became like a teacher.
Obviously the guys who went on to be professors were really good, but the guys who went on to play in the orchestras worldwide were fantastic.
They were the best.
And he tried to see what is the difference between them.
And all he could find was it was the amount and the way that they practiced.
So it wasn't like those people who played in the professional orchestras had some sort of talent that the other people who were good didn't have.
It was just that they pushed themselves more and they worked at it in a better way than the other people.
And of course, you know, getting in the violin is a different thing, but once you're in the field, he found that it's got very little to do with who you are genetically, and it's pretty much everything to do with what you're doing in terms of your practice.
For you, for example, you've done so well with the work you've done in philosophy and in literature.
To say that that was somehow just like you're destined to do that, I think would be very unfair, given the amount of the practice that you put in that other people probably have not put in, who might have similar sort of natural abilities that you do.
Well, okay, so this sounds a little bit like the Malcolm Gladwell's Blink stuff as well, right?
That it's, you know, 10,000 hours and you're great, right?
But, okay, so how does... the most common objection, and again I haven't read the book so I'm sure he's dealt with this, the most common objection to me would be something like this, which is...
You know, when I was a kid I liked to sing.
When I got older I started taking some singing lessons and I made some improvements and then I stopped improving.
Because I just reached the physical limitations of what my voice can do.
And there's no amount of training that can make a bass a tenor or whatever, right?
So I stopped doing singing lessons because I had reached my physical limitations and I was not getting any reward in improved range or tone or control or anything like that.
I don't know, let's say I did a hundred hours of, I guess, including, well, theater school, it was kind of mandated.
You had to do singing lessons and we took voice lessons just for speaking and all of that, which has been very helpful for me as a whole.
So I'm very glad that I did that.
But let's say I've taken 500 hours of singing lessons over the course of my life.
Now there are other people who've taken 5,000 hours of singing lessons, right?
Now, if you were to look at those and say, well, you know, Steph stopped after 500, but some other guy did 5,000 and that other guy's a way better singer.
And you'd sit there and say, well, Steph just stopped at 500.
That's why he's not as good a singer.
It's like, no, no, no.
I stopped at 500 because I'm not that great a singer.
I don't, I just don't have the voice for it.
And my singing teachers weren't like, well, you should keep going.
They're like, yeah, I mean, I've taught you all the basics and you have the voice that you have, right?
I mean, you can't turn Bob Dylan into Placido Domingo with additional voice lessons, right?
That's just not going to happen.
So the objection, and again, it's so obvious, I'm sure that he's talked about it in the book and how that's been teased out, is to say, okay, well, the people who are in violin,
When do you plateau, right?
Now maybe there's a genetic basis to that plateau.
So maybe after 5,000 hours of practicing, after that you just don't really get any better.
You've hit your plateau.
And so you basically say, well, then there's not much point in me doing another 5,000 because I'm going to get 2% better.
And so you plateau.
And so you stop there and you say, OK, well, I'll be a teacher or whatever it is, right?
But then the people who go on and like 10,000 hours and 15,000 hours, the reason they do that is because they haven't plateaued.
They have some X factor, whether it's genetics or whatever, right?
They have some X factor wherein they keep getting better.
So other people stop at 5,000 hours because they just haven't been getting better.
They've plateaued.
Other people stop at 10,000 hours because they plateaued, and then other people, they just keep practicing and keep doing it because they just keep getting better and keep getting more and more rewards.
In other words, there's no practical limit to their peak, if that makes sense.
And so, if he says, well, you know, the people who are at the world orchestras, they just practiced and got a lot more training, it's like, well, sure.
But my guess would be, or at least one objection would be, well, that's because
The people who fell off before, they didn't lack will, they didn't lack preference, it's not like they didn't want to be, you know, first violinist in the New York Philharmonic.
They just didn't get any better after a certain amount of time, so they fell off because there was no particular reward for them.
Does that make sense?
I mean, I'm sure that was dealt with in the book, but what's the answer to that?
Yeah, that makes sense.
So from my reading, it was basically like, so the people, so he looked at the group of the violinists who all wanted to have the same outcome, which was to be a professional.
And they were all in the same program.
And it was a study over, I think it was like five or 10 years or something.
And he, what he did is he tried to find out how each person was practicing and how much they're practicing.
And they all had this pretty much, they're starting from a very similar level.
And he looked at the ratings of.
The only very distinguishable factor was just the time that they put in.
The people who were, say, starting and they were all ranked some of the best, as the best in their group, like the top maybe 50 in the group, the people who went on, like the five people who went on to be professionals, they were just putting in, like on average, maybe three or four thousand more hours over five years than the other people were.
And that was all that he could really find.
It was really differentiating.
And I see what you're saying, like maybe they were getting more out of it, but
In my experience with sports, I've played with guys in hockey who ended up going on to the NHL who weren't very good when I was playing with them.
I was better than them when we were like 14, 15, 16.
And most guys that I played with just quit because they just kind of give up.
And then lots of guys who were sort of not very good, or okay, they just kept playing, kept practicing, kept practicing.
And then you see them in the paper, and then they're getting drafted.
So from my personal experience, and then just also my reading, I don't think it has too much... Of course it has something to do with people getting better at a faster rate than others, but I've seen lots of people, and lots of people in this book too,
They just put in the work when other people sort of give up.
So it's more or less a willpower thing, if you know what I mean.
Like, it's people who are mentally blocking themselves.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but you're just reiterating the initial thesis, right?
So, if I wanted to... It's a very, very big topic, and it's a very, very important topic.
So I really, really appreciate you bringing this up.
You can test for this.
So you can test for this.
So what you would do is, all of these elite violinists have their teachers, right?
They have people who train them.
So what you would do is you would, let's say, the gold, the silver, and the bronze, right?
The gold is the one hit the very top, silver is middle, and bronze their teachers or whatever, right?
So the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
What you would do is you would go to their teachers and you would look at their evaluations.
And there's a way to test for this.
So the people who were gold, let's say they're getting 10% better every year.
I think so.
And they all start off taking the same amount of practice, same amount of teaching, same amount of practice.
So the people who are gold, they continue to improve and their teachers tell them that and so they keep going to practice and take more training because they keep improving.
Now the people who are silver, you would look to their teachers or look to their evaluations and you would say, did the progress stop or slow down before
There was less practice.
In other words, the golds continued to get better, maybe the silvers, they stopped getting better, they struggled with it for a while, and then they said, OK, I'm going to have to accept where I am because I'm just not getting any better.
And then the bronzes, maybe they all started same level and same amount of practice, but then the bronzes, you would look at the teachers, you would look at the evaluations, and you would say, OK, maybe the bronzes
You know, six months after they started, they stopped making progress.
They were still practicing, still getting training, but they stopped making progress.
Maybe for the Silvers, it was two or three years after they started, they stopped making progress.
And maybe the Golds just kept making progress.
And so you would look and you would see
Did they stop practicing as hard after they stopped making progress, or were they making all the same progress and then just the silvers and the bronzes just stopped practicing for whatever reason?
They got bored, they got distracted, they got married, whatever, right?
So this to me is a testable question, and it's not even that complicated.
to test, right?
Like, so if you look at top physicists, because you would have objective marks, right?
So if you look at the very top physicists, we assume, top mathematicians in particular, you'd want to do it with the hard sciences where you have numerically objective marking.
So if you look at the very top physicists, and you would say, well, gosh, they put 20,000 hours into physics or whatever, right?
And then you say, okay, so they're the gold.
So you look at the silver physicists and the bronze physicists, and you would say,
For the silver physicists, when did they stop really working hard on physics?
Okay, so I need to see their test scores before that, right?
So if everyone's putting in 50 hours a week into physics,
And if the test scores for the silvers are beginning to drop off from the golds, even though they're doing the same amount of physics and training, then maybe that's where they're plateauing.
And then, if they plateau, then they stop working as hard in physics because they're just not getting much reward.
And maybe the bronze... So you could test this very easily.
And I don't know, I don't remember it from Malcolm Gladwell's book on Blink, but because it's so easy to test and find out whether people stop practicing because they've stopped improving, or whether they stop improving simply because they've stopped practicing.
In other words, everyone who puts in the 20,000 hours becomes a master genius at the craft,
It's so easy to test, and the data is so available.
Because you, I mean, the test would be pretty simple.
You look at the people in the top of the field, and you look at when they dropped off their practicing, or stepped back from their career progress, and then you look at the marks the year or two before that, and you see if their marks went down, while they were still working as hard as everyone else, and therefore they stopped working as hard, because they weren't getting much reward.
Or, were they doing just as well as everyone, and then they just dropped off for some x-factor which is not particularly important, then you'd know.
You'd have a fairly strong argument either way, right?
If they kept improving but just stopped practicing, then maybe they could have been a gold.
However, if they stopped improving therefore they stopped practicing, then you've got indication of a plateau that is not around hard work or the lack thereof.
Does that make sense?
It does.
It makes sense, but I do see, like,
My problem with that sort of way of measuring it would be, the assumption would be that the actual practice that people are putting in is equal, like the effort that they put in and the way that they practice and how much they get out of the practice.
Like how much, how well they're focusing and these sort of intangible things that does, that's sort of assumed to be equal across people.
And that was also a big part of the book.
Like it's not just hours you put in, it's how you put the hours in, it's how you practice.
And that was something too, that was very important for differentiating these different people.
It's like, you can have one person who practices and sort of just does the routine, plays the song over and over and tries,
tries to just get it right and doesn't really focus on where he needs to get better and just does the sort of, you know, going through the motions.
And then the other people will have a strict routine and they will do things that they don't necessarily want to do, but are necessary for their development.
And so they're putting a lot more intelligence into their planning of their practice, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, I mean, certainly from basketball, if, you know, most people, what they want to do, is they just want to go out and play high level pickup basketball.
There's a lot of fun.
They don't necessarily want to work on their throws, on their dribbling, on their passing, you know, the repetitive running through tires kind of stuff to strengthen their quads.
That stuff is not nearly as much fun as playing pickup basketball, which is a lot more fun.
So yeah, for sure, to work on the techniques and to work on the details and to work on the repetitive stuff is a lot less fun, but absolutely has a better outcome for sure.
So, I mean, you could control for this kind of stuff as a whole.
I mean, so you could say, are they getting the same kind of tutoring?
And are they doing what the tutor says?
Because a tutor will know if you're doing what they say, right?
I mean, if you've got a piano tutor and they say, practice scales, and then you come back and you know how to play Honky Tonk Woman, but you have no idea how to do a scale, then the piano teacher would know that you're not doing the scales, right?
And I assume it's the same with every elite teaching, right?
That you know whether the student is following the path that you're setting out for them, right?
I mean, if you have a coach,
Well, of course, if you have a coach and a basketball team, then everyone's doing the same stuff, right?
Now maybe you could say that some of the kids will just do stuff in the middle of the night or whatever it is, but for the most part you are getting everyone going through the same process.
So you could control for that by seeing if the marking said
You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing to get better.
Now, of course, if people aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing to get better and they don't get better, then that would make sense.
If some people are following what the tutor says and they get better and other people are not following what the tutor says and they don't get better, then that would make sense to me.
So you could control for that, though, right?
And say, OK, well, it's the tutor
Satisfied, you know, if you and I are taking piano lessons, we both have the same tutor, and the tutor says to you, do scales, and you do scales, and the tutor says to me, do scales, and I don't do scales, that would be marked down somewhere, at least in some more formal educational setting.
And then you could see, ah, well you see the root of the problem is that, or the reason why he probably plateaued is he wasn't doing what the tutor said.
And so you could find out whether people are diligently practicing in the way that is going to get the best results.
And of course if somebody, if person A and person B are both doing the same kind of practicing and their tutor has confirmed that,
But person A improved significantly and person B has plateaued.
That would be another example of maybe you hit a kind of x-factor ceiling to your ability and that's why you practice less.
So again, all of these things could be figured out.
It wouldn't necessarily be the easiest thing in the world, but you could certainly do a... you could do research on this to figure out and separate these factors.
And I just... I don't know that that research
I don't know if it's been done in that sort of detail, but the book did go over a fair number of different studies, and it was similar to what you're talking about there.
Okay, well, I mean, again, I think I hugely appreciate you bringing up this topic.
Because it's a very essential question.
I don't sit there and say, well, I could have been Placido Domingo, but I just didn't take more singing lessons.
Like, this is no way.
There's absolutely no way that I could do any of that, right?
I don't sit there and say, like for me, I've never been able to touch my toes with the straight knees, like I just don't have physical flexibility as a whole.
I'm athletic, and I can play a lot of different sports at a medium-decent level, but I don't have any flexibility, so I couldn't be a dancer.
Dancers, you need that physical flexibility.
I just couldn't be a dancer.
So for me, I know that there are physical limitations to what it is that I can do from an athletic standpoint, and certainly from a musical standpoint.
I've tried to learn piano.
I've tried to learn guitar.
I spent, as you know, 10 years on violin.
I don't think I had the best tutors in the world, but
The idea to me that I could have done anything I wanted if I just put the work in, that's a real blank slate or tabula rasa.
Anyone can do anything, all they have to do is put the work in.
And even from a cost-benefit standpoint, you need a certain amount of intelligence to recognize the value of doing things you don't like in order to get better at things you do like.
Right?
Lower IQ tends to be shorter time preference.
So lower IQ people as a whole will tend to do things that are easier and more pleasant, which of course will cost them in terms of excellence in the long run, whereas higher IQ people will say,
Yeah, I hate this, and I'm gonna hate it for the next month, but it's gonna really help me in my career.
Or I'm gonna hate it for the next year, or whatever it is, right?
And so, we know that IQ has a significant biological basis.
There's still a lot to work with, but it's a significant biological basis, so to me,
Saying anyone can do anything would indicate that people with lower IQs can have the same deferral of gratification as people with higher IQs, and that doesn't seem to be the case.
So, to me, I think the truth is in the middle, which is kind of an annoying thing to say because it sounds like, oh, I'm being all kinds of reasonable, Aristotelian mean.
I think people's potential is vastly greater than they think that it is.
But I also am concerned at the idea that anyone can be anything.
That, you know, this is existence precedes essence.
That this is a sort of a sarterian argument or an existential argument that existence precedes essence.
That you are and then you choose what your essence is.
And I don't know.
Like, why did I fall so heavily into the joy and love and challenge and terror occasionally of philosophy?
Well, I warmed to it, and I also had great facility with it from pretty early on.
I understood the arguments, like, as soon as I really started to hear them, I understood the arguments.
They clicked, everything lined up in my brain, and therefore, for me, pursuing philosophy was really easy and really great.
Whereas learning violin was not.
And I didn't even have a tutor when it came to philosophy.
I was largely self-taught for the first, like, until I went to university.
But from the age of sort of 15 to 20, I was self-taught and arguably that's where I made some of the greatest progress in terms of just really understanding philosophy.
Whereas there are other people, I would argue, people who've had PhDs from, you know, under the tutelage of some of the greatest modern philosophers who I think are actually terrible at philosophy and worse than
Than average, because they actually are intelligently propagating massive errors and so on.
So, I think that people have particular potentials.
I don't think they're evenly spread.
I do think that people plateau, and I think the important thing is to find something that you're good at and you love, to the point where you're willing to do the difficult stuff.
You know, like, half of the work that I do is really fun and enjoyable.
And half the work that I do is boring, repetitive, and grindy.
Right?
So, I mean, research can be boring, repetitive, and grindy.
You know, I mean, I have these shows.
I've got to process the shows.
I've got to cut out background noise, cut out pauses.
I've got to, if people have bad audio, I've got to do what I can to enhance it.
And then I've got to save it as a WAV file.
I've got to combine it with video.
And I've got to publish.
And spread it around, and that stuff's all, you know, boring as watching a toad dry in the sun.
It's just appallingly dull.
And I can't even listen to other things while I'm doing it, because I need to listen to myself or the listeners.
So, you know, half of what I do is really inspiring and great and fun, and half of what I do is really dull and repetitive and boring.
And that's down from what it used to be at the beginning of the show.
It was like 80% of it was dull, repetitive and boring because I was marketing and getting the word out there.
And like 20% of it was fun, inspiring and creative.
I do think that we want to uncork people's potential and say, you can be much greater than you think you are if you really work at it, but at the same time I'm a little cautious about, you can be and do anything you want, because I think that people should experiment with a variety of things and find out what gives them the greatest joy and the greatest traction
And the fact that I clicked into philosophy really easily and really early.
I assume that's what happened.
Like, you know, Jimmy Page gets a cheap dime store guitar when he's 10 and he just literally becomes obsessed with it and plays it continually and then ends up as a, you know, a terrible human being but at least a great guitarist.
So, did he become a great guitarist because he just worked that hard, or did he work that hard because he just clicked with the guitar?
These are questions which we could sort out to some degree.
I think, obviously, hard work and doing the... If I wasn't willing to do the boring stuff of this show, this show wouldn't exist.
Like, it just wouldn't be here.
If I hadn't been willing to do all of the boring, repetitive, you know, copy-paste, post on this forum, try to get the word out, and learn how to use audio and video editing programs, and learn how to set up all the technical stuff for the live streams and this.
If I hadn't been willing to do all of that stuff, there'd be no show!
And so people who are like, well, I only want to do the fun stuff.
I only want to do the speechifying.
And like, OK, well, then you don't have a show, right?
Because you can't.
And of course, you know, it'd be nice to outsource some of this stuff.
But, you know, my video files, when I do a live stream, my video files are like almost 40 gigs.
The idea that I'm just going to ship them off to someone and it's going to be really efficient, it's just not.
It's just easier to do it myself.
And I've got it down to a fairly fine art by now.
So yeah you have to be willing to do the boring and dull and dumb stuff in order to be able to do the fun juicy and exciting stuff but the reason is I'm willing to do the boring dull stuff is because the juicy stuff is so good.
Sometimes it's too good even for me.
Like I did this great speech yesterday for 40 minutes and it literally wiped me out for the rest of the day.
I was like lying on the couch you know just listening to some music and I had like no intellectual or emotional or physical energy for the rest of the day.
Sometimes it just
Knocks you right out like a horse kick to the chest But you know even that's worth it because I think it's worth Sacrificing an afternoon evening of energy to have a speech like that recorded for all time.
So
So I think people got to find out what works for them and what excites them, and then recognize that they're not really going to be able to achieve it without a lot of dull, repetitive stuff, like doing scales or, you know, the number of times I've hit control L in Audacity to blank out some background noise.
If I had a dollar for every one of those, I'd probably own half a Bitcoin.
So, yeah, so I think people should be encouraged to pursue excellence.
I don't feel that I could have become as good a guitarist as I am a philosopher, even if I'd put all the time that I spent, I've put 60, probably 60,000 hours into philosophy by now.
If I put 60,000 hours into guitar, would I be as good a guitarist as I am a philosopher?
I don't think so.
So I do think you do have to choose where your skills and desires and drives and abilities lie.
But again, I agree with you that people put the cap on their own progress pretty early and often because they encounter things they don't want to do and then just kind of fade away that way, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does.
And I agree, like I don't think that, I don't want to push the idea that anyone can be anything, because there are limitations biologically, like with IQ and then with your, if you're in sports, you know, you have to have a specific body type to even begin to be a basketball player or a hockey player or whatever.
Or a jockey, like a friend of mine loves riding horses, but she could never be a jockey because she has a normal human size and jockeys have to be halflings.
Right.
So aside from those like basic limitations I do think though it is it's important for people not to to limit themselves and just the based on my what I read in the book it was just really it's very encouraging this this sort of data that he presents and how much potential people have and they might be hiding it and and other people around them too might be trying to you know holding them back saying well you're not really meant to do that well how do you know until you really try and anyways it was a really good book and I'd recommend it.
Yeah, it is a good book, and I do also think that people should try to push through plateauing, but also recognize that plateauing might be a real thing.
Like, you might have hit some X-factor limitation, in which case be satisfied with your limitation, or find something else where you can keep.
I mean, I always had a sense, from being a very little kid, I always had the sense that I could just do something fantastic.
I just always had the sense that I could just do something amazing.
in the world.
And I did cast around a variety of places.
I did writing, I did acting, playwriting, I did directing, I did academia, I did the business world.
So I tried a wide variety of things.
And this is where, for me, I got the greatest traction and the greatest satisfaction and the genuine and deep belief that I was using every part of me.
Right, so in acting, I was using the demonstrative and communicative part of me, but I wasn't using the creative part of me, because I was generally reading other people's lines.
With playwriting, I was using the generative part of me, but I wasn't using the demonstrative part of me, because you just sit alone and you write.
With directing, even directing my own plays, I missed being on stage.
And so on.
And in the business world, I had, you know, rationality and objective goals and creativity and programming, but I missed the poetic-artistic side, which doesn't really exist in the computer world as much.
With academia, I love the intellectual side, but I missed the passion and creative and juicy side of that.
At least with this show, like, I can bounce between, you know, call-in shows and analytical philosophy and some current events and
I can also write novels and nonfiction books.
And so for me...
I get to use every part of my brain in this field.
So I'm not feeling like, oh, but there's this part of myself that I really want to be able to express.
Like, outside of, you know, the physical threats and difficulty traveling if you're unvaccinated, you know, I could even do a sort of stage presence and contemporaneous speeches, and I could do documentaries, and I even got to act a little bit in the hoaxed movie, hoaxedmovie.com.
You should check that out, by the way.
So it's, and I even get to do acting when I do my audio books.
I even get to do acting when I do improv role plays with people, you know, you be your mom, I'll be you, or I'll be your dad, you be you.
And we just to sort of do some improv role playing, which I was pretty, pretty good at in school as well.
So I just, I get to do it all here and,
I don't feel like any part of me doesn't get flex and expression, and that's really, really important to me because I'm sort of a crowd, and I've got that Marine thing when it came to expressing my talents and abilities, which is no one gets left behind.
Yeah, I hope that people will.
Yeah, don't put a limit on yourself, but be sensitive to the fact that limits may occur.
And I've seen this before.
Like, I mean, I worked as hard in theatre school as other people did, but other people, I think, were just better actors.
And, you know, they've gone on to have some pretty decent careers and so on.
And I couldn't, for whatever reason, and it could be because I just wanted to create more than just speak other people's lines.
So I just, you know, part of me was drawn away from pursuing just acting because I just didn't want to be a hand puppet.
I have too many words of my own.
To be the conduit for other people's language.
So it could be any number of reasons.
I definitely plateaued when it came to acting and I wanted to find something where I had no plateau.
And again, I tried a lot of things, poured myself heart and soul into them.
I plateaued in some things.
And in philosophy, again, I still do this every time.
I look forward to a time when I can scratch out time for a live stream.
Because here, I don't feel like I'm plateauing.
Here, I feel like there's always more to go, always deeper and wider to challenge myself and the audience.
And I think that's why people keep coming back, because it's not the same thing over and over again as it is with some kinds of shows.
You never know what the hell is coming out next.
So for me, I definitely plateaued in certain areas and I finally found that thing
Even though I worked hard, when I finally found that thing that I didn't plateau on, that's where I really hit the traction.
And so, it's a complicated thing, and I appreciate you bringing up the topic.
I'll have a look at the book.
Can you just remind me of the title?
Yeah, it's called Peak by Anders Ericsson.
All right.
Peak.
I'm sure I can find that.
All right.
Well, thanks, man.
Really, really great topic, and I really appreciate you bringing it up.
I do find it really fascinating.
And I want to encourage people to succeed, but I also don't want to make people to feel bad if they've plateaued, because I think that's a real thing.
And again, the research may contradict that.
And also, you know, the peak thing is not always great.
If you look at someone who is peak in business, like Steve Jobs, like his personal life was a mess.
So who knows what?
To me, his peak virtue is the way to go.
And that doesn't necessarily mean peak success.
As we know from my own example, that doesn't necessarily mean peak success in the world as a whole.
All right.
Thanks, Adam.
Appreciate that.
Great comments.
If anybody else has any last questions or issues that they would like to bring up, I would be happy to hear.
You talked before about the necessity for parents to do some reading before they have children.
Do you have any recommendations on books on peaceful parenting?
No, I don't.
I found Parent Effectiveness Training.
I interviewed someone some years ago from that school of thought.
Parent Effectiveness Training is pretty good.
I did watch some super nannies in the past, but she's very big on the timeouts, but she's also going into pretty extreme situations.
But no, Parent Effectiveness Training I think would be some of the best books that I've read.
I mean, the best way to prepare for parenting is to process your own childhood as much as possible.
And it really is an inner journey.
So when I was growing up, one of the things that I noticed was this escalation.
Escalation is a big, big problem.
I was talking with a friend of mine who was having a conflict with a friend's little kid and he just felt like, you know, you feel this, I've got to win, I've got to show, you know, this is the start of something big, this could be the snowball that leads to the avalanche that, you know, whatever, right?
And it's like, no, it's just a little conflict, you can let it go away, you can, whatever, work to try and get your way or whatever, but this idea that everything is this crusade
Manichaean battle between light and darkness, that's pretty bad because that raises the stakes of conflict to the point where, you know, if I don't win this conflict, if I don't get my way, I've lost all credibility as a parent and their teenage years are going to be a drug-fueled orgy of disaster or whatever, right?
And so de-escalation is really, really important.
Your kid's just disagreeing with you and you can't have it as a parent, we just need to win all battles.
But
That's usually because you grew up in an environment, I mean I did for sure, you grew up in an environment where if you lose the other person will just use that as an excuse to have you keep losing and they'll keep dominating you and and they'll keep escalating and so you have to in a sense fight a battle to the half death just to not be ground into atoms for eternity.
And so I think the best thing around parenting is not necessarily
Books on parenting, although I think those can be very helpful, but it's really just looking back at your own childhood and just remembering what you liked.
And, you know, there's a funny thing, too, where there's this weird thing in a lot of people's minds where if you admit that you're wrong and you admit fault, then you can never be taken with credibility again.
Oh remember like that time you were so certain you were right but it turns out you were totally wrong?
Well this time it's just like one of those times and they just use your admission of fault or error to just bully and dominate and dismiss you forever and then of course you can't admit fault and you can't admit error and you know you see people on online on social media doing this stuff all the time and it's just blindingly obvious they're just you know the world is my parents and I can never grow up.
And so, yeah, just going back and dealing with all of that and realizing that when people admit fault and they admit error, that's a plus.
That's a good thing.
It means that they have a standard of truth larger than their own ego gratification in the moment.
So I think that preparing for parenting has a lot to do with just going back over your own childhood, dealing with the frustrations and the upsets so that you can actually approach your child in the present rather than as a finger puppet of the past.
And usually it's a middle finger puppet of the past.
So just resolving your own childhood issues and
Having values independent of trauma.
You know, trauma is an attempt to get you to have values that is usually based upon inflicting harm upon others consciously or unconsciously.
And so having values independent of trauma.
And if you have values independent of trauma, then trauma will try to undermine those values.
Like if you have a trauma, which is you grew up with a parent who could never admit fault.
Like my mom, like,
Absolutely incapable of admitting fault or error.
It became like a running joke in my family.
Oh, mom's never wrong.
Mama never makes a mistake.
And if anything is wrong, like if she ever communicates anything poorly to a six-year-old, it's completely the six-year-old's fault.
It could never be the fault.
So people who just don't take any responsibility for their actions, people who never admit any fault, never admit any error,
I just never wanted to be one of those people.
And so if you grew up with a parent who was unable to admit fault, who always escalated, because being unable to admit fault and escalating conflicts is two sides of the same coin.
So if you have a parent like that,
Then you as a kid just have to remember how relieved you would have been if your mom had admitted fault or your dad had admitted error or whatever it was going to be.
Oh, you know what?
You're totally right.
I was completely wrong.
And thank you so much for pointing that out.
Like that's a huge relief when people are like that in your life.
Cause it means they're not bullies.
They don't have to dominate you.
They're not wildly insecure.
They're not brittle.
They're not, you know, whatever is so easily triggered that they lose their minds.
And so to remember back as a kid, just how annoying it was when people wouldn't admit fault.
That's important, right?
Because then when you're a parent and you think, well, gosh, if I admit fault or I admit wrong, my kid's going to lose respect for me and therefore I can't admit fault, I can't admit wrong, I have to get everything perfect.
If you remember what it was like for you as a kid, you'd say, geez, I wish you'd just admitted fault and admitted wrong.
It was pathetic when you didn't.
Because your kids know when you're wrong.
They know when you've made a mistake.
They know when you've gotten something bad, badly.
They know that.
And you either admit it or you don't.
And if you don't admit it, they just lose respect for you.
And they also won't think that you're right even when you are.
Because they know that you can't be right.
If you can't admit that you're wrong, you can't be right.
Because you just have this position, I'm always right, which means that even if you are right, you're not right based on any principle, you're just right based upon willpower and dominance.
So, I mean, I remember that when I was a kid, how annoying it was to be raised by somebody who would never admit any fault, any error, any problems.
And I had a relationship like that once with a girl.
Every conflict was always me.
It was always my fault.
And that relationship didn't last.
Of course, right?
Because it's kind of boring to be in somebody's narcissistic world of infinite self-justification where they are physics and you are a glitch in the matrix in perpetuity.
So if you go back and just remember that.
So I remember that when I was
A kid.
And when I was a parent, it's like, if I'm wrong, of course, you know, you want to impress your kids and you want to be right and you want to be someone that they look to for advice and all of that.
And so it feels a bit odd to say, oh, my gosh, I was wrong.
Oh, my gosh, I made a mistake or whatever.
Right.
And it's also, you know, when there's a minor show off element, maybe it's a bit more of a dad thing, but you know, if your kid is like, you know, how fast can you run?
Right.
And it's like, you can run super fast and they're really impressed by that.
And then, you know, they get faster and faster and you age, at least for me, you get slower and slower.
And at some point they can run faster than you.
And you want to push yourself so that you continue to, quote, impress your kids.
But then you push yourself to the point where you pull a muscle or, you know, whatever, wreck your knee or something, and that's no good, right?
Because then you've just shown them that a certain kind of vanity is really important to you, and you've lost their credibility that way.
And then you're concerned about whether you've infected them with that kind of vanity or whatever, right?
I remember Rocket League was the game that my daughter got better at than me.
She can do things in Rocket League that I can't even really conceive of.
And it's really her spatial reasoning is just off the charts.
And I'm good at first-person shooters, but I'm only better at her first-person shooters than she is because she doesn't really like them or care about them and doesn't want to play them.
So I've only retained any superiority because of her fundamental indifference to these things.
So if you just go over your childhood...
Knowing that it was annoying to me when a parent wouldn't admit fault.
If I was wrong, I would still have that impulse to want to not admit fault because that's what was modeled for me.
But then you just remember that's really annoying and you lose respect for people because you know that they're wrong and you can see them not admitting that they're wrong even when they're wrong.
You know, it'd be like my mom was supposed to leave 10 pennies or 10 pence in a bowl for me to get lunch with at school, because she never made any lunch, but I had 10, right?
And I remember putting a little sign up on the little bowl, bring diner money.
I didn't know how to spell dinner, because dinner, I think, was lunch back in the day.
And in the morning, you know, sometimes I'd remind my mom, can you put a, you know, ten penny piece in the bowl so that I can take it and use it to pay?
Because if you didn't, they'd still give you lunch, but you'd have to wear this big bright elastic on your wrist to show that you didn't have any money.
It was like a sort of social humiliation thing.
And you know, you'd be known as the poor kid or whatever.
So I would say to my mom, you know, sometimes like to drive about, remember to put the money out.
And then she'd forget sometimes.
Right.
And, and she'd race off to work and I'd have, and it would be like, oh man, I don't want to go to school now because I wear this big bright bracelet of rubber humiliation.
And so I'd say to my mom, like, you know, you didn't, you didn't leave the, you didn't leave the money.
Like, it's your job to remind me, but I did remind you.
No, you didn't.
Like she just wouldn't, wouldn't admit things.
Right.
Just wouldn't admit things, you know?
And then I'd say, well, can you just give me the money and I'll just, like, just fill the bowl.
It's like, no, like it was just, I don't know, it was a weird thing that was going on.
But yeah, just I know that I had to remind her.
She'd say, no, you didn't.
It's your job to remind me.
I can't think of everything.
I can't run everything in this household.
It's like, you know, I'm, you know, I'm six, right?
Or whatever.
No, I guess I was back from boarding school by then.
So I was eight.
So.
You've got to take some responsibility.
Well, I can't create money out of thin air.
You know, I'm eight, two years till I get my first job.
So, yeah, just when my daughter noticed that I'd done something wrong or made a mistake, I would just have to, you know, intercept that impulse and say, no, you're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
Thank you for pointing that out.
And of course, it's really worked out.
So I think it really is just around going over your own childhood and figuring out what the right thing was that should have happened and then trying to reproduce that.
Because if you read a bunch of books, but you still have that escalation thing.
Like, I don't escalate.
I don't escalate.
If I'm upset about something, I will repeat it until I'm heard, but I don't escalate.
And it's funny, I remember this.
This is in theater school.
One of the guys, I quite liked him in theater school, and he was pretty cool.
And he was kind of a weird little thing.
So he was playing some bongos, and he was trying to get
A friend of his is attention.
And I just happened to be watching this little interaction.
And he was just, dum de dum dum, just drumming away a little bit.
And he was saying, I'll just make up a name.
He was just saying, Bob, Bob, Bob.
Hey, Bob.
Now, of course, in my family, it was, you know, zero to infinity pretty quickly.
Bob!
Bob!
Bob!
Hey Bob!
Bob!
Bob!
You know, we just escalate like that, right?
Like that quickly sometimes, right?
But I remember watching him and he was just like, Hey Bob!
Bob!
Hey Bob!
Bob!
And Bob didn't hear or whatever it was.
But he didn't, he didn't, he didn't increase.
He did not escalate.
And I just remember watching that like, well, that's really, I think that's the first time I've seen that where it's not like, bop, bop, bop, you know, you become like Jim Morrison screeching about the prayer stuff in the soft parade.
And he's just like, no, bop, bop, bop.
And this went on for like a minute or two and he didn't escalate.
And then eventually he just gave up.
Like, I just can't get Bob's attention.
It doesn't really matter.
But he did not.
I just remember watching that like with
Kind of soft, quiet, awe in my mind, like, oh, that's the thing.
You could not escalate.
And so, yeah, I just repeat stuff.
I tend not to escalate pretty much.
So, yeah, Parent Effectiveness Training is pretty good, but I think, you know, personal therapy, talk therapy, journaling, whatever you need to do to unkink your childhood knots, I think is going to make it pretty great for you as a parent.
Does that make sense?
You're muted, by the way.
Yes, it does, though I'm not sure if unkinking my childhood is an appropriate term after your explanation on toxoplasmosis in cats.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
That's right.
Okay, well thanks.
Appreciate that.
Any last questions or issues or comments?
Great stuff to talk about today.
I really love you guys for the great topics you tickle in our collective Borg brains, so I'll just give you a second here in case anybody else has a yearning burning that they wanted to talk about.
Patience and waiting.
Patience and waiting.
Nice to see the familiar faces.
Also nice to see some new names.
Also great.
Appreciate that.
Welcome.
Welcome.
Welcome to Fantasy Island.
All right.
Okay.
Well, listen, I appreciate everyone dropping by today.
Thanks so much.
A great pleasure to chat.
freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
Really, really, really, really appreciate it.
Did I mention that?
I think I did.
Have yourselves a great day.
I will talk to you guys on Wednesday night and not Friday night though.
I have something else on for Friday night and I will hopefully this week, middle of the week, I will record the first of two presentations on artificial intelligence, which is right back to coding, which I loved for many decades.
So thanks everyone so much.
Have yourself a wonderful day.
Lots of love.
I'll talk to you soon.
Bye.
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