All Episodes
Previous Next
April 8, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:38
Do NOT F%ck with Determinism!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey there, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux, freedomain.com.
Hope you're doing well.
So, a couple of questions here from freedomain.locals.com.
Great community.
You should join.
Hi, Steph.
Long time listener.
I have a curious question about free will.
I think you've probably heard this to some degree, but my question, very briefly, is as follows.
If we had a supercomputer that could run physics perfectly, if somehow we could do that, and then also map every atom, quark, and their spins, etc., perfectly, would we I think if you extrapolate the basics I have laid out, and you probably will, then that would be a pretty good argument for a determinism.
I myself prefer free will because it leads to the onus of responsibility on each actor, but if we had such a system in such a hypothetical computer, it would be amusing to see the results.
If at least for comparison for the actual outcome.
Perhaps you could use it to solve for X, in this case being free will, or it would predict the future perfectly.
Yeah, I mean, this is dangerous shit to mess around with.
Honestly, this is really...
First of all, you can't...
Obviously, I know you know it's a thought experiment that's mostly nonsense, but you couldn't possibly load the entire universe into a supercomputer.
It's not possible.
Because, I mean, just look at the speed of light, right?
So the universe is...
You know, billions of light years across.
So you couldn't get the information about every quark in the universe because you couldn't possibly travel fast enough to get every piece of information in the universe.
So what you're talking about is a complete and total impossibility.
It's not even good as a thought experiment because a thought experiment is impossible.
It's the equivalent of saying, okay, so how would math look if two and two made five?
Right? I mean, it wouldn't...
It's just this massive contradiction.
You couldn't possibly load up every quark and atom into a supercomputer.
It's not possible.
And of course, the supercomputer would be part of that whole experiment.
So yeah, that's not a thing at all.
But it's a very dangerous mental exercise, right?
It's sort of like having the mental exercise that says, okay, let's say I really wanted to.
Kill people, and I wanted to be a serial killer, and you just dwelled upon that sort of month after month, and you fantasized about it, and you fetishized it, and so on.
Thought experiments can rewire the brain, for good or for ill, right?
I mean, you could have a thought experiment saying, what if I want to be the greatest philosopher that has ever lived?
Whatever, right?
And you would do that to further advance philosophy rather than for reasons of vanity, at least we would hope that to be the case.
So, thought experiments are very powerful.
They are seductive.
They are spells that you cast to determine your path in the future.
So, if you've been toying around with a thought experiment that you are a robot with no free will, and I know you prefer free will, but frankly, to hell with what you prefer.
Philosophy isn't about what you prefer.
That's a buffet.
Philosophy is not about what you prefer.
Philosophy is about what is and what is right.
About what is and what is right.
Do not fuck around with mental exercises that make you a robot.
If you don't think that's going to have an effect on your life and your motivation and your sense of self, you are tragically mistaken.
Do not fuck around with thought experiments that you're a robot or that everyone's a robot or that it's all machinery.
That you are a mere aggregate of atoms and quarks.
Bullshit, right?
Seriously, do not fuck around.
Don't fuck around with thinking that you might be a serial killer or what if you were.
This stuff has a deep effect on you.
You would look at an experiment like that.
Well, what if I'm just a machine?
And what if the woman I love is just a machine?
And what if love is just code and just a machinery and everything dissolves into vertical streams of green kanji matrix style?
Do not...
I can't overemphasize this enough.
I really can't.
Do not fuck around with thought experiments that completely disassemble your humanity, your virtue, your will, your choice, your meaning, your identity.
Do not.
You'd be better off playing with flamethrowers at a gas station than screwing around with these kinds of thought experiments.
Because You are programming yourself that all you're doing is programming.
Now, of course, I get that you're going to say, no, no, no, it was just a thought in passing.
It's like, no, no.
Okay, first of all, you wrote it down.
Secondly, you sent it to me with the goal of me amplifying it, which I am doing, but in a way that may be a little different from what you were thinking.
So you can't just say it was just a mere whim in passing, right?
You know, like, I guess when I was younger, I had a thought.
I'm sure I had a thought like, oh, wouldn't it be cool, I saw ballet, wouldn't it be cool to be a ballet dancer, right?
So I had that thought in passing.
But I didn't write to an expert on ballet saying, okay, let's play out this theoretical where I become a ballet dancer, right?
Because then I'm taking it more seriously.
Right? I'm taking it more seriously.
Do not, this is not amusing, this is not fun, this is not just a whim, this is not just an innocent thought experiment.
You are possessed.
By a demonic kind of machinery that is trying to turn you into nothing more than an aggregate of atoms.
And seriously, I'm not kidding about this.
I know this sounds bizarre.
Maybe it seems like an overreaction to you.
I really don't care.
It is what it is.
Do not fuck around with this stuff.
People, and this is sort of from the early days of free domain, right?
This is a well-earned battle scars from the early days of free domain.
I'm not...
Kidding about this.
This is well-earned battle scars from the early days.
We had wave after wave on the old message board.
We had wave after wave of attacks from fairly demonic determinists attempting to strip us of our morals, love, virtue, and humanity.
It is an assault in general from sociopaths to strip you of your humanity and drive from you Your capacity for love and morals and virtue so that you're easier to exploit.
I'm not putting you in this category, just to be clear, because I get that you're just toying with this a little bit.
But toying with this stuff, it's like Russian roulette.
It's just a game.
Well, it's a game that can destroy you.
You know, don't fuck with ayahuasca.
Don't fuck with mysticism.
Don't fuck with determinism.
Don't play with it.
Don't mess around with it.
Don't. Because...
It will get in there and it will do its dismal dirty work on you.
And you'll find yourself, you know, just a little bit less motivated.
Just a little bit more, well, you know, what if we had this thought experiment and we were all just machines and the future was perfectly predictable and free will is an illusion.
What if, what if, what if, what if, what if?
Boom! You get eaten alive and turned into a nothing burger of your...
Own self-slaughtered demise.
Do not.
I know.
I really need to bring you guys up short.
We've toyed with this stuff, but I remember toying with this stuff, and I'm just being emphatic because I don't want you to take another step, right?
Like if you said, well, you know, I'll just do a little bit of heroin.
It's like, no, no, don't do it at all.
Don't toy with it.
Don't do it at all.
Don't get anywhere close.
Don't be in this world or this realm at all.
Do not.
Fuck with determinism.
It will hollow you out.
And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
So determinism, well, you know, we're just quarks and atoms and machinery and physics and nothing, right?
There's nothing but atoms in space, right?
So you'll find yourself a little less motivated.
And you say, well, I guess I'm a little less motivated.
I guess I'm behaving more like matter.
Matter's not motivated, right?
So then you won't ask that girl out, right?
And then you'll feel a stab of disappointment at not having asked that girl out.
And then you'll say, well, but you know, maybe, I mean, come on, maybe it's all just machinery.
Maybe it's all just atoms and void, right?
Maybe it's just physics.
Maybe it was physics that I didn't ask that girl out.
Maybe that's just the way that the universe is unrolling, like a giant boulder smashing down the side of a hill, right?
Where it lands is not moral.
So then you find yourself with a little less motivation, a little less energy, a little less, and you start to muse with it more.
And because you've toyed with the idea of turning into a machine, you turn into a machine.
And then because you start to abandon your humanity and your free will and your virtue, you start to become cynical.
And then you start to say, well, all of those people who believe in virtue, they're just programmed to feel that way.
It's not real.
They haven't earned anything.
It's all just...
Atom space, physics void, and inertia.
They didn't earn it.
They didn't make any choices.
The rich people, it's just where the atoms happen to aggregate.
The poor people, that's just where the atoms happen to not aggregate.
They become bitter, cynical, negative, emptied, hollowed out, and...
Determinism gives you excuses, and when you have excuses, you behave worse.
And when you behave worse, you need more excuses, which means that you can behave worse, which means you need more excuses, and you get hollowed out.
It's a lot easier to stop this at the beginning than later on.
Like every addiction, right?
I find it pretty easy to not do heroin because I've never done drugs.
Just don't start.
So I'm telling you, man, don't go down this road.
Don't go down this road.
Alright. All right.
Let's see here.
This is a long one.
I just grab him and print him out.
That's too long.
Yeah, okay, so I'm not going to do that one.
How to understand and deal with the anxiety of women.
Well, there's nothing wrong with women, and there's nothing wrong with men.
Right? There's nothing wrong with women.
There's nothing wrong with men.
If you have a male and a female athlete, Who are twice as good as their closest competitors.
Like, they get the gold and they're twice as good as those who get the silver.
And they are the champion athletes.
And not just by a little bit, right?
Like that old Seinfeld joke about the 100-meter dash, it's so close that if a guy had a pimple on his nose, he would have won.
It's like, they're clear winners, right?
Like, the best athlete in human history is Wayne Gretzky because he's the guy who is further ahead of his...
Closest competitor.
He's the furthest ahead to his closest competitor in terms of goals scored and all.
So, if you have two athletes who are ridiculously better, a male and a female athlete, ridiculously better than everyone else, would you criticize them?
Would you say, oh, you should have done this, you should have done that.
There's something fundamentally wrong with you.
There's something fundamentally wrong with your exercise.
Something fundamentally wrong with your training.
Like, it's bad, man.
It's bad.
Would you say that?
Well, of course not.
Because they are the very best athletes around.
Now, men and women, throughout our evolution, men and women have been able to achieve the human brain which is the greatest glory in the universe.
We have wrestled our brains from single-celled organisms all the way through, you know, Trial abides fish, lizards, mammals, apes, all the way up to the crowning glory of our existence, which is the human brain that we have.
We have won.
Not just a little bit.
We're not just slightly smarter than the animals.
We are completely different, right?
So we have done, as a male, female, as males and females, we have done the greatest, the best.
We have won so decisively, it's ridiculous.
So there's nothing wrong with men, and there's nothing wrong with women.
In fact, there's everything to praise about men, and everything to praise about women.
Because again, we have created the human brain, which is absolutely incredible, a feat that has no parallel in any kind of history, and no parallel in any other species, right?
So don't think of women as anxious.
We've all been finely tuned as a species, males and females, we've all been finely tuned.
To create and produce the greatest glory in the universe, the human brain.
So, in order for us to have this great and glorious human brain, it takes, you know, a little over 20 years for women and it takes about 25 years for men to reach brain maturity.
And the way that we end up with this incredibly complex brain is, for the simple reason, that we take forever to grow it, right?
We are born ridiculously helpless, right?
It depends on the ethnicity, but it takes about a year to walk, right?
It takes 12 years, 11, 12 years to start sexual maturity, and it takes double that to finish growing your brain, right?
So, the only way that we have our incredible brains is because we are incredibly slow to develop, and because we are incredibly slow to develop, we need a massive amount of protection when we're young.
As babies, as toddlers, we need massive amounts of protection.
And what that means is that women, mothers, have to worry like crazy about us because we are tiny little tasty depredators, death magnets when we are babies and toddlers and young.
So men have to be incredibly productive because children produce little to no economic value for a long, long, long, long time.
And we are, as I said, you've probably seen these videos of Kids in a zoo with a glass wall between them and the lions, and the lions are trying to pounce on them and eat them, right?
So we are tasty little death nuggets when we are babies and toddlers and young.
So, of course women are anxious because we are born so ridiculously helpless that they need to be very worried about our survival.
So it's not anxiety.
I mean, it's how you frame it, right?
Oh, women are just anxious.
It's like, no.
And I say this, of course, having been a stay-at-home father and so on, right?
So I'm aware, probably more than most men, of the near-infinite fragility of young life.
So you can call it anxiety.
I'd simply call it protection.
What are we supposed to do?
How are we supposed to manage or handle women's desire to protect their young?
It's like, well, you're not supposed to manage or handle or minimize it.
You're supposed to respect it as that which keeps us alive.
So, understand and deal with the anxiety of women.
Stop calling it anxiety and start calling it by what it properly is, which is a desire for their offspring, including you, including me, to not die.
All right.
Hey, Steph.
Hope all is well.
Have you and your daughter been on any adventures?
Father-daughter memories?
What's something you'd like to experience with your family while you're here in this life together?
Well, I mean, travel was nice.
We used to do a lot of travel.
Izzy came with me on a lot of travel.
I remember, you know, it's a fantastic memory for me that when...
I was in Australia in 2018.
Yeah, like six years ago now.
So when I was in Australia, I had, of course, I was on this book tour.
And after I gave my speech, I met and chatted with people.
And my daughter, who was obviously quite young back then, what was she?
Nine? Yeah, nine years old.
My daughter was sitting next to me.
I would sign the book and then she would sign the book.
I assume those will be worth quite something someday because they're very rare, right?
My daughter was sitting next to me at the signing table, signing books, because, you know, we'd done some shows together at that point, and the fact that she was there signing books with me was absolutely fantastic.
We had great and exciting times.
We went, of course, to Poland together and had lots of great trips where we met a lot of people and did a lot of very cool things.
So, yeah, I think travel was very nice.
Travel, of course, has been sort of axed during COVID, and so...
And now she has, you know, friends and homeschooling and all kinds of cool things she wants to do with people.
And while I know she loves us to death, being as she is almost 16 years old, I'm pretty sure that she doesn't view traveling with her mid to late 50s parents as the coolest thing known to man or God.
So I'm looking forward to getting back into that later.
But right now we are, you know, fairly stuck.
Stuck at home.
I mean, it's not a bad thing for me.
So yeah, we've done some very cool things.
We've done treetop trekking, whitewater rafting.
She is a fantastic, if not overly uncautious skier.
We've done some great, great skiing together.
We've done fantastic tobogganing.
We've built snow forts and told stories inside the snow forts.
And, gee, what else we've done?
Mountain biking.
Some very, very extensive Crazy hikes, and we have swum with some fairly large and occasionally alarming sea life, and done body surfing together, and yeah, we've had a huge amount of fun, and she is an absolute blast.
So, yes, grab your experiences while you can, and I've always felt it's a good thing to trade passing money for permanent memories.
Alright. Are you allowed in New Zealand?
Yeah. I mean, There's the theoretical rights.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I got more vetting than, you know, criminal rappers when going to New Zealand and, oh, you had to, you were a criminal, get notes from the police.
It was all kind of, you know, just hysterical nonsense and so on.
But I would say that there's the theoretical rights that you have.
You know, like I have the theoretical right to Give speeches, right?
Because it's legal for me to give speeches.
However, the practical right is the police willing to act against those who do bomb and death threats, right?
And so on, right?
And so if the police aren't willing to act against those who, you know, give you bomb and death threats for wanting to give a speech, if the police aren't willing to act against those people and provide protection, then you don't actually have a practical right.
In fact, it's happened on a number of times where the police have...
Really failed to intervene in situations of, I would assume, fairly terroristic levels of aggression.
And so, you know, then the venues pull out and so on.
That kind of stuff.
So this is why, you know, when people ask me about human rights, it's like, well, you don't have anything you can manage and enforce, right?
So, yeah, I'm allowed, but there's no particular practical way to get speeches if the police...
And, of course, the reason why that happens is that the media generally cheers on violence and then is shot when there's violence.
You know, it's a normal thing.
All right.
So somebody says, it would be nice to make a series on the examination of the major European philosophers and philosophic movements of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Particular attention paid to the transition out of the medieval period into the age of enlightenment.
Right. So I have a 22-part history of philosophers series that's available for donors at subscribestore.com slash freedomain or at freedomain.locals.com.
Are you happy with the Bitcoin price?
Well, sure.
Absolutely. Why does no one want to talk about what happened to Rhodesia?
I think the answer is pretty obvious to that one.
Do you still support fluoridation, given it is now a known neurotoxin?
You know, it's funny.
I've obviously been doing this for close to 20 years.
I can't remember everything I've said, and no one can except perhaps AI.
So when people say, do you still support fluoridation?
Did I ever support fluoridation?
Did I ever say fluoridation is a massive positive?
And I know that for sure because I'm a biochemist and a Medical expert.
Well, of course, I'm none of those things, right?
So, people say stuff, and in general, when people ascribe stuff to me that I don't remember, I don't believe them, right?
So, the idea, and the idea that I would want the government to do any of this kind of stuff is just ridiculous, right?
All right, somebody asks, what is your best advice on how to talk to small children about de-food grandparents and aunts?
My kids, two and four, have had a relationship with my parents and my sister before I finally quit contact with them this year.
After they tried to actively ruin my marriage.
Yeah, I think I did this one.
But so basically, I would say, just be honest, age appropriate, and honest, right?
That you, unfortunately, you let bad people in your life, you tried to talk to them about behaving better, they decided not to, and right.
That's bad, right?
All right.
Dear Steph, I am currently at a bar on a late Saturday night.
I just ordered a drink, and the bartender said to me, after I ordered a beer, he said, oh, lovely.
It was strange to hear this, but also flattering to hear a young female bartender refer to me as lovely.
It made me believe that this young bartender was probably flirting with me.
She works for tips, so be skeptical, right?
I don't recall any other bartender using the word lovely towards me.
Whilst the term lovely is often used by older women to refer to younger people, this woman was approximately in her early 20s, about 10 years younger than me.
She looked reasonably attractive, blonde hair, bright blue eyes, but she was also a little chubby, so I wouldn't date her to be frank, but my question still stands.
If a younger woman says to a man, is that all?
Lovely? I thought it was lovey.
Anyway, would she say that to a man she's not attracted to?
Would you say it is a flirting?
To use the term, is that all lovey?
Lovely? I've been to my local bar for the last 10 years, never recall.
Okay, I think we get it.
So, yeah.
So, she's a little bit chubby, and so you won't date her.
Okay. I think that's ridiculous.
Honestly, I think it's just a little bit, like 10, 15 pounds overweight.
So date her and, you know, invite her to the gym and, you know, be a leader, be a coach, whatever, right?
So, yeah.
So, you know, just, For women, this is sort of hard for women to understand.
As women, you literally would not believe how few compliments men get.
Like, it's mad.
Absolutely mad.
I remember when I was in a play in high school, I was in our town by Thornton Wilder, and there was this woman, a girl, I guess, when we were still in high school.
And we...
I went to the cast party afterwards, and she got really drunk, and I walked her home, and she was kind of hanging off me, and she's like, Mr. Van, you're absolutely gorgeous, but you flirt with everyone, right?
And honestly, I still remember this like 40 years later, that that was a bit of praise.
You know, there's this old thing that the woman is rolling their eyes because they get called pretty five times a day, but one man has to remember 10 years ago where a woman who wasn't his mother called him handsome or said he had a nice smile.
We have to get by on so little.
It's ridiculous, right?
I mean, people are saying, well, why is it that women aren't approaching, aren't being approached by men anymore, right?
Men don't approach women.
Well, that's because women have gotten all, a lot of women have gotten all kinds of cocky and arrogant and unpleasant saying they don't need men, right?
So if you, right, if you say, if you have a sign on your door saying no salesmen, right, no salespeople, Then salespeople aren't going to knock on your door, right?
So if you say you don't need people, you don't want people, then they won't be around, right?
If you go to a store and the sales clerk says, can I help you with anything?
And you say, no, I'm just browsing.
Does she then or he then come up and aggressively try and sell you a bunch of stuff?
Well, no, because you just told them, I don't want to be pushed.
I don't want any sales pitches, right?
If you go to a car dealership and they say, can I help you with anything in particular?
You say, no, I'm just researching some prices.
They're not going to come in and say, oh, you should buy this and here's the packages and here's the options and you should get a sunroof, right?
So if you tell me, I don't know why it's this confusing for women, right?
But if you keep telling men that you don't need them and don't want them, then men will stop approaching you, right?
Because if women as a whole say we don't need men, men are toxic, men are negative, then men will stop approaching them because we don't want to be rude and pushy.
Men are actually, most men, I mean, small percentage of men who are kind of rude and mean, but most men are very sort of thoughtful and considerate and all of that.
And so, if all they see, and it's not, I mean, of course, not all women say we don't need men, but it's not so much what the extremists say, it's what everybody else doesn't disagree with.
Right? So there's a number of women, and you can see these, you know, do women need men and all of these Loud, barely clad.
Women out at nightclubs are like, we don't need men.
Men are useless.
Men are scum.
Men are...
Okay. And so it's...
I mean, of course, those are very disturbed women and so on.
But there isn't an associated movement of women saying, don't listen to those.
Those terrible women.
We absolutely need men.
Men are the best part of our lives.
And we love men and we love husbands and fathers and grandfathers and firemen and policemen.
This is why it's important to push back on general movements that you don't agree with, right?
Because otherwise the extremists dominate the conversation if the moderates aren't pushing back hard.
It's just one of these kind of funny things.
So, yeah, men have to get by on very little praise.
So, if a woman is nice to you, maybe she is attracted to you.
But most likely she works for tips.
Most likely she works for tips.
And she has found that if she calls a man her lovely, then she gets an extra hundred bucks a day.
That would be my guess.
I would not...
I mean, it's funny because you say, do you think it's appropriate to ask her out?
And then you say, well, I wouldn't date her because she's overweight.
So it's definitely flirty to use the word lovely, but...
When tips are involved, it's not usually flirty, right?
You have to go with more than that, right?
If she comes over and chats with you, asks you more about yourself, women shoot their shot by asking you questions about yourself.
A lot of men, I guess, don't really sort of understand that at all.
I wouldn't try to find her after work or where she is on her lunch break or anything like that, but it doesn't really matter because you said she's chubby, so you're not going to ask her out, so I don't know what the point is.
All right, dear Steph, our nightclubs.
And bars in Canada are known as a place where people meet, but the only people who meet there are generally trashy people.
I ask because I'm currently in a bar trying to find a girlfriend, and I'm sitting here alone because I didn't feel the need to bring male friends with me, and to be frank, I don't have any male friends.
Not that that bothers me, because I would just use male friends as a wingman to meet women.
Anyway, I don't live in Canada anyway.
I live in the continent of Australia.
Anyway, I'm listening.
Okay, I don't know what this means.
So I wouldn't necessarily focus on meeting girls in bars.
Because you're probably just going to meet social alcoholics.
I'm a big one for coffee shops, libraries.
I would chat with women at the gym and I started a couple of women at the gym.
Went okay, but we didn't have that much in common.
So I would not really focus on bars.
It's too loud and women are there with friends.
And if you're there alone, you know, women will judge you by the company you keep.
And if you're there alone, I think it might be considered a bit of an oddball scenario.
What do you think about Saylor starting a fund that buys so much Bitcoin?
If you've researched it, is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, if he keeps this word, as far as I understand it, to destroy his keys when he dies, then that's going to really add to the value of everyone else's Bitcoin.
I don't know what you mean by a good thing or a bad thing.
I don't know what you mean by a good thing.
If it's voluntary, I don't care.
If it's voluntary, I don't care if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm not sure.
It's certainly not immoral for him to buy as much Bitcoin as he wants.
And he is a very good communicator.
About Bitcoin, like one of the best around.
So the fact that he's invested in Bitcoin and talking about Bitcoin, it's a good thing.
Hi Steph, what are your thoughts on the future of BRICS?
Thanks. I don't really do politics anymore.
So this is Brazil, Russia, India, China, Egypt, Iran, South Africa, UAE, Ethiopia.
That's one I always forget.
So yeah, I don't really do politics.
Alright. Swiss Army Knives.
I think I did this one on a live stream.
If you still experience pain thinking about a toxic relationship you walked away from, does this mean you haven't processed the morality properly?
I'm still thinking about my sister that I don't speak to anymore.
My therapist said that it will always be a pain point.
What are your thoughts?
Asking again.
Apologize if you answered in a previous stream and I missed it.
I would say that occasionally I think about past relationships with a Fairly mild, like maybe a 1 to 2 out of 10 mild level of sort of frustration and annoyance.
So usually it's because you just can't get the truth about what happened, right?
So if you have a relationship where the person was not fundamentally honest about their thoughts, desires, preferences and motivations or their history, then the relationship is going to go south or weird or be a problem and it won't be because of anything you did and it won't be because of anything that you've That you understand, right? That the relationship would go south or go weird or have a problem because you just didn't have the facts, right?
So, I mean, one example, this is theoretical, it's not one that I've experienced, but one example would be if the woman had been sexually abused as a child and never told you that, then you're going to have all kinds of odd manifestations of strange behaviors and you're not going to have sort of the key or the knowledge that holds it together and has it make sense.
Sort of go back and forth over and over these kinds of relationships because you don't know what is causing the strange or bizarre behavior.
And so because you don't know what is causing strange or bizarre behavior, then what will happen is you will keep going over and over in your mind.
And the problem is, of course, that you'll never know.
You'll never know.
Because if somebody didn't tell you in the relationship, It may be because they don't know.
It might be blocked in their own consciousness.
It may be inaccessible to them, or they may have sort of made a kind of minor vow to never talk about it themselves.
So, you'll never know.
You'll never know.
I mean, I'm thinking of one relationship where, yeah, I just don't know why the person acts so bizarrely, and I'll never know, because I knew this person for many years.
And they may not know.
They may have no memory.
It may come to them later in life.
But if they...
Didn't tell you when you're in the relationship with them.
They sure as heck aren't going to tell you afterwards.
And especially if it's been something which has been a dominant, submissive relationship.
In other words, if the other person is considered to be an authority, then they'll really never tell you the truth about what was going on for them.
There's just a certain amount of mental discipline that is necessary when you've had relationships where you just can't figure things out.
Why would they act in this way?
Why would they not be more sensible?
Why would they act in this sort of very odd manner, right?
Well, you'll never know.
You'll never know because either they don't know or they won't tell you.
And these are functionally the same thing.
not knowing and not telling you, you have an equal level of access to the information.
So, when people do act in a bizarre fashion, it's troubling because we want to make sure we don't get in that situation again.
So, mostly it's not a pain point or anything.
It's just that you are trying to figure something out while missing an absolutely key piece of information.
And then that's like trying to figure out hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone.
Right, so if you are trying to figure out why someone is acting a certain way and you are lacking and you will never have the information that explains it, well, then...
But it's impossible to figure it out.
If people don't give you information about why they behave the way they behave, you're just going to have to have the mental discipline to say, I don't know why they behave that way, I'm sure there's a reason, but I'll never know, so I have to stop thinking about it.
Alright, somebody says, I've watched several documentaries on extreme sports.
Athletes, free solo climbing, deep free diving, big wave surfing, etc.
and I noticed that the people are all quite similar.
They just happen to be doing different sports.
They're remarkably driven to push their limits, so much so that they put themselves in tremendous danger.
Many die quite young.
What do you think has to happen to someone for them to want to pursue these massive risks for little more...
Yes. Usually it comes from...
An inner parental voice telling them to punish themselves.
Because it's not just the sports themselves, it's all the training and preparation and denial of food.
So people with very strong wills are often motivated by an urge to self-destruction.
And the other thing too is that it's kind of like extreme sports can be kind of a cult in that everyone who gets in has sort of an immediate companionship.
They have people they can talk about that's kind of exclusive to them and so on, right?
You know, some people are just born hardwired that they just need massive amounts of stimulation.
But I think for a lot of people, it is.
I always sort of think about this patient of Carl Gustav Jung's, a psychologist.
And the guy was having dreams about climbing, like mountain climbing.
And he said, I'd keep climbing and I'd climb up and up and up into the clouds.
And Jung said, look, you have to stop mountain climbing.
You have a death wish.
And the guy wouldn't stop mountain climbing and then fell to his death.
So, yeah, there's a lot of...
A lot of courage is just a death wish, right?
Like I was talking about this with my daughter when we did the Gladiator 2 review, that, you know, the guys who run into blistering machine gun fire, oh, they're so brave, and it's like, well, maybe, but I would generally ascribe it more to they want to kill themselves.
I mean, a friend of mine who was very much into extreme mountain biking when I was younger ended up dying in a terrible crash.
Alright, would you consider doing a Truth About Oprah Winfrey presentation?
No. Not really.
The Molyneux treatment could really help pick sense.
Oh, okay.
I asked this question the other day.
Do you have an opinion on outsourcing?
Large companies sending jobs to third world countries and paying pennies on the dollar.
It's part of the free market and capitalism.
And I wonder if it could just be considered predatory or just supply and demand.
The consumer loses out on jobs but benefits on cheaper goods and services and the third world still is paid.
And the third world, although paid a low wage, is still a benefit from better.
So, the issue with outsourcing is government education.
Right? The issue with outsourcing is government.
Like, why is it that American workers or Canadian workers or British workers, why is it that they can't compete with people who have no education when they've been educated for 12 years?
So after you're educated for 12 years, you should be easily able to out-compete people doing stuff for ridiculously cheap overseas, right?
I mean, this is one of the massive issues I have with government education is how It does not add.
In fact, it subtracts to people's economic value, economic market value.
In a free market with proper education, there would be no particular worry about outsourcing because people would be so motivated, intelligent, and knowledgeable about the economy and the value that they could add that everything that was just really blind, stupid, repetitive labor, like stuff that might happen overseas, It would just be automated, right?
So there wouldn't be any outsourcing.
All right.
Do you have any thoughts on the UnitedHealthcare CEO being murdered?
Yeah, I will talk about that tonight.
I think that's one of these, you know, horrible, tragic situations that really is showing that the addiction to violence, which characterizes our modern society and most societies as a whole, our addiction to violence is really being unmasked as we go forward.
So I'll talk about that in the show tonight.
Thanks, everyone, for a lovely, lovely set of questions.
Really do appreciate that.
Lots of love from up here.
freedomaid.com slash donate to help out the show.
I really would appreciate that.
And take care, my friends.
I'll talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection