March 4, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:17
Wuthering Heights! Freedomain Movie Review
Wuthering Heights! review slams the 2018 film’s "race-blind casting" of non-white actors in 18th-century England, calling it historically absurd and a "diversity award ritual," while mocking Heathcliff’s illogical wealth and sexualized portrayal. The host argues the adaptation reduces morality to lust-driven chaos, comparing it to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag as proof of humanity’s dark impulses, before callers devolve into heated debates—one claiming all behavior stems from mating desires, another interrupting with evolutionary "R/K-selected" theories. The episode collapses into disarray, leaving the host dismissing vulgar interruptions and pivoting abruptly. [Automatically generated summary]
Dear God above and heaven help me, angels and ministers of grace defend us, my friends.
For lo and behold, I have returned eth this evening from seeing the new horniest fairy tale I have ever seen in my life, having read the book of course many years ago, in my course on the rise of the novel in my English degree, I have returned from Wuthering Heights.
A movie that is so true to the original, it makes Kate Bush sound like she's singing Old Man River.
Oh my God above this movie.
Now, race blindcasting only seems to affect European stories, European history, and it's all horrendous and wretched, and very clichéd, right?
So there's going to be a spoiler or two here, and I'm happy to take your questions and comments and so on.
But I was curious, because I haven't gone to see a movie in theaters for a while, so I thought I would give Wuthering Heights a try.
I do like a good historical drama.
One of my favorite movies is E.M. Forster's, well, the adaptation of E.M. Forster's Room of the View.
And so I thought I would go and see this.
And it has a sort of Dickensian primitiveness to it.
It has very, very vivid colors.
Some of the cinematography and set pieces are fine.
Apparently, I guess what set place in England or Scotland, at least in the movie, looks like the Moors, where it never, there's no sunshine.
Not one glimmer of sunshine in the entire movie.
And it is, to me, so unbelievable that you have blacks and Asians and an Indian guy scattered all throughout the British Isles in what, the 19th, 18th century, whenever it's set.
Oh, God almighty.
It's just painful because the families don't make any sense.
The setting doesn't make any sense.
The history doesn't make any sense.
So they have ripped the heart of the story out of its actual historical setting and have placed it in a multicultural fantasy land that never existed at all.
And what that means is that the wild passions, the novel is about wild, bipolar, narcissistic passions, which is fine.
You know, hey, you know, let the human heart rip.
Let it charge like a thunderbolt through the thin gores of social convention.
Absolutely fine.
It's always interesting.
I love a good, passionate story.
It's great.
I like to think I've manifested it myself once or twice in my life a day, often before brushing my teeth.
But When you take all of these foundational Old Testament, grueling, blinding, sadistic passions, and then you unmoor them from the real world, then you have characters that are not rooted in anything real, not rooted in any place real.
And they have all of the grounding of you ever do this as a kid, right?
You have a balloon, shh, you blow up the balloon, and then you let it go, goes flying all over the room randomly.
Well, that's how ungrounded in reality these people's passions are.
Now, if you want to make a fairy tale, make a fairy tale, maybe it's just my particular tastes.
I prefer my fairy tales with a little less oral sex.
Could just be a little fussy thing of mine.
No problem with the oral sex, no problem with the fairy tales.
Putting the two together feels a little bit on the PDF files side, if that makes any sense.
So that was pretty appalling.
The clichés with regards to the racial casting were truly staggering.
So you have the wily, deceptive counselor who happens to be Asian.
Very much a cliché.
You have the weak cuck and fruity and flighty and so on, who happens to be Indian.
Again, this is a pretty broad cliché of sort of Indian males.
And it is just wretched.
I would also say that, oh, I'm not a fan of BDSM, but even if I were, I would say, fairy tale is good.
I guess if you like BDSM, that's fine.
Putting the two together, you know, Cinderella in a dog collar, it just feels kind of cruel and violating.
I've never felt particularly comfortable with the love story in Wuthering Heights because they're brother and sister.
Oh, well, they're not biologically related.
It's like, that's true, that's true.
However, he's a stepbrother in a way because he's brought home as an orphan.
Heathcliff is brought home as an orphan and given to his daughter as a pet.
So they grow up together.
They share a household.
They both call the same guy, Daddy.
Oh my God.
That is just not right, not good at all.
which would explain, of course, how tortured and horrendous and brutal the passions are in the story.
It has an incestuous element to it that, well, it's not even really an element at all.
Like, there's no reason why they couldn't just grow up in the same village together.
No, That's not forbidden fruit enough.
They've got to grow up in the same household and both call the same guy, Daddy.
Oh, father.
Oh, Peter.
Familius.
Yeah, that's not good.
That's not good.
And of course, we do have the connection, which is made a lot in literature, that if you want to raise a sociopath, whip him till he bleeds regularly as a child.
Because the boy is being abused by his biological father.
This guy comes along and says, well, I'm going to take him home.
We don't treat children like that.
And then he whips him as well.
And so the young man, the boy, Heathcliff, who is horrendously abused and exploited, turns into a complete sexually sadistic sociopath.
Again, not too shocking when you understand the development of these kinds of pathologies.
So it's a shame.
The multiracial casting in a story that would have been entirely white rips loose the entire grounding of the story, makes you think of contemporary themes, makes you think like, how could there be an Indian guy right there at the top of the upper classes in England hundreds of years ago?
That's not a thing.
Where did the Asian woman come from?
I mean, did she get catapulted across the Yangtze?
Did she catch the stratosphere?
How did the Asian woman come into the household in England in the middle of nowhere in the 18th century?
It's too unreal.
And Edgar, the guy played, I think is an Indian guy, Edgar has a woman living with him, and maybe I was just too jaw-dropped at the impossibility of it all, but I don't even know why she's living with him.
At the beginning, I think maybe he's trying to court her.
Maybe she's, no, she's just this woman who lives with him.
Is he a sister?
Is she a sister?
I don't know.
Is she a daughter?
I don't think so.
She's too old.
Are they roommates?
None of it makes any sense.
And, of course, it's, I mean, I know it was a young woman who wrote the novel, which is fine, but I just love the complete lack of reality to it.
So Heathcliff leaves, and then he comes back, and he's got a chiseled jaw and one of those Kirk Douglas butt chins.
And he's got windswept hair and a gold earring and a gold tooth, just for good measure.
And he has left for five years and he's returned super wealthy.
Oh, and By the by, when he sexually tortures Isabella, the mystery companion, cohabitor of the giant mansion that Edgar the Indian lives in, when he's torturing her, she gets her own back at him because he wants her to write a letter to Catherine to express their tortured love.
And she says, oh, well, why don't you write the letter?
Non-White Casting Matters00:03:54
Oh, that's right.
You can't.
Right, so Bro went out.
made his fortune in some way that is never described.
And he can't even read.
Because, you know, there's really no better way to make your money in the rough and tumble economy of the emerging industrial revolution than be completely illiterate.
And so nobody does any work.
Nobody has anything to do.
Everybody just prances around, plays games, changes costumes, and wanders in the fog.
And again, self-pleasuring plus fairy tales, because it is a fairy tale.
I mean, it is.
The novel, not so much this a complete fairy tale, because there's no economic, racial, cultural, familial reality in it at all.
And here's the thing.
If you're going to go with race-blind casting and you're going to have some Indian guy pop up in post-Elizabethan I, England, okay, at least make him a good actor.
This guy blew intergalactic chunks of non-acting all over the screen.
All over the screen.
There's a scene for me, at least quite famous, in Streetcar Named Desire, where the wife is snapping at Stanley Kowalski to clean up, and he gets really angry and he throws the plates against the wall, and the gravy and potatoes just sort of ooze and slide down the wall.
Now, this Indian actor, I don't know his name, the Indian actor obviously doesn't have the charisma and raw emotional power of Stanley Kowalski of Marlon Brando in his heyday.
I would say that his acting is more akin to the gravy and the potatoes slowly sliding down the wall.
Except at least they were doing something.
This guy was just sitting there being petulant and wretched.
And this was just appalling.
And, you know, if it's to anyone's consolation, if there was a show about the rise of the Zulu Empire, I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of, I don't know, Inuit Jews and Russians in it, because the Zulus are black.
And that's how they should be played.
If you just threw a bunch of non-white Zulus, sorry, non-black Zulus in, it would be like, what is this?
It's too distracting.
And it's more of a hijack.
Has it become just sort of a humiliation ritual that white people just, we can't have any history of our own.
We're just like, everything has to be hijacked for things.
I think there's also a rule, I think it's in Hollywood now.
And it's funny because I used to absolutely love, when I was in theater school, of course, everybody would picture, as an actor, you'd picture, end up being the person who, you know, I'd love to accept this award on behalf of my mother.
But I think in Hollywood now, if you don't cast non-whites, you can't get an Academy Award.
And I suppose, of course, an Academy Award is a big deal in terms of making money for the film.
Maybe it doubles your income or something like Academy Award winning.
So you have to have the Academy Award.
And in order to do that, you have to cast, no matter where the stories take place or where in history the story takes place, you have to cast non-white actors.
And of course, I have zero problem with multicultural stories.
If you're set, like if it's set in Toronto these days or San Francisco, yeah, there's going to be a diverse bunch of people.
That's all totally fine.
That's historically accurate.
But isn't there a black woman playing Helen of Troy in the Christopher Nolan film that's coming up?
Physical Attraction Misconceptions00:14:23
It's just terrible.
It's just absolutely terrible.
It's just not historically accurate.
It's distracting.
It's false.
I mean, how am I going to trust anybody to be historically accurate when they can't even get the demographics right?
It's too bizarre.
But of course, we all know that everyone's indigenous except Europeans, right?
Everyone.
So, yes, it is not recommended.
And it's a shame, too.
I will say this.
So Margot Robby, I mean, lethal face card is what they say, right?
Very, very pretty.
I think Jim Carrey was making fun of her for her looks.
Very pretty, but I'll tell you this, man.
She was acting her heart out, and she did a good job.
It's a tough role, Catherine, because she's very unlikable, very volatile.
And of course, there's a lot of Freudian elements to it in that these women are not able to have sex.
They're not able to get married for various reasons, or it's very tough for them to do so.
And they can't have jobs.
And so, of course, the Freudian analysis is all the subverted sexual impulse and ambitious impulse and so on.
But Catherine, the sort of lead, is the kind of woman who, you know, maybe she should be a writer.
Maybe she should be a scientist.
Maybe she should be an entrepreneur or something, but she can't because it's women and history and femininity and so on.
And she is mentioned openly as aging into spinsterhood.
And to be, you know, Margot Robbie is like a stunningly beautiful woman.
And like even sort of up close when you can see every lunar crater of this, you know, like I was I just got a haircut today.
I know this sounds like a bit of a jump, but when you watch movies, man, that's a lot of high def.
That's a lot of zoomed in.
And I had my wife take a video of me the other day because I've never let my hair grow quite this long.
I just haven't been able to get to a haircutting place.
I went to one and it was closed.
Anyway.
So I've never let my hair grow as long.
And yesterday, I had my wife do a 360 of my hair just because it's like, it'll never be that long again.
And I look back at it.
I'm like, ooh, okay.
I guess there's maybe some nice filters or pleasant lighting in my studio because I was saying the other day, I'm still waiting for my face to drop.
But then, of course, you know, you see yourself in the kitchen and the 360 and it's like, yeah, that's 59.
Yeah, that's absolutely 59.
And so when you see these beautiful women like zoomed into like Isaac Asimov's incredible journey, levels of craggly detail, you know, wow, this road looks great from space, but then you zoom and it's like potholes.
And this is true even of the kids, right?
You see every little hair, every little pimple, every bit of unevenness.
Like even the sort of creamy, smooth skin of children is kind of ripped apart by that high-def zoom in.
But she, you know, courageous.
There were times when she didn't look that attractive.
Of course, you know, the dying scenes, you know, every early novel has to have somebody dying, which of course happened quite a bit back in the day.
But she was just acting her out.
It's a tough role.
It's a tough role because she's quite harsh.
She's volatile.
She's unlikable.
And Heathcliff, I mean, there's nobody to like in the whole movie, of course, right?
There's nobody.
This is one of the endless anti-hero movies or stories, really.
There's nobody to like.
There's no, it's all Edmund and no Edgar from sort of King Lear, right?
Edmund is the bad guy, Edgar is the good guy.
And there's no counterbalance to the wild animal-like passions spraying across the screen, destroying everything in its wake.
You don't like Catherine because she's vicious, manipulative, underhanded, proud, false.
Because the whole story basically hinges on a three-company style misunderstanding, which is a bit of a labored literary device, but who am I to talk, right?
I mean, it's not like I've plotted everything perfectly in my novels, so I say this with humility, but so there's nobody who's likable.
Catherine is volatile and can be abusive and is cruel and openly mocks the Asian governess for never having been loved, which sort of sets the things in motion where she, the Asian governess, makes sure that Heathcliff doesn't end up hearing the I love you stuff.
And so the Asian governess is manipulative and vile.
Catherine, the main character, is volatile, dysfunctional, hysterical, and vicious and false to her husband.
There's no religion anywhere, anywhere in the story.
The father is a complete hypocrite because he says, how we don't treat children that way.
And then he whips his son and then verbally abuses everyone and is a tyrant and ends up with, well, I mean, they're British teeth, right?
So he ends up with these red-rimmed tombstone teeth that must have taken some significant amounts of ghoul-like special effects.
I hope he didn't age his teeth that way for the role itself.
He's vicious and unlikable.
Edgar, Edgar, the Indian guy, is weak and full of lust.
He doesn't really like Catherine as a person.
He just finds her physically attractive as a flashpot.
And so, yeah, he flashlights her into trying to produce an heir.
Heathcliff is, you know, just this massive button-flicking cliché of, you know, tall, dark, and handsome.
Literally, the guy's like nine feet tall.
Hugh Grant hair and an eternal sneer.
And so, and sexually cruel and humiliates women whenever he can.
I mean, just, you know, very unpleasant fellow.
Like, there's nobody in the movie that is even remotely positive or moral or anything like that.
I shouldn't say there's one nun at the beginning, but we never see her again.
None of that, right?
None of that.
Get it?
Oh, sorry.
That's, you know, if I don't write it out, it can be a bit tough to follow.
Just kidding.
I know it's a brilliant audience.
So, yeah, nobody's likable, and therefore they have to be pretty.
I mean, this is kind of a true thing in movies for sure, but it also happens in The Fountainhead, right?
This Catherine in Wuthering Heights is very similar to Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead.
Actually, there's echoes of Drea D'Amatio's character in The Sopranos, whose name I can't remember, who also is quite haughty, but there's an underlying terror and neuroticism and anxiety underneath it all.
But yeah, so the less pleasant the person, the more physically attractive they have to be.
If Heathcliff was short, bald, and fat, you know, it's like that HR meme come to life.
You know, hey, Susan, how's it going? says the chisel-jawed Chad salesman in the doorway, and she's like, oh, it's fine, thank you.
And then the tubby programmer says, hey, Susan, how's it going?
Hey, HR, HR.
I mean, because he's so good-looking with strange divots in his face.
Again, I'm sure if I was that zoomed in, it would look even worse, obviously.
But Everybody's so unpleasant that you just have to hire attractive people, otherwise nobody would watch it at all.
And so, yeah, it's a story about lust, it's a story about greed, it's a story about hysterical neediness, sexual repression, sexual hysteria, and the infertility that it leads to, the sterility that lust leads to.
Sexuality, unconstrained by morality, is worse than animal.
Sexuality outside of the confines of morality is greedinism, like it's greed plus hedonism.
And the reason why it's worse than animal lust is animals don't need to justify their lust.
Because this causeless love is something that's foundational to these.
This was the original Harlequin romance, Ruthering Heights, right?
I was describing the story to my daughter, and she's like, oh, that's such a cliché.
It's like, yes, but not when it was written.
This was one of the earliest forms of this where all of the male and the female are just panting over each other like they're trying to fog up and clean their glasses, which I actually did in the movie.
But they're sort of panting and drooling over each other and licking each other's noses.
And there's a scene very, very subtly sexual.
When Catherine fingers a fish through jello.
I'm not kidding.
I know.
I know.
I wish I was kidding.
But she inserts her fish into jello and kind of finger F's finger Fs a fish in Jello.
Oh no.
Oh well maybe that's what it smells like in the 18th century.
Imagine something like that.
The scale of that movie.
Anyway, so I mean it's battered.
Women.
Oh too many fish and chips jokes.
Oh, are there ever really too many?
It's hard to say.
But yeah, everybody's just so unpleasant.
And the male and the female protagonist are just panting.
And so, you know, this is one of the things that nature does in evolution, which is the less pleasant the people, the higher the sex drive.
See, life finds a way.
So life has to find a way to get people to reproduce.
Now, ideally, you reproduce with people because they're, you know, kind, loving, strong, virtuous, courageous, whatever, right?
And exhibit good moral character so that you can trust them, right?
Because we don't trust people, we only trust the principles that they're willing to commit to.
So nature needs us to reproduce.
I think nature's first choice, I mean, as far as human beings, is to have us reproduce with people we morally admire.
But I think it's a fair point to say, I think it's a fair point to say, that the number of people that we can morally admire in the world, as it is, is very few.
It's very few.
I would say I have not met over the course of my life more than one person in a hundred that's even in the general vicinity of being able to admire morally.
Outside of this listenership.
But, you know, just in my sort of general travels and travails through the world.
Maybe one in a hundred, maybe one in fifty, but not many.
And some of the worst people in the known universe are the people who claim to be good, but put the burden on others to fulfill their, quote, morality, right?
And so nature says, look, man, I want your loins to arise and erupt like Mount Vesuvius in the general direction of people who are good, kind, nice, virtuous, courageous, all that kind of stuff.
Honest.
However, I don't want that to be a deal breaker.
That's not a make-or-break situation.
So, you know, if there are good, nice, moral people around, yeah, yeah, you know, head towards them, make babies with them.
Fantastic.
I'm down with that.
Or, or, just, you know, just on the off chance that most people around you are terrible people, what I'm going to do is I'm going to reach deep down into your nads, reach deep down into your uterus, and I'm just going to crank the flames up so high that you just collide on the basis of needy lust.
So these are two people, you know, physically about as perfect specimens of human beings as you can find.
And the guy who played the second male at Wuthering Heights, who put the woman into the horse harness, don't ask.
I don't...
I can't even.
This is eye bleach time.
But anyway, he also was a fantastic actor.
He had like five lines of the whole movie, but delivered them absolutely flawlessly.
And as a guy who was a minor character for myself from time to time, minor characters don't get enough love and praise.
And he just did a fantastic job of his relatively scant lines.
You know, it's the old saying in the theater world, there are no small parts, only small actors.
Yeah, they don't like each other, but because they're physically perfect, nature's like, okay, you don't like each other, fine, I'll just make you so full of lust that you don't care.
And you can call it love.
I don't, as long as the sperm gets to the egg, I really don't care how it gets there, Genghis Khan.
Like, as long as the sperm gets to the egg, ideally, yeah, virtue and shared morals and interests.
And yep, absolutely great conversation, shared sense of humor, beautiful.
Let's do it that way.
But you know, hey, just on the off chance that good people aren't around, I'm just going to crank up the lust so that you become sex-obsessed, so you hold your nose and have sex with people whose bodies are filthy because they've never brushed their teeth and bathed once a year, and whose souls are filthy because they're nasty, vindictive, sadistic pieces of human awful.
Awful, awful.
I think both work.
Sorry, Don, I'll be with you in a sec.
Understanding Evil00:11:24
And we know this, this isn't just a theory, right?
We know this, that in particular, when children get abused, their sex drives go through the roof because their bodies understand that they're not going to be responding to anyone's virtues.
So they just have to respond to people's flesh.
And this is where the hypersexuality of the modern world comes from.
All right.
Maybe Don wants to talk.
The Bronte sisters.
Maybe Don wants to talk about something else.
Either way, I want to talk to Don.
No, I'm following you, Stephen, because I think we're at a spiritual crisis.
So I'm, again, attracted to your pursuit of trying to understand a foundational philosophy as to how to build a civilization based on self-rule.
So when it comes down to it, I think the Founding Fathers of the United States were sort of concerned with understanding that government is force and it can be corrupted because it is a structure that is actually created by the people,
by me, by you, and that in essence, it is a necessary evil because every single type of power structure can be influenced by the dynamics of human nature.
And so I think what you're trying to pursue is this idea of Shakespeare or even like the Bible is understanding the nature of human behavior so that we can recognize within ourselves that We have the capacity to commit evil, and they have to have some type of means of restraining that evil.
Because once if you do not recognize our capacity for evil, it will actually end up magnifying itself, which is Sol Nitian in the Gulag Arbraclego.
Gulag Archipelago said that it was something that he recognized and witnessed, which I have not, which you have not, seeing neighbor turned on neighbor and seeing the atrocities that can happen when people are forced into constructed narratives by a power structure created by them.
Okay, sorry, it's very abstract.
I'm forced into a power structure by some of that neighbor turn on neighbor over COVID, which was a dry run for a gulag.
Exactly.
A goalpost, but it's very abstract that I'm always trying to break things down into things that make more sense to me.
So if you could tell me what you mean by people who are forced to, but you never witnessed it.
Hang on.
Hang on.
You never witnessed.
Hang on, bro.
So if I'm asking you a question, can you wait until I finished asking the question before you answer it?
Because we can't have a conversation if I'm trying to ask you a question and you start over-talking me when I'm trying to ask you the question.
I'm trying to ask for clarity here.
But one second.
Do not belittle my insight by saying you're belittling me.
So ask me a question, but don't belittle me.
Okay.
How have I belittled you in your mind?
Because you're saying, like, well, I'm trying to keep it from abstract.
And I'm saying, actually, I'm trying to keep it real because you have never experienced evil.
Evil is.
Hang on.
You have never.
Hang on.
You have never experienced the evil that Solanitan did.
Hang on.
Okay.
So you're saying that I've not experienced being in a civilian.
Seeing your neighbor turn on your neighbor and kill your wife and child.
And you have seen that.
I have not.
That's why I look for those people that have.
You haven't.
So why are you calling into me if you think about it?
Because you're belittling me, basically, seeking those people that have.
That basically I'm looking for.
What are you talking about?
I'm looking for wisdom and I'm looking for Sol Nitchin as wisdom to basically restrain the current behavior, which if you ask me the question, like right now, we seem to be launching ourselves into World War III.
And I'm saying it is not the natural state of being for us to basically, which Sol Nichin said, to basically have our neighbors, which all of a sudden are forced into a narrative to turn on one another.
And I'm saying now's the time for you to wake up the people to say, everybody, this is not the natural state of being that we would want to kill one another.
And yet we are at a state right now where we are literally at the state where we are going to basically create narratives so people are forced into them to kill each other.
And I'm saying that is not the natural state of being.
And I think that's what you're trying to say.
And I'm saying I'm attracted to Sol Nitchin, who lived through it, which you haven't, literally was in a gulag, basically almost died and is coming out of it saying, what is it that would prevent this from happening?
He's saying the only thing that I can think of is the fear of God.
And so I am trying to wake up people when I have conversations with them.
And yet you want to shut me down to say and belittle my fucking my pursuit of the truth.
And so stop it.
All right.
Can I speak now?
Go ahead, but don't fucking belittle me.
Like you're some type of intellectual elite.
Right.
So you're concerned that people are too aggressive, right?
No, I'm not saying people are too aggressive.
No, not at all.
Have you not read?
Have you not read the gulag of like I can't have a conversation with you if you're not actually if you're truly intellectual, then let's take it down to say aggressive.
That's a word.
So let's break down the word.
You're already already throwing out something that has already emotionals attached to it.
So let's break down even the question you threw at me.
Okay, listen, bro, bro.
Bro, bro.
Okay.
Don't say bro.
Calm down.
Calm down.
Just take a deep breath.
Calm down.
We're just trying to have a conversation here.
I know that.
So stop with your bullshit, fucking bro shit.
Just let's work it down to the words.
I'm with you.
Break it down.
I'm with you.
Listen, I will give it one more try.
I will give it one more try.
Okay, so if you can stop swearing at me and just calm down.
Well, then don't say bro.
Well, that's not swearing at you.
But that's so, that's because you're like everything you're belittling.
Just stop.
Stephen, just elevate it.
Elevate the language.
Yeah, so I mean, I gave it a shot, and it's a shame.
It was an interesting conversation to start.
So here's the thing that you, I think in general, we all need to be aware of when we're communicating, is don't be a giant fucking hypocrite in general, right?
Just try not, and, you know, we all have that tendency, or at least I do, but I have to check myself on that.
So if you're saying that people are, you know, we shouldn't have war, people shouldn't be, which is, you know, another way of saying that people shouldn't be too aggressive, right?
Well, If you're saying that human aggression is a problem and power corrupts people and people are too violent and people are too aggressive, and aggression comes from sort of volatility and touchiness, then when I say, listen, I don't understand the abstractions that you're using, can we break it down so that I can understand you better, if you then launch into a tirade against me and sort of swear at me, then you are the asshole that you're trying to combat, right?
Because you're being overly aggressive and you're complaining about human aggression.
So if you want to minimize human aggression, which I think is a good goal, except in extremities of self-defense, then we can use violence.
But if you want to try to oppose irrational human aggression, then maybe don't be the asshole that you're trying to oppose.
Maybe don't be irrationally aggressive if you're saying that a big problem in human society is irrational aggression.
So, all right.
And I mean, of course, don't say that nobody has anything of value to offer if they haven't been in a gulag when you yourself, I mean, haven't been in a gulag.
Then by definition, if nobody has anything to offer who hasn't experienced gulag conditions, then if you haven't experienced gulag conditions by your own definition, you don't have anything to offer.
And in general, it's a pronounced archipelago.
All right.
Done!
What is on your mind, my friend?
If you want to...
Oh, wait, was that the guy who's just talking to you?
Okay, so Stephen, I am attracted to people that have lived through the atrocities.
Hutus and the Tootsies.
I've studied a woman.
Yeah, yeah, so I'm not talking to him.
Because then he needs to apologize to me for swearing at me.
And also complaining that I'm belittling him when I was actually really working trying hard to understand.
But when people say, you know, people are ground down by power structures that are inflicted upon them, like, I don't really know what that means.
And I try not to fence in these sort of abstract terms.
And it could be a failure on my part, but I don't like to pretend to understand people when I don't understand them.
So I usually ask for clarity.
All right.
Dark Nimbus, if there's anything that you wanted to add to the conversation, I would be very happy to hear.
Yeah, I don't know what happened there.
You can hear me, right?
Yes, Mr. Stefan Malnu.
Greetings.
Greetings.
Hello.
So I'm going to make a few statements, right?
Try not to interrupt me, and then you can have your peace with those few statements I make, right?
Okay, so hang on.
Are you asking me if that's okay, or are you just going to do it?
Yeah, sure, Room.
I mean, I'm not going to break your rules, so I'm going to make a few statements, and then I want to, you know, I love hearing you elaborate.
Okay, just let's do one at a time, because if you make four statements, it's going to be kind of tough to address each one.
But if you could just give me the first one, I'd appreciate it.
Okay, okay.
I don't know if this is one statement or a couple bashing the one, but I'm going to try my hardest for you, okay?
Because I know how you speak right now, right?
So every time I listen to you have these moral banters about what's wrong with society and what's not, and the people in here have a discussion about how they think things ought to be.
I also hear you make evolutionary psychological statements that would support the fact that most or I or I would argue to say all human behavior is driven by the desire to breed or procure a mate to breed all human behavior.
And with that being said, I think that the problem is that all the people in this room that I ever hear speak, they're just not getting enough fucking pussy because I don't care about the shit they care about and I'm getting pussy thrown in my face 24-7.
I don't give a fuck.
Selected Reproduction Matters00:15:50
I have plenty of breeding options.
I don't care about politics, any of this shit, nothing.
You guys don't get enough fucking pussy, and that's your goddamn problem.
And if you did, you wouldn't care about any of this bullshit.
None of it would fucking matter.
That's it.
Hey, have we talked before?
I'm trying to remember if this potty math has been on the show before.
Yeah, we talked a lot of times.
Yeah, you know, wait, is there a right way to speak to?
Like, I'm not allowed to say certain words because it's too morally reprehensible for your Puritan ears.
See, I'm getting the flavor of this.
Oh, that's really funny.
I don't know what something's in the air tonight.
Something's in the air tonight.
What can I tell you?
So, I mean, he said some interesting things, and I'll address those for sure.
And yeah, Don, I'm going to block you because we're not going to have a conversation.
So he says that all human behavior is driven by the desire to reproduce.
Now, there's R-selected reproduction and K-selected reproduction.
So very briefly, there's a whole presentation on this you can find at FDRpodcast.com called GeneWars, G-E-N-E-Wars.
So R-selected reproduction is high sex drive, high sexual activity, low parental investment, right?
So you think of rabbits and mice and so on, that they can reproduce very quickly, and there's very high sex drive, and there is very low parental investment.
And these tend to be prey species.
And of course, they need to reproduce quickly and have low parental investment because they get eaten a lot, right?
Rabbits get eaten by a wide variety of creatures, winged and four-legged for the most part, owls and wolves and foxes and so on.
And so just so people understand how they come across to anybody with an ounce of sense or intelligence is that on the other side there is K-selected reproduction.
Now K-selected reproduction is a lower sex drive.
It tends to be pair bonding among the male and the female, sometimes for life, but certainly for the raising of the children.
It tends to be fewer offspring and more parental investment.
So you think of lions and wolves and so on, the larger creatures, generally the predator species, particularly among mammals, because a lion has to teach its cubs how to hunt, as do wolves, right?
So there's a lot of play fighting and so on.
And so you have a lower sex drive, you have more pair bonding, and you have more parental investment.
That tends to be top of the food chain predator behavior, whereas bottom of the food chain prey behavior is K-selected.
Sorry, it's R-selected.
So R-selected is you expand to maximize your reproduction, and the only constraint are the available resources.
And so you just breed and breed and breed until you run out of resources.
But the more you breed, the more prey species there are, therefore the more you become a resource for the predators, which lowers your numbers to the point where you don't strip everything bare, right?
So there have been various experiments where they've tried to get rid of predators in various environments.
And they got rid of Dingo, ate my baby.
They got rid of those kinds of creatures in Australia.
And then they ended up with the rabbits reproducing without, of course, any predators.
And they reproduced until the animals stripped the entire prey.
The rabbits stripped the entire area free of grasses and foliage and then they all died en masse, right?
So it's not good for them either.
So if you want to be an alpha, because I guess that's like a big thing, you want to be top of the food chain, then what you have is pair bonding, not some completely coked up sex drive.
You want pair bonding, reasonable sexual drives and bonding, and high parental investment.
Now, if you call up, let's say, a show.
And just so people, because they don't usually see this kind of stuff, and I think it's important to see it, and this, I think, helps you.
So people who call up and, you know, bragging about getting pussy, crushing pussy, Ben Still has dad in some movie.
So when people call up and talk or display or brag about significant sex, hypersexuality, then they are coming across as prey species.
Like, again, to anybody with sort of eyes to see, the alphas are the ones who pair bond, who invest a lot into their children and raise quality people for the next generation.
You know, strong people, moral people, successful people, and so on.
Just going out and having a lot of sex is being a praise species.
It's just being a rabbit.
You're a fucking field mouse.
Literally a fucking field mess, I guess, right?
So, if you want to appeal to successful people, if you want to be taken seriously as a reasonable and successful person, then coming and bragging, which is almost always false, but coming in and bragging about, you know, how many bitches you've had, you know, and stuff like that, anybody with half an ounce of common sense and intelligence just looks at you as, well, probably a liar.
And if not a liar, then a praise species, because that is the exact mindset of a prey species.
Top of the food chain people pair bond, invest in their children, and that's the mark of K-selected reproduction.
So I just wanted to mention that.
It's funny, yeah, it's funny because I think, yeah, I've talked to that guy before, and there is a kind of hysterical kind of bragging to it.
I'm sorry because I'm not at my computer where I have the list of people who I don't usually have in the show, but sometimes it can be interesting.
It can be interesting to have people call in and be very aggressive.
And it's also, you know, I think it's interesting in real time, and hopefully this is educational to you, and I don't mean any disrespect to the callers who are, you know, obviously just wrestling with their own stuff, but I think it's interesting to see the first caller who calls in and I'm asking him to clarify because it's very abstract for me.
And it was abstract.
I mean, I'd power structures and being inflicted by other power structures.
I don't really know what that is.
Is he referring to government schools?
Is he referring to advertising?
Is he referring to, I don't know, movies.
So just trying to understand what he's saying.
So when people are talking to you and you ask for clarity and they get, you know, really kind of pissy and aggressive and accuse you of all sorts of terrible things of belittling them and they get very angry or upset.
Hopefully it's interesting for you to see, and so you take it less personally yourself, because I was not insulting the guy.
I was not belittling him.
I was trying to understand him.
I was trying to have a conversation, right?
And it's really, really important in life.
Sorry to be Mr. Lecture.
I hope this helps.
But it's really, really important in life to make sure you have conversations.
I don't like to be a listening post.
Like, you know how cats have the scratching pose.
You just scratch.
I don't like to be a listening post.
So I don't like it when people call up and just talk at me, like I'm kind of not there.
I mean, I don't like that because my mom used to do that and I had to put up with that, her.
I'd had to put up with that with her like 40 years ago or more.
I don't have to do it now.
So I don't like to be a listening post.
So if somebody is saying something I don't understand, I'm not just going to smile blankly or just sit here and zone out and just let them yammer on.
I mean, I care about the quality of the conversation.
I also care about what you guys are listening to and what's being, quote, inflicted on you or what's coming across the wire to you.
So if I don't understand something that someone is saying, then I will interrupt to say, I don't know really what you're talking about.
And the more abstract the terms, right?
If somebody says, I'm talking about a tree, I mean, I may not know exactly what kind of tree it is, but if they say an oak tree or a chestnut tree or whatever, chestnut tree, a maple tree.
So if somebody says, I'm talking about a maple tree, well, I know what that is.
But if somebody, the more abstract the language becomes, things like power structures and so on, the more abstract that the language becomes, the more open to misinterpretation it is.
If I say two and two make four, we know what that means.
If I say power structures tend to collide and produce more power structures, I don't know what that means.
I don't know what that means.
So the more abstract the language, the more the definitions are important.
And so if somebody is saying something, just so you know the mechanics of how I operate, which I think is pretty good.
I'm a professional conversationalist in a way, as a good philosopher, I think, should be.
I mean, I've done thousands of call-in shows and these sorts of live streams.
So when people are using a lot of abstract terms and you ask for clarification or definition, because without definitions, we really can't communicate, because we have to share the same definitions if we're going to have a conversation.
And so asking people to help me understand what it is that they mean when they're using very abstract terms, I don't know what power structures refers to.
It could be a Marxist interpretation, it could be a feminist interpretation, it could be talking about state power, it could be talking about social conformity, it could be talking about advertising, I don't know.
And if I don't know what the other person is talking about, we can't have a conversation.
So it is my goal when abstractions come up that are highly subjective, then, like if people even say the universe, right?
I don't know what they mean by the universe.
I don't mean to be obtuse, but some people mean the, you know, knock-on wood tangible universe.
Other people mean the universe including imagination.
Other people mean the universe including alternate dimensions.
Or the universe is what's outside the simulation, right?
I don't know.
The universe could mean that which is naturally occurring.
It could mean that which is created by God.
So even when people say the universe, I need to know what they're talking about.
Not to disagree with them, but just to make sure that we're using the same words.
Like if somebody came up to you and started droning in a monotone in Japanese at you and you didn't speak Japanese, I mean, wouldn't you at some point say, listen, I don't know.
You'd make that gesture, the universal gesture of, ha, I don't know what you're talking about.
And you'd turn out your ear and you'd like shake your head like, I don't, you know, I don't know.
You'd mime talking and then, you know, do that little saw back and forth in front of your neck that Jonah Hill did at some awards show.
And so you would say, I don't understand.
Because if somebody's speaking to you in Japanese, thinking that you speak Japanese, but you don't speak Japanese, it's kind of rude to let them continue without.
I mean, imagine if they talk to you for an hour and then they find out you haven't understood a word they say.
That would be quite confusing, right?
So I do think that it's important to try and get definitions.
But in the first caller, and again, I'm not trying to pick on him.
Obviously, he cares passionately about making the world a better place, and I'm sort of trying to help him do that.
But I think it's easy to see that sometimes people just get really aggressive, and it's not your fault, right?
I mean, there have been times in my life where I have deliberately provoked people, and then when they get aggressive, I'm not going to say, oh, I have nothing to do with that, right?
I needed to get my boss's boss fired once, and I ended up provoking him in a board meeting until he blew up, and then he got fired, right?
So I wouldn't say I didn't have anything to do with that.
I would say that, yeah, that was a necessary move because he was a negative guy, or at least for me.
But I think with the first caller, it wasn't that I was being rude, it wasn't that I was calling him names.
But sometimes you can see that people just get very aggressive and angry, and it's not your fault.
It's not your fault at all.
And I also, I will say this as well, and maybe this is where a lot of people never get heard.
Like, honestly, a lot of people, I would argue most people go through life without ever truly being listened to and heard, and people really striving to understand what it is that they're saying, especially about the important abstract stuff like morals and so on, right?
So he's obviously very, very eager to be heard and so on.
But I will say this, that if you want to be heard, and I love to listen.
I mean, if you've listened to my call-in shows, I did one this morning.
I listened for a long time.
Some shows, it's a two-hour show.
I'll listen and ask questions for like an hour and a half before I offer even a little bit of feedback.
So I do love to listen to people.
But I don't like to pretend listen to people.
Actually, I have to know what they're talking about, which means I have to agree and understand with their terms.
So, if you're talking to people, you need, especially if it's really abstract stuff, like virtue and power structures and things like that.
If you're talking to people, the polite thing to do, and a good thing to do if you really want to be listened to, is you have to stop and ask people, does that make sense?
Again, you've heard me do this.
And not that I'm not trying to put myself forward as some perfect communicator, but I'm not too bad, right?
But you need to check in with people as you're talking, right?
So, I will try to, if I've said something quite abstract, I will say, does that make sense?
Or when I say, well, I'm using these terms, I mean this, or I'm going to define it that way.
So that when I'm communicating with people, I'm trying to check in whether what I'm saying makes sense or not.
Because if you talk to people for a while and you don't stop to check in if what you're saying makes sense to them, if they understand, then people aren't going to listen to you.
Because you're just kind of barfing, like you're using them like a toilet or a bucket or a garbage can.
You're just ralfing.
And that's not a great way to connect with people.
I don't want people to feel isolated.
And the only way we can avoid being isolated and alone with our own thoughts in our own minds is to patiently define terms, make sure that what we're saying makes sense to people.
Don't ask them to agree with us before they understand what we're saying.
And even after they understand what we're saying, they don't have to agree with us, right?
They can, of course, have their own perspectives and pushbacks.
But if you're just kind of greedily spouting off at people and they ask for clarification and you get irritable and aggressive, the sad thing is that, you know, this is a person who cares about right and wrong and cares about the world and cares about the future.
And I think he mentioned that he was religious, which is fine.
Trophy Species Debate00:04:46
But it's like having a curse, that you're desperately thirsty, but every time you reach for the glass of water, you knock it over and it drains into the sand.
And I don't really want that.
Dark Nimbus, I don't know, man.
Interesting.
Should we have him back?
I think he's just kind of coarse and childish and so on.
You know what?
We'll give him a second and then we'll probably close things down.
Sorry, is there anything that you wanted to mention?
And if you could just swear off the, like, if you could just back off from the, you know, effing pussy and things like that.
I don't mind a particular swear word, but it's just kind of disrespectful to women as a whole.
So yeah, is there something else you wanted to mention?
Disrespectful.
Disrespectful.
We could have a whole philosophical conversation like that.
Yeah, I have a thought experiment I want to leave you with.
Yeah.
The thought experiment is: I'm imagining you sitting in your chair, right, on this podcast channel, like you, you're like in your 50s, you're old man, right?
And you have this receiving hairline, and your wife is staring at you.
I could not imagine her wanting to suck your dick, and that is a problem.
She ain't sucking your dick, and that's why you act like this.
This is your cope because you're not getting sex from your wife.
And the answer is, I gotta come over there.
Oh, if only you knew.
If only you knew.
Oh my god.
I mean, that's wild, man.
That's wild.
It's one of those kinds of nights.
One of those kinds of nights.
All right, Nathan, are you going to save us from these coked-up callers or what?
All right.
Nathan, if you want to unmute, I'm all here.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Yeah, I had a question.
I was actually more interested about the, you were talking about the different types of species.
And it seemed like it was at different levels, like in an ecosystem, you know, you got like your prey and predators and stuff.
But I remember listening to a talk, I think, by Robert Sopolsky, who's like a biologist, I guess a behavioral biologist or something like that.
And he was talking about pair bonding versus trophy species.
And I think it was pair bonding versus what?
Trophy species.
Trophy species.
Okay.
I'm not sure what that term means.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I was asking because I was wondering if you or anybody had heard of this idea.
But, and I also may be combining some of this with stuff I heard from Weinstein.
But anyway, the idea was like in pair bonding species, especially we're talking, I think, more in mammals, that the sizes of the skulls of the male and female will be very similar.
Whereas in the trophy species, the size of the skull of the male will be much larger.
And are you following me so far?
Check in.
I still don't know what trophy species means, though.
Well, let me see if I can lay it out a little bit the way I remember it.
So, hang on.
I mean, do you want me to look it up?
I mean, do you?
Because if you don't remember it, well, I don't want to waste people's time.
I think I remember stuff.
Well, I think I remember it well enough to give the basic gist.
Okay.
Is the basic just what we're looking for here?
Because again, I can just look it up on AI.
What is a trophy species?
Yeah, I mean it was basically like where the male is going to have wide sexual he can have sex with any of the females.
Oh, but it's one pair bonded species.
Yeah, but it's only that one male.
Oh, are we still on?
I think he's talking about, like, say, if there's a silverback gorilla who's going to have sex with a wide variety of females or something like that until he gets overthrown by the younger gorillas.
Okay.
Well, so we had a tech issue.
The space ended.
So we will have to pick this up another time.
Nathan, sorry about that, but obviously something's happening at the X end.
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