Stefan Molyneux analyzes why the poor often resent their former station due to internalized negativity, contrasting this with his own rise from poverty. He debates the value of authentic experiences versus curated entertainment, arguing that direct, unpaid human interaction fosters genuine connection while filtering out "NPCs" who cannot handle unvarnished truth. Molyneux recounts a personal "full body revolt" against intellectual arrogance and British cultural conditioning, describing how reconciling with his instincts and accepting his body as vital rather than sinful dismantled his ego. Ultimately, he asserts that true power requires aligning intellect, instinct, and the flesh to counter media propaganda and achieve holistic human relationships. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Authenticity and Fortune00:06:37
Hello, hello, good evening, my friends.
I hope you're doing well.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Welcome, welcome, welcome, my friends, to your Friday Night Live.
Our chitty chatty bing bang, colliding neurons of spectacular thought, as my brother used to say when we were kids, splendiferous philosophy.
And of course, I'm happy to take your questions, comments, issues, challenges, and criticisms.
One of the things that I notice there was a study that came out not too long ago, which had, for some people, a kind of counterintuitive aspect to it.
And the counterintuitive aspect was the study was looking at the attitudes of people who used to be poor and then became richer.
I mean, maybe middle class, maybe above.
And it was fascinating because the expectation was that the people who used to become poor and then became not poor I don't know if they became rich or just middle class or above.
They were expecting them to have a lot of sympathy towards the poor.
And they didn't.
They actually had quite a bit of negative sympathy, animosity, negative views of the poor.
And that was a little counterintuitive.
I'm going to explain it very briefly.
And then, Mike, if you want to chat, I appreciate that.
We will make that happen.
So, when you grow up poor, you hear a lot of endless complaints and resentment.
That people around you have about their lives.
Oh, the system.
Oh, the bosses.
Oh, the government, and so on.
And of course, you know, there are bad bosses and there is certainly negative government actions and all that kind of stuff, but it's just this sort of endless, monotonous, drip drip, petty, resentful, small mindedness, which kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
You know, there's an old Henry Ford statement that I found quite powerful when I was younger.
If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
And I've always tried to not assume ahead of time I can't do things.
I mean, obviously, I found out over time there are some things that I can't do, but that has been vastly overshadowed by my experience of refusing to prejudge my abilities and finding out, well, that I can do some things that are pretty cool and pretty neat and pretty positive.
I ended up being pretty good at business negotiations.
I ended up being pretty good at management.
I ended up being pretty good at academia.
I had an essay of mine.
Read out to an entire class of 200 people as the most perfect essay the professor had ever seen on the village of Montaigu, and it was nice.
And if you think you can't succeed, then you can't succeed.
And poor people think they're being empirical when they believe that they can't succeed.
People who have potential have a stronger relationship between cause and effect.
And if there's one thing you have to preserve in this life, it is.
The relationship between cause and effect in your life.
I can will this, I can will that, I can will the other.
It doesn't mean you're always going to be right.
But if you got everything you willed, you'd be a god.
You wouldn't be a mere mortal human being.
And the if only, ah, if only the boss would be nicer to me.
If only I got a raise.
If only this policy wasn't in place.
If only, if only, if only.
Those are the, they externalize their causes and capacities of success and failure.
They externalize it all.
And it's exhausting to be around.
It's debilitating to be around.
It's horrible to be around.
Now, when I was younger, I won't get into too many details.
I know we've got some callers, so I appreciate your patience.
But when I was younger and I got into the business world and I started doing well, I tried to hire my friends who weren't doing as well.
And trying to hire my friends was not great, it was not a great experience.
I had friends who I would hire, and they would be way too chummy and almost brag about being my friend and would undermine the hierarchy.
And of course, I wasn't expecting them to kowtow and kneel before me.
But, you know, when I hire you and you're my employee, we can't quite be just equal buddies at work.
I'm sure you understand that, right?
I had people who showed up without bathing.
I had people who showed up from my old neighborhood that I hired with bad breath.
I had people who didn't show up at all.
I had people who didn't show up for interviews.
I had people who were overly cocky in interviews because they knew me.
I mean, I really did try and spread the sugar around a little bit, and it was exhausting.
So I stopped doing it.
I stopped doing it.
I really wanted to help people share some.
I mean, I considered some of what I had to be of good fortune.
There was some good fortune involved in it.
And I wanted to spread the love, spread the possibilities, and give people opportunities in the way that I had been given opportunities.
So it doesn't work.
And as far as I can tell, I haven't checked up in forever and a day, but as far as I can tell, Well, they all just kind of sank back down into the swamp of the bottom to society and continue down there to this day.
And once you've been around the poor, you realize that the poor make bad decisions.
And for me, in sort of my experience, some of that, of course, you know, the typical answer would be, well, it's IQ and they're just not smart.
It's like, nope, nope.
One of the guys I hired, and he lasted longer, was actually taking a brutal double major in university at one point and got very high scores in mathematics.
I think he got 100 in mathematics in high school.
Very smart.
But just, I don't know, so much of success has to do with just subsuming your ego.
Because it's an ego to assume you can succeed without effort, and it's an ego to assume you can't succeed at all.
Both of those are putting the judgment ahead of the evidence, and that's vanity based.
Hiring the Smartest Guy00:08:30
Exercise.
All right.
Thank you for your patience.
Sure.
Mike, if you want to unmute, what's on your mind?
Hi, Stefan.
Can you hear me okay?
Just fine.
How are you doing, brother?
I'm good.
I'm good.
Third time caller, getting to know the system a little bit after re listening to your edited version of my last conversation with you.
I want to say I really appreciate all of the editing that has to take place.
So I'll be a little more cognizant of how I speak and when to mute.
Yeah, if it's any consolation, I edit myself too.
I just try and take some of the side quests out.
But yeah, go ahead.
I've been mulling a subject in my head for a few months, and I wanted to get your thoughts on the.
I think it's a philosophical question regarding, I think the appropriate word would be authenticity.
It's a broad term, obviously.
You know, I'm in the construction industry.
There's obviously always some poo pooing of, you know, fake wood, fake engineered stone versus authentic natural.
But I think the question I want to ask you is more about authentic experiences.
More specifically, if you are having an experience with your family, with your kids, with your friends, is there a superior experience, or I guess the word is authentic, if it is, you know, in nature, going on a hike versus, say, playing a video game?
Or, you know, people will oftentimes have an air of superiority by saying, well, you know, I went to Europe and I saw the Eiffel Tower versus.
You know, somebody who maybe just goes to an amusement park.
Can you speak on that?
I don't know if you've had this mull in your head about that idea of an authentic life and the experiences we have.
And is one better than the other?
Yeah, that's a big topic.
And I appreciate that.
Funnily enough, I'm also in construction.
It just happens to be syllables and arguments.
But so we share that.
Well, authentic.
I know authentic cuisine.
I have a friend who's very, I think, I don't know if he is still anymore, but he used to be really into cow milk.
And so he was part owner of a cow, which I think is some requirement in Canada.
He was part owner of a cow and was able to get cow milk.
That was pretty good stuff, too.
I'd had some from time to time.
It's like, mama.
So authentic, authentic experiences.
So in general, when people alter.
Their communications in order to achieve an effect that has always struck me as kind of inauthentic.
Now, everybody does it to some degree or another.
It's, you know, I had a really challenging conversation on Wednesday, to put it mildly.
So there's sometimes a little bit of alteration here and there.
Obviously, I'm a little bit different talking on this show than I would be in private, although I do try to make it sort of conversational because we are just having a chat.
But when people, Change the way that they communicate in order to manage their appearance or in order to manipulate others into having other people think of them in a way that's not true, that's not authentic.
A sort of typical experience, and I'm sure you've had these as well.
Typical experience would be a guy is walking down the street on his first date with a woman, and an unhoused, what do they call them, unhoused, a homeless person comes up and asks for money.
Now, I'll toss this over to you, Mike.
What do you think he's going to do if someone comes up and asks him for money and he's on a first date?
Definitely show a lot more gratitude.
Or I'm sorry, show a lot more largesse and give money to the homeless person.
And why?
I think it's probably something like the peacock feathers.
I have a lot of money to give away and I'm also kind hearted.
Right.
Now, he may not.
In particular, believe that the homeless fellow is going to use his largesse to get a nice, hearty meal, but may instead use it for drugs or alcohol or something like that, right?
And I remember there was a guy in my neighborhood when I was in England who would tell the story of how he was downtown.
Some homeless guy came to ask him, or some poor guy came to ask him for money, and he said, Well, I'm not going to give you money, but I'm happy to go and buy you a meal.
We can have a meal together.
And the guy just cursed at him and spat on the ground and stormed off.
And so, if he's on the date and the guy comes and asks for money and he says, Oh, yes, my friend, here you go and gives him 20 bucks or whatever, that would be, I think, inauthentic if he doesn't really think that's a good idea, but he wants to manage the impression that the woman has of him, if that makes sense.
So, that's a kind of inauthenticity.
You see it with.
Bad parents.
Bad parents.
And my mother was queen of this because the Molynews have to be best at everything.
But my mother was queen of this.
So she was, you know, horrible to me at home.
But when we were out in public, she was fantastic.
I mean, she was really kind, really thoughtful.
I remember one time when she came to visit me in boarding school, she took me out for lunch.
And afterwards, I was running around.
I was six or so.
And I was running around a fountain in my school uniform.
I was running around the raised wall around the fountain.
I think I was chasing some pigeons or something like that.
And I slipped and I fell into the fountain.
Of course, I was sopping wet.
It was a little chilly and all of that.
And my mother was just laughing.
And, you know, she went to get a towel from someplace and dried me off.
And, you know, she was totally fine with it all.
But if you dropped something at home or, Made a mark or whatever, right?
I mentioned that story where I'd spilled some silver paint on the shag carpet and we were all terrified of my mother coming home, right?
And arguably that's a bit more, it's a bit less consequential than getting soaked in public when we're supposed to be out for the day.
But she was great in public, always totally fine and all of that.
And that's inauthentic.
So she was managing people's perception of her and discrediting me in advance.
I would say to anyone, my mother is not nice in private.
They'd say, oh, she's lovely.
What are you talking about?
She's great.
There must be a misunderstanding or something like that.
So that's kind of inauthentic.
If you've been around people, this is kind of true in the business world, where people will just constantly pump up what they're doing.
And they're constantly talking about how fantastic their children are doing and all the wonderful things.
And they got into this university and they went and did that and this and the other.
And it is, I guess, a form of sort of relentless self promotion or advertising.
I mean, I remember when I was in my first programming job, I went out on the trading floor to deal with an issue that one of the guys was having with a program I'd written.
And some guy, it's just a really pompous kind of guy, young guy, was telling me how he turned his spreadsheets into a neural net.
And I'm like, I haven't even looked at it.
I guarantee you have not done that.
I guarantee you've not turned a spreadsheet.
From the year 1999 or 2001 into a neural net.
But he had to say that, even though it didn't really make any sense.
And yeah, so that kind of posturing, that falsifying of direct communication for the sake of managing other people's perception of you is profoundly alienating because it's pretty easy to spot.
The Exhaustion of Bragging00:14:32
I think everyone kind of knows when other people are bragging or.
Pumping themselves up or went bagging or things like that.
And it is a little exhausting.
It is a little alienating.
And it is foundationally, of course, inauthentic.
Now, of course, we could use that word in a wide variety of ways.
How close is what I'm saying to what you mean?
Yes, I'm picking up what you're putting down.
I think my question was more on authentic experiences.
If I can give you an example, say whether it's AI or just virtual reality gets to the point where you can have a fully immersive experience of a certain.
Natural experience you would have, hike, sightseeing.
Is there a difference between the natural and that experience?
If the emotions and the experience you're having, say with your son or your daughter, if that is bringing you as much joy, is one philosophically better?
Biologically, you can argue it is.
You go on a hike, you're getting physical activity.
If you're going on a hike, you know, on virtual reality, it's not.
You're not getting that physical activity.
I understand that biological aspect.
But philosophically, is there a difference in an experience that's been curated for you versus a natural one or one that just happenstance occurs?
Do you mean sort of like you're on a guided tour as opposed to exploring yourself?
Yeah.
You know, you can, like, amusement park.
You go to, I don't know, Vegas or Disney World and you're having a French dinner that's not in France.
One is.
False, one is real, but if you're having a great time and you're having a great experience with your family or your friends, is philosophically one better than the other?
Interesting.
All right.
I'm afraid I'm going to ask.
And I'm sorry.
I think I won't edit out the side quest because I thought there was some useful stuff.
But so then the question is I need to know what you mean by philosophically.
And I'm afraid I also need to know what you mean by the word better.
Exactly.
And this is what I've been bawling over in my head.
I agree with you most of the time when people are having this conversation.
It is, I'm better than you because I'm able to do this, but you cannot.
You're having to do a lesser than.
You have to read about history.
I get to travel the world and experience history.
I think better is probably more fulfilling.
If you want to live a fulfilling life.
I'm sorry, now I need fulfilling.
I'm sorry.
Sorry, I know I'm not answering your question.
I guess I'm trying to make a value judgment on one versus the other.
You have a daughter, she wants to do one thing over another.
One, you're making a judgment call.
Okay, one is less expensive.
Let me give you an example.
Your daughter says, I want to fly to Paris.
Or let's say my daughter says, I want to fly to Paris.
And we're going to have an experience.
We're going to have an authentic French meal.
We're going to see the Eiffel Tower.
We're going to go see some authentic art.
Is that superior or, I guess, more fulfilling for that relationship or that experience with my daughter, for example, versus, and again, just playing devil's advocate versus going, say, to a Disney World park where you have a French dinner and you see a false Eiffel Tower, whatever?
I think that's the question.
Okay.
Okay.
So, more authentic.
So, I'll divide this into two categories to begin with things you have to pay for and things you don't.
If you want to go for a hike, you can go for a hike.
You don't have to pay, usually.
I mean, usually you don't have to pay to go for a hike.
And so, authentic is to me, in some ways, when you're in direct connection and somebody else isn't providing the entertainment.
And my daughter and I, as I mentioned before, we did this thing called role playing for many years, where it was sort of an interactive story.
She would say, I'm going to do this, and I'd say, Here's what happens, and so on.
And we constructed a very wild and complicated world.
And this was something she preferred to do almost everything else, and it was totally free.
And so, curated experiences.
Where other people are providing you the entertainment, right?
Do you want to tell a story or do you want to be told a story?
You know, you can create your own stories and all of that.
And especially with little kids doing this sort of fantasy imaginary play, you could do all of that.
Or, you know, you can read to them other people's stories or you can go see a movie.
And, you know, one is not necessarily better or worse than the other.
I do think that if you are relying on other people for your entertainment, it's a pretty expensive way to live.
And I know that's not exactly what you're looking for, but I think that would be one category that I would put in.
So, in general, we tried to some reasonable degree, we tried to not require spending every time we went to go and do something.
Because, I mean, A, that's very expensive after a while.
That stuff really adds up.
And B, that's kind of how I grew up, because I grew up very poor.
And so we didn't.
Have the money to go and do all of these cool things.
So, my friends and I would just invent games and come up with stuff.
So, paying other people to outsource your creativity and imagination is, and it is value.
It's not like it's all we did, but in general, if you can find things to do that are just you and the other person and your own two minds, that to me is the most authentic because it's you and the other person.
Like if you take your kid to the art gallery, Then, and it's fine.
You can take him.
It's nothing wrong with taking your kids to the art gallery.
We used to love going to the Royal Ontario Museum when my daughter was younger.
But if you go to the art gallery, you're both looking at pictures and you can talk about those pictures, but you're not sort of facing each other and the brains are not interacting with each other.
If you're paying, like if you go and take your kid to see a movie, again, you can talk about the movie maybe before or afterwards.
But we went to go and see the movie Michael.
My wife, my daughter, and some friends of ours went to go and see that last night and we.
Spent a good old, probably an hour and a half or two hours after chatting about the movie and sort of thoughts about it and so on.
And that was really, really cool.
So, again, there's nothing wrong with that, but the most authentic is just one on one interaction.
Now, it's sort of a platonic question.
If you want to have the French experience, obviously, you'd have to go A to France and B in the past because you can't get the French experience anymore unless you want mostly North Africa.
So, once you have a time machine, you can go back.
In fact, you probably will have a more authentic experience.
At the French pavilion of some theme park in America, than you would in actual France.
I may be in the countryside a little more so, but it's really tough to get the authentic experience because everything is getting diluted.
People say they want multiculturalism and then they put all of their cultures together.
You know, kind of like, I don't know if you did this when you were a kid, but my brother and I and friends, we did.
You just grab, you make the everything, you know, you just grab everything, every sauce, every bit of ingredient and so on, you just mix it all up together and you just create this.
Big giant slop, which is kind of not good to eat.
And so everyone's just blending everything together.
So there are no original, you know, like Neapolitan ice cream, which is vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate.
If you mix it all up together, you don't have vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate anymore.
You just have a kind of goo.
So I think the most is just conversation or direct creativity or something like that.
That to me is the most authentic connection.
And then it sort of goes down in scales from there.
But what matters so much to me is not the experiences you have together, but the thoughts you share about the experiences you have together.
So let's say you go to fake France at some theme park as opposed to real France.
What matters the most to me is not whether we're going to fake or real France, but the honesty, the clearness, the enjoyment of the communication you have about it.
Like, oh, I wonder how this is different from real France, or what did you enjoy, or what did you like, or You know, and then you mimic outrageous French accents and pretend you're Pepe Le Pew or something like that.
And so it's not so much the experiences as the authenticity of the conversation about those experiences that matters the most to me, if that makes sense.
It does.
It does.
And I appreciate you bringing that up.
I think that's always been my wife and I's goal, which is whatever interaction we're going to have or wherever we're going to spend that money, are we getting the authentic connection with the kids?
Versus, like you said, just staring at a painting.
I think growing up poor, particularly coming from the former Soviet Union, I think there's always this I don't know if it's a cultural or just a societal pressure where, yeah, you know, you can go camping for free, you can go hiking for free, but, you know, you really should be going to the Panama Canal to really show culture to your kids.
You really got to, you know, embrace culture.
And I've always been focusing more on, yeah, but I just want to have that connection and that.
Time with the kids while I still have them in the house, if that makes sense.
Yeah, a lot of things with kids is there not to do the things with the kids, but to have conversations about the things you did with the kids.
And so, yeah, my daughter was talking about how she was actually quite glad that they showed the.
Sorry, it's a bit of a spoiler, but it's right at the beginning of the movie.
And anybody who knows anything about Michael Jackson knows all of this stuff that his father would beat him with belts and implements and so on.
And they actually have a scene where that happens.
One scene, and then one scene where the door closes and You kind of get that it's going to happen and so on.
And so we were talking about that.
We were talking about the authenticity.
We were talking about how Michael Jackson's mom, this is such a stereotype.
I mean, she has to be the perfect black woman trademark, you know, like wise and gentle and loving and caring and protective of her children, yet somehow gave seven children to a vile and relentless child assaulter.
Yet she has to be perfect and wise and warm and wonderful.
And I've heard complaints from black actresses is like, can we ever play a villain?
Why do we always have to play these.
Perfect, wonderful women.
And so, yeah, we had, I think, really good and interesting conversations about that.
And so, and we wouldn't have had the conversations about those particular topics if we hadn't gone to see the movie.
And I at least try for a one to one thing.
You know, if we're going to go and see a two hour movie, let's at least have two hours of conversation about it because the movie then allows us to have a free flowing discussion on a shared experience, which is kind of important because, I mean, being an older father, you know, it was 40 years ago that I was 19.
Heaven help me.
And so, the more that we have shared experiences, the more we have in common.
She saw the movie for the first time.
I saw the movie for the first time.
So, we're both discussing it fresh.
And as opposed to, you know, if she does something that teenagers do, well, I don't do those things anymore.
And it's been a long time since I did.
So it's nice having those shared experiences.
And most of the things that my daughter enjoyed doing were free.
I mean, other than maybe you got to drive somewhere.
Like she enjoyed hunting for frogs, she enjoyed picking up snakes, which was not fun for her mother, but I thought it was kind of funny.
But she enjoyed catching crayfish in.
Rivers and so on, and exploring ponds and so on.
And so, yeah, we would go and have conversations about that.
And of course, it's nice having chats while you're going.
So I think the authenticity is the directness and honesty of your communication of your experience rather than what it is that you're doing, if that makes sense.
It does.
And I think the goal of having it be sustainable long term is apt because then you can repeat that experience multiple times.
It becomes a lasting memory.
That can kind of carry that connection throughout the lifetime.
Well, and of course, if you teach your children about the true joys of direct communication, you're setting themselves up to save like a million dollars over the course of their lives.
Because if people don't have the direct, honest, and curious connection with each other, then they have to pay for a whole lot of distraction from that emptiness over the course of their lives.
It could be addiction, it could be video game addiction, it could be.
Sex addiction, or you know, in a wide range, it could just be paying people to keep you stimulated, and so on.
You know, constant videos, streaming services, and people who don't fill themselves up with the curious words, thoughtful words, and direct and honest words of others end up having to be filled up by a whole bunch of flash and fire and empty entertainment.
And so it's a kind of exhausting, b it hollers you out, and c it's going to cost you a fortune over the course of your life.
I think, you know, if my daughter and I hadn't enjoyed doing stuff for free.
I'd be a whole lot poorer.
And she would have a spending habit that would consume huge amounts of resources over the course of her life.
So there's a practical aspect to that as well.
Yeah.
And taking it back to your point about authentic, not experiences, but authentic behavior, it's interesting you bring that up.
Reading Instead of Riding Bikes00:02:27
I didn't connect the two.
Growing up, like I said, in the old country, and then when you grow up a little poorer, you live a little more simpler.
You can't afford the masks of society.
I think that authenticity definitely gets lost as you have a bigger circle, you have a career, and suddenly you have to play a part.
And that authenticity gets lost.
And it's so refreshing when you have somebody you meet who is, I guess the word is off the cuff, just says it how it is, how they're feeling, instead of you having to kind of read between the lines.
Yeah.
And I mean, growing up poor, there's things that you don't particularly like at the time.
At least there was for me, but I appreciated them later.
So, for instance, I could never afford to buy a bicycle.
So, what did I do?
Well, I would go down to the dump and find bits of bikes and, you know, pull them together, and I'd end up with a mutant Franken bike of seven different colors and different sized wheels and all of that.
But it was pretty memorable, and I learned a lot about mechanics and how to work with my hands, and there was some cool stuff about it.
I think I spent more time maintaining that bike than actually riding it or that series of bikes, but.
If my dad had just come home with a, or my mom had just come home with a bike with a ribbon on it, sort of the standard thing, it probably wouldn't be very memorable.
But there's things that did turn out to be, you know, kind of cool.
And I couldn't really afford many books.
I had one of my first jobs in Canada when I was 11 or 12, it was in a bookstore downtown, and they would let me take home books.
They'd rip the covers off and send them back as remainder and let me take home as many books as I wanted.
I'd try and keep it to only maybe three or four.
It's really all I could get through in a week.
But it was sometimes tough to get a hold of books.
I remember there was a book I wanted, it was $2.50, which is crazy expensive.
And so I ended up telling stories rather than reading stories.
My friends and I didn't have a lot of money, so we got together and played Dungeons and Dragons.
And that was fantastic for creativity, imagination.
And it is just about the funniest game that you can conceive of when the jokes are flying fast and furious.
It is just hilarious.
And we would sometimes laugh until the cheap R.C. Kohler came out of our noses.
And so, yeah, things that I didn't particularly like at the time ended up being.
Awkward Positions with Lies00:11:04
Quite positive, if that makes sense.
So, yeah, it's negative at the time, positive later.
And that's given me a certain amount of don't judge things now, but wait till later, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Do you take that approach with new people you meet?
And what do I mean by that?
You have a couple party or you have a get together with your family, with somebody else you've never met.
Is your approach typically to be as authentic right out of the gate as possible?
And if, you know, because obviously sometimes that can be very off putting.
Because people have certain decorum in place.
Just curious to get your advice, I guess, or maybe just feedback on what, or do you use that as a filtering method?
Yeah.
So when I meet new people, which I'm always keen to do, I really like meeting people.
I love chatting with people, as you know.
And so what I'll do is I kind of have a general policy, which is that I won't lie, but I don't have to tell the whole truth right away.
If that makes sense.
So, you know, if you'd meet during the age of the Trump hysteria, right?
And people would be like, if I'd meet people and they would be like, oh, Trump is terrible or whatever, right?
You meet some NPC who's just saying what they're told to say.
And I wouldn't say, well, you know, you're just kind of brainwashed because the media has told you all these things and you haven't thought through a single shred of it yourself.
And let me show you how and tell you why.
And I wouldn't necessarily do that.
But I also wouldn't say, oh, yeah, that Trump guy, he's terrible.
Because, or, you know, if they would say, oh, Trump has been convicted of sexual assault, I'd say, I wouldn't say, well, that's just propaganda that's been handed to you by the semi communist mainstream media.
I would say, no, that's not, that's not, I mean, that's not true.
And I would sort of go through the Eugene Carroll stuff and all of that.
And so I wouldn't necessarily tell the whole truth.
And I wouldn't say, you know, I've done all these presentations.
I actually know my stuff.
And I'm afraid you're talking to someone who's done all the research.
But I would just say, that's not true and sort of say why.
And then see if they're interested in the truth or if they just get, as a lot of people do when you correct them, they just get annoyed, right?
They just get kind of a little petty, a little bitchy sometimes.
So, my general policy is I won't tell a lie for sure.
I mean, that's just an honor thing.
And I don't like lying in particular because lying is an act of submission, lying is an act of fear to fear based act.
And so, I won't lie, but I don't have to tell the whole truth.
And I'll just sort of Chip away at the edges of truth and see what they can handle because most people live in a state of fragile and aggressive delusion.
And if you chip away too much at their delusions, they experience that as an act of significant aggression.
And this is particularly true because we know that women have gone hard left over the last maybe 10, 15 years.
They've gone super hard left.
And so a lot of times the males are just kind of voicing and repeating the stuff they have to say to get laid, right?
Because if they don't repeat, All the propaganda, then their wives are like, oh, so you like a guy who says, grab them by the pussy, blah, blah, blah, right?
And then they're in a lot of trouble.
And, you know, these days, of course, male authority has been largely detonated by government courts and family courts and so on.
And just this endless pumping up of women's vanity.
And there's no upper limit to men's sex drive and there's no upper limit to women's vanity, it seems, although people are certainly trying to find it.
But so I will not tell a lie, but I will also, I will.
Put out the truth in small doses to see what their tolerance is, if that makes sense.
It's like testing someone for an allergy.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, it's interesting.
You know, when you're having conversations in a group of people, that authenticity oftentimes makes you, I guess the word is edgy, right?
Everybody wants to be a PC, everybody wants to be graceful.
And oftentimes, you know, and there's obviously a difference between being edgy and philosophical in your conversations.
I'm not going to talk to you for half an hour about.
The latest sports team, or what, you know, how the weather's doing.
But, you know, when jokes come up, it's very interesting to see definitely.
I don't want to say it's a generational thing, but you immediately can tell when somebody is maybe the word triggered is not the word, but maybe wounded in that area or just didn't grow up in the right household where that openness was allowed.
Yeah.
You know, it's an awkward position.
As you know, I think everybody who's listening to this knows, it's a pretty awkward position to be in when people tell you things that are false.
It's tricky.
It's tricky.
And when people tell you things that are false, how you deal with it, how you respond to it, is tricky.
And this is one of the reasons why I have a certain amount of resentment towards society as a whole at times, because so many people are just swallowing so much wholesale propaganda.
And men tend to be a lot more skeptical of things, and women tend to be a little bit more credulous in sort of the mainstream media stuff.
And that's by design, right?
I mean, men generally historically have created culture, and women have enhanced and transmitted it to children.
That's sort of the job.
And so women transmit a culture they don't often participate in creating, at least in the past, they didn't or couldn't.
And so women are fairly easily impressed upon, and then they reproduce that impression upon their children and upon others, and they maintain cultural standards, which is Great.
But when the media takes over and the media is populated by highly destructive people, then the women end up kind of being one shotted and replicating a mental virus instead of good, reasonable moral standards.
It's the story of the Garden of Eden, right?
So when people say things that are false, you know, it puts you in a bit of an awkward position because people don't like to be disproved.
They see or they view being disproved as humiliating.
Because if someone says something, like, I mean, I've had a couple of conversations over the years.
I mean, maybe you've had the same where people say something like, well, but Trump praised neo Nazis.
And I mean, what are you going to do?
Are you going to say, yes, well, you can't do that because that's an act of humiliation and subjugation.
I don't want to do that.
And I can't have, as my entire reason for being and having sacrificed so much of my reputation to bring the truth, I can't say, oh, yes, you're right, you did, right?
I mean, because that's just an act of humiliation and submission and so on.
And it's also unhealthy for people to reinforce their falsehoods.
But, and I'm not going to sit there and say, I'm not sure that he did and be all kinds of dancing around and delicate because that's not right either because I'm lying.
Like, I know that Trump did not praise neo Nazis in Charlottesville.
He did not.
I know that for a fact.
In fact, he specifically said they should be condemned utterly or whatever, right?
And so I'm not going to lie.
Now, I'm not going to sit there and say, you propagandized moron or whatever, right?
But I am going to say, no, that's not true.
And people are a little startled by that, right?
And I'm not going to sit there and pull out the phone and go through the transcript and so on, right?
I'm just going to say, no, no, that's not true.
And then when you say to people something that they truly believe and have repeated over and over again and have never checked for themselves, and you say, that's not true, it's really startling and kind of shocking for people because it reveals that they're not thinking for themselves, that they're controlled opposition, that they're programmed, that they're propagandized, that they're NPCs.
And in particular, heaven help us, It's really tough to do when, you know, when I was younger, if we'd meet people in some place and maybe our kids were playing a bit together or whatever, and then they'd say something if their kids were around, how do you say to the mom or the dad who's saying something false, how do you say, oh, no, that's not true?
Because what have the parents always said to the kids?
Well, you got to tell the truth and you shouldn't lie and you should double check and have you checked your work and have you checked your spelling and that, right?
You check your facts and all of that, right?
So it's really tricky to say in front of people.
Especially when their kids are around.
No, that's not true.
And people get very, very tense about all of that stuff because exposing falsehood would often get you killed throughout human history because most of human history is an edifice of total nonsense that is designed to exploit people.
So you have to say, at least I say, oh, no, that's not true.
Yeah.
I mean, and I would say, look, obviously Trump has done some bad things and he's definitely a hound dog and all of that, but he didn't do that for sure.
Or, you know, if they say, well, he made fun of some disabled reporter, I'd be sick.
No, no, he didn't.
Actually, he makes that sort of face and gesture every time he describes someone who is foolish and he didn't even know that guy was disabled.
So, like, he didn't, like, you know, all the stuff that I've actually done the research on and talked about.
So, with me, again, I'll shut up in a sec.
The general policy is I'm not going to lie for sure, but I will just put out a little bit of truth and see, right?
So, if somebody says Trump praised neo Nazis and I say, no, that's not true.
And if they say, well, hang on, what do you mean?
And then I can say, well, if you want, we can bring up the transcript and so on.
But it's alarming for people.
It's frightening for people because they themselves are trapped and embedded in all these lies.
Their social relationships are based on these lies, their professional success is based upon these lies.
And if you start handing people the truth, things get very awkward very quickly.
And then they realize that they're enslaved by the chains of falsehoods.
And that's horrible for people.
So, they'll fight tooth and nail.
And most times they'll just bail out.
And, you know, that's fine.
Maybe you're just planting seeds or whatever.
But no, people can't make me lie.
They can make me do a lot of things, I guess.
They can kick me off platforms.
They can chase me on the streets of Brisbane.
But they can't make me lie.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, it reminds me of historically a couple in the resistance during the Nazi occupation who would have dinner parties and bring up different subjects to see how receptive the couples were.
Truth vs Social Ostracism00:04:33
And I almost feel that way sometimes where.
You ask a question and you're just seeing is this person an NPC or is this person still have some semblance of authenticity or do they think for themselves in it?
I do think if people are surrounded by NPCs and they're surrounded by inauthenticity, it's much easier to be unauthentic and to put on that mask and to convince yourself that that's who you really are and become that.
You know, it's what's the saying?
Don't say you're going to be a ballerina dancer.
For 15 years, as you're feeding pigs, you're a pig farmer.
At some point, you become what you wear, that mask you wear, and that authenticity almost is who you are.
Most people, like everybody, want to feel that they're special.
I'm so special.
I'm so unique.
I'm snowflake.
I'm so different, and so on.
Everybody wants to feel that they're different and special.
And everyone probably feels kind of unique to themselves because nobody else is occupying your consciousness and looking at it with your eyes.
In the same place at the same time.
So we have a certain amount of uniqueness, like billiard balls are never in the same place at the same time.
They don't merge, right?
And everybody wants to think they're so different and so unique.
But most people are empty headed, propagandized biological DNA replication machines.
They're just there to reproduce, to try and have their kids be reasonably successful, and to continue a biological line.
And they divide things into two A, this serves.
My blind photocopy a DNA replication algorithm, or B, this does not serve that.
And they think that they're thinking when all they're doing is evaluating success or failure of replication.
Now, of course, this is true for people who don't have kids or whatever, but then that's just more about hedonism and satisfaction.
Then they say, if they're hedonists, they say, okay, it's like that line of Coke, credit card, one side or the other.
So, okay, does this serve my hedonism or does this oppose my hedonism?
Does this serve my replication requirements or does this harm my replication requirements?
And that's all they're doing.
They're just empty headed sorting mechanisms.
And when you bring, but they can't tell themselves the truth about that, right?
They can't say, oh, I'll just go along with whatever.
I'm just subject to peer pressure and I'm easily programmed and I don't think for myself and I'm too scared to bring out the truth with anyone.
They think that they're good people and honorable people and they are fighting the evil fascist right wingers or whatever it is, right?
They're just programmed.
But they can't.
Know that themselves because programming doesn't work if you identify it as programming.
Programming has to be camouflaged as virtue in the hearts and minds of the truly propagandized.
And so if you bring up counterfactuals, it completely throws sand in the whole machinery.
I mean, you might as well just be dumping sugar into the gas tank, right?
It just throws sand into the whole machinery and their entire worldview of themselves as special moral agents rather than just empty propagandized replicators, either of DNA or pleasure.
They're just, you know, dopamine multipliers or DNA multipliers.
They don't like that.
And I get that.
I mean, every now and then, I think, like most people, I think, I mean, I took the road less traveled, which is directness and honesty.
But if I hadn't done that, if I had gone down the road of just empty headed conformity, which is, you know, it's pretty tempting and it's pretty easy.
I mean, I think in the short run, I think it's pretty tough in the long run because you end up completely empty.
And then you end up an enemy of the truth, which is to say, an enemy of honor, morality, and progress.
And you're just taking up space and replicating your genes.
Or being a dopamine harvester that runs out of dopamine long before he runs out of life.
And it's really tough.
So I'm aware, of course, like most of us, we have this instinct that if you bring too much truth to people, I mean, they'll lynch you in one way or another, or they will try and take you out of the group or spread rumors or negative things or whatever, right?
It's a minefield out there because people think that they know when they don't know.
And this, of course, is all the way back to Socrates, who.
Figured out that people are only pretending to know things that they don't actually know, and then, you know, got a tasty draft of hemlock for his troubles.
Well, the Matrix comes to mind.
Being Upfront to Filter00:05:46
I mean, that's what we're talking about.
It's a lot easier to eat that steak than struggle for the cause.
That is very true.
Even if you know the steak is not real.
I mean, that's what was a little bit unbelievable about that scene is that he'll take the steak, but once you know the steak isn't real, it tastes like shit.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
I enjoyed the conversation.
I. I'll let somebody else take the line.
Our invitation is still open.
We'd love to host you and the family in Colorado.
Every time I talk, I'm going to try to remind you of that.
I really, really appreciate that, Mike.
That is very kind.
And I actually have, believe it or not, I have met up with people when I'm traveling.
So I really, if I'm ever passing through your neck of the woods, I will absolutely take you up on that offer.
I do love sitting down with listeners and jawboning face to face.
It is a deep and abiding pleasure.
And.
I appreciate that.
And if Sam Hyde ever gets off his loathsome spotty behind and finishes the show I did in what January or something, then you'll see me doing that.
We did live call in shows where people were bringing their issues to philosophy in the studio, which was really cool.
So we'll get that out and hopefully people will see that.
A real pleasure.
And thank you for calling in.
Always an enjoyable chat.
And Richard, I believe we have chatted before.
Hey, Stefan.
How are you doing, man?
I'm well.
How are you doing?
I'm very well.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Really good.
Really happy, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a couple of, I have a question, but I have a couple of comments to make on your previous callers, call in.
It was awesome.
It was really good.
And I want to kind of reference your kind of early example of going out on a date, a guy going out on a date and meeting a homeless person.
This kind of goes back to your, um, You know, you're talked about like meeting the right person, meeting the right partner, and you want to seek out a virtuous person, whether you're a man or a woman.
You want to find out do they have any virtues?
And in that sense, I feel like being upfront, not brutally, I don't mean, but being upfront and not faking it can be a way of filtering, you know, reaching into and seeing how the other person responds.
And then that could act as a filtering mechanism.
To find out where they are in their authenticity, whatever you want to call it.
And yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, certainly it has value.
And I would imagine if I was in the situation, I'm trying to think if I've been in that situation.
It's been a long time since I've been dating.
But if I was in that situation, I think I would give the guy not 20 bucks, I'd give him 10 bucks.
And then I would turn to the woman and I would say, That was interesting.
Let me tell you my experience of that.
I really like you.
I think you're very interesting, very smart, good conversationalist.
I felt just kind of odd when this guy came up to ask for money.
And I actually wasn't thinking about him.
I mean, maybe I should have been being a moral, generous, kind guy.
I wasn't actually thinking about him.
I was thinking about you.
And I was thinking about.
Well, if I give him nothing, what are you going to think?
If I give him too much, what are you going to think?
And I wasn't thinking about him.
I was thinking about your response to what it is that I was doing.
So, what I did was I said, Well, I'm not going to give him nothing, but I'm also not going to give him 20.
I'm going to give him 10.
And then I'm going to tell you my calculations.
But I wanted to be sort of upfront about my thought process that was going on because I want you to think well of me.
I mean, it's a challenge, right?
I would say to the woman, I want you to think well of me, but I don't want to fake it, right?
I mean, I want you to think I'm tall, but I don't want to put in Secret heels, right?
I want you to think I'm attractive, but I don't want to wear some Brad Pitt wig or something like that, right?
So I want you to like me, but I also want you to like me, not me trying to impress you, if that makes sense, right?
So I would just have an honest conversation about my thought processes and experience and see what she did with that.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's great.
And I feel like it's a great opportunity to find out more about the person you're going on a date with, is to ask those kind of questions, right?
And you could even ask them, What do you think?
Should we give them money or should we?
What do you think?
You know what I mean?
And then that would be an opportunity to find out where they stand.
And you can ask them, have you had experiences being generous with people where it's backfired?
Most people have.
I mean, everybody who thinks that helping others is easy is someone who's never really tried to help another person because helping other people is really tough, is really, really, really tough.
And so, and also, it could be like, well, I mean, you look fantastic and I really, really appreciate that you've put effort into looking great for the date.
And you really do.
And, I decided not to show up in makeup because, you know, that's, you know, it's a little rolling the dice as far as that goes.
And it's not really my thing and I'm not very good at it.
But I don't have makeup, but I can give a homeless guy 10 bucks.
You know, so you're working to look good for me, which I hugely appreciate.
I'm working to impress you.
And it's interesting, right?
It's interesting and it's complicated.
And just having those honest conversations about your experience is fantastic.
I mean, it's so relaxing when you just direct.
About your thoughts and experience.
Now, again, somebody might roll their eyes and say, I think you're overthinking it, guy, or something like that.
In which case, you can say, Oh, I don't know about overthinking it.
I was actually just telling you the truth about my thoughts.
Uncertainty as Authenticity00:07:01
Well, you know, it's a little too early for that.
Or if they're sort of negative about it or whatever, it's like, Okay, well, then you just have a short date and you make sure they get home safely and you go back to your life.
But yeah, I think those direct, honest communications is the real test.
It is the real test about whether the person can.
Articulate their inner state and communicate it.
Because if they can't, if people cannot articulate their inner state and communicate it, then they act out.
Like if somebody can't say, I'm angry, then they'll just be passive aggressive or maybe directly aggressive.
But if people can't verbalize and talk about their inner state, you actually can't have a relationship with them because they're just bouncing off their feelings and not ever talking, which is kind of the essence of a relationship.
Yeah, that's really great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I have another comment about the latter part of the conversation about the.
The so called authenticity cultural question.
As far as any sort of simulated or bought for experience, that doesn't really jive well with me.
I feel like, say, for example, you decide, oh, yeah, you're going to take your daughter to France or another place.
It doesn't have to be France, it could be some other place.
The beauty of the reality is that you can't actually predict what's going to happen, right?
You make plans for what you hope might happen, but in reality, you can never be sure that is what will happen.
All right.
So hang on, hang on.
That's interesting and complicated because nobody can ever be sure what's going to happen.
I mean, you might have to make an emergency landing on the Seine, as far as I know, right?
Or in the Atlantic.
So, I mean, you hope you're going to end up like, you know, there's this urban myth about that there's an entire counter in.
The Austrian airport for people who thought they were going to Australia.
But so, I mean, when you say you can't be sure exactly what's going to happen or what's going to happen, that's a life issue as a whole.
I'm not sure why they would be specific to experiences or not.
Well, that's what I mean.
Like, that's the beauty of life in reality is that there is no certainty, right?
You know what I mean?
Like, there's this you might plan to go camping with your daughter or something, right?
And you make all the great plans and all the rest of it, but you can never be sure what's going to happen next, as opposed to playing a video game or being in a simulacrum or something like that, where it's all kind of predetermined.
If that removes the phenomenon of uncertainty, then that, by definition, is not authentic, I would say.
Okay, so hang on.
So let's say you and I are going to go camping in the Adirondacks, or we're going to walk the Appalachian Trail or something like that, right?
Now, we don't know what's going to happen in the content of that.
We don't know exactly what time we're going to go to bed.
We don't know if we're going to meet anyone or who we're going to meet or whatever, right?
Okay, so, but that's partly what we go.
If we, again, if we knew exactly what it was, then it would be like watching a movie for the 20th time.
You know exactly what's coming next, right?
Maybe that prediction is kind of fun, but so it's true that we won't know what's going to happen, but what's going to happen is going to be limited to us doing that trail.
So I don't know where I'm going to be.
Specifically, you know, 802, April 1st, 2031, right?
Like five years from now.
I don't exactly know where I'm going to be.
I know I'm not going to be on Alpha Centauri.
I know I'm not going to be on the moon.
I know I'm not going to be down a silver mine.
I mean, at least I'm pretty sure.
So I'm hopefully going to be alive doing philosophy and so on.
So it's true that we don't know what's going to happen, but.
There's very much different degrees.
If we decide to go and do the Appalachian Trail, we know we're going to be on the Appalachian Trail.
And, you know, we don't know if I'm going to twist my ankle, maybe we can't continue or something.
But so we know where we're going to be and what we're going to do.
The content of that, we also have some idea.
I mean, we don't go to the Appalachian Trail in disco outfits expecting a dance floor, right?
I mean, we go there to hike and to see nature and to so on.
So, because if we didn't know anything, I mean, I'm not saying you're saying that's an extreme, but if we didn't know anything, we couldn't plan anything.
But we know we're going to go on the Appalachian Trail, and we know that there's going to be hikey experiences, hiking experiences, and so on.
But we don't know every detail, otherwise, we wouldn't go.
So we're going to do so.
Like, I went to go and see the Michael Jackson movie last night.
I didn't know the content of it.
I specifically had avoided any previews or any snippets or anything like that.
I didn't want to know anything about it before I went in.
So I didn't know the content of the movie, but I also knew it wasn't a nature documentary about penguins.
I knew it was a movie about Michael Jackson.
And so I didn't know the content.
But so we don't, I didn't know exactly what was going to happen in the movie, but I knew it was going to be all about Michael Jackson, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess my point being is that.
The uncertainty in whichever scenario we want to use as an example is the authenticity, if that makes any sense.
The uncertainty is the authenticity.
So it's kind of like I do these shows, we talk philosophy.
I'm pretty sure we're not going to end up in a duel or mud wrestling.
Maybe, probably not.
But the authenticity is the uncertainty.
Does that mean that you have to be alive to what's happening?
Because you don't know what exactly is coming next.
So, if you're walking the Appalachian Trail, you don't know exactly where the trail is going to go.
So, you've got to watch the trail.
You've got to keep an eye around you for bears or bees or whatever it is that might be difficult or hazardous.
And you have to really make sure you, if you're jumping from rock to rock, my daughter, for many years, we used to have when we'd hike in the woods a game where we jump from rock to tree root to rock to tree root and you can't touch the earth, right?
It's a version of the floor is lava, right?
And So that was exciting and interesting.
And, you know, it was, we would really commit to it.
Like, we'd be like walking on wobbly logs and things like that.
And so you really have to be alert and alive in the moment because you're navigating some crazy stuff and you don't know what's coming next, whether it's going to be a lot of tree roots or a lot of rocks or nothing like that.
And is that what you mean that the authenticity is because you don't know what's coming yet, but you're in a sort of limited circumstance?
Like, if you're in a boxing ring, you don't know where the next blow might be coming from exactly, but you know there's.
Going to be some boxing.
So, is that what you mean by the authenticity is in the moment?
Agency and Excuses00:07:19
Okay.
Hey, look at that.
I shot an arrow over the house and hit a target.
Nice.
It's better than Laertes.
Yeah, that's exactly.
Yeah, you put it perfectly.
Much, much better than I could ever do.
Yeah, for sure.
Okay.
So, I don't know what you're going to say next, but to be authentic in the conversation means that you're not going to probably start screaming in Arabic, at least I don't think so.
I wish I could, but I can't.
Well, I've not.
I've only been out of a few words, but I certainly won't out of those.
Most people in England know some of the words, unfortunately, too vividly.
And sorry, you had other thoughts or questions?
Yeah, and I was thinking about a previous podcast I listened to just recently and all the excuses people make in order to avoid reality, essentially.
And I was thinking about agency.
We have agency.
You can call it agency or free will or whatever you like.
I like the word agency because it.
I feel like it more likely describes action in our lives as opposed to just talking about stuff.
But I feel like, you know, we, when you make excuses and, you know, religion especially has sort of seems like a blank check of excuses built into it.
When you, when you, when you encompass, when you embrace that, then now you've just embraced an unlimited amount of excuses.
And that is a way of stealing or, I'm not going to use the word robbing people of agency because that's obviously a free choice people make.
But in a sense, that's its intent to rob people of agency.
You know, this can be looked at maybe with Erica Kirk's, you know, forgiveness kind of thing.
Like, you know, that's a way to me that is like using this blank check of excuses to avoid reality.
And I feel like virtue is when we are accountable and hold other people to account as an act of love in the sense that we want to promote agency in our.
In our, you know, people closest to us and people we love.
And that entails that we both remain accountable and hold people to account, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I think it is especially the case that you have to hold those you love to high standards of agency because if they don't have agency, you really can't love them.
Because, for instance, if somebody is just continually making up excuses, As to why the right thing didn't happen, why they made, quote, bad decisions and so on, right?
If they're continually making excuses, then they're lying and they're manipulating.
And because they're lying and manipulating, and that dishonesty, which is based upon vanity, right?
It takes a fairly robust ego to look in the mirror and say, I effed up.
You know, I really made a bad mistake.
I really made the wrong choice.
I really have got to, you know, I remember when I was engaged.
Before, quite a bit before I got married to my wife, I was engaged.
I had many years invested in the relationship, bought the ring, proposed, I was engaged, and I had to jump the tracks.
I had to jump the train tracks.
I was on this train tracks that was accelerating, you know, everyone was excited and all of that.
And we were in the planning stages and all of that.
And I had to say, this is a mistake.
And I had to jump the tracks and, And stop and get out and get on and move out and move on and all of that, which was the best.
I mean, again, was not a terrible person, was actually a fun person and a good person in many ways, but just was not right, just not right.
And so I had to, but that's to admit fault and to admit a mistake and to get out and turn on my tracks.
In fact, my insomnia started before the end of that relationship.
And the insomnia was like, bro, you're sleepwalking into a mess, you're sleepwalking into disaster.
And I was.
I couldn't sleep because I was asleep in my life, and I was sort of a waking dream of almost determinism at that point.
And so, I do think that we need to hold people to high account and to hold ourselves to high account because we love virtue, and virtue is agency.
Virtue and agency are the same thing.
The degree to which people make excuses is the degree to which they cannot be good and cannot be loved.
And so, we have to preserve agency in people, and we have to give more and more agency to our children as they age, because the alternative is to lose respect for them.
And I mean, lose love for all the people that reject agency.
So, yeah, holding people to the, and ourselves to the, holding our feet to the hot fires, the Jeffrey Rush hot fires of agency is really, really important because there's just no other way to be loved.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, and that was exactly what I was trying to, you know, say in my comment, right?
I feel very passionate about that.
And I feel like, you know, an act, I really believe, I really see it as an act of love when we're held to account.
If someone holds us to account, I feel that that is an act of account, even though it might be painful and hurt at the time.
In the long run, that is an act of love.
And the same goes for us holding others, our loved ones, to account.
And them holding us to account.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I hugely respect people who say it was my choice.
You know, I mean, when someone's in a relationship with the wrong person, then they say it was my choice.
Now, there's causes which you can look at and say, well, look, people around me didn't help me.
People around me didn't say anything, and that surely didn't help.
But, and that's important because part of the ways in which we retain agency is to have people around us who hold us to agency.
If we have people around us who are making excuses for us all the time, It's harder to have agency.
So it's not an excuse to say, like when I was engaged to the wrong woman, it's not an excuse to say, but nobody asked me if I really, really wanted this.
Nobody pointed out any of the deficiencies in the relationship.
Everybody was just kind of watching me sleepwalk towards a cliff edge.
And I don't know exactly why, but again, as I said, it was like an acquaintance's girlfriend who mentioned something, and that sort of started the whole ball rolling of changing course.
So it was not an excuse to say, It was not my responsibility because I still had these people in my life, but I was kind of sleepwalking and I was in the process of philosophy being theoretical rather than practical.
I was excellent at arguing interest rates in the 1920s or the causes of the Great Depression or the rise of Nazism, excellent at arguing that stuff.
But actually, demanding and requiring that virtuous people be in my life was like, it had never even really crossed my mind.
And it's not like I didn't have a huge amount of excuse for that.
It just, you know, It just hadn't really crossed my mind.
Sleepwalking Through Philosophy00:02:22
And when it began to cross my mind, it was hell on earth.
I felt like I was leaving the entirety of human civilization and wandering out in a desert, hoping to find a dead llama and an oasis I might be able to set up a tent by.
It just felt like self banishment from all that was civilized and human.
And fortunately, I crossed the desert and found a better place to live.
And I look back as just a zombie city I got out of, and this is where the people are.
But when people.
Mess up and they say, Yeah, oh, that's all on me.
Yeah, I did it.
I made the mistake.
I made this decision.
I made this decision.
I knew better.
I should have known better.
I let myself do it.
I mean, it's so admirable.
And it's kind of rare, right?
Absolutely.
Would you, like, would you, would you, would you, would you, I'm not agree, but like, you know, you mentioned that you suddenly went into like this insomnia period.
Would you agree that that was your conscience trying to wake you up?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was my conscience saying, Time is passing and you are trapped in low company.
And if I were a religious man, I would say it was God whispering me to raise my sights.
I mean, I was doing pretty well in the business world and, you know, I had a relationship and friendships and all of this and hobbies and did sports and played squash.
And, you know, life was pretty good.
I was making some decent coin for the first time in my life.
I was well educated and, I enjoyed my career and I was getting to do all these cool things like travel the world and stay in nice hotels and sell software and make deals and negotiate and manage.
And I was really operating at a high level of capacity and so on.
And so the material and status and engagement, intellectual engagement, was all taken care of.
I mean, that was all working well and I was thrilled to be doing what I was doing.
But looking back at my potential, because I thought I was achieving more than I'd ever imagined I would achieve, but I didn't realize at all how much there was a skyhook for my future that was just needing to yank me right up.
High-Level Success and Vanity00:08:51
And it is a very, it almost feels, I think it almost felt like because I was not expecting that kind of success.
I always thought I would do something consequential with my life, but I was never expecting that kind of success.
At least in the business world and the stuff that I was doing back then.
And I was, you know, I wrote a short movie and produced it and so on.
And I think it was almost like I felt like a gargoyle or a hunchback or something.
Like there's a line from the guy who played Jason Alexander, I think his name is.
He played George Costanza on Seinfeld.
And he said he was in theater school and he wanted to play Hamlet and he wanted to play all of these romantic leads.
And the guy said, look, you're short, you're balding, you're pudgy, you got to go to comedy.
Like, there's no other place for you to go.
And it would be almost like, or there was an actor, I can't remember his name.
He played Mr. Beebe in A Room with a View.
And when he first got the script for A Room with a View, he wanted to play George, the romantic lead.
He said, Look, I can drop some weight, I can work out, and so on.
But it actually went to Julian Sands, who was great in the role and obviously a fantastic looking guy who died a year or two ago hiking, believe it or not.
Anyway, so the actor.
Who got the role of Mr. Beeb was enraged because he's like, God, he's just some parish priest.
It's like the least sexy role.
I want to do something that's juicy and sexy and all of that, right?
Because inside he feels juicy and sexy and all of that, but he didn't get the role.
And the lead has to go to the attractive person.
And I almost felt like a gargoyle or a hunchback or maybe the elephant man or something who was getting cast in plays.
I, this feels okay.
I'm glad to be here, but I wasn't expecting to be here.
I was expecting to be maybe a circus freak or something like that.
And the fact that I'm getting cast in place at all is kind of fascinating to me.
Don't they know that I'm a gargoyle or an elephant man or a hunchback or something?
And then it would be like, I can't sleep until I play the romantic lead.
And it's like, but I'm a gargoyle.
I'm a hunchback.
I'm the elephant man.
How can I possibly play a romantic lead?
And I did actually, I played.
I was in the play The Elephant Man.
I played the lead, the doctor, not the elephant man, but the doctor, the Anthony Hopkins role.
And for me, it was like, well, I've achieved more than I could really imagine.
What do you mean there's potentially a huge amount more?
What do you mean I have to leave this entire social circle?
What do you mean I have to leave friends and family and fiance and all of that behind?
Like it was incomprehensible to me.
And it feels like you're falling, it feels like you're cursed and you're being kicked.
Off a cruise line in the middle of shark infested borders.
And it's like, I would do anything to be back on that cruise ship.
I would do anything to not be in these waters with these shark fins around.
And it just felt like being kicked out of all of that was good and noble and reliable and valued and true.
And it felt really frustrating because it's like, well, hang on, things seem to be going pretty well.
I got a great career.
I'm doing a lot of interesting travel.
I've got great employees.
I've got great friends, great hobbies, great sports, and I'm engaged.
And like, Why can't I enjoy this?
Why can't I enjoy this?
It was so confusing.
Why can I not enjoy it?
Because your conscious told you, yeah, you have all that, but you're not going to get a great partner.
Well, it's not going to be a great life going forward.
And that was a real shock because I thought I'd made it.
And I honestly, it felt a little bit like, you know, when I read, when I've read before, but then I read later the story of Jesus in the wilderness that the devil comes to him and says, You can have the whole world.
You just need to worship me.
And it was like the devil, in a sense, was saying, Oh, you can have the girl.
You can have the career.
You can have the money.
You can have the status.
You can have the health.
You can have.
But.
You have to stay at this level.
You can't rise up.
You can't do better.
You can't aim higher.
And I was happy with that level.
It felt like winning the lottery.
It felt like fantastic.
And then I had a full body revolt.
It was like if you've eaten something really bad and you just can't stop from vomiting, it was like a full, as my therapist referred to it at the time, you're in a state of full unconscious revolt.
And revolt is interesting because, of course, it's got two meanings, right?
I mean, to revolt against a particular circumstance, and also this is revolting.
You know, the peasants are revolting, right?
This is a revolting place.
And I got out of that relative amoral hellscape by the skin of my teeth and through no passionate or moral will of my own.
I did not choose it.
I did not want it.
It happened to me.
And I felt like.
I just got chained to the back of some good old boy pickup truck in a gravel road in Georgia and dragged for about 400 miles.
And it's like, I don't want to be here.
I don't want to be in the waters.
I want to be on the cruise ship.
I don't want to be sleepless.
I don't want to be not content with my life.
And it was a wild process that I am incredibly thankful for in hindsight, but will not say I enjoyed much of a shred of it at the time.
Yeah, that's, you know, that's.
Yeah, wonderful to hear.
Truly.
Yeah.
And it would make me religious if I was that way inclined.
Yeah, of course.
To say that I had a higher calling.
Because if I had stayed there, I couldn't have done the work I've been doing for the last 20 years.
I couldn't.
I mean, more than 21 years now.
It would be utterly impossible.
I could not in a million years have given people the practical advice on applicable philosophy, on philosophy where the wheels actually hit the road and get you somewhere.
If I had not gone through that process myself, I really, really, really, really always, always, always try to never give people advice that I have not taken myself.
And, you know, getting corrupt and destructive and dangerous and undermining people, however much they may be unconscious of the process, doesn't really matter.
I mean, if they're unconscious of their own corruption, that makes them even more dangerous in a way, although it makes them a little less blameworthy.
But I try not to give people advice I haven't taken myself.
If I hadn't gone through that process, I would not have the self credibility to give people advice without feeling like a hypocrite, which would have undermined everything I did.
Like, if I said, well, you probably shouldn't have really corrupt people in your life.
And if I had corrupt or amoral people in my life, I mean, how could I do that?
I really, I mean, obviously I make mistakes and I have my own little hiccups and corruptions from time to time, but I can't give advice to people when I live the opposite.
Like, I can't do that.
And so that whole process was like clearing the entire path forward to me getting a billion views and downloads of really lived and applied philosophy.
And I didn't want it.
I take no pride in it.
It was all on the unconscious side.
And again, if I was religious, I would say God was dragging me to a higher place so that I could talk with credibility and authenticity, I guess, back to the theme of the evening.
Yeah.
It's about the philosophy of the world.
That is the hallmark of authenticity.
Yeah.
That was my next comment.
You beat me to it.
Yeah.
If I've gone through it, I can get you through it.
Yeah.
If I haven't gone through it, I've no right to suggest that you do it.
Yeah.
100%.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry, that was a little personal.
I hope it was helpful.
Yeah, that was wonderful.
That was just a, yeah, I really, really, that was lovely.
Yep.
Truly lovely.
Yep.
Not a lovely process, though, I'll tell you that.
Not a lovely process at all.
It's like, no, of course not.
Kicking and screaming, he is dragged up to the top of the mountain.
Yep.
Yep.
But there's beauty in that once you reach the top.
Yes.
Yeah.
And there was immense vividness and power in the process, too.
I remember.
I still remember these dreams.
I won't have to go into them now, but I just had the most vivid dreams of my entire life.
I had the most wild and creative conversations in my head.
Vivid Dreams of Poverty00:04:00
It was just, it absolutely unlocked a truly electric and feral force within me, an absolute contempt and impatience with everything that was lower, and an absolute drive and an ass rocket to get to the heavens.
And I mean, thank heavens.
And thank, you know, I would thank God if I was a religious man to say thank you for scooping me up.
But it was a brutal process.
And because there was no one to guide me, this to me had never been done before.
I'm not saying I was the first one to do it, but I didn't have anyone to guide me.
And I did go to therapy, and my therapist was certainly helpful.
But looking back upon it, it was a path that had not been carved before, particularly with regards to family of origin or parents in particular.
And yeah, giving it all up, giving it all up, everything that I had felt I had fought so hard to achieve.
It's like, it felt like, oh, I'm finally cured of this horrible disease.
Like, I read this book by, this series of books by Stephen R. Donaldson about a, oh, what are they called?
Anyway, it was about a guy who was a leper and he goes into another dimension, into this fantasy world where he's got this gold ring and he's got amazing magical powers and so on.
And it was really very well done, a very, very good series of books.
The guy.
Taught me some things about vocabulary.
He had an amazing vocabulary.
He actually did a whole bunch of QAs, which I've never quite read.
But anyway, so the Ill Earth Chronicles, I think they were called.
And he goes to this alternate dimension to save the world from a bad guy.
And when he beats the bad guy, he's offered to be cured of his leprosy.
And I was like, well, you'll take that, right?
And he gave this long speech about how he didn't want to be cured of his leprosy.
It was part of his identity and this, that, and the other.
And I was like, It never quite sat well with me.
But it would be almost, it felt almost like, okay, well, I've escaped the poverty and I now have some decent income and I escaped the low status and now I've got some status.
And, you know, I'm doing these amazing things, which for me, you know, growing up as a sort of poverty based welfare guy, like staying in $400 a night hotels in order to do presentations to major corporations, it just felt like a wild electric dream that I could, had to pinch myself about.
And it felt like it cured all of those negatives of my childhood.
And then, I had to give it up.
And it was like, oh, so I got cured of this disease called poverty and low status.
And now I just have to contract it again.
Like, what?
I just spent, I literally spent 20 years curing this disease and now I got to contract it again.
This is like, this is not a blessing.
This is a curse because I ended up out of my business career and living in a small apartment, low status and writing and journaling and all of that sort of stuff.
And it's like, damn, that was like a great fever dream.
That was kind of cool while it lasted.
And anyway, so it has been quite a journey.
Well, thank you for, thank you so much for sharing that.
I mean, that is just really kind of, yeah.
Wonderful to hear.
And, you know, I'm so glad that you made it through that.
You know, it was incredible.
I think a lot of people don't.
Yeah, I think a lot of people don't make it.
And honestly, it was touch and go.
It felt like with for me.
There's a great line from a song called Wonderland by Paul Young For everything that has to be, we often have to cry.
But beneath the weight of gravity, we stumble, then we fly.
And it's a really lovely.
I used to sometimes listen to that song when I was going through all of this and it gave me some comfort.
He's a.
He's wrecked his voice now, but he was a wonderful singer.
Seeing the live version that he does of Wherever I Lay My Head, it's just amazing stuff.
But yeah, it's a beautiful song.
And I got very sort of passionately involved with music to sort of help me get through that.
Taming Internal Waves00:03:57
Some Christa Burke, some Alan Parsons was very important.
The Pyramid album was really important to me during that time.
And of course, Dark Side of the Moon, some Pink Floyd.
And yeah, it was really, really powerful stuff to help me get through because.
And I remember there's a Super Tramp song.
Jimmy Green was his name, asylum, asylum.
And I had this vision of myself as a boy playing that piano, piano in that song.
And it was just incredibly vivid.
I had these like just wild, like almost like waking visions.
And I really felt like the inner world was spilling over and obscuring the outer world.
Like, I don't know if you've ever had this where you are sweating so heavily that sweat keeps getting in your eyes.
I used to have this when I was a cross country runner sometimes.
If it was really up and down, it was very hot and muggy.
There would be constantly sweat getting in my eyes.
And it felt like the products of my brain were spilling over and obscuring my vision of the world.
And it felt like a waterfall of visions that was interfering with my sight of the natural universe.
And it felt like going mad, honestly.
It felt like the convulsions and the escalations of my inner life were absolutely obscuring the natural vision of the world that was.
And of course, having seen my mother go mad.
It was a very scary thing to walk towards because, of course, your big desire is to walk away from it.
I remember one night I was just tossing and turning, and I'm like, I'm just going to go dancing.
I'm going to go dancing all night.
And I went out to a bar called My Apartment, which was not too far from where I lived.
And I just danced, I chatted with people, and I just danced for like, I don't know, five hours straight.
And it was a way of getting the world back into my head.
Because, of course, I still remember there was this very curvaceous woman who used to serve shots at this bar.
I occasionally wonder whatever happened to her, like somebody with a truly fantastic figure.
Of course, that wasn't an accident, but it was a way of saying to my inner life, I'm going to bombard you with so many external stimuli that it's going to be like one wave hitting another wave.
There will not be a tsunami, there will just be a thunderclap in the middle of the ocean.
And this is when I had all of these crazy, wild dreams of giant waves.
Giant waves that sometimes would hit me so hard, they would tear my arms off, and I watched them go flinging away in the bloody surf, and it was just wild stuff.
My gosh.
And it felt like I was losing my mind.
And I felt like, because it was, I was about the same age as my mother was when she was losing her mind.
And I felt like, well, what if this is just some biological thing?
Like, what if I just had some good years and so on?
And that was actually, I ended my engagement at the same age that my father was when he left my mother.
And again, these sorts of coincidences, but yeah, I really felt I was disintegrating.
And it was a wild experience.
And being able to tame and harness that has been just a fantastic thing.
And I also do believe that if my mother had been philosophical, she might have been able to ride it out in the way that I did.
But because I had by this time in my life, I had probably 12 or 13 years of philosophy under my belt.
And so I had some principles by which to hang on to this insane process and find a way, like being strapped to the back of a horse that's running towards a cliff.
You have to find a way to tame it before you both plunge off.
And it really felt that touch and go.
But because I had so much of the philosophy and self knowledge and a good therapist and so on, I was able to.
Achieve escape velocity.
Yeah, to aim it, to find some way to harness it, to find some way.
Balancing China and Home00:06:06
And that has been.
And so, you know, when I get attacked or whatever, it's like, no, no, I'm so grateful to be deeply sane that, you know, you can attack me all you want.
And the worst you can get is like a fire ant on my toe.
It's like mildly annoying and brush it off.
But yeah, it was quite a process.
And it went on for.
18 months.
I remember that.
18 months.
And it actually finally, one of the things that ended it was going to China.
It was like there's this huge reset.
I remember I flew out to China.
I was supposed to meet business partners out in China.
This is right before Y2K.
I was going, that's more than a quarter century ago now, but I was flying out to China.
I was supposed to meet my business partners out there.
I was supposed to fly out there with them and then meet more of them there.
For some reason, the guy couldn't come with me on the flight and they couldn't meet me at the airport.
So I basically just had to.
This is long before cell phones and all of that are of any use, certainly in China.
And so I remember I got off the flight.
I managed to get to my hotel and I wanted to go for a walk because I've just been sitting for 18 hours in a flight.
And I walked down to Tiananmen Square.
It was unbelievably cold and I hadn't packed for the cold because I actually had just come from Morocco.
I did Morocco.
I did like a month where I didn't see any English.
I went from Morocco right before.
No, I went from Morocco for Y2K.
And then after that, I spent one night in Toronto and then I went to China for business and spent.
Three weeks in China for business and had a fantastic time.
And there was something to do with that.
Again, I think it balanced.
Like the inner stimuli going to Morocco with its four amazing colors the sky, the sand, the green, the water amazing, amazing place.
Couldn't pay me enough to live there, but an amazing place to go and visit.
So vivid and so different.
And then going from there straight to China to this unbelievable cold and foreignness and the air was gritty and acidic.
And although we did go out to the country, To do some business in the sort of more rural areas.
But what that did, I think, was it balanced the external stimuli because I couldn't be habituated to anything around me because it was Arabic and Mandarin and foreign and foreign and foreign and so different that I think it kind of balanced.
The inner stimuli was then balanced by this significant outer stimuli.
And I remember it was that night in this wonderful hotel in Beijing, I slept.
And I slept.
And it sounds like you think, oh, I remember when I was writing The God of Atheists, where I talk about this process a little bit as well.
The guy who's got insomnia.
Originally, I had, and he slept for seven hours because that was a miracle for me to sleep for seven hours.
And I made it in the book like 16 hours or something like that.
But I slept seven hours and I woke refreshed for the first time in more than a year and a half, about a year and a half.
And that was a turning point.
And I remember, sorry, I know I'm, but I remember reading a book called Darkness Visible or something like that, which was the journal of.
A journal of depression by Arthur Kussler or something, a writer, I can't remember the name, but he was talking about how he was depressed and then he was watching a bird on television and it all began to change around and turn around.
And I thought I puzzled it over for a long time about why going to these two wildly different places began to balance things out.
And I began to be able to sleep and feel more.
It wasn't, and it's funny because it wasn't that I felt unstable, like I didn't feel like I didn't have crazy thoughts or anything like that.
I got it.
I could fly.
It wasn't anything like that.
And I didn't have any hallucinations.
But it was just, there was such an insistence of internal revolt and stimuli that the world was just to some degree occluded.
And it's sort of like if you think about if you're in an isolation tank and you start to get these real visions because there's not as much internal stimuli.
It's kind of why your brain stays alive or awake while you're sleeping.
You get all this internal stimuli.
And I think that this just parade of external stimuli began to balance things out.
And it was really a positive experience because I was completely unhabituated at this point.
And it really was.
And it's funny, too, because what I was doing began to spread to other people around me.
There was a guy I was working with who was telling me one morning we were driving to work, and he just turns to me and he says, You know, you've been talking a little bit about this stuff.
Let me tell you about a dream I had.
And he had this dream that he was lost in the city.
And then right at the heart of the city, he found a model of the city with himself in it, looking back at himself from a tiny.
Pin prick and I just had an amazing dream.
And we talked for like, I don't know, the entire drive to work about that dream.
And he started to go down that road, and other people like it began to because I was so into this sort of inner life stuff and navigating this incredible eruption of stuff coming up from my unconscious that I viewed as sort of thick tentacles on the floor that I couldn't get through and couldn't get under and so on and get to the root of.
And it is how we learn is sometimes through just wildness and.
Passion because it took a lot.
It took a lot to humble me because being well educated and well read and philosophical and obviously fairly talented in art and business, I had a certain amount of vanity there and it just took a lot to humble me.
And so, yeah, so then it all began to sort of turn around and it balanced out.
And then I hit a creative stride that was just amazing.
I wrote The God of Atheists and I wrote my novel almost in, oh, again, about a year and a half.
Which for it was like half a million words or 600,000 words of writing.
And I was taking Canada's sort of premier writing course and had terrible relationships with my first writing instructor, but then a fantastic relationship with my second one and was away to the races.
Reclaiming the Rebel Body00:15:13
Wow.
That's quite the story, Stephanie.
Yeah, that is really, really remarkable.
Yeah.
Really, really.
And there's a song, Crazy.
I think you're crazy.
I think you're crazy.
And, uh, ha ha ha, you think you're in control?
That's sort of the unconscious saying, look, cause, cause the unconscious looking up at me, I was inconsequential.
See, my ego was everything.
But the unconscious looking up at me, I was just like a little bird very high.
You ever see this thing?
When you get older, if you don't have your glasses, they're just these little specks, little blurry specks.
But you see this bird way high up in the sky, or sometimes you'll see a plane with little contrails way high up in the sky.
So learning to view myself from the bottom up rather than the intellect down, because a particularly British thing, it's all intellect and less instinct, which is good in some ways.
This is part of the British analytical philosophy tradition that I talk about in the History of Philosophy series.
But I was getting a view of myself from my deepest instincts.
I mean, my spleen doesn't even know I exist.
My toe doesn't know that I exist.
It's just using me to make another toe.
And seeing the view of my intellect from my deepest, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago instincts that have evolved for billions of years, really, and seeing that I'm just a transitory bird way high up in there, and seeing the smallness of my ego relative to the depth, size, and power of my instincts.
Was really a humbling experience to not look down and say, Well, I have the big imagination.
I have the big reasoning.
I can think of concepts that span the entire universe, blah, blah, blah.
And the arrogance of that sort of abstract intellectual ego, which again is everyone's welcome at the table.
I'm not saying that the ego is bad or that the instincts are bad or anything like that.
Everyone gets a seat at the table.
That's the concept behind the Miko system.
Everyone has to be able to negotiate in order for you to achieve real power in the world and accuracy and truth and connection and all of that.
But I'd always look down at the instincts.
Like, I used to make this joke that, you know, growing up British is like the jolly green giant riding a Shetland Poly, just squishes it like it's ass jam when he sits on it.
And that was sort of the because in England, the British culture is very, Ireland's not so bad, but the British culture is all about, you know, the master of the intellect and the stiff upper lip and the caustic Douglas Murray, brutal, anti emotional, censorious processing of status and the contempt and the hostility towards emotions that characterizes the sort of modern British culture is really.
Powerful and is actually, I think, quite deadly in many ways.
But for me, getting a view of what it, what does it look like looking up from the depths to this vainglorious, pompous, a hole intellectual?
What does it look like from the guts?
And I had convinced myself that I was in love.
I convinced myself that material success was all that mattered.
And my instincts were like, bullshit, right?
But I wasn't, I wouldn't listen.
So they just revolted.
And Getting a view of myself and my instincts up was really humbling.
And to accept that that which was destabilizing me and I thought was destroying me was saving me.
It is literally like jumping off a cliff and believing somehow on the way down you're going to figure out how to fly.
It just feels completely counterintuitive.
And I think that's one of the reasons why when I began to do what I do, the call in shows became the sort of keystone of the arch of what it is that I do because the call in shows are all about.
Me allowing my instincts to feel their way through the conversation so we can get to the truth.
Because I couldn't do that from a deductive or inductive analytical perspective.
I couldn't do that from reasoning from first principles.
I couldn't do that philosophically.
That is an instinct about what matters to people and how I'm able to do the dream analyses and how I'm able to tie things together from the beginning of the conversation and bring it all together at the end.
I don't even know why I'm asking the questions half the time.
That's just letting my instincts do it.
And then the instincts are like, oh, well, here, you know, you didn't know why you were doing what you're doing, but here's why you were doing what you're doing.
And here's why we ask those questions and say, oh, and it's almost like I feel this surprise sometimes when I'm talking to the listeners and they tell me something.
And I'm like, oh, that's why I asked you the question an hour ago about this.
And it's like, you know, maybe it sounds like I had some big blueprint or plan.
It's like I'm as surprised as the listener is sometimes.
Oh, that's why my instinct was to ask you about this an hour ago.
And this bears complete fruition now.
So it is allowing those instincts to have.
Free play.
And also, because I do not betray myself, I will never be betrayed by myself, which means I can't be manipulated into self attacking, which gives me a kind of rock like stability in the storms of opposition that philosophy generally brings.
So it's been a very unifying and empowering experience to have no self attack.
It doesn't mean I'm never self critical and I can make mistakes and so on, but I cannot be manipulated into.
Self attack because I've accepted as much as I think is possible the deepest parts of me, or to put it another way, I've asked the deepest parts of me to accept me.
And it's not been, well, I have to accept my instincts.
It's like, no, my instincts also have to accept me.
We have to work together.
I am not just my intellect.
I am not just my analytical reasoning.
I am deep instincts all the way back to the single fucking celled organism we all came from.
And all of that is detailed and imprinted and works deeply in dreams.
Again, I.
I did a lot of work analyzing my dreams during this whole process, and they were fucking bang on and terrifyingly accurate.
And I just wouldn't let go of that control.
It's like, no, no, no, I got this.
I've been doing self knowledge.
I've been doing philosophy.
I've been doing all of this.
I know what's going on in my life.
And they're like, you don't fucking know.
You don't know.
You don't know.
I had all these dreams that were just like telling me, and that the waves were the instincts.
The waves were the instincts, and the waves were the truth.
They say, if people aren't fighting you, you're not telling the truth.
If you're not considered by evil, if you're not considered evil by anyone, you're not doing any good.
And if you're not being opposed, you're not advancing.
And getting all of those instincts to humble me and to say, you're important, we're important.
We all have to work together because if we don't work together, we can be manipulated.
We can be set against each other.
We can be set against our own instincts and our instincts can be set against our intellect.
And we're just punching ourselves in the face.
Fight club style and getting nowhere.
And it's all just sound and fury signifying nothing.
And we need to all be aligned like salmon in a swift current.
We need to all be aligned to get to the truth and get it out there in the world.
And if we are all aligned, we are foundationally unstoppable.
And if we are not aligned, we're just like everyone else who came before us, and philosophy will not advance.
And that humbling, the mind body dichotomy is what is technically called in philosophy that there's the body, which of course I was raised both in England and through the church, the Anglican church in particular, that the body was a foul, stinky vessel of sin.
And all the pleasures of the body besmirch the purity of the intellect because your essence is an immaterial soul that yearns to escape from this rotting, farting, acidic, ichor based, bile based prison of a body to sort of float free and escape.
Because, of course, for most people, their bodies are used to punish them as children, right?
Your pain centers, your fear centers, your bullied, neglected, hit, beaten, and starved sometimes are sent to.
Or kept up if your parents are abusive at night.
And so your body is used to punish you, and therefore your body becomes the enemy.
And that's how I was raised.
My body was used to punish me, my body becomes the enemy.
And so I have to control it.
I have to be in charge.
My body cannot be in charge because when my body dominated my experiences, it was used as a torture chamber.
My body was a torture chamber that was used against me.
And I could not let the body be in control again.
I could not accept.
And therefore, I dove into the mind, the abstracts, the so to speak, spiritual or the conceptual or the syllogistical and so on.
It's all just a way of getting away from the former.
Prison punisher of the body, that the body is hijacked and used against you to torment and torture you because they can't harm your thoughts.
They can only harm your nerve endings and through that punish you for disobedience.
That this was true in school where I was caned, this was true at home where I was beaten.
And so my body was hijacked, possessed, and used against me.
And I yearned to be free of my body and to take refuge in imagination, in abstractions, in stories, in ideas, in computer code was another great way.
To escape the body, to build these giant edifices of computer code that were incredibly absorbing and distracting.
And then I would dip into the body for food and sex and sleep and sort of allow it to have those particular pleasures.
But the idea that the body could be rescued from it being a brutal abuser of my mind, because the pain is in the mind, right?
I mean, that's where the pain shows up.
And so the body is used to brutalize the mind.
And the idea that I could.
Befriend the body, rescue the body, and take it back from the abusers so that it wouldn't be used against me in the future was incomprehensible to me.
And the body was rebelling and saying, The fact that I was used against you and your intellect by abusers does not make me bad.
That's like the guy who's forced to rob a bank.
You don't put him in jail.
You put the person who's forced to rob a bank.
You know, the story of the guy who robs a bank because some criminals have kidnapped his family and you have to rob the bank or we'll take out your family or something.
And, you know, the body was hijacked against me by.
The church, by the schools, by the boarding schools and the other public schools, and by, um, my father would, would, um, grind his knuckles into my, into the top of my head when he was unhappy and just rub it hard.
And, and it was really, really painful.
And then if he liked me, he had this wonderful fudge that he would give me.
And so my father would be, uh, using my body against me to, to harm me.
And my mother and the teachers and the, the, the, the priests, of course, the priests didn't beat us, but they told us about how bad the body was and the body is this.
Temple of sin, and it's of this world, and it's how Satan gets you, and it's full of vile lusts and greed and horrible things like that.
And then you just yearn, like a just fly free of this prison to die is to escape a prison of vile, rotting, deadly, painful flesh.
And you know, good.
Yeah.
Yeah, the body belongs to authority.
Yeah, the body belongs to brutal authority.
Your body belongs to brutal authority.
Only you get an abstract library corner.
Of the mind.
Yeah.
It's so horrendous.
And the damage it does is so hard for people to escape.
When they've been shamed for their bodies as children, you know, in different ways, right?
You know, it could just be a verbal abuse, but the damage is done once the children are like, you know, once they receive that shame for their bodies.
It's really, really kind of grotesque.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, the body, you know, it shits and bleeds and.
You weep and you vomit, and you get infections and you get rashes, and so on.
It's just like, ah, it's so gross, it's so vile.
The purity of the intellect is all that's needed.
But of course, the body is owned by those in authority.
Your body is hijacked and owned and colonized by those in authority and used to punish you.
And therefore, you have an uneasy relationship and a hostile relationship to your own body.
And the shaming mechanism is too you still have to be shamed for your bodies, but just the shaming mechanism as well, which is to turn your body's nervous system against yourself.
And therefore, you can be hijacked.
And there are these big, giant buttons of brutal punishment that are on.
Your head, or I guess for my father grinding his knuckles into the top of my head, on the top of your head, that you have this big, brutal pain button that can be hit by anyone.
And then you get really, really hostile and afraid of that pain button, and that's your body.
And then, you know, sex comes along and, you know, undoes some of that, but you still have this uneasy relationship.
So the idea of taking back the body of the reconquistador, right?
Reconquista, right?
The pushing back of the ownership of the body by brutal authority, which was inflicted on me.
For my childhood and youth, taking back the body from the prosecutors, from the torturers, those who, and it was just physical.
Again, it can be emotional, it can be scorn.
I remember a nurse once when I had pooped my pants.
I had stayed out too long because I was playing a wonderful game of soccer in boarding school.
I was six.
That was the last time I think I pooped my pants.
I tried to make it back because I wanted to finish the game and I didn't make it back because I'd waited too long.
And I just remember that disgust of having to.
Bathe me and clean my pants, and there's this vile, filthy, and it's like, yeah, you know, you miscalculated.
It's not the end of the world.
It's just some poop.
It's not deadly.
It's no big deal, right?
But yeah, that vicious hostility, that cold, vicious contempt for the flesh that characterizes British culture in particular, Scottish culture even more, a little less in Ireland, a little less in France, very high in Germany, of course.
And in Eastern Europe, it is similar as well that the body is just this foul torture device to torment.
The beautiful soul that yearns to escape the vile prison and return to the divinity.
Because what is the happiest thing in Christianity is getting rid of the fucking body.
Just get rid of this piece of shit torture device that encages and traps you.
It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, as Hamlet says about death.
And the desire to discard the body as a foul, torturous prison.
It's a prison break to die and to say, To attempt to reclaim the body, to attempt to push back all of the programming that was used to punish you through the brutal colonization of your body against your mind, to reconquer the body and retake the body, and to accept the body and to apologize to the body for rejecting it.
Mind as an Effect of Body00:06:04
Because that is like punishing someone who was kidnapped and forced to do things that that person didn't want to do.
That's putting them in jail.
For the actions of the evildoers, apologizing to the body, reclaiming the body, re establishing the body as unity, a beautiful unity with the mind, because the mind is just an effect of the body.
Wanting the mind without the body is like wanting gravity without mass or wanting light without a light source.
It's irrational in the extreme and anti rational.
And so, yeah, just reconquering that.
And that's why, you know, I try to eat well, I exercise, I try to get my 10,000 steps in.
It's one of the reasons I don't do.
As many videos anymore as I like to be able to walk around, and my body likes to move, and I think better when I walk, as it's been very well proven all the way back.
Socrates walked to Nietzsche, he was a famous walker and had great ideas.
And so the fact that I can walk and talk is really important.
I don't want this just to be the mind.
We cannot overthrow tyranny if tyranny still owns our bodies.
We cannot overthrow evil power if our body remains conquered, painted, and owned by the evil powers who used our body against us when we're children.
And this friendliness towards the body, this acceptance and love of the body, this This recognition that the mind cannot be more beautiful than the body, and that the mind is not more skilled than the body, and that the instincts the body has towards truth and consistency, because truth and consistency is processed in the body.
Nothing comes to the mind except through the flesh.
We cannot ever directly contact the world.
We can only receive the electrical impulses that come through the body.
Everything that is in my mind that is empirical or objective comes to me through the body.
And you cannot, like, you're like a king locked.
In a castle that can only get messages, a message through messengers racing in and out of the castle.
You cannot see your kingdom directly.
You can only get messages.
And condemning the messengers for the sake of the vanity of the king is simply losing control of the kingdom, of which the world is our kingdom.
I would just like to add one last thing to that.
What you just said is that in relationship, like say, you know, we're men, right?
So in relationship to women, This is so important, I feel, in order to have a proper relationship with a woman, is so that you don't just see her as partitioned off.
You see her as a whole human being.
This includes her body, her mind, her love, the same way we love ourselves.
Once we accept our bodies as a part of ourselves, that enables us to then have a proper relationship with the other.
Another person.
Yeah, it's very easy to look at females as just flesh.
You said the whole person.
A lot of people just look at the whole and not the person.
And the other thing, too, my brain can't make another brain.
Only the body can make another brain.
I can't even replicate.
I mean, I can replicate some thoughts, some ideas, and so on, but even they die unless we use the body to make new bodies.
And I think part of the revolt against childbearing is a revolt against the body.
And this is why sexual abuse is such a violation.
It's a direct colonization of the body.
Neglect creates anxiety and panic within the body that it's very easy to reactivate later.
This is why neglect to me is the second worst form of abuse after sexual abuse.
And then verbal abuse creates language based triggers that can be reactivated by other people.
Physical abuse, I don't worry about people beating me up.
As an adult, I never have.
I'm a pretty big guy and all of that and fairly strong.
But I don't worry about people beating me up.
So, you know, the physical abuse that I experienced as a child is the least, has the least effect in the long term, if that makes sense.
So, I think a lot of the revolt against the body is because the body is being programmed.
I mean, all of the propagandists that are attempting to substitute the opposite of reality through the media, all you're being taught is that the opposite of the truth is the truth.
You know, the guy who looks like he's a real thug turns out to be a really nice guy.
And the guy who looks like he's a really nice guy turns out to be a real sociopath.
Like, it's just there to absolutely oppose.
All of the pattern recognition that goes on in the real world, and that that's a form of hijacking your entire amygdala, your entire hippocampus, and fight or flight responses being hijacked by the media to turn you into the opposite of the truth.
This disorients the body so much, and we then end up so opposed to the body because the body in the real world learns pattern recognitions that a lot of guys who are dressed like thugs are actually thugs, and a lot of guys who are dressed nice are actually pretty nice.
But so we're out in the world, and the propagandists want us to turn against the natural empiricism of our body in the world and what we actually see and experience in the world.
They want to substitute their own.
Psychotic destructive illusions, the matrix for what we experience in the world, this turns us against our own bodies because our own bodies are like, well, hang on, although the propaganda tells me this is not true, it kind of is.
And then we're very much at war with our bodies.
The propaganda is at war with our bodies.
And when you're at war with your bodies, it's really tough to be fertile.
And I know that that's a big, long thing about reproduction, but I mean, the birth rate is going down, I think, as media propaganda goes up because it sets you, your natural empiricism of your body is set at war.
With the propaganda of power.
And that's pretty paralyzing for the kind of acceptance of the body that leads to the meatiness of the body and reproduction and birth and all of that.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, 100%.
The whole thing's become inverted, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
The Inversion of Power00:00:47
OK.
Is there anything else that you wanted to add?
Fantastic.
I really do appreciate bringing that out in me.
And I think it was helpful to talk about.
Oh, that's awesome.
Stefan, thank you so much.
I really appreciate your time and having, you know, recounting your whole story is wonderful.
Really, really, really mind boggling.
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
I'm glad it was helpful.
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Freedomain.com slash donate.
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