Time is infinite, and it only exists, but for us, you need a clock and a calendar to keep track of how long it takes to do something productive in your spare time. And that something productive thing is a website called Lumosity. It s like a website gym for your brain. They have brain games that are designed by top scientists to train your mental processes. And the beautiful thing about it is that it feels like a game. It's fun, challenging, and only takes a few minutes every day. You can track your progress online and compare yourself to other people, which is a dick thing to do, but don t be like, "Hey Bob, what was your score on Lumosity? My score was better. I play it on an iPad. I m better than you." And if you don t know what that means, you re not going to want to miss this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. This episode is brought to you by Lumosity and Squarespace. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and enter the offer code: JOEANDTheNumber1 to receive 10% off your first purchase. And we'll pick four winners at the end of the month of January! You can't ask for much more! Cheers, Joe and the winner will be chosen on January 17th! Logo by Courtney DeKorte . Music by Ian Dorsch - The Good Mythical - The Bad Mythical Podcast Thank you for listening to this episode? Please rate and review the episode on Apple Podcasts! If you like it, please leave us a review and tag us in iTunes or Podchaser, and we'll send it to someone else who does it on Insta: so they can be featured on the next episode of That s One Word. and they can win a swag bag with swag by on the podcast. That s one word that says That's One Word, That's 1 word, That s 1 word I'm One Word That's A Good Thing That's a Good Thing . or they'll get a discount on the entire month of the podcast! by Joespace! and I'll give it to you a review of the episode that's 1 Badass Thing that's a Badass Goodness, right?
00:01:22.000You can design these games based on the things that you're looking to acquire.
00:01:28.000Whether you're looking to acquire a better memory, or you're looking to acquire...
00:01:34.000If you go to the website itself, there's a bunch of different options like memory.
00:01:38.000You can put recalling the location of objects, remembering names after the first introduction, learning new subjects quickly and accurately.
00:01:45.000And the beautiful thing about it is it feels like a game.
00:01:47.000It's just something fun that you can do that is actually good for your brain.
00:02:09.000I think that playing chess, playing games, doing things that makes your brain think steps ahead, it uses your brain the same way we use our muscles.
00:02:19.000The same way we use our cardiovascular system, we exercise and we get stronger because of it.
00:02:26.000I think the same works with your mind.
00:03:13.000And, you know, this is something that a long time ago was virtually impossible.
00:03:17.000A long time ago, one of the big things about websites is, like, you would get a website that would work really well in Internet Explorer, but then you try to use it on Firefox.
00:03:27.000This is the easiest time in the history of the universe for making a website.
00:03:32.000For a free trial and 10% off your first purchase, go to squarespace.com and enter the offer code JOE and the number 1. That's JOE and the number 1 because we are in the month of January.
00:03:43.000Squarespace is also putting on a contest now.
00:03:46.000For JRE listeners, it's a website design contest, and here's what you need to do.
00:03:50.000Go to squarespace.com forward slash Joe, sign up and get 10% off your first purchase, then build a website.
00:03:57.000It's super easy to do, and once you've built your badass website, tweet it to hashtag JRESquarespace.
00:04:05.000That's one word, hashtag J-R-E Squarespace, before January 17th.
00:04:11.000And I'm going to pick four winners who have designed the most beautiful websites.
00:04:15.000And Squarespace will send these winners a swag bag with items like a Squarespace Apple keyboard, t-shirt, a moleskin, and more.
00:04:22.000So visit squarespace.com right now and use the offer code Joe and the number one to build your website and then tweet your website, hashtag J-R-E Squarespace.
00:04:39.000If you've heard this website, have you heard this podcast, and you've heard me talk about this website, you're probably totally tired of hearing about it at this point in time.
00:04:46.000It's a human optimization website and what we try to do on it is offer you the best things that we can find as far as strength and conditioning equipment like kettlebells, as far as protein supplements like HempForce and different foods that we sell.
00:05:03.000We have buffalo bars and organic coconut oil, just things that I believe are good for your health.
00:05:10.000And supplements that I believe benefit cognitive function, benefits your ability to perform athletic tasks, gives you a bit more endurance.
00:05:20.000There's a lot of science out there that's been done into the science of athletic supplementation.
00:05:27.000And, you know, there's not a lot that really work.
00:05:29.000It's hard to find something that really works significantly.
00:05:33.000One of them that works significantly is called cordyceps mushrooms, a fascinating one that was first figured out by the Chinese Olympic team.
00:05:40.000It's based on a mushroom that they noticed these cattle eating these mushrooms in high altitudes and they became more active when they saw them eating this.
00:05:50.000And so they were trying to figure out why they were more active when they When they're eating this mushroom, well, they figured out that it actually enhances your body's ability to process oxygen.
00:06:01.000All the supplements at Onnit.com, all of them have a 90-day, 30-pill, 100% money-back guarantee.
00:06:08.000So if you're confused or if you're like, man, I don't know if this stuff really works, like New Mood, which is a 5-HTP supplement, which actually is a natural way of boosting serotonin.
00:06:18.000And what's interesting about it is that doctors who are Putting people on antidepressants oftentimes tell them to not take 5-HTP because then you'll have too much of that good shit in your brain.
00:06:28.000Which seems to me maybe you should just take the 5-HTP, you know what I'm saying?
00:08:21.000But now it's getting to the point, like, they could tax all of the rich people in America and it would pay the government for like three days.
00:08:29.000It's just a way of setting us against each other.
00:08:31.000So we miss the whole reality of what's going on.
00:08:33.000It's a piss-poor management solution, too.
00:08:36.000It's a terrible idea to take the people that are earning the most and take a massively disproportionate amount of money from them.
00:08:42.000And so, you know, they're talking about, like, pro athletes and clubs, soccer clubs and corporations and, you know, the very highest of the high.
00:09:33.000And when there's no poverty and the children are all living peacefully and the schools are gorgeous and glowing temples of knowledge, then maybe.
00:09:41.000But at the moment, you know, it's like, oh, sorry, do you need more money for this war in Iraq?
00:10:05.000If it's possible for you to get a job, and if it's not possible for you to get a job, we as a society should take those people off the street and put them in mental institutions and give them help.
00:10:30.000But do you know statistically that the majority of people, like if you take the average of how much people work in a household below the poverty line...
00:10:38.000You've got two people in a household below the poverty line.
00:10:40.000On average, they work 16 hours a week between the two of them.
00:10:45.000Now that is, to some degree, poverty by choice.
00:10:49.000And I don't mind, hey, wouldn't it be great to only work 16 hours a week, especially if your options are jobs that are kind of crappy, which we all generally start with those jobs that are crappy.
00:11:08.000And it's nice to be poor because it's a whole lot less work.
00:11:11.000And people get all the benefits out of not working, which are considerable.
00:11:15.000I mean, I guess daytime TV is good for a lot of people and...
00:11:20.000So – but then what happens is then they need money for something.
00:11:22.000They get sick and suddenly poverty becomes this huge problem.
00:11:25.000But a lot of poverty – it's like monks.
00:11:27.000Monks are poor but they don't need charity because they're kind of choosing that lifestyle.
00:11:31.000And it's not true of all the poor but on average, a lot of people who are poor just – they don't particularly like to work.
00:11:36.000And again, I don't mind that but accept the consequences of that.
00:11:39.000Well, don't you think that it's really difficult to break out of a cycle?
00:11:43.000That's the real issue that I've always had with people shitting on people who are poor or people who live in poor neighborhoods for not getting out.
00:11:51.000And if you're born into a cycle of poverty and of neglect and of laziness and a lack of ambition, it's very hard to break out of that cycle.
00:12:02.000Also, you're dealing with a really down economy where it's difficult to get a job that pays good money.
00:12:07.000There's more people looking for jobs than there are jobs.
00:12:10.000And it's a real issue for a lot of people that, you know, don't really have an education or don't have a particular set of skills.
00:12:16.000Or even if you do, like I did a call-in show while I was here in California and a guy called in and he said, you know, I just graduated as a pharmacist.
00:12:48.000But it's one of these things I worry about the degree to which when we tell people stuff is really hard, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
00:12:55.000If you keep telling kids growing up in poor neighborhoods, and I was a kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood, so I have some sympathy with this.
00:13:01.000But It's, you know, if you keep telling people, well, you know, it's really, really tough.
00:13:10.000I don't think there's an either or, but I think there's definitely a bit of that.
00:13:13.000But, you know, you kind of disproved it with your example of a pharmacist who's looking for 10 months for a job in a very lucrative industry.
00:14:04.000It probably could have been very different if my life was very different, but my life wasn't very happy, you know, with my parents being divorced and moving across the country and always being forced, moved around a lot and always making new friends.
00:15:29.000You know, there's a bunch of people that will say, yeah, well, I have a family, so, you know, it's a great idea for you to just go out there and go crazy.
00:15:41.000Every single person who has ever done anything worthwhile or exceptional or difficult or extraordinary, anyone, whether it's great artists or authors or mathematicians or whatever the fuck it is,
00:16:46.000We all go through doubt and moments in your life where it's really fucking difficult and you're trying to figure out what the fuck your path is going to be.
00:19:34.000And as a comic, some of my best sets ever in stand-up have come after I bombed Like, I bombed.
00:19:43.000Yeah, like if this keeps going, I've got no career, so I better...
00:19:46.000Yeah, well, also, it's a terrible feeling.
00:19:48.000You don't want that feeling to reoccur.
00:19:51.000So you have these bad sets, and then you just get really super motivated to work on everything that's wrong or recognize what went wrong that night and never let it happen again.
00:20:00.000And one of the worst traits that a comedian could ever have is to be easily satisfied with yourself.
00:21:13.000I think everyone looks forward to this utopian time where whatever motivates them, drives them, freaks them out right now can be set aside, the work is done, and you can just sort of like watch the sunset over the pond.
00:21:27.000And the problem is this utopian vision of the future that we have is probably a carrot that's on a stick that we'll just never reach.
00:21:36.000And we keep working hard to improve our society and our life and ourselves and our families and our relationships, hoping that one day we'll achieve this ultimate peace that will never come.
00:21:45.000No, and this is how people get exploited.
00:21:48.000If they can dangle that carrot, right, and they can say, well, you see, in the communist utopia, you won't need to work.
00:21:54.000And in the communist utopia or the fascist utopia or, you know, the Peter Joseph's robot mommy cities, you won't have to work and everything will be fine.
00:22:02.000Or, in the religious view, you'll get to go to heaven or you'll achieve transcendental bliss or, you know, enough yoga, your butt will be firm and your soul will be at peace.
00:22:10.000They will get you to give up freedoms and money and so on in hopes of buying a peace of mind that is fundamentally anti-human in the long run.
00:22:17.000The restlessness of our species is the diamond that we get crushed into.
00:22:22.000For the existence that we currently provide for ourselves in, yes, I agree 100%.
00:22:27.000I think the whole idea about all this is engineering a utopia.
00:22:32.000Like Peter Joseph, who I think is a very smart guy.
00:22:39.000But what I think is hilarious is that he makes his money as a stockbroker.
00:22:46.000I mean, he's talking about this utopian world, and he's drawing the very blood that keeps him alive from a vampire system, from this crazy fucking vampire system.
00:22:56.000No, no, no, but he's a vampire on the inside.
00:23:19.000And then, yeah, he did go a little bit, I thought, ballistic in some of the post-debate, let's say, analysis.
00:23:25.000Where I think he veered off a little bit into ad hominems.
00:23:28.000But, you know, my basic point is I don't – as long as people do two things, you know, do two things and, you know, we're friends till the end, right?
00:23:36.000Respect self-ownership and, you know, property rights and do not initiate force.
00:23:40.000And so, look, if these cities built by Jacques Fresco and his merry band of elven robots, if this is human paradise on Earth, I say go for it.
00:24:37.000There's a lot to being a person that contributes to society.
00:24:40.000There's a lot to what about society is feeding itself and just feeding more society?
00:24:45.000What about corporations are just feeding corporations?
00:24:48.000And what about them is benefiting humanity.
00:24:50.000And if you can sway it towards benefiting humanity, it's always the best choice.
00:24:55.000But the idea of engineering it in one foolproof way that makes everyone happy, that's silly.
00:25:01.000The people that want to remove capitalism as a whole, like, I've met people that have jobs that tell me that people with money are a problem.
00:25:08.000And I'll go, well, they can be, but you know how much money Bill Gates gives to charities?
00:25:13.000Do you know how much charity work that guy does?
00:25:16.000How much money he donates to causes that he feels are excellent?
00:25:20.000Millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars is a great benefit from having that guy being wealthy.
00:25:26.000Some people who are rich do a good job with it.
00:26:07.000Listen, if we just pooled our money together into these massive charities to re-engineer societies and put money into poor communities and stop causing war and stop extracting natural resources out of these places for massive profit and massive loss of human life,
00:26:39.000Which is why Democrats believe that welfare programs are needed, because they're fundamentally stingy bastards who don't give anything else.
00:27:59.000You know, if you look at India and China just over the last 20 years, it has been the biggest poverty reduction in the history of the known universe.
00:28:08.000I mean, it really can't be overemphasized.
00:28:09.000Literally hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty.
00:28:12.000In India, it's 50,000 families a month are getting into the middle class out of poverty because they just got rid of socialist policies and let people actually trade and make money and start their businesses.
00:28:22.000They cut the red tape and all the licensing requirements and so on.
00:28:26.000And of course, in China, they were less totalitarian communist assholes and actually became some reasonable free trade guys.
00:28:32.000And out of that process, the more people that come out of poverty in the 20 years that they've stopped interfering with people's trading abilities I think?
00:29:00.000Do you need like 27 permits to open a lemonade stand or something like that?
00:29:03.000I mean, if you stop doing that kind of stuff or you don't need 300 hours to become a hair braider on a beach of training to get a license, just let people do their own thing and let the customer be the decider about what's valuable, what's safe, what's right, what's wrong.
00:29:17.000Then I think you do a lot more for poverty in many ways.
00:29:19.000There are some people who need charity, but I think most times people just need people out of the way so that they can go and create their own opportunities.
00:29:26.000I think that's true for the most part in a lot of ways, but I think that it's hard to undermine what Bill Gates has done for people that can't afford things.
00:29:34.000You know, what he's done as far as providing funds for education and a lot of the charitable work they've done.
00:29:40.000I don't know if that would all have gotten done if he stayed on at Microsoft and made it bigger and better.
00:30:49.000Aaron Ross Powell Aren't they teaching people in that sense, though?
00:30:51.000They're providing a possibility for education that maybe wouldn't have existed for a lot of poor people.
00:30:57.000So in that sense, they are teaching people out of fish.
00:30:59.000Aaron Ross Powell Well, but education is important, but education when you don't have a lot of economic opportunities.
00:31:04.000Like if you look at Africa, Africa is one of the few places where in the 20th century, like over the last 50 years, it's declined in net standard of living.
00:31:20.000Oh, it's just unbelievable, the crime rates and so on.
00:31:22.000Like, if you rent a car in South Africa, they actually have a fire that comes out the side to deter carjackers.
00:31:29.000You can push a button and have like little jets of flame to come out to push carjackers back.
00:31:33.000And the amount of charity that's been applied in Africa is absolutely huge but generally it goes government to government, right?
00:31:39.000So you give a bunch of money to a bunch of corrupt South African dictators and then you sell them a whole bunch of arms and then you wonder why there's not a lot of freedom for the general population.
00:31:48.000I think if you can scale back that – I mean Africans would do fine as well as everyone else if they had the same economic opportunities.
00:31:56.000And you still have a very corrupt and fascistic style of government.
00:32:00.000I'm not sure what they can really do with that education other than join the civil service, which seems to happen quite a bit.
00:32:04.000So I'm a big one for like scale-back interference in the market.
00:32:07.000People will create their own opportunities, you know, the laissez-faire, let them alone, let them trade, let them build their own wealth and all that kind of stuff.
00:32:45.000Which destroys the market for local farmers.
00:32:47.000And you give all this food to the government.
00:32:49.000The government then hands it out to people they like and don't hand it out to people they don't like, thus reinforcing their power.
00:32:54.000And then there's no local farming left.
00:32:56.000So just one of these kinds of examples.
00:32:58.000If we stop screwing up their economies by selling arms, by dumping food on their markets and all that, and even the foreign aid happens with that too, I think they do fine.
00:33:08.000But it's a lot easier to throw money at a problem than to actually try and deal with these immensely corrupt governments.
00:33:14.000That's a really unknown but creepy aspect of the United States agriculture system, is this subsidies, which causes people to grow food that they're not even going to use, causes people to profit from corn and to put a lot of effort and emphasis into things that they know that they're going to get subsidies from.
00:33:35.000It's a real strange sort of power circle that goes on.
00:33:39.000What it does to people's health is wretched.
00:33:41.000There's this tiny sugar industry in the United States, very concentrated economic force.
00:33:45.000They get millions and millions and millions of dollars in subsidies, and they've been trying to cut this for years, but everybody lobby and focus their efforts, right?
00:33:53.000And so what happened is when the tariffs, the taxes on imports of sugar went way up in the 70s, what do people not do?
00:34:01.000And they said, wow, sugar in America is really expensive.
00:34:06.000I'm no nutritionist, but there seem to be quite a lot of people out there who think that high fructose corn syrup has a lot to do with the growing weight problem in the United States, along with, of course, the fact that you've got dairy farmers and wheat farmers and so on lobbying the government to create these horrible food pyramids where they say,
00:35:18.000That's why I was so creative the last quarter.
00:35:20.000When you start talking about economics and you start talking about giving businesses more freedom, people get real nervous because people think of businesses as being these monsters, that they get power and then they just start trampling and stealing things.
00:35:35.000It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you growing over there?
00:36:14.000You don't get to take profits out of the corporation when it makes money.
00:36:17.000And then if it loses money, you don't ever have to put anything back.
00:36:20.000You don't have this thing where if the corporation or if you do something illegal, the corporation can get sued or can get fined and so on.
00:36:27.000It's a shield that is created to protect the people in charge of the corporations because they give a lot of money.
00:37:16.000I mean, it's a wretched, unfair system that has nothing to do with the free market.
00:37:24.000Of course, the government always say the corporations are the problem to deflect, you know, what's really going on, which is the corporate shield.
00:37:30.000And the reasons why they gave this was A, to get the money from the corporate owners and B, Because then they get to tax corporations and then everyone somehow thinks that there's this thing called the corporation, like this blimp floating around the universe that you can tax for free.
00:37:44.000Like they did this fine recently, $900 million on some financial entity for its wrongdoings or whatever.
00:37:51.000And people are like, yeah, you know, they fined that corporation.
00:37:53.000Like somehow the corporation is paying.
00:38:05.000So anyway, minor rant, but the corporations, they're part of the state capitalism or what's sometimes called crapitalism, which is just the government and corporations working together.
00:38:17.000Technically, that's fascism, but it doesn't have anything to do with the free market.
00:38:20.000It's just the modern bloated monstrosity that's been created.
00:38:23.000And it's just people figuring out a way to extract money and manipulating the system to make it easier for them to extract money.
00:38:28.000Whether it's extracting money from taxes or whether it's extracting money in the form of political donations, however they're figuring out a way to do it.
00:38:35.000And what gets crazy about it is that there's a bunch of human beings that are a part of this thing that really isn't looking out for human beings.
00:38:41.000I mean, some people profit, you get money from it, but if you look at the ultimate destruction of these things, very often they're not looking out for people.
00:38:52.000I mean, I started a company with my brother in the 90s.
00:38:56.000We grew this company, we sold it and then we went public.
00:39:00.000And the process of going public It's like having cocaine injected into your dick, being lashed into a barrel full of psychotic monkeys and thrown off a cliff.
00:39:14.000You focus on the stock price rather than building long-term value.
00:39:17.000And you can make a fortune from tiny upticks and downticks in the stock price rather than focusing on satisfying your – it really draws your attention away.
00:39:24.000It's like you're chatting with your wife and some incredibly stacked woman in a bikini We're good to go.
00:39:48.000And this is why corporations have given up on R&D and focused entirely on marketing and stock pitches because the amount of money you can make is insane.
00:39:57.000And it's because so many people's money is being forced into the stock market.
00:40:02.000I mean, it's like herding a bunch of sheep off a cliff and saying, well, those sheep seem to be kind of suicidal now, don't they?
00:40:49.000And so, you know, an Englishman and a Scotsman are walking down and, you know, a thief comes up and says, I'm going to rob you of everything you've got.
00:40:56.000And the Scotsman turns to the English guy and says, I use that 20 quid that I owe you.
00:40:59.000You know, because it's like you're going to lose the money.
00:41:01.000So you give it, you know, give it to the...
00:41:03.000So the government's going to take your money by force or you give it to a bunch of parasitical, three-eyed, roach-faced stockbrokers, right?
00:41:10.000So it's like, okay, give it to the stockbrokers.
00:41:12.000You know, if the guy's going to steal my money, I'll put it on Red 22. And that's how the stock market works.
00:41:16.000So there's way too much money in the stock market.
00:41:18.000There should be like 1% of the money that's in the stock market that's there now.
00:41:21.000So you've got these massive tsunamis of cash rolling back and forth.
00:42:28.000I think a lot of what you're bitching about, and we're both bitching about, it comes down to a couple of things.
00:42:34.000It comes down to Human beings being born into a system that's already fucked up.
00:42:40.000It comes down to managing your own thinking as well, figuring out how to weigh you as an individual who allegedly, and it's another debate, has free will.
00:42:50.000That's a huge debate, the free will debate, which is very esoteric and strange.
00:43:39.000Again, I don't want to keep harping on rich kids, but have you ever been around a really spoiled rich kid that likes to yell at people that are working?
00:44:45.000Like, this guy in my high school, his father, I think, was running the Toronto Stock Exchange or whatever, and, you know, I was in this little tiny apartment with my mom and my brother, and, you know, it's like the matriarchal manners.
00:44:55.000It was all, like, the fallout from, like, the Yeah.
00:45:13.000And, you know, these are the kids, 16, you know, they get their sports car and they show up in school.
00:45:19.000And everyone is, like, oohing and aahing.
00:45:26.000You know, you just happened to be born there, you know?
00:45:28.000Like, it wasn't like you laser-targeted from the Stork army and decided to go to that house rather than some other place, you know?
00:45:34.000Like, you're not a guided missile of wise prenatal aiming.
00:45:39.000And so I... We all have that, you know, and it's true.
00:45:42.000People who are born pretty or people who are born rich or, you know, people, guys sometimes who are just born tall or you got good athletics or, you know, like I was told when I was a kid, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. You know, like I just wasn't trying hard enough.
00:46:16.000Because that gives you a lot of humility.
00:46:18.000Like, okay, I was born with a fairly good brain and fairly good language center.
00:46:22.000I try to use that for as much good as I can, but with all the humility of knowing that You know, I mean, if I'd been hit the wrong way with a ball when I was a kid, I'd be a whole different person.
00:46:32.000If I'd been born, as you said, you know, different race, different country, different culture.
00:46:37.000I mean, you know, not a lot of female playwrights in Iran, you know, because it's just bad luck.
00:46:41.000Sorry, you know, you really drew the short straw.
00:47:01.000The best predictor for the growth of empathy in a human being is the close presence of a father.
00:47:07.000This is something that's kind of unknown because we all think that moms are about the nurturing and the emotional development and so on.
00:47:14.000But statistically, you know, outside Unstructured play plus the presence of a dad is the biggest thing in developing empathy.
00:47:21.000You take fathers out of the equation in society, this is why sociopathy has doubled over the last 15 years.
00:47:27.000This is basically why we have a welfare state as the destruction of the family.
00:47:30.000It's not a welfare state, it's a single mother state.
00:47:32.000It's all making up for not having a provider.
00:47:34.000Well, the problem with phrasing it like that, though, is you say that the issue is single mothers, but the issue is really that the father isn't around.
00:47:41.000Whether or not it was the mother's fault, the father's fault, whoever's fault it was that that relationship didn't work out, whether it's mutual or one person has the majority of the blame, it's that the family's broken up.
00:47:52.000It's not that the single mom, it's just that the family's broken up.
00:47:55.000I think we're about the same age, is that right?
00:50:04.000I think that ultimately it boils down to once you finally meet each other, do you like each other?
00:50:10.000And if the woman likes the man as much as the man likes the woman, it works out.
00:50:13.000And if they don't, then it becomes this weird balance of power, this weird shifting sort of a thing.
00:50:18.000But I think there's a lot of men that don't want in a relationship and they end it.
00:50:22.000Or, you know, they pursue and they end it.
00:50:24.000I think it's probably—I don't want to be a 50-50.
00:50:27.000I don't want to give you a statistic, but I would say there's a good number of men who end relationships and a good number of women who end relationships.
00:50:34.000To put all the power on the women's side, I think it's— Well, not all, of course.
00:50:40.000So statistically, it depends on how you measure it, but 70 to 80 percent of marriages are ended by women.
00:50:46.000Is that true, or is it that men are so fucking douchey that the women have no choice?
00:50:51.000That the men have given up a long time ago, and they just don't want to fucking bother going to the court, so just shut the fuck up, I'm gonna go out, and they shut the door, and then the woman calls the lawyer, and well, the woman ended that relationship.
00:51:04.000Just one person decided to make the call to the lawyer, but did the guy already give up to the point where he was just treating her like shit, hoping she would leave?
00:51:11.000That's like the old Sam Kinison joke about marriage.
00:51:14.000He goes, you know, he goes, I don't like to break up with women, so what I do is I just stay up all night and do coke for four or five days.
00:51:22.000I come home drunk and smelling like pussy until you get to a point where she leaves you.
00:51:28.000She leaves you because you're falling apart.
00:52:00.000You don't think men want to protect women?
00:52:01.000They want to protect the ones that they love, but the reason why so many women get sexually assaulted isn't because so many men want to protect them.
00:53:18.000A bunch of football players got together, high school football players, got some underage girl drunk, raped her, and then the guys went to jail and they just got out.
00:53:32.000If it was a bunch of women who raped a guy, they got him drunk and sucked his dick for an hour and a half, everyone would be laughing about it, okay?
00:53:38.000It's a sexual act that happens to a woman who can't control herself, and then you find out that it's a football player group, a group of giant athletes, a group of super strong men who obviously could have physically dominated her as well.
00:53:52.000If you simply reverse the sexes, it becomes a comedy.
00:53:55.000If it's some nerd who gets too drunk in a sorority and they all fuck him for three or four hours and take pictures of his penis, it's a comedy.
00:54:20.000I think I would certainly, if I was seeing a woman that was being physically assaulted or something, I would absolutely risk my health to help her.
00:54:26.000I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't, especially if I cared about her.
00:54:34.000I know that I have some preparation in that area, which is a very terrifying thing for people who don't.
00:54:41.000I've seen people involved in physical altercations who don't know how to defend themselves, and it becomes like you're facing a werewolf.
00:54:47.000It becomes like the most horrific thing in the world, because you're going to get slaughtered, and you know you're going to get slaughtered.
00:56:50.000If you know someone like that, you know that it is possible for a woman to do it to a man, just like it's possible for a man to do it with a woman.
00:56:57.000There's weapons, ladies and gentlemen.
00:57:01.000And by the way, there's good and bad in that.
00:57:05.000The good in that is that you can defend yourself against a man.
00:57:09.000If you're a woman and you're physically weak but you have a gun, you can say, get the fuck out of my house and the guy has to run away because you have a gun.
00:57:26.000It's all just shitty people and shitty circumstances and a gigantic past of momentum of terrible decision making that's led you to this really unstable current state that you find yourself in.
00:57:41.000You know, I mean, I believe you and I discussed this the last time we talked, but the amount of fucking school shooters that are on antidepressants, like causation does not, you know, people want to pretend there's not like a relation between those two.
00:57:55.000The FDA has black warning, the strongest warning labels on this stuff.
00:58:00.000Causes suicidal ideation, causes homicidal rage, causes, I mean...
00:58:43.000Just getting around better people, having a better relationship, being a friendlier person, trying to exercise the stress out of your life both mentally and physically.
00:58:54.000And then let's see what kind of emotional and psychological state you're in.
00:59:04.000Really have a big impact in what kind of medication we subscribe to people.
00:59:08.000I think it should have a massive impact.
00:59:10.000And if you find someone and the person is eating fucking donuts all day, and they sleep four hours a night, and they're constantly drinking Red Bulls, and they're depressed.
00:59:21.000Or they're a smart person underachieving in some dead-end job, and they don't have people around them saying, listen, man, you've got more to offer the world.
00:59:28.000Let's just find a way to get you out of the hamster wheel and get you on some flat track.
00:59:31.000Dead-end jobs, dead-end lives, dead-end relationships are almost just as bad as some physical ailment.
00:59:38.000I mean, they literally do suck the fucking life out of you.
00:59:41.000We've all experienced it to some degree if we're lucky because it makes us appreciate the good times when you do experience something along those lines.
00:59:49.000But I think that, man, you've got to really deal with that first before anything else.
00:59:54.000And there's too many people in this world That want a pill.
01:00:50.000I think that we are getting, dare I use the hackneyed Victorian term, more virtuous, better in our relationships.
01:00:57.000You know, there's an awareness of beating and emotional abuse and all.
01:00:59.000I think that the standards are kind of raising, right?
01:01:02.000And, you know, Dr. Phil is like the number one daytime show and he talks a lot about, you know, how to be Reasonably decent human beings in relationships, which is sad that he has to keep saying that, you know, like, stop screaming at each other, stop hitting each other, stop doing drugs, stop yelling at the children.
01:01:15.000If you've got to go to Dr. Phil to figure out your fucking life, you're way behind the ball.
01:01:20.000There's a lot of other shit you need to cover.
01:01:22.000Right, but so I think a lot of that stuff has been going really well, but I think there's a lot of stuff that is not going so well.
01:01:29.000I mean, a lot of, you know, just basic things.
01:01:32.000You were talking the other day about breastfeeding.
01:01:34.000I remember you were looking up on the...
01:02:10.000There's a lot of studies out there that say that sort of personality traits go like 50% genetic and maybe they can get 0% to 10% is the parents.
01:02:19.000And the rest of it is kind of cultural and so on, right?
01:02:21.000And, you know, I'm not going to argue with the science.
01:02:24.000But I will say that I think that parents don't have really that much involvement in kids' lives from a guidance standpoint that much anymore.
01:02:35.000I read the statistic the other day that said the average dad has like 20 minutes of conversation with his children every week.
01:03:22.000And there's a lot of little guidance things that happen during the week about how to modify where they're going, how to help them understand sharing or empathy or understanding how to do win-win negotiations rather than just focus on what they want, which is natural for little kids.
01:03:36.000But it's all these tiny little corrections that are scattered throughout the week.
01:03:39.000You don't know when they're going to be, but you have to kind of be around for them.
01:03:42.000And I think that we don't really have much opportunity for modern parents to really stay involved.
01:03:50.000Like we're kind of designed as a species to be around our parents.
01:03:53.000You know, they were there with the fields.
01:07:25.000It's like, now you know how Lucifer felt.
01:07:28.000Anyway, so she's got this great song, which goes basically, Lucifer was right, Lucifer was right, you know, from the songs.
01:07:37.000And I'm just waiting, because, you know, in Canada, there's some homeschooling, which is kind of, well, aren't schooling what we're doing, but a lot of them are Christians, right?
01:07:43.000So we're going to, at some point, be around a bunch of Christian kids, and she's going to break into this song, and I'm looking forward to that moment of trying to explain that story.
01:07:52.000Maybe she's referring to a Beatles song.
01:07:54.000I completely bail on her at that point.
01:07:55.000I don't know where she gets this from.
01:07:56.000Well, the real issue is you're going to have to mingle with those Christian parents.
01:07:59.000The real issue when you have children, besides raising the children, which is, of course, the primary one, teaching them and everything, is dealing with these other parents and seeing...
01:08:09.000It's really weird when I see people with their kids, see how little they interact with their kids, see how non-appreciative they are of their kids, how they're always distracted.
01:08:21.000Oh, it's the ring of cell phones around the playground.
01:08:24.000Throw your cell phone, go into stupid McDonald's tubes and go play with your kids.
01:08:29.000I know a woman who's a psychologist, and she picks up her kid, and she's on her phone while she's picking the kid up.
01:08:34.000The kid's trying to talk to her about school, and she's like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and she's texting.
01:08:39.000The kid was gone for five hours, and when you're picking him up, you're texting.
01:08:49.000We get so used to the kid being around, and we get so used to our own free time.
01:08:54.000Oh, my daughter's really good at that.
01:08:55.000Sorry, Indra, but she's great because, you know, like I'm trying to teach her eye contact, right?
01:08:59.000Because, you know, when she's a kid, you know, I don't know if they can't focus when they look at you, but they tell stories like they're just watching the biggest disco light show on the planet and you're just like some leaf or something.
01:09:08.000And so I tried to remind her, you know, eye contact when we're talking that kind of stuff, right?
01:09:13.000So the other day, of course, and, you know, I try.
01:09:15.000Oh, Joe, I try, you know, and I, you know, but every now and then, like I get donations.
01:09:18.000My whole show is just donations, right?
01:09:21.000And so, you know, when a donation comes in, it's like, ooh, kibble!
01:09:23.000You know, like, I'm like the rat with the pellet, you know, like, ooh, kibble, what did I get?
01:09:26.000And I got this little ka-ching noise that comes in because I'm four.
01:09:29.000Anyway, so, you know, the ka-ching noise come in, my daughter was telling me something really important for her and all that, and yeah, she's great.
01:09:36.000She's like four, and she's like, Daddy...
01:09:45.000Yeah, it's fascinating to watch their little brains develop, isn't it?
01:09:47.000And watch the way they interact with each other and how they see the world and realize that this is how a person is shaped.
01:09:53.000And this is the number one problem that we have as a race is that we don't respect this process.
01:09:58.000And that we also don't respect this process in strangers, especially people that we know are fucked.
01:10:03.000People in bad neighborhoods, people in bad circumstances, people in abusive families.
01:10:08.000We know they're fucked, and we don't do anything to stop it.
01:10:11.000One thing that I keep harping on is that If we have a resource, whether it's oil or gold, we protect that resource and we set up laws and we attach a value to it.
01:10:23.000But our number one resource for sure is human beings.
01:10:26.000We have created all that you see, whether it's laptops or buildings or cars.
01:10:32.000The best way to ensure that that continues to go on is to have less losers in the world.
01:10:38.000The best way to have less losers is help out kids, educate kids, get on the ball with them very early, and do something as a society to protect them primary.
01:10:47.000Before we go into wars, before we go into all this stupid shit that we do to spying on people's fucking emails and looking into their cell phone record, before you do any of that, how about you protect kids first?
01:12:54.000No, and I come out of the sort of libertarian world, right?
01:12:57.000So, I mean, I'm an anarchist, but I come out of the libertarian world.
01:13:01.000And libertarians very much, as we talked about, non-aggression principle and so on.
01:13:04.000And I've been fighting this battle in the libertarian world and in other worlds as well around, you know, things to me as basic as spanking, right?
01:14:09.000I think central banking is a monstrous cancer in the eyeball of society.
01:14:13.000I can't really do much about it other than rant and rave about it.
01:14:16.000But what we can do is, you know, do some basics like stop hitting kids.
01:14:20.000You know, that to me is a very fundamental thing.
01:14:21.000And in the libertarian community, that's a challenge.
01:14:24.000A lot of religious conservatives in the libertarian community, as you know, like on the right among Republicans, there tend to be more religious people on the left as secularists, less religious people, but more socialists and so on.
01:14:35.000And it is really tough, you know, to just get that basic thing across.
01:14:40.000And we hit kids and we've all, I don't know, if you're out there, you see bad parenting sometimes when you're out and you actually, and I'll usually say something to the parents because I don't want my, A, I think it's the right thing to do.
01:15:20.000You know, I read this article recently on my message board.
01:15:23.000I don't have it in front of me, so I apologize to whoever posted it.
01:15:26.000But it was about a man who got stuck in the financial system of divorce, and it was from his perspective.
01:15:32.000He committed suicide, lit himself on fire.
01:15:34.000I started reading his perspective, and they came to his house, and he had his initial issue because he slapped his daughter in the mouth so hard that her mouth was bleeding.
01:15:45.000And he did it because she was licking his hand.
01:15:48.000She kept licking his hand, so he slapped her in the mouth until her mouth was...
01:15:51.000And then everything I... I stopped reading right there.
01:15:53.000I'm like, I don't want to know this guy.
01:15:56.000I'm sad that he was so fucked up that he committed suicide.
01:15:59.000But if I saw a guy slap his daughter in the face because she, you know, was licking his hand, I would have to really suppress my urge to strangle him.
01:16:15.000Not only that, it's fundamentally the most fucked up kind of violence because you're doing it to a developing human being who you allegedly love.
01:16:25.000You're teaching them that violence is a part of life by the people that they respect the most and that it can be done to you at any time when you don't agree with whatever fucking guidelines and rules they've set up.
01:18:59.000It's just weird that we don't even think of doing that.
01:19:03.000Well, I think your perspective is very unique in the fact that you are a stay-at-home dad and you do have the resources to be able to do that.
01:19:10.000It's really hard for a lot of people, and that's what you were talking about before.
01:19:19.000I don't have a regular life, but I've dabbled in regular life.
01:19:22.000I've had jobs that take me away for a long period of time during the day, and I can only imagine what kind of energy you have to devote to a kid if the mother, both the mother and the father, Both leave the house all day long, work an eight-hour day, and then come home.
01:19:42.000How much focus are you putting on that kid during the day?
01:19:45.000And we have this, again, a couple more stats.
01:19:48.000We have this idea that the moms have to be there and the dads can be there.
01:19:53.000But a study conducted by Dr. Kyle Pruitt found that infants between 7 and 30 months respond more favorably to being picked up by their fathers.
01:20:01.000He also found a father's parenting style is beneficial for a child's physical, cognitive, and emotional and behavioral development.
01:20:07.000Mothers tend to reassure toddlers when they become frustrated, while fathers encourage them to manage their frustration.
01:20:12.000My daughter is like this, so she's learning to do all these things.
01:20:14.000And most of her friends are older because, you know, we're nothing like youngest parents on the block.
01:20:18.000And so a lot of her friends can do stuff better than she can.
01:20:44.000Whereas dads have a little bit more objectivity around that.
01:20:47.000A longer-term study that this guy did proved that a father's active involvement with his kids from birth to adolescence promotes greater emotional balance, stronger curiosity, a stronger sense of self-assurance.
01:20:57.000Additional studies, during the first five years of a child's life, the father's role is more influential than the mother's.
01:21:02.000In how the child learns to manage his or her body, navigate social circumstances, and play.
01:21:07.000And the last one is this is a 1996 study that I was referring to before by McGill University.
01:21:12.000The single most important childhood factor in developing empathy is paternal involvement in child care.
01:21:17.000The study further concluded that children who spend time alone bonding with their children more than twice per week brought up the most compassionate adults.
01:21:28.000Trevor Burrus It seems like a weird – all those statistics seem very odd.
01:21:31.000It's like how do you know what caused a person to have more empathy?
01:21:35.000How do you know what caused a person to be able to move better?
01:21:38.000I mean how do you – how do you prove that?
01:21:41.000Aaron Ross Powell Again, it's sort of a many-to-many relationship.
01:21:43.000So they ask the fathers, you know, how often were you involved and maybe they even measure them if it's sort of a live study and then they measure the compassion and then they measure a whole bunch of other things.
01:21:52.000And if the other things don't change the compassion measure but then the parental involvement is what moves the needle, Then they assume that that's close to causal.
01:21:59.000But isn't the issue also that parental involvement, like say if a father is involved a lot in the kid's life, he's also probably likely involved in the relationship with the wife, and maybe the wife would be more happy.
01:22:10.000The father and the wife would be more happy, and because of that, they would both be better parents.
01:22:15.000So it might not just be that the impact of having a man around does all these things and creates empathy.
01:22:20.000It might be the impact of having a successful family as well.
01:22:43.000But they were floating at one point and then they came out through the magic chamber.
01:22:49.000But I think, you know, I mean, my wife's skills as a parent are fantastic, but there are some differences between us, you know, and I don't know whether it's biological or whether it's just the way we're raised or whatever, but, you know, I encourage more risk-taking.
01:23:03.000I encourage, you know, if you fall off the horse, get back up on again kind of stuff, and I think that's just kind of a natural kind of difference, and I'm also more encouraging of, you know, my daughter is Like crazy friendly.
01:23:14.000I keep thinking she's going to go up to someone, sometimes an unfriendly world, like a cheese up to a grater, you know, and just kind of get shredded because, you know, we go places and she just goes up to kids and says, Hi, would you like to be friends?
01:23:29.000If everybody was on ecstasy, that's how we would interact with each other.
01:23:32.000And that was one of the things that we got a little bit off topic, but one of the things that I wanted to complete this thought on when you were talking about antidepressants and we were talking about the good and the bad of them.
01:23:44.000I think right now, one of the issues that we have with this idea of manipulating human neurochemistry is that it's not really done.
01:23:54.000It's not something like dyeing your hair.
01:23:57.000Like if your hair is gray and you want to have black hair, you simply go to the market and you buy some hair color and you put it in your hair and now your hair is black.
01:24:11.000Yeah, but I think we do have the potential, just like we have mastered virtually every other aspect of our world that we live in, whether it's high-speed communication or the ability to, you know, combustion engines, lithium-ion batteries.
01:24:25.000One day they're going to figure out how to engineer consciousness, and you have this...
01:24:28.000You have this opportunity to take a pill or get a shot or whatever and you have ultimate clarity and you fucking think much better and you're a better person.
01:24:37.000I keep swinging my hands through the air and knocking shit onto my keyboard.
01:24:41.000I am literally retarded when it comes to that.
01:24:44.000I'm looking for something to hand you.
01:25:28.000I think that we know that to a large degree.
01:25:30.000With our current state of consciousness.
01:25:32.000What I'm saying is if we engineered it past this ape-monkey paradigm that we live in right now, and boom, with one shot, they give you this Buddha thing.
01:25:54.000I would want to know what the results were.
01:25:56.000Look, if the entire world took it and then we would engineer consciousness past this stage where we are now and completely restructure society to have no evil, no problems, we think that we have to have a yang to have a yin, and in our current state we do.
01:26:58.000You think we have it now, the ability to engineer consciousness?
01:27:01.000Yeah, I mean, neuroplasticity and focusing on what I would argue is the old Aristotelian idea that we look for something called eudomania or happiness.
01:27:11.000And happiness is, according to Aristotle, happiness is the one thing we seek for its own sake, right?
01:28:58.000Do you think in sort of the sum total, you know that thing you go in front of St. Peter at the end of your life and he tallies up sort of the good and bad?
01:29:05.000How is your conscience as far as that goes?
01:29:07.000Well, fortunately, I engage in not so frequent but quite strong psychedelic activities.
01:29:15.000Like roller coasters with your eyes closed?
01:30:15.000As we talked about before, I think you do a lot of good in the world.
01:30:17.000You bring a lot of, I think, good thinkers to people's attention, hopefully myself included.
01:30:20.000I think that through your comedies we talked about before, I think you give people a very empathetic relationship to their own physicality and bring sort of some of the secret stuff in people's lives into the open and have them have good humor about it.
01:30:31.000So, I think you do a lot of good and I think that's, would you say that you're quite happy?
01:30:37.000And I think that that good, though, is a very reciprocal, it's a very even relationship between audience and me.
01:30:44.000I think I easily get as much out of this podcast as the people who listen to it do.
01:30:49.000And I think that's one of the reasons why it's so harmonious and one of the reasons why it's so easy to do.
01:30:53.000And also one of the reasons why the relationship that I have with the audience when I meet them is like I think they know that I'm as happy about all this as they are and the people that it's benefited their lives and they've been exposed to all these different people like yourself and other interesting people that I've had on the show.
01:31:09.000I have also been exposed to those people, been exposed to you, been exposed to whether it's Sam Hatteras or Amit Goswami, the theoretical physicist, or all these different fascinating people that I've had on the podcast.
01:31:21.000Graham Hancock, Ad Nauseam, Joey Diaz.
01:31:23.000All these people have made my life a more fascinating life, for sure.
01:31:28.000It's been a completely mutual beneficial situation.
01:31:31.000So when you say you've done a lot of good, well, it's done a lot of good for me.
01:32:42.000There's some study on it, like how many animals get ground up in those machines that they use to churn up crops and how much displacement they do to the natural habitat of certain animals when you plant crops.
01:32:58.000It's ideal if you can grow your own stuff.
01:33:00.000If you can grow your own stuff and you want to be a vegan, you want to have the smallest footprint possible, that's the way to do it.
01:33:06.000Grow your own stuff and make sure that you don't harm anything in the cultivation of your fruits and vegetables.
01:33:14.000But if you don't, boy, you're still participating, whether you believe it or not, you're participating.
01:33:23.000And again, if you can do less harm, I think that's great.
01:33:26.000After high school, I wanted some money for school.
01:33:28.000I ended up going up to work in northern Ontario, like past the tree line where you had to fly in to do claim staking and gold panning and all that kind of stuff.
01:33:38.000You know, when you're really in Mother Nature, and this was like, you know, minus 50 degree weather in a tent for months, I mean, when you're really in Mother Nature, you realize she's kind of a bitch.
01:33:49.000She doesn't give a fuck about you, and she'll let you freeze to death.
01:33:51.000Like, she'll just, you know, a fucking tree will fall on your head, and that's it for you.
01:33:54.000I mean, you know, it's really, you know, one time we got snowed in.
01:33:59.000Like, we couldn't get the plane in with supplies.
01:34:02.000And you realize, like, you're looking at a box of food, and you're like, you know, when we're out of this, it's getting all kinds of, like, stuck on a mountain looking at people.
01:34:10.000I actually was thinking, you know, you see those, these are Looney Tunes cartoons, so again, for your younger audience members, please ask your parents.
01:34:17.000You know, like, some guy's really hungry, and he looks across at some other guy, and he turns into, like, this steaming chicken wing or something like that.
01:34:34.000When things get ugly, people do tend to start leaning towards survival.
01:34:40.000Yeah, and a lot of times we like nature because we are a comfortable distance from it.
01:34:45.000You know, like we've got our air conditioning, we've got our antibiotics, we've got, you know, the people in the Middle Ages, you know, they were really close to nature and we died like flies.
01:34:53.000You know, like childbirth was fatal to like half the women.
01:34:57.000How about the whole, every fucking story has a big bad wolf in it.
01:35:00.000And the reason being is that wolves were fucking killing people on a regular basis.
01:35:04.000Until people figured out firearms, wolves were killing people like crazy.
01:35:09.000It was a really common thing for people to get killed by wolves.
01:35:12.000You know, one stupid ass flea comes across in a rat from the Middle East and suddenly a third of Europe is dying from the Black Death.
01:35:19.000I mean, nature is great to visit, but it's not a fucking Ansel Adams poster.
01:35:25.000I mean, she is a sociopathic bitch who will wipe you out as soon as look at you.
01:35:28.000There's a story from 1450 that I've told on the podcast once before, but in this line of thinking.
01:35:36.000There's a series of murders in Paris in 1450 by wolves.
01:35:47.000Wolves killed 40 fucking people in Paris in 1450. And we are no different to them than a caribou or anything else that they can eat.
01:35:57.000It's just when we have protected ourselves completely...
01:36:00.000With cities and cars and guns and all these things, then it doesn't become an issue and then we look at them and like, oh, beautiful nature.
01:36:08.000But that beautiful nature gives zero fucks about you and will absolutely eat your baby in front of you.
01:36:14.000They have no problem with it, whether it's a fox.
01:36:16.000In London, they actually have had issues recently where foxes have broken into children's bedrooms and attacked the children while they're sleeping.
01:37:52.000But now they realize that what happens is the environment that Komodo dragons live in is so hot and tropical and that a lot of times they're biting into water buffalo and all these different things that are exposed to moisture.
01:38:02.000And it's just the septic nature of their environment because water buffaloes piss and shit in the water that they live in.
01:38:07.000And then when this Komodo dragon bites them, he opens up their flesh and the blood gets exposed to all the toxins.
01:38:13.000And they just sit in the teeth waiting for whatever the next bite.
01:38:23.000One of them, though, bit Sharon Stone's husband on the foot, this dumb fuck.
01:38:28.000He got into a cage with a Komodo dragon, and he had white socks on, and the thing thought his foot was a rabbit, so it clamped down on his foot and wouldn't let go, and he almost lost his foot.
01:39:06.000You know, like where they got rid of the predators in Australia, I think it was, and then basically the rabbits just ate the entire continent.
01:39:13.000So if there's some balance in nature thing, I think that's fine, but...
01:39:18.000I am very, very glad to not be around wild animals.
01:39:23.000You know, like when I was working up north, we had to be armed because, I mean, there are bears who might not have had a meal in like a month.
01:40:06.000I got Yellowstone confused with Yosemite and we were talking about bear deaths.
01:40:09.000I'm like, man, bears have fucking died in Yosemite, right?
01:40:12.000And he was like, no, no bears have died.
01:40:15.000I didn't know that there's two different...
01:40:17.000In my head, Yellowstone and Yosemite became the same thing because two people over the last couple of years were killed in Yellowstone by grizzlies and just fucking hikers.
01:40:27.000Just people wandering around and you run into a bear in the wrong situation and That is a giant 1,800-pound monster, or 1,200-pound, or 800-pound, whatever the fuck it is.
01:42:01.000But the problem is then they can't identify you with dental records because your teeth are sprayed out all over the forest.
01:42:07.000So stuff like that gives you a pretty healthy appreciation for the bears killed dogs near the camp and stuff.
01:42:14.000It's seriously dangerous stuff out there.
01:42:17.000I'm very happy to live in a civilized area where I can go visit nature, and nature is absolutely beautiful when it is not trying to kill you.
01:42:43.000That taking your leg off is a real thing.
01:42:45.000That's something you have to think about when you go swimming anywhere in the world where there's sharks.
01:42:49.000You know, you might think that it's not going to happen to you because it hasn't happened to that guy or that guy or this person on the surfboard over there.
01:43:00.000It's like, if you go into the woods, the idea that somehow or another these millions of sharks are going to avoid you, likely yes, because there's so much real estate.
01:43:09.000But it's like, if we knew that werewolves were real, but there was only one of them, and it was out in the woods, how often would you go in the woods?
01:43:16.000When it was a full moon, you would never fucking go in the woods.
01:43:19.000Because you'd go, fuck, what if I picked the wrong night in the wrong place and I get out there and the wolfman is right there and he eats me?
01:43:25.000Well, the fucking sharks are sharks all day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
01:43:32.000The wolfman is only the wolfman once a month.
01:43:34.000And you know that we're not that terrified of nature because all the kids' toys are like cute predators.
01:43:40.000You know that old song, if you go down to the woods tonight, you're in for a big surprise?
01:43:45.000Because the teddy bears are having a picnic.
01:44:03.000Now that there's no bears around, they can be cute and cuddly and you can have the Lion King and all of that because nobody's around lions.
01:44:09.000But in Africa, people still get regularly eaten by lions.
01:44:12.000I bet you there are not a lot of lion toys lying around that are cute and cuddly.
01:44:58.000One tiger killed three men in a boat of five, swam out to the boat, killed a man, dragged him back to the water, to the beach, jumped back in the water, killed another guy, and did it three times before he either got bored or they got away from him.
01:45:46.000But the real question is, if we are going to engineer that, what are we going to do with the natural world?
01:45:54.000What are we going to do with the bears and the tigers and the crocodiles?
01:45:57.000Well, I mean, of course, the natural human predators.
01:46:00.000You know, there's this weird idea, and I think it comes out of religion that...
01:46:03.000I mean, there's a couple of things that are problematic...
01:46:07.000Which come out of religion, and some of them are obviously kind of obvious, but some of them I think are more subtle.
01:46:11.000The issue of the soul, to me, is always really interesting.
01:46:14.000In the religious idea, and not all religions, but a lot of religions, you have this eternal part of you called the soul, which is uncorruptible.
01:46:23.000And so when they say that he's a bad guy but if you reach through, if you connect with him, there's good in him somewhere and all that kind of stuff.
01:46:31.000I think that's a really dangerous idea and it scientifically seems to be entirely false.
01:46:36.000People who are sociopaths don't get better.
01:46:57.000And I mean, it's fairly easy to create them if you really traumatize a whole lot of kids.
01:47:03.000A lot of them came out of Ceausescu's Romania because he banned abortion.
01:47:08.000And a lot of women who would otherwise have had abortions put these kids into these orphanages where they were fed and taken care of, but nobody ever touched them.
01:47:15.000And then I think it was in France, when this came out, a whole bunch of French families adopted these Romanian orphanages' kids, and they were strangling their cats, and they were throwing their other kids out of windows and stuff, and they were just...
01:48:10.000And you can make them or deny them in monkeys very easily, right?
01:48:14.000I mean, if you just give them all the food and drink that they need, but you just give them like a simulated mom, like that doesn't actually interact with them and you isolate them and We're good to go.
01:48:39.000If you stick your tongue out at a baby, it will stick its tongue out back at you, which is a completely freaky thing to do when you think about it.
01:48:46.000They don't know that you have the same.
01:48:48.000So if you develop mirror neurons, then you won't get sociopathy because you'll have empathy, right?
01:48:53.000And people who spank fundamentally are acting against empathy and they're teaching their children to act against empathy because you're doing exactly what your child desperately does not want you to do.
01:49:01.000And so you're really screwing with empathy and so on.
01:49:05.000And so the development of – the non-development of mirror neurons appears to be something that cannot be corrected later in life.
01:49:12.000It's just this – it's like if you don't get exposed to language between like two and five, you just never really learn it.
01:49:19.000And this is why when I talk about fixing the world or having a paradise on earth, which relative to what we have now I think we can have, it's a multigenerational process because if the kids are screwed up that early, it appears to be irreversible and all you can do is manage the symptoms, you know, through – Prison or whatever it is.
01:49:36.000But these human predators, it's not in the religious mindset where there's a soul that there's someone good you can get into that you can connect with is biologically completely, it seems to be again, I'm no expert, it seems to be completely incorrect.
01:49:50.000It's like saying if you've got lung cancer throughout your lungs, that there's a healthy ghost lung that you just have to connect with to breathe.
01:49:58.000They're There's no healthy backup personality or brain called the soul, but this idea that you can reach through to the most corrupted and destroyed people and somehow reawaken their humanity, which is necessary for religion.
01:50:15.000I think it's really a dangerous thing because it lets us – if you have compassion for sociopaths, they use it to manipulate and control you.
01:50:22.000And so it's almost like if you're a sociopath, you'd love to invent the idea of a soul so that people will try and help you and then you can manipulate and control them.
01:50:30.000Whereas if you recognize that they're predators, then you just steer clear of them.
01:51:11.000Like a torturer knows what hurts you and likes it.
01:51:15.000And they've done actually a bunch of studies where they show people And this I find it's so incomprehensible.
01:51:22.000I try and sort of get it because having empathy for non-empathetic people is a tough thing.
01:51:25.000I think it's a necessary process to go through for self-protection and I think for the betterment of the world.
01:51:29.000So there are these studies where they sort of hook up these electrodes to people's brains that can measure what's going on in their brains.
01:51:36.000And they show intentional cruelty films.
01:51:39.000Like they show like no cruelty and then accidental cruelty, like guy steps on a rake or whatever, right?
01:51:44.000And then they show intentional cruelty.
01:51:46.000Like a guy pretending – like stapling another guy's hand or something like that.
01:51:49.000And when people see – some people see the intentional cruelty, the same happy centers related to orgasm, related to just feelings of intense bliss show up because this is sadism, taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
01:52:05.000I mean that is – that's anti-empathy.
01:52:07.000That's like, well, I know that you're attached to your children, so I'm going to use your attachment to your children to control and bully you or whatever it is, like you kidnap some guy's kids or whatever.
01:52:16.000And this aspect of human predation is really important.
01:52:21.000We are a whole ecosystem of predator and prey.
01:52:24.000And our lack of ability to differentiate between predator and prey in the human species, I think, is one of the major roots of hierarchical brutalities and wars and all of this kind of stuff.
01:52:35.000And I think we really need to throw away the idea of the eternal good within us and recognize that the most dangerous species to human beings are other human beings by far.
01:52:45.000I mean, just governments alone in the 20th century murdered, not even including war, governments murdered 250-plus million people.
01:52:53.000They can't even get it down to within 10 million people.
01:52:55.000That's a quarter of a billion people murdered just by one human institution populated by sociopaths.
01:53:01.000These are incredibly dangerous people.
01:53:03.000We're talking about bears and stuff and that's very important but the most important and most dangerous predators are human beings and we don't really have a good way of identifying them other than they're on the ballot.
01:53:13.000Oh, sorry, little anarchist propaganda there.
01:53:15.000Could you imagine if you had like a bunch of bears that were like really cool?
01:53:35.000We really got it as a species up our like radar for this kind of stuff.
01:53:39.000Because imagine if we could see these guys.
01:53:42.000Like if they had some disco ball or whatever.
01:53:44.000A turkey tester pops up when they're psycho.
01:53:46.000And then it'd be like, okay, well, here's someone I'm not going to lend money to or be friends with or have kids with or, you know, we could, this gene or whatever, even if it's genetic, we could eliminate that within a generation or two.
01:53:56.000But as long as, and of course, if they're physically attractive or wealthy or powerful as well, I mean, they're just, it's like, Ambrosia for a lot of people, right?
01:54:04.000Anyway, so this is sort of a pet thing of mine.
01:54:06.000It's just really helped people to understand that there's really bad people out there.
01:54:10.000And even if we say they don't have free will, so what?
01:54:14.000We don't say that bears are morally responsible for eating people, but we don't hang out with them, right?
01:54:18.000Well, I don't buy that, the free will thing.
01:54:21.000It's just like, how much free will do you have?
01:54:22.000How much decision-making does your consciousness have?
01:54:24.000If you believe you don't have free will, guess what?
01:54:26.000But then there's a bunch of people – well, there's factors that go into every decision that you make and those factors are genetic and environmental and this and that and that.
01:54:34.000And if you factor it all together, it's not about free will.
01:55:22.000We compare a proposed action to a moral standard or a moral ideal or something.
01:55:26.000That's the one thing we can do that nothing else in the universe that we know of seems to be able to do.
01:55:32.000To compare a proposed action – like, I mean, dogs propose an action.
01:55:36.000They all get together and they all – birds all fly in one direction or another.
01:55:40.000But they don't compare it to an ideal.
01:55:43.000And this comparing things to an ideal, I think, is the fundamental aspect of – We're good to go.
01:56:17.000So we're constantly comparing things to an ideal standard, and I think that is really the essence of choice that we have.
01:56:23.000And even if it's not an ideal standard, we're being inspired by what we deem to be successful behavior, whether it's emotionally successful, socially successful, whatever, career, athletics, whatever it is.
01:56:35.000We gain some sort of inspiration from that that also enhances our ability to perform the same actions.
01:56:57.000I think there's a lot going on when it becomes...
01:57:00.000When you try to figure out what it is that makes a person act the way they act.
01:57:04.000We could put you in a situation and something could occur with your daughter, for say, and you would be like, well...
01:57:11.000Let me explain to you what happened, and let me explain to you how I've made these same mistakes myself, and this is what I learned from it.
01:57:16.000Or you could put a different person in front of a similar four-year-old kid, and that person's going, what did I tell you?
01:57:51.000If she's playing on the iPad and we're trying to have a conversation, I say, can you turn that off while we chat because I don't want you to be distracted.
01:58:19.000People always – they say, well, you know, but kids these days are spankless and they're running wild and they're having lipstick parties and they're, you know, hooking up and they have no – so they genuinely believe, well, if I don't hit my kids, it's going to be really bad.
01:58:31.000And I think that our futures are fundamentally written by our deepest values, by that which we consider the good.
01:58:38.000What your values or your virtues are will be your future, like a train track.
01:58:42.000Now, we can't change – The effects of our ethics, but we can decide which are valid or invalid ethics.
01:58:50.000So I make the case that, you know, don't hit your kids, non-aggression principle, reasoning, better parenting, better child development, all the science behind it.
01:59:27.000When we can either choose to ignore that information, in which case we're just going to keep doing the same thing as history, like a hamster wheel, a revolving door of history, or we can evaluate new information and change our behavior according to some new ideal.
01:59:39.000That, I think, is the only choice we have.
01:59:40.000The people who argue against free will only ever argue with people, which is really interesting when you think about it because they say people are fundamentally indistinguishable from other complex systems like the weather.
01:59:51.000But you never see somebody arguing with the weather.
01:59:55.000You only ever see people debating or arguing with people.
01:59:58.000I had a guy call into my show recently who was telling me that he said, Steph, you're just like a computer.
02:00:02.000And I said, okay, well, why don't you hear?
02:00:34.000And I said, so you cannot say that people are just like everything else in the universe if you will only ever debate people.
02:00:40.000You have to accept that there's something fundamentally different with people if you will never debate anything else that you compare people to.
02:00:46.000And that's the challenge of the deterministic argument.
02:01:18.000But I don't debate with the TV. I know that the TV is going to – I mean there are idiots who yell at movies, but they don't imagine it's going to change it.
02:01:25.000But isn't that whole debate in and of itself – isn't that whole debate just an exchange of information and an exchange in a controlled system, the system of the human race?
02:01:33.000But you debate with someone to change their mind, right?
02:01:35.000Well, I think ultimately all human beings are trying to accelerate growth, whether it's financial growth, intellectual growth, technological innovation.
02:01:45.000I think we're constantly trying to grow – And expand things.
02:01:48.000We also fundamentally know that we are imperfect.
02:01:51.000So we will either argue our position or try to learn.
02:02:07.000Well, that is about two organisms inside of a system that agree upon a dictionary and a vocabulary and definitions for things.
02:02:17.000And they're arguing about whose path is a better path.
02:02:19.000But ultimately, all of them are trying to be better.
02:02:22.000All of them are trying to improve, and there's no real set guidelines for how to live correctly.
02:02:29.000No one can really prove to you that it's better to be an atheist than it is to be a Christian, or it's better to be a person who likes to exercise than it is to be a guy who sits on the couch.
02:02:38.000You sort of have to figure it all out for yourself.
02:02:41.000And along the way, you want to justify your own actions and your own decisions by arguing and by trying to debate.
02:02:49.000So, in a sense, like saying that humans only argue with humans, that doesn't really negate the idea that there is no free will.
02:02:57.000In fact, it might actually support it by showing the whole thing is just a system, and it is just a mathematical algorithm, and inside that algorithm is a thing called ego.
02:03:06.000And ego is the thing that wants you to be correct and wants you to learn and wants you to improve and wants you also to assert dominance and perhaps sexual preference over those around you by showing how clever you can turn a phrase and how easily you can diffuse someone and make them look foolish in front of the rest of the group.
02:03:23.000All these things are perhaps just more evidence that there is no free will.
02:03:27.000I mean, I'm obviously playing devil's advocate a bit here, but I think inside that controlled system, I think it is possible that that could be an argument.
02:03:37.000Let's go, because you said something that is really, really important that I would like to challenge.
02:03:57.000Look, I certainly can't say that you'll be happier being an atheist.
02:04:00.000Because let's say that they go into atheism, it's going to cause problems in their family relationships, it's going to cause problems in their community, it's going to cause problems in their church, and then they get hit by a bus.
02:04:11.000I have friends that were Mormons, sorry to interrupt you, but I have friends who were Mormons for the longest time, and then in their 40s they abandoned it.
02:04:18.000Penn Jillette writes about that, actually, in his most recent book, about meeting up with a bunch of Mormons and how they become atheists and just...
02:04:27.000He's a great guy who's very logical and very smart, and a lot of his questions and his discussions on these things have caused introspective thought in people that perhaps would have just gone along with the program if it wasn't for a guy like Penn.
02:04:48.000Nietzsche, a 19th century sort of philosopher, sort of guy who wrote great aphorisms, but he said that Socrates' basic argument was reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
02:05:00.000So if you want to be happy, you have to be virtuous.
02:05:04.000You have to have consistent principles, consistent principles.
02:05:08.000And there's some support in psychology for this in that if you have opposing ideas within your own mind, Or if you have feelings that say one thing but your intellect says another, then you are going to be unhappy.
02:05:23.000Or another way of putting it is to say that all psychological dysfunction results from unacknowledged suffering.
02:05:32.000And so, for instance, like, so some people, you know, they're beaten up by their parents, but they're told by their church, honor thy mother and thy father.
02:05:39.000So they've got this idea, this ideal, honor thy mother and thy father, but they have an emotional response of outrage at having been abused or neglected or whatever.
02:05:50.000You've got an ideal that tells you one thing in your heart and your monkey spleen telling you something else, that if you aggress against an animal, it's going to react in a negative or hostile way.
02:06:00.000And so when you have contradictions in your mind, that is going to produce dysfunction in your life, unhappiness in your life.
02:06:08.000And so one of the purposes of philosophy...
02:06:11.000Is to say, okay, we've got some basic principles.
02:06:13.000Let's keep rolling them forward and try and live as consistently as possible.
02:06:17.000Like if we used opposite words for things half the time, it would be impossible to communicate.
02:06:23.000We have to have consistency in our language to a large degree, not perfectly, of course.
02:06:27.000We have to have consistency in our language to be good at communicating, to have any possibility of communicating effectively.
02:06:55.000And in the same way, if you have a consistent methodology for examining the universe, like science, you're going to get a lot further than reading chicken entrails or praying to some non-existent deity.
02:07:06.000You're actually going to have a way of organizing your knowledge about the world to create computers and rocket ships and cars and all that kind of stuff.
02:07:14.000And so the idea is that the more consistent you're thinking, the greater chance you have for happiness.
02:07:19.000Now, that doesn't always mean that you'll achieve it because if you're- It's a great statement though, the way you're saying it, the greater chance you'll have for happiness.
02:07:26.000Nobody can guarantee anyone happiness, right?
02:07:28.000And in fact, if you've grown up in an irrational culture, and culture sort of by definition is irrational because if it's not culture, it's science or math or logic or something like that.
02:07:40.000Then when you achieve the goal of reason and you start working out your beliefs from first principles and being good at philosophy puts you in a lot of conflict with people around you.
02:07:51.000And of course a lot of power structures fundamentally I think live or feed off unacknowledged contradictions, right?
02:07:59.000So for me to use force to take someone else's property is theft.
02:08:03.000For the government to do it is called taxation and considered a virtue.
02:08:06.000So there's all these contradictions and definitions that we have.
02:08:12.000We hit children, it's called discipline.
02:08:13.000We just redefine things all the time based upon emotional preferences and prior trauma.
02:08:18.000And what philosophy does is it says, well, we've got to resolve this stuff.
02:08:21.000We can't just have these little beliefs floating around unattached to each other.
02:08:25.000We need a consistent way of organizing our minds and our values and our decisions and all of that stuff.
02:08:30.000And we can't just make up different values based on the circumstances.
02:08:33.000With the idea being that the more consistent you are, the happier you'll be.
02:08:39.000I definitely think that the less contradiction you have in your mind, the happier you'll be.
02:08:43.000And it's really hard for a lot of people to eliminate contradiction because they've made so many rationalizations about their actions.
02:08:50.000They've made so many rationalizations at the past in order to shield themselves from the sting of the need to correct behavior, need to correct some of the things that you've done.
02:09:01.000That sting is very difficult for a lot of people to deal with.
02:09:04.000So they justify or they'll argue louder to try to...
02:10:40.000Experiencing this fight or flight feeling in the middle of an argument is being completely attached or having your ego attached to ideas or a position.
02:10:48.000If you are not and you treat it as an intellectual puzzle that you can both solve together, then that stuff doesn't exist.
02:10:54.000I've had some really fascinating disagreements with very close friends.
02:10:58.000Where we've managed to keep it completely civil, but yet explored some really interesting topics.
02:11:03.000But then I've also been involved in conversations with people where they get really insulting almost immediately if they disagree with you.
02:11:09.000I had an argument with a dude about recent findings about the Yeti.
02:11:15.000They've found that this thing that they thought was a Yeti may very well be an ancient bear, or at least the DNA from an ancient bear.
02:12:17.000Like, you know, they found that there's some, what they thought was extinct polar bear, some hybrid type of polar bear.
02:12:25.000They thought it was extinct for 40,000 plus years, and they've got DNA that came from something that was killed a long time ago.
02:12:32.000Probably, I think it was in the 1900s or something.
02:12:34.000And they say, oh, well, this thing matches up with this DNA. What we might be dealing with when these people are seeing Yetis is actually just polar bears.
02:13:34.000Like I had a guy, a friend of mine in junior high school, we were in science class and he used the word orgasm instead of organism.
02:13:45.000I don't even remember the sentence, which is a shame because I bet you it was a really great sentence because anytime you put the word orgasm into a sentence inadvertently, It's funny.
02:14:57.000I'd love to know, like the twins experiment and so on, I would love to know Which parts of me are me and which part of me are environment or which part of me are genetics?
02:15:25.000And here's an interesting question to you because you...
02:15:29.000Predominantly ply your trade on the internet.
02:15:32.000How much of an impact has the internet had on who you are as a person?
02:15:37.000Just the free-flowing of information over the last 20 years, since we're the same age, thinking of 94-ish, where it really popped out, how much of an impact has it had on you?
02:16:08.000Like, the last time this happened in such a fundamental way was like in the 16th century when Martin Luther...
02:16:15.000They translated the Bible from Latin to the vernacular, and then people got to get their hands on the Bible.
02:16:20.000Whereas before, it was all done in Latin, and nobody knew what the hell was going on other than what the priests told them.
02:16:25.000They got a hold of the Bible, and basically the text could speak directly to the people and didn't have to go through gatekeepers anymore.
02:16:31.000The unfortunate result of that was a couple of hundred years of religious warfare, which then again culminated in the separation of church and state because they just were killing each other.
02:16:53.000One of the reasons that the Nazis had such power was that Germany missed the whole Enlightenment because they were just so embroiled in religious warfare.
02:16:59.000I mean, there's travelers who went through Germany in the 17th and 18th century and said you could barely see a tree without the fruit of a hanging person on it.
02:17:08.000I mean, it was that insanely violent a society based upon religious dogma.
02:17:13.000And so Nazism is like this weird medievalism that made it through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Germany and then had the power of the 20th century technology with all the brutality of medieval parenting and brutality.
02:18:43.000In child abuse, it's actually available for free at freedomandradio.com, where he says, basically, if you want to know where war comes from, you have to focus on child abuse.
02:18:53.000That is where all of this stuff gets laid in.
02:18:57.000They've done a huge number of studies.
02:18:59.000Robin Grills has written a book called Parenting for a Peaceful World, where he traces, you know, you can tell how quickly democracy comes to a country by how the prevalent spanking is.
02:19:09.000Like, all politics, to me, is an effect of Yeah, I think.
02:19:36.000Being able to talk directly to people without gatekeepers is an incredible experience and is the greatest leap forward, I think, in human communication and the possibility of virtue, I think, is unbelievably enhanced by this.
02:20:12.000I would have never been able to do this.
02:20:13.000I would have been fired a long time ago.
02:20:16.000There's no way I would have been able to do any of the things that I've done online with some sort of a company backing it and saying this is a good idea.
02:20:24.000No one would have said it's a good idea.
02:20:26.000No publicist would have said it's a good idea to say the things I've said.
02:20:29.000No agent would have advised me to move in that direction.
02:20:36.000But I think that the biggest impact for me is not that I've been able to express myself, but that other people have been able to send me information and express themselves to me.
02:20:46.000The impact of being able to share information online, store even wrong things.
02:20:52.000There's a video that went around that has gotten massive traction over the past few days.
02:20:57.000It was a man Who was on the news and didn't know the camera was on.
02:21:01.000Didn't know that his microphone was on.
02:21:29.000Well, this video has gone, you know, viral, and it's millions and millions of hits, and I can't tell you how many people have sent it to me on Twitter.
02:21:36.000But within a couple days, it resolves itself, and people realize, oh, it's just bullshit.
02:23:10.000Genetically ruined population the whole world over.
02:23:13.000And the fact that this information is available at the click of a button to me means that people no longer have the excuse of having been propagandized.
02:23:22.000You know, some poor bastard who was in Stalinist Russia.
02:23:26.000You know, in the 1950s, you know, okay, be a communist or go to the gulag, you know, that's your choice.
02:23:32.000So he's a communist, but you don't say you're a communist by choice, then it's just like the way you was like, you're in the Hitler Youth, you're a Nazi, but you're not a bad kid, because you're a Nazi.
02:23:39.000That's just what you have to do to survive in the culture.
02:23:42.000But now that information is so available, nobody can claim anymore, at least in the West that they didn't know.
02:23:49.000Because it's so immediately available to everyone at all times that if you don't know now, it is an act of choice.
02:24:06.000China, under Mao and the Cultural Revolution, where people were dropping like flies every time they batted their eyelids wrong.
02:24:12.000There's a great story in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag, Apikalago, where some minor party functionary is given a speech, and everyone gets up and is applauding.
02:24:23.000And they're all so terrified of being the first person to stop applauding that they just keep applauding and keep applauding until their hands look like hamburgers and they can't even – like it's so incredible.
02:24:34.000But nobody wants to stop because the first person who stops is our comrade.
02:24:38.000You seem to be less enthusiastic and they're just terrified.
02:24:40.000This is the world that some people live in.
02:24:42.000We don't have that world here in the West and we have access to every kind of information, opposing viewpoints.
02:25:47.000Our last show went to number one on iTunes.
02:25:49.000I was expecting that to happen because my rap sucks.
02:25:53.000It's really great that we're doing this because my music career remains stalled in the doldrums.
02:25:57.000But I think that is an incredible opportunity.
02:26:03.000I do a lot of talk about Bitcoin and stuff like that where we have the opportunity to have a currency system not controlled by governments.
02:26:12.000These things are just unbelievable opportunities for human communication.
02:26:35.000Things like that, just incredible, because we have got to get faster at getting better as a species, because our technology is going through the roof.
02:26:44.000Human knowledge is doubling every 18 months.
02:26:46.000Weapons that are inconceivable to even a generation or two ago are readily available.
02:27:07.000Can't we have technology that isn't put to the service of assholes?
02:27:11.000We have to get faster at getting better as a species because our technology is increasing to the point where if we don't get better quickly, I don't think we're going to have much luck staying free.
02:27:20.000Well, I think we are getting better, and I think we are trying to catch up to this technological capability that we find ourselves in right now.
02:28:23.000I do also think that there's a lot of ethics behind what it is that you do, because it's not like you get a whole bunch of KKK members on here proselytizing about white nationalism.
02:28:31.000I think you try to get people with good and useful viewpoints, even if it's just mentally stimulating, that promotes virtue as well.
02:28:38.000For me, I really feel a sense of urgency.
02:28:42.000And I try not to let it, you know, make every day like a race against evil or something like that.
02:28:46.000But I The technology of control and surveillance and all of that is growing so quickly.
02:28:53.000I really do feel like the same medium that can be capable of so much control and surveillance is also what we're using to communicate.
02:29:01.000I feel quite a strong urgency that it's a race of us versus them.
02:29:07.000And this is why I have like 3,000 shows.
02:30:25.000I like being in the fight where it is now because it seems so overwhelming.
02:30:29.000I mean, what if we got two microphones and one bad haircut and one great polish?
02:30:34.000We're in the craziest time that a human being has ever existed in.
02:30:39.000As far as technology and information, trying to figure our way through this, you're going to get these things like the NSA surveillance issue.
02:31:27.000You've got to have a phone where you can remove the battery and sit down where we know that you're not transmitting this conversation to some nefarious source across the world, which is what they can do.
02:31:37.000That is also a part of this weird thing that we're doing.
02:31:41.000But ultimately, my thoughts are that if I look at the accountability, here's a perfect example.
02:31:49.000General Petraeus got caught and removed as the head spy from the CIA being investigated by the FBI. I mean, the FBI found out that he was having this affair and all this jazz with the reporter,
02:32:04.000the woman who wrote the book about him.
02:32:08.000It happened through the very thing that we're all scared of.
02:32:12.000Everyone is scared of someone being able to go into your email and find out, oh, look, Stephen Molyneux, apparently he's gone to these communist meetings, and he wanted to find out what it's all about.
02:32:21.000We have some information that maybe you've been thinking about overthrowing the government, and then boom, you're in jail.
02:32:50.000No, and I still do it, but I'm conscious of the fact that when I say something is the bomb, this could be pink.
02:32:57.000It could be flagged, and Microsoft and Skype are in deep with these guys, and it is there.
02:33:04.000We do have to struggle through this stuff, and I don't feel particularly concerned.
02:33:08.000I think I've hit, like with three or four million downloads a month, I think I've hit enough trajectory that I just can't be targeted in that kind of way very easily anymore.
02:33:18.000But yeah, definitely at the beginning there was a little bit of, oh, I'm still pretty small.
02:33:21.000But also you have the ability to be honest and express yourself.
02:33:27.000In the McCarthy era, if they came after you and said you were a communist and you got kicked out of whatever job you were doing, what are you going to do?
02:33:43.000Now, if you have a situation where perhaps maybe something comes out where you did say something that you regretted, or you did do something in the past that maybe wasn't the best, you could describe it in depth in a show, own it, and it would be a complete non-issue, and in fact, you'd probably grow from this non-issue.
02:33:59.000And the listeners would grow from the experience of hearing you honestly talk about whatever it is, whether it's going to some fucking communist meeting.
02:34:19.000And I believe that where this is heading is a time, whether it's a decade, two, three, what have you, where there are no secrets.
02:34:27.000And it's probably going to be some sort of a technological change in the way we exchange information.
02:34:33.000Maybe it's some Google Glass thing that goes to the next level and becomes an implant or whatever the fuck it is.
02:34:38.000I really don't think there's going to be any secrets.
02:34:40.000I think we're going to laugh one day at the times we used to be able to lie to people.
02:34:44.000We're going to laugh at the times you used to be able to tell people that you were going to go to some place, but really you went to some other place.
02:34:52.000Your whereabouts will just be information, and it's easy to look as a Google search.
02:34:58.000Well, I think that there's some real benefits to that.
02:35:01.000Do you know that there's a whole bunch of lawyers who are now trying to subpoena the NSA for data that will exonerate their clients, hopefully, where they had cell phone records or something that will hopefully exonerate their clients and so on?
02:35:12.000I mean, I personally would be more than willing to give up where I'm going and what I'm doing and so on to an organization that was actually there to sort of help and protect me.
02:35:21.000I mean, I was just reading on the Drudge Report the other day.
02:35:24.000I think it was the FBI or the CIA. I think we're good to go.
02:35:48.00095% of people never get a jury trial in the United States because all they do is they get threatened with insane sentences and they just plea down.
02:35:55.000I mean, because there's just, you've no hope.
02:35:57.000I mean, they've even said that threatening someone with a life sentence for a minor transgression...
02:36:05.000Getting them to plea for something less while threatening them with a life sentence for a minor transgression of the law is not cruel and unusual punishment.
02:36:13.000You can't bribe someone with 50 bucks in the legal system, but you can bribe them with reducing something from 20 years to 2 years, and somehow 18 years is not a bribe.
02:36:22.000So there is no constitutional right to a trial.
02:36:26.000There's almost nobody, particularly in drug stuff.
02:36:28.000I mean, people just plea down and go to jail.
02:36:30.000And a lot of these people are convicted on the hearsay of other people who themselves are giving up whoever they knew in order to get out of crazy jail time and so on.
02:36:39.000So it is a monstrous system right now.
02:36:42.000I mean, this comes back to the whole war on drug stuff, which is just so amazingly evil that it staggers the imagination.
02:36:49.000I can't believe, and it's so fantastic that America's finally looking over to the example of Portugal.
02:36:54.000Portugal, 10 years ago, decriminalized their drugs, and now they have a 50% reduction in drug use.
02:37:27.000I mean, I thought we were going to be so past what it used to be like before the war on drugs that people like at least with prohibition, it was only what 13 or 14 years in the 30s with prohibition.
02:37:37.000And even that brought organized crime over to America.
02:37:39.000I thought we'd have this war on drugs for so long that people would have forgotten what it was like beforehand and it would have just gone on forever.
02:37:46.000But it does look like there is going to be some relaxation of this stuff.
02:37:49.000Some tentative steps are being taken towards it.
02:37:52.000And my God, what an incredible thing that's happening because, I mean, the majority of people in prison are there for completely nonviolent offenses.
02:38:00.000Do you know what they did in Colorado with the legal marijuana?
02:38:04.000You're allowed to buy it and sell it retail?
02:38:06.000A vet was the first guy who bought, right?
02:38:37.000First of all, there'd be less incentive.
02:38:39.000One of the reasons people get hooked is because people offer them free drugs because it's so profitable once they are hooked.
02:38:44.000It's also forbidden, so it seems it's enticing.
02:38:47.000One of the things about Holland that's been so fascinating is that their hard drug use is radically down because cannabis is so prevalent and accepted.
02:38:57.000Yeah, so I'm actually going to go speak in Amsterdam.
02:38:59.000I'm speaking to this huge crowd in Amsterdam about cryptocurrencies in April.
02:39:30.000When people find out that that was a major motivation for the Vietnam War, that's another thing you can find out on the internet today, is how much money was being made by selling heroin.
02:39:40.000People don't even want to believe that.
02:40:03.000Do people think that the poppies in Afghanistan are completely irrelevant to the war?
02:40:06.000It's a fascinating subject because people automatically want to dismiss it because of the war on drugs and because it's not thought of as a commodity.
02:40:15.000It's instead thought of as something that's illegal and just gross and like, oh, drugs, drugs, drugs.
02:40:23.000Drugs are money, and money is what everybody wants.
02:40:27.000And these fucking people that are over there that are trying to extract resources, whether it's in the form of natural gas or whether it's in the form of oil...
02:40:34.000That same type of thinking, if you think that that same type of thinking doesn't work in terms of trying to make similar amounts of money from illegal drugs, you're crazy and it's so naive.
02:40:47.000And drugs are a fantastic way to harass the population.
02:40:51.000Because the whole idea behind common law is that the law is passive.
02:40:56.000The law doesn't go out looking for problems.
02:40:59.000If you come key my car, then I call up the cops.
02:41:03.000And then, because you've done me wrong, the law leaps into action.
02:41:06.000The law is never supposed to exist without a complaint.
02:41:10.000And if you buy drugs from some guy and you like the drugs and he likes your money, there's no complaint.
02:41:15.000But the law then becomes proactive and it goes out there looking for problems and nobody's complaining.
02:41:19.000And that's when the law becomes tyrannical.
02:41:22.000When the law is passive and just waits for a complaint and has clear rules, okay, that's a fairly good thing.
02:41:27.000When the law goes from reactive to proactive and starts going out there to look, oh, prostitution, oh, gambling, oh, drugs, you know, this is all voluntary consensual stuff.
02:41:36.000You know, it may not be healthy in excess, but neither are cheesecakes.
02:41:46.000Having zero drugs, but having a secret compartment in their car, they can strip your car down, search it, even if they find nothing, they're not in trouble.
02:41:55.000Well, and they get these stupid drug-sniffing dogs.
02:45:07.000If they do ever come up with that technology, they should force it on the people at SeaWorld and get a killer whale's mind and stick it in a person and have them realize...
02:45:16.000Oh, I'd love to fucking bite that person's leg off.
02:45:17.000If I didn't like herring so much, you bastards!
02:45:20.000Just what kind of torture they're existing in on a daily basis.
02:50:53.000Do you ever have a guy that might get mad at you and put up dick pictures and shit?
02:50:57.000No, if I get the feed wrong, he's going to be like, I can't believe you do this in seven years and you can't give people your Twitter feed.