In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, Joe talks about his recent trip to Canada with his friend Johnny Rivette. They talk about his trip, how he got there, and what it's like to live in Canada in the summer.
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00:06:08.000You're lighting the cigarette, you're putting it up to your lips, you're sucking in poison, and they, so many of them throw their cigarettes on the ground.
00:08:34.000That's why you can get cancer from cigars, but it's more rare.
00:08:40.000Even people that are like really radical.
00:08:42.000That's like the Freudian cancer because he had like 20 cigars a day and he got, I think, half his cheek eaten away with cancer and stuff like that towards the end of his life.
00:08:49.000Yeah, a lot of the chewers get that too.
00:08:52.000Those people that keep that stuff tucked in between their lip and gum.
00:09:34.000You know, we were talking just before the show.
00:09:35.000I don't care what you say about me, just make sure you spell my name right.
00:09:38.000Well, that's what I was telling her in a way.
00:09:39.000I was saying, you know, she was getting upset, you know, the things that you had said about what she had said.
00:09:44.000And I said, well, you got to, look, there's a weird thing that goes on where people make these sort of call-out videos.
00:09:51.000You know, everybody likes to do a call-out video, but nobody likes a call-out video turned on them.
00:09:56.000And what Anna did is essentially she listened to Adam Corolla's rant about conservatism, and she made a rant about that, and then you made a rant about her rant, and then she's pissed at your rant about her rant, about Adam's rant.
00:10:12.000I'm like, first of all, this is like an incredibly ineffective way to communicate.
00:10:16.000You know, when people like, that's one of the things that I don't like about blogs.
00:10:20.000I think blog entries are great in some ways because I think it gives someone an opportunity to really expand on their thoughts.
00:10:27.000And you put a lot of energy and effort into writing something down.
00:10:31.000Whereas I think you might be able to get in a deeper detail than you would in a conversation where you're perhaps searching for words or trying to clarify like a lot of things you need to look up and you can't do that necessarily in a debate.
00:10:43.000So it's nice having a back and forth when it's database.
00:10:46.000But it's a massive amount of time involved and it doesn't give the other person the opportunity to respond.
00:10:53.000And when you do it, like one person goes on this long rant describing you in very disparaging terms and minimizes you and then you have to respond to that.
00:11:46.000The core of the conversation was Adam's position on being a conservative and how the term conservative has become a pejorative.
00:11:54.000And then the term conservative has become a negative way of describing a person's behavior and a person's thoughts.
00:12:02.000It's more like, it seems that it's become maybe like a badge of callousness or a descriptive term of someone who is insensitive or who does not care about the underclass, who does not care about poverty, does not care about poor people.
00:12:19.000And, you know, she had this take on it and then you had a take on her take on it.
00:12:26.000Do you consider yourself conservative?
00:12:28.000You consider yourself a libertarian, right?
00:12:35.000Well, I mean, so, and I was a resistant anarchist.
00:12:38.000Like, for me, I was 20 years what's called like a minarchist.
00:12:41.000It came sort of out of the objectivist Ayn Rand school, where your government is basically law and national defense, maybe a court system, maybe that sort of tiny, tiny government.
00:12:51.000It's called the night watchman state, which is, you know, keep other people's mitts off my stuff and keep their shivs out of my kidney kind of thing.
00:12:58.000That's the basic function of government.
00:13:00.000And I was like, but it always bothered me because that would still have to be funded through taxation, right?
00:13:06.000And Taxation, philosophically, morally, is the initiation of force, right?
00:13:10.000I mean, it's like, I have a good idea, you have to pay for it.
00:13:13.000And if you don't pay for it, you are going to get some letters.
00:13:15.000And if you don't pay for it still, we're going to send some people over to your house in blue costumes.
00:13:19.000And if you don't pay for it still, they're going to take you off to jail.
00:13:37.000You have to sort of hang on to your principles no matter what, right?
00:13:40.000So if you're into the non-initiation of force, right?
00:13:43.000That self-defense, perfectly morally legitimate, but you can't go around popping people in the head without provocation.
00:13:48.000You can't go around stealing people's stuff.
00:13:50.000So the non-initiation of force, and if you accept that as a principle, and if you try to get philosophy as close to like the physical sciences, physical sciences, they don't have exceptions.
00:13:58.000You know, they say, well, this rock will fall this fast in Kazakhstan and this fast in Philadelphia.
00:14:07.000So if you're going to go with the non-aggression principle, then the concept of government is morally illegitimate because the government is that group of people in a geographical area that initiate the use of force against others.
00:14:21.000And some people agree with it and some people don't, but those who don't do end up being on the receiving end of force that they don't agree with.
00:14:28.000So in an anarchist state, the idea would be that there would be no taxes.
00:15:12.000And, you know, in a GPS, you could charge people.
00:15:15.000You know, there's a private highway up in Canada where, you know, they take a photo of your license plate or if you have a transponder, it's even cheaper.
00:15:21.000And they just charge you when you go on.
00:15:23.000And however, you know, when you go off, then they charge you for that.
00:15:37.000Oh, yeah, but I mean, because there will be competition, right?
00:15:40.000I mean, hopefully, well, not to the point of wasteful duplication because that would not be very efficient economically.
00:15:44.000Yeah, but there's 100 roads going the exact same direction all side by side, one cost a dollar.
00:15:48.000Well, that's a lot of competition, but I haven't seen a tree in four days.
00:15:52.000Or it'd be like, you know, the movie Brazil where they have those billboards maybe on either side.
00:15:56.000So I think you're pretty open in the idea that you don't have a solution, but what you're doing is saying that the current problem is unacceptable.
00:16:03.000Is that a fair way of assessing your take on current problems?
00:16:07.000Yeah, I mean, technically, it's not good philosophy to have a universal called the non-aggression principle, which you and I and this fine fellow here and the listeners, we all accept, right?
00:16:21.000You don't force anyone to come to your shows.
00:16:23.000I don't force anyone to listen to what I do.
00:16:25.000So we all accept that at our personal level.
00:16:27.000And that's what we teach our kids, right?
00:16:28.000Don't hit, don't take other people's stuff, don't push, you know, all that kind of stuff.
00:16:32.000And so if we're going to have these rules, you know, much like science, like how far can we push these rules?
00:16:37.000Now, I think that it's kind of wrong to say, well, we have these rules, but right up to here, we'll completely abandon them and go to the opposite.
00:16:45.000Or at least we need to acknowledge that is what's going on in society.
00:16:48.000So if we say that the non-aggression principle is the way that we should live, well, the government is just people.
00:16:53.000How do they get this get out of jail free card where they can do stuff that is specifically illegal for the private citizens, like print money, like take out debts on behalf of other people?
00:17:07.000They can force people to pay for things.
00:17:09.000They can incarcerate huge numbers of people, largely on a whim.
00:17:12.000They can tell people who are doing things like drugs, which is a purely voluntary form of enjoyment and self-medication, they can throw them in jail.
00:17:33.000The idea that society has been sort of inherited.
00:17:37.000You know, that we have sort of been born into this system that is really not that well engineered and has massive flaws in it.
00:17:45.000And it's a very good point when you talk about the reinforce the taxes, like enforcing tax laws, that you can lock people in jail for owing money.
00:17:56.000It's one of the only times where someone gets locked in a cage because they owe money, even if you choose to pay that money.
00:18:03.000Wesley Snipes is a perfect example, the actor, chose to not pay his taxes based on an erroneous belief.
00:18:10.000He had this belief that the Constitution does not force you to pay taxes and that it's a misunderstanding that if you fight it in court, you would win.
00:18:29.000When you're one of those people that is already the privileged few making an exorbitant amount of money and then you step up and say you don't have to pay taxes and you do it blatantly.
00:18:38.000It didn't even matter if he tried to pay the money back.
00:18:41.000They were going to lock him in jail no matter what.
00:18:45.000And it's the only time it's a crime to owe money.
00:18:47.000You know, every other time it's like we have a debt and, you know, well, you have to pay that debt off.
00:18:52.000Like, say if I loaned you 100 bucks and we went to court and the court found out that you didn't pay me that 100 bucks, you don't go to jail.
00:18:59.000You just have to pay me the 100 bucks.
00:19:00.000But if you owe the government 100 bucks, they have the option to lock you in a cage.
00:19:04.000And that to me is sort of akin to shitty parenting.
00:19:09.000You're a strong believer in not hitting kids and not screaming at them.
00:19:14.000And if you're tired and you're dumb and your kid doesn't want to listen, one of the best ways to get them to listen to you is violent force or fear.
00:20:44.000I really, I mean, at a very visceral, fundamental level, I think it is absolutely abhorrent and destructive.
00:20:51.000You know, we saw some of the, I think the shakeout of that in Ferguson, Missouri recently, which I think war on drugs had a lot to do with that stuff.
00:20:57.000And the fact that I'm forced to fund this, it goes violently against my conscience.
00:21:03.000And I feel very helpless to not support the things that I find incredibly objectionable and incredibly destructive to particularly minorities.
00:21:20.000I mean, I do charitable work and I give away my shows for free and I'm very happy to share whatever goodies I've accumulated in life with people who are less fortunate or needy.
00:21:28.000But there's so much that goes on in the world that governments do that I find just so horrendous.
00:21:35.000And I would really like none of the above as one of the options.
00:21:40.000Yeah, none of the above, but how do these things get funded then?
00:21:58.000And he's got a new episode, and it's about World War I. And it goes into great detail about the massive losses that were just wrecking the French forces and the German artillery and all this shit that was going on.
00:22:15.000And how it was becoming increasingly difficult to get people to sign up for the war, especially with the English folks trying to get them to sign up.
00:22:24.000Like it had gotten to the point where they had lost 500,000 people, 500,000 casualties in a short period of time.
00:22:30.000And it gets to that point where people aren't buying it anymore.
00:22:35.000In the beginning, it was easy to coerce people into doing it by...
00:22:55.000And it was so much so that they had to kind of figure out a way to not do it because there were many people that were involved in the war effort that weren't soldiers, the people that were building munitions, the people that were making guns, and people that were involved in all sorts of different levels of government that weren't cowards in their eyes, but they were getting attacked the same way everybody else was.
00:23:15.000And it's interesting to see, especially when you're talking about the early 1900s, essentially 100 years ago, talking about this, the use of manipulation of trying to get people to go along with war, especially back then when there was so much less information available to the average person.
00:23:33.000Whereas today, trying to get someone to go along with war is far more difficult, far more problematic.
00:23:40.000Well, and there's this terrible power that the government has to create money at will, which the First World War largely engendered.
00:23:46.000And the First World War could not have been fought on the gold reserves that the countries had at the time.
00:23:50.000It would have been over in six to 12 months.
00:23:53.000And so right now, they could just create this money out of thin air, right?
00:23:56.000So, I mean, the war in Iraq did not come with equivalent, the war on terror did not come with equivalent massive tax increases to pay for it because they just printed all this money.
00:24:55.000But look at how poor a job they did of defending.
00:24:57.000I mean, a million civilians were wiped out.
00:25:00.000Their entire country was essentially taken over.
00:25:02.000The only reason why they don't, the United States doesn't have full power of Iraq is because that was never the objective in the first place and because we abandoned it and pulled out.
00:25:10.000I mean, their defense of the military, the United States military, was woefully ineffective.
00:25:17.000So like saying that it's inexpensive is kind of silly.
00:25:20.000No, no, no, I just mean it's incredibly ineffective.
00:25:22.000Well, but the goal, at least the stated goal of the leaders of al-Qaeda was to provoke America into the same kind of war that Russia got into in Afghanistan that broke the Russian economy and collapsed their empire.
00:25:35.000It was to get America to start waging war in a way that was much more costly to the Americans.
00:25:55.000Well, since Desert Storm, since the first one.
00:25:58.000Yeah, since the first one, but even more so, I think, in the second.
00:26:01.000But from a pure dollars and cents standpoint, their goal was get America into these unwinnable wars against these insurgents.
00:26:08.000Because, I mean, this is what the CIA taught Bin Laden in the 80s with the Mujahideen, was go get the Russians to come in and then just keep pinging them off and pinging them off and pinging them off until they go broke.
00:26:18.000Well, we're talking about two completely different locations now.
00:26:20.000We're talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, two completely different environments.
00:26:23.000And Afghanistan, one of the reasons why it's almost an entirely unwinnable war is because of the terrain.
00:26:30.000I mean, Afghanistan is like trying to fight a battle in the Rocky Mountains.
00:26:41.000You have warlords that own these particular parcels of land, and it's a crazy, crazy place.
00:26:50.000The idea of taking over Afghanistan, I mean, you would literally have to comb the mountainside and pull everybody out and camp them or something.
00:27:12.000So you've got a lot of places you can take over.
00:27:15.000But if we were invaded like that in this anarchist version of society, what would you do?
00:27:22.000I mean, you obviously couldn't force your version of society on other people.
00:27:26.000If you have dictatorships like, say, North Korea or something along those lines that has a strong military power and decided to invade, what do you do in an anarchist society?
00:27:36.000So let's say you have an anarchist society and next door you have some status society, right?
00:28:32.000Because the people that are contractors that get government funds to go over there and spend money on tanks and planes, and it's a huge business.
00:28:41.000The business of the military-industrial complex cannot be denied.
00:29:19.000Well, okay, so they've located it, and it's like, even if it hasn't been extracted, it's like, we're not going to let anybody else go over and control that area because you're talking about massive, massive amounts of money and resources.
00:29:32.000Well, it sort of remains then to be seen because if the argument is, well, they went in for the resources, they've been in there for, what, 12 years now?
00:29:38.000And if they still haven't extracted the resources, that argument, I think it's much more around Halliburton and the military-industrial complex making a huge amount of money by basically picking the pockets of the unborn through inflation and debt.
00:29:49.000So I think that's much more immediate.
00:29:50.000I don't think that's like a 12 or 15-year plan to get the resources.
00:29:53.000I think that's maybe something that's in the back pocket, but I think they really make money off the Fed.
00:30:14.000They don't invade because they want to control the population for no reason and turn them into slaves.
00:30:19.000They invade because they need something that the other people have.
00:30:23.000Okay, so I mean, Germany would generally invade countries, though, when they invade Czechoslovakia and Austria and France and so on, they invaded and took over the tax base so that they got all the tax money and they got the gold and all that.
00:30:34.000So if there's no tax structure, then it's less profitable to invade and take over a country.
00:30:43.000It's sort of like if you've got two areas that you're thinking of taking over, one of them is a farm and the other one is just a forest with nothing there.
00:30:50.000You'd want to take over the farm because everyone's already domesticated and there's already a system of production.
00:30:54.000So the farm is like the government system where the human livestock, the tax livestock, already domesticated, the whole system of payment is all set up and so on.
00:31:02.000So it's more profitable usually if you want to just get money and resources to go into an existing country with a state.
00:31:09.000To go into a country without a state, it's tougher.
00:31:12.000You can still do it, but you don't have that farm domestication production system all set up for you to take over.
00:31:18.000The second thing is that nuclear weapons generally mean you don't get invaded.
00:31:23.000I mean, why did Europe suddenly find kumbaya, you know, let's hold hands and be peaceful after 10 billion years of warfare?
00:31:31.000Because they got nuclear weapons in the post-Second World War period.
00:31:33.000And with nuclear weapons, suddenly it's like, blessed are the peacemakers.
00:31:36.000So, of course, you know, if you get a couple of nukes, then you're most likely not going to be able to do that.
00:31:47.000No, no, that's, but this is the thing, right?
00:31:49.000I mean, because, and this is what I was making the beef at with Anna as well, something needs to be done going to say, therefore, we need a coercive redistributionistic state, is, to me, sort of similar to saying, well, where do we come from?
00:32:07.000Now, running a nuke for a population of any kind of size, having a couple of nukes, will cost you like five bucks a year, $10 a year, for everyone to chip in.
00:33:06.000I'm not sure if it's been done, but there's certainly ways of targeting people.
00:33:09.000It's the start of a movie where shit gets terribly out of control and then it's Mad Max.
00:33:14.000Well, but whether or not, right, when you have a bunch of people who all have governments invading each other, there's kind of an unwritten rule which says don't target the leaders because they don't want that to happen.
00:33:23.000On the other hand, an anarchic society is perfectly comfortable targeting leaders, which would really be the best thing to do.
00:33:29.000I would much rather target a leader and disable that person or even kill them if that leader was initiating aggression against a free society.
00:33:49.000Yeah, but doesn't that seem highly unlikely that anybody would be able to engineer a genetic disease that's going to cause peace?
00:33:57.000That seems like if that's the way to go about doing this, I mean, is that the only way to do that?
00:34:02.000If you can target the leaders of people who are going to invade you, that just seems to me like the best sense, right?
00:34:06.000I mean, why are all the serfs killing each other in France in the First World War?
00:34:11.000It's the leaders who started it all, who, you know, that old Pink Floyd son, you know, general sat while the lines on the map moved from side to side?
00:34:18.000I mean, it's the generals who are starting the war.
00:34:22.000You know, back then, it's completely different because the only way you were getting information was through newspapers.
00:34:27.000And you weren't able to have independent journalists giving you the full facts of the situation like we're able to today.
00:34:34.000But if you did do that, you create a power vacuum.
00:34:38.000One of the things that people don't understand about what's going on in Chicago, everyone's like, why is there so much violence in Chicago?
00:34:44.000I talked to a cop when I was in Chicago, and he gave me a unique point of view.
00:34:48.000And what he said was, what happened is they arrested some of the big-name drug dealers.
00:36:35.000And I don't know how it's going to go, but let me give you an analogy.
00:36:37.000And I've used this before, and I'll keep it brief.
00:36:39.000But we've learned how to do without evil and problematic institutions before.
00:36:45.000I mean, the institution of slavery, obviously, was central throughout human history, all throughout the world, for all of human history that has ever been known or recorded.
00:36:54.000So like 100,000 years, basically, people had slaves.
00:36:58.000And then there was a crazy bunch of people who came along and said this stuff is wrong and bad and so on.
00:37:03.000And people spent a lot of time and energy and money to end slavery.
00:37:07.000And now we have, I think, some fantastic benefits from that.
00:37:10.000You know, we have, I mean, obviously a more moral society.
00:37:14.000We have better economic efficiency and all that kind of slaves was very inefficient.
00:37:18.000So we do end the subjugation of women and things like that.
00:37:20.000Like there's things where we've said, or serfdom or bondage for debt.
00:37:27.000There's things that we've done away with that haven't created necessarily the same kind of power vacuum.
00:37:31.000Like when we get away with things from a moral standpoint, there usually isn't a power vacuum.
00:37:35.000If there's some decapitation of power without principles behind it, then people rush in to fix it.
00:37:41.000But I think we're not done yet as a species.
00:37:45.000And I think the question of the state is one that we really need to examine.
00:37:48.000So if you were to say to somebody in like the 17th century, you say, okay, wait a second, almost like basically all agricultural productivity is done by slaves.
00:37:57.000So if you get rid of slaves, what's going to happen?
00:38:04.000We're going to have these giant robots that go sweeping through the fields, which have the energy of a thousand horses, and they run on the crushed tree juice from the dinosaur era.
00:38:18.000And you'd say, what the hell are you talking about?
00:38:37.000It used to be, because you'd say, well, look, 80% of people are involved in farming.
00:38:41.000So if you're going to get rid of slaves, first of all, nobody's going to pick the crops because it's unpleasant work or whatever.
00:38:46.000And 80% of people will, you know, 40% of them will be out of a job.
00:38:50.000But now, like, 2% of people are involved in farming because we got rid of slavery and it became much more efficient to invest in machinery rather than maintain the value of slaves by relying on manual labor.
00:38:59.000So what I'm saying Is we focus on the principles.
00:39:01.000The non-initiation of force is, I think, a universal principle.
00:39:04.000What happens on the other side of that is absolutely unguessable.
00:39:08.000It's like saying what a phone's going to be like in 200 years.
00:39:12.000So, you're saying that the most important thing is to get rid of what is essentially a corrupt and evil institution, get rid of that, and then figure it out?
00:40:08.000I mean, the tax situation is grotesque.
00:40:11.000I mean, the idea of being forced to pay money for crimes against humanity in other countries, which is essentially what when you see thousands of people that are innocents that got killed by drones, a million innocents killed in Iraq.
00:40:26.000If that's not a crime against humanity, what is a crime against humanity?
00:40:29.000If millions of people dying isn't a crime against humanity, what's a crime against humanity?
00:40:34.000I don't, well, clearly slavery was a crime against humanity.
00:40:39.000Taking people, locking them up, making them work against their will, selling them as objects, as property.
00:40:47.000Abolishing that is not the same as abolishing any form of government.
00:40:53.000It was a foundation for all of human society all the way throughout history, and it was central.
00:40:58.000It was central to how the economy worked.
00:41:00.000Like, why was there no Industrial Revolution in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations?
00:41:04.000They'd even discovered the steam engine.
00:41:13.000And so when you buy a bunch of slaves, you don't want to invest in labor-saving machinery.
00:41:18.000You have to get rid of slavery in order for machinery to do the work of slaves or of human beings, because then it becomes cost-efficient and cost-effective.
00:41:26.000So it's central to how societies self-organize.
00:41:29.000Slavery was as central, I would argue, to historical societies as government is.
00:41:34.000You know, there's an old story about Rome where one guy, one patrician was saying, I don't know, I do some bizarre upper-class Roman accent.
00:42:13.000And so it was as central to the ancient world and to a lot of the modern societies up until sort of the 17th, 18th century as government is to now.
00:42:21.000And it's as incomprehensible for them to think post-slavery as it is for us to think post-state.
00:42:27.000But the moral principles, I think, have to win out rather than consequentialism, like, because we can't possibly guess what will happen in terms of spontaneous self-organization when you get rid of the coercion of the state.
00:42:38.000The problem with your analogy, though, is that during the same time that the South had slavery, the North had abolished slavery, and the North was prospering.
00:42:48.000So there was not, not only was there a clear example of a profitable, forward-moving society without slavery, it was connected on the same continental mass.
00:43:00.000I mean, it was a part of North America.
00:43:04.000It was even a part of the actual Union.
00:43:07.000They were trying to secede, but they had, I mean, the North had no slavery, and they had excellent cities, and they had buildings, and they were building ships, and it was all done through paid labor.
00:43:21.000Whereas at the same time, the South had slavery.
00:43:24.000I saw something that I thought was really fascinating that you argued, and you argued that the South should have been allowed to secede, and if the North wanted the slaves to be freed, they should have purchased them from the South.
00:43:37.000Well, that's how slavery ended everywhere else.
00:43:40.000I mean, the British government and the British taxpayers paid for a lot of the slaves.
00:43:45.000There's a record of some British priest, a bishop, I think, was paid like £12,000 for his slaves.
00:43:51.000Basically, the way that slavery ended throughout most of the rest of the world was the government stopped catching slaves.
00:43:56.000And when the government stopped catching slaves, they just...
00:44:01.000You can't go around chasing slaves who are running all over the place.
00:44:13.000And of course, the government, in the South, the government forced white people to go on slave patrols all the time, or they'd throw them in jail, right?
00:44:24.000So did it take 600,000 people dying to end slavery?
00:44:29.000Well, only in America was that a requirement.
00:44:32.000Everywhere else, it was money and moral browbeating and all that kind of stuff and legislation.
00:44:39.000It was only in America was that required.
00:44:43.000Wouldn't it be required that they would agree to that, though?
00:44:46.000I mean, what if they didn't want to give up their free labor?
00:44:49.000I mean, the whole idea was you're saying that the reason why certain societies did not advance past a certain position was because they relied on slavery.
00:44:58.000And if you come along and you say, hey, we're going to buy all the slaves from the South, what if they say no?
00:45:31.000I'm just saying, from a cost standpoint, it would have been much less expensive to buy the slaves than it would have been to wage that entire war.
00:45:37.000That's a hindsight 2020 argument, though, isn't it?
00:45:39.000Because no one knew how many people were going to die in the war.
00:45:41.000No one knew how expensive it was going to be.
00:45:43.000They just decided that they were going to go to war and they were going to win.
00:45:47.000And that's how a lot of wars are fought.
00:45:49.000That's how we got in Iraq, and that's how a million people are dead, and countless amounts of money have been spent.
00:45:55.000I mean, who fucking knows how much money was spent in Iraq since 2001?
00:46:00.000I mean, didn't they just fly over like giant crates full of $100 bills and basically just throw them into the wind?
00:46:06.000I mean, they just, like, huge amounts of cash itself just went there.
00:46:10.000But that's the big lesson of history, is that once you let slip the dogs of war, you don't know who they're going to take down.
00:46:14.000You don't know how long it's going to last.
00:46:15.000You don't know what the blowback's going to be.
00:46:17.000That's one of the big lessons is that there's very few examples of contained wars and very few examples of wars that match the expectations of people going in.
00:46:25.000So with hindsight being 2020 and 600,000 people dying, what were the actual numbers of slaves that were eventually freed?
00:46:32.000Do we know how many people are freed from the freedom?
00:46:34.000Yeah, I've done a whole video on the history of slavery.
00:46:53.000I mean, it's pretty good, but it sucks compared to what I would like it to be.
00:46:57.000Oh, I'd love to be this giant museum of everything that happened.
00:47:02.000So the arguments, I think, are pretty strong that it would have been much cheaper to simply buy them.
00:47:07.000The other option, of course, is that you let them secede and you let them have their slaves, and then the North gets more and more prosperous, and the South generally stays or becomes less and less prosperous relative to it.
00:47:19.000How can you allow people to be enslaved?
00:47:22.000I mean, if there's anything that as a person with morals and ethics, a person that wants the human race to advance and evolve, if there's anything that you would want to stop, it would be slavery.
00:48:28.000It's something we look for alternatives for.
00:48:29.000And you can see a lot of these things showing up even in Detroit.
00:48:32.000There's private police forces now because the police have basically said, you know, if you call and you get an answering machine, you're lucky, right?
00:48:38.000I mean, the police have basically abandoned sections of Detroit.
00:48:41.000There are wild dogs going through there.
00:48:43.000People have set up their own bus systems where you can have a beer and there's Wi-Fi on them.
00:48:46.000I mean, there's lots of things that rush in to take the place of decaying or diminishing state systems.
00:48:53.000And it's just something we outgrow over time through a conversation.
00:48:57.000And it is a multi-generational change.
00:48:59.000It's not going to happen anytime soon.
00:49:01.000But I do think that we're still a long way from done as far as a really great society goes.
00:49:06.000And I look at the biggest institutions around, and I think that everything's open to question.
00:49:14.000But I just, I can't sort of say, well, what's on the other side of a truly free society where people are not subject to the initiation of force known as the state?
00:49:24.000And I like having these conversations with you.
00:49:26.000I like having these conversations in this sort of a form where we're bouncing these ideas back and forth, and we admit we don't know, and there are possibilities.
00:49:36.000When you do your videos, however, you're doing these essentially these hour-long pieces, and you're very eloquent.
00:50:01.000But in that aren't a lot of these ideas.
00:50:04.000They're not, these aren't essentially black and white issues.
00:50:07.000And when you state them as if they are black and white issues, that's what opens up all these portals of debate and dissent.
00:50:14.000And there's just, there's quite a few places online where people are upset at you and quite a few things that you have said in these hour-long, eloquent pieces that people have vehemently opposed.
00:50:27.000Yeah, and I'm annoyed that it's not more.
00:50:54.000I wouldn't say Troll is going to poison the well, right?
00:50:56.000There was a fellow out there, I think he's a man, a gentleman of trolley persuasion.
00:51:02.000And he, I do these call-in shows, so people call and we talk about sort of philosophy and ideas and whatever, right?
00:51:08.000And he had gotten some of those calls, and through means I don't pretend to understand, he had, you know, doxing where you start revealing people's personal information.
00:51:51.000And then someone took that slice of our conversation and worked like crazy to try and find everything out about Bob and then published videos with pictures of Bob.
00:52:42.000It's a scare tactic to try and get people to not call into my show.
00:52:45.000Like, so we'll target people who try to call into your show, and then we will start trying to find out personal information about them and so on.
00:52:52.000And it's only one or two people, and it's only happened once, but that's why we did that.
00:52:56.000That's why Mike decided to do that thing on YouTube, which I fully agree with.
00:52:59.000I think it's a terrible use of time, and it's a negative thing to do.
00:53:04.000But people, I mean, if I was interested in taking down people who use my stuff, then why on earth would there be so many of my videos reposted all over YouTube?
00:53:13.000Do you think that maybe part of the problem with your perception, the public perception of you, is that you don't engage in these kind of conversations where you're allowed to elaborate and you're questioned on things and people get to see a more nuanced perspective?
00:53:37.000You know, it's like there's a bit that I've done about on stage where it's amazing that you can get someone to sit down and listen to you talk for an hour.
00:53:49.000Because most of the times when people are talking, they're having a conversation.
00:53:54.000It's a very unnatural form to have a long rant or a lecture.
00:53:59.000It's a fairly recent thing in human history, right?
00:54:02.000And that most of the time when people are talking for an hour, you're like, fuck, I got some shit to say too.
00:54:07.000Isn't that what's kind of going on with a lot of the criticism against you?
00:54:10.000Well, no, but see, I do six to seven hours of call-in shows a week, right?
00:54:15.000So I am not like a, it's not like a one-way street in what it is that I do.
00:54:55.000I mean, I'm one human being with some researchers and all that.
00:54:58.000So yeah, mistakes are made and I've admitted to mistakes that I've made in researching and so on.
00:55:03.000But if people want to tell me that I'm doing something wrong or want to debate with me, they get to the very front of the line every time, but they just never really show up.
00:55:11.000But it's not necessarily things that you're getting wrong.
00:55:15.000It's people disagreeing with positions that you have that it's you can't say it's right or wrong.
00:55:22.000But these are very strong positions that you have.
00:55:24.000For one, there's a video of you where you're talking about being an you consider yourself an anarcho-capitalist.
00:55:33.000And you were telling people that if they weren't, if their friends were not also anarcho-capitalists, that they should abandon those friends.
00:55:42.000They should cut those friends out of their lives.
00:55:46.000There's one time in sort of an eight-year show history where I said to someone, I think you need to not have these people in your life, and that's because he was suicidal.
00:55:54.000But there is a principle that is, I think, really important, right?
00:56:00.000And it is part of a long-term conversation that you have with people.
00:56:03.000So let's say that I like to smoke marijuana.
00:56:33.000I talk all the time to people who disagree with me.
00:56:35.000But I will say that in my very personal relationships, in sort of my close friends and family and so on, I really can't, myself, I can't get past this idea that if I have people in my life who say, Steph, if you disagree with me about the welfare state, I think the welfare state is a complete disaster and incredibly destructive to the poor, then you must pay the taxes for the welfare state, or I support you being thrown in jail.
00:57:00.000Or if people are pro of the war in Iraq, or say, I mean, I'm Canadian, but let's say I was in America, and if people say to me, Steph, I think you should be thrown in jail for not supporting the war in Iraq.
00:57:12.000Well, that would be a pretty aggressive action for somebody to sort of eyeball you and say, yes, people should come and throw you in jail where god-awful things are going to happen to you.
00:57:20.000That to me is a very aggressive and very real thing that happens.
00:57:23.000And if you are committed to a belief system, then in the long run, again, this is not a short-term scenario, and I've done speeches, full speeches, there's one in Libertopia 2010 where I sort of go into this in more detail.
00:57:34.000But if you are committed to something, like let's say you're against racism, which is of course a wonderful thing to be against, at some point, if you've got friends in the KKK, you got to make a choice.
00:58:06.000But don't say that you're committed to the belief system, then, right?
00:58:09.000If you are committed to the belief system, this is going to be a collision at some point.
00:58:12.000I mean, that's not something I'm making up.
00:58:14.000That seems to me to be pretty true, but that's sort of where people, I think, get upset.
00:58:17.000I don't think that's very controversial.
00:58:18.000I think what you're saying is very reasonable and makes a lot of sense.
00:58:21.000But the video that I saw was you talking about people that support the state saying that if you support the state, you support people that want you dead.
00:59:09.000But in the video that I watched, you were going on and on about cutting people out of your life that support the state.
00:59:18.000And essentially, this idea of this philosophy that you have about how to live life being the one that these people should espouse and everything else is dangerous and you should cut these people out of your life.
00:59:30.000Well, was that at the end of me making the argument?
00:59:33.000I mean, if that's sort of, if somebody just takes sort of the tail end, right?
00:59:37.000So I sort of gave you the argument here that if you're an anti-racist, at some point, you've got to stop hanging with the KKK people or give up on your anti-racism.
01:00:46.000I'll put you on the spot, but you kind of got a gun against my temple, so I just wanted to talk about that.
01:00:52.000I know we've talked a lot about all the abstract things in the universe, but I want to ask you a question directly, and it's better to talk to people face to face.
01:00:59.000It's harder to point a gun at somebody face to face, even in an abstract manner.
01:02:09.000And they will do whatever they can to disconnect these two things, theory and practice.
01:02:15.000So they can get all the emotional comforts of conformity with the theory, but none of the emotional discomforts of actually advocating somebody getting shot, which people are relatively uncomfortable with.
01:02:24.000But don't let them have their cake and eat it, too.
01:02:26.000That's not because you're mean, it's just reality.
01:02:28.000If you support me getting shot, at least have the courage, the balls, to look me in the eye and say, Steph, I support you getting shot.
01:02:37.000And then I can get you the fuck out of my life.
01:02:42.000Because how can I have even a shred of self-esteem?
01:02:46.000A shred of pride in my own existence if I'm willing to hang out with people who want me shot?
01:03:04.000Self-denigration of the most revolting kind.
01:03:13.000Well, I know that you want me shot, but hey, could I maybe get a little more meatloaf?
01:03:23.000And if we're not willing to do that, like if we're not willing to put our personal relationships to the test, if we're not willing to do that, if we're not willing to do that, that's fine.
01:03:33.000But don't imagine you have anything to do with libertarianism.
01:03:36.000Don't imagine that you have anything to do with virtue.
01:03:38.000Are you using these ideas to play the clever card, to play the cool card, to play the alternative card, to play the I'm smarter and know more than you, and I'm out of the matrix, and you're in the matrix, and they play all this nonsense.
01:03:55.000Don't try and use ethics for your own personal comfort and to feel superior and avoid the anxiety of asking people that basic central question, which you yourself bring up.
01:04:04.000You yourself bring this question up about taxation as violence.
01:04:09.000As the initiation of the use of laws, you bring it up.
01:04:11.000Other people don't bring this to the conversation.
01:05:22.000They might be doing a really shitty job of it, but the idea that they want you dead, they don't want their population dead.
01:05:29.000If everyone was dead, there'd be no money, there'd be no life, there'd be no civilization.
01:05:35.000In my opinion, that's not an effective way to phrase that, and it's leading, misleading, in fact, because it's not the goal of the state is to kill you.
01:05:45.000You keep saying the state wants you dead.
01:05:47.000That's an unfair way of describing their position.
01:05:51.000No, no, but I wasn't describing that the state wants you dead in that clip.
01:06:15.000That's how it's different from a restaurant or the Boy Scouts.
01:06:20.000I mean, at the bottom of what the state does is a gun that is the initiation of force.
01:06:24.000That is the upside-down pyramid that it rests on is a bullet.
01:06:28.000And so when people say, I want the government to do this or the government should do that, what they're saying is that violence, the initiation of violence, is how we're going to solve this problem.
01:06:38.000And that initiation of violence goes against specific individuals.
01:06:42.000And so if you're for the war on drugs and I enjoy using drugs, then you want force to be used against me.
01:06:50.000You want people to come and use force against me to prevent me doing my peaceful activity.
01:06:55.000And that is, I mean, stripped of all the rhetoric and all of the flag waving and all of the matrix-y stuff that goes on that we're raised with, law is an opinion with a gun.
01:07:06.000That's what government law fundamentally is.
01:07:09.000And to resist the state is to risk death.
01:07:15.000I mean, we've seen this over and over again.
01:07:18.000Do you regret saying it the way you said it?
01:07:20.000Do you think that it could be perhaps said in a way that more illuminates that position rather than this continuing use of this phrase, they want you dead.
01:07:31.000And then you separate from the people that support people that want you dead.
01:07:36.000Because that's one of the things that people are worried about with you is that they think that you have this main principle that you bring up about cutting people out of your life.
01:07:47.000Cutting family members out of your life.
01:07:50.000Cutting people out of your life that disagree with your views on the state.
01:07:53.000Cutting people out of your life that disagree.
01:07:55.000And by doing that, you're separating these folks from their friends.
01:07:59.000And that that is the foundation of cults.
01:08:03.000That is a big part of cults, is that cults separate you from your friends that might disagree with the cult, separate you from your loved ones, separate you from your family that may have some sort of a control and bond over you, so that the cult can have more control over you.
01:09:08.000If people are concerned about being separated from families, they should be a hell of a lot more concerned about the war on drugs than anything some internet podcaster is saying.
01:09:19.000You know, as well as I do, how many families are smashed up by the war on drugs.
01:09:24.000So if somebody is for the war on drugs, then they are for people getting ripped out of their homes, separated from their children, thrown in prison.
01:09:34.000If people are for family cohesion, which, you know, I'm married, I have a child and love it.
01:09:40.000If they're for family cohesion, they should be against the military-industrial complex, which separates people from their families, sends them overseas, gets them traumatized, has them come back, dumps them back in with very little support into society as a whole.
01:09:55.000If people are very much into family cohesion, then forcing parents to pay for government schools where parents and children are separated from each other for seven or eight hours a day, that is a significant issue.
01:10:08.000So I'm sort of a little baffled sometimes when people say, when I say, look, if you're going to take a committed stand on a moral issue, at some point your personal relationships are going to have to become part of that equation.
01:10:21.000Now, if you don't want to take a committed stand on a moral issue, that's perfectly fine.
01:10:24.000And I said that right there in the video.
01:10:27.000Then give up this philosophy if you want to keep your relationships.
01:10:58.000Are they saying that they want you in jail?
01:10:59.000They don't want you breaking laws, but do they want you in jail?
01:11:02.000I mean, are they saying they really want you dead or are they saying that they don't think that it's the worst situation ever to have a government?
01:11:09.000Well, no, but you see, again, in this clip that you played, I said, when you sit down with that person, you say, I've talked about this for years, right?
01:12:24.000Or I can say, well, I'm not, you know, for reality or truth or Judaism or anything like that anymore.
01:12:30.000That is the reality of having a committed moral principle.
01:12:33.000If you are in the 18th century and you are for the end of slavery and everyone around you is like, I think slavery is a necessary immoral institution.
01:12:41.000And you had years of conversation with them about the moral reality and you've shown them the pictures.
01:12:46.000In the 20th century alone, Joe, governments murdered a quarter of a billion human beings, not including war.
01:12:56.000A quarter of a billion human beings, 250 million human beings were murdered by governments in the 20th century.
01:13:02.000That is some serious shit that goes down.
01:13:04.000That is like, I don't even know how many holocausts, right?
01:13:08.000And so people who support the state, and I'm talking about after years of conversation, right?
01:13:13.000Because it takes a long time to change these paradigms.
01:13:16.000But at some point, if you are committed to a moral goal, then people who are happy or comfortable or positive or pro the initiation of force against you in pursuit of that moral goal, I think that I cannot have people in my life who are going to, after I have explained it and after they have agreed with the general principles, as I said in the clip that you just played, I can't have those people in my life.
01:13:42.000I can't have people in my life who want me thrown in jail for following my conscience.
01:13:48.000But when you say support the state, you don't want people in your life that support the state.
01:15:00.000But if you're saying that you're going to cut people out of your life that support the state, to what extent do you have to not support the state?
01:15:07.000I mean, if you're paying taxes, you're supporting the state.
01:15:09.000If you're following the laws, you're essentially supporting the state.
01:15:12.000You're following laws that you don't agree with.
01:15:14.000Like when someone says, I don't support the state, what the fuck does that even mean?
01:15:34.000Right, but then the dissent of that obedience, the disallowing of the state or the disapproving rather of the state.
01:15:43.000Like what, to what extent do you require to maintain a friendship?
01:15:47.000All I require for friendships with me, all I require is for somebody to say, I do not support the use of force against you for peaceful activities.
01:16:14.000Well, that's all very, very reasonable.
01:16:17.000And in saying that, but also saying that you also are following the laws, you're still sort of supporting the state, aren't you?
01:16:27.000Yeah, again, we're back to this question of support.
01:16:29.000I don't think that enforced compliance could be support.
01:16:33.000Otherwise, you know, rape, there's no such thing as rape, because if the woman's not fighting back, right, obviously it's, you know, a terrible situation.
01:16:39.000So no, I just, all I require is for people to say it is coercion, and I think it's wrong.
01:16:46.000I mean, nobody has to do anything, because I think that once everybody gets that, then evil is a very tough thing to fight because most people, like once someone identifies something as evil, it's usually done.
01:18:00.000And of course, most people who do follow the state follow the state just as I did and approve of and appraise the state because that's how they're raised.
01:18:07.000And that's, you know, so it takes years of conversations to change people's minds.
01:18:11.000But at some point, you know, again, committed to all people have to say is they reject the use of force against me.
01:18:20.000Yeah, I think that the issue that people have with it is this stern stance of cutting folks out of your life.
01:18:28.000I mean, that seems to come up over and over again in the criticisms of you, is this idea of cutting family members out of your life, cutting your parents out of your life, and that, you know, even people that have thought that they had happy relationships with their family, you don't believe they're happy relationships, and you don't believe that these people, you essentially have talked about childhood in a lot of folks as being like a prison Well, I mean, technically it kind of is.
01:18:58.000It's just that, you know, she's completely dependent on me and she has no rights.
01:19:02.000She has no economic independence and so on.
01:19:04.000So that's more a biological description of dependence rather than it's terrible like a government prison.
01:19:10.000Yeah, I don't think I would ever describe it as a prison.
01:19:13.000I think I would more describe it as someone developing and more of like, you know, a scenario where you're mentoring and raising them and protecting them and then slowly nurturing them to the point where they're independent.
01:19:28.000No, and I can't remember if and where and when I've said anything like that, but I mean, I obviously am a parent and I've been a stay-at-home parent for five and a half years now.
01:19:38.000You've cut your parents out, your wife has cut her parents out, and you've recommended this to many other folks.
01:19:59.000If you want to keep, and this is the consequences of beliefs.
01:20:03.000I really, really want people to take philosophy seriously.
01:20:06.000I don't want it to be like a dilettante science.
01:20:08.000I don't want it to be a opposer habit.
01:20:10.000I mean, when you hold moral beliefs, they're very serious, very, very important.
01:20:15.000And that's how things change in the world is people who take their moral beliefs incredibly seriously and are willing to go to the wall for them.
01:20:47.000So essentially what you're saying is that your idealistic view, your utopian view must be and somehow acted upon.
01:20:56.000And that if you have this idea of what is correct, what is morally correct, what is ethically correct, what is the best way to live your life, if there are any impediments to that that you are enforcing or even nurturing, you need to remove them from your life.
01:21:13.000I think there's a certain amount of real momentum that we are raised with.
01:21:23.000I think many of us, I can give you my own personal example.
01:21:27.000We were raised by people who were raised by people who really didn't know much.
01:21:31.000And a lot of how we developed and a lot of how we were taught around the home was by people that really didn't, they weren't aware of the consequences of their actions.
01:21:42.000They were essentially acting on the momentum of how they were raised and also what is convenient.
01:21:51.000And so they yell at you to shut the fuck up.
01:21:53.000And is it that they're evil or is it that they didn't really know what the fuck they were doing?
01:21:58.000And I think that taking a stand to do things differently is incredibly important.
01:22:04.000And if you have grandparents or parents or whatever that are destructive to your children or they give your children, put bad thoughts in their heads or teach them that what you're saying is incorrect and that these ethics and morals that you're teaching them that you feel so strongly about are in fact against the Bible.
01:22:22.000I could see cutting those types of folks out of your life.
01:22:27.000But I think people have a problem with you saying it because you're so charismatic, because you're so eloquent, because when I hear someone talk that talks better than me, I assume that person's smarter than me.
01:22:42.000I want to listen to that person more than I want to listen to my own mind because most people's minds are filled with doubt and insecurity.
01:22:49.000And it's one of the reasons why cults get formed in the first place.
01:22:53.000If someone can talk clearly and confidently, and I say this with all knowledge that I've been accused of fucking starting my own cult, all right?
01:23:00.000I'm not any sort of a leader whatsoever.
01:23:03.000What I am is entirely a person who's curious and who asks questions, and I give advice based on what I have learned about myself.
01:23:11.000And I try to be as open and honest about all my flaws and all the mistakes that I've made, totally in the interest of disclosure so that other people can learn from the mistakes that I've made without having to make them yourself.
01:23:23.000But I think that when people hear that, this idea of cutting people off, defooing, as you call it, cutting people off, it makes them nervous.
01:24:19.000Screw this, you know, all this other stuff we've been talking about, the state and so on, right?
01:24:24.000If you have issues with your parents, like if they beat you up or if they never paid any attention to you, sit down and talk with them and air your grievances.
01:24:34.000Because you have to be honest in relationships if you're going to have a relationship.
01:24:51.000It's been my consistent mantra for eight years.
01:24:53.000Go talk to a therapist and make sure a therapist reviews the whole situation with you, goes with you through the whole process.
01:25:00.000Now, that's a heck of a lot more than women who are being abused by their husbands usually get in terms of advice, right?
01:25:05.000But as far as I know it, the people who have left their families have done so under the care of a therapist, which, you know, I think is really essential and important because it is a challenging thing to do.
01:25:17.000And as I said at the beginning of the show, Joe, I mean, it's all about principles.
01:25:22.000It's all about the extension of principles.
01:25:24.000Women who were abused by their husbands chose those relationships for bad reasons, obviously, and probably for own personal histories of abuses, children, and so on.
01:25:32.000Women who chose their husbands are in those relationships voluntarily and can leave at any time and have massive support systems around in the world to leave.
01:25:41.000Now, when you're a child, you really can't leave your parents.
01:25:44.000I mean, that's why I think I've jokingly referred to it as like a prison because you can't leave.
01:26:00.000And so then if you become an adult and the behavior has not reformed and the parents are still negative or difficult or abusive, absolutely sit down and air your grievances with them.
01:26:09.000If they continue to be abusive, you don't have to stay.
01:26:11.000Well, how do you define abusive, though?
01:26:24.000Fdrurl.com slash BIB is my presentation on the Bomb in the Brain, where I go through what's called the Adverse Childhood Experiences, which is a test developed by Dr. Vincent Folidi, who's also been on my show.
01:26:36.000And I think it's a nine or 11-part questionnaire about things that you experienced as a child that are considered to be abusive.
01:26:44.000So being beaten, not receiving proper medical care or food or shelter, and living with a family member who is incarcerated or mentally ill or addicted to various substances and so on.
01:26:56.000So there is pretty objective questions out there.
01:27:02.000I haven't obviously vetted them compared to what I don't, excuse me, I don't know.
01:27:07.000But there are sort of standards out there by which people can sort of find out to some degree whether or not they have experienced abuse as a child.
01:27:15.000But this practice of defooing, this is, I mean, it's pretty widely criticized, right?
01:27:20.000I mean, your wife got in trouble for this, for advocating this on your show, right?
01:27:37.000They had some questions about the podcast, and at the end of it, they said, listen, we thought that maybe you had been given advice without giving a full psychological question or workup.
01:27:48.000The quote that I had written down was that she had been told her statements in support of defoing are not supported by current professional or consistent with… The final result was that defooing is perfectly consistent with best psychological practices.
01:29:14.000Until death do us part was the mantra, right?
01:29:18.000That you can't leave your husband no matter how abusive, no matter how terrible, no matter how drunken, no matter how whatever, right?
01:29:25.000And she basically said, well, I don't think that's right.
01:29:28.000I think that you should not stay in abusive relationships.
01:29:30.000Now, if the only people you ever talked to were the husbands, the abusive husbands that these women had left, what would they say about this woman?
01:29:51.000I mean, if you promote voluntarism in relationships and then people go to a therapist and, you know, like I was, I think, I don't know, 2000 and whatever it was, years and years ago, there was some write-up in the newspapers about some guy who left his family.
01:30:08.000He was, a therapist was helping him through the whole process.
01:30:11.000And the therapist was recommending it.
01:30:13.000And the therapist was the one who was helping him through the process.
01:30:16.000But somehow, it's the podcast in Canada that is the sole cause of all this stuff.
01:30:20.000Well, I certainly think there's arguments for cutting people out of your life.
01:30:24.000Whether it's a sister or a brother or a mother or a father, there are abusive people that you are unfortunately just given a relationship with.
01:30:34.000You don't choose them, they are just a part of your life.
01:30:37.000And I think it certainly can be argued that an engineered life where you choose the people in your life and you choose the positive influences that you have can be more rewarding, more satisfying, more beneficial than being committed to this blood is thicker than water bullshit where you have a bunch of people in your life that are fucking assholes.
01:30:56.000I think that in illuminating it like this and speaking about it in this sort of a form where you get a chance to go back and forth with someone, people will get a better idea of your point of view and your perspective on it.
01:31:09.000And it's really easy to look at what you've said and say, oh, this guy's fucking starting a cult.
01:31:51.000Every philosopher throughout history, and I'm not trying to put myself in such illustrious company, but every philosopher throughout history has been accused of corrupting the young.
01:31:59.000I mean, if you're not accused of that, you're just not even in the remotely right now.
01:32:12.000There is, without a doubt, there's problems with the society at large, and many of the problems are because it has not been engineered in a very ethical or moral way.
01:32:27.000It's been engineered out of convenience, it's been engineered out of momentum, it's been engineered by the ignorance of the past.
01:32:36.000Plus, we've got this brain that's like, you know, it's like the lizard bit, and then there's like a bit above the lizard, there's an amphibian, and then we've got this monkey, and now we're trying to operate on this like post-monkey beta expansion pack of the frontal cortex, which is all layered on crap, and it's, you know, it's kind of unwieldy.
01:32:53.000We evolved from some pretty primitive life forms, and it's not like that stuff's all vanished, which is actually quite a good thing.
01:32:58.000Well, all these discussions and these conversations and these heated debates, what they essentially do is they bring up very important points and they allow people to give opinions and bounce ideas back and forth.
01:33:30.000I mean, because I saw that all the time, you know, the movie of the week, the woman in peril, the husband is a creep, and she just gets out.
01:33:37.000Why do you think there's been this blowback against you then?
01:33:39.000Why do you think people take these clips out of context, put them up and make it look like...
01:33:52.000But people love to take someone's jokes, take the words in quotes and put them down in text form completely out of context.
01:34:01.000And some of the things that people say look absolutely horrible because of that.
01:34:05.000And that that's not exactly what they're doing with you, but they're doing they're trying to label you in a certain way and trying to label you as a destructive influence.
01:34:16.000Why do you think that is well, I think I am a destructive influence to them, to their interests.
01:34:22.000But is it the interest of who is the interest of?
01:34:50.000All this criticism, what do you think that's about?
01:34:54.000Well, I think that the promotion of voluntarism in any relationship harms the interests of those who are relying on things other than voluntarism.
01:35:36.000The reason why the culinary union is against the UFC is the UFC is owned by Zufa.
01:35:41.000Zufa, the parent company of the UFC, also owns station casinos.
01:35:46.000Station casinos, there's 20-plus station casinos, and they are non-union.
01:35:51.000So the culinary union does not control them.
01:35:53.000They don't reap benefits and rewards and money from them.
01:35:58.000It would be worth upwards of, according to many sources, more than $15 million a year.
01:36:03.000So they spend exorbitant amounts of money to make the UFC look terrible, to highlight anything that any fighter says that's politically incorrect and harp upon it and pay off politicians to keep it out of New York State.
01:36:18.000That's the last place where it's illegal.
01:36:20.000But it's also just New York is a deeply rooted corrupt institution.
01:36:27.000I mean, some of the people that have commented on the UFC, they've done so with complete disregard to the truth, to the facts of the competition itself, to the laws and the regulations and the safety record of the UFC.
01:36:41.000I mean, their distorted perceptions or the distorted depictions, rather, of the mixed martial arts have been just grossly inaccurate and willfully.
01:36:50.000And they've done so because they were being paid to do that.
01:36:53.000Yeah, so something the UFC is doing is to their perception negative to their interests, and therefore they become very hostile towards The UFC.
01:37:01.000Now, this doesn't mean that everyone who's upset with me is in this category.
01:37:05.000I'm sure there's many legitimate reasons to have a negative opinion of me, but I think that the people who are the most upset are the people who, their adult children, listen to my show, and I said, just as everyone has been telling women for 50 years, I said, you don't have to put up with abuse.
01:37:24.000But you should sit down, talk to your parents, and you should get a therapist if you're going to think about separating.
01:37:28.000So you think it's just people that are like the parents of these people that are separating that are pissed off at you because you're challenging the rule that they have over their children?
01:37:36.000I know a lot of the people who have a...
01:37:42.000In fact, one of them was even on my show.
01:37:44.000And so it's not a huge mystery to me as to what their identity is.
01:37:49.000Now, the other thing to remember is that I don't have a lot of shows about this.
01:37:53.000I've done 3,000 shows, of which three or four have been me talking about this topic.
01:37:59.000So this is not any kind of central focus of what it is.
01:38:02.000It's just if people ask me where the principles apply, I have to say where I think the principles apply, and I have to provide my arguments.
01:38:12.000I understand, of course, it's a big topic for other people.
01:38:15.000And so if you have, if you are a parent and your child has had significant issues with you, that child has grown up, that child has listened to me, and they have sat down and like if I have any influence over someone, then what they should do, let's say, is do what I say, which is sit down, talk with your parents, try and work things out, remember that adult relationships are voluntary, and engage with a therapist if you're thinking of separating.
01:38:36.000If people listen to me, then that's what they'll do.
01:38:39.000Do you think it's just a matter of the...
01:38:44.000Like if somebody just says, well, I listen to three podcasts and I walked right out of my family, then that's not me because they're not doing what I recommend then, right?
01:38:51.000So if I have influence, by definition, then the onus shifts to the parents and the therapist, right?
01:39:03.000And so if I have influence, then it shifts to the parents because people are, quote, doing what I tell them to do and going to talk to their parents.
01:39:11.000And then the onus shifts to the therapist because I say, go and don't do this.
01:39:15.000Don't even think of doing any of this without a therapist.
01:39:16.000I'd recommend that in divorce and stuff like that too.
01:39:18.000I think it's beneficial in those situations.
01:39:21.000So the people who have hate-ons, well, I mean, they, if they have- Is that like a hard-on with hate?
01:39:42.000So, I don't know, but I assume it involves fly-high leather boots and lacks on the nipples and stuff like that.
01:39:49.000But yeah, so if your kids came to you when they're adults and they say, listen, I had all these problems, and you didn't listen, and you got angry, and you escalate, and they went to a therapist, and the therapist said, wow, this is a really toxic relationship.
01:40:06.000And by definition, if they're just pouring hate and vitriol on me, is it really that surprising as to why their kids might not want to be in their lives?
01:40:14.000Like, if this is what they do in response to a challenge, is they just create hate sites and pour all this venom and scour around and manipulate and cut things out of context.
01:40:24.000And like, then maybe this is something to do with why their kids aren't in their lives.
01:40:28.000Well, I think as this thing went down with Adam Corolla, and then Adam was criticized by Anna, and Anna was criticized by you, I think part of the issue is when people communicate in essentially an echo chamber, there's one person talking for long periods of time, and you could take any one of those chunks and decide this is something you want to highlight, and out of the context of the entire conversation, you might be able to manipulate it and make it look in a way that it's entirely negative.
01:40:57.000Your position, however, what you're saying now on this podcast, obviously I haven't listened to all your shows.
01:41:03.000I've seen many of your things online, but I haven't listened to...
01:41:06.000Quite honestly, I don't think I've ever listened to any of your positions on defooing with your family.
01:41:15.000Everything I've gotten from is just communicating with you and then reading the criticisms of it.
01:41:18.000But your position on this podcast, I think, is very difficult to argue.
01:42:03.000I think that it's important to have these kind of conversations.
01:42:07.000I think I need to have them, too, with people, too, where I go over my own ideas.
01:42:10.000You know, when you have someone disagree with you, where you get a chance to look at your position from a different angle as well and look at the perceptions of your positions.
01:42:19.000One of your positions that get criticized, or one of the other things that gets tossed at you, is the term misogynist.
01:42:24.000And I'm sure that's upsetting to you as well, right?
01:42:30.000I don't even, if people could define to me what that, if it means general hatred of all women, then I made a really bad choice of who to get married to.
01:42:37.000Isn't it interesting, though, that that's what a misogynist means?
01:42:40.000It's like if you criticize anyone who's gay, you're a homophobe.
01:42:44.000If you have issue with someone who's black who does something stupid like Al Sharpton, you're a racist.
01:42:49.000You know, it's a cute way of dismembering your argument or dismembering your position right away.
01:42:56.000But you said some stuff about women that I have even disagreed with.
01:43:02.000And one of them, you did this thing recently where you're talking about how the way to get assholes out of society, it's women's responsibility because women are breeding with these assholes and they're making assholes.
01:43:15.000It's not only women's responsibility, but it's a key part of the equation that I think is not discussed enough, which is the sexual choices of women.
01:43:22.000That expression, though, or that sentence is really critical.
01:43:38.000By the way, he killed more men than he did women.
01:43:40.000It's one of the things that I found fascinating, that this whole yes all women, hashtag yes all women thing, came out after four men were murdered and two women.
01:43:48.000That guy was a piece of shit, regardless of gender.
01:44:46.000I don't know what was wrong with him, but if you watch his videos where he's talking, there's clearly some sort of a weird social disconnect.
01:44:52.000He had a really hard time connecting with people and couldn't get a woman to like him for various reasons.
01:45:00.000Blame them for his hate and his feelings.
01:45:03.000That's when people see, when they look around, they see all these people that are attractive.
01:45:07.000They see all these people that are, that are attracted to each other.
01:45:16.000And I think that's where this Elliot Rodgers guy fit in.
01:45:21.000And when this yes, all women thing came about, on one hand, I agree with it.
01:45:28.000it's gotta be way more difficult to be a woman, way more difficult to constantly worry about your own physical safety, worry about men wanting to sexually assault you, which is very rare for a man to fear.
01:45:38.000I mean, maybe in prison, yeah, but in real life, it's very rare for men to worry about other men physically, sexually abusing them or wanting to get them somewhere, roofie them up and sexually abuse them.
01:45:51.000But for women, it's a super common occurrence.
01:45:53.000So women in bars are always worried about covering their drink.
01:45:57.000I've talked to at least five women over the course of my life that believe or were definitely roofied or were definitely drugged by someone, you know, unknown drug.
01:46:53.000Something happened during his childhood.
01:46:55.000And I don't think anybody could have prevented that by being a woman, not allowing him to have sex with them or whatever you were talking about.
01:47:01.000I think, especially in this particular example, that guy was sick.
01:49:32.000But saying that women are not part of the cycle of violence is not correct with the data.
01:49:37.000And I am committed against all calumny,
01:49:43.000insults against all hates and trolls i am committed to doing everything i can to maximize peace in the world i know that sounds like crappy and deluded and all that but that is my commitment you know in life and if we can get women to stop hitting children the world will become a much more peaceful place if we can get men to stop hitting children absolutely but we the male aggression has already been focused on so much that there is this blind spot,
01:50:11.000which is the degree to which women use aggression in the raising of children.
01:50:14.00080% of British mothers spank their child before the child is one year old.
01:50:20.000I mean, it's mad how this kind of thing.
01:50:23.000And those of us who have great wives and peaceful girlfriends and all that, there is a whole world out there of people who, and men and women.
01:50:31.000But again, we've talked about the men a lot.
01:51:40.000Some of the best fighters were bullied when they were younger.
01:51:43.000They were beaten up by their brothers.
01:51:44.000Some of the scariest guys are guys who had older brothers who used to kick their asses because they get used to having that from their family and their loved ones, and they have a certain tolerance to violence and a certain tolerance to aggression that other folks don't have.
01:52:01.000They're not as afraid of competition as the other folks are.
01:52:04.000And yeah, that's a terrible cycle to be a part of.
01:52:08.000And those numbers are absolutely incredibly disturbing.
01:52:11.000But that's not exactly what I had read.
01:52:13.000What I had read where you were essentially talking about women's attraction to assholes and that this was the cause of their being more assholes.
01:52:21.000And if women just stood up and said they're not going to be with assholes anymore, we wouldn't have any assholes in the world.
01:53:11.000And I'm saying to women, one of the ways that women can incredibly contribute to reducing the cycle of violence is to choose better men.
01:53:19.000Because there's a part of women, and again, this is fairly well established, at least as well as these things can be established, there's a part of women that likes the alpha guy, right?
01:53:29.000The guy who's kind of cold and efficient.
01:53:32.000And I mean, I'm plowing my way through 50 Shades of Gray, God help me.
01:53:35.000How dare you if you are going to know it?
01:53:58.000But the reality is that we do need to be wise in who we choose to raise our kids with and who we choose to have kids with.
01:54:06.000And I berate men all the time for choosing looks over virtue.
01:54:10.000I mean, on my show, I'm horrendous on men for choosing looks over virtue.
01:54:14.000And we've all been there, we've all done it, and we all know what a mistake that is, right?
01:54:18.000What is it that someone says, I don't care how good looking she is, there's some guy out there who's tired of screwing her, right?
01:54:23.000And so I talk to men about don't just, you know, go for virtue.
01:54:27.000You know, virtue is the big tits of philosophy, right?
01:54:29.000I mean, that's what you want to go for when you're going to get married.
01:54:33.000And for women, I say the same thing, go for virtue.
01:54:36.000But I think men's tendency to choose on shallow standards is fairly well known.
01:54:41.000And again, I'm just trying to sort of shine the light on that other side and say, look, if like you need to sort of cross your legs and grit your teeth and say, he may be sexy, but he's not a good guy.
01:54:58.000Once you give people, like if you say, look, women are part of the cycle of violence, then women aren't helpless and just need to sit on their knees and beg men not to be violent.
01:55:05.000Women can actually talk amongst themselves and be empowered to do things to help reduce the prevalence of violence in society.
01:55:16.000That gives women something to do rather than cross their fingers and hope that men get better.
01:55:22.000You also did this thing on Robin Williams, and you do a lot of these the truth about people, and you do these one-hour-long pieces where you stare at the camera and explain various lizards.
01:55:41.000Just before, I'm so sorry to interrupt.
01:56:51.000All right, sorry, back to Bobby W. Yeah, back to Robin Williams.
01:56:57.000These videos that you do, I think they're very interesting, but to do a biography on someone requires an extensive amount of preparation and massive amounts of research.
01:57:09.000So when you do the truth and the word the truth is a very tricky thing because there's many truths, there's many versions.
01:57:16.000Like I've had conversations with people.
01:57:18.000They'll say, oh, you know, I heard that this person met this person and that person was an asshole.
01:57:22.000And I'm like, well, actually, I was there and that's not what happened at all.
01:57:26.000That person was annoying as fuck and the other person was trying to get away from them and that's why, you know, they looked like an asshole.
01:57:34.000You did this, the truth thing about Robin Williams, and your conclusion was that Robin Williams died because of women's addiction to free stuff, and that he essentially killed himself because of the fact that he owed money, because the fact that he spent a lot of money in his alimony.
01:57:56.000I think that's an irresponsible statement because I think, first of all, it may have been a factor.
01:58:03.000It certainly was a factor in his unhappiness, but we're not even aware of what kind of behavior he had in those relationships.
01:58:11.000It was probably also a factor in the breakup of the relationship, also a factor in the antagonism that he shared with his ex-wives, if and when, whether or not that did take place.
01:58:21.000But also his alcoholism, his drug dependency, his medical state, the state of just the natural body and brain chemistry after years and years of abusing drugs and then going back into it, and then depression itself.
01:58:36.000Then on top of that, Parkinson's disease.
01:58:39.000Then on top of that, whatever medication that he was taking for Parkinson's disease, disease, which many have been proven to cause depression in people.
01:58:46.000So to boil it all down to Robin Williams died because of women's addiction to free stuff, I think that's irresponsible.
01:58:56.000Well, I mean, and again, I said at the beginning of the video that this is not all set in stone.
02:00:18.000The fact that he's broke, even if he did have to pay out $30 million, it can't be totally attributed to the fact that his ex-wives took an incredible amount of money.
02:00:28.000It has to be attributed also to poor management of his finances.
02:00:32.000It has to be attributed to just the overall recklessness that he exhibited in his life.
02:00:37.000He was a very impulsive guy, as many great comics are.
02:00:40.000It's an attribute that many great comics share is this wild, impulsive behavior.
02:00:51.000It's a part of what makes someone a comic in the first place.
02:00:54.000And that is as much of Robin's problem, his poor financial management as the divorce settlements.
02:01:02.000Because if he had been prudent with his finances and had been really good at managing his career, he would still have a shit fuck ton of money even after giving away 30 million bucks.
02:01:16.000But the 30 million bucks still means something.
02:01:54.000The factors that led to him taking his own life by cutting his wrists and hanging himself.
02:02:01.000I mean, that's a fucking guy who wanted to be dead.
02:02:05.000There's many, many, many, many, many, many factors in that.
02:02:08.000Poor choices, a life of regret, accusations of plagiarism that haunted his professional stand-up comedy career.
02:02:15.000All the various things that were wrong in the life of Robin Williams, the alcoholism, the cocaine abuse, and then, of course, his health failing.
02:02:23.000There's so many different things that were wrong there.
02:02:26.000The $30 million certainly hurt, but Robin Williams made an ungodly sum of money throughout his career.
02:04:02.000It's like, my God, you're on a fucking television show, but the hierarchy of stars is, no, if Jack Nicholson all of a sudden started doing a sitcom, everybody would be like, oh, Jack.
02:05:14.000And I really wanted to, you know, there is no external solution to the problem of insecurity, to the problems of feeling unlovable, to the problems of feeling not enough.
02:05:23.000People will try, I think until the end of time, it seems like, people will try to stuff the holes in their heart with whatever they can grab from talent or money or looks or fame or whatever it is.
02:05:33.000But I really try to urge people, you have to look inside and deal with that stuff in a very proactive way.
02:05:39.000Because the idea that you can just basically glue eyeballs of attention to yourself and become whole, I think is a very dangerous myth.
02:05:46.000It is a very dangerous myth, but it's also what propels great comics to become great.
02:05:50.000And that's where it's ironic that a guy like Robin Williams, his horrific childhood, wasn't horrific, just wasn't good.
02:05:57.000But that childhood, I mean, he was wealthy.
02:06:01.000But the lack that he had in his childhood was what led him to be this magnanimous, just energetic, explosive, like, look at me, look at me.
02:06:12.000And he was this look at me guy because no one was looking at him.
02:06:16.000You know, I know this from my own personal experience of becoming a stand-up comedian.
02:06:20.000My parents were, they broke up when I was five years old.
02:06:23.000My father was very physically abusive, violent, very terrifying.
02:06:27.000And then, you know, my stepfather was very young when my parents got together.
02:06:31.000And it was like, I was ignored a lot, you know, and that's what led me to become a fighter.
02:06:48.000And I figured out a way with, you know, constant objective analysis of myself, constantly pushing myself towards new goals, constant research in terms of like psychology, in terms of philosophy, in terms of meditation, in terms of psychedelic experiences, and all sorts of different things that I've done to try to manage my own particular insanity.
02:07:16.000But my particular insanity was more manageable than someone who's a drug addict.
02:07:21.000The people that are drug addicts with that particular insanity, the real problem is you're also creating this massive chemical imbalance in your main.
02:07:29.000And I could be argued that I'm a drug addict.
02:07:31.000Some people have said I'm a drug addict because I like pot.
02:07:33.000But I disagree because I don't smoke it every day and I have quit for weeks on end and it doesn't bother me.
02:08:06.000I think it's a tool that Mother Nature has given human beings.
02:08:09.000But it's not physically addictive in terms of what it does to your neurochemistry and what it does to your body's actual need for it, where you have to go in a fucking rehab.
02:08:22.000If you go into rehab for weed, you're either some sort of a weird case, like one of those people that's allergic to sweat or something like that.
02:08:30.000Or, you know, there are people that are allergic to their wives who are allergic to their husband's sperm.
02:09:46.000I can recommend your listeners to check out his book.
02:09:49.000His name is Gabar Mate, M-A-T-E, and he's written a book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
02:09:55.000And he specializes in treating people with significant drug addictions.
02:10:00.000He's a doctor in Vancouver's drug area, drug district, and so on.
02:10:04.000And he sort of noticed this pattern, that particularly the women who were heroin addicts had all been sexually abused as children.
02:10:11.000And he noticed this relationship between childhood trauma and adult addiction.
02:10:16.000And this book, I won't obviously do any kind of justice summarizing it here, but it goes into, and I've had him on the show too, but it goes into a significant amount of detail about the biochemistry of addiction, that generally, if people have gone through these very hard childhoods, and neglect is underrated as far as how harmful it can be for someone, which is why children act out in order to get hit.
02:10:39.000They'd rather get hit than be neglected in many ways.
02:10:43.000And his basic idea is that when you have a neglected or abused childhood, your brain is missing particular receptors for certain chemicals.
02:10:52.000And then when you take drugs, you begin normal.
02:10:56.000You feel normal because you finally feel what it's like, what everyone else feels who didn't have those kinds of childhoods.
02:11:02.000And that's why the addiction is so strongly there.
02:11:05.000You know, a person of regular happiness, like just make up a number, happiness 100, they take Coke, they go to 150, they go back down to 95, and then they settle around that.
02:11:13.000But somebody who's got a happiness of 30, they go to 110, they feel like normal happiness and what everyone else feels for the first time.
02:11:19.000And then when they crash back down, their life, which formerly was just normal, now feels unbearable.
02:11:25.000And that's one of the reasons why there's this drive for addiction.
02:11:29.000And I did a whole speech of this at a college in Canada recently, so I won't go into the details.
02:11:33.000But I think there is a lot of ways in which you can see really difficult childhoods producing brains that are very susceptible to getting the reups from external substances that should be naturally occurring but didn't develop as a result of childhood trauma.
02:11:55.000Over the last X amount of decades, they've just sort of delve into these responses and then understanding genes and understanding how you could actually pass on depression and pass on these sorts of behavior patterns to your children.
02:12:11.000And a guy like Robin Williams clearly had demons.
02:12:15.000And there was many, many, many, many issues.
02:12:22.000But it bothered me listening to you talk about that because I've had friends that were depressed.
02:12:28.000I know that it's going very clearly against the current of modern medical thinking and which recognizes depression as a disease to say that this guy was killed because of divorce.
02:12:44.000You know, when he died, he still had millions of dollars.
02:13:06.000You think you just got worked up over this idea of alimony, this idea, which I agree with you that it's a very strange thing.
02:13:14.000And the way you put it, I think, was a good way, that you said that if people get fired from a job, you know, you don't get fired and say, well, I still want money.
02:13:23.000I want you to continue to pay me, even though I've been fired.
02:13:26.000But if someone is married, I have a friend who is married, and I talked about this yesterday, but briefly.
02:13:35.000His wife, not only did she divorce him, but she planned it out for several months and went to all the best divorce attorneys and consulted with them so that he couldn't consult with them because it would be a conflict of interest.
02:13:48.000And they don't have any children, but they were married for a while and she will never get married again because if she did, she wouldn't receive these payments.
02:13:57.000So she has her boyfriend living in his old house.
02:14:00.000And when they send inspectors over there, the guy moves out.
02:14:03.000He gets his shit out, like waits around the corner with a U-Haul.
02:15:47.000I think that's also something that breaks up a lot of families too, because more than half of people who are considering divorce, if they stick it out five years later, they say, I'm really glad I did.
02:15:57.000You know, there's a lot of people who go through challenges, rough spots, tough spots, transitions.
02:16:21.000I hate saying the majority of when you're dealing with individual relationships because they vary so widely that I don't think that you can really narrow them down to statistics.
02:16:30.000I think every individual interaction between two unique people is unique in and of itself.
02:16:36.000And that person, I'm different with my wife than I've been with anybody I've ever dated.
02:16:40.000And I think that that's how it is with most people.
02:16:43.000Sometimes you find someone who's compatible and it works great for you, but there's other times where you're thinking about getting away from them where that's probably the best fucking decision you can ever make.
02:16:52.000And I know people that say, why does divorce cost so much?
02:16:56.000You know, there's a lot of people that think that too.
02:17:00.000I agree with you, though, that there are some ridiculous alimony settlements that are just unreasonable and don't make any fucking sense whatsoever.
02:17:08.000In Europe, there's, I mean, really no such thing.
02:17:11.000And people can check out the movie Divorce Corps.
02:17:13.000I found like I'm, I don't know, I don't get any money from this stuff, but I think it's a good movie, and they sort of compare what goes on in Europe.
02:17:19.000So in Europe, the worst that can happen is you have to pay alimony during the period that the divorce is going through.
02:17:26.000Now, there can be child support and so on, but it's not much.
02:17:28.000It's a weird thing, this idea that once a woman has separated from her husband, that she's no longer able to live her life as an independent.
02:17:48.000Like, if you're a woman and you are used to being a waitress and you're used to living in an apartment, there's nothing wrong with that.
02:17:55.000And then all of a sudden you meet some guy who's some real estate mogul who's worth a billion dollars and he puts you up in his Beverly Hills mansion and you live with him for a year and you get married.
02:18:05.000Should you discount the 30 years of your life that you lived as a waitress?
02:18:11.000You know, like one of the things that we talked about the last time we were here was we were talking about poverty and we were talking about how people in poverty work a shockingly small amount.
02:18:23.000And you were saying that people that live below the poverty line work an average of 16 hours a week.
02:18:32.000My argument with that is also, of course, that you're dealing with people that mostly are unemployed.
02:18:37.000So if you have one person works 80 hours a week, one person works zero, you meet those two in the middle and then you find out what the average is.
02:18:44.000So it's not like most people are just saying, oh, I'm going to work one day a week.
02:18:49.000And when you're dealing with something when it comes to like alimony, when you want someone in the style that they've been accustomed to, you should take into account their whole fucking life.
02:18:59.000You know, you shouldn't take into account the style they've been accustomed to over the last 12 months living with this crazy rich guy.
02:19:07.000The idea that somehow or another, this man that you married who's worth a billion dollars, that you helped earn him, you know, half of what he made during the year that you were together, where's the evidence that you've ever been successful at making that kind of money in the past?
02:19:22.000Why should you be entitled to that kind of money?
02:19:24.000And I think the same is true with men.
02:19:26.000When Kevin Federline was married to Britney Spears, that motherfucker never made a nickel, okay?
02:21:15.000I would try a number of different careers because I think there's a lot of unbelievably fascinating, puzzling, complex things that you could study in this world.
02:23:45.000You're going to push through the difficulty.
02:23:46.000And then you're going to understand what difficulty truly is and how much of it is just mental, how much of it is just in your mind, this adversity to difficult task or to struggle.
02:25:08.000And momentum is a very important point in people's lives.
02:25:12.000That's why some folks don't like to take days off because they feel like they're losing momentum and they sort of have to restart the wheel up again after a vacation.
02:25:19.000It's like what they say, if you want something done, give it to the busy guy.
02:25:36.000You were out Instagramming pictures of you at a strip club two days ago.
02:25:40.000Like, how the fuck did you not get that done?
02:25:42.000Like, you had all the time to do all these other things, but you don't have the time to do the thing that's going to enhance your life, that's going to benefit you, that's going to move forward your career, your life, your prospects, your art, whatever it is you're working on.
02:25:53.000You know, I think that it's hard for people because we operate on the momentum of the past.
02:25:58.000And a lot of times our past has been just a graveyard, just a wreck of disasters, one after the other.
02:26:07.000And you look at that and you go, well, that's who I am.
02:26:13.000And we put kids in these schools where they just sit there passively receiving stuff rather than actively doing stuff.
02:26:18.000And then we wonder why they may, some of them lack motivation when they get older.
02:26:21.000And I think there's a big problem in the fact that the job of being a teacher should be a revered position that's incredibly difficult to earn.
02:26:31.000I think it should be just like, you know, being someone who is in charge.
02:26:36.000I mean, being someone who's in charge of the development of the mind of your child is such an incredible position, an incredible...
02:26:58.000Do you have teachers that you remember from when you were a kid?
02:29:14.000And I think those kinds of questions where you really stimulate your mind, I think is a great idea.
02:29:20.000I was telling my daughter a couple of, I mean, maybe two months ago about, there's an old Spanish proverb that says, habits begin as cobwebs and end up as chains.
02:29:29.000Way easier to break in the beginning than later off, right?
02:29:35.000And anyway, she just brought this up, you know, that we were talking about someone she knew and something that she didn't like that they did.
02:29:43.000And she said, yeah, but they're still pretty much in the cobweb phase.
02:30:38.000And it sort of flies in the face of a lot of people like to harp on free will and determinism and there is no free will and these sort of, you know, I think those can be fascinating philosophical debates.
02:30:51.000But I think as far as like your own life, it could be a massive distraction.
02:30:54.000This idea, this concept that there is no free will, yeah, throw that shit out the window and just fucking get off your lazy ass and get shit done.
02:31:02.000Because that's like this pontificating of whether or not free will is a real thing.
02:31:08.000Well, and for me, I mean, I act as if I have free will because I know it's going to get me a better life.
02:31:15.000And if I don't have free will, it was predetermined that I'm going to act as if I have free will, so I don't lose anything that way either way.
02:31:20.000So, I mean, I'm just going to pretend like I have free will, maximize it as much as I can.
02:31:24.000And if it turns out I don't, then I was predetermined to believe that anyway.
02:31:29.000I mean, the argument one way or the other that can be proven in each, well, Because apparently they can determine that you make decisions before you make decisions.
02:31:47.000Deep down in the amygdala, like the base of the brain, top of the spine, that impulse is there, and then people make the decision, and they experience the decision up here, but the decision is happening down here.
02:31:58.000I don't think that means that's inevitable for everyone.
02:32:00.000That's part of self-knowledge, is learning what your emotional triggers are so that you can make decisions, right?
02:32:06.000You're not just ex post facto rationalizing stuff that you want to do anyway.
02:32:37.000And then you're competent at the country.
02:32:39.000And I think that free will is pursued through self-knowledge, and that gives you the choice.
02:32:44.000But so, yeah, if you think you can, you think you can't, you're right.
02:32:47.000I mean, if you think you have free will or you think you can't, you're kind of right.
02:32:49.000Yeah, and that impulse, I would love to know if there's been any studies done on whether or not people ignored that impulse, because there's a lot of impulses that you have that you never act on.
02:33:00.000Scientifically, you have a quarter second to interrupt an impulse.
02:33:04.000How much research has been done on that?
02:33:06.000Like, how many people were observed and how many different complicated periods of their life where they've been forced to have weird situations?
02:33:14.000How many people wanted to strangle somebody and didn't?
02:33:16.000You know, I mean, how many people are you?
02:33:18.000No, I think most people, given how few strangulations there are in the world, I think most people manage to slap down the strangle hands.
02:33:32.000Now, but what about the days when, do you have the days where you just like the elephant of inertia sits on your chest and just flats up your nose and you just don't want to get anything done?
02:34:17.000Well, that's where my energy comes from because my mind is usually pretty damn energetic.
02:34:22.000My mind is always filled with a bunch of different things that I'm trying to accomplish and different things that I'm interested in and pursuing.
02:34:27.000But if I'm down, usually it's my body.
02:34:33.000I get that sometimes I worked out too hard.
02:35:17.000And she understands it much more from a chemical standpoint, from what's going on inside the mind.
02:35:25.000And there's a lot going on there that keeps people on that fucking couch.
02:35:29.000And What's interesting is it doesn't exist in all cultures, and that it may be also the society that we live in, that this is a very unnatural way to live your life, and that the human body is not essentially not designed for sitting in cubicles, sitting in cars, no motion.
02:35:46.000And they've also shown that exercise has been as effective at mitigating depression as have antidepressants, as have SSRIs.
02:35:56.000I think physical exercise plus therapy is your best times for long-term recovery from the data that I've read with regards to depression.
02:36:03.000Yeah, I think people need to get their juices flowing.
02:36:06.000I think it's so underrated, and it's associated with vanity.
02:36:12.000It's associated with all sorts of insecurities about your body that you're trying to pump yourself up and your ego.
02:36:28.000It's about getting all your endorphins flowing.
02:36:30.000It's about getting your body into a natural state because the body's natural state is in motion.
02:36:35.000We're not supposed to be sitting around doing nothing all day.
02:36:38.000We're supposed to be hunting and gathering, and that's how our body was designed.
02:36:41.000And you know, I mean, we're not the strongest species, and we don't have the biggest teeth, but you know one thing that human beings have is like ridiculous physical endurance.
02:36:49.000Like what I've read is that the ancient hunters, do you know how they used to get their substance hunting?
02:36:54.000You chase that animal until its heart just fucking explodes in its chest, and then you're like, I win, and you drag it back to camp.
02:37:02.000Like 20 miles of running, and then the zebra's heart just dies and you get it.
02:37:06.000It's also in Africa because it's extremely hot and they don't sweat.
02:37:25.000And we get that, of course, being bipeds, right?
02:37:28.000I mean, I think I read somewhere that one of the ways that we were able to get our most expensive organ is the brain, right?
02:37:33.000But one of the reasons we're able to have the brain is because when we were on all fours, more of our back was exposed to sunlight, and so we had to spend more of the water and energy cooling ourselves off.
02:37:43.000Once we went bipedal, much less sun is hitting the body, so you have more water available to grow the brain because the brain requires a lot of energy and water.
02:37:51.000I love that biological development stuff, I think, is really, really fascinating.
02:37:54.000Yeah, that is unbelievably fascinating.
02:37:56.000The development of the human brain, as opposed to the brains of lower hominids, is one of the biggest mysteries in all of science.
02:38:02.000So many different things have been attributed to what caused the human brain to grow double in brain size over a period of two million years.
02:38:10.000It's pretty fascinating, but thank God it happened, I guess.
02:38:13.000But this conversation would probably be a lot less entertaining if we were just grunting and pounding our foreheads into the microphone.
02:38:19.000Not only that, if it was the same conversation, who the fuck would listen?
02:38:25.000Yeah, I think there's a huge amount of human potential that's locked up in people's insecurities and inertia.
02:38:31.000And I really would love to find a way and just get people to understand how much fun being in motion is and how much fun exploring and challenging yourself and challenging the world, how much fun it is.
02:38:45.000But I think that there's just a lot of, I don't know, negativity, hostility, of course, on the internet, as we were talking about earlier.
02:38:51.000It's kind of not all over the place, but it's definitely there.
02:38:54.000And I just wish people could understand that there is very little to be afraid of in life.
02:38:59.000I mean, other than death, which is going to happen whether you're busy or not.
02:39:03.000What's interesting, we're talking about essentially like if we could talk to Robin Williams, if we could pull Robin Williams aside before he committed suicide and have these conversations with him.
02:39:13.000If you look at that guy, he is in a way a great example of someone who on paper should be unbelievably happy.
02:39:25.000He is loved by millions and yet still not happy.
02:39:28.000And one of the reasons is you look at his life and it's this series of things that went wrong, series of Coke binges and alcoholism and breakups of the marriage and regret for the way he was raised by his parents and all these different things that you carry around with you like weight.
02:39:47.000And it's very difficult to shed that weight.
02:39:49.000I don't know what he did besides counseling.
02:39:52.000I don't know if he was an exercise guy or if he did yoga or what his diet was like, but there's a lot of people out there that are dragged down by their past.
02:40:05.000That right now, their heart's beating, they're breathing out of their mouth, their fucking brain is functioning, but they're just burdened.
02:41:35.000I mean, what goes on in our heads is great, but if it's not out there in the world, we'll take it with us when we die and nobody will ever know anything about it.
02:41:43.000And I just never really wanted to have a life where I sort of go through life and into death like a spear into a still lake, you know, barely leaving a ripple.
02:41:51.000And I think that the challenges of an active and challenging life where you're, you know, messing with society's perceptions and trying to Advance the moral cause that you are passionate about is so worth it.
02:42:05.000I wish people could just live one day on the other side of that fear.
02:42:08.000I wish that people could live one day in motion and then they would never be satisfied with the inertia of their lives.
02:42:14.000But until you get there, I think it's really half, really tough for people to picture what it's like.
02:42:19.000I mean, you know, we were talking before the show.
02:42:21.000I mean, you've got a special coming up.
02:42:27.000And I think if people who are inert could live a day in your shoes and recognize just how much fun it is and what a great challenge it is and how wonderful it is to be testing yourself on the edges of your capacities for significant periods of time, I think that they would go back and say, oh, I can't do this anymore.
02:42:45.000But I think until you've experienced it, that's the tough thing.
02:42:47.000Until you've experienced it, I think the inertia feels safer and better, if that makes any sense.
02:42:52.000It's also important to surround yourself with other people that are also trying to accomplish things.
02:42:57.000When you surround yourself with lazy people, it's very taxing.
02:43:01.000They're kind of self-sabotaging people.
02:43:03.000They kind of cockbuck your ambitions a little bit too, right?
02:43:05.000Because they're like, oh, I don't know if that'll be a good idea.
02:44:07.000And stand-up comedy, it's very important to have a community.
02:44:11.000I did all my growing as a comic in the communities of Boston, then New York, and then LA, the two, or three rather, strongest communities in the country.
02:44:22.000Boston, not so much anymore, but at the time, huge.
02:44:25.000And now New York is still just as giant and LA is giant.
02:44:29.000And being in those clubs and being around those guys and seeing those other people that are out there writing new jokes and constantly expanding and creating and growing and getting better at the art form inspires people.
02:44:44.000And that's, it cannot be underestimated.
02:44:47.000Surround yourself with positive people and you'll be positive.
02:44:50.000Surround yourself with shitheads and you'll be a shithead.
02:44:53.000Or at least you'll be fighting against being a shithead.
02:44:55.000Yeah, I mean, nobody expects to become a great tennis player if they play people who can't play.
02:44:59.000I mean, you have to match yourself against the best.
02:45:02.000And this is another thing, last random promise of the day.
02:45:04.000But the people who have low expectations and low ambitions, I also find a little frustrating at times.
02:45:13.000I mean, I think aim your sights as high as humanly possible.
02:45:16.000I mean, there's no Schwarzenegger films unless that crazy bastard from Austria comes and says, I barely speak the language, but I'm going to go marry a Kennedy, run California, and make some great movies.
02:45:38.000But the people who, I mean, again, I sort of feel like, you know, I was sick last year and confronting mortality and all that.
02:45:45.000And it's sort of how I've lived as a whole is whether you're great or not, whether your ambitions are high or low, death's going to take you either way.
02:45:54.000And I think that it adds to the human capital of the world to strive to communicate passion, power, magic, creativity, virtue, whatever it is that you're good at.
02:46:05.000It adds to the human capital of the world.
02:46:06.000We all inherit this great stuff that comes rolling down the mountain of history from all the great people who've come before us.
02:46:11.000Add a little bit, anything that you can, to that human momentum of energy and positivity.
02:46:18.000And the people who want to do a little or get by, I just wish, it's the biggest regret that people have when they're old is that they played it small and they didn't take the risks that they wanted to.
02:46:29.000Because there's this disaster on the other side of risk that never seems to materialize.
02:46:33.000And really, it's like you're in some fight to the battle with your own hand puppets, you know, a fight to the death with your own hand puppets.
02:46:41.000I think that people just take those gloves off and go and take life and have high ambitions and forget everybody who ridicules you for high ambitions and great things.
02:47:01.000Focus on your creativity and what is making you great.
02:47:04.000And I would really, I think that human potential is the great untapped resource of the planet.
02:47:09.000And I wish that there was ways to communicate.
02:47:11.000I try to do this, of course, as best I can, but ways to communicate to people just how amazing a life can be, which is active, enthusiastic, passionate, and challenging.
02:47:23.000And we get this incredibly brief opportunity.
02:47:26.000I said recently in a podcast, the universe has repulsively fucked itself senseless to give you life.
02:47:32.000I mean, in order for us to be here, like one single-celled organisms had to mate with each other.
02:47:44.000But we're all here because of this incredible striving for billions of years of this life.
02:47:48.000And to not embrace that gift of existence in this brief time that we have, it just seems to me such a waste and such a disrespect to the incredible odds of us actually being here.
02:48:00.000And being in this relatively free country and being in this incredible time of communication, technology, and human opportunity.
02:48:06.000I really want people to try and grab that as much as possible.
02:48:09.000You do not save up points that you get to redeem after you're dead.
02:48:13.000Spend everything, leave nothing on the table.
02:48:15.000And that's what I hope people can find a way to do.
02:48:18.000Well, I think by living your life like that, you set an example that people can be inspired by.
02:48:22.000And I think that having these conversations and having something that someone can listen to and they hear this and they go, you know what, I'm going to go fucking run Up a hill.
02:48:37.000And I've had so many people come up to me after the show and say that the podcast changed their life because they become motivated, because they never had anybody around them that was inspiring in any way.
02:48:47.000And then all of a sudden, they get to hear conversations with inspirational people and they take these conversations and it fuels them.
02:48:54.000You know, if you can't have that community in your neighborhood, you can have that community online now.
02:48:59.000You can have that community by having access to these kind of conversations, by listening to songs that fire you up, by reading a book that gets you going, by hearing a conversation.
02:49:36.000I think it's a fantastic contribution to the world to be able to inspire people, certainly in your comedy, which is fantastic.
02:49:43.000I mean, by the way, if you haven't seen Joe, go see Joe.
02:49:46.000But I think that that energy is incredibly positive.
02:49:49.000And I think people who grew up around negative people or neutral people, they don't even know what it's like to have any kind of incandescence around them.
02:49:56.000And if they see that, then it awakens in them a possibility that probably was not possible even within their own imaginations before.
02:50:04.000And I think that social media and the internet and YouTube, it's giving people access to conversations that they probably have been sealed off from for who knows how many generations.
02:50:16.000Certain sectors of society have not had access to enthusiasm, positivity, competence, efficiency, energy.
02:50:23.000And now there's this amazing cross-pollination of energetic, enthusiastic people.
02:50:28.000We can pollinate people who otherwise would never have had access to it.
02:50:31.000I think what an amazing opportunity that is to unleash more human potential.