Episode 3096 - The Scott Adams School 02⧸17⧸26
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
192.94136
Summary
Stefan Molyneux is a philosopher, podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He is also one of the most downloaded philosophers on the planet, and has been featured in a number of documentaries, including "Hoax" and "The Cernovich Documentary." In this episode, he talks about how he became aware of Scott Adams, and gives us a tribute to him.
Transcript
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We're going to give people a minute to come in and we are going to get going with a very
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Some of you might know him, some of you may not, but you're all going to be lucky today
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Before we can do anything on this show, we need to do something first.
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A level that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains.
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All you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or steinac and teat and
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Meanwhile, all of the lazy podcasters have taken the morning off.
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Yes, I feel sorry for anyone who's not joining us today, especially.
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I just want to quickly remind everyone that this is the Scott Adams School.
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This is streaming from Scott's platforms and channels.
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Thanks to Shelly, who's letting this go on with us.
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I am joined today by Owen Gregorian and Marcella.
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And our very special guest, I am so happy and honored that you're here with us.
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Before I fully introduce you, you guys, Stefan is amazing.
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This is what I want to say about Stefan Molyneux.
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He's a philosopher, probably one of the best and most downloaded.
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I think a million downloads is what I'm seeing.
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And I want you to know that I've been aware and we've, many of us have been aware of Stefan
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And he was also in Mike Cernovich's documentary called Hoax, which we talked about the other
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He's had the pleasure of interviewing and being interviewed by Jordan Peterson, Jordan's funny
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cousin, Jesse Lee Peterson, Noam Chomsky, Dave Rubin, Dinesh D'Souza, Peter Schiff, David
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Friedman, Candace Owens, James O'Keefe, Steven Crowder, Joe Rogan three times.
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So he, if you haven't met him, you're going to meet him now.
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And what I want to say to anyone who was worried about having Stefan on because he was canceled
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once for thinking freely and speaking freely is that's exactly why we love you because our
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And if they make you uncomfortable, open your mind a little more and enter the world of philosophy
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and our special guest, Stefan Molyneux, thank you for being here with us.
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Thank you for the, thank you for the invitation.
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We, um, sent out the link of your beautiful words and tribute to our beloved Scott Adams.
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And I think it would be appropriate if we could just open thinking about Scott and maybe telling
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us how you first became aware of Scott and Scott with you and what his words and wisdom
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And it's funny because I got a little blurry eye just seeing him again.
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And so, uh, yes, I'd be very happy to unpack my heart and in tribute of Scott.
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Uh, I actually became aware of him when I was in graduate school.
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Uh, of course Dilbert was in the papers and I was an avid reader of, I don't know, I guess
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we can call them newspapers for those who are under 40.
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You'll have to ask your parents, uh, what, what they were, but they were great for lining
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bird cages the next day and getting the propaganda delivered on ink straight to your eyeballs.
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So I'd read Dilbert and find him very amusing of course.
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And then after graduate school, I got into the business world and very quickly became
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a pointy haired manager, actually became a chief technical officer at a software company
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And I remember some of my employees would occasionally read Dilbert in this samistat subversive way,
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like they were reading Solzhenitsyn under Stalin or something like that.
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And, uh, I pointed out that I actually had a Dilbert calendar in my office.
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I had Dilbert pictures on the wall and that actually got me a great degree of credibility
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And of course I rose up through the programming ranks and I actually, at one point was going
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to grow my hair out a little and tufted up because I was still dark back then.
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And I found that Scott's takedown of corporate fluff and language was a beautiful and philosophical
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I always found it to be deeply philosophical, like a lot of absurdist thinkers.
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And Scott very much pointed out the absurdity of office life, the, the pomposity, the, the,
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the verbiage, the catchphrases, the fear of HR, uh, you know, uh, catbird being the sort
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of the id that the conscience that could speak its mind because it was safe being a cat.
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In other words, as long as you're a pet, that's not domesticated, you can speak your mind.
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And, uh, you know, all of the various characters really burned themselves into my brain.
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I remember being on a flight and, and, and Scott as well, because he was a hilarious cartoonist,
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like one of the best that ever was and underappreciated, of course, as a comic writer, because most people
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As a bit of a writer myself, I just admired just about every sentence.
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And when you write yourself, like if, if you, if you're a weightlifter and you see somebody
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lifting a great weight, you feel it like, you know, because you've tried to do that same
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thing and seeing the leanness economy, precision, and focus of his prose and knowing as a writer
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that he probably sweated blood, you know, there's an old saying about writing.
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You just, you just stare at a blank piece of paper until beads of blood form on your forehead,
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knowing how much Scott sweated over every sentence.
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Maybe it came easier to him, but I think he talked about how he worked very hard to make
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I remember being on a business trip with my brother.
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And we were reading about individuals and it was hilarious.
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And we, we saw a reflection of all that we criticized in authority coming out from Scott
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I mean, even the pointy head boss has his own charms and Scott's obvious affection for
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the characters was, was really a beautiful thing that we can love people and also love
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the absurdity that is within them means that we don't have this sort of Ayn Rand perfectionist
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Um, and I just found him to be a wonderful creative thinker and kind of a Loki based chaos agent.
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And so let me explain what that means that I hope I won't monologue too long, but I came
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from sort of a strict boarding school, Anglo-Saxon precision semi military, got to bounce a quarter
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off your bed, everything has to be perfect, which, you know, from a software standpoint,
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from a business process and coding standpoint, you need that kind of strictness.
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And then into this sort of regimented life of, you know, revelé and morning marches in my mind
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comes this absolute madcap chaos agent, uh, who, who smashes that in, in very, very healthy ways.
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It's like that old, you know, everybody needs to bleed.
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And I found that Scott's absolute irreverence without rage, because a lot of people who are
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irreverent, like, you know, the sex pistols, you know, they have this kind of rage to them,
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but his absolute irreverence and his absolute skepticism, absent rage and hostility was a
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And it got me a lot more, you know, that bell curve, you need some order, you need some chaos
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And he dragged me from sort of that one valley all the way to the, I think where I sit now,
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which is a, hopefully a decent combination of that Aristotelian mean, not too much order,
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uh, because then you're, you know, like the 6,000 year Chinese society that never evolved
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Otherwise, uh, you, you can't plan and execute on anything.
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And I think he kind of helped drag me to that middle point of sort of, uh, ordered creativity,
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uh, because I think he, he was an obviously ridiculously disciplined fellow.
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I mean, I would hear him talk about his day and I would just feel like, what have I done
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with my time getting up at four o'clock in the morning and voluminous notes for every
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And then I'm have this project and I have this project and I'm open this business.
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And I'm just like, wow, I mean, it's a nice life.
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If you only have to sleep four hours a night, good for you.
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That's not my particular, uh, circadian rhythm, but, uh, just, uh, his productivity.
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And then, you know, reading about the restaurants that he opened and things that he did, uh,
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just a ridiculously skilled person in every venue and a genuine love for humanity.
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And one of the rare voices speaking, of course, about optimism for the future, which is so,
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If people are just doom scrolling and waiting for the end of the world, either from a
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eschological Christian sense or a sort of economic libertarian sense.
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And what, what a welcome a voice in the landscape.
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And of course, I, I, as he got more and more sick, I found it hard to watch, of course,
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I mean, everybody did that, that's sort of goes without saying, uh, because it is very,
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very hard to watch, you know, the, the gods of fate snuff out such a bright candle in such
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And, uh, his, but his courage in, in facing that, uh, I, I did, um, uh, write to, uh, to
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Scott and just say that one of the greatest things that he did was to help remove people's,
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excuse me, fear of death because he had, you know, we, we all wonder how we're going to
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die, particularly I'm going to be 60 this year.
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So we all, you know, uh, there's a lot more in the rear view than there is in the road
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And everyone's like, Oh, wouldn't it be nice if I die, die to my sleep or, you know,
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maybe got hit by a bus unawares or something like that.
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But that's not how most of us are going to die.
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Most of us are going to die in a slow decline that we know long time ahead, what's going to
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happen and we all wonder how we're going to deal with it.
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And when we are emotionally invested and wrapped into someone's mind, which we are, you know,
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every time we meet on the internet, our neurons merge together.
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It's like two galaxies coming together with this great effect on each other.
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And the fact that he faced his death with courage, with resolution, with integrity and
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continue to work and continue to do good all the way up to his end has given me, uh, you
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know, as much comfort as you can have in the face of death to realize that it can be an
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It can be something that gives you great focus, depth and power.
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And while it is certainly something not to relish and embrace, of course, I'm sure Scott
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never woke up and said, I'm glad of the richness that my illness has given me.
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But out of great wrongs, out of great, I won't say injustices because it's an accidental
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thing, but out of great suffering can come great gold.
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And that given that there's going to be suffering in life, no matter what, and life ends in
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suffering, the fact that he has taught us how to wring gold out of sort of the descending
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black capes of death's advance has given me at least, and I think countless others, a
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great degree of courage and a lessening of the fear of the inevitable end.
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Having seen someone march heroically into the final battle we all face, you know, spraying
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flaming arrows of wisdom in every direction has given me, uh, uh, some real peace of mind,
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I hope that makes some sense, but that's sort of what I got out of it.
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And then just seeing him again, it's like, it does make me emotional because I was very
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Now I, I, I noticed a lot of parallels in your life and Scott's in terms of some of the things
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I mean, you also have been talented in many domains.
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Um, you had a huge following on your free domain and still do, I think, but you know,
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you went through a bunch of cancellation, probably one of the most severe other than maybe Alex
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Jones, where like every single platform demonetized you and de-platformed you at the
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same time, um, and probably for similar reasons to what Scott was doing, just kind of speaking
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an uncomfortable truth, um, that, you know, inflamed a lot of people.
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And, and, you know, what was that like for you going through that process?
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I mean, the, the power of the reframe is almost thermonuclear.
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I mean, that there's a phrase in Hamlet that ever since I was in theater school, sort of
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There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
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And I'm not quite that far, you know, that, that you can be out of an airplane and think
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And I don't think that Scott would, would think that either, but the power of the reframe
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Uh, oh, there's another phrase, which is, uh, uh, never underestimate what worst luck
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So, uh, if you look at, uh, philosophers throughout history, and I would certainly put Scott in
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the category, uh, at least, I mean, he was such a multifaceted person, but definitely philosophical,
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uh, being in God's Debris is, is a very philosophical work.
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Like, so, uh, truth tellers are very much treading, uh, a tightrope, a line.
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Uh, this is, uh, all the way back to Socrates, of course, the, the, the Holy Trinity of the
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foundation of Western philosophy, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato were all persecuted, uh,
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by the state, early scientists, Galileo, and so on, uh, tortured.
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Uh, and so, and, and Oscar Wilde said it very memorably.
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If you're going to tell people the truth, you have to figure out how to make them laugh.
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Now I was not blessed quite Scott Adams sense of humor.
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So, uh, I, I make a joke and it's a fantastic way to bring a pin drop silence to the room.
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So I knew that there was this line that you have to walk in telling the truth.
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Uh, and I suppose it's something like therapy where if you have, uh, some real selfish monster
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as a therapist, I'm sure you have to tell them that truth slowly over time, because if you
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tell them too much, they'll just rage quit and, and so on.
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So you kind of have to slowly need the truth into people through their epidermis or something
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like that, because very few people can look at, you know, sort of bald truth straight up
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without losing their minds or being hyper reactive.
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And people program that way, of course, to, to react to certain words and phrases in, in
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So, you know, the rage of the mob is something that we all have to surf when you're trying
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And one of the things that I thought about when I was canceled, which as you say, was
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pretty brutal and extensive, but one of the things that I thought about was how can this
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And, and also how might it have been worse if I was not?
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In other words, if you are walking, you know, let's say you've got your headphones on and
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you're rocking out to some classic beats and you're about to walk in front of a bus and
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someone violently tackles you and throws you to the ground.
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And then the bus swings by and you're like, I've been saved.
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I'm going to name five children after you and, and three of my pets and a goldfish.
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And of course, this was brought home pretty, pretty vividly last September, of course, when
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Charlie Kirk, another person that I worked with to some degree was, was gunned down because
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in my speaking tours, I've had to face the same death threats and bomb threats and had
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And then there was another fellow who was beaten to death in France.
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And so what worse luck has my bad luck saved me from?
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So I chose to view the deplatforming in, in two ways.
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Number one, and, and this was an effort of will because part of you is just like, oh no,
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my life's, you know, my life's work off YouTube, which I had, um, I don't know.
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I think you had almost a million followers at that point.
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Well, they've never let me get to a million because they didn't have to send me a plaque.
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Apparently they would have to produce by selling their children's kidneys because they just
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did not want to give me that plaque, which I understand.
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But no, I had, uh, gosh, uh, yeah, I've had almost a billion views and downloads and
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it was sort of, you know, 15 years of life work.
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Now, I mean, I still have the videos and so on.
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So it's not like it's all erased, but it was definitely rough.
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And part of me was, um, you know, that there is that tendency, that undertow to feel like
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a victim, to feel like I've been so hard done by and how dare they.
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But then I thought, okay, so what are the positives that can come out of this?
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And, you know, thinking of Scott to some degree.
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One was, uh, liberation, liberation to pursue what I want, because when your audience goes
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down by say 95%, you can say, oh no, I've lost 95% of my audience, which, you know, happened
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Cause people were seeing me for like the yesterday, all my troubles seem so far.
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They were seeing me for the greatest hits, right?
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And I enjoyed that play the stadiums, play your three chords and, you know, rock on Cleveland.
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And I'm like, okay, so I've been delegated to jazz clubs so I can do the jazz.
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So I started writing a fiction, which I hadn't done for a long time.
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I started reading audio books of my old novels, which I absolutely loved to do to, to sort
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of bring those from the draw and out into the world.
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I got to do more core philosophy, which I had done politics for a long time, which was,
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But again, that's where, uh, that's where the lasers are on the forehead, right?
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I was liberated from stadiums, which I know sounds kind of funny, but, uh, if you've always
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wanted like, like sting, you know, when he was in the police, uh, he would do all of
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his stadium tours and then he toured smaller places with his jazz bands for a while.
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So I liked the jazz and that was number one is it liberated me to do more of the core philosophy,
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uh, like the nature of reality, metaphysics, the nature of knowledge, epistemology, and
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And which, which is going to have the longest lasting effect because I was thinking of people
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like Mark Twain and Mark Twain had for decades, the newspaper column, nobody gives the rats
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Cause he, but, but that's what people wanted in the time.
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And, but because he focused so much in the here and now, he had much less to offer the
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future because all of those events have come and gone.
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So I was liberated from the sort of hamster wheel of the here and now, which has great
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effect in the present, but almost no effect in the future to doing more core philosophy,
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which has, uh, you know, less effect in the present, but much greater effect in the future.
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I mean, Plato, uh, the philosopher, uh, ran for office in, in Syracuse and, uh, was, uh,
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ended up being sold into slavery because that's what happens when philosophers get into
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He was going to be a slave for the rest of his life, except for one of the people out
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there buying slaves happened to be one of his former students who paid 400 drachma to
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liberate him and then returned him back to his life of philosophy.
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So politics is a bit of a, a bit of a filthy game and snow white and pure, you see.
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But anyway, so, so I was liberated from that, got to do more core philosophy.
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And number two was, um, you know, I was, I was knocked out of the way of an oncoming
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bus because a lot of people have hit pretty ugly ends, uh, who've been involved in politics
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So, uh, I think the de-platforming, uh, liberated me to do the jazz.
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I love, which has a greater effect in the future.
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And also it, uh, uh, got me out of the way of oncoming bullets and other, uh, social and
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political and legal repercussions or whatever has been happening to people.
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I absolutely kiss the hem of the garment of the people who canceled me.
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It was a liberation and a reminder, almost if the gods of the future were reaching back
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in time, they'd say, Steph, lots of people can do politics.
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Not so many people can do metaphysics and epistemology.
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Do your thing, do the thing that's going to help us the most in the future.
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Not the thing that changes people the most in the present, because of course, interfering
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with power 50 years after I'm dead, they're not going to bury me.
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They're not going to dig me up and do it again.
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But if you interfere with the, you know, come not between the dragon and his wrath is that
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If you come between political people and their goals, they have a lot more power to affect
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But if you really work on core philosophy and morality, that really changes the future.
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So it was a big plus and I'm enormously thankful for it.
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I believe he felt liberated and he felt he had the creativity shackles taken off of him.
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He didn't have to answer to the publishers of the papers anymore.
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And I think he had like a breath of fresh air once he realized, wait a minute.
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I mean, it was, I think it was, um, who came to his house that day?
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They, they went, oh, it was Joel Pollack went to Scott's house the same day Scott got canceled
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And he's like, no, we're going, we're his friend.
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I will say your cancellation Stefan came when canceling became like the new thing.
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And it was like trying to behead somebody, you know, we're going to de-bank you, de-platform
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you, make you, you know, disappear from the world.
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Um, and then I think by the time it got to Scott, he just realized like, oh, I'm just
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And I'm just going to relish it and run with it.
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I just want to mention very briefly that maybe there was a bit of a trade.
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So maybe watching me be de-platformed and still have a great time gave Scott less fear
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of de-platforming, watching him die and, and be courageous with it.
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So obviously, uh, uh, I get the much better end of the deal, but, uh, maybe there was
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Um, and I wanted to know who was your favorite philosopher and why.
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The fountainhead for like the fourth time at the moment, because I get something new from
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Um, Ayn Rand without a doubt was the one, you know, it's funny that there's a, the woman
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who taught Helen Keller after she taught Helen Keller, who was of course, blind, deaf and,
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And she taught her language, tracing things on her hands, a great movie about this.
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And people asked Helen Keller, like, what was it like before you had language?
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And she said, you know, just a chaos of sensations and blurs and static.
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There was everything with scraps and colors and thoughts.
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And it was all, and for me, prior to philosophy, I mean, that was me.
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I mean, morally speaking, I, I couldn't fully accept the religious training that I got quite
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intensively, uh, growing up because I could very much see that religion, uh, Christianity
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was not in the position to stop the evils that were accumulating in the world.
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And a friend of mine was really into the band Rush.
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The drummer from the band Rush was really into Ayn Rand.
00:25:46.760
And he's like, Hey man, you should read this book.
00:25:48.760
And I just had this vague sense of like, ah, some sort of science fiction, you know, woman,
00:25:54.760
So that was sort of unusual because he handed me Atlas Shrugged.
00:25:57.760
Uh, but, uh, I thought, well, that's, that's a bit of a doorstop.
00:26:00.760
Maybe I'll, maybe I'll try ordering a slightly smaller meal first.
00:26:04.760
And yeah, I, I read, um, I read the Fountainhead and it just, I mean, it just hit me like an absolute
00:26:11.760
Then of course I plowed into Atlas Shrugged, uh, We the Living night of January 16th and,
00:26:19.760
And, and I was just like, uh, voracious, voracious.
00:26:24.760
The, the, my mind, which had been spinning in a void hit the ground and had traction because
00:26:30.760
connecting the mind to reality is foundational for productivity.
00:26:34.760
Your mind is there to change things in the world.
00:26:39.760
It is not there to preen itself or to show off to itself or to languish in its own inner
00:26:45.760
Those are fine in, in emergencies, but you've got to actually get out there and do things
00:26:50.760
But you have to know that what you're doing in the world is good, not exactly.
00:27:01.760
The purpose is to actually do things in the world, but in order to have confidence and
00:27:06.760
not be a psychopath, psychopaths have constant kind of confidence.
00:27:09.760
So that's have confidence because they're narcissists and nobody else exists for them.
00:27:14.760
But if you have a conscience, you don't want it to tell you after the fact that you've
00:27:19.760
done wrong, you need to know ahead of time with reasonable assurances that what you're
00:27:22.760
going to do is going to be good in the world and through objectivism.
00:27:25.760
And then, you know, to some degree, uh, spiced up with the Aristotelianism because
00:27:30.760
Ayn Rand, of course, was a huge fan of, of Aristotle.
00:27:32.760
She named the three books in Atlas Shrugged after the three laws of logic.
00:27:39.760
It gave me a clarifying way to organize my thoughts and to look for contradictions and
00:27:48.760
It can never be a hundred percent, but reasonable assurances that what I was saying, what I was
00:27:53.760
doing in the world would actually be good rather than blindfoldly throwing a ball and
00:28:00.760
You may, but it's purely accidental and you can't reproduce it.
00:28:03.760
So she gave me some reproducible skill in predicting the fact, the moral effects of my
00:28:08.760
And then sadly, it took me an embarrassingly long time to actually bring the philosophy
00:28:14.760
And after that, uh, it was, it was good because, you know, there's the world, right?
00:28:18.760
And there's the people you grew up with and the people you're friends with in high school
00:28:22.760
And, you know, not, not many of them come along that journey of reason and virtue and
00:28:27.760
So it's funny that you pick and ran because she was mostly canceled the whole, her entire
00:28:34.760
life because she's still not considered like a sophisticated philosopher in a philosophy,
00:28:43.760
You know, when I would bring her up in my philosophy classes, the, the, the professor would be like,
00:28:49.760
So you, you, it goes back to the theme of being canceled and being in this row kind of sense
00:28:57.760
where you are like outside of society in a way.
00:29:01.760
And that kind of brings in like Scott being canceled, you being canceled and feeling that.
00:29:08.760
Well, of course, uh, academia has as its pinnacle, Michelle Foucault.
00:29:14.760
And now Michelle Foucault, the most skin crawlingly repulsive.
00:29:18.760
Like if Ayn Rand would write him as a villain, people would say, Oh, come on.
00:29:24.760
I mean, he was a completely void of any virtue.
00:29:30.760
Hedonistically narcissistic, a disease spreader, drug addict, BDSM fetishist, uh, whose, uh,
00:29:39.760
the accusations, I won't even get into them here, but, but even the things that aren't
00:29:43.760
accusations and are validated is that he was one of the most skin crawlingly repulsive
00:29:47.760
human beings to crawl the face of God's green earth.
00:29:55.760
It's wild because all the French intellectuals who wanted to lower the age of consent to
00:29:59.760
about four minutes after birth, I mean, just absolutely repulsive human beings.
00:30:03.760
And these are the people and you can't have both.
00:30:07.760
You can't just go north and south at the same time.
00:30:11.760
You can't have these absolutely repulsive, hideous human beings at the pinnacle of your
00:30:18.760
And then also bring in that smoky voice Russian goddess of reason known as Ayn Rand and have
00:30:28.760
I, I, uh, you know, I also see a parallel with you and Scott just being sort of very rationally
00:30:34.760
focused in terms of, you know, you think of yourselves as very rational people and maybe
00:30:39.760
Um, and Scott seemed to go in this other direction with hypnotism and persuasion and essentially
00:30:46.760
coming to the conclusion that people are not rational 90% of the time.
00:30:50.760
And that includes him and you and me and everybody.
00:30:54.760
Um, and so he seemed to move in this other direction of kind of trying to appeal more emotionally
00:30:59.760
or, you know, with visual language and different things.
00:31:02.760
Um, and I, I guess my perception of you is that you went the other direction in terms
00:31:09.760
Um, I don't know if that's true or not, but I wanted to see what you had to say about
00:31:12.760
that and like maybe how you approach persuasion.
00:31:15.760
Well, Scott bugged the ever living crap out of me about that really did.
00:31:20.760
He really did because here I was with all the, my lovely crystalline syllogistical theories
00:31:25.760
that are all written out and validated and, and, and logic treed and all that kind of stuff.
00:31:29.760
And, uh, Scott was out there communicating with people in a sort of very effective, uh, metaphorical
00:31:35.760
and, and florid language and understanding persuasion.
00:31:38.760
And he, he bugged the living crap out of me as usual because he was kind of right.
00:31:43.760
I mean, it's all very well to have these, these big theories, but if you can't get them out
00:31:48.760
there into the world, again, that's sort of the mind that's spinning, but not hitting the
00:31:54.760
So in, uh, watching Scott, of course, uh, emotional persuasion, uh, analogies, and also, you know,
00:32:02.760
you kind of have to be a reasonable and happy person in order to sell, uh, you know, the,
00:32:07.760
the classical Socratic formula, no reason equals virtue equals happiness.
00:32:13.760
And so, yeah, he, he bugged me cause I'm like, Oh, who cares about hypnotism?
00:32:29.760
So I originally built software products and then I ended up out in the world selling them.
00:32:33.760
And it took me an embarrassingly large amount of time to say, huh, great software products,
00:32:42.760
So yes, he was very, very keen in his analysis.
00:32:46.760
I mean, sort of razor sharp in his analysis of persuasion.
00:32:49.760
And, uh, I came, you know, he predicted Trump's win as did I, but he came from it from a persuasion
00:32:54.760
standpoint and I came from it from another direction.
00:32:57.760
And of course, without the persuasion, without the ability to engagingly and enjoyably communicate
00:33:02.760
to people, it's like, you can write the greatest song, but if you only play it in your own toilet,
00:33:09.760
What, what, um, direction did you come from with Trump?
00:33:14.760
Oh, I mean, I just knew that the American population was desperate to have borders and to have less
00:33:21.760
And that when you are in academia and you're in the media, you are in a tidal wave that
00:33:29.760
feels like it's not moving because it's moving so rapidly.
00:33:32.760
Like, you know, you think of a little plankton in a tidal wave.
00:33:34.760
Do they even really know that there's a tidal wave until it hits, right?
00:33:37.760
And so, um, because Scott and I didn't come out of academia, uh, I mean, I did a graduate
00:33:46.760
We, we could see from the outside, the tsunami of the, the, the woke stuff, the left wing stuff,
00:33:52.760
the, the really centralized planning stuff, the, um, and anti white stuff and all of that.
00:33:59.760
And the view from inside was like, you know, it's like the fish, you know, the old thing.
00:34:03.760
Well, water, what water, you know, this lukewarm, you can't feel it.
00:34:06.760
And so we could see a momentum and a direction and a fear in the general population that we
00:34:10.760
shared, I think, uh, because we were outside the, the sort of bubble and, but we were seeing
00:34:17.760
So we could see that the Trump was standing before that saying, you know, like Gandalf on
00:34:23.760
And so we could see that, I think, I don't speak for Scott, but I could certainly see that
00:34:27.760
mechanism and people in the media and people in politics and people in the arts.
00:34:32.760
I mean, and in academia, they couldn't because they didn't understand what it was like from
00:34:47.760
And, you know, Scott would always talk about, you know, don't worry about these things.
00:34:55.760
And we're very good at seeing the disaster ahead of us and being able to pivot personally
00:35:02.760
with the things I'm seeing, like, especially after watching the amazing speech that Rubio
00:35:09.760
gave and the disastrous responses from people like AOC.
00:35:14.760
Um, I feel like we aren't slowing the ship fast enough, especially when we have politicians
00:35:23.760
who are in another country, trashing the country they're supposed to represent.
00:35:29.760
Um, and it's become like the thing to be doing.
00:35:33.760
So how help me and the people on here like me who worry, uh, I'm like an Italian grandmother.
00:35:44.760
Like, what can you prescribe to us to help us stop this ship from hitting the iceberg?
00:35:52.760
That looks like we're going to, to me, it looks like, you know, we lost borders for a long time.
00:35:58.760
It's going to take a very long time to remove these people.
00:36:03.760
Um, you know, when, uh, when bad people leave one country and come to another country, they're
00:36:10.760
So now we're being overrun with gangs from all over the place.
00:36:20.760
I'm very worried about our country and I'm worried about the world because how many times
00:36:34.760
Well, I mean, for over 20 years, I've been talking about parenting and I know that parenting
00:36:43.760
Uh, I think most of us here, uh, well, we would all understand that.
00:36:47.760
So I, uh, peaceful parenting.com is a free book on the philosophy of parenting.
00:36:52.760
Uh, and that has produced, of course, now I've been talking about it for over 20 years.
00:36:56.760
So some of the people I talked about very early on, their children are now adults.
00:37:01.760
So to, to raise children in a peaceful, negotiated and rational fashion, it makes them completely
00:37:07.960
immune to political temptations because politics is about forcing people to do stuff.
00:37:11.960
And if you raise children with reason, uh, with evidence and with negotiation, then they
00:37:16.960
don't have the urge to force people to do stuff.
00:37:18.960
And they are kind of immune to other people, forcing them to try to do stuff as a whole.
00:37:22.960
So there's a whole mindset thing that you can do about that.
00:37:25.960
I do understand it's, you know, perhaps a little late in the game, you know, plant a tree,
00:37:29.960
uh, because you're looking for some shade that afternoon is not necessarily the best approach,
00:37:33.960
but I would certainly keep, keep focusing on that.
00:37:36.960
And even people who have teenage children can change their parenting approaches.
00:37:39.960
So the philosophy of parenting is, is one of the things that I've really worked hard
00:37:44.960
to add as value as a thinker, because philosophers have talked about everything under the sun,
00:37:51.960
except, you know, the most moral mission that every human being is ever involved in, which
00:37:57.960
And I think philosophers have been, well, a lot of them are, I wouldn't say, but a lot of them
00:38:02.960
were, uh, not, uh, not, not overly blessed with the ability to charm women and, and so on.
00:38:09.960
And so they ended up a lot of them single, a lot of them isolated.
00:38:12.960
So they didn't really talk that much about parenting, which I think was a real shame
00:38:16.960
because that could have changed the world quite a bit.
00:38:20.960
Well, it may not have been as much of a problem back then, because back then when the
00:38:24.960
...brought to life in your personal relationships, which means if people are, you know, super pro-political
00:38:29.960
and want you thrown in prison for like they, they, well, we should have hate speech laws.
00:38:34.960
Well then you want to throw people in prison for legal speech or for speech that is not incitement
00:38:42.960
And so recognize that when people want to use the power of the state against you, they're
00:38:47.960
Now you can take some time to alert them to this, to wake them up to this.
00:38:50.960
Cause you know, it's like, you don't want to wake someone up by going, you want to wake
00:38:54.960
someone up a little gently, you know, stroke their arm a little, wake them up.
00:38:57.960
But at some point they do have a responsibility to wake up and people who are addicted to using
00:39:01.960
the power of the state to get their way, uh, will, will tear apart the world and you're
00:39:08.960
So if they get their way, so you have to really have that line after a certain amount
00:39:12.960
of communication and moral instruction, you have to have that line where you say, no, no,
00:39:21.960
Like you support the use of violence against me, against me.
00:39:26.960
Now, if they're like, oh my gosh, I I'm against violence.
00:39:35.960
It's like, okay, you know, like, uh, hit the eject button and, and get out.
00:39:37.960
I mean, the left is very good at this and we need to learn from the left.
00:39:41.960
They are intolerant of people who disagree with their views.
00:39:44.960
I wouldn't say that I would say I would be, I mean, I am intolerant of people who want to use violence against me for peaceful speech and peaceful actions.
00:39:51.960
So you got to bring these things to life in your actual relationships.
00:39:56.960
And then the plus of that, and you know, what is the opposite of worry, uh, is not comfort.
00:40:02.960
Because if you have adversity and you have people you love and who love you, then the adversity, which is inevitable in life, diminishes enormously.
00:40:11.960
I mean, whenever you have to move, uh, you don't do it alone.
00:40:14.960
You don't try and get some giant couch down a spiral staircase with someone yelling pivot at you.
00:40:18.960
You, you, you hire people because you know, heavy loads, uh, is only lightened with good companions.
00:40:23.960
And if you live, you know, with that kind of virtue, with that kind of integrity, with that kind of directness, and you shave off the bad people from around you.
00:40:33.960
Cause you know, bad, corrupt people act as a moat to keep the good people away.
00:40:36.960
You end up sealed in this chamber of, uh, malintent.
00:40:40.960
And so if you have love, which is only possible through virtue, love is our response to virtue, uh, and nothing else.
00:40:48.960
If you have that and you have love, you know, then you can bear almost anything with grace and the inevitable negatives that occur in life, either politically or personally or health wise or whatever.
00:41:00.960
You have someone in your corner who genuinely loves you.
00:41:04.960
You have people in your life where you have this, you know, shared strength of, you know, co co mingled affections.
00:41:15.960
You know, yes, you can talk to people about politics and, and for sure, I still do that from time to time.
00:41:21.960
But if you aim at virtue, then you have the capacity to love and be loved in a very deep and meaningful way and permanent way.
00:41:28.960
I say, this is a man who's been married for 20.
00:41:37.960
So if you have that, then you reduce your worry and also your values have a purpose and reward.
00:41:47.960
Because one of the things that Scott was, was talking about was, you know, it's difficult to be honest.
00:41:52.960
It's difficult, but there's rewards on the other side of it as a good conscience and better relationships.
00:41:57.960
And so we as individuals, we can't just go out there and, and, and change the world in the way that we want.
00:42:06.960
Which is good because if we could do that, evil people could do it and they have often a higher incentive.
00:42:11.960
So it's good that we can't do that, but we can influence people as much as humanly possible in the most positive direction.
00:42:18.960
That's the best chance we have of saving the world.
00:42:21.960
You know, like if you don't want to get lung cancer, don't smoke, you know, you won't get lung cancer.
00:42:26.960
Well, no, but it means that you have a much lower chance.
00:42:29.960
And the more that we enforce and spread virtue in our personal lives, the more we challenge people's anti-rationality and bigotry, the better.
00:42:41.960
Because I was kind of out in the wilderness for like a half decade.
00:42:44.960
When I came back, my, my ex account got reinstated.
00:42:48.960
When I came back to social media, holy crapola, it was a completely different planet.
00:42:54.960
Stuff was absolutely appalling, shocking, you know, people's heads would explode.
00:43:10.960
I just had to step out of the room and everybody knows how to cha cha cha.
00:43:15.960
And so the, the, the, if you see this change slowly, you don't notice it as much.
00:43:20.960
You know, like if your friend has lost 50 pounds, they lost it over time and it's a little bit, but then if you haven't seen them for a while and you see them, it's like, oh my God, this is crazy different.
00:43:32.960
I mean, people are routinely chatting about topics that I would have been like shaky hand typing, you know, six years ago.
00:43:39.960
And like you said, the Rubio speeches are anti-white racism, like IQ, voluntary family relations, even with parents.
00:43:47.960
Like all of this stuff is, is, is talked about, like, it ain't no thing.
00:43:54.960
You know, this is like a Galileo coming forward 400 years.
00:43:57.960
I'm like, oh, everyone, I should do a bad Italian.
00:44:01.960
So say that, that, that everybody doesn't say that the earth goes around the sun and everybody knows that.
00:44:08.960
It's like, I got the tortured for, you know, like, this is wild.
00:44:13.960
And that level of progress has never before been achieved in human history where the Overton window is like a bullet train these days.
00:44:21.960
And that's incredible because, you know, this is an old Marxist saying, like, there, there are decades when nothing happens.
00:44:29.960
And that this last couple of years have just been, you know, felt like you feel like one of these.
00:44:37.960
These astronauts going through gravity by being whipped around like your skin is peeling back from your eyeballs.
00:44:45.960
All I had to do was leave and everyone becomes perfect at that truth.
00:44:52.960
Because that's still a huge problem in the U.S.
00:44:56.960
And it's even worse in many other countries around the world.
00:44:58.960
What do you think needs to still change to get people to want to have more kids?
00:45:03.960
Well, there's very complicated, sophisticated answers.
00:45:15.960
No, I'm saying the phones have to go away for families to grow, I think, all the doom scrolling.
00:45:22.960
So whatever the problem is in society, the solution is always less violence, less initiation of the use of force.
00:45:29.960
So, of course, the domestic population is being taxed to subsidize the non-domestic population to have a lot of kids.
00:45:38.960
It really is one of the most sinister things that I've ever seen because I'm old enough to remember when all of the Western women were said, you can't have children.
00:45:56.960
And now it's like, oh, sorry, there aren't enough children.
00:46:00.960
And it's like, that is a brutal, sinister pivot that's not really being talked about as much as anybody.
00:46:05.960
And also, it's so painful for women to think that they got talked out of having children because it's kind of a satanic lure.
00:46:11.960
You know, dating and finding yourself and travel is way more fun than getting up for the third time to feed a baby.
00:46:20.960
So I think that that's a devilish temptation of, you know, a lot of education.
00:46:28.960
I was kind of shocked at like, what, 10 hours of classes a week?
00:46:35.960
So whatever the solution is, it's less violence.
00:46:38.960
We need less coercive transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive.
00:46:43.960
Because in the past, smarter people had more kids because smarter people generally made more money.
00:46:49.960
Smarter people generally had more kids, which, you know, did a good thing to raise the IQ of the world as a whole.
00:46:58.960
And I would say education in very, very loose quotes, right?
00:47:06.960
Women and men both need to be treated equal in the workplace.
00:47:14.960
You need fewer people pouring into the country because then it's going to bring down the price of housing.
00:47:24.960
We need the price of everything supposed to come down, which encourages people to have more children.
00:47:28.960
But that's all being buoyed up by a variety of government programs and policies, of which immigration is a key one, to buoy up the value of the boomers' house to give them the illusion that they haven't been robbed blind by Social Security and the decoupling of fiat currency from any hard assets.
00:47:43.960
So it's all, you know, if you want to know the real price of American currency, just look at it relative to Bitcoin.
00:47:53.960
40% of all the currency ever created in America was created over the last couple of years.
00:47:57.960
I mean, there's nothing there but this endless roll of toilet paper with a president's face on it.
00:48:01.960
But you've got to give people the illusion of value.
00:48:03.960
So you've got to artificially stimulate demand for housing, in particular with immigration and things like that, and restricting the building of new housing.
00:48:12.960
They've stagnated since the 1970s, since 71 when Nixon took America off the gold standard.
00:48:19.960
And the American economy, unfortunately, and this is true of most Western economies, it's largely illusion propped up by propaganda, debt and force because you have to use fiat currency to pay your tax bills.
00:48:30.960
So, yeah, the solution to that is less force, less compulsion, less forced income transfers, less forced hiring, less forced student loans.
00:48:41.960
And it would be great, of course, if you could discharge your student loans in bankruptcy.
00:48:45.960
And if the universities would be off the hook and then they wouldn't dangle all of this nonsense in front of people to financially enslave them for the rest of their lives in return for having them pay for their own Marxist indoctrination that has them be completely terrible employees.
00:48:59.960
So would you agree that so I'm on I'm on the kick kind of like the micro kick of forget college, you know, learn a trade, build your family.
00:49:11.960
You know, unless you unless you're going to school for something specific like you want to be a doctor or whatever.
00:49:18.960
But, you know, why come out in debt with a job you're not going to find in whatever it is that you studied?
00:49:24.960
I think to keep this country going, we need trades people now.
00:49:31.960
Nobody knows how to lay a brick or do electric anymore.
00:49:35.960
I mean, everyone that works on our house and our friends houses are, you know, my age and older.
00:49:40.960
And I'm like, oh, my God, we got to get everything done before we all die, because nobody will be left to fix our air conditioning.
00:49:46.960
You know, so I just feel like and I also feel like maybe if people do focus on a trade, you're younger, maybe you come out of college.
00:49:55.960
I mean, you come out of high school and you take an apprenticeship with a trades person and you learn a skill and a trade that you can take with you for the rest of your life.
00:50:03.960
And you start building your family faster instead of waiting of going through college and coming out in debt and definitely not being able to buy a home is one solution I feel like could happen with the younger generation.
00:50:14.960
I think that's certainly true. And I'm so committed to being a tick tocker that I will learn those cat side Korean tick tock dances.
00:50:22.960
I will be pretty. Maybe I can charge people to turn it off.
00:50:26.960
I actually would pay to see that in a leotard doing cat side dances.
00:50:30.960
You know, I could probably do them once. Just once once.
00:50:34.960
Sergio could probably make some version for you.
00:50:37.960
No, that's cheating. So the trades. Yeah, I think that's fine.
00:50:42.960
But I think people should very much look into entrepreneurship.
00:50:45.960
You know, generally, our history was entrepreneurship.
00:50:47.960
You say, oh, I'm a Smith in some villages like, yeah, but you still have to go out and sell your services.
00:50:51.960
And so we kind of were petty bourgeois or entrepreneurship.
00:50:57.960
Everyone's getting together and it's like, oh, let's play Fortnite.
00:51:01.960
But also sit together and say, hey, if somebody had a gun to our head and we had to make, you know, $10,000 in two months, what would we do?
00:51:12.960
You know, they got elephants over the mountains.
00:51:16.960
Our ancestors survived, you know, entire winters on three sardines.
00:51:21.960
You know, you can do unbelievable things if you make the priority high enough.
00:51:26.960
And of course, a lot of modern society is about distracting you from self-fulfilling and productive priorities.
00:51:32.960
So, yeah, sit down with your friends and say, OK, let's say that your dog was kidnapped and we had to come up with $10,000 ransom in a month.
00:51:40.960
What would we do? And just brainstorm about things and get your skills together, get that jigsaw puzzle together to start being able to make money.
00:51:46.960
Because once you become an entrepreneur, I mean, I've been I had my corporate jobs, but I've been doing entrepreneurship for, I don't know, like 25 years or more.
00:51:57.960
And so people should be getting together, particularly young people should be getting together with their friends and say, what could we do?
00:52:04.960
Come on, let's let's just let's just whiteboard a blue sky.
00:52:10.960
So you people should be really sitting there saying rather than going on this kind of silly train track of other people's expectations and on the conveyor belt that society leads you towards, which just goes off a fiscal cliff, you know, jump the tracks and figure out what you can do on your own.
00:52:26.960
I mean, when I was a teenager, I was putting up little little signs in bus stops saying, I'll do your typing for you, because I was a pretty good typist from writing all of that.
00:52:34.960
Just anything to just figure out how you make some money, the opportunities that are available now online to do stuff to make money is is staggering.
00:52:44.960
Yeah, never, ever put a ceiling on your ambitions.
00:52:46.960
It's a kind of vanity to say I can only go so far because you don't know what is lurking in your unconscious that could be incredibly productive.
00:52:53.960
The unconscious mind has been clocked at 8000 times faster than the conscious mind.
00:52:57.960
Unleash all of that by removing any ceiling on your abilities and just figure out what you can do.
00:53:03.960
Because if you're willing to think hard and take risks, you're already ahead of 99% of the people and it's very hard to fail.
00:53:10.960
Yeah, and I, you know, a lot of people are worried about AI taking away all the jobs, but I look at the it also is a huge enabler for entrepreneurship, because to whatever extent it is going to take away people's jobs.
00:53:21.960
It also means as an entrepreneur, you can do a lot more and maybe have a profitable business that wouldn't have been profitable 10 years ago.
00:53:27.960
And there'll always be people, boomers, who really get AI.
00:53:32.960
And my mother was referring to her CD player as a gramophone for for many years.
00:53:36.960
So there will be boomers who were like, don't really get AI don't understand it.
00:53:46.960
I wanted to ask you about your projects coming up in next month.
00:53:51.960
I think you're having a debate at Word War Debate.
00:53:58.960
Yeah, it's going to be on April the 11th in Atlantic City.
00:54:05.960
I think we're going to be debating the nature of truth and knowledge, which is juicy, juicy, meaty stuff and really, really essential to get that rubber on the road of the mind.
00:54:16.960
I recently was in studio with Sam Hyde and we did a really, I've never been on quite a ride like that.
00:54:25.960
And that man makes Scott look like early me in terms of chaos agent.
00:54:30.960
So, but we did some really, really great, great conversations and great debates.
00:54:37.960
And so, yeah, I'm sort of, I've been a studio band for a while, but I'm sort of back out on the road a little bit because I really, I really do love working with an audience.
00:54:46.960
And so we're going to try and do sort of a dinner with people and all of that.
00:54:49.960
So I might have to come to Atlantic City to see you.
00:54:53.960
Oh, I would love to, you know, shake hands and, and swap, swap mine.
00:54:59.960
So yes, that's going to be going on Atlantic City.
00:55:03.960
I don't think the tickets quite available yet, but I think they're coming out soon.
00:55:06.960
We'll drop all of that for you after the show in the chat.
00:55:09.960
And I also want to remind people that you can get peaceful parenting.
00:55:17.960
And there's also an AI there that's been trained on all my parenting material.
00:55:20.960
If you have specific questions, you can check out the AI.
00:55:24.960
Who doesn't want all the help they can get peaceful parenting dot com.
00:55:35.960
And that's also his Twitter handle is free domain.
00:55:41.960
And you can go back to his website and look at all the interviews and talks.
00:55:56.960
This is where I try to like wrangle you in to commit to commit to all sorts of things.
00:56:06.960
I mean, if you guys find it a value for me to chatterbox my way through your hour, I'm
00:56:16.960
You might hear my cat with dementia meowing in the background.
00:56:22.960
I'm very glad that my conscience is meowing at me because that would be tricky.
00:56:27.960
And also, maybe we could do something on locals like a longer form Q&A where we can actually
00:56:37.960
And that would be amazing because there's so many questions happening for you and just
00:56:44.960
So I just want to see like, oh, and do you want to wrap up with another question or Marcella?
00:57:07.960
And I wanted to know what your thoughts are on AI.
00:57:14.960
I think that's another realm that I'm not sure how, what your thoughts are on that.
00:57:24.960
So we've got to get people to start thinking because AI is just a word guesser.
00:57:27.960
I've done whole presentations and interviews on AI.
00:57:29.960
And as a coder myself for many years, I think I understand the basic principles.
00:57:35.960
So AI turns a computer into an unthinking human being who just repeats slogans and navigates
00:57:42.960
the way through the most common and approved sentence formats.
00:57:46.960
So if you're an NPC, then you can be replaced by AI.
00:57:50.960
So you need to start thinking from first principles creatively and originally, then you can't be replaced if you are just repeating the general propaganda.
00:57:59.960
And I don't mean to criticize or bug anyone about that.
00:58:06.960
But we're going to kind of bust out of that egg of solipsistic propaganda and get out there and really think in the world.
00:58:12.960
But the best way to protect yourself against the ravages of AI is to start to think from first principles.
00:58:18.960
I've got a whole book called Essential Philosophy at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
00:58:23.960
I've got Art of the Argument, ArtoftheArgument.com to sort of teach people how to think from first principles.
00:58:29.960
And so if you're scared of AI, AI is a wonderful opportunity to stimulate you into breaking out of propaganda because that's all AI is, is just repeating what everyone has said before.
00:58:40.960
As Ayn Rand would say, the social metaphysician, the second-hander, right?
00:58:43.960
Don't be just a reflection of other people's thoughts.
00:58:50.960
You don't see people painting portraits that much anymore because it doesn't take a picture, right?
00:58:58.960
You have to be able to think for yourself and create for yourself.
00:59:01.960
And then the more that you think and create, the more you can wind into AI itself.
00:59:05.960
I mean, AI has hoovered up all of my books and therefore I've had some adjustment to AI itself.
00:59:10.960
But there is no defense save clarity and originality because everything that is repetitive is going to be automated.
00:59:22.960
We have Stefan who's got a treasure trove of information.
00:59:42.960
And you guys, in the comments below, I'll make sure I tag Stefan in there.
00:59:47.960
Tell him how much you loved him today, what your favorite things were, and be sure to follow him and subscribe to everything.
00:59:57.960
Everybody said, yes, please make him a repeat guest.
01:00:03.960
I said this before the show, but, you know, we're all dealing with this loss.
01:00:07.960
You guys, much more, of course, than I am being so close to him.
01:00:10.960
And just big virtual hugs to everyone for dealing with this loss.
01:00:14.960
We should all live a life as meaningful as to be mourned by millions.
01:00:18.960
And that is the greatest testament to everything that Scott did.
01:00:21.960
And thank you guys so much for keeping this conversation running.
01:00:25.960
Because for the conversation to die with Scott would be the final nail in the coffin that we don't need.
01:00:33.960
Thank you, Shelley, for letting us continue this.