Since gene therapy by man is definitionally* witchcraft, is it possible for a geneticist to be pious if he believes it's only by God's will that his work can succeed?
What advice can I give my daughters on how to see and pick good men to marry as they get older?
Thank you Stefan Molyneux.
Was the French Revolution the start of the death of Europe?
Do you think the Ukraine War will go nuclear?
does art have a function and if so what is it? Can you go into the different theories of art and how the "end goal" is seen differently? Maybe go into the different schools of art more specifically and why they arose and their philosophical differences
Thoughts on how to build better habits?
Been following you for well over 15 years Stephan. First and foremost, thank you. Second, another thank you for what I believe is your best work to date, the story of your enslavement. Rings true today.
0:00 - Introduction to Gene Therapy
6:14 - The Risks of DNA Manipulation
14:31 - Advice for Daughters
14:36 - The French Revolution’s Impact
19:09 - The Function of Art
22:27 - Building Better Habits
25:20 - Conclusion and Farewell
In this lecture, we explore a range of thought-provoking questions surrounding the themes of gene therapy, programming, and their moral implications. The discussion begins by addressing the ethical considerations of gene therapy, particularly in relation to divine will and human intervention in life’s very fabric. The lecturer provocatively likens the manipulation of genetic code to altering computer source code—a process that, despite possible technical successes, carries immense risks and ethical dilemmas. By sharing personal anecdotes from his early career in programming, he illustrates the complexity and potential dangers of meddling with foundational structures, whether in code or DNA.
Delving deeper, the lecturer reflects on the audacity that drives humanity to alter genetic building blocks that have evolved over billions of years. He emphasizes the importance of caution, urging that like in programming where alterations can quickly lead to disastrous outcomes, so too can changes in genetic structures. The concept of debugging—fixing a bug rather than widespread modification—is presented as a more acceptable approach. This perspective prompts a larger inquiry into whether humanity possesses the wisdom or humility to engage in such foundational manipulations without significant repercussions.
The conversation then shifts towards personal relationships and the nature of delight in relationships, particularly advising parents on how to guide their daughters in selecting partners. The lecturer asserts that for a man to be a good match, he must find joy and delight in who she is. This theme of bringing joy is juxtaposed against the broader societal landscape, suggesting that without mutual delight, relationships may falter. The correlation between personal fulfillment and the quality of relationships emphasizes that the essence of love goes beyond superficial connections, delving into the deeper question of how to cultivate happiness and support in each other’s lives.
Further on, the lecture touches on historical reflections, questioning if events like the French Revolution signify the decline of Western civilization. The lecturer provides insights into how societal fears often lead to a grasp for power, which can ultimately result in the erosion of liberty and the emergence of totalitarianism. He argues that crises often serve as catalysts for governmental overreach, cautions about political dependency, and highlights the dangers of relinquishing control over foundational cultural tenets.
Looking to contemporary issues, such as the potential for nuclear conflict arising from the U.S. relationships globally, the lecturer articulates a belief that while tactical nuclear options may be considered, a widespread nuclear war is unlikely due to the self-serving interests of those in power. He argues that the motivations behind international conflicts often center around managing societal expectations and lowering living standards under the pretense of crisis.
Finally, the exploration of art's role in society is addressed. The lecturer posits that art has devolved into a vehicle for political narrative rather than a genuine expression of human experience. He critiques the current landscape of art as largely propagandistic, detached from its moral and educational responsibilities. Art is framed as a crucial means of illustrating the consequences of human decisions, serving as a moral compass rather than merely a reflection of the artist's whims or societal trends.
Overall, this lecture intricately weaves through personal experiences, ethical debates, societal trends, and philosophical inquiries, encouraging listeners to consider the weight of their decisions and the impact on their lives and relationships, as well as on broader societal structures.
[0:00] All righty, good evening. A couple more questions from Facebook. Since gene therapy by man is definitionally witchcraft, is it possible for a geneticist to be pious if he believes it's only by God's will that his work can succeed? Well, let me tell you something.
[0:22] So when I got my very first professional programming job, job making the princely sum of $40,000 a year, which was all the money in the world back then, at least for me. What I did was I worked on a tandem terminal, a terminal to a tandem computer, and I worked on COBOL-74. COBOL-74 had no end if statements, just dots and so on. And at one point, we shifted from COBOL-74 greater to COBOL-85, which had end if statements. And I wrote a program to run through code and switch the dots that terminated the if statements to end if statements, sometimes even to else statements, and it was very cool. And the code ran perfectly except for one strange thing where there was a hidden carriage return or something like that. And my code upgraded and made much more readable and maintainable millions of lines of code from COBOL 74 to COBOL 85. Except for that one. And that one was hard to find. And if you've ever worked managing or upgrading or changing or altering source code, I remember I was given a program to upgrade, and that didn't just mean translate it from COBOL 74 to COBOL 85, but make some substantial changes to the code.
[1:49] And it was about 100,000 lines of code. It was an incredibly complicated program that processed haircuts in trading algorithms.
[2:02] And, boy, I really found that one very hard to work on. It was all on a terminal, so there were no breakpoints. You couldn't F8 step through the code like you can in Windows. You couldn't immediately interrogate all the variables to find out their values. It was really tough to work on. and so the reason I'm talking about this is because.
[2:26] Do not fuck with the source code if you can at all avoid it in fact when it comes to DNA do not fuck with the source code and this is just computer code, we're talking about the elemental and essential building blocks of life itself self. It takes to me a staggering arrogance to think that we can change source code that has developed for literally billions and billions of years, that we can just go in, screw around with it and improve it. Now, I get if there's some kind of deviation, if there's a bug in the code and we know what it's supposed to look like, like if there's something missing here or there, we know exactly what the right one's going to look like and we can use some kind of CRISPR magic to fix it. Okay, that's a different matter. That's a different matter. That's fixing something. I get that. That's debugging and fixing something. Okay. I mean, when I was neck deep in programming, what I would always do is I would get the right inputs and outputs and only then would I work to make things more efficient. So I didn't care if I had to open up 50 record sets.
[3:47] And get the code right, and then close them all, which was ridiculously inefficient. When I was programming back in the day, particularly I programmed code for international databases, databases that crossed all time zones, and the amount of data that was available sometimes across the oceans was like 10k a second. I mean, it's crazy slow. So what I did was I would open up all the record sets in the most ridiculously inefficient way possible, accessible, just working locally, and I would get the code to run correctly, knowing it would be ungodly slow if I put it in production. But at least I knew how it was going to work, and I knew that it was working correctly. And then I would work to make it efficient, knowing the input and the output, knowing the variables as they went along. So then what I I would do is I would load the record sets into memory locally, and I would do all the data manipulation that I need, and then I would just push a remote update statement for just the relevant data so that I only had to send some values and a SQL statement to get the database to update remotely.
[4:59] It takes a huge amount of work to optimize, to make things right. I remember reading a programming article back in the day. I think it was a Microsoft head programmer who said, there are little clusters of code. You don't know what they're there for. And your big idea is to, well, we'll take these out. We don't know what this is for. This doesn't seem to be needed. And then you take it out and then you find out that the reason that little code snippet was in there was because if somebody was writing to a floppy disk or a hard disk and the disk failed, that this is a way of trying to get something that could work.
[5:41] Now, if somebody pulled out the disk or the disk failed in its write, I mean, one of the very first programming things that I did when I started taking computer science courses back in my early teens was learning how to read and write the fat tables on 5 1⁄4-inch, the file allocation tables on 5 1⁄4-inch floppies. Don't fuck with the source code, man, unless you have something that you know is right. So I could optimize my code once I knew the input and outputs were correct. So once I had a template of what was right, then I could make things more efficient.
[6:15] But this is one of the things that creeped me out about the mRNA vaccines. Is it possible that they could be screwing with the source code? You know, we are the most successful species in the known universe, and the idea that we can tinker around with the source code and make it better without a template of what works perfectly, or at least what is the norm? Oof. Man, that is a bad, bad, bad idea. That is a bad, bad, bad idea. All right. So, no. You cannot screw with the source code and call yourself pious. All right. What advice can I give my daughters on how to see and pick good men to marry as they get older? Thank you, Stefan Molyneux. Ah, something that is not entirely theoretical. radical.
[7:02] Well, the only way to get your daughters to pick good men to marry is to say to those daughters, the man has to take delight in who you are as a person, and everything else will flow from that. The man has to take delight, for a woman, in who you are as a person, and everything flows from that. Now, for a man to take delight in who you are as a person, two things need to happen. Number one, you need to be delightful, right? And number two, he has to be capable of recognizing how delightful you are, right? You need to be delightful to have the capacity to delight someone else and the other person needs to be capable of seeing how delightful you are. I mean, to be perceived as a good singer by someone, A, you have to be a good singer, and B, they have to have ears that work or recognize what good singing is.
[8:11] Now, as far as how to be delightful, and I love that word delightful, it's really, really underused these days. To be delightful is to bring delight to someone, to bring sunlight into our occasionally, tear-stained and darkened hearts, to bring laughter to sometimes the world hangs weights on our shoulders, hearts and minds and to have the giddy helium balloons that take those all away to grab a scrap of immortality in the delight of a well-placed comment or joke or thought or glance to have someone run to the door when you come home to bring delight Delight, to have a woman laugh in peals of laughter because of your comments, to have.
[9:00] Enough self-deprecation that she feels safe around you, but not so much self-deprecation that she loses respect, to walk that fine line of being challenging without being aggressive, of being assertive without being abrasive, to bring delight. You know, one of the proudest things that I ever have in my life is no matter whatever ever happens in my life. You know, everything that I have ever done could get scrubbed from the universe if they keep provoking Russia, right? But no matter what happens in my life or what goes forward from my existence, and even if I were to be entirely erased and forgotten 57 minutes after my death, some men in black pants gone like he was never here, I have brought deep delight to my wife and daughter, and that will never be undone. Though you erase me like a Stalinist henchman from a grainy photo, the delight that I have brought to people in my life will never be undone. And if you have that, if you know the deep delight that you have brought to the people in your life. You can bear almost any and every burden, including death itself. And this is a very foundational question that you need to answer in your life.
[10:27] Whom do you bring deep delight? Who can you make belly laugh? Who jumps up and down, sometimes with excitement, when you come home? Who rushes into your arms? You know, I mean, I start every day with my wife with a big, deep, passionate, soulful kiss, bottomless hugs. It is a beautiful thing. Do you bring deep delight to at least one person other than yourself? Because that's what pair bonding is. It's being drawn like a mass to a gravity well to that which brings you deep delight. And by deep delight, I don't just mean sort of frivolous, goofy stuff, although that certainly has its place, but a deep and foundational joy in the beauty and pleasure of existence. distance. Who can you make giggle by waking up by blowing raspberries on their neck? Whatever it is that you're going to be doing that is going to bring you deep delight. I mean, who do you, which spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend do you have? They come out of a shower with the towel wrapped around them. Do you say, yes, I'm afraid I'm going to need my towel back right now.
[11:40] Who do you bring deep? And it doesn't necessarily have to be some sophisticated sense of humor. It just is. You have to bring people joy in order to be loved. They have to bring you joy as well. Now, for your daughters, if they bring deep delight to a man, and of course it has to be reciprocal, right? We're just talking one side versus the other. If they bring deep delight to a man, then, you know, when they get older and they're, I don't know, married and they're sitting in bed and it's like, we could chat or we could kiss. Either one is great. That's really what you want. That's really what you want. We could chat or we could kiss. Either one is great. It doesn't really matter. Either one is great. And if you have that, you have everything. If you have that, you have everything.
[12:46] So once they have a man in their environment who takes deep delight in their existence, in their conversation, in their humor, in their joy, in their curiosity, in their wisdom, in their excitement, in their joy and thrill of living, well, you can't do better than that. And, you know, say to women, oh, don't settle, don't settle. Okay, I get all of that.
[13:13] A long life to be absent, unhappy, dour, negative, ill-tempered, and that happens to all of us from time to time. But if you can have a life that you share with someone who brings you deep delight and joy, you jump up and run to see them when they come home, they jump up and run to see you when you get home. You can't get enough of the kisses and hugs. Man, there's no upgrade from that. There's no improvement from that. Bring delight to someone. Because if you bring delight to someone, then your life has been worthwhile. And if they bring delight to you, then their life has been worthwhile. And if you bring delight to someone, you will automatically figure out the dour, negative, the hostile, the depressed, the dysfunctional, the sour, the hostile, the angry, and you will have your life surrounded by people where the only challenge is how happy you can make each other. There is no end to that challenge, there is no summit to that challenge, and there's nothing greater than living in the face and in the embrace of that most delightful challenge.
[14:31] So that'd be my suggestion. I hope that that helps. All right.
[14:37] Was the French Revolution the start of the death of Europe?
[14:40] No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, in a more proximate way, and of course, this did happen. I've got a whole series on the French Revolution available for donors at freedomain.locals.com or freedomain, sorry, subscribestar.com slash freedomain.
[14:57] The way that the West has fallen, or is in the process of almost completing its fall, is this, that the devil, for want of a better phrase, the devil himself, makes you feel frustrated, fearful, and helpless. And then, because you feel frustrated and fearful and helpless, you reach for power, political power, in the hopes of saving yourself. And for a brief time, much like a drug makes you happy, you feel saved. And then the greed that you have, the break with virtue, the hungering and grabbing of political power, what that ends up doing is it ends up destroying you utterly. I mean, of course, in the West, governments gained control. In particular, in America, America was founded as a WASP nation, right? Protestant. And then when large numbers of Italian and Irish Catholics came in, there was a concern that the Catholic culture was going to break the American culture.
[15:57] And so, because people felt frightened and overwhelmed by a foreign culture, and a culture that had been at war with each other for hundreds of years, the Catholics and the Protestants, well, the government said, well, we've got a solution. Revolution uh you give us control over the education of children and we will maintain your culture and we will make sure that this new and alien culture has a very limited impact on your life we will save your culture just give us your children to educate and for a short amount of time that seems like a fairly decent deal just as the devil gives you money success talent and power, and it seems pretty great for a short amount of time. And then, inevitably, those utterly opposed to European and Western traditions ended up taking over the government schools and are using it to dismantle the mindset of European culture. Do you think the Ukraine war will go nuclear? I don't, really, unless it's some very limited tactical thing, I don't think it will go nuclear. I think that the purpose of the provocation of the conflicts in Eastern Europe and with Russia in particular are there to.
[17:13] The elites to reduce people's standard of living without there being as much complaint. So in a time of peace, it's very hard for government to cut back on spending because people are soft and weak and greedy and all that kind of stuff. But the moment that you provoke conflict, and in some ways, of course, COVID was a dress rehearsal for this. But when you provoke conflict, then what you can do is you can put people on rations, you can have people, you can cut welfare, fair, you can do a lot of things to cause a lower standard of living, at least temporarily for people. And rather than rioting in the streets, you'll say, well, it's an emergency. We all have to pull together. Our very way of life is under threat and enemies are at the gates and terrorism is happening. I think there'll be terrorist stuff for sure, whether it's real or not, or whether it's self or other, it's something that history will sort out over time as it usually does.
[18:07] But no the escalation of conflict is there to frighten and shock the population into accepting lower standards of living because i mean this is i've talked about this of course as have many other people for decades that one of the problems with a greedy and thoughtless population is that they vote for more and more stuff they don't want to pay for the government gets into debt, and when the government runs out of money it goes to war well it goes to war now before it runs out of money. So I think it's just there. It's not there to lay waste to the planet and so on, because all the greedy people and all the power mongers still want to be in power and get stuff, and they can't get that in a radioactive fallout wasteland. So...
[18:49] There to get you to accept a lower standard of living. And we can see this, right? I mean, the amount of rights that were stripped out of people in the West as a result of COVID, it's an emergency. And people were just willing, well, seemed quite eager to line up and rat on their neighbors and strip people of their rights for private medical decisions. Nuremberg could be damned, right?
[19:09] All right, does art have a function? And if so, what is it? Can you go into the different theories of art and how the end goal is seen differently? Maybe go into the different schools of art, more specifically, and why they arose and their philosophical differences. Yes, I'll just, I'll get right on that.
[19:29] I think that's delightful. Oh, I think that's delightful. I'm sorry. That is just, that is such a wild question. Yes, let me get into all the schools of thought across the world, examine their philosophical roots, and tell you what their purpose is for all of them. Sorry, don't mean to laugh, but that is some pretty, pretty wild stuff. I mean, the purpose of art is to push a moral agenda, which can be positive or negative, right? It can push a moral agenda. That moral agenda could be the destruction of morality. It's an evil and anti-moral agenda and so on. And we have not had art in the West really since the 60s. Since the 1960s, there has been no functional art in the West. It's all propaganda. It's all pushing collectivism it's all pushing various forms of leftism and it is all about making women frightened of men so that they stay single and dependent on the state it's all about.
[20:30] Opposing western traditions it's just non-stop propaganda this it's like journalism or so-called journalism right it has to conform to a particular propaganda purpose it has not been a free and this This is another thing, too, which is that artists who cannot be successful in the free market run to the government. And the government says, well, we have to support our artists, don't you know? And then the artists start taking all this government money. And then with the government money comes a political agenda, right? Once you're taking government money, you can't be skeptical of government action. You can't be skeptical of political power. And whoever pays the piper calls the tune. So rather than liberating the artists from the mere concerns of the market, it has instead enslaved artists to the inevitable marching hammer drums of propaganda. All right, so.
[21:23] Art is there to allow you to taste the results in the recipe. How is this food going to taste, right? So art is there to show you a moral journey and what happens when you make small decisions at the beginning of things. And I'm just working on this novel at the moment. When you make small decisions at the beginning of things, they turn into large disasters down the road if you don't know what happens. So if you think of the woodcuts from the 19th century, it was, you know, hey, you should try this. This alcohol is great, and then the guy ends up a complete dissolute wastrel. Or a woman who gets taken in by a cat ends up as a prostitute clutching her baby to her chest, right? So it's a way to have you taste the disaster at the beginning. It's a way to build up your immune system. It's sort of an inoculation, like the idea that you have a small amount of dead virus to activate your immune system, so that when the real virus comes along, you're safe. So art is there to show you how bad decisions lead to a terrible life. And because of that you end up making better decisions and avoid the terrible life all right.
[22:28] Been following oh thoughts on how to build better habits give a man a why this is Nietzsche give a man a why he can bear almost any how so how do you build better habits well you identify that which needs to improve you learn why it needs to improve and then you figure out why in your life it hasn't improved yet already.
[22:49] It hasn't improved yet already. So if you're a guy and you know you need to learn how to talk to girls, well, you've got to figure out the why of that. Well, talk to girls and get married, have kids, have a good life, have people by my side in an increasingly dissolute and desperate time. So that's the one. And then you have to figure out why you haven't done it already. Let's say you're 25 or 30 and you know you need to go talk to girls. The question is, why have you spent, you know, Most guys will learn how to talk to girls in their early to mid-teens, you know, 13, 14, 15. So why haven't you done that? Say you're 25 and you're 10 years behind the curve, 10 to 12 years behind the curve. Well, why haven't you done that? Well, the desire to talk to girls, for young men as young boys or boys, is so high that it takes an immense amount of resistance to not do that. So why do you not talk to girls? Well, most likely it's because you've got some creepy, Oedipal single mom who wants to cling you to her bony chest so that you don't leave her alone when she gets older because she's too old to get much male attention. So she's just going to hang on to her little Lord Fauntleroy, attached to angelfish, burrowed in the maternal, buried alive in the liver-spotted chest. That is, keep little Johnny close. And so, you know, there's some reason as to why. And once you confront that reason, the habit's easier to build. right?
[24:17] Been following you for well over 15 years, Stef. You could spell my name right, but that's all right. I've been following you for well over 15 years, Stephan. First and foremost, thank you. Second, another thank you for what I believe is your best work to date, the story of your enslavement. That's a video from 15 years ago or so, right? Rings true today. And I appreciate that. Yeah, you can find that. It's still around there. Let's see here. How how did it feel getting owned by peter peter joseph so many years back oh that's so sad, obviously low-key annoying right destroyed owned i mean it's sad it's just it's just pick a team and claim to win right you just got owned i mean it's just so funny right and sad you know it's It's not, no arguments, no thoughts, no ideas, and so on. Just, well, my team won and I downed the new grave. You're in the wrong place. You need to go watch a Mr. Beast video. All right. Thank you, everyone, for your thoughts.
[25:20] Freedomain.com slash donate. To help out the show would be enormously appreciated. Lots of love from up here. Go delight someone. Bye.
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