0:02 - Introduction and Overview
1:00 - The Importance of Empathy
5:40 - Childhood Experiences and Communication
13:39 - Regrets and Life Lessons
19:47 - The Nature of Consciousness
26:20 - Philosophical Questions and Uncertainty
32:40 - Optimism and Pessimism in Life
34:08 - Defining Help and Worth
38:46 - Wealth and Relationships
41:10 - Conclusion and Farewell
In this episode, I dive into a series of profound questions sourced from social media, navigating themes of empathy, communication, and the complexities of human relationships. We begin with an abstract inquiry regarding the implications of randomness in neural networks and the potential for deriving moral principles from such randomness. I dissect this concept, focusing on the necessity of empathy in communication and how jargon can obfuscate meaning. I argue that clear communication is crucial for healthy relationships, encouraging listeners to consider the recipient’s experience when they communicate.
Taking a closer look at the evolution of. empathy, I connect it to personal experiences, recalling the impact of a challenging upbringing where I had to navigate hostile relationships. I emphasize how hostile environments can stifle one's ability to communicate honestly, leading to the development of what I call "baffle gab"—language that confuses rather than clarifies. This phenomenon often reflects a fear of vulnerability, a desire to protect oneself from punishment whether for honesty or deceit. I illustrate this with anecdotes from my childhood, where the stakes of miscommunication led to complicated dynamics.
Throughout our conversation, I invite the audience to reflect on the personal implications of their communication styles and the values they hold. I challenge listeners to re-evaluate their easily accepted assumptions about morality, human relationships, and the impact of our upbringing on our present interactions. Empathy, I assert, involves recognizing the experience of others and adjusting our communication to foster mutual understanding. Moreover, I touch upon the philosophical inquiries surrounding consciousness, morality, and the abstract nature of our existence while maintaining a focus on practical implications.
Further, we explore the interconnectedness of actions, choice, and consequence, drawing parallels to how our upbringing shapes our responses to various life situations. I advocate for a perspective grounded in optimism for immediate actions while planning pessimistically for long-term outcomes, emphasizing the importance of preparation in navigating life’s uncertainties.
As the episode progresses, I address questions about humanity, individual worth, and the moral obligations we owe each other. I posit that the definitions around these inquiries are often traps designed to create guilt or inaction. By encouraging critical examination of ill-defined concepts, I empower listeners to question societal norms and their resultant obligations.
Finally, I reflect on my personal journey through philosophical exploration over the decades, expressing my contentment with my life's trajectory. The episode closes with an acknowledgment of the complexities inherent in human relationships and the persistent challenge of aligning our innate instincts with our moral frameworks, leaving the audience to contemplate their own paths towards empathy and clarity in communication.
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:03] These are questions from the Book of Faces. The Facebook, Facebook. And you can check me out there. And the questions go something like this. If the neural weights of our values, neurons, is randomly initialized as by neural network backpropagation, does that mean we can get an ought from an is and that that is basically randomness from the total universe's electromagnetic smog?
[0:30] That is a juicy bit of kaleidoscopic syllables, man. That is a thought cloud of random rotation. Let's take it again. If the neural weights of our values neurons... Okay, so... This is an empathy thing, right? This is an empathy thing. This is really important. And I'm not saying, look, I appreciate the question. I'm just trying to give you some feedback here to help you in your life.
[1:00] Somebody help me. So, empathy is when you sympathize with somebody on the receiving end of your communication. So, for instance, are you trying to sound smart by making other people feel dumb? So, that's exploitive, right? That's not kind, that's not nice, that's not thoughtful, that's not considerate. And again, I'm not saying you're not this in general, I'm just talking about this particular instance of communication.
[1:30] So, I don't know if this is probably a joke, but if it's not, if this is serious and this is a problem in the world as a whole, so jargon and, you know, acronyms, and I had a conflict with the guy on Telegram the other day who used an acronym that even he didn't know what it was. So, this is just empathy. This is just empathy, which is, what is it like to be on the receiving end of your communication? Ah, you see? Big question. Big, deep question. You can't have a relationship of any kind of quality. You can have proximity and semen and syllable exchanges, but you can't have a relationship if you don't ask yourself this basic question. What is it like to be on the receiving end of my communication? This is related to a question I got not too long ago about how do you tell if somebody's emotionally mature? Sure. Well, they recognize self and other. They recognize that it is their responsibility to be clear in their communication. And they have a filter between stimulus and response. Like, you know, people who just get triggered and just get angry, they don't have a filter between stimulus and response.
[2:46] So the person who's writing this, yeah, I mean, this could be a joke or something like that, but this is quite common. So even if it's a joke, it's a good learning tool. well, what is it like to be on the receiving end of your communication? So you would read this back, and I do this when I'm writing, when I'm communicating live, it's a little tougher, but I'm thinking about it quite a bit. But certainly when I write, what I do is...
[3:16] I say, what is it like to be on the receiving end of this communication with no knowledge of the subject in particular, like I've got a book called Essential Philosophy, and of course, all of my books are written to be comprehensible by non-technical people. So, in this kind of work, you say, what is it like to be on the receiving end of this communication? Can somebody understand what it is that I'm doing? My life was forever changed when I read somewhere that Socrates never used the word epistemology. He spoke in the common parlance, as did Jesus, and he spoke in the common parlance. So I've tried to invent as few words as possible. I've made a couple of joke words and a couple of acronyms for fun, but I try not to invent any new language because, you know, that is an old Emerson quote, I think. Never trust any enterprise that requires the purchase of new clothes. Never trust any philosophy that requires the invention of new words.
[4:15] So, that is something. So, when you have empathy, you say, you put yourself outside of yourself and you say, what is it like to be on the receiving end of me? What is it like to be on the receiving end of me? Now, we're born with this capacity, we're born with this as a whole, but what happens for the most part is that if you have hostile parents, empathizing with them is a kind of suicide, So if you have hostile parents who look at you coldly or with contempt or with hatred, even at times who manipulate, who bully, who don't see you for who you are, if you empathize with them, you disappear. In other words, to empathize with people who hate you is to end up hating yourself. So we have to shut off this empathy. And when we are exquisitely punished for the general accidents of youth, what happens is we start developing this baffle gab. So, a lot of people end up communicating in life as if they're being cross-examined by a hostile prosecutor who's really out to get them and on trial for their life. So, that's how a lot of people communicate.
[5:27] And that's because they're being cross-examined and they are going to be horrendously punished or neglected or avoided or ostracized or something like that.
[5:40] They're being horrendously punished if they give clear and cogent answers. So I'll give you sort of an example from when I was a kid. So when I was a kid, I could always be, quote, gotten for something or other. Right and the one that i remember most vividly is the flashlight right so i would borrow a flashlight or i would use a flashlight do something fun at night with friends maybe in the woods explore build a fort or something and we'd have a flat i'd have a flashlight and then a couple of days later you know this is when i was like maybe seven or eight years old a couple of days later I'd suddenly wake up and be like, hey, where's that flashlight?
[6:22] And then I would have this, ooh. Now, of course, as kids, you lose stuff, right? It's natural, it's inevitable, it's not a huge issue, and stuff doesn't matter relative to people. So all the people who sacrifice relationships for stuff, I want them to end up alone with a bunch of ornaments that can't hug them when they age out. So I would have this uneasiness from time to time like well I can't afford to get a new flashlight, and we in the 70s in England when I was a kid there were power outages because there was a big coal strike and all this kind of stuff so in the power outages my mother would look for a flashlight Ooh, right?
[7:11] And unfortunately, I did have the kind of sibling who would say, oh, I think Stef had it last, right? To be helpful. And so if I was questioned about the flashlight, I couldn't say I never had it because I would have said I'm going to the woods and whatever. What do you have with you? Oh, it's a flashlight. Bring it back, right? So I couldn't say I never had it because then I'd be punished for lying. I couldn't say I had it because then I'd be punished for losing it. So I would have to just create a big kaleidoscopic ort cloud of confusing syllables to just try and baffle gab into getting away with stuff. And, you know, people just plead the fifth or whatever it is, right? People do this with lawyers or in court quite a bit, right? So if someone says, you did X and you never did X, you can't say they're lying because then they could sue you for defamation. but you could say, my memory of the event is different. So, when I see this kind of baffle-gab language, what I see is, and I see this with great sympathy, really, really great sympathy. When I see this kind of baffle-gab language, what I see is somebody who was both punished for telling the truth, right? I had the flashlight. And also punished for lying. I didn't have the flashlight. and if you're punished for the truth and you're punished for lying.
[8:34] Then you end up having to you're forced to say nothing really at all so I mean you see this all the time in academia I did a whole parody of this decades ago in a novel I wrote called The God of Atheists which you should really check out people have created online this was back in the day a postmodern generator like just generating nonsense language so nonsense language, is when you're punished for telling the truth and you're punished for lying, then you end up writing Kafkaesque syllables that nobody can really understand, because you're just hoping that people get lost in the fog of what you say and give up the chase, right? This is like a squid who's being chased will release a cloud of ink so that it can hide, right? The cloud of ink is academic language and, you know, I have to pad out my essay so just make up a bunch of nonsense and so on, right?
[9:29] So, when you look at a sentence like, if the neural weights of our values neurons is randomly initialized, as by neural network backpropagation, does that mean we can get an ought from an is, and that that is basically randomness from the total universe's electromagnetic smog. So, neural weights is plural. Neural weights of our values neurons is, right? So, neural weights is plural, is, is singular. Randomly initialized, I don't even know what that means, has binaural network backpropagation, don't know what that means. Does that mean we can get an ought from an is? And that is basically randomness from the total universe's electromagnetic smart. So empathy, and this is a cry for help, honestly. I mean, I'm just interpreting this as a cry for help. And again, I say this with sympathy. This is somebody who was punished for lying and punished for telling the truth, and has developed an exquisite random syllable generator. That is an appeal to insecurity, right? So am I supposed to know what neural network backpropagation, I mean, am I supposed to know what that means? Is that common knowledge? Have I just sort of missed out on something that's obvious? You know, this kind of stuff, right? Well... So then you have to pretend that you know what they're talking about, and you both end up in this nonsense language as a whole, right?
[10:54] So this is meaningless drivel. And again, I say this with sympathy. I'm not trying to insult. It is meaningless drivel. And there may be thoughts in there, but when you communicate, you have a responsibility to be clear. And it's fine if you can ask as many complicated questions as you like, but if you don't have empathy to the point where you say to me or you say to yourself regarding well I'm communicating with Stef I shouldn't assume that he knows what I'm talking about, so I'm going to be as clear as possible if the question really means something to you then you will make it as clear as possible so for instance if you have a great desire.
[11:43] To write a beautiful poem and then you write it on a white background in white font and quote print it out, which is to just have a blank sheet of paper, and then you hand it to me, then we are involved in something quite bizarre. So if the question was really important to you, if the question is really important to you, then you have to make sure that I know what you're talking about now if you don't make sure i know what you're talking about as much as possible i could ask some clarifying questions but this person hasn't even made the slightest effort to have me understand what he i assume he is talking about so clearly the question isn't that important, if the question isn't important enough for you to be clear then it's not really important enough for me to answer right i mean we understand that right.
[12:34] Now, the other thing that I think of when I see this kind of polysyllabic and dimensional, baffle gab is I say, okay, so this person lacks empathy because they're not putting themselves on the receiving end of their communication and seeing if it's clear, right? Not putting themselves on the receiving end of their communication for reasons of child abuse and trauma, which I sympathize with. So, I do not want to hand this person the power of an answer if they lack empathy, because if they lack empathy, they cannot use it for good, right? There's an old puzzle in Greek philosophy where somebody says, well, if you borrow something and somebody asks for it back, should you give it back? And the answer, of course, is, well, yes, if you borrow something from someone and they ask for it back, you should absolutely give it back. And then, you know, what if you've borrowed an axe from your friend and your friend comes to you and says, give me your axe, I want to chop my wife into tiny little pieces. Give me an axe, I want to chop my wife into tiny little pieces.
[13:39] Well, you wouldn't want to give him the axe back, right?
[13:42] So, saying, well, you should always return things that you have borrowed is complicated, right? And then it's a fair question, and so on. Although, of course, it's a real edge case, and it's something that nobody will ever deal with that in their life as a whole. And if you have a friend who wants to murder his wife, your issue is not that you borrowed something from him. The issue is that you have people in your life who are this terrible or this deranged or this murderous or this evil. And the whole issue then is your moral judgment as a whole and so on, right? So, I don't want to give power-ups to people who lack empathy.
[14:26] So let's say I give an answer to this question, I sort of puzzle it out, give an answer to this question. Well, the other thing, too, is that when people give you baffle gabs and you answer the question, they'll always say, well, you didn't get to the core of my question. You didn't answer my question. You just danced around it, right? So when people give you questions that are impossible to answer, there's a reason for that, and that is because they want to tell you that you got it wrong. You didn't understand them. You didn't respond. You weren't clear. So, but if, let's say, I did puzzle it out and give them a great answer around morality, then I would be giving deep moral understanding to someone who lacks empathy, which means they'll probably use it not for good, to put it mildly. So, it's a very interesting thing. It's a general, you know, read it as if you're not you. It's basic empathy.
[15:12] Read what you write as if you're not you. And that's an interesting and difficult thing to go through, because it requires you to put yourself outside of yourself and view yourself critically, which, of course, if you were verbally abused in particular as a child, putting yourself outside yourself and being critical of yourself feels like you're inhabiting the skin, you're wearing the skin suit of an abuser, and that's painful and disorienting for a lot of people. For reasons, again, I completely sympathize with, but I think when I look for empathy, or I look for virtue or I look for clarity, people who are unclear, and, you know, I've been in philosophy, you know, 40 plus years, right? 43 years. So I'm coming on for a half century in philosophy.
[16:06] I understand quite a bit about philosophy. And if I don't understand something, it's not because I lack knowledge. Because if I've been in a field for almost 50 years and I don't understand what you're saying I'm not going to assume it's my fault, it is your job to be clear now again if you were raised with verbal abuse it is terrifying and painful to be clear because to be clear is to be punished, to be clear is to be punished I took the flashlight and lost it I did not take the flashlight both things get you punished both the truth and the lie will get you punished, so you have to fog and confuse. If you could go back in your life to when you were 17 and left school, what would you do differently and why? You know, I find these kinds of exercises both useless and annoying. Now, this doesn't mean that they are useless and annoying. I'm just telling you how I find them. You can't go back in time, so all it's doing is trying to stimulate regret or self-recrimination about things that cannot be changed.
[17:23] Now, I understand it's a useful exercise, and this is what the first video I ever did was live like you're dying, which is, you know, go to the end of your life, look back in time, and you would be happy to do what you're doing now. What decisions can you make that's going to make the end of your life better? I get that, you know, project yourself forward in time.
[17:43] But when you say to people, what would you have done differently in the past, you are inviting them to regret and self-recrimination. So I will say that in general, I've tried to make the best decisions based on the knowledge that I had. And I've always tried to reference philosophy. I've always tried to improve my moral status and station. And of course, I've made mistakes. I mean, to live a life without making mistakes is to live a pathetically paralyzed life, which is the biggest mistake of all, right? If you play baseball, you will miss hitting the ball. And the only way to avoid missing the ball is to not play baseball, which is to not even have that experience of fun and camaraderie and teamwork and exercise, right? So, I certainly was very fortunate to get exposed to philosophy at a young age, which has really helped guide me to a better and better place in life. So, when people say, well, what would you do differently if you could go back? Well, first of all, you can't go back. You can't go back. And it is unfair prepare to say that if I were to go back 41 years to when I was 17, with all the knowledge I have now, that would be bizarre because it's too much power for a mere 17-year-old brain, right? Things have to evolve.
[19:03] For me, it's like saying when somebody is 18, saying, would you like to have been as tall as you are at 18 when you were two years old. Well, no, that would be an indication of some severe hormonal or growth hormone dysfunction, like you'd be dying or dead, right? So the idea that it is an invitation to go back and say, oh, I shouldn't have done this, or I should have done that, or I wish I'd done this. It's a way of inviting regret and self-recrimination. Do I have regrets? Yeah, I've got a couple of regrets, but when I go back in time and I put myself with empathy at the time that I was making those decisions, I didn't have the knowledge to make better decisions.
[19:47] I did not have the knowledge to make better decisions. So I beat my head against the wall of art, the art world for some time, without realizing that it had been largely taken over by socialists and communists to program the general population to accept tyranny. It was no longer about exploring the human condition or anything like that. It was just about propaganda. I could have guessed this with, you know, the farm show and the focus on Botox Brecht and so on, right? But yes it was all about depression and exploitation and brutality and loss and madness and like always just about carving down depressing and lowering the human spirit into an early grave of softly soul-sucking syllables now if i had gone back and learned all of that i might have been overwhelmed by how much power crazy people have in society and i might have been too depressed to do much with my life.
[20:45] So it's sort of like saying, and I honestly, I mean, this is without a shred of vanity. I'm just telling you my direct experience of my life. I could not picture being in a better position in my life as a whole. I could not, I could not. I mean, if someone had said to me when I was 17, was it 17 the guy was saying, right? If somebody had said to me when I was 17, here's what your life is going to be like.
[21:11] When you are 58, right? Let's say someone had gone forward, right? Here's what your life's going to be like, Stef, when you're 58. I'd be like, damn, wait, I got a wonderful wife. I got a really happy marriage. I've got a great relationship with my child. I have good friends. I have the most meaningful work known to man. I can pay my bills. Like, I would have been like, that's fantastic, right? So for me, I felt like I won the gold. I mean, I earned the gold. They fought hard for the gold. But honestly, I'm just telling you straight up, right? For me, I won the gold. Now, if someone were to go, say, to Michael Phelps, I think one of the most successful athletes or whoever, right? Simone Biles or Wayne Gretzky, I think, was the best athlete of all time because he was further ahead of number two than any other athlete. So if you go to an athlete who's won the gold and then you were to say to that athlete, well how would you have trained differently do you see this gold i mean you see this gold medal, you see these world records i mean i i'm not trying to brag or anything like that because look my life has certainly had its ups and downs and i get all of that but at least where i've landed is is great not much that i would do to change or improve it so when people say well.
[22:39] You're a great athlete who's won a whole bunch and gold medals how would you have trained differently it's like i don't really know it doesn't really it doesn't really make any sense to me and of course not knowing what i know now is what got me here so i would not go back and change anything because right it's that ripple effect the butterfly effect if i go back and change something then i might change where i've ended up which i wouldn't want to do so all right If we are merely the current iteration of our genes, what moral obligations do we have towards other iterations?
[23:12] Is unclear, right? If we are merely the current iteration of our genes, what moral obligations do we have towards other iterations? So, is this sort of genetic in group preference? I mean, there is baked into our systems. I mean, we prefer our own children to other people's children as a whole, right? I mean, most people, if you could only save your child or some stranger's child, you will save your child. That's kind of baked into us. So, that's all creatures. It's not a human thing. So, what obligations? So, in general, you will transfer your resources to your children, right? Time, money, energy, focus, attention, resources. So, in general, you will transfer resources to your children. So, your property is devoted towards your children. But what you owe to people who you're not related to, right, you may owe, not morally, but from a sort of instinctual obligation love standpoint, I mean, morally you owe your children, right, just about everything, but what happens is you owe your children just about everything. You owe, I mean, you'll feel probably a lot of blood loyalty to your family as a whole.
[24:32] Now, with regards to strangers, you owe them moral respect. You owe them the non-aggression principle, and you owe them a respect for their property. So, you owe your children the transfer of your property. You owe strangers respect for their property, if they respect your property, right? So, hopefully that makes sense. You did your best work years ago, the Christmas truce, it can't be beat. Yeah, I mean, that's always an interesting question for me, which is, you know some of my work was sort of very big and very famous would I like it, if I was still producing this sort of big famous work and so on? I mean, that's an interesting question. I very much enjoy the shows that I'm doing. I very much enjoy the show that I'm doing now, of course.
[25:19] So I very much enjoy the fact that I continue to generate new ideas and arguments, perspectives, and approaches, even in my 43rd year of philosophy. That's pretty cool. But if you look at, you know, like the band Queen, ended up teaming up with a couple of different singers they did some stuff with george michael they did stuff with oh gosh where's the guy from all right now and then they did adam lambert and so on but never really produced any new songs of note you know when was the last time paul mccartney or sting or eric clapton or like and fine you know no issue but when was the last time they produced good creative new work well i'm still for me producing good creative new work, that I'm satisfied with and happy with and excited about and enjoy producing. So I think that's pretty good. That's pretty good. But yeah, for sure, some people will prefer what I did years ago and some people will prefer what I do now. So what is the nature of consciousness?
[26:21] Where do thoughts come from? Give those a shot.
[26:24] So the word nature is something that most people haven't thought through. So what is the nature of consciousness? Does that mean, what is the definition of consciousness? Well, the definition of human consciousness is our capacity to form abstract ideals, to form or derive. It's an old question, like are numbers invented or created or discovered.
[26:51] Numbers are identified, right? Now, numbers are defined, right? You've got three coconuts, there are three disparate things that you're identifying with the number three, and then you can take that concept of number three and say, oh, there are three clouds in the sky, or there are three birds in the air, and these are all accurate things. So, they are defined, numbers are defined. So, our capacity to create abstract definitions is the definition of our consciousness, as opposed to, you know, like they've taught sign language to monkeys for like 50, 60 years, monkeys have never once asked a question. And they certainly haven't defined anything abstract and universal. So our capacity to create, to accurately create and identify universal concepts is foundational to our consciousness. But when you say, what's the nature of consciousness? I don't know what you mean by nature. Is it the definition? Is it the process? Is it the physical substrat? Is it the subjective experience or whatever it is, right?
[27:44] So if somebody, again, and by nature I mean, right? So if somebody says, what is the nature of consciousness? Again, this is, if I answer, based upon the subjective experience, they say, well, that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to the physical substrata, like the biology of it. And if I answer the biology, they'll say, well, it's something else. So I don't generally respond to undefined questions, either confusing ones like the first are undefined questions as a whole, because it's a trap. And if people can't be bothered to define their terms, why would I be bothered to answer the question? Where do thoughts come from? Well, thoughts come from the brain, because there are no thoughts that exist outside of the brain, so I'm not really sure what that means. All right, let's do one or two more.
[28:32] Stef, I've been listening to and watching your content for 15 years now, and you've been a great source for all things philosophical. I'm grateful for all the work you put into educating and informing others, in particular, as it pertains to the state. My question is, do you believe we are either in or approaching the modern equivalent to the Enlightenment era when humanity, or at least a portion of humanity, will finally be getting an upgrade regarding knowing what it means to be a free human being? Or is it too early yet, and we have to go through something akin to the dark ages for a while first? Thanks for all you do. I hope you get the chance to answer my question. See again an upgrade regarding knowledge what it means to be a free human being don't know what that means so are things going to get better or are things going to get worse well we act in optimism we plan in pessimism we act in optimism we plan in pessimism so we spend money that we make.
[29:29] Because we need to, it'll make us happy. There's things that we buy that are of value. So we act in optimism. This will make me happy. This is a good choice. I'm going to ask this girl out because I think she'll say yes. She might say yes. I'm going to apply for this job that I want because I think I might get it. So we act in optimism, but in long-term planning, we have to be pessimistic. And this is just a culture that comes from the cold, and it's a good rational thing, right? So I think of life insurance. So we act as if we're not going to die today, but we have life insurance today and not tomorrow because we might die today.
[30:01] So we go out and make money, we spend some money, and then we say, well, when it comes to getting old, I might live a long time and I won't have enough money, right? So we plant in the summer and we harvest in the fall or whatever, right? We do all of that. Optimism, planting works. We're going to get crops and plants. And we do that because we're pessimistic about our chances of surviving the winter without a lot of extra food. So I act in optimism and I plan in pessimism. I don't know what's going to happen, because there's too many unknowns, right? So who would have known, who would have imagined, who would have guessed that, say, Elon Musk would buy Twitter and turn it into a relative free speech haven? And thus, there's this ripple effect where now Mark Zuckerberg is saying, oh, yeah, no, we've gone way too censorious. The fact checkers are bad. We're going to replace them with community notes, because Trump got elected and he's losing business to Twitter or X. And so Facebook and Instagram are going to get the bull clamps of bluehead censorship released to some degree and so on. Because, you know, I mean, I don't particularly believe the guy has any principles, but he can wet finger the wind and see what's coming down the pipe. It makes my metaphors. So it's too unknown. It's just too unknown.
[31:24] All the stuff that I was talking about, you know, 10, 15 or more years ago is finally coming to the mainstream with, of course, very little acknowledgement that I was talking about a long time ago. So who would have guessed? I mean, you can't guess, oh, well, you know what's going to happen as a free speech absolutist or very close to a free speech absolutist is going to buy and liberate Twitter and so on, right? Which, you know, is part of Elon's business genius, right because he spent 44 billion dollars on twitter but how much has he made from free speech and how much does he expect to make or to continue to make and i'm not just talking financially because he's not just about the money far from it from the election of trump right so it was a very very sound investment.
[32:06] Yeah, act in, act in optimism, plan in pessimism. There's really no better, no better way to, to live. All right. I mean, you put your seatbelt on, right? You wear a bike helmet. You don't, you go out and driving, not with the anticipation of crashing, but you know that you might, right? So you go out on your bike with the anticipation of not crashing, but you wear a helmet, right? So you plan in optimism. I'm going to go out and enjoy my bike ride and go drive somewhere. You act in optimism, you plan in pessimism, right? All right.
[32:40] So, Corinthians, that's a big one. I might do that one separately. Are human beings worth helping? So, again, this is an undefined question, and it's a trap, right? So, if you say human beings are worth helping, then you have to help everyone at all times, in all circumstances, no matter what, which is impossible, so you can't win. If you say, well, no, human beings aren't worth helping, then you're cold-hearted and blah, blah, blah. So this is just everything that is ill-defined is a trap, right? And just be very wary of people who, right? If your boss doesn't give you clear markers about how he's going to know whether you're a good or bad employee, then it's a trap, right? Are human beings worth helping? I don't know.
[33:22] Human beings worth helping by definition? In other words, should all human beings be helped? Well, that's just a logical contradiction. Because if all human beings should be on the receiving end of being helped, then who on earth is providing the helping? It's asymmetric, right? It's like saying all human beings should receive a bag of gold. Okay, well, who's digging up the gold, putting it in the bag and giving it to them? Well, whoever's doing that is not getting, right? And you have to have the gold in order to give the gold. So it's, if you say, are human beings worth helping? If you're saying the definition of the human being is to be helped, well, then that's a contradictory definition because you require human beings to help and you can't to be helped. You can't be in the state of being helped and helping at the same time. So it's just a logical contradiction.
[34:08] Is it really better to give than to receive? That's a false dichotomy. When you give, you receive. When you give to people who are virtuous and you give to people who you love, you receive virtue, mutual support, and love in return. So in the best relationships there's no dichotomy between giving and receiving. When are you back on YouTube? I'm still banned to my knowledge so it's not really up to me. Objective morality exists? Nope. Mathematical numbers don't exist but that doesn't mean they don't describe real things in reality. The scientific method doesn't exist. That doesn't mean that it doesn't describe real things in reality, right? The law if gravity doesn't exist, that doesn't mean that you should jump off a building, right? What are feelings exactly if you're in the mood? Same for time. What are feelings exactly, right? See, again, that's a trap. That's a trap. Feelings in general are instinctual, rapid-fire evaluations of situations or possibilities that through your value system and through your instincts, some of which is independent of your value system, feelings are.
[35:16] Internally generated sense responses and evaluations of good for me or bad for me, right? So, if a drug addict finds a bag of drugs that he can snort or smoke, then he's very happy because it's good for him with regards to satisfying his addiction. It's bad for him, of course, in terms of health and happiness and well-being in the long run. So, he feels joy. Somebody plays the lottery, wins a million dollars, he feels joy, even though it may end up being completely destructive for him, because his emotions evaluate that as good for him in the moment, right? If a man is devoted to some girl and she leaves him, then he feels sorrow because his emotions experience that as bad for him, even though it may end up being good for him in the long run, right? So, they are instinctual inner sense responses to good for me or bad for me, and these will change based upon your values, at least to some degree. Why do some people think that life and creation itself could have been a random accident. Well, again, this is ill-defined.
[36:19] So, random is a human concept. Accident is a human concept, right? So, if I slip and fall down a mountain because I'm being careless, or just do it, whatever, that's an accident, right? I don't want to do it. It's not something I willed or wanted. I may have been careless, but I didn't want that. So, that's an accident. If, you know, the Palma style, the side of the mountain slides into the sea, that's called a disaster, but only for human beings. It's not a disaster for the mountain. The mountain doesn't care. It has no consciousness, no preferences, no senses, no nerves, no emotions. The sea doesn't care. The tsunami is bad for the fishing villages it lands on, but the water doesn't care if it's high or low, up or down, back or forward, right? So, accident and random are human concepts. I mean, there's no such thing as random in nature. Even if things happen, quote, randomly, without human beings, there would be nobody to evaluate as random. It wouldn't be perceived as a random, right?
[37:21] I mean, in some waterfall, it may feel like the water droplets kind of land randomly because there are too many variables to figure out what's going on, and each affects each other. If you look at the path of a water molecule, it's going to be impossible to predict in any great detail, right? Evaporation and condensation and rain or precipitation. But it's not random. It's just, it's impossible for humans to predict because the variables are too great. But it's not random. And it's not an accident. These random and accident are human concepts. So creation itself cannot have been a random accident. If I don't, you know, I'm not sure what the status is of the Big Bang. I gave up on physics once I realized that string theory was a largely completely unproductive money-grubbing scam from white coats pillaging taxpayers because they're too nerdy to use force. Directly so random accident it's meaningless when you talk about if the big bang is a thing right that the universe exploded from an infinitesimally small point it's not random neither is it an accident it's just a physical process.
[38:25] There's a mountain slide because it's raining too much. This. It's not an accident because it's just a physical process, right? If you have dominoes, you may not know exactly, you won't know exactly where the dominoes are going to fall, but the only concept that that's somewhat randomized, that's a human concept. The physics don't matter, right?
[38:46] Thoughts on the following. Humans aspire to gain wealth so they can skate on the backs of the fiscally enslaved. Humans aspire to gain wealth so they can skate on the backs of the fiscally enslaved. Yeah, I mean, again, that's just a big baffle gabby nonsense stuff. Are you saying that everyone who desires to gain wealth does it because they're enslaving others? So that's old school, right? That's old school. And understand that the zero-sum game, like if you get more, I get less. If I get more, you get less, comes from dysfunctional sibling relationships, right? So if the parents put out a pie and there are 10 children and there's only one pie, then if one child gets more, the other children have to get less. The idea of relationships multiplying positivities is only in functional moral relationships, right? My wife and I's lives are immeasurably better by having each other in our lives.
[39:45] Just facts reality, right? So it's not like something is subtracted from my life by having my child or my wife in my life. Not the case at all. So the idea that you have more, and therefore someone else has to have less, is a dysfunctional family and dysfunctional sibling relationship. It is looking at, they call it literally a piece of the pie, right? A piece of the pie. And that in a family, as a child, resources are provided and you cannot create or make your own. So, if you say to a millionaire chef, right, well, your pie is limited, you can only have a certain amount of pie, he'd say, well, I can afford to buy and bake more pie than I could possibly eat. Right, I'm a millionaire and I'm a baker, so I can afford to create more pies than I could possibly eat. So, there is no practical limitation on my pie eating. I could make 10 pies a day, and I could eat, but I would, you know, I would die eating whatever that many pies. So, for a millionaire chef, a millionaire pie maker, saying, well, there's only a limited amount of pies, it's like, there's not, right? So, in a situation of adulthood choice and abundance.
[41:11] Then you can have as much as you want in a situation in a situation of childhood dysfunction and scarcity it's a zero-sum game so i understand all of that so thank you everyone so much for, great questions i will get to the one about corinthians later but it's a bit long don't want to go over an hour have yourself a wonderful glorious lovely day my friends lots of love from up here i'll talk to you soon freedomain.com to help out the show thanks email bye.
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