0:03 - Birthday Month Reflections
1:18 - A Philosophy Jolt
2:45 - The Foucault Controversy
7:14 - Protecting Children
10:22 - French Revolutionary Insights
14:17 - The State of France
16:59 - Government and Education
20:05 - The Dangers of Power
23:43 - Hedonism and Control
26:01 - The Rise of Trades
28:27 - Cybersecurity and Corporate Culture
31:52 - Dystopian Futures
36:07 - War and State Power
38:13 - Family Formation and Society
42:02 - Ideologies and Male Discontent
44:28 - Public Administration Perspectives
56:41 - Soul and Career Choices
59:22 - The Diggers and Legal Reform
1:01:44 - Foreign Perspectives on Ethics
1:02:49 - Social Gatherings and Community
1:06:59 - The Isolation of Oddballs
1:11:50 - The Role of Oddballs in Society
1:16:10 - Academia and the Quest for Innovation
1:20:13 - The Alzheimer’s Debate
1:25:31 - The Complexity of Cancer Research
1:34:12 - Challenges of Obesity and Stress
1:42:54 - The Graduate Experience and Relationships
1:48:01 - Closing Thoughts and Reflections
In this lively episode of Stefan Molyneux's podcast, which takes place on September 3, 2025—an amusingly declared "birthday month" celebration for Stefan—he engages with a variety of callers, sharing insights on deep ethical issues, personal growth, and broader societal challenges. As he turns 59, Stefan reflects on the blessings that come with age, emphasizing a philosophical appreciation for the joys and wisdom gained throughout life's stages.
The conversation begins with a caller expressing gratitude for Stefan’s passionate defense of moral truths, particularly regarding a previous discussion that tackled unsettling topics like the age of consent. This exchange transitions into a more profound examination of Michel Foucault's controversial philosophies, with Stefan dissecting Foucault’s promotion of deviant practices and the academic idolization that ensues therein. His intense scrutiny reveals a trepidation regarding the ramifications of such intellectual endorsements, as he draws lines between moral integrity and academia’s troubling flirtation with normalized perversion.
As the episode unfolds, the discussion shifts to the history of the French involvement in the American Revolution, sparked by a caller's curiosity. Stefan examines motives rooted in a desire to counter British imperialism, unpacking the complex intertwining of past alliances and historical narratives. He challenges the mainstream understanding of this period, linking it to a broader critique of contemporary cultural and political dynamics.
Continuing, another caller navigates the challenging waters of modern masculinity and the quest for genuine connections in the current socio-political climate. Stefan offers his thoughts on the implications of a system that marginalizes traditional values, proposing that the modern relationship landscape is fraught with obstacles that discourage stable pair bonds. The insightful dialogue touches on the nature of rebellion among young men who feel disenfranchised, plucking at the strings of societal expectations and the innate drives that fuel conflict.
Diving deeper into the biomedical realm, one particularly riveting segment occurs as a caller shares experiences from a PhD program studying cancer treatments. The discussion rockets through the complexities of the immune system’s relationship with diet, particularly in fighting cancer. Here, listeners are treated to a nuanced exploration of how gut health relates to immunological responses, thereby emphasizing the importance of both physical and mental wellness. The caller explains the nature of certain diet-induced pathways that cancer cells exploit while underpinning that the future of cancer therapy may not lie merely in brute force but in nuanced, sustainable methods that tap into the body's own systems.
As the episode wraps up, Stefan emphasizes the value of critical thinking, a relentless pursuit of truth, and the necessity of navigating difficult aspects of society with tenacity and compassion. His admiration for knowledge-building and community engagement rings clear, ultimately encouraging listeners to foster connections, remain open to learning, and advocate for a more principled approach to ethical dilemmas. This award-winning podcaster once again proves that engaging with tough questions can illuminate paths toward understanding, healing, and progress in both the personal and broader societal contexts.
We’re left with a medley of thought-provoking questions, insights on philosophy, historical perspectives, and practical considerations in the realm of health and ethics, all expertly woven into this rich tapestry of discourse on personal evolution and collective responsibility. Tune in for an enlightening experience that promises both challenge and inspiration!
[0:00] So good evening, welcome. It is the 3rd of September, 2025.
[0:04] It is, in fact, my birthday month. Much to the chagrin and dismay of my family, the entire month is dedicated to my birthday. They will often choose only to observe a single day and not even the entire straight 24 hours, obviously due to some sort of selfishness I can't quite follow.
[0:22] But nonetheless, that is, um, that is the way it plays out. I will be 59 years old. And, uh, you know, there's real, there's a real, don't, don't let people fool you, man. Don't let people lie and complain about all of this kind of stuff. There are some massive, massive benefits to getting older. I'm not just talking about the number of doctor visits, although that's not inconsiderable, but, um, Yeah, massive benefits to getting older. Every stage of life has its joys, its beauties, and its charms. And I hope that you will remember that. And although I may have lost some of the springiness of youth, other things are even better. So anyway, enjoy looking forward to it. I'm sure that even as we go forward in life, that there will be other charms to other areas and aspects of life. All right.
[1:18] Commodore K. Commodore K, let's get straight to you. If you want to make sure you're unmuted, I'm all ears. What is on your mind? How can philosophy help joggle your noggin today?
[1:31] Well, Mr. Molyneux, this is my second stream I've listened to of yours. Now, you must have had dozens, maybe almost 100 streams between the last time I listened and now. But I didn't get a chance to say it then. But there was this guy on your face months ago, months ago, and he was defending, eliminating the age of consent. There's nothing wrong if a girl, a 14-year-old girl has her pictures shared, her explicit pictures shared, and he was defending this and you were going after him. And your attacks on him were so great. I was just inspired to be a human being. I was inspired to be a man that day. When you went after him and said, no, you're evil, you're bad. And so I just wanted to come on to your space today and say, thank you for standing up for truth and justice. Thank you for standing up for what's good in this world. I'm so happy I found you. Thank you so much. That's what I have to say to you tonight.
[2:32] I appreciate that. Thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention or ask about?
[2:37] No, I'll let others take my spot. I just wanted to compliment you. So thank you.
[2:42] Well, thanks. I appreciate that. And I did post this on X today.
[2:46] Like, I got a wee bit of a banger going talking about Foucault.
[2:54] Michel Foucault, the premier number one all-time favorite intellectual philosopher, historian, sociologist of modern academia. Like, bar none. there's almost no close second to bald-headed, cryptic-keeper-faced, AIDS-dying, and extremely questionable moral practices, to put it mildly, Michel Foucault. And somebody had posted an image which is like, hey, why did Foucault go so often to Tunisia? Actually, he taught in Tunisia for a couple of years. And Tunisia was in a state of great chaos. And later, much later, and again, who knows, no independent verification. It wasn't like there were a lot of video camera footages back then. But later, somebody said that Michel Foucault raped schoolboys in graveyards in Tunisia. Now, I normally would take that with a grain of salt, having been lied about extensively, though not to that degree myself. But it does seem to align with Michel Foucault's other kinds of practices such as trying to commit suicide, such as slashing open his chest in the middle of a dorm room, such as running and trying to attack and perhaps even kill a fellow student with a knife. Guy was a fucking psychopath.
[4:13] And an extremely evil and degenerate fellow who, by his own admission, wanted to explore the Freddie Mercury-style scatological netherworld of the San Francisco gay culture in the 70s, which was wretched and horrible excess. He did a bondage, domination, submission, masochism.
[4:37] You know, chains up the ass, hot nipples, hot wax on the nipples, just about everything appalling that you could think of, he pursued with great hunger and avidity. And he denied the existence of AIDS. He figured it was a far-right plot to denigrate homosexuality, which meant that he did pass on AIDS, almost certainly knowingly, to other people. And just, you know, you could not, in your wildest imaginations, concoct a more vile person. And yet, he is absolutely lauded on the left. He is praised, He has by far the greatest number of citations.
[5:23] I did also write, of course, on X that Michel Foucault was, you know, a, oh, and there's reports, there's reports, there's some conflicting information, but there are reports that he also signed a petition to remove the age of consent. Some people say that he signed a petition to equalize the age of consent between males and females, between gays and straights and so on. But certainly in the intellectual left in the 60s and 70s, there was a very strong pro-pedophile movement to removing age of consent, Michel Foucault absolutely did explicitly state that, it was an abuse of power. It was an abuse of power to even think that children could not consent to sexual activity with adults, that children could absolutely consent in this horrible, wretched, vile mind of his, that children could absolutely consent to sexual relations with adults.
[6:22] A more hideous brew of vile Gallic wretchedness and pro-pedophilia could scarcely be concocted. He's like an Ayn Rand evil character on absolute bone-crushing steroids, to the point where his corruption swells like the rock's thighs, all which he would probably be attracted to as well, as long as they were crushing his own windpipe, perhaps. Absolutely vile human being. And of course, most modern philosophy is around the normalization of completely deviant and wretched sexual practices. And of course, evil ones, including pedophilia. And that's what I'm fighting. That's why there's so much lashing out against me. That's kind of what I'm fighting. I'm a good old Anglo-Saxon, protect the kids at all costs.
[7:11] Out of the Christian tradition, protect the children at all costs.
[7:15] And of course, the rape of children is standard fare worldwide. You can go and look at the Bacchabali or Bacchabaki practices in Afghanistan. You can look at what goes on. In India, there is a sort of old saying that any girl who reaches the age of 14 with her hymen intact must have neither uncles nor father nor brothers. It is unfortunately just wretchedly common in most of the world. And in the West, it has been damned and condemned for quite some time, much to the chagrin of people who want to engage in such evil and destructive acts. And so I have been sitting on, and this is my fault, not James, as James held his nose and donned his full hazmat gear.
[8:02] And waded into the cesspool of Michel Foucault's life, and handed me over a presentation, which I have not had a chance to, I shouldn't say I haven't had a chance, I've chosen, I've just finished my latest book, I really wanted to finish that before going on to the cesspool of Michel Foucault's life. And so the arts academia, arts academia is pro-pedophilia, It is. I mean, most of the heroes and certainly their number one hero is that way. You say, ah, yes, well, there are a few people who aren't that way, or maybe there's many people who aren't that way, but they're still there. They're still there.
[8:44] And so, of course, if you're sending your kids off to get an arts education, they're mostly going to be brainwashed by people who are pro-pedophilia. Say, ah, yes, but they don't necessarily approve. It's like, yeah, they do. They really do. They really, really do, because he's the most cited person. And I myself would not join an intellectual organization where the most cited, most respected person was pro-pedophile. I wouldn't do it. Like, you just couldn't pay me enough to do it. And that's the state of modern academia. And and that's why they worship michelle foucault and de-platform me because the left if they want to get rid of someone i mean they're very active in doing it so whoever they don't want to get rid of let alone actively worship and praise well that's someone that they admire that's someone that they want so they don't want me who works to protect children and they do want michelle foucault who says they can consent to being raped so that is sadly the world that we live in and And this is why, you know, when Trump is recently letting 600,000 Chinese students, into America, he said, well, but there's some academic institutions are going to close down. We don't have these students. It's like, good, good.
[10:02] Cesspools, absolute cesspools. And, you know, tricking students through propaganda into paying for their own indoctrination, letting them down with debt to the point where they can't Have families or fall in love or form stable pair bonds. Monstrous. Monstrous, monstrous. All right.
[10:23] FSC. You are on your mind. If there's anything else people want to talk about, I'll do the Foucault presentation over the next seven days. Or strike me dead. If you wanted to unmute and let me know what's on your mind, I would be happy to hear and respond as best I can.
[10:41] Hi there, sir. Can you hear me?
[10:44] Yes, I can. Go ahead.
[10:47] So I've been kind of going down this rabbit hole lately of, you know, we went to Richmond, Virginia, went to the state capitol, and there's a lot of French involvement in the Revolutionary War and then the decades following. It doesn't seem like American history really gives a full picture of just how involved the French were. I don't know if this is on topic or not, but I'm curious how you think French, like what was the motive of the French in the American Revolution and how it's kind of manifested into today?
[11:27] Well, there is in most countries a rich history of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? Like if you look at some of the origin story of 9-11, it's that America was funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. And then the Mujahideen then morphed into Al-Qaeda, which then morphed into the, um, sorry, I'm getting a message here from James.
[11:56] Oh, I don't know what that's about. So then they morphed into Al-Qaeda, which then took great objection to the American presence, the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and concocted 9-11 and so on. And so I would go out on a limb and say that most people in the American administration weren't massive fans of the Mujahideen, but the enemy, my enemy is my friend. So the French involvement in the American Civil War was simply to stick it to what the French referred to as perfidious Albion, which is England, the snake and the traitor to all of the vaunted interests of France.
[12:32] And so it was really mostly to do with sticking it to England rather than having any highfalutin. I mean, and the reason I think we know that for the most part is that when you look, and I've just, I just sent out a whole French Revolution presentation at 12 hours, the truth about the French Revolution, really, really detailed in depth historical and contextual analysis of the French Revolution. So we know that it wasn't the vaunted rights of man and free speech and gun ownership and minimal government and libertarian minarchism that the French were interested in, because the moment that the French had their own revolution, they did the kind of exact opposite of what the Americans did. So it wasn't that they really, really treasured the American values. They just wanted to harm as many British troops as possible without being directly involved in a war with England. And so they simply armed the rebels because the rebels were shooting the British, if that makes sense.
[13:28] It does. Thank you. I guess I'd take it even a step further. What do you think that the French, the current French nation really is? Is it sort of a makeup of corporate power and old money that still has some colonial interests? What actually is it? I'm sorry if that's vague.
[13:53] No, that's a fine question. I'm not pausing because the question is bad. I just, I don't want to answer off the cuff. So if there's anything else that you wanted to ask, I'd certainly be happy to hear.
[14:02] No, this is, sorry, it's a little off the cuff for me too, but.
[14:05] No, that's totally fine. That's totally fine. So what is the French country? And I've done some presentations on France in the past.
[14:18] The French nation is largely taken over, as is the case in a lot of Western nations, is largely taken over by a predatory elite hostile to the native population, for a variety of reasons we can perhaps talk about another time. But there is a very ghastly streak of pro-pedophilia in French intellectualism. And there is, of course, in England as well. We know this from Jamie Seville. We know this from the various scandals, some of which were covered up. I mean, Edward Heath was roundly suspected of predatory behavior. A prime minister and Margaret Thatcher actually covered up a bunch of these reports from Parliament. So unfortunately, and maybe this comes out of boarding school, but unfortunately there is just in the elites a fair amount of pro-pedophilia mindsets and perhaps even actions. So when they bring in.
[15:22] You know, uh, immigrants from, uh, countries where this behavior is kind of normalized, they're sort of bringing in allies. I think that the long-term goal is for them to release their evil, the restraint upon their evil, um, habits and, and predilections and so on. So, uh, I don't, uh, and, and because the government runs education, and this is true every place where the government runs education, right? There's an old saying that says, uh, no matter where you are in the world, if you send your children to be educated by Caesar, don't be shocked when they come back Romans.
[15:52] And so, unfortunately, since, I mean, the West was really lost when the governments took over education, sort of 1850s, 1870s, 1880s, and so on. Before that, it was a highly literate, highly educated, and highly commonsensical population. And the entire purpose of government education is to have you ignore facts, reason, evidence, experience, and instincts for sake of rubber-stamped, quote, studies and nonsense from government-accredited, quote, experts, so that you can think for yourself or learn from the value of your own experience and those of your friends. So common sense went out the window when government education came in. And of course, government education was sold to help retain the nature and flavor of the country, right? That's why it was sold. So America was founded as a Protestant country when all of the Italians and the Irish came in who were Southern Irish who came in who were Catholics. It was like, oh no, we're gonna lose America. There's a government stepped in. No, no, no, no. we're going to take over government education to make sure that we just hold on to American values and thoughts and mindset. And people were like, sounds great.
[17:00] And so the government took over education in the 19th century, mid to late 19th century. And then of course, a generation later, you've got World War I. That's not an accident. It's not like, oh, that's a weird coincidence. Those are dominoes. Those are dominoes. When you have private institutions, they will teach you skepticism of state power when you have the government train your children. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
[17:27] Power is like a strong current. It's like a very strong current in a stream. And if you've ever gone fishing or my daughter and I like to go river walking and catching crayfish and so on and minnows. And when there is a very strong current, all the fish kind of swim. Now there's a little wobble here, but they all swim in alignment with that current, that that is the major force upon their demands. And they're all working within that very strong current and political power is like that. You want a very slow, lazy current, so that like very little political power, ideally for me, no political power, then you've got, you can go wherever you want. But political power is just a strong, riptide current, and everyone either gets swept away, or navigates it, or fights with it, or harnesses it, or whatever, but nothing, and no one can ignore that level of power. And so when governments take over education, the true nature of the state is obscured. And of course, the way that we kind of work as children is whatever our parents approve of, we view as the good. Whatever our parents approve of, we view as the good. If the parents say, oh, Grandma Moses is a wonderful babysitter, then we think well of Grandma Moses because we can't sit there and think, well, our parents are complete idiots or corrupt and are going to act in ways that go hostile to our survival or flourishing or health or happiness or virtue.
[18:53] So whatever our parents approve of, we are programmed and will automatically approve of as well. Governments know this. People who are in power know this. So when you or me, of course, as a kid, we are sent to government schools.
[19:10] We approve of governments because that's where our parents sent us. And our parents wouldn't do anything against our interest, would they? That would be inconceivable for children as a whole. So the fact that people were skeptical of war, right? You had almost a century of peace between the fall of Napoleon, 1815, start of World War I, 1914, Franco-Prussian and so on, but nothing major compared to the sort of 300 years of religious warfare that largely characterized Western Europe before. So it's not an accident that a generation after governments took over education, everybody was programmed to just obey the government and go to war. That's the price you pay. When you send your children to be educated by Caesar, they always come back as Romans.
[20:05] So, what is France? Like a lot of countries, it seems to be largely staffed by people hostile to the interests of the people. And we kind of know this too statistically, which is that there's almost no correlation between what the citizens want and vote for and what the government actually does. Almost no correlation, with some rare exceptions. When you get a real populist guy like Trump, there could be more of that. But Trump is extraordinarily rare in the history of democracy. So, I would say that France is full of a lot of NPCs programmed by the state. And when you are under the control, when your mind is under the control of the state, you feel rebellious. Normal human beings feel rebellious. You feel upset. You feel angry. You feel disenfranchised, right? Because your thoughts are not your own. There's a program. So what does the government do to counter that? What does the government do to counter your natural sense of rebellion when you are under the control of state propaganda, as we generally are growing up in this kind of system. Well, what they do is they offer you hedonism. They offer you, this is R selected versus K selected, if you've seen my Gene Wars presentations.
[21:30] G-E-N-E, not Sidney Sweeney. So they offer you hedonism. And the way they offer you hedonism is they promote easy access to sexuality, sexual degeneracy, sleeping around. They don't necessarily harm you or kick you out of school if you're vaping or smoking drugs or even drinking. That's kind of fine. Wink, wink, look the other way. And it's the same thing with universities, right? They'll offer you hedonism, parties and sex and drugs and all of that kind of stuff. And that's how you get paid to surrender your sovereign soul, to surrender your independent mind, to surrender your capacity to reason. And then anyone who does reason, well, they fuck them up royally and try and get them kicked out of school or, you know, like me, de-platformed and so on. And so the government knows that you don't like being propagandized and all of that, but wink, wink, what we'll do is we'll offer you, free and easy sex. Oh, you know what? And if you get an STD, yeah, we'll treat it for free. And, and, uh, oh, if you have a kid outside of wedlock, nah, no worries. We'll just give you welfare. And if you have any medical issues because you've been too hedonistic, like you've gotten fat or you've got clogged arteries or diabetes because you ate too much, no worries. We'll just give you free insulin. And right. So they just take away all the consequences of easy pleasures.
[22:56] And that's how they bribe you to surrender to the indoctrination. They harm people who don't surrender to the indoctrination and then they train you in hedonism and in hedonism you have no principles other than the random dopamine hit of the next pleasure center, the next nerve tickle stimuli like you're some electrified jellyfish getting an orgasm out of a rolling through the ocean, being struck by lightning. So once they can get you to be addicted to hedonism, to the pleasures of the moment, hey, you can sleep in. Don't take any 8.30 classes. What are you crazy? There's only so much you can learn about economics through one bloodshot eye. Get some later classes. Go play hacky sack in the quad, man. Here's another dance. You can go and do some acting. It's going to be kind of fun.
[23:42] We're not going to burden you with too much work.
[23:44] All you have to do is obey, conform, and surrender your critical nature and sovereign independence of thought and reason and evidence and just, you know, we'll just bribe you with endless dopamine and we'll shield you from any real consequences of that and we'll only ever attack people who think for themselves.
[24:02] Once they get you addicted to hedonism, and I'm not saying anything I didn't go through myself, so I'm not lecturing from any position of superiority here, but once they can get you addicted to hedonism, then all you operate on is the pleasure-pain principle.
[24:17] Well, it's more fun to smoke a blunt and go have sex than it is to be failed by a professor for thinking for yourself. And once they can get you to financially invest in the university, in particular, or in high school, just your time, then you can't fail, right? Once you've dropped 20 grand or 30 grand, or, you know, if you sort of put four years plus lost earnings, you put $100,000 to $150,000 to $200,000 into your education, you can't fail. Because then it's all lost money, and it's all terrible. You can't fail. So then they've really got you.
[24:50] What are you going to speak up for yourself and then get flunked out? What was the point of all of that? How are you going to pay your student loans back? How are you going to explain to employers? No, no, no. It's because I thought for myself, you know, those employers who didn't probably think for themselves and ended up taking the free stuff that comes again, only at the expense of your soul as a whole. So I think that's kind of the deal that's going on. Once they get you addicted to hedonism, you just operate on the pleasure pain principle. And once you just operate on the pleasure pain principle, you have no other principles. You have nothing that you're willing to sacrifice for because the good is what feels good and the bad is what feels bad. And since those in power can reward you or punish you, you simply obey based upon carrots and sticks with no particular thought for yourself. And then, of course, what happens is you lose your identity and you get depressed and then, oh, it's okay, man. If you get depressed, we'll just put you on SSRIs. And then you can get dead genitals and depression. Does that make sense? I'm sorry, I know that was a bit of a rambling answer, but that's what came to mind.
[25:57] No, no, I loved all of that. Can I add one thing?
[26:00] Please.
[26:01] I do think that the market should correct to a certain extent for that. Like you would start to see, as we've seen, younger people and even their parents start to tell them, hey, college is kind of bullshit. Head towards the trades. And in response to that, we've seen, typically, I think you see waves of immigrants coming in. I think that that could kind of go hand in hand. I might be reaching there, but there is definitely something where, like, taking over, like, there should be a natural kind of correction. Like, corporations can't subsidize people who don't do anything forever. There has to be people who are actually working. And you have this upcoming generation who is veering more towards the trade. Meanwhile, you're flooding that entire workforce with immigrants.
[27:01] Well, I mean, generally, and I did a whole presentation on this many years ago, the truth about free speech. Generally, white males tend to be small government, low taxes, and free speech, and guns. You know, the citizenship can have guns and so on. And so when you bring other cultures into the country, if those cultures don't have a history of this kind of thinking, and the history of this kind of thinking takes thousands of years to develop and debate and argue to sort of manifest in a general and common way, then you are diluting in general, again, tons of exceptions, but you're diluting in general the domestic population's preferences for small government, low taxes, and free speech. And this is why those things have been eroding for quite some time. And of course, the hope is maybe that the immigrants, you know, and some of them are very pro-free speech, but in general, we can hope that it will change over and so on. But it does lower the resistance to expanded state power to have cultures without that kind of history coming into a country, if that makes sense. Thank you, man. I appreciate your questions. Thank you very much for the comments. And the emo named Dark Nimbus. I can't just say that normally. Dark Nimbus. No, no. Dark Nimbus.
[28:28] What is on your smoky brain, my friend?
[28:30] Well, what's on my smoky brain is that I pursued a career in cybersecurity thinking that my future would be absolutely secured until I witnessed that the corporate landscape, even though I graduated top of my class in my field, was more catered towards rewarding people for their beauty and their sex rather than individuals who were completing projects in due time and benefiting to the company in a way that would include people. Their profit margin, and I witnessed this in a way that I seen that these men who were controlling these corporations and organizations were men who would normally not really have any interaction with women outside the workplace that they were in.
[29:15] You mean they're sort of hiring a harem?
[29:18] Yes, they are, and I've witnessed women work their way up in the ranks who just got in the door at 19, and they literally did nothing except TikTok their family, and the CEO would hire them for the sole purpose.
[29:31] I'm sorry, TikTok their family? What does that mean?
[29:34] Well, while they're working, they're TikTok-ing at the same time. Like, I've witnessed this. And the CEO...
[29:42] What does TikTok their family mean?
[29:46] Well, they're TikTok-ing and their family's watching and they're cheering them on.
[29:49] Oh, okay. Like they're doing the day in the life of kind of stuff. Yeah. We got up to the roof and got some frappuccinos. Yeah, yeah.
[29:56] Yes, exactly. And then I would watch these CEOs just call them, and every day they would have a meeting. And the reason for the CEO having this meeting was not anything productive, but because of the fact that under no other condition would he have a female of this caliber under his control. Oh, that's interesting. This is all that happened in these corporations, and I feel like that the situation now is that we are moving towards extreme hyper-individualism, and people like me, who are extremely hyper-individualistic, but through adaptation and loss of community and family and everything else, are going to be the ones that survive and thrive in this new cyberpunk-like dystopian fantasy that we're heading into with AI replacing people. And I wanted to know what your thoughts on that were, Mr. Stevan Molyneux.
[30:42] That is a, that is a lot of, a lot of syllables to stuff through my cheese grater. Um, so tell me a little bit about more about the sort of dystopian situation. So is this where we seem to have like IQ tends to be dropping and, AI, in general, replaces lower skilled labor of a sort of computer-based or physical-based kind. So is that what you mean where you have an excess of people who aren't particularly smart and AI replacing them and maybe they want to go on unemployment and welfare, but there's just no money? Is that what you mean? I'm not sure what you mean by the dystopian thing that's coming.
[31:21] Yes. What I mean is that if I'm just a guy spawning up numerous businesses in his basement with no network, when your net worth used to be your network, and I don't need anybody to do this and make tens of thousands of dollars, there's an entire class of people who don't know how to do what I do, and they're slowly being phased out. So there's going to be a precipice, a point in which we reach to where there is an entire class of people which have been deemed useless by the market because
[31:49] it is more profitable to replace them with robots.
[31:53] And then I think that we will have the forceful implementation of UBI and the massive overreach of the state to essentially control the situation and exacerbate it in a way that they find profitable and more controlling of this type of environment that we will be in. What do you think?
[32:11] Yeah, I do. I wrote about this in my novel called The Present. I do sometimes try to put myself in the mindset of the sort of shadowy elite power people. And I don't think we particularly know who they are very well, and it doesn't particularly matter. It's like an obscure oligarchy. But I do try and put myself in the minds. I think it's a useful exercise. Many years ago, I did a popular video called The Story of Your Enslavement. You can look for it at fdrpodcasts.com. The Story of Your Enslavement. Yeah, yeah. It's a good video, obviously, My Bohemian Rhapsody. And I say that you look at the world, it's a series of tax farms and with livestock. And so I think given that the people in charge charge, I don't mean like the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but like whoever's like three levels above that person, the people in charge charge, when they look at the world, I tried to figure out how they would look at the world because it's actually a pretty good way of figuring out what the future is going to be is to try and figure out what people with the most power, how they view the world and what they want. Now, of course, I don't have any particular insight. I certainly don't have any inside knowledge.
[33:27] But I would think that the elites that are there now did not create the world. They did not create the laws that we are currently in a grueling manner laboring under. They didn't create any of this stuff. But they do have to deal with its after effects. A lot of these bad laws were put in the 50s and 60s of welfare state and so on. And so to me, it's like to look from the standpoint point of being a tax farmer and say, okay, so this is the citizens. Well, we inherited these terrible schools. We can't fix them. We can't change them because the teachers unions are too powerful. And you could listen to Scott Adams for more on that. So we can't, we can't fix the schools. We can't change the schools. People tend to be getting less smart as time is going on. And we're getting these amazing robots and AI coming in, which means we just need fewer and fewer people.
[34:23] Now, in the past, in the past, when countries had too many people that they perceived off, or they couldn't pay their debts, they couldn't pay their financial liabilities, they just go to war.
[34:35] Because the population will not accept sacrifice and privations, particularly the boomers, unless maybe there's a war, right? So you couldn't just say to people, we're going to lock you in your houses for a year and threaten your jobs and so on or deny you healthcare. But if there's a pandemic, right, then we can do that, right? So you create an emergency and then people are willing to make sacrifices when there is an emergency. And I, you know, I think it's possible that a lot of the bad policies that are being pursued by the government, that obviously counterintuitive and some bad policies being pursued by a lot of governments are designed to provoke a massive amount of social conflict so that there can either be a clampdown or there's going to be some sort of insurgency or whatever it is, right?
[35:24] And I think the purpose of that is you can't go to war anymore because everyone's got weapons of mass destruction. So you can't just go to war because the war could wipe out the elites as well, right? And so provoking internal conflict is another way of being able to expand your power with less pushback and so on. So you can't say to people, we have to cut your social security because the boomers would lose their shite, perhaps literally. But if there's a war or some sort of conflict or some sort of emergency, then maybe you can say emergency rations or for the good of the country and so on, you have to create this emergency. War is the health of the state. And I wrote an article many years ago called
[36:05] the state is the health of war.
[36:08] So war feeds the state, But by printing money, the state also feeds war.
[36:14] So, there's too many people who aren't really producing much. Now, they're a reliable voting base for more and more government because the people who are dependent on the largesse of the government don't tend to vote for smaller government. I mean, people on welfare don't vote to cut welfare. People on old age pensions don't vote to cut old age pensions. People who are sick don't vote to cut socialized medicine or privatize it. But at some point, you know, when the bill simply can't be paid, I mean, I think you're right. I think there'll definitely be a push for some kind of a UBI, but to, to look at the world from sort of the cold eyed semi-sociopathic human livestock owner calculation standpoint is probably the best way to figure out what's coming. Like if you had an almost infinite amount of power and you didn't care about human beings as individuals, like there wasn't any sanctity for human life. Like you looked at human beings like you were a livestock owner, it's not too hard to figure out what's going on and what's coming, if that makes any sense. So that would be my answer, if that makes sense.
[37:23] It does. And correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm taking notes with what you're saying. One of the things that you're saying is that modern society has, in a way, allowed people who generally would have passed away in unforeseen circumstances in the past as now they just live forever. So we have entire classes of people that just keep surviving and contributing nothing. And there's essentially nothing to eliminate them because the system cradles them.
[38:00] Well, I don't, yeah. I mean, I hear what you're saying. I obviously don't like the sort of, I just rebel against the term eliminate them because it sounds, you know, I'm not saying that you're saying that, but it sounds pretty aggressive.
[38:11] So what I would say is it's really around family formation.
[38:14] So in the past, men and women married each other. Now, they didn't always get married and then have sex. Sometimes they got sex, got pregnant, but they got married. And the reason they got married was that their families forced them to. And if they didn't get married, they'd be handed out a civilized society and the women would end up prostitutes and the men would end up outlaws. So it was just easy to get married. And again, another reason why they got married was if a girl got pregnant out of wedlock, let's say she's 19, she gets pregnant out of wedlock, and the man doesn't marry her, then she has to go and live with her parents. And then they, the grandparents and her have to raise the kid and she'll never get married. And it's just a whole mess around. And her kid as a illegitimate or as a bastard, they used to be called would have a very low likelihood of dating and settling down and getting married and all that. So.
[39:03] There was a huge incentive because there was no welfare state. There was a huge incentive for people to at least attempt to form stable pair bonds that involve children and getting divorced because people were religious more so than now. Getting divorced was a sin against God and a, you know, would send you to hell and so on. And so the children that were born were born into relatively stable, at least compared to single motherhood in the welfare state, relatively disabled two-parent households. And it's not just among the old. The question is, you know, I did the truth about single mothers again, not to over-reference myself many years ago, and talked about how, you know, the children of single mothers generally are much more dysfunctional than the children of two-parent households. And what do you do with that? And so in the past, women made better choices on who to have sex with when they're young, because there was no welfare state and the man that they had sex with, if they got pregnant, which they usually would.
[40:05] She would have to live with him and he would have to be her sole provider, absent sort of private Christian charity, which was quite strict. The government wasn't just firing the money cannon of infinite glitch cash at them. And so she would have to make better choices, more wise choices and more productive choices about who she was going to have sex with and who she was going to have children with. Now women can just go for the hottest guy and multiple women can have the same guy and that's absolutely happening the harem situation there's no question that's happening i mean twice as many women as men are having sex and uh statistically that just means women are sharing um because a lot of women are in stable relationships so women are sharing men quite a bit so the hottest guy can have his pick of women and then if they get pregnant they can just go on the welfare state or get a free abortion and that kind of stuff and there's no particular social shame for that anymore And so... There are women who are making choices to have children with men who aren't stable, who aren't committed, who aren't good providers, who aren't emotionally mature, who don't pair bond, and so on. And so you've got a whole bunch of people who are raised without good father figures.
[41:25] And that's a challenge and a problem for society as a whole. And so, again, you have to look at this from sort of cold-eyed view of people who have infinite power relative to you and I, and they are cold-hearted, calculating machines. And you have to say, what do they think of their farms and what are they going to do about this mess? And from that situation or premise, you can usually figure out what's going to be coming down the pipe. All right, is there anything else you wanted to mention?
[42:03] Yeah, being with what you said, the problem with the acquisition of the average male to get women, I think that the reason I'm seeing an extreme rise in ideologies from all left and right circles is at the core of all these ideologies, I see men who are having problems getting laid, And I think that the reason for the rise of these ideologies is to return to a time or a situation where it will be just easier for them to get pussy. Really, that's what I'm seeing.
[42:38] Well, in general, young men are skeptical, cynical, and rebellious, particularly these days when they're so denigrated. Boys are so denigrated in government schools because the women are wonderful phenomenon has just completely estrogen drowned the young wild testosterone of young men. So normally young men are an X factor, a variable in society. And the way that young men are tamed is through access to regular sex. You tame young men through getting them married. But if society doesn't have jobs to offer young men, if it doesn't have women, so to speak, that are available to young men, then young men have no particular interest in the system. And at some point when the genetics kick in, and of course, young men are drugged a lot with SSRIs, they're drugged a lot with other kinds of psych meds, they're drugged a lot with drugs, they're drugged a lot with video games, pornography, and other things. But at some point, young men say, I can't reproduce in this society. And that's when things get pretty exciting for a society because life finds a way. And if there's a large cohort of young men in a society who can't get married and can't settle down.
[43:52] They tend to get pretty rebellious because the genes are like, okay, well, if we can't reproduce, we might as well try and find some way to change society so we can reproduce. Otherwise, the four billion year march of life that has peaked in us just vaporizes. So, all right, good questions. I appreciate that. And I'm going to move, see, bringing in the livestock thing and move on to the next caller. Dude, guy, he said redundantly, dude, guy, dude, perfect. What's on your mind?
[44:29] Boom boom you want to speak you want to speak i feel it.
[44:38] You're correct i do good how are you doing good.
[44:42] How you doing.
[44:43] Doing well it's great to talk to you again um so uh the last caller um had some uh kind of government how society functions topics And since the last time you and I spoke, I actually started a public administration master's degree.
[45:04] Sorry, go ahead.
[45:05] Yes, yes. So it's, no, no, no, it's one of those things where I've realized that the people who seek power shouldn't have it. Yet at the same time, a lot of systems are broken and are in need of repair. And so it's one of those things where it's like, well, shoot, I guess I got to do it. So, you know, it's, unfortunately now I'm one of those people I hate that seek power, but c'est la vie. But something I wanted to bring up was the first chapter or second chapter of our particular textbook talks about the founding philosophers of the theory of public administrations. And they list three names. And the first is probably well-deserved. It's Karl Weber, a German guy, Weber, you know, and he studied the systems of bureaucracy and how they operate. And he has a theory about, you know, what an ideal type bureaucracy looks like. The next, of course, is Sigmund Freud. And particularly, they're looking at his group psychology. And then the final one shocked me a little bit. It's Karl Marx.
[46:14] Sorry, why is that shocking?
[46:15] Oh, um, it's, it's shocking in that, you know, all this public administration for the most part in modern societies happens within the capitalist administration, yet they, you know, one of the, uh, most public administration occurs within a capitalist system. And so they inserted...
[46:38] Hang on, hang on, hang on. I'm not talking to one of your profs who agrees with you here. So most public... So by public, you mean not capitalist.
[46:48] Well, by public, you're right. You're right. You're correct. It's publicly funded. So it's non-prof.
[46:55] That's like saying most infection occurs within a healthy system. And it's like, but it's not the same as a health, right? I mean, so by public, you mean, you know, coercively funded and a monopoly protected by the state, right? So that's not the free market or capitalism at all.
[47:10] Yeah. This is true this is true but it's really shocking to me because you know the entire point of marxism is the critical consciousness so you know they're breaking people they're breaking down these systems until they control them it's it's.
[47:25] Weird to me that they're uncritically handing hang on you uh you've spent a lot of time in academia right you've spent a lot of time so you just you just rip off these like you know you're speaking to a general audience here and i always find it kind of odd and now this is just a little tip for you right because i hope that you'll get into public speaking at some point if you haven't already. Don't assume your audience knows what you're talking about. Right? So if you just rip along with these, well, critical consciousness and blah, blah, blah, blah. But you have to tell people what you're talking about because you and I are talking in front of an audience that is going to number over time and the hundreds of thousands or millions, they need to know what you're talking about because if they don't know what you're talking about, they'll just stop listening.
[48:05] You're right. I'm not properly backloading.
[48:07] No, no problem. So, okay, tell people what Marx means by critical consciousness.
[48:12] So, critical consciousness is essentially the process through which Marxism occurred. So, it's based on the thinking of a... Through which it occurred. It's the rubber meets the road for Marxism. And it's based on the Hegelian dialectic. So, that's, you know, this German philosopher named Hegel, he thought that the way things happen And the way anything changes is you have thesis, which is an idea, then you have antithesis, which is like the opposite of an idea. And then to progress thoughts or ideology, you need to have synthesis, which is where the thesis and the antithesis combine.
[48:56] So just for example, so people know what this means, this is something like the thesis is pure free market capitalism. And then the antithesis is communism, but the synthesis is like the welfare state.
[49:10] Oh, perfect. Perfect example. Yes. So, you know, Marx takes that and he says, okay, well, if we want to make, you know, capitalist society, which, by the way, is a slur he invented to describe free market economies, yet we unironically use it to describe our systems these days, he says, okay, so if we want to make those progress, we have to break them down with antithesis over and over and over again. So we have to criticize them relentlessly, and only then can we actually produce the synthesis that moves things forward.
[49:47] So, yeah, so what this means is that you say the thesis is free market capitalism, the antithesis is communism, so then we're going to end up with 10% socialism. And then you say, well, 10% socialism is now the thesis, and communism is still the antithesis, so let's get 20%, 30%, 40%, and then you end up with communism.
[50:05] Exactly. Well, you end up with socialism because, you know, they always say, oh, real communism has never been tried. But that's kind of neither here nor there. But the point I was trying to make, though, is that by making Karl Marx, you know, a founding philosopher of this profession, they are handing students loaded guns and sending them out to be agents of the state.
[50:35] Sending them out to be agents of what?
[50:38] The state.
[50:39] Sure.
[50:40] Because they'll be public administrating. Yes. Oh, exactly. Exactly. You're jumping ahead of me. The other thing I realized, though, is there is actually a fourth founding philosopher, but they either don't realize the professors, the theorists in this field, or they're unwilling to admit it. And I would argue that that fourth philosopher is Machiavelli.
[51:09] Because, you know, everyone who works for the state is a miniature tyrant. All of us go out and we, you know, even if we do the Karl Verber ideal bureaucracy, he says you should have a domain of expertise. So he's saying, you know, everyone who works for the state should know their position in the state hierarchy, and you should have a small section of the government that you are a master of. So if you're the guy at the planning department who issues permits, you then therefore become the czar of permits. So in the ideal bureaucracy, if someone comes to you and says, I want to build a horse cover for my farm, so my horses will have somewhere to go when it rains, and he happens to live across the street from you, and you see his plan, and you think it's ugly, you can deny it. You can become this miniature tyrant. um and so again you know they're loading these people up with the ability to critique they're loading these people up with the ability to wield state power but they're not teaching them about the dynamics or how it works it's yeah so i sorry.
[52:16] They're not teaching them of the dynamic of how this power works i don't know what you mean by that.
[52:20] They're they you know by leaving out machiavelli or even if you wanted to use a more modern version or you could use a dictator's handbook or even rules for radicals. They're not teaching these people that, okay, you're an agent of the state. You've been taught the founding principles. You've been taught how bureaucracies work. And now you'll be wielding power, but you need to understand power is dangerous. They don't teach that last part.
[52:53] They're not going to do that? Why would they do that?
[52:56] Well, exactly. But it's interesting because this particular profession, they don't even have a hard definition for what public definition is. And I think the reason for that is they're trying to build a profession on a three-legged stool when really it's a four-legged table, but they're just leaving that for corn.
[53:13] Okay, but the entire purpose of politics is to hide violence. The entire purpose of politics is to pretend it's a social consensus, it's a social contract, it's the will of the majority, it's the general good, it's the law, it's the entire purpose of politics is to hide coercion. And so saying, well, you know, you're dealing with a lot of dangerous coercive power, it's like the whole purpose of politics. See, and you know this as well as I do, I'm just mentioning it for the audience, but the way that it works, of course, is that they say, no, no, no, no, it's not violence, It's not power It's order It's procedure It's order You know, if we didn't have Phishing licenses, there'd be no fish It's order.
[54:03] If the government didn't own the parks, there'd be no parks. We're keeping order. There'd be no roads, no education, no health care, no charity, starving old people, dying sick people, no defense. It's order. We're giving you order. And of course, everybody knows when that comes from. It comes from the church, the parents, and the teachers, when you're kids. The bell means order. I hated that bell, man, just by the by. I'd be working on something, particularly in English class. I mean, I wrote my first novel, By the Light of an Alien Sun, when I was like 11 years old, and I was working on it. Oh, stop it. Go to some other. Even occasionally, I'd get into a math problem. You can do a puzzle. Go on, like some Pavlovian anti-concentration camp. And so it's order. You have to show up here at nine o'clock. And if you talk in the back, even if you're discussing the lesson, you get lines. We've got to keep order. And it's just all, it's all coercion and bullying. But that's the only way that you're told that any kind of order can be maintained. That without violence, all is chaos. And that is the big line. So the fact that they don't talk about the dangers of power in a course on public administration, yeah I can I would be shocked if they did.
[55:30] It's just, it leaves a giant gap. It feels like there's an elephant in the room. Although, for what it's worth, I seem to be the only one in my courses who's noticing.
[55:44] Well, what would you say? I mean, I know it's hard to read minds. Maybe you had conversations. What would you say is the mindset of the people as a whole taking the course? What are they there for?
[55:54] Well, the ones I identify with are largely there to kind of advance their careers, or, you know, actually figure out how to do political science degrees they'd have. That sort of... However, that said, you know, two-thirds of my courses are occupied with foreign...
[56:13] I'm sorry, with what?
[56:15] Foreign nationals.
[56:16] Foreign nationals. Sure, sure, yeah. Yeah, that's very common. That's very common.
[56:20] And I'm largely clueless what they're trying to do because they're taking a course on American public administration and then returning to their home countries of Beirut and Nairobi to figure out how to use it there.
[56:36] Well, maybe they are, maybe they're not. Who knows, right?
[56:40] Perhaps.
[56:42] All right. Yeah, it is the way it is. All right, is there anything else that you wanted to mention? I wish you luck with your career, and I hope it doesn't steal your soul.
[56:50] Oh, I'm pretty... I've been brainwashed in the past, worked my way out of it. I've realized if I want to get around the Chairman Mao style brainwashing where they make you write down something you don't believe bit by bit you have to write down what you actually believe first. I'm attempting to get out of it with my soul. Hopefully it affects some positive.
[57:18] Okay. Well, I appreciate that. And we'll move on to a new cowrler. Noah! I remember you from that rainy Sunday. What's on your mind, my friend?
[57:30] Hello. Well, I thought this was an interesting conversation. I haven't read my Derrida as much as I probably should have. But I was reflecting on your point about how society kind of organizes. And it reminded me of reading a book on the Anglo-Saxons and how the Anglo-Saxons used to organize society, which I think is very, very interesting and informative. Um um and so you know and and so from that back in the day when you had the anglo-saxon kingdoms in england and i think that's and and i spent some time at oxford and when i was at oxford i spent some time reading the ancient anglo-saxon laws to kind of understand how they kind of govern their society um and of course it's kind of summed up um through uh through taking basically torts where somebody's injured somebody else and then you go to the king or your lord or whomever and you say, hey, this person has harmed me, please, what should the punishment be? And usually what they have is they have, they charge the person who committed the crime and said, well, you did this much injury to this other person and therefore you must pay them.
[58:38] It's a wear guilt, it's called sometimes, right?
[58:41] Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.
[58:43] And so it's funny because it's almost all civil rather than criminal, but go ahead.
[58:47] Yes, yes. And so these criminal ideas kind of come from those Czar Normans. So this is where the French come into it. And after the Normans came and imposed their kind of top-down legalist system, you know, you had this huge rebellion. You know, of course, they did it in French and Latin.
[59:02] And there's no way for you as a common person to navigate the legal system unless you hired a very expensive lawyer. And so then there's this movement called the Diggers. And the diggers were people who protested this insane legalistic system where they said, no, we need to have courts that speak English and people need to be able to represent themselves.
[59:22] And I think that, but, you know, this is the brilliance of the English common law system. You know, I think now it's hard for us to imagine a country without a state, but this was how it worked before the Normans. You know, people signed their allegiance to a lord because that was the person to whom they, as farmers, I store my grain with my lord. And lord is like the ancient Anglo-Saxon word for a person who stores and takes care of grain and the surplus that you produce. And the lady is the person who manages the labor that goes around manufacturing bread for the village. And then you have big parties every Friday in the meat hall, right? So, you know, and then if you need to raise an army because you have invaders, basically it's naturally organized around the lord because you're all invested. And this is where the idea of knights comes from and then you protect. And so this is the whole center of social organization and it's completely voluntary. At any point, you can decide that you don't trust a particular lord and you take your stuff elsewhere.
[1:00:25] And this came to a head around the time of the early Anglo-Saxon kings because, you know, when the king would have a kid, that kid wouldn't necessarily inherit the throne. People had to decide that they wanted to voluntarily submit to the king because they trust them, the new king, to take care of their stuff. And usually that did not happen. And so people would vote with their swords and go to war against each other to decide who the new ruler should be, basically. And so this was kind of a system. But this was, of course, a problem for the ruling elite. And it's sometimes a practical issue, too, because when you had the Danes coming down, it was hard to raise a reliable army to fight off the Danes. And anyway, there's a whole thing there. And so then you get religion. And so Divine Right of Kings, the Catholic Church came and solved this problem by saying, no, we're going to Christianize you guys. And God gives the king the right to rule. And now you submit. and then you have all the rules associated with the church and the church got paid a whole bunch of money and you have to tie the church and all this and that kind of got people domesticated to the point where they submitted to a religious authority and anyway, before you know it, we end up in a situation we have now. So I think that's important.
[1:01:39] I think that should be the title of your history book, Before You Know It. Anyway, go on.
[1:01:45] I also want to say that I also work with a lot of, I mean, I'm a PhD student, a lot of foreigners. Those foreigners in public administration, if I had to guess, I mean, this is entirely my imagination, but in their home countries, the way that you make money is you get a nice little Senate care government job and you charge bribes. And that's how you earn status and merit within your small community. And so therefore, they got the golden ticket to come to the U.S. And they plan to do exactly the same thing here that they did over there. And I seriously doubt them. They have any intention whatsoever of leaving and going to their home countries.
[1:02:21] Well, yeah, that's the other thing too. They may... They may say, I want to educate you to bring your wonderful practices back to my home country. And then, oh, I got a job. I guess I'll be saying.
[1:02:30] Not any chance. No, they're not going to happen. But yeah, that's what I was thinking about. I think that's something that more people should know about. I think it's very, and I think that, you know, that's our ethics. I mean, we got our cultural heritage. You know, we're not so different from those guys, you know.
[1:02:46] Yeah, there's two things I wanted to mention, and I'd love to hear more.
[1:02:49] The first is that you were sort of saying like every Friday, everyone would get together in the Mead Hall to break bread, eat meat, and discuss business, right?
[1:02:59] Yes.
[1:03:00] I mean, we live, it's a wild thing how atomized our lives are. Can you imagine having a block party every Friday to get together, break bread, chat with people you'd known your whole life? You know solve problems uh and make jokes and do dances and just knowing that that was like like a metronome just part of your week it is inconceivable for a lot of people who just they've all scattered and the other thing too and i'm sort of ambivalent about this but i'll just sort of mention it and i'd love to hear people's thoughts on it so when i was younger.
[1:03:42] We my friends and i a lot of them were my brother's friends but we would get together for a couple of activities we play some dungeons and dragons because we were kind of all broke and it was pretty cheap or free we would play soccer uh in at the school or at a local park where it was free and we would play baseball at the local school and we did this for many years and there There were in that group a couple of oddballs, a couple of people who were just a bit strange, eccentric, I guess you would say, in the British nomenclature. I mean, you know, still fine to hang with, but, you know, they were very awkward with sports. I remember we had one guy we played Dungeons and Dragons with, and Dungeons and Dragons, for those of you who don't know, is a great excuse to make a lot of pretty funny jokes and he would be like guys let's get serious you know he would get really frustrated and wouldn't be able to roll with it now sometimes he was right and all of that but just just some some some oddities but because we all did the same things together, it would be like it was kind of unthinkable to not invite kind of the the oddballs now i don't think that's such a thing anymore i don't think because because in a sort of small rural community some village community, something like that. Yeah, there'd be a couple of, there'd be a couple of boo-radleys. There'd be a couple of oddballs around, but they'd be included.
[1:05:09] And I don't really think, because it's very much segregated now by social status, and I don't think the oddballs get included as much anymore. And also because there's been this massive anti-bullying campaign, which has, unfortunately, I know this sounds kind of harsh, but the anti-bullying campaign has removed some pretty essential feedback from some oddballs so that they could get a bit more less, a bit less oddball-y, particularly. I mean, I'm not talking bullying like violence or whatever, but sort of, you know, some sort of harshness or negative comments or whatever. I mean, I remember when I was at, I think I hung on to childhood a little bit too long. Let's just say I was a little bit overly imaginative and playful. And I remember being up at Camp Bolton, which was the camp I went to. I was actually, I went up there for a photo shoot. They thought I was such a good looking young fellow. But anyway, I was up at Camp Bolton and I grabbed a broomstick, unscrewed it from the broom and did two. And I threw it to another kid who was older than me. I was like, I don't know, 12 or 13 at this point. and I was like, let's have a sword fight. And he was like, aren't you a bit old for that? Now, that's not bullying, obviously not bullying. But, you know, it kind of stung because I'm like, ooh, yeah, maybe.
[1:06:21] You might be, you know, I was like, you're never too old to have fun, man, which was like the lamest comeback. I still remember this movie. But, you know, getting that kind of feedback, everyone's just so segregated now. And, you know, the multiculturalism stuff doesn't exactly help with that. But there is this oddballs left behind that there's just a community used to wrap around its oddballs and take some of their sharper edges off and maybe even give them a chance to get married and have kids and sand down the rough spots and so on. But I think people are just kind of isolated now and they're at home on their
[1:06:54] tablets or computers and there's just less mingling.
[1:06:59] You know, like my daughter, when my daughter was into rocks, a friend of ours bought her a rock tumbler, you know, and you tumble these rocks and it cleans them out and stuff like that. And it takes some of the jagged edges off. And I think that we sort of lost the rock tumbler of society a little bit because we don't have these big, wide social gatherings or groups, as was the case when I was a kid. And of course, I went to a boarding school with like 500 kids. You couldn't get away from the oddballs. You just had to find a way to work with them. And it actually helped them quite a bit. And I wondered to some degree if some of this autism stuff, um obviously this is just pure nonsense and theory on my part but i wonder if some of the autism stuff hasn't something to do with a little bit of the autism stuff might have something to do with the fact that oddballs are just isolated now and i just don't think they get sanded down or um socialized in that kind of way sorry that's all a bunch of nonsense but i'm curious what you think no.
[1:07:48] I i completely agree with you and actually i've got a couple stories um, Now, I think that that's, listen, I've got a little brother who's an oddball. And, you know.
[1:07:57] My parents are- My brother might have one too. I don't know, but go on.
[1:08:01] No, I mean, I'm happy to go goofy. But, like, you know, for him, I mean, you know, my parents are obsessed with autism diagnosis and all this stuff. And I'm like, dude, he's just a guy who just doesn't have enough friends. I mean, to be honest. I mean, the kid's smart. He's got an IQ of probably 135, you know. And just his friend, he just doesn't have that big of a social pool. And the more he gets integrated with his friend group, the more kind of just like relaxed he becomes. You know, sometimes it just takes time. But I'll say that on the other end, I think that there's a little bit of danger in the way that we are expected to socialize in some extent. Because, you know, we're almost expected to include. Like at the same time, it's easier for people to kind of itemize, as you said, and separate it. There's also some expectation of inclusion. And I think that people have an inherent drive to take that slightly oddball. And so this is where my story comes in. My friend, a good friend of mine, so we've got a really tight group in the PhD program. And my buddy was including this fella, and he's like, you know, he's a little odd, but he's a nice guy, and he's probably never had very many friends in his life. So they end up spending a lot of time together.
[1:09:12] Now, this guy, he's from, I think he's from Venezuela or Mexico or something, I'm not sure. But the trouble was, was that the more time he spent with him, the more he realized that this guy's core values were, it wasn't just that he's peculiar, his core values were very, very, very different. And it culminated when it was, we're making fun of my friend because he's in a close long-term relationship, but this girl in the graduate student office invited him to go out for coffee, and he was thinking, oh yeah, we're going to talk about politics in a cohort and what we can do differently in administration. And we're like, dude, she's asking about a date. And so we go, no, no, it's not a date. We make fun of him. Anyway, he goes. But this guy, he was very concerned about it. And so he comes and he talks to me. And he sort of beats around the bush, beats around the bush for a while. And he finally comes, I'm worried about your friend. And I'm like, oh, I wouldn't worry about us, whatever. It's like, yeah, but wouldn't his girlfriend get upset? I'm like, dude, listen, first of all, it's none of our business. But second of all, literally, I would not worry about it. He's a bit naive. You know, it's whatever. But this guy, he, I said, leave it alone. And so, but this guy, what he does is he writes a threatening note and puts it on her car and says, and pretends, poses as his girlfriend and says.
[1:10:29] Oh, you know. Is this the guy from Venezuela or something?
[1:10:32] Yeah, this is the guy from Venezuela, exactly. And so then he says, he writes this threatening letter and says, you stay away from my man or else. And it's like long and we know it's him because he writes in this very particular way where he bolds and underlines letters.
[1:10:46] But he didn't even use his non-dominant hand to write the note, isn't that like...
[1:10:49] No, well, he typed it out, but he uses this particular way of writing composing messages where he bolts and underlines things. And we know it's him. And my buddy's telling me, you know, I was kind of worried about this. We went to Italy together, and he's really interested. He wanted to tell me all about the patron saint of cartels, and he posts cocaine on his Snapchat all the time and all this stuff. And he drives this really fancy car, and I think he has connections to the cartel. And I'm like, oh my God, what a headache. So we ended up having to file a police report. It's a huge pain in the butt. But it's like, after that, it's like, I don't know if we want to spend time around these weirdos because I think underlying this notion of best, there are going to be weirdos, but they're weirdos who share a common origin and set of core values where you can iron them out. But they often, when I bump into weirdos, they have completely different core values. And if you try to push back against them, iron it off, You can't sand them off
[1:11:46] in a way where you're able to appeal to common language.
[1:11:51] Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, these were all general, like, Anglo-Saxon oddballs or eccentrics. And I like to think, and I think it is true, that we transferred some good social skills. I learned some good social skills and so on. But I remember my friend and I walking over to the Don Mills Mall one day. And right before the crosswalk, again, I was like 12 or so. And there was this middle eastern fellow i knew from high school who stopped us and just talked to us it felt like forever it probably was like half an hour but you know time kind of dilates when you're that young interstellar style and he was telling us about all the gang people he knew all the people he could get killed if he just snapped his fingers and so on and i'm like, Well, that seems a bit odd to me, but I'm pretty sure we're not going to be inviting you to play Dungeons and Dragons anytime soon, because that's just a bridge too far. And that was one of these things that had sort of a fairly big impact on me about, you know, self and other kind of thing. Like, that's, that's just a whole different. So we had our oddballs, but not people who, who claimed to be able to get people killed by anonymous strangers at the drop of a hat. That was just a whole different thing.
[1:12:52] No, of course, of course. No, so I guess what I'm saying is that it's troubling because I think that the way that when, like you were saying, like in the Boy Scouts when I was a kid, of course, we all had the same background. We had our oddballs and it was fun, you know? We roughed each other, you know, we sanded off the edges as it were and we could do that. But that behavior is instinctual, you know, it's instinctive. And I think that in the current day and age, part of what might be defeating that process is that punishment because, you know, It takes a long time to develop a consciousness of self versus other. And I almost wonder if people, having encountered those situations, not really understanding or having the kind of consciousness to realize where this sort of variation and oddness might be coming from. It may be very difficult for the average person to be able to differentiate between oddballs that are manageable and normal versus the other. And that might actually prevent them from being more inclusive through this sense of danger.
[1:13:49] Yeah, because you can bring oddballs into your life who will make your life very difficult and complicated. They might glom onto you. They might not leave you alone. They might not get hints. They might be difficult to have around if there's girls you like. I mean, they could follow you around. I mean, I remember one, one friend I had, um, I had to, it doesn't really matter. We had a conflict and I didn't want to be his friend anymore. Guy just followed me home.
[1:14:16] And he just like, he'd wait out front of my, um, my literally not just out front of my apartment building, out front of my apartment door. And it's like, that took a, that took a little while to resolve because it's like, okay, like I'm allowed to not be your friend anymore, man. And so, yeah, some, some of the oddballs can, it's a risk, right? And the way I sort of think of it is we got to have our oddballs in society. I mean, I know there's people who think that I'm an oddball and I, you know, I'm not saying I would not fight to the death on that hill that I'm not, but.
[1:14:46] I think we got to allow our oddballs and the oddballs are allowed to function because we keep them within society. And so we need the oddballs to challenge us, to question us like Socrates and, and, you know, Galileo, they're, they're odd. They're going against the grain. They're not social conformists. They go, we need the oddballs to challenge us. But if they get too odd, they become a danger, right? They become, they become dangerous or they just become completely lost to society, which has its own dangers as well as loss of human capital. So the way I see it is that you got the people who live on the earth, right? And they're on the earth and they're not going to leave. And then there's people in orbit, right? Now they get a bigger view of the earth, but we got to keep them in orbit, right? So they've got their oddball, which is their momentum, right? That's their inertia. They're just oddball in motion, but it is having them part of society that keeps them orbiting the earth. And we get that drone view. We get that satellite view. We get that GPS view of society, which is really, really helpful. They're like advanced scouts for dangers down the road, whatever you want to call it. But if we don't include them in society, they just leave orbit. And then they come back as comets. Or they just completely get lost to society, which is a shame. So I think we do have to keep our relationship with oddballs, but it definitely is an Aristotelian mean. You don't want to just be with normies, but if the oddballs are too odd,
[1:16:06] you do lose your contact with society and you end up in a very strange place.
[1:16:11] So what do you think of Edward Dutton's thesis? So you have, so in academia, for example, you have this pendulum swing where you go towards, you know, you need your oddballs like Newton, you're your true super geniuses in order to move things forward in a productive way, you know?
[1:16:26] And so, but then unsettling people that say, you know, it could be the case that are like our solar system is just an atom in a like, whatever, just unsettling stuff where you go like, ah, we could be living in a simulation. And, you know, just oddballs who shake up your or mental furniture, but go ahead.
[1:16:42] Oh, no, absolutely. And so, I don't know if you're familiar with Ed Dutton, but he, and I think he's, I mean, I think he's right. I mean, you know, academia as it becomes more institutionalized, you know, you don't have the opportunities for your geniuses to manifest themselves, to push things forward. And I've talked to my father, we talked about this for a long time before that, that you have these saltatory sort of jumps and ideas and thinking.
[1:17:10] Sorry, I missed that word, these what sort of jumps?
[1:17:12] I'm sorry, saltatory.
[1:17:13] Saltatory. I'm sorry if I'm completely ignorant. I don't know what that means.
[1:17:17] No, that means like as in to jump. It just means to move in jumps rather than continuously.
[1:17:25] Okay, saltatory.
[1:17:27] Yes. So example of saltatory evolution and saltatory is used in an evolutionary context when you have...
[1:17:34] Saltatory, but related to or adapted for leaping and dancing. Okay. Obviously, you never saw me try to learn a dance in theater school. Then you'd understand why I did not know that word. In fact, it probably will give me hives of some kind. Saltatory. I appreciate that. Sorry, go ahead.
[1:17:48] Of course. And so you have this saltatory movement of ideas where you have these super geniuses who don't just think incrementally in terms of scientific progress, but they're able to reconceptualize the world and make great advances. And so those are all the names in your science textbooks. These are your Galileos. These are your Newtons. These are your people who are obsessed with ideas and think about them internally for so long that they're able to reconceptualize their worldview based on all the devil evidence and come up with something.
[1:18:17] And they have a closer relationship to their own ideas than to social approval, which you need to some degree, but not too much. But go on.
[1:18:24] Yes, exactly, exactly. And so they're a pain in the ass for everybody else, you know, and everybody else has to disagree with them and say, I don't know, you sound crazy, but then they have to be not actually crazy, well, maybe a little bit. I mean, Newton did threaten to burn his family's house down with having locked them inside of it, but, you know, regardless.
[1:18:43] They, you know, we have to put both sides objectively. So who knows, right?
[1:18:48] Yes.
[1:18:49] But go on.
[1:18:49] I had so many friends who were so much smarter than I was in school, and I was always friends with them because I was like, this person's really, this person's, you know, they're the people you just talk to for hours and hours and hours about whatever the heck they happen to be interested in, you know?
[1:19:04] Yeah, I'm so friends with my college roommate who ended up getting two PhDs, has been in just about every industry known to man, and is, yeah, just absolutely brilliant and a great joy to chat with.
[1:19:13] But they'll get excluded from academia because they don't want to do all the busy work, you know, and they'll just get marginalized and excluded and give up on it.
[1:19:24] Academia has also become about small, repeated, non-controversial within academia ideas. And I think that's just a function of tenure. To tenure, for those of you who don't know, means that professors basically can't get fired. And it was put in place so that people wouldn't get fired for being Marxist, basically, for being crazy radicals or whatever it is. But because of tenure, tenure meant that controversial people couldn't get fired. But because there's tenure now, controversial people just never get hired because you could just never get rid of them. So they just go with the safe, the boring, the predictable. And this is why academia to me has felt like a complete echo chamber for at least 40 years.
[1:20:04] Well, just look at the Baptist hypothesis. So, you know, the Alzheimer's, you know, faked with the beta amyloid research and all this.
[1:20:13] Well, basically, there was a research paper published about like probably 20 years ago or more than 20 years ago saying that Alzheimer's disease was attributable to the presence of beta amyloid in the brain. And this causes Alzheimer's. And so you have 20 years where there are, oh, and then you have tau. Wow. So jokingly, if you're in the neuroscience community and you're cool, you refer to the people who subscribe to one of the two competing hypotheses for why people get Alzheimer's. And so you have the Baptists, the people who believe in the beta-amblythe hypothesis, and the Taoists, or the people who believe in tau neurofibrillary tangles as being the common origin. Now, both have pretty much been, for a long time, been definitively disproven as the source. But everybody ignored the evidence against and it wasn't until just the other year that the original paper for the beta amyloid hypothesis was somebody realized oh, these figures there are overlapping images these figures are fake therefore the original paper needed to be retracted Was it AI.
[1:21:19] That picked that out?
[1:21:21] No, it was people.
[1:21:24] AI is going to run roughshod through all of this crap but anyway.
[1:21:27] Go on I sure hope so, and I'm working on, actually one of my side projects is working on a tool to do something to that effect, but we have, yes, so, but the point is, is that people, you reproduce this research in your lab over and over and over again, and I know, I know researchers who just make up bullshit, and the net effect is that you have professors, and I swear to you, it's, you know the expression confusing the map with the territory?
[1:21:58] Yes, I do, but go ahead. Explain it for the audience.
[1:22:01] Well, okay, so pretend. You'll all know somebody like this. You know, somebody who looks at them, for example, you give them a blueprint or you give them a map, and they'll refer to the map as if it's the actual thing you're working on and say, oh, there's gravel here. We just need to move this from point A to point B. And then you might say something like, well, you actually need to move it, so you need these shovels, you need these other things, and actually it's not a slope. So if you were to try to move it and replace it with sand, then it would flow, and they'd have this issue. But they don't think about anything like that.
[1:22:30] They don't quite understand what you mean. Well, the people who think that their computer models about the temperature 50 years from now have anything to do with reality.
[1:22:37] Right, right.
[1:22:38] Like the global warming models. I mean, I did computer modeling in the environmental field when I was an entrepreneur. I mean, it's like a business model. It's not reflective of reality. It's just a bunch of assumptions.
[1:22:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and so people make predictions based on the model and tweak the model and say, oh, well, this will be what happens. Like, yeah, but, but, but no, but there, there, there are always some things that are not in the model and you have to always go back.
[1:23:04] I'm sorry, last thing I'd also mentioned, like when I was talking to a guy once and he was said he was in a business meeting and they're like, well, the investors need this return of investment in order to invest. And the guy was like, oh, I can change the model to do that. Okay, good. Well, you get the money. And that's global warming. Anyway, go on.
[1:23:22] My ex-girlfriend got into an hour long argument with her boss because she had an illustration. She wrote a peak detection algorithm for detecting when neurons were firing, and she drew a picture to show how this happened. And she could not get her professor to understand that this was an illustration picture and not a figure of an actual neuron firing. Like, they went around and around on this, and she gave up. She was reduced to tears.
[1:23:48] The fact that it has a smiley face and is giving a high five might be the clue.
[1:23:55] So many people don't understand that the words in the paper, and of course the worst thing is they'll just change the statistics that they're doing. This suits your example of your business model and your global warming, your climate model perfectly, where they don't understand that the statistics that they're measuring or the phenomenon that they're measuring is real. And so therefore they'll just change the statistics to suit whatever it is. And you can't reason with these people. But it's hard to fathom how you can go 20 years of people doing experiments where they must be replicating the original Baptist or the beta amyloid hypothesis and yet reject all of the results that contradict that hypothesis and just accept the data and just make the beta fit that they can actually publish that agrees with the previous literature.
[1:24:43] But doesn't it follow the money?
[1:24:46] And they follow the money, exactly.
[1:24:48] Yeah, there's money for one of these two hypotheses. There's not money for anything that challenges those hypotheses. Neither are their jobs. And also, you'll be pissing off your department head who's been doing this for the last 10 years.
[1:24:58] Probably more than the former, because I think that usually if you can reason, well, no, actually, it's a combination. So in my experience, if you're able to make a compelling argument for a new mechanism, there would be huge hunger for that. Because people kind of know that it's not working, and it's not as productive as they'd like it to be. People love new ideas. The trouble is, is that in my experience in science, nobody has any trust in their own intuition or their own ability to reason and develop a new idea. They assume that whatever idea it is, they'll be wrong. And quite frankly, they're right because they just quite simply cannot think rationally.
[1:25:32] They cannot. So they have no faith in their ideas and you believe that they have rights to have no faith in their ideas. So just break that out a bit for me and make sure I understand that.
[1:25:43] Yes. So I was working on what's called, it's basically a molecule that basically grabs one cell, grabs another cell, and because of the surface that you're grabbing a cell on, it's like a switch. And it triggers some sort of new behavior change in that cell. And so you can do this to fight cancer, because on one side you can grab the cancer cell, and then on the other side you can grab an immune cell. And what you do is you flip the switch on the immune cell and the immune cell says, oh, I have to kill and so then it'll kill the cancer cell. So people have been doing this in a very particular way where they'll design a genetic construct which is just like a DNA molecule. They'll put it into a cell and then that will code and create the protein, the drug for them that does this thing. And so I said, well, what is the point of doing this? It takes a long time. This is a proof of concept, for example. Let's just take the, because it's based on two different, but there are antibodies, you know, antibodies, your body produces antibodies to detect pathogens. So your body can produce many, many, many different types of antibody and basically can produce an antibody that can find or detect or fit onto basically anything that your body could potentially want to kill.
[1:27:02] Well, and just by the by, I mean, people think they just get cancer, but you get cancer stuff all the time. It's just that your immune system generally kills it, and it's when your immune system doesn't kill it that you get the problem.
[1:27:16] Yes, that is absolutely correct. And there are all these tolerance mechanisms, but sometimes cancer, I mean, cancer is kind of like a virus-infected cell because cancer comes about because the genome mutates. And when the DNA mutates, it makes different stuff. And kind of the idea behind training the immune system to detect cancer is by figuring out what new stuff that cancer cell is making that makes it different from all the other cells in the body and then showing that to the immune system saying, hey, this is what you need to be attentive to. This is what you need to kill. But you can kind of short circuit that process by just saying, oh, I know what I need to be looking out for. I can just get an antibody against that. And so as a drug designer or whatever, you can just get an antibody that will target that thing that's special on cancer cells. And then on the other side, You just put a different antibody that hits the switch on the immune cell. So that way you don't have to worry about educating the immune system. You can just direct the immune system directly just by creating that little connection.
[1:28:14] Yeah, because it's my personal opinion. I view cancer more as a failure of the immune system than the growth of cancer.
[1:28:21] Yes, absolutely. And that is correct. And I could go into three hours about telling you all the mechanisms through all the ways that's true in terms of cell exhaustion and all the things that we're researching to figure out.
[1:28:33] Yeah, and that's why it's really important in life to do whatever you can to maintain the strength of your immune system. Because people are all like, my bones and my muscles, like, well, that's great. But you've really got to work on maintaining the strength of your immune system because that's got a lot more to do with your health than a lot of the other things. get.
[1:28:49] Lots of exercise and and lift weights in particular.
[1:28:52] Yeah get to sleep keep your stress down you know all of that stay off social media just kidding but yeah i mean that's that's uh that's that's sort of my big health advice is keep your stress down as a whole and get your sleep and get your exercise get your sunlight and whatever you know read up on whatever boosts your immune system because that's probably the single biggest thing that keeps you healthy a.
[1:29:09] Fiber fiber get lots of fiber because um actually your gut is extremely immunologically active and it It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
[1:29:16] Oh, yeah, yeah. Talk about that. It's a fascinating topic. Go on.
[1:29:19] Oh, yeah. So your gut, of course, you... So, okay. So your immune system is always being exposed to foreign stuff, but you can't develop an immune response against it. Otherwise, you'd be allergic to everything that you ate. And so your gut is lined by these extremely active immune cells. It's the layer, if anybody wants to Google it, it's called the lamina propria. And the lamina propria is a place where all of your little immune cells live. And for the most part, they have to be regulatory. And that's to say that they regulate the immune response rather than encourage it. So it's kind of like regulatory versus inflammatory.
[1:29:51] Yeah, because you want your immune system to do the Aristotelian mean to not be inactive and not be overly attackive and attack things that are good for you.
[1:30:00] Exactly, exactly. And that stuff, especially maybe if you have a slightly leaky gut, it gets all the way to your liver. And so the same process happens in your liver as well. In order for your liver to be able to purify your bloodstream from toxins, it also means that it has to calm down your immune system and say, hey, don't worry, this is just food. I can process this. But now think about, what if you have colorectal cancer? And so this is kind of like what allows, so you can tolerate many, many, many mutations in your gut, for example, because it's exposed to your gut. And this is part of the mechanism that says, don't develop an immune response against this. But at the same time, your immune system has to be able to detect when there's something genetically wrong, like there's a virus or something in your gut endothelial lining. And so this is really the cutting edge of what we don't understand. What we don't understand right now, and this is a subject of active research, is how does your gut know? How do those immune cells know when something is evil versus when it's something that you should be tolerant to?
[1:31:01] And so, yeah, but a big part of this is actually feedback from your gut microbiome. So we've evolved to have particular strains of bacteria in our guts. We inherit them from our mother. Even after we've been living with our wife or our husband for a long time, still 80% resembles our mothers rather than our partners, the people we live with. And so these species have lived with us for a long time. But what can happen is if you take antibiotics or you get dysregulated, you can have different strains of bacteria that end up kind of taking over. And this triggers an immune response. And this triggers leaky gut, for example. And this causes major, major, major, major, major problems for people. But in the healthy state, these healthy bacteria, they produce, they actually ferment. So they ferment in our gut to produce the fiber that we consume, and that's part of what keeps them healthy, to create these molecules called short-chain fatty acids. And these short-chain fatty acids, what they do is they actually regulate the immune system. They also regulate your mood. They do a lot of important work in terms of allowing your signaling to your immune system that your gut is in a healthy state, it's not full of pathogens, it's not full of invaders, and you shouldn't have systemic inflammation. And in the absence of it, you end up with a systemic inflammation, which then ends up in all kinds of immune dysregulation issues. But this is just another reason why fiber is a very important part of your diet.
[1:32:24] Well, and you can even cure some people of ailments by transplanting fecal matter. In other words, introducing new gut biomes and biobacteria and so on into the organism as a whole. Is that somewhat right?
[1:32:37] Yeah, that's true. And it can also make you skinny. So these short-term fatty acids, they actually act like GLP-1 agonists. They have the same pathway as, you know, ozempic, the skinny drug, which of course is very bad for you. And I'll tell you why it's very bad for you.
[1:32:50] How does that even work? I don't even know how that works.
[1:32:52] So basically, it's a peptide, and it just hits the receptor that makes you feel satiated. And you take a whole bunch of it. So it makes you feel satiated. So my understanding of the way that it makes you feel, and I'm thinking myself, is that it feels as if you had just eaten and stuffed at Thanksgiving. And the idea of having another bite to eat makes you nauseous. That's that feeling. That's the feeling that causes it. And that's why it allows you to stop eating. Now, the problem is that you now feel this way the whole day. And so you don't eat anything. And if you don't eat anything, you also don't feel like exercising. And what happens is you lose weight, but you don't just lose fat weight. You also lose muscle mass. And if you're older, it's very difficult for you to build muscle mass. So the cost of taking Ozempic is, the primary cost is that it was causing you to waste your muscle that you may, if you're elder, that you may never get back, be able to build back again. So it's like dieting. It's like starving yourself without getting good exercise. You know, we've known forever, diet and exercise. Those two things have to go together. And you can take Ozentic if you get good exercise, and you make sure to eat enough protein. That will ameliorate the side effects, but nobody's being told that.
[1:34:02] And when they go off it, does their normal hunger level return?
[1:34:07] The hunger level returns, the fat comes back, the muscle does not come back. You're weakened.
[1:34:13] Wow. Yeah, that's rough. stuff and you know lots of people want want these shortcuts and you know i think another thing too when people come from stressful childhoods i had a pretty stressful childhood and one of the things that i notice is it's it's very hard for me to feel full and i think that comes from i think when you're a kid uh if if you have a stressful environment i think your body thinks like food is scarce it's feast or famine it's hunter-gatherer it's not it's not a farming is you're not going to have enough meals, you know, and so you don't feel full in the way that, you know, if your dad brings home half a deer, you got to just gorge in it because it could be, you know, four days till you get another meal or whatever. So I think that when you come from a stressful childhood or a sort of chaotic or uncertain childhood, and I think this has a lot to do with obesity, that it's really hard to feel full. You know, my wife had a much more content childhood than I did. And she's like, oh, no, no, I'm full. I'm like, what does that feel like? Because even after this sort of Thanksgiving dinner, I'm like, I could eat some more.
[1:35:18] That's a very interesting idea. I'll have to do some research into that.
[1:35:21] If you find out anything, just do let me know. I'll get two more questions if you have time.
[1:35:28] Of course.
[1:35:29] Number one, what's the story with Crohn's disease?
[1:35:33] Crohn's disease? Great question. I wish I knew more about that one. It's an inflammatory disease of the gut. Let me think for a second. So irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn's disease. I believe you have lesions. You have lesions and colorectal. Yeah. Yeah, I believe it's in a particular segment of your gut, you end up with these lesions. But I don't know that much about the etiology right now.
[1:35:54] Unfortunately. The other one, maybe you know, maybe you don't. And this is just straight out of my comments over the last 20 years, is that every time I mention anything about cancer, I'm sure you know this kind of thing. People are like, oh, there's been a cure for cancer forever. They just don't want to tell you about it and so on. I find that a little hard to believe. But because it would be such, of course, a moneymaker and money saver for people. Why is it so freaking hard to to to cure cancer like why do we still have to blast people with chemo and radiation and god knows what and um do you have you ever heard that there's a cure that's been suppressed again that seems hard for me to imagine but you know i've i've been wrong about stranger things before oh.
[1:36:33] That's a great question well i think you know from my perspective i don't i don't think that there's been a cure that's been suppressed and that's because we've cured cancer many, many times. We cure cancer every day, actually. It's just that cancer is just very different. Every cancer mutates its own special, stinking, upsetting little way. And that's the problem. Cancer, it's an evolutionary success story in that you give chemoradiation, you figure out a way to cure it. But any cells that remain that have found a way and mutate and escape whatever your treatment happens to be, they will then divide and metastasize, and then we don't have a cure for that. So that's the problem with cancer. There are cells that are rapidly evolving in order to escape the immune system and any treatment that we can throw at them. So cancer mortality is down for all kinds of different types of cancer, and we're kind of knocking them out one type of cancer at a time. Right now, what's really challenging for us is solid tumors, because they engineer their little environment to be very suppressive to the immune system. Immune cells go in and never come out because they get what's called exhausted. The other type again, then acreatic cancer.
[1:37:45] Do you mean it's sort of like a cyst that you develop this little ecosystem that's kind of hiding from the immune system?
[1:37:50] Yes, exactly, exactly. And that completely changes their physiology. So you end up with heterogeneous physiology where you have the parts of the tumor that are exposed to an oxygen-rich environment that behave one way, and they don't have that hypoxic in the core of the tumor that behave in a very different way. Yeah, it's complicated.
[1:38:06] You must see these comments all over too whenever cancer is mentioned on social media, everybody. I won't say quack remedies because, Lord knows, people think that my solutions to social problems are quack remedies too, but... You know, you just don't eat sugar. Sugar fuels the cancer. I mean, what do you think about this kind of stuff that you've seen floating around that says the diet will significantly influence a cancer outcome?
[1:38:30] Yeah, it depends on the cancer. So the cancer has its own metabolic signature, but again, depends on the cancer. I did research where we're looking at the effect of basically a ketogenic diet. Excuse me, a ketogenic diet on brain tumors. Because the brain tumors were very responsive to carbohydrates. They're called a glioblastoma multi-form.
[1:38:53] Sorry, when you meant responsive, you mean in a bad way.
[1:38:56] Oh, yes. Exactly. They'll eat it all. And so if you were to starve it of that preferred metabolic pathway, then it'll stop growing. And so the idea was, and so our question was if we were to push ketones, like just the keto, like a highly ketogenic diet, would it be okay? Would that force the tumor into a more ketogenic mode? Because this is the one thing about cancer that you could, and I think there's a lot of promise in, is basically kind of like the cancer is in a mode of proliferation. Like if you think in terms of leukemia, for example, these are lymphoma. These are white blood cells that are supposed to divide when they're active. They're just basically stuck thinking that they need to be dividing it on. And then they just don't stop. So they're doing their job. So if you could just tell them, hey, hey, hey, it's okay. They're natural off switch. And you just turn off the natural off switch, you can switch them into a mode in which they actually are not cancerous.
[1:39:51] You don't want the white blood cells to be like those Japanese soldiers 30 years after the war. They think it's still going on. It's like, okay, peace was 30 years ago, man. You can come out of the cave now. Stop fighting. Stop fighting.
[1:40:04] Yeah, actually. And the brain tumor is kind of like that. They're glial basalma. They're feeling glial cells in the brain. And they just get stuck in the honesty and they divide, divide, divide. And so the idea is that, well, if you were to switch them to a more energy conservative mode where they don't divide, then you're taking advantage of their healthier behavior. And unfortunately, that research did not work because if you give them any carbohydrates at all, they prefer that, so they'll do that. But no, no, but there is truth to this. There absolutely is truth to this. Also I think that sugar it has an impact on the immune system as well um, It has an impact on all the, on your endocrines and everything. And so, yeah, so I think that, you know, whether it's fueling cancer per se, yeah, perhaps depending on the cancer, but probably also there's a more holistic element to it.
[1:40:57] Yeah, it's a funny thing because it was a couple of years ago, I cut out sugar from my diet. Now, for the most part, I have it out. Occasionally, I'll have a piece of dark chocolate or something like that, but for the most part, it's out. And I felt quite uncomfortable and the sensation of discomfort came from my gut. It was kind of a craving and a yearning. But of course, I'd read enough at this point, like Dr. Robert Lustig, who I had on the show and things like that, where I was like, okay, so the bacteria that I have that feed on the sugar are complaining about the gut genocide of sugar-free diet that is occurring in my innards. In other words, they are provoking me to give them what they want because they can't go to the cupboard and get candy or chocolate or cheesecake or something like whatever. So understanding that the discomfort wasn't anything like, my body is crying out for sugar. It's just, oh, I got this bacteria that's acclimatized to eating sugar, and they want daddy to feed them.
[1:41:52] Easily could be. But I would also like to divert you back to your thought about this feast versus famine. Think in nature, in human evolution, when we would have sugar available to us in the form of fruit. Maybe for a very limited period of time. So I would imagine that there's some evolved psychological mechanism, where if you think there's sugar available, now is your time to gorge to gorge on fruit.
[1:42:13] Well that's why i mean all the candy wrappers have bright colors because that's what fruit uh does this is generally a bright color and you want to get as much of it as you can because you don't want to get scurvy over the winter right, okay very good very good so when do you when do you graduate.
[1:42:30] Oh, in a few years. I see. I'm one of these people. I was always like, I don't want to, you know, I took several years after graduating just to figure out whether I wanted to do MD, PhD or what. And so I was a staff scientist for a long time. So I just started my PhD program on studying influenza.
[1:42:50] And so it'll take me a few more years and then I'll graduate. And, but, but for me.
[1:42:55] Sorry, do you enjoy the process? Because some people get tired of being students, other people thrive in the environment. I mean, one of my best friend's wives was a genetics researcher for many years and absolutely loved it and didn't even like the idea of graduating, although she enjoys her job now. But do you like the environment? How does it work for you as a student?
[1:43:13] Oh, I love it. I mean, personally, I love it. I mean, I, well, I mean, it depends on the parts. I mean, I love the research. I mean, I love being paid to read papers and learn things and, and to develop my own ideas. I'm also pretty good at working, you know, writing. I've written funded grants, and that's the hard part for a lot of people. And I convey my ideas, and other people can insult me and criticize my work and not understand what I mean, and it doesn't really get to me that much. So I'm pretty well suited to it. I'm not making much money, obviously, right now, but I have side projects to solve that problem.
[1:43:46] Well, and of course, the flip side of being the entrepreneur is having the groundwork for and the context for entrepreneurship, if you want.
[1:43:55] Yes, yes. And so getting a PhD is just, for me, a necessary evil in some regard to get those initials after my name and establish my credibility. But in the meantime, because I have all of this experience, it's kind of a cakewalk, to be honest. And so I can spend the rest of my energy networking into the innovation hub that we have and spend my time, I spend a lot of time kind of mentoring my fellow graduate students, you know, and helping them to not lose their love and because their PIs often don't know what to do with them. I mean, I warned a couple of them, for example, listen, the lab that you want to go into, their stuff does not work. I believe that it can work though. And they didn't listen to me, they went in and now they're coming complaining and like, you're right, you're right, you're right. So I said, never fear though. There's always a solution. It's just the only limit is your creativity. We live in a world that's extremely, extremely multidimensional. And the problem is not that these ideas that people have are not possible. It's just that you're not going about it the right way. And so here are all the possible avenues that have not yet been explored. Let's try some of them. And at the very least, you'll make a contribution to scientific knowledge.
[1:45:09] Now, have you managed to find a girlfriend who enjoys the eternal student lifestyle? Or are you monk-moding until you heard her daddy Warbucks?
[1:45:18] I know. I mean, I did. I went to Oxford with her, but she just had pretty severe mental health issues, and it made it very, very difficult. I helped her a lot with her work, her PhD, and when we got there, she got really, I mean, I never held it over her head or anything, but she just got really fixated on the idea that now her postdoc needed to be her own individual work. And she got very obsessive and it just made it very difficult to be a good team. This also, because this also isolated me from my family, so I had to come back.
[1:45:57] Sorry, do you mean the relationship or the graduate?
[1:46:01] The relationship.
[1:46:02] The relationship.
[1:46:02] The relationship, yeah.
[1:46:03] Was that on her insistence or just as a functional result of having to manage someone's ill health that way?
[1:46:09] It was on her, it was a combination, but it was kind of on her insistence.
[1:46:13] Right, right. I'm sorry about that.
[1:46:15] And it's all right. You know, it's one of those things where it's, you know, I wish there were a way for us to kind of be what I imagined that we could be. And I think we were for parts of that. But, you know, I mean, she's very smart. You know, she's very, very smart, very, very kind. But, you know, sometimes what comes along with that is a lot of obsession. And that obsession can really make things challenging sometimes, I think. So we still talk quite often, but yeah, that was really quite difficult. So maybe someday. Who knows?
[1:46:51] You may be someday with her or?
[1:46:53] Well, you know, probably not.
[1:46:56] But you're in different countries now too, right?
[1:47:00] No, that postdoc did not go well. So she came back to live with her parents, actually.
[1:47:04] Oh, is she not still in school?
[1:47:05] Which is kind of what I expected to happen. Um, she's, uh, she's, she's teaching now.
[1:47:10] Oh, okay. Well, that might be a little bit less obsessive because here's the thing, like you, again, you, it's, it's that old joke from Seinfeld I've mentioned before, like maximums. He's got this joke about, you know, maximum strength, tile it all. It's like, what is maximum strength? Like, give me the dose. It'll kill me. Pull it back 5%, just a little bit. So it doesn't quite kill me. And that's the same thing with achieving anything great. Maximum concentration and effort and work. And it's like, but not to the point where I can't relate to other carbon-based life forms. You want that focus, but not to the point where you're basically in deep space with your own reflection.
[1:47:44] Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's hard.
[1:47:47] I just wanted to give you feedback as well. People have been saying, this guy is great. I could listen to him talk for days. The host ain't bad either. So I think you're getting higher marks.
[1:47:58] That's good. That's good. I want people on who people find interesting.
[1:48:01] And I really do appreciate your comments. is there anything else that you wanted to mention before I wrap things up with the rap song no I'm just going to wrap things up no wrap.
[1:48:10] No I just want to say that I've been following you for a little while now and I really admire your work and I admire that you're you know you speak you speak truth even when it's unpopular and you know so thank you very much for everything that you do.
[1:48:22] Well thank you I appreciate that and you're welcome back anytime it was absolutely fascinating and I wish we lived closer I'm sure we'd be buds alright have yourself a great evening freedomain.com/donate to help out the show freedomain.com/donate. It is my birthday month, birthday month, 24th of September, but don't wait until then. Let's celebrate the whole month. freedomain.com/donate. Have yourself a wonderful day, everyone. We'll see you Friday night for Friday Night Live and then subscribers for Sunday morning at 11 a.m. Lots of love, everyone. Take care. Bye.
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