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In this episode, I explore mental health, personal agency, and societal norms, challenging conventional views on bipolar disorder and emphasizing the importance of personal responsibility. I discuss the philosophy of the mind, advocating for reason and empirical evidence in understanding mental well-being. The conversation shifts to cryptocurrency, highlighting Bitcoin as a pathway to financial freedom, and critiques the risks posed by centralized digital currencies.

I also address homeschooling, defending parental education against bureaucratic oversight, and critique modern ideologies that contradict human instincts. Drawing on philosophers like Camus and Sartre, I underscore the significance of personal integrity in philosophical discourse. This episode encourages listeners to critically assess societal constructs around mental health, education, and autonomy.

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Transcript
00:00Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Some great questions from Facebook.
00:05Can bipolar be fixed with personal agency and responsibility?
00:10Now, I, of course, no doctor. I ain't no doctor with degree.
00:15No psychologist, no psychiatrist, just amateur nonsense opinion.
00:20But I don't think that the biochemical basis of some mental illnesses have really been strictly determined.
00:28So I would look at, and I did a whole show on mental illness, theories of mental illness in the past.
00:36You can find it at FDRpodcast.com.
00:39But in general, what I would say is that our brain is there to process reason, facts, reality, and the empirical evidence of our senses.
00:50And the world is objective and predictable and rational, like the material world is objective, empirical, predictable, rational, consistent.
01:01And therefore, we are aligned with the purpose of our brains exactly and specifically to the degree that our brains follow the principles of material reality.
01:12Do we accept the evidence of our senses? Do we accept the need for reason? Do we accept empiricism?
01:17Are we willing to overthrow theory in the face of actual evidence?
01:21Are we willing to be corrected by the facts of reality and the strictness of reason?
01:26If that is the case, we have the greatest capacity for mental health, right?
01:33The body has particular purposes, and if we follow that which is best for the body, that which is the body is designed for, we are most likely to have physical health.
01:43Of course, there can be bad luck exceptions, and it's the same thing with the mind.
01:47The purpose of the mind is to process and extract principles from the sense data that comes into us from objective, empirical, universal, rational, predictable, and consistent reality.
02:00So, we found our beliefs on reason, we accept the evidence of the senses, and we discipline our minds to follow the strictness, because we have imagination, which is a good thing.
02:09We can deny immediate empirical reason. In fact, we do it every night in our dreams.
02:14So, we have the capacity for imagination, which is wonderful.
02:18Animals, in a sense, don't really have much option to not follow their instincts, but we do.
02:23And that's great. Imagination is a wonderful thing.
02:25Imagination should be tempered by rational and objective principles as a whole.
02:31So, whatever is going on in people's minds that is dysfunctional, we have to look and say,
02:37OK, if something is called a mental illness, what is mental health?
02:43And it's always a big problem. OK, what is mental health?
02:46It can't just be conformity to society, as the old saying goes.
02:50It is not a mark of mental health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
02:54So, what is mental health? Mental health is having principles within our mind, which is part of reality.
03:01Our brain is part of reality.
03:03It is having principles in our mind that follow the reality that gave us birth and sustains our existence.
03:10So, principles within the mind that follow the objectivity, rationality, and universality of the properties of matter and energy,
03:18allowing our foundational beliefs, in a sense, to be a shadow cast by the statue called absolute reality.
03:25That is our best chance for mental health, in my humble opinion.
03:28All right, where is Bitcoin headed to? Five years, ten years?
03:33Well, I've said this from the very beginning, it's Bitcoin or bust.
03:37We either get Bitcoin or we end up with a creepy totalitarian social credit CBDCs.
03:45CBDCs, sorry, I had a little aneurysm there, but good, we're back from the dyslexia.
03:54So, we either get Bitcoin, which is a private and universalized and decentralized currency,
04:01or we end up with the government in control of everything we buy, and therefore we will enter into a totalitarian phase.
04:09I remember reading once that somebody theorized that the government in 1984 lasted for 9,000 years.
04:15Would not seem to me.
04:17So, to me, it's like Bitcoin either wins or humanity loses.
04:21That's really all there is to it, which is one of the reasons I've been talking about it so fervently and positively,
04:27and essentially, and with great necessity for lo these many years.
04:31So, I obviously can't tell you in any detail where Bitcoin is heading to,
04:36but if Bitcoin doesn't win, humanity loses probably forever.
04:41So, all right.
04:42You are not qualified to homeschool your kids.
04:45Yeah, this is something that went on X recently.
04:47You're not qualified to homeschool your kids.
04:53There is this funny thing where the new sort of modern gatekeepers are the people layered in the Scrabble bag acronym of supposed credentialism, right?
05:06So, this is, well, if you don't have a PhD in climate science, you can't talk about it.
05:12So, this is all just gatekeeping, right?
05:14All it is is saying, well, I have not been taught how to determine truth from falsehood, right from wrong, good from evil, facts from fantasy, information from disinformation or malinformation,
05:26both, by the way, Soviet terms invented by the NKVD to crush dissidents and questions of the virtues of communism.
05:33But credentialism is the new mystery religion, right?
05:41I talked about with regards to science.
05:43Credentialism is the new mystery religion.
05:45So, in a mystery religion, you have to submit your questions to the priest.
05:50They go into closed areas, have bizarre rituals you're never allowed to figure out, and come back with an answer that you're not allowed to question.
05:58And it is terrible.
06:03It is really beyond terrible.
06:05It is a new white-suited, horn-rimmed glasses, pocket protector cult of infallible priests whose methodologies you can never question, right?
06:16So, for instance, with regards to global warming, there's all of this modeling stuff, right, that they model the temperature in 100 years.
06:27Of course, if the government cared about the future, we wouldn't have a national debt.
06:31So, the idea that they care about the future is obviously laughable.
06:35It's just a basic intelligence test.
06:37But, so, everyone understands that.
06:44Imagine a business case, like a business case scenario, right?
06:48Like I've done this.
06:49You present a business case to investors, and they'll give you $100 million, right?
06:55They'll give you $100 million if your business case shows a profit in 50 years.
07:03No, let's say 100 years, because the climate stuff goes out 100 years, right?
07:07So, this is just, again, it's just a basic intelligence test, right?
07:11So, if you go to a bunch of businessmen and you say, I'll give you $100 million, but you need to give me a completely unverifiable business case,
07:21wherein you make a profit, this business makes a profit in 100 years.
07:25When, you know, everyone's dead and all of that, right?
07:30Now, if you have hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world,
07:36I mean millions of entrepreneurs around the world, let's just say hundreds of thousands.
07:39You have hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world, and you put it out there that you will give an entrepreneur $100 billion with no oversight,
07:47no need to make any short-term profits, no need for any of their predictions to come true in the short run,
07:52but you'll give them $100 million if they come up with a business model that shows significant profit 100 years in the future.
08:02Now, this whole process has been going on for decades, since really the 1970s.
08:08None of anybody's predictions have come true yet, right?
08:11None of anybody's predictions have come true.
08:13But if you think that out of hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs,
08:16there isn't a single one who would come up with a model that predicted profit 100 years in the future
08:23in order to get $100 million in the here and now,
08:25I'd like to introduce you to a species of bull biped called human beings,
08:29because clearly you haven't met any of us yet.
08:32It's corrupt beyond words, it's ridiculous beyond words,
08:36and anybody who would believe it, it's incomprehensible.
08:39It's like they've never met a human being.
08:42Like they're the writers for Emily in Paris or Megalopolis,
08:45like you've never met a human being in your life.
08:49So, that's all.
08:52So, with this kind of stuff, I mean, it's like the projections that the government puts out for various things.
09:02You know, if you were good at projecting economic facts,
09:06you would go and make a billion billion dollars in the stock market.
09:10You wouldn't be mucking away in some fluorescent Excel sheet government corner office
09:15putting politically crafted fantasies together in the guise of economic projections, right?
09:20You would actually, if you knew where the economy was going,
09:23the last place you'd be looking for is the government.
09:28It's pretty funny.
09:29It's like somebody who says, well, I know exactly who's going to win the Super Bowl,
09:32and I have for the last 50 or 40 years or 30 years, however long the term's been used.
09:36Somebody who says, yeah, I know exactly who's going to win the Super Bowl, man.
09:39It's like, well, why are you working in a little corner office putting it out on a block?
09:42Why don't you go and bet on the Super Bowl legally and make a zillion dollars?
09:50I don't know, it's just kind of funny.
09:52So, this idea that you're not qualified to homeschool your kids.
09:57So, who is?
09:58Who is qualified to school your kids?
10:02Who is qualified?
10:04I got a wasp on my camera here.
10:06So, who?
10:07Two, I guess.
10:08So, who is qualified to homeschool your kids?
10:12Politically motivated bureaucrats a thousand miles away who don't even know your child
10:18and are responding to the endless demands of the teachers' unions.
10:21You know, like, forever and ever, just a little example, forever and ever, amen.
10:26Everyone has known that the best way to remove the Sartorian existentialist horror of school
10:32is to allow kids to sleep in, right?
10:34Just let them sleep in.
10:36If they need more sleep, let them sleep in.
10:38And then they won't be exhausted and irritated and distracted, right?
10:42How much of ADHD, or what's called ADHD, is just lack of sleep?
10:46Because teenagers need a huge amount of sleep, especially boys.
10:49So, forever, the recommendation has been to start school later.
10:52But they can't.
10:54Do you know why?
10:55At least the reason they get, you know, we have contracts with our school drivers, the bus drivers.
11:01The bus drivers.
11:04The bus drivers.
11:08Tired to think of a more incompetent group of people whose job is somewhat more essential for the economy than bus drivers.
11:13We're late.
11:14We got lost.
11:15We dropped your kid off too early.
11:16We dropped your kid off too late.
11:17We're sick.
11:18We're unavailable.
11:19We don't have any discipline.
11:21We can't control the kids.
11:22Anyway.
11:23So, yeah.
11:24So, who is competent to school your children?
11:30Strangers with a political agenda, who are very easily taken over by special interest groups to promote bizarre, toxic, anti-human ideologies?
11:39Who is?
11:40Compared to what?
11:41So, you're not qualified to homeschool your kids.
11:43Like, okay, so you don't have the requisite scrabble bag of acronyms after your name.
11:47But what you do have is a deep knowledge of your child's preferences and personality and a deep love, affection, and care for your child.
11:56So, it's saying that anonymous strangers a thousand years, sorry, anonymous strangers a thousand miles away are better at understanding and raising your kid than you, the loving parent, who, and you also understand your kid at a deep psychological level.
12:15Right?
12:16Because your kid is birthed from you and your wife, you and your husband.
12:20Which means that since almost every aspect of personality is influenced by genetics, you understand and know your kid pretty well.
12:27I think the wasp is trying to mate with my camera.
12:30Fascinating.
12:31You just keep doing that and don't give me another hole.
12:35So, the idea that some anonymous stranger in a government bureaucracy is better at raising your kid, because that's what educating your kid is raising your kid, right?
12:47So, an anonymous stranger with a bag full of highly politically corrupted credentials is better at raising your kid than you, who have a deep and visceral understanding of your kid.
12:57Because your kid is like you and your kid is like the woman or the man that you love and so on.
13:02Because of all of that, you're just not qualified.
13:05What a bizarre thing it is to say to a parent, you are not qualified to raise your own child.
13:15But politically motivated strangers following the demands of greedy public sector unions, well, that's the ticket, man.
13:25That's what you need to do.
13:28How on earth did we ever evolve as a species with parents raising their own children?
13:32It's incomprehensible.
13:34That's just so bizarre to me.
13:36I mean, who's good at raising your kid?
13:38And education, you know, education is conversation for the most part.
13:43Like, I don't know how people homeschool as a whole, but education is conversation.
13:47You sit there, you drive and you say, oh, there's a for sale sign for a business.
13:52Let's talk about how a business gets bought and sold.
13:54That's interesting.
13:55I find that interesting.
13:56My daughter does too.
13:58The leaves are falling.
14:00Let's talk about the cycle of the seasons.
14:02Like, you just have conversations.
14:04And that's how knowledge gets transferred, right?
14:07That's how knowledge was transferred for almost all of human history.
14:10Did a pretty good job, I would say.
14:12I mean, we did get to the top of the old food chain and we do have the biggest brains in the known universe.
14:16So, not too terrible.
14:19No.
14:20So, all that is natural is opposed.
14:24Right?
14:25That is the modern world.
14:28All that is natural is opposed.
14:30Ideology is a humiliation ritual by which you oppose everything that is natural.
14:38Everything that is natural is opposed.
14:41And that's just, it's a gaslighting humiliation ritual.
14:44So, that which is common sense, that's with natural, that which we evolve with, all of it has to be opposed.
14:50If you've ever been in an abusive relationship, you know that one of the demands of the abusers,
14:54one of the ways in which you get ground down and abused is you have to deny the evidence of your senses.
14:59You have to deny common sense.
15:01You have to deny that which is obvious.
15:03Like, they literally hold up a red ball.
15:05And this is 1984, right?
15:06How many fingers am I holding up?
15:08It's just whatever the party says.
15:10So, one of the humiliation rituals is you must deny the evidence of your senses.
15:16And you must deny all that is natural.
15:18So, if you accept that which is natural and you promote that which is natural, then you lose power over people.
15:25Right?
15:26It's kind of bright.
15:27It's kind of bright.
15:28So, you lose power over people when you allow them to accept the evidence of their senses and build their knowledge up from then.
15:34Because then they have a methodology of knowledge that doesn't require outside authority.
15:41And the whole purpose of what I do in philosophy is to give you a methodology for determining truth from falsehood, right from wrong,
15:47which does not rely on an external authority in the same way that Bitcoin is a way of storing and transmitting value and information without relying on an external authority.
15:57I mean, I am a voluntarist, which is no rulers.
16:01Right?
16:02Because when you have rulers, you don't have any rules.
16:04Right?
16:05If someone can just arbitrarily change the rules of chess, there are no rules of chess.
16:07There's only the whim of the ruler.
16:08So, you either get rules or you have rulers.
16:10You can't.
16:11The antonyms.
16:12Rulers and rules are the exact opposite.
16:14And it's the same thing with credentialism.
16:16That you have to submit that which is obvious and clear to you because some stranger is waving a piece of paper that says,
16:24I'm right and you're wrong.
16:25That's just completely bizarre to me.
16:27Like, why on earth would I listen to someone who thinks they're right?
16:30Right?
16:31You know, who thinks they're right because they jumped through a bunch of hoops and followed a bunch of rules in a completely corrupt organization like a university.
16:39It's just completely bizarre to me.
16:42It's like somebody saying to me, well, you see, murder is moral because I have this doctorate.
16:49And it's like, I really, I don't care about your doctorate.
16:52You're just, like, it's just speaking nonsense.
16:54All right.
16:57Rand or Mises?
16:59I would say that I've read more Rand than Mises.
17:01I really love the Mises explosion or detonation of the price calculation problem and so on, which is great.
17:07But there, you know, Rand is more of a philosopher and Mises, of course, is an economist.
17:13So I don't think it's an either or.
17:16Steph, have you ever read The Myth of Sisyphus?
17:18Just wondering what your thoughts are of Albert Camus's philosophy.
17:23So, I mean, so Albert Camus was born to a mother who was both deaf and illiterate.
17:36Right.
17:37So a deaf mother can't talk to you in general.
17:41Right.
17:42Because they just make those sort of odd sounds.
17:44Right.
17:45So his father was killed in the First World War.
17:50I don't think he ever knew him.
17:52And his mother was deaf and illiterate.
17:56So that's going to have a huge effect.
17:58You know, I remember dating a girl when I was a young man.
18:03And she had a very vivid imagination and had very, very great difficulty really focusing on other people.
18:09But the imagination was fantastic, right?
18:11And it turns out for the first six or seven years of her life, her parents didn't notice that her vision was atrociously bad.
18:16So she really couldn't see anything.
18:18So she went and retreated to the world of the mind, which sort of makes sense.
18:24And let's see here, just sort of quickly.
18:30When Albert Camus was a young man, he married a woman named Simone E.
18:36She had an addiction to morphine because she apparently had menstrual cramps and turned to morphine.
18:44So he wanted her to beat her addiction, so he married her.
18:49And then it turned out that he found out that his wife, oddly named he,
18:55his wife was having sex with her doctor, I assume, in return for the morphine.
19:02And so he divorced her.
19:05So, I mean, everybody makes mistakes.
19:08Getting married to a rampant drug addict who's sleeping with her doctor,
19:12we assume to get a hold of the drug.
19:15That's pretty, pretty bad.
19:17I mean, it's sort of a male fantasy that my love can fix a pretty woman with a massive dysfunction.
19:22So he joined the Communist Party.
19:25So he was a totalitarian asshole.
19:29Now, of course, he's like, well, no, no, no, I'm a libertarian socialist.
19:33I'm an anarcho-syndicalist and so on.
19:35It's like, no, don't care.
19:37Don't care.
19:38Look, here's the thing when it comes to philosophers.
19:41Oh, my God.
19:44Philosophy is really bounded by don't try to be too fucking clever.
19:48Just don't try to be too clever.
19:50Don't try to be too clever.
19:52Right?
19:53So let me tell you what I mean.
19:56So if you're a physicist and you come up with a brand of physics that denies people the ability to catch a ball that's thrown at them,
20:06then you're an overcomplicating asshole.
20:10Right?
20:11You are asking people to deny their actual abilities and the reality of their life in exchange for your view of physics.
20:18Right?
20:19Now, and I'm not talking about like, okay, it's kind of weird that you gain mass as you approach the speed of light.
20:23But that's all.
20:24That's not people.
20:25If you can't explain how people can throw and catch a ball, your physics is bullshit.
20:30It's just yapping.
20:32It's just noise.
20:34It's distracting, destructive noise.
20:36If you can't explain to people how they can catch a ball and base your physics on that,
20:42I don't care what you have to say about anything else.
20:48So people and all moral systems around the world oppose rape, theft, assault, and murder.
20:54Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
20:55Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
20:57And fraud, you have to pretend it.
20:58Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
21:00Everybody teaches that to their kids.
21:02Don't hit.
21:03Don't steal.
21:04All systems around the world recognize property rights.
21:08You say, ah, but communism doesn't.
21:09It's like, well, communism does.
21:11It only says that the government should control all the property.
21:13So the people in the government have all the property rights.
21:16Right?
21:18So rape, theft, assault, and murder, property rights.
21:22Every moral system, what we teach, so if your ethical system can't explain that,
21:28it's masturbatory, ookie-cookie, embarrassing, pathetic, irrelevant, stupid, weird, twisted, horrifying, destructive bullshit.
21:38If you can't explain that, if you can't explain the opposition to rape, theft, assault, and murder,
21:44and concomitant property rights, I don't care what you have to say.
21:48I don't care what you have to say about anything else.
21:51Right?
21:52Because if your theory of physics says human beings can't catch balls,
21:56right, you know, it's the old joke about, it's kind of a joke, right,
21:59how physicists say that bees can't fly.
22:01So that's kind of a joke, right, because bees can fly.
22:03Physicists say they can't, but they can.
22:06So I can't tell you, like, I have a visceral, bone marrow, acidic tongue loathing for philosophers who come up with, like,
22:17suicide is man's only fundamental question.
22:21It is the absurdity of life.
22:25Right, okay, but most people don't find life absurd, and most people don't want to kill themselves.
22:30Okay, if I was raised by an illiterate deaf mother, my father got blown up in a war,
22:35I married a woman with a drug addiction who then cheated on me with her doctor to get the drugs, probably,
22:41yeah, I could understand that you'd be kind of depressed, but don't confuse your fucked up choices
22:46for human beings' general reality, right?
22:50I don't try and base physics on my nightly dreams, and I don't try and tell people
22:54that whatever difficulties I've had in my life is somehow the human condition.
23:00You know, it is the human condition, it is something like that, right?
23:07Sorry, I lost a page here.
23:10What else?
23:13Camus could not keep it in his pants,
23:16and was a Spanish-born actress, Maria Casares.
23:22One of his, let's see here, oh yeah, he married some other woman, I think.
23:33And his wife, I think it was his wife, she had a mental breakdown after he had all these affairs,
23:39and needed hospitalization in the early 1950s, and Redia Camus, who felt guilty, withdrew from public life
23:47and was slightly depressed for some time.
23:49Yeah, I'm screwing so many bimbos, or, I guess, Dubovia, but that's a different matter.
23:59But I banged so many women that my wife had a mental breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
24:06Yeah, I think I feel slightly depressed.
24:10So, the absurdity of life and the fact that it inevitably ends in death is his big thing.
24:16Well, your life is absurd, mine isn't.
24:20Of course, he was anti-Christian, it's almost inevitable.
24:25He wrote, there is only really one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.
24:32Suicide.
24:34Yeah, yeah, emo prince, I get it, man, you're really all kind of the Crow Dark and it's just suicide.
24:41Yeah, suicide.
24:45Camus follows Sartre's definition of the absurd, that which is meaningless,
24:51thus man's existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification.
24:58I don't know, don't drive women insane and put them in asylums because you can't keep it in your pants.
25:04Don't marry drug addicts and don't be a communist.
25:09You know, these things are okay, you know, reasonable.
25:12So, all I want from philosophers and thinkers as a whole is just, you know, start with the nature of reality, what is real.
25:23Start with the nature of knowledge, what is true.
25:27Move to the nature of morality, what is moral, what is right.
25:31And then, you know, talk about social organization in consistency with these three things.
25:36It's really, it's not that complicated.
25:38I mean, it's not that easy to do.
25:39I mean, this is what I did almost 20 years ago with my Introduction to Philosophy series.
25:43You should really check it out.
25:44It's a 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series that goes through that whole process.
25:49But, yeah, don't go against humanity's lived and general experience.
25:54Don't try and be weird and clever and suicide.
25:58It's like the number of people who want to kill themselves is quite low.
26:02So, the fact that you're feeling suicidal because you're a rampaging asshole who sleeps around and drives his wife to madness and so on, right?
26:15And the fact that you support communism and violence, right?
26:21So, the fact that you're an asshole and you have no self-control.
26:25You have the self-control of your average coke-addicted rabbit or Sigmund Freud, two sides of the same coin.
26:34So, just because you're an asshole who has no self-control and tragically was raised by a deaf mother who couldn't really communicate with you
26:43and you have a sort of sad and tragic life of suffering pain as a child, which I sympathize with, and then inflicting endless pain on people as an adult,
26:54and you can't say anything that's sensible and useful to the average person, why would I have any respect for any of that?
27:01It's just a bunch of baffle-gab, polysyllabic, French existentialist, depressed noise.
27:08Why would I listen to philosophy from a man who probably cheated on his garden gnome?
27:15It's like, my gosh, I mean, most of the French intellectuals, a lot of them signed a, hey, let's legalize child sexual assault.
27:25That's all repulsive and vile beyond words.
27:29It's just a bunch of pillages and abuses and vile, vile human beings.
27:36Why would I listen to any of them? I mean, it's like a diet book by a fat guy.
27:40I mean, it's all just ridiculous. Why would you bother examining the morality of somebody who lived a life like that?
27:46I mean, it's beyond repulsive and vile, but it's just a sort of subsonic call out to all the other depressed weirdos to get together and pretend they're being deep.
27:57And all they're doing is exploiting everything but the pulse and some of the things that don't even have a pulse.
28:06It's like Foucault, like Foucault, the absolute monster, just vile, vile human being on every conceivable level.
28:13I'm not even going to talk about the crimes that he committed because it's absolutely monstrous beyond words.
28:18But that's, of course, the world, right?
28:19Like you have these pseudo moralists who justify every atrocity known to man and God and Satan in particular, and they're lionized and taught.
28:27And here I am in the woods.
28:30All right. Have yourself a wonderful day. Thank you for these great questions. Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon, my friends. Bye.