- 2 days ago
Philosopher Stefan Molyneux takes on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey by showing how the film twists the warrior’s cunning Trojan horse victory into guilt, sadness and depression instead of the original triumph.
0:00:00 Fire, War, and Homer
0:07:26 Art as Moral Warning
0:12:08 Humility Over Bragging
0:13:42 Hamlet and Hallucination
0:19:04 Christian Guilt vs Heroism
0:23:20 Warrior and Artist Minds
0:32:33 Victory Turned to Shame
0:37:32 Artists Against Warriors
0:43:51 Character Depth Matters
0:47:56 Craft, Class, and Respect
0:51:31 Why the Journey Lasts
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0:00:00 Fire, War, and Homer
0:07:26 Art as Moral Warning
0:12:08 Humility Over Bragging
0:13:42 Hamlet and Hallucination
0:19:04 Christian Guilt vs Heroism
0:23:20 Warrior and Artist Minds
0:32:33 Victory Turned to Shame
0:37:32 Artists Against Warriors
0:43:51 Character Depth Matters
0:47:56 Craft, Class, and Respect
0:51:31 Why the Journey Lasts
GET FREEDOMAIN MERCH! https://shop.freedomain.com/
SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux
Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!
You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/FREEDOMAIN2026
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LearningTranscript
00:00Good morning, my friends. Hope you're doing well.
00:03Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine, sometime in the fetid, smoky wilderness of mid-July 2026.
00:10Up here in the tinderbox known as Canada.
00:14Probably be doing a little something later today on the forest fires.
00:19The hundred-plus forest fires raging across Canada.
00:23Some of the causes and reasons behind it.
00:25Because, you know, Canada's got a pretty special relationship with summer.
00:31Because it's one of the times you can, of course, go outside and you don't freeze your nads off.
00:37Instead, you feed mosquitoes with all of your descendants' lifeblood.
00:42But it's nice to be outside.
00:44A little tricky to be outside when it smells like a cyclops tinder ass.
00:51So we'll be talking about that a little later today.
00:53So, yeah, I was thinking this morning about, I'm sorry if you haven't seen it, I'm not going to put
01:01any spoilers in.
01:03But with regards to the Odyssey, I was thinking this morning like I can't think of any other race or
01:10culture or ethnicity or group or religion as a whole
01:14that is continually hand-wringing itself over military victories.
01:19I just, I can't see it in other cultures.
01:25Other cultures tend to have great respect for their military heroes.
01:29Those who bring great victories.
01:32I mean, the Trojan War, we can, of course, say, and it's reasonable to say, was not a defensive war.
01:40It was not a necessary war.
01:42It was a war of vanity, and it was a war of jealousy, and it was a war of, in
01:50a sense, lust.
01:51The face that launched a thousand ships, the most beautiful woman in the known universe, and so on.
01:55And it was a war of entangled alliances in that the kings in Greece had all agreed to go and
02:05get Helen if she was taken.
02:09And it was a grinding slaughter fest that wore down between 50 or 100,000 or more of Greeks' prime.
02:18And, of course, we think, oh, that's, you know, 50 to 100,000.
02:23Well, it's a big deal, though.
02:26It's a big deal.
02:2750 to 100,000.
02:28So, you know, Greece only had a couple million people.
02:31Greece now only has 10 million people.
02:33So that's a lot, right?
02:36And that is a lot.
02:38That would be the equivalent of what?
02:41But somewhere between, let's see here, math, somewhere between, it would be, you know, 5 to 10 million, perhaps, of,
02:53it would certainly be, yeah, 3 to 8 million Americans going off to war.
02:59And, of course, how many of them came back and those who came back, how many of them were marriage
03:05-worthy, how many of them had assets, how many of them were wounded, and so on.
03:09So, you know, the decisions that are made at the top, you know, they say, oh, what we do echoes
03:17in eternity.
03:17Well, that's not true for most people.
03:19Most people come and go and barely leave the mildest skid mark on the tarmac of reality.
03:27They're just there to replicate their NPCs and do their manual labor and avoid self-knowledge and have no inner
03:35voice and contribute nothing.
03:36You know, consume the most sloppy media and eject the most programmed opinions and, you know, barely raising their life
03:47from the intellectual level of a mudskipper.
03:49But what the people do at the top, what the people choose at the top, really does echo in eternity.
03:58And the decision to pursue Helen to Troy and to flex mighty military muscles and to send the strength and
04:15flower of Greek youth trained.
04:20You know, it's tough to train people in a war like that, to train people in sword play, sword and
04:29shield play, spears, bows, and so on.
04:33To train people in those kinds of martial weaponry is way tougher than teaching them to shoot a machine gun.
04:44Way more skill, way more skill, way more skill.
04:48And so all of the efforts, all of the efforts, it has such a ripple impact on everything and everyone
04:56when you make a decision like that at the top.
04:59It teaches people, of course, that being a slave is safer than being a free citizen because slaves were not
05:06sent to the war, right?
05:07Because you don't want to train your slaves on how to fight and the people who bought the slaves don't
05:13want to give them up.
05:14And so being a slave is better.
05:17Being subjugated is better than being free because being free means that you get yanked across the Aegean for a
05:24useless 10-year battle that was only ended by just about the most famous ruse in history, the Trojan horse.
05:31Which was Ulysses, which was Ulysses' idea, of course.
05:34He was a cunning trickster.
05:35He was a brilliant man, known more for his wicked intelligence than for his martial power, which is why having
05:43Matt Damon slog his way across a washed-out Aegean for 20 years and become a drug addict, which is
05:51not in the source material, and so on, it just makes no sense.
05:56I mean, don't you have to really like the guy?
06:00I remember in Raging Bull, I see Jake LaMotta, my Robert De Niro character, you know, is violent and abusive
06:10and scornful of anybody more attractive.
06:14And then there's a scene at the end where he's in jail, he ends up in jail, and he's just
06:19like punching the wall, incredibly frustrated with his own bad choices.
06:23I think that's a bit of a character arc, right?
06:26One of the greatest character arcs is Hamlet, of course, or Macbeth as a downward character arc, where you're different
06:34at the end than at the beginning.
06:36And this is the idea that if you watch people make terrible decisions, then you get inoculated against those bad
06:45decisions yourself, right?
06:46There's an old movie, I think it's from the 80s or 90s, called Fatal Attraction, with Glenn Close and Michael
06:53Douglas.
06:53And I remember this was memorably called the movie that scared the pants onto American men, because it's about Michael
07:04Douglas, who made an entire career playing put-upon white guys.
07:10And it was, oh, yes, you can have wild, hot, sweaty monkey sex with an unstable woman, but then she
07:19gets pregnant, she becomes a stalker, and she boils your children's bunnies, and so on, right?
07:26And so there's a bad consequence.
07:29And so you say, okay, well, maybe I don't want to go down that path.
07:32And that's really one of the purposes of art, is to inoculate you against bad choices.
07:40And where's the character arc?
07:42Of course, in the original Odyssey, Odysseus is, in part, in part, it's his vanity that causes his problems, right?
07:51Because after his men blind the Cyclops, he can't resist telling the Cyclops that it is he, Odysseus, who blinded
08:02him, and know this, and all of that.
08:04After he uses the fantastic word trick of saying, what is your name?
08:07My name is Nobody.
08:08Nobody's attacking me.
08:10Okay, you're fine.
08:12So, yeah, a joke that lasted 3,000 years, traveled 3,000 years to land in Christopher Nolan's film, found
08:19no friendly shores, and couldn't land.
08:21Because Christopher Nolan doesn't do people.
08:25He does plot and depression.
08:29He doesn't do people.
08:30He doesn't do joy.
08:32He doesn't do humor.
08:33He doesn't do spark.
08:34He doesn't do wit or anything like that.
08:36And he's sort of fulfilled.
08:37What is he fulfilled?
08:38Was it his brother, the screenwriter, who gave him the line?
08:41Either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain, which is just one of these
08:46things that sounds deep, or it's not really deep.
08:49But it is actually, well, not deep.
08:51It is kind of true in Christopher Nolan's case.
08:53He's just another self-hating white dude who will sacrifice everything in the pursuit of fame and accolades and glory
09:03and so on.
09:04There's a reason.
09:05I mean, these days, there's a reason a movie gets made, at least by the studios.
09:08And it's because it's negative in general to the West, right?
09:12So, the reason why Odysseus has such a tough time getting home, or one of the main reasons, is he
09:19blinds Poseidon's son and then tells Poseidon's son, hey, it's me, Odysseus.
09:26I did this to you.
09:27And then, of course, that's how Poseidon finds out who blinded his son.
09:32And that's why Poseidon prevents him from getting home for so long.
09:36And, of course, you need that story.
09:38I'm sure, of course, Odysseus lived and he had a long time getting home.
09:41And you have to answer why a week to a week and a half's voyage took 20 years, well, or
09:4710 years.
09:47I'm sure the tale grew in the telling.
09:49The Iliad and the Odyssey are only two.
09:52I think there's eight in total.
09:53We only have fragments of the others that detail the entire Trojan War.
09:57But the decision, just go to war, go to war, go to war, go to war, that's a decision that
10:04really does echo in eternity.
10:06The decision to go to war in World War I kind of doomed the West.
10:11Or the decision to, oh, you know, we're going to give the government control of the education of our children
10:15in order to preserve our culture and our values and our history and our way of life.
10:21And does it work?
10:23No.
10:24And we all have to live in the shadow of these decisions.
10:27It's a whole lot easier to go to war than to stop going to war.
10:31It's a whole lot easier to break someone's bone than it is to fix it.
10:37And some things can't be fixed.
10:39Right?
10:40You hack off someone's hand, you throw it in a blender, it ain't coming back.
10:44And the decision to go to war, oh, it's going to be a grand adventure.
10:47They'll tell tales of us in Crispin's Day.
10:49Yeah, just go to war.
10:50And then what happens?
10:52Well, I mean, we see, right?
10:53For over 2,000 years, Greece was then subjugated because going to war meant, genetically, mostly a dead end.
11:02If you're a slave, you survive.
11:03If you're a free man and a warrior, you die.
11:07Or you come back so haunted and traumatized that you're useless to your bloodline in many ways.
11:17The same thing happened, of course, after World War I.
11:20Easy to start.
11:22And by the end of it, the communists are in control of Russia.
11:27And you have millions of traumatized, broken people that are a massive burden on the state.
11:34You know, this is where the term shell shock came from, is they couldn't figure out why otherwise brave people
11:38couldn't function.
11:39It's because they had been exposed to so much lengthy stress.
11:43Stress is for, like, you get away from the bear 5, 10 minutes.
11:46You're in a fight 5, 10 minutes.
11:47You either win or you lose or you run.
11:48But you don't stay in a fight or run from a bear for 4 years straight or 3 years straight
11:53or 2 years straight.
11:55It just burns out your entire system.
11:57It's not what the human body is designed for at all.
11:59It's perpetual stress.
12:01Perpetual stress is one of the greatest killers of people and cultures and histories.
12:08So, one of the basic virtues of the Odyssey, as it's portrayed, is don't brag.
12:18Don't brag.
12:19Don't brag.
12:20And it's kind of true.
12:22It's kind of true.
12:24I mean, the Tate brothers are inveterate braggarts.
12:27And they just got arrested, I think, in, was it Miami yesterday, on extradition requests from the British government that
12:34is piling up more and more tsunami-like charges against them.
12:37Just don't brag.
12:38Don't brag.
12:39Easy, live, quiet, die.
12:41Be humble.
12:42Don't brag.
12:43Brag makes you a slave of status.
12:45And bragging generates hatred.
12:50So, talking about your accomplishments is very encouraging to people of confidence, and it is enraging to people without confidence.
12:59Everything that we do is an interplay of intrasexual competition.
13:07If you brag too much as a man, the other men recognizing the danger of hypergamy and that you could
13:14end up with a harem, or if you brag about, oh, I'm so hot, I'm so this, I'm so that.
13:19So, wealthy.
13:20Well, other men resent you because you are, in a sense, broadcasting to the women and triggering their monkey branching
13:27in hypergamy, the hypergamy wanting to marry up.
13:31And it's dangerous.
13:33It's dangerous.
13:35I mean, it would be nice if it wasn't, in a way, I suppose, but if wishes were horses, beggars
13:41would ride.
13:42But what is the moral of the movie?
13:47In other words, what did Odysseus do wrong?
13:53I mean, in Hamlet, Hamlet sits as a midway point between the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment.
14:03In that, I would certainly hope that if I knew someone who said, a ghost has told me to kill
14:12a guy, that we would get him checked out medically, that we would have him evaluated, that we'd check his
14:19brain, his hormone levels, see if there was a tumor or something that was really affecting his mindset.
14:24I would want to do that because I don't think that we should say, oh, a ghost told me to
14:28kill a guy.
14:29So, I would go, kill a guy?
14:30Well, that's not the way to live.
14:32Right?
14:32That's not.
14:33So, Hamlet has a vision.
14:35Now, of course, it's made more dramatic by other people who can see the vision and so on.
14:40But if you're the prince and you say, I saw a ghost, other people who are subordinate to you will
14:47say, okay, or sure, oh, yeah, I think I saw something, too.
14:50Like, they're not going to contradict the prince, right?
14:53He's going to be the king.
14:54He's a very powerful guy.
14:56So, the idea that hallucinations, psychoses, visions are not true.
15:06They're not true in an empirical sense.
15:08Hamlet's father did not come back from the dead to tell him about hell and to murder his uncle.
15:13It's not a factual thing that happened.
15:16He dreamt.
15:17He had a vision.
15:18He has psychosis.
15:18He has schizophrenia.
15:19He has some sort of, I mean, a lot of people hallucinate.
15:22A lot of people hallucinate.
15:25People who have epilepsy, then they've been able to do this.
15:28They can simulate religious visions in people just by stimulating a particular portion of their brain.
15:33They get cascading angels.
15:35They get bliss.
15:36They get trumpets.
15:38They get amazing stuff.
15:40And the humility of saying, look, we have an entire generative area of our brain.
15:46We have a part of our brain that can 150% manufacture reality.
15:52I don't know.
15:53Have you ever had those dreams?
15:55That are more vivid than your waking life?
15:59I have.
16:00I remember when I was going through therapy and just this massive life change where everything in my life changed.
16:08Everything.
16:09I had these incredible dreams that were so vivid and detailed.
16:15It wasn't lucid dreaming, because lucid dreaming is when you can sort of control the outcome.
16:20But I just, it was super reality.
16:23It was, I was flying over a city and I could see every hair on everyone's head.
16:28I could see every rantian bottle cap ground into the tarmac.
16:33I could see every piece of gravel around every air conditioner on the top of every apartment building or office
16:39building.
16:39I could see everything.
16:41And all at once.
16:42Like normally you look at something, you see that, but everything else is peripheral vision.
16:45It's kind of a blur.
16:46I could see it all.
16:47And of course, if I was not self-knowledgeable or had respect for my inner life, I would say, I
16:53touched upon a real reality.
16:55I touched upon a higher reality.
16:57I went to another dimension where things are more, it's like, no, I didn't.
17:01I didn't.
17:02But I had a hyper vivid dream.
17:06And that was a more dramatic one.
17:08Another one, I opened a hotel door.
17:10I was actually staying in a hotel and business and I opened the hotel door in my dream.
17:14And all I did was stand in the doorway of the hotel door I'd opened.
17:20And I looked across the hallway and I could see every little fiber and divot and bump on the wallpaper.
17:30Everything.
17:31Like I was zoomed in, but I wasn't zoomed in.
17:35I could absorb it all.
17:36So, that tells me how incredible the generative aspect of the mind is.
17:44It's incredible.
17:45I mean, every night.
17:46Every night.
17:48I had a dream and a dream this morning that I was in a giant library and a T-Rex
17:55and I were kind of playing cat and mouse.
17:58And I think I know what it's about.
18:00It doesn't really matter.
18:00But, I mean, it's amazing.
18:03So, the brain has these incredible generative abilities.
18:07It can make the unreal seem real.
18:10And it does that at night.
18:12And is it impossible for that to overwhelm the senses and to do that in daytime?
18:17Well, we know for a fact that it is because there's something called psychosis, schizophrenia, hallucinations, both auditory and visual
18:23and both.
18:24And it feels real to people.
18:26And taking sort of core central dysfunction in the brain and trying to move that to the realm of metaphysics
18:34is to make madness real.
18:39For the blind man to assume that there is now no such thing as light, that there's no such thing
18:45as vision, that everyone who says that they can see is just kind of lying.
18:48Well, it's a dysfunction, deficiency of the eyes.
18:52So, in the Odyssey, there's no character arc.
18:56How is he different at the end than at the beginning?
18:59Well, he's reunited and so on.
19:01But he's just miserable.
19:03He's just miserable.
19:04And that, of course, is if you were to do the Odyssey for real, it would be wildly foreign to
19:16the post-Christian mind, to the post-Christian mind.
19:20And, I mean, Nietzsche talked about this quite a bit.
19:24Christianity is opposed to the conquering tribal warrior spirit.
19:29And there is a depressed or depressive and masochistic element to the Christian worldview.
19:41Satan runs the world.
19:43Your body is largely your enemy.
19:45And your hero was overpowered and destroyed.
19:53You don't have a hero who conquers.
19:57All you can say is, he died, but he conquered death.
20:00Okay, he conquered death.
20:02I mean, if you're in a duel and the guy shoots himself, you've kind of won the duel, right?
20:10And this is why Christianity just cannot hang on to countries.
20:15I posted this whole list.
20:16It was a list of like a dozen countries and a dozen regions that Christianity just has lost out to.
20:21And there's a kind of dreamy focus on the other world, on the world to come, that all of this
20:29is a passing bit of minor testing nonsense.
20:35And the real purpose of life is death.
20:40That life is a brief, unimportant test for the eternity of the afterlife.
20:47And as a friend of mine said, Christian years ago, unfortunately, Christians, we're at our best when we're being persecuted.
20:55And that is, that's going to mean that persecution is going to, to some degree, be the goal.
21:01If you were to portray the world of ancient Greece accurately, it would be incomprehensible to the Christian mind.
21:12It would be incomprehensible because the idea that Ulysses would feel catastrophic guilt at his brilliant military victory is incomprehensible
21:29in the ancient world.
21:31He took a 10-year stalemate and ended it with one of the most brilliant strategies in all of military
21:37history.
21:38And he won, he triumphed, he's now famous for eternity as one of the most brilliant military minds in all
21:45of human history.
21:47And he gets to go home, he gets to go home.
21:51I mean, you're now a famous general, you're a hero, in your culture songs, a song about you, you will
21:58be famous forever.
21:59You've won the battle, you get to go home to your beloved wife.
22:02The idea that he would just be pouty, negative, and stung with guilt.
22:10I mean, the takeover of India was one of the most brutal things that has ever happened in human history.
22:15I've not seen a lot of art coming out of that that is highly negative.
22:19I mean, Japan had this long martial history, right?
22:23You've seen those memes of like the Japanese warrior.
22:27There's the three stages of Japan, like the Japanese warrior, and then Hiroshima Nagasaki, and then this goofy anime boy
22:36band stuff.
22:37And look, I'm not an expert in Japanese artistic history or anything like that, but I'm going to go out
22:42on a limb here.
22:43I'm going to assume that there was not a lot of self-flagellation over their military victories in the past.
22:50I mean, as I've mentioned a bunch of times, Genghis Khan is praised and considered a wonderful figure by the
22:57Mongolians.
22:59How many cultures self-flagellate over brilliant military victories?
23:07So famous that we're talking about the military victory 3,000 years later.
23:12I mean, how many things the people did from 3,000 years ago are we still talking about now?
23:16Well, you know, stuff's been lost, Library of Alexandria, I get all of that.
23:21But the idea that you are a warrior and you fight a tough battle and then you win and then
23:31you're wracked with guilt is incomprehensible to the ancient world.
23:37Incomprehensible.
23:39And, of course, one of the problems is that Odysseus didn't write the Odyssey, right?
23:46I mean, Homer, a bunch of people, blah, blah, blah, right?
23:49And so another problem, of course, is that the artistic mind and the military mind are in many ways opposites.
23:57The military mind conquers the world.
24:00The artistic mind explores the mind.
24:04The military mind goes out and dominates empirical reality with little thought to internal stimuli.
24:13Embrace the suck, right?
24:14That's what they say in the army, right?
24:15Things are bad, things are bad.
24:16Embrace the suck.
24:18And having worked, I've worked with a bunch of military guys over the course of my career, and they're just
24:23very different.
24:24They're very impatient, very blunt, very mechanical, no particular inner lives.
24:31And this is not a criticism.
24:33It takes all kinds, right?
24:35Without the military mind, there's really not much of anything because you just get conquered, enslaved, and killed.
24:42But the artistic mind, which is about the exploration of inner stimuli and imagination, and there is no empiricism to
24:56the artistic mind.
24:57I mean, there can't be.
24:58There can't be because, I mean, if you're writing a work of fiction, and I've written many novels myself, so
25:04you have to abandon yourself to pure imagination, and you have to imagine people who don't exist and write down
25:11things they never said.
25:13I mean, you want to make it realistic, of course, and there's cause and effect and so on, and you
25:16want the characters to be consistent.
25:18But the military mind is empirical.
25:23The army marches on its stomach.
25:25If you don't have the ammo, you lose.
25:27And victory or loss in the military world is usually life or death.
25:32So you can't afford to be dreamy, daydreamy.
25:35You can't afford to indulge in your imagination, which is one of the wild things about Odysseus, which is that
25:42he comes up with the Trojan horse.
25:44It's an incredible act of imagination, which is why he was so unusual.
25:49So the military mind is empirical, other-focused, outward-focused, practical, impatient with abstractions, and certainly impatient with imagination and
25:58daydreaming, which is why most of the innovation in the military comes from outside the military.
26:03And the artistic mind is very much focused on inner stimuli and is anti-empirical.
26:08In fact, it's so anti-empirical that in the modern world, you know, you see all these – this is
26:16a work of imagination.
26:17Any coincidence of real people is purely coincidental.
26:21Like, they have to be so anti-empirical that you really can't base your characters on anyone identifiable because then
26:28you might get in trouble, right?
26:31So you have to be very anti-empirical.
26:33And so when you have creative people trying to talk about the mind of a military person, and creative people
26:42create and military people destroy, right?
26:46It's an old saying about the army.
26:47What's the army for?
26:48Killing people and breaking things.
26:50And it's true.
26:51And this is another problem in the communication of military matters from creative, artistic people is that you have to
27:01avoid the narcissism of saying to yourself as a writer, as a creator, you have to avoid the narcissism of
27:09saying, well, how would I feel if I caused the sack of a city and the destruction of countless people?
27:16How would I feel as a sensitive, creative person who's anti-empirical?
27:22How would I feel if I had unleashed hell in a city?
27:28So, of course, Christopher Nolan would not have been – he would not have been among the Greeks who went
27:38to Troy.
27:38He would not have been there.
27:40There was an actress – there was a World War II film called Mrs. Miniver.
27:46And the actress said, oh, I want to go drive an ambulance.
27:50I want to do something for the war effort.
27:53And everyone just kind of laughed at her and said, listen, you make these great movies that inspire people to
27:58do well under war conditions.
28:01So, trust me, what you're doing is great.
28:04So, Christopher Nolan – I'm not reading his mind, right?
28:08But this is just sort of the evidence stuff, right?
28:09It could be any artist.
28:11I'm not sort of trying to pick on him.
28:13Christopher Nolan injects the creative mind into the journey of the warrior.
28:21The journey of the warrior occurs because Odysseus is not Christopher Nolan.
28:26He's not a creative, dreamy – I mean, Christopher Nolan works hard, of course, right?
28:30I think he said he's going to take three years off from making movies because this one just about broke
28:34him.
28:35Hey, it's tough applying depressed, washed-out filters to the beauty of the Aegean.
28:39That's not easy, man.
28:40No, make it darker.
28:41Make it more depressing.
28:43And so, the journey of the military mind is the journey of practicality, of anger, of the will to dominate,
28:49of empiricism, and not of daydreamy, anti-empirical imagination, which is what fuels the artist.
28:57So, Christopher Nolan cannot resist saying, well, if I had caused the pillaging of Troy, I would feel bad because
29:09I'm an artist and I'm creative and I'm sensitive.
29:13And, yeah, nothing wrong with being creative and sensitive.
29:15I'm pretty sensitive, pretty creative, but there's nothing wrong with it.
29:18Sorry.
29:19Make it sound like there's nothing wrong with it because I have those characteristics.
29:23I mean, obviously, there's nothing wrong.
29:24You need your artists and you need your warriors.
29:26I'm trying to try and point out that one of the problems with how warriors are portrayed in art is
29:32that artists are the opposite of warriors, for the most part, for the most part, for the most part.
29:39And so, you've got the artist who has to imagine the mind of a warrior, and artists are W-O
29:47warriors, not W-A warriors.
29:50And so, Christopher Nolan says, oh, man, I mean, let me try and get into the mind of Odysseus.
29:56I mean, let me try and get into his mind.
29:57Okay, so, man, if I had caused the sack of Troy, I'd feel terrible.
30:07I mean, if I had source, I mean, this Athena is like the girl killed, which is not a real
30:14thing, right?
30:15A young, beautiful girl would not be killed by a pillaging army.
30:20I mean, she would be taken as a concubine, right, or as a slave, but she would not be killed,
30:25right?
30:26So that, I mean, except by accident, but this was very willful and deliberate, right?
30:31So, the artist looks at Odysseus and says, ah, and what does he do, right?
30:38So he has the Trojan horse, and he's keen, and he's eager.
30:43This is going to end the war.
30:44This is a wild stab in the dark.
30:45This is like the most crazy military maneuver that has ever been attempted in all of history, and it kind
30:51of is, right?
30:51And so he really, he's desperate to end the war, and, of course, he's seen the Trojans kill his soldier
31:01mates for 10 years straight.
31:04So, bro's got some anger.
31:06Bro's got some rage.
31:07And his will to dominate is so great that he comes up with the Trojan horse and goes inside, and
31:15it is almost certainly a suicide mission.
31:18Almost certainly a suicide mission.
31:20There's a bit in the, there's a bit in the Odyssey, the movie, where they're sticking swords in to make
31:28sure there's no one inside, and that, to me, makes no sense.
31:32If you think there's people inside, then you would feel all around it.
31:36You know, there's literally a, there's a giving birth thing, right?
31:39The sort of, the trap door in the bottom and the belly of the horse and so on, right?
31:42So you would check for that.
31:44Oh, look, there's a trap door here.
31:45Oh, wow.
31:46Okay.
31:46You know, they would listen.
31:49They would, you know, people got to pee, they got to poop, you know, whatever it is, right?
31:52They sweat, they drip, right?
31:53So, again, we don't know the actual, obviously, the story, but it's not particularly realistic that they think there might
32:01be people in there, but then they just don't really.
32:03I mean, they had to have air to breathe, right?
32:05They had to have air to breathe, which means that there's, you can look in, right?
32:08So you hold up your torch and you look in, right?
32:12So anyway, we'll just go with it.
32:15So it's almost certainly a suicide mission.
32:17For some reason, it is.
32:18I mean, they're so relieved because they think the Greeks have left.
32:20Why there's a Trojan horse there doesn't really make much sense.
32:24But anyway, so it's almost certainly a suicide mission.
32:26He's absolutely keen and he pulls off just about the most brilliant military victory, which is what he's been trying
32:31to do for 10 years.
32:33Now, of course, he's a warrior, so he knows that there's going to be a pillaging and sacking of Troy.
32:39He knows that his men are going to do what the communists did when they rolled into Germany at the
32:44end of the Second World War, like grape, pillage, loot, riot, steal, stab, right?
32:52They're going to do what victorious armies have always done.
32:55This is not going to be a shock to him.
32:57It's not going to be a shock to him.
32:59It's like a coach who's leading a team to victory and then they win the World Cup and he's shocked
33:04that they're celebrating.
33:05It's like, what?
33:06It just makes him look ridiculous.
33:07And so the journey of Odysseus to Troy is the journey of the warrior.
33:15And then when he achieves his victory, suddenly he becomes Christopher Nolan.
33:21And this is the narcissism and vanity that artists have to resist if they wish to be accurate.
33:28If they wish to be honest.
33:30So it's the military mind that gets the Trojan horse inside the city.
33:36And then what happens?
33:38Well, there's a bit of fighting from Odysseus.
33:42And then what happens is he just sits on the steps and stares and he's sad.
33:49No, no, no.
33:51That's not Odysseus.
33:53That's not Odysseus.
33:54That's Christopher Nolan.
33:56That's suddenly the artist unable to empathize with the victory drive of the warrior.
34:05He's been, he's so passionate about this war that he, sorry, not Christopher Nolan.
34:12Odysseus is so passionate about this war that he threatens to kill anyone who abandons their post and sails for
34:21home.
34:22That's how much he wants to win.
34:24So then in his victory, the artist, the writer, the director, Christopher Nolan cannot sustain the military mind and instead
34:34becomes the artist.
34:36He possesses and invades the mind of Odysseus and turns it into Christopher Nolan looking at all of this sadness
34:44and tragedy and looting and pillaging and victory.
34:50Right.
34:51And the artist is sad, but the military man would not be.
34:56So then instead of vanity and braggadocio being the cause of Odysseus's 20 year journey back home because he brags
35:09to the Cyclops.
35:10Now it becomes, well, he's just guilty.
35:14He's guilty.
35:15He's guilty about his victory.
35:17And what does that do?
35:18Well, it tells to Western men that victory is bad.
35:24Victory makes you sad.
35:26Winning is losing.
35:27Winning and that to triumph when you have willed it will produce depression, negativity, drug addiction, isolation, loneliness, and a
35:3820 year journey of watching your beloved companions get picked off one by one and killed.
35:46Victory is lost.
35:47Victory is lost.
35:48Victory is lost.
35:49Triumph is sadness.
35:50Domination is depression.
35:52It's the cuckification and the emasculation of the Western warrior mind.
36:00And the West ain't doing too well.
36:03And this is partly why.
36:05This is partly why.
36:07And, of course, the Christian mind would recoil at the image of Odysseus taking great joy and triumph at the
36:19vanquishing of his enemies.
36:21Now, of course, troops are supposed to have some kind of discipline when they win a lot of times, right?
36:28It's not like the Geneva Convention applied 3,000 years ago.
36:31But troops are supposed to have some discipline and they're not supposed to do all these terrible things and so
36:36on.
36:36And the military leaders will often try to, even for just practical reasons, restrain the bloodlust of their troops.
36:44So he could have done some of that.
36:47But the idea that Odysseus could take joyful triumph in the vanquishing of his enemies, like Conan style, right?
36:54That he could take, it's incomprehensible to the post-Christian mind.
37:05By post-Christian, I'm not just talking about the fact that Christianity has diminished, but also post-infliction of Christianity,
37:12so to speak, on the West.
37:15On the West.
37:16It is a movie that programs Western males to give up, to lose, because winning makes you sad.
37:29Triumph makes you sad.
37:32Think of the tribes, right?
37:35The indigenous population of North America, you know, engaging as they did in various battles and conquests and murders and
37:44so on, right?
37:45I mean, maybe, maybe it's there, right?
37:48But if it's there, it's because it's the artistic mind inhabiting the mind of the military and saying, well, I
37:52would be sad if I did these things.
37:55But the militia mind is not sad when it does these things.
37:57It's sad and unhappy when it doesn't do these things, because it means you lose.
38:01Were there lots of stories?
38:04And maybe I'll look this up, right?
38:06But were there lots of stories from cultures that emasculated their warriors by cursing them with depression if they won?
38:12If they won?
38:14And, of course, deep within the mind, this is no criticism of femininity, but deep within the mind of the
38:20creative, daydreaming, artistic guy is the belief that he might just be a little girly, a little hyper-feminine, a
38:30little, you know, because he looks at the tall, striding, dominant, masculine warrior type.
38:36And there's a certain amount of envy, a certain amount of resentment, and this sort of intersexual competition between the
38:43artist and the warrior.
38:45The warrior triumphs and, obviously, will often not do nice things to the artist unless the artist is purely in
38:54service of the warriors in terms of, like, the epic poems of conquest and victory and so on, right?
39:00And so, when it comes to the cheerleader, right, to the attractive young females, the artists are also in battle
39:12with the warrior, just as the nerds are in battle with the quarterbacks, who gets the hot females.
39:21I mean, the artists want the hot females, and the warriors want the hot females.
39:26And the artists have this resentment, which has really come pouring out since the 70s and 80s, right, which is
39:33the artists will always portray the jocks as dumb, as sexist, racist, violent, abusive, drunkards, thoughtless, idiots, right, sort of
39:46revenge of the nerds.
39:47It's like a very real phenomenon.
39:48It's just intersexual competition.
39:50It's just intersexual competition.
39:53Most of modern art, particularly movies, but also in books, most of modern art is the artist slandering the athlete,
40:04the warrior, the man of action, and saying, I mean, you can get, okay, he's got reflexes, he's got a
40:11Chad jaw, he's got great hair, he's got sports or martial skill.
40:17Okay, he's got all of that, but I'm the really nice, sensitive one.
40:24I'm the guy you should choose, hot cheerleader, because he's an idiot.
40:30And it's not true.
40:31I mean, it's not true.
40:32Elite athletes are very intelligent, and elite warriors are very intelligent.
40:36You can't be elite at anything without being very intelligent.
40:40And where are the artists who truly understand the mind of the warrior?
40:44Now, listen, I don't want to make this all about me.
40:46I don't even want to make this tangentially about me, but I really did work hard to understand the mind
40:51of the warrior when I wrote my novel, almost, which is my one war novel, at least the one war
40:57novel that I still have.
40:58The other one is somewhere buried in my mother's apartment.
41:02So, I really did try to understand the mind of the warrior and not project, well, how would I feel
41:08if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
41:10Because artists are sensitive to feelings, and warriors are only horrified by loss, by losing.
41:18And the warrior has to be the opposite of empathetic.
41:21He has to be blind loyal to his own side, and he has to completely dehumanize the enemy.
41:28All right, of course you can.
41:29I mean, in order to conquer in a martial sense, or even in a sports sense, you have to dehumanize
41:34the enemy because they want to win, you want to win, blah, blah, blah.
41:37And, of course, when I was a little kid, I was like, I would go to all these sports movies
41:40and be like, yeah, but if, you know, we cheer for the red team, but if we were on the
41:44blue team side, we'd just cheer for the blue team.
41:46It doesn't really mean anything.
41:47It wasn't like some big moral divide.
41:48I get all that.
41:49So, yeah, that's true.
41:50That's true.
41:51And that's fine for universal ethics and all that kind of stuff.
41:54It's good for empathy.
41:55And, again, it's part of the spice you need in society.
41:58But, holy crap, I mean, if my mindset was dominant throughout most of human history, it would be dominant for
42:05about five minutes.
42:07Well, they want to win on the other side of the battle just as much as we want to win.
42:11We're all people, blah, spear through the trachea, right?
42:16Respect for the martial mind.
42:17Respect for the martial mind.
42:19But it seems almost impossible for the artistic mind in the modern world to do anything other than rail against.
42:26And in the Odyssey, this is the movie again, right?
42:30So, I mean, there was an interview with a bunch of the people from the Odyssey.
42:35And Tom Holland, remember, I was saying, like, he's just, he's too feminine.
42:40He's too young.
42:41He's too, you know, whatever, right?
42:43He's too immature.
42:44He just, he plays these sort of Japanese boy band child characters.
42:49And there was this, and I actually asked my wife this yesterday, because I saw this interview.
42:54My jaw kind of dropped.
42:55She didn't hear the interview.
42:56But I turned to her and I said, so, Tom Holland has played Odysseus' son at 16.
43:04What's the problem with that?
43:05And she immediately shot back.
43:06He's like, well, he's gone for 20 years.
43:08He can't be 16, right?
43:10Like instant, right?
43:11Because she's very smart, right?
43:12So, the other actors are pointing out to Tom Holland, hey, but you can't have been 16,
43:20because he said he was playing the kid at 16.
43:22I said, you can't be 16, because Odysseus has gone for 20 years, and you were like two
43:26when he left.
43:26It makes you at least 22.
43:28Now, the difference between 16 and 22 for a male is like night and day.
43:33Night and day.
43:35And Tom Holland was just blinking, and he's like, oh, did I make a huge mistake?
43:39Did I play this guy at 16 when he's, in fact, 22?
43:43I mean, we all, as a male, and as a female, too, you all feel that huge difference, right?
43:48And that tells you an enormous amount.
43:51I mean, if I've been a director, obviously, you know, completely minor relative to someone
43:57like Christopher Nolan, but I've directed a couple of plays that I've written.
44:01And you have to have long and deep conversations with the actress.
44:06And the actors have to know, you know, how old is the character?
44:10What's his backstory?
44:11You know, where's he coming from?
44:12I mean, when I would direct a play, if someone comes into a room, I would ask them, where did
44:18you just come from?
44:20Right?
44:22And when the character leaves the room, why are you leaving?
44:24Where are you going?
44:25Right?
44:26Because you have to believe there's something outside the stage in order to believe there
44:29are things inside the stage.
44:30Like, if you just walk out and despawn, like, some NPC character in a video game, well, it's
44:37not very realistic.
44:38You have to be coming from somewhere, and you have to be going to somewhere, and you have
44:43to know, right, something, or where did your character grow up, and what's his relationship
44:47with his parents?
44:48Like, you have to have this sort of richness in a character.
44:51So, this means that they spent years planning and filming, and a quarter of a billion dollars
44:57making, and the director never had a conversation about how old a pivotal character was.
45:06I mean, the story takes him in flashbacks from the age of two or so to the age of 22.
45:12So, you kind of have to know what that arc is.
45:15Also, Tom Holland didn't think enough about the character to even work out the obvious
45:21basics of how old he was.
45:2316 is very different from 22.
45:26Very different.
45:27Also, I don't think the Greeks did human sacrifice, so that whole story of the, was it Agamemnon
45:34killing his kid to get good weather?
45:36That's not a real thing, I think.
45:38I mean, I don't think, I don't remember anything about human sacrifice in ancient Greece.
45:43Child sacrifice in particular.
45:44That's, again, a bit of a blood libel, but what the hell.
45:50So, it just tells you that they have not talked about the humanity of the characters.
45:55And it's all up to the actors, and actors are, in general, charismatic idiots.
46:01I have spent a lot of time around actors.
46:04I mean, I've trained with actors for almost two years.
46:08And I spent a lot of time around actors, and they generally are grinning, charismatic.
46:14Deep-looking, but not deep.
46:17They're idiots, right?
46:18I mean, Matt Damon, I mean, obviously an intelligent guy, I think completely compromised by the
46:23powers that be, whatever, right?
46:24The Kavanaugh thing, the Kavanaugh jokes that he makes on SNL or a stain on his character that will outlast
46:29anything else he's done if we have an even remotely moral future.
46:33But if you have the father and the son, and this is why the reuniting scene is so flat, right?
46:41Then they should be sitting down with each other as actors.
46:43Just being responsible actors, they should be sitting down with each other and saying, okay, what's our relationship like?
46:47How much do you miss me?
46:49What if you thought about me?
46:50And so on, right?
46:52And part of that will be, okay, I've been gone for 20 years.
46:55How old are you now?
46:55Okay, early 20s.
46:57Okay, so do you date?
47:01Do you, what do you do with your lusts so they subvert it to some sort of other end?
47:06Like, you have to have these conversations to round out the characters and make them people.
47:09And just knowing this kind of stuff, you know, I remember reading the autobiography of Lawrence Olivier, famous British actor
47:18from the last century.
47:19And he said, like, oh, imagine you play a character, you play a character where he's just shaved off his
47:25mustache and he keeps touching his upper lip because of that.
47:27Wouldn't that be fascinating?
47:29Okay, it's a little detail, it's a little interesting thing.
47:31It's a little interesting thing.
47:33And on the waterfront, like Marlon Brando is distracted by things that aren't in the scene, as you kind of
47:39are, right?
47:40And that just makes it very real, very spontaneous.
47:45There's a scene on a swing set where he takes the woman's, she dropped her glove accidentally in the scene,
47:50he picked it up, put it on, played with it, and she kept trying to want it back.
47:54It's very real, because it wasn't acted, right?
47:56So, it just means that in this quarter billion dollar production, nobody had any conversations about how old one of
48:04the central characters was and got it completely wrong.
48:06Like, wrong by 20, 25%, from child to man.
48:13He played, Tom Holland played the character as a child when the character is, in fact, a full-grown man.
48:21Astonishing.
48:22And this was the lack of connectivity, the lack of relationships, because Christopher Nolan doesn't do relationships.
48:31He's not related to the characters, he's related to the technology.
48:35And, of course, the reason why the movie is funded is it pushes for the, well, the endless inclusion of
48:40outsiders, which is, you know, kind of a thing in the West these days, right?
48:46So, it's tough to watch.
48:47Now, listen, of course, look, I've just got to, obviously, maybe it's an elephant in the room.
48:52It's like, oh, well, if you know so much, why are you doing a podcast and not out there directing
48:56movies?
48:57It's like, yeah, it's a perfectly valid question.
48:59It's absolutely valid and perfect question, right, that I'm just sniping from the outside and, you know, if I'm so
49:05smart.
49:06You know, like the guy in the diner who's like, I can solve all the world's problems.
49:09It's like, well, then why are you just some guy in a diner?
49:11Like, why am I doing podcasting?
49:13Well, I have written, I believe, they're going to be viewed in the future as really great books.
49:19And I think they're great books right now, so I have certainly put my theories into practice as an artist.
49:29And I've tried to make sure that I do not view those different from my mindset, not from a moral
49:36standpoint.
49:36I do not view those as different from my mindset as lesser.
49:40I don't view, I always try to say, okay, but I happen to be, you know, creative, intelligent, blah, blah,
49:45blah, blah, blah, and so on.
49:46So, and therefore, those are the good, and then people who are not creative are the bad, and it's like,
49:52nope, that's not it at all.
49:54You know, the guys who built my house aren't writing novels, but if they weren't building my house, I wouldn't
49:58be able to write novels because I'd have no place to live, right?
50:01So, it's the scattershot of how human personalities are formed.
50:06It's all essential.
50:07It's all important.
50:07It's all necessary.
50:09So, I try to not say, I am the template of that, which is good and noble and perfect and
50:14right, and therefore, everyone who deviates is somehow lesser.
50:18And it's like, no, respect for the people who run the sewage system, man.
50:21It would be pretty tough to live without a sewage system.
50:24I mean, I've done it working up north and in various primitive, primordial cottages in northern Ontario and other places.
50:31So, yeah, it's pretty tough to live without.
50:34If you've ever had to boil your own water to get something to drink, then you know that having taps
50:40and plumbing and all these kinds of things, and those people don't tend to write books, and they don't tend
50:44to do philosophy, and they don't tend to solve the problem of secular ethics and so on.
50:48But they're as essential to the functioning of human civilization, certainly in the short run, maybe a little bit more
50:53me in the long run as anything else.
50:55So, I've always tried to have that respect for personality differences and, of course, having communicated with thousands of people
51:03about the inner parts of their lives over the years when their mindsets are very different from mine.
51:09You know, I released a show recently with a guy who claimed he was autistic, and I've had a number
51:14of people talk about being autistic in my call-in shows over the years.
51:19It's a very different mindset from mine, but I really tried to meet them where they are without the sort
51:24of good-bad judgment to take accidental personal attributes and say that these are somehow the universal good and everyone
51:30else is deficient and so on.
51:33And it's tough, you know?
51:35I mean, in the Odyssey, without the vanity of taunting the gods, how does Christopher Nolan explain why it takes
51:45Odysseus so long to get home?
51:47I mean, there is the bit about the gods and Poseidon and the storms and this, that, and the other,
51:51and I get all of that.
51:53But why does it take him so long to get home?
51:55Well, he faces genuine physical obstacles, right?
51:58The winds are always against him.
51:59There's all these storms.
52:00He gets blown off course.
52:01There's Scylla.
52:02There's Charybdis.
52:03There's Circe.
52:03There's the giant Cylon, as James memorably referred to them as.
52:09Not the hard ones.
52:10So, I mean, he faces genuine external threats.
52:13But then it turns out, well, he's just kind of guilty as well.
52:16And maybe that's why he becomes a drug addict, spends seven years on the island with the hot South African
52:21with laser blue eyes.
52:24So, I don't know, man.
52:26So, is it an outer resistance, but he really wants to get home, which makes it a tragedy?
52:30Or is it inner guilt he becomes a drug addict, which makes it pathos?
52:34It's not a tragedy if you get what you want and you're really unhappy about it.
52:39So, he went, like, how does that work?
52:41You get what you want, but you strive for 10 years to achieve.
52:45You finally get what you want and it makes you miserable.
52:47I mean, maybe that's, maybe, I mean, maybe Christopher Nolan's battling depression, though he's a very celebrated filmmaker, right?
52:53Maybe.
52:53I don't know.
52:54I don't know.
52:55But you get everything you want and that makes you miserable.
52:58That's a way to program people to not strive, to not be ambitious.
53:01I mean, just for myself, I have gotten what I want out of life.
53:06I've got a great family, I've got great friends, an incredibly meaningful occupation, and doing good in the world, and
53:13all of that.
53:15How can I get what I work for and get what I want and be miserable?
53:21That's kind of incomprehensible to me.
53:23Now, of course, some people get what they want and they're miserable, like, I want to win the lottery, and
53:26then they end up in a shallow, empty life of being exploited and everybody wants them for their money.
53:31So, I get all of that.
53:32But, I mean, I have, you know, some pretty decent moral goals and so on, right?
53:35So, can you get what you want and be miserable?
53:38It's just a way of programming people to not try and achieve anything.
53:41Oh, you're depressed now, but, boy, wait until you achieve a massive victory that will resound down through the ages.
53:47Boy, then you'll be miserable.
53:49Yeah.
53:50So, this is a collision of sort of Christian guilt with ancient warrior spirit, and it just drains the vitality
53:56out of the whole film.
53:58Nobody has any fun.
53:59Everybody's sad.
54:00Everybody's depressed.
54:02Everybody's depressed.
54:03And then, if Odysseus is depressed when he comes home, then his wife is not going to be enjoying his
54:13company that much because it's pretty tough to enjoy the company of depressed people.
54:16So, that means this big reuniting, this big get back to your family, which drives the whole movie, doesn't really
54:24mean much.
54:24Hey, the broken shell of the man who went away has returned, and now I get to nurse his depression
54:30for the rest of time.
54:31Blech.
54:32Anyway, so I hope that makes sense.
54:35I really do.
54:35Sorry for the people who came and went.
54:36I was on a bit of a roll there, and I hope that you find the conversation to be of
54:42value.
54:43But think about it.
54:44Think about the people who are very different from you, not in a moral sense, but people who are just
54:47very different from you.
54:48I mean, I spent six months in a tent with two guys who were just very practical, externally driven guys.
54:58I spent six months in a tent with those guys, and they smoked.
55:03And I got to really recognize just how different people's thinking is from me.
55:09I worked with a woman.
55:11We lived in the same apartment, and we worked together, and she was a woman who was an Asian geologist,
55:19and incredibly different.
55:22We tried to have conversations.
55:23I lived with this person, just had these incredibly different thoughts and perspectives and opinions.
55:29She had zero in her life, and very outward-focused, and very practical, and very hardworking, and all of that.
55:35And just, if you haven't really, so to speak, grubbed noses, the people who are very different from you, and
55:41learned the value of what they have to offer, it's really tough to do good art.
55:46All right, so have yourselves a beautiful day, everyone.
55:48Don't forget, call.freedomain.com.
55:52Call.freedomain.com.
55:53Set up your call-in shows.
55:54Got a couple today, and I've got some space next week, so I hope you'll set up some call-in
55:59shows.
55:59It's freedomain.com slash donate to help out the most unique and powerful conversation in the world for all time,
56:07I think.
56:08I think it's what I aim for every time I open my yapper.
56:12So freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
56:14Hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day.
56:16I'll talk to you soon.
56:17Bye.