Stefan Molyneux joins the Scott Adams School to dissect despair, arguing that while global events are uncontrollable, individuals must reject "bed rotting" and practice virtue to secure contentment. He critiques generational pessimism as a media-driven illusion, contrasting modern entrepreneurial opportunities with past limitations, while debating the tension between moral courage and inevitable backlash. The discussion analyzes justice system biases, citing a man convicted of aiding ISIS who served only five years before killing two on probation, contrasting punitive US approaches with European rehabilitation models. Finally, Stefan addresses Charlie Kirk's murder, criticizing Erica Kirk's premature public forgiveness as performative and theologically unsound, emphasizing that societal order requires punishment even if personal emotional release is possible. Ultimately, the episode urges listeners to reframe trade-offs between love and hate to maintain moral integrity amidst chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Lawler, look who's sitting in here with us, you guys.
Ooh, we have a nice, juicy Friday coming in hot.
Hey, Kev.
Andy.
Aw, look at YouTube over there.
All right.
Is everyone looking good?
Feeling good?
Big plans for the weekend.
I see some people coming in.
Just put your coat down there and come up front.
We have room.
You're not going to want to miss Stefan Molyneux, famed philosopher, guest professor extraordinaire.
And he's ready to get our mindset straight.
All right, guys, there's something we need to do before anything else can happen.
So grab a vessel of any kind.
Are we ready?
I'm ready.
Let's go.
There's a little thing I like to do.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And I know you like it too.
And that's why you're rushing to get in here on time.
Imagine how bad you'd feel if you were in the, let's say, the third 1,000 people to come in here and you missed a simultaneous sip.
Well, you'd feel sad all day.
No, you wouldn't.
But it's better if you have it.
And you're going to have it right now.
And all you need is a copper mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dope mean hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Go.
Oh, yeah.
Bed Rotting and Lost Focus00:15:32
Yeah, that's good.
I miss him.
I love that.
And he's right.
It does make the day better.
All right, you guys.
So I'm Erica.
We are here at the Scott Adams School.
Like I said, oh, it's Friday the 13th.
This is a good luck day.
I just want you guys to know that.
Especially if you're Italian.
So turn that thought around.
If you think it's not good luck, it is.
And proving that point, we have Stéphane Molyneux back with us, probably one of the most downloaded philosophers we have.
And we did some facial warm-up exercises with him before this show.
He's in a good mood.
We're in a good mood.
And we're going to get everybody in the right mind frame.
So Stefan, I'm just going to turn it over to you and you can set our minds straight.
Welcome.
Thank you.
I still miss him.
You know, it's funny to see him up there on the screen.
And it's a wild thing now because the archives that Scott shows and his books and all of the work that he did, I'm sure there are a bunch of his speeches that are recorded when he was out there being a public speaker.
And it's wild because normally people go out of focus over time.
You know how you age?
Well, some people age when their eyes get a little blurry and you got to glass it up and so on.
And so people kind of go out of focus.
Like we don't know Socrates because he never wrote down anything.
We only know what Plato said about Socrates.
Aristotle's original works are long gone, but we have his students' notes from which they've tried to reconstruct his books and his thoughts, which is a real shame because Aristotle was considered to be a better writer than Plato, and Plato's writing is fantastic.
And so we don't know what happened with the trial and death of Socrates because there's no transcripts.
There's only Plato's recollections.
You know, however much he loved Socrates, we can't expect much objectivity.
But the funny thing is now, because Everything is recorded, everything is archived, everything is there forever, that Scott won't go out of focus.
People will be able to reference him.
And of course, as AI comes along, which has its own hallucinations, but I'm not convinced any more than the average person does.
As AI comes along, it can summarize and you can look things up and cross-examine Scott as his text and his words transcribed are out there.
And I'm going through a basement cleanup.
I know this sounds like a real left turn here.
I'm going through a basement cleanup at the moment.
So I'm coming across all of these old photos and I have photos that my father sent me of my ancestors from like 1902.
And, you know, they're peering out of this blurry, alternate dimension.
But of course, now we're all high deaf.
We don't age.
Our voices don't degrade.
You listen to old recordings of opera singers and it sounds like some Martian going through a tin can.
But now all of the richness of our thoughts, the vividness, we will never age, we will never die.
And I think that's really a wonderful thing.
The closest thing I think in the past was the epistolary format where you could get letters from people, but that's not quite the same as actual conversation.
So it is always startling to me.
Maybe I'm just old, but it's always startling to me when someone who's gone is talking right there as if he was still here.
And that gives a kind of ache, of course.
I'm glad that all Scott's recordings and his statements are all there forever and ever.
Amen.
There's no library of Alexandria that's going to burn the whole thing down.
And just having him come back just reminds me of, you know, all the value that he brought and all of the great things he had to say.
And all of the things that I thought were actionable.
You know, this is one of the things you don't get from academics, but you get from public intellectuals.
And I would certainly put Scott in that category, is that what he did was actionable, right?
There's a lot of stress and strain and not just rumors of war, but actual war that is going on in the world.
And, you know, one of the things that is very easy is to feel overwhelmed, to feel helpless.
You know, they call it among the young now bed rotting.
I don't know if you've heard this term, but bed rotting is when you just lie in bed and you scroll and it's bad news and it's bad news and it's overwhelming.
And I think that is a very great temptation.
You know, people love to court despair.
And I'm not even going to count myself out of this number.
This is a pretty wide net that includes my big chatty forehead.
But people love to court despair because despair is an excuse for inaction.
You know, like I talk to guys on my show who are like, oh, you know, I like this girl, you know, but she'd never go out with me.
And it's like, well, first of all, don't make that decision for her.
And secondly, despair is an excuse to avoid courage.
And in many ways, courage is simply reserving your actions for that which you can most effect.
It's easy to be courageous in the abstract.
It's easy to be courage.
I watched the movie recently, Stand By Me.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It's an old Rob Reiner film.
And in it, there's a self-insert of the writer.
The writer in all stories, the writer is the hero because the writers like to project themselves into that.
And of course, it's an old movie.
I don't think there's much of a spoiler.
But in the end, the writer pulls a gun and fends off these bullies.
And you just know that didn't happen in real life.
If it's a fantasy of what the writer wanted to have happened that's recreated on screen, because I doubt that he pulled a gun and warded off all of these teenage thugs and there were no negative repercussions.
But I think Scott, one of the things I always got out of him was you can change what is in your mind.
You cannot easily change what is in the world.
And certainly with regards to politics and war and debt and the propagandizing that has replaced higher education, you and I, we can provide alternatives, we can provide ways of reviewing it, but we can't change it.
We can't go in and rewrite the curriculum to be more reason and evidence-based or more rational or more moral or more empathetic or more curious or anything like that.
But what we can do is we can do two things.
And I think I focused on one.
Scott focused on the other a little bit more.
For Scott, I think it was in the reframe, you can change the way that you think about things in the old Hamlet sense.
There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, which is a bit too far for me as a moral philosopher, but definitely very, very important.
And the other thing you can do is you can bring as much honesty and courage as you can to your relationships.
Because one of the things that this bed rotting or the doom scrolling is going to do is it's going to fill you full of despair.
It's going to fill you full of helplessness and hopelessness.
And unfortunately, that releases you from the challenge of moral courage, but it also releases you from the possibility of actually being loved.
So I have a formulation for love that is love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
And I'm not talking, you know, some massive warlike virtue or anything, Genghis Khan resisting.
I'm talking about just, you know, the basic honesty and integrity to think clearly about what you believe in, to stand up against falsehoods, to promote a truth to some reasonable degree.
You know, there are some truths that are still quite radioactive and we don't want to go the Charlie Kirk route.
At least I don't think Charlie Kirk did and I certainly don't.
So sort of maximum truth while still being able to draw breath because truth tellers get axed in society on a fairly regular basis.
Although now we've upgraded to deplatforming, which is very, very civilized compared to a big cup of hemlock.
And so to sort of divide the world into things we can change and things we can't, which is an old bromide, but very true, to work on telling the truth in our personal lives and to approach people with love and affection and resolution, right?
So we want love and affection.
We want to think the best of people and then give them the opportunity to behave in a positive manner.
Give them some grace period because it all takes people a while to change and adapt to the truth.
But then at some point, you know, if they simply resist truth or are hostile or hateful, to have the courage to say no more and to then end up with the very best thing in the world.
We can't have much control over our political freedoms.
We can't have much control over the censorship complex or the deplatforming complex that both Scott and I were, I could say victims of.
We were liberated by.
We were set free to have more integrity by having our audience sharply reduced.
You know, if you're a jazz musician, it's better to play a club than a stadium because what do they say?
A stadium is three chords to 10,000 people and jazz is 10,000 chords to three people.
So I think Scott made that choice and I think it was a good choice in a lot of ways.
And so if you can act in reasonably courageous and honest and enthusiastic moral ways to bring the truth to people around you, to bring reasonable levels of truth to society, to have maximum effective courage, then you do get the great benefit of being loved and having the capacity to love and to be loved.
And it really doesn't matter if you have a First Amendment in politics or you have free speech in society, if you are censored in your own relationships because you're afraid of upsetting people, you're afraid of bothering people, you're afraid of imposing, quote, imposing things on people, or people are going to blow up and react negatively to the truths that you're in pursuit of and you're delineating.
And if you have that kind of virtue in your life and you have those kinds of people in your life, you have a better life than the king of France 200 years ago.
I've talked to a lot of people over the course of doing my show for 21 years who have wealth, professional success, and yet are heavily censored in their relationships, are unhappy in the home.
Build a happy home.
I really don't care about my tax levels.
Like I'd rather have a happy marriage and be taxed at 80% than be taxed at 0% and be unhappy at home.
So building the kind of happiness at home, building the kind of honesty in your relationships that gives you a good chance, or the only chance really of being loved and reframing things so that you can look at them as positively as possible is, I think, our greatest chance to achieve a kind of happiness.
And what I really strongly resist, and I won't monopolize the whole thing, but what I really strongly resist is don't surrender more than you have to to bad actors in the world.
Look, we can't control who goes to war.
We can make our recommendations.
We can make our case.
But if people choose to go to war, don't let them further invade your peace of mind.
You have to have very, very strong fences in this world.
You know, if they're going to tax you at 50%, don't give them 90%.
You know, if they're going to control you for two hours of the day, don't then think about it for the other 22 hours of the day and be frustrated at that because then you're never free.
Surrender what you have to.
Reserve for yourself every remaining freedom and option.
And I think if we do that, that is maximum freedom.
And I think that can't help but spread to other people.
If we are bed rotting, if we are doom scrolling and we are spreading despair, we are enslaving people beyond what is inevitable in society.
You're going to be enslaved to some degree in society.
You're going to be forced to do things by the law that you don't agree with.
You're going to be forced to pay for wars that you don't support and other things.
So, you know, pay what you have to and not one thin dime more and reserve everything else for your own contentment, love, and happiness.
I really can't think of a better way to live your life.
I got a lot of that from Scott, and I'm adding maybe a spice of cayenne pepper to the mix as a whole.
I love that.
Owen, did you want to say something?
Well, I definitely think it is a problem today that a lot of people seem to be very discouraged and in despair.
I see some of that in my own kids.
I certainly do everything I can to turn that around every time it comes up.
And I think I'm pretty successful with it.
But I also saw a story, I may have posted a day or two ago, that said something like a third of people think the end of the world is coming within their lifetime, which just sounds so crazy.
You know, I mean, to me, I would say that's, you know, a one in a million chance, one in a billion, one in a trillion.
Like, it's not going to happen.
And somehow, a third of people, at least on a poll, are saying, I think the end of the world is coming very soon.
And so it does seem like a lot of people are discouraged.
A lot of people are economically discouraged, thinking I'm never going to own a house.
I'm never going to have the American dream.
Everything's rigged against me.
There was another poll that talked about that, or people think the economy is rigged against them.
So it's definitely a big problem.
And I don't know exactly what's causing it.
I mean, I'm sure there is some reality in there, but to me, it's only a grain of truth.
It's not the big picture.
And that's kind of what I talk about with my kids.
Like, you know, my son would say, oh, I'm never going to be able to afford a house.
I'm like, yes, you will.
You will be able to afford a house.
Maybe not today.
It might take you five years.
But if you save for a down payment like you are, and if you have a good job like you have, you're going to be fine.
I mean, my son is doing really well.
Like he's probably in the top, you know, 10% for people his age in terms of his income.
And I'm just like, you know, I can see the reality because of my age, you know, my history.
I've seen bad times economically.
I've seen good times.
You know, my parents went bankrupt when I was in high school.
I've seen ups and downs in my own life too.
But, you know, having that perspective is really helpful to me to say, okay, things might look bad, but they're not really as bad as they seem.
And things are going to get better.
But, Owen, don't you think, don't you think a lot of this has to do with what they are seeing in the news and on TikTok and social media?
There's so, I mean, if I go on X within like 30 seconds, I'm like, oh my God, I got to get out of here.
Everything is so leveled up.
And I think especially for younger people, you know, it seems like reality.
You know, you had AOC telling young kids that the world was going to end in 12 years.
Luckily, we survived that.
But I get it.
You know, like kids are so scared.
And then there's a lot of like scared parents and then they're putting that fear into their kids.
And I don't know.
I just think that we have to be really careful, you know, what we're telling younger people, what they're seeing.
And I think between having Brian Romelli here yesterday, you know, pointing out that experiment with the mice and it was like, yeah, you know, everybody's got to feel useful.
You've got to like make your own way.
You can't become like that sloth lazy person.
And so it was like, you know, what my takeaway was was like, turn off the noise and like just get grounded back in reality and connect with people more, more eye contact, more socializing, send letters and cards instead of texts and, you know, kind of get back to basics.
And I think kids were so much happier.
I don't know.
I mean, you guys can tell me in the chat.
I think kids were happier when they didn't have all this stuff in their face all the time and they were just using their imagination and playing.
But I think that's what's happening.
Making Your Own Way00:04:15
I'll turn it over to Stefan.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
So one of the things that we have a very wealthy generation, the boomers were the wealthiest Gen X is the second wealthiest in all of human history.
Now, call me a madcap optimist, but if after, you know, 14 billion years of the universe and 4 billion years of life and a million plus years of human beings, you are only the second wealthiest generation in the history of the planet.
It's a little tough to cry, woe is me, when you came in second out of four billion years.
Four billion years.
Oh, no, you brought the second wealthiest generation.
That's, that's pretty precious.
You know, like, well, you know, it's true that I won $20 million in the lottery, but there's some other guy who won $23 billion, $23 million.
So I'm down $3 million.
It's like, that's what you focus on.
I focus on the incredible opportunities that exist.
Look, we are all here having this conversation to thousands and thousands of people without a TV studio, without having to apply places, with no gatekeepers.
We can talk within reason about whatever it is that we want to do.
You can make a living in a Thailand cafe doing work online.
There's AI assistants that make being an entrepreneur infinitely easier than when I started being an entrepreneur in the 90s.
There's ways to connect with people in the present.
I was around before the internet, you know, before the internet, when I wanted to start a philosophical debate, I took an ad out in the newspaper and set up a P.O. box and people mailed me stuff.
I read it, I wrote letters back, I mailed it back.
That's how crazy things were.
Now you can just set up a server, you can get going, you can live stream, you can.
So the opportunities of communication and connection and community for people who genuinely think for themselves is something that was beyond our possible imagination.
Even just a couple, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, it was impossible.
Now people like Scott, people like this show, people like me, we're able to create communities as is just about anybody to be able to bring people together and to think.
We never would have met in any alternative universe.
There's ways to make money from home.
There's ways to put your mind into solving humanity's problems, you know, with a $300 laptop and your cell phone.
That is absolutely unbelievable.
And the other thing, too, is that when you grow up in a wealthy household, you grow up in a house, you know, maybe it's 2,500 square feet.
It's got three or four bedrooms, a little backyard and so on.
And so you think, well, that's what I should have.
And it's like, but your parents didn't have that when they were teenagers and your parents didn't have that when they were in their 20s.
I didn't even get a car till I was in my 30s.
I bought with my wife my first house or our first house in my 30s.
And so you're not supposed to have these things when you're young.
And so it feels like being almost kicked out of paradise.
It's like, I love this lovely suburban home with two cars and all of that.
And now I'm going out there and I'm, I lived in a house with five roommates when I was in my 20s.
I moved 18 times because I went to various universities and then worked up north and all of that.
So you're supposed to live this semi-starvation vagabond rubbing shoulders with the with the proletariat lifestyle in your teens and in your 20s.
And if all you do is compare that to the wealth that your parents accumulated in their 40s and 50s, it makes no sense.
It makes no sense.
So you're going to be kicked out of paradise if you grew up in a happy home.
It's going to take you a while.
And listen, it may be true.
It may be true that maybe you won't end up making as much money as your parents.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of being the first wealthiest generation in the history of the planet or the second, you might in fact only be the third, only be the third wealthiest generation with opportunities that your parents could never have dreamed of.
The amount of conformity that was required prior to the internet because you could only deal with the people in your immediate environment who were strict at conforming.
The fact that you can go out and find like-minded people on the internet, I mean, it has its pluses and minuses.
Some sexual deviancy gets reinforced by R slash dating toasters or whatever it is.
Protecting Those You Love00:02:17
But for the most part, it's a fantastic and positive thing.
And the last thing I'll say is with regard to doom and gloom, it's a tale as old as time.
And you can read Roman texts about the youth are completely corrupt and decadent and society is going to end.
Now, their society ended, but society as a whole did not.
I grew up with nuclear war.
If you're older than all you fresh-faced, young-looking people on this or young people, I'm going to be 60 this year, which means I was born in 1966, which means I grew up under the shadow of the Cold War with TV shows actually funded by the Kremlin, it turns out, to terrify us about nuclear war and the end of the world.
Then, when that began to fade a little bit, ooh, we got global cooling, that we were going to turn into an ice age and we were going to all end up like Encino Man.
And then we got global warming and then we got killer bees and then we got the ozone layer depletion.
And I'm not saying none of these things were at all relevant, but they certainly did not turn out to be anywhere close to the hype and fear that was being promoted because the powers that be want to keep you nervous, want to keep you scared, want to keep you jumpy for two reasons.
One, it makes you want to flock to authority.
When we feel nervous, we flock for protection.
And number two, if you're nervous and jumpy, then you can't relax into the kind of confidence and happiness that, again, to go back to what I was saying earlier, ends up with you being loved.
And if you're not loved, then you can't found families.
You can't have children.
And that means you don't have anything to fight for.
If they can get you to not have children as a whole, assuming you can, if they can get you to not have children, they've won most of the battle.
Because then what do we fight for?
We fight for our kids, right?
I mean, I live a pretty comfortable life, but I want to make sure the world is a better place for my child.
And so keeping you jumpy keeps you isolated, keeps you so unhappy that no one can fall in love with you, which means you can't get married and have things that you love that you want to protect.
And if you have people that you desperately love and desperately want to protect and desperately want to make a better world for, well, you get to do some great things in the world that have their risks, of course, as most people have found out who's spoken uncomfortable truths.
Contrarian Perspectives on Life00:03:50
But this psyop, I mean, just think of all the things.
Sometimes when I really want to waste an hour, I'll sit there.
And I think everyone does this probably at one time or another.
And I go through the list in my head and I say, okay, let's just think of all the things I was worried about in my life that did not come true.
It's an, I mean, I'm not too bad at prognostication, but I got to tell you, it's an embarrassing list.
I've never been able to get to the end of it because what happens is I'm like, God, think of all the things I worried about that didn't come true.
And now I'm worried that I'm wasting time thinking about all of the things I'm worried about that didn't come true.
And it just goes round and round and round and breaking out of that cycle and realize that while caution and fear and sometimes even anxiety can be a healthy thing, it definitely can be a rut that you get into.
And it does become an excuse for inaction.
And it then does become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the world ends in our hearts if we're unloved long before the tiny percentage possibility that there's going to be big dislocations in the world come to pass.
So again, that's sort of back to Scott, that control what you can, focus on the positive and have the courage to build a life that you'll do almost anything to protect, because that's the only way we're going to get to preserve our freedoms going forward anyway.
I love that.
So I want to remind everybody, listen, you guys, as one of the hosts here on the show, it's my job to remind you that everybody has different opinions.
And, you know, we don't always agree with everybody who's a guest.
A lot of you disagree with me.
And that's all good.
But sometimes I want to reference like a contrarian point of view, even maybe it's something that is even contrarian to how I personally feel.
And I want to put it out there because if I'm having like even a little feeling about something or Owen is or Marcella is, there's a bazillion people that fall in line with that.
So it's good to put those things out there just to hear a take on it and try to represent people.
But and also, you know, I, like I said yesterday, I didn't always agree with Scott.
Maybe I don't always agree with Stefan or Owen or Marcella.
And that's okay too.
But if you can like just pick up some genius tidbits here, like I am, I think overall, sometimes, like, you know, they say when you go to therapy, it's not the therapy session where the work happens.
It's after therapy when you're out in the real world and things come at you and thoughts come at you.
And then you're like, you know what?
Like maybe I remember Stefan saying that.
And that's a good way to look at that.
I can reframe this thought in my head.
And, you know, maybe there's an alternate.
So I like it.
I like hearing all sorts of opinions.
I want to hear them all.
I want to hear what, you know, even if, you know, some people are like, well, I know the difference between, you know, emotion and reality.
Like, okay, I do too.
But some things, you know, like I still feel, I feel things, even though I know the difference, I still have a feeling.
I have a reaction.
So that's why I like to bring these things up.
And I don't know, I think it's important that we understand that we, you know, we're like a little teeny, teeny little microcosm of the everyday people that you're dealing with out there.
So unless you're only talking to people who fully agree with your exact mindset, which is never going to happen, this is just like, you know, we're like a little world right here.
So I appreciate all of these things.
And also these are just opinions.
Ancient Virtues in Modern Times00:07:25
Okay.
So that's my little spiel that I needed to say in the middle of this.
And we're sorry that YouTube isn't working right now.
We'll get on with it.
Marcella, did you have any questions from the group or Owen?
I see a lot of questions going by.
Well, I guess I wanted to talk about this in terms of philosophy.
Stefan, you mentioned virtue as being one of the important things and that that would lead you to being loved and having what I would call a good life.
I think that's how some of the ancient philosophers talked about it as, you know, you'll have a good life if you live this way, if you have these virtues and you stay away from the vices and things like that.
And it seems like more modern philosophers like Nietzsche, for example, had a much more negative take on things.
And they would say how the bad people are being put in power and the good people are being put down.
And the other thing that I noticed when I studied Stoic philosophy was they pointed out that back in those ancient philosophy days, philosophy was an actual, a very actionable thing.
Like it was teaching you how to live life.
It was meant to be very actionable.
You would send kids to these schools to study so that they knew how to live a good life.
But it somehow transformed into this more academic discipline and also became much more negative, I think.
So how would you go about maybe selecting the right philosophy?
And, you know, do you think philosophy should be more of an actionable thing where you're actually saying, okay, I'm going to adopt my philosophy based on the actions I'm going to take and try to live the way my philosophy tells me I should?
Well, philosophers have always had a pretty uneasy relationship with actionable things in the world because Socrates took pretty significant action in the world and ended up, as you know, being murdered by the state.
Plato said, well, you know, enough of this theorizing.
I'm going to go into politics.
And so he ran for office in Syracuse and ended up being sold into slavery by his political opponents and only got accidentally freed by one of his students who paid 400 drachma to relieve him of his burden of being a slave.
So it's kind of uneasy in terms of doing things in the world.
Evildoers are very happy if we just sit and think because they get to do their evil deeds without interference.
And so whenever you do good, and again, to reiterate on Scott's legacy did a lot of good and brought a lot of uncomfortable truths to the fore, his stuff about DEI and being a white male in the hiring environment, and to name one of many, many things that he did that was very honest and courageous and really, really important to talk about.
But one of the things that I think is really important is to focus on action that can be sustained.
And that there's this tension.
We want to do good in the world, but when we do good in the world that is actionable, we interfere with the designs of evildoers, right?
People who want to control and bully and subjugate and humiliate and sadists and political power mongers of every kind, addicts to political power.
Like political power is a genuine, measurable addiction.
They've done these studies in, I think it's in bonobos.
As bonobos climb higher in the social hierarchy, they get more dopamine.
Like it is an addiction and it hollows out the personality to control other people, which is why control freaks tend to be so empty and also so violent, because anytime you interfere with the supply of a drug, the addict gets manipulative, hostile.
Emotional terrorism and violence will often emerge.
So when you promote freedom, independent thought, skepticism, reason, all of the stuff that Socrates was promoting and even the pre-Socratics were promoting, then you interfere with the goals of the addicts of power.
And the addicts of power, you know, whatever you say, your enemies get your say back, right?
You can promote as much as you want and, you know, you can fire these horrible missiles into Iran and Iran gets its responses, which are going to be somewhat unpredictable because the fog of war is essential to any approach to victory.
So you want to do good in the world that is practical and actionable.
And then your enemies get their response.
And then there's blowback and there's all of these challenges and they'll work to do the two things that people generally do in the modern world if they're in the wrong and can't make a good case is they'll attack your source of income and they will attempt to destroy your reputation.
And I think Scott, if I have this right, and of course you guys would remember this, but I think he said he lost over $100 million in his support of Trump as a result of deals falling through.
And he had a very lucrative speaking engagement career that he lost most of.
And so there's prices to be paid.
Of course, we want to leave good behind us more than money, because if evildoers get their way, your money ends up worthless anyway, because they print it into oblivion or just steal it in some Bolshevik style revolution.
So yeah, we want to do good.
And it's a sad thing about the world.
It's always been the case.
The more good you do, the more you can be loved.
The more good you do, the more you're going to be hated.
You know, like if it's sort of the argument is if you cure cancer, then all the people who've got cancer will love you, but then all the people who are currently profiting off whatever they do to try and treat cancer now will not be happy with you.
The guy who invented the car, people liked the car.
All the people who shoveled horse poop off the roads and sold horses instead of cars, they weren't so keen on that.
And that's just practical stuff.
And so the price of being loved is being hated.
And the price of doing practical good in the world is getting blowback, which is why a lot of philosophers like to sit in dark rooms, think and scribble, and not really interfere with the plans of anyone who's doing bad things.
But, you know, we kind of have to interfere with the plans of people who are doing bad things because that's the only kind of measurable courage that gets us love.
To get love is to get hate.
To me, it's worthwhile bargain.
I would much rather be loved by my wife, my child and friends and family and have, I don't know, some mean typing on Wikipedia than I would be innocuous to evil, which means impossible to be morally admired and therefore loved.
It's just a deal that I'm willing to take.
And I think that sort of framing, which I think Scott would somewhat appreciate, because he sacrificed a lot for the cause of what he perceived too, and I think was, in fact, the good.
And the loss is immediate.
The gains in terms of love and happiness take a long time, but it's well worth the wait.
I wanted to say something.
Thank you, Stefan.
I wanted to say Andy Wang has a question.
He said, how do we do good when doing good is punished?
Like Daniel Penny got punished enduring the process for saving people.
He was the one that was on the train.
I get that, Andy, because you do get punished, right?
So how would you respond to something like that?
Every Negative Has an Opportunity00:07:04
So you can look at punishment as a negative or you can look at it as a guidepost.
So when I was I worked up north after high school gold panning and prospecting, and this is long before GPS and satellite phones or anything like that.
And the big terror was getting lost because it's just endless wilderness up there in northern Canada.
It just goes on and on.
And, you know, several people a year would get lost and die.
So what do you do?
You blaze, right?
It's one of the things you do is you blaze trees so that you can always find your way back.
When I was in Africa exploring the jungle as a teenager, and my father lived there, I would put little stones in arrows so I could find my way back.
So you can look at punishment as just a negative, or you can look at punishment as a sign you're doing something right.
So when I was in the business world, I would go up against other companies to try and get contracts for the software that I wrote.
And I don't want my competitors to like me.
In fact, I want them to mutter and curse when I come into the room.
And so you can look at this kind of punishment as, oh, it's a negative and it's hurtful and it's a harmful thing, or it's a sign that you're doing something right.
And if you just look at it as a negative, you're going to be scared away from doing the right thing.
If you say, well, you know, the old cliche that they only shoot at you when you're over the target kind of thing.
So you can look at it as just pure punishment and negativity.
And, you know, with regards to the Daniel Penny situation, it is very risky in a leftist controlled judicial system to act in any manner of self-defense or defense of a third party.
They are, for reasons we can get into either this time or another time, depending on the interest of the audience and the panel, they're very pro a criminal and they are very anti-self-defense.
And of course, as a white male as well, you have all of these other political considerations that are a challenge.
So if you are in a heavily leftist controlled legal system, then self-defense is probably too risky in defense of another is too risky.
You know, there's an old saying, it's better to be judged by 12 than carried by six in terms of the coffin.
So self-defense, yes, defense on behalf of another can be risky unless it's someone you really care and love.
But you are going to get opposition and you are going to get hostility for doing good in the world.
And you can look at that as a huge negative that is only isolated as a negative.
But everything is a cost benefit in life.
Everything is a cost benefit in life.
If you look at the costs, you get depressed.
If you look at the benefits only, you get overly cocky.
You want that Aristotelian mean, right?
Too little courage, you're a coward.
Too much courage, you're foolhardy and you're running thinking you're Wonder Woman into some machine gun nest and just goes very badly from there.
So try and find that balance.
And it is.
It's a changing and emerging situation.
The cost of doing good is that you will get blowback and you will get punishment and you will get lied about and you will get slandered and you will, you know, bad people will dislike you.
Well, yes, of course.
I mean, you wouldn't, I don't want to use too many cancer analogies given what happened to To Scott, but I will say that if you're designing an antibiotic, you want it to kill the bacteria, right?
You don't want to be an antibiotic researcher saying, well, I don't want to upset the bacteria.
It's like, well, that is kind of your job.
And if you're promoting virtue in the world, people will go after you.
It will be a negative.
And you can just say, oh, that's just a pure negative without saying, look, that's just a shadow cast by the positive.
And trying in life to say, I only want the positives and not the negatives is not reasonable.
It's not rational.
It's like saying there are only negatives or there are only positive.
Every positive comes with its shadow.
Every negative comes with its opportunity.
When I was deplatformed, well, I would say, I broke the trail.
I mean, there was one or two people before me, but I like to think I was in there as an icebreaker nice and early.
And I was like, okay, this could either be a massive catastrophe or negative.
My life work is destroyed and my income and the audience and blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, I am now liberated to pursue longer-term truths rather than just doing the immediate, you know, revolving door come and go of politics.
I can really work.
So I wrote books, foundational philosophy.
I wrote novels that will demonstrate the purpose and power of philosophy in a more entertaining fashion.
And so you can look at it as negatives or you can just judo that into a positive.
If something bad happens to you and you can't think of any positives, you're not thinking hard enough.
You've got to flip it on its head and say, what are the great things that have come out of this?
Because except for death, there's always an upside.
And even in death, as you could point to Socrates and Jesus and other people who gained great fame over passing their expiration date, there are even positives in death.
Just not for you, but for the truth and for virtue and so on.
So if you say, well, the punishment is bad, what you're doing is you're saying that the loss is bad, the hostility is bad, the negativity is bad, but realize that that is the inevitable consequences of all the good in your life that allow you to love and be loved and do good in the world.
And you choose the plus, you choose the minus.
Like if you choose to exercise, you're not playing piano at the same time.
Choose to play piano, you're not exercising at the same time.
You're getting better at exercise, you're getting worse at piano.
Everything in life is these kinds of trade-offs.
And if you just isolate and focus on the negatives, you will end up paralyzed because the negatives are always part and parcel of the positives.
Yeah, and I would also throw in on the Daniel Penny situation.
Yes, what happened to him is bad legally, but he was then recognized as a hero by Trump and Vance.
And then he was hired by Andreessen Horowitz.
So now he's working in a venture capital firm.
I'm guessing he's much better off today than before any of this happened.
So it's all a matter of perspective.
Marcella, I want you to jump in.
I know you had questions.
This actually happened yesterday.
I don't know if you saw that, Stefan.
It happened in the old Dominion University where there was someone that came in and shot, I think, killed the ROTC professor.
He was part of the army.
It was Mohamed Jalo.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but he was killed with the bare hands of a person there.
I don't know if they've named them, but basically he came in with a gun, shot at them, and the ROTC members defended themselves.
They haven't explained in what they used to kill this person.
We believe it's a knife.
Yeah, I think he stabbed him.
Yeah, stabbed him 22 times.
Forgiveness as a Path Forward00:14:54
So the press asked if there were going to be any charges.
This is Virginia we're talking about.
So Virginia is pretty blue.
They have not said that the person that killed the terrorists is going to be charged.
It also happened in France as well in a train.
And the French did not charge the Americans that ended up and made them heroes.
So I don't know if you have anything to say on that.
And I do have a question on something else.
Well, self-defense is absolutely justified morally.
And it really depends on where you are.
You know, in California or other blue states, it's tough.
I remember seeing a press conference from a sheriff in Florida.
Some guy had shot at the police and they emptied like 60 bullets into the guy.
And then the reporter was like, well, 60 bullets?
That's like, that's crazy.
Why so many?
He's like, well, we would have done more, but we ran out of bullets.
And so there are places where the principle of self-defense is honored.
The sort of stand-your-ground stuff where there's no duty to retreat and so on.
And that has to do with the question of rehabilitation.
And this may be a bit of a male-female divide.
I've sort of noticed it.
I don't know if it's true or not.
But when men look at a criminal who's done great evil, we generally tend to say beyond repair, beyond reform, all we can do is segregate that person from society because reformation or rehabilitation is largely impossible.
And women, I think, a little bit more, look at a criminal and it's a perfectly valid position.
And they look back and they say, well, you know, he was raised in a foster home.
His parents were drug addicts.
You know, he never had a chance.
And all of that, I'm sure is true.
Not everyone who's abused becomes a criminal, but almost everyone who's a criminal was horribly abused as a child.
And that level of sympathy is perfectly understandable and is an important counterbalance, right?
And men and women tend to balance each other really well, which is why we became sort of the top species on the planet because we're a great team.
And when men tend to rule the justice system, it tends to be very Old Testament and very punitive, sometimes to an excessive degree.
When women or leftists generally in charge of the criminal system, it tends to be a little bit over-conciliatory, over-sympathetic, and over one more chance.
And, you know, women, of course, evolved to deal with babies and toddlers and children because the men were out hunting and half the children died.
So women had to pretty much devote themselves to raising the next generation.
And I've been a stay-at-home dad myself.
And you can't condemn your children, right?
You can't just say, well, they're beyond rehabilitation because they're still moldable.
They're still able to change and to grow and to progress.
And you can't condemn people until they become really committed, evil adults.
And I think that that impulse to reshape personality, to give one more chance, to look for the best is a beautiful thing when you're dealing with children and toddlers.
Adult super predators may not be quite the right thing.
So again, that's sort of, it's not specifically male-female.
I would say there are these general trends, but there's tons of exceptions.
And again, the combination of sympathy and justice, sympathy and harshness, understanding where people are coming from, also having a pretty good certainty of where they're going to go, which is to worse and worse places, is a good combo.
And if you're in a place where it's mostly sympathy, then self-defense is very tough to maintain and defend against.
Although philosophically, it's perfectly justified.
Marcelo.
And I would just bring in Scott's point of views on those issues that, number one, he did say self-defense is kind of like, you know, absolute.
But he also would, he had that sort of duality, I think, in what he said about crime, that he said, you know, he doesn't believe in free will, which means a criminal didn't have a choice.
They basically were put on that path.
But at the same time, he said, we still need to punish them.
We still need to lock them up because that's the only way the system will work.
Well, interestingly enough, this proves your point, Stefan, because the guy that the terrorist yesterday was actually supposed to be in prison for 11 years.
He helped ISIS convicted for 11 years.
He only served, I think, five years.
And then he went out and the first, he was on probation.
The first thing he did was shoot and kill, I think, two people.
So it shows, I mean, I wanted to get your perspective on something else, but it reminds me, I lived in Europe and in Europe, they see it very differently.
When in Norway, you're serving prison for murder, but you can, basically, you're in the prison.
It looks like an apartment and, well, like a room, a very nice room.
And then you're able to work outside of that prison, come back every day.
I think the same is in Denmark.
And so it's a very different over there.
They don't believe in capital punishment and they believe in getting, you know, helping someone change their views and that they can be rehabilitated and all that.
So, but going to a different point, I saw your post on Charlie Kirk yesterday and I think somebody had a question on it regarding, and I don't know if you want to talk about that, if that's too.
It's your show.
I am an open book.
Whatever works for you is fine with me.
You posted something about Erica Kirk and Charlie.
Stefan, can you just hit me with the echo?
Thanks.
Sorry, we're having like an echo thing.
So you posted, and I don't know if you wanted to clarify what you meant or.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the murder of Charlie Kirk was, of course, appalling to anybody with half a heart and mind.
I didn't know him super well.
I'd worked with him once at a conference and we sort of knew of each other.
And I sat on a panel with him and was he was an amazing man.
I mean, his command of facts and memory, it seemed that there was almost nothing that he hadn't read and also had a steel-trapped mind.
I'm good with principles.
I'm like B.B. King.
You know, if you've ever seen him in the YouTube documentary, B.B. King is like, I don't do chords.
I'm good with solos.
I'm not good with chords.
And I'm good with principles, but facts kind of come and go like birds flying through a barn with me.
And his grasp in facts was just absolutely unparalleled.
And it was a truly stupendous mind that was shot down on that terrible day last fall.
Now, with regards to Erica Kirk, I, of course, I can't imagine the horror and the suffering with the children and also seeing it recorded and repeated endlessly.
I watched it once because I think it was somebody, I think it might have been Tim Poole who was saying that he's, you know, he's in stable but dangerous condition or something like that.
And I saw the shot and I was like, I'm certainly no doctor, obviously, but I was like, that's not a stable condition situation.
He's gone.
Now, Erica Kirk, the issue that I had in particular with Erica Kirk, and again, I very much hesitate to criticize a widow, but as Plato said, we care about people, but we have to care about the truth even more.
There was a lot of outrage and energy that was generated and a lot of exposure of the leftist sort of slavering, bloodthirsty lust for violence that characterized a lot of people's responses to Charlie Kirk.
And I very much, very, very strongly disagreed with what I felt and would argue was very performative in terms of saying, as she did a couple of days after the father of her children and the love of her life was gunned down, that she forgives the murderer.
And she got applause and that was very performative.
And I believe, I genuinely believe that took a lot of the energy and outrage out of the response.
And theologically, much though I sympathize with her suffering, theologically, she's totally wrong.
There is no instance in the Bible, there is no instance in Christianity where forgiveness is granted without genuine contrition.
You do not have the right to forgive people who don't apologize, who don't have that genuine repentance, who don't have a come to virtue or come to Jesus or come to virtue or come to morality kind of moment.
And so that performative apology really sucked the energy right out of the outrage.
And I thought it was kind of selfish.
It's that she wanted to be perceived as a good Christian.
I can't read her mind.
Obviously, it's just my particular opinion.
And I think it took a lot of energy out of the movement.
And, you know, if you've seen the videos of her, you know, talking with people, and we can say, well, it's shock of this, that, and the other, but she seems to be fairly positive about marketing opportunities and so on.
And I say, again, all of this with great sympathy towards her, but it is the kind of behavior, you know, I don't want anyone to, if I happen to get killed by someone, I'm just putting this forward as, of course, as a tiny, tiny possibility.
Please don't forgive them if they've never repented within a couple of days afterwards.
That seems to me almost incomprehensible.
And I think it did great harm to the outrage that was necessary to fight back against this level of violence that we see coming out of the left.
But of course, if you forgive when the other person hasn't repented, that is saying that you know better than God.
God does not forgive people.
In the Christian theology, God does not forgive people without repentance.
And so to will that is performative.
And I thought was, again, we can say it was shock and so on.
I'm simply, I can't read her mind, but I can certainly look at the effects that it had.
And the energy and the outrage kind of went out of the shock and horror of Charlie's assassination.
And I think that her behavior since, I got to tell you, like, I mean, I can't imagine being in that situation.
I can't imagine it.
I think we can all imagine it.
But honestly, fireworks and glitter pants and things like that, it just doesn't seem right to me.
And I'm not trying to police other people's grieving, but it's a little hard to follow as a whole.
And that is a challenge because as a Christian, he would have, I assume, prayed to God for guidance and so on.
And I don't know that he got the right answer before he got married and so on.
So it is troubling.
And it is, I think, part of this excessive empathy, this pathological sympathy stuff that honestly, if somebody gunned down somebody that I truly loved, I would be quite the opposite of forgiveness pretty much for the rest of my life.
And I think we needed some of that energy in the West.
I just was, I wanted to add, Stefan, my father was assassinated.
He was a politician in El Salvador.
So I know I'm not Erica, you know, but I did lose my significant other as well.
And I have to say That when we mourn, we mourn differently.
Everybody mourns differently.
For example, for the killers of my father, I, for a long time, I held a lot of rage, but I forgave them, you know?
So, part of the reason she might have forgiven them is selfish, like you said, and it's part of being able to move forward as a person.
So, that's my only take is what I know from my own experience.
But that's sorry.
But that's a great point.
And I certainly understand the argument that people make that forgiveness is not for the other person, but it's for you to be able to move on and so on.
But not two or three days afterwards.
And also, the other thing, too, is that that would be a private act, not a to the world on stage with the eyes of everyone upon you.
Because if you publicly say, I forgive the man who murdered the father of my children a couple of days ago with no repentance on that person's part, then you're saying that that's Christian and that's good.
And if you say that's Christian, then that's good.
Then the people who want to throw him in jail or give him the death penalty are somehow being not good Christians.
In other words, if every Christian, and I'm not mean to pick on Christians, lots of religions that have this forgiveness stuff, but if every Christian were to forgive the murderer, they'd just let him go because he's forgiven.
Just let him go.
So no forgiveness is something that is only possible because other people specifically don't forgive.
And as a philosopher myself and a moral philosopher, I look for these kinds of contradictions.
So if one person's forgiveness of a murderer is only able to be performed because other people, usually men, specifically don't forgive that person and lock him up and give him the death penalty if that's what happens legally and end up taking his life.
In other words, she can forgive because other people refuse to forgive.
So is it good or bad to forgive?
Well, if everyone forgives, we let all the criminals out and society collapses.
If society can only be sustained, again, according to Scott's, I disagree with you.
Forgiveness doesn't, I mean, I can't mind read Erica, but it does not mean that he cannot face capital punishment.
She doesn't, whether she wants that or not, he will be facing that.
So for the Christians, it may be that they forgive for their own selves, but they won't forget and they'll like keep attacking.
The Complexity of Letting Go00:05:31
I hate what you're saying, but to me, that makes the concept of forgiveness a little hard to understand because it's being used in two ways.
So if someone does something to me that's negative and they apologize, they make restitution, and I say, I forgive you, then I'm saying I'm not going to punish you.
That's what forgiveness means to me.
Like we're square, it's over, it's done.
Some guy dings my car and he pays to get it fixed.
And I'm like, okay, it's water under the bridge, move on, right?
Then I don't get to, I'm going to press charges too, right?
So to me, forgiveness is it's even, it's okay, restitution has been achieved, things are fine.
And if we're going to say forgiveness also means inflicting the death penalty on someone, and we use the same word to when, you know, some restaurant brings the food cold, oh, it's fine, don't worry about it, it's no problem, right?
As opposed to, yes, it's so bad that we're going to have to take your life for what you did.
Then to me, the word becomes kind of, you can't use the word to mean both we're even and it's fine, and I'm going to inflict the death penalty on you.
Yeah, and I was going to just add that it seems to me like it's just the wrong word that I think it is used in two ways.
I think the, you know, some people think of forgiveness as just I'm no longer going to hate this person or I'm not going to hold on to that hatred or that revenge or that feeling that is really within the person doing the forgiving.
And it is more of a, I don't know if I'd call it selfish, but it's a, it's a, you know, self-centered act.
And I think it is a very different concept to me than saying we're square, no punishment, you know, everything's fine.
We're back to even, because that's clearly not the case.
And I would guess if you asked Erica, should this person go to jail?
She would say yes.
I don't know how she feels about the death penalty, but she would probably say yes, that person should be locked up and should be punished for what they did.
And again, that, you know, it's all about how you define forgiveness, I suppose, but it almost seems like we need a different word for what Erica was, I think, saying, which was, I'm going to no longer hate this person.
Thank you for bringing up Erica because this, Erica, is on the timeline.
So listen, these are opinions, right?
And I think the chat was pretty agreeable in both directions to everybody here.
Marcella, you are a powerhouse, dynamic woman who has just been through so much and I want to cry and prevails.
And, you know, you're a superhero.
So we love you so much.
And thank you for sharing that personal side of you with us.
Stefan, amazing.
You gave us so much to think about.
I saw a lot of people once again saying they're going to have to watch this a few times because there was a lot of good information here.
And I'm also glad that you brought up on your own that the next time you're on, we can talk about something because you know I'm going to ask you to come back over and over and over again.
So I would like to thank you again.
And Stefan, any closing remarks before we have our final sip?
Well, first of all, Marcela, I just wanted to express my absolutely deep and heartfelt condolences.
You know, virtual hug across the planet, digital sympathies flowing your way.
That is brutal.
And to your point, to reinforce your point, if people have done us evil, we can't just stare at that and be in horror and rage and frustration and tension.
Because that, then again, as I said at the beginning, we don't surrender more than we have to.
So if some people have done us great harm, at some point we do have to move on and we do have to kind of let that go because we can't just circle the drain of people who've injured us.
Just as we, you know, we all injure each other from time to time and we don't want people to just only focus on the negative.
So I completely agree with you that at some point we need to move on.
Again, I don't know that the public, it's a virtue to forgive a couple of days after.
It seems to me that there is a process of grieving that we can't just leap over.
Like there's a post, you get a wound, right?
You get a stab.
It takes a while to heal.
You get surgery.
It takes a while to heal.
You can't just go play squash two days after your surgery.
So I completely agree with you that we do need to find ways to move on from the evils that have been done to us.
So I'm not saying that, you know, we hold that grudge forever and we simply focus on the negatives forever.
So I'm with you there 100%.
And I just, again, really want to sympathize with the wrongs and the evils that you have suffered.
And the fact that you have obviously moved on with grace and positivity is a magnificently inspiring achievement.
And I just wanted to say that.
Yeah, my website, freedomane.com, blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, are we closing to our end sip?
The end time sipping is occurring.
Yes, we are.
So you guys grab your mugs, enjoy this little echo.
It's our special little gift to you.
A closing sniff to Scott.
Thank you again to Stefan.
I love you, Owen and Marcella and everybody in the chat.