Aug. 24, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:41:58
3802 She Was Murdered - Call In Show - August 16th, 2017
Question 1: [1:47] – “Why is the correct use of definitions important, and in which ways can it be used for ill intent?”Question 2: [11:00] – “I am a 21-year old jazz musician and play music at a very high level for my age. However, I happen to hold a number of political views which run counter to the mainstream ideology of the jazz community. The community is rather small, interconnected, and for the most part politically homogenous, so if word got out that I don't support Black Lives Matter for example, my future as a musician could be permanently ruined. Inevitably I will be forced to either lie about my views, or tell the truth and forever become an evil racist in the eyes of my peers. Is telling the truth always the best option, even at the expense of a lifetime of career opportunities?”Question 3: [34:16] – “I am a Christian who believes in God and has had several very deep and profound spiritual experiences including speaking in tongues, involuntary shaking, feeling ‘the love of God’ pulsate throughout my body in waves, strangers speaking things to me as if it were God speaking to me, etc. I fully acknowledge that I am unable to reasonably defend my faith against arguments such as ‘there is no empirical evidence of God’, ‘the bible is full of contradictions’, etc. but I find myself still drawn to the faith and have no desire to leave it. With everything else in my life, I look to evidence, reason, and data except for this one thing which oddly enough is the one thing that gives me a deep sense of peace, comfort, and joy. Am I, therefore, unreasonable to hold these seemingly contradictory positions?”Question 4: [1:31:00] – “On September 6th, 1996, my mother was murdered. To this day the case remains unsolved. The same goes for every day of my life since then. For the past 20 years I have felt like I have been wandering the earth aimlessly. I have managed to do the ‘normal’ things like marriage (and subsequent divorce) and children but I have lacked the drive and focus needed to achieve the goals I had once set for myself. Throughout my adult life I have always felt like no matter what I do I can never seem to outrun my past. It's like I can feel, and I believe in my heart, that there is something great out there for me and that hope alone is what has kept me motivated to keep going through all of the things that seem to get dumped on my plate on what seems like a daily basis. How much truth is there to the idea that my past is controlling my future and what thought processes can I use to overcome the things that have happened to me and shed these chains?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well. Please don't forget to support the show at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
What a set of callers tonight!
It's amazing to me just how wonderfully the variety comes together in a show sometimes.
The first caller wanted to know why is the correct use of definitions so important to philosophy?
And the second caller... Is a jazz musician and is facing a lot of pushback based on his political opinions from a generally lefty musical community.
He wants to know, do I tell the truth?
Am I honest? Am I open about my beliefs?
Because what if that completely blows up my potential career?
He's a young man, very talented, and so on.
Great conversation.
Boy, I think we all have that question to decide upon several times a day.
The third caller is a Christian.
This actually is the first time we've had someone speak in tongues during a show.
I'm not kidding. He's had several very deep and profound spiritual experiences, and he values reason and evidence at the same time.
Where does he stand in terms of rationality, given these two contradictory perspectives and experiences and beliefs?
It's a great question, and we hashed it through in great detail.
The fourth caller, what a courageous man.
His mother was murdered almost 20 years ago.
Murder was never solved. And he's stuck.
And, by golly, did he ever get unstuck in this conversation.
I hope that you will listen to this maybe even more than once.
Well worth it. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
You can use the affiliate link, fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Alright, up first today we have Christopher.
He wrote in and said, why is the correct use of definitions important and in what ways can it be used for ill intent?
That's from Christopher. Hey Chris, how are you doing tonight?
Hi, hi Stefan. I'm doing fine.
How can correct definitions be used for ill intent if they're correct?
Isn't that good?
Oh yeah, that is good and that's important.
The problem is when you use them for...
I mean, you take a word that's actually got a definition and there's a reason why it means as it does.
But the problem is when you try and distort what it means.
Oh, so correct definitions are important and people who have incorrect definitions or who alter definitions probably have ill intentions, right?
Yes. Can you give me an example that has popped into your mind about this?
Oh, it's mostly politics.
Like there was this word I heard at a time where they were saying They used the word dark as in something's dark outside, but in actuality they used it to distort a real meaning.
So dark got used in a way that it's...
Well...
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you can see the media, right?
The media comes up and talks about Donald Trump's dark language.
And they have recently been talking about the alt-right.
And, you know, a number of people have been categorized as being in the alt-right.
And I'm not going to go through the list of names, but let's just say some of them.
It's a little surprising.
And it is just a big bucket of negative emotions, right?
Like, what happens is they create a bucket of crap, a bucket of acid, a bucket of negativity, and then they attach that bucket to whoever they don't like.
This is usually the mainstream media, but it happens in other places too.
They... Attach you to a bucket of negativity, and that's considered to be a rebuttal.
Or, you know, they may look towards your motives rather than your arguments, because it's a lot easier to make up motives than it is to rebut arguments.
And so, that is...
Something like... Was it on Twitter?
On Twitter. Yesterday, I think it was.
I wrote something like this.
You know, when black illegitimacy in the inner cities is approaching 80%, I don't think the big problem is Civil War statues thousands of miles away.
Also, it'd be interesting, you know, they keep talking about pulling down these Civil War statues in the South.
They don't really mention that most of the statues are of Democrats.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there, I guess, at the moment.
Okay. But yeah, so it was some senior writer at Newsweek who was like, that's racist!
It's like... I actually want the black illegitimacy rate to get better because I know how bad it is for the community.
How is pointing out a problem and saying that this is not solving it racist?
Well, of course, the word racist is just, again, a negative term that they want to staple onto people's foreheads so you don't actually listen to their arguments.
So a misuse of definitions would actually be a massive step up for the mainstream media or for academia because...
It's all straw man ad hominems, right?
Like you create a negative connotation to someone, or you create a negative connotation word, you attach that word to people you don't like, and woohoo, you have won the debate of the ages!
And it's sad.
It's really, I mean, if they actually only got definitions wrong, or skewed definitions, that would be a huge step in the right direction.
But we don't even have that yet.
But sure, if we look at, I just talked with Dinesh D'Souza today, About all of this.
The fact that the left, the Democrat Party, has a long history of ties to the Nazis, to the National Socialists.
And it's a very, very powerful thesis.
Because of course, this basic definition which you have in the world, which is that the extreme left is communism, the extreme right is communism.
Is fascism, national socialism, Nazism.
I mean, it's a beautiful thing in terms of increasing government power because it's sort of like saying a really, really big tumor is on the right.
And... A really, really big nail gun through the head is on the left.
So what you want is a small tumor and a small nail gun through the head.
And it's weird, because the reality is, of course, that government compulsion, coercion of any kind, left or right, is the big tumor.
And freedom is good health.
Freedom is good health. And what they say is, because they put these two things in the middle, right, the extremes are both totalitarian, they basically get you to compromise in the middle.
But the compromise between totalitarian and totalitarian is a smaller tumor that eventually is going to grow into totalitarianism no matter what.
The real question is individualism versus collectivism, or Voluntarism versus violence.
Individual choice and freedom versus the collectivized coercion of the state.
It's voluntarism versus violence.
It's lovemaking versus rape.
It's charity versus theft.
All of these things.
And so, yeah, once people have got the wrong definitions, what the wrong definitions do, Chris, is they give people the illusion that they know something.
Well, this is where you get this ridiculous two-dimensional line of politics, you know, like extreme left, extreme right.
It just has you sit in the middle, which means you can't make any decisions, you can't have any principles.
And of course, everybody who's got principles, whether they're good or bad principles, love it when you don't have principles.
Because then they can just march all over you and you don't have anything particular to defend.
It's another reason why they want to tear up all these statues.
And right now, people are working at digging up the body of some Confederate general, I think it is.
But they want you to have no history or to be ashamed of your history, so you have nothing to defend when people want to take you over.
There's nothing of value to defend.
There's no ground to keep.
There's no values to protect.
There's no honor.
There's no virtue to defend.
They just want to roll the steam railers of indignation over all of your monuments so that you have nothing left to defend when they want to take you over.
And the fact that they're starting with the South is not accidental, as Dinesh pointed out, in 1860, beginning of the Civil War in the United States, there were precisely zero Republicans who owned slaves or All of the four million slaves were owned by Democrats.
And so the idea that the left is going to be so outraged about Democrats, about slave ownership, when it's their own party members who did it, is something quite astonishing and astounding.
So, yeah, the definitions are very powerful, and you really do want to You really do want to work from first principles with empirical evidence and clear definitions.
Because if you look at things like, until Donald Trump It came along, there was like this somewhat inchoate frustration about what it meant to be a Republican.
What a Republican generally meant was somebody who mouthed platitudes of smaller government, but caved to media pressure to support the Democrats in whatever they wanted to do.
Mitt Romney, is he an individualist?
Is he for the free market?
Well, he says so. But then he goes along talking about, you know, Antifa's Pretty good.
Marco Rubio, he's a Republican, and he was just talking about how, well, if you have an ideology filled with hate, whatever that means, if you have an ideology filled with hate, then that justifies violence that's used against you.
Nice try, Marco!
I'm afraid the water dissolved any edifice remotely close to the First Amendment in your brain.
I mean, that's not even this ridiculous.
In America, hate speech, whatever that means, that the term, of course, is so subjective, and it's supposed to be.
Hate speech is perfectly protected by the First Amendment.
So, yeah, I mean, this is why philosophy is such a challenge, because bad definitions, false definitions, sophistic or manipulative definitions, give people the illusion that they know something about the world, when in fact they don't, And generally, particularly the left-right continuum, herds people, you know, up the ramp to the slaughterhouse of increased state power.
I hope that answers your question, and thanks very much for your call, and let's move on to the next caller.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Okay, bye. Up next, we have Kenny.
Kenny wrote in and said, I'm a 21-year-old jazz musician and play music at a very high level for my age.
However, I happen to hold a number of political views which run counter to the mainstream ideology of the jazz community.
The community is rather small, interconnected, and for the most part politically homogenous.
So if word got out that I don't support Black Lives Matter, for example, my future as a musician could be permanently ruined.
Inevitably, I will be forced to either lie about my values or tell the truth and forever become an evil racist in the eyes of my peers.
Is telling the truth always the best option, even at the expense of a lifetime of career opportunities?
That's from Kenny. - Hey.
Hey Kenny, how are you doing? Stefan, how are you?
I'm well, thank you.
So when you say that the jazz community is politically homogenous, I guess we're not talking Ancapistan inhabitants here, are we?
No, I think what I would say about the jazz community is that I think I've met hundreds of musicians, and I think I've met one person who was a conservative, and basically everybody that I currently keep in contact with is quite far on the left.
Yeah, no, I like going to go and see Queen.
Not so much without Freddie, but I like to go and see Queen.
But two things I don't like about Brian May.
Number one, don't take me on your intergalactic noodling guitar solos from here to eternity.
And number two, stop talking about global warming.
But anyway. Well, congratulations on your musical ability.
I envy that. I think that's absolutely wonderful.
I'm learning piano at the moment.
I played violin for about 10 years when I was younger.
And I am learning the piano because my daughter is learning it.
She started to write some music, which actually I really like.
But there are a few things, a bit more of a challenge.
Foreign languages, ooh, that's going to live in luck.
And learning piano is a challenge.
So I really do envy that ability.
I will tell you what I think, and then you can tell me if it makes any sense.
So you're 21, so I am going to extend this with probably a little more harshness than it deserves.
But again, I'm not just speaking to you.
I'm playing for mankind here, right?
No, fair enough. Go for it.
I'm just going to tell you what I think.
Kenny, stop whining.
And stop thinking...
That the world is some giant series of nipples that you need to attach yourself to to get your sustenance.
Stop thinking that you have to go on bended knee to go and ask people to let you play.
That is not where you want to be if you are a powerful, original thinker.
Let me tell you where you want to be, Kenny, in my humble opinion.
And I say this when I didn't have to make this choice at 21, so again, forgive the harshness.
But what you want to be, Kenny, is you want to say, okay, I'm surrounded by a bunch of gutless, helium-headed socialists.
Wait, is that too strong or is that fairly...
That sounds about accurate.
Okay, good. Gutless helium-headed socialists surround me everywhere I go is a shit symphony of socialist syllables.
Okay. So here's my challenge, I would say to myself.
My challenge is this. I have to be so freaking great that people will not even care about my political philosophy.
I have to write such great songs.
I have to be such a great performer.
I have to up my charisma.
I've got to up my game. I've got to up my work ethic.
So that I can vault over these noodle-headed leftists as if they weren't even there.
I have to be so much greater, so much better, so much more powerful, so much more in demand.
That my primary relationship is not going to be with a bunch of other people who are, you know, limp-necked lefties saying, oh, can I play?
Would you mind? Would you mind if I play?
Right? But go in and view these people like the prow of an icebreaker views the ice.
Just go through. Work twice as hard.
Work five times as hard.
Work ten times as hard.
Be ten times greater. Be ten times more innovative.
Write songs until your fingertips bleed.
Continue to escalate your competences.
Continue to push what it is that you do.
Continue to challenge yourself to be better and greater.
To the point where people say, that Kenny man?
I hate his politics.
But damn can that guy play!
Bring him on! Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that's a completely different way of looking at it, and that's why I was looking forward to talking to you, because I felt that I was kind of stuck in this paradigm where I was thinking about the situation in a way where I could either play jazz or do something else.
The way that you put it makes a lot of sense.
But at the same time, I'm not completely confident that even if I was in the top one-tenth of one percent of musicians, that that would completely immunize me from being outcasted or blacklisted by my peers, really. What I'm trying to say, Kenny, is have no peers.
Do you understand what I mean?
Have no peers. Be Mozart to their Salieri.
Be Charlie Parker to their buskers, right?
Be so great.
Like, if you're great enough, people will write off things that they don't like about you as just odd little quirks.
Oh, he's got this eccentric philosophy.
Who cares, right? Man, come listen to this guy play.
That was the most beautiful song about birds in June that I've ever heard in my life.
Just look at it as a challenge to be greater.
You have been given a great gift, Kenny.
And it's a gift that sucks and blows and jets you up to the very stratosphere.
And that gift is an obstacle.
That gift is resistance.
That gift is the potential of ostracism.
Because without the potential of ostracism, we will often tend to just blend into the middle.
We will get good enough to be accepted, and we will go no further, because we're tribal, right?
So if we've got a tribe that accepts us, then what we do is we say, okay, well, I guess that tribe accepts me so I can get my gigs, I can make some money, and...
That's what I'm going to do. I sit in a tour bus and I'm going to play Tetris.
Right? But if you're like, okay, I'm going to conquer not the jazz world.
Who cares about the jazz world? I'm going to conquer the audience.
I'm going to conquer the music world as a whole.
I'm going to write and write and write and I'm going to create and I'm going to create and I'm going to create.
And it may take me 10 years.
You know, I mean, I think it's true that if you...
Start writing songs, it can take you five years or ten years, depends on how often you're writing or what it is that you're doing, to truly find your own voice and become original.
And if you haven't started yet, now's the time to start.
So you can, in your mid-twenties, you can hit the charts with your original compositions.
And then people will be like, I hate that non-lefty guy, but I'd kill to play with him!
Right. Put yourself in such demand through connection with the audience that you are without peer.
You become... I mean, I say this from experience.
I mean, I spent many, many, many years, many years Writing, you know, I wrote like 20 plays and poems.
I've written like six novels.
I've written like, I don't know, five or six or seven nonfiction books and so on.
And with the exception of what's happened more recently now that I've sort of come out of my writing retirement and penned The Art of the Argument, which will be out soon.
Thanks for everyone's patience.
Now I'm finally getting some interest from the publishing world, but only because, I mean, there is definitely some like-minded people out there.
Funny, not a lot of Canadian publishers.
You might not be surprised to hear.
And the funny thing is, you know, and I appreciate the interest that the publishers have taken.
But to me, there's this old story about bankers, right?
Bankers won't lend you money unless you have assets, but if you have assets, you don't really need the money, right?
It's one of the things. There's an old saying about bankers, they say, well, bankers are the kind of guys that ignore you when you're out there struggling financially.
In the ocean, and then they bury you in life preservers after you've made it to shore.
It's like, thanks, guys.
Could have used your help. And I understand this is kind of a funny thing.
And the fact that I was rejected for decades, literally decades, by publishers is fantastic in hindsight.
Sucked at the time. Don't get me wrong.
Sucked at the time. But it was fantastic in hindsight because...
I'm going to end up...
I mean, I already know.
I already know well north of 100,000 books of mine are downloaded or read or ordered every month.
Every month! 100,000 books.
In Canada, 5,000 books is a bestseller.
You've got 100,000 books.
It's 20 times in one month.
5,000 over the life of a book.
So if I had gone the route of regular publishers, I would have ended up squarely in the middle.
You know, I'd be making like a, I don't know, I don't know what writers make.
I do remember being rather terrified a couple of decades ago when I was taking playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada, finding out that playwrights made an average of $2,400 a year.
And it was not so long ago that that actually meant something in terms of income.
It really didn't. So if I had been accepted by publishers, I would have had my message, without a doubt, reduced, or I would have had to just give up on the publishing contract.
I didn't have the kind of weight that Ayn Rand had with Atlas Shrugged, where she said not one single edit in the whole 1,200 pages or whatever.
So I would have ended up in the middle.
I would have ended up with some lower middle class income.
I would not have gone into the business world, and I certainly would not have started what I'm doing now.
Or if I had, it would have been some relatively bland situation, because I wouldn't want it to threaten whatever income I had from writing.
And I certainly would not have had the kind of global reach, power, and ascendancy that I have gathered over the last 12 years.
So... The fact that I was rejected, the fact that my belief systems, my rationality, my philosophy as a whole, was roundly rejected by publishers meant that I became better.
I became greater.
I became deeper. I became richer.
I became more committed to passionately connecting the audience with the truth as I reasoned it.
Again, you're 21, so please understand, this is a lot to heap on your shoulders.
But if you look at it this way, good!
It's good that I was rejected.
It's good that I was ostracized.
It's good that I was pushed back against.
It's good that I was repelled.
After you get repelled, what do you get?
Rejected. Right?
So it was good.
You know, that which does not kill you with the absence of Lyme disease makes you stronger.
And so look at this as an incredible opportunity to pursue all your potential.
And I'm telling you this, Kenny, you don't know what your potential is as yet.
You don't know how great you can be.
You don't know what you compassionately commit to.
And I say this, I mean, I didn't know I was going to be this good.
I had some idea, but not this good at what I do.
And I'm still working at getting better.
I still don't know what the end product of my potential is going to be.
I don't know. I'm continually pushing the envelope and challenging myself and challenging the audience.
And so, you don't know what your potential is going to be, but you have been given a wonderful opportunity to really work to find out.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let me ask you, in the meantime, while I am assiduously improving my craft until I become the next Beethoven of jazz, What would you say about the best mode of being in terms of being politically outspoken or not?
Is it the best idea to just say what you think and just not care what other people think?
And if so, how would you go about immunizing yourself from that sort of criticism?
Look, if you're still dependent upon other people for your livelihood, and you don't have a backup plan, keep your mouth shut.
Listen, I wrote this line when I was 25 years old.
So more than a quarter century ago.
And the line goes a little something like this.
There's this... I wrote this novel called Just Poor.
I think it's somewhere...
Oh wait, I think it's on the...
Anyway, it's somewhere on my website.
There's this novel called Just Poor.
It's about the agricultural revolution...
In England, 18th century.
And there's this young girl who's completely brilliant.
I actually had the idea...
You don't get an idea for a book.
You get this portal to a world that you go into.
And the portal for me was...
I had a dream when I was 24 about a little girl...
Who was milking a cow, and she was dressed in old-timey outfit.
She was milking a cow. It was early morning.
She was sitting on a bale of hay.
She was milking a cow, and she had her cheek, which had a few freckles, pressed against the sweaty, hairy side of the cow.
And her hands were just working mechanically.
She was paying very little attention to what she was doing, because she was very good at it.
She'd done it for a long time. And she was milking, and she was staring off into space.
And she had these blindingly intelligent eyes.
And the loss, the hope, the despair that was in her eyes.
She was in a farm in the middle of nowhere in England in the 18th century.
She was a genius.
And she had no scope for her ability.
No scope for her ability, no path to manifest her brilliance.
And that dream led to a novel.
We'll republish it on Amazon at some point.
It's a great book called Just Pour About.
And she, at one point, well, okay, this is the beginning.
So this lord comes by and he's got all these great new ideas about how to improve farming.
And he comes and he talks to the farmer and the farmers are all sitting around a table.
And she's eight or nine years old.
And they're all listening to him deferentially and respectfully and so on.
And she's really disgusted by this because she's looking at this guy, this lord, and she feels in her heart like...
Why you? Why you and not me?
How are you sitting here?
You're pretending that everyone's listening to you because you're just so wise and you've studied so many things and you know all about farming because you grew up in a rich house.
You've barely touched the ground but you've read some books and everyone's pretending to listen to you just because.
Just because you're the king.
Sorry, you're the lord.
You're the local lord and they're scared of you.
And one of the...
And Milkmaids flirts with him, the Lord, a tiny little bit, and he says something like, well, you know, you play your cards right, you just might have influence in the world.
And then she says, when she's eight or nine years old, she says, oh, really, Lord Lawrence?
Is that, did you just play your cards right?
Is that how you have influence in the world?
And I won't get into it, there's this huge blow-up.
Because she's incredibly frustrated and angry at the fact that he has all this privilege, which he did not earn, and she has all this ability, which she cannot manifest because of her environment or situation.
Anyway, so there's an older man who's also smart and who's lived through this life of potential but no scope to exercise it.
And... He says to her, when the disasters happen after her outburst, he says to her, Mary, the truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
And that is something that came to me like writing with lightning when I wrote it, and it's something that really has stuck within my heart.
You don't owe the truth to everyone that you meet.
You don't owe honesty to everyone that you meet.
Honesty is a relationship. It is not some commandment that you obey regardless of circumstances.
Honesty is something that is earned by people around you.
So if you withhold your truth from people around you, you have broken no moral laws.
If you If you're well trained in combat and you can reasonably rescue someone who's being unjustly attacked, okay, you can go for that if you want, and I think that could be a courageous and heroic thing to do.
On the other hand, if you're facing an army of a hundred men with guns, is courage and intervention a sword to be drawn at all costs?
No. No.
You don't want honesty to become something that punishes you, that flagellates you, that harms you, because then you end up with a masochistic relationship with virtue, with honesty.
Honesty becomes an enemy.
It becomes a way that you lose.
And people, you know, there's lots of people in the world who will say, be honest no matter what.
And do you know who those people are, Kenny?
Those are people who want the goods on you so they can screw with you.
Those are the people who want to fuck you up.
Well, you gotta be honest.
You gotta tell me.
You gotta tell me, right?
Because there's these two things in authority, right?
Parents will say this, or other people will say this.
When you have information your parents want, or your teacher wants, they'll say, tell me, because honesty is a virtue.
But if you start blurting out some family secret at the dinner table, when there are guests over, suddenly honesty is not such a virtue, is it?
So when you have information they want, honesty is a virtue.
When you have information they want concealed, then suddenly diplomacy and discretion and whatever it is becomes a virtue, right?
Don't ever isolate philosophy from circumstances, philosophical commandments, I should say.
Don't isolate philosophical commandments from environment circumstances.
If you and I agree to a deal, I'm giving you a foot rub, you're giving me a back rub, I'm supposed to go first.
I don't give you a foot rub, you don't have to give me a back rub.
Well, you've got to keep your word.
It's like, yes, but only if the other person keeps his word.
You've got to be honest. Well, only if the other person is honest.
You've got to have integrity.
Only if the other person has integrity.
really.
All the people who say you've just got to follow these commandments independent of circumstance, environment, or relationship are playing you for a fool, and they're trying to turn philosophy into a predator that hunts you and tears down your life, and they want you to provide them the information that's going to help them harm you.
So I very much in my life, and with the audience, with you, I'm honest.
I mean, that's, you know, I made that commitment.
But outside of the studio, you know, in the world that I navigate through, honesty is something that is earned by integrity from those around me.
So So, yeah, you can keep your mouth shut and be a better person thereby, a wiser person thereby.
The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
So, yeah, it's good that you brought that up because a big part of what I've been thinking about with this whole situation is the idea of radical honesty.
And what you're saying makes complete sense because I was just thinking, well, I better just tell the truth to everybody that asks.
And that, I thought, Would be some sort of moral virtue and some sort of principle to live by all the time.
But what you're saying certainly seems to hold true as well in the sense that If someone wants the truth from you, more often than not, it's probably because they want to use that truth to exploit you in some way.
Oh, Lord, your truths, man.
Do not display your treasures to the world for magpies and zombies to pick at and rummage through in soil.
You hold your truths close to your chest and you share those truths with those you love.
Now, I mean, crazy me, you can make it a gig and you can speak the truth, but you want to be a jazz musician, not...
A public intellectual, so as far as that goes, you, listen, you become a great jazz musician, you write wonderful songs, you can slip very subversive things into your lyrics, right?
You can slip some wonderful thought-provoking things into your lyrics, and you can do a great deal of good thereby, but you can't get there if you're gonna unpack your heart to everyone around.
That, to me, honesty is like sex.
You don't fuck everyone.
Yeah, I like that analogy.
That's good. Well, I think that pretty much does it for me.
I'm going to be thinking about this conversation for a while and analyzing it, and hopefully I'll make something good out of it.
Thanks, Kenny, and send us some of your music if you can.
I'd like to hear it. I will.
Thanks so much, Stefan. Thanks, man. Right up next we have Thomas.
Thomas wrote in and said, I'm a Christian who believes in God and has had several very deep and profound spiritual experiences, including speaking in tongues, involuntary shaking, feeling the love of God pulsate throughout my body in waves, strangers speaking things to me as if it were God speaking to me, etc. I fully acknowledge that I am unable to reasonably defend my faith against arguments such as, there is no empirical evidence of God, and the Bible is full of contradictions, etc.
But I still find myself drawn to the faith and have no desire to leave it.
With everything else in my life, I look to evidence, reason, and data, except for this one thing, which oddly enough is the one thing that gives me a deep sense of peace, comfort, and joy.
Am I, therefore, unreasonable to hold these seemingly contradictory positions?
That's from Thomas. Hey Thomas, how are you doing tonight?
Hey, what's up Stefan? I'm doing well, how are you?
I'm well, I'm well.
How interesting. I really appreciate you sharing these thoughts.
Can you tell me a little bit more about your spiritual experiences?
Yeah, no, absolutely. I'll probably mention the most profound one that I had.
This was back in April 2010.
And, um, I went to a, uh, I won't name the organization, but a specific type of organization that's, um, within the charismatic Christian stream.
Um, and at this point in my life, I was, uh, how old was I? I was 19, I believe.
Um, yeah, I was 19 and, uh, I was really searching for just more experiences with God.
You But at this point in my life, I was just looking for, you know, deeper experiences with God.
And so I had heard that at this specific—it's a church, but it also functions as an organization.
But at this place, they have a lot of people claiming that they have a lot of, you know, really deep experiences with God, like I'd mentioned, like speaking in tongues and all that.
So anyway, so I went to it because I wanted— To encounter God and I didn't know what was going to happen.
I had never spoken in tongues.
I had never like shook or anything like that.
But I went there. And when I went there, you know, it was like a worship service.
I don't know how. I think you said you grew up a Protestant.
So I just heard a noise.
Are we still here? We are.
OK, good. I think you said you grew up Protestant.
So, you know, like a typical like Sunday morning service, you know, they have music playing and, you know, people sing.
Oh, more than Sunday for me.
Church choir, the whole thing.
Anyway, go on. Oh yeah, oh yeah.
So anyway, so they were doing that, and then one of the speakers came up and was like, you know, hey, if you want a fresh touch from God, you know, stand up on these lines and we'll pray for you.
So I was like, okay. So I stood up on the lines.
This guy I'd never met came up and, you know, he asked me, you know, hey, what can I pray for you about?
And I told him I just wanted to, you know, touch from God.
I wanted to feel God. And then the guy was like, okay.
So he started praying. And, you know, he started saying a lot of, you know, fairly general things that just sounded nice, you know, like God loves you, He's here for you, whatever.
But then he said a certain phrase.
He said, you're not a doubting Thomas.
And that phrase I had been thinking of for the past several months because I felt like I was having a lot of doubts in my faith about, you know, if God can really move in my life in a supernatural way or, you know, just move my life in general.
I was kind of going through a downing time.
So when he said that, it's like I just was undone.
I started crying. I just started to just feel like, I don't know, like I said, this wave of God's love.
It's really weird. It's hard to describe these things.
And so I just say a wave because that's literally what it felt.
It felt like a wave was going from the top of my body to the bottom.
And the guy was praying for me, and then they started praying that I would experience God's joy.
And so then I started to laugh.
And it wasn't like there were people around me laughing, so I started laughing with them.
I just started laughing almost like it felt uncontrollable laughter.
I was just laughing so hard because I felt so, I don't know, loved.
I felt so... Accepted.
I felt very happy.
I started to laugh.
And then, probably the most peculiar thing that's ever happened to me, I started to have these involuntary movements in my body.
And I knew 100% it wasn't me doing it.
I just knew that it was something, I don't know, something, I felt like something other than, you know, doing something.
Again, it's really hard to explain, but like my chest would kind of I had a panic attack once, and I shook from that, and that was really bad, but it wasn't like that.
It was very peaceful.
I was feeling just love, pure love, and it was like electricity going through my body.
And again, I'm saying all these things and I make fun of leftists for using emotional language, but that's all I can use to really describe this stuff is just, you know, it felt, I felt these things.
So anyway, so, you know, I had this, I was just having this experience.
I had, I just, I didn't know what to do with it other than I just believed that it was God doing something.
And I felt from that moment on, I had a very profound, you Very loved by him.
I felt a deep desire to, you know, read the Bible more, pursue God, and, you know, I would go to some of those meetings more.
Eventually I quit going there because certain things they believed, I kind of was like, I don't really believe that anymore.
But I would still have these experiences.
So that's one experience that I've had.
I didn't mention this too, but the next day after that crazy shaking experience, I came back and I started I asked for people and, you know, it was the same thing.
I stood up front, had people pray for me, asked them to pray for me so that I would speak in tongues.
And again, I was never raised with this stuff.
My dad's dad was a Pentecostal preacher, but I was raised predominantly just evangelical Christian, which is not very charismatic, not very, you know, speaking in tongues, all that stuff.
So I wasn't raised with it, but I always had believed in it and I had thought, oh, it'd be cool to experience that.
So anyway, somebody prayed for me.
I just opened my mouth and I started saying a lot of weird stuff.
I could even do it on this radio thing.
I mean, I don't care.
But it's just this weird—I just started just saying a bunch of weird stuff.
And it felt like gibberish, but I don't know.
But it was just really cool.
And again, I felt a deep connection to God.
Do you want to—I mean, you made the offer.
I've never heard speaking in tongues other than a few videos in passing on YouTube.
You said you can do it sort of at any time?
Yeah, no, I can do it.
Give me 20 seconds of speaking in tongues if you could.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's just, I don't know.
A tiny bit more, tiny bit more.
That was cool. This is going to be on YouTube, right?
Yeah. Okay.
Just don't summon anything sinister in my studio.
That's all I'm asking, man.
Don't give me any pentagrams.
Okay. I know.
It sounds weird. I know.
Okay.
Yeah.
Isn't that weird?
Right. .
I'm glad the word Candyman didn't come up three times.
All right. All right.
Anyway, so I've experienced a lot of weird stuff like that.
But... Again, with my spiritual experiences stuff, like I said, it gives my life meaning.
I feel like I have a strong connection to it, to my roots of Christianity and stuff like that.
I didn't mention this, but interestingly enough, I actually, like a year or two ago, started to really question my faith, and I actually became kind of a borderline Atheists kind of just...
I started to listen to the arguments against God and it started to make logical sense to me.
But there was still that part of me that was fighting it because I'm like, I still hold this dear to me.
It is a positive influence in my life.
I'm not like a part of a cult or anything like that.
I mean, you know, I don't know.
That kind of stuff does sound cultish, I'm sure.
But again, I'm not part of any group like that.
Yeah, and then I always...
I listen to you all the time.
I love your arguments against, like I said, leftists, and I love just your take on philosophy.
And I've heard you talk about Christianity, and it actually helped me kind of go, when I was going through my phase where I was really questioning my faith, it kind of helped me realize how beneficial the faith was to me.
Just listening to some of your stuff about Christianity, and then also other things.
But anyway, yeah, so I feel like I've talked a lot, but yeah.
Well... There's two responses within me, Thomas, to what it is that you're saying.
And I'm just going to get past the first one, so it makes sense.
So the philosophy guy within me, or the philosopher, philosophical thinker within me, says that if you say that a certain portion of your beliefs are unreasonable, and you label them or identify them as unreasonable, that's actually not that unreasonable.
Now, if you were to say that these unreasonable beliefs are reasonable, then we would have a different situation, right?
Yeah. Does that make sense?
No, that really does, yeah.
Right. So, are you unreasonable to hold contradictory positions?
No. If you identify your positions as A, reasonable, and B, unreasonable, well, this has been the habit of Christians and many theologians to say there is the realm of the census, there is the realm of reason, there is the realm of science, there is the realm of empiricism, and then there is the realm of faith.
And the belief in God exists in the realm of faith, it exists in the realm of belief, it exists in the realm of immaterial, Irrational, which doesn't mean crazy, it just means like they're not subject to rational examination.
You can't hook up an MRI and see God's footprints in your soul.
And the belief in God remains in the realm of faith.
Now, from a philosophical standpoint, I have some challenges with that, but it's much more rational than to say I can prove the existence of God.
Saying, here is a belief I have where reason does not apply, is to me much more rational than saying, here is a belief I have in God that is rational and empirical.
So, also saying to me or to other people, saying, I have this belief in God, it is not rational, it is not reasonable, but it is enormously beneficial to me.
That also is more rational than saying, God exists, God is real, God is true, and I'm going to prove it.
So, if you have this divide...
But philosophically, I don't have much to say about the faith aspect, because the faith aspect is not making any philosophical claims.
Because only if you make a claim that somewhere within the realm of reality can philosophy enormously examine what it is that you're doing.
Now, the moment you say, God exists, the moment you say, I believe in God because of X, Y, and Z, or whatever it is, if it's simply a willed perspective that is separated from any kind of rationality or empiricism...
Philosophy may say that is not a good methodology for belief, and I would agree with that.
But you're not making any philosophical claims, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, that does.
And I understand that.
It's just...
I don't know. I... I don't know.
Like I said, I went through a phase where I almost became obsessed with making sure that everything that I believed was correct, you know?
And that's kind of what brought me down that path.
But here's the thing, right?
The challenge, as you know, Thomas, Wait, your name is because you said you're not a doubting Thomas.
That's kind of funny. It just struck me.
Yeah, that was why it hit me, but anyway.
But you need to believe that, but the funny thing is you were actually a doubting Thomas at the time when the priest said you weren't a doubting Thomas, but anyway.
But you, in order to gain these benefits that you have emotionally or spiritually, you need to believe that God exists, right?
I would say so, yes, because without it, just emotionally it was difficult.
I kind of got over it for a bit, but just, I don't know, it made me feel very empty.
Like, you know, I would make fun, not make fun, I would hear people talk about the God-shaped hole in your heart, and then I would hear atheists on YouTube like, oh, that's a stupid argument.
But I actually felt it, and I genuinely felt like that Quote-unquote, God-shaped hole.
I felt empty. You know, without...
I know what that is.
I know what that is. Right.
Yeah, yeah. And of course, it's not proving anything empirically, but it's something I'm feeling.
And I just, for my benefit, I made the decision.
And again, this was...
I've been going through, you know, phases where I was trying to, you know, figure it out, basically became a borderline atheist.
But I got to a point, I was like at a crossroads.
And on one side of crossroads, it was, you know, go back to the way I was before as a Christian, full-blown.
My heart wanted to go down that road, but my mind was saying, okay, but that's not the rational decision.
You know, you've listened to all this evidence to contradict, blah, blah, blah.
And on the other road, full-blown atheist, not believing in God or anything, my heart did not want to go down that road just because it felt empty.
But my mind was saying, but this makes the most sense.
So I felt like I was at that crossroad, but then...
And eventually, I knew I had to make a decision.
So I just decided that I would attempt to go down the Christian route because it was most beneficial to me.
And I would just try to figure out the, you know, rationale issue as I went.
And I mean, I have, for the most part, I mean, I feel better with my decision.
I feel like it was the right decision.
And I don't really struggle with my thinking as much.
And maybe it's cognitive dissonance, I don't know.
But I just, I feel more at ease with that.
Sorry, that was kind of a long one.
That's fine. And I was thinking, and just if you can let me have a little bit of a chat here.
I was thinking today, after I read your question, and I was thinking, okay, so why was it for me that I stopped believing?
I stopped acting on the basis of Christianity even before I had the abstract arguments.
Atheism, The Case Against God, was a big book that the same guy who introduced me to Objectivism lent to me.
And it's a well-argued book.
It's an important book to read.
But I was thinking, well, why did unbelief, so to speak, why did faithlessness, why did it land on such fertile soil in me?
I can say, well, you know, I had this passionate belief, but I valued reason even more.
Like, that's not, but that's not what happened.
That's not what happened. And I was thinking, well, why?
Why did I let go of God before I had reason to?
And I understand the God-shaped hole in your heart.
I don't think...
That is not an intellectual argument.
But who cares?
The hole in your heart is saying...
That without God we have no values.
Without God we are thrown down the well of evolution to mere mammalian status.
We are scraped of our greatness down to the bare forked animal that Lear talks about, to the mere mortal flesh.
We go from souls to meat.
And that feels a hell of a lot.
Like a very significant downgrade.
So the question for me was, why did I not believe before I had reason to not believe?
Because the whole shape God in my heart has three letters on it.
U, P, B. Universally preferable behavior.
How on earth can I have goodness without God?
It's only one letter that looks like a zero.
The difference between good and God.
But it's a pretty damn important bagel.
It's a pretty damn important goose egg to work with.
Why? And I think the two answers for me...
Were pain and loss.
I will most likely go to my grave with the secrets of some of the things that happened in my childhood.
It is very hard to go through a childhood like that and believe in a loving God that allows such things to occur.
Now, you could say, yes, well, God gives us free will and so on, but he didn't give me free will to be born into that.
And it is very hard to think of a God who knows all, who knew what my life was going to be like, yet still suffered me to be born into that environment.
But Even if the personal pain of a satanic household was something that could be understood or explainable in a theological context in some manner, I was, as a child, surrounded by Christians.
I was taken to church.
I was in boarding school.
I was taught, as I mentioned, I was in the school choir.
I raised a joyful Nice.
My mother was not particularly religious, or my mother was not religious, but I definitely had extended family members who were, and when I would go and visit them sometimes for extended periods of time, I would stay there and we would go to church.
And I... Actually kind of liked it.
You know, there's that, I guess it's kind of a cliche of the kid in the itchy three-piece suit who just wants to go out and tear off his collar, go out and play.
I liked it because, as you can imagine, I was a...
Linguistically gifted child.
And I liked sitting in the pews.
I loved the singing. Of course, I've always loved singing.
And I loved sitting in the pews, and I loved the words rolling like slow surf over my brain, these wonderful ponderous syllables of half-understood words.
I pieced together words like an archaeologist with an ancient statue shattered to the four winds.
I pieced together Words, I pieced together identity, and there was a depth in that conversation, in listening to the priest.
There was a depth to that, that until I really became individuated through therapy and philosophy, I found no way to replicate, no way at all.
And I lived at home in hell.
I was surrounded by In church, by heavenly words.
And there was no connection between the two at all.
Nobody asked why I was quiet.
Nobody asked why I was silent.
Nobody asked why I was sad.
Nobody asked me why sometimes I was giddy and manic in an attempt to overcompensate for what was going on at home.
Nobody asked me how I was doing.
Without a father, with the mother that I had, whose nature and character everyone knew.
Nobody asked.
Nobody intervened.
Nobody did anything.
And I certainly had no benevolent strength flowing like a spiritual waterfall down from the heavens into my Hardening and deep-hooked heart.
There was no sustenance for the hungry, no water for the thirsty, no rest for the weary.
No rest for the weary.
And this combination of no salvation for being born into a hell No tender hand from God or Jesus reaching down to help a child lost in a dark and nasty wood.
And combined with the priest who wished only to speak the words of God.
I remember so clearly the first time that I heard The parable of the Good Samaritan.
That a man saw another man bleeding in a ditch who'd been beaten up, and he had to stop and go and help that wounded person.
And sometimes, when adults were around and they winked at me, I would imagine that they would produce a coin for me to go and buy something.
A sweet, as they called it in England, a piece of candy or chocolate.
Or what I love to model airplane, if it was enough coins.
I remember this parable of the Good Samaritan, the story rolling back, and you know, I would close my eyes and the story would come to life in me, like I was a tiny theater of infinite space.
And I would see the fact that the mud in one eyebrow on the wounded man by the road went in a different direction than the mud.
That's the detail, the mud in the other eyebrow.
That's the detail of my imagination has always been extraordinary.
For me, anyway. I'm sure a lot of people have it, but my imagination is a half penny away from lucid dreaming.
And because it became so real to me, I mean, I absorbed that.
I took that in, and I tried to help people as I went forward, as I have tried to help people now through my life.
Some of what I do is founded on that very absorption of the story of the Good Samaritan, that if you see wounded people by the side of the road, you damn well stop and help them.
You do not pass by.
And a lot of what I have been doing in the public sphere, a lot of these kinds of conversations, are because I cannot see the blood in the ditch by the side of the road and whistle and walk.
I can't. Because I know what it's like To be left behind, I know what it's like to have people worry more about how their tie is sitting on their shirt, whether it's hiding all the right buttons rather than a soul in great peril in a tiny body right next to them.
And I will not, while I have strength in me, pass by those in need.
Without offering as much help as I can.
Whether it is an individual or a nation or a civilization itself.
No blood in the ditch in my rear view.
I won't have it. I won't have it.
But I think why the seeds of the soul fell on such stony ground within me, Thomas, was because I was raised by a devil.
I was surrounded by people who called themselves angels and did nothing.
And for me, I think the connections began to really grow within my heart that God was not enough.
God was not enough to make man good.
I also remember, at six years old, I was reading some history.
I said to my mom, who started World War I? She said, the Germans.
I said, how long did it last?
She said, five years.
I said, who started World War II? She said, the Germans.
I said, how long did it last?
Five years. I know five, six, four, five, you understand.
And I remember thinking, that, that cannot be a coincidence.
And I said, did everyone go to church?
Mom, when you were a girl, did everyone go to church when you were little?
She said, oh yeah. And on my Father's side, my relatives, when I was there, I said, did everyone go to church when you were little?
I said, oh yeah. And I knew that these two families had fought each other across Europe.
My uncle was on the raid from my father's side that killed my mother's mother on my mother's side in Dresden, 1944.
And I remember thinking, okay, so all of these Christian countries where everyone went to church slaughtered each other by the tens of millions.
Virtually giving the entire Western world the first Darwin Award in human history.
This cannot be the best that we can do.
This cannot be the best that we can do.
When I read about the Holocaust and when I read about the tortures that occurred in the Far East, in the war between America and Australia and other countries and Japan, The testing of the poison gases on the Australian prisoners, the torture, the suicide, the kamikaze bombers, the seppuku self-slaughter of those who had been disgraced.
Ah, but you see, Japan was a very religious country.
And I thought, this cannot be the best that we do.
This cannot be the best that we can do.
This Cannot be the best that we can hope for.
To maybe go one generation, one generation without some giant fucking disaster.
Can we just have one generation?
I, myself, have been lucky enough to have reached the ripe age of 50 without being drafted.
Praise whatever.
But I may live to see the end of everything that was defended.
I may live to see the disintegration and dissolution of everything that took thousands of years and millions of lives to build could collapse into nihilistic, resentful nothingness, into hatred and violence and sharp glass against the straining neck A free speech.
Twist. Bleed.
Die. This is what I may live to see, and as a father it does not make me very happy.
And so, I believe that for me, the Christians weren't good enough for Christ.
The Christians that I grew up with put more thought and energy into pressing their Sunday best than in reaching out to the broken souls around them and caring for those bleeding in the ditch.
They cared more about Avoidance than connection.
See, the priest, it's funny, you know, I'm curious what people think.
This was my experience. It may have been different for others, but it was more than one church I went to.
But it was a funny thing, because the priest would be up there with his big sonorous voice and the organ, and he would roll out His sibilances and his resonances and these big giant words would go back and forth like big giant boulders rolling through the church.
And then people would dutifully sing and we would turn to this hymn and we would sing that and we would sit down nicely and more sonorous words.
And I wrote once in a novel that a priest had a most magnificent voice.
His God was his resonance.
And the funny thing was, And this also troubled me enormously.
The funny thing was that I would love these big words.
I would love this deep language.
I would love the fact that something important was being talked about.
When I was eight, Years old.
I was back in regular old government school.
And a friend of mine and I, we were split off.
I mean, my language abilities, my reading abilities were understood, and one guy and I were split off.
And he was very smart, and obviously I was very smart.
We were split off, and we were given our own area to study in.
That's where I first read Emil and the Detectives, which I read to my daughter.
It's a fun book. And I was with this boy, and the teacher came in with a big stack of books, and she said, all right, boys, what next?
And we would read our books, and we would write a report on the books and so on.
And I picked the biggest book because I wanted something meaty.
I wanted something deep.
I wanted something important.
And the teacher said, oh, great.
Okay, you guys can both read this book and give me a report next week.
Okay.
And my friend got really angry at me.
And he's like, man, why did you pick the biggest book?
Why? You could have picked a little book.
We could have read it today.
And we wouldn't have had to do anything for the whole week.
He got mad at me. And I thought, oh man.
It's like that line from Paradise Lost.
Where Satan says...
Everywhere I fly is hell.
I am myself.
Hell. Oh, I can leave my home and I can go to school and I can be put into the super advanced class of me and one other guy.
And when I want to sink my teeth, my mental teeth, into something meaty and important, I'm still going to get crapped on.
Man, you got a giant brain.
Can't you figure out how to be lazy and unproductive?
Even when I'm with the smartest guy in the school, he's still an idiot.
See, reading and learning is punishment, man.
And I said to him, do you go to church?
He said, yeah. But the words that went back and forth in the church, the big words, the deep meanings, the spiritual lessons, the moral exhortations, here's what the amazing thing was.
After the service, after the sermon, after the exhortations for deep and meaningful spiritual thoughts, after the prayers, we would gather, or if the weather was good, outside, outside the church.
Had a nice garden, stone paths, we would run around after a while.
And here's the funny thing. These Christians would come out of the church and there'd be this, well, that's done for a week now, isn't it?
That was the kind of feeling.
And it was like, okay, let's talk now about football.
Let's talk about the weather.
Let's talk about what the royals are doing.
Let's talk about the neighbors.
Let's talk about the price of eggs.
It was like they were like pearl divers who'd been held underwater by some big giant robot arm.
Depth, meaning, thought, spirit.
And as soon as it let them go, they come up, they vault out.
Now I can breathe the shallow air down there.
I was dying. Like they'd been released.
Of meaning. Of depth.
Of spirit. Of thought.
Of God. They've been released.
Woo! Clabber out of that cage.
Woo! It's kind of hot in there, don't you think?
I mean, not as hot as it is out here.
Look at those clouds. Do you think there's going to be a lot of...
And I thought, what?
You've just been given these great words of depth and meaning and power and spirit, and the first thing you can do is race to the shallowest, emptiest topics you can conceive of.
Like, they're the only air you can breathe.
It's not enough. It's not enough.
It's not enough to make us good.
And I think that's why when I first...
Well, that's why I fell away from it, because it wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough to make them good for me, to make them helpful to me.
It wasn't enough, oh, the Good Samaritan, that's a great story.
Here's a kid who's being viciously abused at home, but let's not ask him anything.
He's flesh and blood, but who cares?
Let's keep moving, keep moving, keep dodging.
We could ask him how he's doing, but what's really important...
It's how Crystal Palace, the football team, are doing.
That's what's important. We'll get to that kid at some point.
But first, the weather.
Not even the news.
The weather. Which in England is pretty boring.
Kind of cold and clammy.
And that's it. It wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough to make them good with regards to me.
What Jesus said was, Whatever you do to the least among you, so also do you do to me.
And I saw children getting hit and yelled at and pushed through bushes and sent to bed without dinner.
It didn't connect.
It wasn't enough. Now, of course, a lot of theologians will say, yes, of course, that's the point.
You know, God is perfect. Jesus is perfect.
We can't expect to be.
We can't get there. But can you take a couple of steps in the general direction, people?
Maybe, just maybe, a little bit.
Journey for a thousand miles and all that.
Single step, come on! No, run in the opposite direction.
To the weather channel of infinite small talk.
There wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough. It had a good run.
It had a pretty bad run, overall, in many ways.
And don't get me wrong.
Most atheists are worse.
But the Christians weren't good enough.
And they weren't failing in the grand things.
No one's saying, stand in front of state power like the Chinese hero in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square.
Nobody's saying that you have to invent the cure for cancer.
Nobody's saying that you have to tear down all corrupt institutions and rebuild them as glowing citadels of perfect virtue.
There's a silent, sad-eyed child right next to you.
You know, if mom's crazy, can you ask a question or two?
No! But these sausages are fabulous.
They weren't good enough, even by the little ethics of the everyday.
It did not give them the courage that they needed to make the world a better place.
If Christians had paid attention to the peaceful raising of children, We would not be in the place that we are, as a culture, as a society, as a hanging by a thread civilization.
And it was not enough.
It was not enough.
It did not produce the virtues that could have saved me.
It did not produce the virtues that could have saved those around me.
It did not produce the virtues that could have saved the country, the civilization.
It's not been enough.
And people say, well, the atheists, and I say this too, the atheists came along and tore everything down and gave nothing new, no other place for people to go.
And that's true. But that's not me.
I had the God-shaped hole in my heart.
I missed the meaning.
I missed the purpose.
I missed the clarity.
I missed the glorious certainty of what is good and what is evil.
That is what we must navigate by.
That is the compass by which we know where to go.
And all I could get from the Christians and I met a lot of them.
And I was in school with a lot of them and I was one for many years.
They did not Do what was necessary to keep civilization going.
Jesus, God, the Old Testament, the entire Ten Commandments in many ways to me boils down to thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not steal.
And the great test for Christian civilization came along in the First World War.
They ran out of gold. They jacked up the income taxes.
Thou shalt not steal, people.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not covet. And governments came along with income taxes and central banks.
And they did it at a time when the rest was racked.
Not in America.
It was 1913 for the Fed, but...
In Canada, of course, the income tax came in as a temporary measure in 1917.
It was just a couple of percentage point on the rich, and now it's easier for a rich man.
It is easier for a rich man to go through the...
Sorry, it is easier for a man to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
But that was the challenge.
Maybe it was a war extremity, but afterwards there was the challenge saying, well, thou shalt not steal.
That's God's commandment, and the income tax is certainly a form of theft.
Thou shalt have no false gods before me.
And so many end up worshipping the state and subjugating themselves to the state.
Christians in the past, I don't know where or what's happening now and in the future, but Christians in the past were not good enough.
I'm sorry. I'm just telling you my thoughts and experience.
I'm not saying this is all a syllogistically reasoned argument, but this was my experience.
Not good enough. Not enough.
And if that was the world that was, the world that was needed to change.
Twice in the span of 20 years, Christian nations across Europe engaged in the mass slaughter of each other.
Not good enough.
Not good enough. And there are Christians who have done wonderful things.
I do not doubt that for a moment.
In fact, in many ways, I would say that there are far more Christians in the world today, alive, doing better things than most atheists.
Don't even look up what Richard Dawkins is talking about with regards to Antifa and other feral leftist organizations.
Don't. Ah, you know what?
Look it up. The atheists also, not good enough.
The statists, not good enough.
The socialists, not good enough.
The communists, far from good enough.
The fascists, don't even get me started.
Not good enough.
Collectivism. Nationalism.
Classism. Racism.
Sexism. Nationalism.
Religion, all of it has been tried, and it has all fallen short of the moral excellence we damn well need now that the free market has delivered unto us the technology to destroy everything.
You see, as technology rises, our moral standards must rise.
A war in the 15th century had no chance of wiping out a civilization.
A war in the 20th century, the 21st century.
Does. As technology rises, our ethics must rise, and technology rose far above the practical ethics that religion could deliver to us.
We had more power.
With more power, we need more virtue.
We need more courage.
We cannot run 21st century weaponry with Middle Ages morality.
We can't do it. That way, Nothing but glowing shadows on the wall lie.
And so, philosophy.
Philosophy the one thing that has yet to be tried.
Philosophy Is to theology, as the free market is to socialism.
We've had the upgrade in one.
We need, we need, we require an upgrade in the other.
All right, I'm putting my earpiece back in.
That was the end of my speech, and I appreciate your patience.
No, that was, I don't know how I could top that, man.
That was good. That was really good.
It sounds like both of us have had different types of experiences within The realm of Christianity, my experience was positive and it sounds like yours was kind of a bit of both, but more on the negative side,
I guess. But I would just say, so it sounds like you lost your faith because of the experience that you had and then you kind of Started to kind of piece things together.
I got tired of people talking about being good, and I started to require some more actual, tangible virtue.
Yeah, no, I totally understand that for sure.
I mean, I grew up in church, and I know what you're talking about, the fake Christians that, you know, I think you explained it beautifully, how they'll go into church, and then they'll come back out, and then they'll start talking about football.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally relate to that, and it's unfortunate.
It really is.
No, it's not unfortunate.
Sorry to interrupt you as you tell me about my experience, Thomas.
It's not unfortunate. It's not unfortunate.
Unfortunate is something you bought new broke right away, right?
I mean, this is not a matter of unfortunate.
This was a matter of whatever the church was doing was not enough.
And people were listening to virtues without enacting those virtues.
That's not unfortunate.
Okay. They had free will.
They had a choice. They knew what the virtues were, whether they're going to enact them or not.
So what would you say that's just, you know, people, not people being people, but people making the wrong decisions?
What would you call that then, if not unfortunate?
It's a good question. It's easy for me to say what the wrong word is.
It's more of a challenge to say what the right word is.
And let me think about that for a moment.
I think... I think that people respond to incentives, and I think that the immediate incentives overwhelm the abstract incentives.
So the immediate incentives of our tribal desire for conformity and acceptance overwhelm the long-term and very abstract objectives of getting to heaven versus going to hell.
I mean, it's funny, the one thing with hell And heaven that is a challenge, is that in order to change your behavior to the point where you will go to heaven rather than go to hell, you have to have significant empathy with your future self, and that future self may be decades and decades away, right?
If you're a 20-year-old guy, you might live to 80 or 60 years, 90, 70 years, right?
And in order for heaven and hell to work, there must be such a projection forward of empathy to your future self.
To change behavior in the here and now, particularly when, of course, and I've been corrected on this, and I do apologize, just wanted to mention this, I did get pushback from Catholics.
I apologize for swallowing hook, line, and sinker some of the Protestant propaganda.
I was fed as a child, and I'm wrong for that.
It's wrong for me to assume those things.
But when I talked about there not being a Bible in the vernacular before Martin Luther, I'm wrong.
I'm wrong about that. Oh, that's good to know.
Yeah, we will put some notes to the show about that.
I unreservedly apologize.
That's absolutely my fault.
I should not assume these things, and I should look up contrary sources rather than stuff that I remembered from Sunday school.
So I apologize for that, and I really do appreciate people bringing up that correction.
It's a very, very important one.
And, of course, there was a lot of illiteracy at the time.
And for those who thought that I was saying that Martin Luther invented the printing press, no, I said he came along with the printing press, i.e.
at a similar kind of time in history, not that he had one tucked under each arm.
So I just wanted to fix that.
But here's the thing. If you're going to have enough empathy to your future self...
To change your behavior based upon an afterlife 70 years from now, it means that you have a lot of empathy already, which means you're less likely to do bad things.
People who don't have empathy for others to the point where they'll do bad things are probably not going to have much empathy for their future selves either.
So I think that's one of the challenges.
That's the one that sort of popped into my head.
There may be more, but I'll just put that one out as the first one that came to mind.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
I mean, when you break it down, and I have friends that Used to be Christians.
I went to school with them. They're atheists now.
And we have this discussion quite often about, you know, how, like, heaven and hell are, like— Heaven is the best possible thing ever, and then hell is the worst thing ever.
So it's kind of simplistic.
So I get that.
I think there's probably some people that just go to church just so that they get their get-out-of-hell free card or whatever.
Which won't work. This is the thing, right?
God knows if you're doing it for the right reason or not.
So that, oh, I'm going to fool God on this one, is like, I don't think...
I mean, if you think, slate of hands don't work with omniscience.
Exactly. Yeah.
No, for sure. I just, I don't know.
Do you think if you would have had a more positive experience, you would think differently now?
I mean, obviously, in certain instances, you probably would.
But with this type of thing, do you think if it were more positive, you would have maybe embraced the faith a little bit more and Or do you think that you still would have gone down the path of just really questioning?
I think that I would have continued to question, but I don't think that that questioning would have fallen on such fertile soil, if that makes sense.
In other words, I would have said, you know, there are empirical arguments to be made for the benefits of religion.
And if I had seen strong moral courage among the Christians, And, of course, among a lot of the atheists when I was a kid, they were sort of nihilists and very much hedonists and, you know, scowly, long-haired hippie dudes and so on.
I remember my mom would have them gather around the table and she would tell them stories of how I was ill a lot.
But anyway, which I wasn't. But I would have at least said, okay, there must be something going on here because of the strength and the power.
That the Christians had as far as virtue went, but it did not seem to be...
Well, it wasn't there.
And so I could either be a hypocrite or a hedonist.
I could either listen to virtues and not practice them, or not have virtues and practice titillating my dopamine receptors.
And when it comes to hypocrite or hedonist, I think I was sliding towards a second before philosophy restrained me.
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Well, I've taken a lot of your time.
I wanted to ask a question of yours, kind of relating to the things that I had experienced.
And, you know, I know you're not like a, you know, expert on religious studies or experiential stuff or whatever, or maybe you are, and I just don't know.
But so, you know how I described how I was experiencing, you know, like involuntary shaking and You know, feeling like the waves of God's love and all that.
And I mean, I don't—I'm assuming you haven't experienced something like that yourself, but I'm sure you've heard of something similar to that.
Do you, from your personal knowledge, do you— Would you know or have an idea of maybe what that was, at least from your perspective?
What do you think that that was?
I know it's tough to talk of another person's experience.
I don't know. I mean, I will certainly say that I've read of scientific experiments where certain parts of the brain have been stimulated electrically and people have very transcendental spiritual religious experiences down to like spinning cherubs and angels in the architecture as the song goes and so on.
So there is that capacity.
Of the mind to be able to do that.
I actually, I won't get into the whole story now because I've also taken up a lot of your time, Thomas, but I will say this, that I did actually experience what I call the God glow when I was in therapy and...
When I really began to question diversity, it's a strange combination, but that was a time when I really did feel that.
I don't want to get into too much detail about that because it's a lot of information for people to take in, but I really do appreciate the question.
I will move on to the next caller, but thank you, Thomas.
I appreciate that. You're welcome back anytime.
Thanks, Stefan. Alright, up next we have Brian.
Brian wrote in and said, To this day, the case remains unsolved.
The same goes for every day of my life since then.
For the past 20 years, I have felt like I have been wandering the earth aimlessly.
I have managed to do the normal things, like marriage, and subsequent divorce, and children, but I have lacked the drive and focus needed to achieve the goals I had once set for myself.
Throughout my adult life, I've always felt like no matter what I do, I can never seem to outrun my past.
It's like I can feel, and I believe in my heart that there is something great out there for me, and that hope alone, it has kept me motivated to keep going through all of the things that seem to get dumped on my plate on what seems like a daily basis.
How much truth is there to the idea that my past is controlling my future, and what thought processes can I use to overcome the things that have happened to me and shed those chains?
That's from Brian. Oh, hey Brian, how you doing?
Good, how are you? Anniversary's coming up, right?
Yeah, it's going to be a couple weeks, yep.
Do you mind telling me the story of what happened?
No, not at all, actually.
I was locked up.
I did six months in a place called Regional Treatment and Habilitation Center.
I'd been in some trouble.
My parents separated and divorced when I was in my early teens.
I was rebellious and that whole thing.
I got into some trouble.
I ended up in this treatment center.
I did the six-month program.
It took a lot of things that helped me I changed my perspective on life.
I got out September 4th of 1996.
On the 6th, I went to my probation officer and did the whole thing.
It was my first real day free.
It was a Friday.
Went there, did that. I came home and I found my mother dead from multiple gunshot wounds.
The police immediately assumed I did it.
They took me to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, questioned me for what felt like forever.
Turns out the police believe that maybe it was her boyfriend at the time that she was trying to cut off ties with.
But you had an alibi with your probation officer, right?
Right. But at that time, it was the day of.
It was at that moment...
I'm not quite sure why they never really just checked with my probation officer and said, you know, hey, he was here when this all happened.
They're losing precious time to find someone else and question them too, right?
Exactly, yeah. And I had a troubled past before then, even.
I was 20 years old.
I got locked up at first when I was 16.
Yeah. And basically, that all stemmed from my parents' divorce.
It was a very abusive relationship between the two of them, both emotionally.
Not really so much physically, but it reached those levels at some time.
And my mom got fed up with it at some point.
I was about 12, 13, and we moved to a small town.
In the country where the things I did where I came from weren't exactly the same here.
It caught on real quick and I got into a lot of trouble.
I was rebelling. I was in those teenage years when I felt like there was a lot of pressure on me.
Brian, can you hear me?
I'm so sorry to interrupt you, man.
That's okay. You've got to not spin with me.
Okay. Because you're giving this narrative, I was rebelling, I was rebelling.
But you've filled out the Adverse Childhood Experiences score with us, right?
Yeah, okay. And just so people understand why I'm bringing up what I'm bringing up at the time that I'm bringing it up.
And I know that you're being sincere in what you're saying, and this is a narrative, but here's the reality.
You were neglected. And that doesn't mean people didn't pay enough attention to you.
That means not enough food, maybe dirty clothes, no protection or medical treatment and so on.
Your parents divorced. You lived with an alcoholic or drug user.
You had a household member in prison.
You saw physical abuse towards your mom.
And your father would beat you, started with hands, graduated to a belt, And he made a paddle out of three yardsticks duct taped together and would beat you once a week.
Or sometimes more.
Have I mischaracterized anything?
Absolutely not. So, this is not that you were rebelling.
You were brutalized and abused, weren't you?
This is what happens when you beat your child with implements hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.
Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
Oh, I thought that was a cat.
Now I don't think it is. No, she's trying to figure out what I'm doing.
Does he want to come in? Oh, she was watching a movie.
She just happened to walk past the room.
Oh, okay. If she wants to come in, listen, I mean, I don't want to come between a father and his child.
If she wants to come in, it's fine with me.
Oh, she'll be okay.
All right. She's a good kid. All right.
And when you think, of course, of doing anything similar to your own child, as what your father did to you, I assume it's a repulsive thought.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Because rebelling says that it's you.
You're like Satan rebelling against God.
You're just a bad guy, right?
Like, you just did this incomprehensible rebellion.
But you were brutalized and abused, from what I can see.
That's how I've always felt.
But then I've had these...
Counselors and therapists that have told me that, you know, because I did break the law and I did these things.
But your father broke the law, didn't he?
I mean, don't tell me where it was all happening, but I know that in a lot of places, beating your child with an implement is illegal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, I... I don't know where to go with that, because in some parts of me feel like I may have deserved at least punishment in some sort, but I don't really feel like that way really helped me in any way other than to scar me.
You know, if that makes sense.
Well, what do you mean by punishment?
What did you deserve punishment for?
I was... When my parents separated, I chose sides.
I felt like I had lived with my mom.
We moved to where we did.
And I came with my mom because I kind of felt like I'm the oldest.
I have three younger siblings.
And I kind of felt like the protector.
I was at that age where...
I needed to protect my mother because it's my mom and my mom and I were very, very close throughout my whole life.
I'm going to have to stop you again.
Okay.
For how many years, Ryan, were you beaten with paddles by your father?
Sixth grade on up, pretty much.
Thank you.
Right, so about half a decade or so?
Yeah, yeah. At least that.
Yeah, so let's say once a week, five years, 50 weeks, maybe, you know, two weeks after Christmas, 250 times you got beaten with belts and paddles duct taped together by your father.
And what did your mother do about it for that half decade?
Not after when she left, but what did she do about it?
Did she throw herself in front of your father?
Did she physically prevent him?
Did she call the police and have him talked to?
I mean, what did she do? She didn't do any of those things.
I don't think she...
I never really...
Well, hang on.
Did she know it was happening?
It was pretty loud, I assume.
Well, see, at that time, they had already separated.
I was living with my father at that time.
Before that, I would get the hand on the ass thing.
But if you're close, why wouldn't you tell your mother about being beaten?
Well, We lived two hours away, so I decided I wanted to live with my father.
This was late 80s, early 90s, so there wasn't really access to a phone.
I kind of felt like...
You saw your mother, right?
At the time, I honestly kind of felt like I deserved it, as weird as that sounds.
I kind of felt like that was...
I broke a rule, I deserved punishment.
And that was kind of how I felt at the time.
I mean... What did your...
Sorry to interrupt, and I appreciate you sharing this, Brian, but what did your mother chose as the father of her children?
A violent man, right?
Yeah, I mean...
Come on, man. He's beating his child.
He's beating a child with belts and implements, right?
I don't want to speak badly about my father because in the last 20 years since mom has died, we've become very close.
He understands that what he did was not who he is.
There was a lot of things.
That were aggravating factors to the situation.
And I understand.
We've made a lot of amends, my father and I. Hang on, hang on.
So your father's situation should excuse him beating his child.
But you deserve it. No, not at all.
No, come on.
You were giving me excuses. You were giving me extenuating circumstances that somehow it wasn't him.
It was him. He may be different now, which I appreciate, but it certainly was him.
It wasn't like he was possessed or had strings on his hands.
Right, absolutely.
No, and I'm trying to liberate you from this idea, like if you can forgive your father for beating you, then it means that he can do egregious wrong and should be forgiven, right?
Which means that none of your beatings were ever justified.
Because surely an adult is more morally responsible than a child, right?
Yes, absolutely. And you were a child who was going through a very difficult situation and circumstance.
Your father was an adult, so if he should be forgiven for beating you, then there's nothing you could ever have done that would justify being beaten.
Do you understand? Because that would be to say, well, your father beating you should be forgiven, but your actions as a brutalized and abused child, you must be held morally responsible for those and punished.
I see where you're going. Yeah.
Who's more worthy of forgiveness, your father or yourself as a child?
Myself as a child, I mean, of course.
So don't talk to me about, I was rebellious and I did something to deserve it and whatever, right?
I'm asking you to be kinder to Little Brian than you are to current dad.
And as forgiving, more forgiving.
Because he leads less forgiveness.
Right. Does that make sense?
Yes, absolutely.
So tell me about the boyfriend, your mother's boyfriend in the 90s.
It was a guy she met.
They used to bowl together.
She got into bowling as an out to get away from us kids for a while on Friday nights.
She met this guy through bowling.
They were together for a couple years.
He kept trying to convince her that his ex-wife wanted to kill her, more or less.
So he talked her into buying a gun, a handgun.
And then there was some really weird things that he did in the weeks leading up to her actual murder.
And I'm kind of fuzzy on everything because I was incarcerated, so I don't really know what was going on.
But I do know that leading up to it, the week before she was actually killed, she had The window of her van was shot out when she was supposedly going over to see him.
And the sheriff's department wrote it off as being a stone thrown from the tire that somehow shattered the passenger side back window of her car.
And then about a week before that, I was home on a home pass.
And he demanded that she go down back when this was when payphones were around.
To go down to the baseball diamond, which is about a block and a half from our house, he demanded that she walk down there to use the payphone to call him.
And he specifically mentioned walking down there.
I remember hearing her say, like, why should I walk?
It was raining outside at the time.
And she's, like, arguing with him, but he demanded that she walk down there, but she drove down there instead.
But she had a phone in the house, obviously, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he was saying, come call me from a payphone?
Yeah, because he didn't like me for the most part.
I always felt like I was a lot smarter than he was.
He didn't seem like a real bright guy.
When I first met him, I was really aggressive back in those days.
I was just very defensive of my mother after seeing what I'd seen.
And so like any man who came around, I was just kind of just very protective of my mother.
And I wanted to know what his intentions were, who he was as a person.
And we just kind of rubbed each other the wrong way.
It was like he didn't want me to really know anything about him.
And he kept Trying to convince my mother that maybe when I came home from jail that she should just not let me stay there and I should just go wherever, a friend's house or whatever.
So we kind of had a conflict between the two of us to begin with.
And I think he wanted her to go down there so I couldn't hear the conversation that they were having.
That's how I felt at the time.
And what happened then? She drove down there instead.
She's like, fuck this, it's raining.
I mean, sorry about my language.
But she's like, you know, it's raining.
I'm driving down there.
I'm not going to go stand down in the rain and talk on a payphone because, you know, whatever.
And she drove down there and she waited for the call, waited for the call, and the call never came.
And I went back to the program and I got out six days later, and on the eighth day, she was dead.
It was just weird.
His daughter, which was weird that this happened this way, he had a daughter and a son that were in their teens.
I was 20.
My very best friend in this whole world happened to go to school with his kids.
He's a couple years younger than me.
He knew them intimately.
And come to find out that the day that the murder happened, their father, my mom's boyfriend, was at their house waiting for the garbage to get picked up.
Just standing outside, waiting for the garbage guy to show up.
And once the garbage was gone, he was gone.
Supposedly they went and looked through the garbage at the landfill, that kind of thing.
Didn't find anything.
He had some kind of receipt from the bank showing that he was 20 miles away within the scope of when the murder could have happened.
And that was really his only alibi.
But a few weeks later, I was on probation at the time.
I was at work, and my sister, this was back when pagers were the thing, you know, people didn't have cell phones.
My pager went off, like, probably ten times in a row, and it was my sister.
And she put the little 911 after it, you know, which was an emergency.
So I finally, I called her back, and I said, you know, what's going on here?
My mother's boyfriend was sitting, we lived in a trailer park at the time with my father, because he lived by himself.
He wasn't expecting to have four kids dropped on at the time.
Here, my mother's boyfriend was sitting a street away in the trailer park where he could see through and was watching our trailer where we were staying.
So I left.
I left work. I dropped everything.
And my cousin, who worked there at the same time, we left and we got there.
Sure enough, he was on the street right next to ours, just sitting in his car.
Not really sure what he was really doing in that area at the time, but as soon as he saw us, he took off.
There was a high-speed chase.
We ended up losing him on the way to where he lived.
Ultimately, there was a...
We never found him after that.
I got a probation violation for leaving the county.
And I went to my probation officer and she asked me what was going to happen if I would have caught him.
And I told her, you know, like, I honestly, at that time, you know, I told her, I said, I don't say I want to kill him.
I want to kill him because I really think that he did it.
And she told me, uh, you know, I really wish that you would tell me something else because I know you're going through a hard time and I don't want to lock you up right now.
I don't want to take you away from your family.
And I told her then, I think that that may be the best thing for me at this point.
And so I, I ended up going back to prison.
I did my little eight and a half months.
But, uh, That's getting farther away from the subject.
What about the boyfriend's ex-wife?
I met her, and she was my mother incarnate.
Her build, her characteristics, the way she talked, the way she walked.
I still talk to her to this day.
We're great friends.
It was just uncanny how much she was just like my mother.
And she told me that he had...
The reason that they separated and got divorced was because she was afraid he was going to murder her.
And the things that she told me about him was just...
And I could see it in my mother and his relationship.
And it was just incredible.
Like, the... You know, how it connected.
It blew my mind.
I don't know. Like I said, we're still friends to this day.
I even call her mom because she just reminds me so much of my own mother that it's just, I don't know.
It's kind of freaky. Did anyone talk to your mother about the potential danger she was in from this guy or whoever?
No, see, mom was very, she didn't really have a lot of what I'd call friends, I guess.
Our family is kind of fractured and fragmented and she was the, we'll call her a lone wolf of the family.
She just kind of, everybody had warned her in the past and she didn't listen to them.
Just about her life.
Probably my father and the way she was living and she just went and did her own thing.
She was very, how do I put this, strong-willed.
What she wanted was what she wanted and she was going to do.
Of course she was going to do it.
Maybe stubborn, but alright.
Stubborn, okay. Yeah, strong-willed has a pretty positive connotation.
Okay. Strong-willed people don't usually like to be ground down by physical violence or threats.
Right, okay. That was the word I was saying.
I assume that there's no particular activity on the case anymore.
No, there's...
It died out, I don't know, 15 years ago.
There's a lot of theories and, you know, coulda, woulda, shouldas.
I've got my own conspiracy theory about it, which probably isn't realistic.
Excuse me, I'm sorry.
I mean, I'm just... I'm sorry, Brian.
I mean, I just...
Your mother was with your father, who at the time was certainly violent.
Now, in your ACE, you had said that you had seen physical abuse towards female adults.
Was that towards your mother and who perpetrated it?
Yeah, it started off as a mutual argument between the two of them.
Your mom and your dad? Yeah.
A salt shaker was thrown through the plate glass window of the front of the house.
She started punching him.
He kind of grabbed her and shoved her.
She ended up hitting the corner of the wall.
I was standing there the whole time.
I was like 12, I think.
She ended up hitting the corner of the wall, and she got a cut on her head, and she was bleeding.
There was a lot of screaming.
They went to the hospital, and then a few months later, we moved.
I'm under no whatever that she started.
I mean, she started the physical aggression that night, anyhow.
I'm not real sure. I'd heard them yelling and screaming throughout a lot of my childhood, but I do know that night that she did go after him.
He was a lot bigger than her, so...
I have a lot of conflict about who should have done what then in hindsight.
Were there no non-violent guys around for your mom to date?
At that point, no, not really.
I mean, we lived miles away from where she knew anybody, so it was kind of...
She was a homemaker for years, so she kind of just stayed at home.
She got a job towards the end.
Sorry, but do you know if she dated any men other than the boyfriend we talked about and your dad?
No, she didn't date anybody else.
Oh, no, she did. There was another guy that she dated who was...
I guess the father of a girl I was seeing, because I thought it would be, you know, kind of, you know, whatever.
And that didn't work out.
They went out a couple times.
But other than that, no, nothing serious.
Do you know if that guy was violent?
No, not at all.
He was... I still know him to this day too, and he's a really, really nice guy.
Wait, wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
So, hang on.
Sorry. So your mother went out with a nice guy.
Yeah. But didn't want him.
Yeah. Your mother went out with two violent guys, one of whom might have killed her.
Yeah. Do you see where I'm going with this?
I see exactly where you're going with it.
Please tell me where I'm going with this, Brian, because it's more important you get there than me.
It's the decision making on her part where she, you know, I've seen it through my adult life.
It's not necessarily the bad boy thing.
Oh no, that's a pretty bad boy.
Yeah. Right, so she was sexually attracted to violent men.
Perhaps, yeah.
Tell me how that theory doesn't fit the facts.
I'm going with you on this.
And I bet you that's kind of frustrating for the nice guy.
Yeah, I'm sure it is.
So for your mother, dating was...
An extreme sport, so to speak, right?
She was kind of taking her life in her hands by following her romantic impulses towards violent men.
Yeah, I think it was more along the lines that maybe she was looking for...
I don't know if she knew that the guy that she was dating was a violent guy.
My ex-wife wants to murder you.
You know, there are some subtle red flags, Brian, and then there are red flags that aren't so subtle.
The father of my children is beating my son with implements taped together.
I may not have the greatest choice when it comes to men I want to sleep with.
There's an opportunity for self-knowledge that shows up there, right?
Yeah. Which she rejected.
People warned her. They said this is a bad idea.
Life was warning her. Life was telling her this was a bad idea.
Circumstances, environment, what people were saying, what was happening, all whispering, singing, shouting, yodeling into your mother's ear.
Danger. Bad idea.
Yeah. She did not listen.
Right? Yeah.
Stubborn. Well, or self-destructive.
You know, I went parachuting once in my life.
I went parachuting once in my life, Brian.
I had a fear of heights when I was younger.
I wanted to get over it, so I thought I'd just burn it out with cortisol like a flamethrower.
Me also, yeah.
Yeah, so I went, I won't give the whole story, but I went and trained on the Giant Fan and learned what to do.
And then do you know what they said?
They said, you can pack your own chute or you can pay us $10 to do it.
Now, what do you think I said? I think I'm going to pay you $10 to do that.
I can't think in my life of a better way to spend $10, in fact, right?
Can't possibly be a better way to spend $10 than having you pack my parachute rather than me, who's never done it before.
I'm surprised that's even an option.
Is that right? Yeah, that's what I remember.
Anyway. Now, if I had...
Decided to pack my own chute despite having no clue what I was doing, and I had fallen to my death.
After a certain amount of time had passed, what would people say?
You probably should have pointed up ten bucks.
Yeah, because people would have said, Steph, you've never gone parachuting before.
It's not a good idea to pack your own chute.
Come on, man, it's ten bucks.
No, I can do it!
Hey, man, I'll give you the $10.
I just don't want to see you make a perfectly morally comprehensible stain on the ground.
No, I'm going to do it.
People are like, man, even the guys teaching me said, hey, man, we have to offer you this.
We don't recommend it. Please don't do it.
You know, whatever, right?
And I'm like, no, I'm going to pack my...
And I don't know what I'm doing. We'll give you a $10 off coupon.
Or whatever, right? Like, if I'm just that stubborn.
Right? Yep.
Because what I'm concerned about, Brian, is your aimlessness.
Yeah, me too.
I'm actually kind of angry at your mother.
You know, they say, don't speak ill of the dead.
I've never subscribed to that at all.
Never seems to apply to Hitler.
I'm not saying your mom is Hitler. I just want to be clear.
Right. But, you know, particularly when you have a family, I love motorbikes.
I love dirt biking. You know, since I became a family man, am I doing it?
No, I'm not. I don't have the right to take those kinds of risks.
Because there are people who love me, people who depend on me, and people whose lives would be shattered were I to die.
Or be injured, or whatever, right?
So the cost-benefit, just love it, can't do it.
And that's true of a bunch of things that I used to like to do when I was younger.
I've never been a total daredevil, but I'm not unacquainted with the pleasures of speed.
I mean, acceleration.
I don't mean the drug. Anyway.
So... Your mother had children.
Your mother had an ex-husband.
Your mother had people around her who cared about her.
Did she really have the right to put her life in danger by continuing to date violent men or men whose ex-wives apparently wanted to murder her?
You know, when there's a bullet going through your windshield, that's kind of a hint that you're going in the wrong direction, right?
And that's the thing. That's when you leave town!
She was actually trying to leave him when this all went down.
That's the thing.
But that's the danger time, right?
He was using her for her money to put new tires on his car and And pay his rent and do this and do that.
And she had cut him off.
And she said, look, you know, I'm done with this.
No, I understand that. But that is the danger time, right?
That is when the woman is trying to leave or whenever you're trying to leave an abusive partner.
That's the dangerous time, right?
Yeah. And I think she felt empowered at the fact that she had a gun.
And that's the weird thing.
Was it her gun that was used to kill her or someone else's?
Yeah, it was her gun.
And when the police asked So that's kind of interesting to me, because if you're going to lie about some very important detail, that seems to me something kind of worth a big follow-up.
Yeah. Well, they're the police's excuses.
The grand jury doesn't feel there's enough evidence to indict him.
And that's what we've been left with for 20 years is the grand jury doesn't feel like there's enough evidence.
Right. That screams to me like, hey, you know, the guy's watching our house.
He lied to the police about him even knowing she had a gun, but yet he's there helping her buy the thing.
And then he's got this lame excuse for where he was that day when he was supposed to be at work, but yet he just happened to take the day off and be at the bank around the same time that this all went down.
No bank footage, I'm assuming.
Yeah.
Yeah, no. No, none of that.
He's got a receipt from an ATM, but no ATM footage.
Sounds great.
Right. I mean, to me, again, I'm no expert on this, Brian, but if you're going to leave somebody who's violent, you know, two o'clock in the morning, you bundle up and you just go.
Yeah. And that's what doesn't make sense of any of this.
I really think that, man, I know she liked the guy and whatever his virtues were.
But she knew he was bad, and she was trying to get away from him.
There's a lot of things she didn't tell me that kind of bother me to this day, because I have this hero complex where I feel like I could have done something, I could have stopped it, I could have done this, I could have done that.
It wasn't like her to not...
She confided in me some of these things.
She confided some big things about their relationship and whatnot.
But I keep blaming myself for not...
When I left that day, I went to my probation officer.
But afterwards, I went and I looked at a car.
I feel like I should have just gone home.
Well, look, I mean, I understand that kind of thinking.
I really do. But you understand that that's not rational, right?
I mean, it's understandable, but it's like Christopher Hitchens, right?
His mom committed suicide and he couldn't get through to her on the phone or didn't get through to her on the phone.
He's like, oh, I'll fight, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe if everyone had said, okay, this guy's violent, we've got a bullet through the window, we've got weird phone calls from phone booths in the middle of the night, we've got an ex-wife who reportedly wants to kill her and so on, let's just scoop her up and get her out of town and let's just make this a concerted effort to yank her out of the bear trap as quickly and as quietly as possible.
But she may not have, with the stubborn side, she may not have gone with that either.
Yeah, that's... Yeah, so if you're going to do dangerous things and you're not going to listen to people, sometimes you're going to roll the dice and they're going to come up snake eyes, right?
Yeah, sometimes. It doesn't justify any, I mean, you know, whoever kills her, absolutely evil, total murderer and so on, right?
But there is also the poking the bear aspect.
You know, it's one thing to be in a safe place and some random crazy guy shoots you from a window or something, right?
You know, like this Washington sniper of many years ago.
But it's another thing to date violent men and not date nice men.
There is agency in that.
you understand yeah I get it so what is it in your past I What is it in your past that you feel you can't outrun?
Is it the murder itself? Is it the feelings about the murder?
Is it the unresolved nature of the murder?
It's kind of another subject, I guess.
I mean, it's related. When this all happened, I was 20 years old.
After this happened and I came home, I started drinking really heavy.
I became an alcoholic for many, many years.
I lived in the bottom of the bottle.
I did a lot of different drugs.
Mostly marijuana and acid and mushrooms and that kind of thing.
Self-medicating. Self-medicating.
And I lived in this haze for years because it just numbed everything.
I didn't have to feel because I could numb it with alcohol.
And I also made a lot of bad decisions, of course.
Go figure.
But now you're married and you have a child, right?
I'm divorced now.
But I have a child with the woman that I'm with now.
Now, let me ask you this, Brian.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever hit your child?
No. No, no, no.
It sickens me to even think about it.
Do you think it's possible that you might have hit your child if your mother had lived?
Perhaps. Because you saw...
Look, I have no doubt that your mother had an absolutely terrible childhood.
Yes. You don't end up with that kind of predilection for violent men if you're raised peacefully, right?
Probably not.
So... Maybe...
You know, when stuff like this happens, it's always a challenge because nobody wants to say, think of all the great things.
You know, I mean, that's horrible, right?
Nobody wants to say that.
However, when bad things happen, there are good things you can get out of them.
It doesn't make the bad things good, but it means you're making as much good of the bad things as possible.
Does that make sense? Yes, sir.
My, like, when I got cancer, my courage regarding the show went up.
And I dealt with even more taboo topics and even more challenging topics.
It wasn't like getting cancer was great, but I'm damn well going to get the very best possible things I can out of it.
So... Coming across your mother's body that day, bleeding, bullet-ridden, God knows what expression on her face...
Sends you spiraling into drugs and alcohol, but it also may have given you an imprinting of the end result of the path to violence that has had you recoil from it as a father ever since.
Yeah. That that is the sword, in a sense, or the shield is a better way of putting it.
That is the shield that you can pull out of that tragedy.
That your mother's murder contributed to you being a better father.
God, I hope so.
Well, you were beaten black and blue, hundreds of times.
you've not once hit your child.
Yeah.
You've broken the conditioning.
Yeah.
Maybe that's the sacrifice that did it.
that maybe that's the blood that washed your hands clean.
That's a lot to take in.
And isn't that if your mother could see you, if your mother could speak, if your mother could process everything that's happened?
Wouldn't she want you to raise your child the opposite way that she was raised?
Because she said all the beatings, all of the terrible things that happened to me as a child left me stepping in bloody footprints to a hail of bullets at the end of things for me.
Do differently now, Brian.
Do the opposite. Learn from my lesson.
run, run in the opposite direction from where history dragged me.
Wow.
And you're doing it.
You're honoring her death with your far better life.
Your daughter, your child, Brian, will never become your mother.
You broke the cycle.
You got out.
Wow. Yeah.
I knew I called you for a reason.
Being killed by her abuser, her murder also killed your capacity for abuse, do you understand?
The bullets took two bodies on the ground there, your mother and you as an abuser.
Two people down there.
And that's why you're free of what your father did to you.
Wow.
That makes sense.
Thank you.
Her murderer, while evil, horrifying, had redemption in a way.
We never, ever want redemption to come in that form, but we can get redemption from that.
And I think, I think that, uh, I think you're, uh, I think you're right.
And it's just, uh, it's, uh, You know, life is fucked up.
And, you know, how they say everything happens for a reason.
And you don't really know that reason until...
And it's extreme.
I don't think everything happens for a reason, Brian, and I don't think that life is fucked up.
Your mother made very, very bad choices, and those choices cost her everything.
That's not just random.
You know, people who get random illnesses, that's random.
What happened to your mother, and please understand, I'm in no way blaming the victim here, but she does have some responsibility.
Life is not completely random in this particular instance.
She spent decades in the orbit of violent men, and who knows what happened, but this happened, and who knows how it happened, but this happened.
There's no answer, but she was rolling the dice every day.
And it is tragic, of course, that when she wants to get out, that's when the guillotine comes down.
But it's not unknown.
But here's my concern, Brian, is that your mother is 20 years in the ground.
21 years almost in the ground.
Her life, her choices, they're done.
They're deep in the rear view.
But for you to find some life in you, some more life in you, some more joy in you, some more satisfaction, some peace.
It seems like, to me, this is just my impression, Brian, this is not the truth, you understand, this is just my impression.
But Brian, it seems to me You dragging your mother around.
Or if she's in the grave, you have this zombie umbilical cord that only stretches so far.
That you can't leave the grave.
That you can't leave that day that you found her.
You can't leave that.
You can't escape. I can't even leave this town.
You are imprisoned in a cell of history with your dead mother.
And I am positive, if there were an afterlife, Brian, that she would say to you, I died, you don't have to.
I am stuck in the ground, you don't have to be.
I did not learn, you have.
You have chosen differently.
I don't want you to stay in the coffin with me.
I don't want you to stay in the room where I bled out.
I don't want you to To smell the bullets that took me down until the day you die.
I want you to be free of my history.
I lived my life.
I made my choices. Some of those choices were very bad and some of those choices might have got me killed.
That was on me. You were the child.
You were in jail and you were in jail partly because I chose a very violent man to be your father.
But you must be free of what I did and didn't do.
You must live your own life.
Do not join me in the endless autopsy table of examining yesteryear.
The body is cold.
The trail is cold. The murderer may be dead.
You must move on And gather as much life from my death as you can.
Because there's no point both of us going down.
If one of us goes down and I went down, you should rise up.
You should flee this tomb.
You should flee this grave. You should chew your way out of this coffin and live your life.
otherwise the murderer got two for the price of one.
Yeah.
I've, I've, you know, I've, I've been sober for five years and, um, I'm actually on probation right now because of some stupid shit that I had done because of my drinking.
I've been taking these classes for thinking for a change.
You're saying you're right on the same thing with them.
The last three or four years, things have gone from completely terrible to...
I feel like I'm doing well now.
I'm running a construction crew on my own.
I've got a pretty nice place.
I've got nice vehicles.
I feel better about myself.
I listen to you daily while I'm at work.
You're in my ear and I'm listening to the things that you say.
I kind of just needed to hear you say what you just said to me specifically to kind of reaffirm that I'm doing the right thing.
And I thank you, because I knew this.
I knew it inside of me.
But it just, it's not like I needed the confirmation, but I needed the confirmation.
You need to not be solitary in your certainty.
Right. You know, we're a social species.
You know, if I see something weird on the horizon, you and I are walking down the street, and I see something weird on the horizon, and I say, hey, Brian, do you see that?
I'm going to ask you! Right.
Right? So, you see something, you need to ask someone.
You need to get confirmation.
If we're solitary in our certainties, they never cement, right?
And I never understood where my anger towards her came from after all this happened.
I never understood why I was mad at her For this happening.
I kind of always felt like, you know, what you said.
I couldn't bring myself to be angry.
Not angry, but you know what I mean?
Like, just not understanding why she would...
Like, you know that these guys are not good for you.
What the fuck is wrong?
You know? I just...
I needed this.
I needed... I needed this call, and this is what has been missing with my recovery.
It feels like there has been an epiphany.
I feel like I'm not wrong.
I'm not wrong.
You're not wrong. And it's okay to be angry at the victims.
Who rolled the dice? This has been the internal conflict in my life.
This is it.
You focused on it.
You found it straight away.
Straight away.
It's incredible.
It's incredible.
My mom was my best friend.
She was my everything in life.
I could never understand why I had this inside of me where I doubted her.
Like, why?
Why? And it makes sense.
I'd heard from family and everything that there had been some troubled times when she was younger.
I didn't understand.
I understood from listening to you, and since I've been listening to you, I've been listening to you for about a year, and I've dabbled in philosophy and read a few things, and it got me in tune with that, and that's where it had led me, but I just needed that confirmation, more or less, that...
That I wasn't crazy.
That I can love my mother, but at the same time, question her thinking.
You need to question her thinking.
Because the only good that can come out of something like this, Brian, is a massive wanting to never do anything that ends up in that situation.
And you're not. Yeah.
And it broke the cycle.
And it's a horrible black sacrifice to break the cycle.
But it's the only way, I think, that you can pull an angel out of this devilry.
Yeah. And please understand, like, Brian, if I was in your situation, I don't have any big special wisdom here.
I just, I didn't see the body.
It wasn't my mom. Right?
If I'd seen the body and it would have been my mom and my history, I'd need you to tell me this.
You understand? And you'd be able to see it more clearly because you didn't see the body.
It would be me. Yeah.
Yeah. Can I tell you a ridiculous story?
You go right ahead. Okay.
All right. I'm going to tell this story.
Oh, look, it's Defpot Chatty time.
All right. It's got a sad ending, but I think that the message is going to resonate.
So tell me what you think when I'm done.
I just take my headset off if you don't mind.
So I'll, you know, it's just a little poking in my ear.
You're fine. So, shortly after I moved to Canada, I became friends with a guy.
He was very funny, very charming, just a little crazy.
And he was the child of a single mom.
And he had some pretty aggressive stuff going on with his mom.
We went through puberty together, which sounds, you know, kind of gay, but it wasn't.
It's just, you know, it's a big deal.
You know, I remember us both weighing ourselves.
I also remember that we would work on cleaning our faces because, you know, this new stuff had come out to clean your face to prevent you getting pimples.
And I just...
I spent a lot of time with his mom and with himself.
On my 13th birthday, nobody remembered at all, except for his mom who gave me five bucks, and I always remember that.
It was nice.
Thanks. Still remember.
The turnover between 1979 and 1980.
Oh, I remember us playing the Queen album The Game together.
And I remember I had a sleepover with him.
He and his mom went to bed like 10.30 or 11 o'clock, and I'm like staying awake with a little radio.
I was at a party at his house, and I was trying to impress two girls who were gymnasts.
And I said, hey, check this out.
I can do a handstand up against the wall.
And I tried to do it. I slipped on the floor because it was hardwood, and I guess somebody had spilled a drink, and I put my head through the wall.
Ooh! Not so impressive.
And boy, I felt just terrible having to go and say, oh, sorry, there's a hole in your wall.
And anyway, we used to dirt bike a lot.
Now, I had no money. I was working, but I had no money.
So all my money got hoovered into just paying the bills.
So we would go to garbage dumps and we would, you know, get those bikes with seven different colors and different wheels, you know, stuff that looked like Frankenbike or whatever, right?
And he actually, I don't know what his mom did.
She had some money. He had like a cool bike with shocks.
And I was just like, ee, ee, ee, wobbly wheels.
He had to hammer them out and stuff.
They barely even ran until you poured, you know, 14 Kuwaitis worth of oil into the ball bearings and stuff.
And we would go dirt biking a lot.
He, again, could be very funny.
And, you know, we built a great model train set together.
I used to sleep underneath it because there was no room in the room.
And... But yeah, he had a bit of a cold side for sure.
We would go dirt biking.
And one time I didn't have gloves.
I didn't have any gloves, no money, right?
And... We went dirt biking.
He had these big, giant hockey glove mitts, like oven mitts, but like with nuclear heaters inside.
And, you know, we'd be biking, my hands like frozen claws, right?
You know, the kind of thing where you feel you can make wind chimes from your fingers just by hitting them with a spoon.
And I would say, man, just let me boil your gloves for a few minutes just to warm up.
And he's like, why don't you have your gloves?
You know, it's just kind of cold, right?
Sometimes he could be that way.
And he was pretty bossy.
He was bossy. And I would keep the peace to some degree because I didn't find it too bad.
You know, it's like, okay, it's so important to you.
It's not that important to me. That's fine.
So one day, and this was the, this was it.
We are biking back.
We had gone biking in a park.
We were biking back. It's nighttime, and I'm biking along, and there's a big stone on the sidewalk, and I swerve to avoid it, and he almost crashes into me.
I don't know what his major malfunction was, but he went crazy.
Well, actually, no, I shouldn't say that.
He didn't go crazy right away. He's like, hey, man, don't cut me off.
He snapped at me, right?
And I'm like, mm-mm.
No, no, no. No, no, no, no.
I said, no, man.
You were tailgating. Now, I thought we'd have a tussle.
There may be some disagreement. Who cares, right?
But it was like a slow pin out of a grenade.
He just, right?
And blew up. You cut me off!
I said, no, I had to avoid.
You want to go back and see it?
There's a rock right there on the sidewalk.
You can still see it from where we are.
I had to, what, do you think I should drive over it?
I had to swerve to avoid it.
You cut me off. No, you were tailgating.
You were too close. Boom, it went from there.
And it was on that day, I believe it was a Friday, and I was 13 years old.
Lo and behold, I discovered the joys of not backing down.
And since then, I have only strengthened that resolve.
And so he just kind of went crazy, just more and more.
And so I'm like, dude, checking out.
I'm bugging out. So I bike.
And he was chasing me on his bike.
Now, I've got the, you know, one of the wheel comes from a goddamn tricycle from a three-year-old or something.
So he's blazing.
And I'm like, but I've got horror movie flea kind of going on for me.
And... There were stairs down, and then there was a door into my apartment building, and the door was locked, right?
You know, it's a security thing. So I actually biked down the stairs, which I'd never done before, and I don't know if I ever did since.
I biked down the stairs, which when you have no shocks, it's...
And he's yelling at me behind me, and he's coming up, and it's like a horror movie.
My hands are shaking. I'm trying to get the key in the door, like...
So I can get in and slam the door before he comes!
He's here! So I get in and throw my bike in.
He's pounding on the door and I go up to my apartment building and I can hear him yelling.
We're on like the fifth floor. I can hear him yelling.
He's throwing his bike around just having a complete meltdown.
Because he was tailgating.
Sorry, it's just the way it was.
Now, that's a not too important story.
But the reason why it ties in To your history a little bit, I think.
We... Well, we weren't friends after that.
I mean, no. Can't do it.
Sorry. I graduated to my Dungeons& Dragons friends and didn't really look back.
And like the next summer, he like called me up and he's like, hey, I think you still have my football.
I'm going to come by and get it.
And I'm like, yeah, I'll just leave it outside.
I'm going out. You can pick it up if you want.
But... And I did see him once or twice more And then I didn't really think about it much, you know, as those early friendships that have some sanity incompatibilities, they tend to drift past you.
But here's the thing, Brian, and this is why the story popped into my mind.
I don't know if this is true, but I think it's true.
A couple years later, After high school, after I was working up north, I came back down.
I'm riding on the bus somewhere.
I'm reading the newspaper.
And I came across a little story you This guy died.
He was dead. Shocking.
Shocking. And...
When I find out how he died, my mind went right back to that night when I was 13 and he was tailgating.
And the way he died was he was on a motorcycle and he crashed Into the back, I think it was a truck, he crashed into the back of a truck, truck went flying and died.
Now that was an amazing moment for me and a terrifying moment for me and it gave me a sense of the synchronicity of life and the fact how decisions can warp us many years into the future.
He destroyed a friendship that he really cared about because he refused to admit that he was tailgating.
Years later, he died from tailgating.
How much of his driving habits were determined by holding on to that moment?
I wasn't tailgating so I can get as close as I want!
I wish it had been different.
When you get older, you circle back almost against your will, it seems like.
Your history is like salmon going back to where they were spawned.
Your memory. But he made a bad decision and then he made another series of bad decisions and then he died.
And the only thing that I can do is leave a good fucking comfortable distance between me and the car ahead.
I ride a motorcycle too.
Carefully, I hope.
Very carefully.
I've got a cruiser and I cruise it.
Alright. I've always been told if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.
I've been trying for the last three or four years to change everything because everything before was not working.
It seems to be working now, now that I've changed everything.
Good. Listening to you and hearing what you had to say tonight was really...
It was the confidence booster that I needed to know that the things that I have been feeling, I'm not crazy.
I'm not a bad guy for feeling crazy.
The way that I feel.
I love my mother and I'm devastated still to this day because she's gone, but I always had this feeling that she had the choice.
She knew what the potential consequences of everything was.
She tried to get out of it, but maybe not getting in that situation in the first place is the best way to be.
That's how I try to live today.
I try to imagine the potential outcomes of decisions before I do it.
I might always go the most conservative way to avoid anything, but in my life, it seems like the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady seems to win the race.
I'm okay with that.
And you are providing your child the opposite of what your mother received.
And that is as noble.
Yes, sir. That is as noble a turnaround as is humanly possible.
And I admire and respect you bottomlessly, Brian, for doing that.
I thank you for your time tonight.
Thank you very much. Stay in touch and all the very best.
Yes, sir. Thank you everyone so much for calling in and for listening to this, the most important, I believe, conversation in the world.
Free Domain Radio. Please help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
You can follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
You can do some shopping at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
Don't forget to check out.
My interview, the one that came out today with Dinesh D'Souza, very enjoyable, and the recent Jordan Peterson one was also great as well.
Got some great, great interviews coming up that will, I think, really surprise you and delight you.
And last but not least, please thank you for your patience.
We are working as hard as we can to get The Art of the Argument out.
It will be out this month.
I strongly Believe and predict.
And I hope that you will pick up a copy and suggest it to your friends.
That way you won't have any.
Just kidding. I'm sure it'll make your conversations more productive if there's possibility of that happening.
