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Nov. 28, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:23:52
Freedomain Livestream! Spanking, Jokes, Censorship and Screen Time!
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What's your relationship?
You can let me know in the chat here. What's your relationship with, say, getting things wrong, with making mistakes?
It happens, right?
It happens, you know, I'm only human, right?
So it happens that...
mistakes from time to time.
Like, I remember when I wrote The Art of the Argument, there was some technical term that I did not use in the correct context.
It's a pretty colloquial book.
It's not an introduction to formal logic and so on, right?
And logicians have had hundreds, if not thousands of years to popularize their terms.
It's not really my fault that they haven't, right?
But valid and sound or whatever, I use sound in a somewhat colloquial fashion, it's a People are like, aha! I don't really care about that one so much, but when I went to go and see the movie Joker, what happened was, well, I made a mistake.
I was making notes, I suppose, about the movie, and I missed a 10-second clip that was really, really important.
I stood by my guns, and then people were telling me I was wrong.
I went to go see the movie again, made my correction, made my apologies, and so on.
And, you know, it kind of gets under my skin, right?
It bothers me when I make a mistake, right?
You know, again, you have to cut yourself some slack.
You know, I'm cruising up on 4,500 shows, so, you know, there's going to be a couple of errors here and there.
But it bothers me, right?
And I'll tell you something that's kind of interesting.
Brian Stelter, he's a CNN guy, right?
So, Brian Stelter... Is crabbing about Trump.
And he's crabbing about Trump and he's crabbing about Bill O'Reilly.
And that's kind of annoying and kind of important, I think, to mention with regards to just, you know, kind of getting things wrong, making mistakes, that kind of stuff, right?
Because what he's doing is he's complaining.
I'll read the tweet. So Brian Stelzer tweeted, it's November 26th, 2019, 6.42pm.
He wrote, how pro-Trump media backscratching works.
Trump gives an interview to Bill O'Reilly.
Then O'Reilly promotes it for a day and says his site's premium members will get first access.
So Trump gets a platform, O'Reilly gets relevance and a way to promote his subscription service.
Dun, dun, dun.
Yeah.
Of course, right?
I mean, the mainstream media treats Trump terribly and CNN has treated Trump terribly.
And therefore, Trump doesn't really want to go on CNN.
He'll go on Bill O'Reilly.
Makes sense to me. And the fact that there's a quid pro quo, that it's a mutually beneficial exchange of value and so on, like, it's kind of strange that he would be complaining about this business model, that if you treat people reasonably, they're more likely to want to chat with you, and you can then sell access to them through your show.
That's That kind of makes sense to me.
I mean, I've had kind of a policy of not ambushing people on my show.
Boy, it'd be nice if other people had that policy too, but not ambushing people on my show.
If I want to have a debate, I'll let the people know ahead of time that I'm going to come in guns blazing, but I don't sort of invite people on and then, aha, what about this and what about this, right?
So this is Brian Stelter complaining about this business model that Bill O'Reilly is working with.
So I tweeted and I said, here's how mainstream media works.
One, promote war.
Two, sell ads.
Three, wallow in blood money.
Because, you know, the reason I asked about your relationship to mistakes...
Yeah, I can make a mistake from time to time.
I'm sure there are many people on this right chat who think I've made a big mistake lately.
But I kind of have to follow my own conscience, my own knowledge.
But... I've never made a mistake like, oops, I started a war, or significantly contributed to starting a war.
I've been pushing back against the war narrative for as long as I've been a public figure, and even before that, though not as I've talked about in the past.
I'm sort of glad I wasn't a public figure back in 03.
But anyway, I've learned more since, and I've been resolutely anti-useless war ever since.
Because this is what happens, right?
If the media can...
Push people into a war, justify a war, and it is largely the media that sells the war.
Then people tune in, right?
We're fascinated by war.
We love to watch the rockets and all this kind of crap.
And so people tune in with more eyeballs.
You can sell more ads for more money.
And that's the profit, right?
That's the profit model. So it's just kind of funny that the media, who got so much wrong, I mean, we're talking Spanish-American Civil War.
We're talking First World War.
We're talking, well, causes of the Great Depression and all that.
But just regarding war, Second World War, Korean War, the war in Vietnam, First Gulf War, Second Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria now and so on, Libya.
We got so much wrong!
And they're like, yeah.
But the problem is, you see, that The business model of Trump going on O'Reilly is somehow bad or somehow wrong.
I just... I can't imagine.
Like, it bothers me when I get a little something wrong in a movie review.
It's not really... Nobody dies, right?
There's no... No white phosphorus is deployed out there in the desert.
No cities end up with a completely genetically compromised population because of God-forsaken weapons.
People don't get their limbs blown off.
People don't lose their hearing, their eyes...
Their lives. So yeah, if I get something a little wrong, it's a drag.
It bothers me. But can you imagine what it must be like to live with yourself if you get something wrong like, oh, for sure, Assad used chemical weapons against people in that town.
That's justifying bombs and Wars and all that.
Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction getting something wrong, where hundreds of thousands of people get killed.
That is, like, that's a serious error.
And, I mean, it bothers me when I get a little something wrong in a movie review.
I can't even imagine what it's like to have accidentally, or not accidentally, to have driven the propaganda that starts a war Can you imagine?
I couldn't live with... I don't even know how I would get out of bed if I started a war on false...
promoted a war on false pretenses.
I cannot imagine.
But mainstream media does it regularly all the time.
All right. Let's get some questions up here.
And let's see here.
Oh, there was a good question, which is, how do you praise your daughter?
Like, so there's this guy, he's a parent, and he says, how do I praise my daughter?
Because he says, do I tell her she's beautiful?
I mean, she's physically beautiful, I guess that's what he's talking about, right?
And that's a very interesting question.
I was just talking about this with my daughter.
We were exercising, and...
We were talking about praise, right?
So she and I just did a review of Frozen 2, which I hope you will check out.
I think it's very charming and actually quite deep.
And it's available on the channel.
And, of course, it's available on SoundCloud.
It's available at freedomain.com.
It's available at FDR Podcasts, which, of course, you should follow.
And listen, bye-bye. You might want to join my newsletter.
Like, if you go to freedomain.com, it'll be a little pop-up.
You might want to sign up to the newsletter because, you know...
The ground is shifting a little beneath our feet these days.
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If you can go to freedomain.com forward slash donate, help us out.
John and I are just mostly John working on the...
Hong Kong documentary, which is really good.
And, you know, there's costs involved in getting it all completed, and the music, and anyway.
So, yeah, please, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
I really, really do need your help.
I would really, really appreciate that.
So, we were talking, my daughter and I, about praise.
And I said, well, do you want to hear any of the comments from the video?
And she's like, no, not really.
You know, I like the shows.
I know we did a good show. I don't really care what the comments are and all that, which is, you know, kind of interesting.
And she had this kind of thing where, you know, you have this where you're a kid and you do a drawing and the adults are all like, oh, that's great!
You know, she's like, that's kind of, sometimes it's way too over the top and kids know that, right?
And so we were talking about how when...
You have babies and toddlers, you have to be just madly enthusiastic about what they do.
At least I think that's a reasonable approach, right?
When a kid is first learning how to turn over or stand up or walk and so on, or the first time they're out there catching balls or something like that, then, you know, you want to be enthusiastic.
You want to be positive about it all, right?
Because they can't really get it wrong.
Like, you can't learn how to walk incorrectly, if that makes sense.
You can't learn how to roll over incorrectly or whatever it is, right?
Or, you know, when a toddler is kind of bashing away at a xylophone or whatever, you don't say, hmm, it's a bit pitchy.
You know, let's twinkle, twinkle that little star one more time.
So when... And I think this is some of the difference between men and women, right?
That men are a bit more critical and women are a bit more enthusiastic because women are usually pointed at toddlerhood and men are usually pointed at kids who are older.
So if you do have, let's say, a physically beautiful daughter, I think she needs to know that, but she also needs to know a couple of other things about that, right?
It's really, really important. You don't want to tell her...
You don't want to lie to her, right?
So let's say she's physically beautiful, right?
So you say, yes, you're physically beautiful, and that's going to be some advantage to you in life, and it's going to be some disadvantage to you in life, right?
This is a really, really important thing to know every plus is a minus, every minus is a plus.
This is, you know, on the other hand kind of thing, right?
That's why, you know, people shouldn't...
This is something I think Dr.
Thomas Sowell talked about.
There's no point talking about solutions.
You can only talk about costs and benefits in a lot of things.
I don't mean like moral things, but in terms of, you know, people would like to be good-looking.
They would like to be, you know, ripped.
They would like to be wealthy and so on.
There's nothing wrong with these things, but...
There are pluses and minuses to all of them.
So with your daughter, if she's physically beautiful, I mean, you don't want to keep repeating it, but you want to say, listen, you have been given kind of a gift.
It's a little bit of a curse. And most people want it.
Like, you know, you look through the magazine and all the beautiful women and all that.
So, it will get you some advantage in life.
You know, good-looking people make more money.
Good-looking people get more dates often and so on, right?
So, there is...
It opens doors, right?
Being good-looking opens doors.
So, there's a real advantage to it, and that's the plus.
The minus is that you're going to have lots of guys who want to ask you out, right?
I mean, there was a woman on Twitter...
Who was talking about...
She's had stalkers in the past.
And I've known some women who've had stalkers and the women tend to be very physically attractive.
And the stalkers are like usually these Quasimodos who think that if they can capture the...
Beautiful girl, then it wipes all the ugliness out of their existence or history or whatever.
And so, yeah, there's pluses to it, and those are real pluses.
There are minuses to it, which are important.
And, you know, if you're physically beautiful, you have to be careful that people aren't into you just for your looks, right?
The guys don't want to just date you because of your looks, because you're arm candy, because you're a trophy and so on.
So, yeah, I mean, I think you want to talk to her about it.
It's not really a compliment to say that a beautiful girl Person is beautiful.
It's just a statement of fact, right?
I mean, it's a statement of fact.
It's not like they earned it, right?
Because the other thing too with kids, right?
You don't want to praise them for things that they have not earned.
You don't want to praise them for things that they have not earned because that gives them the sense that you don't have to earn things in order to have value, right?
And you generally do have to earn things You have to earn things to have value.
So I think that's really important too.
And to praise the effort and not the outcome is important to praise how hard that they're working rather than the particular outcome.
Because if you just praise the outcome, they'll start looking for shortcuts.
And, you know, generally in life, there are no shortcuts.
So, all right. Let me just see what...
We have four questions.
I'm sorry. I just wanted to get some questions.
Wow. I made a mistake ten years ago.
So someone picking wrong friends got stabbed twice and beaten so hard and nearly died.
Never will make the same mistake again.
Wow. That is pretty, pretty bad.
All right. No one cares what Stelter says.
You know, this funny thing, you know, where people say, well, no one cares.
It's like, you know that you're just talking about yourself, right?
All right. Why is it okay to joke about Jeffrey Epstein's global pedo-ring killing him, but not about an atrocity from almost 100 years ago?
Why is this okay?
Listen, I mean, people can say whatever they want.
They can make all of the tasteless and unpleasant jokes that they want.
And, you know, I'm no stranger to dark humor.
I kind of understand that, and I kind of get that.
But I would not be particularly okay with somebody making jokes about this global pedo-ring.
I mean, what Jeffrey Epstein did to these hundreds, if not more, girls was absolutely appalling.
He destroyed their lives in many ways.
Certainly they'll never be the same before he got his hooks into them.
He broke, for many of them, I think, their capacity to bond, their sense of security, their sense of self-trust, their sense of living in a reasonable and benevolent universe.
I mean, the guy was a monster who just chewed through girl after girl and destroyed their lives for a long time.
And, you know, the courage that they have in coming forward is incredible and it's wonderful.
So, yeah, I don't think that it's particularly funny.
And... Of course, people can...
You know, it's funny, too.
Like, when I say I don't like particular jokes, I don't...
I don't understand what people hear out of that.
You know? Yeah, I don't like some jokes.
You know? I mean, for a lot of people...
Listen, for a lot of people out here in North America...
Like...
You usually didn't have...
Say, female family members bombed to a living crisp, which happened in Europe pretty much from end to end for five or more years, right?
So, if you want to go there and make jokes about the bombing in Dresden, it's like, I think that's kind of tasteless, right?
Now, maybe it's all very distant to you, and maybe it's all very foreign to you, and maybe it's ha-ha for you, right?
But, you know, that was my grandmother who got blown to bits, right?
And as I've said before, the only thing that my mother found of my grandmother, my father and...
Sorry, my grandfather and my mother left Dresden the night of the bombing, the firebombing, the thousand plane raid.
And my grandmother was working with some important person, I can't remember who, and she decided to stay because, of course, Dresden was considered to be relatively safe because it was full of art treasures, it was full of books, it was full of culture, and it was a civilian place.
Place, as far as I remember, no particular military installations, at least that I know of, or can remember.
And so it was considered to be a relatively safe city to be in, in Germany during the Second World War.
And my mother had a fight with her mother, which is one of these just terrible things that happen in life.
This is why it's important to resolve things with the people you care about.
My mother had a fight with her mother because she wanted her mother to come with them.
And her mother felt it was safe and felt that she had a responsibility to do whatever it was.
It was not a war effort thing and she didn't work for Nazis or anything.
But my grandmother had a sense of duty and obligation and she stayed.
And the last words between my mother and her mother were hostile and hateful and accusatory and angry.
And then, of course, my mother and her father sat outside the city, watching the endless rains of bombs down on the city, and the sirens, the anti-aircraft fire, the falling planes, the firestorm, because when you get a large enough fire burning, it sucks the oxygen in, which creates a wind which further fuels the fire, and it became literal hell on earth.
And she watched the funeral pyre of her own mother in the war.
And, of course, a lot of...
I mean, she comes from a family of intellectuals and writers and poets and so on.
And they were...
Almost all...
I think all of them were banned from publishing or from writing during the Nazi regime.
So... You know, if you have this kind of family history, if you grow up with this kind of stuff in the house, and of course the irony is that one of my uncles on my father's side was flying one of the planes that was dropping the bombs on...
The woman on my mother's side.
And this is Europe, man.
It's messed up. It's messed up.
And Europe never really recovered from the Second World War, just as it never really recovered from the First World War.
So if you have, like, kind of cynical, youthful, emotional, callous distance from all of this stuff, it doesn't mean that you're a bad human being.
It doesn't mean that you're a terrible person.
It's not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
It's nothing that I would ban.
It's nothing that I would censor.
But just as you're allowed to make jokes about massive suffering, other people who have a bit more visceral connection to that suffering are allowed to not like that.
This is a weird thing.
I can say I don't like something.
I'm not saying it should be censored.
I'm just saying I don't like it.
And people say, well, you can't say that.
It's like, well, then you're the censor.
like you're the one who's censoring things.
So, when you're young, and listen, I was young, I get it. I made my crass jokes.
I made my callous jokes.
And it's not the end of the world.
It's, you know, people survive and life goes on.
But if you've gone through the suffering, maybe there's some kind of humor that can help you with it.
I've never found any humor.
In that stuff.
If you haven't gone through the suffering, I'm not sure...
I'm not sure that you've really earned the right to make jokes about something that you haven't gone through.
I mean, I'm just...
Again, you can do whatever you want.
Free speech. I'm a free speech absolutist.
You can do whatever you want.
But... The war...
The war...
Really messed up my family.
Really, really messed up my family.
It really messed up my mother.
What she went through in the war, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
There were no standards of morality in the war.
There were brutal Russian soldiers who had been eviscerated by the millions, by the Germans, who were coming in to get revenge, from a fairly brutal and undignified cultural class, after they, of course, themselves had been brutalized by decades of communism.
And my mother was a very...
She was a very, very pretty girl, very pretty woman.
I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out all of the things that probably happened.
I'll never know, for sure.
But I do remember my mother telling me that she had to flirt pretty heavily.
And she would have been less than ten at this point.
She would have been maybe eight.
She had to flirt pretty heavily with the Russian tank commander so that he wouldn't destroy the village that they were hiding in.
So, it was a dark, dark time, man.
And the war that messed up my family, the war that messed up my mother, well, she took it out on me.
Which sounds like an excuse.
It's not. Causality is not an excuse.
You know, if you say, oh, so-and-so died from lung cancer because he smoked, you're not justifying over saying it was a good thing.
You're simply describing causality.
And so, when you're young and your brain is still maturing, right?
Men, it's into their mid-twenties, right?
So, it's not like I just hate people who make these jokes or anything.
It's just that's going on over there and there's this history and this reality that's going on over here.
And... I don't know if it's kind of like a callous tough guy thing.
It's hard to say. I mean, it's hard to say.
But for people who've been really wounded, physically, psychologically, spiritually, by virtually bottomless horrors, I don't know.
I mean, dark comedy, I get it.
I understand it. And people should be free to make the jokes that they want.
But for those of us who have a visceral history and a visceral connection, it's a different view.
It's just a different view.
Alright. So, let's see here.
What else do we have?
If you have questions, that's...
That's fine if you're just going to complain about stuff.
I mean, it doesn't interest me.
Do you think the leaders of the Hong Kong protesters might be working for the globalists?
I would say that I don't have any evidence of that and I would really, really be surprised about all of that.
Do you think Alberta should separate?
Do I think Alberta should separate?
I'm not a big fan of this Federalist model.
I mean, listen, I'm not a big fan of government at all.
It's all a violation of the non-aggression principle and all of that.
The more power that gets concentrated in the federal government, this is true for America, Canada, other places, the more power that gets concentrated in the federal government, the less experimentation there is at the state's level, right?
This is why a lot of libertarians, a lot of small government people are into states' rights, and why states' rights is considered to be anathema to people who want big government.
Because when you have...
States making the rules, then you have, in America, 50-plus experimentations on different levels of taxation, on different levels of regulation, on different levels of...
Old age pension offerings and welfare, and you get this competition, which is happening to some degree in the States, but so much power kind of flows uphill, right?
Because the people who want power over you, they want to be as far removed from you as humanly possible, and that's why they all sort of swarm up to the stratosphere of the federal government.
And so, when the federal government gains too much power, how do you solve that?
Well... Power is what's called apudli stiki, right?
I mean, it's like what I said about socialism, that, you know, people can vote you into it, but you've really got to fight your way out of it.
And so with Alberta, they're not going to get a good deal...
From the federal government.
They're just not. And if the only way that they can get a good deal is leverage, right, is leverage, then yeah, I mean, I think that they should definitely explore their options and see what possibilities there are for them as a whole.
But I cannot see them getting any kind of good deal from the federal government anytime soon.
What about California? When one party dominates politically, even on the state level, things go to crap.
Yes, it's not perfect.
Because, of course, this microcosms itself, right?
So in California, you have the state legislature, and then you have the cities, you have the counties, like various subdivisions, but the state legislature tends to be dominant.
So that is a challenge for sure.
Steph, you should learn about philosophy.
Well, you know, to be fair, I still am.
I mean, the reason I'm still doing it, it's been 15 years almost.
The reason I'm still doing it is there's always something new to learn.
There's always some new approach to take.
There's always new data to process.
So I am very, very happy to keep pursuing it.
And let's see here.
Yeah, it looks to be mostly trolls today.
Yeah, well, it happens.
It happens. So, let's see here if there's anything else.
Oh, yeah, okay, that's a good one.
Oh, yeah, I just saw your video, What Men Most Want to Say to Women.
Pretty damn interesting. Thumbs up for it.
Well, I appreciate that.
I was very, very pleased to do that speech, and it was a great deal of fun.
Is there a non-libertarian argument against spanking?
Yeah, I mean, there are definitely non-libertarian arguments against spanking.
So the libertarian argument, and I've just published this again recently, it was on a message board that was A free domain message board from years and years ago, but we had to shut it down because people kept doing DDOS attacks through it.
But yeah, so the non-libertarian argument against spanking would be more of a pragmatic one, the libertarian argument, and you can do a search for this on my blog at freedomain.com, which is, does spanking violate the non-aggression principle?
And of course, once you establish that spanking violates the non-aggression principle, then your answer as to whether you should spank is clear, right?
I mean, it's an immoral thing to do.
The other argument would be more of a consequentialist argument, which is...
Do you want a good relationship with your children?
Say, ah, well, but I want them to respect me.
And it's like, well, but hitting people doesn't breed respect.
It will breed fear. It will breed compliance.
It will breed conformity.
But it will not breed trust.
It will not breed respect, right?
Because, you know, this word respect gets kind of complicated because people talk about, well, you've got to respect the lion.
It's dangerous. It's like, well, you fear the lion and you fear what it will do.
But you don't want to blur the word when you have...
The human capacity to earn respect through being reasonable and conciliatory and assertive when necessary, but without being abusive.
So there's ways to earn respect, which I think is a really, really important thing to pursue.
And you're not going to get respect from your kids by hitting them.
Do not. I mean, they'll fear you.
And they will comply.
But hitting breeds resentment, right?
Hitting your children will breed resentment.
And what will happen is none of the lessons that you wish to transmit to your children will be internalized by your children if you hit them.
Because all you're teaching them is that if you disobey someone who's bigger than you and has more power than you, then they can make you feel pain.
If you don't conform to their wishes.
Well, that is not internalizing any kind of moral standard.
Right? At all.
And so it won't work.
And it's one thing when you're bigger and the kids are smaller, when the kids grow and you get older and they get stronger and you get weaker, well, the tables turn, right?
Particularly in the teenage years, and I've talked about this before, that the power shifts when the kids get to be 15 or 16 in particular, a little bit earlier depending on where you live.
But when the kids...
get more independent and less easy to control and you can't really go around hitting a 15 or 16 year old because you know you could be punching up not down anymore then the kids are not going to have any respect for you they're not going to have any respect for you and the reason being So in program, there's something called a nested loop, which is a loop within another loop, right?
Like you start reading through it. You start a table scan, and you do a search, and you do a search until the end of that table or the end of the search records or whatever it is, right?
So it's called a nested loop.
It's a loop within a loop. You can also do subroutines that call themselves.
You use those for building...
Tree iterations in a usually what used to be an active X control now I guess it's dynamic HTML or whatever, but anyway, so there are these nested loops these subroutines and so on and what I mean by that is if you tell your kids or if you show your kids okay to hit them when they don't do what you want then they go to school and they find smaller kids who don't do what they want and do they hit those kids well then suddenly you as a parent say well you're not allowed To hit people who are younger than you because they don't do what they want.
That's being a bully. That's being abusive.
That's absolutely unacceptable, right?
Where did they learn it from? They learned it from the parent hitting them for not doing what the parent wants.
So we say, okay, well the rule is if you're bigger you can hit the person who doesn't agree with you until they conform.
Then they go to school and they bully and suddenly it's bad, right?
So, they get this deep down.
They just, they won't respect you.
And then when you try to teach them the important stuff around, say, sexuality, or physical size and physical strength, or fighting, or whatever it is, self-discipline, when they get in to be a teenager, they won't listen to you.
And because they won't listen to you, they'll go to the internet.
They'll go to their peers.
They'll go to who knows what, right?
And those people won't have their best interests at heart because they're not their parents, right?
So, you don't want to break that bond with your kids.
If you teach children to negotiate, then they're going to be better off in life.
Because in life, if you use violence to get what you want as an adult, you're going to end up in jail, right?
Or worse, somebody's going to hit you back so hard you're going to time travel or something, right?
But life as an adult is all about negotiation.
And so when you teach children how to negotiate, you're teaching them an essential life skill.
I think it raises their verbal IQ. I think it raises their IQ as a whole, and maybe not much beyond what's genetically possible, but I think that there's more that's genetically possible that can be enhanced through that.
And the last thing that I would say is that it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
You know, if you have a dog and you say, oh, I want to house train this dog or whatever, right?
If you're still hitting the dog when the dog is 12 or 13 or 14 years old, well, clearly it didn't work.
And so the question with spanking is, does it work?
Does it... Well, and it doesn't.
Statistically, we know this, right?
It just produces short-term compliance and then long-term resentment and subterfuge, right?
And do the kids just hide the behavior that gets them hit?
And so... Yeah, it doesn't work.
It erodes your authority when you most need it, which is the teenage years, and I think it just produces really dysfunctional family structures.
So, alright. Can you negotiate with evil?
Generally, no. You cannot negotiate with evil, but you can negotiate with people who can stand up against it.
And that's kind of important, right?
All right. Bravo, Stefan couldn't agree more.
Peaceful parenting is the way.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Let's see here. Stefan says, long-time listener, first-time caller.
How do we counter the movement that appears to be reversing all the positive gains the West has created through Christianity and democracy?
Well, you know, I mean, the peaceful parenting is still very, very important, right?
So I'm always sort of balancing on this knife edge, right?
Because I like talking about the big issues I like talking about.
I mean, I enjoy talking about politics and all the big stuff that's going on in the world, but it does feel a little bit like you're trying to push a cloud around.
And there's so much money in politics, it really doesn't feel like reason is going to have much of a chance against any of that.
Again, it's the old argument I've talked about before.
You can't talk to someone who's just won the lottery out of cashing in that lottery ticket by saying, well, you know, the government doesn't really have money, it's going to be borrowing it from the unborn, it's kind of like theft intergenerationally and so on.
The person's going to be like, hey man, I want my million bucks, right?
So... I would say that...
I do like talking about the big issues, but I think where, and you guys let me know what you think, but I think where my most traction is, is with the individual conversations with people whose lives can turn around as the result of those, you know, those great sort of call-in show conversations that we have.
And reversing the positive gains, I think it's worth making the case with people, but I've got a whole presentation called The Death of Reason.
You can find, of course, on the YouTube channel.
And it's really tough.
It's really, really tough to change people's minds.
Confirmation bias is a very, very big thing.
And Scott Adams' new book, Loser Think, is a very good way to sort of look at this.
So I think it goes back to this old argument from Von Teres Candide that the big ideas are important and the big ideas matter and they can change a lot of people.
But individual conversations and what you do in your life personally has really, really great and powerful value.
So I know that's not a huge amount of an answer, but that would be what I would focus on.
At least that's kind of the balance of focus that I'm working on at the moment.
All right, let's see here.
Let's see here.
I don't quite understand that one.
Sorry about that. Can a philosopher make an effective politician?
That's a really, really great question.
I've certainly asked myself that from time to time.
And... I do think it is kind of a...
It is kind of an issue of trying to serve two masters.
That would sort of be my particular concern with...
Being a politician, not me necessarily, but I do think, you know, it's tough.
So when you know particular truths about the world, and people have been, like ideological tripwires have been put into people's hearts and minds to oppose the simple expression of basic truths, I think that philosophers have to kind of lay the ground for positive and productive truths.
Politicians. You know, and I know that that's a bit of a stretch for me as a voluntarist, as an anarchist, to say positive and productive politicians, but there are differences, I mean, in politicians.
So, a philosopher, of course, doesn't want to lie and doesn't want to prevaricate and doesn't want to misrepresent.
And so, for a philosopher to stand in front of a crowd and...
Not speak the truth is kind of a tough thing to do.
But politicians, of course, do it all the time.
So I don't know.
I think if you have good enough philosophers, then better politicians will come along because then the philosopher can help people to understand the value of truth and of relying on reason and evidence and all that kind of stuff.
And that can lead the way for more politicians to be able to tell the truth.
But if people are kind of allergic to the truth...
Then you really can't be much of that.
Let's see here.
If climate change predictions are true, aren't the proposed solutions counterproductive?
Prevention is impossible and reducing economic capacity reduces each individual's ability to adapt to change.
Hmm... I'm not sure I quite understand that.
If climate change predictions are true, aren't the proposed solutions counterproductive?
Well, of course, the proposed solutions are counterproductive because they're not about climate change, and they're not about limiting our consumption of nature's resources.
It's just a whole money grab.
I mean, of course CO2 can raise temperature.
We know that. Of course CO2 has that effect, and it also promotes plant growth and so on, right?
So, there's no question that CO2 in limited areas is going to cause temperatures to rise.
The problem is, of course, the Earth is a complex system, and it's not like one tiny little experiment.
And they cannot get to where they want to get to without putting in, I think it's a three times multiple to the effects of CO2. The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the less effect each additional molecule has in the global warming situation.
Smaller government, stop with this insane debt and unfunded liabilities and so on, which is, you know, debt is just deferred consumption.
That's all it is, right? And so, you know, lower immigration considerably, stop overspending government budgets and so on.
It's going to do a huge amount for the economy and it's going to do a huge amount for the climate, but they don't want to do that because it doesn't really serve their desire for Alright, let's see here. Stefan, do you have any suggestions on choosing a good man as a life partner?
You know, here's the key thing about choosing a life partner, my friends.
Someone you can have productive disagreements with is someone you should cleave to your heart, mind, and soul together for as long as you draw breath.
Someone you can have productive disagreements with.
You're always going to have disagreements.
This is inevitable because nobody's right, nobody's perfect.
And a disagreement means one or both of you is wrong, right, if you're disagreeing about something important.
Recognizing that conflict can produce intimacy.
Conflict can spark up love.
Conflict can make everyone better.
conflict is a necessary and essential part of relationships.
I mean, you don't want a relationship where you're fighting all the time or disagreeing all the time.
But when you have disagreements, somebody who can sit down and say, well, it looks like we really disagree on this.
Let's, you know, let's sit and hash it out, right?
They don't attack and they don't scream and they don't yell.
They don't call names or anything like that.
If you can find someone who is not Afraid of disagreements, who is not a bully regarding disagreements or overly submissive regarding disagreements because overt submission is a kind of manipulation as well.
And so if you can find someone you can productively disagree with, that's about as good as it can get.
How do you go about monitoring and limiting your daughter's screen time?
Yeah, that is a challenge.
She did give up her tablet for a while.
She's playing a little bit on it now.
But she's reading like crazy.
So for me, I don't really count that as screen time because it's like a book, right?
And I certainly read like crazy when I was a kid and still do.
So when it comes to screen time, the challenge for me is to be engaging enough that...
She would rather chat with me than be on a tablet, right?
A tablet is just a competition.
Now, of course, you can go, you know, hardcore and just like, no tablets, right?
Like I knew some kids from a family when my daughter was younger, and they were like, no sugar.
Like even their dessert was like a, it was a watermelon dressed up to look like a cake or something like that.
So... When it comes to screen time, you just have a competitor, right?
And if you have a competitor, don't you want to do better?
So I'll give you an example, right?
Tonight, I wanted to play with my daughter, and we started playing.
And I was telling her the story of the...
Like the Syrian video that I did yesterday, I was telling her the story of that and we got into the whole story of World War II and we got into the story of the atomic bombs and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so on and it was...
Fun, you know? And that's because I don't lecture her, right?
So I say, oh, you know, some weapons are banned.
Why do you think they would be banned?
Or what are the most dangerous weapons you can think of?
I mean, it sounds kind of gruesome in a way, but it keeps her engaged.
And you don't want to lecture kids, right?
You want to engage them in thinking through a particular problem.
So, I don't have a rule, which is, oh, I'm going to turn on the monitoring system on a tablet, and after three hours it shuts off, or after an hour it shuts off.
I don't have anything like that.
I've talked to her about, you know, the challenges of screen time.
And I've also talked to her about what it's like for her if she's with other people and those other people are on their screens, right?
And, you know, it's not necessarily great.
So having her understand some of the, you know, you're kind of hunched over.
Maybe it's not great for your eyes. I don't know, right?
But it's something that I have to compete with in terms of being engaging and engaging.
I'm a competitive person, as you can imagine.
So, I do end up doing it that way.
So, okay. Ryan says, I'm sure...
Ah, yes. I'm sure you have already spoken about this, but my wife is listening to you with me right now.
My question is, is it a violation of the non-aggression principle to execute a convicted pedophile?
That's a tough... That's a tough question, and I appreciate that.
So, I'm going to pretend...
Okay, no, that's a good question.
So... Ah, you know, it's a tough question.
So, this is all philosophical.
I'm no lawyer, right? So, this is the philosophical principles that I see at work here, and let me know what you think.
So, if you come across, let's take this sort of stereotypical example, right?
You come across a man who is aggressing against a child in this manner, Are you allowed to use lethal force if it's the only reasonable way to prevent it?
For whatever reason, right?
You can imagine 10 different scenarios.
I won't run through it because then people are like, oh, the scenario, I found an exception or whatever, right?
Well, I think yes, right?
So in terms of protecting someone, We can think of a situation where a man has taken a child as a hostage, and are you allowed to shoot the man who has taken the child as a hostage?
And I think the answer to that would be, well, if you can do so in a relatively safe manner with that, then yes.
And so, in the moment, lethal force is allowable in the protection of life and survival, right?
And of course, if somebody is aggressing against a child in that manner, you don't know if they're going to go too far, if it could be fatal, if it could be internal injuries, who knows, right?
Yes, even lethal force is valid in the protection of a person.
That's the basic self-defense.
Now, you could say, well, isn't it better If you don't use lethal force...
And this is the whole question that you hear all the time with the cop and some guys.
Like, you remember the Mike Brown thing, right?
Was it Darren Wilson? Mike Brown was, like, six foot six and three bills of muscle or whatever it was.
And he's charging at the cop.
And the cop shoots him.
And people say, well, why don't you just shoot him in the knees?
Or why don't you just disable him somewhere?
And it's like, that's not...
It's not really how...
That stuff works. Not really how that stuff works.
And so, you are allowed to use, it's morally permissible in a rational, I think, moral philosophy, certainly under UPB, it's morally permissible to use force in self-defense up to and including lethal force.
Now, The concept of question of proportionality is very, very important, which means that if somebody is, I don't know, leaning up against your fence post and their hands are over top, you don't just get to shoot them, right? I mean, there's a sense of proportionality.
He's not harming your personhood.
He may be entirely accidentally.
He's not even harming your property.
You know, maybe you don't want him to lean on there or whatever.
Just say, hey, man, do you mind not leaning on my fence or whatever?
Right. That's fine, right?
So, there's ways to kind of resolve that stuff.
And I think there's kind of a gut sense about that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, if somebody is aggressing against a child in a particularly heinous manner, I think force is perfectly legitimate, up to and including lethal force, to protect the child.
There is, of course, the caveat that the child will be heavily traumatized by that, right?
Whatever you're doing.
So it's complicated.
With regards to later, right?
This is always the question about the death penalty, right?
So if somebody is rushing at you with an axe, you can use lethal force to prevent them from harming you.
But that doesn't mean that the next day you can go and shoot them, right?
When they're no longer immediately threatening you, right?
So that is a very, very tough situation.
My answer is that once you're in these kinds of situations, generally philosophy is more about prevention than it is about cure.
So philosophy is more like being a nutritionist rather than an ER doctor, right?
So you remember Dr. Kevin Wiccasey, I've had on the show a bunch of times.
He's a very experienced and I'm sure very good ER doctor.
So when you're already having the heart attack, you go and you talk to him or someone like him.
But philosophy is more about the prevention.
So the question is then, how do you prevent the creation of a pedophile rather than how, like, should you kill the pedophile or later on?
Again, I'm not saying, I'm not trying to cheat out of the question.
It is an important and interesting question, but I think it would be far better if we had an answer which was about prevention rather than, quote, cure.
So... In my particular perspective, pedophiles are bred by Other pedophiles, right?
I mean, it's sort of like a horrible mimetic reproduction of sexual attraction through the harm, infliction of sexual harm upon children.
So I would say that, you know, keep your kids close and don't have strangers around, don't have strange men in the house.
You know, I've talked about this with single moms that it's, you know, really, it can be risky and so on.
And so just Have a close enough relationship with your kids that if anything untoward happens to them...
Usually there's a whole grooming process.
I'm no expert on this, but my understanding is that there's a whole grooming process that goes on ahead of time.
And that grooming process...
If you have a close relationship with your children, that doesn't even start.
Or if it starts, you go and talk to your...
You know, your kid will come and talk to you and say, well, this kind of weird thing happened.
And then you... Right?
The... Those who prey upon children are very good at figuring out who they can prey on.
So if you have a close enough relationship with your kids, you street-proof them, and they can talk to you about anything, and you encourage all of that, then if we did that, then these predators would have...
Less capacity to reproduce, I think, the way that they operate through this kind of infliction of trauma upon children.
So I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, although I emotionally completely understand it.
And the reason is that I think that giving...
And I've changed on this over the years, and I'm still open to it.
It's not sort of, you know, UPP is a final conclusion.
Non-aggression principle is a final conclusion.
This is somewhat conditional.
To give, because I don't believe that the state can morally do it, so if there's a private security agency, would they have the right to execute?
I'm a little concerned about that.
Again, in a free society, we already have had a generation or two or three of really, really good parenting, and therefore the prevalence of pedophilia will be very, very low or small.
Maybe there's some genetic elements, I don't know, but I think most of it is the infliction of harm reproducing itself that way.
So if it's a very, very small problem, and there's ways to deal with it that keep the person out of society, which I've talked about, economic ostracism and so on, I would rather that, I mean, not only is there the possibility that there could be some kind of mistake, which, you know, it happens, I mean, but I'm not sure that I want an organization or group of organizations in society with the right to execute.
That seems like kind of harsh and I'm not sure if it corrupts the organization or the people who are doing it.
But the good news is that if you and I disagree about that, well, you can go to a security agency or what I call the dispute resolution organization and you can say, yeah, I signed this.
That if you find me to be guilty of some sort of heinous crime, then my life is forfeit.
You can sign that, right?
I don't think people will.
I think that there will be other ways to deal with it, but the free market will pursue that.
I hope that helps. I hope that helps.
Alright. His works are non-serious.
Oh, this is about me, right? His works are non-serious.
It's my works. Who comments on them?
Who in philosophy proper has commented on Stefan's, quote, works?
Why do I never see him in any journals of consequence?
I don't really know what to say about that.
Why on earth would an academic want to review my work?
I mean, it's a totally different world that we would be living in.
And so there's no particular...
I mean, and of course, if the academics were to review my work, then they would be...
It would be crazy for them in terms of their careers to be anything other than mindlessly hostile, right?
Reputation and all that kind of stuff, right?
So I would say that you...
You want to think for yourself.
You want to approach the arguments that I've made, and you want to evaluate them according to reason and evidence.
I don't know that you want to run to philosophy journals and say, well, have they written about him?
Well, then he must be a real philosopher.
I mean, that's not philosophy.
Philosophy is not defined by whether state-funded, state-protected institutions Bureaucrats basically is the way I look at academics for the most part.
Philosophy is not defined by whether people whose very paycheck comes from a violation of philosophy.
They don't get to determine who's a philosopher or not.
You understand that, right?
The people who fund me, who fund what I do, do so voluntarily through a mutual exchange of value, right?
They help me support what it is that I do, do my documentaries, run my studio and all of the stuff that, I mean, it's incredibly expensive having like so many podcasts downloaded every month.
If I showed you the bill one day, your jaw would drop through the floor and that's fine because, you know, that's, you know, the only thing worse than not having a high bill for podcast downloads is not having a high bill.
For podcast downloads.
So what I do is voluntary.
It's peaceful.
It's negotiated. It is philosophical.
The academics are using the power of the state to exclude other people.
They are usually being paid by money taken from the state, taken from people by force.
Or they are...
Benefiting from a massive propaganda campaign to get kids heavily into debt for economically questionable degrees.
So, you know, you can go to people who I believe almost by definition are compromised with regards to voluntary transactions, voluntary interactions.
You can go to them and say, well, you guys aren't commenting much on...
The guy who's out there doing it for quote free and just asking for voluntary support.
You get to define whether the guy who's doing it voluntarily, who doesn't have a degree to dangle in front of people.
In fact, people who follow philosophy, at least is the way that I work it, their life becomes...
Quite challenging for...
I mean, I think it improves over time, but it's a challenge, right?
I mean, it's like if you've got a good coach and you go from sitting on the couch all the time to wanting to run a marathon, it's going to be kind of unpleasant for a while, right, as you work your way through it.
So I don't think that rationally you want to go to people who are benefiting from coercion and say, well, why aren't you more like the guy who talks to people about what matters to them And doesn't charge for his time.
Again, there's nothing wrong with charging for your time, but doesn't run to the government for protection from competition, doesn't run for the government to get paid, doesn't run to the government to get paid, right?
So academics, of course, will look at someone like me, right?
And they'll say, I mean, I think maybe this is sort of a dark tea time of the soul or dark midnight of the soul kind of thing, but I think academics would look at someone like me and say, oh my gosh, this guy has 650 million views and downloads.
He's out there, you know, giving speeches when he can possibly do so.
People email him to talk philosophy.
He does live streams where people come up with great questions and he's finding a way to make it work.
And then they look at all that bureaucracy and those endless meetings and all the regulations and part of them must say, well, gosh, if Steph can do it, you know, what one man can do, another man or woman can do.
If Steph can do it, by gosh, maybe I should think of doing it too.
But then it's tough, right?
It's a tough thing to say, I don't want to be protected by the state anymore.
I don't want to get my money through government.
Coercion or compulsion or state protection or the indoctrination of children about the value of college.
I want to go out there.
I want to speak to the people about what matters to them.
And I want to trust that they're Honor and integrity will support what it is that I'm doing.
That's got to be pretty tempting.
And listen, I've had conversations with ex-academics who basically had to leave because the threat of complaints or problems from students was enormous, right?
So... If they were real philosophers, I think, you know, listen, I don't get to define what a real philosopher is, I think, any more than they do, but I'm certainly living philosophy better than an academic.
No question. No question.
So I would say to them, look, it can be rough out here for sure.
It can be tough. You know, there's been a tough month, right?
It can be rough out here, but it's well worth it.
It's well worth it.
I will go to my grave, hopefully in a long time from now, I will go to my grave never having doubted.
That I have worked my mental muscles to the benefit of mankind as much as humanly possible.
I will never doubt that my life has meaning.
I will never doubt that my life has purpose.
And I will never doubt that my life has value, not just to those who are in my life directly, but to the millions of people around the world who've listened to this show over the years and who email me and support me and say, you changed my life.
You changed my life.
You taught me... How to negotiate with people I love.
You taught me how to not hit my children.
You taught me how to not yell at people.
You taught me how to have courage.
You taught me how to reason with people.
And with myself. I don't know that a huge number of academics can have that same thought or experience.
I used to be more condemnatory to this kind of stuff.
But I will say that...
I would invite them, you know, if you're out there.
Don't bother reviewing my works.
I mean, you can if you want, and I think that I've debated with academics on this very show.
I debated Thaddeus Russell about postmodernism and others.
But, you know, come on out.
I feel like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs from the ivory tower to the common square.
Come out here. People really want to talk about philosophy.
People really care about ideas.
People really care about truth and goodness and virtue and metaphysics and epistemology.
They really care.
They really are curious about whether we live in a simulation.
They really are curious how to live a good life.
They really are curious about philosophy.
And, you know, We need you.
We need you out here.
We don't need you up in an ivory tower.
We don't need you trapped like Saruman in academia.
We need you out here in the rough and tumble of the real world.
We don't need you arguing about whether nouns exist in sensual reality.
We need you out here teaching people how to be peaceful with their children.
And, yeah, it can be rough out here, but it's rough in there too.
And you'll never doubt.
You know, there's a movie called Shadowlands with Deborah Winger, who once more dies of cancer, and Anthony Hopkins.
And Anthony Hopkins is an academic.
And I remember this scene.
It's one of the last movies I ever saw with my mom.
I remember this scene. Anthony Hopkins is playing C.S. Lewis.
And he says to another academic, they're sitting in the library and they're just working away, and he just puts down his book and he says, don't you...
Don't you just get a sense of such waste?
What they're all doing, right?
What they're doing. And the other academic kind of blinks and says, of course.
Of course. Well, if you want to avoid that feeling, come out here to the Wild West of the Internet and talk philosophy with the people.
Let's see here. Somebody says, Hi, Stefan.
I thank you for your work.
I recently have made the decision to ostracize my alcoholic father, who constantly was drunk under the influence and made my childhood traumatic.
I feel pressured by family to love him.
Should I? Well, my friend, I am very sorry.
I'm very sorry for what you experienced as a child.
I'm working on the truth about alcohol, which is really quite shocking in a way.
Like, 1 in 20 deaths around the world is the result of alcohol, and it's a significant factor in a lot of violence, and of course, as you say, DUIs and so on.
Accidents. And...
When it comes to love...
When it comes to love, love is not something that you can will.
People will tell you that you should love someone or you should love something.
It doesn't work that way.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous.
If we're evil, our involuntary response to virtue is hatred.
But You're listening to this show, my friend, and I assume you're a good person.
I believe you're a good person.
If you're asking this question, you're a good person.
And so, if you're a good person, you cannot love something which is destructive.
Something which caused trauma to you in your childhood.
You can't love that.
Now, you can say, if you want, and I don't know the truth about this, there certainly are genetic susceptibilities to alcoholism, which is why some of the natives in Canada and America have such difficulty with alcohol, but it's still a choice.
So there's a disease, there's a genetic susceptibility to it, I'm sure, but I still believe that there's a choice.
People say, well, no, a disease is like cancer.
You get cancer... You don't get to not have a drink and the cancer goes away.
Sorry. It's a dysfunction.
And there are genetic elements, I'm sure, for a lot of people.
But it's still a choice.
And you can't put it in the same category as a sheer disease.
You know, if you have cancer and...
There's no rehab for cancer, right?
If you have cancer or multiple sclerosis or something, you don't get locked in jail and suddenly you're not sick anymore, right?
But if you're an alcoholic and you're drunk all the time, you get thrown in jail, you dry out, right?
You get the DTs, I suppose, but you dry out.
So I'm really, really sorry about what happened in your childhood.
But people, I would imagine, this is probably the case, And listen, if you want to call in, just the information is on the website.
I'd be happy to chat about this further.
This is very important stuff.
And alcohol is a bloody curse.
It's a bloody curse on the planet.
But most likely, what happens in families is if you take a stand, everybody else gets messed up.
And people want to keep the peace.
They don't want anyone to take a stand.
You can all imagine this at a family dinner.
At a family dinner, let's say you had a mother who hit you a lot as a child.
And at a family dinner, you say, you know what?
It's been bothering me.
I really need to talk about how mom hit me.
And people, what, are they going to be mad at your mom for hitting you?
No, they're going to be mad at you for bringing it up.
Usually. Not always, but usually.
They'll be mad at you for bringing it up.
Let the past be in the past.
Don't make things awkward. It's a nice meal.
Let's just have fun. Let it go.
They'll just try and minimize your pain.
And what they're trying to do, of course, is minimize their own anxiety.
They feel upset if there's conflict.
And usually what people do in any conflict is they scan the two parties involved in the conflict, they figure out who the more reasonable person is, who the least abusive person is, and they just try and suppress that person.
It's the price you pay for not being abusive, for not being mean, as people will try and shut you down rather than the truly mean people.
Because they don't have anything to fear from you.
You're reasonable. They have things to fear from the abusive person.
And so they would try and shut you down to appease the abusive person.
And unfortunately, that's just a very common thing in society and in family life and in other places.
So recognize that the people who are saying, you have to love your dad, they're not saying that because they know what love is.
They're not saying that because they care about you or they care about your dad.
And they're doing that because they don't want to experience the anxiety of you not conforming to what they want.
Of you maybe potentially causing a conflict that could be enormously unpleasant for them.
They're just worrying about their own feelings.
They're not concerned about anything objective to do with you.
So when it comes to people in our lives, it's a simple test.
I'm an empiricist, right? So I can make all of the abstract arguments, and I will.
But this is the reality.
You have an instinctual emotional experience of people.
You have an instinctual emotional experience of your father and of your mother and your siblings, if you have them, and friends and so on, right?
You have an instinctual emotional experience.
And the way that I've talked about this before, I have a whole book called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, which you can get for free at freedomain.com, is think of the phone call, right?
So, this is back, I wrote this even before cell phones really became a thing, right?
But you had cold display, right?
So, how do you feel about your father?
Well, it's complicated, I'm sure, but your phone rings and it's dead.
Your phone rings and it's dead.
How do you feel? That's, I think, the greatest truth about your relationship.
How do you feel? When my wife calls, I'm thrilled.
Yay! You know, friends call, I'm happy, right?
Wonderful. How do you feel when the phone rings and you see who it is?
Is it yay? Is it rather not?
Do you just let it go to voicemail?
How do you feel? That's really, really important because that instinctual feeling you have is the accumulation of thousands, if not millions, of tiny interactions or big interactions that have given you that emotional reality, that emotional experience.
So... Again, I'm really, really sorry for what you went through.
Justice is composed of two things.
Justice is a great virtue.
Justice is paying what you owe and not paying what you don't owe.
Right? Justice is paying what you owe and not paying what you don't owe.
Right? So, to take a silly example, you order...
Something from Amazon or whatever, right?
You order something from some online store.
If they deliver it and it's what you want, you should pay them because you should pay for what you owe them, the money, right?
You should pay them. If they don't deliver whatever you ordered, you should not pay them because you don't owe them.
Now, your father was...
he had a job. Probably his most important job.
And his most important job was to deliver to you a happy childhood.
A happy, wise, productive, positive childhood experience.
That's the online retailer, right?
That's what he was supposed to deliver to you.
Now, to me... If your father did do that, and listen, nobody's perfect, right?
Of course, mistakes are made and so on.
I apologize to my daughter from time to time when I say something, right?
Or I interrupt her too much or whatever, right?
So, that's fine.
Nobody's perfect. And in fact, the expectation of perfection makes relationships terrible, usually.
So, if your father does deliver to you this happy, productive, useful...
Wise, inspiring childhood.
I mean, I don't think I would need to tell you to do this, but I think you owe him positive regard.
Because he's delivered the good that he's supposed to deliver, right?
Now, I know you didn't choose to be born, and I get all of that, but I don't think, like, if your father is wonderful and you love him, you don't need me to tell you that you owe him love.
I mean, my friends, my family act in a way that I love them.
I love them. I love them.
And for me to withhold love when they act in honorable, virtuous, positive, incredible ways would be to not pay for something that I owe.
I owe them the regard.
They've earned it. So pay what you owe, but don't pay what you don't owe.
And if your father made you childhood hell...
You can't love him that I can see.
Again, my definition or involuntary response to virtue, if you're virtuous, it was not virtuous to be an alcoholic while you were a child.
It was not virtuous. Now, does that mean he can never be virtuous in the future?
No, he can be virtuous in the future.
Does that mean that it's impossible to forgive him for what he did?
Well, I mean, there's two levels of forgiveness.
The first level is... That, you know, just gotta let it go.
Just let it go and move on, right?
I don't think about my mom that...
I know she comes up at the show and it gives you a bit of a distorted view.
I don't really think of my mom that much.
I'm 53 years old.
It was a long time ago now. Like, I last had any really regular contact with her because...
I mean, I was on my own since I was 15, so, you know, it's close to 40 years ago.
I think she's useful for illustrating things, and I think it's something good that I can get out of a bad childhood.
But, you know, it's not a big thing for me.
It's like I'm going to move on and so on, right?
So there's that level. Now, there's another level of forgiveness, though.
Which is the person has really worked hard to make amends and restitution and they've apologized and they've maybe paid for your therapy or whatever it is that they need to do to really try and make things whole.
Okay, well that's the second level of forgiveness.
And the first level is people who just kind of wrong you and they kind of come and go.
And the second level is for people who are actually in your life, right?
And they're going to stay in your life and all of that.
So... The first level is certainly possible, but does not require contact.
The second level is something that your father has to initiate and manage.
You can't sort of force him into doing it or anything like that, or bully him or nag him into doing it or anything like that, right?
But the problem is, and this is the total rule of thumb, so this is not science, but for every negative experience you have with someone, you need like seven positive experiences.
Again, it's kind of like a rule of thumb.
Maybe it's a little higher, maybe it's a little lower, depending on the circumstance, right?
But Like, if you have a really bad day with someone, then you need seven really great days just to even it out, right?
Just to even it out. And when I first thought about this when I was younger, I thought about, you know, my mother, right?
And I thought, okay, well, I think I can't remember how old I was in my 20s, right?
So I'm like, okay, let's say I was, let's make it easy, right?
Let's say I was 28, right?
Okay, so 28 is four sevenths, right?
So, I'm going to need, if I've had 28 years of bad experiences with my mom, right, then I'm going to need something quite different, right?
I'm going to need, like, you can do the math, right?
How many years of really, really great behavior am I going to need for my mom to make up for 28 years of bad times, bad experiences with my mom?
Well, 25 times 4 is 100, and then plus 3 times 4, 112.
I'm going to need 112 years of really great behavior for my mom to make up for the first 28 years.
No, more. No, more!
I'm doing it times 4.
Sorry, 28 times...
I got that completely wrong. No, sorry, 196.
I'm going to need almost 200 years of really great behavior for my mom to make up for the first 28 years.
And that's even assuming that the first 28 years don't even need more makeup because they are the first initial impression, right?
Initial impression. So, if you've had 20 bad years with someone, you need 140 Damn near perfect years for them just to make it up, even if we don't count the initial impression stuff.
Because, you know, the first 20 years kind of count, right?
If you've had 10 bad years with someone, you need 70 great years to even it out.
And this is why you don't let things fester.
You don't let things stay bad.
You understand, right? If you have two bad days with someone, you need two weeks of perfect stuff just to even it out.
That's why you don't let yourself have those bad days.
You work it out. So once you understand that, I sort of understood this, okay, I need like almost 200 years of great behavior for my mom, which isn't going to happen.
And even if she turned around tomorrow completely, you know, it's really, you know, once you're in that much of a hole, there's no way out of it, in my particular experience.
Now, last thing I'll say is, if you are thinking of taking a break from your father...
Please, please, please talk to a therapist.
Get involved in a therapist.
I've made this offer before.
I'll make it again. If you need money, if you need help with your therapy bills, let me know.
Call me. I'm happy to help.
Because this is not the kind of thing that you would want to do alone.
So that's my particular strong, strong, strong suggestion.
All right. Another couple of minutes.
All right. Do you think narratives are making us dumber, like when E. Warren, Elizabeth Warren, starts a speech with a story, trying to persuade with it?
I reckon it makes us focused on entertainment rather than logical arguments.
Yeah. Yeah, she's bad.
She's bad for this kind of stuff, and she's kind of false, right?
Like, she was talking about how, oh, you know, I got fired for being pregnant, as you did in those days, and so on.
And it turns out that there's an old interview with her saying, oh, she quit because she was pregnant.
Anyway, so, yeah, the story...
I don't mind a good story.
Like, I don't mind... I mean, I tell stories, right?
I mean, I don't mind a good story.
I think it's fine, but it's just not...
It's not a substitute. Story is like dessert.
You can't live off dessert, right?
It's fine. It's part of a meal. Although, not when you're over 50, but all that.
So, yeah, not pretty good.
Not very good. Hi, Steph.
Would you have Jordan Peterson back on the show to discuss peaceful parenting?
I'm not sure he would come back, but I would always be happy to chat with anyone about...
About that. Hey Stefan, lots of pushes for gun control in the US. Do you foresee a revolution between peaceful people, especially peaceful gun owners, and the US federal government?
Why and when, or why not?
There is a lot of push for gun control in the US. There is a lot of push for gun control in the US. And I will say that I don't know enough about...
I mean, the people I've talked to in the US, it's always tough to know whether people are talking tough and how far they're actually going.
But... I certainly think it's possible.
I certainly think it's possible.
And I'm hoping, of course, that the people who are all pushing for gun control don't.
But, of course, they want to.
There's an instinctual thing that leftists do and socialists do.
They just need to disarm the people.
Because, well, you can see what's happening in Iran where the people are disarmed.
You can see what's happening in Venezuela where the people are disarmed.
My gosh. All right.
What happens when the petrodollar collapses...
I don't know. This is accelerationism, right?
It's one of the first essays that I wrote.
Is it better if it happens sooner rather than later?
Well, probably better if it happens sooner rather than later.
When fiat currency collapses...
There is a readjustment and that readjustment can be short and painful or it can be long and painful.
And the less that they try to interfere with that process and the more we can get into a rational currency like maybe a gold or commodity-based currency or Bitcoin or some limited currency, so much the better.
Somebody says, this woman says, how can I fix my low tolerance for frustration?
Hmm. That is a good question.
I need more details, so send me an email.
We'll do a call. We'll do a call.
Is a life applying the non-aggression principle considered a paradise type of world?
Which do you think is an impossible task?
What's paradise compared to now?
It's paradise compared to now, for sure.
Do you think Trudeau's handgun ban will actually happen?
Do you think there is hope in the future for concealed carry in Canada?
Well, yeah, of course.
I mean, so a lot of the rising violence in Canada is to do with immigration, and so rather than deal with immigration or have a conversation, a rational conversation about immigration, they're going to try and ban guns.
And... It's going to be pretty rough.
Mr. Molyneux, what would you recommend our First Nations do to improve their living and social conditions in Canada?
Oh, boy, there's a heartbreaking story.
When I worked up north, I had some exposure to this life, and, oh, man, it's rough.
It's rough. I have a lot of sympathy for the First Nations people in Canada, and I've had conversations with one or two of them over the course of the show, and it's really tough.
So listen, two things that are going on with the natives in North America and other places too.
So number one, there is this tragic genetic susceptibility to addiction, and that's harsh, that's rough, and I think it's pretty well known, fairly well understood.
Europeans have developed a gene to process alcohol, or a series of genes to process alcohol more effectively and more efficiently, which did not occur in the native population.
And it is a massive and horrible curse.
I mean, yeah, two-way street, blah, blah, blah.
You know, they gave us syphilis and tobacco, and we gave them alcohol and lead sometimes.
So I think that recognition, real sympathy for that.
Real sympathy for that. Like, that's not their fault, and it's rough.
The childhoods are rough.
Really, really rough. I mean, I remember working up north and seeing these native kids just rolling around three o'clock in the morning when I'd be out of bars or whatever, just rolling around like in their underpants or diapers and just nobody taking care of them.
And it was just rough, rough.
And so here's the thing, though.
I mean... Some of the First Nations people that I worked with when I worked up north were incredibly hardworking and dedicated and smart and great conversation and so on.
And so one of the things that's happened is because of the massive wealth transfer that's gone on between, say, the white culture, the Western culture, and the natives, we all need struggle.
We all need challenge.
We all, like, why...
We're a struggling and striving species, how we get to the top of the food chain.
So this, you know, pumping money in casinos and so on, I mean, it's really, really destructive.
And so, I mean, I understand there are all of these treaties and I get all of that.
But when you have kind of free money, so to speak, flowing into a population that has significant susceptibility to addiction...
I mean, that's just a deadly combo.
And I think the kids are paying the heaviest price of all.
So it's just, it's a really, really important conversation to have.
You know, this over-help, this over-guilt-ridden, healthy-help stuff is really, really, really, really tough.
Someone says, Hey Steph, how are so many parents still justifying sending their children to universities to become demonstrably more ignorant and biased?
Well, it's the long shadow of when universities were better, right?
I mean, this is what happens, is reasonable people create value, and then the anti-rational people move in, and it takes a while for people to adjust to the new situation.
So, yeah, you've got to keep your kids away from that.
The art stuff in particular is just brutal.
Just brutal. How can we diminish crime?
Well, again, it's immigration. I think it's an important conversation.
And... I will also say that Peaceful Parenting, you can watch my series called The Bomb and the Brain.
That would be great.
All right, let's do one or two more.
It's so much fun, you guys have. I'm glad that the good questions got through.
I have lost Paul's support.
Well, yeah, we'll see.
We'll see. Time will tell.
Time will tell. All right.
Don't be gay. Have you ever considered videos about the philosophy of Machiavellianism?
You know, that's interesting, right?
That's interesting. So I'm sort of halfway through working on a presentation on Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher.
And, you know, it's tough.
It's tough because there is this sort of feeling of emergency around things in the West and in the world at the moment.
And At the same time, I still want to create things of depth and power and beauty, you know?
So, it's tough.
I don't want to be seen as fiddling while Rome burns, but at the same time, I can't keep chasing every emergency off a cliff to the point where I lose my joy in what I'm doing.
So, I think that is a very good...
I have thought about it before, and I will take that and make a note of it.
So, let me just put that along with the teens and the NAP. Teens love napping, as far as I understand.
All right. All right.
I think...
yeah. Long question.
All right. Well, thanks everyone so much.
I really, really appreciate your time.
Please don't forget to go.
freedomain.com forward slash donate to help me out.
Massively appreciated. Massively necessary at the moment.
freedomain.com forward slash donate.
You can help me out there. Please look for the Hong Kong documentary, which will be coming out soon.
Check out my speech in Orlando.
It was a great deal of fun and I'm really, really pleased with it.
It's called What Men Really Want to Tell Women.
Oh, what men really want to say to women, you can find that on my channel.
And thanks everyone for dropping by tonight.
It was a great pleasure.
And have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening.
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