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March 7, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:23
mATh iS HarD fOR BriAN WilliaMS anD the NeW YOrK TimES!
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Time Text
All right, we are gonna take a swing at this and just see how it goes, how it looks, how it works.
This is Van Molyneux from Free Domain, and I hope you're having a wonderful day.
I think we may have this up and running.
Let's find out, shall we?
And see how it's looking.
Oh, am I getting a weird message about a weird resolution?
Yes, I am.
Oh, well. I'm going to have to abandon it.
Streamlabs OBS appears to have an issue streaming to YouTube, but no biggie.
I've got a local recording, so we're just going to take a swing for it.
I have no idea why.
It's streaming at 11.52 by 6.48.
To hell with it. All right.
Let's do a little bit of a chat here.
Sorry, this is the perfectionist guy that ran a software team.
All right. Let's have a go.
So, here's the thing.
This just came out yesterday, and it's got millions and millions of views.
Well worth having a look here.
And let me know if the audio was peaking a little last time, and just let me know if it's coming through all right now.
But here's the thing. MSNBC's Brian Williams reads a tweet.
And he says, Bloomberg, right, this is former mayor of New York who ran and crashed and burned for the Democratic presidential candidate.
Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads.
U.S. population, 327 million.
He could have given each American $1 million.
Now, speaking with Brian Williams on MSNBC was a lady...
Named Mara Gay, and she's a New York Times editorial board member.
So when Brian Williams got the math incalculably incorrect, in other words, Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads, U.S. population $327 million, he could have given each American a million dollars, she said, it's an incredible way of putting it.
It's true. It's disturbing.
Yes, it is in fact.
disturbing. Hang on. Here we go.
You see it as a possibility if he wants to spend a billion bucks beating this guy, he could do it.
Absolutely. Somebody tweeted recently that actually with the money he spent, he could have given every American a million dollars.
I've got it. Let's put it up on the screen.
When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear.
Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads.
U.S. population $327 million.
Don't tell us if you're ahead of us on the math.
He could have given each American $1 million and have had lunch money left over.
It's an incredible way of putting it.
It's an incredible way of putting it.
It's true. It's disturbing.
It does suggest what we're talking about here, which is there's too much money in politics.
Yes, if you're ahead of Brian Williams and Mara Gay on the math.
In other words, if you're, say, six years old and you're ahead of him and her on the math.
So this is obviously hilarious.
Now, listen, I'm not the guy...
Who's going to sit there and rag on people for, I don't know, a couple of little errors.
Everybody makes verbal flubs.
Everybody makes mistakes.
If you're out in the public eye, I've done like 4,500 shows.
I've had my share of whoopsies.
I do try to catch them, of course, but especially when you're speaking stream of consciousness and you're edgelording to infinity, it's...
It's going to happen. So I'm not bagging on these guys for making a mistake in the math on the fly.
That's not... I don't want to sort of sound petty this way.
This is like when I was tweeting about...
People should just stop bagging on Bloomberg for being short.
It's not his fault. It's just the way that he airs, and it's kind of a sad little thing to pick on someone for.
And what happens when a tall Bloomberg comes along and you've lazed out on all of the short jokes?
It's not right.
It's not fair. Heitism is a massive issue in society.
You know, I talk a lot about IQ, but if you want to know, one of the best predictors For someone's income as an adult is you measure how tall they are When they're one year old.
One year old! So bagging on height to me is kind of sad.
I mean, I'm above average.
I'm just under six foot. But one of my best friends, one of the best men at my wedding is 5'6".
And he clued me into this height stuff really early on.
And he was saying that there was a show.
It was a dating show. And there was a guy below average height and a guy above average height.
And they said to the woman...
To the women, who do you want to date?
And they all wanted to date the tall guy, right?
And then they said, okay, well, the short guy is a musician.
Nah. Okay, he's a musician on the side, but he's also a doctor.
Nah. The other guy was like a, I don't know, homeless?
It was not impressive.
And then they said, okay, the short guy, he's a musician, he's a doctor, and he's a millionaire.
And then they were like, mmm, maybe.
In other words, for a couple of extra inches of height, the short guys...
We have to be millionaire musician doctors in order to get women's attention.
And, of course, women will complain about the objectification of women.
Hey, hey, hey, my eyes are up here, you know.
Cleavage, cleavage, cleavage, right?
But it is sad, of course, when the man is down there.
And there was a Sex and the City episode about this where this very confident guy who ran a hedge fund, like anybody in Sex and the City knows what that is.
And then he stepped off the barstool and he was short.
And, of course, it was endless amounts of height jokes.
Like, that's just really sad. That's just, I mean, it's really sad.
It is not short guys' fault that they're short.
And look, it's fine.
If women want to do this, if women want to just say, I'm never going to date a guy shorter than me, it's fine, it's fine.
But then just don't complain when men objectify you.
That's all. Because it's a complete objectification of the man, even more so than his wallet.
So I'm not going to bag on these guys for making this ridiculous mistake.
Because the actual math, of course, $500 million on the ads, U.S. population, $327 million.
$327 million is, well, it's less than $500 million.
So it's not a million dollars and change per person.
It's $1.53 per person.
So that's off by close to a factor of a thousand, right?
And so that's really, really, well, actually almost a million, right?
Oh, look at that, me making...
Mistakes on the fly. So that's just crazy.
So they're saying you're going to give each American a million dollars, have changeover, when they're actually talking about $1.53.
$1.53.
So, of course, a million is a thousand thousand.
A dollar is much, of course, less so.
So the reason why this is important to talk about is because you've got to think of layers here.
Layers, layers, layers.
And When you want to understand the mainstream media, you really, really need to process this stuff.
So, someone saw this tweet and said, you know, this would be a good segment for the show.
And, you know, they have these meetings when they're figuring out what to go in their show.
And they say, hey, we should talk about this tweet!
And it goes up there in front.
There's a whole room full of people.
Right? There's your gift.
There's a whole room full of people and they're all talking about what to put into the show.
Because you've got to get it all queued up.
You've got to have it as a talking point and so on.
And all of those people were like, yes, this would be a great tweet.
To put into this show.
And then they hand it over to the tech guys.
And they say to the tech guys, listen man, here's the tweet.
We want to come up at this show.
It's going to be at this time in the show.
It's going to have to be on the top left third or wherever they put it.
And it's going to have to, if you want you to fade it in.
And they hand it to the tech guys.
So then there's another half dozen or so tech guys who go over this and set it up and set up the queue and everything that you could imagine.
And so all of this stuff...
What is going on in the newsroom?
There's editors, there's editors-in-chief, there's whoever it is who's going to figure out what goes on air.
And then you see there's nobody in any of these probably 10 to 20 people, at least 10 to 20 people, all with university degrees or technical degrees, all smart people apparently, right?
So 20 people, this just goes bouncing along, 20 people.
So how on earth, how on earth does this get on air?
You don't just look at the camera and, oh, these two people.
Of course, you know, they're dumb as a bag of hammers, as the old phrase goes.
But here's the thing. You get pretty people in front of the camera.
There's supposed to be a whole lot of Oh, I don't know.
People who try to back up their prettiness with some actual smarts, right?
Those are both attractive people on the air, right?
So how on earth does it get past all of these gatekeepers on air?
Well, I mean, there's only really two explanations for this, neither of which is good and both of which are very important.
So the first is that everybody...
It's as dumb as a bag of hammers.
Like they simply don't understand that 327 million is less than 500 million.
Like they simply don't understand that.
And there's 10 or 20 people who are filtering through all of this stuff.
They had zero, absolutely zero clue that this...
What's happening? That this catastrophic error, and it's catastrophic not because it really matters.
It's not like anyone dies. It's not like, I don't know, the Chinese Communist Party covering up the origins of coronavirus.
So it's not catastrophic because anyone dies.
It's catastrophic because what it tells you about fact-checkers and The intelligence of the people on this show.
And the New York Times.
This woman on the New York Times editorial board doesn't understand that 327 is less than 500.
Now, so one possibility is everybody dumb as a bag of rocks there.
And, you know, that seems kind of likely, but it's not a slam dunk.
I believe, I genuinely believe, that what is actually occurring is that there are a couple of smarter people in there, but it's such a weird culture.
It's such an emperor's new clothes, tyrannical culture.
You know that story of the emperor new clothes, right?
There's this vain and famous emperor and these two tailors come along and say, well, we can make you the most amazing costume.
It's beautiful. It's iridescent.
It's a carousel of rainbow waterfall gorgeousness, but it's magic and it'll actually help you figure out who's incompetent in your kingdom because no one who's unfit for their position can ever see this cloth, can ever see this clothes, right? And so the king is like, well, that's pretty good, man.
I sure love to know who's unfit for their position around here.
That would be excellent. Go make it, oh, tailor people.
So, of course, they're just a bunch of scam artists, and they just pretend.
Just, oh, look at this cloth.
Now, of course, the king can't see anything, and what that means, because he's swallowed the gullible nonsense, still better than astrology, what it means is he says, oh, my gosh, I can't see this cloth.
Oh, my God, I'm unfit for my position.
Well, I can't let anyone know I'm unfit for my position.
So everyone says...
You know, the kings and everyone says, oh man, this is so beautiful.
I can't believe it. They all think everyone else is seeing it.
I remember when I was six, I went to Africa to visit my father and I listened to this story over and over on the plane.
It was really the only children's story they had in a flight that approximately lasted 23 hours.
And so I listened to this and it really sort of sunk deep into my brain, just how common this kind of phenomenon is.
So the king, of course, roams around the palace.
Butt naked. Butt naked.
And of course, I think of him as kind of corpulent, you know, like John Goodman in his prime combined with the gravity of Jupiter.
So he's basically waterfalling off his own skeleton.
And he's, oh, doesn't everyone think how beautiful my clothes are?
And everyone's like, oh, your majesty is magnificent, stellar, beautiful, wonderful.
I can't imagine anything more pretty.
Oh, my eyes, they scald with the gorgeousness of your attire.
And because nobody wants to say they can't see it.
And of course, the quote tailors are making out like bandits, getting paid a fortune.
And then of course, the king goes on a parade to show off his new clothes and blah, blah, blah.
Long story short, he's parading around on horseback, poor horse.
And finally, one kid in the crowd says, the king is naked.
Because he's a kid. How could you be unfit for your position as a kid, right?
So that's The Emperor's New Clothes, a fantastic story, and tells you an enormous amount about groupthink, crowdthink, and manipulation, and it's just a one, political power, and so on.
I always think of it taking place in the Chinese or Japanese kingdom in the Middle Ages, but, you know, that just could be my, well, reading of their history, but anyway.
So... Maybe that's the situation.
Maybe, I mean, the two leads here, these two people are completely dumb.
I mean, that's not even close to, like, you can make these kind of calculations on the fly and make a mistake.
But this is all pre-planned and pre-approved and pre-cued and all that.
But my guess is that there's a culture in there of being supportive.
Supportive! You see, that's what you've got to be in this world.
You've got to be supportive, which means never contradicting anyone.
With actual facts. And that is something...
So, I bet you there are a couple of people who are like...
Well, that... Boy, that doesn't...
That doesn't quite seem right, does it?
No, I don't... I don't really think that's right.
But what do they do? What do they do?
Do they sit there and say...
Guys, come on. I just did these numbers.
This is incorrect math. They don't.
Why? Because they're afraid...
That if they contradict anyone with facts...
They're going to get fired or lose their career or they're going to be ostracized or they're going to be put down or they're going to miss the next promotion, whatever it is.
In other words, if you want to understand how the media works in general, facts are the single mother of secretary hanging on by a thread and she's being sexually harassed by the large, corpulent, retarded mainstream media boss.
Facts are being harassed out of the workplace by predatory cultural crap.
In other words, facts are scurrying around, clutching their skirts, wishing that they were dressed up in burkas.
Facts are running around the hallways of the mainstream media crying, Me too!
Me too! Me too! Facts are being invited into Anchors rape rooms and then the door slowly shuts based upon a button under the desk.
Facts are the Me Too victims of the predatory leftist culture in the mainstream media.
So this is important because...
Next time the mainstream media says, oh, I don't know, the Covington kids cornered a brave native elder and harassed him.
Or, I don't know, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Or, I don't know, I'm a white nationalist.
Whatever the nonsense they're coming up with.
Just understand that the mainstream media is full of either incredibly dumb people or people dumbed down by fear of retaliation for pointing out basic mathematical facts.
It's not even controversial. This is not like how many people died in the Holocaust.
This is basic math. It's 327, less than 500.
And they can't do it.
They can't get there. How toxic and how poisonous is it?
I don't think they're all dumb. But I think that there's such a claustrophobic, don't talk, don't speak, don't bring facts to bear on the conversation culture, that it would actually be a vast improvement if they were dumb.
You can fix dumb. I mean, you don't have to have an IQ of 150 to realize that 327 is less than 500.
You can fix dumb, you understand.
But fixing a toxic culture usually means burning it to the ground and starting all over again.
I mean that, of course, metaphorically, allegorically.
And it's what I said on Twitter, that the smart people left the mainstream media long ago.
Could you imagine? If you're a smart person who has integrity, look at the culture that's going on here.
If you are a smart person with any kind of integrity or even just a person of average intelligence with any kind of integrity, can you possibly imagine what it must be like to work in an environment where you can't tell people that one number is less than another number?
I would be like a ferret in an overturned aquarium, just trying to scratch my way out.
I can't imagine, like my job here is telling the truth, right?
So I can't imagine what it would be like to work in a culture where you can't say 327.
It's less than 500.
What is their dedication to truth?
What is their dedication to fact-checking?
What is their dedication to basic reality?
And I'd like to say what's wrong with them, but of course everything's wrong with them, and they're a bunch of propagandists and a bunch of liars.
And they have created either a completely dumbed-down or completely toxic culture where anybody who talks about facts gets fired.
So I just wanted to point that out.
Because I think that's kind of important.
Let's talk about one or two other things.
I'll take a couple questions.
And then...
Oh, yeah. In Denmark, over half of African and Middle Eastern migrants are convicted of a crime before the age of 30.
Just for... If you want to check out the debate I did with Mac McManus, which is at fdrurl.com slash...
Feb debate, F-E-B debate.
Or you can just do a search for McManus, M-C-M-A-N-U-S. And me, there's a debate that we did where he was talking about how wonderful immigration was for the economy.
And that seems kind of important.
After just one week from the outbreak, Northern Italy is already considering expanding its hospital beds capacity because 1 in 11 patients goes into ICU. Also, coronavirus has mutated into a more dangerous and less dangerous version.
And that seems quite important as well.
This is from back in the day, a couple years ago.
Joe Biden's niece dodges jail after a $100,000 credit card scam.
Carolyn Biden given get-out-of-jail-free card.
That is really quite something.
Because, you know, why is Joe Biden in the race?
I think it's because if he ain't in the race, half of his family, if not all of his family, is going to go to jail.
So it's kind of like, why was Clinton in the race?
Well, you know, she's a... Power-hungry vampiric hag from another dimension, but also, you know, she committed so many crimes that she knew if Trump got in that she might be targeted.
And this is from 2017.
The wild child niece of former Veep Joe Biden stole more than $100,000 in a credit card scam and quietly cut a plea deal in Manhattan court that spares her any jail time.
So using a borrowed credit card, the blonde, Carolyn Biden set up an unauthorized customer account at Bigelow Pharmacy on 6th Avenue, racked up the six-figure bill over the course of a year, according to a criminal complaint that is not named the victim card owner.
As part of a plea deal, she pleaded guilty to one charge of grand larceny, another of petty larceny, and agreed to make restitution of $110 and change, okay?
If she pays everything back and keeps her nose clean, boy, if there's one thing that Biden seemed to have a fair amount of Trouble is keeping their nose clean.
She can return to court and enter a substitute plea to a lower misdemeanor charge of petty larcenery, be sentenced to two years probation.
But even if she fails to live up to the plea deal...
She only gets five years probation.
And I just, you know, this is like really low-tech way.
But this face, I don't know if you can see it, right?
You can see it, right? Look at that face.
That is the face of somebody rich and pretty enough to live a consequence-free life.
In other words, to stay worse than a child forever.
That is some pretty, I mean, desperately ridiculous and sad...
And then one last thing I wanted to mention, I'm not going to talk about who posted this because, you know, she's not a big person, but, I mean, not a big person social media size, but she wrote apropos of nothing.
In other words, I'd hit it.
Yeah, that would be a very risky thing to do.
So... She responded to my Bloomberg Height tweet by saying, It's not always a woman's fault that she's single and 30.
I know more women who've been dicked over getting their time and lives wasted by self-absorbed men than women who just can't stop partying.
Your minions make fun of this, ladies.
Take your own advice. Now, there's a lot to unpack there, and I'll just spend a minute or two on it, and then I'm going to love to get your questions.
So... This woman, her name is Kay.
It's not always a woman's fault that she's single and 30.
Well, first of all, I never said it was always her fault.
I don't even know what that means.
Choices and consequences. If you start looking for a quality man earlier, you're much more likely to find it.
You know, I spent years, well, actually no, about a year and a half in total, working up north, prospecting, gold panning, and all that kind of stuff.
And... I didn't find a gold mine.
But you know what? I was a hell of a lot more likely to find a gold mine than if I'd sat at home not looking for gold, right?
So if it's hard to find, then you got to start looking sooner rather than later.
Like if you're not sure where your passport is and you got to fly overseas, you don't start looking for it five minutes before you have to leave.
It's kind of important, right?
So I don't know what it means when you say it's not always a woman's fault that she's single and 30.
I don't know what that means.
I know more women who've been dicked over getting their time and lives wasted by self-absorbed men, blah, blah, blah, right?
Okay. So now she's saying, well, you see, it's not the woman's fault.
Now, if she's a humanist rather than a feminist, then she's going to say, well, the moral standards...
The self-respect free will standards that I have for women must also apply to men.
Right? It's really fascinating.
It's really fascinating.
Because if she's saying, hey man, it's not always a woman's fault.
You know, just sometimes stuff happens.
You know, it's...
Life happens.
You missed the turn off recalculating, you know, says your GPS. And that's just...
Just the way that the cookie crumbles.
You hit 30 and you're single and, you know, so, okay, so that's her statement regarding women.
But then, what happens when she turns that humanist focus and that deep examination of free will, choice, and consequences...
To the testicularly endowed members of the population, what happens when she takes these general excuses and don't blame women and looks at men?
Ooh, the eyes narrow, the breasts freeze over and fall down like frozen icicles of witch daggers into male testicles.
And she says, oh no, you see, men are taking over the women, wasting their lives, they're self-absorbed.
Okay, so you see, for women, don't blame women.
Blame men! Right?
And this is really, really interesting.
Right? This is really, really interesting.
So, what I wrote back to her...
That was a paraphrase, I get that.
But I wrote back to her, women have no responsibility.
In quotes, like she's saying, women have no responsibility.
Men have all the responsibility.
This is why you are unmarried.
Do you see? Because...
If she's all kinds of fired up with don't blame women, don't hold women accountable, it's not always the women's fault, it's the men's fault!
Well, who's going to want to date that?
Who's going to want to marry that kind of woman?
Where anything bad that happens requires gentle pillow-like consideration of the consequences that may have led a woman to end up in a suboptimal position.
But if bad things happen, it's because men are dicking over women, wasting their time by being self-absorbed, I mean, my gosh, can you imagine trying to sign up for that?
Because, hey, you know what? I'm in my 50s now.
I'm going to be 54 this year.
54. Put that together when I was 40, you'd get a pretty decent album.
But anyway. You know what?
Bad things are going to happen in life, man.
Bad things, and you can't avoid it.
You can stay home, but that just means everything bad happens because you don't go anywhere.
You don't do anything. So you have to take risks in order to achieve anything.
And life risk means you're going to fail.
You're going to screw up. You're going to make mistakes.
You're going to get sick. Maybe no fault of your own.
I just got cancer. I'm a healthy guy.
Well, not just. I got cancer years ago.
I'm a healthy guy, right? So, you know, bad stuff's going to happen.
You're going to get, I don't know, deplatformed.
You know, bad things are going to happen.
And if you have someone who says, who enormous anxiety is provoked when bad things happen, and when you have enormous anxiety being provoked because the vicissitudes of life are going to just occasionally wing you and hopefully not take off your head with a sniper, but just leave you with a flesh wound, then if you have a lot of anxiety, generally you want to discharge it.
And the way that you discharge it is you find a scapegoat And then you pour all of your frustration and your anger and your disappointments and your anxiety into that scapegoat.
You attack them, right?
So scapegoat actually comes from, I can't remember where, an African tribe or something like that.
And what they did was they cast all the sins of the tribe into a goat and then they drove the goat out into the desert to die.
And that got rid of all of the sins of the tribe.
That's where scapegoat comes from.
And so this woman is obviously single and 30.
And that's provoking great anxiety in her, right?
So when you get great anxiety, that's kind of an opportunity.
In general, anxiety accrues when you're not exercising your free will to take the necessary risks to achieve your full potential.
Let me just say that again.
Anxiety generally, it's not the only way, but I think in general, anxiety accrues when you're not exercising your free will to take the necessary risks to achieve your full potential, whatever that may be.
And you have the choice in life of short-term anxiety, in other words, you're taking risks that are going to make you nervous, or long-term anxiety, which is you miss the boat, massive regret, and your life peters off into nothing like 10 CC's Things We Do For Love, which was my very first album, 45 album when I was a kid, and I used to play it quite a lot, and my God, did that have a repeat and fade outro that went on for about 19 days.
So... That's your choice.
Like, I've taken a lot of flack and a lot of damage and a lot of harm reputationally for talking about controversial topics.
Yeah, that sucks sometimes.
I'm not going to lie.
But what's my alternative?
To know these controversial, important, essential facts, not to speak them, to look straight into your eyes and say, I'm a philosopher, I speak the truth, and then dodge these essential truths.
Well, then all I would have is regret.
And so I either take reputational damage, or, which, you know, can be unpleasant at the time, or I can avoid challenging and difficult topics, kind of lie to you guys by saying, I'm being mean to the truth, right? And then I just end up with a huge amount of regret down the road, and a feeling of...
Being a coward, right?
Which is really an unpleasant feeling.
So that's life.
So this woman, she's single, she's 30, and what's happening is her brain is kicking up her anxiety.
Now, anxiety, of course, is your brain's way of saying you're not taking enough risks.
I know it sounds kind of paradoxical, but it's really, really true.
Anxiety is your brain's way of saying you're not taking enough risks.
Sensible risks, right? It's that Aristotelian mean, right?
If you take too few risks, then you're a coward.
If you take too many risks, you're foolhardy, and you're Thelma and Louise-style spinning in a Rocket League, rotating car off the end of a cliff, and starting Brad Pitt's career.
So she's 30, she's single, and it's causing her great anxiety.
Now, how is she discharging that anxiety?
By attacking men, by blaming men.
Holding women faultless and blaming men for what happens to women.
Okay, that's going to give her temporary relief from her anxiety, but it gives her no choices to make that are better.
Because if you say, well, if you're a woman, say, well, I'm single because basically men are bad.
Well, how can you fix that?
You can't go fix all men. But if you say, I'm single because I choose bad men, that is an empowering statement.
But in order to feel empowered, you have to feel like crap on a stick first.
Like you have to feel like microwaved moose dung.
That's the price of waking up to bad decisions.
Empowerment is something that Evel Knievel style you get after you cross that fiery chasm of feeling like crap about your bad choices.
So everybody wants to feel empowered, and they want to feel empowered by, as I talked about earlier, being supported.
Sure, 327 is...
Almost infinitely higher than 500, right?
I'm empowering you. Everybody wants to feel empowered, but to be empowered, you have to take responsibility.
To take responsibility, you have to accept that you didn't take responsibility for quite some time.
Otherwise, it wouldn't really be an issue, right?
And to be empowered is to die and come back to life.
I'm going to tell you about this, man.
I haven't talked about this before.
In a long time. But I will tell you my own particular fiery path through empowerment.
So in my 20s, I was enmeshed in, in hindsight, significantly corrupt and destructive relationships.
And I mean, like, just about everywhere.
In my family. In my business career, we took a company public and what happened in that process was something that, well, it was pretty bad.
It was pretty nasty and there was a lot of corruption going on.
A lot of corruption going on.
I'll never look at the financial class the same way again.
They're a bunch of jackals. And I was in a relationship with a woman that was not good.
I proposed.
I bought the ring and it was just...
It was just not working out.
I couldn't have an opinion contrary to this woman's without it breaking down into some lunatic fight.
And a lot of good times, it wasn't a terrible, terrible relationship, but I just couldn't be myself.
And I couldn't be honest. Now, I've been studying philosophy at this point for 15 years.
But it was very abstract for me.
It was very, yeah, you know, if I were John Galt, if I were Howard Rourke, I would do this, and I would stand up for these abstract ideals, I would stand up for these principles, but I wouldn't actually bring them to life in my own life.
I was not living the values I had been studying.
And it was a strange thing.
For the only time in my life, I just...
I just stopped being able to sleep.
I'm not a very happy guy when I can't sleep, and I'm a good sleeper for the most part now.
I've been a light sleeper sometimes, but usually I'll get enough to get by.
But this was just like, nope!
Awake! Why was I not sleeping?
Because I was asleep in my life.
Because what had happened is I had fed the beasts of integrity enough to the point where they were now mounting an attack upon my denial of virtue.
You feed the dogs and keep them chained up long enough.
Eventually, they're strong enough to break their chains.
And they come for your false self.
The self that you develop to gain the approval of people who don't like you when you tell the truth.
Which, you know, when you're a kid, you don't have any choice about.
But when you're an adult, you do. So I just stopped sleeping, man.
This went on for 16 months.
Now, I'm not Jordan Peterson.
I did not sleep for 16 months, you understand, but it was a massive battle.
And this is what drove me into therapy and into everything changed.
I mean, everything changed.
I came out of that situation and experience like you die.
You die. It is not...
It feels like a death, because when you actually die, it's over.
But this feels like a death that you come back to life from, and then you really experience the whole death thing.
I don't know, whatever crazy flashing disco lights and flashbacks occur when you actually die.
But this is a drawn-out death that never stops, and it is a wild thing.
It's a wild thing. Where you say...
It's something I wrote in a novel years ago when a child was thinking, and he said, it's really shocking how little truth is allowed in a young life.
It's shocking how little truth is allowed in a young life.
And just speaking the truth caused incoate rage often in those around me.
And that's no way to live.
Well, it is obviously a way to live, but it's no way to live, live.
And eventually, after feeding the beasts of integrity, they tore free from their chains and ripped down the entire village of my being.
Tore it down. Smoking crater.
Nothing left. Couldn't even stay to rebuild.
Everything was on fire.
Everything was irradiated.
I had to Move out Chernobyl style.
Of everything that I had.
Every one that I knew.
I've got no one left from that time in my life.
No one. But I have you guys.
And I have a wonderful wife and a loving child.
I've got great friends now. All people that I've met through the course of philosophy.
All people who love me because I tell the truth rather than love me because I only talk about the truth in abstract terms and would never imagine bringing it to bear.
On my life, on their life.
For real. And so when I talk to people, I just released a show today about a guy who wrote that his girlfriend was carrying another man's child.
And look, I spent two hours with the guy.
It was one of the longest calls I've ever done and one of the hardest calls I've ever done just to get to the facts.
That was hard, man!
That was a hard slog.
And, you know, everyone, it's funny.
And I get this. Like, I really do.
I understand. And it's not a criticism.
I'm just pointing it out. That people, and I knew this was going to happen, they're on comments, they're on Twitter, they're on Facebook, on Gab, on Minds, you name it, right?
L-B-R-Y. And they're all like, well, just run, man!
And all those pictures of Johnny Depp sprinting off Pirates of the Caribbean style and just get out, man, run, you cuck.
It's like, that doesn't teach him anything.
If you're in a bad situation, just running away from it, it teaches you virtually nothing.
No matter where you go, there you are.
You've got to stay and you've got to stare it down and you've got to find out why the hell you were in this situation to begin with.
How on earth did you end up in this situation to begin with?
Because if you don't know that, you're just going to go out.
It's going to happen again. It had already happened twice to this guy already.
His first girlfriend turned into a lunatic or was a lunatic.
His second girlfriend, well, told him that a child was his when she had every reason to believe it wasn't.
So just saying run, so what?
It's like Groundhog Day or it's like this Mobius Strip or like this...
You know, my first train set when I was a kid had just that little circle, right?
Not even a straight, no tunnels, no switches, just a little, not even any, no oval, like nothing.
It's just circle, man, just round and round, right?
I mean, I could go faster, but the train wasn't going anywhere.
So just telling someone to speed up their passage when they're just going around in circles doesn't help them break the circle.
It just actually makes it worse because then they collide into the same problems in an ever-increasingly rapid format.
And it just gets worse and worse.
So I have to work with people to get to the root of why they're doing what they're doing.
And this guy, no fault of his own, hard-working guy, man, it took almost two hours.
And listen, I strongly suggest that you go through that show.
Go through that video.
Listen to that show.
Because... Just saying run, which I completely understand, doesn't teach anyone anything.
It's sort of like if your piano teacher just, you know, tapes her fingers to yours and then just plays, what have you learned?
Nothing. Nothing.
It's like if your coach says, watch me run.
You don't get to practice, right?
So, yeah, you can post a link to that show.
I also wanted to remind people, I'm going to just check it out.
Sorry, I haven't quite set it up where I've got super easy access.
Oh, no, I can do it from this.
Okay. So, you should also check out, there's a private Discord server.
I do a lot of work here that's kind of technical and not super fascinating.
It's putting shows together, normalizing, equalizing, taking out any background hits and so on.
And I'm on that server quite a lot.
And you can check it out.
We'll sometimes drop into a chat, especially if we've got a debate or something coming up.
I will usually get feedback on how I'm going to approach it from people.
And you can get there through Subscribestar.com.
You can sign up for Subscribestar.
Listen, it's like 10 cents a day.
And I hope that you can afford that for quality philosophy reaching 700 million times in the world.
So, free domain, sorry, subscribestar.com forward slash free domain, you can go there, or if you just want to do one-time donation, you can do a tip there, but you can subscribe.
You will get early shows, and you will get exclusive shows.
I've got, I don't know, probably 20 shows on there that have never gone out yet.
So there's really, really good stuff there, some kind of advanced stuff, but I hope that you will check that out.
And let's get to some questions.
Do you think socialism would work in an ethically homogenous, high-AQ nationalist society?
No. No, because it's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Socialism is a small elite group of people with a massive amount of weaponry pointing their guns at everyone and shoveling trillions of dollars around the economy, ostensibly for helping the poor, but fundamentally to buy votes, and they will be corrupted and turned soul rancid through power.
Through power, like...
Okay, so let me sort of give you a tiny example, right?
It's a bit of a... So there's this woman named Busy Phillips, and that's her nickname.
And a show that I quite liked when I was younger is called Freaks and Geeks.
She was in it playing a very disturbed bully with a very dysfunctional household.
And Busy Phillips...
Says that she was raped at the age of 15.
No, sorry, she was raped at the age of 14 and got pregnant and then had an abortion at the age of 15.
Now, if you read her description of the rape, she grabs the guy's penis, he invites her into the back of the car, and then she doesn't say anything to him and they have sex.
I mean, unpleasant, of course.
I mean, if she didn't want to, but...
It's, you know, I really find it tough to put that in the same, totally the same category as, you know, a woman who's dragged into an alley and a knife is held to her throat and so on.
And it, of course, speaks to, I would assume, a lonely, and she talks about how she felt she was unattractive.
And, you know, she's a very, very attractive woman.
So, terribly low self-esteem and unable to speak.
And this is really bad childhood stuff, bad childhood stuff.
And, but...
She gave this, like, unbelievably horrendous speech.
Horrendous not just because of the moral content, but just the screaming and the emphasis and this weird licking tongue thing or whatever's going on.
And she's saying basically, well, I have a talk show now because I had an abortion and I'm going to drive an electric car.
I mean, you trade in a child's life for a talk show?
Are you kidding? Are you kidding?
It's funny. I was looking up something on Michael Hutchins the other day.
Guy I'm actually kind of fascinated with.
And one of his last appearances was on the Rosie O'Donnell show.
And Rosie O'Donnell, you know, is kind of cute back then in terms of like she was a cutesy comedy girl.
Not so much anymore, but...
And, you know, Michael Hutchins was talking about how...
Some woman was playing one of his songs to him by peeing rhythmically into a toilet.
And I think there was some joke, like he was talking about his kids.
They all had age names and Rosie O'Donnell was like, yeah, you got your own 4-H club going there or something like that.
Like just a cutesy little moment.
He did a song and then shortly thereafter he...
He killed himself because he got involved with this terrible crazy woman who claimed that he was into strangling her during sex and, oh, it's just nasty.
So you get a talk show.
No one's going to care about that talk show in the future.
No one's going to care. So you get a talk show and that feels like everything in the world to you.
Oh, look at that. I've got a set.
I've got cameras. I've got that, right?
I bet you're going to have a bunch of MSNBC rejects who also can't tell the truth about anything because it's really, you know, to hold people's paycheck over them so that they lie to you is really brutal and unfortunately common.
So she got a talk show and she got some, you know, she's been on, she was in Cougar Town.
She was in a couple other things.
And, but, now, I don't know.
I mean, It's a lot of times it's parents, right?
A lot of times it's parents who support the easy access to abortion because they don't want a parent, right?
So in the past, if a woman got pregnant and the man wasn't around, then she would give the child up for adoption or she would keep the child.
Now, if she kept the child, then the parents would be on the hook.
The parents would basically have to step in and provide the nurturing and financial role that the father would have provided, right?
And you don't have to parent if the girl can just go get an abortion because you're not on the hook for raising a bastard child for 20 years.
Right? So the welfare state has crippled people's desire to and efficacy at parenting, especially girls, because the reason why parents got involved and made sure the kids were chaperoned and wouldn't let the girl go out past 9 p.m.
and wouldn't let her be alone with the boy was because, like, hey, man, you get knocked up and that boy runs.
We're on the hook for the next 20 years.
But now everyone just dumps everything on welfare.
So this kind of corruption, this is the kind of corruption that power gives you, the power to get resources from other people against their will.
And it happens in parenting, it happens in abortion, and it will happen in an ethno-state with high IQ people.
If you have high IQ people, you don't need a welfare state, because people are smart enough to know that helping others is a good thing to do, and they will.
All right. What other questions do we have?
Western society is dying.
It has to repopulate itself through mass immigration.
It's not dying. It's not dying at all.
I, uh... A falling birth rate is just...
It's sorry, and I don't mean to be insulting, but maybe it's just the fact that I've studied a lot of history and have a long-term view of things.
Population increases and decreases, of course, right?
That's natural. You know, it's like if you look at the temperature, right?
And from 6 o'clock in the morning until noon, it goes from 0 to 10 degrees, right?
And then you say, oh my gosh, by the end of the week, it's going to be 3,000 degrees.
Because, you know, like this line doesn't just go down in the evening and all of that, right?
There's rhythms in life.
It's a wave, right? If you're measuring a wave, right, or you're measuring the surface of the ocean, and then a fairly decent sized wave comes up and you say, oh my gosh, the water level just went up three feet in one second.
If this continues, then by this time tomorrow, the entire world will be underwater.
You say, well, no, it's going to go back down.
Wave comes up, goes back down.
Temperature goes up, goes back down.
The same thing with population, right?
So there was a big baby boom after the Second World War when all the soldiers came home, all that.
And so you had a lot of people.
Then there was a baby bust. And if left uncorrected by massive amounts of government propaganda and controls and federal money bailouts and quantitative easing and all the stuff that gives...
You know, Pete Schiffer aneurysm.
Well, then things, they sort out, right?
So you get an excess population.
Look at that! We got a lot of extra people, so we got a lot of extra houses.
We got a lot of extra development.
We got a lot of extra building. We built up all this manufacturing capacity to satisfy the needs of the boomers.
Oh, the boomers are dying off, and 10,000 a day of them are retiring.
So what do you do? What happens?
Well, everything just gets super cheap.
Because you have all of these extra houses.
So the price of real estate is going to plummet.
And congestion is going to diminish and pollution is going to go down.
So when houses are cheap...
Oh, and their wages.
You see, all these businesses have built themselves around the baby boom employment demographic.
And then, oh my gosh, there's only half the number of workers around.
Well, what happens? Price of real estate is going right down.
Houses are costing 50% what they did 10 years ago.
And the wages have doubled.
You don't think that's going to cause another baby boom?
Really cheap real estate?
You know, I mean, I remember talking to a teacher, a teacher who was saying, oh, yeah, so in the 60s, I was in Ontario, and I was making $9,000 a year, and I got a house for $12,000.
And this was when there was a baby boom, because they were building like crazy, right?
And I don't know, teachers get what, $60,000, $70,000.
So it's like a $100,000 house.
Getting a nice house in Toronto for $100,000.
Well, you can't even get a rat's nest tear-down crap heap for a million dollars, for less than a million dollars these days, right?
So there's a rhythm.
The population goes up, you build, you grow, and then the population goes down, the wages go up, the housing prices go down, and you just get another baby boom.
The West's not dying. It's just a cycle.
They're not bringing in immigrants because the West is dying and population needs to be replaced and blah, blah, diversity.
It's nothing to do with that. They're just immigrants vote for the left.
I mean, it's not complicated.
Sorry. It's not complicated.
All right. A couple more questions.
I've got some people coming over this afternoon.
Do you know anything about the claims of Jewish organizations regarding the restitution of Jewish wealth that was lost during World War II in Poland?
No, I don't. Sorry. I really, really don't.
I really wanted that rat's nest.
That baby boom destroyed the US? No.
It was that the Communists won the Second World War.
We're all just trying to struggle to survive in the shadow of that.
I just posted a whole link series on peaceful parenting, which I would recommend.
It's all my podcasts on peaceful parenting.
It's on Twitter.
Just do a search for me on peaceful parenting.
There will be no cheap real estate.
Investors buy the houses and keep the price high.
No, because the investors are only going to buy the houses if the price keeps going up.
And if there's no demographics to support collapsing real estate prices, people won't...
They're short, maybe, but they won't buy that stuff.
All right. Anyone else?
Questions? Nice to chat with you guys.
Actually, I wanted to do a cast during the day as well to test this new setup.
I know. It's a little anal of me to kind of work on all of this stuff, but I do like having a camera I can just turn on and go with.
Okay. Hey Steph, would you like to come down to America and shoot some guns?
I've got a nice target range. You never know when you might need the skill.
You're assuming I haven't.
The future of the United States will be within the coming decades.
Well, it depends what you do.
It depends what I do. It depends whether people listen or not.
Do you have a problem with white people becoming a minority in the USA by 2040?
Well, what you need to do is look up the rights of indigenous peoples from the United Nations and read through all of that and just ask yourself if the United Nations and the international world community has a problem with people losing their homeland in general and just go from there.
Have I seen a good movie lately?
Well, I tell you, and this is Jack Posobiec's recommendation if I remember rightly, I tried Midsommar.
And although the acting was very good, cinematography was very good, I didn't like any of the people involved in the movie, I mean, the actress and the characters and so on.
And, you know, with all of the weird stuff that goes on in the world, saying that the big problem is Swedish cults populated by white people or the big thing to focus on, it just seemed kind of, you know, kind of cowardly.
So it just seemed kind of like, oh, let's go back on white people because the big problem is white cults these days, right?
So I did try that.
I didn't make it more than halfway through.
It's kind of unusual. But no, I haven't seen a good movie.
I haven't seen a good movie in quite a long time.
What kind of therapy would you recommend for childhood trauma caused by narcissistic parents?
And what would you require from the therapist?
So I think it's 1927 is the show where I talk about my thoughts on finding a good therapist.
But also what I would do is internal family systems therapy.
I think the doctor is Schwartz.
I interviewed him on the show. I would check.
I would check that out.
Last movie to recommend Good Morals and Kids, I guess, would be Tangled, back in the day.
I think it was the last Christian-directed movie from Disney, if I remember rightly.
PewDiePie has gotten into philosophy.
What do you think? I think that it's a wise thing to do.
I would strongly recommend that he start building his philosophy up, not by reading about cool philosophers in the past, but...
By working from first principles and really figuring out what reality is, what truth is, what virtue is.
And I've got, of course, I've got a book, Essential Philosophy, which you can get at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
We'll do that, right? My parents have millions but refuse to help me while I'm studying.
I have to rent a room in a basement from a crazy lady and live with passes smoking.
Should I defoo them? I think that would be to indicate that they have to buy your allegiance.
I would sit down with them and talk about your issues and just ask them what's going on and why.
Are you writing any new book?
Well, I have a new idea. I have a new idea for a book just called On Morals, which is about sort of practical advice on how to live morally in a very difficult world.
So let me know what you think of that, On Morals.
Let's see. I love your show and I have one of my own.
Who's... You know what?
Do I have to diddle to get you on for an interview?
Thanks, Steph. You know, it's tough and I don't mean to sound all kinds of hoity-toity because, you know, I'm barely middling famous.
But listen, if you email me and say, come on my show and I go to your channel and there are like 82 subscribers...
I mean, like, I love you guys to death.
I have to sort of manage my time.
And I'm sort of facing my own struggles with deplatforming, with suppression and all that kind of stuff.
So, I'm sorry. All right.
How to start from scratch. Ended a long-term friendship.
Moved to a new city. No friends.
Well, I sort of hate to push the Discord thing again, but it's a really, really great resource, and there are hundreds and hundreds of people on there.
This is the Free Domain Discord. Maybe there's someone around who listens to the show who's in your neck of the woods, so you could maybe meet up for a coffee.
So that could be kind of cool, right?
Have you read JF's book?
Is that Gary Eppie's book? The Revolutionary Phenotype?
I have not. I actually have very little time to read other people's books, I'm afraid, so that's not really happening.
Let's see here. Sandals or flip-flops?
Sandals. How do you know if you should forgive someone?
Well, if they genuinely make amends, if they promise restitution, if they enact it out, and if they don't drop the topic after you've just had the conversation once, and eventually be open to it, and eventually you'll feel better and you will forgive them of your own accord.
It's not a will thing. You can't will forgiveness.
How can one improve conversational skills, practice, or any book on the topic you'd recommend?
So I'll tell you what.
Most times people have conversational problems because everyone around them is boring.
And, you know, the aforementioned thing where I was talking about the death and resurrection, I actually wrote this.
Yeah, everybody wants the resurrection, nobody wants the death, right?
So... It could be that you have bad conversational skills, or it could be that everyone around you hates you if you tell the truth.
I would go with a working hypothesis of the latter.
And I say this because I've had, I don't know how many conversations with listeners over the years.
And what they say is, a lot of them, they will say, you know, I'm not really, really good at conversation.
And then, boom, like we have the most incredible conversations.
That go on. And it's beautiful.
And so they are actually really good at conversations.
They just are surrounded by people that they can't figure that out.
$2 donation is still unacceptable.
Please do not send me $2.
I say that because if $2 is all you can afford, the last thing you should be doing is giving it to somebody online.
You need to hang on to that money for bus fare to get to a job.
You need to hang on to that money so that you can get some food.
Please do not send me that money.
Hang on to it for yourself.
It's much more important that you use that money to get out of whatever financial hole you're in rather than send it to someone on the Internet.
If you do want to support me, freedomain.com forward slash donate is the way to go.
Would you debate Sam Harris?
I would debate Sam Harris, but I can guarantee you that Sam Harris will not debate me.
I've enjoyed my debates recently.
I may have one tomorrow, I think.
I'm just waiting to hear back from the guy. 8 p.m.
Eastern. And what is the Discord?
Discord is a server for voice and text, which is available.
It's integrated into Subscribestar, and so when you sign up in Subscribestar, you get access to the Discord server.
How do you see the future for countries like Sweden?
Well, see, Sweden is experiencing the kind of horrifying blowback that occurs when the Swedish government, when it was infested by leftists, sent millions of dollars to help destroy South Africa, and nobody did anything, nobody cared, and you were called a conspiracy theorist for talking about it, and now, you know, they keep winning.
I'm a woman in engineering, and people are always surprised because I am attractive.
Men seem to be scared off by me, and I'm still single at 27.
Yeah, you know, I've heard this myth that men are scared of strong women and so on.
Listen, I'll tell you this. I mean, the moment I found a really competent woman, a strong woman, I married her.
You know, like, I mean, this idea that men are just scared off by strong...
If you believe that, then you're going to come across as really aggressive or really compliant, and it's just going to be weird, so...
How would you spend a gap year as a 23-year-old with a BSc in mathematics who just missed the deadline for the master's program?
Hmm.
It's an interesting question.
I would spend it working on myself for the most part.
I remember when I had a month between jobs, I put out a 17-part Introduction to Philosophy series, so that may be my particular way of doing things, but let's see here.
Sorry, there was a good question here.
And if anybody does know Streamlabs OBS, if you could let me know.
I did look up resolution 1152 by 648.
Let me know why that might be happening on YouTube.
That would be great. Do I meditate?
I used to. I don't really have time for it at the moment, which sounds kind of odd.
And let's see. Let's do one or two more questions.
Great, great questions. William says, I'm a huge coward, Stefan, when it comes to speaking truth.
I've read your books on relationships and parents, but I can't seem to get over this hump that I'm a huge coward.
Does that make me bad?
No. I mean, you are admitting an issue that you have.
And listen, calling yourself a coward is not going to help you become courageous.
In other words, you call yourself a coward, I would assume, because you were verbally abused and bullied as a child, probably by your parents.
And so if you feel weak or you're weakened because you were bullied and abused by your parents, then calling yourself a coward is only adding fuel to the fire that's burning down your future.
You need to be gentle with yourself and you need to be positive with yourself and be curious.
Okay, what's the worst that could happen?
Why am I so scared? Am I willing to handle the most negative outcome of a particular action?
If not, Okay, then don't do it, right?
That could be in the realm of foolhardiness.
I mean, you know, you shouldn't end up living homeless because you spoke the truth about IQ or something like that, right?
So just be gentle and be curious with yourself and figure out why you're doing what you're doing and figure out why the first place you would go to is to self-abuse yourself by calling yourself a coward.
So I would not do it that way at all.
The truth about food would be a cool future project.
Yeah, I'm not going to. Look on that.
There's so much complexity and education and detail and different schools of thought and so on.
So many people are already doing it as a whole.
What is your favorite Beatles album?
I think the last one.
I think the last one. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Truth about Kurt Cobain.
Well, you've got to be careful who you date.
Monstrous. Monstrous dating situation with Kurt Cobain.
All right. Listen, I will...
Oh, I just lost my mother.
Any advice for being in the grieving process?
I miss her a lot. I'm sorry about that.
I give you my deepest sympathies for losing your mother.
That's a sad thing. A very sad thing to go through.
And... I mean, so there's...
Great loss is the flip side of great value.
So, you miss your mother because you loved your mother enormously.
In other words, you had many decades of a great relationship with a great mother.
That is something to be enormously grateful for.
Now, the best way to honor your mother and to get over the grief is, first of all, imagine what she would want you.
Would she want you staring at the grave, pouring Niagara's of tears into her...
No, she would want you to go out and enjoy your life.
And the best way to honor your mother and to get over your grief, in my humble opinion, is, I don't know if you're single or not, but find a woman who embodies the virtues that your mother possessed and then recreate her, so to speak, for your children through your wife.
I know that sounds all kinds of weird and Freudian, but it's not.
I'm just talking about look for a woman with honor and integrity and courage and honesty and all of that.
And if that's what your mother had as virtues, Then you can, in a sense, bring those virtues back to life in your own life through your mother.
And that's the only way, really, to get over the grief, in my humble opinion.
Samantha says, having a difficult time with doubting myself as a mother.
Many, including my own mother, say I'm doing well.
I also resent my mom for my bad relationship with food.
Advice? Call me!
Let's talk about it. Send me an email.
Call in at freedomain.com.
Thought on Ted Kaczynski's manifesto?
I think I read it years ago, but I don't remember it well enough to say anything about it, so...
Beware of half-Japanese women here.
Well, how did Sweden destroy South Africa?
Oh, they sent huge amounts of money to the communists there, and it was just terrible.
All right. Okay. Well, listen.
Thanks, everyone, so much for a wonderful chat this afternoon.
Please go and check out freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Such a great pleasure to chat with you guys.
It really is an honor I do not take lightly.
I like the new camera.
And I think this will make it easier for me to sort of jump on.
I think the audio volume is good too because sometimes I have to kind of rejig it later and normalize it if it's over or a little or whatever.
So just great to chat with you guys.
Thanks a lot. Again, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Have a great, great...
Afternoon and evening. And I'll keep you guys posted.
There's some reflection of the lights.
I will keep you guys posted about the possibility of a debate tomorrow night, which will be live streamed on this here channel.
And lots of love to everyone out there.
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