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Aug. 28, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:42:05

THE DEVIL SELLS SIMPLICITY! Freedomain AMA 27 Aug 2020

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	All right, all right. Good evening, good evening.
	I'll turn the video on in just a second.
	How is everyone doing this evening?
	Welcome, welcome, welcome.
	Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	I hope you guys are having a great, great evening and staying safe in these increasingly challenging, exciting slash dangerous times.
	I guess it's been a little while, right?
	It's been a little while.
	Thoughts on the Jacob Blake situation?
	Well, well, well.
	Everybody's trying to lure me back into political commentary.
	We'll see. We'll see.
	It's something I've left a little bit, actually, quite a lot in the rear view, because I'm not sure philosophy has a place in these kinds of situations, but perhaps we'll talk a little bit more about it.
	Over time, but yeah, I hope you guys are having a great evening.
	And let's go say hello to the wonderful listeners here.
	Oh, let's see here.
	Lutentalic says, yes, Winter, thoughts on the Jacob Blake situation.
	What's up? What's up with you guys?
	You have to watch RNC and Steph at the same time.
	Well, why are you going online during the RNC? Well, you know, I felt like chatting with you guys.
	What can I tell you? Jenny says, I was just singing Billy Joel The Way You Are on the app called Smool.
	It's karaoke. Have you ever tried it out?
	I have not, but I like that song.
	I'm a fairly big Billy Joel fan, largely because, I mean, he's just such a good singer that, yeah, he's really good.
	He loves you.
	You've paused your book reading for me?
	Well, I really, really appreciate that.
	How am I today, Steph?
	I'm pretty good. I'm pretty good.
	It's... It's a new world.
	It's a new life. It's a new gig for me.
	And, oh yeah, listen, so first and foremost, of course, please do check out...
	How do I even say this?
	So before I did what I did for the last 15 years, my goal was the arts.
	I went to the National Theatre School, studied acting, studied playwriting, and played Macbeth.
	I was in, oh gosh, a wide variety.
	I played Gloucester and King Lear, the evil guy who gouges out someone's eyes.
	Out, vile jelly!
	And I was really kind of aiming at the art world.
	I did poetry. I wrote like 30 plays.
	I've written like half a dozen novels.
	Anyway, so one novel that I was working on...
	It's called Almost, and it's a real meaty historical deep dive of a novel about a British family and a German family from World War I to World War II. A lot of European history, a lot of famous people in it, and of course, a whole whack load and a half of...
	So I hope that you will check it out.
	It's free. I've got the audiobook reading going on.
	You can get it at FDRURL.com forward slash almost.
	I'll put that in the chat. FDRURLURL.com forward slash almost.
	I've got a nice setup there for reading the old audiobook, and I'm quite pleased with how it's coming out.
	Again, it's all free. I hope that you will grab the files and listen to it, even if it's, you know, historical novels aren't really your cup of tea.
	Of course, I've been very influenced by Ayn Rand, by Dostoevsky, by Turgenev, by Dickens, of course.
	So, yeah, I try to stuff it with a lot of life, some jokes and some stories, yeah.
	Tell your story about when you realized you were too old to play Brimstick Sword for my wife to hear, the full dork version.
	I'm afraid I'm not a philosopher on command, but let's see here.
	We all love you so much, so very much.
	Please don't give up. Don't give up.
	Sing us a philosophical thought.
	You're the Steph-Bott man. Went golfing today.
	Tires. Here's Stephen.
	Because no one cares about stupid politics.
	And of course, I did the show for years before I started into politics.
	I started a true news section a couple of years into the show, and it did very well.
	No, I'm not going to stop.
	But you did do all of that stuff.
	You do poetry and novels. People just mainly know you for your philosophy show.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess I've got my foot in a couple of different buckets, so to speak.
	I asked you a question in your mind's DM. May I ask it to you now?
	You certainly can.
	We love you just the way you are.
	I know that song's in my head as well.
	You can certainly ask me the show here.
	This isn't ask me anything.
	I certainly have some topics.
	If you would like, but I... Oh, Lord, the Nick Fuentes thing.
	You gotta let it go.
	You gotta let it go.
	Let's see here. Doesn't the outright lies and propaganda by the Democrats and the media remind you of 1930s Germany?
	So, yeah, it's pretty wild.
	You know, it really is amazing when you think about it, just how quickly we went from there's no such thing as truth to how dare you say that!
	It's a pretty wild thing. Of course, if there's no such thing as truth, there's no such thing as right or wrong, then...
	You shouldn't be able to tell anyone.
	There should be no such thing as hate speech.
	There should be no such thing as hate crimes.
	There should be no such thing as true or false or right or wrong.
	Nobody should ever get attacked for anything.
	Everything should be live and let live.
	Morals should be a matter of musical tastes.
	Nobody usually gangs up and destroys people's reputations or assaults them because they like a particular different genre of music than you do.
	But it is a chilling thing that...
	The whole sort of postmodernism, there's no such thing as truth, is a way of destroying your capacity for intellectual self-defense, right?
	That's the big problem.
	So there's no such thing as truth uncorks the wild rage of the mob, and that is a dangerous thing.
	And one of the things that's happening, of course...
	One was first and now the second.
	So the first is that they take away your capacity to intellectually defend yourself because they say, well, there's no such thing as truth.
	So then they can say outrageous things about you and you push back and say that's not true and they say, hey, man, there's no such thing as truth, but they know the emotional effect of saying negative things about you or people that you like and so they're taking away your capacity for self-defense.
	You can, of course, see that.
	In the streets of America at the moment when you have people who are trying to defend themselves or trying to defend their property and the defund the police, we hate the police, we don't want the police around here, all suddenly, you know, stops and reverses itself the moment that someone tries to act in self-defense and then suddenly you've got to call the cops, you've got to arrest the person, you've got to punish the person, that's really, really bad.
	And so, yeah, it's...
	It's all about removing your capacity to defend yourself.
	It's not about there's no such thing as truth.
	Truth is like a church, right?
	If you don't believe in God, there's not much point going to church.
	And if you don't believe in truth, there's not much point correcting other people.
	But it is about removing your capacity for self-defense.
	Postmodernism does that in the intellectual realm.
	And I think fairly unjust prosecutions for people who are defending themselves occur in the political realm.
	And that's pretty bad as a whole.
	All right. Vincent James just got banned from YouTube.
	Do you have any tips to stay motivated?
	Can you give me a bit more...
	Detail about all of that.
	Stay motivated in what area?
	In business, in love, in life, as a whole, in politics?
	I'm not sure. For you, I'll let it go.
	Great to see you live again.
	It's been ages after shite tube.
	Bolsheviks share some things in common with their overlords today.
	Well, I mean, the Bolshevism is, they don't just share some things in common.
	I mean, the Black Lives Matter was founded by three Marxists, right?
	I mean, it's not like they happen to have some things in common.
	That's like, you know, everyone at a Queen concert, well, pretty much everyone at a Queen concert has something in common that they have a positive regard for the music of Queen.
	And everybody else, of course, is musically insane, but...
	So, yeah, I mean, that's the way.
	Bolshevism and free market is such an elemental and foundational situation in the world, right?
	Like, here's the thing.
	There's this little fork in the road.
	You know, if you think of sailing from, like, London to New York, if you're a couple of degrees off, you're going to end up in Florida rather than New York.
	Like, if you have a little bit of difference at the beginning, then you end up in a completely different world at the end, and that's Pretty wild.
	So, disparities.
	Disparities, disparities, disparities.
	What is it? Jeff Bezos is now the world's first $200 billion man.
	And again, I mean, I know that there's some hinky stuff.
	You know, everyone gets involved in the government.
	But listen, I mean, I'll be perfectly frank.
	Of course, when I was in the business world, although I was not an anarchist back then, but when I was in the business world, I said sure to government contracts.
	When government contracts came along, I was like, well, I'm being taxed as an individual and as a business person through corporate and personal taxes and sales taxes and property taxes and gas taxes and liquor taxes and cigarette taxes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	So I don't mind at all getting some of the old cashola back from the monster squid arms of the state.
	But disparities.
	Why is he so wealthy?
	Why do some people do well?
	Why do some people do badly?
	And you can either make that a complex question, i.e.
	an interesting question, or you can make it a simple question, and simple questions to complex answers destroy the The human mind.
	They destroy civilization.
	They destroy capacity to negotiate.
	They destroy capacity to get along.
	It's horrible. You know, like, look, we all have this in our life.
	We're all tempted by this black and white two-dimensional flatland idiocy of simple answers to complex questions.
	Where did the universe come from?
	It's a pretty complex question.
	What is the relationship of the earth to everything else in the universe?
	Pretty complicated question.
	Why do these girls keep breaking up with me?
	Kind of a complicated question.
	Why can't I get along with my sister?
	Kind of a complicated question.
	Why do some people, some groups, why do men make more money than women?
	Why do East Asians make more money than Hispanics?
	These are big, complicated, meaty questions.
	And there's like the left and then there's the right.
	And on the right is this big complicated library.
	It's like a jungle.
	It's an ecosystem. It's a library and it says, okay, I'm going to drop some breadcrumbs of curiosity from where you are with these big important questions.
	You got to go into this library and you got to read some shit and you got to sit there and you got to strain your eyes and you got to be puzzled and you got to be confused and you got to give up treasured things that you believe in because they ain't true.
	It's complicated. It's a complicated question.
	Now, for those of us, you know, you're listening to this show, I get that you're intellectually curious and like knowledge and don't settle for the easy answers, but you have the more refined and aesthetic tastes of, you know, like classical music takes a little bit of getting into it.
	Jazz fusion takes a little bit of getting into it, but, you know...
	Buddy, you're a boy, make a big noise.
	That's pretty easy to get into.
	There's nothing wrong with it. It's a fine song and all of that.
	But rap is the easier to get into than Bach cantatas, so to speak, right?
	Or country, for that matter.
	So on the right, there are these breadcrumbs of curiosity across this shaky bridge to a big, deep library of lifelong study.
	And it's complicated.
	On the other hand, on the left, that's the hard path, right?
	That's the straight and narrow path.
	That's the path that's on the cliff edge.
	That's the path that would get you in trouble with people, because a lot of people, and the sophists just lead this, the period people, right?
	It's like this, dun-da-dun-da-dun, period.
	Those people. Bane of civilization, bane of progress, right?
	So those people on the left, what they're doing is they're saying, it's simple.
	It's easy. There's nothing complicated about it.
	Why is Bob rich?
	Because Bob's an exploiter.
	Bob stole from people. That's why he's rich.
	He's a thief! Boom!
	Done! Why...
	Do men make more than women?
	Sexism! Men hate women!
	Boom! Done! You're done! It's all done!
	Don't go to that library!
	That's just a mess! It's complicated!
	It's confusing! It's not good for you!
	It's bad for you! It'll give your brain a cramp!
	And it'll get you in trouble with people!
	Why is Mary a single mother?
	On the right, it's complicated!
	She grew up without a dad. That means she's kind of R-selected, which means she probably started puberty earlier.
	She has a higher sex drive.
	She has less incentive because of the welfare state to look at the consequences of her actions.
	So she goes for some hot guy attempting to ratchet up Batman-style the high ramparts of alpha-maleness and bring him down with the powerful strength of her vagina.
	Didn't work? Oh, single mother.
	And it's daddy issues.
	And it's the welfare state.
	And it's our versus case selection from a biological standpoint.
	It's complicated. I mean, I do these call-in shows and people say, well, why do I do this?
	And we can talk for like two hours and we're still kind of scratching the surface.
	It's complicated. When I did personal talk therapy, I was in therapy for...
	Three hours a week for like two years and then I did another eight to ten hours of journaling and diagram work and I wrote out entire dialogues with my inner self about various things that I was debating and so on.
	It's complicated.
	It's complicated. Why do East Asians make more than Hispanics on average?
	It's complicated. There's cultural issues.
	There's IQ issues. There's historical issues.
	There's injustice issues. There's...
	Right? Nope!
	Racism! Save the left.
	It's simple. It's simple.
	And you know what stops emotional destructive rushes?
	It's complications. It's complications.
	So I want you to think...
	Think of a fish tank, right?
	And you've got an eyedropper, right?
	Right? And let's say the fish tank is totally empty, right?
	It's as empty as the conscience of Brian Stelter.
	So you got an eyedropper and you squeeze it at the top.
	The drop of water falls and splashes on the bottom.
	Done. It falls and it impacts, right?
	Like a little bomb. Right?
	That's simple. Now, think of...
	Some plants in there, think of some animals in there, think of sand and earth and so on.
	Now, if you drop the water from the top, it'll get to the bottom eventually, but the root is pretty circuitous, right?
	Bounces off a leaf, goes on the back of a hamster, a hamster shakes it off, it lands on a twig, drips off the twig, goes into the soil, goes through the soil and the sand, and eventually gets to the bottom, right?
	So how do you slow down things to the point where you can actually think about them?
	Well, the way that you slow down things is you accept and recognize complications.
	Complications. And the high road and the hard road is to recognize there are complications and three things, right?
	Number one, recognize there are complications.
	Number two, study the hell out of those complications.
	And number three, find a way to bring it back to people so it's less complicated.
	One of the most powerful statements I ever heard.
	When I was younger, I was in the business world, although very much in the periphery.
	This is like when I was in, oh, a year between, gosh, What the heck was I doing?
	Oh, yeah. A year between...
	And I was – it doesn't really matter.
	I was temping.
	And I was in a meeting and the boss said to someone who was explaining something to him and it was unnecessarily complicated.
	He said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	Okay.
	Explain it to me like I'm five years old.
	Now, that's a very confident thing to do.
	And it's kind of a volatile thing to do.
	So when someone's giving you that tsunami of baffle-gab bullshit that passes for instruction in the world these days, can they break it down and explain it to you like you're five years old or ten years old or whatever, right?
	If they can't, then they don't really understand it very well and they don't know how to explain it very well and they're kind of bullshitting you, right?
	Explain it to me like I'm five years old.
	Explain it to me like I'm ten years old.
	And the reason why that's important is when it comes to talking about ethics in society, the people we need to talk about it to are children.
	Who, at about the age of two, can start doing moral reasoning.
	So explain it to me like I'm two years old.
	I mean, I've done the ABCs of UPB, my whole theory of ethics, which is like a 450-page book for free, available in audio and video format and HTML format and PDF format at freedomend.com.
	Just click on Books. I've got the ABCs of UPB. I've explained it to kids.
	A number of kids explained it, of course, to my own daughter when she was very young.
	So you can get this stuff across.
	So complications.
	That's civilization. Because the mob is certain.
	The mob is outraged.
	And the mob does not stop to think.
	And anybody who stands in front of the mob and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's more complicated than you think it is.
	It's, um, when I was a, uh, In my early teens, I heard of the kids who would go down and put pennies on the train tracks so that the train would squish them.
	You'd get this big, cool, flat penny with a little curl in it from the train track.
	Now, a lot of times you just lose the penny.
	Oh, man. Okay, time for a wee bit of story.
	I used to go and hang out on train tracks because you know money when you're a kid, right?
	So I'd go hang out with my two friends At the train tracks and we used to cross this big high bridge over the Don River.
	And we'd be on the other side and the only way to get back home would be to cross it over it.
	And one time we crossed it over and a train came.
	That was some pretty hairy stuff, let me tell you.
	That was some pretty, like, night time running on the tracks and the big wooden slabs, right?
	The wooden logs between the tracks.
	It was pretty nasty.
	Pretty... Pretty alarming.
	That's when you do get a good sense of mortality from these kinds of things.
	I remember that shadow, right?
	Because this train starts behind you and there's this shadow.
	It's so dark out there.
	We didn't have flashlights or no cell phones, of course, back then.
	And the train's coming and you're trying to get across this big, long bridge with train tracks.
	And you see these two white lines of train tracks going off into the distance.
	And behind you is this glow.
	And you don't turn to look at it because you're too terrified.
	The glow is lighting up. The logs you need to jump across to get to the other side.
	And as long as your shadow is long, you're okay.
	But when your shadow starts to get shorter, it means the train is getting closer.
	And you can't jump. It's like hundreds of feet down to the river.
	That was bad, man. It was so bad.
	You know, even now, my gosh, this is over 40 years later.
	I still get that. You know, you ever have those things where you've had a near miss in a car or on a bike or whatever it is.
	You get... Even now, over 40 years later, sphincter tightens up a little bit, like I could shop in a pencil up there.
	Anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
	So, complication, that's civilization.
	And if you ever want to, and people do, you ever want to open the lid to the human hell?
	Of thought leading to action without conscience intervening and slowing it down.
	All you do is you just make things simple.
	No such thing as truth! Boom!
	The Vesuvius of impulse erupts and compels people to action and they don't stop.
	They don't slow. And then afterwards, of course, ex post facto justifications.
	All they do is reason that they must have somehow been in the right because they did what they did and they can't be doing wrong and therefore everything they did is just perfectly fine and perfectly great.
	So, Bolshevism is just one of these simple answers.
	Why are some people rich?
	Because they're stealing.
	They're expropriating unjustly the excess value of the labor from the people that they're enslaving.
	And that's why they're rich.
	They're thieves! Whereas it's complicated.
	There's culture, there's history, there's education, there's personal interest, there's IQ, there's religion, there's opportunity, there's willpower, there's free will.
	Like, it's complicated, and there's no clear answer for a lot of people.
	I mean, for individuals, there's no clear answer.
	For groups, it becomes more clear and more evident.
	But everybody's kind of, half the world is kind of luring you with these simple, lurid, brain-dead non-explanations that uncork your emotions, your resentment, your rage, your anger.
	And they trap you, right?
	This is the devil.
	It's devilish. It's fundamentally devilish, these simple answers, because they trap you.
	Why don't women make as much money as men?
	Sexism! Okay, so the only way to make more money is to be sexist?
	Well, I don't want to be sexist, so I guess I'll just stay poor and dependent on the state.
	But the resentment in me will grow, because everyone who's got stuff that I don't have is unjust.
	Everyone who's got stuff that I don't have is unjust, and they've stolen it from me.
	It's a simple answer, and there's nothing more dangerous than simplicity in the face of true complexity.
	It's really brutal.
	Why does Bob make more money than me?
	Ah, Bob must be unjust.
	Bob must be a thief.
	Bob must have stolen.
	Well, what that means is you can never become wealthy because wealth is immorality in that worldview.
	So you're stuck. Poor, dependent on the state, stuck.
	So it's really, you've got to watch anybody who tries to boil things down to a simple headline.
	It was this recent shooting, right?
	Was it Wisconsin? It was a recent shooting.
	You know, the way you read it in the media, this guy was just, hey, he was shot right in front of his kids just getting into a car.
	Shot in the back seven times, now he's paralyzed.
	Don't know if it's permanent, just shot getting in front of him.
	Sounds horrible. Same thing with George Floyd, same thing with Ahmaud Arbery, same thing with George Zimmerman, Philando Castile, Mike Brown, all these things.
	It's so simple.
	Just out there hunting blacks.
	Well, it's complicated.
	There was an arrest warrant out for the guy.
	He's had a brutal history, brutal legal history, including very ugly things he did to a young girl.
	He was fighting with the cops.
	He was disobeying the cops. They said, don't go to the car.
	He goes to the car. They say, don't open the car door.
	He opens the car door. They say, for God's sakes, don't reach into the car, whatever you do.
	He reaches into a car.
	There was a knife there. I guess that's not that complicated, I guess.
	But they give you the simple...
	And people are just so thirsty for these simple answers.
	Because with the simple answer, you can just...
	Be an asshole. Simplicity is assholery.
	You know, why did the girl break up with you?
	It's probably quite complex.
	Maybe you chose wrong.
	Maybe she chose wrong. Maybe you didn't listen.
	Maybe she didn't listen that much.
	Maybe you drifted apart. Maybe you didn't do anything about it.
	Maybe you took her for granted. It's complicated.
	Maybe she's like your Mother.
	Prince style, right?
	It's probably quite complicated.
	And you can then take that right path.
	The high, the hard path.
	The breadcrumbs to the library of self-knowledge.
	You say, why did you break up with me?
	I said this to myself in my 20s.
	Why am I in a multi-year relationship?
	That is not working.
	It wasn't bad. It wasn't abusive.
	But it just wasn't working.
	It was just kind of...
	You ever sit there in a movie where it's like, it's not a bad, bad movie?
	It's not like so bad, just like, oh my god, I've got to get up and go.
	Like, I've just got to go get my refund first half hour.
	You know, back in the day when you could go to movies, or you start some Netflix show, or some Prime show, or some Crave show, or whatever, and you start, it's like, eh, give it another couple of minutes, right?
	Or I was going through absolutely brutal insomnia at the point in my life where some friends of mine and I went to go and see Fight Club.
	And that movie was just like...
	Amazing.
	Amazing. Powerful, terrifying, nihilistic movie.
	Hit me, you know, square in the net, square in the spinal cord when I first went to see it.
	But you ever have this thing, it's like, it's okay.
	It passes the time.
	It's not bad. Maybe it'll get better and blah, blah, blah, right?
	That was kind of this relationship, right?
	I proposed, got the ring.
	It didn't quite take...
	I mean, she said yes, but we weren't enthusiastic about it, but things just kind of drifted along.
	And it's like, this isn't bad, but it's not really working.
	I said, okay, well, why?
	Why would I be involved in that kind of relationship?
	The easy answer is, I'm just going to break up and go date someone else.
	Something's, you know, just don't care to examine it.
	It's just not working like that, not working as some third party that's just not getting the job done, right?
	Or you can say, hmm, why am I in a time waster of a relationship?
	It's really the worst kind is the time waster, like a really bad relationship.
	You just get in, you get out, right?
	Or you don't even start it.
	I remember one woman...
	This happened a couple of times with me in my life because I was very hungry to get into the art world.
	And a couple of women offered me, oh, I can get you a play produced or I'll get you a novel published or whatever, but basically you've got to go out with me.
	That was sort of the deal. Like, there's a he too as well as a me too, right?
	There's a he too as well. And I'm like, yeah, I'm hungry to be an artist, but I'm not doing it that way.
	I'm not going to... Himbo Fabio my way into a publishing contract.
	There's no way. No way.
	That's not going to happen. I was keeping myself pure for you.
	Keeping myself pure for philosophy.
	That's how I rolled or rather didn't roll in the hay.
	So I never even got into those relationships or other relationships.
	I remember picking up a girl once at the gym in yoga class.
	Very attractive girl, smart woman and all that.
	And I mentioned that I was going to see a movie with some friends.
	And she's like, oh, can I come?
	I was like, yeah, it'd be great.
	But, you know, we're running a little late here.
	So if you could, you know, be out as quickly as you can, that would be fantastic because the movie starts in like 20 minutes and we've got like a 10-minute drive.
	So if we could, you know, if you don't mind, like you're welcome to come.
	But, you know, if you could just hurry it up, that'd be great, right?
	So I'm sitting out there at the gym entrance waiting for her to come out.
	I waited for like 25 minutes.
	I mean, the movie would be like 25 minutes, right?
	So, you know, I drove her to the movie.
	We watched the second half. We hung out with my friends.
	I dropped her home. Never asked her out again.
	Yeah, we'd see each other at the gym.
	I'd chat with her fine and all that.
	And I could tell she wanted to be asked out again, wanted to go someplace again.
	But I'm like, well, no, I just said...
	Like, it's not that she took her time.
	That's not the issue. The issue is that I said, you got to be quick.
	And she agreed. And then she wasn't quick.
	And she didn't come out and say, oh, strangest thing.
	I completely lost track of time.
	Or I fell and hit my head and blacked out for a while.
	Or I got beamed up by space aliens, close encounters kind, and they beamed me back down again.
	Like she just like comes out like, okay, I'm ready.
	Like we just had the conversation about hurrying up and she didn't hurry up.
	She agreed to hurry up. She didn't hurry up and didn't even notice that she hadn't.
	And I'm not going to get into a scene.
	I'm not going to make a thing or anything like that.
	I'm just going to, you know, we'll go do it.
	So those aren't the problem, right?
	Those kinds of things where you're like, you know, all the women, same gym actually, met a woman there and she was reading a book I liked.
	We were... Met her for coffee and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Seemed to be getting along.
	Smart girl. And then she mentions her husband.
	I'm like, hmm? Husband?
	What are you talking about? You basically get picked up at a gym.
	Meet me for coffee. I'm single.
	And you're married? And she's like, yeah, but you know...
	I'm open. And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not going to work.
	And she's like, well, why not?
	Don't you find me attractive? I'm like, yeah, you're attractive.
	Sure, absolutely.
	But here's the thing. Let's say, all the morals aside, all the morals aside, let's say that you and I start an affair.
	Just forget the bros before or whatever, right?
	Let's just say, after all the morals aside, you and I start an affair.
	Now, if I don't like you that much, It's not really worth it.
	Now, but if I really do like you, and it becomes worth it to have the affair, the problem is I really like you, but you're married!
	So there's just no way that I can win in this situation.
	It's either a bad affair because I don't get along with you that well, or it's a terrible affair because I really, really like you, but you're married, so we can't be together.
	So I just don't see where the upside is, even outside of all of the ethics, right?
	So why am I stuck in this relationship that's just kind of going along?
	Eh, it's okay, it's good, then it's not good, it's good, it's not...
	Right? Now, the answer was, I won't get into the whole answer here, but the answer is complicated.
	It's complicated. It was really, really, really complicated.
	And it was from that relationship that I bounced into therapy to try and figure out why I wasn't sleeping.
	Well, I wasn't sleeping because I was sleepwalking.
	I was sleepwalking through my life.
	I was studying philosophy rather than living philosophy, so...
	Just, you know, you can see this when you read the media, you look on the news, look at the headlines, anything that's just simple.
	It's not just wrong.
	It's like civilization wrecking.
	Civilization is the recognition of complexity.
	And complexity is the ecosystem that slows down emotional impulses to the point where we have the chance to intervene between thought and action.
	And when people understand that a lack of sophistication, a lack of depth, a lack of complexity in your thinking is the mark of a fool, a knave, or both, And it becomes humiliating to act out because it's a confession of shallowness and stupidity, then we might have a chance to resurrect this crazy little thing we call civilization.
	All right. Love the review of Animal Farm, although I didn't finish the video yet.
	Yes. Love the review of Animal Farm.
	Yes, my daughter and I did a review of Animal Farm, and we are currently going through Lord of the Flies.
	Which is interesting.
	And my gosh, let me tell you this.
	William Golding, I don't know how many times you really need to describe how sunlight is hitting a leaf in this book, but there's about 12 pages of actual story there and then a whole lot of description.
	And some of it's quite poetic and some of it's quite lovely.
	But a lot of it is kind of unnecessary.
	Rebel One says, you've lost everything because of your political and social views.
	I think you should double down.
	Well, you have a pseudonym there, don't you?
	Yeah, you are anonymous, and you're telling me what you think I should do as a public-named figure.
	How very interesting.
	I haven't lost everything. I've got a wonderful family.
	I've got great friends. I'm really enjoying reading my audiobook.
	I'm starting tomorrow on my book on parenting.
	I'm doing research on...
	Well, right now I'm doing Jean-Jacques Rousseau leading into the French Revolution.
	Maybe I'll do Napoleon afterwards, who's also quite fascinating.
	But no, I lost some eyeballs out there, of course.
	Kicked off... Twitter and YouTube.
	Yeah, lost some eyeballs. And now we're having this intimate little Jazz Cub chat rather than me playing the stadium, so to speak.
	And no, I haven't lost everything.
	The things that are most important in my life are not at the whims of social media CEOs.
	Like, fuck that. Fuck the idea, frankly, and fuck it with a barge pole.
	The idea that the essential important things in your life are at the whim and mercy of politically motivated strangers.
	I mean, see, from your standpoint, like I understand this.
	I'm not criticizing you at all, right?
	I'm just sort of pointing it out like this.
	It's complex, right? So from your standpoint, yeah, I got yeeted off a bunch of social media platforms.
	It's election-related, I believe, of course, right?
	But yeah. So for you, it's like, oh my gosh, that's end of the road for staff, end of the...
	I get all of that. And yeah, it's been tough, for sure.
	I mean, it's been an adjustment, without a doubt.
	But... The virtue in my life, the conscience in my life, the integrity of my soul is not open to deplatforming.
	The love of my wife, the love of my child, the love of my family, the love of my friends, that is not open to deplatforming.
	I cannot be deplatformed from myself.
	I cannot be deplatformed from the love and respect of others.
	In fact, if I had held back on essential truths Because of a fear of other people acting unjustly against me, then I could have been deplatformed from my own conscience.
	Now, that's what really matters.
	What really matters is not what the heads of YouTube or Twitter think of me.
	What matters is my relationship to myself, fundamentally my relationship.
	To truth, virtue, honor, and integrity.
	That's what matters.
	Because that is really the source, not just of respect for the self, but of love for me from others.
	And that is not open to the whims of people who lack integrity outside of my circle.
	I speak the truth.
	They do what they do.
	If I don't speak the truth, if I lie to you, if I lie to the world, if I misrepresent, if I undermine, if I falsify facts that I know to be essential about the world, then I lose my self-respect.
	If I speak the truth and other people act unjustly against me, come on.
	Come on. This is all the way back to Socrates.
	It is far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
	And I will not let the unjust actions of others stand between me, my conscience, and the truth.
	So, let's see here.
	Don't believe your lying eyes.
	The fires raging behind me are mostly peaceful.
	Over to Mika, covering the mostly dry hurricane.
	Yeah, should I mention this?
	Some of this stuff is pretty wild that's out there, I've got to tell you.
	It's pretty wild that's out there.
	And I did, in fact, let me just see if I can get there easily or not.
	I don't know. But yeah, so it's been like mostly peaceful, right?
	They say mostly peaceful.
	What was the Babylon Bee saying that CNN is hiring the, this is fine, doc, to cover the riots?
	Yeah, mostly peaceful. They got literally fires raging in the background and all of that.
	It's mostly peaceful. You know, like the Titanic, except for a minor brush with an iceberg, mostly an uneventful voyage, you know, except for a little bit of lead poisoning.
	I believe that President Lincoln very much enjoyed the play.
	So all of this kind of stuff is pretty wild.
	And it's really – it's lovely to see Joe Biden having such a wonderfully close relationship with – The woman who was a stripper and who has publicly admitted to drugging and stealing from men.
	Drugging, stripper, drugging and stealing from men.
	Cardi B, right? It's so wild to me that on public platforms, this WAP song Cardi B did with some other woman, which is Wet Ass Pussy.
	I don't really think that ass and pussy are...
	I mean, I get that they're kind of next to each other biologically.
	I don't think you want them next to each other in your thoughts about sexuality.
	And yet you go to video sites and it's all like that video which is unbelievably horrendous and explicit where she talks about loving pain and, you know, getting the ring because she doesn't cook, she doesn't clean, but she basically knows how to work the dumb stick like an oilman with a fresh derrick in Texas.
	And that's just available.
	It's not age protected.
	You don't have to sign in. Any kid can just go, hey, I've heard about this WAP. Let me type it in.
	Let me look. Let me listen.
	Now, there's no room for philosophy, you see.
	There's no room for philosophy for reason and evidence and arguments, debates, facts, well-sourced diatribes.
	No room for that. But if you want to talk about giving up sex for money because you like pain and you're willing to be beaten sexually in return for money, well, that's not even age-restricted, you see, because that's the hellscape of modernity, of all of this stuff.
	Crazy. Yeah, so there's mostly peaceful stuff.
	It's pretty wild.
	And I did actually...
	Let's see here. Can I do this?
	Yeah, okay. And some people actually had some pretty good responses to this.
	Yeah, so I did fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, of course, right?
	Because the media lies.
	The media just says, oh, this guy was shot and he's just getting into his car with his kids and they just showed up and shot him.
	Until the media is responsible for the resulting damage.
	Anyway, so I posted, they made a desert and called it peace.
	Oh yeah, Jacob Blake had a knife.
	This is from the local news, and this is from Sophie Carson, a female, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, from August 26, 2020, it's yesterday.
	Jacob Blake had knife in car, but it was otherwise unarmed.
	Wisconsin DOJ says as it releases name of Kenosha officer who shot him in the back.
	See, he shot him in the back. Shot him in the back.
	Right, because he was turning around, reaching into the car.
	You have to assume he has a weapon.
	Even Tucker Carlson got this wrong, because Tucker Carlson said, well, we need to know if there was a gun in the car.
	No, you don't. No, you don't.
	Because the officer can't wait for the gun to come out, because by the time the gun comes out, the officer is dead.
	And then you have a guy who shot an officer who's now going to be in a big blazing gunfight with other officers and this is the training and if you reach into, if you're a known criminal, I don't know if you had gun charges before like George Floyd, but you reach into the car and the officer tells you not to, the officer has to assume the worst because that's what the training is and that's what the reality is.
	Jacob Blake had a knife in car, but was otherwise unarmed.
	And I said, Titanic brushed iceberg in otherwise uneventful voyage.
	And I invited people to put their additional parodies below, not because there's anything even remotely funny about this situation, but simply because this is...
	I mean, I don't even know.
	It's become so absurd that it's like a Harold Pinter play on Quaaludes.
	I mean, it really has become...
	Just absolutely appalling.
	And I'm still working with Parler here.
	And I would recommend you check out the site, parler.com.
	I don't know anything. They don't have any relationship to me.
	But I'm just sort of pointing this out.
	And I'm still sharing my thoughts there.
	And I mean, obviously, I think my thoughts are worth sharing.
	Otherwise, I wouldn't. Oh, here we go.
	Yeah, 431 replies.
	Kaepernick took an E but otherwise sucked at football.
	Enola Gay had an atomic bomb but was otherwise unarmed.
	World War II killed tens of millions but was otherwise peaceful.
	Jonestown was a successful commune even though a few fell ill from bad fruit punch.
	Oh yeah, take the Kool-Aid.
	Do you know that he was a communist and actually was good friends with Jimmy Carter's wife?
	What else do we have here?
	Jeffrey Epstein's age-diverse island of varying levels of consent.
	Krypton exploded, but is otherwise intact.
	Despite a few scrapes and bruises, Ted Bundy otherwise did excellent makeup and nail polish work on many women.
	None complained. Sauron's attempted conquest of Middle-earth and the destruction of men was mostly peaceful.
	The Death Star blew up a planet, but was otherwise peaceful.
	I'm just going to put the tip in.
	That's what philosophy's been saying to me for many, many decades.
	Picture of the Hindenburg.
	Great moments in fire, but otherwise peaceful aviation.
	The Japanese did destroy Pearl Harbor.
	Hawaii was otherwise unharmed.
	Oh my gosh. Quite something.
	This is what Michaela J wrote.
	Dear, oh dear.
	Yeah, I don't know about the truth of all of that.
	I've heard it various places.
	I haven't researched it myself, but yes, it is quite something.
	It is quite something.
	All right, so let's get back to your lovely questions, my friends.
	Let me just dip over here to the live stream questions.
	Advice on dealing with thoughts of revenge, says Mr.
	A. Huh.
	Interesting. I will say the three most important words in a relationship.
	Everybody misunderstands the three most important words, particularly in a romantic relationship, a love relationship, a marriage relationship, a parenting relationship.
	Three most important words, three most loving words that you can ever say to someone.
	It's not I love you, which is very often manipulative.
	It's kind of a conclusion. And it's not tell the truth.
	It's not Be nice.
	Me too.
	The most important three words that indicate love in a relationship is tell me more.
	Tell me more. Somebody says advice on dealing with thoughts of revenge.
	Tell me more. Curiosity is love.
	Curiosity is love of wisdom.
	Curiosity is love. And if you really want to love people, you want to get along with people who can be gotten along with, what you do is you say, tell me more.
	Tell me more. Somebody's mad at you.
	Tell me more. Somebody's praising you.
	Tell me more. Tell me more.
	That's what you really need to do.
	I mean, this is why, you know, I'll do these call-in shows and I'll be listening for an hour, hour and a half before I'll usually sometimes at least will give even a shred of feedback.
	It's a little different more recently because more recently I'm doing call-ins With people who already know the show, not sort of people who are coming in from the outside, so I can go a little faster.
	But yes, Tell Me More is the most important thing that goes on in a relationship.
	All right, let me get back to your delightful questions.
	Morning, Steph from Melbourne, Australia.
	How did you develop your ability to clarify your arguments with metaphors?
	Was it an innate skill?
	It was not an innate skill.
	And I remember... In high school, I was probably in grade 11, maybe grade 12, we had a mock UN. Now I mock the UN, but back then we had a mock UN. And in it we were debating a resolution about abortion.
	And I was anti-abortion.
	And I was terrible.
	I was terrible at it.
	This is my sort of speech verbatim, or at least part of it, when something like, well, you know...
	If there's a soul...
	Oh no, was I pro-abortion?
	Oh yeah, I think I was pro-legalizing abortion.
	And it's like, well, you know, if the soul takes place at conception, well, if there are twins, then the twins don't split until some days after conception.
	So if the soul enters the baby at the moment of conception, and then there are twins, I mean, who gets the soul?
	And I remember making this speech, and like...
	People were looking at me like, what?
	What are you talking about? And look, I get the argument.
	It's not a bad argument at all.
	In fact, it's quite a good argument.
	But I just was doing such a bad job of connecting with it, of communicating it, and caring about it, and so on.
	So no, I did not start out well at all.
	I was like Freddie Mercury in wreckage.
	But it just...
	What? So there's a certain...
	First of all, you have to connect emotionally with what it is that you're talking about.
	I was talking about this with my daughter.
	We were listening to a live singer who was very good.
	And I said, you know, look at all the things that you have to have.
	You know, I was giving her the Marxist argument, right?
	She was playing devil's advocate, right?
	Giving her the Marxist argument, right?
	Okay, so let's say you're Katy Perry.
	Okay, so, you know, you have to have a great singing voice.
	That's like maybe one in 100,000 people, maybe one in 250,000 people are born with that kind of singing voice.
	That's number one. Number two, you have to have perfect pitch.
	Also very rare. Number three, you also have to be interested in music.
	Number four, you also have to have musical talent.
	Number five, you also have to be willing to go through the boring technical stuff of learning how to play instruments.
	Number six, you also have to have a very good songwriting ability usually.
	And number seven, you also have to be a very, very good performer, right?
	So some people are really good in the backroom and some people are good on stage and so on.
	And number, what is it, eight or nine, if you are very physically attractive, that also helps quite a lot as well.
	And so, you know, that's like nine or ten things that you kind of have to have.
	And each one of these is like one in 100,000 people, one in 50,000 people, one in 10,000 people.
	And you stack all of these things together and And that's why there are very few people at the very top tiers of music, just as there are very few at the top tier of sports.
	I mean, with sports, you have to have, you know, the innate ability.
	You have to have the desire, the discipline, the drive.
	You have to have the encouragement. You have to have good coaching.
	And you have to be really bloody lucky that you didn't get some sort of knee-crushing injury or some sort of tendonitis or something bad that happens, carry-strike style, to the point where you can actually continue what it is that you're doing.
	So there's a huge amount of things that have to be in place for all of this to work.
	And so the first thing, if you want to become good at communicating and good at debating, you have to really care about what it is that you're doing.
	It can't just be a gig.
	It can't just be like, I could look at this and say, oh, this is just a gig.
	It's like, no, not really.
	I mean, it's not really a gig because I'm trying to do something really good and important in the world.
	And I know that I have. And no matter what happens in the future, those 725 million views and downloads will never be undone in the world.
	They'll never be taken back. There's no rewind.
	There's no undo. There's no men in black blue light pen that's going to erase the world's memories of this massive injection and bomb drop of interstellar philosophy onto the planet.
	Raining down like frozen frogs from a fridge plane.
	And so you've got to really care about what it is that you're doing.
	And there's a certain amount of just trust yourself.
	The part of you that you know is the tip of the iceberg.
	The part of you that you know is the tip of the iceberg.
	Because, you know, we are a couple of bricks on the top of a pyramid of 4 billion years of evolution.
	Right? Like 12, 13 billion years of existence of the atoms that go to make us up, and then like 4 billion years of evolution, and layer after layer we're built up.
	Think of yourself, you know, like the food pyramid or Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which is total bullshit, but anyway.
	The part of you that you know about, the part of you that you think about, the part of you that worries and is excited and, oh, there's a new video game coming out and, oh, this movie's coming out and I hope that girl goes out with me.
	Hey, that's important stuff.
	It's fine. But that's like the tip of who you are.
	It's like the tiny, tiny tip of who you are.
	It's like that little vagina that's at the end of your penis should you have such a thing.
	So you've got to trust that what's going on deep down there It's important and valuable.
	You've got to be in a dance with your depth.
	You've got to be in a dance with your depth.
	I've got a whole book about this called Against the Gods, talking about God as the unconscious, God as the deep conscience.
	And when I was doing my therapy and I was doing my journaling work and so on, I was like tunneling down deep into the parts of me I could get to that were way deeper than I thought.
	Because, you know, we kind of live like surface froth, you know, like the spray and the foam at the seat.
	But there's like seven-mile-down Mariana Trench depths going on down there.
	Now, we can drill down that a certain amount, but we can't go that far down because we're very much on top.
	Like, we're very much this post-Monkey Beta expansion pack called Modern Humanity.
	Like, we're... 50,000.
	Like, if you're white, you're like 50,000 years.
	That's it. A little bit longer if you're East Asian, a little bit longer if you're black.
	But, you know, we're really new on the planet, man.
	And this whole stuff that's going on, the neofrontal cortex, the frontal lobes and all of that, Ex-post monkey factor shit we got going on.
	That is really new and we sort of float around in this area, which is very powerful, very good, but in terms of getting down to the mammal brain, getting down to the lizard brain, getting down to the depths, getting down to the spinal cord, we can't get down there.
	We're like pearl divers.
	You know, like pearl divers, they can grab their knife, they go down and they shuck the pearls and see if they can find some oysters.
	They can go pretty deep. They can stay down for a couple of minutes.
	They've got to come back up to the surface.
	So you've got to understand that we get the solidity and the depth to stand firm in the face of the endless flying tsunami gale of acid known as social disapproval.
	Well, the tree that is left standing after the hurricane is the deepest and strongest tree with the roots that go down the furthest.
	So you've got to plant yourself deep in your brain, and you've got to be in a dance with your depth.
	Like, if you have dreams at night, and I know you do, everybody does, you've got to think about that shit in the morning.
	What the hell is your depth trying to tell you?
	How is it trying to guide you?
	What is it picking up that you're not getting?
	How is it trying to help you?
	It's like Al Pacino in that movie about Big Tobacco.
	You know, I fight for you, I'm still fighting for you!
	Well, Your depth, your power, your strength, your soul, so to speak, is trying to, like a spinning compass, trying to get to the right place, trying to point you in the right direction, but you've got to listen to it.
	You've got to listen to your instincts.
	The stuff that comes coughing up from my depth, It comes up because I listen to it, because I'm not suppressing, and I'm not saying, ooh, I can't say that, ooh, that's too crazy, a metaphor, that's too crazy, an analogy.
	Yeah, most times they work, sometimes they don't, and that's kind of fun too, right?
	You know, like if you're playing...
	My brother and I used to play, we call it wibbly tennis back when we were kids, where you're just hitting back and forth.
	You're not really stretching. You're not really getting better.
	You're not really trying new shots.
	You're not really risking much. You're just kind of keeping the ball going.
	And then you get tired of it and you start risking shots and then a lot of them go out.
	And that's how you learn. If you're always hitting the shots you know and can do, then you're not learning how to become better at what it is that you're doing.
	So trust your depth.
	Trust that there's a whole lot of stuff going on way below.
	Your conscious mind, that is an entire ecosystem.
	It's an entire pantheon.
	I mean, think of the Middle Earth, right?
	Middle Earth came out of the brain of one guy.
	But not his conscious mind, because if it was just a conscious mind, everybody would do it, right?
	Paul McCartney woke up with the tune to Yesterday.
	He dreamt it. Scrambled eggs, oh my dear, you have got lovely legs, right?
	That's what he wrote down because he didn't have good lyrics.
	And he played it to everyone and was like, have you heard this song before?
	I feel like everyone should know this song before.
	But nobody did. Now, he, you know, trained himself in music and played in Hamburg for two years, you know, as Malcolm Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours and all that.
	But he, my God, he was in a dance with his depth.
	And when you're in a dance with your depth, you can do the most amazing and powerful things.
	When you're living on the surface, you're easily pushed over.
	You're a tree without roots.
	You know, think of a tree that's in a potting plant.
	You can just push it over, right?
	Roots don't go anywhere. It's not got any depth.
	But you get in a dance with your depth, and you get your roots down, and you have that two-way communication.
	The elevators go up and down to the depth.
	It's like those tubes in the old office buildings that showed up in Brazil, too, in the movie, right?
	Terry Gilliam movie. And those tubes where you put something in, it goes rocketing all over the building and stuff comes back.
	Well, that's you with your depth. That's you with your unconscious.
	That's you with your power.
	That is more than just you.
	There is an immortal part of us, the part that is outside our framing.
	You came out of that depth because when you were born, you didn't even have your neofrontal cortex.
	You didn't have a sense of consciousness or self or identity.
	We're just a couple of bricks on the top of the pyramid, man.
	It goes way deep. And the I is the we of history, of evolution, of life all the way back to the single-celled organisms.
	There is no such thing as I. There's no such thing as an identity that is specific and merely individual to each person because there's so much that we have in common and there's so much that we share in the pyramid depth of our origins.
	When you say I, what does that mean?
	Did you build your liver?
	Did you build your spine?
	Did you figure out why you need a spleen?
	No! You didn't do any of that shit.
	Did you figure out, ah, breast, nipple, milk?
	I bet you that would be very helpful.
	I'd better work to earn some.
	It's like, nope. The nipple hit here, you turned, you sucked.
	Some things never change.
	And that was all instinct.
	Did you invent English?
	No. And there are concepts and words in English that don't exist in others.
	Like, I mean, look at Arabic.
	There's barely any word for secular.
	Did you invent the society you were born into?
	God, no. Absolutely not.
	Does that have an effect?
	You're born in a relatively free society.
	You speak English. Did you invent the internet?
	No. Al Gore did. Did you invent TCPIP? Did you invent Ethernet?
	No. Yet we're using that to communicate.
	Did you invent this camera? You understand, right?
	So there's this radical individualism that is paralyzing and weakens you.
	You hop out of the forest, the only place to go is into a flower pot, and then you can be pushed over like that.
	So yeah, dance with your depth, man.
	Listen to your unconscious. All right.
	What have we got here?
	Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm behind everyone here.
	An hour, my goodness.
	All right. I'll get to your question in a sec, Mr.
	A. How do I ask a longer question?
	Hmm. That's a question.
	Story of your enslavement? Yeah, you should check it out.
	Stefan was right again? It's usually a pretty fair bet.
	Would you like to get your thoughts on sociopaths?
	Do they really exist? Yes, they do.
	And they can actually be...
	They can be measured through brain scans.
	Do you still owe a few G's even at 50 cents a podcast?
	Yeah, you know, the link is here, right?
	The link is here. Please, freedemand.com forward slash donate.
	Please help out the show.
	As you know, the goal of being deplatformed is to have me bleed resources to the point where I can't do anything, so it's fine.
	But if you could help out, freedemand.com forward slash donate.
	I would really, really appreciate that.
	How much of your personality is formed by age three?
	I don't know. I think it's, you know, those kind of curves, like they start up.
	Like, when I first learned how to sing, right, I got an octave and a half within a couple of weeks, and then it kind of flattens out from there, right?
	It's like all skills, like some skills you learn, you start off and it's like, boom, like stretching, right?
	You can stretch and then it slows down.
	So I think that's personality, right?
	Like, there's a lot to tenate, and then it impacts and collides pinball style with your environment, and then...
	It slows down, and by five, it's mostly done.
	I mean, this is the reality of parenting.
	If you haven't got it right by the time they're five or ten or whatever, certainly five, certainly ten, probably five, it's like, eh, you're just managing the mess now.
	Walk down the tracks listening to Credence on my headphones.
	I really thought they only go one way.
	Oh yeah, did you listen to Credence Clearwater Revival on your headphones?
	And then you... Hey, there's a glow!
	Ah! I hope that's an alien.
	No, no, it's a train. You're doomed.
	Someday you'll understand.
	There's a good singer, that guy, for that rock and roll stuff.
	How would you rein in big tech so they won't censor people?
	How do you rein in big techs with the one sense of people?
	Well, I mean, everything exists already.
	I mean, everything exists already to rein in big tech.
	I mean, it's not a matter of how would it be done.
	It's just a matter of will people do it.
	That's it. Big tech has to be neutral.
	And as far as I understand California law, you can't fire people, so to speak, for their political opinions.
	So the law just has to be enforced.
	That's all. All right.
	Men's brains are larger and heavier than women's.
	Yes, that is certainly true.
	Hello, James. Just noticed you're here.
	All right. If women make less, why not hire all women and keep the change?
	Yeah, of course. I mean, it's all such nonsense, right?
	I mean, I get so bored with activists.
	Activists are... If you combine being a loser with high ambition, you get an activist, right?
	Because if you're a loser and you don't have ambition, you won't be an activist.
	If you're an intelligent person, if you're a winner and you have high ambition, then you actually go and do something.
	But... Activism is just weaponized nagging.
	That's all it is, right? So when women are young, they get attention and resources because they're hot, and then when they get older, they go from positive economics, maybe access to sex, to negative economics, which is, I'll make your life uncomfortable till you give me what I want through nagging and stuff.
	And again, it's not just female. Men do it as well, but it's a little bit more female than male.
	And so when people say, oh, women are underpaid, I'm like, well, why are you talking about it?
	Just go hire women and make a fortune.
	If women are underpaid, You know, it's like somebody saying, you know, I could get Brad Pitt.
	Brad Pitt has agreed to do my movie for $50,000.
	He's not going to take his usual 10 mil or whatever it takes, right?
	He's going to take $50,000, right?
	And maybe he'll actually act this time, like once upon a time in Hollywood.
	Ooh, a guy who smokes weed, takes his shirt off and doesn't get along with his wife.
	What a stretch for Brad Pitt there, really flexing his old acting muscles.
	So if you could get Brad Pitt that cheap, you can make the movie with Brad Pitt and you can make a fortune, right?
	So if you can get women... For cheap and they're worth a lot more, then go hire them.
	And so everybody who's complaining about it rather than just hiring women and bringing up their wages, they all know the truth.
	It's all just a bunch of nonsense, right?
	All right. Let's see here.
	What have we got? I will get to a question I haven't forgotten.
	I just want to make sure I'm really behind on this stuff.
	I would have been a singer-songwriter, but my mother wouldn't stop screaming at me, so I had to get into the philosophy instead.
	Well, you know, one of the problems for me, I'm a bit of a deep baritone when it comes to a singer, is that most of the singers that were pretty popular when I was a kid, particularly Sting.
	I mean, you just can't sing along.
	It was much Billy Idol.
	It was all like countertenor screechers, right?
	Let's see here. I like how COVID-19 has made Hollywood irrelevant.
	Yeah, yeah. Alright, let's see here.
	Favorite outdoor recreations that live your philosophy?
	Favorite? Okay, I mean, I like to play tennis.
	I love a good hike because with a good hike, if it's not too brutal on the lungs, a really good hike is such a great place for conversation, and I never tire of great views in nature.
	I ski, although I'm not particularly great.
	I can do like a diamond.
	I can do a double diamond with some strain and risk, and generally I'm too old to do double diamonds now because...
	You know, you just don't bounce back from injuries the way you did in your 40s when you're in your 50s.
	So, outdoor recreations.
	My daughter and I have started fishing, which is kind of relaxing.
	We fished in a place.
	We talked with a guy who said that the last time he fished there, a snapping turtle took his fish.
	Reel it in, reel it in.
	What else do I do outside?
	I mean, I love doing stuff outside, particularly hammock-based activities.
	Let's see here. Malcolm X was right.
	The white liberal is the most dangerous animal in the Western Hemisphere.
	You will always have thousands of supporters.
	Well, that is very kind.
	I appreciate that. I really appreciate that.
	And, you know, there is...
	Life just has phases and changes, you know?
	Life just has phases and changes, and we'll see what's next.
	We'll see what's next. Hope you're doing well, Steph.
	We have the same name. Oh, I guess you're probably from Eastern Europe as well, then at least my name was.
	What is it like being a modern philosopher online?
	How do historical means to share philosophy translate in modern times?
	Well, there's no competition.
	Yeah, there's no competition. Being a philosopher online is the greatest gift that intellectuals have been given.
	The internet is without a doubt, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is the greatest gift.
	You know, I was actually just thinking about this the other day, how little I've understood of my life looking at the time and even sometimes years afterwards.
	So when I was in the National Theatre School, And the head of the school was, to me at least, it was like an outright, I don't know if he was a full-on communist, but definitely a hard socialist, because when we went in there, he was like, aren't you all young, white, and bougie, which was short for bourgeois. And so, you know, definitely hard leftist, probably a communist or whatever it is, right?
	Now, they didn't know about my political perspectives when I first got in there.
	And when I first got in there, they loved my acting so much, they were like, dude, My first review there, we're like, dude, forget this writing stuff.
	You're so good at acting that just stay as an actor.
	We like your writing and all that, but just be an actor, right?
	And then I got into some political debates, second term, first year, second term.
	And man, I'm telling you, that second one was like night and day.
	They were like sitting me down like, oh, I'm talking to this teacher, no progress.
	Talking to this teacher, no progress, no progress.
	You're just not getting it. You're just not doing it, right?
	Now, they hadn't said anything to me the whole term, but at the end there, they kind of reamed me a new one.
	And at the time, I was like, well, it's kind of weird.
	Like, why on earth would they – like, they love me so much.
	And then they hate me.
	And it's like, well, now, of course, in hindsight, it's like, yeah, they got that I was a free market capitalist guy.
	So, you know, like, it all makes sense in hindsight.
	And some of the other stuff I had – With regards to my higher education, yeah, I mean, looking back in hindsight, it's like that long march through the institutions were still going down.
	And so there were a lot of gatekeepers keeping me from you back in the day, man, a lot of gatekeepers.
	And it's the same thing with my novels.
	My novels would get the most astoundingly positive review because, you know, when you...
	Get involved in writing and you go through courses and you get involved with agents and so on and you get recommendations.
	The agents send your books out to readers to see if they're at all interested in what you do.
	And I would get the most, like, amazingly positive responses from those readers.
	Like, one of them called my novel The God of Atheists.
	It's the great Canadian novel.
	We finally have a book of art that's going to last a test of time and blah, blah, blah.
	I was like, loved it. But he was a Christian, actually.
	He was a theology. He had a PhD in theology.
	So, of course, he loved...
	What I did in that novel, which again, you can get FDRURL.com forward slash TGOA. Let me just check that.
	FDRURL.com forward slash TGOA. Let's see.
	Is it going to take me someplace useful?
	Let's find out.
	No, it's not. I'll find it.
	I'll find it before the end of the...
	I'll find it before.
	And if you're listening on, let me know.
	But, yeah, The God of Atheists, you can also...
	I'll put it out in my newsletter as well.
	So... Oh, actually, I know how to get it.
	I know how to get the URL. So...
	I would get the most astoundingly positive...
	And I was in my... Business career, and I'd be waiting by the phone like, man, I mean, if they're calling this the great Canadian novel, like, I'm sure it's going to get picked up and blah, blah, blah.
	And every time the phone rang, I'd be like, oh, well, here's my agent saying we got a contract and I can quit my job and go be a writer and all that.
	I literally were like, and like, it never came.
	It never came. And I understand it now.
	Again, the long march through the institutions, and it was a pro, it was, you know, my novel's critical of communism.
	And so, you know, the Christians really liked it.
	And Other people who were probably socialists or communists really didn't.
	And, of course, at the time, I was like, oh, this is hard to understand because, you know, I just – I was pretty.
	What can I tell you?
	I was pretty and I was not quite so much with the really understanding what was going on, right?
	Oh, yeah, okay.
	So we can do it this way.
	I'll put this in here as well. So feeds.feedburner.com forward slash TGOA. Yeah, I know that's not particularly friendly, but feeds.feedburner.com feeds.feedburner.com forward slash TGOA. That will give you the novel in audiobook format, and I hope that you will enjoy it.
	Let me just put it into the chat here.
	I can type.
	I really can. T-G-O-A. Alright, look at that.
	There's something for the audio people to enjoy.
	Let me just double check that because I am paranoid.
	Alright. You really think I'd be able to remember that from there, right?
	Yes, you would. You would, in fact, be quite sure that you would.
	All right. Well, you got it.
	I don't need to type it. You got it, right?
	As I said, it's someplace useful.
	All right. So, yeah, it is really an incredible gift to be able to have these direct conversations.
	And, you know, the gatekeepers were, you know, otherwise occupied for like 15 years.
	For about 15 years, actually probably about, things started to go hinky with me with regards to YouTube last week.
	A year ago, February, after I did my speech at the European Union, parliament buildings about tax censorship, things started to go kind of awry.
	And it started to go bad there.
	So let's say 13 years, 13 years, the gatekeepers were otherwise occupied or distracted or didn't care or didn't think it mattered.
	And those were 13 pretty glorious years, I will tell you that.
	And that's more than...
	Almost every philosopher has ever had throughout human history.
	All right. Oh, yeah.
	We need to get back to our classic rock roots.
	I'm sick of this terrible music.
	What happened? Oh, you will occasionally...
	I was watching this live version of...
	This was back when Freddie was fronting the band.
	It's a pretty good song by Brian May called Save Me.
	I think that the chorus is not great, but the rest of it's quite lovely.
	And he actually played piano on tour.
	And Freddie Mercury's out there singing away this song.
	Started off so well.
	And his mic actually went out twice.
	And he kept going.
	And it's really, it's quite a beautiful song.
	And somebody had quoted, I think, somewhere down there.
	It's like, oh, so my parents got this and I get Cardi B. It's just not fair.
	And that is kind of...
	Kind of true. All right.
	All right. Let me just finish this up here.
	So I'm going to scoop down.
	I'm sorry about missing some of these questions.
	And let's see here.
	Is being an immigrant moral?
	Well, in a truly free society, no, because it's all voluntary.
	If you go to a country that's based upon political and economic freedoms, and you vote for more taxes and higher taxes and restricted liberties and the destruction of free speech in someone, that is not a good thing.
	That is just not a good thing to do at all, at all.
	Don't ever give up, Steph.
	We need you. Truth tellers.
	That is very kind. I appreciate that.
	And yeah, please try to recall.
	FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
	That helps an enormous amount.
	All right. So let us get to our friend's question about vengeance.
	Vengeance. All right.
	Here's the question. I frequently feel anger towards the father of a girl who interfered with a relationship we tried to have some time ago.
	Fantasies of violence, that sort of stuff.
	I can't see a photo of him without my body going in fight or flight mode.
	I do not like to feel this.
	I wish I had a bit more peace of my mind.
	So, thoughts of revenge.
	Okay. So, your balls and your dick think in the short term and your heart and your mind think in the long term.
	So, without wanting to reduce your attraction to this woman to mere lust, because lust is healthy, lust is important, lust is good, but you don't want to build your life on it, right?
	Like, dessert is good, but you can't eat it all the time.
	So, here's what you do to deal with this, in my humble opinion.
	And it really is a humble opinion.
	I can't tell you what to do. I'm just telling you how I would approach this issue.
	Okay. So, you had this girl.
	First of all, you have to be careful about...
	The rampant spine-dissolving disease called oneitis.
	So oneitis is this idea that there's only one girl out there, and if you missed that boat, she's the one that got away.
	You'll never be happy. Nobody else can blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	I don't believe there are reasons like the universe is conspiring to give you reasons or there was a reason why something happened and blah, blah, blah.
	But there are reasons. And the reasons has to do with that deep dance with the unconscious that I was talking about before.
	There are deep reasons as to why it didn't work out with this girl at the time.
	And I'm not saying that God is playing chess with your nads.
	I'm just saying that there was a reason.
	And the reason is this.
	So, you had a relationship with this woman, right?
	Let's call her Sarah, right?
	So you had a relationship with Sarah.
	And Sarah's dad, Bob...
	Wrecked the relationship, right?
	You say interfered with, but you wouldn't be this angry unless he wrecked the relationship, right?
	She made the choice to stop seeing you, right?
	So why are you so mad at the dad and not mad at the girl?
	Right? That's the first step, right?
	Your anger at the father is covering up your anger at the girl.
	And your anger at the girl is not the last step in the whole series here, right?
	Because you are taking away her agency, right?
	So her father says, you shouldn't date Mr.
	A. The guy is asking the question.
	You shouldn't date him. Well, it's still her choice, isn't it?
	If she loves you and you love her and her father is abusive or mean or destructive or whatever it is, then she can make that choice.
	She can make the choice. So if she allowed her father to wreck her relationship with you, then she has more allegiance to her destructive father than to you as her lover.
	That's bad, right?
	Because you can't trust your heart to a woman who can be so easily swayed by bad people.
	I mean, even if they're her father, right?
	I don't know why I have a fly here.
	It happens every couple of months.
	It doesn't matter. I'll stay focused.
	I just, you know, people are going to mention it because we are 1080p, 60 frames a second up this yin-yang, right?
	So she chose to obey her destructive father rather than be with you, who I assume is a good guy.
	And that's her decision.
	Unless he physically locked her up, in which case you shouldn't be talking to me, but you should have called the police, right?
	Unless he physically locked her up, kidnapped her, locked her in the basement or something, then she made the choice to stop seeing you based upon the pressure from her father.
	Now, she actually did you a favor.
	Because remember earlier I was talking about those half-and-half relationships, right?
	She did you a favor, my friend, because...
	Let's say that the father had not liked you but had not interfered with the relationship.
	Then you might have got engaged, got married to this girl, and then you get to spend the next 40 years with your wife being heavily influenced by her destructive father and you're married.
	And you have kids maybe with her.
	And then he detonates the relationship and you end up being dragged ass backwards like a cat through a holly bush through the family court system.
	Your life is destroyed. You can't see your kids.
	Maybe he provokes her or himself, starts to make unjust allegations towards you.
	It's so common. It's called SAID, sexual allegations in divorce.
	It accuses you of molesting the kids or otherwise harming the kids.
	And your life gets destroyed.
	And then you know what you'd say?
	If you had this alternative universe, let's say this was happening.
	You can't see your kids.
	Your marriage is destroyed. This guy is going full.
	John Meehan on your life.
	And if somebody had said, well, you know, Let's rewind 10 years.
	Would it have been better for you if this guy had prevented you from marrying this woman in the first place rather than have you marry this woman, have kids with her, and then destroy everything?
	And you'd have said, yes, it would have been way better.
	Because what you're doing is you're comparing the fantasy of where things would have gone with this kind of destructive father-in-law to where things would have actually gone.
	Where things would have actually gone is a very ugly and destructive place.
	So he kind of did you a favor.
	You know, it's sort of like saying, oh man, my toe got infected and they had to cut it off.
	I can't believe I have to go through my entire life without a toe.
	It's like, yeah, but if they hadn't cut it off, you'd have lost your leg or your life.
	It's better to have the relationship destroyed before it gets to marriage and children than after.
	And that's the bullet that you dodged.
	And actually it's an insult to bullets because bullets end things pretty quickly and this kind of family court shit goes on forever, right?
	So that's the first level is that you're mad at her and not at him.
	And the most important level...
	Is that there's two more levels, right?
	So there's four levels in total, right?
	You're mad at him? No, you're mad at her.
	Mad at her? No, you're mad at yourself for choosing her.
	Because why would you get attached and put your heart in the hands of a woman who can be so manipulated by destructive people into destroying the relationship?
	That's not a safe and secure environment to put your heart, is it?
	You've got to think of your heart like a child.
	Like you can't just drop the kid off at a biker park.
	Actually, I'm pretty safe at a biker park, but you can't just drop your kid off at the DNC and expect things to go well or it's not going to work out.
	I mean, didn't they attack some seven-year-old kid for wearing a MAGA hat?
	My God. So you're mad at yourself for putting your heart in this situation.
	Where you attach to a girl and that attachment is then slashed and torn by her destructive dad, right?
	Now that's second from the bottom, right?
	Remember we're talking about the pyramid.
	Top. Mad at the girl's dad?
	Nope. Mad at her? Nope.
	Mad at yourself? Nope. You're mad at all the people who trained you to get into this situation, whether it's your own parents or you're mad at the people who let you wander into this Whirling Indiana Jones blade of death situation without saying, stop!
	This is a bad idea. This is a bad situation.
	You know, I was just talking early about my relationship in my 20s, right?
	I was mad at her. Then I was mad at myself.
	But who I was really mad at? I was really mad at all the people who let me trundle on in a go-nowhere relationship and let me waste years of my life in that sense, right?
	That's who I was really mad at. You know, a friend of mine's wife just said, After she found out I was engaged, she said, you'd think, usually people who were engaged are happier.
	And that's all I needed.
	That's all I needed. After years of just trundling along in this go-nowhere relationship, finally, someone just, and she didn't sit there and say, hey, I really need you to understand.
	She just said it in passing. She was heading off into the kitchen.
	With a glass of wine to refill it?
	And she said, normally people who are engaged, they're happier.
	they seem to be happier.
	So finally, after years, someone in my life, and it wasn't my immediate family, it wasn't even a close friend, it was the girlfriend of a friend of mine, finally said something that clicked.
	And it wasn't like other people had said stuff.
	Everyone was just letting me drift along.
	Those are the people I was really mad at.
	Because then one chance comment from a friend of mine's girlfriend released me from the spell.
	And nobody else could be fucking bothered for years.
	So... You're stuck because you're mad at the wrong people.
	If you're mad at the wrong people, it's like going to the doctor and...
	In a sense, telling him that the pain isn't where it really is.
	So he, you know...
	Or you go to the dentist and you say, oh, it's this tooth that hurts when it's actually this tooth that hurts.
	It's going to make everything worse, right?
	So if you're...
	Angry at the wrong person, that anger won't ever make you safe.
	So you're mad at the father's girl, but what is anger for?
	Anger is like your body's immune system.
	It's your psychological immune system.
	It's there to keep destructive people out of your life and hopefully bring good people into your life.
	That's what anger is for. Now, this guy, the father, he can't do you any more damage.
	He's already destroyed the relationship with the girl, or rather, he influenced her and she made the choice to wreck it, right?
	So he can't do you any more harm.
	So why are you still angry?
	If you say it's fight or flight, why are you still angry at the father?
	He already got what he wanted. He toasted your relationship with the girl.
	So why are you still angry? Well, the reason you're still angry, I submit, is because...
	The danger is still in your life.
	And if you were in a call with me, Friday night, 7 p.m., Sundays, 11 a.m., we do the call-in shows.
	You can catch them later. FDRpodcast.com But there's something that is still dangerous about this whole situation, and I imagine it's the people who let you get into this dangerous situation.
	So... Alright.
	Let's go back here to our questions.
	Do a couple more. Alright.
	Audio is coming through alright.
	Yeah. Sorry if you're having some issues.
	Alright. 72 weeks to slow the spread.
	Oh, yeah. Well, there's a great meme somebody put out there.
	there i can't remember where but they were saying that this is why we don't give an inch on gun control because it was two weeks to flatten the curve and now it's been like seven months and you don't have a face right have you ever loved a woman so much it made you tremble in pain I did.
	Not tremble in pain.
	I got a little hung up to the point where my friends were playing that old song, Obsession.
	You're my obsession. I got kind of hung up on an ex-girlfriend once for quite a while and really, really, really, really wanted to get back with her.
	And, you know, I didn't stalk her.
	I didn't do anything creepy. You know, I stated my case.
	Asked for what I wanted, which I think is usually a good idea.
	I did that twice with actually ex-girlfriends.
	Two and a half times.
	Wanted to get back, right? And...
	It was a very important process.
	It happened in my early 20s.
	It was an ex-girlfriend. I won't get into the details, but I really, really just wanted to get back with her.
	And I was working in the bush, so that sounds bad.
	I was working in the bush. Not that kind.
	And so I had some time on my hands, and I really, you know, it became this ache, like I wanted to be with her, wanted to be with her.
	Even to the point where I'd hang out with her friends when I'd go into town.
	Anyway, so I wrote her poems and wrote her songs and all that.
	I really wooed her, right?
	And, you know, went back and forth.
	She was humming and hawing and then eventually she's like, no, not for me.
	And I'm like, okay, never contacted her again.
	But it was a really good thing in a way because I went through that whole attachment thing and it didn't work out.
	I didn't get what I wanted.
	And I survived. Because if you really feel like you're made of glass, you can't do any gymnastics, right?
	If you really feel like if you get rejected, then you're going to be broken fundamentally or whatever, right?
	Or you're going to get stuck forever or have regret forever.
	Then you can't really be yourself because the stakes are too high.
	You have to be able to be rejected in order to love.
	Because otherwise, you're just avoiding pain, which is not the same as pursuing integrity, which is what you need for love, right?
	So... Yes, I have.
	I wouldn't say. I don't know if it was love or not.
	It's hard to say. But it was a very, very strong attachment and all of that.
	Let's see. This person says, thanks for helping me become a good father to my boys and a husband to my wife.
	We're ever grateful. Thank you.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	The family court system made a whole generation afraid to have a family.
	That is very true. You put together women's unbelievable power over men, which is just sexual and emotional, and men ask and women say yes or no, and rejection and all of that.
	Like... Twice as many women as men reproduce throughout most of human evolutionary history.
	So you put together the awesome power that women have over men just in general, biologically and so on, and then you combine that with the awesome power of the totalitarian state and, oh, well, it's a dictatorship, as I've called it before.
	All right. What do we got here?
	One more. One or two more.
	Steph's new glasses go really well with the new background.
	Actually, these are old glasses. These are my second prescription from...
	Six or seven years ago, but pretty good.
	My eyes are aging slowly.
	You know, this is my little tip.
	It comes to me from my optometrist.
	20-20-20, right? Which means every 20 minutes, take a 20-second break and look at something at least 20 feet away.
	So when I am doing an interview, I'm not actually looking at my camera.
	I'm focusing my eyes on the wall behind the camera.
	It's probably why I'm looking into your soul.
	Imagine being so in love.
	Foam comes out of your mouth every time you see the woman you love.
	I'm going to tell you something funny.
	It's a little rude, but it's funny.
	I was walking down the street the other day, and I saw in the window of a spa, it said, you're just one facial away from happiness.
	So I think that women read that and get a certain image, and men read that and get another kind of image, which, you know, is not entirely false, but anyway.
	Let's see here. Re-watch the story of your enslavement the other day, and it's very accurate.
	Do you still agree with that same fundamental worldview today?
	I do. I do, I do, I do.
	I love Stefan. Hey, man, that makes two of us.
	Thank you. All right.
	Last question here.
	Any life tips for someone who's in the 99th percentile of openness to experience, i.e.
	me? Do you know people like that?
	I'm not necessarily struggling with it, but I can see I'm very different from others in that aspect.
	Some common advice that works for most doesn't work for me.
	My mom is not Jewish.
	No, my step-grandmother was Jewish.
	Too vague.
	Please rephrase. I sound like...
	Galaxy Quest is actually a pretty funny movie.
	I have one job.
	I have one job. You are not taking that job from me.
	Sigourney Weaver plays the computer.
	Anyway, let's just wait for a little bit of comment from that.
	Last question! Anybody?
	Anybody? Everybody step in line.
	Give me a last cue.
	My mother is crazy, too.
	Well, you know what you should do is start a podcast taking all of your hard-won skills, trying to talk sane into crazy, and then do a philosophy show in the world and see if it works out.
	All right, what have we got?
	I love Jewish women.
	Well, if you're not Jewish, it may be a little troublesome getting them to love you back, because...
	They are under certain obligations for the group, right?
	All right. I don't know.
	We're getting a quote back from this guy?
	Otherwise, I'll have the...
	Oh, he's typing.
	He's typing. Openness to experience.
	So, openness to experience is one of the big five personality traits.
	Is that right? And you're going to have to type faster, man, because...
	I don't want to start another question if I'm just about to do yours.
	Listen to...
	It's an old album now, but the remastered version of Supertramp's Live in Paris album is very, very good.
	So this guy says...
	I have a trillion answers.
	I like art a lot. Have a strong entrepreneur.
	More focused lifestyles are hard to get into.
	Oh, is it that you like...
	Is it that you just have so many different interests?
	Is that right? A trillion interests.
	Okay. Yeah, okay.
	So... So when you have a very wide band of interest, and I think I'm kind of along those lines, I actually just want to do a show one night where we just talk about music all night.
	Like, I mean, that to me would be, like, so much fun.
	I absolutely love and adore music and wish I had the skills to contribute more positively to it, but I've only written a couple of songs in my life and I would not say that they were stellar.
	Stellar! Anyway, but...
	So, yeah, I mean, I have a lot of different interests and what you want to do, I think...
	If you have a lot of interests, you want to get into a field where you can express those interests as widely as humanly possible.
	Now for me, that field...
	So if you're a writer, like let's say you're a writer of fiction...
	I love history, and so I've written a number of historical novels.
	In fact, most of my novels have been historical.
	So that, to me, is a way of doing that research.
	I also love doing research and learning about new aspects of history.
	I would do that on my own regardless, but it's really nice to have an avenue to put it together into a presentation that I can share with the world and get views based on that kind of stuff, right?
	So, if you can get into it, like, let's say you just really like analyzing and debating.
	Okay, well, maybe law is maybe like numbers and structure, maybe accounting, right?
	So if you have a sort of narrower range, which is maybe more focused, like a laser rather than a searchlight or sunlight.
	So if you're narrow-focused, it kind of helps a lot.
	I mean, if you're just like, so now you find yourself in 82.
	Boy, there's a line back from the old Asia album.
	And the singer...
	Who died a couple of years ago, I think.
	The singer, his brother was learning Bach on the piano when he was a kid, and he just picked up the bass lines on the piano, and he started learning the bass lines to Bach's whatever it was that he was learning on the piano.
	And the guy said, oh, these bass lines are really cool.
	Yeah, bass. Yeah, that's for me.
	That's what I'm going to do. So, you know, He just did that, right?
	Or, you know, the guy who recently died from Supertramp just picked up piano, loved piano.
	A friend of mine just, again, picked up piano and guitar, loved it, and so on.
	Owen Benjamin just picked up piano and loved piano and so on.
	It's like, that's your thing. That's your thing.
	I'm going to be this, right? Or was it Eric Wolfson from the old Alan Parsons Project, who I actually saw live, believe it or not, back in the day.
	I saw at Double Bill, the Alan Parsons Project, and yes, Which was a great combo.
	Their album, Pyramid, is really good.
	The Alan Parsons Project album, Pyramid, is really, really good.
	And they had some good stuff later, but this was a pretty more experimental one.
	It's a really, really good album.
	I love that line from, How can you be so sure?
	That line in that song, Pyramid.
	That really struck with me. I remember listening to that on headphones when I was in my teens.
	How can you be so sure?
	How can you know what the earth will endure?
	And it's like, yeah, okay, how can you be so sure?
	It's kind of a fundamental philosophical question, which I've now spent decades answering and so on.
	So, yeah, these people who just, hey, man, I heard music, I love music, that was going to be my life.
	Or, you know, Celine Dion, her mother writes her a song, she loves to sing, that's her life, right?
	But if you have wider interests, you want to try and angle yourself towards a field where you get to not be bored.
	I like the business world a lot.
	I really did. I really enjoyed programming and so on.
	But it didn't touch my history.
	It didn't touch my philosophy.
	It didn't touch... Well, it touched the realm of ethics, but usually like a third rail because the software industry has a certain amount of sleaziness in it that I, again, write about in...
	Oh, somebody put it up.
	FDRURL.com forward slash TGOA. Oh, James went and made a nice...
	Yeah, so FDRURL.com forward slash TGOA, and you can get the audiobook of the God of Atheists, which I put out quite some years ago now.
	Thank you very much as well.
	Also, yeah, James, do we have the origins of war in child abuse?
	I think we do, in fact.
	Yeah, so my audiobook, I've re-released that.
	I did an audiobook reading of a great book by Lloyd DeMoss called The Origins of War and Child Abuse, which you should really, really check out, in my humble opinion.
	Not so much because of my reading, which is pretty good, but the book itself, the content is really good.
	So I hope that you will check that out.
	Yeah, we do have something for it, right?
	Because I put it out. Oh, newsletter.
	FreeDomain.com forward slash newsletter.
	FreeDomain.com forward slash newsletter.
	If you could do that one, that would be excellent.
	Sign up for the newsletter. It could be important.
	Yes, so FDRURL.com forward slash OWCA, Origins, War, Child Abuse.
	FDRURL.com forward slash OWCA. Again, OWCA. I think that was the original OWCA. It's fun to stay.
	Okay, but complete opposite, if you can imagine that.
	So let's put in...
	This is the feed. I'm putting this in the chat.
	That's for the God of Atheists.
	And here's the one for...
	Here's the one for fdrurl.com forward slash OWCA. And I will put that in the chat.
	I know you can hear it and all that, but...
	Let's see here. Here we go.
	Copy link. So yeah, you should check out those audiobooks because I know that my production is down a little bit compared to what I was doing.
	That's why it's so nice to drop in with you guys.
	I am still working pretty hard, but there's a bunch of stuff that needed to be done in terms of housekeeping just because everything got kind of yanked out from under me over the last month or two.
	So I'll be doing a fair amount of backdoor housekeeping.
	Yeah, that's right. That's a pickup line.
	Hey, you want to do some backdoor housekeeping?
	And so we did all of that.
	Let's see here. Someone re-uploaded the 10-hour YouTube video.
	Someone might want the audio podcast.
	Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
	For sure. Okay.
	Yeah, you know what? Drop by 4 p.m.
	tomorrow, Eastern Standard Time. I've got a nice little surprise for you guys coming up, which would be great.
	I will be live streaming with somebody who's not been on the show for quite some time that I think you will enjoy the presence of, as I will as well.
	It's going to be 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow.
	And we started GoFundMe for James' new computer.
	Anyway, well, I'm a backdoor man.
	That's right. That's right.
	All right. Well, let me close it off here.
	It's been close to two hours, and I really do appreciate the questions and the comments.
	It's absolutely wonderful to spend an evening with you guys.
	I hope that you enjoyed it as well.

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