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Sept. 11, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:32:01

THE STATE OF THE WORLD! Stefan Molyneux AMA

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	There we go. Aren't we live, my friends?
	Hello, hello. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
	How are you doing?
	I guess with everybody who is on the verge of sending their kids back to school.
	It is the 9th of September.
	9-9, I guess, flip it around, 180 out of 6, and we are in the general vicinity of the exciting year of our Lord, 2020.
	I hope you guys are doing well.
	And let's just do a minute or two of greetings and meetings and hi there's, before we dive into, well, all of the exciting stuff that is going on at the moment.
	And... Let me know who you are, where you are from, and what your thoughts are about what's going on in the world at the moment.
	I don't think I've had a year quite this exciting since I was 15 and started to live on my own, paying my own bills.
	It's all been Very, very wild this year.
	So lots of ups. I would say, objectively, even more downs.
	And hello to Nigerian Prince.
	Hey, I think I remember you from my inbox, if I remember rightly.
	Let's see here. I'm just going to grab the chat over here.
	Yeah, you know, it's kind of wild, eh? I mean, because they're all about defunding the police.
	Are you likely, do you think, to get a refund on your taxes because the police have been defunded?
	No. I doubt it.
	I doubt it. I doubt it.
	Somebody here from Switzerland.
	Scott in North Carolina, good to see you.
	Good to see you, Tad459.
	Watching you from northeast Brazil.
	Ooh, that's very nice. I'm actually going to do a show with a Brazilian fellow this week.
	Hello from the Netherlands.
	What is going on with your emergency orders over there, my friend?
	That all seems quite exciting and wow.
	Well, so I got a Q&A going to go on at the moment.
	I also have a bunch of emails.
	So for those of you who don't know, I do a newsletter.
	You can get it at freedomain.com forward slash newsletter, of course.
	And... I get a bunch of really great email responses.
	And from those email responses, what I wanted to do was to give you the responses here.
	Why not, indeed? To, I guess, widen it out a little bit.
	Might as well reach the world rather than just one email recipient and all that.
	So let's...
	I'm going to keep the chat window up here and follow along with what your questions have.
	And hello from Long Island, from Portlandia, snowy Colorado.
	There's my naked dancing gift.
	Ah, pretty good shape for a guy in his 50s.
	And let's go going.
	So somebody wrote to me, sup boy, how's the philosophy going?
	Determinism is hot.
	What you want to mean, what you mean to say is, determinism is tight.
	Barely an inconvenience.
	So, determinism is a topic that I have thrashed back and forth on this show over these many years.
	I have a whole section of it in my free book, Essential Philosophy, which you can find at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
	But... The people I've had countless, literally probably at this point over the last 40 years of philosophy, countless conversations with about determinism all share one character trait.
	This is not an argument, this is merely an observation, although I'm going to put some arguments behind it.
	So the personality trait that is most displayed by determinists Is a really, really, really bad conscience about something.
	Now, that bad conscience could be something that they did quite often, or it could be something that was done unto them.
	That was pretty heinous.
	I mean, I remember talking years and years ago on this show with a fellow who was a determinist, well, remains a determinist, I'm sure, to this day, and his parents had abused him and locked him continually in his room.
	Now, if you've been very harmed by people, and for whatever reason, usually to do with cultural conditioning, you don't feel comfortable getting angry at the people who've harmed you, then what generally happens is you seek to find ways to excuse their behaviors.
	If you've been abused by your parents, you will usually find or seek a way to excuse their behavior.
	Now, how do you do that? Well, first of all, you can say, it's my fault, right?
	It's my fault. And that's the big moment in Good Will Hunting, where he finally rejects that it's his fault, right?
	If you think that it's your fault, then you caused the harm to you, which lets your parents off the hook, but unfortunately means that your identity is based upon a lie, which is that you as a child provoked attacks from your parents.
	This is not the case. Our children are...
	Not guilty of parental attacks.
	And so you end up saying, okay, well, my parents are off the hook, but I am responsible for my own abuse.
	And that is so fundamentally wrong that you either end up not getting married or having children because you have such a self-loathing view of yourself, or if you do get married and have children, the whiplash happens.
	The Indiana Jones whiplash of that particular idea becomes truly appalling because what happens is you say, well, when my parents yelled at me or hit me or abused me, it was my fault.
	So when I become a parent, if I get angry at my children, it's their fault.
	In other words, the excuses that you gave to your parents who abused you Then return and nest in your heart and your mind and your fists and say, well, if my parents were off the hook for abusing me, then I'm off the hook for abusing my children and the slippery slope becomes a true chasm of immorality.
	Now, also people who've done significant harm to others.
	Because determinism is basically the idea that it's stimulus response, stimulus response, stimulus response.
	And in the aforementioned scenario, the stimulus is, quote, bad behavior on the part of the child, and the response is abuse or aggression on the part of the parents.
	In other words, by turning your parents into machines, you rescue them from your just moral outrage against them.
	But by turning your parents into machines, by the time you become a parent, you then have become a machine by categorical definition.
	And that's very dangerous.
	If you've done harm to other people, let's say you had a younger sister and you were really harsh or mean or teased her or hit her or something like that, then you have a bad conscience about how you treated someone who was younger, helpless, dependent, and so on, and without... I mean, the siblings should be like Frodo and Bilbo.
	No, Frodo and Samwise in Mordor.
	They should be propping each other up.
	They should be taking care of each other.
	They should be... Side by side, arms linked, facing the evils that beset them.
	And if you have instead had that crap rolling downhill scenario, you know, the boss yells at the man, the man yells at the wife, the wife yells at the kid, the kid yells at the younger kid, and then the younger kid kicks the cat.
	Or usually just kind of absorbs it like a blowfish of wrongness or being wrongness.
	And so if you've got something that's in your conscience that's really bad, then if you scrub yourself...
	Of free will. In other words, if you say, well, it was stimulus response for me.
	The reason I harmed my younger sibling is because I was harmed by my parents, right?
	I took out my frustrations on my parents.
	Younger sibling, now I'm not talking when you're 5 or 7 or 8, but you know, when you get to 10, 12, 15, 17 or whatever, you should know better, right?
	So then what you say is its stimulus response.
	Every time you explain your behavior according to environment, you strip yourself of choice and thus of the capacity to change in the future.
	It's a hell of a bargain. It's the moment you explain someone's behavior.
	Oh, my mother was mean to me because she had a bad childhood.
	Well, if you had a bad childhood, then you've just excused yourself and everyone else.
	And what you're saying is how we act is just a series of dominoes that reaches back to infinity in the same way that we don't view the solar system as a willed, conscious entity.
	It's something that formed over billions of years, you know, the Gas rings around the sun.
	The sun ignites. The gas rings collapse into planets and so on, right?
	That's true physics.
	That's dominoes, right? But if you view yourself as a domino, then you try to say...
	Because, you know, we all have things that we have done wrong in this life.
	We all have things that we have done wrong in this life.
	And... If you say, and we have that great mystery, why did I do wrong?
	Why did I do wrong?
	And if we reach for the external environmental causal explanations, then we gain some temporary relief from the pain of looking in the mirror and seeing not always the best and shiniest person looking back from the mirror.
	So we gain a short amount of relief.
	Determinism is a kind of drug for a bad conscience, whether it's in yourself or those who've harmed you.
	So you get a relief. But the problem is that the price is then you say, well, the stimulus response as to why I say mistreated my younger sibling is because my parents were mean to me or I was frustrated at school or I didn't have glasses and couldn't see anything and got really upset and angry or I had ADHD or the teacher was bullying me or was bullied at school.
	Whatever you say, then you've taken out the intervening angel of choice.
	From circumstance and response.
	You're just another domino in whatever happened in history.
	And it's kind of really convoluted and complicated, right?
	Because if you say, well, I took out my frustrations on my younger sibling because my mother or my father were mean to me, then what you're saying is that you were so angry at your parents being mean to you that you took it out on your sibling.
	But the problem is...
	If that's your belief and your understanding, then your parents were doing the same thing to you as you were doing to your sister.
	They were frustrated about whatever happened to them, so they took it out on you.
	And so the excuse that you give to yourself, you must also give to your parents.
	And therefore, there was nothing for you to be frustrated about to take out on your sister because your parents weren't being mean to you.
	They were just acting in the same way that you were acting.
	You say, ah, yes, well, they're older, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But that's usually not the way it plays out.
	So if you ascribe...
	Environmental causes to your behavior.
	And look, I'm not saying environment doesn't affect your behavior.
	I get all of that. But there still is that magic angel, so to speak.
	And I say that not because I'm a mystic, but because philosophy cannot determine and explain these things, right?
	But if you have a causal explanation towards your behavior, then what happens is You no longer have the greatest gift of human consciousness, which is the capacity to choose different, because the moment that you choose outside of environmental influences, you gain your humanity.
	You gain what the Christians would call a soul, what atheists would call magic, I suppose, your conscience.
	Now, if you steadfastly ascribe Your behavior to external environmental causes, then you are a machine.
	You have lost free will.
	And the delicate balance, of course, is knowing that Trauma as a child is necessary but not sufficient for abusing someone as an adult or as a teen or whatever, right?
	In other words, almost nobody who was raised peacefully and reasonably and with negotiation and so on, almost nobody raised that way will end up as an abuser.
	Now, there could be brain damage, there could be some genetic stuff that's hard to understand, but it's...
	Almost nobody who gets lung cancer never had any exposure to carcinogens, whether tobacco smoke or asbestos or something like that.
	So this issue...
	Of just hanging on to your capacity to choose is so important.
	You will become a machine if you ascribe everything to the environment.
	You become like a pinball, racing around, bouncing off bumpers, being hit by flippers, and even the person playing the pinball game is himself a robot or a machine.
	So you really, really do have to try and...
	Stay away or stay off all of that stuff.
	Now, you'll notice, of course, if you look at the big combat that's going on at the moment between communism and Christianity, it's really the biggest and deepest combat manifesting in the U.S., Communism is largely deterministic and it is economic determinism, like you've got class consciousness based upon your relationship to the means of production, right?
	If you are a worker, then you are the poor and you have a remote relationship to the means of production.
	If you are a manager, Then you are middle class or bourgeoisie and you have a medium relationship to the means of production.
	If you are an owner, then you are a capitalist and you have a very close relationship to the means of production.
	So your distance from the means of production determines your class consciousness.
	And that is a form of determinism, which is why when Christianity comes along and says, well, regardless of your circumstances, you have a responsibility to choose right, to choose better.
	And here are the standards and here are the rewards and here's the punishments and all of that.
	That goes fundamentally against...
	Communism, all philosophies that focus on free will oppose environmental explanations as the causal factors, not the influencing factors, but the causal factors of human behavior.
	So you really do have to watch out for that kind of stuff.
	All right, let me just...
	He quoted the pitch meeting guy, barely any inconvenience.
	Oh, really? He's really, really funny.
	What a delightful guy.
	Alright, so let's see here.
	You're reading too far into this.
	No one actually portrays determinism.
	It's just an interesting observation about reality.
	You're reading too far into this.
	That's not an argument.
	And frankly, it's just kind of annoying.
	You're overthinking this.
	It's like, what does that mean?
	It's not a rebuttal.
	2 plus 2 is 4. Hey, man, you're just reading too much into this.
	Nobody actually says that 2 and 2 are...
	It's an interesting observation about reality.
	That is absolutely meaningless.
	And this is the kind of intellectual laziness that determinists generally bring to the conversation, right?
	Of course, if you...
	Try to change someone's mind while believing that they have no capacity to change their mind.
	That's the problem, right?
	Is there a distinction between soft and hard determinism?
	Yes, the hard determinism is the one that clicked on the Viagra ads in their spam box.
	So soft and hard determinism.
	So there's stuff like compatibilism and soft and hard determinism and so on.
	Compatibilism says, okay, life is a movie, but it's a movie you're watching as you go along, so you might as well kind of act like you have free will even though you don't, and it's all just convoluted nonsense.
	Like, any time, any time your explanations get overcomplicated, you've probably done something wrong, especially, especially when it comes to moral choices, right? There's a couple of things about philosophy, moral philosophy, really, really important to understand.
	First of all, if you inflict it on children, you must be able to explain it to children, right?
	If you inflict personal responsibility upon children, if you believe that children are responsible for the choices, can make good or bad choices, right or wrong choices, moral or immoral choices, then you cannot say, well, we have very high...
	We shouldn't laugh, it's kind of funny though, right?
	You can't say, well, we have very high moral standards for children, you see.
	But once they become adults and start listening to Sam Harris, well, then it's determinism.
	See, when you're four or five years old, you're responsible.
	Morally responsible.
	For pushing or hitting or grabbing or screaming or using bad words, you're morally responsible.
	The full mantle of free will and moral choices land upon the tiny shoulders of four- and five-year-old toddlers.
	But, you see, when you become sophisticated and go to an Ivy League school and understand...
	Well, then you understand that there's no such thing as...
	Free will. It's like, then why are we inflicting this on children if we don't believe in it as adults?
	Why do we try to condition and change and civilize our children?
	Why do we give good or bad marks for, you know, like if they're a bunch of boulders bouncing down a hill, do we award a medal to the boulder that bounces fastest or furthest?
	No. Why do we have marks in school?
	I mean, not ARX, but ARCKS. Like, why do we have grades in school?
	Why do we give people good or bad points for being racist or anti-racist or caring for the poor or not caring for the poor or doing charitable things or not doing charitable things?
	Like, why? If you are a determinist, you are bound to view the universe and view humanity and their, quote, choices and actions as rocks bouncing down the side of a hill.
	That's it. That's all.
	That's the fundamental reality of the position.
	Now, you and I don't go around, at least I don't.
	I hope you don't either. We don't go around debating with rocks bouncing down a hill saying, oh, you should go left.
	Oh, you should go right. We don't debate with computers, even though computers have inputs and processing in terms of microphones and outputs in terms of speakers and so on.
	We just don't do that kind of stuff.
	Because determinism fundamentally is saying the human mind is bound by physics and the laws of physics and matter and energy exactly the same way.
	There's everything else in the universe.
	You can't create a magical exemption for the human brain.
	Everything else is deterministic, yet the human brain, you want to create this magical little other-dimensional exception where it's self-generating, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, okay, so if the human mind is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, then you should treat it like everything else in the universe.
	And you don't debate with asteroids and you don't debate with weather, even though it's complex and unpredictable at times.
	You only debate with human brains.
	I mean, that makes absolutely no sense.
	It's really deeply disturbed when you think about it, right?
	You know, it's like you have a hundred pies in front of you and say, all of these pies are equal.
	And you say, oh, you're hungry?
	You want some pie? Oh, I do.
	All of these pies are equal, but I'm only going to eat Pie 97.
	You could not put a gun to my head and force me to eat any of the other pies.
	I will only eat Pi 97.
	You understand? You can't have it both ways.
	You can't say all the pies are equal.
	I'm hungry. I want a pie, but I will only eat from Pi 97.
	And eating any other pie would be completely insane.
	Those two positions are completely and totally contradictory.
	And so if you say the human brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, Just blind mechanistic determination or determinism.
	Then why do you only debate with human beings and would consider it insane to debate with anything else?
	Anyway, it's nonsense, right?
	All right. The distinction between soft and hard determinism.
	Hard determinism has a kind of integrity to it, but it's easier to disprove.
	Soft determinism is goopier, of course, and harder to disprove because it just keeps changing positions, right?
	All right. Did you get any messages from the people on YouTube?
	And is there a possibility you'll get your channel back?
	I did not get a message from the people on YouTube.
	I do not hold out any possibility at the current time that I would get my channel back.
	Isn't the purpose of philosophy to think too much about things?
	Well, so, but the phrase too much here is, wait a minute, you are creating arguments or you are transmitting arguments that are upsetting me emotionally, so I'm going to ascribe...
	The completely useless phrase, too much to what it is that you're doing.
	No, the purpose of philosophy is not to think too much about things.
	Thinking too much about things is obsessive-compulsive disorder, right?
	So I read a description of this once.
	A guy was a psychologist, I think, was on his way to a conference, and he was driving along, and he thought for a moment at the corner of his eye, he saw a body In a ditch by the side of the road.
	And he kept driving, kept driving.
	And he couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't stop thinking about it.
	And I think this is pre-cell phone, so you could just call it in.
	And what happened was he ended up, after driving for another half an hour, 45 minutes, he turned around, he drove back.
	Another 50 minutes and then he missed his conference and he was just driving back and forth seeing if he could see this.
	Okay, that's thinking a little bit too much about things.
	You know, somebody who's an anorexic, who's obsessed.
	There was a woman, I think it was an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, who was obsessed with measuring her thighs.
	Like, how big are her thighs? Has she gained any weight?
	People who obsess about that kind of stuff.
	That's thinking too much.
	About things. And the people who...
	You've got to wash their hands, I guess, and look ahead at the game these days.
	So thinking too much is a disorder, right?
	Thinking about something too much.
	It's called being obsessed. Like if you're a stalker, if you're obsessed with someone, you're thinking too much about them.
	So no, the purpose of philosophy is to think the right amount.
	Not too little about things, not too much about things, but think the right amount about things, right?
	So... How does determinism affect someone's choice to join a group like Antifa?
	I don't know that it would be specific to something like Antifa.
	How can I know when my explanation is overcomplicated?
	Well, what you do is...
	You find the least intelligent person that you would expect your idea to apply to, right?
	So if it's quantum physics, well, you don't really have to explain it to somebody who's not that smart.
	If it's morality, yes, you do.
	If it's morality, you have to explain it to the youngest or the least intelligent person that you expect to be bound by your idea.
	Argument, right? So if you, for instance, at what age do you consider a child is responsible for telling the truth rather than lying?
	Don't know. There's no hard day or anything like that.
	But at some point, right, at some point, for me, I think it was around two or so, that the child does have to be responsible for starting to tell the truth.
	And I've gone through this a million times.
	I won't go through it again. Plus, I'm starting on my book on peaceful parenting, which I appreciate everyone's support to do.
	I'm working very hard on an introduction to peaceful parenting.
	Well, it's just called peaceful parenting.
	I'm just working on part one, the introduction.
	But, yeah, you have to...
	Like, whatever your idea is, can you explain it to someone who has the least capacity to understand what you're saying, but still would be subject to it, right?
	So, with lying, you don't have to explain it to someone in a coma, because someone in a coma is not responsible for telling the truth or lying, because they can't, right?
	Somebody who's currently going through epilepsy and lashing out should not be lectured about Physically hitting people because they're not in control of their body at that particular time.
	So if your explanation is overcomplicated, if you can't explain it to the bottom edge or the outlier of the people who would be subjected to it, then you need to figure it out again, right?
	Aha! This is a nice surprise.
	I still haven't worked out how to get notifications from DLive.
	Greetings from Golan Heights in Israel.
	Well, welcome. I'm glad you've come.
	There is no free will.
	Well, Your Honor, I didn't kill that guy.
	The universe determined it for me.
	The legal system is predicated on it.
	Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
	Destruction is how people express their creativity.
	It's interesting. Any channels you are subbed on DLive and you have the DLive app, you will get notifications when the channel goes live.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	Is there a philosophy to a mob?
	Hmm. Is there a philosophy to a mob?
	So the philosophy of the mob is founded around approval and fear.
	A mob forms when violence will...
	Be used to harm people who don't join the mob.
	Right? So, you know, if you're in some crazed left-wing mob and then you see a guy in a MAGA hat and someone says, oh, there's a Nazi Trump supporter, let's get him.
	If you're going to turn and say, hey, you know, like, let's debate him, let's do free speech, let's this or that or the other, then the mob might turn on you, right?
	So once you've got that tipping point, which happened fairly recently in America, once you've got that tipping point where violence becomes how social questions are decided...
	then what happens is the mob is the momentum that is brought about under the threat of coercion for disobedience or lack of conformity to the goals of the leader of the mob.
	So there's the leader of the mob and then there's the phalanx, like the people who will enforce his will.
	And if you try to get between the crazed mob and the mob's victim, then the mob will turn on you.
	And so it's generally easier and safer to go along with the mob rather than to stop and question the mob or try to oppose the mob because you're no longer in a situation where debate is occurring.
	It is really comply or die.
	And so the philosophy of the mob is brute survival, right?
	Once you've gone to that tipping point where society is now using violence to resolve complicated social questions, then the philosophy is survival in a sense.
	So you will go along with the mob whether or not you...
	Agree with the mob. But you see, once you've gone along with the mob, you know, one of the foundational aspects of joining a criminal gang is you have to commit a crime, and usually a pretty heinous crime, and that way you are part of that gang.
	I talked about this in my documentary, which you can still get on Bitshoot, on Library, and so on, and you can get it at freedomain.com forward slash documentaries.
	But... When the communists took over in China, they tried to get people and often were able to get people to commit crimes.
	And that way, they're now committed to communism because if communism gets overturned, then you get this kind of, well, I mean, these Nuremberg trials afterwards, wherein you may do very badly because you participated in the crime.
	So once... The mob or the leaders of the mob and their phalanx, their enforcers, once they can get you to participate in something nasty, like you chase someone down, you beat someone up, you vandalize, you destroy people's property, right?
	Once the mob can get you to do that, and two things happen.
	One, you become ego-identified with the goals of the mob, because if then you go against the mob, you're also going against your own prior participation in their criminality.
	That's number one.
	And number two, you will oppose anyone who opposes the mob, because if they successfully oppose the mob, then you could be liable for the wrongs you committed while you were part of the mob.
	So, yeah.
	Let's get back to our chat here and make sure we are keeping up with the glorious listeners and what y'all have to say.
	And we will then continue.
	And I do actually have, I mean, you guys have got some great questions here, of course.
	I do actually have, believe it or not, some emails.
	Some emails to go with, to get out into the world.
	and Alright, let me just log in here.
	Yeah, so then when I restart the program, it's like, I can't get you to restream again.
	Alright, we'll get back here in a sec.
	Thank you for your patience. This is a technology that...
	It's not the broadcaster's fault.
	It's definitely something with the PC, but we shall sort it out.
	And this is the one I actually do my gaming live streaming on, so it should be pretty robust when it comes to that kind of stuff.
	Anyway, we are back.
	Okay, let me get to some questions.
	I've got a couple in the chat over here, so let's have a look.
	All right, so here are some questions.
	Thoughts on the recent peace agreement and Nobel Peace Prize mentioned for Trump?
	Yeah, so Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
	And it is for his work in the Middle East and so on.
	Now, I mean, those of us who've been around the block a couple of times, we are perfectly aware that Middle East peace initiatives have occurred a whole number of times before.
	What was it?
	Yasser Arafat shaking hands with the Israeli prime minister, with Bill Clinton lurking in the background on the rose lawn of the rose garden or whatever.
	So we've seen these kinds of things before.
	And sure, you know, you put enough pressure in, you put enough threats and bribes in, and you can get enemies, so to speak, in the same room together.
	And you can get some seeming breaks in hostilities and detente and so on.
	Until people embrace philosophy as a method of resolving disputes, it's all going to be temporary.
	And so, yeah, there will be some initiatives, there will be some movements towards, but unfortunately, like most of the world's power is derived from anti-rationality.
	Most of the world's power is derived from anti-rationality, like the power of central banking, right?
	How are you supposed to compete with people who can type whatever they want into their own bank account?
	Well, you really can't, right?
	So that aspect is based upon anti-rationality, just the basic anti-consistency that if the government bank creates currency out of nothing, it's just and fair and right and righteous social justice.
	Responsibly economic, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But if you do it, you're a criminal and you must be thrown in jail, right?
	And so you and I can't create contracts on behalf of other people that we get stuff and we expect them to pay, particularly if they haven't even been born yet.
	But if the government does it, well, it's, you know, the application of Keynesian blah, blah, blah to fiscal blah, blah, blah, and the next generation gets the national debt, right?
	So, anti-rationality is the foundation of most of the power in the world today, right?
	And this happens in families too.
	This happens with parenting, right?
	I mean, I've done hundreds and hundreds of calls, thousands probably now, with people talking about family structures when they're growing up and so on.
	And again, it's a bit of a self-selecting group, but nonetheless, I've talked to people outside of the show as well a bit about this stuff.
	And The way it generally goes is that parents say that you as a child are morally responsible for your choices, but if they abuse you, then when you become an adult and you confront them, they say, hey man, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
	And they then claim that a lack of knowledge is a perfect excuse for any wrongdoing that they may have done.
	Committed. Or they say, well, you know, I had a bad childhood and so on, well, making your bad childhood was not an excuse for you, right?
	So that's anti-rationality as well, which is why is a five-year-old infinitely more morally responsible for his actions than a 35-year-old, right?
	I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
	If doing the best you could with the knowledge you had or have Is enough, then why is the child who, you know, if the child says, hey man, I'm just doing the best I could with the knowledge I have, the parent wouldn't accept that.
	If a child doesn't study for an exam and gets a fail on the exam and says, hey, I just did the best I could with the knowledge I had, the parent would say, well, why didn't you gain more knowledge?
	Why didn't you study? Why didn't you do this and that?
	So anti-rationality is the foundation.
	Of the power structures of the world.
	And everywhere you look at power structures, you will see, like unjust power structures, then you will see this anti-rationality.
	And until we start embracing reason as a whole, well, you might get some detente, but thinking it's going to last is like thinking that you've turned into a fish because you can hold your breath underwater for 60 seconds.
	All right. Why is anyone who isn't a communist smeared as far right?
	Because it works. And it works because people are not taught about history.
	Any recommendations on how to connect with people if you are a bit stunted emotionally and a bit retarded socially?
	So my first statement would be to say that you would not want to describe yourself in those terms.
	See, after childhood, you are your own parent.
	When you were a child, you are heavily influenced by your environment, which you do not choose.
	As an adult, you are heavily influenced by your language, which you can choose.
	And in fact, if you want to be happy, you must choose language.
	Do not describe yourself as retarded.
	Do not describe yourself as stunted or anything like that.
	That is not helpful.
	If you want to unpack the reality of how you talk to yourself, then...
	All you have to do is to see if you're being fair or not, to see if you're being just or reasonable or not.
	All you have to do is say, okay, if I overheard a father talking to his child in this manner, what would I think?
	So if you overheard a father talking to his child and saying, well, you're just stunted emotionally and retarded socially.
	I'd be like, oof, boy, that's unpleasant.
	That's harsh. That's nasty.
	That's not, no, no, don't do that.
	That's not right. That's not right.
	And if it's bad for a father to say this to a child, why is it okay for you to say this to yourself?
	In other words, if you would not accept the behavior or the language From someone else to someone else, or like if you don't want to do the parent-child thing, imagine you saw a boyfriend saying to his girlfriend, but you're just stunted emotionally and retarded socially.
	Would you think that's a good boyfriend?
	Would you think that he loves her? Would you think that he has her best interests at heart?
	Don't do it. Until you get married, at least.
	Language is your family. And you are your own parent.
	And the world that you create is largely created through language, right?
	I mean, language is defining the world at the moment.
	Which is really the goal of postmodernism, which is to allow definitions to surmount and destroy actual reality, right?
	That's the goal of postmodernism, is to make sophists the most emotionally messed up, persuasive, obsessive, weird people in charge of society, because it is definitions that have displaced reality and That arises really from yourself.
	So with yourself, you have to say, okay, if I have a criticism of myself, I'm a bit stunted emotionally.
	Say, okay, well, what is the empirical evidence for that?
	And if you say, oh, I'm a bit retarded socially, what is the empirical evidence for that?
	And even if you can find empirical evidence for that, is that necessarily a bad thing?
	I mean, to get along fluidly and well socially these days is not good.
	It's really, really not good.
	Sorry, I've just noticed here, I think it'll say off.
	Are we getting stuff through?
	I apologize for bringing this up, but I just wanted to check.
	Just give me a yo there.
	Great topic. Okay, sorry, we are.
	We are still there. My apologies. It just doesn't say that we're there.
	Anyway, no biggie. So, the language that you use to describe yourself as an adult is the empirical evidence that you will take to define your own existence.
	And how do you know?
	How do you know? How can you be so sure that these definitions apply to you in a just and fair way?
	So people could say to me, oh, you know, Steph, you don't read social cues and you talk about topics that are bad, forbidden, whatever, right?
	Okay, well, is that because I'm retarded socially and stunted emotionally?
	I don't think so. I think it's a commitment to the truth that obviously upsets people to a large degree, and that's a shame, right?
	But I didn't create the environment wherein the truth upsets people to this degree, right?
	That's... Just the reality that is here at the moment.
	So, stunted emotionally, retarded socially, how do you know?
	It sounds to me, it sounds to me like these are labels that have been placed upon you by people who are projecting, right?
	So projection is when you ascribe to other people dysfunctions that actually exist within yourself, right?
	The left says that anti-leftists are intolerant, which is, of course, a very intolerant thing to say.
	To say, as I assume was said to you when you were a child, that you're stunted emotionally and retarded socially is only said by people who are themselves, if it were your parents, who are themselves stunted emotionally and retarded socially.
	Maturity is discarding the language of your origins.
	Growing up, becoming an adult.
	I'm not saying you're not.
	I'm just in my definition. Growing up and becoming an adult is rejecting, or at least strongly questioning, the language of your childhood.
	Because the language of your childhood was not chosen by you.
	The language of your childhood was not chosen by you.
	My mother had a pretty bad habit, which was When she would switch a light on, and you know, occasionally you switch a light on, particularly back in the 70s or whatever, you switch a light on, there's a little pfft, and the light goes out, right? And my mother would be shocked by this, and would kind of burst into tears and fly into a rage and say, oh, nothing works.
	Nothing works, nothing works, she would say.
	Now, I could have internalized...
	That language, right?
	I could have internalized that language.
	All of us have received some consistent or inconsistent insult as a child.
	You know, like you drop your glass down the stairs once and suddenly you're the clumsy one and now it's just confirmation bias and then you become self-conscious and, oh, I'm the clumsy one.
	Well, What do you do with that language as you get older?
	Do you say, well, you know, I'm the clumsy one and then you play into it and then it becomes your identity and it's determinism.
	You've allowed people to rob you of your identity based upon foul dehumanizing language, which is stripping away who you are and reducing your possibilities.
	So, this question, any recommendations on how to connect with people if you are a bit stunted emotionally and a bit retarded socially, whoever told you that, really try and connect with them.
	And if you can't, and I'm pretty sure you won't be able to, then it's their issue, and you just leave that in the rear view.
	All right, here. Quick question.
	I'm working on art stories that bring philosophy to the forefront.
	I've been very careful with my online presence to not associate my handle or identity with any political statements.
	I've seen that any association with a political identity that isn't left is a mark of doom for getting people to read your works.
	My work isn't political in nature, but rather philosophical slash allegorical.
	I saw how Ayn Rand was slash still is derided by people who have never read her works.
	And while it's true that she was heavy-handed in her soliloquies, The derision is not warranted.
	I feel guilty about this, but feel it is necessary to protect my creative works.
	What are your thoughts on this approach?
	Any advice? Well, you know, it's tough, I've got to tell you.
	It's pretty tough.
	Anti-rationality is now sort of in the process of garroting my fourth career, right?
	This is something I thought about the other day.
	I shouldn't really laugh because it's pretty serious stuff.
	So I was originally going to be an actor and a playwright, but the amount of hostility towards my plays was huge.
	And again, it was because the people in charge of the theater world tend to be very left-wing.
	Everybody loved my work until any kind of political discussion came up and then I was apparently just a terrible, terrible guy.
	Then I went into academia, and academia was really, really tough because...
	Not so much because, I mean, I spent a lot of time in three different universities I went to.
	I went to York, the Glendon campus of York University.
	I went to McGill. I went to the University of Toronto.
	I spent a lot of time arguing against socialists.
	That wasn't the major issue, although it was not an important issue.
	The major issue was just a commitment to Aristotelian rationality and objectivity.
	That was... Pretty rough.
	In a place where it's like, well, you know, history is all interpretation and nobody really knows.
	And it's like, okay, well, then what are we studying here?
	What's the point? Then it just becomes, you know, where does the kidney sit in a Klingon?
	So you can make something up, but there's no facts that you can use to actually know for sure, right?
	And so, yeah, academia.
	I didn't exactly get hounded out, but I could kind of see which way the wind was blowing.
	So then I went into the business world.
	And the business world...
	In the software world, this is a fairly well known phenomenon.
	That you fake it till you make it, right?
	That you just make promises and make commitments and so on, get the signature and then just work for your very best.
	I didn't like that approach and fought against it and that was not particularly great as well.
	Actually, no, maybe the fifth. So that's three, right?
	So that's acting, playwriting, academia, the business world.
	After the business world, I wrote a bunch of novels and I was off playwriting because at least with...
	Novels, I didn't have to worry about getting actors and directors and set designers and all of that, because I did produce a play that I wrote.
	This was produced in Toronto and ran for a while, and it was a play called Seduction, which was an adaptation of Tegenev's Fathers and Sons, and I produced and directed it myself and almost acted in it when I had to fire a guy who then demanded scale pay for all of the time he'd come for his auditions and so on.
	But... I thought novel's pretty good, right?
	Because with a novel, you control everything yourself.
	And then I won't get into the details of it.
	But I've always had the most wildly divergent views of my work.
	The most wildly divergent views of my work.
	I'm a love him or hate him kind of guy, which, you know, I accept as the price of integrity.
	Integrity means that the people who are similar to you will really respect and admire you and you can learn from them and be inspired by them and they can learn from you and be inspired by you.
	But the people who are either neutral or in opposition to you really dislike you, the neutral people, because you formed yourself into a shape that they envy and the opposite people because you're natural enemies.
	And so I'm a love him or hate him kind of guy.
	And that's the price.
	That's the price of honesty is people believe or love you for it or hate you for it.
	And so it was the same thing when I was doing writing.
	I had an agent. I had people, professional writers reviewing my work.
	I had professional people doing reports on my book for agents like I was really in this.
	And I got...
	I'm trying to remember the exact phrasing.
	I got on the same book I got one professional writer, a very famous guy, to say, I don't even know what to say about this.
	This isn't even a book. Ouch.
	That's like the Not Even Wrong from Richard Dawkins.
	And then I had another reviewer who said, finally, someone has produced a great Canadian novel.
	This is one of the greatest moral books I've ever read.
	And if you want to hear the book that I'm talking about, it's available for free, the audiobook.
	You can get it at fdrurl.com forward slash TGOA or The God of Atheists.
	It's fdrurl.com forward slash TGOA. So there was nothing in between.
	There was not like, eh, you know, it's good, but there's a little tweaks that are needed, or, you know, it needs this, or something's missing, or this.
	It was like, this is the most amazing book I've ever read, or this book made me throw up in my nostrils a little bit.
	Like, there really was nothing in the middle.
	I've never been a middle kind of guy, so to speak.
	And so, yeah, that was four.
	And then now, of course, five, podcaster, social media guy, vlogger, and so on, political analyst.
	Yeah, that's, I mean, of course, in the process of attempted dissolution and so on.
	And that's, it gets a little tiring.
	I've got to be honest with you. It gets a little tiring to keep rebuilding all the time.
	But that is the reality of where things are as far as this kind of stuff goes.
	So don't let other people Don't let other people take that away from you.
	Don't let other people take that honesty away from you.
	And as far as advice goes...
	See, here's the thing.
	People who are on the hard left...
	And, you know, there certainly are some people on the far right, and that is probably the case as well for them.
	But people who are on the far left, you probably don't want to be in business with them anyway.
	I mean, it's just a ticking time bomb, right?
	It's just a ticking time bomb, so...
	Alright, do you still view Bitcoin as a viable global cryptocurrency given its now high transaction fees?
	The planned Lightning Network won't be on-chain, essentially making every transaction an IOU on a separate network.
	What do you think of Bitcoin Cash, which has increased the block size and reduced the transaction fees?
	I think they're both great.
	Bitcoin, of course, is beginning to lose some of its luster when it comes to rapid, small-scale, buy-a-coffee transactions.
	But think of big giant business to business transactions.
	It's still a very, very good thing to be doing.
	Bitcoin Cash is great and much more helpful for these kinds of things and so on, right?
	Let's see here. What do you think of the idea that there is no such thing as the right?
	There is only the left in the absence of it.
	I'm sorry, I don't really know what that means.
	What is your thought on speed limits on the roadways, and what ways could they be enforced in an anarcho-capitalist society?
	Just have dedicated enforcers of whoever built the roadways or let people drive at whatever speeds they deem suitable for the conditions.
	Well... It's a great question.
	I did a show some years ago.
	I think it was a place in Holland that had increasing number of accidents despite or probably because of the fact that they had layered so many lanes and signs and warnings and speed limits and so on that people either watch the signs and keep adjusting their speed which makes for a staggered driving or they just completely ignore the signs and some people don't ignore the signs and some people do and you end up with this problem.
	So what they did was they got rid of all the lanes and all the signs and traffic accidents virtually ceased in the entire area, right?
	So people self-regulate in the absence of central regulation and in the presence of central regulation like the state, they kind of do the bare minimum, right?
	And so, yeah, an unhappy employee versus an entrepreneur is.
	It's kind of like the unhappy employee will kind of do the bare minimum, or somebody who's, I don't know, working in a prison or something like that where they're getting paid nothing, right?
	So somebody who's got no motivation will kind of do the bare minimum, but an entrepreneur will go above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak, right?
	And so when you don't have an external...
	Coercive situation, then what happens?
	The purpose of roads is to get people from A to B. Apparently these days it's 90% just Amazon deliveries, but to get people from A to B. Nobody cares about the speed limits, they care about the safety, right?
	So what is the safest way to get people from A to B? Now clearly somebody going 250 miles an hour is probably not going to be particularly safe.
	Somebody going too slow is also not particularly safe because if you're going too slow, people have to kind of flow around you and lane changes are where a lot of accidents happen and so on.
	So I don't know. That's the great news is that I don't know what the best way to organize roads are in a society.
	I do know that there'll be nothing like they are right now.
	And, you know, that old saying from back to the future, you know, where we're going, we don't even need roads.
	Well, that's actually quite dangerous.
	I don't know.
	That could be done anytime. But why didn't it happen?
	The reason it didn't happen is that people pay for roads in time, not money, right?
	So in Canada here, there's a road called the 407, which is a private road, and you pay, you have a little transponder, or they'll read your license plate, and you pay to go on, you pay to go off, right?
	And you just pay for the kilometers that you're on there.
	And I used to take that to go to work back in the day when I had a...
	A fairly long commute.
	Well, those of you who know the show know that it started out as a podcast in a car on a very long commute.
	And I would spend a couple of hundred bucks a month on that, but I would save myself 15 hours a month.
	And so when you put it in, it was like, you know, 20 bucks an hour.
	I was saving or 15 bucks an hour.
	I can't remember the math exactly, but I was saving.
	I was paying myself to not sit in a car in traffic, which is a very unpleasant thing.
	I hate sitting in.
	I mean, everybody does. The length of the drive doesn't matter as much as the speed of the drive to me.
	A long drive where you're moving is better than a short drive where you're...
	You've got to keep concentrated, but it's incredibly boring.
	It's kind of high-stress, kind of dangerous, and kind of boring, which is really a bad combination.
	So, I paid money to have more time with my wife.
	I bought time with my wife or time at work or time to sleep in so I didn't have to go and leave work up to half an hour to an hour early.
	So, I paid for more sleep.
	I paid for more time with my wife.
	I paid for more time at work, which came back to me in raises and bonuses and so on.
	If people paid for roads, then there's no business that would then require absolutely everyone to be at work at the same time, right?
	The moment you require everyone to be at work at the same time, you create traffic jams.
	And that's no good.
	So some people want to come in a little early, some people want to come in a little later, some people want to work from home.
	That's the way it would work if people paid directly for roads.
	Businesses would start to stagger and so on, and there would be more at-home stuff and so on, right?
	So... I did a speech on this years ago in Philadelphia, back when you could travel and give speeches.
	But I did a speech on Eisenhower was the one who created the interstate highway system in America.
	And he did that because there were fears of a nuclear war and they needed to be able to move the army from place to place.
	And so he built all and they were still paying off the debts for all of this kind of crap decades and decades and decades later.
	Now, because these roads had been built using debt, America became a very mobile, car friendly kind of environment.
	Right.
	Everyone loved to drive, drive everywhere because the free interstate highway, so to speak, had been put in place.
	Right.
	And so then what happened was America became very oil dependent, largely as a result of these, quote, free highways.
	And because it became oil dependent, there's flowed a huge amount of money into the Middle East, which gave Middle Eastern rulers enough money to start getting more radical forms of Islam up around the world.
	And then environmentalists kept that money flowing to the Middle East and all that.
	It's all just crazy stuff.
	Right.
	And it all has these domino effects.
	As far as speed limits go, it's really simple to enforce speed limits on private roads.
	I mean, it's ridiculously simple to enforce speed limits on private roads.
	I mean, it's really, really simple, right?
	So let's say you have, you know, an entry and exit transponder or GPS or whatever it's going to be, right?
	So let's say you have a speed limit of 70 miles an hour.
	A speed limit of 70 miles an hour.
	And let's say someone beeps in on the highway, travels 70 miles, then beeps off, right?
	Did it take them less than an hour?
	Then they sped, right?
	It's really, really simple.
	You don't need all these cops and all that.
	You just need transponders, right?
	And you can very, very quickly and easily find out if people are speeding, if people are running red lights, all these kinds of things could be sorted out.
	And, you know, people want safety and they also want convenience and this would all be worked out and then alternatives would be worked out and so on, right?
	All right. So a true determinist would say, yes, you're right, but I have no choice but to debate you anyway.
	Yeah, of course. So then you just say, well, you feel that you have no choice to disprove, in a sense, emotionally a determinist, which is actually kind of a real thing, right? I mean, if people's emotions don't follow their ideals, then a rational person would say, oh, maybe there's something wrong with my ideals, right?
	So, for a determinist, if they say, well, I have no choice but to debate you anyway, then you say, well, then you won't have any problem with me saying you're a hypocritical idiot and hanging up on you, right?
	And I did this once. I don't think I said hypocritical idiot.
	But I did say, oh, well, then you'll have no problem with me canceling my debate with you because you're a determinist and everything I do is determined.
	And he was like, no, no, no, no.
	And then I hung up, right?
	Okay, well, those are the consequences, right?
	Only an immature person gets angry at natural phenomena, right?
	I mean, it's not raining on you personally.
	It's just the weather doing its thing, right?
	I can understand some frustration or whatever, right?
	I remember on my honeymoon, it was crazy cold in what was supposed to be a tropical paradise, which was annoying a little bit.
	But you don't sit there and get enraged at the weather, right?
	It's just, oh, this is kind of inconvenient or whatever it is.
	Well, I guess we'll spend more time in the room, right?
	So... It takes a very immature person to take natural phenomenon personally, right?
	And it's like everybody has this thing, you know, where you butter a piece of bread, right?
	And then it slips off the plate.
	And whether it falls butter side down or butter side up, it's not unimportant, right?
	If it falls butter side down, you don't want to eat it.
	If it falls butter side up, you're probably okay if the floor is clean.
	And then you've got to clean butter off the floor, which is greasy and gross, but you don't want to leave it there because people can slip and all of that, right?
	So butter side down versus butter side up, right?
	But nobody sits there and thinks, oh, if the bread falls butter-side down, nobody sits there, at least I hope nobody sits there and thinks, oh, that butter is trying to get me.
	The universe is trying to get me.
	Or like my mom would say, nothing works.
	I can't even get the bread to fall butter-side up.
	It takes a very immature and obviously quite ridiculous person to take Natural phenomenon, a natural phenomenon personally, right?
	And so whether I choose to stay in a debate with the determinist or not is about as morally or emotionally real or personal as whether the bread falls butter side up or butter side down,
	right? And so, I mean, you may joke if the butter's falling, no, don't fall butterside, but you're not talking to the bread, right?
	You're not debating with the bread.
	And you're not upset with the bread, right?
	You don't pick up the bread and say, I can't believe you fell butterside down.
	Don't you care about my time?
	Don't you care about making a mess?
	Don't you have any consideration?
	For the sentient beings you live with, what's the matter with you?
	So mean, so thoughtless, so selfish, so careless.
	I mean, it's a piece of bread, you understand, right?
	This is not how reality works in a sane person's mind, right?
	Lecture the bread on its thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for your time and feelings, right?
	It's not how things should work in a sane...
	I mean, maybe if you're in a mental institution, something like that could happen, you know, the person who's screeching at the bread, you know, but that's something that needs significant intervention from a team of specialists from Vienna.
	I don't know, but... And so for a determinist, if I decide to stop debating with him because I think he's a hypocritical idiot, it shouldn't be upsetting.
	I mean, a mature person who actually accepts it.
	Now, if he gets upset, it just means he doesn't believe determinism.
	He's now holding me responsible for not debating with him.
	No, no, no, no. Okay, come on, right?
	It's ridiculous. And then the emotional disproof is actually quite important.
	Like, I did this sort of empirical disproof.
	I did this with... The people I debated with, Vash, V-A-U-S-H, I think his name was.
	So Vash, I debated with him, right?
	He's, oh, means of production.
	You've got to share the means of production, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Well, of course, all I did was I asked him how many times he had given his...
	He turned over his channel to other people, right?
	Well, other people, they need access to the means of production and all that, so that seems quite important.
	Oh, look at that, you know?
	Oh, Sargon is not a determinist, is he?
	We should debate that. See if you can set it up.
	Like when it rains every day for two weeks straight, that's a little infuriating.
	Absolutely, for sure. But the relationship you have is with you and your goals to get outside and do something or play tennis in a way that's not deep in water or whatever, right?
	But you don't get angry at the clouds and take it personally and think that the clouds are out to get you.
	I'm not saying don't get frustrated by natural phenomena, but you don't take it personally like the clouds are conspiring to try and prevent you from going out on a hike or something like that, right?
	I mean, it's... Which modern-day culture is the most rational?
	That's a very, very good question.
	That's a very, very interesting question.
	I'll have to mull that one over. The modern-day thing is the challenge, right?
	I would hate to say the...
	The culture of the future, because you did say modern day, so I get all of that.
	Oh, by the by, by the by, don't forget to check out my free book.
	Almost. I'm reading a historical novel I wrote.
	It's very good, I think.
	Very deep, very powerful.
	And it's...
	FDRURL.com forward slash almost.
	FDRURL.com forward slash almost.
	Almost a novel.
	It's almost a novel. Almost a novel.
	You can remember that, right? Yeah, so sorry.
	I just realized this, of course.
	I had all of my...
	The emails I wanted to talk about were all in a little notepad thing that wasn't saved.
	And so when the computer completely froze and I had to reboot it, it's gone.
	So I will do that another time.
	So let me just check in here for questions, just in case I have missed.
	Yes or yet! And this or that.
	And let's see. FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
	You can see that on the screen.
	If you could help out with that, I would really, really appreciate that.
	All right. Let's see here.
	What have we got here? I'm just going to go back here.
	Oh, I missed a lot of questions.
	Sorry about this. I made a lot of comments.
	All right. How can I overcome the devouring mother?
	Well, grandmother, I want to forgive her, but just can't, because she won't admit doing anything wrong.
	So, you know, forgiveness is—I've done a lot of shows on forgiveness.
	Forgive me, but I have.
	And to me, forgiveness is something that you have to earn, and you earn it by admitting fault and making restitution, right?
	Admitting fault and making restitution.
	I mean, on the couple of times where I've done something that upsets my daughter and I've been unfair, I apologize, and, you know, what can we do to make it better?
	Or I'll make suggestions.
	If she was younger now, she has very definite ideas.
	And so forgiveness has to be earned.
	And if you hand out forgiveness to people who haven't earned it, that's an insult to people who have earned it.
	So to me, the goal is not forgiveness.
	The goal is closure.
	Now, closure is another word for certainty.
	Closure is when you have an accurate view of an existing, usually emotional situation, and you also have an accurate view of the future.
	It's really, really important to get this distinction, right?
	It's really important to know when to stop beating your head against a wall, right?
	So I've always said this to people.
	You've got big issues with people in your life.
	They're mean. They're untrustworthy.
	They're abusive. They're whatever, right?
	Selfish. Well, you sit down and talk with them and give them the chance to learn to understand, even if you're not getting along with them at the moment, based upon the past love or care that you've had for that person, sit down with them and at least offer that to them, right?
	And maybe more than once, maybe twice.
	I've done it up to three or four times.
	Really, really sit down.
	There were parents we knew and I had some issues with their parenting and I sat down with them like a whole afternoon to go over the things that I thought could be improved.
	I was happy to hear about things I could improve and so on.
	Didn't. Well, I don't want to get into the whole outcome of all of that.
	But what you want from your relationships is...
	Self-trust. And self-trust means that you have an accurate view of the situation.
	And accepting that people rarely change is very, very important, right?
	You know, like only 0.5% of people or 1% of people...
	Who lose weight, lose the weight and keep it off.
	And most people just comes back and often more, right?
	Think of how long it takes for most people to quit smoking.
	And this is, you know, losing weight.
	You get a lot of positive feedback.
	Everyone's happy. Oh, you look fantastic.
	You can buy smaller pants or whatever it is, right?
	Get a lot of positive feedback.
	Philosophy is quite the opposite. The better you get a philosophy in a lot of ways, the more negative feedback you get.
	And so... Forgiveness, no.
	You can't forgive people who don't admit that they're doing anything wrong because, again, it's an insult to the people who have earned it, right?
	It's like saying to a bunch of kids in the lineup, you got to have a buck to get an ice cream.
	You know, you run an ice cream truck, right?
	You got to have a buck to get an ice cream.
	And you refuse, you refuse to give an ice cream out to a bunch of kids if they don't have their money.
	And then the kids are all milling around.
	And then the next 10 kids, you just hand out free ice cream.
	It's like, what? And then all the kids who paid for the ice cream are mad at you because, like, wait, you said we couldn't get an ice cream with that.
	So people will listen to you and make restitution because it matters to you and it's important and it's virtuous and so on.
	And so you give them the forgiveness because they've earned it.
	But the people who don't admit fault who blame you, you can't give them forgiveness because they haven't earned it.
	I mean, you can give them whatever you want, but it's just not a true and real transaction.
	It's not an honest transaction.
	But what you want is closure.
	So you sit down with your grandmother and you talk to her about what happened, what you don't like, what you want, and listen to her and so on, and then you just keep doing that.
	Until you break through or you break out.
	What you don't want to leave behind is the possibilities of redemption.
	That you don't want to leave behind the possibilities of redemption.
	Because it's kind of a betrayal to someone's potential.
	And so you sit down with that person, you try and talk things through with them, and either they will break through and things will be better and great, you know, good for you.
	You've got that honor and that pride of helping somebody redeem themselves.
	or they just relentlessly manipulate and bully and abuse and minimize and gaslight and you name it, in which case you keep trying and then you realize nothing's going to change, and then you can not see that person and you have closure.
	In other words, you have certainty.
	You have certainty.
	And certainty is really important in life.
	Because once you're certain, then you don't expend resources in that.
	You gotta hoard your resources, right?
	Resources are really, really important in life.
	You gotta hoard your resources and focus them on what's most important and most powerful in life.
	And if you are continually banging your head against the wall and chasing possibilities which are never gonna materialize, Then it's really bad for you, right?
	Like, I mean, if you think you're a singer, but you don't really sound that good and nobody really likes your singing and all of that, well, you know, you can keep trying, but it's probably not going to work out very well.
	And I don't mean like you have a different kind of folk Bob Dylan kind of voice, like literally you can't stay on key and your voice cracks and it's straining and, you know, right?
	Then don't do it.
	Focus your resources on what's good.
	And you see this in these talent shows where somebody says, you know, this isn't the thing for you, dog.
	You can be great at something, but this ain't it, right?
	And so once you get closure, you don't circle back.
	You don't circle back and say, should I, should I, should I, shouldn't I, shouldn't I, shouldn't I? Could it have been saved?
	Could it have been better? You just, you know, earn your way out, so to speak, or earn your way in, but don't just sit there floating around in the periphery where you don't have closure.
	So focus on forgiveness.
	You can't will yourself to forgive any more than you can will yourself to love.
	I mean, you can talk yourself into stuff briefly, but again, it's just like thinking you're a fish because you hold your breath underwater, right?
	Did you all see the events in Australia lately?
	Oh yeah, people getting arrested for organizing lockdown protests.
	Sure. It's kind of inevitable.
	Focus less on getting an apology and more on creating a good life for your kids.
	Yeah, see, the chosen relationship should take priority over the unchosen relationships in your life, right?
	Your grandmother is not a chosen relationship in your life.
	Your children is a chosen relationship.
	You chose that relationship. You chose to marry your partner.
	You chose to have kids. You chose to keep the kids, hopefully.
	I'm sure you did. So that which is chosen should get more of our attention than that which was historically accidental, like family of origin stuff, right?
	Let's see. I was challenged to forgive her by an orthodox monk friend and I'm in agreement.
	She's also 96 and she can't live on forever.
	The moment you start handing out forgiveness without people earning it is the moment that people will treat you wrong more because you subsidize their wrongness by forgiving them without them having to earn it.
	All right. Have you seen Bluey, a show on Disney Junior?
	Okay, there's two reasons I wouldn't have seen Bluey.
	One is the word Disney, the other is the word Junior.
	So, yeah. All right.
	I didn't join D-Life when I got the boot from YouTube.
	I've been on D-Life for a long time, a long time, a long time.
	Love you, Steph. You're the man.
	I am a man. I appreciate that.
	It's very, very kind. All right.
	What have we got here? Yeah, somebody's got to go.
	Thank you. Thank you.
	I guess you're already gone, right? I doubt many on their honeymoon are worrying about the weather.
	Let's see here.
	What do we got? Last couple of questions, right?
	Oh, the pred stuff.
	I'm curious as to why you became angry at some point in your last YouTube debate with the communists.
	Why? What's wrong with anger?
	I mean, anger is a very healthy emotion.
	Anger is the immune system of your soul.
	Anger tells you when your right's being violated.
	Anger tells you when people are manipulating you.
	And what's wrong?
	I don't know. Like you think, well, I'm not supposed to become angry.
	I'm into free will. I'm not a determinist.
	So it's perfectly permissible.
	And I've actually talked, I've got a whole podcast called The Joy of Anger about how healthy anger is.
	So no, anger is...
	Just great. You know, in the right way.
	It's the old thing. It's easy to get angry.
	It's hard to get angry for the right reasons, in the right way, in a productive way of all of that.
	So, curious as to why you became angry at your last debate with the communists.
	Because... Because, I don't know.
	I can't remember the exact cause of it, right?
	I mean, this has been months ago that I had this, but...
	It's interesting, like, why would you become angry with the communists?
	Because... You know, communists have done a lot of bad things in the world and would like to do a lot more, so...
	Peaceful parenting can be hard to debate because parents who use physical punishment become very defensive.
	How best to reach them? Yeah, no, that is a very...
	So, I mean, I've interviewed in public a number of times when I see people treating their children very harshly and...
	So a couple of ways to do it.
	And listen, I don't know. I'm just telling you what worked for me.
	I don't have any big objectives.
	Each situation is different. So, you know, something which is like, this is not what you got into.
	This is like, you didn't become a parent so you could yell at your kids, right?
	You didn't become a parent so you could threaten your kids.
	You didn't become a parent so you could scream at your kids.
	Like, that's not what you want to be doing as a parent, right?
	Come on. There's better ways to achieve what you want.
	And, you know, I'll mention, you know, I mean, Supernanny's not perfect, but she's not terrible.
	She's got some really good arguments and ideas.
	Parent effectiveness training is pretty good.
	Of course, my work on peaceful parenting on this show, I think, is very good.
	And there's lots of parenting resources out there on how to deal with your kids without screaming, yelling, hitting, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So just appeal, you know, when people, like, they just take step by step, right?
	You step by step by step.
	And... I was on a hike the other day, and...
	It was such a great conversation.
	I was with my wife. It was such a great conversation that we did a loop.
	We were supposed to head back and we did a loop.
	And the conversation is so great, you don't really notice that you're doing a loop, right?
	Oh, did I see that before?
	Forget it. And then you just get, oh, man, we did a loop, right?
	So you want that, oh, we did a loop.
	Like you want that gap between the step-by-step and the big picture of the map.
	You want to give people that gap because in that gap is where a lot of beautiful things can grow, right?
	So step by step, they end up screaming at their kids.
	And I remember, yeah, I was in a parking lot with some guy who was just like screaming, like neck vein bulging, purple face screaming at his kids because I guess he'd been driving with them for a while and they'd been driving them crazy or whatever, right?
	And I just, I went up.
	I didn't touch the guy. I said, listen, this is not what you want.
	This is not what you want to be doing as a parent.
	Like you didn't have kids to do this, did you?
	I mean, come on. This is not, this is not who you want to be.
	This is not how. And I said, also, you know, I mean, They're smaller than you now, but they're not going to stay that way.
	They're getting bigger and you're going to get older.
	And I just posted this on Parler the other day about how my daughter is almost as tall as my wife.
	Yeah, there's a time flash for you.
	There's a gap where something fertile can grow, so to speak, in terms of the map versus the step-by-step.
	And so give them the gap between what they dreamed of in becoming a parent and how they're acting.
	And that gap can be like, whoa, my gosh, right?
	People have this when...
	I'm not suggesting you do this, and please don't, right?
	But if you ever have the situation where...
	People are recorded and then they see themselves back.
	Like this happens in Supernanny.
	Like people are recorded and then they see themselves back and they're like, oh my God, I'm terrifying.
	Oh my God, I'm horrible. Like inside they don't see it, but outside you can get this view that really can give you fertile ground for growth and change.
	So appeal to that.
	Remind them that they're going to get older, the kids are going to get bigger, and they say, oh yeah, but they're not listening.
	It's like, yeah, but they're kids. Of course they're not going to listen.
	First of all, you know, I said, you know, when you're a parent, you've got to think of your mouth like, Three inches from your kid's ear.
	They're so dependent upon you.
	They're so helpless. They really have few other options, particularly when they're toddlers.
	Everything you do is giant, right?
	It's huge, right? And I said, would you be able to listen if someone three times your size stormed into the parking lot screaming at you in the top of your lungs?
	You would be absolutely terrified and you'd shut down.
	Right? And then you'd be resentful, especially if it kept happening and it was mostly threats, you'd get really angry.
	So, you know, a gentle touch with kids is the way to go, right?
	And the other thing you can say, if you know them better, is you can say, oh yeah, but they don't listen and they don't obey and so on.
	It's like, well, you know... Their brains are very immature, right?
	So let's say that you get older and you, you know, you get into your 70s and you have what are called senior moments, right?
	You have senior moments and you forget things and you forget, you use the wrong words, you get distracted, you don't listen, you whatever, right?
	It's going to happen. You get older, your brain, you know, changes, right?
	Do your kids get to scream at you when you're 70 if you forget where your keys are or if you forget to meet them somewhere or whatever, or if you're short-tempered and you crank out some loud phrase or another, right?
	So when your brain is no longer in its most robust form when you're old and your kids' brains are not in their most robust form because they're young, do they get to do to you when you get old what you do to them when they're young?
	Or would you think that would be pretty mean and not respectful of the slightly diminished capacity you'd have as an older person, right?
	So lots of these kinds of things, I think, can be really helpful.
	What are your thoughts on the new CDC report on the COVID numbers?
	Oh, yeah, that only a small percentage of COVID deaths were directly due to coronavirus.
	Yeah, that is...
	That is accurate and true, and this has been known for a long time, that the greatest danger of COVID is not the virus itself, but its effect upon comorbidities and a variety of that.
	All right. I just want to make sure I don't miss any other very, very important question.
	They're all important and all of that, right?
	The other day I saw a young mother elbow her son multiple times as punishment.
	I thought about confronting her but didn't because I was unsure.
	Yeah, listen, I mean, it can be pretty volatile.
	It can be pretty volatile.
	But, I mean, the question...
	Don't do anything dangerous, obviously, right?
	And some parents can be pretty volatile.
	But here's the thing, right?
	Yeah. It's not whether or not you change her behavior in some permanent manner.
	And it's risky too, right?
	So there's a plus and a minus. So the plus is somebody intervenes, corrects her, gives her a sense of a gap between what she wants to do as a parent and what she's actually doing.
	So there's that, right?
	It's a good thing. But I think the most important thing in this kind of intervention is the effect that it has on the child, right?
	So the child sees an adult clearly say that his mother is doing something wrong.
	Now that is very, very important for a child.
	Very important for a child.
	The society seems to prop up and support abusers all the time, and that gives children a pretty horrible relationship with society.
	I mean, you think of some of these rioters and so on, right?
	Why do they hate society so much?
	It doesn't come out of nowhere. And it's not just propaganda.
	I mean, this is my very big wrestling conversation.
	Match that I had when I was younger.
	I did not have any moral relationship with society when I was in my early to mid-teens.
	And I can tell you why the rioters are largely out there.
	To a large degree, it's because they were horribly abused as children.
	Horribly abused as children, like I'm Beatings, rapes, sexual abuse, like just horrible stuff.
	Or they witnessed, you know, drugged out, drunken, promiscuous mothers getting beaten half to death and so on, right?
	I mean, if you really want to see where this kind of stuff comes from, there's a show called Intervention, which it follows a sort of format, right?
	It can be drugs. It can be gambling, promiscuity, alcohol.
	One woman, she didn't eat any food.
	She would inject food through a tube in her belly.
	I guess they had drilled a hole through her belly button and she could take food.
	And she'd been doing it for like 12 years, right?
	And then they talk about their childhoods, and it's never complicated.
	It's never that confusing.
	It's always horrible and tragic, right?
	So why wouldn't the woman swallow any food?
	Because she had been forced into giving an old man oral sex and forced to swallow, and so she just couldn't do it emotionally.
	She just couldn't swallow.
	She didn't want to use her throat for swallowing, obviously, right?
	And I won't get into the stories, but there is a depressing familiarity to all of this stuff, right?
	Which is, yeah, these people were horribly abused, and so they have very dysfunctional self-images, and they self-abuse, and in a sense, they abuse others.
	Now, why are they punishing themselves and punishing others?
	Well, they're punishing themselves because they blame themselves.
	For their abuse and why are they punishing others by continually...
	Like, they don't go, say, I'm going to move to Alaska and then they just become addicted in some cabin in the woods.
	They're always enmeshed in this social situation and their addiction is a form of punishing others.
	Well, why do they want to punish others?
	They want to punish others because others, particularly parents, were charged with protecting the children and these people went through horrific abuse as children.
	There was one guy, one of the worst drunks I've ever seen, who was...
	So he was a fairly young man in his early 20s.
	And he was such a drunk that his liver had stopped being able to process alcohol.
	And they said to him, listen, like one more drinking binge, you're going to die, most likely.
	And he's like, yeah, maybe it's a couple of weeks, but I'm in, right?
	I'm going to do it. And, you know, what was his history?
	Well, his history was that his mother married...
	A man who was so verbally abusive, he would literally scream into this toddler's ear that he wished he was dead and he was useless and worse than garbage and he should have died and he wished he wasn't here.
	And then that guy left and then the mom married another guy who was also violent but to the mother, introduced her to drugs, got her hooked on a variety of hard drugs.
	And beat her to the point where there was like literally blood splashing on the floor in front of this kid and then he starts drinking and then his younger brother gets leukemia and he cleans up, the older brother cleans up because he wants to give his brother a bone marrow transplant and does clean up and the bone marrow transplant works but then a year or two later his brother gets relapses into leukemia and dies.
	So, you know, that's just an enormous amount.
	And the mother still drinks and so on, right?
	And so, yeah, I mean, why does he drink?
	Well, it's not that complicated, right?
	I mean, if you have a voice in your head continually screaming that you should be dead, that you should die, that you should not be here, that you're useless, you're worse than garbage, you're a stain on the face of the planet, then...
	And if the only way you can get that voice to shut up is to drink, then, yeah, you'd probably be pretty damn tempted to drink, right?
	So... All of this, you know, if you just get one person who comes into this environment and says, this is wrong, like, that can be an amazing thing for a child to hang on to.
	Just some disapproval, right?
	So, yeah, the Antifa, like, why do they hate their current society?
	It's not about politics. It's not about economics.
	It's not about any of that stuff. They hate their society because their society fucking failed to protect these kids when they were little.
	And these kids were subject to the most horrendous predations and violence and sexual abuse and, in my view, you name it, right?
	And so what are they raging at?
	Why do they want to destroy it? Because they were destroyed.
	And society bloody well let it happen and didn't step in and didn't do anything and didn't say anything and probably continues to support their abusers.
	And yeah, I've talked before, yeah, there are somewhat the shock troops being sent out by single moms to make sure the gravy train keeps running.
	But no, it comes straight out of child abuse.
	And I know this one intimately.
	I know this one. Why is it that people want to tear down their current society?
	Because their current society didn't protect them as children and supports and enables their abusers.
	So to me...
	It's not that. Now, this doesn't mean that they're not dangerous.
	This doesn't mean that I don't think there should be negative consequences for their behaviors or anything like that.
	But if you want to look at the etymology, the source of this, it's that.
	Steph, how do you explain to the layman why suffering is a necessary part of life and gives it meaning?
	But you can't guide yourself without suffering.
	I mean, even when you're a kid, right?
	Why is it that you don't do things that are dangerous?
	Because pain tells you not to.
	Why is it that fight or flight, right?
	Fight or flight. You can't survive without fight or flight.
	And flight is fear, and fear is suffering.
	And so... It's not just a necessary part of human life.
	It's a necessary part of all life.
	You know, the squirrels who...
	Squirrels are chipmunks and so on that gather together the nuts and bury them for the winter.
	Well, that's a weird thing for them to be doing, except all the ones who didn't do that died off, right?
	So evolution is suffering, right?
	Natural selection is suffering.
	The advantageous genetics outcompete, the disadvantageous genetics, and the disadvantageous genetics die off.
	Like, why do we have pale skin if we're white?
	Because we need vitamin D, and in the northern climate there's less sun, and so you need...
	That's why Scottish people and Irish people are this cloudy a lot of times.
	They have very pale skin and lots of freckles and red hair and so on, and they can't spend much time in the sun.
	And they...
	Why? Because the people who didn't...
	Developed the lighter skin, didn't get enough vitamin D. They got, what, rickets or something and did badly or died, right?
	So he's only alive because of suffering.
	And so thinking that you can separate suffering from life is thinking that there's some magical Ken doll factory where human beings are made.
	All right. How many Speedos do you own?
	Gotta tell you. It's my birthday month.
	Oh my gosh, is that right? I have my birthday on the 24th.
	Yeah. So I have about 15 days left to be 53.
	My point being over 50, actually even over 40, you don't really do Speedos anymore, right?
	It's not very reasonable. You don't want to be that sunburned German guy with the muffin top jammed into Speedos like a Zeppelin in a condom.
	That's no good. That's no good.
	All right. Thanks for reading my questions, Steph.
	Long time listener. Glad you're streaming here now.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	Thank you for the questions. Molly red-pilled me on single moms.
	Thank God for that. Did you know the Canadian government is sponsoring masturbation instead of sex?
	It's not sentences I thought I would be saying today.
	I think I did read something about that.
	But I'm largely glossing over all of this stuff because the news is just too weird.
	And of course, philosophy is not going to be able to solve contemporary political problems.
	I mean, you've got Hillary Clinton saying that Joe Biden should not concede To Donald Trump no matter what, no matter if Donald Trump wins, right?
	So the peaceful transition to power is done.
	It's not a time for philosophy.
	It's a time for other people, hopefully the police.
	All right. Well, I appreciate everyone dropping by today.
	I'm sorry I didn't get to the emails.
	I will do them another time.
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