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Oct. 17, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:55
In the Name of Elvis, Saving the World is NOT What You Think!
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Good evening, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain for our Friday evening chat.
And it's great to have everyone here.
So, the story came up.
Oh, no, two things, two things.
Okay, so number one, Dan Bongino has officially now released the information that he has lymphoma, that he has cancer, he has a Immediate, personal, visceral, and probably still glowing in my gonads history.
With this, I just wanted to send out my condolences, my best wishes for a healthy and happy recovery to remind him that, from what I understand, your survival rate is 90%.
Not bad.
Not bad. You know, those are the kind of odds you want to pull in the old cancer lottery.
You don't want to pull the Christopher Hitchens odds, which are not the odds that any sane human being...
I'm very sorry that this happened.
I was in my 40s too when this happened to me.
It's an odd thing. And you will be fine.
I'm absolutely sure of it. He's a healthy guy.
And when I went in for my treatment and I said, you know, it's not really hitting me too hard and all that, it's like, yes, that's because...
You came in as a very healthy guy to begin with.
Exercise, good heart rate, good muscle mass, strong bones and all of that.
So the health and exercise that Dan Bongino has been focusing on for a long time.
He basically looks like the kind of guy that if your truck tips over, you call on him.
Don't need a jack, just need a Dan.
And so I'm sure you'll be fine.
I'm incredibly sorry that this happens.
You can get some great things Out of these kinds of negative experiences, as I talked about, and if there's anything I can do personally, just let me know.
I'd be happy to chat offline, off the record, or anything like that.
It may be worth chatting with someone who's gone through all of this and just massive sympathies and warm wishes to you and to yours, your family, your children, and I'm so sorry.
That this is happening. And it's particularly, of course, at this time, where a lot of Dan's and Bill Mitchells, for that matter, and other people, their whole kind of careers have brought them down to this particular point.
And on D-Day, they're kind of at a health ammo.
And I'm really, really sorry for all of that.
And again, if there's anything I can do, please, please let me know.
And I'm sure you will be fine, but it is a very scary thing.
to go through and it does give you courage and perspective, not that I think either men are lacking that in particular, but you can get some great things out of it and my sympathies go out.
So speaking of life, death and the giant comet arc of our entire existence, I was talking to my daughter the other day and you know one of the things about the pandemic The at-homeness,
the, you know, I mean, I spent like a third of my year last year away doing stuff, doing documentaries and speeches and all of that.
And... It's really been an odd kind of at-homey, closed-in, claustrophobic kind of year.
And one of the things that, I don't know if this has happened to you, but you sort of sit there and think, okay, well, my particular plans for documentaries in Greece and Japan and so on are all on the wayside, as is other things, other travel-based things that I was planning on doing, but... You sort of sit there and say, well, gosh, you know, for my daughter, it's like, okay, well, not really socializing that much.
And, you know, travel, which we used to do, is on the down low in particularly egregious ways.
So, you know, what do you do?
What do you do with your time? What do you do with your time?
And I don't know.
You guys have hobbies, obviously.
And in the...
Text, if you could.
Just throw in your hobbies.
Just, you know, let me know what your hobbies are, if you don't mind.
And I've never really had any.
I've never really had any hobbies.
Actually, when I was a kid, I was into stamp collecting.
My father gave me a big sort of book of stamps, and I did collect stamps for a while, and it's somewhere around.
Other hobbies...
I mean, when I was a kid, I actually slept under...
I had a 4x6 model railway, HO? The medium one, not the N, not the huge one that goes around people's gardens, but a medium one.
And I would spend some time on that.
I would, you know, create the mountains and the villages and get the lights and all of that.
And I made it quite an elaborate little thing.
It's the kind of thing where, you know, because there were no cell phones back then, I'd just have a little video of that.
And I slept underneath it and occasionally I'd wake up and forget, sit up quickly and bang my head on the...
Ass end of a model railway setup.
And other than that, I drew quite a lot.
And I'm a very obsessive drawer.
It could take me a week to do a portrait of a photograph or something like that because I shade everything so microscopically and build it very slowly.
I always love that bit at the end of the drawing when you can just flesh things out.
But... Yeah, hobby?
I don't know. I don't think I've ever...
I mean, as an adult, I don't really count video games as a hobby.
A hobby is usually something where you create, or you adapt, or it's usually something with your hands.
So I've never really had a hobby.
And I was just wondering, what do you guys have?
So music and programming.
So a hobby is something that you do for pleasure...
That obviously is not going to make you money.
It doesn't lead to a particular career.
It's something you do to sort of exercise your mind and your fingers and all of that.
Just kind of on the side, right?
It's not a distraction.
It's not the consumption of somebody else's material, like a video game or a movie or music.
But it is something...
I guess I did karaoke for a while, off and on.
I don't really think that's a hobby, but it was certainly something that I enjoyed.
Doing, so what do we have here?
So I've defined the hobby. Music and programming.
Yeah, see, programming, it could be a hobby, I suppose.
It certainly was for me when I was a kid.
But it is so closely related to something that's economically productive, it's kind of a little tough to think of it as just a hobby.
But yeah, it could be if you're just doing it for fun.
It's something where you do it for the pleasure of itself alone, not in order to lead to something else.
So I programmed for the pleasure of it in itself.
And then many years later, I became a programmer and a research development manager.
I wrote songs.
I sang in a band.
Actually, the band was pretty good.
It wasn't pretty good, which is why I ended up in acting.
But what else we got here?
Shooting guns, ham radio, programming, garden.
Hiking? Hiking is a hobby.
I think that's a sport or an activity, obviously.
I don't know about a hobby, though.
Programming, watch collecting, guns reading, hiking, working on cars, and I'm sure a few other things.
Painting, playing the violin.
Yeah, I did 10 years of violin from the age of 6 to 16.
I was in a church orchestra for quite a while.
Weightlifting. Again, I don't know about the sports versus the athletics versus the hobby.
I don't know. It's interesting. You can buy a raspberry pie, oh man, now I'm hungry, for $10 and automate the hell out of your house with programming, I guess.
Writing is a hobby. I think writing is a hobby, but of course the question is, what do you expect or hope or want for the writing to lead to?
Like, so when I did my model railroad, I was never sitting there thinking, I'm going to be a model railroad guy.
It's going to be my job. I'm going to open a model railroad shop and write for the model railroading magazine and so on.
And, you know, I'm still a bit of a sucker.
Like if I drive past the place and it's like, model railroad inside, I'm like, you know, like some people with auctions or antiques or whatever.
And I rarely see them anymore, but I can go in.
A friend of mine who later died, the guy on the motorcycle, his mother was dating a guy who was a baker.
He had a very elaborate model train set.
Down in his basement.
And I thought it was great.
I mean, I just really liked it and all of that.
So let's see here. Is pleasure a goal?
Yeah. Writing novels you don't intend to publish.
Writing novels you don't intend to publish.
Well, do you have other people read them?
I mean, do you just give birth to them and crucify them in the basement?
I do the writing for the joy of it.
If it goes somewhere, great. If not, I still want to do it.
Hmm. I did cross-stitch as a kid or teenager.
Could I play plus sing something on your stream someday?
Yeah, absolutely. Grab your stuff.
What might be better is if you record it locally, send it to me, and then I'll insert it, because you'll probably get better audio quality that way.
Oh yeah, listen, if you guys are musicians, and I sing occasionally on the show, if you are musicians and you want to share your joyful beats with the world, you want to make a joyful sound, I'm very happy to include that in all of that.
So what is a hobby?
It's something that you do for pleasure.
Where you are not just consuming but creating without the goal or purpose of having it lead to somewhere professional or somewhere renumerative, like something that's money-making.
It's something that you do for fun that is creative and it's not done with the expectation of honing your skills in order to do something else.
And I would assume that it's a different...
I think it's a different category from...
Sports or athletics.
So tennis, is that a hobby?
No, I think it's a sport. And that's a little bit different.
I have decent gear here.
Should sound fine. I'm actually ready to go.
Even now! Even now.
Alright. Well, are you seriously ready to go right now?
I'm starting now.
Okay.
It's down at the edge of a lonely street at Heartbreak Hotel.
Well, he'd be so lonely, baby.
He'd be so lonely.
He'd be so lonely.
He could die. Oh, though it's always crowded, we still could find some room for brokenhearted lovers who cried out in the gloom.
Well, it'd be so, it'd be so lonely, baby.
It'd be so lonely, it'd be so lonely if you'd die Although it's always crowded, soon you'd find some room For broken-hearted lovers who cried out in the gloom
Well, it'd be so lonely, it'd be so lonely if you'd die It was great!
Do another one! Do another one!
Do another one! Seriously?
Yeah! It's a lot easier than me doing philosophy.
Please, by all means.
What time is it where you are, by the way?
I guess 7.28.
It's half past one.
Sorry, I read my watch wrong.
It's Elvis time.
Whatever time it is, it's Elvis time.
All right.
Are you...
All right, let's go.
Are you lonesome tonight?
Do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart?
Does your memory stray to the bright summer day when I kissed you and called you, sweetheart?
Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?
Is your heart filled with pain?
Should I come back again?
Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?
My singing is terrible.
Is your heart filled with pain?
Should I come back again?
Tell me, dear, hearty, lonesome tonight Bye.
Ah, all right.
I need to do a mandatory...
Very nice.
This is good.
I don't know.
Wallet.
Wallet.
Wait.
Wallet's the one for the money, the two for the show.
Ready, ready, ready, now go get go, why don't you?
Except for my blue sweat shoes.
Well, they can't do anything, but they're up for them blue sweat shoes.
Well, you can knock me down except for my face.
So learn to my name or love of the place.
I'll do anything that you want to do.
I'll lay off of them shoes, but don't you?
Except for my blue switch shoes.
Well, you can't do anything but I'll lay off of them blue switch shoes.
You know I can be found.
Sitting home alone If you can come around And baby, please, please telephone Don't be cruel Too hot, that's true Baby, if I made you mad Something I might have said Please forget the past Well, the future looks bright and Don't be cruel Too hot, that's true Well, should we be apart?
I really love you, baby, cross my heart Let's walk up to the preacher and let her say I do.
If you stop thinking of me, then I won't stop thinking of you.
Don't be cruel.
Too hard, that's true.
Well, should we be apart?
I really love you, baby, cross my heart.
You ain't nothing but a hound dog We're crying all the time You ain't nothing but a hound dog We're crying all the time You ain't nothing but a hound dog We're crying all the time You ain't nothing but a hound dog We're crying all the time You ain't nothing but a hound dog We're crying all the time They told me he was hopeless.
Well, that was just a lie.
Yeah, they told me he was hopeless, baby.
Well, that was just a lie.
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend.
You ain't never caught a rabbit.
You ain't no friend. You ain't never caught a rabbit.
She ain't no friend of mine That's great.
Hey, listen, let's do more music.
That's great stuff. And it gives me a little workout, too.
And I give everyone their gifts for the week.
So I was talking to my daughter about hobbies, this and the other.
I think I've told the story, but it was many, many years ago.
I'll keep it brief.
Sorry, that's just a bait.
The hook is, spoiler, he didn't keep it brief.
But... A friend of mine, I was over at his place and we're in the basement getting something, some tools, we were working on something.
And it's this big giant cabinet, this big series of big blonde wood cabinets with all these like really tiny, like wide, wide, but very short drawers in them.
And it didn't look like anything that I've ever seen that was used to store things before.
And I said to him, I said, what is this?
And he said, oh man, that is a pain in the neck.
And I said, what is it?
He said, open it. So I walked over and I pulled out one of the drawers.
And inside the flat drawer, We're butterflies.
Row and row and row of butterflies, you know, with pins and spread out.
And he's like, be careful, you know, don't want to shake the dust of pollen or whatever it is off their wings, right?
And I'm like, holy crap.
I'm like, this just goes on and on.
I mean, there were three or four of these big giant cabinets with like, I don't know, maybe 30 drawers.
And I'm looking at them, and I call my daughter down.
She was much younger back then, because we love butterflies.
We still do, right? And we're opening these up.
We're looking them out. I'm like, God, this is incredible.
What is this doing in your basement?
And he said... It's my uncle's.
I said, okay, tell me the story.
We've got time, right? And he said, yeah, so my uncle got really into butterflies.
And so he wasn't that into butterflies, obviously, when he was sort of young, middle-aged or whatever.
But around sort of the age of...
40 he started becoming really obsessed with butterflies and what he did was he would work and then he would quit his job and he would take whatever money he'd scrounged up and he'd fly someplace in order to collect these butterflies and He found out how to store them, he bought these big cabinets, and he kept them, and he kept them at the right temperature, and this, that, and the other, right?
And I said, I asked, and I knew the answer to this question before I even asked it.
I said, so he never married?
No. Do you ever have kids?
No. So, never married, never had kids.
But sure had a lot of butterflies.
And he had gone...
Like, there was no continent, I guess, outside of the Arctic or the Antarctic that he hadn't gone to go and get these butterflies.
It became this ide fix.
This... I mean, I could say almost an obsession.
I think that's a fair way to put it.
And... It was one of the saddest things I'd ever heard because I said, okay, well, how did you get, like, when did you get these?
It's like, oh, you know, he died and they were willed to me and they brought them over and I put them in my basement.
I know it's probably too much humidity or not enough or it's not the right temperature.
And it's like, I don't know what to do with these, with these butterflies.
And I was like, of course, you know, like I try not to be Mr. Obvious, although I know I sometimes am.
I try my best not to be Mr. Obvious because the Mr. Obvious in me said the following, why don't you donate them to a museum?
And immediately I said it and I said, like, I'm sorry, man.
Of course, you've thought of that a million times.
Let me rephrase that.
What happened when you tried to donate them to a museum?
And he said, well, you know, I called this place in New York.
And the place in New York said, you know, well, if it was a natural history museum, they said, yeah, we could, we could take a look.
You got to ship them down.
But, you know, we can take a look.
And if there's something we don't have or something that we want, we could, we could take it off your hands or whatever.
And I'm like, holy crap.
I mean, these are big, heavy cabinets.
There's quite a few of them.
And I assume you can't just tape them up and throw them in a FedEx box, right?
Because they're very delicate, right?
I mean, you breathe, they break, as Laura says in The Glass Menagerie.
And he's like, yeah, you know, they...
And I said, well, will you at least pay for the shipment?
And they're like, no, we don't do that.
But, you know, if you want to ship them down, we'd be happy to have a look and all of that.
And he's like, would you pay for any of this stuff?
No, we've got... We've got butterflies.
We've got tons of butterflies. But, you know, maybe there's something we don't have or whatever.
And so...
This had happened, I don't know, a couple of years back.
And he...
It was one of these things like...
It just kind of fell off the truck, so to speak, right?
It just kind of fell by the wayside, right?
Which is like, eh, you know, it's probably not worth going back.
You know, like you drop... Once I was in Florida, I dropped my sunglasses into a swamp where there were alligators, and I'm like, I could go down and get them, and I could return with either A, my sunglasses, or B, a distinct absence of arm or something, or head or leg or whatever, right?
So... It was one of the saddest things I'd heard in quite some time that this guy chose to focus 30 years of his life on collecting I hate to say these stupid butterflies because they were beautiful and they were slowly decaying in a humid Canadian basement after this guy went all over the world Managed to catch these butterflies unharmed,
managed to somehow ship them back, managed to get them mounted, and managed to buy all of this equipment.
And his whole life's work, these 30 years, and God knows how many tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it all assembled.
Gone. Not gone, but your entire life's work is now a burden for someone else to try and deal with.
And I don't know how much it would have cost.
Thousands of dollars, maybe, to ship these things in a delicate way to New York, and I think that was the only place that showed any interest at all.
And, oh man, it's a horrifying thing.
And the reason I thought of this as well is, I've just recorded, though I haven't released another...
Two chapters from my novel almost.
We're now past the halfway point.
Yay! Well, not yay. I love these people.
I forget how much...
I mean, I love all my characters and I forget, like even Reginald.
But I forgot how much I just fell into these people's lives and thoughts and how much I absolutely loved inhabiting that world of the First World War to the Second World War in England and Germany and France and other places.
And how much I enjoyed writing historical characters like Churchill and so on was just a really wild, wild thing.
So, it is...
There's a lot in it where...
It's a lot of talk of death at this part in the novel because, well, I won't spoil anything, but there's a reason for it.
So... And I think...
I knew a few people like this when I was younger who had...
Like, even the guy who died, whose mother dated the baker.
And it's funny to think, you know, the people...
So I was in my teens back then, so we're talking 40 years ago, right?
And this guy is probably, statistically, he's probably dead by now, right?
And this is the baker who said, he told me all about the word fresh.
I understood the word fresh.
And it helped me a lot when it came to marketing, right?
So he said, well, first of all, if you want to be a baker, you've got to get up at like 3.30 in the morning or some god-awful thing like that, right?
I was in his store, and there was a little bag of buns, and it said, two-day fresh, right?
And I said, two-day fresh?
What does that mean? They'll be fresh in two days?
They were fresh two days ago? He said, no, that's just they were baked, and I didn't sell them the day.
I didn't sell them the next day, so now they're two-day fresh.
And I said to him...
Okay, so what if it's four days?
Well, then it's four-day fresh. What if it's a week?
Then it's seven-day fresh.
You kind of get the... The word fresh never goes off the edge of the cliff.
And I remember thinking, like, you always put a positive spin on things.
Maybe not quite as much as Trump, but certainly somewhat.
And it's just a very, very sad thing to think of somebody at that fork in the road who says, okay, I could settle down, I could have a wife, I could have kids, someone who's going to outlive me and so on.
And... What an act of, in a sense, sheer desperation to distract yourself from life by chasing butterflies all over the world, collecting them all together, and having the sum total of your life's passion be a hassle and a burden and an annoyance to those you leave it to.
I mean, this guy liked his uncle.
You know, I mean, when you're a kid, you know, Mr.
Butterfly Hunter, he seems pretty cool.
You know, like the fawns.
You know, it seems pretty cool.
But it's not.
It's a giant waste.
And I guess I've always had these kinds of fears.
Like, the baker, he had a train set in his 40s.
I don't know how old he was, but...
Let's see, the mother...
Yeah, it would be 40s. It would be 40s.
The baker had a...
a train set.
Oh, I enjoyed trains at the time.
I was just kind of getting out of my train phase and going into my Dungeons& Dragons phase.
So I like trains, like model trains.
And I thought of it with my daughter.
But she's so-so about it.
And of course, the big concern is you buy all this stuff, you put it all together, and then it just kind of sits there and nobody uses it.
It's the nightmare of the exercise equipment ordered at 3 o'clock in the morning with Cheetos on your underwear that slides under the bed never to see the light of day again.
Or the ping pong table that's used to hold cleaning products and never scooped off and played with.
So... I like hobbies.
I think that they're nice.
They're fun. I've never been...
Because for me, and this is a Protestant thing, or maybe it's just a me thing, I really genuinely feel like I have to be productive a lot.
I mean, I get comments from, like, gosh, you do a lot of work, you produce a lot of stuff, and yeah, I do.
I mean, I work...
I work in a very concentrated fashion and produce a lot in a relatively short amount of time, for better and for worse.
But I guess I've always had this fear.
I wrote an entire novel about this.
I'm sure I'll get around to reading it.
It's an audiobook to give the pandemic lockdowns go on.
And my audiobook was based on a dream I had.
About a woman, a girl, a little girl in the 18th century who was milking a cow in the backwaters in the middle of nowhere in England in the 1760s.
And she had this light of genius in her eyes, like an Ayn Rand or maybe a Phyllis Schlafly or somebody who's just really, really brilliant, kind of in the middle of nowhere.
Not really any education, no particular opportunities, and she was poor.
She was like half-surf and all of that.
And I wrote an entire novel about...
What happens to a brilliant person in a backwater?
And my daughter and I were doing a mock debate with antinatalists.
This is why all this stuff was cooking around in my brain.
So we were doing a mock debate with antinatalists, and the antinatalist was basically saying that everything we create is going to get erased.
Everything we create is going to get erased.
And it's a little tough, right, sometimes, occasionally when you get that long-distance perspective.
And most people leave almost no footprint in the world.
Most people leave almost no footprint in the world.
And part of that is innate.
Part of that is probably just the way you're born.
And part of that, of course, is how many risks are you willing to take?
How many envelopes are you willing to push?
How much of the Overton window are you going to try and expand?
But yeah, most people, like 99.99999% of people, they're gone.
Even people who are relatively prominent at the time.
You sort of look back and say, okay, well, to become a senator in ancient Rome...
That was pretty tough.
Pretty hard. A lot of skill.
You've got oratory. You've got to work the population.
You've got to get your donations.
All the same stuff politicians have always had to do.
But if you were to name, if you were to ask the name, not the famous politician because you could come up with, you know, whatever, right?
Some people, Cicero, whatever.
But if you were to, okay, give me a Roman senator's name.
Okay, Rome lasted for like a thousand years.
Can you name one? When you think back of famous writers from 200 years ago, you could probably name five, maybe ten.
How many hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people tried to write?
You get a couple.
And most people are going to vanish from this world.
Now, they'll leave kids, and those kids may achieve things.
They probably won't in terms of any particular import.
And I guess it's just kind of an invitation to live large, to take risks, to fight back, to do the right thing, though it may cost you.
And obviously, there's been a lot of costs for me over the last year or so.
Year? Yeah, about a year.
I won't go through the list.
You guys know it. But...
You know, worst fears have come to life and it's alright.
It's alright. I remain incredibly proud of everything that I have done.
And try to find something that you can sky-right.
Even if it's just in the moment, even if it's just in your local community, find something, whether it's putting a blood drive together, whether it's helping out orphans, whether it's creating some place where or some group that can go and help shut-ins or the elderly or something, something that is going to have a ripple effect.
Don't be the kind of A javelin drop from a plane, you know, it streamlines itself down to a perfect vertical, and then it disappears into a deep lake with barely a splash.
That's it. Gone.
And you have to balance what you want with what the world needs, right?
Because we've gone from, I think we went, I was just talking about this with Paul Cottrell last night, we went from the greatest generation, as they're called, Which thought really only about what the world needed, not much about what they needed, to the boomers who only thought about what they needed, not what the world needed.
And you've got to find that balance.
So this guy, you know, he probably, the guy with the butterflies, right?
He probably was saying to himself, oh, this is going to spark people's interest in natural history and they're going to love butterflies and they're going to save the world.
And it's like, but he didn't do any of that.
He just collected the stuff, threw it in a bunch of drawers and died.
He didn't sit there and say, wow, you know, I now have a bunch of butterflies.
Like after the first year or two, you got a bunch of butterflies.
Maybe I should call up a museum and say, hey, you want some butterflies?
I got them. No, he just kept gathering them obsessively like a hoarder.
And then... Left to someone, left them to someone, and maybe the end was still telling himself, well, my nephew will get these into a museum and they'll provoke a love of nature.
Oh my gosh. Oh.
Just try and find something that is going to leave a mark.
Don't be... So this is what the antinatalist said in the mock debate I was doing with my daughter.
He said, you want to know what human life is?
You want what human lives look like?
Here's what human lives look like.
You're standing on the crow's nest of a ship, right up there.
And you're looking out and there's the ocean.
And the ocean has its waves.
And the waves rise and the waves fall.
The waves come and the waves go.
That's human life. Indistinguishable.
Occasionally there's a little white cap and occasionally there might be a swell.
And very occasionally there's a tsunami.
But you're looking out over the sea of humanity.
People are being born. People are dying like waves are rising and falling and they just...
it all blends together and it all evens out.
And no one wave matters more than any other wave.
And what's the point?
You say, oh, I'm going to try and reach higher.
As a wave, I'm going to be the tallest wave around.
It's like, yeah, and then you fall back down to the ground.
You fall back down to the sea line, right?
Every effort that you extend or expand to try and rise is going to be followed by an inevitable fall on the other side, and it's just going to be ripple, ripple, ripple, see, see, see, blind, blind, blind, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Who cares? Yes, it's true.
As David Bowie says, you can never step in the same stream twice.
You can never look at the same ocean twice, but who cares?
That's people's lives.
And then people come along and say, you should strive to be an excellent wave!
A towering, wonderful wave!
A waterspout! A tsunami!
So what? It all still falls back down.
And the tsunami is viewed with great annoyance by everyone else.
So this guy obviously found a way to convince himself that he was doing something important by catching these butterflies.
But he wasn't.
He was wasting time.
He was wasting money, and everything he did became an annoyance and a burden to those who came after him, baby boomers, national debt, unfunded liabilities.
Try, I think try, to create something, to do something that will outlast you.
And the last thing I'll say here, my daughter's very cool.
She's very cool. So, the antinatalist said, if you think about life, you look in the mirror, right?
Instead of looking in the mirror where you take up most of what you see, think of zooming up.
Like, everybody's seen these videos.
I used to be fascinated by them when I used to go to the Science Center out in Don Mills and Eglinton when I was a kid.
There was a video there which, you know, would start at the atom level and would zoom out and zoom out and zoom out, you know, to the cells, to the skin, to the body, and it was a guy lying on a blanket in a park, and then it would zoom all the way out to the very edge of the universe.
So you go from the atom to the edge of the universe, right?
And he said, you know, whatever you think you're going to do, whatever you think matters, If you zoom out enough, you zoom out to the edge of the universe, you zoom out to the moon, you can't even see yourself.
Zoom out to Mars, to Pluto, to Alpha Centauri, to Betelgeuse, to whatever.
Go out to the edge of the galaxy, go further, you vanish, you disappear.
In the totality of the universe, you are less than one Grain of sand on one beach in the world.
There are more stars just in our galaxy than there are grains of sand in the beaches of the world.
You don't show up in the universe, right?
My daughter said...
She's so cool. My daughter said...
Yeah, but your brain is bigger than the universe because you're looking at it from the outside.
You can't think of yourself as small...
By looking at yourself from the edge of the universe, because your perspective is out there on the edge of the universe, actually bigger than the universe, because you're looking at the universe from within your mind.
So he said everything that you do to make yourself feel small actually shows how big you are, how powerful your imagination is.
And I believe you get to graduate grade 6.
Anyway, so just remember Butterfly Man.
Just remember, butterfly man.
At least don't leave the butterflies.
Okay, if you want to just live a life, you know, fine, pursue your own pleasures, at least don't leave people the butterflies, right?
At least don't leave people the butterflies.
At least don't leave them a hassle and a burden, right?
If you want to be a boomer and you want to live your life selfishly, at least don't leave people with massive debts and a very corrupt system.
All right. So that's it for my intro.
Look at that. We had a little song, a little universe-spanning conversation, and I am all ears.
If people have questions or comments, please bring them to me.
Have I startled everyone? You can type them in if you want.
All right. I guess I've been summoned.
Hey, Steph. How's it going?
Hi, Satan. I'm sorry.
I mistook you for someone else. Oh my goodness.
I don't even know if I can do a convincing Satan.
Why not? Come on, I'm going to get baptized soon.
I don't think I should do that. Can you just back off a smidge from the mic?
Yeah, I can do that.
Here, let me...
How's that? Is that a little better?
Uh, yes. Fantastic.
Fantastic. But you said something on a recent call-in, I think it was the necrophilia call-in, that stuck with me.
Because you were talking to the guy about why he didn't really want to find a relationship.
And you said, I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something to the effect of, you know, you're not looking for it very hard because you don't really understand what you could get out of it outside of just the sexual aspect.
Like, he didn't have an understanding of the emotional benefits.
Yeah, why would you want a woman outside of the sexual aspect, or the cuddly, the romantic, the sort of skin-on-skin, dogs-not-cats, human-bonding stuff...
Why would you want a quality woman outside of that?
I think that was the question, if I remember rightly.
Yeah, exactly. And I was kind of asking myself that question.
And it did make me realize, you know, not realize, sort of re-realize that, you know, I haven't observed a lot of really functional relationships in my time, personally.
I don't have a great understanding of what it's like to have that relationship.
So I was wondering, how do I sort of train my mind to look for that kind of thing?
You know? How do I want what I don't know is?
Right. So what I didn't get to, I'm really glad you brought this up, almost like synchronicity, but what I didn't get to with that dude, which is really, really important, is that the moment you start asking for quality in other people, You are setting yourself into a relationship.
It's kind of like a one-way thing, right?
So the moment you start asking for quality in your relationships, say, okay, well, what's a woman going to bring to the table other than sex, right?
So then your unconscious starts plumbing away on that question, right?
And your unconscious begins to basically ask the following.
Say, okay, well... Or the following pattern goes along.
So your unconscious says, ooh, okay, so we're up in our game here.
So we're going to need to...
We're going to start looking for a woman who has...
Quality. She has quality.
She has moral character. She has courage.
She has virtue. She has resolution, integrity, like all of the bouquet of virtues that we talk about here, right?
It's okay. So I want a Lamborghini, right?
So I want a Lamborghini.
So if you want a Lamborghini, what do you need to bring to the table?
A lot of cash.
So if you want value, you have to bring value.
Because if you want a woman, we'll call her the alpha female, right?
I mean this in terms of virtue and all that, right?
So if you want an alpha female, then you're going to say, you're saying, I want a woman who has pursued, who has defined and pursued excellence.
Aristotle's eudomania, right?
Which is the pursuit of excellence, particularly in the moral sphere, which is the greatest guarantor of happiness that you can imagine.
I mean, this is Aristotle's view, and I think it's pretty close.
So, you are looking for a woman who's been able to define and pursue and achieve moral excellence, right?
Which means... She's really good at evaluating moral excellence, right?
Which means if you want her, she's got to want you.
Which means you have to bring moral excellence to the table.
The pursuit of a woman who manifests moral excellence is a call to yourself, deep down, to identify, pursue and achieve moral excellence.
And that's why most people avoid it, right?
I mean, if you say to a guy, do you want a woman who's morally excellent?
Yeah! Do you want that woman if the price of getting that woman means that you have to be morally excellent?
Oh, maybe take a rain check on that one.
I'll get back to you on that one, right?
And that is...
You know, to take a sort of silly physical example, I was...
Oh, this was last summer?
Gosh, it feels like such a lifetime ago these days.
So last summer, I drove off to Collingwood with my daughter, and we went hiking through these caves.
Very, very cool. There's one called Fat Man's Misery.
Which I do not recommend if you have claustrophobia.
I'm not too bad with that stuff.
But basically you have to squeeze through this very narrow area in order to get out.
And it's not impossible to get stuck.
You're fine until you think about the trillion tons of rock sitting right above you.
That's not good. So I did make it through Fat Man's misery.
And my daughter made it through as well.
And yeah, it's really tight.
It really is like...
Oh, Ladyhawk?
Is it where Ferris Bueller starts off?
Particularly thinking he's being born because he's squeezing his way out through something.
And yes, it really is tight and narrow and, you know, I would really recommend...
No burritos before heading in.
Anyway, so we were in this rock climbing area and there's these big gullies and there's up and down.
It's a neat place.
I'd recommend it. A great playground as well.
We spent like half the time in the caves and half the time in the playground.
And anyway, we were there and there was this incredibly athletic couple.
You know, like the women who've got these...
The legs are narrow at the top of the hips and narrow at the bottom and in between is this, like, arc of muscle.
You know, like they're...
You know, I don't ride the horse.
The horse can ride me, but I don't ride the horse, right?
An incredibly fit woman and, you know, nice figure and obviously very strong and all of that.
Not in that kind of Eastern European deep voice and shaving kind of way, but, you know, just a very sort of fit athletic woman.
And she was there and, of course, she was banding all over the place and stuff.
And... She also had those muscular boobs that always make you think of someone doing a flyby with a beach ball and a syringe, but...
And she was there, and of course the guys were looking at her like, wow, here's a fit woman, right?
And of course, so she shows, and then what comes after her is a guy who, you know, is equally, you know, muscular and all of that.
And they weren't totally flaunting it, you know, but they certainly weren't in shorts and a t-shirt, right?
So pretty tight outfits and all of that.
And they had really nice physiques, both of them, right?
The guy had, you know, he had what they called the viper.
It was like the big thing when I was younger.
I don't know if they still call it the viper.
You got the big shoulders and the narrow waist.
And it's not too impossible to get big shoulders if you're willing to eat a lot.
You get those big sloped-shouldered things, right?
They call it the V. Is that what it's called, the V now?
Yeah, V for Viper, right? With the Viper, because, you know, you kind of flare up.
And there was a guy I used to play soccer with who had that.
Trevor, his name was. Like the guy...
I used to play soccer with a guy named Chuck, and every time I wanted to pass him, I'd say, Up, Chuck!
Anyway, there's a joke from, like, 40 years ago that should never, ever be lost to the human history.
But... And so... The guys were all looking at the woman like, wow, she's really fit and attractive.
And the women were all looking at the guy like, oh, I could do some laundry on that guy's sit-ups.
And all the guys were like, wow, you know, it'd be really nice to date.
I mean, I assume the guys were like, oh, it'd be really nice to go on a date with somebody who's that fit, you know, that attractive.
And, of course, the question is, are you willing to spend...
Like, I knew a guy like this.
Oh, man. He spent four hours a day in the gym.
He spent four hours.
Now, he was this Swedish guy.
He was tall, good-looking, big thatcher hair and all of that.
And he spent four hours a day in the gym.
Yeah, it was not a good relationship with his girlfriend anyway.
That's a topic for another time, if ever.
But... Are you willing to spend, you know, to watch everything you eat?
And, you know, like Adam Kokesh style.
I remember being at Porkfest once with Adam Kokesh, and I was hungry, there was no food, and the only thing that somebody had was, like, they gave me a bag of chips.
I'm like, okay, fine, I don't usually...
I'll have some chips, right? I offered them to Adam Kokesh, and he's like, excuse me.
Excuse me, colonist!
Because... Adam Kokesh.
Well, he likes his abs, I suppose.
I don't know if he's still into that stuff, but he was certainly pretty fit when I knew him.
Lots of abs and big dogs.
That's Adam Kokesh. And so that's the question, right?
Oh, my gosh. I did a show on Adam Kokesh's dating profile many years ago.
I don't think it ever released. I've got it somewhere, I'm sure.
But... We were doing lots of shows like Such and Such, The Road to World War III. This is when the geopolitical tensions were pretty high.
I remember Mike and I dating Adam Kokesh, The Road to World War III. We didn't actually make that the title, but it was a joke that we made about that.
So if you want to date a woman that fit and athletic, are you yourself willing to be that fit and athletic?
Otherwise, she's probably not going to want to date you because...
A, she wants somebody who shares her values, and B, she probably is quite body conscious and probably views fat or just general dad bod with kind of a distaste.
And so, yeah, that's the question when it comes to ethics, right?
I mean, you want a woman of moral excellence.
That means you've got to start upping your game, otherwise you're not going to attract her in the same way that if you want a very fit woman, you should probably try to become more fit yourself and take your shot that way, if that makes any sense.
So yeah, why do people not aim high?
Because they know if they aim high in the realm of love, their potential partner is going to be aiming high as well, and can they reach it?
Hmm, that makes sense.
It's actually fairly reassuring.
It makes it seem almost simple.
Just be good, be morally excellent, and then, at the very least, that means that you're a candidate.
Yeah. And if you pursue moral excellence, then you create this wonderful Repulsion around yourself to other people.
I remember sitting in a car.
Oh, gosh. I had just come back from working up north, and I was in my first year of university, the Glendon campus of York University.
I was doing English literature.
And I'd written a play, a short play.
And I met this woman at a bar.
She was nice, you know, we chatted and all of that.
And she offered to drive me home.
And of course, I was still like 15 years away from getting a car or whatever.
And so we chatted, she drove me home.
And she was an attractive woman, but there was just something kind of off about her.
I don't know if you've ever met these people.
They kind of have like a hole inside that they're dancing over all the time.
Everything's a little bit forced.
Everything's a little bit self-conscious.
Nothing seems particularly organic.
Like they're bluffing the whole time or there's something kind of missing.
There's a lot of showmanship.
There's a lot of razzle-dazzle and jazz hands and laughter and all of that.
A lot of times these people quote Monty Python entirely too much to mention that.
This wasn't this girl. Anyway, so...
We're sitting in the car. She offered to drive me home, which I appreciated.
Otherwise, I had to take two buses or whatever to get home.
No, I didn't bike there because I was going for a drink.
And so she drove me home.
I was sitting outside my apartment building.
And I could feel this desperation in her.
Like, she really wanted to go out with me.
She really wanted to go on a date with me.
She wanted me to ask her out.
But instead, she started talking.
She couldn't be direct about it.
And instead, she started talking about how she worked for, I won't get into whatever it was, but it was a very big deal, and she could get my play produced.
You know, she'd be happy to read it, and she'd pass it along, and she'd get my play produced.
Now, I'm an ambitious guy.
I'm sure you're aware of that.
I'm of the Arnold Schwarzenegger camp where he's like, yeah, if I was born in America, of course I'd want to be president.
What's the point of getting involved in something if you don't aim for the very top?
You know, like, I fundamentally can't I don't understand singers who aren't Freddie Mercury or whoever, like Pavarotti or even Josh Groban or people like that, right?
If you can't sort of be at the very top I don't know, like, in a sense, why bother?
Now, that's just me. It's not some sort of universal thing, but I think you should aim for the very best of whatever you can achieve no matter what.
And so, yeah, if you're the front man for a band, they toured with Marillion, I think.
And the singer for Marillion, he knows, you know, would sit there and watch Freddie Mercury and would be like, man, I got a lot to learn from this guy.
And I'm like, yeah, so learn it and do it.
You know, like, I mean, just learn how to be the best at what it is you do and just keep trying to get better.
That's the fun in life, I think.
So, I was an ambitious guy, and of course I wanted to get my play produced on giant venue plays, right?
But then I kind of...
I got this chill, you know, like some ghost was flowing past me out the car or something.
I got a body chill, like, this is a very, very bad idea.
The woman has a hole in her middle, not the fun kind, and...
If she is kind of dangling getting a play produced because she wants to spend more time with me, then it's the me plus.
This is very sort of early on in the me plus ideas that I was working with.
Like, okay, what is it that you need to bring to have value?
Do you need to bring a thousand dollars?
Do you need to bring a fancy car?
Do you need to bring abs? Do you need to bring great hair?
Like, what do you need to bring to have value?
And whatever you feel you need to bring is how much you feel you're missing, how much you feel you're lacking, right?
I mean, come on, look at this show, right?
I have the production values of your average Punch and Judy show from 1822, right?
I mean, occasionally, what do I have?
I have, like, a background.
I have a camera.
I have a microphone. That's it!
And I'm halfway to a cartoon philosophy character, right?
So I don't bring a lot of production values for a variety of reasons.
I don't want to get into the whole philosophy of the show, but I don't bring a lot of that stuff.
You know, like Milo would be carried in with like four guys on a throne with Omar and Kate.
And, you know, he's a flash guy.
It works for him. Not a criticism of Milo, who did a lot of good in a lot of ways.
But... That's not me.
Like for me, when I go out, I just want to get the audience if I go and give a speech back in the day when I could.
I just want to get the audience. I just want to connect and I just want the personality and the message and the delivery to...
Capture people, not the production values.
And so for this, in this car, this chill wind of this woman's neediness, it was like, oh my gosh, she has to know that's one of the things I want the most, and she's got to dangle that in front of me, which means that she thinks so little of herself and her value as someone to date, that I would have to ignore that in order to date her.
So she feels she needs to bring a giant...
A giant artistic opportunity to me.
That's how little she thinks of herself.
That's how little value she feels that she has, that she's got to stuff her bra, so to speak, with artistic opportunities that are incredibly rare.
Now, Now, of course, not only were the fates and the gods and the gremlins of virtue keeping me safe from her, but they were keeping me safe from tumbling into an artistic realm long before I had self-protection and independence.
So, you'll get this shield.
You'll get this shield when you have virtue.
And I did not see her again.
That's very helpful.
That's very, very helpful for me.
So, yeah, pursue it.
Not only will it bring you closer to what you want, it will keep away the...
It's dysfunctional, I think, is the way that I would put it.
And I don't know if this woman ever hears this, like, drop me a line, let me know if I was right or wrong.
But I think that's the thing I wanted to mention as well.
So the big question is, why aren't people good?
Why aren't people good? Why aren't people good?
It can be tough at times, for sure, but...
Boy, it's a whole lot easier than being bad or being on the fence.
The fence never stays still.
Everyone sits on the fence. The fence always goes one way or the other.
Is there anything else I can add to that for you?
Well, I feel pretty good.
I feel like you just told me that all the work I've been doing for two years was a good idea, so I'm happy.
Good. All right. All right.
All right. So this is a good one from Colin Topics.
James, do you want to read that one? Yeah, sure.
How's my audio right now?
Good? Still good? It's good.
You can be... Oh, gosh.
Ashley Flowers. I'm Brit!
Yeah, you can be Brit. I'll be Ashley, and you can be Brit from Crime Junkies.
Anyway, go on. All right.
So, one of our listeners writes, Can you expand on the concept that you started to get into with a recent call-in about negotiating with two-year-olds?
What of the argument that small children do not have a sense of self enough to form conceptual ideas required for negotiating?
Specifically, isn't it facetious to start a conversation about choice regarding things that a parent has no intention of compromising on, such as teeth brushing, bathing, eating veggies, etc., and speaking to a small child with no sense of self, is it productive or good to bring in the factor of choice?
Alternatively, is creating a sense of this is just the way things are more productive for small children, as in the sun rises and we get dressed and eat breakfast.
We don't negotiate with the sun rising, nor getting dressed or eating breakfast.
Wow. Too bad that person's not here.
I'd ask them about their childhood.
No sense of self.
A two-year-old with no sense of identity, no sense of self.
I can't picture such a thing.
Because two-year-olds have a strong sense of self and a strong sense of preferences, babies have a strong sense of self and a strong sense of preferences.
They have done a lot of studies with babies, right?
So one of the ones that they've done is that babies of particular races will gravitate towards and choose pictures of people of their own race.
So there is an in-group ethnic or racial preference for babies.
For babies. And that's why this idea that we could just eliminate in-group preference is, you know, it's kind of a challenge.
It's like the Soviets who say, we're going to create this new man who's not motivated by profit.
And now I guess the new leftists are going to create this new man where there's no in-group preference.
We're not tribal in any way, shape or form.
Now, you could make a case for that, but then you'd have to not be tribal yourself.
And we all know that the leftists are heavily tribal when it comes to themselves because they never hire people who are anti-leftists.
Or, you know, they say, well, you know, diversity, really, people make the best decisions when there's a variety of viewpoints around the table.
And then, of course, you know, at these various places, it's all just the same people over and over and over again, all saying the same things and no one challenging anything or anyone, right?
You know, like this whole suppression stuff that's going on in social media companies.
It's really not that complicated.
It's that they've had a mandate to hire a lot of women, and women really aren't that much into free speech on average compared to men.
Lots of exceptions, but there was a survey of college-educated women, and 60% of them said that it's much more important to have a diverse and shared and inclusive society than it is to protect free speech.
60%. Only 28% of men agreed with that, right?
So, more than twice the number of women wanted to suppress free speech for the sake of feels, inclusion, diversity, or whatever.
And so, yeah, it's not that complicated as to why free speech tends to be falling apart as these mandates for hiring expand and extend.
And, yeah, I'm sure there are lots of women in these companies who are either fighting for or thinking about fighting for free speech, but...
They're just a little bit outnumbered by the bell curve as far as all of that stuff goes.
So males and females have differences with babies, with toddlers, and there are significant preferences with regards to toddlers.
So I guess the reason why it would be really fascinating for me to talk to this person, and if you hear this, as I'm sure you will, call in and we'll talk about it, why would you think that two-year-olds don't have a sense of self?
I mean, do you not remember that far?
I have the blessing slash curse of remembering back to before I could walk 11 months or so.
I remember sitting 11 months and going through a frustrating situation.
And I had preferences.
I mean, if you think that kids don't have preferences, because you've kind of got a paradox here, right?
Because you say that kids don't really have a sense of identity, kids don't really have a sense of self or preference or whatever, and then you say, well, what about all the preferences they don't want?
You know, like they don't want to brush your teeth.
They prefer to eat candy than vegetables and so on, right?
Well, so you can't say a child has no sense of self and then also say the child has very strong preferences.
You understand? It's a bit of a contradiction, right?
Which is why it would be worth talking about.
So... You say, alternatively, it's creating a sense of this is just the way things are, more productive for small children.
As in, the sun rises and we get dressed and eat breakfast.
No. We don't negotiate with the sun rising, nor getting dressed or eating breakfast.
But that is to create a wild...
Epistemological mischaracterization, right?
Metaphysical, really. So, you can't choose that the sun doesn't rise, but you can choose about getting dressed.
And if you try to put the two together, you're saying that the will of the parent is the same as the laws of physics.
That the preferences of the parent is the same as the law of physics.
Which means that the parent doesn't have free will.
Which means that the child can just fight like crazy because the child is not going to have free will either.
So if you throw into the bucket of things that are absolute and inevitable, physical events like the sun rising and parental choices like, what do you got here, getting dressed or eating breakfast, then you are saying that human beings are dead machinery like the solar system.
And the kid's going to have zombie nightmares.
He really is, right? So, teeth brushing, you've got to make the case.
And I remember, I remember very clearly when someone, I can't remember who, someone made the case for me and said that you've got to brush your teeth because otherwise little sugar fairies are going to dance in it and as they dance and skate around, they're going to crack your teeth. I mean, that's not true.
They only dance. They don't skate.
But it certainly was vivid and got me to brush my teeth.
Right? So you have to say that things are a choice for the parents so that you can instill a belief and value In choice in the children.
You say, no, this is my choice.
Yes, you could eat candy.
Yes, I could eat candy.
And you empathize with the child.
Because if you say, well, my will is just like physics, there's no empathy involved in any of that, right?
What you do is you say, I would love to eat candy for breakfast.
You get a whole long conversation about how great it would be to eat candy for breakfast.
If I want my daughter to say no to Candy, what do I have to do?
Do I just sit there and finger wag and say, no, you got to say no to Candy?
It's like, no, I have to say no to Candy.
I have to say no to Candy.
I have to model the behavior that I want.
In the same way that if I want to use the correct terms of things, I will use the correct terms of things, right?
So you model the behavior.
You model the self-discipline.
It is more important that your children, infinitely more important I would say, that your children get a sense of their own capacity to choose, to negotiate, to have power in their lives, and that you don't confuse them between the sun, the moon, the trees, and the person.
These are not the same categories.
And if it means that your child does not brush her teeth for a night or two or three, That's okay.
A kid can survive that.
But in terms of their soul, their generative individual capacity, their identity...
See, there is no identity outside of negotiation.
It's really, really important to understand.
There is no identity outside of negotiation.
Identity is to some degree an individual, but almost, when you're a kid for sure, almost exclusively a social product, right?
So there's your genetics and there's your individual choices and so on, and that's there.
But children don't have a huge mess of choice for the most part.
And so there is no existence outside of negotiation because the moment that you squelch the kid down, make the kid do something, you have simply erased that part of their personality.
So, you know, you think of a chalkboard, some big, beautiful equation or a big, beautiful picture or some beautiful haiku or sonnet or whatever it is, right?
Beautiful piece of writing. So that's the personality.
And then when you force, when you dictate, when you control, what you're doing is you're taking that eraser and you're just going right through the middle of that.
Yeah, there's stuff on either side.
So right down the middle. You've got to brush your teeth.
No back talk. Do it.
It's just a fact. It's like the sun rising.
It's what we do. We brush our teeth.
Now go brush your teeth. You've just taken out all that beautiful complexity.
Now there's stuff on either side. Maybe you can kind of piece it back together, but then what happens?
You come along and say, kids go to bed at 8 o'clock at your age.
That's just the way it is. You take that.
Eraser. Write the way through another piece of text.
Okay, still stuff on either side of you.
Maybe you can piece it together and then you've got to eat your breakfast.
It's what we do. We wake up, we eat a breakfast.
That's just a fact in this family, so sit down and eat your damn breakfast.
Another dry erase across the blackboard.
And eventually, as we know, you keep doing this and they get more at school and they get more from peers.
And eventually there's nothing left.
Just a few scraps and bits that they have to try and knit together into some sort of identity later on in life.
But no. You negotiate.
You negotiate. And then, of course, people say, yes, but if your child is running towards the street in the way that apparently happened to one of Stephen King's kids while he wrote Pet Sematary...
Yeah, you can tackle that kid, but that's not specific to children.
If there was a blind guy with his walkman on about to walk into traffic, you'd tackle him too?
That's not specific to children.
What you do is you act in such a way that the child is going to thank you later.
And I've talked about this with my daughter, and I started talking about her when she was like five or so.
I said, look, my goal is, like, you'll thank me now if you get chocolate.
You'll thank me now. You'll be very happy with me now.
And if I give you chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you're probably pretty happy for a while.
But when you're fat, when your teeth are rotting, when you get diabetes, when your joints hurt and your bones are brittle and you're made fun of by other kids and you can't get a date, right?
Are you going to thank me?
You can pull out a picture of a fat person with bad teeth and say, okay, if you become that, if you become that, will you thank me?
No. Now, if, on the other hand, like if I deny you all pleasures when you were a kid, right?
Only broccoli. If I deny you all pleasures when you were a kid, then you're going to grow up and you're going to look back and say, well, that was a joyless, bloody existence.
You know, like I guess I've got good teeth and I'm lean, but I'm...
I have no capacity to experience joy.
You know, that's no good, right?
So, yeah, have some candy.
Yeah, have some chocolate.
It's fine. It's fine.
But think about what's going to happen down the road.
Like, the guy who's 60, who's got emphysema, is not looking back at the guy who's 40 and smoking.
It's the same guy, right?
Not looking back at his younger self and saying, man, I'm so glad you enjoyed those cigarettes.
This is great. I go out Peter Zaski style, right?
So, you can tell kids about all these things.
It's something, listen, my father, my late father, the timeline, the timeline, came to visit me in my early 30s.
I had moved out of a long-term relationship where I had gotten engaged, gotten out, left, and I was living with...
A couple of gay guys downtown.
Because, you know, I was in theatre school.
I knew the gay community fairly well.
And it's nice having tidy roommates.
Anyway. So...
He came and...
Stayed with me.
And... We played squash, right?
I was a pretty good squash player.
Pretty good. I'm a fairly good racket player as a whole.
Anyway, so we were playing squash and afterwards he said, yes, I put on some weight.
I've forgotten the fundamental reality and purpose of middle-aged men.
Middle-aged men, you say, I'm only gaining a pound or two every year.
Well, But, you know, for 20 years, it's 20 to 40 pounds.
It's almost impossible to lose when you get older.
So just try not to gain the weight.
And I forgot.
Oh, okay. It's a useful bit of advice he gave me.
A useful bit of advice. And, yeah, I go up and down a little bit because I do love me some eating.
But, yeah, I weigh...
Actually, I just got weighed late summer when I went for my annual checkup, and I weigh less than I did when I was 18 now.
You just got to remember these things, right?
So, the cost benefit.
The cost benefit. It's very easy to say, well, but if my kid gets a cavity, that's bad.
Okay. Yeah, okay, that's not great.
But if your kid loses their personality because you've erased the blackboard of their identity, that's worse.
The cavity can be fixed.
Lack of identity can. And my daughter's never had a cavity.
And, of course, the important thing, too, is to instill in them the reasons why you don't just live on sugar.
Because sugar, as Jack Posobiec said when I did a show with him, sugar is not food.
It's not food. It's fun.
I love sugar, but it's not food, right?
So, it's not worth it.
It's not worth it to...
Try to merge.
I don't want to say you're a coward, but this perspective is kind of cowardly because what you're saying when you don't negotiate is you're saying, I don't know how to negotiate.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
All I can do is impose rules and intimidate.
Come on. It's not what you do when you go in to buy a car.
You just give me zero APR. Zero!
Like the sun comes up in the morning and you give me 0% interest loans.
That's just the way it is.
Yeah, good luck with that, right?
I am like the sun and the moon.
My will is a tidal wave of inevitability.
So, that's not how you do it.
You don't go around, I hope, intimidating your spouse.
You don't go around intimidating your boss.
I want to raise! My salary shall rise low as the sun doth rise in the a.m.
It is inevitable. It is physics.
It's not just a good idea.
It's the law. That's not how you do things.
And your kid will get that pretty quickly, right?
Your kid will get that. Okay, so if you have power over dad, or he can't force you, then he's pretty reasonable.
He'll negotiate. But man, when I'm home and I'm smaller than he is...
He's a douchebag.
You may not know that word, but it's an image that will persist nonetheless.
So, I hope that helps.
See if we have another cue or two before the evening ends.
I don't know why that went so long.
Do we have anything else?
Anybody else? Do we have another song?
Get my groove on.
Now here's the funny thing. Because of the lag, my backup dancing routine will probably be way off.
Way off. Should I share my gameplay from Serious Sam 4?
I have not gotten around to finishing Doom.
I probably should. I probably should.
I haven't been in the mood.
You absolutely want some serious, Sam?
I've played 1, 2, and 3.
Many years ago. I quite like them.
And they're actually quite funny. As far as video game comedy goes, I think it's a bunch of Eastern European guys.
They are pretty funny.
They are pretty funny. Okay, I'll let you know if I play some Serious Sam.
I'll throw it on. dlive.tv forward slash free domain.
They're Croatians, right? Yeah, they are funny guys.
And they are very much dedicated to mayhem.
And it really is an interesting challenge to see just how many things you can get moving on a...
Crow team, yeah.
It's really amazing just how many things you can get moving on a computer screen at the same time.
Question, how many things can you get moving on a computer screen at the same time?
Answer, all of them.
All right, somebody got a cue?
Hello? Hello? Michelle Fields.
I just was reminded of that for some reason.
What's it? Lewandowski knocked her down when she asked a tough cue.
Michelle Fields. Whatever happened to her?
Okay. Yes, go ahead.
So, currently, I'm struggling...
Back away from the mic, dude. Back away from the mic. Sorry.
Sorry. Is it better?
Yeah. So, currently, I talked to you before...
About my abusive relationship.
And now I'm struggling with a lot of self-doubt.
Like, if I can make it out there, if I can fix my life.
And I've always been doubting myself and I don't know what to do, really.
Who do you support in your life?
Who do you encourage? What do you mean?
Well... Who have you dedicated yourself to helping them improve?
I mean, is there anyone in your life?
Maybe somebody's got a drawing talent or, you know, I mean, our lovely friend earlier this evening with the Elvis McLean voice.
You know, like, that's great, right?
I mean, who do you encourage in your life?
No one. Right.
It's a bit of a problem because otherwise you're like, I need, I need, I need, I want, I want, I want, right?
But sometimes a way to build self-confidence is not to have other people prop you up, but to go out and encourage other people.
Is there anyone in your life that you know of, friends, family, neighbor, who's got a kind of talent or something that you think you could encourage them?
I guess.
Well, why don't you go do that?
Instead of waiting for the world to fill you up, why not just go and fill the world?
And the reason I'm saying this is because when you're a kid, you don't really have much of a choice about that.
You're kind of the shadow cast by your parents' choices to some degree.
But when you're an adult, instead of saying, what can I get?
A pretty good way to build your confidence is to say, what can I give?
I never have any doubt about the value that I bring to the world and that's one of the things that keeps me strong in the face of some pretty virulent opposition.
It's not because I have this magic spell called self-confidence.
It's because I put things out into the world that do a lot of good and it is that Encouraging people and challenging them to be better, challenging myself to be better, all of that translates into a confidence that has so far at least proven stronger than the opposition.
But if I wasn't out there being generous and encouraging people and helping them become better and working on myself to become better, if I wasn't doing that in particular with other people, I wouldn't have the confidence.
Confidence arises From generosity, in a lot of ways.
It's something that people often don't really connect with, right?
So you're in a situation, you call me up and you say, Steph, I need, I need, I need.
I want to feel more confident. I want to feel better.
And you're kind of asking me to encourage you, right?
In a way. So you know that being encouraged is a very good thing.
But if it's a good thing, shouldn't you be doing it too?
Out there, and there's got to be people who are worse off than you, right?
And shouldn't you do a little bit or try a little bit?
You might find that your own confidence is going to improve when you begin to give to the world what you want from it.
Like, what did I always want from the world?
To be rational! To make sense!
To not be arbitrary, to not be subjective, to not be aggressive, to not be violent.
What did I want? Just be sensible.
I remember this when I was a kid.
Living in these shitty apartment buildings and you'd hear these Bukowski style couples yelling at each other and it's like, why are you yelling?
How hard is it to just be nice?
Just be nice with people yelling at each other for like what a crazy thing to do.
What is your major malfunction, people?
Just be nice. Just be nice.
And I wanted the world to be sane, to make sense, to be reasonable.
Not necessarily rational, but at least reasonable.
And, you know, kept waiting for that bus.
It wasn't even a bus stop, turned out.
Just a sinking ship. So, you know, it's the old thing, like, be the change you want to see in the world, right?
So, instead of waiting for the world to be more rational, which is the child's perspective, because you don't have control, I went and said, okay, the rationality that I want is not coming from the world, so I will bring it to the world.
Right? And that gave strength and confidence and power in the world.
And annoyed a lot of bad people and helped a lot of good people.
Which is kind of the deal, right?
That's the deal. So, you're coming to me in a state of need, right?
Like you want me to encourage you.
Now, of course, I did that already.
So there's not much point in me doing it again.
I did it in the last call. And I'm not saying that you just need it once in your life or anything like that.
But instead of...
Coming to me and saying, Steph, prop me up or make me feel better or encourage me or give me some insight that's going to make me feel stronger and better and happier.
One possibility that I would strongly suggest is to find someone in your life and instead of thinking about what you're lacking and what you need, you know, it's just a funny thing in life that sometimes the most full we can feel is when we feed someone else.
The best meals are the ones we give to others.
And if we're just like, I gotta eat and I'm hungry and I gotta eat, we never feel full.
Because happiness is something we gain to a large degree by improving the lives of those around us.
And you want that, right?
I mean, I don't want my wife or my friends or my daughter, or I don't want them to be like, oh, well, you know, Steph needs me, but I don't really enjoy his company.
I want them to be like, oh, yeah, this is...
This is great. I had a lot of work to do the other day, and my daughter was like, we're going for a walk.
She just grabs me by the hand, drags me out, not drags me out, but pulls me out, put down the...
Whatever you're doing, you can do it later.
We're going out for a walk. We went for a nice hour-long walk, had a really great chat and all that, because she wanted to spend time with me, and I really, really enjoyed spending time with her.
So, if you approach the world in a state of need for yourself, only in need for yourself, You'll never.
I think you'll never gain liberty from childhood.
Because when you're a kid, you know, like you're a little kid, you can't go out and get your own candy.
You've just got a need. You need candy.
You've just got to find a way for other people to get you candy.
Mom, give me candy. I'm going to whine.
I'm going to complain. I have a tantrum, right?
You see these kids in stores sometimes having tantrums because the evil store makers have put all the candy at eye level for the kids, right?
And so when you're in a state of need, you're in a state of childhood.
When you're in a state of generosity, you're in a state of adulthood.
And I know it's kind of counterintuitive, right?
But if I had simply complained to the world that it wasn't rational enough and waited for rationality to manifest, well, I'd still be waiting.
Time would have gone by and the world would have gotten crazier.
Well, the world's kind of gotten crazier in a way, but at least our pocket is saner.
You know, what we're doing is saner.
And that's, I guess, my first suggestion is try to provide someone what you think you most need and you'll find that you will have broken the neediness because you will have moved from a childhood relationship of I need and can't provide for myself to an adult relationship of I can provide and gain my strength through generosity,
not through receiving. Does that help?
I'm not sure if you're still with me or not.
Yes, it helps.
You've got to take your mind off yourself, right?
When you've got a lot of problems or you're feeling unhappy.
It's good to have your own feelings, know your own feelings, process your own feelings.
But at some point, you also just have to get your mind off yourself.
And one way to do that is to go and bring something positive and great to other people in the world.
And I think that you will find that that will fill you up in a way that what other people can provide to you just won't.
So I hope that helps.
Please keep me posted about all of this.
And if that doesn't help, we'll hopefully can have a chance to chat again.
All right. Well, listen, I'm going to...
It's been almost two hours, so I am going to close it down for the night.
I really, really appreciate everybody dropping by.
What a wonderful, talented, great crew to chat with.
Please, to those of you who are listening, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Please, please help out the show.
It's tough times, man. I mean, it's tough times for everyone.
I specifically did not really ask for donations much at all this year because I know it's been a tough time for everyone, but I do have to be responsible to what's needed.
So, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Thank you everyone so much.
Have yourselves a great, great evening, and I will talk to you soon.
Lots of love from here. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on Philosophy.
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