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Dec. 1, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:14:15

"Can the World be Saved?" Freedomain Call In

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Wallenew from FreeDomain.
	Sunday morning, some damn time.
	Some damned time.
	You know, I was watching a Scott Adams show the other day and he was talking about his troubles with his HP printer.
	And I just say, you know...
	Technology is a freaking house of cards.
	If you're doing anything other than typing into a word processor, printing is generally a hassle.
	Hey, you've got a wireless printer that will only intermittently be available, even if you assign it the correct IP address on your modem or your router.
	And so, yeah, even just this morning, right?
	I want to start up with a show. Now, the listener wanted to do video, and we don't normally do video, so I had to switch things up quite a bit to get the video going.
	But this morning, I was trying to get a file onto my daughter's tablet.
	It didn't show up under Windows.
	And then I booted up a program to manage and said, welcome to your new tablet.
	And I didn't want to do anything to do with that, because then it's like, oh, what if it erases her tablet?
	That would be pretty bad. All of her We made movies are on there, and so there was that, and then we boot up this program, and you can't hear the audio, or it's peaking too much, and this is one thing Windows does, is every program wrestles audio settings away from every other program.
	So every program is like, I don't care what your audio settings were before, these are the ones that I want, and too bad for you, which is why when I'm doing my audiobook, I actually had to buy two separate computers, Well, I used old computers, but I had to set it up so that the only thing I ever do is record the audiobook.
	That's the one you can get at freedomain.com forward slash almost.
	Record the audiobook.
	That's all I have to do because I know if I boot up anything else, it's going to change some settings.
	I'm going to end up recording.
	it's going to be a slightly different volume, or there'll be more background hiss, or it'll be something that will change.
	And I guess this is why, what is it, Steven Crowder has a team of 17 people, and probably 16 of those people are just to keep this air gust juggling, wind storm house of cards bullshit going that passes for technology these days.
	And people say, oh, you should switch to Linux.
	And it's like, yes, maybe I should switch to Linux.
	But I'm sure Linux has its own issues.
	And I know I programmed computers I know how they run.
	And still, it just seems like a big fucking house of cards from A to Z when it comes to just getting basic things to work.
	And it generally works the least when you're in a little bit of a time crunch.
	And this is all the way back to...
	I was going to use another computer for this, but Windows decided to start doing all these big updates.
	And I could cancel them, but I don't know if it's going to start trying to do those updates again.
	Because Windows updates...
	It's kind of like this. Like if you're driving a train, right, and you've got a big, long searchlight, and you can see a ways down the road, and let's say there's a baby pram parked on the train tracks, and you can see it a long way.
	You've got plenty of time to stop.
	See, now, if you had basic programmers with, I don't know, human empathy working at these various tech companies, well, first of all, they wouldn't de-platform people for telling the truth, but secondly, they'd look ahead and they'd say, like the train conductor would say, Well, I don't want to be late in the delivery of my train stuff, but there is a baby carriage on the train track, so I think I'm going to do the right thing and stop the train while we deal with the baby carriage.
	Or maybe there's a school bus that's locked and parked on the train crossing or something like that.
	But the way that the programmers generally work is, well, you know, we've got to be on time, and so we're just going to keep the train going, whether it's updates or whatever the hell it is, or whether you want to change Windows settings for audio or whatever.
	They're just like, no, we've got to be on time.
	I mean, baby carriages, school buses, to hell with that, man.
	We've got to program. We've got to be on time.
	We've got to download these updates.
	We've got to patch all the shit that's open to all the hackers in the known universe.
	And then expose more things to be open to all the hackers in the known universe.
	By the way, being an alt tech means it's very exciting when you say, huh, update to an iPad.
	I wonder if anyone else is getting that.
	Let's just target it to be probably a little bit too jumpy.
	But the thoughts do cross your mind in general as you do this.
	So, yeah, I would just like to say to all of the programmers out there, dudes, I know, you're probably bullied a lot, you're probably hit out in the computer lab, you're probably not having a massive amount of social skills, but rather than just being like tunnel vision, laser focused on what you want the computer to do or what's important to your particular program, The important thing is to work the computer not from the bits up, not from the bits and bytes and burps up, but from the outside in, from the human element, which is the only goddamn reason you have a programming job to begin with.
	Your programming job is to make my work easier.
	That's all you exist for, because if there weren't people like me buying and using your shit, your shit wouldn't exist, and you'd go back to doing I don't know what else you'd be doing before computers gave you a chance to hide away from human beings in the hidey-hole environment.
	Of solipsism known as I've got my computer job to do.
	Lose your tunnel vision. Remember the customer.
	If you're writing an audio program, don't fuck with Windows audio settings.
	Just leave them the way that they are.
	Even this thing, like I use this camera interface, right?
	This is a camera that then goes into Windows.
	Now, every time I want to use it, what do I have to do?
	I have to unplug it and plug it back in.
	And usually, I've got my earpiece in and I'm lashed here.
	Oh, yeah, I've got to unplug and plug it back in.
	So I've got to unplug, got to round the whole studio, go to the computer, unplug it and plug it back in.
	Why? Why?
	It's supposed to be plug and play.
	And you gotta unplug it and plug it back in to make it work.
	Why? That makes absolutely...
	This is one thing you would test, isn't it?
	You know, when you're out there in computer land, doing your dinky little bite manipulation, you sorcerers of darkness, wouldn't you unplug and plug the goddamn thing back in to see if it works...
	Maybe the computer is asking too much for the computer programmers to remember that there are carbon-based flesh people out here actually trying to get shit done with your stuff.
	But please, maybe it's the managers.
	Bring a grandmother in and have them try and use this stuff.
	That's all I'm asking. Just bring a grandmother in.
	Bring some boomer in, somebody who still refers to the CD player as a gramophone.
	Bring that person in. Sit them down.
	And see if they can figure out what the hell is going on.
	And I think, in general, you can, and it won't work.
	And yes, maybe, maybe, I should discard all of my investments in Windows and move to Mac, and I hear it's better, and I hear this, that, and the other.
	And we did use a Mac.
	I actually used a Mac for a while when I was recording my interviews, because it was stable, and it actually worked, you know, because half the time stuff says it's working and it's not.
	Think you're recording? Think again.
	You get a corrupt file that you can spend three hours trying to resurrect, but it's pretty much about as easy as go to Mary Wilson Craft Shelley with a car battery and some paddles and try and shock her 200-year-old corpse back to life.
	Didn't finish saving your file.
	Can you get it back? No, no, not really.
	Sorry. And here's the thing, too.
	If your program screws up, please tell the user, don't just wait for that depressing, inevitable Windows grayed out thing where it says, hey, do you feel like waiting?
	Do you want to wait for more time to see if your two-hour audio recording of your audio book where you put all the voices in and summoned all the deep emotions from the darkest pics of Second World War hell, do you want to see if that continues or do you want to just wait?
	Because that kind of puts the onus on me.
	Because if I say, no, don't wait, and then, of course, Audacity is supposed to recover from it, crashes.
	Sometimes it doesn't. And then it will give you a dump raw file, which is like, oh, but if you download this program and number the files sequentially that has been left in the Audacity tenfold, or maybe you can get your files back, turns out, spoiler, you can spend another two hours doing that where you could have just re-recorded things.
	It doesn't work anyway. So this is just the House of Cards stuff that's going on.
	If your program screws up, just say, hey, our bad man, You did everything right.
	We screwed something up.
	Oh, and also, please stop taking all my memory.
	Please stop taking all your memory.
	You guys are worse than 1984 with the memory hole.
	Stop writing bad computer programs that are just like, oh, just take a little bit more memory.
	Oh, just take a little bit more memory.
	I got 32 gigs in my computer.
	And after I boot up Windows, it's funny, I've got one computer with 8 gigs and I got one computer with 32 gigs.
	And the 8 gigs computer is faster.
	I do not understand why that is the case.
	Why does an 8 gig machine only need...
	Three or four gigs to boot up Windows, but when you've got 32 gigs, you boot up into the double digits.
	Why? Why?
	It's slower. How is it possible that you throw more hardware at a system and it turns out to be slower?
	How is that humanly possible?
	Well, it's humanly possible because managers are forgetting about the people out here who actually use your shit and pay your salary.
	I am paying your salary.
	Think of me. Think of what works for me.
	Don't think of what's convenient for you.
	Think of what actually works for me.
	For the end user, because I'm telling you, my God, maybe it'll be Linux, maybe it'll be some sort of Apple thing that'll come forward, but I'm telling you, This house of God shit, something is going to come along that's going to throw all of your asses out of work.
	I don't know what it's going to be, but I'm not the only person finding these kinds of frustrations.
	You know, every time you look for a particular technical issue, having a problem with, what happens?
	You go online, you say, oh, I'm having a problem with this, that, and the other, right?
	And it's like infinity hits.
	Every single... It seems like half of the forums out there on the internet are devoted to people trying to make basic stuff work on their computers.
	And... It really doesn't.
	It really does. Now, I got a hardware camera here.
	It's pretty nice. I know it's not as complicated.
	You boot it up and you push the record button.
	You know what it does? It records stuff.
	And it's never failed.
	Now, maybe if you have a power failure or something, it's never failed.
	And I just really wanted to point that out.
	You know, you have entire infrastructures like iOS where stuff seems to work pretty well.
	Pretty well. I tried recording something on my iPad the other day.
	Got a lovely recording with no audio.
	No audio. Why? It says it's going to record audio.
	It doesn't. So, yeah.
	And the amount of redundancy you have to build.
	You know, I bought a Zoom hardware recorder.
	Why? Because all the software recorders were failing from time to time.
	They boot up exactly the same configuration.
	Even now, I tried to get into this, and audio settings were all weird and off.
	Oh, we were peaking last time.
	We weren't peaking this time. Why?
	I haven't touched anything.
	You know, you're like some weird, obsessive night stalker that comes in and moves your passport the day before you've got to get on a plane.
	Or, you know, just moves your, whatever you've got, it's just moved.
	Got eye drops by your bed for when your eyes are dry in the morning?
	No, I'm not going to put them there.
	I'm going to put them at the back of the drawer of your nightstand table.
	Why? I don't know.
	Just like messing with your head.
	And it's like we live in this shifting universe where gremlins keep changing their settings and things don't work and you've got to have redundancy.
	I couldn't rely on software to record anything.
	So I have to route everything through a hardware recorder with an SD card to make sure that I actually have the recording no matter what.
	Because software doesn't work.
	And you need so much redundancy these days just to have a basic chance of getting shit done.
	And it's not like I'm trying to run some n-dimensional multi-national conglomerate.
	We're not covering the Olympics here.
	We're doing a talk and listen show with a bit of video.
	That's it, man. I'm not even putting any logos up.
	At the moment, because it just doesn't work.
	And don't even get me started. Don't even get me started on live streaming.
	Live streaming, particularly with video games, is unbelievable.
	I bet you the people out there who do this on a regular basis, you have to have an entire separate sealed-off Hermetic Bubble Boy hardware setup to make sure that you don't touch anything, because stuff is just going to change underfoot.
	Stuff is just going to change underfoot, because people are like, well, these are the settings I want.
	Forget your settings. Forget your program.
	You're there to serve me. And please learn.
	Please learn, my fellow programmers.
	Please learn how to play well with others.
	There are other people in there who want to share these settings.
	Please stop going in and just wrestling them to yourself.
	Don't be that. I know you were bullied.
	Don't be that big bully who wanders into my software and hardware ecosystem and just starts taking settings for yourself because that's what you want.
	Because that's just like, I'm sorry you kids are playing basketball with that ball, but I'm going to take that ball and I'm just going to go play my game and you can't play.
	Sorry to get that off my chest, but I had to get that off my chest.
	Got to clear the air so that I can listen well.
	But yeah, it is really astounding just how much time you can spend keeping basic shit working that worked yesterday and just realizing that it didn't work today and then not even knowing why.
	It just is absolutely astounding.
	And I think maybe it comes out of the managers who've just got to remind people, we pay your bills.
	You're not there to program.
	You're not there to...
	Welcome to my show!
	All right.
	So we got a caller on the line, and we – I won't record your video because we don't – he said just before, and it was just a minor annoyance too.
	It's not your particular issue, just a minor annoyance.
	If you've listened to this show for a while, we don't do video for callers because most people want to stay anonymous and all of that.
	And if you do want something that's a big change, if you could let us know ahead of time.
	Now, I could have – look, I could have just said no.
	I could have just said no, I don't want to set up and do a mutual video.
	But I thought, okay, why not?
	Because I was set up – sometimes I do shows in studio, and sometimes I do shows if I want to walk around a little.
	I'll do shows with a portable machine.
	And I was on a portable machine.
	Again, not your issue, not your fault.
	You wouldn't know.
	But if you want a big change from people like, hey, this show never does video from listeners, but I'd really like to do – just let us know ahead of time.
	That's all. I mean, I want to accommodate and I want you to have a good conversation, but feel free to, if you want a big change, feel free to let us know ahead of time.
	That would be excellent. All right. James, you have the email.
	Do you want the listener to read it?
	Do you want to read it? I was prepared to read it, so I'll go ahead and do that, unless the listener has any objection.
	No, I don't. All right, I'll go ahead and do that.
	And James, you're also awfully quiet.
	I always have to PQ post, so we'll talk about that afterwards.
	Oh. Don't worry about it.
	Just read it. We'll fix it afterwards, but I'll just have to press because you're barely audible to me.
	Just give me one second.
	Is this any better at all? No, just read it, because otherwise I'll have this to trim to.
	Okay, sure, sure. Listener writes, I am more than ever in need to have a conversation with you because I can't continue participating in society with my conscience intact.
	I am in a serious bind of what to do and have pondered it in great detail since I last wrote to you.
	I dealt with my family issues and other important stuff which I wanted to talk about with you back then.
	One thing remains and it is this.
	I have literally no one to talk to who is even close to be able to brainstorm with me my situation of the predicament facing me.
	I can't live with myself living in a society that forces me to participate in acts against my moral conscience.
	Small examples are the Finnish state taking part of my spent energy's results through taxation and using it to murder unborn children.
	Or using it to fund other kinds of activities like selling old military equipment to questionable Middle Eastern countries who fund terrorism, funding the welfare state that clearly does a very poor job of vetting who is in actual need of these funds, funding the growing government apparatus that clearly infringes more and more with censorship and authoritarian measures.
	The list is huge and I can't do this anymore.
	The fundamental question for me has been, can I do something that is efficient enough to contribute to change in this society and see it actually changing so I could be a willing participant?
	The more I've pondered on this, the more I've come to the conclusion, no.
	There are so many reasons for my conclusion and I'm overwhelmed and I basically want to get out.
	I figured the only way I can do that is to live so that I can't come for my taxes.
	I am too furious and appalled to be a forced participant in this system that I would rather choose to live in nature where the state can't force me to participate.
	I have been exploring these and different options for a while, and I am more and more drawn to stand my ground and say enough is enough.
	I will not submit myself to participate with evil because I can't live with myself anymore like that for long.
	I will go insane and lose all will to be.
	Contacting you is my last-ditch effort to make a plea for you to have a conversation with me, so maybe you could give me good reasoning why I should stay, for example, for the benefit to contribute to change.
	This is a big topic and I need help.
	I'm open right now and every moment forward to have a conversation with you above all else.
	Nothing else matters more now.
	Update. I want to add that I have a host of different normal life problems like addictions, being lazy, immaturity, and lack of self-discipline, and the list goes on.
	I'm afraid that me being such a life loser might make a call with me not worth your time.
	I feel unrationalized.
	I have enough knowledge and resources and thus need to take responsibility alone to deal with my wide variety of personal issues.
	The subject of to stay or not to stay in society is one I feel I need to help To talk and think it through.
	Well, hi and welcome.
	It's a very good and deep and powerful letter and I really, really appreciate you sending it in.
	Is there anything you wanted to add to what we've talked about?
	Guess what James read? There could be a lot, but it's hard to summarize because of my poor English and I'm really nervous right now just to let you know.
	Sure, sure. I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that. Okay, well, why don't we talk about...
	So, the show, the motto of the show from the very beginning, Free Domain, it was originally Free Domain Radio, Free Domain, the logic of personal and political liberty.
	Now, personal liberty has to come first.
	Personal liberty has to come first for a couple of reasons.
	First of all, we want to act on what we can change before we try and take on things that are very hard to change.
	Or rather, we want to act on things that are easier to change rather than things that are harder to change.
	And some things are beyond our control.
	You or I can't stop.
	The war in Afghanistan that America has been on for, like, what, 19 years now or something like that, where they say, no, we don't want to rush by taking the troops out, right?
	Oh, it's crazy, right?
	And you and I can't decide whether American troops stay in Germany because, you know, what is it, 70-plus years since the end of the Second World War, and wouldn't want to rush that either, apparently, right?
	And, of course, Angela Merkel wants the troops to stay there because then she gets more money for migrants because she doesn't have to pay for national defense, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So is it possible that we could have some kind of influence on those policies?
	Yeah, it's possible.
	But unfortunately, I wrote this on Parler the other day, and people should really follow me on Parler.
	It's a really, really great platform.
	And on Parler I said, the world becomes a whole lot easier to understand once you realize most people don't give two shits about the truth.
	That's really important to understand.
	And I'm not saying you don't understand that.
	But what I mean by that is, if you want to influence people, because you can decide for yourself whether you pick up a cigarette, you can decide for yourself whether you play a video game or read a book, you can decide for yourself whether you exercise or whether you don't, and that's under your control.
	But the moment that you want to try to affect or influence other people, with the truth, then what they're going to do is they're going to try and find any conceivable way to dismiss you and therefore what you're saying.
	In other words, they're going to judge you as a person if your arguments threaten their identity, threaten their relationships, because most human relationships are built on a web of complete Metaphysical deceit.
	Deceit about reality.
	Not even about things, but about reality.
	And so when you bring the truth, you threaten people's relationship with themselves.
	You threaten people's relationship with each other.
	You threaten their relationship with the good or the virtuous or whatever.
	And the devils of delusion that are within them view you as a predator, as a priest that's going to...
	You know, you see these horror movies where the priest, James Woods, did a hilarious parody of these ones.
	But the priest comes in...
	And wants to deal with the devil-possessed child, and the devil-possessed child is like, you know, like, you will be mine, whatever happens, right?
	There's always this incredible pushback, and the more powerful the priest, the more grim the sort of head-rotating pushback of the devil.
	There's a reason why we talk about the difficulties and dangers of demonic possession.
	Because the devils of delusion have the soul of the person in their grip, and they don't want to give up their power.
	The devils of delusion take human souls or replace human free will with propaganda in order to have foot soldiers to enforce their various whims, like the people who say, I don't want to wear a mask.
	Well, it's not like the police are usually going to come, but other people are going to frown, not let you in the stores, or disapprove of you, or they might even physically attack you, as has happened in various places around the world.
	So you implant delusions into the minds of the masses so that they can become foot soldiers to horizontally enforce your oligarchical edicts, right?
	And so when you attempt to bring the truth to people, they generally view you as a predator and they will look for any excuse to dismiss you.
	And the reason why my reputation over the years has been so shredded and undermined and attacked rather than my arguments and evidence and science and facts and reason being addressed is because if I bring the truth to people, then reputational damage gives them an excuse to not listen to what it is that I'm saying.
	To avoid... And that way, I look like the devil.
	The devils are content because I'm viewed as a bad guy and as a danger, and therefore people can dismiss.
	Or if someone says, oh, this guy made this very interesting argument, and they say, ah, yes, but this is said about him or the Internet, and therefore they can just wish away the truth, right?
	So it creates an immune system for evil.
	Reputational damage creates an immune system for evil.
	Now... The reason I'm saying all of that is that you have, rationally, some significant concerns about the society that you live in.
	And you can fight or you can withdraw.
	And neither are necessarily honorable or dishonorable in and of themselves.
	Because there are some people who say, you know, you fight no matter what.
	No, you don't fight no matter what.
	Because if you're in a situation where you're guaranteed to lose, then it's an excess of courage.
	It's a vice to fight where you cannot win.
	Now, it is a vice also to not fight where you could win when you have reasonable odds of winning, right?
	And so if you are...
	Walking down an alley and some small, unarmed, weak guy, and you're a sort of big, strong guy, or some small, unarmed, weak guy comes up and says, give me your wallet.
	You know, let's say you know he's unarmed for whatever reason.
	Maybe he's in, I don't know, skin-tight spandex or something like that, he's a little guy.
	Well... If you choose to not give him your wallet, okay, that may be a certain act of courage, right?
	And if you just fail and hand over your wallet and the guy is small and weak and unarmed and all that, okay.
	And again, I know that he could be some ninja warrior extraordinaire or something, but let's just say for whatever reason you know that he's not, maybe someone you knew in the past or whatever.
	Okay, so should you fight to keep your property if the threat is relatively small?
	I think there's good cases.
	I mean, I wouldn't call someone evil for handing over his wallet, but I'd just say, you know, maybe you could have taken that one on, right?
	On the other hand, if you're walking down the alley and, you know, five guys with guns jump out and ring you, What do you do?
	Well, you hand over your wallet. You can't win in that situation.
	Or the odds of you winning are so tiny and the danger of you losing is so great that you give up your property because life is worth more than immediate ownership, right?
	I mean, life is not worth more than property as a whole because life doesn't exist without property.
	But in that particular instance, you evaluate the situation and you say, you know, this is not right.
	So your question is whether you fight or whether you run.
	And that is a very important question.
	The reason I'm bringing this up and why I want to start with your personal life is that if you fight political restrictions prior to liberating yourself personally, you will almost certainly fail in what you want to achieve.
	And this example is pretty common.
	I've used it before. I'll just mention it briefly here.
	If you want to sell a diet book, don't be a fat guy.
	Because you may have a great diet, but if you yourself are overweight, then either your diet is terrible and you're following it, or your diet is great and losing weight is a value.
	But you just haven't followed your own diet, which means that losing weight isn't a value, which means why are you writing a book on how to lose weight and how good it is to lose weight?
	So it's important for the general population to not have A significant contradiction between your desire for liberty and your own personal freedom.
	And personal freedom, I mean nothing to do with the state or anything like that, but how free are you in your own personal life?
	Are you free to be expressed?
	Are you free to say what you think?
	Are you free to express your feelings?
	Are you free to get passionate about things?
	Are you free in your relationships?
	Because most tyranny does not come from the state.
	Most tyranny comes from the general population.
	Most tyranny. Freedom of speech.
	Freedom of speech. Are you free to talk about what you think and what you feel with the people in your life?
	Now for most people, they're not.
	Because if they say something like, I don't know, I think Trump was dealt with unjustly or I don't believe the Russia collusion conspiracy hoax or whatever, then they'll run slam into the general programmed prejudice of the general population.
	Like, boy, you want to see some crazy stuff, right?
	You go on social media. You know, Donald Trump Jr.
	just announced he has coronavirus, right?
	And you go on social media to where this has been posted.
	And it's really important to do this.
	You've got to track where this stuff is.
	You go to this and you scroll down and look at what people are saying about Donald Trump Jr.
	getting a dangerous disease.
	They're cheering, they're celebrating, they're putting, there's pictures of, oh, these are the only kids I want to see in cages, and it's a picture of all the Trump children looking sad-faced behind bars.
	And they are overjoyed, celebratory, thrilled and happy that Donald Trump Jr.
	has coronavirus. That's not good.
	That's not good at all.
	And of course, that's not against anyone's terms of service.
	As far as I can see, nobody gets banned for celebrating a potentially life-threatening or life-ending disease on Donald Trump Jr.
	And people are chewing this stuff.
	People are thrilled about this.
	And so, if any of their friends have any...
	Doubts about the virtue of celebrating someone's illness.
	Well, you can't express that, right?
	So are you free in your personal life?
	If you are free, to a large...
	Again, I know politics and personal life overlap, but I'm just talking about what you can say and think and express in your life.
	Do you have free speech in your personal relationships?
	100%. You do?
	100%? Yes, I do not spend time with people anymore, that's...
	Fantastic.
	Okay, so that's great.
	Now, when it comes to presenting yourself to society, saying, I want change, how you present yourself is very important, and your relationship to yourself is important.
	So, you have freedom in your personal relationships, but is it reciprocal?
	In other words, are your friends committed to your freedoms as well?
	Yeah, tell me, because if you have addictions, then your friends should help you with that.
	In fact, that should be a significant commitment in their lives.
	If they care about you and you have addictions, then they should.
	Right? I mean, I've thought about this for a while, that, you know, if you have a friend or family member who's addicted to social distancing, Sorry, let me start.
	If you have a friend or family member who's addicted to the mainstream media and this sort of hate mongering and propaganda and so on, and the lies and the falsehoods and so on, then you should intervene with them as if they were addicted to a dangerous drug because they are.
	And that dangerous drug is also going to affect your freedoms and liberties as well.
	So if you have someone in your life who's flipping on major networks and absorbing all of this garbage and dangerous, toxic propaganda and being taught how to hate and loathe and fear...
	You need to intervene with them like they're in a cult, because they kind of are.
	You need to intervene with them as if they're addicted to a dangerous toxic substance, because they are.
	You need to intervene with them as if they were captured by some alien entity that injects them with unhappy juice, because they are.
	And yet people don't.
	Well, I like to have people of different political persuasions around me.
	Politics is not about persuasion.
	Politics is about force. Philosophy is about persuasion.
	So, okay, so let's talk a little bit about you.
	I just sort of wanted to give that background for people as a whole, but let's talk a little bit about you and your addictions.
	You say you've got addictions, lazy, immaturity, lack of self-discipline, and the list goes on.
	So I'll turn it over to you if you can sort of explain to me what's going on there.
	Well, regarding the stuff I mentioned, I have a wide variety of followers I have a wide variety of followers regarding that I have aims or I have the idea of trying to get to a certain
	goal or achievement or have an ambition.
	And...
	For example, trying and living in nature and seeing how that works out.
	And there, I notice it's not that easy.
	It's actually very hard.
	You need a lot of self-discipline to learn all the stuff and not being with people around that much or having very few Contacts or personal human beings, because there are not many people practicing stuff or living in nature, so there's not much to choose from.
	I've noticed that it's very hard for me, in just essence, to stay on my course And sometimes it's due to the new information or the new experience, adjust my goal.
	But I honestly, mostly it's because there is this option of just going back to the comfort zone of, you know, playing computer games, for example, just living the easy life, you could say.
	Oh yeah, no, living in nature is hell.
	I mean, I did it for a year, working up north in tents, and yeah, it's, and this is when we used to get fly-in people with food, and yeah, no, living in nature is pretty, you know what I remember the most?
	It's bloody itchy. Everything in nature makes you itchy.
	All right, so your addictions are, would you say computer games are an addiction for you?
	I would say so in a sense that the feeling of me wanting to do that trumps over the feeling of needing to do obligatory stuff that has to do with my long aims of Of the long goals I have, or the bigger goals I have.
	But it's not a hindrance.
	If I have to go to work and make money, then it's about survival.
	Then there's no issue. You've got to make money to buy more computer games.
	Well, not in this case, because I don't buy in that sense more computer games.
	There's just a few games I play, which I enjoy.
	I do not excessively spend time or money on software or games or anything like that, actually very little.
	It's just a lot of time goes into procrastinating on stuff which I just happen to enjoy very much, but I know it doesn't lead in the long run to the other stuff.
	It's very hard for me to prioritize enjoyment versus getting forward in my own life, basically.
	Because the hedonist part of me, or the...
	I don't know, I can't say if it's part of me, but there is this...
	I feel it's one side of me is very just enjoyment-oriented and who cares about, you know, stuff.
	And there's the more responsible side of me that sees that this is not really very productive.
	And I've been in this loop, you could say, for most of my life.
	So, you say addiction is plural.
	Are there other ones that you wanted to mention?
	Yeah, I mean, haphazard smoking.
	I started when I was 15, 14.
	You mean nicotine? Yeah.
	Okay. But I don't think I'm addicted to nicotine because being without smoking is not a problem.
	It's just a habit of, you know, sucking in something in my lungs.
	Weed has been, when I was young, it was a problem.
	Now it's not anymore. I really enjoy smoking now and then, but I don't really do that anymore in an addictive, very harmful sense that I'm just blazed out all the time.
	I don't do that. Now also new stuff has arised.
	I eat too much.
	I noticed that in the relationship I have been in, my girlfriend made very good food.
	Very good food is around.
	It's amazingly how much I can actually eat.
	And I have always been a very slim person.
	I'm not now fat or anything, but I noticed that I have become more flabby, chubby.
	And this was not a problem for me before.
	Just in general, I am not a very self-disciplined guy.
	I just happen to be. The stuff I enjoy naturally to do was kind of...
	Enough healthy, and now that...
	Well, if I'm a leaf, now the wind has blown me to situations where this is not very healthy anymore.
	for example eating habits but other addictions um um i would say i'm smoking playing computer games or a few games um Being lazy, actually.
	Just addicted to being sloth.
	I don't know if that's the right word, but being slothful.
	I'm not this person who makes very accurate routines, very strict timetables.
	I'm a very feeling guy, but I'm also very rational.
	But sometimes I do very, my feelings trump my rationality and then I just, you know, do what I feel like.
	And in a sense, I mean, I don't drink.
	I don't do any, you know, in a sense, classical, addictive, very harmful stuff.
	And what about exercise?
	I exercise when I feel like it and right now it seems to be a problem because I eat too much and I'm too much on the computer versus exercise and now I'm 30 and I noticed it has already for a few years starting to show getting flabby and not so energetic anymore.
	For those of you who are not in contact with older people much, if you are in contact with older people then it scares the living crap out of you what can happen to people who don't exercise.
	You know, muscle loss, bone density loss, and all of that, it's pretty brutal.
	It's sort of like, you know, your car.
	If you don't maintain it, yeah, you can drive it for a while, and then eventually the whole thing might just get toasted, right?
	So you've got to find that balance.
	People who exercise too much can really damage themselves.
	Tiger Woods was talking about that recently, about he wished he hadn't jogged so much because he ran like 25 miles a week, and now his knees are shot.
	And exercise too much, you can cause problems.
	And exercise too little, you can cause problems.
	You've got to find a sweet spot.
	And you don't pay for it much when you're young, right?
	As you say, you're 30 and you're already noticing that there are changes.
	Yeah, I mean, your peak physicality is in, I think, your late teens or something like that.
	Your brain is a little different, mid to late 20s, but it's rough.
	It is really rough. And so you're probably getting a bit of a premonition of that going forward.
	We're not recording the video, but I can see your room, and I don't know if you've changed it for this particular video, but it has all the aesthetic sense of Stevie Wonder's crib.
	Your room depresses the living shit out of me just looking at it, I've got to tell you.
	There's no pictures, there's no color, it's like you're living in this cubic ping pong ball of no sense stimuli, and I guess you're getting a lot of sense stimuli from the computer, Video games and all of that, but I mean, what's the sheet there behind you?
	What's the story with that? Oh, it's just to make the sleeping room to feel like a room.
	Oh, that's your bedroom? You hung a sheet up?
	Yeah. Why don't you?
	I'm not criticizing, I'm just curious.
	Nothing beautiful on the walls, nothing nice in the environment.
	I'm not that kind of aesthetic guy.
	I don't care about having pictures or stuff like that.
	I have never done it. Why do you think people do it?
	Because they enjoy it for their own reasons, I guess.
	I mean, I could explain that more if you want, but I think you know already.
	Well, because I think your environment has...
	Like, we have a two-way street.
	Our personality affects our environment.
	Our environment also affects our personality.
	And so people like to beautify their environment because it's nice to come home to.
	They come in and... It looks nice and it's tidy and it's clean and it's pretty and whatever it is, right?
	Like it's a bit uplifting for the same reason that people like to go hiking to enjoy a beautiful view or whatever it is, right?
	So having beauty in our environment is good for us.
	I think it's good for us. And this is also a big anti-mating crib.
	You know, because if you bring a woman home and you say, oh, that sheet?
	Yeah, that's my bedroom. What's her thought going to be?
	Well, this is actually...
	I live still with my ex-girlfriend.
	This is her house. Come again?
	This is... Oh, no, no, I heard it.
	I mean, just flesh it out a little for me if you don't mind.
	So, I mean, right...
	A little while, we have agreed to separate.
	But it's really hard to...
	But we really enjoy each other's company.
	So right now, even, we are...
	I call it flip-flopping, but flip-flopping between still staying together, but, you know, enjoying just being with each other, not necessarily in an sensual sense, but just, you know, sharing the living costs and, you know, being like...
	Roommates like this, but I'm not sure about that idea because based on my life experience and stuff I read and, for example, watched YouTube videos about what you explained about stuff, it might not be a good idea.
	And I've talked... Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah. We have brainstormed this together and this is an option, but I actually told her that After the call with you, I would probably be more rational to speak about this topic again with her later tomorrow.
	So, give me a sort of story of the relationship that you guys had-ish have.
	I'm not sure. Again, this is a real slow tail-off here, but it's like a song that fades out over three years.
	But, yeah, tell me a little bit more about your relationship with her as a whole.
	So in short, I met her through Tinder when I was...
	And this was like last year of November, I think.
	And yeah, I just wanted to try to meet someone who would like to At that time, because now I've changed my mind because I am not a mature person, I'm not ready for a family and stuff, but at that time I had this idea to try to find someone who would like to date, who would want to have a family in the long future, stuff like that.
	So I met this one South Korean girl on Tinder and we talked and Oh yeah, okay.
	I'm not sure if this is an addiction, but there's this hedonist side of me, which eventually she wasn't so sure about wanting to have family and stuff like that.
	She couldn't speak for that, but we...
	It became evident that she wanted to have, you know...
	Pleasure, enjoyment, sensuality, closeness.
	That was her need right now.
	And then I explained to her that that's fine with me if you kind of know what you're doing and an afterthought.
	Now, in retrospect, Again, the responsible part of me thinks that's very stupid, but this may be an addiction.
	I just want to make sure I understand.
	So, to boil it down, you met this South Korean girl through Tinder and you had a primarily sexual relationship that couldn't lead to family or didn't lead to family because of one or both decisions?
	I mean, it could lead, but let's say I am not, and she is not also, enough mature to even consider that in a close time.
	I mean, I am not ready for that, and I have to...
	Living with her and experiencing this relationship, I understood that I am not even close to be enough of a responsible human being to even consider a family yet because of Of my personality, of my ponderings about these existential problems, because there's too much of these big questions.
	And also, I mean, we noticed this when we started to become acquainted and get to know each other.
	We have very different enjoyments and...
	How can I say?
	Long-term... You could say plans or ideas.
	Right now, she's a giant moat around you meeting anyone else, right?
	Because if you meet a quality woman and you say, come over to my depressing inside of a dice cubicle sheet where the bedroom is place, which is, by the way, my ex-girlfriend's place, what's she going to say?
	No, I'm not trying to meet anyone.
	No, no, no, I get that. But if you were to meet someone, this would be a chick repellent, to put it mildly, right?
	This whole situation. Sure.
	Wait, do you agree or not?
	I'm not sure what sure means. I mean, sure, I agree.
	But I'm not trying to meet anyone, so it doesn't matter.
	Why do you feel that you are...
	You said you're 30, right?
	And you said you're nowhere close to being ready to have a family?
	And what are the barriers? Because of my...
	The barriers is my...
	The stuff I mentioned in the letter...
	No, no, that's not a barrier. No, no, no, that's bullshit.
	Sorry, my friend. That's not a barrier at all.
	Okay. No, it's not. It's an excuse.
	Because you have no way of knowing the effects of becoming a father on your commitment to helping the world.
	If you get married and you have children...
	I mean, this is why the bad guys out there in the media and academia and...
	This is why the bad guys...
	I'm telling people to not have kids.
	They either say it explicitly, like, oh, it's bad for the environment, or they say it implicitly, like, it's really important that women go out there and they get educated and they go and have a career.
	All of this is just pushing off having kids.
	And, I mean, I fell for this to some degree.
	You just live your life and enjoy yourself and, you know, date around and have fun and travel and do your business and all that.
	Yeah, it's great. They tell you not to have kids because that takes the spine out of your fight.
	It takes the spine out of your fight.
	So saying, well, I can't have kids because I'm worried about the future, well, and the thing is you're not really acting on your concern about the future, which I think is the fundamental.
	You're tortured because you have concerns about the world and about the future, but you're not acting on them.
	Right? And so that's your concern.
	Now, you're saying, well, I can't have kids because I'm worried about the future.
	Well, one of my big motivations, people will notice, it's not that hard to see, that after I had my daughter, I started taking on more and more challenging topics.
	Because I am helping to forge the world that she's going to have to live in.
	Well, to be specific, for example, if I'm going to withdraw, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to make a kid go through living in nature when I'm not even good at it.
	Why not? Well, I might, but not now because I'm not sufficient.
	But you're not doing anything. Right now, your ideas are a torture to you without giving you any impetus to action.
	Is that fair to say? Regarding the addiction stuff, yes.
	No, no, no. Your idea is about the world.
	It tortures you, but you don't act on those ideas.
	You don't go and live in nature.
	You don't find a way to live legally without paying a lot of taxes.
	You don't say, well, I'm going to go have kids and that's going to give me some spine to fight.
	You don't start a blog. You don't start a movement.
	You don't start making speeches.
	And again, I'm not criticizing you.
	I'm just sort of pointing out that these ideas are here to torture you because ideas that cause you concern, which you don't act on, means that your addiction is to being anxious.
	Your addiction is to being depressed.
	Your addiction is to avoidance, not...
	Whatever people keep doing is what they want, deep down.
	I mean, this is a basic principle of life.
	And again, it's not a criticism of you at all.
	I'm saying this because I want you to see it so that you can change it if you want.
	Whatever people keep doing is what they want.
	So if there's some woman out there, you know, and she keeps meeting these guys, and they have these red flags, and then they break her heart because they break up with her, or they cheat on her, or they turn out to be drug addicts, and she keeps doing that, that's what she wants.
	You say, ah, but how could somebody want anything that destructive?
	It's like, doesn't matter. I mean, there's obviously a reason probably to do with her childhood.
	Whatever people keep doing is what they want.
	So if you keep worrying about the world without changing it, what you want is not to change the world.
	What you want is to worry.
	Because worry gives you an excuse.
	Because you say, well, I can't commit to something because I'm so worried about the world.
	But if you're worried about something, and you don't do anything about it, and you don't give up the worry, because you could sit there empirically and say, okay, I have these ideas about how bad the world is.
	How long have you had these ideas for you?
	I mean, they have... I can't say how long, but they have developed...
	No, no, just roughly. Just roughly.
	Five years, ten years, three years.
	I mean, just... I mean, I always...
	From when I was a kid, I noticed the contradictions and the lying and all this kind of stuff.
	But all the more sophisticated details have become...
	I became aware when I started to follow very closely politics and read about history and that happened like five years ago.
	Good. Okay. You could have just said five years ago, but I get it.
	All right. So what I would do if I was in your shoes is to say, okay, five years I've been anxious about the world.
	What have I done? Now, there are people out there doing things.
	I mean, the reason you're calling me is because I'm doing things, right?
	I'm in the ring, taking the blows, landing the punches, whatever you want to call it, right?
	So you could sit there and say, And it probably would be a sitting position, honestly, but you would sit there and say, okay, so empirically, what is going on in my life?
	Because, you know, we live our life, and it's perfectly natural that we do this.
	We live our life inside this cue ball cage of a skull, right?
	You know, when you really sort of sit there and think about it, your brain and my brain will never touch.
	We will never contact each other.
	Our thoughts will never intermingle.
	We're both stuck inside a prison called a skull, and We're like a disabled king who can only receive information about his kingdom from messengers, some of whom are biased, right?
	He can't go out and talk to his kingdom directly.
	He can't go out and meet the people.
	He can't go out and see. He can't even see the weather.
	Our brains cannot perceive the weather.
	All we can do We can feel the sensation of cold.
	We can see snow or we can see sunshine.
	We can, that's it.
	We can taste the snowflakes maybe.
	But the brain can never be touched by a snowflake.
	And so the reason I'm saying all of this is that it's natural for us to live a little solipsistically.
	In other words, it's natural for us to get enmeshed and enraptured in our own thoughts about the world.
	Now, one of the central goals and purposes of philosophy is to pull your perception out of the skull prison, to break you out of your jail, called the head, and to say, not, that's a beautiful sunset, but what is the sun, objectively.
	To say, not, Am I worried about the world, but what am I doing?
	To try to become empirical about your own life is really, really important.
	It's the greatest path to liberty that exists.
	Because if you look and say, okay, I've had these thoughts for five years.
	I haven't done anything about them.
	Empirically. Not what's going on inside your head looking out from the skull prison, but like a drone outside.
	Okay, let me judge my life.
	Like I'm an outsider, like I'm objective, like I'm not me.
	Let me judge my life like I'm not me.
	That's the foundation of philosophy.
	Let me judge the universe not from my own perspective, right?
	How do we have this conversation?
	Because we have technology. Why do we have technology?
	We have technology because of science.
	Why do we have science? Because of empiricism.
	The world looks flat. It's not.
	Sun and the moon look the same size.
	They're not. Hang on, hang on.
	Let me finish this point. Let me finish this point.
	Sure. The only reason we have science is because people are willing to say, what does the universe look like not from my skull prison, but from an objective standpoint, from outside my consciousness?
	What does the world look like outside of myself?
	Now, that's the only reason we have science.
	It's really the only reason we have the market, the free market.
	Because it sort of ties into the rant I had at the beginning about programmers.
	Stop thinking about your own needs and your own preferences and remember that it's people like me who pay your damn bills and serve me.
	And stop screwing around with my settings and stop uploading when I'm doing something important or downloading when I'm doing something important.
	Think of me, right?
	So if you're an entrepreneur, you have to put yourself in the customer's shoes and say, okay, well, why would I buy from me?
	What do I have to offer?
	And getting outside of your own consciousness and looking at your life objectively is one of the greatest parts of the freedom that exists.
	Because you can look and say, what am I doing?
	Not what am I thinking, what am I perceiving, what am I feeling, what am I actually doing?
	Now that's one of the reasons why people call me, is that I'm not inside your head.
	Well, I am kind of in a way because I'm coming in through your headphones, but my brain is not inside your head.
	You and I are different people. So I can look at your life objectively.
	Now, I strive to do that with my own life to varying degrees of success, but that's the goal, to think about things objectively.
	That's philosophy as opposed to psychology.
	Psychology is more about subjective stuff.
	Philosophy is more about objective stuff.
	So if you look at your life empirically, Empirically, not from within your own skull prison.
	You look at your life empirically.
	Do you care that much about fixing the world?
	Well, there's maybe a misunderstanding.
	I might not be able to fix the world in the sense you mean because it's more about I do not want to participate in stuff I do not agree with because I'm not God.
	God, I do not know what's the best thing for the world.
	But the point is, I am very frustrated about the authoritarian...
	Okay, sorry.
	I think I communicated badly, but I don't think there's a misunderstanding.
	Because you have neither tried to change the world nor left the world.
	So you still haven't acted on your discontent with the world.
	Either way, right? But soon I have to act.
	But contacting you is...
	But here's the thing.
	You're only contacting me because I'm not you.
	You're only contacting me because I am acting in the world.
	Right? So empirically, these ideas have not caused you to make any kind of decision around engaging the world and trying to help it or withdrawing from the world or anything like that.
	They have paralyzed you.
	Well, if, for example, five years ago, it's when I started to read about everything that is engaging with the world to investigate.
	No, no, it's not. It is not.
	It's like saying, I'm losing weight because I'm reading diet books.
	No, no, no, no, no. Simply absorbing information that you do not act on is not engaging with the world.
	I was continuing to say that that led me to actually challenge all the stuff, for example speaking to my friends or acquaintances or just random people who were engaged or started to engage with me in a debate about stuff.
	And I have always spoken my mind regarding You understand that language is not action, right?
	It's not unimportant, of course it matters, but language is not action.
	Having a debate is not...
	Language is not action.
	It is not doing something decisive about your values.
	I mean, I could spend all day arguing on social media with people, right?
	I'm not doing a philosophy show, not having these kinds of conversations.
	Now, I say language is not action when, of course, what I do is I talk a lot, for sure, absolutely.
	But the topics that I choose, the communications that I have, the purpose that I have, and I do go out in the world, and I do speeches, and I make documentaries, and I engage with people and all of that.
	Is not action. That's the big question around the election in America at the moment is, have we moved beyond language to a place where only action in the form of courts and arrests and indictments and whatever it is, right?
	Is it a place of action and no longer debate or dialogue?
	That's the sort of big question, but you have not taken any particular action So when I went to practice to nature, survival, even went to America for survival schools when I was 19, and all this kind of stuff after, I mean, I think that's action.
	No, no. That's like saying I'm a doctor because I went to medical school.
	I didn't say I'm a doctor.
	No, no, no. But just going to train yourself on something that you don't implement is also not action.
	And we've actually gone back more than five years, right?
	If you're 30, then we're talking 11 years.
	If you were 19 when you did survival training, is that right?
	In America, for survival classes, three weeks, yes.
	Okay. And what have you done with those survival classes?
	How have you enacted them in your life?
	Practice them in Finland. Okay.
	Here, in the local nature.
	And it doesn't last, though, right?
	I mean, what do you mean it doesn't last?
	It might last if I choose to withdraw.
	But here's the dilemma, to stay or not to stay.
	Because otherwise it will just become a hobby.
	Or it might become a hybrid lifestyle if I live more in nature, but still working normally in society like that from...
	Like, whatever jobs can be done living close to nature, because I enjoy nature.
	But that's not the issue here, I mean.
	So, if you want an admittance from me that I haven't done the best I could, Regarding action, of course, I admit that because...
	That's why you're calling it, right? And again, I'm not criticizing.
	I'm just simply pointing out from the outside, you're a guy who's 300 pounds and it says, well, I've read a lot of diet books and every now and then I go on a bit of a diet, but you're still 300 pounds and in fact you're gaining weight.
	Because here's the thing. An object...
	There's an old saying from the business world, which is, if you want something done, give it to the busy man.
	Do you know what that means? I think so.
	What does it mean? Because he will get it done.
	Well, you say, oh no, you should give it to the guy who's not busy because he's got more time to do it.
	But you never give what you need done to the guy who's not busy.
	Of course, I understand it.
	Right? So an object that is in motion tends to stay in motion and an object that is at rest tends to remain at rest.
	Now, it's a little bit different because you and I and all human beings and everyone listening to this, we don't just...
	We rest like a stone.
	We rest like a sapling.
	We rest like a seed.
	In other words, we rest, we stop moving, we put down roots.
	And the longer we stay inert, the harder it is to move.
	Now, of course, the law of inertia means it's tough to get a rock moving, it's tough to get a car moving, but it's even tougher if a tree has put down roots to move the tree, right?
	So when you don't act on what you believe, Then it gets progressively harder and harder and harder because inertia is a habit.
	It's not just you're not moving and then it's just tough to get yourself moving.
	It becomes a habit. So let's go back to your girlfriend, okay?
	So when did you meet her or your ex-girlfriend?
	November. November of last year?
	Yeah. And you met her on Tinder and it was mostly a sexual relationship, right?
	You could say that. Well, I know.
	I don't want to say it. It's your relationship, man.
	If I'm wrong, you tell me. Well...
	I can't speak for her because I'm not in her head, but based on the conversation I had.
	So, I mean...
	60-70% sure.
	Okay, so that's mostly sexual relationship.
	And did you have values that you shared that, I mean, obviously not because you broke up, right?
	right?
	But what overlap was there, do you think, in the values that you had with each other?
	And you never won 100% because that means there's no growth, right?
	But you certainly wanted to at least 70%, I would say.
	That's a hard one because...
	I mean, speaking the truth, being honest.
	But yeah, otherwise, I mean, I can admit right now, and that's the reason why I don't think it's a good idea to, you know, being a roommate and stuff like that.
	Because I would characterize our relationship as being very hedonistic.
	It's just pleasure-oriented in the end.
	It doesn't lead anywhere.
	So what, 20-30% value overlap?
	Maybe because I can't even identify anything else as a value in a sense.
	Okay, so maybe it's 10%.
	And the 10% is you both like sex.
	All right. Have you been listening to this show for a while?
	I started about three, two years ago, I think.
	Okay. So...
	Imagine a caller who would call me up and say, I met the South Korean girl on Tinder.
	We don't share any values, but we like to have sex.
	Should I go ahead? What would I say?
	No. Right.
	And you knew that in your head, right?
	I mean, it's not like what would Steph do or anything like that, but certainly if you value this philosophical conversation, the idea that you date a woman simply for hedonistic sexual access, in other words, you're kind of using each other to masturbate with, that's not love, right? That's not virtue, that's...
	It's very R-selected.
	It's crass, right? It's the flesh and nothing else, right?
	So the reason I'm sort of pointing this out, again, I'm not trying to make you feel bad or anything, but the reason I'm pointing this out is when people say, I don't know how to live my values, which is, I think, where your challenge is.
	And I sympathize with the challenge.
	I really, really do. We all have challenges living our values.
	You, me, everyone, right?
	Because it's a tough world out there, and it's not like it's getting saner in many ways.
	But... You listen to this show, wherein I talk about love as our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
	You can't find any virtues in common with this I mean, mean, I think you would agree, I hope you would agree, maybe you don't, that true love is a response to shared virtues.
	I would agree with that, yes.
	So you were consciously using sex to deny yourself love because you'd heard this argument from me before.
	I certainly, it's not like I go three years without mentioning it, right?
	So you'd heard this argument from me and, you know, I'm not saying do what I say you should do.
	I would never want anyone to do anything for that reason.
	But if you absorb and accept these values, that love is our response to shared virtues, and then you act in the complete opposite manner, you understand why I have some questions about your commitment to living your values.
	Sure. Because it's manifested not just in the relationship you just had, but you're also, I mean, how old is this woman?
	Same age. Okay, so you've chewed up a year off and on of this woman.
	You said it was last November you met?
	Yeah. Okay, so you've chewed up a year of fertility from a woman who's 30.
	That's kind of cruel, you understand?
	You're destroying her sexual market value.
	You're destroying her capacity for a family.
	You can have a family later if you want, but she can't.
	I understand. So what the hell is going on with your heart?
	Forget about the world and the taxes and the, oh my gosh, the abortion.
	What are you doing in your life that's harming this woman?
	I understand. So if I may say, earlier when I started to listen, I didn't agree or I wasn't, you know...
	I didn't have an opinion or I didn't share the same views as you.
	But after especially this experience, as time has gone by, I have come to see the same way you explain things much more.
	And right now I'm in the point where...
	Yeah, I can't deny that.
	But at the point when I met her, I didn't, you know, I wasn't still so certain about everything you spoke about as such.
	But now I am much more...
	I can't deny it.
	After this experience I've had with her, I noticed this is kind of on point what you're saying or what you have said.
	No, but you're still not getting what I'm saying. You're living in her basement is preventing her from having a husband.
	Yeah, but that's why I think it's a bad idea to stay together.
	I will live.
	I will probably live.
	Even though it will be very sad and hard.
	If you want to talk about actions with regards to big social institutions and structures, how about you act in a way that stops harming the woman that I guess you claim to care about at some point?
	How about starting a little closer to home?
	I understand. I don't know that you do.
	Or if I say I will move out, so I will move out.
	No, but now you're just sort of responding to what it is that I'm saying, like I'm pushing around a leaf on a stream.
	Because now it's like, okay, I'll move out, right?
	But the whole point is, and again, I'm not trying to make you feel bad or anything like that, but in terms of if you want to have the courage or the resolution for the big existential universal questions of society, you've got to live with integrity, right?
	In your own personal life first.
	That's how you don't start off saying, well, I've spent three years on the couch.
	Now I want to go and run a marathon or join the Olympic team.
	You start small.
	You have to start small because the small is the biggest to us.
	I know that sounds like an annoying paradox.
	And what I mean by that is the big stuff out there in the world we have a very small effect on.
	The, quote, small stuff in our lives we have a massive effect on.
	So, the largest things we can do are the most personal first.
	And if we want to build up the resolution, if you want to build up the resolution to do the Olympic sport of do I stay or do I go in society, that's a huge Olympic level decision, right?
	Then what you do is you start and say, okay, maybe I shouldn't have used a woman for sex.
	Maybe I shouldn't stay in her basement.
	That's preventing both of us from moving on.
	Maybe I should manage my eating better.
	Maybe I should get more exercise.
	Maybe I should...
	That's how you start.
	You don't start with worrying about the Federal Reserve.
	That's just a way of saying, hey, I'm not going to do anything about my personal life, which is where you actually have effect.
	If you want to know whether you should stay or whether you should go, fuck society.
	It's your girlfriend's basement that you have to think about.
	Should you stay or should you go in your girlfriend's basement?
	Not society. You start with that.
	You lift the 10-pound weight, then you can start moving on to the 100-pound weight down the road.
	But should I stay or should I go?
	is in your cubicle-based sheet-for-a-wall basement.
	Should you stay or should you go from there?
	You know, to hell with the society of taxes and abortion.
	That's important stuff. I get it.
	But you're saying, well, I can't lift a 100-pound weight, so I don't know what to do.
	Of course you can't lift a 100-pound weight, because nobody can lift a 100-pound weight.
	You start with the 10-pound weight, and you start with your own personal life.
	Now, I don't know whether you should stay or whether you should go in society as a whole any more than I can say you will or will not be able to join the Olympic team.
	But what I can say is go lift the 10 pound weight.
	You can do that. Go lift the 10, like start exercising the muscle of decisiveness and choice and living your values in your own life.
	Now, when you get that going, you get those muscles going, you go from a 10-pound weight to a 20-pound weight, next thing you know, you'll be lifting a 100-pound weight, which is, should I stay or should I go in society as a whole?
	But you're asking me to say, Steph, either you lift this weight for me, which I'm not going to do, because I'm not going to tell you what to do.
	I don't know what you should do. Or, you know, I feel so depressed because I can't lift this 100-pound weight.
	And I say, well, why are you trying to lift a 100-pound weight?
	There's 10-pound weights all around you.
	You're like, oh, they're irrelevant.
	The hundred pound weight is what matters.
	It's like they're not irrelevant because that's the only way you get to the hundred pound weight.
	The only way you get to the big virtues that are distant and unreachable is you start with the smaller virtues that are actionable and immediate.
	You used this woman for sex.
	And now you're using her for a place to live.
	At her expense. I don't mean her expense.
	You're probably paying rent and all of that.
	But it's at her expense because if she wants to get married and settle down and she brings some quality guy home and wants to make him a coffee and he says, hey, who's that in the basement?
	Oh, that's my ex-boyfriend.
	He lives down there. What's he going to say?
	You're cock-blocking her.
	I mean, I talked with her about this besides...
	perspective but she said she's not interested to see right now anybody else and regarding because she she has other other stuff she wants to she does not want to focus on finding another guy and she she doesn't know even if she wants to have kids but yeah I understand what you're saying I totally agree thank you for that So relying on what other people say is not particularly helpful,
	right? Because then that's your flesh cage, your skull cage, relying on her skull cage as if it's objective.
	And that's like going to someone in the year 1500 and saying, yeah, the world looks pretty flat to me.
	Does it look flat for you? They say, yes, it is flat.
	It feels flat to me for sure.
	That's just subjective to subjective.
	And the whole point of philosophy is to get you out of your skull cage into the objective world.
	Objectively, you living in your ex-girlfriend's basement is bad for both of you.
	Because there's no chance of moving on.
	And she says, well, I don't want to move on.
	That's her subjective... The question is, is it objectively good for both of you?
	No, of course not. You say, well, but it's convenient and we don't want to move on and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, okay, well... But if it's just going to be your subjective hedonistic preferences, there's no point talking to a philosopher.
	Do you understand? I understand.
	Like, if you're just going to want to eat whatever you want to eat, there's no point talking to a nutritionist, because all you're going to do is frustrate the hell out of that nutritionist by giving them all the reasons as to why everything you want to eat is fine.
	Well, I want to eat chocolate cake.
	The nutritionist says, well, no, you probably shouldn't.
	It's like, yeah, but it's really tasty, and I don't eat too much of it, and I haven't had it for a while, and blah, blah.
	It's like, okay, well, if you don't want to listen to the nutritionist, then don't talk to the nutritionist, right?
	Because here's the battle that's going on between you and I. This is the third I, objective battle, because I'm always in the conversation, and I'm observing the conversation.
	It's the kind of duality that I have to have, which is that...
	I'm trying to get you to have power in your own personal life and you're telling me all the reasons why you can't or shouldn't.
	Right? So what's happening is you're trying to spread your paralysis to me.
	You're trying to spread your indecisiveness to me.
	And listen, I have no problem.
	You push back as hard as you want.
	Be as honest as you feel.
	Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me how, oh, she doesn't want to, it's not bad.
	She doesn't want to move. Okay, I'll move out, basically, if you tell me to.
	Like, you can go rubber bones on me.
	You can tell me that the girl doesn't want to move on.
	You can say, you don't want to move on.
	All of that, right? But all of that saying is that values can't be implemented in your life.
	Right? Or you say, oh, well, I wasn't really in agreement with you when I started banging the South Korean chick for sex and didn't like her as a person that much.
	And, you know, but now I agree with you more.
	It's like, yeah, but you're still there.
	Well, I guess I'll move out. Like, you're going rubber bones or avoidant on me because the bombs of values are landing and you're just taken to a bomb shelter to try and get away from the blast radius of here's things you can actually do in your life rather than worry about these big giant abstractions.
	And I don't criticize you for that.
	I'm not mad. I'm just pointing out, having done this for 15 years, thousands and thousands of conversations, I'm afraid you're up against a bit of a ninja here who's been through this about a thousand times before, where...
	And this is also part of, again, minor part of how the conversation started, which is, I'd like to do video, which I sort of talked about early on, right?
	And I have no problem with us doing video.
	You could say no. Oh, absolutely.
	Of course I could have said no.
	Absolutely I could have said no.
	But you were right.
	I'm glad we did video because now I get to see the kind of depressing hole you're living in.
	It's kind of important for me to know that.
	You wanted to show me where you live.
	You didn't want me to see your face.
	You wanted me to see the background of where you're living.
	Well, if in some esoteric sense you can make that...
	If you just know that, I mean, I don't know, because that was not my intention.
	I just wanted to see your face so I can see you.
	Now, did you, when you were a child, what was your capacity to enact your will in your life?
	Quite limited. I'm sorry?
	Limited. Quite limited.
	Very limited. That's what you're going to say?
	Do you want me to start pulling teeth here?
	I mean, you give me three pages of an email and then I ask you about your childhood and you give me one word.
	Oh man, you're working hard to keep me paralyzed here, brother.
	I'm just telling you. And if you're mad at me, tell me that you're mad at me.
	If you think I'm wrong, please tell me that you think I'm wrong.
	But don't give me this passive-aggressive stuff where you give me a one-word answer to a complicated question.
	Okay, so I just assumed you wanted to ask more specifically or go from that.
	How on earth am I supposed to ask about your childhood when I have no information about it whatsoever?
	Well, you asked how was my capacity to enact my own will.
	I think I'm saying it was not very big.
	What more do you want to know or details about it?
	Do you want to continue this conversation or not?
	Because if it's bugging you this much, if you're getting this mad at me, we either need to deal with that directly or I've got to move on to someone else.
	And I'm not threatening you or anything.
	I'm just saying that if you're going to put me in the position of sticking my hand up your ass and turning you into a hand puppet because you're not going to answer basic questions, you know.
	Come on. Let's be friends here, right?
	You know that when I'm asking you about your childhood and your capacity to enact your will, that it's totally fucking passive-aggressive to say to me, limited, and that's it.
	Right? You're making me do all the work and this is your life.
	My life is great. This is your life that you want to fix.
	So why are you making me do all the work?
	When you say limited, you understand, you just need to know what it's like outside of your skull prison, so to speak, right?
	So when I ask you a question, and I know that you can go on for a long time because you have before, and you gave me lots of details about, you know, I asked you, I said to you, I said to you earlier, like, look at this contrast, right?
	And again, I'm not, I'm not trying to make you feel bad or anything, but look at this contrast.
	I said, tell me a little bit more or tell me about your relationship with your girlfriend.
	And you gave me like five minutes or 10 minutes of the whole history, right?
	And then I ask you about your child and you say limited and nothing else.
	So if you don't understand that that's passive aggressive, then we're just operating at a different level here.
	Okay, I was very... I'm trying to understand.
	So I was very shy. I was very afraid to speak my mind.
	I was bullied when I went to the first grade.
	So it was very hard to...
	I was very afraid to speak to other children because everyone else had already...
	I've been acquainted in the, I don't know what's the word in English, before preschool, I guess, and I came there as an outsider to the first grade, so I was kind of the outsider, and very fastly I got bullied,
	so it made me just shut myself, so I couldn't It was hard to navigate through those waters, and I basically was just shut down to the age of 14 until I was a victim.
	I just became very paranoid to speak to people because there was...
	Yeah, I was very afraid, or I saw just demons in the world from my own paranoid cues that might lead to bullying, so I just shut down.
	But you weren't paranoid if you were being bullied, right?
	I mean, it's not paranoia. Yeah, but there were situations, of course, later when that wasn't happening, but I was just...
	the fear of it happening or starting to happen in the situation made me just not wanting to engage because the idea or the fear that this somehow relates to those experiences made me, you know, just withdraw from the experience of, you know, talking or engaging in the social queue with the other person.
	And my childhood with my parents in the family wasn't that socially awesome.
	They argued a lot and it was very...
	It was a very...
	Not a tidy house.
	It was very dirty.
	And... And I... I don't feel that me and my parents, we weren't that close.
	I mean, or I felt we never...
	it felt like they weren't very interested what I had to say or it felt like a theater or their own show which I was just a part of and so my capacity to Thank you.
	My wishes or what I wanted was very limited in my family in that sense that it wasn't very both ways, you could say.
	I'm very unsure.
	Am I speaking too much?
	How much details you...
	No, perfect. Listen, that was a great job.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	And I'm also appreciative of the fact that when I asked you about your childhood, you said, well, I closed up in my childhood, and then you closed up by just saying, limited, to me, right?
	And then when I sort of urge you for more, or in a sense, demand for more, that may feel like bullying to you, and it's not.
	I mean, I just want information.
	And I want information not to have control over you, or power over you, or make you do something you don't want to do, but just because...
	You know, you go to the doctor, you've got to know, say where it hurts, right?
	So, the bullying you said at 14 onwards, but I wasn't sure I understood too much, and I'm sorry if I missed it, of what happened at 14.
	I mean, the bullying started when I was at first grade, and when I went to high school, I got to another school.
	And that was like a very relief because then I could maybe get rid of the past and all that surrounding.
	But the sad thing is that most of the same people went to the same school, which I didn't know or I wasn't.
	I noticed it already on the first day when I came to the high school door that there was this same person from my Because we had the same class through the grade one to six.
	So there was the same guy and he already started with the bullying social queue.
	So then I was already super depressed at that moment forward on the whole day because I understood that the same guys are already in the same school and they probably will Spread the whole thing to other people.
	And it started to manifest that quite fast already.
	And then I snapped in my head eventually in the high school, the seventh grade.
	Because I knew this would start to Continue the same way as it had.
	So then I started to become very aggressive and not being, you could say, a victim.
	I started to become a bad boy, you could say.
	What do you mean? Well, in that sense, I started to shout back, be physically violent back when people were violent to me.
	Why is self-defense, why does that make you a bad boy?
	Well... It's like saying you're a thief because you took back a bike that someone stole from you.
	I can explain. So I was excessively...
	It was not just self-defense.
	I used the same evil weapons they used on me, for example.
	Like a case where this one person who were bullying me and was physically violent with me, so I used more violence than needed to stop it.
	So basically I just... When he was pushing me around, I just snapped and put him on the ground.
	How can I say?
	I used my legs to trip him over, and then just hover, take him like this.
	I didn't hit him. I was like, you have to stop.
	I just laughed evilly to him at how pathetic he is because I wanted to give back the same medicine that they always were using on me.
	How many times had this boy used violence or aggression against you?
	Well, not many times.
	It's just there was a lot of different people.
	But more than you had, right? Yes. Okay.
	So please help me understand how what you did was wrong.
	I'm not sure.
	I mean, how old were you when you did this?
	From the perspective of, I felt that at that time I was being overly, you know, you could say evil because I was reading the Bible when I was at the first and second grade and I wanted to be a good person and not be violent and da da da da da.
	And from that perspective I felt that I was going in a bad way.
	I mean, you know the Bible has an eye for an eye, right?
	I mean, again, maybe I'm missing something and I'm happy to be schooled on this, but if you were my son and you hit back against the bully, I'd be like, good job!
	I'd be like, good! Good for you!
	So, again, maybe I'm missing something, you know, maybe you later went and poisoned his dog or something, I don't know, but I don't see the badness here.
	Well, I had this idea that I should, you know, just turn the other cheek stuff.
	Okay, I understand that, but you're talking about a very one-dimensional reading of the Bible, of course, right?
	I mean, Jesus didn't turn the other cheek in terms of the punishment, but I'm just talking about a moral evaluation now, because you used the word evil to describe yourself as a child desperate for self-defense in a violent environment, and I'm like, holy shit, man, that is a hell of a stamp to put on your forehead, evil.
	I mean, you suffered through years of violence, humiliation, degradation, bullying, and you punch back one time and you're the bad guy.
	Like, just help me follow this because I can't.
	I mean, for example, the situation I gave, At that time, I felt that that was too much.
	I could have just, you know, pushed him away.
	No, no, you keep saying the same damn thing.
	I don't care what you felt at the time.
	I'm talking about your evaluation as an adult.
	It's like saying, well, you know, when I was four years old, I believed in the tooth fairy.
	It's like, I get that four-year-olds believe in the tooth fairy in Santa Claus.
	I'm talking about now.
	Because your judgment about yourself now is what matters, not what you felt at the time when you were a kid in a desperate situation of violence.
	Now. What do you think of what you did from an objective outside the Skull Prison empirical view?
	If you heard this story from someone else, if I told this story that I've been physically, violently bullied for years and then I punched back hard, what would you say?
	And I want to correct, I mean, I'd never said that I was, if you mean that I would have been physically, like, Abused constantly.
	I never said that. I said that was one instance, for example.
	But most of it was very psychologically abusing.
	And they sometimes escalated to physicality, yes.
	But it wasn't like 90% of the time.
	I don't believe I used a percentage.
	Okay, but I'm just making sure.
	Let's get out of your fucking abstractions and let's get back to your actual life.
	If you heard me tell the story you just told, that after years of bullying and some violence, I punched back and made it stop, what would you say?
	Good job. So why don't you say that to you?
	I'm saying...
	That's not what you said two minutes ago.
	Right now, honestly, I did...
	I could have done it a little bit less, you know, less...
	A little bit less, but yeah, he got what he deserved.
	How do you know you should have or could have done it less?
	How do you not know for certain, or how do you know for certain that if you had done it less, he wouldn't have continued?
	Maybe you did it exactly right.
	Maybe if you hadn't done it that strongly, he would have continued.
	Or if you hadn't done it that strongly, he would have ganged up with five of his friends and beat the living shit out of you and caused brain damage.
	How do you know? That's the whole point is you don't know.
	It's like, you know, when the cops shoot some guy charging that and he's like, he was unarmed.
	They don't know. They don't know.
	So applying all this knowledge after the fact, maybe you did it just right.
	Maybe it was absolutely perfect and brilliant what you did.
	Maybe. It's certainly within the realm of possibility, right?
	And did it stop the bullying?
	Yeah, he didn't.
	Perfect. Then you did it just right.
	You didn't put him in hospital, you didn't give him a permanent injury, and you stopped the bullying.
	How is that not a perfect outcome?
	I mean, he didn't engage directly, but he was still with his minions, or as a minion with the group, you know.
	But yeah, eventually, in overall the aggressive way, I started to push back.
	Yeah, it brought results.
	So, was it not a good thing that you did?
	Not neutral, but a good thing that you did?
	Because you also probably stopped them from bullying other kids a little bit, for fear that they would also grow up and punch back.
	In a sense, I kind of became a bully myself, in a sense.
	I just elevated myself from the victim status, but then I didn't become the defender, or in some way I became, but in a sense I did not become this super warrior who could just intervene in every situation where other people or kids were bullied.
	I'm sorry, sorry, how old were you here?
	14, 15. What are you talking about?
	13, 14, 15. You didn't become a superhero warrior at the age of 14 or 15?
	I'm sorry, my lack of English vocabulary.
	That's fine. I just want to make sure. That's a bit of an unrealistic standard.
	At the age of 14, I didn't become Superman.
	It's like, yeah, neither did I. Neither did anyone I know because he's an exceptional character.
	I feel guilty of me watching from the side when other people...
	I got out of my...
	Myself of that situation, but I did not intervene in situations where, and I was just, you know, in a sense, a witness to then other people being bullied, and I did not always, I sometimes, but not always, I did not stop because I was afraid I was going to get back to the same hellhole if I Intervened on those some or some instances.
	Listen, man, listen, you're 14 years old.
	It's not your job to be the policeman of the world or your school or your environment or your neighborhood.
	That's not your job.
	It's the job of the teachers, the parents, the police, whatever it is, right?
	But it's not your job. I hope that you will cut yourself some slack with regards to this.
	You know, you prevented the bullying yourself.
	You stood up for yourself. That's good.
	But the idea That you are somehow morally at fault, either A, for using violence to protect yourself in the face of sometimes violent bullying, or B, that you're somehow morally remiss by not becoming a vigilante superhero protecting the children of your environment from all of their bullies.
	That is an absolutely...
	I mean this with all affection, love, and respect.
	It's an insane standard to hold yourself to.
	It's a crazy self-abuse.
	You understand, you're just bullying yourself.
	You took over the bully. You hit the bully and you became the bully.
	You became the bully. I didn't understand what you said to yourself.
	Because earlier you called what you did evil.
	And now you're saying, well, you know, I was remiss in not defending all the other kids.
	Holy shit, man. Stop that.
	Seriously, stop that.
	You're being mean to yourself.
	You got so used to people beating down on you that you took over the role.
	What you did was great.
	And it's not your job at the age of 14 to police a schoolyard and deal with all the bullies.
	That's a great way to get yourself killed, and I'm not kidding you about that.
	Or certainly a great way to get yourself beaten up, maybe lose some teeth, maybe lose an eye, maybe get some brain damage, maybe just accidentally fall down a flight of stairs.
	You uncork the genie of violence, you never know what the hell's going to happen.
	So you did proportional response, which was good.
	You kept yourself safe, which was good.
	The bullies were picking on other kids.
	Yeah, that's a shame. But who the hell protected you?
	No one. Not your parents, not the teachers, not police, not security guards, not other kids, not older kids, no one.
	And that's the world you live in.
	The world you live in is, we all stand by, well, not all of us, but most of us stand by when kids are being bullied.
	And the reason that we do that is because we don't want to be bullied by the parents.
	So we live in a world, just so you know, we live in a world now where People don't confront you directly.
	What they do is they work to destroy your life.
	Right? It's like in the past there used to be duels, right?
	And you go pistols at dawn, 10 steps, turn and fire, right?
	But people don't do that anymore.
	Right? There's no confrontation these days.
	Like people, they didn't call into my show and say, Oh, Steph, you're wrong about race and IQ. You're wrong about R versus K. You're wrong about this, that, the other, right?
	I mean, a few did, but mostly what they did was they filled out endless complaint forms to social media companies and got media platformed, which is like saying to someone, I disagree with you, slap them across the face, you think there's going to be pistols at dawn, but all you do is you put poison in their coffee the day before.
	And so we have all of these creepy, weird, foggy, tentacled ways of destroying people's lives these days, by complaining to their employers, by complaining to whoever provides them services, by escalating attacks upon their character.
	It's, you know, we've gone from honorable pistols at dawn to mean girls' character destruction.
	And life destruction, really.
	You know, to destroy your reputation, then they use the destruction of your reputation to destroy your income, destroy your life, hopefully get you divorced, whatever it is, right?
	So, in the past, you could confront bullies.
	I remember, gosh, what was this show, Kindergarten Cop?
	It was a movie many years ago.
	Arnold Schwarzenegger beat the crap out of a child abuser.
	Now, if a teacher who's big tries to beat the crap out of a child abuser, and I'm not suggesting you should, but you'll get taken to court, you'll get sued, you'll lose your house, you might go to jail.
	There's no Wild West justice anymore.
	I think there's some pluses and minuses to that.
	I think a lot of minuses now.
	So you can't.
	I mean, I stood up for adult victims of child abuse and tried to destroy my reputation with the media.
	They don't confront me and say, oh, you're wrong.
	My child is wrong. They were never abused.
	This guy, he's got his facts wrong.
	He's got his arguments wrong. He's got his data wrong.
	You know, they just run to the media and say, he's a cult leader.
	And then the media is like, okay, great.
	Right? There's no fair fights.
	You understand in the world, there's no fair fights.
	Left. I mean, people put a lot of effort into saying, oh, you should vote for this candidate or that candidate.
	It looks like a whole bunch of stuff was just shifted around anyway.
	There's no fair fights. We're good to go.
	Fight like mean girls.
	They don't fight like men. And they'll just raise complaints and cause problems and give you endless paperwork and threaten your license.
	Like, there's no fair fight.
	There's no manly confrontations anymore.
	There's just this girly, slithery, tentacled, wreck people's reputation, spread gossip, be mean.
	But there's no face-to-face, I think you're wrong.
	So, I think you need to cut yourself some slack, man.
	You were unsupported by your family, unsupported by your teachers.
	I don't know if you have any siblings, but if you do, unsupported by your siblings.
	You were all alone in this Lord of the Flies brutal environment.
	And even in Lord of the Flies, there was companionship.
	You were absolutely isolated.
	In a violent and degrading and destructive environment.
	And you should give yourself a fucking medal for getting through that in one piece and standing up for yourself.
	Rather than say, well, I was bad, I was evil, I didn't live up to standards, I did it wrong, I did too much violence.
	Come on, man. Come on, cut yourself some slack.
	Don't let the bullies win and continue to negatively characterize your desperate fight for survival in an endlessly destructive environment.
	Give yourself a fucking medal, dude.
	Don't stop pinning hell words on your forehead.
	I appreciate your words.
	Because if you have this kind of bullying in yourself, it doesn't matter whether you stay in society or don't.
	You understand? You won't be free either way.
	Because then you'll just get mad at yourself in the woods.
	Just put yourself down in the woods.
	Rather than saying, maybe I'm a hero.
	Maybe, just maybe, I did everything right.
	Maybe, just maybe, I survived incredibly well.
	I am so sorry.
	I am so sorry for what happened to you as a child.
	It was absolutely, completely and totally wrong.
	I'm angry at your parents.
	You know, parents who fight in front of their kids, stop that shit, man.
	That is so destructive.
	You can have your disagreements, of course.
	And you can reasonably work them out.
	And if you have some big disagreement, wait till later.
	Send the kids to another room.
	Don't fight in front of your kids.
	And don't yell in the house with your kids.
	And don't yell in general. Don't yell at people that you sleep next to.
	That's just crazy. Don't call them names.
	Don't escalate. Don't be a right fighter.
	Don't twist the knife until you get what you want.
	Don't turn your ring finger into a noose to your love.
	That's just terrible. And I'm sorry that...
	Because you saw this bullying at home.
	You know, when you see parents yelling at each other, calling names, escalating...
	Rather to be right than happy.
	You were seeing bullying.
	Like your bullying was going on at home.
	The bullying at school, you understand, was just an effect of the bullying at home.
	Your parents handed the weapons to the bullies in your childhood.
	Because you saw your parents bullying each other at home.
	And it's terrifying how many marriages involve just this kind of bullying.
	Slamming cupboards, calling names, withholding sex, withholding money.
	You name it. It's absolutely horrible.
	And you understand the bullying that you had at home.
	And your parents, you're a good-looking guy, which means that your parents were probably good-looking, which means that they probably got together for a combination of two things, which is the curse of pretty people.
	The curse of pretty people is getting together for status and for sex.
	You want to know where a lot of sex goes on?
	The Olympic Village.
	Why does sex go on in the Olympic Village?
	Because you've got a whole bunch of perfectly toned body narcissists hopped up on who knows what banging each other like a drum, right?
	And so your parents probably got together for vanity because they both look great together and they're like Jennifer Lopez who marries cryptkeeper Mark Anthony and all of her husbands have been pretty gross looking and she herself says, hey, I'm not really into looks.
	You've probably noticed that over the years.
	But Your parents probably got together for vanity status and sex.
	And then look at you.
	At 29 years old, you meet a woman.
	Bet you she's a good-looking woman.
	You're a good-looking guy. And what do you get together for?
	Sex. Like your parents did, probably.
	These patterns are very clear, again, from the outside.
	You can't figure out if the world is flat just looking at the world around you.
	You've got to zoom out. And philosophy is to zoom out.
	You know, like the picture of Earthrise, this famous picture from the moon, right?
	The Earth rising over the moon.
	We all see the moon rising over the Earth.
	You look at that, okay, the Earth is round.
	You've got to zoom out enough to see what the hell the shape of the world is, because it looks flat.
	It's uneven, but it's flat.
	And that's sort of what I'm pointing out.
	If you have a great relationship with your younger self, if you understand the susceptibility Because if your parents don't get along, it's a fundamental question you have to answer if you want to have a happy life, if you want to have love.
	If your parents don't get along, you've got to ask yourself, why were they together?
	Why were they together? Did they love each other?
	No. Did they dislike each other?
	Yeah, quite a bit. So what kept them together?
	That's a big question for my parents.
	My parents weren't married very long and continued to dislike each other, as far as I can tell, until my late father died.
	And my mother, I'm sure, is still at the same opinion and still is frustrated and angry about the marriage that happened 50 years ago.
	Why did they get together?
	Pretty good looking people.
	My mom, in particular, very good looking.
	And my dad was a geologist, seemed to have a big future.
	So, yeah, money and looks, status, And that was it.
	Did they share values?
	Was my mother a wonderful person?
	Was my father a wonderful person?
	Hell no. Oh my god no.
	I was just thinking of this the other day.
	I was out on a hike and I just remembered hiking with my father when I was in my mid-teens.
	I went to see him in Africa for a couple of months.
	And my father...
	I was kind of depressed in my mid-teens, of course.
	I started to get fit, really fit in my mid-teens, but this is before that.
	And I was depressed.
	I was anxious and lonely.
	And, you know, this is when my mother wouldn't get out of bed.
	It was a whole terrifying time.
	And my father, he walked for a living.
	That was his thing, right? He was very fit.
	Now, I go out. My father takes me on a hike through these crazy mountains.
	Like, holy shit. It wasn't quite rock climbing, but it was pretty damn close.
	And this went on.
	Like, day after day after day, we would just hike and hike and hike, like, up these crazy mountains.
	And, of course, the beginning is up, and then we went along the top for a while, and then the end is down.
	And I was finding it hard, man.
	Plus, he didn't bring enough water.
	I mean, maybe he was more used to hiking without water, but I was desperately thirsty and tired, and I wasn't used to this kind of exertion.
	And my father... Would sometimes hike so far ahead, he'd be like a dot up the mountain.
	And I'd just be laboring along, trying to control my breathing and pushing through the exhaustion and all of that, and desperately thirsty.
	And my father, he wouldn't walk with me.
	He wouldn't ask me if I was okay.
	Do I need a break? Do I need a rest?
	He wouldn't ask me about my life.
	You don't seem very fit. Are you not exercising?
	You're not part of any sport? Didn't any of that.
	I just walked ahead. And I could feel the disgust.
	Oh, my son. Such a punchball.
	And I wasn't overweight or anything, but I just...
	I was depressed. I was anxious.
	I was terrified of my entire existence.
	Eviction notices piling.
	I mean, it was bad.
	I was thinking we're going to live on the street if we're lucky.
	And my father just marched ahead, just marched ahead, right?
	And that's just a total asshole move, right?
	I mean, it's a complete asshole move.
	My sons are clearly not fit.
	He's a butterball. Anyway, whatever, right?
	He just moved ahead, right? And then when I finally catch up with him, He wouldn't say, are you okay?
	I'd say, can I have some water?
	He's like, we don't have any more water.
	You don't need it. You're fine.
	I'm really thirsty. He literally reached down on the ground and picked up a fucking rock.
	Do you know what he said? Suck on this.
	Suck on this. I said, what the hell is that going to do?
	I didn't say what the hell. I said, why?
	This will help you produce saliva.
	Saliva will help you with your thirst.
	What the? What the hell?
	I'm supposed to recycle my spit rather than you bring me some fucking water?
	That's the deal? You know that doesn't add any liquid to my system.
	Bring enough water? I don't know.
	Maybe he forgot to pack water for two.
	I don't know. That's really...
	It's Africa, for God's sakes.
	It's bloody hot! I'm on the rooftop of the world.
	I reach up and I'm brushing a solar flare, for God's sakes.
	I shouldn't...
	It's so long ago now. It's like 40 years ago now, right?
	So it is long and he's dead.
	But, you know, this is who my dad was.
	My mom was violent. My dad was kind of callous.
	And my dad, of course, also was responsible for keeping me safe.
	But he wanted to go and play tennis.
	And I was crawling around the tennis court.
	And I guess he was involved in a real toddler.
	I don't know. I was crawling. So I was probably maybe a year, maybe 18 months old.
	And... I was crawling around the tennis court, and my dad was playing his tennis game, and I crawled into a garden shed, and I managed to open, or maybe it was open, some weed killer, and I drank it, and it nearly fucking killed me.
	And according to the stories I've heard, people were yelling at my dad, like, where's your son?
	Someone's screaming, and he's like, one more point, one more point, I'm almost, I've almost won!
	And I was swelling up.
	My throat was swelling up. I drank poison under my dad's watch because he wanted to play a tennis game and win.
	Well, I hope he won that tennis game because he lost his son.
	And so I say this not to try and dunk on my parents, but that sort of fundamental, why were they together?
	They didn't like each other.
	They weren't likable people.
	They weren't good people.
	They weren't nice people.
	They weren't caring people.
	I mean, I used to say to my mom occasionally, I used to say to my mom, you know, when you do good things in the world, when you help the world, when you help people, as I hope I'm doing with you and with others, It's a good feeling.
	It's a good feeling to do something in the community that's positive for the world.
	And that's your big question, my friend, is do I do something in the world that's positive for the community or do I abandon it?
	Like the Titanic.
	You don't stay on the Titanic. You get the hell off the Titanic.
	Is it the Titanic or can I bail and we make it?
	It's a big question. I don't have an answer to that because I can't read the future.
	I would say this to my mom.
	You know, maybe join a community group.
	Maybe do something nice, but she would never want to do that.
	Never want to do that. Because, you know, someone had to pay for the wreck of her life.
	And when it wasn't her kids and she couldn't bully her kids, she started bullying other people.
	Badly. I mean, she was like Terminator Karen on steroids.
	She wouldn't just sit there. And I learned that.
	Just do something nice in the world.
	Go bake something for someone who's lonely.
	Go be a big brother.
	Go teach some kid how to read.
	Just go do something nice. Just go do something nice.
	Even if it's just give to charity.
	Even if it's just go do something nice.
	If somebody's posting about being sad on the internet, write them a little letter saying, I'm so sorry, I understand.
	Just do something nice.
	That's all. It's funny because the left is all like, oh, we want to take care of the poor.
	It's like, if you want to do some nice things, how about you just do some nice things rather than run to the government all the time, right?
	And so, sorry for the long speech, but with regards to your parents, and this is for everyone, you've got to know why your parents got together.
	You have to know this in order to change it.
	Otherwise, it's going to run you.
	It's going to control you.
	And Your recent relationship, I bet you, in many ways, was a mirror of, we look good together, and the sex is good at the beginning, reason for your parents.
	There's no moral foundation.
	You know, to use a biblical analogy, you're building your house on sand, not on rock.
	You're building your house on ass, not on morals.
	So do you have a theory As to why your parents got together?
	Why did they get married? Why did they have kids?
	It's almost impossible to say because I have asked them when I was young even and they just it's always quite shallow answers and when I contradict the sad shallow answers or try to try to investigate more it doesn't produce a very nice Are they still together?
	Yes. Right.
	Did they ever stop fighting?
	I mean, it goes like this, but I guess because they're older, they don't have the energy to do that anymore.
	But the same attitude is...
	I think they haven't changed almost at all.
	I mean, for 18 years, I saw the same shit.
	Right. I mean, it's just their way of being.
	It's just like that, and they still somehow are able to cohabitate.
	I don't understand how it's even possible.
	I never saw intimacy from then, except for my mom sometimes giving, you know, this needy hug, or like one thing, and my father, usually I always saw my father pushing her away in this kind of Not interested in the intimacy thing, and I never actually heard...
	Were they good looking when they were younger?
	Not to my taste, no.
	I mean, my father, maybe to, I guess, in general, good looking.
	Because you got that whole PewDiePie good look thing going on, in my humble opinion.
	Well, this is kind of a surprise to me because I've been more aware after the age of 25 that I'm not actually that ugly, but the most of my life I thought I was very ugly because I had no attention from girls and 25 was the first time I actually went to the dating market,
	you could say. Before that, almost nothing.
	Like no contact, no dating or nothing.
	Let's get out of your head and even out of my head and let's ask the people who are listening in on the call.
	What they think of his looks.
	And look, I mean, looks, they're not unimportant.
	Signs of genetic markers and strength.
	You're obviously very intelligent. And, you know, I really appreciate your English.
	I know you feel like it's deficient and all that, but it's certainly better than my finish.
	So it does kind of look like Pewds.
	Felix something or other anyway.
	And PewDiePie is a very good-looking guy.
	Sort of underestimated. I think he should stay clear of the beard thing, but that's just my particular...
	You seem to be doing better with that.
	But yeah, so several people are typing.
	Above average for sure. Yeah, 7 out of 10 at least.
	Yeah, good-looking guy. Good-looking guy.
	And he looks good.
	Ladies should go for him. Good facial structure, yeah.
	Looks like you're going to be keeping that Hawaii Five-0 tsunami of a hair, hairline.
	I mean, he's not my type, but he's pleasant to look at.
	Yeah, he's a good-looking guy.
	He's a good-looking guy. And he has hair.
	Hey, hey, that's no reason to judge anyone's looks.
	No, I'm kidding. Nice head of hair.
	Nice head of hair. Somebody says bald at 25 here.
	Yeah, well, just think of all the money and time you save on haircuts.
	So anyway, so I just want to point that out.
	So you don't know why they got together.
	They don't seem to like each other. So they're addicted to this situation, right?
	So when you were a kid, you couldn't get away from the bullying either at home or at school.
	What's your relationship with your parents like at the moment?
	I do not spend time with them, only if there's some...
	Actually, this is a reason, as I said in the email, I have dealt with my family issues.
	With this, I mean that I'm not sure if I have actually dealt with them enough, but to the point that I did everything from my perspective that I could to face the past and Telling them what I thought was quite appalling.
	And, you know, all the stuff, just digging it up and asking them questions.
	And, yeah, it didn't produce anything.
	So when you pulled back from them, did they fight for you?
	Did they call you? Did they try and figure out what the issue was?
	I mean... No.
	They judged. I mean, it's hard to say.
	They... The way you explained how people start to demonize you and paint you and everything you just said, that basically happened.
	I had never actually heard my father say sorry or taking responsibility for his own mistakes.
	Did they know you were bullied as a child?
	Yeah. And they never said it was our job to protect you and you had to fight that fight alone and we're sorry?
	Well, I do not recall that they would have put it in that way.
	Well, whatever way, something that puts some kind of solve on the wound, so to speak.
	I mean, if I give you an example, my father is saying that I have mental health issues probably because of the bullying I had when I was young, and he has more of this attitude of blaming when I try to Criticize him for what he did or what he was kind of, what kind of my childhood...
	The way my childhood was, then this card always comes up where it suddenly shifts the attention to me.
	I do not get forward with the issues.
	And why I did this, I just wanted to see what kind of person he really is right now.
	So he says that you have mental health issues for bringing up pain and loss in your childhood.
	Well, that's not the way he sees it, but the way I, you know, become a bit emotional and say with firm and, you know, with not like this right now, but with, you know, you could say anger because I am angry.
	Yeah, you should be.
	Yeah, and then I don't know.
	I think it's very evil and manipulative how he responds to these accusations or this enlightenment.
	And he doesn't even remember many or most of the stuff I talk about.
	They just vanished conveniently out of his memory box of what happened, for example, when he kicked me in the side here when I was on the ground, when things didn't go as he wanted.
	And it was one kick, okay, it wasn't a beating, but it still hurt as hell.
	And yeah, my bones didn't break or anything, but he doesn't remember that.
	And of course, when you were a child, if he told you to do something and you genuinely forgot, I bet you that wasn't an excuse.
	Well... Actually, in the household, the whole theme was quite irresponsible.
	Me and my brother noticed very fastly that if we did something bad, we got away with it after one day.
	They threw everything always under the rug, that everything is basically okay.
	It just resets after one day or two days.
	You just avoid it, basically, if stuff happened.
	Yeah, that can certainly happen.
	Yeah, that can happen in chaotic houses.
	I remember my mom grounding me for a week in the afternoon and then that evening wanting to go to a movie.
	It's a little... Yeah, I like that.
	It's a little disorienting. And it's also struck me earlier, you were saying that your house was sort of messy and unpleasant and...
	Very dirty. Yeah, so if you look around your environment, it's not necessarily dirty, but it's definitely not...
	It's not a big transition.
	I mean, this is nothing compared to the household I was living in.
	It's still like that. I mean, it's still a garbage dump, basically.
	Not in a sense.
	It's just very dusty, dirty, disorganized, old stuff, old something that they don't need.
	It's just a mess.
	It's not a nice environment to be in.
	Right, right. So I'm sorry about all of that, too.
	You know, there's the wrongs that parents do.
	They can do a lot to fix them by simply taking responsibility when the kids are older and the kids have the capacity and the freedom to come and talk to them about it.
	But of course, most parents who are abusive or neglectful, they will simply pull the I don't remember.
	I'm sorry you felt that way.
	Nothing bad happened. Are you all right?
	You seem unstable. You have emotional problems.
	I can't believe you're bringing this up.
	It's so long ago. Get over it.
	I mean, you know, the endless cavalcade of bullshit.
	That characterizes, you know, parents who inflict responsibility on their children and then when the children get older and try and push some responsibility back on the parents, suddenly excuses are the only thing that matters and counterattacks which are never allowed to the children at that.
	That's basically, you summarized it very well and that's me, that's my father and mother and also my brother's stance.
	So here's the thing, I'll tell you the big transition, right?
	The big transition. One of the most difficult things that I had in this show was why did I become, you could say, hyper-rational?
	I became hyper-rational because it was a necessary defense against my mother's intrusive insanity.
	My mother wasn't crazy in her own room.
	My mother was crazy, like, sitting on the chair, endlessly grinding into me weird theories, complicated things, bad thinking.
	Like, she needed to discharge this stuff.
	You know, like vomiting.
	Like if you drink too much alcohol, your body views it as a poison and vomits it.
	Well, she had drunk too much crazy and she needed to like rip open my mouth and literally vomit like a bird with the opposite of a worm into my gullet.
	She needed to vomit her insanity into me.
	So in order to stay sane, I had to develop these incredible ninja moves of getting outside my own skull.
	Now, that sounds like dissociation, but it's not that.
	Objectivity is not dissociation.
	Dissociation is when you abandon your body, like a woman who's being assaulted or raped or whatever.
	She sometimes will dissociate.
	She's abandoning her body because it's being used to punish her.
	This was, to me, I have to flee my body in order to return with the facts, with the truth.
	I need to view things objectively.
	I need to go out and get the hunter and the killer and the meat of reality and bring it back to a starving little boy called me, right?
	And... So I developed all of these ninja moves.
	Now, these ninja moves, I tried to use them on my mother, tried to use them on my father, other family members, it doesn't really matter, and I failed.
	Now, I mean, objectively, they failed, but I was not able to achieve my goal of making my family of origin the same.
	Do you know how hard it was to then say, well, you know what?
	It didn't work with my family, but I got some really good skills here.
	I'll go and try to make the world sane instead.
	Ah, yes. That was very difficult emotionally, right?
	Because part of me was like, yeah, but the world supported your family and their craziness.
	Nobody called the cops.
	Nobody tried to save or rescue me, right?
	So, if you are a rational, sane person, and you try with your family to make them sane, to make them honest, to make them what I would call basically human, which is to have free will and choice and not be an automaton run by defenses.
	And if you fail with your family, the question is, okay, Failed with my family.
	Can I succeed with the world?
	Failed with my parents.
	Can I succeed with the state or people's dependence upon it?
	Now, that's a big question.
	Now, if I had answered in the negative and said, well, I'm going to do my business career, I'm going to make my money, and I'm going to find some island, and I'm going to get away from it, I'm going to retire, whatever it is, right?
	That would have been a choice.
	And trust me, there's times when that seemed like a pretty damn good choice.
	But the other is to say, the skills that I learned from my family about how to be rational and how to be sane, those skills I should bring to the world.
	And the reason I did that was I thought, God, I wish that someone had brought those skills to me when I was a kid.
	And in a way, through reading philosophers, they kind of did, but not on a personal interactive level, which is why I always wanted to talk with people at a personal level about these kinds of things.
	So, the best way to heal the past is to give the world what was denied you.
	I think. The best way to heal the past is to give the world what was denied you.
	Now, the world denied me reason, so I bring reason to the world.
	Now, that triggers a lot of people.
	I get a lot of blowback. I get a lot of punishment.
	I get a lot of attacks. And I get some support.
	And please, people, freedomain.com forward slash Lene.
	Help a brother out. It's been a tough year.
	But I think if you want to leave the world, I think you have to earn your way out.
	And I think what you have to do is find out if the world is like your parents.
	So bring your reason to the world.
	You tried it with your parents.
	I'm sure you've tried it with other people in your life.
	And you bring your reason, your arguments, your facts, your reality, the reality, objective, empirical reality to the world and see how it responds.
	Now, if the world responds with universal attack and contempt and threats and degradation and deplatforming and whatever, then it's like, okay, so my parents were just a reflection of the world as a whole.
	And I'm not going to fight where I can't win.
	And I'm going to find some hidey hole, some safe, secure place, some whatever it is, and ride out the inevitable tsunami of destruction that follows in the wake of the earthquake of anti-rationality that characterizes a lot of modern culture.
	I'm going to go in and fight.
	But if it turns out that I get illegally kicked in the balls while my hands are tied behind my back, well, then there's...
	No rules. There's no Queensbury rules for fighting, so I'm not going to get in the ring.
	It's just self-abuse, right?
	Where we are in that process, I can't answer in any totally objective way.
	And the reason being that it's a Schrodinger's cat kind of thing, like it's a quantum physics thing, like to make a decision is to change the outcome to some degree.
	And you and I are having this conversation because I decided to treat the world as not my mother, as capable of reason.
	And some people are.
	It's not a massive amount, but some people are.
	And to provide to others what was denied to me is, I think, good for the world.
	It's good for me, for sure.
	And to act in a way that is different from how you had to act as a child is the only way to fundamentally grow up.
	And I know that you feel a little bit like a man-boy, right?
	Like a man-child, because I'm 30, I'm not even remotely ready for...
	Family or, you know, you still feel like a delayed adolescence, they call it a failure to launch.
	The best way to break the cycle of history is to do the opposite of what happened.
	Because that's breaking the power of your parents.
	If your parents say, you can't be rational, go be rational.
	Now, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.
	But... It heals you either way.
	Now, if you go out and try to treat the world as different from your parents, and the world treats you like your parents did, then go live in the woods.
	But you won't go live in the woods thinking you could have done more, or you won't go live in the woods thinking that you could have made a change, or if things go bad and the badness follows you even to the woods, you won't sit there and say, well, if I'd stayed and fight, I wouldn't be in this situation now.
	So I would say engage with the world.
	Don't just think about the world.
	Engage with the world. And if you find that engaging with the world is a no-win situation, then you can make your decisions about what to do from there with empirical knowledge rather than theoretical knowledge.
	But when you're concerned about only theory, which a lot of what you wrote was theory, you don't know for sure whether you can have an impact on the world.
	So I would say go have an impact.
	Try and have an impact on the world.
	And if it turns out that the world is your childhood, fundamentally, then you can make your decisions based upon that.
	But I wouldn't do it prior to trying.
	Because then what's happening is you're saying, okay, I was isolated as a kid, and I had no effect on my family, no effect on my parents.
	I was not supported. I was not protected.
	So the best way to deal with feeling isolated and ineffective as a child is to run out of the woods where I'm isolated and ineffective.
	I think that's only going to reinforce what happened to you as a child, and I think that's your parents' winning.
	Now, maybe you'll end up out in the woods.
	I don't know. But I wouldn't do it based upon what happened to you as a child.
	Because that's just saying my childhood is going to last until I fucking die.
	Oh, is he frozen?
	Is he gone?
	and I'm here. Oh, okay.
	Yeah, so that's basically my suggestion.
	I don't know what to say.
	Well, there's nothing to say.
	It's a lot to mull over, right?
	So you can just mull it over and all of that.
	But yeah, that would be my thoughts.
	I think that you've got to earn your way to the woods and not by running away from a too similar childhood situation.
	All right.
	All right.
	Would you let me know how it goes?
	claps I will. All right. Thanks, man.
	I appreciate the conversation.
	Thanks, James, so much for setting this all up, as always.
	And thanks, everyone.
	We've had a couple of great games among us lately.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
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