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March 25, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:59:50

ON BECOMING A FATHER! Stefan Molyneux Livestream

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	Good evening, everybody.
	I hope you're doing well.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	We are trying something new.
	Not only are we trying something new, which is Bitcoin dipping below 69K Canadian, which is fine.
	But, you know, I do the Ask Me Anythings, but it's all text.
	And text just doesn't feel chaotic enough.
	Did you get that feeling? Text just does not feel chaotic enough.
	So I thought, what the heck? Let's see if we can get ourselves some voice chat going.
	I, of course, want to be doing this for a while.
	And, yes. Good evening, good evening.
	I will distribute some lemons soon.
	You know, lemons and black pills.
	That's the whole business I've got going on here.
	So yeah, lemons and black pills.
	And if you wanted to join in the Telegraph chat, you can do that if you like.
	I'm more than happy to have you come along and join.
	And I guess we will just see who's got any questions.
	I have some stuff to talk about, but, you know, let's try and make this a chitty-chitty-chatty-bang-bang.
	Just wanted to remind you, so I had a chat with some of the guys from Locals.
	So Locals is a website that allows for a sort of community.
	You can support me.
	They're going to be live streaming soon and you can tip over there.
	And I was chatting with the people at Locals because I generally only do business these days with people I can actually talk to and or are Christians, just the way it goes.
	FreeDomain.locals.com.
	FreeDomain.locals.com.
	I really, really would recommend dropping by that.
	I'm going to get more and more engaged in that.
	Community, FreeDomain.locals.com.
	And don't forget FreeDomainNFT.
	FreeDomainNFT.com. You can check out my very first collectible.
	I've got so many cool things to sort of handing out or sell as collectibles.
	So one of them, it's pretty wild.
	So I think I was 24 years old, and I wrote an entire manifesto.
	Oh my gosh, 24 years old.
	That's 30 years ago.
	Oh, creaky, creaky.
	Aren't we getting up there? But it's called The Rationalist Manifesto, and it was the way I was working to differentiate myself from objectivism and Aristotelianism and all the other belief systems that kind of swamped me and my thoughts when I was...
	So yes, it is the Rationalist Manifesto.
	I found a copy.
	I'm going to read it, and I'm going to store it, and I'm going to sell it as a collectible, because I think, you know, if I'm right, you know, I think I am.
	But if I'm right, I'm going to be very large in the history of philosophy.
	You may think for the right reasons, you may think for the wrong reasons, but certainly there's almost no philosopher in history that's had a bigger influence and effect on the world contemporaneously.
	I mean, of course, you know, the geniuses back in time, over time, they did incredible things and, you know, vastly bigger.
	But in terms of in the moment, in the moment, in the sort of 15-year compression that I've been working with the world, a billion views and downloads, millions of books, thousands of conversations, hundreds of interviews, just an enormous amount of, Of very powerful and very original and unique contributions to philosophy.
	So I'm going to be big in the history of philosophy, you know, whether you like it or not.
	And the reason for that, I mean, yeah, I'm a smart guy.
	I'm good at philosophy. But fundamentally, it's you, the audience, who's listening and who's participating.
	But also, it is just the fact that it's something I thought about many years ago.
	There is no history of philosophy.
	There's no objective history of philosophy.
	Because the philosophers that ended up being grabbed up and taught in the schools were the philosophers who tended to serve the powers that be.
	So when you had a group of bourgeois, petty bourgeois, who wanted to get rid of the aristocracy and have a more secular state, then you saw a lot of rationalists and secularist thinkers coming up.
	And when you needed a lot of theologians, then St. Augustine was the guy.
	When the powers that be wanted the blessing, so to speak, of the greatest philosopher, in my mind, who ever lived, although we don't have any of his writings, which is Socrates, then Socrates guaranteed that he would continue to be taught across the world curriculum by saying then Socrates guaranteed that he would continue to be taught across the world curriculum by saying whatever you do, make sure you obey the government.
	Whatever you do, make sure you obey the state.
	Don't run away if you have the chance to run away from an unjust persecution or punishment, or in his case, giving him hemlock and putting him to death.
	So Socrates made sure that he was going to continue to be taught in the Western canon by saying, hey, you've really got to obey the state no matter what you do.
	And of course, government's kind of like promoting Socrates as a genius, which he was, but also promoting him because he said, obey the state.
	And I made this case probably 12 years ago on this show.
	That he did that out of his hatred.
	He succumbed to hatred at the end of his life, which I can completely understand.
	I mean, we all get tempted by that.
	I don't know if you do. I certainly do get tempted by that kind of hatred over time, but...
	Yeah, it's pretty rough.
	So he succumbed to hatred, and he said his curse upon humanity, his curse upon those who deplatformed him from life, right?
	We've got a lot of progress in the world because we're only deplatforming people from technology, not from existence itself.
	But his final curse upon the world, certainly upon his fellow citizens and upon Athens as a whole, was to curse them with obedience to the state.
	To curse them with obedience to the state.
	That's how he got his revenge.
	And I made that case 12 years ago.
	You can look for the trial and death of Socrates.
	And it was one of my first writing assignments when I was in the theater school was to dramatize the trial and death of Socrates as my own interpretation of how the trial and death went.
	Man, I hope I can find that again, too.
	I've got boxes and boxes.
	I also have about 500 shows which I've never released.
	I've got the truth about the rise of Nazism.
	I've got the truth about IQ. I've got just a whole bunch of shows.
	I've never actually released And I may, in fact, end up releasing them as NFTs, non-fungible tokens.
	Because, you know, being deplatformed and being deplatformed from payment processes and so on, you've just got to be creative when it comes to putting food on the table.
	So, freedomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out with that stuff.
	I would appreciate that.
	Let's distribute some rewards from the treasure chest.
	And I do want to get to your questions.
	Not much point me doing a monologue when we have this great new technology.
	To join in. So, I will look on Telegram, and you can tell me if you want to chat.
	There's been some questions posted there, but I would rather have a direct conversation if you could.
	I don't know if there's any way to raise, like, just raise your hand, or how does it work?
	So, if you're listening, and just give me your name, and...
	I will do my best to figure this all out and get you guys or get it up and running on Telegram in the chat itself.
	All right, so let's see here.
	How do we do this?
	Is there a raised hand feature?
	Timing is everything, yeah.
	Yeah, so I'm the guy.
	I don't have to be approved by the state, and therefore I can speak honestly and directly about the state.
	I'm also not hooked into the state as an academic, which means that people can dismiss what I say based upon me still sucking on the teeth of state power by having, like, you know what's amazing?
	Don't you, like, this is what I always wanted out of philosophy, and it was kind of impossible to get there until the internet.
	What I always wanted from philosophy was this.
	What if I don't have anything to sell you?
	What if I don't have anything to offer you?
	And what if we're just here for the raw, pure, deep, powerful conversation called philosophy?
	What if I don't have anything to offer you?
	Because I always disliked this idea, like if I had become a professor and I would have a passing grade to offer students.
	I would have the gateway to the empty riches of academia.
	I would have the breadcrumbs that's dropped by society for brilliant minds to go into inconsequentiality and vanity and pettiness.
	By joining academia.
	What if I could bring philosophy to the world and could offer the world nothing?
	Nothing! I would be such a beautiful woman without makeup and a bag over her head or something like that.
	What if I actually could...
	I can promise you nothing.
	I can give you no benefits.
	Well, I guess if you got into Bitcoin in 2010, maybe a little, but...
	What if I just didn't have anything to offer you other than the truth?
	What if I couldn't bribe you?
	What if I couldn't give you a job?
	What if I couldn't make you cool?
	What if I couldn't offer you a passing grade?
	Or I couldn't offer you a gateway to a PhD or professorship or a letter of recommendation?
	Or what if I just couldn't offer you anything?
	I couldn't pay you? What if I just couldn't offer you anything?
	Wouldn't that be the rawest and most pure conversation in philosophy that could possibly happen outside of private conversations at dinner tables, right?
	Alright, John. Alright, let's see if we can find you here.
	My friend John.
	And thank you everybody for dropping by tonight.
	A great pleasure to chat with you all.
	And let's just make sure our recording is still going.
	Yes, it is.
	And John, I'm just looking for you.
	I won't read through the list here, but I'm just looking for you.
	You've got to join the chat from that standpoint, and it's got to be called John, I suppose, right?
	And I would love to chat with you.
	Let me just see here. What are you, John?
	Yeah, online? But I can't find you in the chat, man.
	I'm sorry about that.
	Why are we still here?
	Just to suffer? I hope you don't mean it in this conversation as a whole.
	We're here to do good and fight evil, and love virtue, and hate immorality.
	Hate! Hate the sin, not the sinner.
	Hate the immorality, not every individual who's immoral.
	So, yeah, sorry if anybody else wants to untruth the tyranny of illusion.
	That's right. Stefan, your book's changed my life.
	Thank you very much for writing. I appreciate that.
	Thank you very much. All the books except for Art of the Argument are available for free.
	Art of the Argument, you can get it at artoftheargument.com.
	John says, not working.
	Well, that's very helpful, John.
	I really can't help you with that, I'm afraid.
	I'm just using the technology.
	As it comes up.
	So I will, let's see here.
	What have we got here?
	Lewis, you got a thumbs up here.
	I don't hate immoral people.
	I hate amoral people.
	So amoral people are sitting on the fence seeing which way the wind's going to end up blowing.
	And then they're going to try and join the winning team.
	So I was playing Rocket League with a couple of FDR listeners the other night, and my daughter.
	And my daughter's very good, frighteningly good.
	And this other guy was really good.
	And I was just making jokes, like whenever they had a good score, I'm like, I am on...
	If his name was Bob, and Bob made a good score, I'm like, I'm on Bob's team!
	So I was like, you know, you see which way the wind blows.
	And you join whoever you think is going to win.
	And that's just the nature of most people.
	They just want to join the winning team.
	They don't particularly care if it's moral or immoral.
	They probably have some mild preference for the moral people.
	But in a superhero movie, they'd be the one who just waits and then jumps on the bandwagon.
	They would be a figure of comedy.
	And in a sense, minor tragedy as well.
	Alright, so listen.
	If you have... Stuff to chat with.
	I will also go and drop by D-Life and hello to everyone there as well.
	I'm happy to take text questions as well.
	And yeah, just remember, so the way the world works, it's pretty simple, right?
	The way the world works is this.
	When people enter into a situation of conflict, they very quickly find out who the least rational person is in the room and then conform to that person.
	This is the way that human society works, tragically, at the moment.
	99.999% of people, what they do is they're in a situation of conflict.
	Let's say you're fighting with Bob.
	They will come into that situation of conflict, and they will scan you and Bob, and they will figure out who is the least rational.
	Because least rational translates into most dangerous.
	Least rational translates into most dangerous.
	The most rational person isn't going to troll you, isn't going to try and get you fired, isn't going to dig up old tweets and try and destroy your reputation.
	They're just going to, you know, if they lose, they'll be sad, they'll be upset, they might send you a rather plaintive or even sternly worded message, but they're not going to F up your life, or at least try.
	Whereas the irrational person is going to get fixated, and hostile, and enraged, and angry, and destructive, and obsessive, and they're just going to make your life a living hell.
	So in any conflict, you look at the most reasonable person, and you screw that person.
	This is what most people do.
	And this is why being rational tends to get you screwed.
	Because when you're rational, it's like that meme with the white guy blinking, like, oh, kind of surprising.
	Oh, that seems quite odd, right?
	So, generally, in conflicts between whites and non-whites, people side with the non-whites because the perception is, whether it's right or not, is that the white guy is going to be more reasonable and so on, right?
	So, that's just the way it goes.
	It's a harsh and black pill to learn about the world that the more rational you are, the more likely you are to get completely and totally screwed by people because they view you as a non-threat, right?
	They view you as a non-threat.
	And as a non-threat, you are expendable because people don't think of what's right or wrong.
	They think of what's harmful or not harmful.
	And as a rational person, you're just the least harmful person around.
	And that's just the way things go.
	All right. Let's see.
	That parenting book can't come quick enough.
	Please don't George R.R. Martin us.
	Yes. Yes, you're absolutely right.
	Is it wise to let someone back into your life that broke your trust before?
	So, it's a great question, and I will tell you, this isn't even my opinion.
	This is a straight-up truth.
	So, look, it's not up to you whether someone comes back into your life.
	It's not up to you whether you love someone.
	It's not up to you whether you trust someone.
	It's not up to you whether you forgive someone.
	It's not up to you. Don't will this stuff.
	It's not a push scenario.
	It's not up to you.
	Can you will yourself, let's say that you're not a chubby chaser, right, and you find an obese woman unpleasant and it doesn't, can you force yourself to become sexually excited by a morbidly obese woman, right?
	Well, you can't force yourself.
	You can't force yourself.
	So sexual attraction is a pull scenario.
	It's not a push scenario. A pull scenario.
	A tug scenario, perhaps, right?
	So sexual attraction is you look at someone and you say, wow, that person is sexually attractive, that woman is hot, you know, she's your type, whatever.
	It could be a tits guy, an ass guy, a leg guy, a hair guy, a cheekbone guy, a whatever, a brain guy.
	It could be anything, right? A cello guy, if you like cello players, as I did.
	But anyway... So, sexual attraction is not up to you.
	It's like, who should I be sexually attracted to?
	Well, you know, you go for decent values and look for, you know, and I'm just talking like raw sexual attraction, lust, not sort of quality of character, morality, and so on.
	So, it's not up to you.
	Fundamentally, it's not even up to you who's in your life.
	I mean, I know this, and I don't want, this is not passive, right?
	This is not passive. But if you're running both sides of the relationship, you're just going to get exploited.
	So if somebody betrays me, then I will say, you, so this is real-time relationships.
	I feel upset or I feel angry.
	My thought is that you betrayed me, and I think this is why, I don't know, I want to hear your side of things and so on, but this seems to be the case, right?
	So, you're honest with people, you're upset with them, you're angry with them, and you can tell them your interpretation, but you can't tell them your interpretation as true, right?
	So I'll give you a simple example, right?
	Many years ago, I was supposed to meet a friend at 7 o'clock on a street corner.
	It was cold, and he finally showed up at 8, and I was really upset.
	And I said, you know, you're late, right?
	And he was like, no, I'm not late. He said we'd meet at 8.
	And I pulled out my piece of paper and said, no, man, it...
	And it was 8 o'clock. I'd written down 8 o'clock.
	You know, sometimes numbers just swirl around in your brain.
	So I thought he was late, and I sat there for 45 minutes stewing, getting mad at the guy.
	Turns out he was in the right, I was in the wrong, and I froze my butt off for absolutely no reason other than to learn a lesson about not assuming that your interpretations of things is correct.
	So when you have a thought, you don't walk up to someone and say, you betrayed me.
	You walk up and you say, I'm upset.
	My thought is, or my belief is, that you betrayed me.
	I don't know if it's true or not, but I'd like to hear your side of things.
	And you just, right, you don't assume that your emotional interpretation is the truth until you get confirmation.
	So you go up to someone. Now, let's say that they did betray you.
	Then either, like, they don't have an excuse, you know, and maybe they deny it, but, you know, you then believe or accept that you're emotional.
	Interpretation has validity to it.
	And you say, well, yeah, you know what?
	From where I can see it, based on what you're saying, you did betray me, and I'm upset.
	I'm angry, right? Now, that's it.
	That's being honest. What happens after that is totally out of your hands.
	And you can just lie back on a hammock, so to speak, to let the other person earn their way back in.
	If somebody betrays you, then they can learn the lesson.
	They can learn the truth.
	They can figure out what happened, why they did it, what their motivation was, how far back goes, how deep into their history, why do they have this compulsion to betray you, why didn't they come and be honest and say, I really feel like I need to betray you, but I don't want to do it and have a conversation about that or anything like that, right?
	So, you state your issues with people.
	And then you let them earn their way back in.
	But it's not up to you.
	It's up to the other person to earn their way back in.
	If somebody has betrayed you, and it's confirmed, right?
	It's not just your feeling. If somebody has betrayed you, then it's not up to you whether they come back in your life.
	It's up to how they behave.
	Have they acknowledged their mistake?
	Have they made restitution?
	Have they figured out the causality?
	Have they done all of these kinds of things?
	If they have, yeah, okay, then you'll see how you feel.
	See how you feel. Relationships are to a large degree based upon emotions, and emotions are not irrational, but we need to be respected and all that.
	All right, let's just go back here, and let's just check and see if this is going to work.
	All right, let's see here.
	You can provide visual cues and perform the actions.
	Okay, sorry about that. Who wants to talk?
	Let me just throw this out here.
	I guess this is 1.0 of the chat on Telegram, so just let me know if you want to chat.
	I'm very happy to have you come in at the moment.
	We have a bunch of people listening, which I appreciate, and thank you very much for coming by.
	But can you change your...
	Know to say that you want to talk?
	Can you do that? Let me know.
	Let me know. Ah, very good.
	You can unmute yourself. Well, that seems quite simple and quite easy, I suppose, isn't it, right?
	Now, some people's microphones are red and some people's microphones are gray.
	Does anybody know what that means?
	Oh, no microphone capability?
	So they are in a mime situation?
	Hey, mime is money.
	All right. Well, I will...
	Let's see here. So, yeah, if you want to unmute, just feel free.
	Just unmute and holler.
	Man, I'm happy to hear you got questions, issues, comments, criticisms, debates, whatever it is that you want.
	Otherwise, I'm going to embark on a pretty lengthy diatribe because I got a very interesting email from a guy saying, what is a troll?
	Why would you call me a troll?
	It's a guy I called a troll. Like, what is a troll?
	How would you even know that I was a troll?
	What's your standard for knowing that I'm a troll?
	It seems kind of like a troll-y question.
	Even the troll-y question in philosophy is a troll.
	All right, so I'm sorry.
	The guy who's spanning me dancing is gone.
	Let's see here. Hi.
	Hey, Stefan. I was the caller you told your blue dot story to.
	I was 19 then. I'm now 27.
	Married. Wife pregnant with our first child.
	Wonderful. That is.
	That is fantastic. In Telegram, the mics that are gray are requesting to speak.
	I think. All right.
	Hang on a sec. Sorry. People are saying to me that they can't hear you.
	So, just before you chug along...
	Let's see that.
	Let me just go to my options here.
	And what's going on here?
	Audio. All right.
	Let's say default speakers are a Yeti microphone and apply.
	All right. Sorry, can you just give me a testing one, two, three again?
	All right. Let's see here.
	One more time, if you don't mind.
	One, two, three. Testing, one, two, three.
	Ah, there we go. I think we've got it up and running now.
	So, sorry, the gentleman was just saying he grew up in Zambia and he's having a kid in a couple of months.
	They don't know the gender and what sort of do you do to prepare for this kind of stuff?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, is your wife going into full nesting mode?
	I mean, is everything being cleaned and scrubbed?
	And generally, there's this sort of clean the house environment that goes on, particularly for women when they're pregnant.
	Is that stuff going on?
	We just had our first trimester scan today, so I guess it's still kind of like just starting in terms of getting the nest prepared, so to speak.
	Right. Okay. So, I mean, when I was younger, I had kids later than a lot of my friends, but I remember endless weekends of like just before the baby was born, you just go through and you like literally pull the fridge out from the wall and scrub the living crap out of everything because there's just this feeling of like, oh my God, we got to keep everything clean and all of that.
	So that's great. When you look at your social circle, are other people having kids?
	Are they parents? Are they pre-parents?
	Are they not in the vicinity of parenting?
	Or how's that looking? Social circle.
	A lot of our friends, they're already parents.
	They have very young children.
	So, yeah, you could say that a lot of our friends do have children of their own.
	That's great, because here's another thing, too, man.
	If you're having kids and your friends aren't having kids, be prepared for those friendships.
	Do take some serious blows, just because time and different focus and all of that.
	And, you know, when you become fundamentally responsible for another human being's life, it's really...
	It's really tough to take your friends' issues who are single kind of too seriously.
	I know that sounds kind of elitist and all of that, but it's just kind of a fact that happens when you are fundamentally responsible for keeping a helpless, independent human being alive and somebody else says, oh, I'm having some difficulties with my boss at work.
	It's just kind of tougher to keep that going.
	But if your friends are parents as well already or in that vicinity, that can help.
	Yeah, and I'll say a lot of friends of ours as well, they're kind of in the same boat during the lockdown.
	They're also expecting and soon-to-be parents as well.
	Oh, fantastic. Okay, great.
	Great. Sorry, people are just saying.
	Caller is louder, me quieter.
	Okay, I just changed this.
	Sorry, this is the first time I'm doing this stuff, so it'll take a little bit of while to get used to it, I'm sure.
	So, okay, so the biggest thing that has to happen or happened for me mentally on becoming a dad was...
	You just kind of cease to exist for a while relative to the life that you had before.
	I mean, this sounds kind of odd, and it sounds selfless, but it's not really that way.
	But basically, you become invisible to yourself because all of your energies, your thoughts, your requirements, these are all being poured into your childhood.
	And, you know, you wake up when your child wakes up and you don't, like, you can't have needs that contradict with your child's needs.
	I mean, when the baby's needs, right?
	Whatever the baby needs. If the baby is three o'clock in the morning and the baby wants to play, then you go and play.
	And whatever the baby needs, whatever the baby wants, you become invisible to yourself because your own needs, which is what has guided you for decades, your own needs kind of cease to exist.
	And I wish there was a better way to put it that didn't make it sound kind of selfless, like you erase yourself.
	But no, your goal now is to work on nurturing and bringing this life to a happy and positive fruition.
	And the people I know who got really dissatisfied with parenting were the people who tried to maintain their own preferences in the face of the absolutes of a baby.
	And if you just say to yourself, okay, for the next, I don't know, I mean, what it is now, my daughter is going to be 13 this year.
	She was born in December, so she turned 12 not too long ago.
	She's going to be 13 this year.
	And, you know, she's still got five years to go until she's an adult, just a little under five years.
	And you just, you put your own needs aside.
	And there's something so immensely and enormously liberating about putting your own needs aside.
	My preference in life as a whole was not to do what I'm doing, right?
	I mean, my preference in life as a whole was to be an actor, a playwright, a writer.
	I wanted to be in the theater world, the movie world, then the novel writing world, and you can get one of my novels for free, freedomain.com forward slash almost.
	It's an audio book. I'd really recommend it.
	It's a fantastic book.
	You'll love it, love it, love it. But when I got into the software field, I wanted, you know, let's make a bunch of money and let's be up there in the software world and be a recognized entrepreneur and speak at conferences and be a business guy and all that.
	But, you know, that sort of fundamental question that I asked myself back in 2005 was, does the world need another software guy or does the world need a philosopher?
	Does the world need another playwright or novelist or actor or does the world need philosophy?
	And when you sort of put it that way, then your own personal needs and preferences get set aside and you work for the benefit of the world.
	Now, I know that sounds selflessness and all the objectivist heads are out there exploding like you're self-sacrificing, but it's not.
	It's not that way at all.
	You do what is good for the world because the world is good to you as a whole, right?
	I mean, you've got food, you've got shelter, you've got a reasonable market to deal with, you've got great technology, you've got people who love you, you've got a society that was built from freedom, a free society, you've got some free speech, you've got all of these great things, and those...
	All occurred because people put their own immediate self-interest aside for the sake of a greater and broader And so for me, I went through these sort of two shockwaves in a sense, right?
	Number one. And of course, even in the business world, it's not about your own needs fundamentally, but you can't serve your own needs without serving the customer, without providing value to the customer and producing a good product and maintaining that product.
	So if it's just about your needs and your preferences, you really can't get anything done in life because people kind of smell that coming off you, like that self-absorption, that selfishness.
	And I'm not putting you in this category, of course.
	I'm just talking about the general philosophy of it.
	And so what you need to do is recognize that the time of focusing on your own needs in the short run is done and dusted.
	It's gone. It's in the rear view.
	And I don't know when it comes back.
	You know, I've been a father for over 12 years now and still not coming back.
	And, you know, my daughter really likes playing Among Us.
	No, I don't mind it. It's fine.
	It's a fine game. But I play it because she enjoys it so much.
	And we play with people in the FDR community.
	And it's really a lot of fun.
	But it's mostly because it's fun for her.
	So I kind of put that... Aside, I gave up writing books for the most part when I became a father.
	I gave up playing video games when I became a father.
	And I was never a huge gamer, but, you know, it was a lot of fun and I have not played much other than the stuff I've played with my daughter.
	But you've got to just look in the mirror and say, hey man, you know, I had a great time focusing on my own needs, but now it's not about me anymore.
	And if you want to do anything great in life, whether it be a parent or a philosopher or a business person, you just have to stop focusing on yourself and focus on the effect you're having on the world.
	And in this case...
	Having brought a child into your family, a baby into your family, you just owe everything to that baby and that's your focus and that's what you work on and that's who wins.
	You know, if you're like, oh, I'd really like to sit down and play some Scrabble with my wife and your child or your toddler needs some time and attention, it's like...
	Don't shave at that, you know, because the people who try and keep those two things going just tear themselves in two and end up not enjoying parenting.
	You just, you focus on what the child needs.
	And if you do that, you have a great relationship with your child.
	You fulfill your duties and roles as a parent, which is enormously and deeply and very satisfying.
	You will have very little conflict.
	My daughter, you know, people are amazed.
	I mean, people have played with her, maybe even some of them online here, have played with her in Among Us.
	And, you know, there have been three games in a row, four games in a row.
	She just gets killed first.
	She's still perfectly merry and happy and all of that.
	And I'm actually less gracious with those things than she is.
	She's never had a tantrum.
	She's never lost her temper.
	She is enormously funny, and she's very good at burns.
	Oh, let me tell you. Very good at burns.
	And just a real delight and a pleasure to be around.
	And she will, you know, make me food, she makes me smoothies, she makes me acai bowls, and she's happy to do it.
	And that's not out of any sense of obligation, but just because she knows how devoted I am to her, and that just comes back to you a hundredfold, and it's just the most beautiful echo In the universe.
	So my thought is just, you know, everything is for the child.
	And that would be, you know, to support your wife, to support your child.
	And don't get caught in that, you know, the boat and the dock, you know, they're going apart and you've got one leg on each, you just end up in the water.
	And so just really, really focus on...
	Making sure that you don't end up...
	I just put things aside.
	It wasn't like, oh, I really want to go and write a book, but I've got this kid.
	Or, oh, I really, really want to play some video game, but I've got this kid.
	Or, you know, even the Scrabble thing, you know?
	Or, I really, really want to go out to some place, but, you know, the baby's sleeping and it just...
	It's all about the baby. It's all about the baby.
	And that's how you build a great life.
	And fundamentally, nothing is more important than your relationship with your wife and your relationship with your child.
	I mean, just nothing. Nothing is more important than that.
	So yeah, I mean, I was writing a book or two a year before my daughter came along.
	And because I started this show in 2005, 2006, and my daughter was born in 2008, and I got cranked out like six or seven books in that time period.
	And the books are great. I'm happy with the books.
	And I will get back to writing more again.
	But... I just...
	I don't look back and say, oh, all these books I didn't have.
	It's like, well, I had a great time with my baby, with my toddler, with my daughter.
	And that's what matters. The books aren't going to hold my hand when I slip into the great beyond and dodge my relatives.
	Right? It's going to be...
	You only have to wait five years before you can play video games with your child.
	Well, that's kind of true, except tablet games are a little bit different.
	So... Yeah, just put your own needs aside.
	It will come back to you in terms of happiness and contentment and satisfaction about a million fold.
	That's my sort of big advice, but I'm certainly happy to, if there's anything else that I can help you with, I'm certainly happy to hear.
	No, that was fantastic.
	Thank you. I'm just looking forward to it.
	And congratulations, man.
	It is the most amazing thing.
	You know, a book is a dead thing.
	It's alive for other people when they're reading it, but it's a dead fossil that fell out of your head.
	That's what a book is. And a human being is alive and can challenge you and joke with you and play with you and race you and there's no comparison to the things that are out there.
	I was, I don't know, for some reason or another, I was thinking about the game Max Payne the other day, but it's bullet time.
	And I played that game and I was like, oh, it's a fun game.
	But compared to an actual human being, like who's going to outlast me and give me grandkids and all of that, it's a whole different, whole different thing.
	All right. Thank you very much.
	I'm happy to answer any other questions or any other topics or criticisms or debates that people want to get involved in.
	I know it's a bit of a new format, so, you know, don't be shy.
	You're still anonymous, man, so don't be shy.
	Just jump on in or I'm going to start talking about trolls.
	Hi there. Yeah, go ahead.
	I have a quick question, if you don't mind.
	Yeah, sorry, can you just, I hate to be like Mr.
	Techhead, but if you can just give me a kind of count to 10, I just want to drop by as we stream and just make sure that the volume's okay there.
	But if you can just give me a count off, I'd appreciate that.
	Sorry to be so annoyingly techy.
	Sure, no problem. Testing, testing.
	One, two, three. Testing, testing.
	One, two, three. All right.
	So you guys will let me know.
	Bitcoin is on sale today.
	Yes. Yes, it certainly is.
	Steph, do you think border people will overwhelm Arizona, i.e.
	Phoenix? Yes, they will.
	Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, people say that there's a border crisis.
	It's not a border crisis at all.
	It's entirely engineered to take down Christianity in America.
	There's no question of that.
	All right, my friend, go for it.
	I'm happy to answer whatever I can.
	Sure. So, throughout my life, kind of growing up, I have had a little bit of an issue with kind of being assertive and making a case to kind of get my way, and it's something that I think I really need to work on.
	But the truth is, I don't know how to go about doing that.
	Like, where do I start?
	How do I work on that?
	Right, okay. Do you remember a time in your life when you were assertive in the past?
	A lot of that comes when I actually get really, really angry.
	You know, unfortunately, when somebody kind of really gets under my skin and I end up kind of lashing out and yelling, you know?
	Oh, so do you go from sort of compliant to angry?
	Not very often, but yeah, it happens.
	Okay. Can you think of a specific example, doesn't have to be that recent, but something that's really vivid that comes to your mind so I can sort of understand the flip that happens here?
	Yeah, an example that comes to mind is a couple of years ago when I was at work.
	We were dealing with...
	My team and I were producing a product for another company, and the project manager that was in charge of working with us to receive that product...
	Would pull this little trick where we would give him a status update, and he would pull little words of that status update and kind of latch onto those.
	So we would tell him that, you know, goals A, B, and C were working fine today.
	But then, not to go into too much detail about my job or anything, but essentially...
	We would get one piece working, we would get one gold working a certain way and then the next day something would kind of fall off mechanically and change a little bit so that that gold was not met anymore.
	So in this guy's mind he would lash that he would spin that around back towards us and say hey you told me yesterday that That goal B was met, it was working, and now it's not working, so you guys are lying to me.
	Right. And obviously we were not lying to him because we were telling him the truth at that moment in our status update that it was working.
	But he wouldn't take into account the fact that these little things happen here and there.
	And it would not work anymore.
	So I just kind of got fed up with it once and I called him an effing liar.
	Your boss? Yes.
	And did you get fired?
	No. Actually, I think I kind of got lucky.
	No, I got lucky.
	I got lucky because he didn't actually hear me.
	I was on the other side of this kind of glass thing and that kind of blocked some of the sound like a glass partition and that blocked enough of the sound to where my co-worker that was right next to me heard me but the other project manager didn't hear me.
	Right, right, okay.
	And how long had this been going on with your boss when you blew up?
	Oh, this wasn't my boss, sorry about that.
	No, it was the project manager of the customer that was buying this product from us.
	Ah, okay, okay, okay, got it.
	Right. Yeah, and that project was really, really tough.
	It was like a set of five different products that all had to be working perfectly under a million different conditions and the customer wanted to tweak little things here and there.
	It was a project that really kind of took a lot of my time.
	I was pulling 55, 60 hour work weeks during that project and it was just something that kept going on, kept going on, kept going on and it was an increasing amount of annoyance and And I guess it all kind of piqued at that moment.
	Yes. Well, so for those of you who aren't in the tech industry, and I assume a bunch of you are, but...
	Here's the reality, right?
	So the salespeople get paid for selling stuff and then they oversell like crazy in order to make the sale and then they go to the cottage for the weekend and the tech people lose their entire lives chasing after the promises made by salespeople and it's a horrifying, exploitive situation that I fought like hell against when I was in the IT world with some success or some limited success.
	Okay, so... We all have sort of an ideal picture of what assertiveness or whatever we feel we're missing.
	What does it look like?
	So give me what you would have if you were like the superhero of perfect assertiveness in your own mind.
	What would that look like looking back through time?
	How would you have acted that you would say, that was assertive and that was good, man?
	Are you asking about that particular incident?
	I would say, let's talk about that particular incident.
	Yeah, I would say so. Okay.
	What I would have wanted to do is kind of let him know that some of the changes that he had been requesting, some of the issues that we were trying to do, because we had to...
	Run these products in several different...
	Without going into too much detail, it was just a lot of different ways that this product could be used.
	Let me be assertive for a second here too.
	Would it be fair to say that when the scope creep of the project exceeded the original specifications, that you would say, You want more than we agreed on.
	I can quote that for you, because this is how my fantasy was when I was sort of in your situation, assuming there's some overlap.
	My sort of fantasy was, you'd say, you know, we booked 100 hours for this project, right?
	And then somebody changed the scope, expands the scope.
	You say, okay, now it's going to be 200 hours.
	I'm happy to quote that for you.
	And wait for the person to come back.
	Now, they could come back and say, here's the extra money.
	Okay, in which case, you can probably make it work.
	Or they could come back and say, I can't justify the additional expense, so forget about this change in the scope of the project.
	So is it more like just giving people the reality that if they want more, you have to pay more?
	And I used to say this When I was on the sales side, I drifted around a lot between sales, marketing, and technical.
	And I would say to people before, like we would sign the project scope, right?
	And I would say, okay, so this is the project scope.
	Like this is what we've agreed to do.
	So I want you to think of it like you're buying a car and you've ticked off a bunch of stuff.
	I don't want the sunroof.
	I do want tire rims.
	I don't want a platform to step up to the cabin.
	Whatever. I don't want a GPS. So we've got this tick mark.
	And I said, look, If you want a sunroof, the cheapest time to order the sunroof is before the car gets built.
	Because if you say, you get the car delivered, and you say, now I want a sunroof, then they've got to send it back, they've got to cut the roof, it's much more time-consuming and expensive, right?
	So let's make sure that we know exactly what we want, or you know exactly what you want, and that you're happy with the quote.
	If we give a quote that says something costs 20 hours and it ends up taking 30 hours, Then we're not going to charge you for that any more than if we say it's going to take 20 hours.
	For some reason, it ends up taking 10 hours.
	We're not giving a refund. This is our best professional estimate.
	If you want to change anything, now's the time to do it because changing it down the road costs like 10 times more.
	And I would have this whole big speech and then what would happen is the customer would end up saying, oh, you know what?
	I know that sales guy.
	He's really agreeable, right?
	And so they wouldn't call me and say we want to change the scope.
	They'd call the sales guy and then the sales guy would say, oh, we can do that no problem.
	Why? Because he doesn't have to do it.
	It's the tech guys who have to do it.
	So there was this constant tension between the sales and the technical side.
	So is it that You would like to say if the project scope changes that people have to make rational decisions based upon rational costs, right?
	Or is it something like...
	Would that be assertive or is it something else completely?
	Well, I actually have been in that situation before, but the incident that I'm talking about was not that.
	So... Okay, tell me your fantasy scenario then.
	What would assertiveness look like?
	How would you look there and say, wow, pat myself on the back, that was great?
	I think I wanted to be able to tell him, like, okay, look, the reality is that this product...
	It's going to take a while to be able to tweak, to run in all the different situations that you want.
	And, you know, it wasn't scope creep or anything.
	It was just, look, it's going to take time.
	It's going to take a lot of effort to be able to have it do A, B, C, and D, because right now we got A, B, and C working.
	Changes we got to make to have D working knock B out of the table and A out of the table.
	So now we have to go back and chase and B to bring it back in.
	So I wanted to just let him know that his perception was wrong.
	Like we weren't lying to him saying that A and B are working today and then they're not working tomorrow.
	It's... I wanted to kind of rationally have him understand that we were not lying to him, that I was not lying to him.
	Right, right. Now, do you think that would have been the right thing to do?
	Because assertiveness doesn't operate in a vacuum, right?
	Because assertiveness may have particular consequences.
	I mean, if you're dealing with somebody really irrational, like I've dealt with people in my profession, I mean, everybody has, right?
	I've dealt with people in my profession who We're good to go.
	I mean, if it was somebody who worked for me, and this happened I think only once or twice in my entire career, then I just fired them, right?
	If it was someone who was my contemporary, like he was horizontal to me, then I would just make sure to float up enough negative facts about the person that they would end up getting fired by the managers.
	And if he was above me, I'd end up going outside of them to the investors and all of that to make sure that they understood what was going on.
	So sometimes assertiveness is not direct confrontation.
	but simply removing somebody who is destructive to the organization.
	But direct confrontation doesn't work with that kind of stuff because they're crazy, right?
	And, of course, if you give them direct confrontation, that person will then be aware that you have a negative or hostile intent towards them, and they'll work to get you fired first.
	So you have to work very quietly and behind the scenes.
	That, to me, is very assertive, and it's a better kind of assertiveness than these confrontations.
	It's simply alert people as to the fact that you're dangerous to their interests.
	And so assertiveness, to me, is doing the right thing in the long run, and it may have nothing to do with the direct confrontation fantasy, which often is really counterproductive, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that's true.
	With this guy, if him being a customer, he could always basically threaten to not write the check to the company, and then my...
	My job would be in danger.
	Right. Or he could say, he could just make up something about you.
	Like, he could just say, this guy did tell me to F off or whatever, and then what do you do, right?
	I mean, so sometimes direct confrontation is a form of masochism.
	In other words, you know, well, I was assertive, but you got fired and your reputation got trashed and you don't have a good reference.
	Like, oh, maybe that's your cue to become an entrepreneur.
	You know, do something yourself.
	But assertiveness is a very big...
	Challenge. It's not a simple thing.
	And I know that that doesn't help you, but the reason I'm saying that is that if you have an idea, like assertiveness is just, you know, you pound the table and you tell people exactly what you think, that's often just entirely self-destructive.
	So I'm sort of inviting you to trust your instincts better than you think they are.
	And if you say, well, I didn't tell that guy to screw himself, I didn't tell that guy to get lost, or I didn't say to that guy, we're not liars, you assholes, that probably would have been more akin to self-destruction than assertiveness.
	Assertiveness is when you establish or you promote the right values in the long term.
	You promote the right values in the long term if you can't necessarily achieve it in the short term.
	Managing upwards is notoriously difficult.
	Managing customers who hold a lot of the purse strings is notoriously difficult.
	So hopefully you can cut yourself some slack and not imagine that there's just some, you know, we all imagine there's some statement we could have made.
	Just some statement we could have made, right?
	I mean, I remember after, gosh, going back some time ago now, but when I was on my third Joe Rogan show, like the first Joe Rogan show, totally friendly.
	Second Joe Rogan show, super friendly.
	He came out and, you know, walked me to my car and he's like, oh man, if there's anything I can do to help with your career, you're great.
	You know, you're really doing important work in the world.
	And he was super friendly, super positive, right?
	And then the third one, you know, he just, I don't know what had happened, but someone got to him and he just did an entire, like, hostile, weird attempted takedown of me, right?
	And I could have said, well, wait a sec, Joe, where's this coming from?
	You know, you said I was the greatest thing since sliced bread the last time we met.
	Now you've totally turned on me. What's going on, right?
	Now, maybe that would have been a better thing to do.
	Maybe what I did, which was just to kind of roll with it and then have a reasonable conversation and then get the hell out.
	So, you know, you can always look back and say, well, if I'd said this one thing or done this one thing or taken this different approach or something like that, maybe, you know, maybe it would have been better.
	Or I could have just said to him, you know, because he brought my wife up, right?
	And he could have said, well, you know, one of the reasons that you're concerned about my statements about women is I've talked about the realities of single motherhood and you married a single mom.
	Right? And then he would have got...
	But then he would have got really mad.
	You know, and that's not the end of the world.
	I've been in conversations and debates with people who've gotten really mad before.
	But the problem is...
	And the other thing I thought is, like, later I thought, okay, well, maybe what I should have done is just, you know, nicely pulled off the...
	You know, and said, hey, man, you invited me down here for a pleasant chat like we had the last couple of times.
	This is a total bait and switch.
	If you wanted to come down...
	And just rag me based upon troll bullshit out there on the internet.
	You should have told me that ahead of time.
	You don't just sucker me down here for a pleasant chat like we had the last couple of times, then totally turn on me without warning.
	That's a bait and switch, and it's bullshit behavior.
	And get up and then walk out.
	But the problem is, this is a funny thing about assertiveness, is that I had my stuff all spread out.
	Right? And I had my computer up and, you know, I had my coat was in the bag or something like that, right?
	So here's the thing. I thought about this and I thought, okay, well, if I take my headphones off and walk out, that's a pretty powerful moment.
	That's going to be viewed a lot, right?
	You look at Piers Morgan storming out.
	You say, okay, but here's the thing.
	And the aesthetics of the situation, because, you know, we live in a pretty irrational world, right?
	The aesthetics of the situation is really complicated.
	So I thought, okay, if I say to him, you know, screw Get lost, Joe Rogan.
	You're like a two-faced backstabbing son of a bitch who invited me down here under false pretenses.
	You've totally turned to me. This is all bullshit.
	You know, I don't know what weird agenda you're running, but I've got no part of it.
	Then you get up, you take off.
	But then, what do you do?
	You've got all your stuff. Then you've got to sit there and, oh, I've got to grab this.
	I've got to fold up my computer.
	I've got to put it in the back. And then you just look ridiculous.
	Because, you know, you can't storm out in five minutes.
	Yeah. You can't do it, right?
	So you kind of lash there.
	Like if I had everything out of the studio, which of course I didn't know I was walking into this kind of trap, right?
	So if I'd have been sort of slowly packing things up and he's kind of making fun of me and I'm obviously upset or angry, I just look ridiculous.
	And you know, you can say, well, that doesn't make any sense.
	But again, we live in this appearance-based universe where...
	It's a real thing. And then people...
	I knew what would happen is if I had a slow exit where I had to pack things up, people would play, like, you know, sad music or Benny Hill music, and I would just look petty and ridiculous, and it was all being live-streamed, so it's not like that could have changed any time.
	So, unfortunately, you're just latched there by circumstances, and...
	You've just got to tough it out.
	But you're going to say, oh, if I'd have done this, it's like, well, maybe you trust your instincts in the moment.
	That's the first thing I wanted to say.
	The second thing I wanted to say is, you were born assertive.
	You wouldn't have survived if you weren't assertive.
	It's a really, really important thing to remember when it comes to assertiveness.
	We're all born assertive.
	The reason being that...
	As babies, we don't sit there and say, well, I am really hungry and I'm not going to make it through the night.
	If I don't eat, I'm going to die.
	But, you know, mom's kind of tired and I don't really want to intrude.
	I don't want to impose. I mean, what we do when we're Babies is we're hungry, we cry.
	We're happy, we laugh.
	We're uncomfortable, we squirm around and cry some more.
	We pee ourselves, we cry.
	And that's exactly what we should be doing.
	So we're all very assertive to begin with.
	The big question when you feel that you lack assertiveness is not that there's some personal flaw that you had.
	But something got beaten out of you.
	Something got bullied out of you.
	And recognizing that is really important.
	Because if assertiveness gets bullied out of you by parents, by teachers, by peers, by siblings, whoever, right?
	You can tell me the story of this if you want.
	I'm certainly happy to hear. But if your absolute, inbuilt, decisive, world-encompassing assertiveness gets punched out of you, By usually family environments when you're quite young.
	I mean, that's not a flaw.
	That's not a failure. That's not a...
	It's nothing lacking in you.
	It's just that you were punished for being assertive and because you wanted to survive, you stopped being assertive.
	And now when you want to be assertive, So when you were a kid, let's say if you were a kid, and being assertive meant that you'd get yelled at, verbally insulted, abused, beaten up, sent to bed without supper, thrown out into the snowbank, whatever. So if you got significantly and massively punished for being assertive when you were a child, and this happens in school, of course, all the time, right?
	And sometimes it comes from the teachers, and sometimes the teacher evokes the giggling idiots around you, the Bobbleheaded clown chuckle idiots that just laugh at everything and every possible thing that has any value.
	The hyenas of the classroom.
	So, if you are significantly punished for being assertive, then you are assertive-aversive, right?
	You are assertive-aversive.
	You are averse because you've been trained that way.
	I mean, if you have a puppy and every time the puppy whines, you beat it with a newspaper, the puppy will stop whining.
	Of course, right?
	But it's not because the puppy has some fundamental flaw.
	It's just that that's how the puppy is trained through negative stimuli.
	So I guess that's my question is, was there a history that took you from a perfectly assertive baby, which is the only way you survived, to where you are now?
	What was your relationship with being assertive in the past?
	Or how was it dealt with?
	Yeah, unfortunately, growing up, yeah, both of my parents were very quick to anger.
	It was kind of a situation where I would do something to bring the anger of my mom down on me, and she would start yelling and screaming.
	And my mom's Hispanic, so she can get very, very loud and very, very passionate and speak for a very long amount of time, just about how flawed I am.
	And then I would get a wait till my father gets home.
	And once dad did get home, the belt would come out.
	So you had the verbal abuse followed by the physical assault, right?
	Yeah. You characterized your mom as loud and passionate?
	Come on, man. Let's call things by their proper names, right?
	I mean, she was verbally abusive, wasn't she?
	I agree. I fully agree.
	So that's because you kind of sold it as a little softer than that, at least tried to.
	So yeah, so you were massively punished for...
	Being assertive, right?
	And being assertive, of course, doesn't mean that you're right.
	It just means that your thoughts and needs and preferences are out there in the open.
	So it's not a flaw.
	You don't have a fault.
	You don't have anything that you're lacking.
	You don't have anything that you're bad at.
	It's just a fact, like, if you've been to war, and then you go watching Saving Private Ryan, and you get all these flashbacks, and your hands start shaking, you're not a coward.
	You don't have a moral flaw.
	It's just, you're triggered, right?
	Because you're in the same situation where you could have got killed in the past.
	And so when, for you, when you're assertive, it brings up your inner mom and your inner dad.
	And your inner mom and your inner dad, they're not the same as your outer dad, right?
	So they're called alter egos, right?
	So what happens is when we as children, if we do something that brings punishment from our, let's just say your mom, right?
	So if you do something that brings punishment from your mom, then you implant an inner mom in yourself and what your inner mom does is she says, don't do that because that'll make the real mom, the outer mom, really angry.
	So you internalize your mom so that you avoid The physical danger of your mom's punishment, or the emotional danger, which sometimes can be even worse, right?
	Physical abuse leaves bruises, verbal abuse can reshape who you are, so it can be much more toxic and difficult to track and manage.
	So you internalize your mom, and your mom says, your inner mom says, don't do that, because then your outer mom will punish you, right?
	Now, we are not designed to flip from situations where We can't be assertive, but later we can.
	Right? We're not designed to do that any more than we're designed to learn one language and then suddenly completely flip to another language, no problem.
	Like... If you look at most of the primitive tribes in human society, they raise their children unbelievably brutally.
	I mean, there are mutilation rituals, there's circumcisions with rocks, there's like just, I did this whole speech in Australia, like they would throw spears at the young men to see who could dodge and be manly enough to achieve masculinity.
	There are these terrible cutting rituals and brutal tattoo rituals and all of that.
	And it's not like, well, half the tribe is really violent and brutal and destructive to children, but the other half is reasonable and nice and sweet.
	They're all that way.
	So we're not designed, if you grew up with physically and verbally abusive parents, your adaptation to that is if that's everyone in your entire environment, because most times it would be.
	If you grew up in a small village in Montaigneux, in France, in the 14th century, you wouldn't meet people different from those who raised you.
	Like, they'd all be pretty much the same.
	Kind of mindset. But now, now we can change, right?
	Now we can go from, oh, I had violent and abusive parents to I'm now going to surround myself with reasonable people.
	We're not really emotionally or physically designed for that kind of flexibility, but we have those kinds of opportunities, but it's tough.
	So what you have to do, of course, is you have to say to your inner mom, your inner dad, okay, they're not here anymore.
	Like, I thank you for your service.
	You know, you are, you are, it's time to retire.
	Because if I treat everyone like they're my mom, I'm basically going to end up with everyone acting like my mom.
	If I treated everyone in the world like they were the mom who raised me, my mom...
	Then I would end up either bringing those people who were like my mom into my life or kind of half turning the people.
	You know, if I treated my wife like she was my mom, well, she never would have married me, but then she'd kind of turn into my mom after a while, right?
	Because if you treat people like they're dangerous and scary and abusive and mean, and, you know, eventually they'll just sort of usually start acting out that kind of dysfunction.
	So... You say to your inner mom and your inner dad, you know, thank you guys so much.
	You kept me alive. You kept me safe.
	But we need something different now.
	And they're tired of doing it too because they want that psychological energy released to other things, growth and creativity or whatever it is, right?
	So your inner mom and your inner dad are right now stepping in saying, if you are assertive, you will die.
	If you are assertive, you will die.
	And all you have to do to worry about that or to think about that is say, what would have happened?
	So let me ask you this. What would have happened if you had simply kept standing up to your mom and kept standing up to your dad?
	Like, would they have just eventually given up?
	What would have happened if you had just resolutely and relentlessly pushed back and opposed how they wanted you?
	I actually got to see a little bit of how that works with my younger brother.
	Eventually, when my brother was growing up, my dad was no longer in the picture, so we only had my mom there, and there was no physical...
	There was nothing physically there to stop my younger brother from being more...
	like fighting back more.
	So I had kind of the instinct to where I would react to my mom's anger by just kind of folding and just kind of going with whatever she wanted.
	But my brother would fight back verbally more and more and more.
	And it got to a point where...
	My mom essentially tried to call the police on my brother one time because she essentially faked injuries.
	She tried to slap my brother and my brother kind of held his hand up and prevented her from slapping him.
	And that caused a very kind of minor welt on her arm.
	So, she decided to try to use that as an excuse to call the police on my brother.
	And how old was he at this point?
	Oh, she's 14, 15, something like that.
	So, yeah, he could have gotten into some serious...
	Trouble there, right? I mean, probably not jail, but he could have been put into a juvenile criminal facility where levels of child abuse and molestation and so on can sometimes be...
	Through the roof, I was reading the other day, I haven't confirmed it, but even some of the people that Dr.
	Phil sent to these rehabilitation centers got horribly abused.
	So, yeah, your brother could have really gone into a spiral of unbelievable levels of destruction simply by standing up against your mom, right?
	Exactly. Right.
	So, assertiveness is death.
	In your unconscious, assertiveness is death.
	So when you say, and this is an important thing to recognize, when you say to yourself, I've got to be assertive, you're basically saying to yourself, I have to jump out of a plane without a parachute.
	And I hope that you'll be gentle with yourself about all of that.
	That's a tough thing to overcome.
	That's a tough thing to overcome now.
	I think it's great. I know you can overcome it.
	We can change. We can grow and all of that.
	But the first thing that you have to do is not feel like you're deficient, which is just that you say, oh, I should be more assertive.
	I can't believe I'm not assertive. It's bad that I'm more assertive.
	I really should have said this. It's just another form of verbal abuse to say that you're deficient in something when all that's happened is you've been threatened unbelievably harshly for the basic positive human act of being assertive.
	And once you recognize that, then you can be gentle with yourself and say, yeah, this is a tough thing.
	You know, I can't believe my mom was this unbelievably brutal to me.
	It's really left a lot of emotional scars, and I've got to work through that.
	But you just don't have a standard for yourself.
	This is a great temptation when you've been abused, is you have a standard for yourself called, I'm not abused.
	Like, I should be assertive like I wasn't abused.
	But that's another form of abuse to yourself.
	I mean, to take a silly example, if you have a parent who abuses you so badly, you end up in a wheelchair.
	And then you say, I should be a great runner.
	I'm just sitting in this wheelchair.
	I'm a bad person. I'm a lazy person.
	It's like, no, you're just a victim.
	That doesn't mean you're a victim forever, but you've got to start from what is, which is you've been violently trained to not be And when you can be gentle with yourself about that and say, I've got to rebuild the aspects of my personality that my parents destroyed or tried to, then I think being gentle with that and building from a place of self-sympathy, you can't bully yourself into anything in this life.
	You just, you can't bully yourself into anything, at least for very long.
	You know, it's like the people who try to diet by, you know, I'm a disgusting fat pig and they look in the mirror and they grab their fat rolls and they shake them and look, my boobs are jiggling even though I'm a dude or whatever.
	They just get mad at themselves or frustrated.
	They're simply perpetuating the same dysfunction and self-abuse that is leading them to overeat in the first place.
	And so I would just say, you know, embrace the hurt child.
	Recognize that you were very much sinned against and you were very much abused.
	What was done to you was absolutely immoral, completely and totally immoral and destructive.
	And your parents are 100% to blame for that.
	100% to blame for that.
	And I hope that you can be gentle with yourself going forward and say, yeah, I have to rebuild.
	You know, I have to rebuild.
	I was sinned against.
	I have to recover and take it step by step, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, it does make sense.
	And it's actually really interesting that you should bring up the weight example because I actually am on a diet and I do have a little bit of that, of what you were talking about, where I stand in front of a mirror and I grab my fat roll and I'm like, ah, this is disgusting.
	And a lot of that has to do with, like I was saying earlier, my mom would go on for Endless hours about all my different flaws, and that was one of the flaws that she would constantly bring up, is anything and everything about my physical...
	Well, and she would be responsible for that as the person who gives you food as a kid, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I mean, I did...
	I would take my lunch money and buy candy and ice cream with it, rather than just stuff that was a little bit less sugary and stuff that was not as...
	not as...
	Calorie intensive, you know?
	And was your mom also overweight?
	No, no. Oh, okay.
	So she knew how to not be overweight.
	She just didn't help you with that.
	Yeah, she...
	I don't think she ever actually taught me a lot.
	It was mostly by I would do something and she would yell at me for doing it wrong.
	Like, she decided that she was going to teach me, just as an example, teach me how to properly dress.
	So we would go to the department store, buy a whole bunch of shirts and nice pants and all that stuff, you know, like button downs and all the nice clothes.
	And I would have to basically parade different shirts in front of her every day.
	Before school, even on the weekends going out with my friends, I would have to bring her all these shirts and she would say, why are you going to wear that shirt?
	You look a clown. No, no, don't wear that shirt.
	You're not a 40-year-old man.
	Why would you wear that shirt? So instead of actually giving me an example, a positive example of, okay, do A, B, and C, I would go up to her with option A and she would Criticize me for why would you even think that was a good option?
	And by the way, these were all clothes that she picked out because at, you know, 15, 16, I didn't have any money on my own.
	Right. And do you know what her motivation was for doing that?
	A lot of it is vanity, I think.
	No, I don't know about that.
	I mean, listen, I don't want to tell you your own experience.
	Like, no, you don't know your mother.
	Me, the guy who just met you, totally does.
	But maybe, sorry, that was a bit rude of me.
	I apologize for that. Can you just break that out for me a little bit more, make sure I sort of see where you're coming from?
	Yeah, she was always very worried about her own physical appearance, not only in terms of the clothes that she would wear, But also her physical appearance in terms of always having perfect hair, perfect makeup, perfect shoes at the expense of her own feet.
	Her feet even now are really warped because she liked the pointy high heels and all that stuff.
	So she wrecked her feet like Michael Jackson style?
	Yeah. Yeah, because his feet were just horrendously destroyed from dancing and all of that.
	And same thing with Prince. Like, his whole hips were destroyed from dancing, and it's all like, was it worth it?
	I don't know why people do that to themselves.
	But, okay, so she had this hyper-awareness of her own appearance, right?
	Right. And so you had to look perfect as well, right?
	Right. Yeah, she definitely wanted my brother and I to look as good as possible.
	And looking back, do you think she was right about some of the choices that she was suggesting?
	Not really. I mean, if I'm going out with my friends and I wanted to wear a normal t-shirt, nothing with curse words or crazy images on it, literally just T-shirt and jeans.
	It's a little bit ridiculous to expect me to need to dress up if I'm going out to a casual restaurant or even literally just to a friend's house.
	Right. I mean, if I was walking into a job interview, yeah, I would need to wear a nice jacket and then a tie and a nice shirt, right?
	But this was just...
	Going to school or going to my friend's place.
	Right, right. So, in general, I believe, people who hyper-criticize others do so because they are out of control themselves.
	They have no capacity to control themselves.
	They feel out of control in their own mind.
	And therefore, they have an obsessive need to control others.
	Because this is the way it works in life, man.
	You understand this, you'll understand just about everybody you meet.
	Which is, if you can't control yourself, you end up having to control other people, right?
	If you can't control yourself, you end up having to control other people.
	In other words, let's say somebody is saying something that you find just so upsetting.
	Well, a mature person, a wise person says, oh, I find that really upsetting.
	I should probably figure out why.
	And if it is genuinely, you know, legitimately wrong what the person is saying, I can either engage them and prove them wrong, I can ignore them, or whatever it is, right?
	But you control yourself.
	You don't just react like an idiot, right?
	But if you can't control yourself, then you end up having to control others.
	Like, why was I? I was deplatformed because people couldn't control their own emotions.
	Because I would say something and they would get triggered and they couldn't manage that triggering within themselves.
	It made them intensely uncomfortable and they didn't even know that it's their job to manage their own emotions.
	So in the same way, like if someone is in a mall randomly shooting people, you're going to have to tackle that person and take their gun away because they're massively dangerous to people and they're obviously out of control themselves.
	And so, if words are like bullets to you, then tackling someone and removing them from the public square, like with me, it makes a kind of weird sense by that logic.
	If words are weapons, right?
	And so, your mother, I would imagine, felt massively out of control of her own emotions.
	In other words, she couldn't handle any criticism herself.
	And because she couldn't handle any criticism herself, she had to obsessively control you to make sure that you never exposed her to the self-attacks that she knew she would inflict upon herself if anything went wrong.
	In other words, if you were out walking with her at the mall and somebody gave you a second look like, what the hell is he wearing?
	Then she would brutalize herself.
	The verbal abuse that she poured upon you was to avoid the verbal abuse that would be poured upon her.
	Now, normally parents are supposed to make sacrifices so that children live more peacefully.
	But in this case, she sacrificed your happiness so that she could gain some escape from the intense verbal abuse that would be poured upon herself by herself if something went wrong and so on.
	right? So she was criticized, she didn't know how to handle her own self-criticism, so she ends up controlling you.
	And once you understand that, and I say this not so that you have any sympathy towards your mom, certainly welcome to if you want, but that's not the causality of what I'm talking about.
	The causality is when you see someone, you called it passionate and loud, when you see someone who can't control herself, this is in the dating market, in the marriage market, if the person cannot control herself, if the woman cannot control herself, She will end up enslaving you.
	She will end up trying to control you, and it will be a living hell.
	So look for people who have self-control.
	Now, if you're around people who don't have self-control, then you will end up losing self-control yourself.
	And the example, I think, was in the work situation where someone was saying, you guys lied to me, which is a very strong and terrible accusation to launcher people, and the person was in fact wrong who was saying that.
	And because they had no self-control, Then you felt, oh my gosh, he's calling me a liar.
	That totally offends me.
	That's totally upsetting. So I'm going to tell him to fuck off.
	Or he's a fucking whatever.
	I can't remember what you said exactly, right?
	So if you're around people who have no self-control, they will provoke you to the point where you will end up losing self-control.
	And that's a very, very bad situation to be in.
	If you're around people who can manage their own emotions, it doesn't mean they're dead inside.
	It just means that they don't They don't act out their emotions.
	Like if someone upsets me, it doesn't mean that they're upsetting.
	It just means I'm upset. It may mean that they're upsetting.
	I don't have to have a conversation with it or really examine it.
	But people who just like their input-output, there's no conscious control between stimulus and response.
	And you only have about a quarter of a second when you get triggered to prevent the acting out and reason through it.
	So I would say that when it comes to assertiveness, What you want to be is you want to be in situations where you can be assertiveness without...
	You can be assertive without people trying to destroy your life.
	It's really, really important because if you're assertive and people try to destroy your life, then you're right back with your mom when you were a kid and then she's calling the cops faking an injury and you might end up in a juvenile detention facility getting gang raped by guards or something horrible like that, right?
	So, in general, rather than saying, well, I've just got to be assertive, say, I need people in my life Where being assertive doesn't destroy me.
	Like they won't work. They're not trolls.
	They want to try and destroy me by being assertive.
	Like earlier I was saying I will only do business with people I have a personal relationship with and or who are Christians.
	And I'll go into some of the reasons why at some point because when I was assertive on other platforms, the other platforms Destroyed, you know, 15 years of work, 10 years of work, and so on, and so I couldn't be assertive in those environments.
	Does that mean I should have been assertive in some way that that didn't happen?
	You know, it's hard to say. I mean, I only would have silenced myself, which is not being assertive.
	You know, the point of what I do is to tell the truth, not to have an audience or have a platform, right?
	Because I don't want to sacrifice the truth for the sake of a platform or an audience that's just selling out, and that's not fucking not going to do that.
	I'm not going to do that. So, Rather than say, I just need to be assertive no matter what, it's saying, I need to have people in my life who can handle me being assertive, and who I can handle being assertive with me.
	So I think that's...
	Let's see here.
	Made sure to get me a girl who has excellent emotional regulation, zero manipulation, zero lies, so she can assert herself, and it's logical.
	Yeah, fantastic. We all go crazy alone, a little bit.
	You'll only do business with Christians.
	That's my first port of call.
	Absolutely, my first port of call.
	Because I never got deplatformed by a Christian.
	I never got deplatformed.
	In fact, Christians stood up And helped me produce documentaries.
	Christians stood up and invited me to come give speeches on Jesus and give me public venues.
	Christians, I criticized Christians the most and they treated me the very best.
	The very best. I defended Jews like crazy and was not always the same reaction.
	Some, but not always the same.
	So, you simply cannot beat Christianity for just amazing behavior.
	You can't beat it. You know, the atheists didn't give me platforms.
	The atheists didn't defend me.
	But the Christians have been, you know, universally, I can't think of many exceptions, just amazing and wonderful in my trials and tribulations.
	So, yes, that is, I'm an empiricist man, and what they do works, and it's very compelling.
	All right. I hope that helps.
	If there's anybody else who wants to jump in, we have time for another question or two, or debate or two, or criticism or two.
	I'm open. Yeah, I have a question.
	Yes, sir. And do I need to do the test?
	Yeah, I can hear you fine.
	Go ahead. Okay.
	I have a question. You already talked about it with doing business.
	How do you approach that?
	Do you ask those business owners for their political views?
	How do you personally approach that issue?
	Well, yeah, so, you know, when I was talking to a fine young lady from Locals today, she said, you know, we don't allow pornography or illegal behavior.
	And I said, well, I can commit to at least one of those.
	And there was sort of a pause, and then she, of course, she recognized that I was joking, and we laughed about it, and I said, of course, I would never do either of those things.
	And so, you know, do they have a sense of humor, and do they have a principled commitment to free speech?
	And, you know, I didn't ask her her religious perspectives.
	I didn't say, you know, let's pray together to do some sort of purity test, but...
	I'm not going to do any business with some faceless, empty bureaucracy that you can't ever get in touch with.
	You can't phone someone at Facebook.
	You can't phone someone at Twitter or YouTube.
	I'm still on Facebook, but all I do is really just post my shows there.
	So, when it comes to the platforms that I'm on, for the most part, I've had conversations with people who understand that they have, you know, the guy who runs Gab is a very strong, devout Christian, and, you know, the guy who runs Breitian is a very strong, devout Christian, and,
	you know, John Dutoit, I don't think I'm telling tales out of school, a very strong, devout Christian with very strong moral beliefs, and we work together on Hong Kong, we work together on the Poland world, I hope we can work together again because he's a magnificent guy with a very strong moral character.
	He's a great dad and a fantastic filmmaker, by the way, as well.
	So I just won't invest in faceless, no contact, no negotiation kind of thing, right?
	And I also, you know, YouTube, you know, they broke their own rules, right?
	They're supposed to give you warnings. They're supposed to, again, I just went from, you know, full standing, no strikes to no channel whatsoever, no appeal, right?
	And same thing with Twitter.
	So, yeah, just garbage organizations, as far as I can tell.
	And, you know, because they're big, they got infested by the woke activists and who can't manage their own emotions and somehow think...
	That that gives them the right to bully and silence other people, which, you know, unfortunately, in the current condition or circumstance, it kind of did, right?
	Or Patreon. Look at Patreon and, you know, some of the stuff that's allowed on these platforms.
	I mean, my God. I mean, the stuff that's allowed on Patreon, the stuff that's allowed on Twitter, the stuff that's allowed on YouTube, I mean, it's just jaw-droppingly reprehensible in so many ways.
	And so, you know, in some ways it's like glad to be out of the cesspool in many ways.
	All right. Is there something else you wanted to mention or did I completely bypass your question or how did that play?
	Yeah, I also had a question about, it's a philosophical question.
	I like your philosophical side more.
	But why is it that the left is so successful in making the political personable, like brand marketing, that is such a way?
	And why is the right wing, the conservative side of politics, they are not really making the political personable?
	Well, I mean, if we take the sort of standard cliched, and there's usually truth in just about every stereotype, but if you take the standard cliched view that the people on the left are those who benefit from government spending and the people on the right are people who pay for government spending, then it's pretty easy for the left to make the political the personal.
	So if you are on welfare and you have, you know, two kids by two different dads, neither of the dads are in the picture.
	You never really finished high school.
	You don't feel like you have any job opportunities and, you know, you desperately need or feel that you desperately need that four or five thousand dollars a month you get in direct and indirect subsidies and all of that.
	That's pretty easy to make the political personal, because if someone comes along and says, I think the welfare state is immoral and destructive, and it makes people addicted to dependency, and it's blatant vote buying.
	So if you come along and you say that, then the woman, or it could be a man too, right?
	But the woman who's on welfare...
	Looks at that $5,000 a month she's getting and says, you know, old Baldy over there is completely screwing with my capacity to survive and my children's capacity to eat, right?
	So it becomes very personal, very personal, very quickly.
	Whereas if you kind of want to lower the tax rate, you say, oh, well, you know, maybe I'll get the tax rate down by 5% or whatever.
	Okay, so if you're making $100,000 a year, maybe you'll get another $5,000 a year out of that.
	I mean, that's important. But, you know, if you take home $75,000 rather than $70,000, it's nice, but it's certainly not the difference between surviving and not surviving in your mind, right?
	Whereas if, you know, the welfare state gets cut or, you know, benefits get cut or healthcare kind of goes away in the sort of socialist model, you literally feel like you can't survive.
	So it hits you right in the solar plexus.
	It hits you right in the feels, right?
	And it's the same thing is true for people who work for government unions, right?
	As you know, government unions were never supposed to be a thing.
	Ever. Because unions are supposed to exist To fight the capitalists' endless desire to grind down wages in pursuit of massive profits, right?
	Because they want to pay their workers less, and so the workers have to collectivize in order to fight back against the capitalist factory owner's desire to grind their wages down, make more profits.
	Now, there is no profit motive.
	In the government, which is why government workers for many years either weren't allowed to or didn't get any public support or even see the need to unionize.
	Because when you have a violent legal monopoly, a union doesn't make...
	and no profit motive. A union makes no sense from a socialist or Marxist standpoint because there's no profit motive grinding down the workers' wages.
	And so if you are...
	A government worker.
	And I only worked once in the government.
	I worked at the Department of Education for a summer And I was in charge of maintaining and making changes to and tracking all the changes to a union contract.
	So, I mean, I got to read that thing cover to cover, and it was just unbelievably jaw-dropping.
	And I saw what happened in these government offices.
	You know, the people would kind of roll in a little bit after nine.
	They'd go and get a coffee.
	They'd sit and chit-chat for a while.
	And I think there was one guy there, and the rest were all women.
	And I remember one woman...
	Spent the entire morning telling her co-workers about how her husband was quitting smoking.
	I remember this so clearly like it was yesterday.
	She said, ah, my husband, ah, he's quitting smoking and he's such a bear.
	He's so ill-tempered when he quits smoking and he does this all the time.
	I literally, I, I, he was nagging at me so much and crabbing at me so much.
	I literally... Went across the street.
	I picked up a pack of cigarettes.
	I went and knelt in front of him and I begged him to smoke a cigarette just so I could survive the evening.
	I just remember her telling the story.
	Oh, yes. You know, they had a pretty...
	And then they would go for a long lunch and then in the afternoon they'd have a training seminar on diversity and then, you know, they did nothing.
	Nothing. Now...
	And they were all, of course, overweight.
	That seems to be almost a given when it comes to government workers as a whole because, you know, they spend most of the time sitting in chairs and overeating.
	And so if you have that kind of job, You have no responsibilities.
	You can't really be fired.
	There's no accountability and all of that.
	And then someone comes along and says, I think we should privatize education.
	Well, what's going to happen? You're going to look at your plum, cushy, do-nothing, overpaid, massive benefits and pensions.
	All that might dry up and go away.
	You might actually get up and work for a living.
	You might actually have some accountability.
	Now, it's a universal truth that the easier your life, the softer you get.
	I mean, it's a sad, sad thing, man.
	The easier your life, the softer you get, the more jumpy you get, the more paranoid you get, the more insecure When you're coddled and you're pampered and you're spoiled, it's like being in space, right?
	You don't have resistance with gravity, and your bones and your muscles all get ridiculously soft.
	And so people have evolved into economic spinelessness, and then you're saying, hey, I think I'm going to dial up gravity to its proper levels, and they're like, I'm going to puddle into a jellyfish of nothing, and it's very personal for them.
	Whereas for other people, oh, you know, privatized education, okay, I can see some benefits in that.
	My property taxes would go down to some degree and I'd have more.
	But it's pretty abstract, right?
	Whereas your actual paycheck, your actual job security, your actual do-nothing, overpaid bullshit, quote, career, and, you know, it's a lot of women and all of that in the government.
	Women outnumber men significantly in government employment because you've got to find some place to put them.
	So they don't have kids.
	And it's very easy to make the political personal one.
	Political decisions have that much impact because you're so dependent on the state.
	Does that make sense? Yes.
	Yes. Yes, very much.
	You're talking about...
	Oh, I forgot the part.
	I'm a bit nervous.
	I don't have to. Oh, no, fine.
	We're just chatting. Okay. Okay.
	I also, at the moment, I feel like a bit suffocated because I'm, like, wanting to get out of a situation.
	Like, I read your books and all of that, and I... Yeah, I brought things to the conversation, like you say.
	Like Dylan, the people were not willing to listen to my arguments.
	It's time for me now to move on.
	I basically want to get out of the village I grew up in.
	Sorry, how do you feel when people don't listen to your arguments?
	Yeah, I feel very sad, very disheartening, and also with the truth that they say they care, but then they're not really considerate about my feelings.
	Right. Can I give you a perspective that will help with this?
	Because, you know, those of us who are out here in the world trying to make people listen to reason, we're very often disappointed, right?
	We're very often disappointed.
	And I have developed a mindset that I think will be very helpful to everyone out there who is continually disappointed at people's lack of willingness to listen to reason.
	Are you ready? Yes.
	Okay. People are perfectly free to not listen to you.
	People are perfectly free to not listen to reason.
	People are perfectly free to deny evidence and facts.
	Perfectly free. But freedom for them is also freedom for you.
	Freedom for other people is freedom for you.
	And it's really, really important.
	It's really important Principle to grind into yourself.
	People are free to reject everything that you say, no matter how reasonable, no matter how sensible.
	And you are perfectly free to not care about them anymore.
	Because if you say, well, I've got to change people's minds, they're not going to listen to me, but I've got to keep caring about them, you are writing an obituary for your own sanity.
	You're writing an obituary for your own sanity.
	You do the very best you can to bring reason and evidence to people.
	And if they won't listen, if they won't listen, you are perfectly free to detach from them.
	Like if you have a friend who smokes like a chimney and you say, hey man, you gotta stop smoking.
	It's gonna kill you.
	Right? And you give him the reason, the evidence of all the facts, right?
	And he just says, now, forget it, I'm going to keep smoking.
	It's like, okay, I will refuse to care for you more than you care for yourself.
	I will not care for you more than you care for yourself, because the moment you care for people more than they care for themselves, you are just going to get exploited.
	You are going to get taken from a ride.
	You are going to get pillaged.
	You are going to get emotional vampires to come and feast on every last corpsicle in your jugular.
	You cannot care for people more than they care for themselves.
	If people won't listen to reason, their lives will become hell.
	The road to hell is paved with anti-rationality.
	That's really all it is. And all hell is is a place where reason has no purchase.
	Whether it's totalitarianism, whether it's an abusive relationship, whether it's the self-hatred fostered by communists through higher education, whatever it is.
	Hell is where reason has no sway.
	In the same way that your dreams are places where physics have no sway.
	Continuity has no sway.
	Geography has no sway.
	Hell is where reason has no sway.
	And so when you say to people, listen to reason, and they say, no!
	They are devils dragging you to hell.
	This sounds like an allegory.
	It's not. They are devils dragging you into hell itself.
	Now, If you had a physical devil who was dragging you to hell, you would fight like hell to not go there, right?
	You would fight like hell not to go there.
	And you wouldn't sit there and say, well, to be fair, the devil really does want me to go to hell, so I really should care about the devil's feelings.
	It's like, no, no, no, that's hell.
	You don't want to go there. You don't want to be there.
	You don't want to be there. People will drag you to hell.
	Hell is a place where reason has no purchase, and...
	No sway. And if you're rational, you're silent.
	You're silenced in hell.
	In hell, reason has no voice.
	Evidence has no purchase.
	Facts have no weight.
	People make up whatever they want.
	Say whatever they want.
	Insult whoever they want.
	Make up terms. Trump said that Neo-Nazis are very fine people.
	Stefan Molyneux is a racist and white supremacist.
	They just make up whatever they want. They don't need any facts.
	They don't need any evidence. Like, James O'Keefe's currently fighting like hell against the New York Times at the moment, and they got past the first attempt to dismiss.
	Now they go to Discovery, and you're going to actually find out what's on the seething cauldron lid of hell known as the New York Times.
	And, uh...
	It's an amazing, amazing thing.
	Good for him. Good for him.
	And... Hell is where you're not going to have anything to say if anything you say is rational.
	People make up whatever they want.
	They're incredibly dangerous to be around.
	They will do anything to keep their illusions intact, including feeding you into the wood chipper of their own vanity, should that prove necessary.
	They are addicts to unreality.
	They are in a dream.
	They're in a nightmare that they think is a paradise, like every addict.
	And they will sacrifice anything and everyone, including you and especially you, to maintain their delusions of virtue and delusions of truth.
	They have emptied themselves out in pursuit of the unreal and have become a Pac-Man on the glowing darts of every rational mind they can get a hold of.
	Having become addicted to reality, they've lost control over themselves.
	Sorry, having become addicted to unreality, they have lost control over themselves and over nature.
	And therefore, the only way they can feel any sense of control is to have control over others.
	Now, they can't inspire others because they are spiritually dead inside.
	So the only thing they can do to gain any sense of power is to destroy others.
	To destroy others.
	And when you go into that...
	Manipulative, endlessly manipulative, lower intestine rat's maze of a hall of mirrors where everything you do is wrong and everything they say that's insulting is just you misinterpreting everything, whereas everything you say that's honest is you insulting them.
	There's no way out.
	The only way to win that game is to not play.
	So, when people don't listen to reason, With me, and it happens a lot, obviously.
	When people don't listen to reason, they don't listen to facts, I get the glorious indifference of not having to give a rat's ass about them anymore.
	I mean, I could pretend to if I want, and I have done this to my own detriment for many years.
	I won't do it anymore.
	I haven't done it for a long time.
	Is that if society, if the world as a whole, that the people...
	I don't have people in my life anymore who don't listen to reason...
	Why would I? Any more than I could pretend to be in love with someone I don't share a language with.
	All it would be is lust and delusion.
	So, when people don't listen to reason and you view that as a massive negative, it's just a negative.
	You've got to listen to reason!
	I can't feel safe if you don't listen to reason.
	The world can't be saved if you don't listen to reason.
	You have to! Listen to reason!
	Right? What's happened is they've simply gained control over you.
	Because by denying you what you so desperately need, they gain a sense of power.
	Ah! That's what they need.
	That's what they live for. They gain that sense of power.
	You can see this.
	You know, older brothers... Holding the candy up so the younger brother or the younger sister can't reach it, and they're crying, and they're frustrated, and they're trying to reach it, but they can't, and the older brother with that sadistic, smug self-satisfaction of, hey, look, I'm taller. I'm great.
	Look at me. How wonderful.
	I'm taller. I had the incredible skill and expertise of having to drop out of mom's vagina before you.
	Look at me. I'm magnificent, right?
	So to deny While people desperately want, you can see this with kids who are having tantrums, right?
	Kids are having tantrums, the parents are simply denying.
	Denying, denying that. You don't give your kids stuff because they're having a tantrum, but they're having a tantrum because you're taking pleasure in denying them.
	That's why the kids have tantrums.
	Toddlers have tantrums because the parents are taking pleasure in denying them.
	That sadistic pleasure of, oh, you want it?
	Can't have it. Oh, you want it?
	Can't have it. The more you need with most people, the more they will deny you out of sadism, out of having this sad lack and emptiness of self-regard and self-control and self-power in their life.
	They'll simply deny you because denying others is the only way they feel that they exist.
	They have any power frustrating others.
	Other people want things and they say, no, not really.
	Maybe later. Stick around.
	Just maybe, you know, like the woman, the sort of archetypical woman who some, the beta orbiters, the guys who are around who are like, hey, did you break up with that guy yet?
	Can I help you move? Do you need any help with your homework?
	Can I rub your feet? Do you need that sofa moved?
	I'm happy to, you know, do you need me to lend you any money?
	Right? They take pleasure in denying that And continuing to deny.
	I mean, obviously a woman can deny sexual access to whoever the hell she wants.
	Perfectly fine. She says no and go away.
	But if she says, well, you know, we'll see, or you just hang around, then she's just taking pleasure in the continual denial of romantic access because that's all that gives her a sense of power.
	So by sticking around people who deny reason, you're actually summoning the worst devils of their nature and giving those devils control over the personality.
	By being around people, you need them to listen.
	They must listen.
	Need, need, need.
	Deny, deny, deny. You are fortifying the worst habits of the saddest domination over others, which is denial of legitimate needs.
	Denial of legitimate needs.
	So when people don't listen to reason, And you continue to try and get them to listen to reason.
	You know who's not listening to reason?
	You. They've clearly stated.
	Reason is not welcome here.
	We don't do evidence.
	We don't do facts. We don't do truth at all here.
	Take that shit elsewhere.
	We ain't buying. And you continue to try and deliver them reason when they've clearly said they don't want it.
	And then you say, well, they're not listening to reason.
	No, no, no. It's you who's not listening to reason.
	It's you who's not listening to the facts and evidence and truth that they don't want reason.
	So you say, okay, well, what do I do?
	How do I get out of this relationship without it just tearing my heart apart?
	Ah, the freedom to not give a shit anymore.
	Somebody you care about smokes like a chimney, drinks like crazy, doesn't exercise gains weight.
	You know, in the last year, the millennial generation has gained an average of 41 fucking pounds.
	41 pounds!
	The average weight gain for Americans over the last year is 20-odd pounds.
	But for millennials, it's 41 pounds.
	Somebody just keeps, you say, oh man, don't eat so much, exercise, get out of the house.
	And they won't do it.
	It's like, I am now liberated from giving a shit about you because if you don't care about yourself, I'm not going to be sucking into caring for you.
	Do not give people a sense of power over you because it destroys their soul.
	You are an agent in their destruction.
	It's not you who's being destroyed.
	It's them who's being destroyed.
	You do not give people power over your soul.
	You do not give people the power to feel powerful by rejecting your legitimate needs and requests.
	If somebody rejects legitimate needs and requests, I need you to listen to reason, I need you to accept facts, I need you to deal with reality, If they reject all of that, you get to dance out of there without a fucking care in the world.
	Liberation. Liberation.
	If you're going to hell, I'm not coming.
	If you won't listen to reason, I'm not following you down.
	If facts are your enemy, I am free from you.
	If your only sense of control is denying my legitimate requests, guess what?
	I will take my legitimate requests elsewhere to people who will.
	Listen to reason. Listen to facts.
	Respect reality. Because it's the only place I can have any relationships anyway.
	You can't have relationships with denial or sadism or people Feeling a pathetic sense of power by frustrating others.
	There's no relationship. There's nothing there but hell.
	You want them to listen to reason?
	Show them that you listen to reason by walking out without a care in the world.
	World de-platforms me.
	All right. I'm off politics.
	Focusing on Bitcoin and personal conversations where I can have an effect.
	Focusing on what gives me pleasure.
	No more sacrifice. Oh man, you gotta do your truth about videos, people tell me.
	Really? Why?
	Because 5% of people followed me to a new platform?
	Because my donations have cratered?
	Why? You get what you deserve.
	I'm not talking to you guys, right?
	You're here on the conversation. It's wonderful.
	Love you for it. Thank you for it.
	It's great. I'm talking to everyone else.
	The deplatforming only worked because people didn't follow me, right?
	Because being one website over apparently is just a bridge too far.
	Typing in FreeDomain.com slash connect rather than YouTube.com.
	It's just impossible. I can't possibly follow you there.
	You know, I get interviewed and some of the interviews are on YouTube and people are like, hey man, I've really missed you.
	Where have you been? I'm not impossible to find.
	I'm not sitting here in a camo gear and a snorkel in the Florida swamps trying to hide from Airboats.
	I'm like, right there.
	I'm right there, freedomain.com.
	And people are like, well, you know, it's kind of tough to, I don't know, do I have to create a bit shoot account?
	Oh, man. That's a drag.
	I don't want to create a bit shoot account.
	That's too much work.
	Okay, so if it's too much work for you to create a bit shoot account, then why the hell would I work to save your ass?
	I won't care about people more than they care about themselves.
	I certainly won't care about them more than they care about me, if it's a relationship.
	They're like, oh man, you know, you're the greatest guy around.
	I really miss your show. You have no one to blame but yourself, right?
	I'm still here. I'm still producing material.
	Or all the people who were on my show and so on, and they're like, oh man, you're great.
	You're wonderful. We've got to work together.
	It's going to be fantastic. It's like, oh, when I start talking about topics they're not comfortable with, poof, all gone, right?
	Okay. Great!
	Great! Then you can go and muck about with your political bullshit thinking you're going to change anything when you're not.
	You can have your gig, right?
	And it's liberating. I'm telling you.
	I know this. I don't want to sound bitter.
	I'm not bitter. I'm genuinely not bitter.
	I hope that I'm not coming across as bitter because I'm not bitter.
	I just, I absorb information.
	I'm just an information eater.
	I'm a fact eater. I'm a empiricism and truth eater.
	It's what I do. And so if the world as a whole doesn't want to listen to reason and doesn't seem to complain that much when one of the greatest speakers of reason and facts is yeeted off the major platforms, That's very liberating for me.
	Then I can work on what I want to work on.
	I can focus on what gives me the most pleasure.
	And I have no need or desire to sacrifice one goddamn thing.
	I'm not going to take one. Why would I take risks anymore?
	Who's taking a risk for me, right?
	I mean, a risk being come to another website and be notified of when I post a video, right?
	My BitChute subscribers are 8% of my YouTube subscribers.
	And I already had a bunch of BitChute subscribers.
	So about 3%, and, you know, again, not bitter, just facts, about 3% of my YouTube subscribers went over to BitChute.
	About 3%.
	So why the hell was I sticking my neck out Risking massive blowback, risking violence, risking death threats, risking terroristic threats to attack venues.
	Why the fuck would I be sticking my neck out for people who can't be bothered to type in a new website?
	And again, I say this not with, oh, I can't believe.
	This is just facts.
	I'm a fact muncher.
	What I do is I munch facts, right?
	I'm just giving you an example of I'm out there You know, when Lauren and I went to Australia, you know, my wife, my daughter, we're staring out at this parking lot with a bunch of feral, jackal, black-clad terrorist leftists that are out there physically attacking everything in sight, trying to get into the venue.
	You know, I'm in the streets of Australian cities with security and sometimes people are hunting us.
	And we're scurrying around and, you know, I'm out there in Hong Kong and I'm taking facefuls of tear gas to bring you the front lines of the battle against Chinese communism.
	But then people say, oh wait, did he go to a new website?
	Ah! To hell with him!
	Screw him! Ah!
	That's fine. Honestly, it's completely and totally fine.
	But all it means is that I'm not risking anything for you guys anymore.
	I'm just not.
	I'm going to do stuff that gives me pleasure.
	I feel zero sense of moral obligation or responsibility to save anybody's ass anymore.
	I'm going to focus because people are like, well, you know, it might be slightly risky for me.
	Maybe somebody might find out that I follow Stefan Molyneux and that quote.
	Okay, and that's fine.
	I respect that.
	That's totally fine. If following me is too great a risk for you, I'm not taking any risks for you.
	I'm not. I'm free.
	I'm liberated. If you won't listen to reason, if you won't show me any loyalty, if you won't follow me, and again, I'm not even saying you should.
	I'm just saying that the consequences of not doing it is that I'm completely and totally fucking liberated from taking any risks whatsoever.
	And that's not a bad thing for me because, let's be frank, I was taking a lot of risks.
	A lot of risks. Some of them you don't even know about.
	Some of them I won't even write about until I'm old.
	Some of the risks that I took, some of the blowback that nobody knows about outside of a few people I know.
	If it's too risky, To follow me, to support me, to...
	I mean, that's fine. It's totally fine.
	You're absolutely free.
	I'm not... You're totally free to not do that.
	And, you know, most of the people will never even hear this.
	I just want to give you an example of this in action, right?
	So I get deplatformed from one of these places, and I'm like, oh, great.
	I'll move. I'll move to a new place.
	It's one website over.
	Wait, 3%?
	Really? Ah!
	That's a fact. And it's an immensely liberating fact.
	You are perfectly free to not follow me to a new platform.
	You're absolutely completely and totally free and you shouldn't do it out of any sense of obligation or because I'm nagging, because I'm not nagging.
	I'm simply telling you, I'm demonstrating to you how incredibly freeing it is when people don't give much of a shit about you.
	It really is just so immensely liberating because any sense of obligation, any sense of obligation, That you have vanishes.
	I don't have an obligation to the world as a whole.
	You don't have an obligation to people who don't listen to the reason.
	Listen, would you risk life and limb to deliver ammunition to soldiers you knew were going to surrender anyway?
	Would you? No, of course you wouldn't.
	Why would you risk your life to deliver ammunition to people who aren't even going to fight, just going to surrender anyway?
	It's a wonderful fact to be in possession of.
	It really is. Because I was out there like, oh my gosh, I want to take all these risks.
	I owe it to the world.
	People are really, it's going to make a difference.
	And then, oh, did he move one website over?
	Forget about him. Say 97% of my audience.
	Fantastic. You've found someone else to glom onto.
	People who aren't speaking the kind of truths that I'm speaking, who aren't going to give you the facts that I'm going to give you, who aren't going to give you the ultimate arguments against the decay of the world.
	Fantastic. It's fantastic.
	I appreciate the honesty.
	I really do. I mean, this may sound manipulative.
	It's not. I genuinely appreciate the honest indifference of my former audience.
	I love you for it.
	I love you for being this blunt and direct and honest with me because I am completely liberated from working to save anybody's ass in the Node universe.
	I can focus on what's best for me, what's best for the core group of listeners, what's best for my family, what's best for my friends, what's best for my future.
	And I don't have to risk anyone for anything.
	I don't have to risk anything for anyone.
	For any foreseeable future.
	And I just wanted to sort of model and demonstrate.
	That was a very personal thing for me, but I, you know, if you're saying, well, what about the people who won't listen to reason?
	Listen to them. It's immensely liberating.
	It's incredibly liberating to actually absorb the facts That very few people absorb any facts.
	Very few people absorb any facts.
	And because I was working so hard in my relationship with my listeners, I thought that we were a team.
	You know, like I thought we were a team.
	You know, like if you're in a relationship and you're the only one who's doing anything to maintain the relationship or to keep the romance alive or, you know, you're buying flowers, you're writing poems, you think it's a great relationship.
	And then, and I've been in those before, and I was in this with my listeners.
	I've been in some relationships. You're putting all the work in.
	You're putting all the work in.
	And you think that makes the relationship.
	But all you're doing is just propping up something that falls apart.
	If you don't keep working a profit, it's not a relationship.
	It's exploitation in a way, right?
	And so I was working so hard, taking so many risks, and literally risking life and limb to bring truth to the world.
	And people were like, man, we love your truth.
	You're absolutely essential.
	You've changed my life. And listen, none of this to you guys who are watching.
	All love you. All fantastic. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing because I'm doing what I love to do now.
	What I feel is responsible to the world has totally gone, right?
	Oh, man, you should get into politics.
	Why? Why should I get back into politics?
	Why should I get back into politics?
	That put me at risk of serious injury and death.
	Why? Why? Why?
	To try and help the 97% of my listeners who didn't bother following me to a new website?
	And listen, it's not even a negative.
	They may have thought or accepted that politics, political conversations can't go anywhere anymore because, you know, elections are pretty dubious these days, right?
	So maybe people are communicating to me something really important.
	That's why I say this does not come from a place of resentment or frustration or anger.
	Maybe people are just telling me, Steph, stop!
	It's too risky, you can't change stuff, and we're going to show you that fact with our colossal indifference to following you.
	You guys might have saved my life, literally.
	That indifference of the listeners might literally have completely and totally saved my life.
	I thank you for it, because I love my life.
	So, listen to what people are telling you.
	Listen to their indifference, listen to their opposition, listen to their undermining of you, listen to their hostility.
	Listen to it all.
	Absorb the facts that you want other people to absorb.
	Model what it's like to absorb facts by absorbing other people's hostility and indifference.
	They're really trying to teach you something very, very important.
	And I hope that you'll listen.
	I'm so glad that I listened.
	And I gave it some time.
	See what was happening. And I was like, oh man, if a lot of people start following me again, I could go back to that responsibility train that's incredibly physically dangerous and exhausting at times and risky as hell.
	And it's like, oh, they're not coming?
	Okay, it's a bit of a drag, but...
	Is that ever a weight off my shoulders?
	Is that ever a weight off my shoulders?
	God. I'm free.
	of pathological altruism and self-destructive over-caring.
	There are real benefits in that.
	Genuine, deep and powerful benefits in that.
	Being in a conversation with the world is You don't always get what you want, but you almost always end up getting what you need.
	So anyway, I hope that helps.
	Sorry for the long speech.
	Yeah, thank you very much.
	Just be free. Be free.
	All right. Thanks everyone so much.
	And listen, great pleasure to chat with you guys in this new medium.
	I'm going to just ask people if you want to have a chat, please, please find, you know, 20 bucks will get you a decent headset and a mic just because sometimes the built-in stuff is not that great.
	But I really, really do appreciate everyone dropping by.
	Such a great pleasure. To chat with y'all.
	And I feel very honored and very blessed to have this conversation as a whole.
	And so I really do thank everyone for dropping by.
	FreeDomain.com forward slash donate to help the show out really, really I appreciate your help.
	You can go to free domain NFT. I'm going to be putting up some very cool stuff that's collectibles from my origin story of philosophy and shows that I have not released that you can get exclusive access to and eternal ownership and they're tradable as well.
	So I think they'll gain in value considerably over time.
	That's my particular prediction, of course.
	So, yeah, love you guys.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you so enormously much for the great privilege and pleasure of having this conversation with you, and have a wonderful evening.

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