Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 4, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:20:34

DO NOT TRY TO CHANGE PEOPLE!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi. How are you?
	How are things? You know, I've never created an operating system from scratch.
	But you know one thing that I probably wouldn't do if I was creating an operating system from scratch?
	One of the things I probably wouldn't do is what the ungodly living Sam holy hell our system interrupts.
	I would kind of design not system interrupts.
	That would be my particular approach.
	Things like if you're doing something and you want it done quickly, don't interrupt.
	That would be the thing. Don't interrupt.
	And yet it seems that you pay thousands of dollars for a computer And you get yourself a very fast processor, and it would basically seem that approximately 9,999% of the processor is devoted to something called system interrupts.
	That doesn't seem to be a very productive thing.
	It's basically like...
	You hit the gas going forward, and it's like, well, we could spend pretty efficiently the gas to move the car forward.
	But you know what we've done, what we've designed, is we've designed forward interrupts.
	So what happens is, every time you hit the gas, there'll be two cycles forward and 1.9 cycles backwards.
	It will be hitting not just the gas, but the brakes and the reverse, all at the same time.
	Because we wouldn't want you to Get anywhere.
	And so you should really pay a huge amount of money for computers.
	And what they basically do is they spend about 99% of their processing power on something called system interrupts.
	Help me understand what that possibly means.
	It's like the Bill Gates explaining of everything.
	It's just pretty wild.
	Is there a buzz going on with the audio?
	Yeah, sorry, I've got a separate audio recording here, so I don't know how to fix that.
	I don't see it showing up here, but yeah, isn't that funny, right?
	The government is primarily concerned with freedom interrupts.
	Yeah, funny, eh?
	Let me ask you guys something.
	Oh boy, somebody says mask mandates got me effed up.
	I haul furniture and my lungs feel like concrete.
	Boy, I got it. Sympathies for that, brother.
	Holy crap. I did that job once.
	Once. Once.
	And a friend of mine and I, we spent a weekend, a long weekend, Setting up furniture in a corporation that was changing buildings and Man, it was brutal.
	It was unbelievably brutal because what happened was you kind of hold stuff off the truck and Everything banged into corners and you just you got the living crap bruised out of your hands under every and all situations and circumstances It was rough man.
	I don't know. I don't know how you do it.
	I don't know how you do it so Yeah, I can't do the mask, man.
	I just, I can't do it.
	I can't do it. I've tried.
	You know, like I get, people are kind of freaking out.
	At least they were early on. Now they're just freaking out for the sake of freaking out.
	Delta turns out to not be that.
	Anyway, you can look up all this stuff yourself.
	I'm really bored of it, as I'm sure you are as well.
	But I can't do it. I feel like a pearl diver.
	I feel like I'm fake breathing, and then I've got to get a proper breath.
	It's brutal. So, yeah, I don't know how you do it.
	And, of course, if you've got glasses, right?
	You've got glasses. And what happens, right?
	I mean, you're fucked.
	You might as well have cataracts, right?
	It's just crazy. Hello.
	Hello. Hello. Hello.
	How you doing? To all the people just joining, say hi.
	Hey, you got questions?
	You got comments? I have stuff, but not a whole lot, because I'll tell you what I was going to do.
	I'll tell you what I was going to do.
	Here's a hint. Mama loves her baby, and Daddy loves you too.
	Though the sea may look warm to you, babe, and the sky may look blue, but ooh, ooh, ooh.
	Baby Blue. Ooh!
	Ooh! Ooh! Baby Blue.
	If you should go walking through the thin ice of modern life, dragging behind you the silent reproach of a million tear-stained ice.
	Don't be surprised if a crack in the ice appears under your feet.
	You slip out of your depth and out of your mind with your fear flowing out behind you as you claw the thin ice.
	I have been...
	I had the request, and I put this out a while ago, I had the request...
	To do an analysis, soup to nuts, start to end, of Roger Waters slash Pink Floyd's The Wall.
	So I've been thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking about it.
	I've been circling it like a shark.
	And what I have will blow your mind.
	But I won't do it tonight, because there may be people who know the album, people who don't know the album.
	But that album, man, does that ever tell the story of the modern world?
	Like, holy crap, does that ever tell the story of the modern world and post-Second World War history?
	And I will get into all of that.
	Maybe I'll do that over the weekend.
	But it's going to be just...
	Sit there with the liner notes and just grind through the lyrics and grind through the meanings of what's going on because it is pretty mind-blowing.
	It always amazes me how little artists know their own work but how much the audience catches the whiff of something deeper and more powerful in what's being done.
	So we will be doing all of that.
	Hey Steph, any plans for another child?
	Dude, I'm 55.
	I mean, I could do it, but my wife is 54, so unless we want to give birth to some kind of croaky dino-raptor, I think the days of dusting off the egg basket is done.
	But if it's any consolation, we had as many children as we could possibly have, given the reality of things.
	Happiest days of our lives?
	Favorite Pink Floyd songs? Roger Waters has largely gone woke, though, sadly.
	Oh, he's pathetic.
	He's absolutely, unbelievably pathetic.
	And his hatred for British people, his hatred for white people is, well, you've got to make it in the music industry.
	And being pro-Christian is not the way to do it.
	So, yeah, he's pretty sad.
	Where is he reading the chant?
	I'm reading the chant from a variety of places.
	What do you think of Roger Waters' solo albums?
	I don't know if I've ever listened to one of Roger Waters' solo albums.
	You ever have just a joke that comes out of you and the timing is perfect?
	Okay, here's a joke resurrected from 35 years ago.
	I was at a party and somebody was talking about Roger Waters' solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking.
	And some woman said, well, what are the pros?
	And I said, oh, they're the ones who do it all the time.
	And it actually got like one of the largest laughs I ever had, probably because it was a fairly drunk audience.
	But I don't really have any opinion of his solo albums.
	I liked...
	The Gunner's Dream from The Final Cut is a magnificent song.
	Floating down through the clouds, memories come rushing up to meet me now.
	It's a really lovely song.
	You should listen to it. Very sort of powerful, but...
	He's...
	He's too sad. I mean, it's really, really pitiful, right?
	We don't need no education.
	Of course, what's funny about that is it's grammatically incorrect.
	We don't need no education is a double negative, which means you do need education, which is kind of indicated by the fact that it's grammatically incorrect.
	But, you know, here's the sad, pitiful, pathetic thing about who is a great songwriter, not a great instrumentalist, nor a great vocalist, which he admits himself, but a great songwriter for sure.
	Is that he's all like dark sarcasm in the classroom, teachers are sadists, and the women beat the teachers, the teachers beat the children, and government-mandated education sucks and is brutal and sadistic and abusive to children, but I'm a socialist!
	It's like, so the same shitbirds who run hellish and sadistic government education Should be in charge of everything.
	This is... I don't know how people...
	I'll get into this more, of course, of any of the review of the wall.
	I'll do that this weekend maybe, but...
	How do people do it?
	How do people... How do you rage against a government program like war, which killed his father?
	How do you rage against a government program called education?
	And how do you rage against apartheid in various places around the world and then think that the government should run everything?
	Like, I don't know what people's major brain malfunction is.
	Like, I have no idea. I have an inconsistency in my thinking.
	I've said this before. It's like Socrates' gadfly, right?
	Like, it just nags at me.
	It's like, I haven't closed that circle.
	I haven't squared that off. I haven't deal...
	I haven't unraveled that Gordian knot and straightened out that Mobius Strip, and I just keep returning to it.
	But people can rage against the government and everything that the government has done to them And then immediately turn around and say, but of course the government should run everything.
	I don't know what it is in people that allows them to do that and not notice it.
	I mean, the guy is, what, 77 years old, for God's sakes?
	And he started railing against the state in his 20s.
	He had 50 years.
	He had 50 years.
	Half a freaking century.
	He's a well-read man. He's an educated man.
	But he's morally insane.
	Completely morally... I don't know if you just end up surrounding yourself with yes-men.
	I don't know if you just end up never being challenged.
	I don't know if you ever read anything outside the prescribed woke literature or the leftist literature.
	I have no idea. But I don't know how...
	You rage against every way in which the government has affected you and your life and where there's been a brush-up of state power against you.
	You rage against the horrors of all of that.
	But then you're a socialist who believes that the government should run everything.
	Government killed your dad.
	The government should run everything.
	Government destroyed your childhood with abuse in schools.
	Government should run everything. I mean, help me.
	I can understand if people are like, oh, government education was the best thing ever.
	Okay, that's at least one thing.
	I'm really glad the state killed my dad.
	I mean, but he rails against every manifestation of state power and then totally believes the government should run everything.
	It's mind-blowing.
	I feel like an alien life form with regards to this.
	Welcome, my son, welcome to the vaccine.
	Yeah, crazy.
	Because it would work if I were in charge?
	But he's not in charge.
	He's a 77-year-old musician who's now in his fifth marriage.
	He's not in charge.
	He's never going to be in charge. I don't know.
	It's just weird. It's like every conceivable instance of the state touching my life and my family's life has been a complete disaster.
	So therefore the government should run everything for everyone.
	I don't know. You say, ah, well you can't have counter-woke opinions and still have a career.
	You should hear what Eric Clapton has to say about immigration, or David Bowie for that matter.
	And they still had careers.
	Why, do you think...
	Fame has anything to do with that, how artists gradually become more NPC-ish.
	Yeah. The wall, somebody says, the wall made me a super anarchist.
	Then he turns around and talks this kind of crap.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Well, the wall is basically, so his father was a communist.
	And he probably, his father ended up fighting with the allies because they were fighting against the national socialists or the fascists, which were the enemies of the communists.
	And fascism is masculinity metastasized by the state, just as communism is femininity metastasized by the state.
	And it's the battle between hyper-masculinity, which arises out of father absence, And hyperfemininity, which is his mother and the state.
	So, it is strange how artists...
	Boy, I had this dream last night.
	This morning, I guess.
	I had this dream this morning.
	That I was in a simulation.
	A VR simulation that was tactile and I was flying over an area I knew very well and somebody had recreated it in a VR computer program and I was like, man, you got every detail down.
	That's incredible. That's perfect.
	And the guy who designed it was flying next to me and he said, hey, man, that's nothing.
	The fact that you can see it, the fact that you can feel the wind, the fact that you can touch things, check this out.
	This will blow your mind. And he swooped down and plucked me up a flower.
	And he said, smell this.
	And I smelled it and it was a beautiful scent of flower.
	And I was like, oh my god.
	You've got scent in your simulation.
	You have smell, sight, sound, touch.
	You've got smell.
	And smelling is the kind of tasting.
	You've got smell in your simulation?
	That's incredible! And of course, I thought about this dream, as I do.
	I used to analyze other people's dreams, I just now analyze my own.
	To me, the dream is pretty clear.
	To me, this is an indication that the media has created an alternative anti-reality so vivid that people have no chance to find their way back to the real world.
	And that's where we are.
	And that's where we are.
	That the media has created an alternative anti-reality so perfect, so complete, that it now tickles at least four of the five senses.
	I didn't get to taste.
	But it's so perfect that I mean, I will.
	It's a good exercise to do, I think.
	What I will do is I will read the media with the NPC mindset on.
	I will read the media like I'm just some guy.
	I will read the media without any philosophical blinkers on or without my 2020 philosophy specs on.
	And that's why you can sort of plumb the depths of the dangers of the people around you, right?
	And the dangers are considerable these days, these days in particular.
	So I think having done that, I think the dream was telling me that the media simulation for the normies has closed off.
	It's sealed them off.
	They no longer have any particular capacity to break out of that.
	manufactured reality and that you can't break through to them, that you can't enter that world.
	To enter that world is to dissolve your mind because the media matrix is the soup that is created when the bones of the brain are boiled away.
	Let me say that again.
	The media matrix is the soup that is created when the bones of the brain are boiled away and there's nothing left.
	So what does he say about that?
	By supporting the state, he's implying he's wealthy enough to negate the negative influence that the rest of us have to endure.
	Sure, you've said this before, yeah.
	Right.
	Triple lapel microphone set up.
	So this is a dual mic that I use with my daughter that just plugs nicely into the laptop, and I have another mic that's working with the second camera that I'm using for broadcasting, so...
	I have a friend who is so petrified of his unvaccinated friends and swallowed so much Kool-Aid, he's yelled at and disowned them.
	Yeah. Yeah, of course, you know, the spread of the...
	I mean, spread of the spikes is something that I think may be of pretty significant concern.
	And... Without getting into any details, because I'm always very cognizant of the fact that people just chat with me and then I go and do shows, right?
	And I don't want to betray any confidences or drag people into the public eye where they don't want to be and had no reason to believe they would be.
	But let's just say yesterday I talked to a person in fairly great length and that person told me That the person in the next office,
	her husband, got the vaccine, ended up in hospital, was on a ventilator for two weeks right after they got the vaccine.
	Maybe there were blood clots in the lungs or something like that.
	And was on the ventilator for two weeks.
	And you know, like 80-90% of people who go on those ventilators die.
	They appear to be quite brutal. On the ventilator for two weeks.
	I was unconscious. And then the doctors came to the person in the next office.
	The doctors came and said, we can't keep your husband on the ventilator.
	We can't. Because after about two weeks on the ventilator, his body will stop learning how to breathe.
	Like he won't be able to breathe anymore when he comes off it.
	So we've got to take him off the ventilator.
	Can he breathe if he's not on the ventilator?
	We don't know. So they took him off the ventilator and he fucking died.
	Flatlined. It's anecdotal.
	I get that.
	The person I was talking to said, my son's daughter's friend's father took the vaccine, sat down in his chair, Fell asleep.
	Everybody figured he was tired.
	Just left him there. Woke up in the morning.
	Dead. Blood clots.
	Everywhere. Just anecdotes.
	Not proof of anything.
	But wow. But wow.
	That is not exactly ideal.
	So, yeah, I mean, I can talk about artists and why they tend to get so NPC-like.
	Yeah, you guys gotta...
	Anyway, just, I don't know.
	I mean, I get that you're all perfectionists like me, but don't worry about the buzzing.
	We'll fix it in post. If you're getting it.
	Some people are, some people aren't.
	So, yeah, hit me with your questions.
	I'm happy to talk about why artists become so boring philosophically.
	Somebody says my mom's co-worker got a second shot and had a heart attack two days later.
	No prior heart problems. Oh, she died?
	My father-in-law got the vaccine earlier this year.
	He's currently on a ventilator and close to death.
	Oof. I'm sorry about that.
	And here's the thing too, right?
	So, as far as I understand it, in most places...
	Well, in... So in most places you're not counted as vaccinated until 14 days after your second dose.
	You're not counted as vaccinated, right?
	So if you have, like let's say you die two weeks or less after getting your second dose, or your first dose for that matter.
	So let's say you die or you have significant health issues.
	Again, 14 days or less After getting your first or your second vaccine, you die, your significant health issues, they count you as unvaccinated.
	They count you as unvaccinated, of course, because they don't consider you vaccinated until two weeks after your second dose.
	So what are the doses? A couple of months apart, right?
	So you get the first dose, maybe you have a problem, you end up in hospital, well, hey, you're unvaccinated, man.
	Let's say you're fine-ish, you get your second dose, boom, you end up in the hospital.
	A week, 10 days later, hey man, you're unvaccinated.
	And in Alberta, and this is not something, I mean, I saw the health minister talking about this, in Alberta, which is the Texas of Canada, they're currently going through a massive spike, they say, right?
	But in Alberta, they've said, look, if you call in sick, if you don't come to work, you call in sick, and you don't get a COVID test, we're counting that as COVID. Seems a little messed up, you know, from an armchair, I guess literally armchair, amateur, outside eye.
	That seems a little messed up, don't you think?
	You could sprain your ankle and say, do you need a COVID test?
	No, I sprained my ankle. I'm not coming to work because I sprained my ankle.
	I'm a waiter. I'm not going to come to work.
	Oh, that's COVID. It's kind of like those race hatred hoaxes like every time it's like so-and-so sent a noose so-and-so put poop on the doorstep of so-and-so and it's like it always turns out almost always turns out to be like a hoax or then the person mailed it to themselves or whatever it's like the demand for race hatred hoaxes the demand for race hatred vastly outstrips the supply it's like in a pandemic do you need to Count questionable issues as actual COVID cases?
	It seems like in a pandemic, like when a real pandemic was going on like the Spanish flu, I don't think that they needed to interpret marginal or unproven issues as Spanish flu because it was everywhere and people dropping like flies.
	It just seems like the demand for high COVID numbers seems to be somewhat outstripping the supply, if that makes any kind of sense.
	Oh yeah, and of course the guy who invented the PCR test said it was never supposed to be used for diagnosis, for any kind of diagnostic, because you can keep multiplying it and amplifying it until you can find what you want, right?
	So, I mean, you guys want to talk COVID? You want to talk...
	Something else? There's a new pill out.
	Well, some people are calling it Pfizer-Mectin, right?
	Pfizer seems to be coming up with something.
	Some people are saying it's somewhat similar to Ivermectin and calling it Pfizer-Mectin because then they can patent it and protect it and get much more money from it.
	Because there's this big giant province in India that some people claim has largely dealt with COVID through Ivermectin.
	Again, I don't know if that's true or not, but But now there's a pill that has been shown, not a huge study, but pretty impressive numbers, been shown to reduce hospitalizations of COVID by 50%.
	So that's interesting, right?
	So let's say that there is a prophylactic or a treatment for COVID. Then, I mean, by any rational legal system and by the legal system in place in most Western countries, if you have a treatment, then you can't mandate a vaccine.
	You certainly can't emergency use authorization of that vaccine.
	So, I mean, nothing's going to change, right?
	That was my dream was telling me that the simulation is so vivid to people that they can smell what they're being told about.
	You know, like somebody says, let's say you're just eating some bland omelette and someone says, that's a really spicy omelette.
	And you immediately, your nose starts stinging and your mouth starts watering in your eyes, right?
	It's that vivid. Whatever people say, be afraid.
	I'm terrified! You're going to die.
	I'm going to die. It's now because the circle, it's completed.
	You can't... It's like you get those Oculus Rift...
	I'm really...
	I tried one of those once.
	I just did them all back in 2018.
	And it was Minecraft.
	You were kind of looking around and you sort of walked with your joystick and you looked around.
	It's freaky, man.
	It's really freaky. And that's Minecraft, which is like...
	Cubist, OCD, Paul Clay Central, right?
	Like, Minecraft's, like, autistic, cubist interpretation of the world.
	And even that was pretty vivid.
	I feel if I went into Skyrim and was, like, looking around, like, I would, it would mess my mind.
	Like, it would mess with my mind, this virtual reality stuff.
	But it's like now, it's like the virtual reality stuff is just, like, from the media, it's, like, fused under people's heads.
	It's... It's like...
	It's now become part of their flesh apparatus.
	It is now their exoskeleton for pretending to deal with the world, right?
	See, friends ask me to discredit the mainstream narrative, but it's not my job to analyze it all.
	No, that's right. Yeah, you really have to...
	You know, when people ask you to do all the work...
	Yeah, people ask me to do all the work.
	I just won't... You know, like I was talking the other day about how...
	Robots are going to replace a lot of people's work.
	And he's like, well, I've never heard that before.
	You cite me the articles.
	I'm like, no.
	Like, if you're comfortable with the stuff that you know, and other people demand your sources, it's like, go look them up.
	Go look it up. It's an act of dominance, right?
	It's an act of dominance and subjugation to say to you, You now have to be my research assistant and you have to prove your case to me.
	That is an act of dominance.
	That is an act of subjugation of the other, right?
	Now, listen, I mean, if I've got some really obscure...
	Piece of information? Sure.
	Yeah, absolutely. I mean, or something which is really shocking to people?
	Absolutely. I will provide that.
	But if it's like robots replacing people, that's been talked about since the 1980s and has progressively occurred since the 1980s, I'm not looking up that shit for people.
	Like, I'm not going to provide them a reference.
	I need to just go search for it, right? And anyway, so yeah, you really have to be careful when people, like almost always when people ask you to prove something, all that will happen is...
	You'll prove it, and I'll move the goalpost.
	And now they want something else, and now they doubt this source, and I need a different source, and forget it, right?
	You can't digest food for people, you can't shit for them, and you can't think for them either.
	Skyrim VR is pretty neat.
	Well, I think it's more than pretty neat.
	I think a lot of times it would be, well, more compelling than...
	Because, you know, you've got to keep your eye on the news these days, right?
	When the unvaccinated hunting parties start to gather, you've got to know when to be nimble, right?
	So... People always ask me to do all the work on explaining Bitcoin endlessly.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So here's the thing. I mean, if you hear about Bitcoin and you want it explained to you, you shouldn't invest in it.
	Now, if you hear about Bitcoin and you're...
	Your skin starts erupting with excitement and, oh, goose feathers, right?
	Oh, goosebumps. And then you've just got to go find out about it and you go research it.
	Yeah, maybe you should, right? But if you knew, ah, tell me about it again.
	It's like, no, no, it's not for you.
	It's not for you. The fact that a prophylactic for HIV has been rightly advertised and not for the pandemic.
	Sorry, I don't quite follow that. Everyone has gone mad at this point.
	Oh, it really does feel like we're living in an asylum.
	It really does. You know, I basically, I broke out of prison into a larger prison.
	You know, I broke out of my family into the adult.
	They won't accept a non-mainstream media source.
	Well, will they accept an actual scientific article?
	Because those are all over the police, right?
	But they're harder to read, so whatever, right?
	They won't accept right-wing sources, period.
	Yeah. I missed the part about why artists become philosophically lazy.
	So you keep repeating that.
	Are you just being passive-aggressive and kind of a dick?
	Is that the thing that you're doing?
	Oh, I guess I missed that part where you explained this thing you said you were going to explain.
	I asked for people if they wanted to hear about it and people want to talk about COVID, so I don't know why you keep writing, I missed the part about why artists become philosophically lazy.
	Like, you're lying, right? I assume, right?
	You didn't miss it. I just didn't say it.
	Because people want to talk about other things.
	So, why you keep...
	Now, you could be honest and you could say, Steph, I'd really like you to talk about this if you don't mind.
	Or you could say to everyone, would you mind if I refocus the conversation on this thing because I'm really interested in it?
	But this, I don't know, Cameron passive-aggressive bullshit of, well, I guess I missed the part.
	It's like, dude, come on.
	I mean, don't be like that.
	Don't be like that.
	Don't do me like that.
	All right. Don't let people treadmill you.
	Yeah, especially if you suspect malicious intent.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.
	Like, people are like... They're all over the place.
	Oh, there's no such thing as morality.
	Or prove to me the non-aggression principle is valid.
	Or I don't believe in ethics.
	Or, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And I've gone down this road a bunch of times.
	And it's not bad the first couple of times.
	It can help clarify your thinking.
	But people are just like... Oh, yeah, well, blah, blah, blah.
	Oh, well, you know, you can't universalize the non-aggression principle.
	You can universalize it.
	We can all logically and rationally, empirically and objectively, we can all not initiate the use of force against others.
	So the non-aggression principle can be universally preferable behavior.
	The initiation of the use of force cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	If you say everybody at all times and under all circumstances must initiate the use of force against others, that the initiation of the use of force is a universally preferable behavior, the initiation of the use of force against others, it can't be universalized.
	It can't be universalized.
	Well, first of all, you've got the problems with sleeping people, you've got the problems with people in a coma, you've got the problems with people who are drunk and can't, or whatever, other people who are mentally handicapped, they're not initiating...
	They can't initiate the use of force, so are sleeping people evil?
	Like, if you say that A is moral, then the opposite of A must be evil.
	There's moral, amoral, and evil.
	Moral is the good, amoral is neutral, like running for the bus, and evil is the violation of universally preferable behavior.
	And so if you say action A is moral, then the opposite of A must be the opposite of moral, which is evil.
	So if you say that the non-aggression principle is moral, then the opposite of that, the violation of the non-aggression principle, which is the initiation of the use of violence against others, must be evil.
	Pretty simple, right? Now, if you say that the initiation of the use of force is universally preferable behavior, then people who aren't initiating The use of force are doing the opposite of your universally preferred behavior.
	And since A is the initiation of the use of force, the opposite of A, the non-initiation of the use of force must be evil.
	Therefore, all people who are not initiating the use of force are evil.
	Therefore, a guy in a coma is evil because he's not initiating the use of force.
	Therefore, a guy who's asleep is evil.
	Therefore, a guy who's daydreaming is evil.
	Therefore, a guy who just beat someone up, his hands are bloody, and he can't hit anyone else for a week because his knuckles are so sore, he's also evil.
	It's not, right? Come on, you can't call a sleeping person evil.
	That doesn't offend your common sense.
	I don't know how to help people like that, right?
	And also, the initiation of the use of force in order for it to be evil must be unwanted, right?
	I mean, I got a scar here from cancer surgery I had years ago, and I very much want it.
	Dr. Keith of the Oklahoma Surgery Center to cut into me and he did a wonderful job and I would highly recommend him.
	He was initiating, in a sense, he was cutting me, man, he was cutting me, but I wanted him to and paid him to.
	I was happy to and he did a wonderful job and saved my life.
	So it has to be unwanted, right?
	If you're in a boxing ring, oh, you hit me, I'm going to press charges.
	Like, no, you went into a boxing ring.
	That's understood, right? For violence to occur, physical aggression to be immoral, it must be unwanted.
	The violation of your personal property must be unwanted, right?
	I mean, you can think of some silly example where a guy pays a woman to pretend to rape him, right?
	And that's his sick role-playing fetish or whatever it is, right?
	Okay, well, did she rape him?
	Forced to penetrate is a thing, right?
	No, because he wanted it to happen, right?
	So it has to be unwanted, right?
	So for the non-aggression principle, let's say you have the, not the NAP, but the AP, the aggression principle, right?
	So everybody must always be violent towards everyone else.
	Violence is universally preferable behavior, but violence is only violence if you don't want it to happen to you.
	So if violence is universally preferable behavior, you must want to be violent and have violence against you, because it's universal, right?
	It's not asymmetric, it's universal.
	But if you want violence against you, you may be a masochist, you may be a boxer, you may be at a hockey game and accept that as a risk.
	So if you want the violence against you, it's no longer universal.
	It's like stealing.
	If I want you to take my property, it's not stealing.
	You've got a couch, you leave it on the front lawn, the sign says, take me.
	If you want people to take your property, it's not stealing.
	So if you say stealing is universally preferable behavior, everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
	To steal and be stolen from.
	But if you want to be stolen from, it's not stealing.
	If you want to have sex, it's not rape.
	If you want to be, quote, assaulted, right, then it's life-saving surgery.
	So it's not a complicated argument at all.
	Even Stephen Woodward of rationality rules, despite his immense deep-seated pathological hostility to universally preferable behavior, He completely accepted this in our debate.
	He completely accepted that rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
	I then felt that there was something else to debate about, which I was kind of confusing.
	It's like, A is A. Yes, it is, but I want to keep arguing that A is not A. It's kind of boring, right?
	So, yeah, when people want you to start...
	And then people say, well, but there are people who don't accept universally preferable behavior.
	It's like, right.
	It's not universally preferred behavior.
	It's preferable, which means the future, right?
	This is a diet that will help you lose weight.
	Yeah, well, some people don't follow diets.
	What is your major malfunction?
	What on earth does that have to do with anything?
	You know, here's the exercises you need to do to become strong.
	Oh, yeah, some people don't exercise.
	Wow, you're just a cosmic genius here to enlighten us with your Brain-frying idiocy of a half-brain.
	All right. Let's see here.
	All right.
	Questions? Comments? It's 8 o'clock.
	Do you know where your philosophy is?
	I would be happy to hear.
	I would be happy to hear what is on your mind with regards to le philosophie.
	Le philosophie. Boy, look up French philosophers and pedophilia.
	That's not pretty. That's not pretty.
	All right, I'll wait for a question or two, otherwise I'll talk about it.
	Woodward accepted it, then mocked it, as if proving UPB wasn't a big enough accomplishment to impress him.
	Well, see, I mean, I... How was my day?
	I had a wonderful day. I had a wonderful day.
	I mean, I've got a lot of paperwork to do at the moment, which is always kind of brain deadening.
	And it's like that scene with Robert De Niro in the movie Brazil by Terry Gilliam, which is where it's like a guy gets eaten alive by paperwork.
	There's just so much paperwork in the world.
	Now, it kind of clusters for me around certain times a year, but there's just so much paperwork.
	It's just completely mad.
	I mean, we're just getting sanded down by paper cuts, like all of our giant, majestic, enlightenment-based human hearts of reason and passion are just getting paper-cutted into atoms by just endless amounts of paperwork and the subjugation of Small-minded people to small-minded rules.
	But other than that, what did I do?
	I went on a lovely five-kilometer hike with my wife, came home, chatted with my daughter, played with the ducks, and then I played.
	There was a tennis opening, so I went and played some tennis for about an hour.
	And then I came back and I did some computer programming, which was fun, and did the show.
	So it was really outside of the paperwork, which is just kind of part of life these days.
	It was a very pleasant day.
	And I get to chat with you, which is a lovely thing, though.
	Let's see here.
	Hey, Steph, one thing I found extremely common when talking with a leftist is how they put the end in a higher ethical standard than the mean.
	The means?
	Yeah, try that again, man.
	That doesn't make much sense to me. So, yeah, I mean, Stephen Woodward...
	So, look, we understand what it is that people...
	Why are they fighting? Why are they fighting UPB? Because they're surrounded by shitheels.
	That's what's all. Why are they fighting?
	Because they're surrounded by people who will attack them for accepting UPB. I mean, the UPB is so basic and it's so clear.
	I mean, I know it takes a little while to work it into your brain, but, you know, once you get it, it's so basic and it's so clear.
	And I've had, I don't know, like half a dozen or a dozen debates about it, and I've done like 20 presentations on it, live presentations, questions.
	It's done. It's done and dusted.
	It's proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, right?
	So why wouldn't you accept it?
	Because you're surrounded by people who will reject you if you accept morality.
	That's all. Stephen Woodward, I guarantee you, 100%.
	100%. It's not about...
	It's like, oh, that Steph guy, he's so arrogant, he's so blah, blah, all this stupid stuff, right?
	They just try and provoke hatred of me so that people are like, I'm going to get his scalp, I'm going to take him down!
	I have a beautiful, wonderful wife, a loving daughter, a great life, a great, you know, I get to chat with you guys, talk philosophy, I mean...
	It's a beautiful thing.
	I mean, I found a way to survive.
	I haven't asked for donations.
	I haven't done a donation pitch since the pandemic started, which is like a year and three quarters, which has been kind of exciting, to put it mildly.
	But yeah, I mean, you can support me.
	Hey, man, I always appreciate it.
	Free Domain. It's really tough, although it's going to get really fantastic.
	It's going to get really fantastic over time, I believe.
	So, yeah, it's a great life.
	So, you know, people are like, oh, that Steph guy is a bad guy.
	He's a mean guy. He's a vain guy.
	He just needs to be taken down a couple of notches.
	All this, you know, boring, petty, bonobo brain stuff, right?
	Take him down a notch or two, you know?
	And so there's this general thing that rows hatred against me.
	And then to get my scalp is considered to be a great thing and all of that.
	And rather than saying, okay, I don't care whether Steph is arrogant or grandiose, you tell me somebody who wants to achieve something great who doesn't believe that they're great.
	I mean, let's be frank, let's be honest, let's be adults about this.
	Do you not think that Steven Soderbergh thinks he's a great director?
	I mean, the guy directed just about every movie star in the known universe on Oceans 11 through 13, the movies, right?
	What have you got? He had George Clooney.
	He had Brad Pitt.
	He had... Jason Bourne, the guy, I can't remember his name, but Matt Damon, right?
	He had all of these, Elliot Gould, he had Andy Garcia, he had Godfather Guy, I mean, yeah, I mean, so, you know, to get that level, and he made it all happen by telling everyone, oh, there used to be these movies with all these great movie stars in it, now every movie star is $20 million, can't have any more than one movie star in a movie, why don't we put all these things together, blah, blah, blah, it'd be fun.
	So Steven Soderbergh, you don't think...
	What did he do? Sex and lies and videotaping?
	You don't think he thinks he's a great director?
	Do you not think that James Cameron thinks he's a great director and a great storyteller?
	Do you not think Tom Hanks thinks he's a great actor?
	I mean, are you supposed to think it but never say it?
	Because you don't want to arouse the enmity of the petty and the insecure and the people who view any kind of self-confidence or aiming high as some sort of thumb in the eye of their pretend self-diminishment?
	You know, because here's the thing, right?
	People may call me arrogant, which I find funny because I'm very humble.
	I am very humble in that I don't.
	When have you heard me claim to have knowledge I don't have?
	And when I say I don't, I have to figure out what ethics are, I'm saying that I was in my 40s and still had no idea what virtue was.
	If that's not humble, I don't know what is.
	But so people say, oh, oh, it's just arrogant, or they get sort of tense or upset about that.
	And, of course, the reality is you'd say, well, I don't care whether he's arrogant or not.
	I care whether he's true or not.
	Let's say that some movie star thinks he's a great actor.
	It's like, well, I don't care whether he thinks he's a great actor.
	Or if he's a movie star, he probably at least is a charming actor.
	I don't care whether she thinks she's beautiful.
	I care whether she's beautiful. And here's the thing, too.
	Here's the real arrogance, right?
	Because if people think that I'm arrogant, I find that, again, I know for myself that I think through everything and double-check everything and really want to make sure that I've got two feet on solid ground when it comes to what it is that I'm doing.
	But if people think I'm arrogant and also that I'm stupid, that I'm clearly and obviously wrong, that's a level of arrogance I could never imagine.
	Honestly, it's a level of arrogance I could never imagine.
	I mean, a brilliant philosopher, Ayn Rand, she was a brilliant philosopher, a brilliant writer.
	I mean, you tell me some other writer who ended up writing one of the most influential and powerful novels in a language she didn't even grow up with.
	Come on. She didn't even learn English until she got to America in her late teens or early 20s or something like that.
	And then she ended up writing some of the great English novels.
	I mean, imagine, you don't speak Russian, you move to Russia in your late teens, your early 20s, and you end up writing great Russian novels, which is absolutely brilliant.
	Now, all the people who will lie...
	So she's a genius. Ayn Rand is a genius.
	You know, does she have flaws? Yeah, we all do.
	But she was a total genius.
	And anybody who denies that is just ridiculously arrogant, right?
	Because what I don't do is I don't sit there and say, well, Socrates was just an idiot.
	And look, am I saying I'm Socrates?
	Of course not. Nobody will be Socrates because Socrates was first in many ways.
	But... I have the world's largest philosophy show, at least, you know, in the sort of height of my sort of strength and fame and power and all of that.
	I have the world's largest philosophy show, a billion views and downloads and millions and millions of books downloaded and read and sold there, right?
	And I'd interviewed a whole bunch of really smart people, read a whole bunch of books and had to learn a whole bunch of stuff to do my show.
	So I was fairly knowledgeable, fairly well-educated and very successful in the realm of philosophy and came up with original and powerful theories in a variety of areas, right?
	But then to say, like, so I'm very intelligent, obviously, and I'm not saying this to praise myself.
	It's, you know, it's like if I say I'm bald, or I'm six foot tall, or I'm 190 pounds, like, it's just things that are facts, right?
	But if I, since I am intelligent, either I'm intelligent and good at what I do, or I've somehow bamboozled Tens of millions of people to give me a billion views and download books and all of that and think that I'm smart and I've just accidentally changed lives, millions of lives for the better and protected a billion assaults against children, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And again, I'm not saying this to praise myself.
	I'm just saying, look, these are honest and real accomplishments.
	So then to say, oh, that Steph guy's an idiot.
	Now that is arrogant.
	You understand? You understand? With them calling me arrogant, it's just pure projection.
	Because I'm very humble. I don't make claims to knowledge that I don't have.
	I correct myself when I make errors and I criticize my own theories relentlessly in my own head and on the show.
	So, if you say about the guy, well-trained in philosophy, he got a graduate degree from a very tough school.
	So, if you say to a guy, Very well educated in philosophy, who runs the world's biggest and most successful philosophy conversations with numerous radical and creative and original additions to the field.
	If you say, oh, that guy's just an idiot.
	You see, that's arrogance.
	That's arrogance.
	So this, you know, when people call me arrogant, first of all, it's not an argument, of course, right?
	But yeah, I've always believed I was capable of great things.
	I've always believed that. Sure.
	If you love singing and you love to write songs and you're very good at playing instruments, of course you believe that you can do great things in the music industry.
	And you probably will. Just keep at it, right?
	10,000 hours. Yeah, it's just kind of funny, this whole arrogant thing.
	It's very sad, really.
	Because if you can look at someone like me up in the stratosphere of public philosophy and say, oh, he's just an idiot.
	Oh, he's just arrogant.
	Oh, he's just so, he's so obviously wrong.
	Well, everybody who says all of that stuff without, you know, really sort of making the case And if they come in, here's the thing too, like if somebody comes into an argument just absolutely knowing that you're wrong.
	Like, 100%. They just know that you're wrong.
	It's not really, uh...
	It's not really much of a productive or positive conversation.
	I was just thinking about, so, like, I've gone into debates with Vash or whatever, and, yeah, I'm pretty sure he's wrong, but there would be certainly things that Vash would be right about, and I'd like to hear those, right?
	So... You still need to read The Fountainhead?
	Oh, you've got to read The Fountainhead, man.
	I think it's better than that or Shrugged, in a way.
	I'm sorry, I don't have audio set up for the dream analysis, but I tell you what, I'm sorry because you have been talking about this.
	Call me on Wednesday or shoot me an email at callinatfreedomain.com.
	Callinatfreedomain.com. We'll do the dream analysis.
	Some people hate seeing others do well.
	Well, again, so most people, right?
	So someone like Stephen Woodard, I think that was his name, I can't really remember.
	So someone like Stephen Woodard, he's surrounded by people who are arrogant and pompous.
	And he himself, I think, is fairly arrogant and pompous.
	And they look at me and it's like, oh, that stiff guy is so arrogant and pompous or whatever, right?
	Now, if he were to say...
	Well, okay, maybe.
	But, you know, step me through all of the mistakes that he's made.
	Now, but if people get poisoned against you, and this is true in your personal life as well as online, though.
	So if people get poisoned against you, they will just look for anything that they can say that's negative about you.
	They will look for anything, any mistake.
	They're just looking for anything negative that they can find out or say about you.
	But what happens is the poisoning the well, right?
	I mean, if you're told, let's say you're going to some party with like a hundred people and you're told, oh, that one guy, Bob, is a total pedo.
	He just molests children, right?
	And you genuinely believe that when you go to the party and then Bob comes over and talks to you, you're going to find him creepy, you understand?
	Because you're primed against him, right?
	You know, whether it's true or not, right?
	But you're going to find him... And even if it's a total lie...
	You will find him creepy, right?
	So, you know, all of the lies out there about me, you know, they're all designed so that people don't listen to me.
	Or if they do listen to me, oh, he's arrogant, he's this, then whatever I say will go through that filter and they will then discredit what it is that I say and do because they already have been primed to believe that I have these characteristics and therefore That's the way it is, right? That's the way it is. And this is not just true online, of course, right?
	This happens in your personal life, right?
	If somebody has been trained to dislike you significantly and enormously, then there's nothing you can do, because everything you do will go through that filter.
	Everything you do will go through that filter, right?
	So let's say there's some woman who genuinely believes that you're interested in her, you want to date her, you're just obsessed with her, you've got a crush on her, whatever it is, right?
	Then everything you do, if you ignore her, oh, he's so overwhelmed or he's playing games, right?
	If you talk to her, ah, hi, right?
	If you don't ask her out, oh, he's too shy, he's, you know, he's too nervous or whatever you ask.
	Like, everything you do is based upon that filter.
	And setting up these filters is one of the fundamental tasks of the sophists, right?
	To set up these filters. Oh, Ayn Rand is, she's a complete hypocrite.
	Ayn Rand was a total hypocrite because she took social security that she paid into for her whole life and she justified it morally.
	She took social security at the end of her life.
	Therefore, she's a total hypocrite.
	And now the goal, of course, first is to get you to never read Ayn Rand.
	And the second thing is to read her with the big word hypocrite overlaying everything that you read.
	Right? With me, it's like racist or whatever it is, right?
	So... And that way, most people, if they're told you are X, they look at you, they just see X. Whatever it is that they're told, that's what they'll see.
	And if you try to convince them that otherwise...
	Then it would just be a trick.
	He's just doing a trick. He's trying to bamboozle you.
	Whatever it is, right? So that's a very sort of important thing.
	What's so great about Ayn Rand?
	Is that like a real question?
	Like you've never read her?
	You've never read any of her essays or Forenoon intellectual, the romantic manifesto, none of these things, the virtue of selfishness, introduction to objectivist epistemology.
	I'm not saying you should, I'm just curious if you don't know I'm happy to tell you No one ever mentions We the Living by Rand.
	There's also a movie made during Mussolini's Italy.
	Yeah, and the movie's actually pretty good.
	The movie's actually pretty good. Oh, you haven't read her?
	You haven't read her? Okay, I'll tell you what the Russians are fantastic at.
	All the Russian writers that I've ever read are unbelievably fantastic in their analysis of evil.
	There is something in the Russian soul, the Russian history, the Russian experience.
	Maybe it's the Genghis Khan thing.
	Well, you couldn't really count the communist thing because Dostoevsky was fantastic, as was Turgenev, as was Tolstoy.
	Their analysis of human evil, the great Russian writers, is second to none.
	It's second to none.
	In my opinion. I think it's a fairly commonplace observation.
	The analysis of evil is a very great challenge for artists because artists tend to be pretty empathetic, sometimes overly sentimentally empathetic and with no judgments or virtues or boundaries or whatever, right?
	So artists tend to be very empathetic.
	They can see very, very deeply into the human soul, which means that they have a very tough time understanding evil.
	Because evil is the opposite of empathy.
	And so evil is when you see human beings as just kind of objects to be used and tools to be manipulated to get what you want.
	And so really the opposite of empathy.
	But to be a good artist, you need to be able to empathize deeply, and therefore you're going to have a great deal of difficulty Understanding evil.
	But the Russians, through some mechanism, and with Dostoevsky it was because he directly experienced evil.
	He was part of a fairly lefty group and he was arrested and he spent, I think it was close to a year, in solitary confinement and they really tortured you in solitary.
	It was pitch black. And even the prison guards would wear felt on the bottom of their shoes so they wouldn't make any sound when they walked.
	So you'd be in complete silence and solitude for like a year.
	He was dragged out of his prison cell and he was dragged up to be shot.
	And they raised their rifles at him and then a reprieve came at the end that gave him 10 years in Siberia.
	And he wrote memoirs from the House of the Dead, which is an amazing book, documenting his time in basically a concentration camp, a political prisoners camp in Siberia.
	He wasn't there for all of the 10 years.
	And so he had directly experienced this kind of evil He came out of it so traumatized.
	His first book was Poor Folk, which was before he went to prison.
	He came out so traumatized that he ended up traveling across Europe and was completely addicted to gambling.
	And I read his wife's memoirs about just this endless pattern of just gambling, making a little bit of money, losing a lot of money, getting into debt, writing something, just this unbelievably horrified and stressful life.
	That he did. And he wrote in a very ad hoc manner.
	He didn't plan out his novels for the most part.
	And he would just walk and smoke endlessly and dictate.
	And there would be a woman who would shorthand write down his books.
	And in Crime and Punishment, there's this character Marmaladov, who's a drunk.
	And it's very much like...
	An odd sticking out kind of thing in the novel.
	And this was because he was working on a novel called The Drunkards and decided to jam The Drunkards into crime and punishment, which made the book too long and had too many side plots and all that.
	So all of his brilliance, he ended up with these really jangled, stitched together Franken novels a lot of times.
	And some of his novels are great.
	And some of them, for me, are fairly unreadable.
	I can't even tell you how many times I've Tried to read the devils and not been able to succeed.
	At least he's better than Tolstoy.
	I can't get through Tolstoy. I read Anna Karenina and that was about it.
	But artists have a very tough time with evil.
	Ayn Rand excavates evil in a way that is stunning.
	I mean, absolutely stunning.
	Because evil is easy to caricature, but it's hard to plumb the depths of it.
	Evil is generally quite shallow.
	Like, if you've ever known a sociopath, I know I have.
	If you've ever known a sociopath, they're brilliant but shallow.
	Shimmering but shallow. It's kind of like you look at a lake, and it's like a beautiful sunset and rippling of the clouds, but the lake is only six inches deep, right?
	It's like you don't really notice it till you, oh my god, it's a really shallow lake.
	And so evil tends to be very shallow, but she drills down to the core that goes way underneath that, and she examines power lust, the lust for power, the lust for control, and domination over other human beings, Almost nobody does it better in all of literature.
	And this is all combined with a level of philosophical depth and insight really unparalleled in novelists.
	Novelists tend to be soupy when it comes to philosophy.
	Philosophers tend to be too abstract when it comes to understanding the human soul and the human emotions.
	But she had a great combination of the two.
	She had wonderfully powerful arguments Against state power, hyper-regulation, for sound money.
	All of them woven into incredibly plotted novels.
	And Ellsworth Toohey is one of the great villains of literature as a whole.
	And people get really bothered because the standards of characterization, the standards of the heroic characters in her novels are impossible to achieve in daily life.
	And she was the first one to admit that.
	She said they're the recipes for action, not meals you can actually cook.
	They're like ideals. They're not supposed to be what you can actually achieve.
	But to have those as...
	It's like saying, well, I can't use the North Star to guide myself because I can't fly to the North Star.
	It's like, just because you can't get to the North Star doesn't mean that you can't use it to guide yourself on the ocean.
	So, she is absolutely...
	Now, we can't talk about Ayn Rand without talking about the rapes, right?
	The rapes. So...
	She was heavily criticized, of course, and I don't think it was fair, and I'll sort of tell you why, but she was heavily criticized because the female characters submit to men in violent sexual situations.
	Like, ferocious and violent sexual situations.
	And it's not rape, exactly, obviously, right?
	I mean, because the women don't complain afterwards, and they end up being with the men who, quote, raped them, but...
	It's like the ultimate shit test, right?
	And so the women aggress against the men.
	Dominique even whips Howard Rourke, if I remember rightly.
	They aggress against the men, and the men just come and take them.
	And the women are ferocious in their opposition to this, but submit and become tamed and all of that, right?
	Now, of course, Everybody was, oh my gosh, this is so horrifying, this is so horrifying, I can't believe a woman, whatever, right?
	And it's like, then Fifty Shades of Grey came along, and it was like, oh, okay, so everyone's full of shit about this.
	This is a very powerful fantasy for women.
	I'm not saying that women want to be raped, obviously, right?
	But I mean, as far as it being a fantasy, a sexual fantasy, unfortunately, or fortunately, or whatever it is, I mean, I don't like it, but it seems to be fairly common.
	And of course, the most successful novel in the entire history of the planet is the Fifty Shades of Grey series, right?
	Which is about violence and abusive sex.
	And women love it.
	So, I don't know. I can't plumb the depths of this aspect of femininity.
	It's too creepy for me. Ayn Rand knew the depths of Satan.
	Didn't Ayn Rand advocate for open borders?
	I don't believe she did.
	I don't believe she did. If you've ever seen the Fountainhead movie, I've never, I've tried watching it once or twice.
	I can't get very far in it.
	And what was it, Gary Cooper, Gary Cooper, who was playing Howard Rock, he said he didn't even understand the character until long after the movie was made.
	He didn't really get it, so.
	Well, I mean, I mean, and I would say that the rise of these rape obsessions on the part of women is a sign of significant decay of civilization because it signals, I think, like when women switch from nice guys to bad boys, it's because deep down like when women switch from nice guys to bad boys, it's because deep down they know the
	Yeah. No, you've got to read Rand.
	You have to. I mean, you just simply have to because...
	And also her nonfiction.
	Her speeches weren't great, I think, but her nonfiction is also very powerful, very clear, very well thought out.
	And it was...
	I mean, to Leonard Peikoff is the one who really tried to put objectivism in its...
	I remember meta-energy puffs or whatever, but...
	She was not able to get to...
	Voluntarism. She was not able to get to consistent application of the non-aggression principle.
	And she herself had a domineering and dictatorial personality.
	And listen, I've done a whole three-part series on Ayn Rand.
	You can find this at fdrpodcast.com.
	It's a whole three-part series. It's going to be four parts, but a whole three-part series on Ayn Rand, which you can look at and understand that.
	But yeah, she's a stone genius, absolute stone genius.
	And she wrote the most successful philosophical literature ever, ever.
	It puts Robert M. Persick to shame, right?
	And has influenced and affected more people than just about any other novelist in the world, in history, ever, anywhere.
	And so, an amazing and stellar accomplishment.
	I mean, yeah, she had her flaws.
	She had an affair with a married man, one of her students, so to speak, Nathaniel Brandon.
	And that was messed up. Unbelievably messed up.
	She was kind of selfish.
	She was addicted to amphetamines, right?
	She wanted to keep her weight down.
	Very vain about her legs and was obviously...
	I mean, it's funny, you know, when you're thrust into the public eye and you're not pretty, it's easy to get obsessed with your looks, right?
	I mean, you see this like...
	Amy Winehouse, the Jewish woman, a great singer and a great songwriter, but a completely messed up human being, of course.
	But Amy Winehouse was brutalized for her looks.
	She had this 50s piled high, heavy...
	She's not a very attractive woman, but who cares, right?
	She's a singer, you know, right? And she had to really fight back against all of that in her mind and say, oh my God, I'm not, you know, I'm not a model.
	I'm a singer. It doesn't matter how I look.
	You know, the people brutalizing me about my look.
	And so when you get thrust into the public eye, especially if you're in the movie business, right?
	So Ayn Rand was a very good screenwriter in some ways.
	And, of course, she also sounded a lot of warnings about the infiltration of communism into the American society.
	And, in fact, she was brutalized for Atlas Shrugged, in part by the conservatives.
	Was it William F. Buckley who said, you can almost hear in Atlas Shrugged, to the gas chambers go, right, this cry?
	And she was pretty horrified at that.
	Leonard Picoff was so enthusiastic about Atlas Shrugged that he said, my God, within a year of this thing being published, all the regulations will be gone.
	I mean, it's so obvious, right?
	And so Ayn Rand was pushing hard back, along with Ilya Kazan, along with people like, obviously, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and others.
	pushing hard back against the infiltration of communists into American media.
	into the American arts, and so on.
	A lot of the Communists...
	Robert Whittaker... No, Robert...
	Oh, God, I can't remember his name. Whittaker Chambers.
	Whittaker Chambers. I knew it was somewhere.
	Hey, found the... In the skip lands.
	Whittaker Chambers was in an epic battle with Alger Hiss about this.
	Whittaker Chambers was in the Communist Party.
	He left the Communist Party because he became a Catholic, I think.
	Certainly a Christian. And he knew that...
	Al-Jahis, who was very high up in the American government, was a communist, or at least used to be, and he accused him of this.
	I know Al-Jahis is a communist, and everybody said to Al-Jahis, my God, he's slandered.
	You've got to sue him. He's slandered. You've got to sue him.
	And Al-Jahis waited a long time and ended up suing him.
	And then Al-Jahis lost and was bound to have perjured himself by saying he'd never been a communist and ended up spending five years in prison for perjury where he helped a lot of prisoners, got out and everybody on the left celebrated him and gave him a big party and all of that and welcomed him back.
	Because that's what they do to their dissidents, whereas people like me are thrown into the sticky and darkness.
	But back to Ayn Rand.
	So if you're famous for writing, And you end up in the arts.
	You're surrounded by unbelievably beautiful people.
	I mean, would you want to be Ayn Rand standing next to Hedy Lamarr?
	Or Grace Kelly?
	I don't think so, right? And so for Ayn Rand, she was, I mean, very concerned with her looks.
	And also because she was with a younger man, Nathaniel Brandon, for a long time.
	And she used to stretch out her legs after they'd had sex in the afternoon.
	They would send their respective marital partners away.
	And she'd say, don't you think I have the prettiest legs?
	And I'm like, I never understood that, honestly.
	I mean, she's a literary genius, a philosophical genius.
	And she's like, but aren't my legs nice?
	And it's like, people like me saying, look at my look, my arms, aren't they strong?
	I mean, it's just, the brain is, you know, my arms are boring.
	My brain is not, I think.
	So... Yeah, she was very concerned with her look, so she ended up taking a lot of amphetamines to keep her weight down, so she wouldn't be hungry.
	Of course, she smoked a lot to keep herself slender.
	But the smoking kind of destroyed her voice, and of course your skin gets destroyed by smoking.
	And she, like, it's like a lot of women, right?
	I've heard this from a lot of women who are...
	In the arts. And they get there not based on their looks.
	That they just, they feel ugly.
	They feel unattractive standing next to, you know, the movie stars and all of that.
	Which again, I mean, I sort of understand that.
	But aren't you going by a different metric?
	I think you should be. So yeah, she had her foibles.
	And of course, from 1957 until her death in, what, the early 80s?
	It's a long time. It's a long time.
	And she was basically depressed pretty much the whole time.
	The sort of later stories of her life, just shuffling around in this dirty...
	Not quite Howard Hughes, but pretty grungy, pretty grotty.
	And she never really was able to form many good friendships because she was very prickly and very reactionary and very hostile.
	She was good friends with Mickey Spillane, the crime writer, and he would write to her and say, well, when is Atlas going to shrug again?
	Like, what are you doing? It's been like 20 years.
	You've never written anything other than a bit of nonfiction.
	To me it just seems like a tragic life.
	It's a tragic life.
	I mean, I lost in many ways, right?
	I mean, I certainly lost in terms of what it is that I wanted to gain, but you have to adjust to that.
	And if you say, look, I thought I was going to win, or I thought I could win, I lost, that simply means that there was something I didn't understand about the battle, about the conflict, and therefore I can now, through my losing, I can gain wisdom in figuring out what I didn't understand that gave me the enthusiasm to go forward when I ended up losing.
	A loss can be a gain in wisdom.
	Obviously, that's pretty obvious, right?
	She wanted her man to see her as pretty.
	Don't all women want that?
	Ayn Rand at my speed.
	Thank you from Tarantino.
	Well, yeah, okay. I mean, sure.
	I mean, I guess everybody wants to be pretty.
	Everybody wants to be viewed as pretty.
	I get all of that, but if you're not pretty, you're not pretty.
	So what? You know, I dated an engineer once, and she was not pretty.
	She was attractive enough, I guess, but she wasn't pretty.
	She's like a six. And she was a pretty good conversationalist, though, and pretty funny.
	And she's like, yeah, I'm not pretty.
	I'm not pretty. I'm a really good engineer.
	She was a really good engineer, but not pretty.
	She was fine with that. I liked when you said you were looking 500 years in the future.
	Yeah, for sure. I have at least a half millennia business plan.
	See, I can't lose, right?
	I mean, I can lose in the moment, right?
	I've obviously dropped politics and attempts to influence the world in a larger sphere or context.
	No thanks, right? Nobody walks straight into a machine gun nest if they're on a hunt, right?
	But here's the thing.
	I can't lose, right?
	I can't lose. Did Socrates lose?
	Did Jesus lose? Again, not comparing myself to these people, but as far as inspirations and people who changed the world for the better in many ways goes.
	So, oh, they lost, right?
	Obviously lost a lot worse than I did, but they gained enormously based on that.
	And the losing and the longevity are the same thing.
	Just so you understand, if you care about my thinking on these matters, maybe you do.
	I think it's important for your own life too.
	The losing and the longevity are the same thing.
	I mean, you can pick on just about anyone, I don't know, like Sam Harris or whoever, right?
	And no massive, I don't particularly care about Sam Harris that much, but he's not going to last, not going to last the test of time, right?
	It's what Marlowe said about Shakespeare.
	He said, I'm for our time, he's for all time, like Shakespeare's for all time.
	And so all the people who've made massive compromises and avoided particular topics and so on, in order to curry favor and survivability in the present, will be invisible to the future.
	Be forgotten. And, you know, Spencer was a huge thinker in the 19th century.
	Nobody really thinks of him now.
	He's massive in his day, right?
	People are like, I don't know. Joe Rogan or, I don't know, like, I mean, are they going to be talked about in a hundred years?
	Well, no, because they made too many compromises, in my view.
	I mean, to be talked about. I mean, obviously, Joe Rogan, what did he get?
	A hundred million dollars just from Spotify or whatever.
	So, the guy's made some coin, obviously, right?
	Well paid for this stuff, right?
	I mean, lots of money in compromise.
	Because lots of profit in intellectualism, but the ultimate profit is intellectuals compromising on truth and virtue.
	So, for me, it's a case of, do you want to win in the present, or do you want to win for all time?
	Do you want to play the long game, or do you want to play the short game?
	I mean, I'm not a dumb guy.
	I mean, it was very clear to me that take on certain topics, and you're rolling the dice for the future, but you're going to get snake eyes in the present, right?
	You're going to just roll a two in the present.
	But conformity to the present is invisibility to the future.
	If you want to be far enough ahead of your time to still have relevance and importance to the future, then you can't really give a shit about the Overton window of your day.
	You can't. You can't.
	And you can't just have a one thing, like all the abolitionists who ended slavery, a wonderful advance, one of the most important advances in human society, and the abolitionists who ended slavery, well, they ended slavery, we don't read them anymore.
	Right? So... And of course, here's the other thing too.
	In the future, the topics that got me lit up and dismissed from society, those topics will be common parlance in the future.
	And everyone who avoided those topics will be blindingly evident to the future.
	Absolutely, completely and totally evident to the future.
	And they will be dismissed because if a man is a coward in one thing, he's probably a coward in all things.
	Unless he explicitly says, I'm not touching this because of whatever, whatever, whatever, but I'm going to whatever.
	Like, am we going to do that? If it's conscious and explained, maybe, right?
	But if you want to be relevant to the future, you can't care about the pettiness of the present.
	I mean, obviously you care about it like it matters, like it's something important you need to navigate around.
	But if you want to be tall enough to be visible in the future, you can't care about the ceilings.
	You've got to just blast through those ceilings.
	You just blow past them, right?
	Blow past those ceilings.
	And, you know, it's a funny thing, too, because I remember when I was growing up, there was all this talk.
	You guys probably heard it, too.
	It's probably still around. The glass ceiling.
	Remember the glass ceiling? That there was this invisible ceiling that women just couldn't get through.
	This glass ceiling, blah, blah, blah.
	Glass ceiling being, I don't know, production of the next generation of human beings so that everything's worthwhile.
	Something like that. But the glass ceiling.
	Now, the real glass ceiling is fear.
	The real glass ceiling is a fear of disapproval and punishment for telling the truth.
	And I was always encouraged, you know, you've got to just blast through that glass ceiling.
	And look, I'm not hugely criticizing.
	Not everyone can be visible 500 years from now.
	But I will be.
	I will be. You will be.
	People who participate in this conversation will be.
	Absolutely. No question.
	Because we're dealing with such foundational and fundamental issues.
	That they will be there in the future.
	In the future there will still be evil to fight.
	In the future there will still be self-knowledge to examine.
	In the future there will still be ethics that need to be supported and enforced.
	In the future there will still be children who need to be raised rationally and well.
	In the future there will still be collectivism to shatter into individualism.
	There will be all of these things.
	It will be less in the future over time.
	But The praise of the present at the expense of the future.
	A philosopher is measured by the good he does long after he's dead.
	There's a basic simple fact.
	A philosopher is measured by the good he does long after he's dead.
	An artist is sometimes measured that way as well.
	An entertainer is not measured by the good he does or the entertainment he provides long after he's dead because you have to be popular enough to be able to leave a legacy in the present.
	But no, philosophers, that's the deal, right?
	The deal is abuse in the present, glory in the future.
	I can only do what I do because I believe in an afterlife.
	In the future. Not for me personally, but for the work that we have gathered together in this high plane.
	The abuse of the present is actually kind of boring.
	It's... Like, how do you finally get out of an abusive relationship?
	It's not when you're angry.
	It's not when you forgive. It's not when you rage.
	It's not when you submit. It's not any of these things.
	It's when you look across the table and you're more interested in the dust that is floating between you than the other person.
	When you look across the table and you say, you know, I... I gotta tell you, I know everything that's gonna come out of your mouth.
	I know your response to every situation.
	I know that anal-tight sphincter clenching that happens whenever someone disagrees with you.
	I know, I know, I know everything you're going to say.
	You know, when you've played through Skyrim or some game so often that you just, you know.
	What did I play on the iOS Blades?
	I played that for a little while and there's like a little, there's these NPC talking, like you know, you know that the end of the abusive relationship is Unbelievable boredom and predictability, right?
	So, if I'm ever written about, I know.
	I know. There's no curiosity.
	There's no, right? All of this, right?
	And so the sort of lies and slander and calumny in the present is completely boring.
	It's just circling the wagons to protect political power, domination, the addiction of The drug of control.
	So it's just boring. You know, if you've ever been around an addict, it's just, isn't it really boring?
	You know, yeah, you want the drugs.
	Yeah, you want the alcohol. Yeah.
	Or someone, have you ever been around someone, everyone they meet romantically is just the greatest thing ever.
	And oh, this is perfect.
	And this is my dream guy.
	This is the perfect woman.
	We just get along so, and you just know, you know that they're going to be broken up in three months and it's going to be horrible.
	You know! Beyond a shadow of a doubt because they've learned nothing and they have grown in no dimension whatsoever.
	And... You know.
	It's completely boring. And you also know that if you point this out, they're going to get enraged at you and they're going to attack you for failing to take any happiness in their joy and, you know, just because you can't get a great woman, you now have to dump on everything I do.
	Like, you just know. It's completely predictable.
	It's completely boring. It's completely boring.
	As I say, you're looking across the person, you're more interested in the dust between you.
	At least it's moving. At least it's slightly unpredictable.
	And that, like the end of the relationship at the present, for me, like the end of the relationship at the present is just, yeah, this is completely boring.
	It's completely boring. There's no interaction that's possible because it's like interacting with a robot and thinking that you're talking to a human being.
	It's boring. It's boring.
	And heavily defensive people are just that way.
	They're just really boring. You know what they're defending.
	You know what they're going to say. You know what's going to upset them.
	You know what's going to trigger them.
	You know that they're allergic to the truth.
	I mean, it's boring.
	You know that every time they're contradicted, they're just going to abuse you.
	And it's like, ah, it's so boring.
	Every time I talked to my mom, it was like, sorry, Squire, the record's stuck.
	Sorry, Squire, the record's stuck.
	Sorry, Squire, the record's stuck.
	The way that records used to get stuck in the old day, right?
	I had a speaker system so bad.
	It was all plastic. It came from consumers distributing or ShopRite or something.
	We used to have these warehouse stores like long before Amazon.
	When you had to go to Amazon in a sense rather than Amazon coming to you, you would go to these stores.
	If things were pretty cheap, they had these big catalogs and you'd have to write down like the 15-digit Inventory thing, you'd take it to some guy in this grungy counter and he'd go back into the warehouse and some other guy would then go and bring your thing forward and that's how you used to buy things.
	You used to go down to these warehouses and order these things at the desk and then they'd bring them to you.
	It was like Amazon, the alpha, not even the beta, right?
	And, oh God, what the hell was I talking about with that?
	Oh, I can't even catch up with myself now.
	Look at that. Normally, I keep the threads going fairly well.
	But this one...
	I'll wait.
	Maybe you guys can. Oh, yeah.
	It's boring, right? Yeah, so...
	Just way too predictable.
	I'd go to my mom and she'd be like, say the same things over and over again.
	Same things over and over again.
	The doctors made me sick.
	The court case is about to settle.
	You're going to make lots of money from my court case.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you contradict anything.
	Anything. You contradict anything.
	Question anything. Ask for evidence of anything.
	And suddenly you're on the side of the bad guys.
	You don't trust them. Right?
	So boring. So boring.
	And... Yeah, I mean, yeah, you can say NPCs, but NPCs don't come with the same level of aggression and volatility.
	NPCs are, you know, bland and blank computer characters, and you can just turn off the computer.
	But, yeah, so for me, and I say this not because you're rapidly fascinated by my process of being a public philosopher, but simply because I think, I think, I hope, I hope that this is useful stuff for you to mull over as well in your life, right? I mean, what percentage of your relationships are boring?
	Family relationships, like what percentage of relationships are boring?
	When I knew what was coming out of the person's mouth, and you know, you know what's coming out of the person's mouth in most, with most people, you know.
	When I was like, I know, I know, whatever, whatever's coming, I know what this person is going to, I know how this person is going to respond, and you think, you sit and think to yourself, you say, okay, well, When was the last time this person said something that genuinely surprised and enlightened me?
	When was the last time this person said something that genuinely surprised and enlightened me?
	I hope that I'm still doing that with you after 5,000 shows and actually 5,500.
	I just haven't published 500 of them.
	Oh, yeah. 100% of family relationships.
	85%. So many topics I'm not allowed to discuss.
	Yeah. It also feels hard to be spontaneous with some people because I'm afraid how they will react.
	Yeah, for sure. For sure.
	Yeah, it's volatile, right?
	It's volatile. And this was the sort of powers that be responded to the potential of the internet by giving us all recording devices so that we could catch each other saying unwise things or bad things and then could get our lives destroyed, right?
	To turn us all into the hate speech policers of other people's fevered imaginations and so on, right?
	Steph is, my online family.
	Lovely to hear. Lovely to hear.
	But, you know, work to get that in your life, obviously, but it's great.
	I can't have a discussion with my mother because I'm just talking to CNN. Oh, I'm so sorry.
	CNN. Wow.
	They treat you like you have a problem when they irritate you.
	Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so Ayn Rand did a great phrase for them, social metaphysicians, right?
	They don't say what is true, they say what do people believe is true.
	They don't say what is right, they say what do people think is right.
	What happens is when people base their identity on easily manipulated opinions or manipulatable opinions, you start to question those opinions, it feels to them like you're disassembling their entire personality, like you're driving them insane.
	When they have based their mindset on madness, And contradictory media, lies, nonsense, all of that is madness.
	I mean, it's not even hyperbole.
	It's absolute madness. It's insanity.
	But when you can get people to base their personality on insanity, then trying to bring consistency feels like you're driving them mad.
	It feels like you're driving them mad, and bad.
	So when you can get...
	If you can get people to believe that, I don't know, like, questioning the safety of the vaccines or whatever, right?
	Just take an example, right?
	That that's just evil and it's going to get people killed and then you're a crazy anti-vaxxer and, you know, you're just selfish and you don't care about society and you don't want people to stay healthy and you're willing for people to die for your...
	Like, once you can get people to that mindset, well, then they've based their only shreds of happiness on the...
	On hostility and hatred and contempt towards others.
	That's, you know, if you can give people easy moral superiority, you mostly own them for life and their kids and everything, right?
	So it's like, well, education's got to be done by the state if you don't want the state to do it and you don't want kids to be educated.
	It's like, okay, well, that's just easy moral superiority to anyone who questions the beliefs.
	If you persist in your questioning, you know, the patiently and calmly They react with violence because it feels like an assault.
	It really feels like an assault. It feels like you're poisoning them.
	It feels like you're disassembling their reality.
	If somebody was standing over with you about to inject you with a drug that would make you insane, you would fight them like hell too, right?
	You would use violence against them.
	And this is the disassembling of delusion, capacity of philosophical inquiry, the Socratic method.
	It feels like, genuinely, and I'm not kidding about this, it feels like an assault to people.
	That's why they've got this hate speech and they want to throw people in jail for questioning and criticizing and bringing up uncomfortable facts.
	It feels like an assault.
	You get people to live on lies, the truth feels like murder.
	You get people to live on lies, the truth feels like murder.
	Or for people who live on lies, the truth feels like murder.
	You're assaulting them.
	Now, for people who are curious and empirical and rational, curiosity and questions, not only do I not fear that, I welcome it and do it with myself and others every day.
	Every day. Every day.
	I hope you will check out, I just published this, freedomain.locals.com, a bunch of great call-in shows just went out recently.
	I hope you will check that out.
	"Should the same standards be applied to a violent abuser even when she's convinced herself that it never occurred?" What do you mean by the same standards?
	Would you lower your standards if people deny their evil?
	Well, all you're doing is rewarding them denying their evil, which means they're just going to keep doing it.
	Whatever you reward, you will get more of.
	Whatever you punish, you will get less of.
	So if you allow someone who denies the crime to get away with it, then you will simply be training everyone in your life to hurt you and then deny that it happened.
	So I don't see how that helps at all.
	If you're anti-vax, you're pro-COVID. Yeah, strange, eh?
	Somebody says, more my father in this case.
	And her husband told me to smoke some weed because they were irritating me.
	Oh yeah, mellow out, man.
	Just chill out, man.
	Chillax. Do you have any insight into helping a relative manage a painful divorce, a chronic illness?
	My father believes that his life is over.
	I don't, really.
	And I'm so sorry because pain management is a very specific psychological and...
	Physiological thing. So there are psychologists who are trained in pain management in how to distract and dissociate from the pain, not in a dissociative like spaced out way, but how to find ways to work on diminishing the pain if you're in chronic pain.
	And of course, pain management is a very complex pharmaceutical art and science, which is heavily punished by the government if you've got a very high pain tolerance.
	So, no, I really can't help you with that, but I will say that if you can get to a psychologist who specializes in pain management, I think that there could be some considerable help that can come out of that for you.
	Is there anything that can be done when people have these delusions, aside from question them?
	it.
	So you need to figure out, I think, I would suggest, that it's worth trying to figure out Why people are wedded to their delusions?
	Why are they wedded to their delusions?
	Now, take an example.
	Somebody works for a tax collection agency, then the taxation is theft stuff and you might be not a great guy in the eyes of history in the future.
	It's not really going to go very far.
	If somebody's a public school teacher and you talk about The corruption of the public school unions and the corruption of the curriculum and it's weird and creepy these days and anti-white and anti-healthy sexuality and so on.
	Well, their paycheck and their sense of self-respect, their social circle, everything.
	Just depends on this, right?
	So, you're not going to be able to, you know, the old thing, if you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.
	If you have them by the wallet, their soul and conscience will follow.
	Soul and conscience won't get far, but they'll ignore that.
	So, you have to look at what their stakes are.
	What are their stakes? I've never had it myself, and I've had a lot of experience with this, I've never had it myself when somebody has publicly come out with extreme hostility and aggression towards me, which is very unwarranted, right?
	The harder they punch, the less they will change.
	So if somebody's been really hostile and aggressive towards you, the odds of them changing are zero.
	Now, is it possible?
	Sure. If you jump out of a plane over a city, is it possible for you to survive?
	I suppose. You could...
	Fall into some hay bale.
	You could, I don't know, something, right?
	There's a possibility that you could, you know, they always do this in cartoons, you fall through a bunch of awnings, and then you just, is it possible for you to survive?
	Sure it is. But it's effectively zero.
	Because if somebody was trying to push you out of a plane, you'd fight like they were trying to kill you.
	You wouldn't sit there and say, well, maybe I'll fall through some awnings or I'll bounce off some hay bales or there's some deep lake there or there's some open sewage hole that I'll fall into with the sewage and it will break my...
	Like, you just say, the guy is trying to push me out, but the plane is trying to kill me.
	So, for the OCD anal among you, when I say zero and you immediately want to say, well, that's a possibility.
	Like, no. The effectiveness is zero.
	And what I mean by that is, could you save for your retirement by playing the lottery?
	Sure. Could it happen that you will end up with wonderful retirement because you played the lottery?
	Yeah. You know, there's a 1 in 50 million chance, a 1 in 10 million chance that...
	But it's effectively zero.
	Because you can't have to make a plan for that.
	You can't have a plan for that.
	It's not a sane or rational plan.
	So the effect of zero is really important.
	I mean, this is the one thing that you...
	Okay, there's stuff that's impossible.
	Right? If you get ejected from a spaceship with no space suit on, if you get ejected from a spaceship in the void of outer space, you cannot survive.
	100%. You will die.
	Right? And you won't even die from lack of oxygen, like you'll explode, right?
	Because there's no air pressure to keep you, right?
	So that's 100%.
	100%.
	You know, somebody, I don't know, jams a shotgun in your mouth and pulls the trigger, and you're not going to survive.
	They hold you underwater for 20 minutes, you're dead.
	Like no breathing apparatus, right?
	So there's some stuff where, yeah, it's zero.
	And then there's a lot of stuff that's so close to zero, you plan for zero.
	It's so close to zero, it's exactly the same for zero as zero in terms of planning.
	Right? I mean, is it possible that someone could call me tomorrow from YouTube and say, oh, you know what?
	Did we ever make a mistake?
	Your channel is totally restored.
	Is that possible? Yeah.
	Yeah. Is it going to happen?
	No. It could happen.
	It's like, yes, but the functional, practical aspect of things is zero.
	What you plan for, what you aim for, what you base your decisions on is zero.
	You don't say, but a sliver, but a .001.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	No.
	Like, you know, the statistic I quoted the other day, a healthy 30-year-old American has a 1 in 250,000 chance of dying from COVID.
	That's zero.
	For planning purposes, right?
	In the same way that you don't say goodbye to everyone, hope that you'll see them again, but you might not.
	Here's my will, last will and testament, here's where my life insurance is, because I'm driving to the grocery store to get some cream and I could get killed in the car.
	Could you get killed in the car on the way to the grocery store?
	Yes. Yes.
	Will you get killed in a car crash sitting on your couch?
	No. Could you get killed in a car crash on the road driving to the grocery store to get your cream?
	Yes. But it's effectively zero.
	And that's what we do. We get into our cars and we drive like we're not going to die.
	Could we die? Yes. But what do we plan for that we're not?
	So the difference between zero and effectively zero is really, really important to understand.
	And the reason I'm saying all of this is that the sliver of hope is a bad idea, man.
	Well, I didn't save my retirement, but maybe I could win the lottery.
	You understand? So thinking you could win the lottery to save for your retirement, to pay for your retirement, thinking, well, I'll win the lottery, what that means is that you will save less for your retirement because you've got this liver of hope.
	The reason why you have to say it's effectively zero is because thinking it's not zero changes what you do.
	It changes your behavior.
	You go, oh, well, I could pay for my retirement by winning the lottery.
	Then you're Discipline in saving for your retirement will go down because you've got this magic.
	You understand? You've got this magic that could happen.
	So it's really important to nail shut the coffin of effectively zero.
	Right? If I genuinely thought, yeah, there's a chance I could get the call from YouTube or Twitter or PayPal tomorrow and they've restored every...
	Come on.
	Do they restore? Yeah, they do.
	Ron Paul, one of Ron Paul's channels got nuked off YouTube and then they restored it because they'd made a mistake or whatever.
	But, you know, not, what is it, well over a year now, right?
	So, you have to work with effectively zero.
	Could you get hit by an asteroid walking tomorrow?
	You, not the asteroid walking.
	Could you get hit by an asteroid tomorrow?
	Yes. Do you live your life that way?
	No. The odds are so close to zero that they're effectively zero.
	Because, of course, if you genuinely thought that there was a possibility that you were going to get hit by an asteroid tomorrow, you'd stay in a bunker, right?
	Like, it would change your life.
	You'd be dancing in the sky and walk into traffic and get killed by a car.
	So the effective zero thing, the effective zero thing means you have to stop magical thinking.
	And saying, just because something is possible...
	Doesn't mean that you should act as if it is.
	Just because something's possible doesn't mean you should act as if it is.
	Is it possible that you have a creeping aneurysm that's undetected that's going to kill you in the next five minutes?
	Yes, I suppose it is.
	Do you have some heart blockage?
	I don't know, whatever, right? Yeah, it's possible.
	Do you live that way? No, you don't.
	Is it possible you're going to live for 200 years?
	No. So possibly you can leave for 100?
	Yeah, it's unlikely, but you could.
	So what do you plan for? So, the effectively zero is really important, and you've got to wedge that as wide as humanly possible.
	As wide as humanly possible so that you don't spend your life, waste your life, on the slim to none.
	On the slim to none.
	Is it possible that my mother could call me tomorrow and she said, you know, I've been listening to your show.
	You really did make a great case for therapy.
	I went to go and see a therapist.
	I've really been talking things through.
	By gosh, I really understand things and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Is that possible? Yeah.
	It's statistically possible.
	But it's zero. And then, of course, the people are like, but it's not zero.
	Yes, it is zero. It absolutely is zero.
	Because the moment it's not zero, it changes my behavior for the worse.
	Because then I sit and wait and mull over it and wonder what I'll say.
	And I waste time for things that will functionally never happen.
	You have to take the slim to none's and eliminate them completely.
	Could you have a distant relative who will die and give you a million dollars that you didn't even know?
	This actually happened to a friend of mine.
	It actually happened to a friend of mine.
	He was broke.
	And a relative in another country died, had no kids, and he was the closest living relative.
	They were not a very fecund group.
	And he literally woke up and was over a million dollars richer.
	It happens.
	Do you plan for that?
	No. Is it possible?
	Sure. Just like the Nigerian prince could be, wanting to move all that money with using your bank.
	Yeah, it's possible. But do you act like that?
	No. So, in order to have a productive, efficient, and happy life, you have to, have to, have to, like I'm really, I'm on my knees begging you, I'd command you if I could.
	You have to take the slim to nones and sweep them completely off the table of your life.
	You've got to evaluate this shit ruthlessly, rigorously, harshly.
	And you've got to get the slim to none's and just wipe that, like just yeet it right off your table.
	Take it out of your calculations.
	If you've got someone who's been mean or boring or abusive or indifferent or careless or dangerous or addicted for five years, could they change?
	Sure. Is it possible?
	Yes, it is possible. But planning as if it's possible will change your life for the worse.
	Is it, you know, you've got some, I don't know, your mom has been like, I don't know, boring, abusive, dangerous, upsetting, troublesome, difficult, obstructive, petty, vindictive, whatever, right?
	And you've known her for like 40 years.
	Could she change tomorrow? Yeah.
	Is she going to? No.
	Oh, but no, no.
	You've got to be firm with this stuff.
	Got to be firm with this stuff.
	The slim to none's will destroy your life.
	I'm not kidding you about that.
	The slim to none's will absolutely destroy your life because they will keep you in an orbit of nothing, in an orbit of waiting, in an orbit of the worst four-letter word in the world, hope.
	Because you'll sit there and say, oh, my mom could change, blah, blah, blah.
	Meanwhile, you're getting older and all the decent women are staying away because you're a bitch of a mom.
	And you end up with no life, no marriage, no kids.
	You're fucked in life because you've been, the slim to none got you and choked the living life out of you and got you to waste your life waiting for something.
	It's not coming. Oh, but there's a chance.
	No! No! Zero chance.
	Oh, but zero points. No, zero.
	Be disciplined.
	Be disciplined.
	Maybe I'm a chainsmoker, but there's a possibility it won't harm my health.
	George Burns smoked cigars and lived to be 100.
	No. No.
	Absolutely not. You think you're going to live on the edges of the bell curve?
	You just miss everything.
	Discipline. It's taking that slim to none shit, pouring gasoline on it and burning it down and cheering.
	Liberation from fantasy.
	You want people in your life to be liberated from delusion?
	How about you liberate yourself from delusion that you can liberate them from delusion?
	You understand? That slim to none shit is Dark, slippery, quicksand, murkwoods of doom that you will get lost in and expire.
	And you will lose everything, everything, on the slim to none's.
	Is it possible some CNN-addicted NPC person is going to wake up to philosophical truth and reality?
	Sure. But no.
	Yes, but no. Yes, it's possible, but no.
	You do not act as if it's possible.
	You do not act as if it's possible.
	Or you will lose everything.
	Everything. If you want to give up...
	Here's the thing.
	If you want to help the people in your life who have delusions, the first thing you need to give up is every delusion you have.
	You know? Oxygen mask on yourself.
	Then you help the people around you.
	Because if you're sitting there trying to, oh, there's a slim to none, but slim chance that I could change the person who's an NPC into blah, blah, blah.
	And then you say, well, you know, you've got to give up your delusions.
	And they're like, hello, do you know who I am?
	I'm not going to change. And you're still trying to change me.
	Who are you to talk about giving up delusions?
	You model the giving up delusions.
	You model what you want in the world.
	And then you see who comes along.
	That's how you change things.
	That's how things get better in the world.
	You model absolutely deeply and compellingly what you want in the world.
	You show it to everyone in the glory of your integrity and consistency.
	You show it. You manifest it.
	You live the shit out of it.
	And you see who wants to come along.
	That's what you do. You don't nag.
	You don't boss. You don't bully.
	You don't bank like a cringing dog.
	You don't hope. You don't circle, you don't...
	You got some fat guy on the couch, you want him to lose weight?
	You're fat too? You're going to sit there and lift his arms for him?
	Shake his legs? Look, you're exercising!
	Yay! No.
	You can't ever get him to lose weight if he doesn't want to, if you're still fat.
	Because he'll just look at you and say, who the hell are you to talk to me about?
	The virtues and values of being slender when you're fat.
	That's vanity, right?
	That's arrogance. That's...
	Somehow people will ignore what you're doing because you're saying stuff that's different.
	If you want people to be free of illusions around you, you must relentlessly expose and reintegrate the false self delusions that are surrounding you in the hall of mirrors where you move and you think that the planet is changing itself.
	No, it's just a hall of mirrors reflecting your movements.
	You want people to give up their fat, you lose the weight.
	You want people to give up their delusions, you give up your delusions.
	You want people to value freedom.
	Don't be enslaved to their fucking delusions.
	You understand? When you are desperately trying to change people who refuse to change, you are saying that the best thing that free people can do is be a slave to other peoples.
	No. No, I won't change.
	No, I won't listen. No, I don't like that sauce.
	No, that's too right-wing. No!
	You're a racist. Oh, no, but please.
	Oh, no, you gotta...
	No, no, no, no.
	Unworthy of any sovereign soul.
	You don't give delusions power over you.
	You don't give other people's delusions power over you.
	In what they lie about you.
	In what they do to themselves.
	Because of course it's painful to watch people you care about who are lost in delusions.
	It's painful. It's painful. I understand that.
	But as long as you are feeling the pain and trying to change them, not because you want them to be free, but because you want less pain from seeing them be a slave.
	But everything you do where you chase after and empower people's delusions strengthens those delusions because now those delusions have power over you.
	They can make you jump and bark and do spins and twists and look things up, right?
	Don't. Freeing people It means withdrawing every, every single ounce of subjugation to their delusions.
	You want to live in lies?
	I think it's a bad idea.
	I'm not going to do it. Off I go.
	Now they may look at you and say, that's a pretty great life, man.
	Come on. Tell me this.
	Hit me with a why in the chat.
	If you're at least as convinced by the life that I lead as the words that I say.
	Hit me with a Y. If you're at least as convinced by the life that I live rather than the words that I say.
	Because I live my values, right?
	I came from a horribly abused background.
	I've been in a stable, happy 20-year marriage.
	You heard my daughter. I didn't tell her to say this.
	She said this the other day when we were doing the review of Cinderella.
	And she said, I'm the least abused person on the planet.
	I'm the least abused person on the planet.
	Okay, so you're all saying yes, right?
	Possibly more so. Izzy is the proof.
	Izzy is the proof. Okay, so that's how you do it.
	I changed your mind by how I lived.
	Now, if I was enmeshed in abusive relationships and, I don't know, broke, and I was telling you all about how to be free, would you care?
	No. Because we're empiricists.
	That's why I've always said I'm an empiricist, right?
	I'm an empiricist. This is the freedom.
	My tears of joy.
	Yeah, you got it, man. You got it.
	The tears of joy come from this basic fact.
	This is the freedom that I'm talking about.
	This is the freedom that I'm talking about.
	You can only liberate people by inspiration.
	You cannot liberate them through language.
	You cannot liberate them through arguments or facts or data or websites or graphs or charts or numbers.
	You can only liberate people through inspiration.
	You cannot give any fuel to any delusion in your environment.
	And wanting to change people is giving power to their delusions.
	Because now they have power over you because you want to change them.
	You want them to give up their delusions.
	And most people are so petty and lost that whenever you have a need for something from them, they will...
	Act out power by denying you.
	Did you see? I need something from you.
	Oh, I have power by denying you.
	I don't have any real power in my life.
	Oh, but this feels good.
	Oh, I at least can say no to you.
	I can deny you.
	I have power over you because you need something from me.
	You want something from me.
	And then you want them to give up that power?
	No. They won't. You're feeding the beast in them.
	You're trapping them. It's a form of hostility, what you're doing.
	It's a form of vicious cruelty.
	It's vicious. I know you think it's kind.
	I know you think it's nice. I think, oh, I just want them to see the truth.
	No. By needing something from them, you are empowering their delusions.
	Because by retaining their delusions, they are controlling you, and they don't have much control in their life.
	Why? Because they're deluded! They don't have much power over reality.
	They only have power over you by hanging on to their delusions.
	You follow me, right?
	You follow me.
	You wanting to change their delusions is serving their delusions.
	You wanting to remove their delusions from them is serving their delusions because it gives the delusions power over you, which is the only power that they experience as human beings.
	When you give up on reality and you focus on delusions, people wanting to talk you out of the delusions is the only power you have in the world.
	Can't do it. You can't do it.
	You can't do it. I mean, you can.
	You can try. But it's like bribing someone to do something while you say you don't want them to do it.
	You're bribing them with a sense of power while saying you should give up these delusions.
	But you wanting them to give up their delusions is what gives them a sense of power over you.
	It's the only sense of power they have.
	We all gravitate towards a sense of power.
	Everyone.
	Me, you, everyone.
	Don't feed them.
	Don't subsidize their delusions by giving them power over you because you want to change them.
	You want to change them.
	Very bad idea.
	It's a very bad idea.
	you will waste your life.
	And you will just feed the demons that have control over everyone.
	And you know this. .
	You know this deep down.
	And I'll close on this.
	You know this deep down.
	Look. When you have done something that is added to your sense of power, what do you feel?
	And you can answer this.
	When you have done something where you genuinely feel empowered and in control, what is your emotional state?
	If you've mastered something, if you've achieved a goal, what do you feel?
	What is your emotional experience?
	Satisfaction, fulfillment, power, right?
	You feel power when you have achieved something that is positive and good for your sense of control over the world.
	You feel happy. Yeah, you feel happy, for sure.
	Happiness is the reward of the achievement of efficacy and power.
	Now, I don't mean power over people like you're subjugating or controlling them, right?
	Whatever it is, right? Power.
	Gratitude. Yeah, gratitude for sure.
	Yeah, for sure. When I get the words right, like this speech is very good, I think, very helpful.
	Good means helpful. When I get it right, I get a sense of energy.
	I get a sense of like a thrumming in my chest, like a giant tuning fork of truth.
	I had this when I did the show with the guy.
	Oh my God. I did a show recently with a guy.
	It's freedomain.locals.com.
	I think it's subscriber only for now.
	He was literally raised wallowing in his own urine and shit for the first couple of years of his life.
	His grandmother used him to trick his mother into having an exorcism performed upon her, which he was forced to watch.
	And I was really just drilling down into what happened to him and what this means about society and the world, and I was just like, boom, boom, truth bomb, truth bomb.
	And you know when you get it.
	You know when you have that Connection to the truth and the value of what it is that you're saying is like a bullet shot through a cloud of the present to a firework for eternity.
	It is something that will last the test of time.
	I know, I'm perfectly aware of what I'm saying now.
	This little community, this little camera, what I'm saying now will stretch through the years, through the centuries, through the millennia.
	We are not the only people who have pissed away decades trying to change people without realizing we're only feeding their sense of power over us by rejecting our improvements.
	So you feel this, right?
	You feel what I'm saying here, so it's why some of you have tears of joy and will remember for the rest of your lives that you were here when this speech came out.
	So you have that, right?
	You have that experience, what I'm hearing in this speech.
	I am empowering myself, reminding myself of all of this.
	I am empowering you, and you feel a sense of liberation and of joy and of happiness and of peace.
	Philosophical power and peace, peace of mind, it's the same thing.
	Now, compare this feeling, compare this emotion, this experience, compare that.
	To when you've just spent an hour beating your head against some deluded, matrix-dwelling NPC's brain.
	What is your feeling when you are rejected and eye-rolled and humiliated and told you're annoying and told that that's not a good source and told that you're a bad person?
	What is your feeling when you have tried and failed for hours or years or decades To liberate someone from their illusions.
	What is your feeling?
	Then, hurt.
	Yeah.
	Soul death. Yeah, in a way, right?
	Certainly sands you down, right?
	You feel sad, frustrated.
	Don't you feel frustrated? Paralyzed?
	Helpless? Hopeless, humiliated, embarrassed, ashamed.
	You feel less.
	When you hear a speech like this, you feel more.
	More possibilities, more freedom, more liberation, more self-control.
	When you feed people's delusions by struggling to free them from those delusions, when you give them that power over you, when you strengthen their delusions, it weakens you.
	It weakens you. And you experience that.
	If you learn to trust your feelings...
	See, we sit there and say, well, I tried to change so-and-so.
	It didn't work. They got really insulting, kind of bored, and rolled their eyes, and I just felt really...
	So I must have been doing it wrong.
	I felt really frustrated and hurt and weak and worn down and sand down, whittled down to nothing.
	I've got to get back up.
	I've got to get back on the horse.
	I've got to try again. You've got to trust your feelings.
	That's why I talk about the emotions.
	It's so important in life.
	You've got to trust your feelings, my friends.
	Seriously, you've got to trust your feelings.
	If it diminishes you...
	I mean, how many times have you listened to me speak deeply about these things and walked away feeling diminished and embarrassed and humiliated and less?
	Does it happen? I hope not much, right?
	I hope not much, if at all.
	How many times do you come out of the beat-your-head-against-the-MPC's blank wall of defiant denial and humiliation and feel empowered and strengthened and happy and...
	...efficacious?
	Doesn't happen, right? Listen to your feelings.
	Oh, Magnus. Trust your feelings, Luke.
	This is a Star Wars reference.
	Right, so you get something incredibly generous and benevolent and beneficial like this, and you just have to chip it down, don't you, in your mind?
	It's very sad. Come on.
	You've got to chip it down.
	You've got to use some stupid, cheesy pop culture reference to whittle this down and diminish it, right?
	That I'm badly written science fiction dialogue.
	I mean, I know you think you're being funny, but what you're trying to do is puncture the moment so that people don't get the seriousness of what I'm talking about, the liberating moment that is at hand if you want it.
	It's making you uncomfortable and you need to diminish it because you feel that it dwarfs you when in fact it is trying to elevate you.
	I mean, we look at a spaceship and we feel small until we remember we get in the spaceship, we can be taller than the whole world, right?
	Goodbye before I cry.
	What's wrong with crying? It's the rain that waters the future.
	Often, right? You need to examine your feeling.
	If you feel lesser after an interaction, you feel diminished, you feel weakened, you feel humiliated, you feel embarrassed, you feel less.
	You weren't joking, sorry.
	You say, I was joking, sorry, and I appreciate that.
	No, but the question is, why were you joking in such a serious moment where people are poised on the flight of liberation away from wasting their lives trying to change people that they're surrendering power to by trying to change?
	Like, that's not a joking situation, is it?
	I've got a good sense of humor.
	This is not a joking situation.
	You're joking to keep people trapped.
	You're trying to make them laugh so hard as they're trying to get out of quicksand so that they fall into the quicksand.
	I'm not being too harsh.
	You think this is harsh?
	I'm not insulting him. I'm simply pointing out that he's feeling the need to puncture the seriousness of what we're talking about by making stupid jokes.
	And it's a stupid joke. And that's important.
	What would be really disrespectful to the guy, to him, and listen, I say this out of love, I'm not being mean to the guy, What would be really disrespect for him would be to not point this out, that this habit of diminishing the seriousness of a powerful moment by dragging people away from it, just a stupid Star Wars reference, right?
	It was not my intention.
	See, but you don't even know. This is the thing, man.
	This is the defensiveness that you got from your parents.
	You don't know what your intention was.
	Jokes are not subjective.
	Otherwise, there'd be no such thing as comedians.
	Jokes are not subjective. And joking in a serious moment where people, like, you understand, this is a moment where people in the chat are weeping with joy at the power of what we're talking about here.
	This is a moment where people are weeping with joy because they're feeling such an immense sense of liberation and potential.
	And you drag in a stupid Star Wars reference.
	And I'm not calling you stupid, right?
	But the reference is stupid. So there's a seriousness in the air, in the conversation, and a very powerful moment of liberation for human beings.
	Here. And I'm not trying to insult you, and I'm not saying you're a bad guy or anything like that, but you wanting to puncture that moment is really important.
	You wanting to diminish and puncture that moment.
	People are crying tears of liberation in what I'm saying.
	And you have to back away from that, and you have to diminish that, or you feel that you have to.
	And again, I'm not trying to insult you.
	I'm just pointing out that you're doing that mostly to yourself.
	Because it's going to...
	You wouldn't make this joke at a funeral, right?
	And this is a funeral of people's delusions.
	People are feeling tears of joy, being released from the delusion of wanting to change others.
	And you wouldn't make this joke at a funeral, would you?
	I mean, if your grandmother was up there crying about how much she loved her husband, you wouldn't say, trust your feelings, Luke!
	Because that would be a serious and powerful moment, right?
	And you would have respect for that, I would hope, I would think.
	And you just are recoiling from the depth of the moment.
	And what I'm saying by that is that there are people in your life, you see, I'm teaching you how to not give a drug to addicts.
	The drug called, I want to change you.
	I need to change you. I need you to be free from your delusions.
	I'm telling you, stop being a drug dealer and go and be free.
	Now, there are people in your life who desperately, you understand, there are people in your life who desperately want you to keep trying to change them, because that's the only sense of power, control, and efficacy and superiority that they have.
	And they will be immensely disappointed if you walk away from trying to change them.
	Could be in your marriage, could be in your Sibling relationships, could be a parental relationship, work relationships, friendships, extended family.
	There are people who desperately need you to come back and keep trying to change them because it gives them power and superiority, particularly moral superiority.
	They get to feel...
	God forbid society run out of the unvaccinated.
	Who on earth will they then lord it over and bully?
	So what's happening is there are people who are sensing the liberation in what it is that I'm saying.
	And you are delivering a message from the people who desperately need you, the listeners, to go back and keep trying to change them because it gives them a sense of power control and superiority, moral superiority in particular.
	So you're trying to diminish this moment so people don't get a sense of the liberation that they're experiencing.
	You are sending a message from the people who want to still enslave everyone in this conversation.
	Come back and change me. Come on.
	Come on. Try and change me. Come on.
	Maybe I'll do it. Maybe I'll do it.
	Come back. Try and change me. Come on.
	Come on. So I can have power over you, so I can reject you, so I can feel superior to you.
	So I can make you dance!
	For me! That power over you.
	So you want to diminish people's tears of joy so that they will continue to be delivered to the people who are addicted to them wanting to change those people.
	That just means that they're in your head and they're running a good chunk of what it is that you want to do.
	Which means that you, obviously, really want to change people around you, desperately want to change people around you, which is actually their desire, not yours.
	You understand? If you're trying to change, let's say, Sue, some woman named Sue in your life, you're trying to change her, you want to change her, you keep going back, you email her, you send her messages, you talk, you understand?
	That's The desire to change her comes from her, not you.
	Because she wants you to try and change her.
	It gives her power over you. And she doesn't have much power because she's a social metaphysician.
	She's not connected to reality.
	She's connected to opinions.
	Or CNN, or whatever, right?
	So Sue, Susan, the desire to want to change Susan comes from Susan, not you.
	You are a slave to her desire for you to change her.
	To want to change her. Come on.
	If you were dating a woman, you kept taking her out on expensive trips, but she knew that the moment she slept with you, you'd leave her.
	Is she going to sleep with you?
	No, because not sleeping with you gets her more benefits than sleeping with you.
	Not changing gets Susan and other people more benefit from you than changing.
	Because the moment that they change, they go from a position of power to a position of desperation.
	From weakness, from power to supplication.
	Because if they join you on the I want to change people side, right, then they're no longer on the position of withholding change and thus having power over others.
	Now they're on your side, which is the begging, supplicating, please change so I can be happy.
	I am a slave to you not changing.
	Now who voluntarily wants to go from master to slave?
	Who wants to go from a high power moral superiority situation to a low power desperate begging dog situation?
	No! They're not going to change because you want them to change.
	They won't surrender high power for low power.
	They won't surrender plus power to minus power.
	They won't surrender moral superiority to cringing dog begging nothingness.
	They won't do it.
	They won't do it. You're asking a hungry hyena to give up a fresh kill.
	They won't do it. You've set it up so that they are absolutely guaranteed to never change.
	Which is why I'm saying that if the Slim to Nuns, if you work on the Slim to Nuns, you're doomed.
	Because you would change your behavior to turn the Slim to Nuns into a nothing.
	And you are the nothing. If you want people to change, you have to stop giving them the drug of wanting to change them.
	The power of wanting to change them.
	The superiority that they feel because you're desperately wanting to change them.
	You know, if you've ever had a salesman really be persistent, it gives you a sense of power, right?
	This guy's really persistent.
	He really wants to buy the product.
	I can just say no. It keeps coming back, right?
	Now, I don't think it's particularly true for you guys because you're into philosophy, but come on.
	If you think that the real change comes from stopping wanting to change people, because right now you're subsidizing them not changing by constantly wanting them to change, giving them a sense of power.
	You stop wanting to change them, they'll miss it like you won't even believe.
	You won't miss it. It's never going to happen.
	The more you try to change people, The more possible it is for them to change, because you're bribing them with more and more power, trying to get them to give up power.
	But they're addicted to power.
	You can't do that. It's like giving someone more heroin to give up heroin.
	I mean, come on. Except there's no ODing on power.
	Well, social collapse, I guess.
	When you stop trying to change people, you feel this great sense of relief.
	I can have a life.
	I'm not a cringing, begging dog pawing at people to change, thus affirming that they will never change.
	God, I can find people who are already changed or already in the process of changing.
	I don't have to beg for the rest of my mortal fucking existence.
	I don't have to keep buying boats and trying to turn them into cars with my bare hands.
	I can just go and buy a car.
	I don't have to wake people up.
	I can just go and hang out with people who are already awake.
	And I won't be subjugated to other people's denial of change anymore.
	I won't be feeding their lust for power by desperately needing them to change, thus affirming they never ever will.
	I'm free. Oh, thank God.
	Free at last. So it's a huge benefit for you.
	They'll hate it. Other people will hate it.
	The people you're trying to change, that you withdraw this drug of needing them to change, this power, moral superiority, this power over you that they have, you take away that power, You get to the core of their helplessness.
	You push them closer to the core of their helplessness.
	By no longer wanting to change them, you're not giving them the drug that they mistake for power.
	You take that away. How are they going to react?
	They don't want you to do that.
	They want you to keep trying to change them, which is why you get stuck in these revolving door conversations that never lead anywhere.
	They'll accuse you of not caring, maybe.
	Thank you.
	They might accuse you of not caring.
	Most likely they'll escalate, though.
	They'll spread more rumors. They'll make you feel worse.
	They'll try to provoke you into engaging with them again.
	They'll trash you.
	They'll insult you.
	They'll cause problems in your life.
	They'll try to get you to re-engage with them to now, you've got to stop spreading lies about me.
	Why? The moment you say to someone, you've got to stop spreading lies about me, they're like, oh, fantastic.
	Boy, they really need something for me now.
	I'm back having power over them.
	No. What you do is you don't hang out with anyone who believes the lies that trolls say.
	Right? Think there's anyone in my life who thinks I'm a bad guy?
	Of course not. I'm a good guy.
	Have there people in the world who think I'm a bad guy?
	Oh yeah, the worst. Would I ever have them in my social circle to give them the time of day?
	Of course not. They're desperate for you to engage with them.
	They'll just escalate trying to get you to engage.
	For sure. I've lived in, actually, ex-wife.
	Shiver. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we've all had those relationships.
	Most of us have had those relationships where somebody says, oh, you're a terrible person.
	You're a bad boyfriend. You're a bad husband.
	And then you finally like, oh, she's never going to change.
	I'm out of here. Right?
	And then they just desperately escalate to try to get you to re-engage with them.
	They'll do it through laws, through false accusations.
	They'll do it through lawyers.
	They'll do it through spreading rumors.
	They'll do it through trashing your reputation.
	They're just desperate for you to re-engage with them, to give them that sense of power.
	That you need something from them.
	You need them to stop doing bad things.
	Your need is why they're doing the bad things.
	You stop needing it, and yeah, they'll escalate, and at some point they'll just give up and find some other victim to fasten onto, right?
	Oh, the I'm concerned about you.
	Yeah, I'm worried. You're not the person you were before.
	You've changed. Yeah, it's because I'm thinking.
	Going to definitely evaluate my relationships with this framework.
	Thanks, Steph. You are welcome.
	This is some serious soul-shattering stuff.
	Yes, well, I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot.
	That's why I decided to get out of politics, man.
	The real backlash also comes, like let's say you get what you want and they do start to change They'll attack you, man, because they'll feel that they're losing power and then the only way that they'll gain power is to try and attack you and have you need them to stop Attacking you and all that escalation and all that, right?
	So, is there anything else?
	Should we stop here? Is this enough of a truth canon for one night?
	The concern trawling is strange.
	Well, that's an appeal to insecurity, right?
	The appeal to you've changed, I'm concerned, we're worried, we're all worried about you.
	It's a way of making you feel like you've stuck down a well and they're lowering a rope and then you need for them to not stop worrying about you.
	No, I'm fine. I'm really, honestly, I'm fine.
	Forget it. No.
	The moment that you feel the need to change someone else's mind so you feel better, you're doomed.
	And that relationship is doomed.
	Twitter is so stuck in the let's try to change bad people with arguments mode.
	Yeah, for sure. Facts, right?
	True food for your soul.
	Fantastic show. Good stuff.
	And listen to the guy with the Star Wars joke.
	I really, I didn't mean to humiliate you.
	I don't want to do that. I want to be frank with you, because I think you are in considerable danger of...
	You're obviously, I think, highly invested in trying to change people.
	And you have to, I think, be concerned about blowback when you stop trying.
	So... Yeah, that's part of the growth.
	I spend a lot of time trying to change people.
	And I did change a lot of people.
	You guys are here, lots of people.
	I get emails. It's a whole testimonial section on my website about that, right?
	But... There's a time when you have to let people learn from empiricism and start trying to change them.
	And the time is now. So, alright.
	Guys, love you so much. Thank you for...
	This conversation, thank you for this show.
	Thank you for bringing out the best in me in a way that nobody outside my family and friends do.
	So I really, really thank you for helping me to achieve what it is that I achieve through your interest and your conversations and your feedback.
	Positive, negative, productive, unproductive, it's all.
	Deeply and greatly and massively treasured.
	Thank you. Thank you so much.
	And I guess I will be seeing you guys.
	I'll try and do the Pink Floyd thing sometime over the weekend.
	I'll sort of see. I wouldn't mind singing along with some of it, but I'll have to see how my voice is.
	It's a little rough at the moment.
	But yes, love you guys.
	Have a great, great evening.

▲