Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 9, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:03:15

How to FINALLY Trust Yourself!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	That's right. Good evening, everybody.
	Stephen Mullen, you from Free Domain.
	Hope you're doing well. It is the 8th of April, 2022.
	We're back to our regularly scheduled Friday night.
	Chitty chats. Chitty chatty bang bangs.
	Chitty, chitty bang bangs.
	Anyway, so let's look at a couple of questions on the chat.
	And yes, here I am.
	Here I am.
	All right. Good evening, Steph.
	May I ask, do you think all MGTOW men are women haters?
	I think most are, but the few that aren't realize how biased the courts are.
	Yeah. Well, divorced or dead, right?
	That's always the big question.
	Would you rather be divorced or would you rather be dead?
	So, of course, throughout most of human history, human beings had to deal with massive amounts of risk.
	Huge amounts of risk.
	Now, we've become peculiarly sensitive to risk at the moment, and whereas before we had to face down flamethrowing mastodons, you know, I may not be an anthropologist, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went.
	We had to deal with scurvy, chickenpox, smallpox, polio.
	Famine, terrible weather, all various kinds of predators.
	We men were able to survive and flourish to hand to the modern world the society that we have with all of its pluses and minuses.
	And I've got to tell you guys, I don't know how you feel about this, but I'll tell you straight up.
	I wouldn't want to live at any other time in human history.
	You ever get that feeling?
	You should. This is without a doubt, without any question, with no ambiguity, this is by far the best time to be alive in human history.
	By far. Your level of control over your own health and your own environment is The level of liberties that you have, the liberty to even have this conversation, it's unprecedented for us to be able to talk to each other.
	Without gatekeepers, it's a fantastic time to be alive.
	I wrote a novel in my 20s about a brilliant person who had to struggle to find any kind of voice in history because, you know, born an orphan, poor, middle of nowhere, backwaters of England in the late 18th century during the time of the agricultural revolution and the French revolution, And, of course, this was my fear that everything that I had to say in the world was going to sit in my brain and go into the ground with me.
	It was just going to die with me.
	That was my fear. That was my fear that all of the thoughts that I had, which I knew and know are fantastic for the world, great for philosophy, great for people, That I was going to have all of these great thoughts like a bunch of mosquitoes in my brain.
	We were all going to die together and I was going to get thrown into the dirt and be buried with everything I hadn't said.
	You just got to not gatekeep yourself?
	Are you kidding me? Of course you have to gatekeep yourself.
	So... We've got this conversation.
	We have communities of people who think, which we can communicate with no matter where we are.
	We have the capacity to take the thoughts that we have, carve them into the very fabric of the universe, and keep them available to humanity for all time.
	I'm very, very cognizant and aware of this basic fact.
	If you were a brilliant writer in the ancient world, and you managed to get your books hooked into the library at Alexandria, and then what happened?
	Well, the barbarians came and burned it down.
	Probably considered the library of Alexandria to be hate speech against stupidity.
	All wisdom is hate speech against stupidity.
	And, oh, I couldn't hear you on telegraph.
	Sorry, that's my bad. My bad.
	All these deep thoughts and a bit of technical hoo-ha here and there.
	There we go. All right. So, if you were a brilliant genius of the ancient world and you managed to get your writing, you wrote it down and you managed to get it into the library at Alexandria, then it was just burned down by the barbarians and it's like you never existed.
	Imagine being the most brilliant philosopher at Pompeii.
	At Pompeii, the city that was buried under ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted, where they found people copulating and playing dice games and board games.
	And you had the most amazing, deep, radical, powerful thoughts, philosophy, poetry, plays, stories.
	One volcano erupts and it's like you were never there.
	But now with all of this, you can be de-platformed from various places to speak, but you can't be de-platformed from the universe.
	You can't be de-platformed from the world as it is.
	I mean, the only thing that can de-platform us is a giant comet hitting the planet and vaporizing us all.
	Still better than Burning Man.
	So, you have the opportunity to live forever.
	In the hearts, minds, and souls of the species.
	And you need virtually nothing to do it.
	That's an amazing phenomenon.
	And it's one of the things that motivates me enormously, is knowing that I'm not going to vanish.
	There's an old line from an old Alan Parsons song.
	How can you be so sure?
	How do you know what the earth will endure?
	How can you be so sure that the wonders you've made in your life will be seen by the millions who follow to visit the side of your dream?
	How do you know? Well, of course, in the past, that was the case.
	But now, where we get to live as digital ghosts for eternity, far beyond the flesh and meat mattress of our mere mortal existence, that's an incredible thing.
	It's an incredible thing.
	And what a time to be alive!
	And yes, some of the things that serve the cause of virtue also serve the cause of evil.
	The internet serves the cause of virtue and it also serves the cause of evil.
	Welcome to every piece of technology known to man.
	Iron produced plows and swords.
	So, of course, everything that is fashioned is turned to both virtue and evil.
	And if all we do is say, well, gosh, it's really terrible that easy people, that evil people are able to use this technology for immorality.
	Well, sure. But the only way that you don't end up with technology in the hands of evil people is don't have new technology.
	It's like saying, I want to invent a gun that no criminals will ever use.
	Not going to happen.
	I respectfully disagree on the time to be alive.
	The most essential things regarding life have been nearly obliterated.
	The hell are you talking about?
	The most essential things regarding life have been nearly obliterated.
	So, I mean, I hope that you understand here, today, and for the rest of your life, that communication comes with silencing.
	Censorship comes as a result of having free conversations.
	And the censorship only applies to a majority of people who tend on the whole to be staggeringly unimaginative.
	The real communication is happening out here on the periphery, right?
	The real honesty, the real power, the real connection, the real communication is happening out here among the stars, not on the seashore, not on the tourist towns.
	You won't see me doing the same stuff over and over again.
	And there's lots of people on the left and the right.
	All they do is do the same stuff over and over again.
	Can you believe the Democrats did this hypocritical thing?
	Can you believe that the Republicans cucked out again on this?
	Can you believe that the government is spending more money?
	Can you believe that there's this terrible abortion law?
	Can you believe that there's this contradiction that yesterday they said this and now they're saying the exact opposite?
	Can you believe that there's this intellectual worship by the left who's really, really bad?
	Can you believe... I would go mad.
	And I think you would too.
	I can't do the same things over and over.
	That's a nightmare to me.
	That's like Dostoevsky's how do you drive a man mad?
	You tell him to dig a hole, and then you tell him to fill it in.
	Then you tell him to dig a hole, and then you tell him to fill it in, over and over again.
	That would drive him mad. I couldn't do it.
	So the real conversations...
	The real truth is out here, right at the edge of what is permissible, of what you can talk about.
	That's where the conversations are happening.
	So the only way to be widespread and popular is to not say anything of any particular consequence.
	To complain, for instance, which I understand, right?
	To say, gosh, you know, can you believe it?
	Can you believe that there's been a slippery slope with regards to sexuality?
	Sure. Yeah, of course.
	Can you believe, isn't it shocking and appalling, you see, that none of the people who were either lured into or might have paid for sex with underage girls on Jeffrey Epstein's island, that none of those people have been arrested?
	Isn't it appalling? Isn't it shocking?
	Isn't it this? It's not appalling and it's not shocking.
	That's the entire purpose of power.
	It literally is like a gazelle saying, can you believe the lions are eating another gazelle?
	Yeah. It would be kind of shocking if they weren't.
	It would be news, you know, dog bites man, not news.
	Man bites dog, news, right?
	Powerful people escaping consequences for their crimes.
	That's not news. That's the entire purpose of power.
	The entire purpose of power.
	Can you believe? Like when they say this destroyed thing, right?
	Brian Stelter, destroyed by some undergraduate student.
	It's like, he's not destroyed.
	He's still doing his thing and getting well paid.
	So, yeah.
	This is the only place where the conversations can happen.
	And there are other conversations that can't happen.
	So, that's really, really important to understand.
	Say, well, it's really frustrating that there's censorship.
	It's like, well, the censorship and the conversation are the same thing.
	As long as we have the government, this is going to happen every time, right?
	Every time. Well, things are getting worse.
	Yeah, things are getting worse in a lot of ways, for sure.
	Things are getting worse, but there's, of course, the escape hatch of Bitcoin, which never existed before in human history, which we should be, every day, enormously grateful about.
	And it was actually kind of funny.
	Jack Dorsey, the guy who presided over MIT platforming from Twitter and the ex-CEO of Twitter, he was at a Bitcoin conference in Florida, Miami, I think.
	And he watched the introductory roundtable, the intro roundtable.
	And he tried to share the introductory roundtable on Bitcoin.
	It was a YouTube video.
	And he tried to share that on Twitter.
	I shouldn't laugh.
	I shouldn't laugh, right? So he tried to share that video on Twitter.
	And what happened? Well, the video got removed for violating community guidelines.
	For what? Well, for providing an alternative to central banking and an alternative to the people who run the central banking, right?
	So, he's like, this is like, what happened?
	Why was this done? Why?
	Why? Why? Gee, Jack, I don't know.
	How can it possibly be that social media platforms are censoring?
	I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't have presided over a social media platform that relentlessly censors me.
	Well, wait a minute. I want to share some important information and it's being censored.
	My God! How could this be possible?
	I hear there are people who are bald.
	How is this possible? I've never seen it.
	Because I relentlessly avoid looking into mirrors because I'm a vampire.
	So... Let's see.
	Could you do the truth about Frank Franz Boas?
	I don't know. I think I'm going to do...
	I do want to do a truth about...
	I'm sort of halfway between Michel Foucault, the most cited modern intellectual, Michel Foucault and the French Revolution.
	Unfortunately, the idiots will be preserved forever as well.
	Now, you're somebody who looks at the negative.
	Guaranteed. You're somebody who looks at the negative.
	Guaranteed. The idiots will be preserved forever as well.
	Do you listen to Mozart or do you listen to Salieri?
	Well, Salieri stuff is all written down, but you mostly will see Mozart festivals, not Salieri festivals.
	So sure, the idiots will be preserved forever as well, but no one cares in the future at all.
	So, when you say, well, unfortunately the idiots will be preserved forever as well, it's like, well, sure.
	And bad and mediocre painters, their paintings are still stored somewhere, but nobody cares, nobody buys them.
	They never get into a gallery and never seen by anyone.
	So you're just somebody, I understand this, when you see someone, look, I got beaten down pretty hard a couple years ago, right?
	I mean, 15 years of my life's work just got erased.
	I'm here telling you to be happy, to have hope, to be positive, to love the life that you have in the world that is, which is the greatest world there is and has ever been.
	And your relationship to enthusiasm is a really, really important thing to think about in this life.
	What do you do?
	What do you feel when you see someone?
	And I'm not a Pollyanna.
	I'm not saying, oh, everything's perfectly wonderful because I'm on top of the world and a bazillionaire and running my own media empire with no censorship, right?
	I went from two and a half million contacts on social media down to virtually nothing, you know, overnight, prior to an election.
	And here I am telling you I'm ridiculously happy and enthusiastic to be in the world that is.
	Now, what is your relationship to someone Being very positive and enthusiastic.
	It's a tough call.
	You've got to look yourself in the mirror and say, how do I feel when somebody is being enthusiastic?
	How do I feel when somebody who's been pounded down, had a decade and a half ripped out from under them?
	If somebody's being positive, happy and enthusiastic, despite all of those setbacks, how does that make you feel?
	Now, for some of you, and I can see all of this, you are upset that I'm positive and enthusiastic, and that I'm challenging your negativity by reminding you what an amazing time it is that we live in.
	For those of you who value and appreciate this show, what I say, the conversations I have with people, you do understand that prior to the modern world, and by that I mean the last 15 years, prior to the modern world, we never would have met.
	Do you understand? We never would have met.
	You never would have heard anything that I have to say.
	You never would have heard any of my interviews, or any of my call-in shows, or any of my solo shows, or any of my truth abouts.
	You never would have known I even existed.
	Now, obviously I'm not saying that the entire purpose of the modern world is for us to meet, but it's pretty important, right?
	So if you hate the modern world, but you hate Like being in communication with me, you have a contradiction because the two are one and the same.
	And this may be someone else you're in conversation with, someone else that's going on with you or whatever, right?
	But it wasn't the best time to be alive during the Roman Empire, that 200-year period of no war, etc.
	Okay. Let's say you have an ankylose tooth, right?
	A tooth that is attached to your bone.
	Let's say that you need some kind of surgery.
	Let's say that you get an infection.
	Let's say that you're a woman and you die in childbirth.
	Let's say you're one of the 80% of the people in the cities who is an actual fucking slave.
	Beaten at will, killed at will, raped at will.
	Would you trade in what we have now for that?
	Got to roll the dice and see whoever you're going to be in the Roman Empire in the past.
	No. The best time to be alive was the 1950s.
	Well, in the 1950s, people had a lot of kids.
	Obviously, the boomer generation came out of 1945-1946.
	When families were having, you know, four or five kids per family.
	And yeah, there was a lot to talk about that was positive.
	There's a reason why the leftists have continually demonized the 1950s.
	They have to. Because it was small government, largely free market, and people were having a pretty good time in a lot of ways, but here's the problem.
	So in the 1950s, you work very hard, and of course you could have a car, a house, and good savings, nice vacations, 9 to 5 workplace, one guy working.
	Taxes were pretty low for the most part.
	Now, of course you say, well, taxes are very high on the rich, but nobody paid them.
	them because people don't pay that kind of taxes.
	So, but here's what happened in the 1950s.
	In the 1950s, you worked very hard to raise your kids according to the values that you had, Christian values, conservative values, nationalistic values.
	And then you sent them off to school.
	You sent them off to university where they were turned into raving, drug-addled, collectivist Marxists.
	A little painful. Plus, of course, in the 1950s, there was a threat and significant shadow of nuclear war.
	Also, your kids in the 1950s would grow up, perhaps, to be drafted into the war in Vietnam.
	So, I'm going to choose right here and right now.
	Steph, why do I get looked down upon for being Christian?
	For me, it helps me find peace in being moral.
	I love being moral. Well, I'm not going to look down on you for being Christian at all.
	I think it's a wonderful thing that you're a Christian.
	You are looked down upon for the simple reason that, on average, Christians tend to be conservative.
	They tend to understand the slippery slope argument.
	Christianity is very hard-won knowledge.
	Christianity is very hard-won knowledge.
	Because Christianity came out of the fall of the Greeks and it lived through the fall of the Roman Empire and so it saw decadence and collapse in real time right in its face.
	The moral lessons of Christ were then played out by the secular powers of the Roman Empire and plunged the world into a dark age and a lot of people who wrote various verses of the Bible, various books of the Bible were very aware of all of that.
	They lived through it. Degeneracy and they lived through the collapse of the family.
	They lived through hyperinflation.
	They lived through the military-industrial complex destroying the remnants of democracy.
	They lived through all of that. And so Christianity possesses within it a great deal of skepticism for utopianism.
	So utopianism is the idea that human beings can be perfected in this earth, that suffering and inequality of results of outcome can be eliminated if we just hand bureaucrats one more book to write rules in and one more gun to enforce it with.
	Now, utopianism is satanic, fundamentally.
	Utopianism is satanic. Utopianism is the idea that we can perfect people if we're just violent enough, which is like saying you can beat your wife into loving you.
	If we just use enough violence, we can perfect society.
	Now, the violence is always hidden, but the perfection is like that light that those anglerfish in the deep Mariana Trench waters have.
	They lure them in bite, right?
	So the promise is equality.
	That's the promise. The temptation is free stuff, right?
	So with equality, if you're underneath, like if you're underneath the average income and people promise you equality, then you Free stuff.
	Now, you say equality is an abstract, like is an ideal abstract virtue.
	You'll say all of that. But what you really are corrupted by is the desire for free stuff, desire for things you don't have to earn, either by working for them or, of course, by being benevolent enough within your community that people want to give you free stuff anyway.
	I talk about this in my book, The Art of the Argument, which you should check out, outoftheargument.com.
	So, utopianism...
	It's the fantasy of equality and that's the cover story for the predation of the forcible transfer of wealth and resources to the less competent.
	The less competent cry victim and run to the government because they either can't objectively or don't feel that they can compete with people in the free market to get as many resources.
	Of course, right? Hyenas don't hunt as much.
	Why? Because they take the leftovers from the kills of more competent hunters.
	In other words, their competence is in scavenging, not production.
	They take leftovers. But, again, at least they don't use force in that sense to achieve it.
	So, Christianity, you know, one of the reasons why you've got very advanced civilizations coming out of particularly European Christianity is Christianity says...
	Oh no, this is hell, by the way.
	Like, we're in hell. And the devil is constantly tempting us, and the devil is going to try and tempt us with perfection.
	Perfection, moral perfection, as a cover for predatory mammal-based greed.
	I'm going to pretend to be into equality because I can't compete and get nearly as much by working as I can by Dreaming and complaining.
	So it's like if you're an unattractive man, you're going to want the state to redistribute wives, to make you get a wife, because you feel, and maybe it's true, you'll get a higher quality wife if the government forces a woman to marry you than if you're out there in the free market of dating trying to find a wife for yourself.
	Same thing with jobs, same thing with money, same thing with housing.
	And so you love this concept of equality As a cover, it makes you feel moral for being predatory through the power of the state.
	You say, well, no, I'm into equality.
	But all the people who are into equality the most tend to be the people, or they're run by those people in charge, but the focus is people who can't achieve as much through competition.
	Of course, right? The less attractive women generally turn to the state, Because the state will give them more resources than the kind of quality man that they could attract given their unattractiveness.
	Whereas the more attractive women tend to be on the right because then they can attract a higher quality guy and get more resources than that than from the state.
	So the reason you're looked down upon for being a Christian is that you reject the utopianism that drives statism.
	And Christians accept that...
	I mean, look, if Satan himself can't handle power, what chance do we have?
	Satan himself, being chief among God's angel, Lucifer, bringer of light, the chief second in command to God himself.
	If Lucifer, if the highest and most moral and most perfect angel...
	Second, in virtue and power to only God himself.
	If Lucifer himself cannot handle power to the point where he rebels against God, he convinces other angels to engage in a war against God, he gets cast down into hell.
	This has been going on for virtually an infinity of time.
	And Satan still is not repenting.
	He would rather serve in hell.
	He would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
	He would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
	So if the greatest, most brilliant, most virtuous, and most powerful of God's creations cannot handle power, is corrupted by power, what chance does a human being have To be dog catcher, let alone the master of trillions of dollars in a giant military.
	You're skeptical of power, you're skeptical of utopianism, and therefore you stand between the incompetent horde and the resources they can get through the state.
	Do you see a large-scale economic collapse inbound?
	Well, it's a reconfiguration, for sure.
	Whether you say collapse or not, I don't know.
	But for sure, a reconfiguration, for sure.
	All right. Why are there so few people that can have live, spontaneous conversations where you're not just regurgitating talking points?
	Well, this is the NPC meme, Anthony.
	That's the idea.
	So most people, of course...
	Don't have opinions.
	They are assigned opinions by propaganda, bullying, social pressure, and conformity.
	They don't say what is true.
	They say what do people accept as true.
	They don't say what is right. They say what is approved of.
	They don't say what is virtuous.
	They say what would get me in the least trouble and get me the most praise.
	And you see, when you don't have virtue, there's a terrible thing that happens to the human soul when you don't have virtue, when virtue is taken away from you by relativism, subjectivism, and atheism.
	When you don't have virtue, how do you feel good about yourself?
	Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	The great equation of Socrates, right?
	So, when you don't have virtue, how can you feel good about yourself?
	By the way, I'm trying a bit more of a low-key approach.
	I realized I was a little bit watching the Elizabeth Holmes story.
	I realize that being a little too peppy can be a little hypnotic.
	So I'm just trying a bit more of a low-key approach tonight, which is fine.
	So what happens when you don't have virtue?
	Virtue being the primary and foundational source of sustainable human happiness.
	Everyone can be happy.
	You win the lottery. You take some drugs.
	Have sex. You can be happy.
	But sustainable. Sustainable human happiness is only the result of virtue.
	And virtue will also make you miserable quite a bit as well, because virtue interferes with the interests of the predators, and they don't like that.
	So, when you don't have virtue as the path to happiness, what do you go for?
	Well, you go for status.
	It's all you have. I can't be virtuous, so all I can be is superior.
	All I can be is better than. All I can do is virtue signal.
	All I can do is have status.
	Now, once you take away virtue, propaganda works really well because it threatens your status if you don't conform.
	So if you're like an anti-vaxxer or you're skeptical of mass immigration or whatever, like whatever is going on for you, all that you do is you punish people for deviation from The very narrow Overton window of acceptable social discourse.
	And so you train other people to reject anyone who thinks for himself or for herself.
	You simply train everyone in society to reject and attack anyone who thinks for himself.
	Now, that of course is Socrates and Jesus and Buddha and lots of particular thinkers in human society.
	Philosophers, I would say, for the large part.
	And when you have status, like if you look at what goes on for a lot of people, if you sort of uncover the top layers, you'll see the status thing going on all over the place.
	I'll give you sort of two examples that pop to mind.
	So people who say, defund the police.
	Well, all they're saying is that they can afford their own security.
	It's a form of status. It's a form of showing your superiority to the masses.
	Because the people in poor neighborhoods who are actually being preyed on by criminals, they don't want the police defunded.
	They love the police because the police is all that stands between them and the predators in their environment.
	So when you say, I want to defund the police, all you're simply saying is, hey man, sucks to be you.
	I'm so good I can afford to live in a gated community with my own private security and you know what, right?
	So you understand it's status, right?
	People who say, oh yeah, you know, mass immigration, blah, blah, blah.
	All they're saying is they don't generally live in neighborhoods which are most affected by mass immigration, which generally tend to be poorer neighborhoods.
	When people say, even on the conservative side, when people say, oh, outsourcing is fine...
	You know, overseas manufacturing is fine.
	They're reminding you that they don't work with their hands.
	They're not low or middle class.
	They don't have one of those icky jobs that involves grease and dust and masks.
	So when you look at what people say as a whole, what they're saying is, I'm showing you that I can afford to be four ideals that affect lesser people but not me.
	And they're showing their own status.
	So much status signaling, it's absolutely insane.
	When you see this, you can go anywhere in social media and the things that people are praising.
	Yes, I think we should be.
	Less tough on crime.
	Yes, absolutely. We should rehabilitate.
	We should be nicer to the criminals so that they end up not being criminals.
	But of course, nobody knows how to rehabilitate a criminal because by the time you're an adult criminal, particularly a violent one...
	I mean, you're past the whole thing.
	You don't have the empathy.
	Again, not every criminal re-offends.
	Recidivism rates are very high.
	But not every criminal re-offends, but the vast majority of them tend to.
	And once you become a career criminal, you can't fix it.
	So when you say, I think we should be kind to criminals...
	All you're doing is you're saying to people, well, you see, I live in such a wealthy neighborhood that I just, I don't need to worry about these things.
	So I can deal with these abstract things that don't affect me.
	It's all just status signaling.
	It's all it is. It's all it is.
	Just status signaling. It's all people are doing.
	Over and over and over again.
	Continually. All the time.
	Relentlessly. And that's what happens.
	When you don't have morality, you end up with status.
	Let's see here. Mark Dice.
	I thought that said Mark Dice has destroyed Steph's cred on the internet at least.
	but Mark does.
	Stelters, Brian Stelters.
	What is the deal with parents banking kids specifically on the butts?
	Seems weird and sexual. I think there is a creepy element to it.
	But one of the reasons that parents spank kids on the butt is the butt is always covered.
	So if you go too hard and you leave a bruise or a cut or a welt, then...
	It's covered up. Let's see here.
	Sorry, the ice cream truck came.
	I'm here. Well, of course, as long as you have priorities, that's totally fine.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Let's see here. Sorry, I'm just catching up on the...
	I'm reading comments.
	I have a... Program that's supposed to amalgamate as a whole.
	But I will go over there. My daughter, sorry, I did put out a post asking for people who had my daughter wanted to do a show on parenting.
	Which, you know, and people were like, well, why would a kid do a show on parenting?
	Which is like saying, well, why would you ever have a customer evaluate your service?
	It's like, well, yeah. You don't have to be a movie maker to be a movie critic.
	In fact, it can help if you're not.
	And yeah, my daughter and I just finished a show yesterday on parenting.
	She was great, in my opinion.
	I need the white pill, Steph.
	If you give up, it's over.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	If you give up or if you become so black-pilled that nobody wants to have anything to do with you, if you become radioactive through negativity, you're simply serving the bad guys.
	You understand that? You might as well join up with them straight up, right?
	You might as well dye your hair blue and attack people who disagree with you.
	You understand that part of evil is overwhelming you with negative information to the point where you give up.
	And you can do that if you want, but just recognize that you're betraying those of us who are still out here fighting the good fight.
	Don't give up.
	All right. Will you do a book on peaceful parenting?
	My son is 10 months and has begun getting his way by yelling.
	He can't talk yet, so how do we reason?
	I'm so sorry. I like the username without a doubt, but...
	My son is 10 months old and has begun getting his way by yelling.
	Do you see the problem there?
	You don't need a book on peaceful parenting.
	You don't let people get their way by yelling.
	See... There's two kinds of upset for kids, and this is all the way from babies through to toddlers.
	I was just talking about this with my daughter on the show that we did, which I'll just give you a tiny preview here.
	So there's kids, let's say you've got a 10-month-old, right?
	So there's a 10-month-old who is genuinely hungry or thirsty, and they will cry, and they will genuinely be upset, right?
	And so you give them the water, you give them the food, and they're fine.
	And you should, and you're happy that they're complaining about that, because you don't want them to be dehydrated or hungry.
	But there's also the kid who wants a piece of candy, not because the kid is hungry, but because the kid is greedy.
	And I have no problem with greed.
	I'm greedy for philosophy and no problem with greed.
	But you have to be able to distinguish...
	Genuine upset from bratty greed.
	And bratty greed, I know it sounds like a big negative phrase, but he's just trying another strategy.
	How does he get what he wants?
	Well, if you give him what he wants because he's yelling, I don't know...
	It's like, I pay my employee $50 an hour to sweep, and only $10 an hour...
	To be behind the counter, serving customers.
	I pay him $50 an hour to sweep, but only $10 an hour to serve the customers.
	How do I get him to serve the customers?
	Well, you've got to stop paying him five times as much to sweep.
	Because he's going to respond to the incentive and he's going to sweep.
	Every child will try every strategy to get his way or to get her way.
	It's perfectly natural. Perfectly natural.
	So your son tries a variety of strategies to get her way.
	My daughter, when she was young, She would express a significant desire for something but not say, can I have it?
	Oh, I would really love that.
	Oh, my God. She would say, oh, my gosh, that would make me so happy if I had that or whatever, right?
	You know, because she tried a bunch of different things.
	Kids are like water. You know, just trying to find their way down the mountainside of whatever is the path of least resistance.
	So your son probably tried fake crying.
	He probably tried manipulation.
	He probably tried pretending to be sad.
	He probably tried just about everything.
	You know, when you really got to go to the bathroom and you have 10 keys and one lock and you don't know which one fits, you're just going to keep trying every different key until you get it open so you can go to the bathroom.
	So kids will try...
	Every psychological and emotional trick that they can possibly come up with in order to get their way.
	And that's a beautiful thing.
	That's why we have civilization.
	It's why we are the top of the food chain.
	It's why we're the apex predator on the society.
	So, as far as he can't talk yet, so don't confuse, if you've ever learned a foreign language, you know that you understand the language long before you can speak it fluently.
	So don't, just because your son can't talk doesn't mean that he can't listen, he can't understand.
	And you can use diagrams and you can use little props, whatever it is, right?
	And the first thing you need to do with a child is truly empathize with the child's desire for something.
	So if your son wants a piece of candy, you say, oh man, I could eat candy all day.
	I love candy. Man, if I could live on candy, I'd be a happy guy.
	And you empathize. So now you're in his corner.
	Yeah, you both want candy.
	Absolutely. I say, well, but you know, I've got to say no to candy for myself because I don't want to get fat.
	I don't want to have owie teeth.
	Whatever you can just say, right?
	So you empathize.
	Your son is like you, but smaller, right?
	So there's things that you want guaranteed you.
	That's certainly true for me. I think it's true for everyone.
	There's things that you want that you shouldn't have that you still take.
	Of course, right? Sometimes you stay up too late on your phone rather than going to bed when you know you should.
	Sometimes you watch an extra show when you know you have something else to do.
	Sometimes you postpone a difficult phone call.
	Sometimes you eat sugar when you shouldn't.
	Sometimes... Sometimes you let your schedule drift because it's more convenient even though you know it's bad for you.
	Sometimes you forgo exercise because you say you have a mild headache and you know that you could do it if you wanted, probably help your headache.
	So recognize that you and your kids both want to do things that aren't great for you sometimes.
	So empathize. This is a human condition thing.
	This isn't parents perfect, kid bad.
	He wants things that he shouldn't have and sometimes he uses, quote, unjust ways to try and get them.
	Guess what? So do you. So do I. So does everyone.
	It's a human condition. So empathize with him that he's like you.
	He's like you. But you don't.
	You're not helping him at all.
	At all. You are not helping him at all by letting him use yelling to get his way.
	You're simply teaching him that yelling works.
	Now, let's say it's 18 months until you can truly reason with him.
	So he's got another 8 months to go, right?
	So for another eight months, assuming he's been doing it now for a month or two, so maybe ten months, he's been yelling to get his way.
	And then you say, oh, no, no, no, we can't yell to get your way.
	It's like, well, sorry, you just gave him half his lifetime yelling works.
	And then you're going to try and get him to stop yelling?
	It's like, no, no, no, you can't ever let yelling work.
	You can't ever let yelling work.
	Kids are amoral, resource seekers.
	They don't have the capacity for ethics, especially at 10 months of age.
	Nothing wrong with that, perfectly natural.
	But they're controlled by lizard brain and the human capacity to manipulate.
	And dogs do it too, right?
	It's like if you said, oh man, how do I get my dog to stop begging dogs?
	At the table. Because every time he begs at the table, I give him a giant juicy piece of food.
	Well, to ask that question is to answer it in some.
	Just wanted to point that out.
	I don't have any particular thoughts on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
	Redirection works with some kids.
	Sure, yeah, empathize with them.
	I want it too. We'll have some later maybe, but let's go do something fun now, for sure.
	It's not redirection. I mean, just be more enjoyable and engaging than candy or a screen or something.
	Parents are competing with kids for screen time, right?
	Of course. And parents are always saying, well, how do we restrict the use of screens for our kids?
	Be more interesting. Be more interesting.
	Then screens. Be more fun than screens and your kids will gravitate towards you and you won't need to use...
	Just up your game for God's sake.
	So you've got to compete with screens.
	Great. That means you've got to be a better parent to be more interesting.
	The other day I had to take a piece of electronics in for repair.
	And you know what that's like, right?
	You go in, stand around for a while and wait and all that.
	And my daughter and I enjoy our company, each other's company so much that I said, I said, look, I got to go.
	It's going to be kind of boring. I got to go get this piece of electronics fixed.
	I'd love it if you came. If you want to come, it'd be great.
	And she's like, yeah, be great. I'll come.
	And she came and we had a great, great deal of fun while we were out.
	Now, of course, she could have stayed home and Look to the screen, all that.
	But you've just got to be more enjoyable and engaging and fun to chat with and curious about your kids and enjoyable companies so that your kids prefer you to screens.
	You're competing with a screen.
	And if you can't compete with a screen, you've just got to keep upping your game until you can.
	Find a way to be interesting.
	If you're in the chat and you're negative, I think of five things I'm grateful for every day.
	Often philosophy is on my list.
	I've become way more positive.
	Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, if you've given up If you've given up, then I don't know why you're in this conversation.
	I don't know why you're here. I don't know why you're here in this conversation.
	This conversation is for people who haven't given up.
	So, and even if you feel somehow your society isn't going to make it, tons of other societies, there's also the future, there's lots of things you can mark down, you can document the decline, you can be witness to the disasters, and so that people will learn better the next time.
	And the worse things get, say, in the West, the more other cultures and countries are going to say, well, we never ever want to do that.
	And maybe you can go there, right?
	All right, let's see here.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, the devil promises you cool stuff, but then you go to hell.
	So the devil doesn't promise you cool stuff.
	I think that's not quite specific enough, if you don't mind me saying so.
	So, what the devil says is, you can break reality by getting something for nothing.
	You can get something for nothing.
	And we're tempted by that, for sure.
	And then, turns out there's something that we have to pay as a result.
	Alright, I'm so sorry. I'm way behind on the chat messages here, but you guys have such great comments and questions.
	What can I do? I am helpless.
	I am helpless because you're so brilliant.
	Is it possible to raise children with a Christian upbringing while being an atheist parent?
	Yeah, it's called UPB. Look into it.
	And you can, gosh, many years ago I did a show called The ABCs of UPB about how you explain UPB to kids.
	Go buy more stuff and it will make you feel better and then depressed and repeat.
	Yeah, for sure. Do you have any guesses as to how age of consent would work in a free society?
	Well, I don't know where 18 came from, to be honest.
	I have no idea. I have no idea why it's 16 to drive a car, 18 to join the army and vote, 19 to 21 to drink liquor, depending...
	I have no idea how these things came about.
	But the way that an age of consent would work in a free society...
	I doubt very much that it would be a universal standard because it's too broad a brush.
	So a free society would regularly give children brain scans.
	It would be part of their annual checkup and brain scans would reveal any trauma that was developing, any lack of empathy, any narcissism, any sociopathy, any psychopathy, any whatever, any grandiosity.
	All of this would be showing up in brain scans like that.
	And parents who did not submit their children to brain scans, those kids would no longer be insurable and the parents would be liable for any negative behavior that occurred, not just in childhood, but throughout the course of that child's life as they got older.
	So if they didn't submit their kids to brain scans, then if the kid grew up to become, or was a criminal in his teens who grew up to become a criminal, the parents would be liable.
	And so, I would imagine that through the course of that brain scan you would figure out the child's maturity according to objective.
	Biological markers or metrics.
	And then the age of consent would probably be some minimum standard for sure.
	And then after that, it would depend upon the maturity of the child.
	And the same thing would happen, of course, with regards to contracts and so on, right?
	And being able to go to university or whatever would be the situation.
	Because I always hated this.
	I mean, this is a petty thing, but I always hated this as a kid.
	Oh, man, did I hate this as a kid.
	Did you ever notice this? Of course you did, right?
	Every kid does, but it's rarely talked about.
	I've never talked about it before. This is what I hated as a kid.
	So, as a kid, you say, oh man, you're an adult at 18, right?
	But then you go to some goddamn amusement park, and what do they say?
	An adult is, kids are only 12 and under.
	And it just, it bothered the living hell out of me as a kid.
	Really did. Because it's like, okay, so it's just a rip-off.
	There's no definition of an adult.
	It's just that the amusement park is going to make a lot more money if they can push down the definition of what a child is.
	And you saw the same thing at restaurants.
	Children's meal, 12 and under.
	It's like, wait a minute, that's not the definition of a child.
	Can society not come up with any definition of the adult and child thing that makes any sense whatsoever?
	Then you go and try and rent a car and say, oh, you can't rent a car if you're a male until you're 25.
	It's like, okay. So an adult, who can make their own decisions or is treated as an adult, is somewhere between 12 and 25.
	Well, that's just crazy.
	It really bothered me because it's such a rip-off, right?
	All right. Just a little bit of nonsense from my past.
	I'm tired of people telling me I'm being brainwashed by Fox News when they watch CNN. Oh, Fox News is pretty trashy.
	They pushed a vaccine based on money from the government without telling their listeners about this massive conflict of interest.
	That's terrible. Just terrible.
	Could you expand upon the hierarchy by which some levels of enthusiasm are superior to others?
	Well, enthusiasm just means a positive emotion towards a particular thing.
	You can be enthusiastic for morality or health.
	You can be enthusiastic for someone torturing an animal if you're a sadist, right?
	Let's see here.
	Okay. All right, I'm slowly, slowly catching up.
	Thank you guys for dropping by tonight.
	It's such an enormous, deep, and wonderful pleasure to chat with you guys, and I hugely, hugely appreciate this opportunity.
	Twitter keeps permanently suspending me for the most mild of comments.
	They're awful. Well, I mean, there was a guy at Twitter, I can't remember his name, there was a guy at Twitter who responded to Elon Musk buying nine point something percent of the company by saying, well, no, no, no, we're not censoring, we're protecting people from hate and bullying, right?
	They view themselves as heroes protecting people from words that will physically damage them, right?
	Because, of course, I grew up in the culture of sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
	That's a free speech mantra, right?
	Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
	Hey, is it inappropriate to call your own children terms like princess or muscles, etc.?
	I'm not a huge fan of that kind of stuff.
	You know, like, what was it, the old Ed O'Neill show, Married with Children?
	Hey, pumpkin! I mean, it's fine when they're little and so on, but...
	Steph, thoughts on the 1986 Chernobyl disaster?
	Well, it's not a Chernobyl disaster.
	It's a communist disaster.
	It's a communist disaster, right?
	So two things that I use as filters in this world.
	These are two filters that I use.
	The first filter is if you've never worked with your hands, if you've never worked with your muscles, if you've never worked with your body, I really don't care what you have to say about abstract topics.
	Don't care.
	If you grew up rich, if you grew up privileged, if you never had to hump drill bits like I had to up north, if you've never even just worked as a waiter, if you've never worked chopping wood, if you've never worked with some tangible consequence-based physical risk situation, and there is physical risk involved in and there is physical risk involved in waitering as hot food can spill on you and coffee and all that.
	So if you've never actually worked in a physical job, I don't care what you have to say about abstract topics because you've never had the discipline of the physical and immediate consequences for being wrong.
	So I had a friend who missed an exam.
	And he was just able to go and get a note from the doctor and, you know, he could just talk his way back into retaking the exam, right?
	And we all know that, right?
	You know, the woman who applies lipstick when she's being pulled over for a speeding ticket and then unbuttons the top button of her blouse and maybe she can get out of the ticket that way, right?
	People who could just talk their way out of stuff because you're dealing with people.
	Now, if you're dealing with people, you can't develop a rational and cohesive and objective philosophy because the resource provision and the manipulation capacities that you have when dealing with people are virtually infinite.
	You can talk your way out of trouble.
	You can talk your way into some positive outcome.
	So, if you've never actually worked with your hands in some immediate, visceral, objective, consequence-based situation, I don't care what you have to say about abstract topics because you're not grounded in reality.
	Abstractions, concepts flow imperfectly from instances.
	Abstractions flow imperfectly from real things in the real world.
	And if you've never actually dealt with significant consequences, real things in the real world...
	Then you're automatically wrong about abstract topics.
	And by automatically wrong, I mean you may be right, but it's only accidentally right.
	You know, a blind man can shoot a hole in one every thousand years.
	Doesn't mean he's Tiger Woods, right?
	So that's the first thing.
	And the people that I like, the people that I respect who actually have sensible abstractions generally tend to be the people who've had physical labor jobs and their abstractions come out of the absolute reality of physical labor jobs.
	Like when I was working up north...
	I had to be unbelievably careful.
	Because that level, we were working with drills.
	I used to burn through the permafloss with a giant flamethrower just standing there, burning through the slope with a giant fuel-dripping flamethrower.
	And we had to drill through ice.
	We had to mount drills and put huge shaking...
	Machines on top of the drills to push them down.
	We had to hook them back out. It was big.
	It wasn't oil derrick stuff, but it was pretty damn dangerous.
	And the reason why it was so dangerous is that if you ever got injured, you were probably two days away from a hospital.
	And if you got injured out there, you were dead.
	Like, no fooling, no kidding, you were dead.
	If you got a significant cut, you would just bleed out.
	Because you might be...
	You know, four hours fast walk from the tent.
	So you'd have to cover that somehow.
	Deep snow. Yeah, good luck walking with a big cut in deep snow.
	And then you'd have to radio for an airplane.
	Then an airplane would have to be available.
	And then a pilot would have to be available.
	And then they'd have to fly out.
	And then they'd have to scoop you up.
	And then you'd have to fly back.
	And then you'd have to fly to and use another plane to get to a hospital.
	Like, it was crazy. And this, you know, this had a big impact on my life as a philosopher.
	Like, I've dealt with actual fucking tangible, objective, dangerous, can't talk your way in and out of it, reality.
	We were looking for gold by following the paths of the glaciers, right?
	You figured that the glacier finders a big deposit of gold, the glacier's going to smear it, so we would...
	Find the parts of the glaciers and we'd go back up.
	If we found an anomaly, we'd find the line, we'd try and track it back up to the soil.
	It's a good theory. You can't talk the ground into giving you gold.
	You can't talk your arm into not bleeding, if it's bleeding.
	You can't talk the gold into coming up to the surface.
	You can't, you know, there were times where in the summers, I remember once, you know, we would have 80-pound sacks of dirt, because you take a lot of dirt out.
	And then you pan it all down to try and...
	Because gold is very heavy, right?
	So you shake it up, put it in the shakers and all that, and the gold ends up at the bottom.
	And I would have these 80-pound sacks of earth on my back.
	And I remember one time, it had been recently locked, so there's all these trees on the ground...
	And the only way that you could get the earth back to the truck, or back to the camp in this case, you'd literally have to walk on the tree trunks with 80 pounds on your back, with bugs all over your face, right?
	Now, you can't talk your way in and out of that.
	You either slip, break a leg, and God help you, right?
	Or you're just super careful.
	You can't talk your way in and out of that stuff.
	It's actual, factual, tangible, material, dangerous reality.
	So, that's the first thing.
	If you've not worked with tangible, dangerous, immediate, objective reality, I don't care what you have to say.
	The second thing that I do is that if somebody doesn't experience any negative consequences of being wrong, I don't care what they have to say about a topic.
	No interest. Has anybody been fired for being wrong at the CDC or the World Health Organization or anything like that?
	No. Anyone being fired at the pharmaceutical companies for being wrong about things?
	No. Has anybody lost their job by saying, oh, the vaccines, they're going to prevent infection and transmission?
	Which they do neither.
	Anyone getting fired?
	And, of course, you know that from the very beginning.
	You know that people can just talk out of their ass and suffer no negative consequences whatsoever for being wrong.
	So I just don't listen to people who are telling me about things while suffering no negative consequences for being right.
	Now, of course, I've suffered negative consequences for being right.
	But that's a different topic.
	So when it comes to Chernobyl, it's not a Chernobyl disaster.
	The disaster is not geographical.
	Calling it a Chernobyl disaster, people want you to call it a Chernobyl disaster so you don't call it what it is, a communist disaster.
	Because you had people in charge of Chernobyl who hadn't worked physical, tangible, difficult, labor-based jobs, and you had people who suffered very few negative consequences of being wrong as a whole.
	That's kind of what communism is, right?
	So... Follow-up.
	The boy is only getting his way by yelling when eating.
	He screams if the food's given too slowly.
	Do I get him to stop by...
	by what? By what?
	By what? By what?
	Do I get him to stop by...
	He screams if the food is given too slowly.
	Okay, but are you engaged in some kind of sing-song or something with him, even if he can't talk?
	Are you telling him a story? Are you being animated?
	Are you showing interest in him?
	Is he bored, right?
	Is he screaming not because the food is given too slowly, but because nobody sits down and talks with him until the food is all delivered, so he wants attention, right?
	Just keep in contact with your kids at all times.
	Stay in verbal contact with them.
	Stay in sing-song contact with them.
	Stay in eye contact with them if you can, right?
	Vox Day recently said that Steph's philosophy of raising children is ridiculous, that you shouldn't shield children from consequences, and that he's most grateful to his parents for disciplining him.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, again, I generally don't take with any seriousness people's reports of what other people say, because it's going through your filter and so on, so you could just be a troublemaker.
	I don't know. And ridiculous is not an argument, right?
	Yeah. Let's see here.
	The boy's yelling is meant to speed up the pace of feeding.
	Perhaps I should just go at the same steady pace and ignore the yelling.
	No, don't ignore the yelling, because that's passive-aggressive.
	You have to accept the fact that he's yelling and say, I don't like...
	Be honest with him. I don't like that you're yelling.
	I don't like it. I do not like...
	No, I don't like that you're yelling.
	I don't like it. And kids are incredibly sensitive to parental disapproval.
	You understand? Peaceful parenting doesn't mean you don't have emotions.
	It doesn't turn you into some sort of a-feeling robot.
	You're perfectly welcome, and I would encourage you to be honest with your kid.
	Like, no, I don't like you yelling.
	Don't yell at me. I don't like that.
	Would you like it if I yelled at you?
	No! Don't yell at me.
	No, absolutely not.
	No, you are not going to yell at me.
	I'm not going to give you what you want if you yell.
	Stop yelling and you'll get your food.
	No. No.
	No yelling. No yelling at me.
	I don't like it. I mean, I assume you don't like him yelling at you because he's trying to apply negative consequences to get what he wants.
	So be honest with him. Say, no, I don't like you yelling at me.
	Be honest with him. Honesty is a pretty good thing to do.
	Oh, I love that meme.
	My dog when I'm eating is a socialist.
	My dog when he is eating is a capitalist.
	So if you haven't seen that meme, it's absolutely brilliant.
	I loved that meme. And what it is, is a dog when you're eating, he's got a communist flag over him.
	And then when you're eating, he's got a don't tread on me flag.
	It's really, really funny.
	How do I get my writing out there to a wider audience online without paying for ads?
	I remember you mentioning you went to bars for FDR. I don't remember that exactly.
	So what you need to do is find a place that has some audience and then just...
	Like, I went to lourockwell.com to get started.
	I went to other places. I went to go.
	I spoke to, like, 20 people at the Libertarian Conference.
	I just moved that. And what's wrong with paying for ads?
	Don't you care about your writing?
	What's wrong with paying for ads?
	Or read it as an audiobook or pay for someone to read it as an audiobook and get it out there.
	But you've just got to relentlessly hustle.
	MC Hammer, who's a rapper from the 90s, I think it was, he just drove around with his LP in the back of his car and he would just go to DJs and say, you've got to play this, you've got to play this, just hustle like crazy.
	Because here's the thing. People don't know how good your writing is.
	The only thing they know is how good you think your writing is.
	And if you say, well, my writing's good, but I don't want to spend 50 bucks a month to advertise it, then people will say, oh, well, I guess then your writing isn't that good because you don't really care about it.
	So if you don't really care about it, why should anyone else?
	Isn't defund the police a libertarian principle?
	I don't believe so.
	I don't believe so. A lot of libertarianism is very small government, which usually means police, law courts, military, maybe prisons.
	So no, I don't defund the police.
	It's not a libertarian principle. The Amish lifestyle seems better and better as I get older.
	So yeah, where are all the...
	I mean, haven't the Amish all died from COVID after the winter of severe illness and death?
	Right, so, you know, as the Biden administration said, you're going to have a winter of severe illness and death.
	Didn't happen. Does anyone get fired for that?
	For frightening the entire population, predicting a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated?
	Does anyone get fired? Hey, Steph, do you hate your former audience for not following you?
	No. No, I don't.
	Hatred is a very last resort emotion for me.
	It does happen on occasion, but no, the audience gave me great freedom.
	The audience gave me great freedom, great liberty, right?
	Because by not following me, they allowed me to focus on the stuff that I really want to focus on.
	And thank you for listening and thank you for watching and all of that.
	No, the audience gave me great freedom.
	They're totally free to not follow me.
	Of course, obviously, right? But by not following me, they're saying, they're begging me, stop taking crazy risks.
	Stop taking these kinds of risks.
	Stop doing it. It's not worth it, because we're not going to follow you.
	Right, so...
	No, they gave me a great deal of freedom to focus on...
	I mean, reading my books as audiobooks has been unbelievably great.
	My novels, right?
	Because I started out as an artist, not as a philosopher.
	So reading my novels as audiobooks has been an unbelievably great pleasure.
	I am listening over and over and over again to just poor audiobooks.
	and getting something new out of it every single time.
	My God, that's a great book.
	JustPoorNovel.com, free, just free.
	So they gave me the liberty to get back to my roots.
	The audience gave me the freedom to really focus on what I most want to do and to not feel a sense of obligation and responsibility to focus on what they wanted the most, right?
	So what did they want the most? My audience as a whole, what did they want the most?
	They wanted a lot of politics, which is kind of risky, kind of dangerous, right?
	A lot of IQ stuff, kind of risky, kind of dangerous.
	They wanted a whole bunch of stuff, right?
	And... Because I was really focused on the audience's needs as a whole, because I'm a good businessman.
	I did that. When they didn't follow me, I was free from that responsibility.
	Free from that. Which wasn't my primary focus or primary desire when I first started the show.
	I didn't do True News for the first couple of years I ever did the show.
	And so I've got to really, and I've got a new book coming out that I've been working on, which I'm incredibly happy with.
	And I wouldn't have been able to do that if it had been all just chasing the audience.
	So it's incredibly liberating for me for 90% of my audience to not follow me.
	So I don't hate them at all.
	Let's see here. Is it 21 to buy cigarettes?
	Someplace. I think it's 19, Canada.
	All right. Do you have any caution and or advice for people who follow you but can't afford the survival risk of deplatform slash ostracism?
	I can't tell other people what risk or reward to follow in their life.
	That is a very personal decision.
	But I'll tell you this.
	The deplatforming was a little shocking when it happened, but it's fine.
	It's fine. I recently saw people spreading a rumor that Steph took the vax.
	I've never even taken X. All right.
	Most adults never read a book their whole lives, but what was really there to decline anyway?
	Well, it's true. I mean, the majority of people really don't read books at all, for sure.
	Construction is that way.
	Immediate danger which requires logic to navigate.
	Yeah, for sure. I mean, the trades in particular.
	There's a reason why the leftists want you going to do an arts degree rather than working in the trades.
	You work in the trades.
	It's absolute objective.
	It works or it doesn't.
	Same thing to some degree with computer programming, but that's still a little fudgy.
	But, you know, you're installing plumbing.
	It either works or it doesn't. You're installing electrical outlets.
	They either work or they don't, right?
	So there's a reason why the trades get denigrated by the people who are supposedly pro-working class, right?
	There's a reason why the trades get denigrated, because if you do the trades, you're more likely to be conservative.
	Or small government or whatever.
	You're less into utopianism, right?
	Steph used flamethrower.
	It's super effective. Do not get that reference.
	Hey, Stephan, trick question that's not a trick.
	Where does logic come from? Oh, I know the answer to that.
	So logic is the conceptual derivation of the objective nature of the universe.
	Right? So you look at the three laws of logic, right?
	A is A. An object is itself.
	Okay? Okay. Is that true in the world?
	Is a tree a tree? Yes it is.
	Is a ball a ball? Yes it is.
	The second Something is either a tree or not a tree.
	Okay, that's very true in the universe, right?
	And something has to be either a tree or not a tree.
	Something that exists, something that is tangible is either a tree or it's not a tree.
	It can't be both at the same time, right?
	So, logic comes from the objective and universal properties of matter and energy.
	It comes from scientific laws, it comes from laws of physics and electromagnetism and strong and weak forces and so on because matter behaves in a universal objective and predictable fashion The laws of logic describe or are derived from the objective behavior of matter and energy.
	Oh yeah, you're in a bad way, injured remotely.
	Oh yeah, you can. Yeah, for sure.
	What is your favorite way to deal with disagreeable people who always need to be right?
	I don't deal with them.
	I mean, why would you? Because, I mean, you may have one conversation with them, but most likely, most people need to learn from bitter experience.
	They won't learn from reason and evidence.
	So, I wouldn't deal with them at all.
	Steph, what's your favorite vegetable?
	Ooh. Unfortunately for my wife, it's onions.
	Oh man, a good red onion.
	Boy, you want to have a nice little piece of food.
	Nice piece of toast, some light cream cheese, some capers, some onion, and some salmon.
	Oh, my mouth's watering already.
	That's my favorite vegetable.
	All right. What was your best experience with your audience?
	I mean, I do miss public speaking a little.
	I've really enjoyed playing with the audience as a public speaker.
	And some of the great...
	I mean, that was really... I have no regrets.
	I mean, Australia was very costly for me in many ways.
	It really escalated the deplatforming, but...
	It was so much fun.
	So many great memories from the tour in Australia.
	All right. Steph, Owen Benjamin on a stream challenged you and a few other anarcho-capitalists to debate UPB, if you'd have him.
	Um, I'm not really dealing with other people in the show.
	I did that for like 15 years straight, but I'm mostly just doing me and the audience these days.
	Small business people are conservative.
	That's why the leftist way should warn them.
	Yeah, for sure. So small business people, you have to deal with the customer, you have to deal with objective facts and prices and costs, and you don't have, you know, you can't just call up a politician and get a rule your way.
	So yeah, small people, small business people tend to be conservative.
	That's one of the outcomes of the mandates and the anti-vax stuff is to destroy small business for sure.
	But why is the left trying to destroy society?
	Isn't it counterproductive? They believe that They're knocking down a bad, terrible, destructive house and building a shining castle of virtue in its place, right?
	I mean, if you want to put something new in it, there's something there already.
	You got rid of something that's already there.
	They don't think they're destroying society.
	They think that they're getting rid of an unjust, patriarchal, racist, sexist, homophobic system and going to replace it with a perfect utopian, egalitarian world, right?
	If the tree falls down in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
	Well, that depends on how you define sound, right?
	Obviously, if you define sound as something that someone hears, no.
	If you define sound as vibrations in the air, then yes.
	And we know that for sure because if you put a recorder there, like a little cell phone recording, and the tree falls, you can hear the sound later.
	So you know it's happening even when you're not there to hear it.
	So that's an easy one.
	I don't know why that's complicated for philosophers.
	If you define the sound as something you hear, then no, if there's no one there.
	But if you define the sound, and I think a sound is something that is vibrations in the air, then of course it makes a sound, right?
	All right. Yeah, you know, I got to tell you, I'm not a huge fan of people coming on my show and advertising other people's podcasts.
	It's not a terrible behavior.
	It's just a little rude, if that makes sense.
	Like I remember being at a gym once and I just happened to throw on a t-shirt that had the name of another gym and the guy said, hey man, take that t-shirt off.
	I'll give you a free t-shirt with my gym's name on it, right?
	It's not terrible. It's not like really horrible behavior, but I think you might want to be kind of sensitive to...
	Saying, you know, if you come on my show and are advertising another show, it's not the very best kind of behavior or whatever, right?
	Okay. I remember a live stream where the Art of Furry guy came back and said he had a wife and kid on the way.
	Any inspiring results you can share?
	Yeah, well, I did a show.
	I never published it, but it was a woman who needed to know how to explain her imminent death to her children.
	And we had a long show about it, and I did my best to explain it.
	And she's still alive.
	It's incredible. All right.
	Why do so many Christians in the U.S. spank?
	Well, because they've, you know, spared the rod, spoiled the child, that kind of stuff, right?
	So, do you think at 32 it's not too late to find a wife to start a family?
	No, it's not too late. I didn't get married until I was 34.
	So, no, it's not too late at all.
	Why do Christians seem to think that the Bible says beating your child is good?
	Well, again, spare the rod, spoil the child, and so on, right?
	It's a misinterpretation.
	The rod actually refers to the rod of instruction, like the staff of a shepherd.
	You use it to guide. You don't beat your sheep, right?
	Okay, let me just get to...
	What's the closest anyone has come to teaching you something?
	Are you kidding me? I get taught stuff all the time.
	All the time. At what age should a man ideally have a kid?
	Well, the age where he's tried to deal with as much personal trauma as he can and is ready to truly dedicate himself to someone else.
	We love you, Steph. Thank you so much.
	Love you guys back. I learn stuff all the time.
	So it may come as no massive shock to you guys in particular, but just between us.
	A little bit hyper-competitive.
	Now, my daughter has taught me how to become less competitive, which means I still want to win, but the process of playing and the enjoyment that you have is more important than the outcome, right?
	Because if you play a game, let's say you've been 45 minutes playing a game, right?
	And you're only really happy if you win.
	Well, winning is five minutes, right?
	So five minutes out of 45 minutes is what your happiness is, right?
	But if you are having a great time playing the game as you go and you care less about winning or losing, Then you get 45 minutes of fun.
	Let's say for the last five minutes you're not happy because you lost or whatever, right?
	So you get 40 minutes of fun if you're engaged in the process of playing the game, whereas you only get five minutes of fun if you're only there for the winning, right?
	So this is something that my...
	My daughter taught me.
	And seeing her and her enjoyment of playing games even when she doesn't win, her indifference in a sense to winning while still playing hard, she's taught me a lot.
	I could do an entire show on things that she's taught me.
	How did therapy help you, Steph?
	So what therapy did, I mean a lot, right?
	But what therapy did in particular was I would say the most is it got me to take my own emotional instincts with great and deep seriousness.
	So people who want to exploit you need to separate you from your second brain, right?
	Like you know you have two brains, right?
	I'm not kidding, like you literally have two brains.
	So if the brain up here and you have your gut brain and your gut brain is your instincts and your lizard brain and it all happens down there, you know, I've got a gut feeling, I've got an instinct about this, right?
	So, you can talk yourself in and out of stuff intellectually, right?
	Your upper brain is kind of the equivalent of an arts degree and your lower brain is like the equivalent of working construction.
	So, you can talk yourself into just about anything and talk yourself out of just about anything.
	But... Separating you from your gut brain is usually done through trauma.
	It's through punishing you for every instinct that you have, right?
	So if you have some aunt, right?
	If you have this as a kid, right?
	Let's say you have some aunt who's kind of smelly, who's kind of weird, who's got bad teeth or whatever, right?
	And as a kid, you don't want to go and give her a hug because it gives you the creeps, right?
	She's got some mole with a wart with hair sticking out of it and, you know, yellow teeth and bad breath or whatever.
	So you recoil from that aunt, right?
	Yeah. Because your instinct says, that's not healthy.
	That person could be diseased. They could be sick.
	I don't want to go there. I don't want to be embraced.
	I don't want to have her breath on me because I could get sick, right?
	Because she looks unwell, unhealthy, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So that's your instinct. Now, what does your mom say?
	Go and give your grandmother or go and give your auntie a hug.
	So she overrides your instincts, right?
	She doesn't sit down with her aunt or her sister.
	Let's say it's her sister. She doesn't sit down with her sister and say, okay, like we got to get you to a dentist.
	We got to get you to a skin specialist.
	Like you're scaring my kids.
	Like they don't want to come and give you a hug.
	And I don't blame them because I wouldn't either, right?
	So, in the choice between upsetting her sister and upsetting her kid, she chooses to upset her kid for the most part because the kid can't fight back, the kid isn't going to cause trouble, the kid isn't going to get too mad, blah, blah, blah, at least until the kid gets to be a teenager, in which case they act down with promiscuity and drug use.
	So, you're taught to reject your own instincts.
	When you're taught to, you're really ordered to, you're forced to, you don't want to go to school, you have to go to school.
	You don't like the teacher, you've got to find a way to like the teacher.
	You're being bullied, you've got to find a way to just avoid the bully, right?
	And so the central purpose of propaganda and control and bullying and subjugation is to get you to go against your instincts, to separate you from your true protector, which is your gut brain.
	Your gut brain, your instincts right down there, right above your balls, right below your tits, right?
	That's your gut brain. And therapy really, really helped me get in touch with my gut brain by working on dream analysis, by working on physical sensations, by working on instincts.
	There's a way to... You know, the gut brain can see through time.
	In a way that the intellect can't.
	Because the gut brain can see, can taste the food just by looking at a recipe.
	It's incredible instincts, right?
	And we also know the gut brain is also, you can say, you're unconscious as well, like sort of linked, right?
	The unconscious has been clocked at working as over 8,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
	So you can't navigate without your gut brain.
	You're flying blind without your gut brain.
	And so therapy really helped me with getting in touch with my gut brain and it's really helped guide me.
	All right. Kevin Samuel said, men should not think about settling down before the age of 36.
	What do you think of this statement?
	I mean, I think, again, putting a number on it, some people are wise, right?
	I mean, some people are wiser when they're younger, right?
	All right. Let's see here.
	How long should therapy last for the average person?
	I've known people who went to therapy for 10 years.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, I had a really terrible childhood and I was in therapy for I think about 18 months, but I was also going three hours a week and also doing another six to eight hours of journaling work and all of that.
	So I was really, really working hard on that.
	So I don't know.
	I don't know the answer to that, but I think that you should not use therapy as a substitute for your actual relationships because it's not an actual relationship, right?
	When should we not trust our gut brain?
	Well, I would say trust it and then wait to be proven otherwise.
	I just fed my gut brain a hamburger.
	Can we be our own therapist?
	I would say probably not if you have real trauma because real trauma tends to isolate you and problems that are caused by isolation and whose symptom is isolation can't be solved in isolation.
	If you expose your sane and non-clown worldviews to your therapist, isn't that risky because they can rat you out?
	I don't know.
	I don't know. I mean, my understanding, again, completely outside amateur understanding, and talk to your therapist about this, is that if you're not talking about committing a crime or something like that, they have to keep it secret.
	But talk to a therapist who's not some blue-haired ideological nutbag.
	I mean, talk to somebody who's genuinely curious about the human condition and doesn't try and slot people into.
	Just by the by, I've sort of had this thought for a while and I'll just jam it in here and pretend that there's a connection.
	One of the reasons why...
	The haters in society want a social credit score is right now they're accidentally being nice to people who they disagree with, but they don't know to be mean to them because they don't know that they can disagree with them, right?
	If you have a social credit score, then people, cashiers or people in society or bank tellers, they'll immediately know whether they should be nice to you or not so that they're not accidentally being nice to someone and humanizing someone that is actually some sort of hysterical class enemy or some sort of anti-human person that they've decided and all of that.
	So, yeah, because I think leftists are really mad that they might end up liking someone who is an ideological enemy.
	I mean, I... Many, gosh, many years ago.
	So when I got into, I did rollerblading for a while, which is a lot of fun.
	And I went down to the beaches.
	This is before I was married. I went down to the beaches.
	It was a beautiful day.
	The beaches in Toronto were lovely.
	And it's like, basically, it's the ocean, because it's Lake Ontario, and you could, like, take all of England and drop it into Lake Ontario, still have room to spare.
	And I took my rollerblades, and I went down, I had my helmet, I made the elbow pads, because I was still learning.
	And I went down, got my rollerblades on, and I just went roller skating, rollerblading.
	I did this in Venice Beach, too, which was wonderful.
	But in California?
	California. So I went rollerblading along...
	And there was this woman who was rollerblading there as well.
	And I could tell that she was a feminist.
	You know, they have the look, right?
	But I was feeling particularly gregarious and positive.
	So I just thought, oh, it's a beautiful day.
	And look at the sunlight and the smell of the plants.
	It's incredible. And all of that, right?
	And so we ended up rollerblading together for, I don't know, about 45 minutes, maybe an hour.
	And had a really nice conversation.
	Now, I was a single guy, but I wasn't going to date her or ask her out because I could tell, right?
	I don't put my hands in wood chepers either.
	And I could see her.
	She kept glancing over at me because she had been told, you know, how terrible the patriarchy was and how bad men were.
	And here I was having a wonderful day, enjoying the sunshine and a fine conversation.
	And I could see her looking over like, this doesn't add up.
	This doesn't... Work?
	What's happening? Right, I mean, there's a woman, oh gosh, Daniel Crittenden.
	She wrote a book. It was actually quite influential to me called What Our Mothers Couldn't Tell Us or something like that.
	And in it she talks about, you know, Going from theory to practice, it's like if you're in there in the library and you're reading all about the oppressed proletariat and how miserable and terrible capitalism is for the working class and so on, right?
	And then you go out into the world and outside the library there's a bunch of guys across the street building some building, repairing some building.
	And they're laughing and they're chatting and they're calling out jokes for each other and they're listening to music and so on.
	And it's like, you've got this whole theory about how miserable the working class is.
	You go out and actually interact with the working class.
	And again, I came out of the working class.
	I came out of the welfare class to a large degree, but I came out of the working class.
	And you simply can't believe.
	This is another reason why they don't want kids to have jobs, right?
	If you get a lot of immigrants coming in, the teenagers don't get jobs.
	Yeah. And one of the reasons they don't want teenagers having jobs is then, because I got my first job when I was 10, painting plaques for the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in England, and I've been working ever since, really.
	And when you come out of the working class, when you get a job early, first of all, you see the taxes and all that, and you realize that there's nothing free.
	But what happens is you get the working class view of the bosses.
	And in most of the places I worked, the working class guys Had nothing but pity and contempt for the bosses.
	Like, who'd want that job? That's a terrible job.
	Just people yell at you all day or whatever, right?
	And no thanks, right?
	The waiters, they never wanted to be the restaurant boss.
	If somebody had said, oh, no, you can become the boss of the restaurant, and they'd be like, oh, God, no, thanks.
	What a nightmare. So this idea that the working classes are being exploited by the predatory managerial classes, right, just doesn't, right?
	What's stopping you from becoming a Christian?
	My commitment to empiricism.
	I need proof, sorry.
	I need proof and physical and sense-based data and evidence and so on.
	If God shows up, I'm in, right?
	I'm going to start homeschooling this year.
	Hi, Julie. Nice to see you.
	I'm going to start homeschooling this year when my kid finishes elementary.
	Any advice how to start? So I think that the most valuable stuff that comes out of homeschooling is based upon conversation.
	So learn stuff yourself because you have to know stuff to show the value of knowledge, right?
	There's no point trying to show the value of knowledge to a kid if you haven't learned a whole bunch of stuff.
	So learn a whole bunch of stuff.
	And then just have conversations.
	You know, you can read the newspaper, you can read the newspaper, you read the news or whatever, and just talk about what's going on and what's happening and why.
	And just get into conversations.
	Figure out what your child is interested in and facilitate that.
	Steph, how do you deal with people's fake selves?
	Is there a way to get around to them, to the real person, or is it a waste of energy?
	So when you encounter the false self, the false self is the self that emerges because individual, individuation, individuality is suicide, right?
	It's like to be an individual, to think for yourself is kind of suicidal.
	It's suicidal in a lot of families.
	It's certainly suicidal in school, socially and psychologically and so on.
	So people develop...
	A fake self which is to be enthusiastic about the grave of authenticity, the headstone of which is conformity, to be enthusiastic about being forced to attend the funeral of your own authentic self, that fake enthusiasm, that is the false self.
	And it's a survival mechanism, and it's a really tragic survival mechanism.
	So I don't deal with people's fake selves.
	I try to be relentlessly authentic myself.
	And if they're interested in that, great.
	Then we can have a real conversation.
	If they attack that or avoid that or that poses too much of a psychological threat to them, then they will recoil from me anyway and they will go and find someone else to interact with.
	Somebody says, I've been going to therapy and it changed my life.
	A great therapist is a godsend.
	Okay. Have you noticed how spouses tend to propertize their partners, actually regard them as their property?
	I mean, human beings aren't property, but marriage is sole and exclusive use of the other person, so to speak, right?
	To love, honor, obey?
	Sexual monogamy? Romantic monogamy?
	Pair bonding monogamy? I mean, you're saying that there's an exclusive lease on the other person for the rest of your lives.
	I mean, there's a proprietarian way of looking at that.
	Steph did a whole show on how to find a great therapist.
	I think it's 1927.
	I think that's it. But yeah, just go to fdrpodcast.com, do a search, and you can find it.
	Let's see here. Are men better therapists?
	I don't know. I don't know about that.
	I think, like, if you have problems with a mom, a female therapist might be a decent idea.
	But if God shows up, it wouldn't be faith.
	Well, no, that's not true.
	Because God has certainly shown up for people in the past, right?
	God made himself directly known to people in the past.
	Jesus performed miracles right in front of people in the past.
	The whole basis of knowing that someone is a saint is they're able to perform a miracle that other people can see.
	So if I see a miracle, right?
	So the whole reason we know about the existence of God or that God is there is because he has made himself known to people.
	I mean, he gave ten commandments directly to Moses, right?
	So... He was right there to Adam and Eve, right?
	So God certainly has the capacity, and that's the only reason we know what he's like, is to make himself known to people.
	So if the entire basis of the religion is God making himself known, then don't ask me to work on faith.
	That's not the essence of the religion, right?
	All right. No job when you're young makes you way more subservient to your parents, and as a result of that, you become more subservient generally.
	Being dependent upon authority is important, right, for the continuation of that authority.
	The owners of Walmart don't run much.
	They hire managers. I don't know the truth about that, but I will say this, that if there are owners who take a significant amount of profit out of Walmart, and there are other owners who work at Walmart, which means that Walmart requires lower payroll, then in the other, right, the second example will be more efficient and so on, right?
	Can two people's true selves be completely incompatible?
	I don't know what completely incompatible means, but there is a...
	I mean, there's morality, and then there's like the flavor of personality.
	There's a style of personality.
	And, you know, I mean, a morning person and a night person may not be that compatible.
	Somebody who reasons more and somebody who's more instinctive may not be that compatible, or they may be super compatible in that they feel where each other is lacking, so...
	Certainly, if you have a true self, if you're genuinely authentic in who you are, and somebody else is genuinely authentic in who they are, what you know for sure is that if you are compatible, it's going to stay that way.
	All right. Steph, has non-living matter ever been observed to become alive?
	Has it ever been observed or repeated?
	How do you reconcile entropy?
	But entropy is the inevitable decay or you could say dissipation of energy from concentrated energy sources, right?
	Stars eventually blow up and disperse and so on, right?
	And mountains erode and waterfalls go down and the water goes down the waterfall and so on.
	So entropy is for physical matter, but evolution puts organizational pressures on organisms that's the opposite of entropy because they don't survive if they're too chaotic or can't organize their bodies or their All right, so let's see here. Have you read Leo Tolstoy's A Confession?
	I've tried Tolstoy a couple of times.
	I simply...
	He absolutely puts me to sleep.
	It may be a complete failure on my part, but he absolutely puts me to sleep.
	I've never really loved a novelist.
	When you pour years of your life into creating something, as I did in creating novels...
	The reason you do it is because there's beautiful things in the world that don't exist yet, but need to exist.
	Right? So, that's why you have children, because there are beautiful things in the world that need to exist which don't exist as yet.
	So, I worked very hard to produce the kind of novels that I always wanted to read.
	Always wanted to read.
	And I... Which have not just philosophical or abstract virtues, but deep psychological personal virtues and psychological deep emotional truths.
	Because usually we go one or the other, you get the very abstract stuff like Ayn Randall, you get the very emotional stuff like some of the modern novels.
	But intellectual discipline plus emotional depth was always what I wanted to create.
	It was always missing for me. It was always a void in literature like that for me, so...
	Let's see here.
	Rand gave me what Steph is describing with novels here.
	Rand and Dostoevsky. Well, I appreciate that.
	I think that's some real great stuff there.
	Give mine a try. Almostnovel.com.
	Justboar.com. Just give them a try.
	If you like my voice, you like my way of communicating...
	Listen to me. Read these books.
	You'll really be in for a treat.
	Have you seen the movie The Four Feathers with Heath Ledger?
	I have not. Have I watched any good movies lately?
	I don't think I have watched any good movies lately.
	I haven't really watched any movies lately.
	I don't generally...
	Like if some new movie comes out, I am almost certain to be uninterested in it.
	Because you can't make any good art these days.
	At least not in the West. You just can't make any good art.
	Because the whole point of art these days is to avoid being yelled at by extremists.
	That's the whole point of art. Catering to the genuine and deep human emotions and human experiences, that's no longer part of art and hasn't been for a long time.
	A long time. And so the idea that I'm going to find something particularly valuable in a movie, particularly a modern movie, well, no, you're just going to get a whole bunch of propaganda.
	None of it's going to be true, and all of it is going to be, well, we don't want this special interest group to yell at us, and we don't want that special interest group to yell at us, and my God, we're going to get in trouble if we portray this, and we're not going to get in trouble.
	It's all defensive avoidance of being yelled at or attacked or deplatformed or ostracized or whatever.
	There's no actual art in the way that I would genuinely understand the term going on these days.
	I just don't think that's a thing at all.
	So... Yeah, that's not something I really believe in, and I just don't really want to subsidize that, if that makes any sense.
	I mean, occasionally I'll sort of dip into art to see kind of what's going on, but usually it's with a, oh, well, this is the complete opposite of art, as far as I can tell.
	The complete opposite of art.
	Everything is there to manipulate you into a politically correct perspective.
	Because people consume so much media these days that the media has become their empiricism and they make decisions about things in the real world by being programmed by the programming.
	And once you're kind of awake to life as a whole, it's really tough to take that stuff at all seriously and to find any kind of pleasure in it.
	I mean, in the same way that I don't read back issues of Pravda from, like, the old Soviet Union, and I don't watch pro-Soviet films from the 1940s and the 1950s, you know, the kind of stuff that was examined in the McCarthy hearings and so on.
	Like, I'm just not interested in that kind of stuff at all.
	So it just doesn't hold any vitality for me.
	It's really, really boring and predictable, right?
	We're back. Yeah, sorry, I don't know what the heck happened there.
	It's all very exciting.
	I never know what to start up again with.
	I never know what to start up again with.
	All right. Let me just go back to the other place here and see.
	Have you got something on your network static IP set up as the router is up?
	Couldn't I tell you?
	Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?
	Oh yeah, that's the guys from the It Squad.
	The DLive video is done.
	Now it's back, man. It's back, baby.
	Yeah, don't panic. Don't panic, it's all too beautiful.
	It's all too beautiful.
	Good thing about DLive is I get to see lovely Steph.
	Well, I applaud you on your most excellent taste.
	Alright, so let me just go back here.
	So, last question or two.
	I almost finished reading Almost.
	I really like the interaction of conversations between the characters.
	Thank you. Hey, Steph, you're right about staying out of politics.
	Makes me feel more sane.
	You could have just called it a knight, Steph.
	That's true. But it could have been a squire.
	It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell.
	All right. Is respect earned and not given?
	Yeah, no, respect is earned, but people always sit there and say, well, is this person worthy of my respect?
	But, of course, it's mutual, right? It has to be universal.
	So, if you act in a manner which is worthy of respect...
	And somebody else acts in the same manner and you expect respect, then you should provide respect, right?
	That's just universalization.
	If God is real, hell is real.
	Worth careful consideration?
	I do believe that hell is real, I just don't think it happens after death.
	I mean, if you look at, so Madonna, not the one of the Renaissance paintings with the baby Jesus, but the one of rampant, our selected hypersexuality from the 80s.
	So Madonna did a video before, was it before the Grammys or something like that?
	And she has become...
	An over-inflated, hyper-pool-stuck-in-a-drain-pipe balloon caricature of an anime X-Star.
	And, I mean, dead eyes, an intense and psychotic focus on personal attractiveness to the point where the back of her head must just look like a pile of hamburger because she's so stretched and taut.
	And of course that is a terrible thing where a woman has, what has she had to offer the world except talent and looks, right?
	And she is talented for sure.
	I'm listening to her do Santa Baby.
	She's like really talented as a performer and as a singer.
	Okay, it's not going to be enough though.
	And she married a guy, Richie, or something, and she did some video or some picture where she's, you know, shaking her ass at him and stuff like that, because it is awful.
	And I will tell you a story.
	I will tell you a story that I just heard about recently.
	Thanks, Razor Fist. All right.
	Veronica Lake. Do you know Veronica Lake?
	She's an old movie star from the 1940s.
	Well, she wasn't old, of course. And if you've ever seen either the movie or the memes that came out of Jessica Rabbit, you know, I'm not bad.
	I'm just drawn that way.
	So she was in films like Sullivan's Travels and I Married a Witch and so on.
	A beautiful, beautiful woman.
	A beautiful woman. And she was, of course, very, very much.
	It was focused on her looks, right?
	She was beautiful. And she had a very bad childhood, right?
	So she was born Constance Francis Marie Ockelman.
	Her father, Harry Eugene Ockelman, was of German and Irish descent and worked for an oil company aboard a ship.
	He died in an industrial explosion in Philadelphia in 1932.
	Her mother was of Irish descent, married a newspaper staff artist, and so on, right?
	And she went to an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Montreal, Quebec, so separated from her family probably because she was a stepdaughter to the new husband and he probably wanted to keep resources for his own kids, so ships her off somewhere else.
	And she was...
	She had a troubled childhood, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to her mother.
	Now, whether that is official, whether it's not, or whatever, right?
	And so, basically, she was known for her beauty, and she was beautiful, and she had this kind of hair, it was called the picaboo style, kind of curls over one eye.
	I'm doing this because I can't possibly show it except by combing down my eyebrow.
	And she actually lost some popularity when she changed her Hairstyle.
	Now, so in World War II, she had to change her peekaboo hairstyle.
	The government told her, you've got to change your hairstyle because women, a copy, and the women working in the war industry factories were getting their hair caught because their hair was kind of flopping down.
	So she went to a shorter, pulled-back kind of style and all of that, right?
	And she had a great figure. She was a pin-up girl, which was like the picture you'd put up.
	Younger people don't know this about.
	You'd have these pictures that you'd sort of pin up on your wall of attractive women and so on, right?
	And anyway, sort of she made a bunch of movies, fairly successful star and all of that.
	And so here's the thing, right?
	After her third divorce, Veronica Lake drifted between cheap hotels in New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct.
	In 1962, a New York Post reporter found her living at the all-women's Martha Washington Hotel in Manhattan, working as a waitress downstairs in the cocktail lounge.
	Thank you.
	She was working under a pseudonym and so on, right?
	And so this idea that she was out of money, she had no contact with her kids really anymore, and she was just, she was past her prime, right?
	She couldn't get... Male attention based on her looks.
	She might get some male attention based upon her history as an actor.
	So she wrote her memoirs, Veronica, the autobiography of Veronica Lake.
	She dictated it to some writer and they were published in 1969 in the UK, in the US the next year.
	She discussed her career, her failed marriages, her romances with Howard Hughes, Tommy Manfill, Aristotle Onassis, her alcoholism, and her guilt over not spending enough time with her children.
	In the book she said that her mother pushed her into a career as an actress.
	She also laughed off the term sex symbol and instead referred to herself as a sex zombie, which would be my understanding or interpretation of what's happening to Madonna these days.
	So, in June 1973, Veronica Lake returned from her autobiography, promotion, and summer stock tour in England to the U.S., and while traveling in Vermont, visited a local doctor complaining of stomach pains.
	Now, if you've been an alcoholic for a long time, stomach pains is not a good sign, right?
	She was discovered to have cirrhosis of the liver, directly out of her years of hyperalcoholism.
	And on June 26, 1973, she checked into a hospital and she died there, Two weeks later on July 7th, acute hepatitis and acute kidney injury.
	Her son Michael claimed her body, right?
	She died alone. And this was a woman who was a sex symbol and a very famous woman, very talented, very beautiful, very wealthy, very much in demand, very popular.
	And then she ends her life as a down-and-out, half-arrested cocktail waitress alcoholic.
	She dies alone of an entirely preventable disease brought about by her dysfunction.
	And... Her kids didn't even show up to hold her hand while she died.
	Her son did show up later to claim her body.
	And she was cremated.
	And did her kids even hang on to her cremation?
	No. In 2004, some of Lake's ashes were found in a New York antique store.
	And that's the outcome of getting something for nothing.
	Beauty, physical beauty...
	And particularly for women, physical beauty is getting something for nothing.
	It is the devil's handiwork.
	This doesn't mean that we should reject or hate physical beauty.
	It's a part of life.
	It's a fine thing. There's nothing wrong with physical beauty.
	But those who are born genetically gifted with physical beauty...
	And the same thing can be true for leanness of physique, for the capacity to build muscle as a man and have a lean physique and so on, right?
	But physical beauty...
	Is unearned. Now, you can say, yes, but people who are physically beautiful, they wear their makeup, they do their hair, they work out, but they do that because they're physically beautiful.
	It's like saying, well, the guy who's the Calvin Klein underwear model must work out a lot.
	It's like, well, yeah, but he works out because he's already physically beautiful and it pays off for him to do so.
	Physical beauty is...
	A very dangerous thing to be in possession of.
	Very dangerous thing to be in possession of physical beauty.
	And I don't know if you've noticed this, and I don't mean to put this forward as any kind of obviously ironclad law or actual physical thing, but I'll tell you this.
	Can a man be physically attractive in his 30s?
	Well, yeah, men can be physically attractive for a long time, more so than women, because they don't have kids and get that leeching of youth and beauty.
	So, here's the thing.
	The question is always, why are beautiful women often so damaged?
	And the one thing that's not really talked about is the degree to which beautiful women...
	are usually beautiful children, and beautiful children are targeted by pedophiles and predators.
	So, if you were to look at this woman, Veronica Lake, she was reportedly held to work with, really difficult to work with.
	She was an alcoholic, she was schizophrenic, but she was obviously schizophrenic to the point she wasn't having outright hallucinations, and she was probably self-medicating that schizophrenia with her alcoholism.
	Miserable. Married three times.
	Like, men had affairs with her.
	And I've got to tell you guys, it's really, really hard.
	What if women had to work for beauty like men have to work for money?
	No, but there's, you know, your face is your face.
	Men can work for money as a whole, but you can gain money.
	But beauty is generally something you're born with.
	You can't just make yourself beautiful, right?
	So, let me tell you something about women.
	And if you understand this, you'll understand a lot about the modern world, so hang on to your hats.
	There is nothing that is going to destroy and enrage a woman more than being used for sex.
	A woman who is good enough to be a screw toy but nowhere near good enough to be a wife is going through an exquisitely tortuous humiliation the likes of which men can scarcely understand.
	Now, if a woman is desired, but only for sexual activity, but not liked for her personality, in other words, if a man will have sex with her but would never think of making her his wife, that is an unbelievable humiliation for a woman.
	It exposes her to the worst kinds of predatory men, and it literally will destroy her soul.
	Literally will destroy herself.
	I'm just talking about women here.
	And Kevin Samuels points this out too when he says to women on his show, he says, how many men are actively vetting you to be their wife?
	How many men are actively vetting you to be their wives?
	So if you're a woman, you can always get attention for sex.
	This is why you don't see homeless women because they can always trade sex for a place to sleep, a place to stay.
	So, you know, what destroyed this woman?
	Well, if she was a beautiful child and she had a stepfather.
	Now, what do we know about stepfathers?
	What do we know about when there are adults, males in the house who are not related to the children?
	That the odds of abuse go up 3,000%.
	100%.
	So, to be a beautiful girl in particular, because we know that women are sexually beautiful, I don't have any proof of what happened to Veronica Lake, right?
	But we do know that women are sexually abused.
	The girls are sexually abused more than boys, right?
	It's one in three girls, one in five boys.
	And if the girl is particularly beautiful, right, then she's more likely.
	And if there's no biologically related father in the house, it's even more likely to be abused.
	So... If you do have that beauty, which I think a lot of people experience, if they're really honest with themselves, a lot of people experience that as a curse.
	Because it gives you such incredible highs when you're young.
	Especially female beauty. It gives you such incredible highs when you're young.
	It's astounding. It's a power that men can almost never understand.
	Especially, you know, the one in a million women who just have it all, right?
	The looks, the face, the hair, the body, whatever, right?
	And the And the talent, of course, you have to have the talent.
	You can't just be beautiful. So that beauty gets women such astonishing levels of interest, right?
	So she claimed to have these affairs with the world's richest man, Howard Hughes, with another hugely successful rich man, Aristotle Onassis.
	Jackie O married him later, I think.
	And yet none of these men could put up with her for long.
	She's just used. You understand, a woman's vagina is exactly where she's not.
	It's a hole. So, beauty corrupts because it's a power you did not earn.
	It's like for a man, I guess, the equivalent would be inheriting a billion dollars.
	Although if you inherit a billion dollars, at least you get usually guidance from someone who made a billion dollars.
	But if you are born beautiful and your parents aren't beautiful, you don't even have the guidance of somebody who was born beautiful too, who knows how to navigate it.
	Greatest examples of beauty and deterioration of character is found in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.
	Yeah, power corrupts. Beauty is power.
	Now, again, to go back to the stage, right?
	Beauty is in particular a power for women these days because of the welfare state, old age pensions, free health care, and so on.
	So they don't need a man to provide for them as long so they can milk that beauty in a way.
	Because the beauty is there to get a man locked down to be your lawfully wedded husband, better or for worse, until death do you part.
	So it's there designed to be locked down.
	And a woman's beauty is supposed to be Four years, you know, 18 to 22.
	That's it. And after that, you've got babies, you've got kids, you've got boobs drooping, you've got tiredness, your skin pallor goes down, your figure is kind of wrecked by pregnancies, and so on, right?
	And so a woman's beauty is supposed to be four years, and this eternal youth, the stuff that's going on, Madonna's in her 60s and still, you know, and of course, here's the thing, though, right?
	I remember Ann Coulter, not really the most shallow person in the world, that's a lot I admire about her, but Ann Coulter was talking about Elizabeth Warren, like, Man, I'd really love to know what her skincare regimen is, because she looks fantastic.
	It's like the battle that, I can't remember who it was, was it Kayleigh McAnony, or the woman who was there before her, who said that she baked this pie and other women just didn't believe her, and there was this big battle about whether she baked this becan pie or something, things that men just don't understand, right?
	Yeah, Elizabeth Holmes. I don't think Elizabeth Holmes was beautiful, but she definitely was beautiful relative to just about anyone else you're going to find in the high-tech space.
	Elizabeth Holmes, I mean, at one point she was saying, we won't even need to pierce the skin.
	You're going to have a floating way of analyzing blood without even having to pierce the skin.
	Years and years and years just went on for her.
	It's absolutely astonishing.
	Absolutely astonishing.
	So Elizabeth Holmes...
	Well, I mean, she claims she was raped at Stanford, right?
	So she would have a certain...
	With older men, she would have both a sexual presence and a daughter presence, and that's an unbelievably powerful thing for older men, which is why she got these older men to invest in her company.
	Theranos didn't get any institutional investors, like people with any experience just bailed because they just knew it was nonsense, right?
	You can't revolutionize a complex technical healthcare field with a high school education.
	It's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen.
	You can do it in computers or maybe the abstract sciences, but no, not healthcare, right?
	Not healthcare. So, yeah, good looks can be extraordinarily dangerous because they can really be a magnet for sexual predators when you're little, right?
	When you're little. So, yeah, using beauty to find a husband and have kids is a great use.
	Yeah, but you don't take, I don't take any pride in my intelligence or my eloquence.
	I don't take any pride in that.
	I mean, I've worked very hard at my language skills but one of the reasons I've worked very hard at my language skills is they were pretty good to begin with.
	I mean, as I said, the first year I went out for debating tours, I'd never debated before, and there were people there in graduate school who were debating, and I came in sixth out of all of Canada, and I think that I should have gotten higher even than that, but I've always had these great language skills, so I work hard on them.
	I don't take any pride in my intelligence or language skills.
	It's like taking pride in having blue eyes.
	I didn't earn any of that. You have to relentlessly reject everything that you didn't earn in life.
	You have to relentlessly reject everything that you didn't earn in life.
	It's like, am I proud of being taller than average?
	No. That would be like being ashamed of being bald.
	I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
	Steph, how much your so cute type of comments should be tolerated from family and people when it's towards your kids?
	So, a requirement to be around my daughter is that you engage her in conversation like she's an actual human being.
	You know, we talk about this in the parenting show that we did together that kids are just completely ignored.
	You know, we're out with the ducks and people will literally ask me about my daughter's ducks.
	And I'd be like, no, no, ask her.
	She's the duck owner. She's the duck expert.
	Talk to her. And they're like, well, talk to her, but she's just a kid.
	You can see this, like, why would I talk to her?
	She's just a kid. It's like... And it drives my daughter nuts.
	Drives her nuts! That people just completely talk over her.
	And it's really rude.
	And so, the cutie stuff, I mean, it's fine, but if you want to be around my daughter, you better engage in conversation with her.
	Like she's an actual human being with thoughts, emotions, and ideas, and arguments, and everything, right?
	People don't know how to talk to kids.
	Yeah. It really irks me a bit when people talk about kids like they aren't in the room.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah, you know you have stuff to offer.
	I remember being six years old.
	In a car in South Africa visiting my dad and one of his engineer buddies and I were having a big fierce debate because I said, well, what you need to do is have an electricity factory that produces electricity.
	And he's like, well, no, that can't be the case because you'd have to produce less than you were consuming because some of the energy would be taken up and consuming.
	And I thought it would be possible somehow.
	Of course, he was totally right, but I actually had a debate with him about that when I was six years old.
	Would that ability to be eloquent not be something to be proud of?
	No! You know, I've thought occasionally over the years that when I'm dead and gone and they slice open my brain, they'll find this grotesquely enlarged language center.
	I mean, of course. Right now, I just happen to come from a lot of hyper-intellectual, hyper-verbal people.
	I mean, on my father's side, there's philosophers and playwrights.
	And on my mother's side, there's artists and poets and playwrights and novelists.
	And I just have this amalgam of language...
	Brain things. Look, my eloquence failed me when talking about my eloquence.
	But I didn't earn that.
	Now, what I do with it, I'm proud of what I've done with it, for sure, because that was a choice.
	I could have used this eloquence to go into some pretty sinister fields like politics and so on, right?
	But no, you can't take pride in what you have not earned.
	It's like taking pride in your race.
	You didn't earn that.
	It's just something you're born with, right?
	When I was a kid, I got your, oh, you're so pretty, and oh my god, you have big, beautiful eyes.
	I hated it. It made me feel worthless.
	Yeah, because people are describing things that aren't you.
	Your eyes aren't you. Your face isn't you.
	I mean, if you've worked out, your abs are you a little, because that's a choice that you've made.
	So, yeah, you can only take pride in what you've earned.
	So I take pride in how I've used my language skills, but I don't take pride in having language skills.
	I started writing short stories when I was six years old.
	I wrote my first novel when I was 11.
	I've just always had that language thing.
	Always. I can't take pride in that at all.
	A choice is the only thing you can have pride in.
	Well, you've got to have a more clear definition because you can make terrible choices and you can't take pride in those, right?
	Adding to the virtue of the world despite the opposition of evil, that's really the thing that you can have the most pride in.
	Do you see anything morally wrong with people who use steroids?
	Well, morality, if you're a father...
	And you're doing things that are endangering your life with regards to being there for your kids and all of that.
	You're no longer making decisions on your own.
	Like if you're a single person who smokes, that's one thing.
	But if you're a father who smokes, that's quite another thing.
	Because you're putting a burden. And of course, just about everybody has some people around them who love and care for them and want them to do well.
	So I would say that to the degree to which steroids harm your health, you really are.
	And what are you using the steroids for?
	You're using them to get swole, to get bigger, right?
	Which is a vanity-based project, right?
	So you're endangering your health and the happiness of the people around you for the sake of vanity muscles.
	Not really a very good trade, I would say.
	Steroids give you a small dick.
	Is that true? Roid rage, I know.
	It doesn't give you emotional instability.
	Is that right? Why haven't parents evolved to stop abusing or children to not respond negatively to abuse?
	Well, remember I said that people mostly learn from suffering?
	So parents have not evolved to stop abusing because it works.
	It works. Because we haven't evolved to the voluntary family, right?
	If, when abuse stops working, parents will stop abusing.
	Because they're at the level of that 10-month-old that we talked about earlier who gets what he wants by yelling, right?
	All right. I think we should stop here.
	And I appreciate everyone dropping by.
	Thank you for your survival of the technical issue or two that we've had.
	I mean, it's fine. It's all working out.
	But yeah, I'm really pleased.
	Love this new camera. Love the new mic.
	Love the new mixer. I think it's working out really well.
	I really like that I don't have to modulate my voice.
	It's all handling it for me with a compressor and all that kind of stuff.
	So really happy with that.
	And I'm sorry we didn't get to the chatty audio voicey call and thing, but I'll try and do that this Sunday.
	And have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening.
	Again, massive love and thanks to you guys for keeping the show running.
	FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
	I'm trying to be a bit more responsible to the finance show that kind of got wrecked over the last couple of years because I didn't do any donation pitches.
	But if you could help me out, hugely would be appreciated.
	And fredomain.com forward slash donate.
	You can also go to Locals.
	I'm doing a lot of stuff on Locals, some private live streams and all of that.
	So if you go to fredomain.locals.com, that would be very helpful as well.
	You can sign up for free and there's lots of stuff there that's for free, but I also do some premium stuff there as well.
	So thank you so much and have yourself a wonderful evening.
	Lots of love from here. And I'll talk to you guys on Sunday.
	Let's try in for 11 a.m.
	Eastern. All right. Take care, guys.

▲