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July 15, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:22
NEW FREEDOMAIN FORMAT: RADID-FIRE PHILOSOPHY!
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Time Text
Hey everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
Thursday, July 14th, 2022.
These are the questions I did not get to last night.
Thank you for your patience during the live stream.
Somebody says, how to process long-term childhood and beyond family-induced trauma?
I've had bouts of depression since I was 13.
I've seen a few counselors but can't say anything that feels particularly addressed in this area.
I'm going into counseling again and believe I need help getting focused on this issue along with finding the right counselor that can help me move on.
So, obviously, I have nothing wrong with the word trauma, but reframing can be really helpful.
Reframing can be really helpful.
See, trauma is the internal wound, and the question is, though, why are your negative feelings associated with the abuse or neglect that you suffered, right?
So, if you say trauma, it's within you, it's kind of permanent, and so on.
And what I chose to do, and maybe this is helpful to you, what I chose to reframe I looked not as trauma, but as protection.
It's a thirst for protection.
So when you have negative stimuli, when you're around people, that's because your emotions are trying to protect you from something.
Now, you could be some crazy ideologue who gets negative emotions because someone's telling you the truth.
Okay, well then you're just trying to be protected from the truth.
Your ideology is trying to protect itself from the truth so that it can continue to spread like a virus.
But you're not an ideologue if you're listening to this show, for sure.
It's a thirst for protection.
It's a desire for protection.
So why did you feel depressed at the age of 13?
Well, in particular, 13, right?
See, anything could happen with your emotions.
I remember thinking of this, gosh, many, many, many years ago.
So, and this is one of the things that drove me into looking to fix people's understanding regarding, you know, the R versus G. Okay, selection stuff and like why would a lack of father, like having a lack of father around, why would that drive dysfunction?
There's no automatic reason.
It's not physics, right?
We adapted for some way.
So why would you feel depressed around the age of 13?
Well, 13 is the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood in terms of like your physical maturity and puberty and your voice dropping and hair or boobs developing, whatever's happening.
I don't know if you're male or female. But if you're fundamentally unprepared for adulthood because of childhood abuse or neglect, then you're going to be depressed because people's lack of caring is becoming manifest to you, right?
So when you understand that you're unprepared for adulthood, you're going to feel depressed.
And what is the depression trying to get you to do?
Well, the depression is trying to get you to understand how uncared for you are.
In other words, you're really feeling your parents' depression because when you're depressed, it's really hard to care for other people, right?
You're trying to understand it from their perspective.
You're trying to understand life from their perspective.
Because if you really empathize with people who don't empathize with you, you are released from feeling bad about their lack of empathy.
You are released from feeling obligation to them in the future.
When you really dig in deep and understand people who don't care about you, who are supposed to care about you, i.e.
your parents, when you really dig in and understand How they process, then you can really understand that it's not your fault.
When you understand that it's really not your fault as a child, that people don't care for you, you don't have to win people over.
You're not supposed to woo them. You're not supposed to find some magical way to generate love in the desert hearts of loveless people.
That's not your job. Your job is to receive the love, to receive the affection, and to flourish and grow in that way.
Children can no more create love in their parents Then plants can create the sun.
I really understand this. I'm going to repeat it.
Children can no more create love in their parents than plants can create the sun and sunlight.
Plants grow toward sunlight.
They cannot create sunlight.
They're not nuclear scientists or God.
So depression is a way for you to understand how empty-hearted your parents were, and I assume are, And that way, if you explore your depression and say, this is trying to keep me safe.
What is my depression trying to keep me safe from?
Depression is a negative stimuli, but it's a way of understanding the emptiness of the people around you.
If you're surrounded by empty people, you will get depressed.
And the depression is, I believe, I mean, it's just a theory, right?
But your depression is a deep attempt to really understand the emptiness of the people around you.
If you understand the emptiness of the people around you, You are released from the desire for love from them and you are released from obligation in the future.
So the depression is a form of empathy for emptiness that is designed to release you from obligation and guilt and thus it is trying to protect you.
If you have Anxiety, then it's usually an attempt to try and empathize with the anxiety of the people around you.
And, you know, when you recognize that anxious people really don't have much to offer because they're kind of self-absorbed, they're kind of consumed by their anxiety, it gives you, again, a deep understanding that it's not your fault and releases you from further and future obligations.
So that would be my approach to this, or at least it was, and it was helpful to me.
So I hope that kind of stuff will be helpful to you.
Don't think of yourself as traumatized.
Think of yourself as being given the tools for self-protection.
Your trauma is trying to protect you.
When a zebra has flashes and floods of cortisol and adrenaline because a lion is bolting towards a zebra, does the zebra kind of stand there, go internal navel gaze and say, gosh, I seem to have all of this anxiety and my heart is racing.
No, no, there's a lion running at you.
And that's the anxiety and the fear, the terror, the mortal terror that the zebra is feeling is not isolated from the environment, but is rather designed to protect the zebra from the environment, said environment being the lion's claws and teeth and hunger.
So your feelings are like ripples, like you throw the rock into the water and then there are these ripples.
Your feelings are the ripples from the rocks, and they're designed to protect you from future abuse and assault.
So I hope that helps. Somebody says, I'm feeling insecure about my husband's new position at work.
He has a lot more traveling and responsibilities and a lot more interaction with female co-workers and female clients.
Do you have any guidance for us, please, on boundaries or guidelines you had when if you ever had to do solo dinners with female co-workers or clients?
How do I work through my own insecurities surrounding this so I can support him better?
Well, there were no particular rules as far as all of this stuff went.
So when I was younger, I mean, I never had any dalliances with co-workers or clients or anything like that.
So no, that wasn't a thing.
I was never tempted by any of that kind of stuff.
Well, I mean, it wasn't like I was never attracted to anyone, but I was usually in a relationship and never acted on anything.
So the way that you deal with any insecurities that you have is to just make yourself as attractive as possible.
Just make yourself as attractive as possible.
If the best meal your husband can get is at home, he's not going to be tempted to eat out, now is he, so to speak.
Well, there's a double entendre if ever there was one.
So, just work on being as attractive as possible.
Work on exercising.
Work on, I don't know, whatever you can do to make him happy in the bedroom.
Like, just... Be attractive.
And it's the same thing as your husband for you, right?
Just be as attractive as humanly possible.
Because you want him to be drawn to you.
You don't want to put fences around him.
And if you're the very best thing that he can possibly get, he just won't be tempted by anyone else.
Questions for the big chatty forehead.
How to become a great conversationalist, especially when talking to women, currently looking for a wife and really need to improve in this area.
I've gotten some great tips from the community already.
We'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject as well.
Thanks. So to be a great conversationalist almost always involves listening.
I mean, you've heard me a million times in the call-in shows.
I can spend an hour to an hour and a half, sometimes even longer, just asking questions to get to know someone.
And asking questions to get to know someone is a wonderful thing.
Most people go through life barely having any opportunity to talk about themselves.
It's really sad.
We're all fascinating. We're all deep wells of...
History and wisdom and instruction and all that.
Most people go through lives having very little ability, a very little opportunity to talk about themselves.
We all think about ourselves all the time, but to actually talk about it.
So if you want to be a great conversationalist, just ask people questions.
Everyone is interesting. Everyone.
I am telling you, absolutely everyone is interesting.
I have this wild urge to literally stop everyone in the street.
Oh, what are you doing here? I went to a store the other day with my daughter to pick up some dice.
She's running a dungeon.
It's just fantastic and really creepy and wild and exciting and thrilling and all that.
But we needed some dice that we didn't have.
So there was this guy running the dice store, running this Dungeons& Dragons type store.
And I was like, I just wanted to ask him, how did you get into this?
Oh, how was it getting the store?
How do you have so many books and dice that you can't possibly sell them all?
How does the inventory run? I could just spend all day just talking to him about his life and his business and be wonderful.
Everyone, everyone, people on the bus when I was younger just would love to chat with everyone.
I remember going from, gosh, Montreal to Toronto sitting next to a woman on a bus.
She was older, I'm just asking her questions about it.
I've always been. This show didn't come out of nowhere.
So being a great conversationalist simply means focus on the other person.
Now, this is not to empty out yourself because somebody who's high quality will basically say, like there's an old joke about dating a narcissist where you ask the narcissist a whole bunch of questions and then they finally say, but enough about me.
Why don't you tell me what you think of me?
Yeah. So the great thing about asking people questions is that it'll always be interesting.
I guarantee you. I mean, unless they're just completely false people, in which case you'll learn that pretty quickly.
Absolutely fascinating. Everyone is just deeply fascinating.
And the wonderful thing about asking people questions is one or two things are going to happen.
At some point, they'll say, well, let's talk about you because they have an interest in you.
And that means that they have enough self-knowledge to talk about themselves.
And then they also have enough politeness and empathy to say, well, I'm enjoying talking about myself.
I bet you this person would enjoy talking about himself as well or herself as well.
And so they'll ask you questions back.
And that is wonderful.
Simply drones on and on at people to hypnotize them, to give them an out-of-body experience, to cause them to dissociate and so on.
And so being interesting, putting things in an engaging and enjoyable manner is simply a matter of empathy.
And you know what is interesting to you, so just work at trying to make it interesting to other people.
So modulate your tone.
You know me, I'm sometimes full voice shouting and other times I'm kind of murmuring.
You don't have to go full William Shatner, but modulate your tone and And just be rabidly curious, and then when somebody asks you something in return, just be as honest as you can going back.
So, let's see here. Hi, Steph.
You've been very influential in my life for the past five years.
Helped me through a lot of my journeys.
Gratitude. I'm glad to hear that.
Thank you. I've got two questions.
One, how do you find virtuous women?
Virtuous women. So, there's two things, right?
Pretty obvious, but I'll just put them out here for clarity's sake.
Number one, be virtuous yourself.
How do you find a conversation in Japanese?
Well, first you have to speak Japanese.
So how do you find a virtuous woman?
Be virtuous yourself, A. And B, go to places where virtuous women will be.
Can you find a virtuous woman in a bar?
I guess, maybe, but...
I spent lots of time talking to women in bars and discos and nightclubs when I was younger.
I started going to discos when I was 15 or 16 years old and didn't find virtuous women there.
It doesn't mean you can't. You can go to church.
You can go to a literary club.
You can go to a book club. You can go to even sports leagues and so on.
At least then she's interested in exercise and all that.
So be virtuous yourself and then figure out where the virtuous women are going to be and go there.
Let's see here. How do I get a call-in conversation with you?
Well, just email callin at freedomain.com.
Callin at freedomain.com.
What makes someone susceptible to disgust?
Where does the emotion come from?
So disgust is an emotion that is as close to an expression of your immune system as an emotion can be.
So disgust is the first level of the physical immune system, right?
So disgust is, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, My mom would, she had buttermilk in the fridge.
And, you know, one thing about my mom, she would never clean out the fridge.
So, you know, and I just remember, oh, I chug milk, right?
So I remember grabbing the buttermilk and, you know, chugging it because I thought it was just milk.
I've always been a milk drinker.
And, like, just disgusting chunks of rancid buttermilk went in.
It took me forever to try buttermilk, probably about 20 years until I tried buttermilk again.
It's actually not bad, but...
The disgust I had was the smell, the taste, the chunks.
It was just gross, right? So, of course, I spat it all out.
If I had smelled it, I would have experienced disgust.
If you see someone who is coughing and bent over and blood's coming out of the mouth or whatever, right, you're going to feel fear and disgust because that's an extension of your immune system and it's telling you, get away from this person because they're likely transmitting an illness, right?
If you see someone with a horrible skin condition and, you know, lots of sympathy for people who have these things.
This is not I'm just talking about the emotion of disgust.
It's the first barrier to getting ill, right?
So if the food is furry, you're disgusted, you won't.
If people are behaving or a part of a lifestyle that is highly conducive, To spreading disease, like rampant promiscuity and so on.
So if somebody is part of a lifestyle or something that is highly conducive to spreading disease, then you will feel usually disgust at that lifestyle because you wish to not be in the presence of people who might be spreading disease.
So yes, susceptible disgust is a very visceral emotion.
Like fear is the first, like physical fear is the first Layer of defense against injury, right?
It's prevention, right?
Then you hurt yourself and you get pain, but that's about punishing you so you won't do it again, right?
But fear is a way of avoiding situations which are going to cause you damage, and so fear is your first physical defense, and disgust is your first defense against viruses and bacteria and illness.
Freedom Man, why would certain friends completely change in social situations?
Like, if you both joined a large group of people, your friend would begin to tell jokes about you to the group at your expense and highlight your flaws.
Yeah, so, I mean, that's very primitive, simian kind of one-upmanship, right?
So, If your friend is intimidated by you or your friend feels that you're going to get the more attractive woman or the more attractive man, depending on your gender, then they will attempt to denigrate you and put you down so that you are lowered in status and thus they are raised in status.
It's a form of chest-thumping dominance and obviously very immature, very primitive, and of course it does put you in an impossible situation because if somebody is making jokes at your expense in public and you get angry at them, then of course you look like you just don't have a sense of humor and you just can't laugh at yourself then of course you look like you just don't have a sense of humor and you So, it's one of these impossible situations.
And they're saying, "I don't have the ability to have high status based upon my own personality, So I'm going to have high status by dominating other people and putting them in an impossible situation.
I feel it is used in society to make non-mentally ill people feel guilty for not wanting to be around chaotic behavior, especially with regards to forcing children to play alongside one another.
I had an argument recently where an activity director claimed that the misdirected child's behavior does not affect the other children, because children are resilient and get over stuff quickly.
Oh boy, oh boy, I don't think you want to step on the landmine that is my entire soul around the phrase that children are resilient.
If children are resilient, then where do non-resilient adults come from?
It's kind of an important question, isn't it?
Children are resilient means I can be a selfish, horrible, vicious, nasty narcissist.
And children are resilient, so whatever harm I do to them, I don't have to feel guilty about because children are resilient.
We can shut down children's social activities, we can shut down playgrounds, and we can shut down exercise.
You know, most kids go to school just for the, I mean, for me, I went to school just for the recess.
I mean, I had to go anyway, but I went there just about for the recess, which was a huge amount of fun.
And we say, oh, it's children are resilient.
Okay, well then, where do fragile adults come from?
Are children super resilient until they become adults and are free of the precious and lack of control of childhood and then suddenly magically become fragile?
No, it's nonsense. So neurodiversity?
I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, there are certain people who have autism, who have issues with cognitive processing, with sense processing.
They're easily overstimulated.
They lack empathy.
And it appears to be some sort of physical thing in the brain, where it comes from.
I know there's lots of theories, but...
And the fact that People aren't completely freaking out about the fact that autism used to be like 1 in 10,000 and now it's like 1 in 40, particularly among boys.
People should be absolutely, completely and totally freaking out about that.
And the fact that they're not, to me, lends credence to the argument that we have a pretty good idea where it's coming from.
So there are people who do have these issues.
And sympathy is a challenge.
They can be helped, I think, with the right education and so on.
But then there are kids who are just really shy.
There are kids who are traumatized and so on, and a lot of people just get tossed in.
You know, they say it's a spectrum, right?
And a lot of people just get tossed into that spectrum for reasons of being victims of abuse rather than whatever neurodiversity is.
What is the cure to growing up constantly being told that you're fundamentally unlovable, incapable of love, and this is the source of your suffering?
Well, I would assume significant anger.
At being so sabotaged in such a malevolent way.
So please recognize that just about everything that people criticize you for is a projection.
What they do is they look in their heart and they say, what would hurt me the most or what crime am I covering up the most?
And they will then launch that at you, right?
So people who call me racist are incredibly racist, right, because there's only one race in society that they attack, right, as white people.
So people call you racist and it has power because they are the racist ones.
So somebody who says you're unlovable, incapable of love is such a vicious and ugly person that they are fundamentally unlovable and incapable of love, particularly if they're hammering These verbal abuse nails into the forehead of a trapped child, right?
So all verbal abuse is a confession of evil.
All verbal abuse is a confession of evil, both in the form and the content.
So verbally abusing a child is a confession of evil in that you're damaging a child.
Verbal abuse against a child, and I go into this...
In my new book, The Future, freedomain.locals.com, available to subscribers in a wide variety of formats.
So verbal abuse against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And again, for all the arguments you can go, and the examples, you can go into my book, The Future.
But verbal abuse against children is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
It's not the case against adults, because adults are free to leave, and adults already have their existing personalities that are independent.
But verbal abuse against a child is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Because the child is in a state of formation, is being formed by language, is being physically shaped by language and has no choice to leave.
It has no choice to leave.
If you injected a child with a serum that produced the kind of mental damage that verbal abuse gives, then clearly that would be a violation of the non-aggression principle.
The fact that it's done with words and not a serum is absolutely irrelevant.
The child is being formed by the words and the child cannot leave.
So verbal abuse against the child It's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
In the same way, and you say, oh, well, but it's not physical, so what?
Neglect of a child, we absolutely understand, is a violation of the non-aggression principle, right?
If you have a child and you neglect to feed that child, you don't feed that child, and the child can't leave your house, the child will starve to death, that's murder.
Oh, well, but he didn't do anything.
Well, yes. So if my neighbor starves to death and I don't do anything, I'm not charged with murder, but if I lock my neighbor in my basement and he starves to death and I don't let him out, then I'm guilty of murder.
Children are trapped. They are confined.
They are in a prison called the family.
They're in a prison called the family home.
That's just a fact. They can't leave.
They can't get out. And...
I mean, I'm putting it very starkly just so everyone understands.
And we all know that there's a form of torture called breaking someone down through verbal abuse.
I mean, it happens in the army, or at least it used to, all the time.
So, if somebody is, it is an assault upon a child in this instance to say, you're fundamentally unlovable, you're incapable of love, and that is the source of your suffering.
No. What they're trying to do is say that your suffering is caused by yourself when your suffering is caused by your viciously evil abusive parents.
I'm a big free speech guy.
Absolutely. But verbally abusing and harming the mind of a child through verbal abuse when that child clearly cannot leave because they are trapped there by abuse.
Biology. It's the wrong phrase to call it a prison.
I use that for dramatic effect, and it's the wrong phrase to say trapped.
But they can't leave. Kids can't leave.
And so it is an evil action.
It is an evil action to physically harm a child's mind through relentless verbal abuse.
Okay, just snapping once and saying, oh, that was stupid.
I mean, I get it. I've never done it, but I can understand.
You apologize. You move on. But this is so psychotic, this is so malevolent, this is so sociopathic that it's just projection.
When people insult you, they are simply confessing what they're doing.
They're simply confessing what they are doing.
You know, I had communists accusing me of being an ethno-nationalist and that the same communist was a big fan of the Dalai Lama who said that Europe is for Europeans and should remain that way.
I mean, it's just, I don't know, it's just crazy, right?
Okay, so I know how to deal with people who won't speak openly and honestly, but it sucks to let them go.
It does. It does, yeah.
Quitting addiction, quitting the addiction called victimization is tough, but the only option is to remain a slave of your life.
Are there going to be illustrations for your book, The Future?
It's a great idea. I hadn't thought about it, but I will certainly think about it.
Why is Ayn Rand so polarizing?
It seems as though people either worship her or denounce her as some great evil.
It's hard to find a rational critique of objectivism.
Gee, why is someone so polarizing?
I can't imagine. So Ayn Rand had, you know, two specific geniuses.
One is for storytelling and one is for philosophy.
And she was a genius in philosophy and she was a genius in literature.
To me, to anybody who argues against that, oh, well, the character's kind of wooden.
I mean, that's like criticizing James Joyce for lacking punctuation.
It's not because he couldn't punctuate his novels.
It's because it's a particular style.
Or, you know, saying, oh, Ayn Rand's characters are kind of wooden and artificial.
And it's like simply saying about Shakespeare, well, no one talks that way.
It's just an indication that you're fundamental or the person who makes that claim or thinks that that.
They just you just you're fundamentally uneducated on literature.
And therefore, you really shouldn't judge great literature such as Atlas Shracht or in particular The Fountainhead.
You shouldn't do it. There are things to critique in Ayn Rand, absolutely, but she was way ahead of her time, talking about how governments weren't going to work in the 1940s when the government was the great savior of Of capitalism with the New Deal and all of the socialism of the 1930s and then was saving the world from Nazism, saying that government was immoral and its programs wouldn't work in the 1940s, 1950s was unbelievably ahead of its time.
Even talking about women's preference for literary sexual aggression, which is a criticism level that Ayn Rand endlessly, but of course the reality is that I don't know.
It's bizarre. Like, the number of female sexual fantasies that involve aggression is just legion, and Fifty Shades of Grey, I rest my case.
So she was just way ahead of her time.
Now, I do view her as subversive in a negative way in that she attacked religion, and in particular Christianity, and did not provide a rational substitute for Christian ethics.
Her ethics of self-interest and that which is good for man and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, it's just a form of Darwinism or hedonism.
And I have a whole series you can find at fdrpodcast.com on Ayn Rand and so on.
So she made very strong and very powerful arguments, but her first cause was not sufficient for everything that remained.
And so, of course, you know, the powers that be want to warn you away from Ayn Rand because she will lead you to criticize the powers that be.
Is Stepholite, a fan of Steph plus Apholite, a good name for fans of you?
Molyneuvian is too hard to pronounce.
Oh yeah, like one of my literary, one of my professors of literature really liked my writing and said that it should be called Stephanesque.
Molly Amorous? Stephan?
I don't know. Who are your favorite philosophers?
It's a too big a topic.
Who was the most formidable debater you've ever faced?
I'd have to think about that. Right.
What do we got here? A lot of questions.
committed to peaceful parenting.
I've encountered some other parents who think it's okay to give a little spank to their misbehaved children.
I find this conversation a little difficult since I do not want to be friends with someone who is not a peaceful parent.
Do you have any advice for bringing this topic up on what to say to something like this?
Yeah, I mean, it is good.
With people, you need to figure out, you know, just ask them, oh, were you spanked as a child or how were you disciplined as a child?
Just get to know them as people, right?
Before you give advice, you need to listen.
Before you give advice, you need to listen.
Now, of course, I'm in the process here giving advice without listening because I'm just doing these comments and so on.
So, but I've listened to a lot of people on this.
Thousands of conversations available in the public square, as you know, do a lot of listening.
So don't just sit there and go, you know, spanking is bad, spanking is wrong, you shouldn't spank and so on.
I mean, there are very few parents who say it's good to spank, and if you give them an alternative that works, they'd be happy to take it.
So just ask them.
Now, if they say, well, I was spanked as a kid and I damn well deserved it because I spoke back, okay, then you've got a really entrenched, inhabited, abusive parent, right?
You never know if you're talking to the person or an intrusion.
You have to figure out, are you able to talk to the person?
And you've heard me say this again a million times in my call-in shows.
Right now, I'm talking to your father.
I need to talk to you, right?
When someone's really defensive about what happened to them as a child, right?
Well, my father beat me, but I deserved it!
Okay, so the first part is the child saying, my father beat me, and the second child, the second part of that sentence is the internalized father saying, but he deserved it, but I deserved it, but you deserved it, right?
So you need to figure out if you're talking to the person or you're talking to the intrusion.
You're talking to the defenses.
So just ask a bunch of questions.
Now, you can also say, you know, I was reading about this stuff and read up on it ahead of time.
Elizabeth Grishoff is great.
She was on my show a couple of times about spanking.
So just get the data.
Spanking doesn't work.
It produces the opposite effects over time.
It creates resentment.
It severs the bond between parent and child.
But it really only shows up in the teenage years.
And then people blame the Internet.
So, yeah, just ask questions, figure out what level of defenses you're working to, And if somebody says, oh, you know, I really hate spanking, but I just don't know what else to do, wonderful, right?
So, yeah, figure out who you're talking to, whether you're talking to the person themselves or some defenses, and get the facts across as quickly as possible.
All right. Is there a link between the polytheism of the ancient Greeks and the mycosystem or the IFS model?
I think there is. Yeah, I think it's a very clever thing.
So the polytheism of the ancient Greeks and, of course, many other religions...
The polytheism is a way of taking the human personality and universalizing it.
But Christianity is a case of taking universal principles and manifesting them in the form of God.
So we take the chaos of our personalities, particularly primitive personalities with lots of fragmentation and warring among the self.
We take those fragmented personalities, we project them onto the sky, and it's called a pantheon, or polytheism.
Whereas with Christianity, you take the principles of universal virtue, and then you put them into a god and make them universal that way.
Polytheism is making the universe a mirror of human chaos, whereas Christianity is making the universe the ideal of human virtue.
What did you think about Lauren Southern's Whole Truth video?
Admiration, her honesty.
She's always struck me as a very honorable person, so...
I think it's a good thing that she did.
I've heard you say that lots of swearing is a red flag.
Could you explain that further? So, swearing is something that...
Oh, God.
I mean, I remember chatting with a woman once and she...
I won't swear here, but she used the phrase, F my ass he did.
And I've just thought, okay, that's coarse.
Now, I swear from time to time, but in a passion, in conviction to sort of get a point across.
Like, it's okay to hit things with a hammer if the things you're hitting with a hammer is a nail.
It's not good to hit things with a hammer if what you're hammering is a teacup.
So, a lot of swearing is a red flag.
So if somebody just swears as part of casual conversation, it means that they don't have the empathy or self-respect to gauge somebody else's comfort level with swearing before erupting into it.
So how do you fit through doorways with those bulbously virtuous balls and buns of steel?
Yeah, that is a challenge.
Obviously, you have to widen them a fair amount just to get my ego through.
What is the difference between being curious to cultivate intimacy and interrogative prying?
So curious is open-ended and interrogative prying is to gain a particular piece of information, right?
So if something breaks, if the mom comes home, there's a bunch of kids in the house and a lamp is broken, Right?
Then the mom's going to say, who broke it?
And who was there? And, you know, the goal of the questions is to get to a particular answer.
Right? I mean, if you're with the police, and I mean, always have a lawyer, right?
Always, always have a lawyer. But if you're with the police, and they're asking you about something, their goal is to get a confession.
Their goal is to get information, to get a confession.
They're not curious about you as a person.
They just, you have information that they need.
To get, right? So if the goal of the questions is to gain particular or specific information, there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not curious.
Whereas if the goal is to get to know someone, right, so if you know there's an answer that you want to get, you just have to figure out how to get it, that's interrogative prying, as you say.
But if you don't know what the answer is, and you're curious what the person is going to respond, that's curiosity.
Uh, let's see here.
Hi, my friend's three-year-old claimed to have seen a scary man upstairs with a tattoo and didn't want to go upstairs.
This is the same friend whose wife pulled a fat grenade post-marriage.
The child's step-grandfather is the only person in her life with a tattoo on his chest.
I have an invisible foot tattoo.
The child also said, Papa, scare me.
Her papa is what she calls a aforementioned chest tattoo step-grandpa.
Very recently it was found out that the same step-grandfather cheated on his wife.
The mom of this child is interpreting it as a supernatural happening, oh dear.
I have a terrible feeling something awful is happening here.
Is my intuition correct? Well, I don't know how awful.
I don't know. Is a tattoo on his chest?
I suppose maybe at a pool or something, the step-grandfather has been seen by the child, so he sees the tattoo.
But yeah, you absolutely have to take children's fears with great seriousness, and writing it off as some supernatural happening is...
Absolutely irresponsible. It's a way of avoiding confrontation.
If you say it's a ghost, well, you can't confront the ghost.
If you say, well, we've got to find out what's going on with the step-grandfather, then you have to confront an actual person.
So supernaturalism is a form of cowardice, right?
It's a form of cowardice.
Like my friend, I talked about this, my ex-friend many years ago, who believed he woke up with a Victorian woman floating over his bed staring at him.
And he then went this whole path down to mysticism and was very unhealthy for him.
Rather than say, why is there a woman floating above me who's dead and staring at me?
Well, his relationship with his mother was very claustrophobic and toxic, and he ended up never getting married and just went over to her place all the time and had his hamburger helper with her and watched Murder, She Wrote and his life.
So, you know, he gave it a supernatural so he wouldn't have to confront his relationship with his mother, and the ghost killed him, so to speak, right?
So, how do you see the value in yourself?
How do you see yourself as valuable in yourself as somebody worth investing time and energy in?
How do you see the value in yourself?
How do you see yourself as valuable?
So if you're talking about value you have solipsistically, like why yourself?
Well, be honest with yourself.
Be relatively disciplined with yourself.
Not like wholly strict and cold showers and thrashing yourself with a stick if you do badly.
But be reasonably disciplined with yourself.
Say no to... Dessert and say yes to exercise and whatever it is, right?
Be honest about if you're gaining weight and work to fix it and all that.
So, you know, be valuable.
Have a good relationship with yourself.
Do things that you're proud of that don't put you in massive danger.
And, you know, like if you're in some...
Left-wing city and you see a crime taking place, you could report it, but for God's sakes, don't get involved, right?
I mean, this is true in just about any city.
So yeah, do things that are brave but not foolhardy.
Tell the truth but not to the point where, you know, people set fire to your house.
So yeah, be honorable and rational and reasonable and hit that Aristotelian mean of virtue where it's enough to have pride but not enough that you get nailed to a cross necessarily.
So do these things and you will feel that you have value to yourself because you've got pride without being hunted.
And so if you have value to yourself, then you've developed a lot of skills that other people will find valuable, both in terms of how you'll treat them and also how you might be able to transfer those skills of liking yourself and getting along with yourself, how you may be able to transfer those skills to others, which is very, very important. Steph, how does the MECO system apply to addiction?
Can the addicted part of your brain be likened to a character you should speak to?
Yes. So the ecosystem is the idea that we are not just an individual.
We are a collection of personalities that sometimes are in conflict with each other, but everyone should get a seat at the table.
There are no enemies within.
There are no enemies within. There are enemies outside of yourself.
There are enemies without, but not enemies within.
So yes, the way that I view addiction, it's just my personal opinion, right?
No facts, no science here, just my personal opinion.
I think it's borne out by lots of conversations and data, but I'm not saying it's proven.
So addiction works in this way.
We know that in totalitarian regimes, one of the great ways that people are silenced, one of the most horrible and powerful ways that people are silenced, is they are considered insane and they are drugged, right?
So in the old Soviet Union, If you weren't happy under communism, it's because you were mentally ill.
And if you resisted or fought against communism, it's because you were mentally ill.
And then you would be put into an institution and you would be administered horse tranquilizers until you could barely see out of your eyeballs.
And then they would just keep you like that because clearly you're crazy and you don't want that craziness to spread because communism is perfect and wonderful and good and therefore if you're unhappy you must be insane.
And so... That's how they dealt with the issue of resistance to communism.
We see this to a smaller degree, although perhaps even more insidiously, we see this in government schools, where if you are bored and restless and frustrated and don't pay attention to boring curriculum and boring teachers, and now school is not just...
Boring was the best opportunity.
It was the best outcome for government schools.
Now, I mean, they're actually toxic.
I mean, they're I mean, it's straight up crazy verbal abuse.
If this was... A parent that was doing this in a sane universe.
This would be complete verbal abuse and all that.
So if we understand that the totalitarian system is perfect and all who don't fit in and flourish and enjoy it are insane and must be drugged, then we can see that there's a part of every victim of abuse that knows damn well that it's abuse, that knows damn well that the abusers are How to get free and be healthy.
And that presents such a threat to the internal system of abuse, like when you've internalized the abuse, when you're abusers.
So if you've got some father who beats you, then you internalize that father to avoid, so that you internalize his standards and therefore you avoid the behavior that leads to the beatings.
Again, it's that first part of your physical integrity is the fear, right?
But there's a part of you that knows that it's an internalization, that it's wrong, it's evil and so on.
Now that part, right, that part of you that knows you're being abused and knows how to become free is the part that resists the totalitarianism of the internalized abuse.
And just like the abuser always thinks that he's perfect and everything that you did was because you were bad and every punishment you accept was just because he's perfect and you're wrong in the same way that communism is perfect and you're wrong if you don't like it.
And so the honest part of the personality has to be drugged so it shuts up.
It can be a death sentence to allow...
The honest part of yourself into contact with your external abuser.
So what do you do? Well, again, your abuser wants you to drug the honest part of you in the same way that communists want to drug people.
And this also happened under National Socialism.
It happens under Fascism.
Fascism is perfect. Nazism is perfect.
And if you disagree with it, you're mentally ill and you need to be killed or deported or...
Whatever, right? The drugs and so on, right?
So I would say that it is really important to understand this as a potential way of looking at it.
So it would be interesting to see if you're in a situation where you can do it safely, if you're an addict, if you're just perfectly and brutally honest with your abuser, whether you still have the same desire to be an addict.
All right. Do you have any great tips for being a great father for an infant?
Yeah, just infants are magical.
They're wonderful. They're so much fun.
How do you change someone's mind?
with information and arguments and let them make their choice.
When you present people with data contrary to their viewpoint, they often get more entrenched in their initial belief.
Yes, that's right.
I sometimes find myself saying shocking truths and scaring people off.
For example, taxation is theft or spanking is hitting kids.
Yeah?
But you never know.
May grow out later, right? Is slavery inherently wrong?
Yes, it violates self-ownership.
How severe do you see the crash getting?
Bad. What's the best way for charity to help people out of poverty?
Clearly just giving them money doesn't work.
So poverty is a curse put on people by their abusers, assuming that there's not cognitive difficulties and so on.
So helping people...
Giving them external allies against their abusers by honestly, this is what I've been doing, right?
But honestly identifying abuse and sympathizing with people and being their ally.
I mean, how many of us went through our entire childhoods being abused and without one ally, without one person ever giving us sympathy or empathy or understanding?
Most of us, right?
So you want to help people out of poverty, ask them about what happened to children and give them sympathy where they were wronged.
Freedom Man.
Friend is trying to date long distance plus international.
Is there a good way to balance limited physical interaction with no sex until marriage?
Yeah, I mean, try and find someone closer.
Long distance, it's like an affair, right?
I mean, affairs are so seductive because there's nothing real in them.
You meet, you have sex, you have great food, you watch a movie, whatever, right?
But there's no dealing with dental bills, there's no...
Dealing with my mother-in-law as being a bitch and, you know, my beloved father is ill.
There's no reality to it.
So long distance is a certain kind of, there's such a deep level of unreality to long distance and international relationships that, to me, just move there.
Move there and find out. Just whatever you have to do, just close that.
Because otherwise you could end up wasting years of your life in a relationship without finding out whether it's real or not.
All right. What's the limit of excuses?
Where do we draw the line between consequences of bad decisions and tragedies of life?
Well, you give people information so that if they make bad decisions, you're guilt-free.
I mean, you give people information in the hopes of helping them, but if people make bad decisions and they don't know that they're bad decisions, we can have some sympathy.
If people make bad decisions and we've given them good arguments and information, then the results of those bad decisions...
It's so important in life to pull back the tentacles of over-empathy.
Pull back those, because, you know, we're all caring and empathetic people here, which means that we're ripe for exploitation, right, by the predators in society, which is a lot of society.
So you give people good information.
If they don't listen, it's sad, but the wonderful thing is that you are now free from any guilt.
About what happens, any feeling you should have done better.
Like, my mom has a terrible life and has for decades.
I gave her good information.
I gave her the best of me.
I gave her everything that I could try to do to help.
She continued to make bad decisions.
She continues to make bad decisions.
But I feel no guilt for what's happening to her.
I feel no guilt. I feel no shame.
My father died two and a half years ago.
I also gave him good information, gave him the best of me.
I just, it doesn't touch me deep down.
I mean, there's some certain, like, I wish my mom was happier and all that, and I mean, would it have been better if my father had contacted me before he died and had any kind of real conversation?
Yeah, but he didn't. And the great relief of that is, yeah, that sucks, but I don't have to feel bad at all.
I did everything that I could.
I did everything that I could, and, or I should say, everything that I could is a bit of a Self-traumatic statement.
I did every reasonable thing I wanted to.
I mean, the Aristotelian mean, right?
You don't stalk people. You give them information.
You don't chase them down. So I did everything that I could to improve those relationships, and they, for whatever reason, decided they didn't want that.
Okay. So... My father dies, but he wasn't in my life anyway.
My father was never in my life, except maybe for one six-hour bus ride from Toronto to Montreal.
That was about it. So six hours out of 53 years.
That's not enough to hang a relationship on.
I mean, you can chat with someone on a long bus ride or a plane ride.
So the limit of excuse is you give people the information, and if they continue to make bad decisions, you're free of obligation.
If you've got some uncle...
And he's a chain smoker and you beg him to stop smoking and you give him the information and blah, blah, blah.
And then he gets sick from smoking.
I mean, you're free. It doesn't mean you can go visit him.
You can go take care of him, but you don't have to because he didn't listen to good advice.
So people who don't listen to good advice, you're free of obligation.
I mean, you can do it if you want, but you're free of obligation.
You don't have to. I mean, I could be free to go and spend lots of time with my mom.
I don't have to, though. I have no obligation to because I gave her good information and good advice.
So, all right. Let's see here.
Are you going to review Top Gun Maverick?
Oh, I did talk about it before.
The other thing I'll mention is, you know, Tom Cruise is a very astute businessman.
And so Tom Cruise knows how to appeal to males and females, right?
You know the old thing about male movie stars that you're a male movie star if men want to be a friend and women want to sleep with you, right?
And Tom Cruise has a ridiculous amount of charisma and so on, right?
And also a ridiculous amount of talent.
So Tom Cruise, you know, he knows to bypass the woke stuff, right?
Maverick is like the army if the 2000s had never happened.
So he's kind of frozen in time, like a lot of people who were younger, who are older, right?
He's 60 now or something like that.
So people who are older, it's easy to get stuck in the past.
And because you're out of school when the whole woke stuff hit.
I saw it coming and bailed out just in time.
And so it's like the people who were addicted to watching high school shows from the 90s or the early 2000s where there wasn't all of this conflict and hatred.
So he knows.
Bypass the woke stuff and...
Be like the 2000s, never happened, and people will flock to it.
And the other thing he does, of course, is he wants to appeal to men, so he's got lots of planes and military toughness, and he wants to appeal to women, so he's got lots of handsome guys with buff bodies.
And, and, I asked my daughter, right, how old do you think Tom Cruise looks?
He's like, oh, 30, 35, right?
Yeah, he looks fantastic, right? Unlike Kelly McGillis, who got kind of narwhally.
But, so Tom Cruise is a really good-looking guy, really high status in the movie, to some degree.
And, Sorry, really high status to some degree.
He's high status to the audience, though not necessarily in the army.
He's considered a maverick, right?
So there's a woman who runs a bar who's got a daughter, right?
So she's a single mom who works in a bar or runs a bar or inherited a bar or something.
Anyway, she works. Single mom who works in a bar.
Now, how low status for dating is a single mom who works in a bar?
Pretty low status, right?
But Tom Cruise, who's a very high-status, good-looking guy, falls in love, or there was some prior relationship, I didn't really get the whole backstory, but falls in love with a single mom who runs a bar, who works in a bar.
So that, of course, is out there for all the alpha widows, right?
That the single mom who works in a bar still thinks she can get someone like Tom Cruise, who's wealthy and good-looking and And high status at least in the movie and so on.
Yeah, he knows his audience, man.
He knows his audience and he's a very good businessman that way.
So, alright. Thanks everyone so much.
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