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July 16, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:29:42

FREE SPEECH IS FREE WILL! Friday Night Live July 15 2022

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	I'm live, babe, alive, now that the day is over.
	Yeah, you got it. Okay, okay.
	So, let's start with our questions.
	First is, what do you think of art generating artificial intelligence, like Midjourney and Dahl E2? So, AI cannot generate art.
	Art is the selective and focused recreation of reality according to the values of the artist.
	That's what art is.
	And I can say this not just theoretically, but I've been an artist, of course, for many years, a novel writer.
	I was an actor, a playwright, a director.
	So I've been heavily involved in the art world.
	So art is the selective recreation of reality according to the values of the artist, right?
	So if the artist paints something beautiful, he's saying, yeah, yeah, I know there's ugly things in the world, but boy, let's really focus on the beauty.
	Let me just refresh your soul with beauty.
	If the artist paints something vicious and ugly, then he says, well, I know there are beautiful things in the world, but let's focus on what really matters, what is the essence of life, which is ugliness and viciousness and so on.
	Like that painting, The Scream, right?
	He's like, Well, I know that there are happy, wonderful, well-adjusted, or at least reasonably well-adjusted people in the world, but let's talk about the people who have existential horror scraped and tattooed into their very bone marrow.
	And it's a way of universalizing your own personal experience to say there's something essentially human about it, right?
	There's this big wrestling that goes on in society.
	This wrestling that goes on in society is what is the essence of humanity, right?
	So the existentialists say that the essence of humanity is striving and anxiety and so on.
	And the Stoics say that the essence of humanity is to survive the inevitable hardships with as much composure as possible.
	And I have a character in my novel Just Poor called Jonathan Edsworth who is the romantic.
	He's the romantic. And the essence of the romantic life is to pursue passion and eat experience like Pac-Man after glowing dots and just absorb experience and passion and depth.
	And craziness, and that's the essence of life.
	And so, yeah, everyone's got this whole thing about, like, what is it to be deeply human?
	What is it? What is the essence of humanity?
	And people take their own particular personality traits or traumas or explorations or whatever, and they say, what I experience and who I am deep down is the essence of humanity, and everyone else is lying, right?
	So, I mean, I grew up around a The novel The God of Atheists, I mean heavily allegorized and so on, and I also write about them again in my novel The Future, which you can get at freedomain.locals.com.
	And so the cynical people say that the essence of life is emptiness and nihilism, and the only happy people are the people who become plastic and empty by ignoring this basic fact.
	So an AI isn't attempting to replicate a foundational worldview usually based on trauma.
	It's not acting like a virus to spread the Despair or to spread joy or happiness or whatever it is.
	I mean, the purpose of my novel, my new novel, The Future, is to spread joy, to spread eagerness, to spread anticipation, to spread a goal that we would all love to get behind and live in.
	So, yeah, I mean, AI isn't doing any of that.
	AI isn't painting.
	It isn't replicating trauma.
	It isn't helping to focus values on a particular purpose.
	It's not doing any of that.
	It's just pushing pixels based on algorithms.
	There's no such thing as artificial intelligence.
	By God! I've been a programmer.
	I mean, I did programming recently.
	Did graphical programming recently.
	Started programming at the age...
	Of 11. I'm 55.
	Okay? It's 44 years of programming off and on.
	And I had my entire career.
	I was research and development manager, head of technology, chief technical officer, director of technology.
	I have pushed just about every bit, bite, and piece of metal around inside a computer.
	I'm telling you, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence.
	Intelligence is spontaneous.
	It is generative. It builds on itself.
	It has free associations.
	It has analogies.
	You gain wisdom from your dreams.
	You reason through. You self-criticize.
	You have emotions that help you pursue knowledge, virtue, and wisdom.
	We have a horror of the evil and the lust and holiness towards the good.
	None of this is experienced by machines.
	None of it. They don't free associate.
	They don't have spontaneous generative dreams.
	They don't have desires or repulsions.
	All they have is ones and zeros pushed around by the iron laws Of computer programming.
	Ah! But it's a neural net!
	It's like, no, it's just ones and zeros being pushed around by the absolute laws of programming.
	And you say, ah, yes, but there's randomness.
	And it's like, randomness is not intelligence?
	Randomness is not intelligence at all.
	I mean, you could get a computer to simulate the defense mechanisms of the human body.
	I mean, I guess that's what antivirus, anti-spyware and all does, but there are no T-cells.
	There's no inoculations.
	So... Yeah, I mean, the artificial intelligence, I don't know.
	I mean, I remember when I was, my first professional job as a programmer, when I was programming on tandem at a COBOL 74.
	COBOL 74 is 1974.
	I remember being heavily involved in the upgrade from COBOL 74 to COBOL 85.
	It was really quite exciting.
	And... I was out there with a trader and, you know, traders can be arrogant and pompous as hell, right?
	Like stock traders. And I was helping him with some computer setup that he had and helping him install a program I'd written to help manage, gosh, haircuts and losses.
	He had three screens and he had a bunch of spreadsheets open and he said, well, I'm kind of operating these spreadsheets as a neural net.
	I'm like, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
	I mean, just the amount of pompous windbaggery.
	Oh, it's artificial intelligence.
	If it's artificial, it's not intelligence.
	It's artificial. It's not intelligence.
	All right. What are your thoughts on no sex before marriage?
	I think it's a good idea, but relatively difficult to attain.
	Of course, marriage used to happen in your teens, so you didn't have a huge amount of time to wait.
	Now people have this extended adolescence that goes well into their 30s, and expecting people to not have any sex until they're in their 30s is rather an extreme position.
	So I don't really think that it's very feasible, but that's certainly what it's designed for.
	Our life is designed for that, right?
	Yeah. My father is 66 years old, continuing to drink alcohol, has cirrhosis of the liver, and now it's very apparent he has alcohol-induced dementia.
	Oh yeah, I think you have enough alcohol that puts holes in your brain, right?
	He is now in an assisted living facility.
	I cannot reason with him. He still wants control of his life.
	How to handle this? Well, your father chose alcohol.
	I'm sorry that he did.
	But your father chose alcohol and he didn't choose you.
	He chose alcohol at your expense.
	He chose alcohol at his own expense.
	And even now, he's dying from alcohol.
	He's still drinking. So he is an alcohol consumption machine.
	I would not imagine that there's much free will or elevated personhood in that unholy wreck of an alcohol-stewed brain.
	So I don't know why...
	You would want to handle this at all.
	I mean, why would you want to handle this at all?
	You didn't make this mess.
	I'm sure that you tried to counsel your father into not drinking, and your father made his choices, and no one, not even the gods, can prevent the consequences of choices.
	Not even the gods can prevent the consequences of choices.
	You know, not even... If you choose to sin, right, in the Christian world, if you choose to sin and you do not repent, God himself cannot prevent you from going to hell.
	There's no special dispensations.
	There's no committee that lets you off.
	Not even the guards can prevent the consequences of choices.
	Now you say, well, my father doesn't have much choice now because his brain's all fried from alcohol.
	It's like, yeah, but he chose to keep drinking and those are the consequences.
	So... I'm an older guy now, right?
	I mean, I'm going to be pretty frank, right?
	I started this in my 30s.
	I'm now in my mid-50s, right?
	So, is that right?
	Yeah, end of the 30s, right?
	So, my position in life is, you know, probably a little bit different from yours.
	If your father had you when he was, I don't know, 20, in his mid-20s, right?
	Then you're 40.
	So, yeah, I'm 15 years down the road.
	So when I look back at the drama of trying to deal with a truly screwed up family, I'm like, why?
	Why did I waste so much time?
	Why? Why did I waste so much time trying to fix people who didn't want to be fixed?
	Trying to reason with people who didn't want to be reasoned with and who attacked and opposed any kind of reasoning I tried to do with them?
	Why? Why did I spend so much time?
	Why did I waste so much time with people who clearly didn't want to get better or only promised to get better in order to get stuff from me?
	And Why?
	Why? It just seems like a bad dream for me, looking back.
	You know, sometimes you have those bad dreams where you kind of realize you're dreaming and you struggle to wake up.
	Okay, so you go from believing the dream is real, and then you go to struggling to wake up from the dream.
	Well, believing the dream was real was my teens and most of my 20s, and then struggling to wake up from the dream was late 20s, early 30s.
	And once you wake up from the dream, you look back and, oh, my God, it was only a dream.
	Now, of course, society pounds these nails into your head.
	Oh, but he's your father! Well, what if you had a sperm donor, right?
	And let's say that sperm donor is old and sick.
	You've never had anything to do with him.
	Would you sit there and say, oh my God, my sperm donor is sick.
	I need to move to Thailand to be with him and nurse him through his illness for the next three years.
	Say, no. Why? Just a sperm donor.
	No, he's your father! If I had a sperm donor, he wouldn't have traumatized me.
	I wouldn't have any negative experiences with him.
	You sit there and say, ah, but he's my biological father.
	He's your father. He's your father.
	Like that's some magic spell that just reduces your free will and turns you into a slave of biology.
	No, thank you very much.
	No fucking thank you very much.
	If people are a positive influence in my life, it doesn't mean perfect.
	I'm not perfect. If people are a positive influence in my life, I would go to the ends of the earth and move heaven and hell for them.
	Absolutely. No question.
	There's virtually nothing.
	I mean, there's nothing that the people I love in my life would ask me to do that I wouldn't do.
	Because I know because I love them and they love me, they're not going to ask me to do anything wrong.
	But there's nothing. There's nothing I wouldn't do for them.
	But the people who traumatized me, the people who hurt me when I was vulnerable and dependent and helpless and in need, and the people who failed to support me, Even as an adult, when I was striving for wisdom, when I was being attacked from all sides, when I was sick with cancer, the people who traumatized me and failed to support me, I don't wake up every day wishing them ill, I don't grind my teeth, I don't clench my fists because I have a great life.
	But if I would not have obligation to a sperm donor who did me no harm, why would I have obligation to a father who did me harm?
	That's like saying you have a greater obligation to someone who really harmed you Well, again, no thank you very much.
	So look, this could just be an older guy thing, but I look back at the years I wasted trying to fix a family that didn't want to be fixed.
	My God. I mean, maybe I can sort of, maybe it's a little gaslighting, like I can kind of say to myself, but you know, it didn't be good because...
	Because I earned my way out of...
	Okay, well, yeah, maybe.
	Maybe. Maybe I wouldn't feel as conscience-free or as free of guilt or shame or obligation if I hadn't put all that time in.
	Maybe. Maybe. There's doubt in my mind about that, but...
	So, yeah, how do you handle this?
	If your father is a drunk and your father has alcohol dementia and won't listen to reason, There's no relationship.
	You can take care of him if you want.
	I mean, obviously, I'm not telling you what to do or what not to do.
	I'm just saying that morally, I don't see where the obligation is at all.
	At all. Morally, I don't see where the obligation is at all.
	He made his choice. He chose alcohol rather than dealing with his problems.
	He chose alcohol rather than Alcoholics Anonymous or whatever might be necessary to quit drinking.
	He chose that. And the choice of...
	I mean, to me, it's like this.
	If I have a best friend who lives next door, and then my best friend chooses to move to New Zealand, because he enjoys living under gap-tooth COVID tyranny, I don't know, just chooses to move to New Zealand, and then calls me up and says, Hey, man, we don't see each other anymore.
	I mean, we don't get together.
	We don't do face-to-face.
	We're just not hanging out.
	In each other's company anymore.
	What am I going to say? Well, I'm not blaming you.
	But the fact is you moved to New Zealand because you were tired of any vestige of free speech.
	You moved to New Zealand. Hey, I hope you're enjoying New Zealand.
	No hate. But that's why we're not hanging out because you moved to New Zealand.
	I don't have the option of hanging out with you face-to-face on a regular basis like we were living next door when you moved to New Zealand.
	Your father chose alcohol.
	You don't have a choice about whether that means you have a relationship with him or not.
	You don't! He chose to have a relationship with alcohol and not with you.
	Okay, that's his choice.
	I respect people's choices.
	I really do. I respect people's choices, which means I will not shield them from the consequences.
	Why won't I shield them from the consequences?
	Because they're not eight fucking years old.
	Now, if you're eight years old, yes, you should be shielded from the results of your bad decisions because you're learning.
	You're a kid. Your dad's in his 60s.
	You know, let's say he's got this alcohol-induced dementia.
	Yeah, that sucks, man. That's terrible.
	That's why you don't drink like a fish your whole life long.
	Of course. Of course.
	The pattern I've seen, which I have no proof for, it's just my opinion, Heavily defensive people end up unable to think when they're old.
	Heavily defensive people, in my experience, end up unable to think.
	All they do is defend. The habits get more and more rigid.
	The defenses get more and more rigid.
	Their choice to listen shrinks and eventually vanishes, and they just become these machines.
	So let's say that six years ago, your father still had the choice to drink.
	Maybe he started drinking in his teens.
	He was still drinking when he was 60, but he had a chance to stop.
	Well, he had a chance to stop in the entire 42 years between 18 and And 60!
	42 years, man, that's a lot of years.
	That's a lot of years. Probably only a little bit longer than you've been alive.
	So if somebody chooses alcohol for 42 years at the expense of their children, I respect that choice.
	Hey, he had fun drinking and he got to avoid the delirium tremors.
	He got to avoid Drying out, he got to avoid dealing with his issues.
	I respect that.
	Now, respect doesn't mean I admire it.
	I respect the power of a lion.
	It doesn't mean I want it to eat me.
	Or admire it. I just respect the power of lightning so I don't go swimming in a lake during a thunderstorm.
	I respect the power of a car so I drive like there's a giant spike pointed at my chest for my steering wheel.
	I respect people's choices.
	I respect the fact that you made the choices.
	I'm going to respect you enough to let you accumulate the consequences of those choices for good or for ill.
	Make the choice. Make the choice.
	Take the consequences. That's adulthood, right?
	So, yeah, sorry about that.
	Let me just mute this fellow. Yeah, so that's what we do.
	And why would you have to handle it at all?
	Did you want him to drink to the point where he's got delirium and he's still drinking and he's dying from cirrhosis?
	Did you want him to do that? No.
	Did you tell him to stop? Of course you did.
	Probably thousands of times over the years.
	Did he listen? No. So you're free.
	You're free of obligation. Free of obligation.
	Because here's the thing, man.
	Let's say your dad's going to live for another five years, right?
	Maybe three years, whatever, right?
	I have no idea, right? Maybe 20.
	I don't know, right? But let's say he's going to live for another five years.
	Boom. Five years subtracted from your life.
	Why? Because you're taking care of a guy who's falling apart as a result of his own choices.
	Oh, but addiction is tough.
	It's like, well, yeah. But every addict has the choice at the beginning.
	I mean, I love gambling with my career.
	I love gambling. Love it.
	It's very absorbing, very exciting.
	So do you know what I don't do?
	I don't go to casinos.
	I don't gamble.
	I gambled in Vegas when I was there for a conference and it was super fun.
	I gambled... I don't know.
	30 years ago, I had a friend of mine's bachelor party.
	Huge amount of fun. I played poker and accidentally won $500.
	Huge amount of fun, man. I could spend time gambling, let me tell you.
	So I don't.
	Because it's nice. It's fun.
	It's exciting. It gives me a thrill.
	So I don't go anywhere near it.
	Anywhere near it. And when I first...
	I mean, I drank a little bit in my teens...
	Had a couple of lost weekends.
	And it was like, yeah, it's kind of fun.
	But I mean, it's way too costly the next day when you wake up like a frog shit in your mouth.
	And every time you open your eyes, it's like someone driving crucifix spikes into your eyeballs.
	No, thank you. I don't like those lost Sundays of recuperation.
	So I don't drink, really.
	Occasionally I'll have a light beer, but yeah, I don't drink.
	I haven't been drunk since I was 21 or 22.
	And before, it was at some cast party of a play I was in.
	Oh, when I was in Macbeth, when I played Macbeth.
	That was the last time I got drunk.
	And then, you know, like that old Dean Martin line, you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
	It's like, yeah, I got the spins, man.
	I'm exhausted. I got the spins.
	Like, I'm never doing this again, and I never have.
	So, yeah, he liked drinking.
	And Drinking was a shortcut to self-expression because it's a disinhibitor, so he liked drinking.
	And he got an instant social group of losers who also liked drinking.
	Because, you know, when you have an addiction, you have a low-ranked group of losers who are going to sit around and cheer on your addiction because it makes them feel like less of a loser.
	And like most losers, they enjoy disassembling other people and encouraging them to make bad decisions so they can join them in Loserville, right?
	So he kept drinking. He could have stopped early on.
	He could have said, oh, man, I like this too much.
	I better stop. Which is what any sane human being does, right?
	So, yeah. What's to handle?
	He chose alcohol over you at your expense.
	He was a terrible father.
	He's imposed an unjust, horrible burden on you.
	And you spend five years wiping this guy's ass?
	What happens? You're just five years older.
	Five years more traumatized.
	Five years of you being unavailable.
	To a girlfriend, a wife, your children, your friends, you burn up a half decade of your precious existence chasing after this guy who traumatized the hell out of you, made all the wrong decisions, and that you tried desperately to stop from making those bad decisions.
	You've got a half decade to burn.
	You've got six months to burn. You've got a year to burn.
	You've got three years to burn. I don't think so.
	Nobody does. And all it's doing is keeping you trapped in the underworld of terrible people making terrible choices and keeping all the good people who could be in your life at bay.
	So it's up to you. All right.
	How should adult children react to aging parents distributing resources in a haphazard, secret, or unbalanced way?
	Ah, yes. So in Canada, this is the living hell of the cottage.
	The living hell of the cottage.
	Ooh, the cottage.
	Okay, so the story of the cottage in Canada is you've got a family.
	They do pretty well. They've got three kids.
	The parents get older and older and older, and there's a cottage.
	Now, you can't sell the cottage and distribute the money among your kids.
	It's part of the... As part of the will, because I think in most places, if you sell your primary residence, you don't pay tax on it.
	But if you sell a vacation home or a secondary residence, you pay tax on it or whatever.
	So, you know, government takes massive percentage and it's like you just got rid of the cottage for half price or whatever, right?
	So you can't get rid of the cottage.
	So you got one cottage, you got three kids.
	So what do you do? Well, you can't just give the cottage to one kid.
	Because that makes all the other kids mad.
	Could you sell pot ownership in the cottage to each of them?
	Well, then two are always ganging up on one.
	Everyone wants August.
	Nobody wants February or March or November because...
	November, February, and March.
	Well, February not so much, but March and February kind of suck at cottages because it's not cold enough to do winter sports or winter activities.
	It's kind of mushy and kind of uncertain, and it's not warm enough to swim, obviously.
	So everybody wants a summer.
	Nobody wants. All right, so then you go fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.
	So it's like this Prince Charles thing, like you hang around waiting to be king, and then you just end up pissing your life away waiting for Nothing.
	So, yeah, here's the thing.
	Look, I refuse inheritance.
	I refuse inheritance.
	Been offered. I refuse it.
	Don't want it. Won't do it.
	Have never wanted it. I'll learn my own.
	Thank you very much. You have no right to your parents' resources after the age of 18.
	You have no right to your parents' resources.
	And there's nothing more wasteful in this life, and in many ways there's nothing more destructive in this life than waiting around for someone to give you something.
	You know, we do this, you know, if you're a beta orbiter, like some pretty girl, and she's like, oh, you know, you're just a wonderful guy.
	Maybe we could get together one day, but right now I'm really into the drunken alcoholic tattoo artists.
	They're just waiting around, waiting around for someone to give you something.
	Waiting around. Grandma has a million dollars.
	There are only four grandkids.
	Maybe we'll each get a quarter of a million dollars.
	And you wait, and you wait, and it's in the back of your mind, and it robs you of your ambition, and it robs you of your drive, and it robs you of your capacity to take reasonable risk.
	Why? Because you're just waiting.
	Just waiting. You ever had it?
	Maybe when I was a kid.
	I wanted to go to the war museum to pick a fight.
	No, I didn't. I wanted to go to the war museum sitting there waiting at the bus stop.
	I'm waiting like half an hour.
	This is back when London buses used to run fairly regularly.
	I was waiting for like half an hour at the bus stop.
	Guy finally stops his car and says, Hey kid, no buses on Sunday.
	Oh! Bummer.
	Now, if I had kept a fair walk up for half an hour, I could have been halfway to the...
	War Museum. But the longer you wait for the bus, the harder it is to give up and start walking.
	Big piece of advice, man.
	Big piece of advice.
	Do not wait around for stuff you think is owed.
	Now, if you are genuinely owed, like some vendor owes you something, somebody borrowed money, okay, stick around for that, but not forever.
	But don't stick around for an inheritance.
	If it comes, great, nothing wrong with it, but it will rob you, it will cost you.
	I mean, the number of families, the number of siblings I've seen break up over inheritance is a lot.
	It's a brutal thing.
	And of course, I believe, I genuinely believe, and this has been my policy, you'll end up doing better if you just say, no, my parents had their money, it's their money, I don't want it, because I'll make my own money, thank you very much.
	So you end up more ambitious.
	I mean, you get the same amount of money either way.
	It's just with one, you get pride, and you don't screw up your sibling relationships.
	With the other one, you just hang around...
	With less ambition, less risk-taking, less entrepreneurship, you end up with the same amount of money, but you lose your pride, you lose your independence, and quite often you lose your relationship with your siblings.
	It's a bad deal.
	It's a bad deal.
	Don't do it. Don't do it.
	All right. Let's see here.
	How should people who did horrible things and truly decided to change deal with the thoughts and guilt of those actions?
	See, that's a question that references itself in a very dark way.
	In a very, very dark way.
	So... If you do horrible things and you say, well, how do I deal with the thoughts and guilt of my actions?
	You're still making it about you, which is kind of why you did horrible things in the first place.
	How you deal with having done horrible things is not up to you.
	It's not up to your preferences.
	It's not up to your emotions.
	It's not up to your needs. It's up to the victims of you.
	It's up to the people you victimized.
	If you did horrible things and you want to deal with thoughts and guilt, you go, let's say you did a horrible thing, to a woman.
	We don't even have to specify what it is, but let's just say it's horrible.
	It's a horrible thing to a woman. Okay.
	It's not about you in terms of how you make it better.
	It has almost nothing to do with you.
	What you have to do is you have to go to the woman if she'll even speak to you, and she doesn't have to speak to you at all.
	But if she does decide to speak with you, You go to the woman and you say, I'm sorry, I did horrible things to you.
	I very much want to make amends.
	Is there anything that I can do to make the horrible things I did to you okay with you?
	Now maybe you give her $30,000 for therapy.
	I don't know what to do.
	I have no idea. But it has to be something that's difficult.
	Maybe if you badmouth her to her friends, And lied about the effect of the horrible things you did.
	Maybe you decide to go public and you record a video saying, I did these things.
	I lied about it.
	I'm totally wrong.
	I'm totally sorry.
	I'm not asking you to forgive me, but you certainly do have to if you're just.
	You have to change your opinion of the woman who I lied about.
	She said I did these horrible things.
	I said she didn't.
	She was making up accusations.
	I actually did do these horrible things, and I want to go public to restore her reputation.
	That's right.
	Now, if that would be helpful to the woman, maybe that wouldn't satisfy her completely.
	Maybe that's just part of the journey.
	If you assaulted her, and she says what would make it better, and she says give your life savings to battered women's shelters, and that will make me feel better.
	Then you take your life savings and you give it to battered women's shelters.
	You try to make her as whole as possible.
	Now, if she says there's nothing you can do to make up for what you did to me, which is a perfectly fair and valid thing, because there are many things that you can do to people for which recompense, restitution, rehabilitation is completely and totally impossible.
	You know, if my mom called me up tomorrow and said, well, what could I do to make your childhood okay with you?
	Be like, well, there's nothing you could do.
	There's nothing you could do. Like if you ding someone's car and it costs 500 bucks to fix, then you pick up the car, you go get it fixed, you pay the 500 bucks, you bring it back and you say sorry.
	So you've made the car whole.
	There's tons of things you can do for which restitution is fine and acceptable and no problem.
	And then there are other things where people say there's nothing you could do that would make this okay.
	Maybe... The woman says, well, I need to know that you're not going to, let's say you assaulted her.
	I'm not saying this is the case with this person.
	I have no idea. I'm just making something up here, right?
	But let's say you assaulted the woman, and the woman says, well, there's nothing you can do to make it whole for me, but I would feel a little bit easier in my mind if I knew, if I knew that you were going to anger management, going to therapy, and spending your money on that.
	So send me the certificate when you've finished the most comprehensive anger management program known to man, I'd like to see some receipts from your therapist that you've shown up and worked at it.
	And that would give me some comfort.
	See, you're focusing on how to get rid of your thoughts and guilt.
	Without thinking about it, it's not up to you.
	Who could release you from guilt?
	Who could release you from guilt? Not you.
	I mean, if you're a Christian, I guess God can release you from guilt, but God will require that you make restitution to your victims.
	I mean, even AA says make restitution where possible for the people you've harmed.
	Apologize. Take ownership.
	So, if you did horrible things, it's because it was all about you.
	And if you're thinking there's some magic way to wave away guilt, shame, and horror at what you've done without making restitution, it's still all about you.
	And I don't say this with hatred.
	I'm just telling you the facts as I see them.
	All right. Oh, and the other thing, too.
	If somebody says there's nothing you can do to make restitution, then you leave them the F alone.
	You just leave them alone. You let them move on.
	You say, oh, but I need them to forgive me.
	So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
	Because you'll be tempted to get angry at them if they don't forgive you.
	You'll be tempted to manipulate them, to pout, to try and get an apology out of them.
	They don't owe you an apology.
	The best way to have an easy conscience is to not do horrible things to people.
	Once you've done horrible things to people, you're at their mercy.
	Now, maybe they will show you mercy and maybe they won't, but they don't owe you shit.
	And if you've done horrible things and people won't give you forgiveness, then you just have to live with what you did.
	And use that pain as a way of not doing horrible things again in the future.
	Again, just my opinion. How do I make amends with someone I have hurt?
	I want to regain their trust and rebuild our relationship.
	I have begun therapy to unbreak habits formed from my abusive childhood for a start.
	I'm wondering what other steps I can take to make things right.
	Well, what's the benefit to the other person?
	Say, I want to regain their trust and rebuild our relationship.
	Well, I'm sorry, but like in relationships, who cares what you want in this situation?
	You know, I mean, it's kind of an important principle in relationships.
	I mean, if it's someone you love, say, I love this person, they're a wonderful person, great addition to my life, you focus on their needs and preferences.
	You focus on making them laugh.
	You focus on making their day better.
	You focus on easing their burdens.
	You focus on just making their life better because you're in it.
	Now, if it's the right person, they'll focus on making your life better and it's just a win-win back and forth, up spiral until you're both dead with a smile on your face.
	It's beautiful. But if it's just, I want, I want, I want, then you're a user.
	And I say this with sympathy and so on.
	I'm not saying this with any hatred or any negativity.
	I'm just pointing it out, right?
	I want to regain their trust and rebuild their relationship.
	But who cares what you want?
	What's the benefit for them?
	What's the benefit to them? Listen, think of running a store.
	Running a convenience store.
	You're running a convenience store.
	I want people to come in and buy things.
	Who cares what you want?
	The only thing that matters is it's beneficial to customers to come into your store and buy something.
	It's all that matters. I want people to listen to my show and donate, I say.
	But who cares what I want?
	I mean, I'll express it.
	Sure, I do want you to listen to the show, but I do want you to donate.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	But the point is, I have to provide some value to you in what I'm saying.
	You have to emerge from listening to, you have to emerge to listening to my show in a better situation with some additional gain of wisdom or virtue or knowledge or humor or tears or like whatever, right?
	There has to be something that you get out of this show.
	Now, if I provide value, which I believe I do, I don't I don't believe anybody else provides the value that I do.
	I mean, they provide different value, but nobody provides my specific value.
	So if I provide value, I can remind you to support the show.
	I think it's fair. I think it's reasonable.
	Exchange value for value.
	Be an adult. Don't be a child.
	Children expect investment without return.
	Adults exchange value for value, and I want everyone to, you know, grow more mature, grow wiser.
	Except for adulthood, which means exchange value for value.
	But if I just sat there and started off a podcast saying, well, I want people to donate and I want people to listen to me.
	I want this. It doesn't matter.
	What matters is that you gain value out of what I'm doing.
	That's what I focus on. That's why I listen to people.
	That's why I do call and shows. You gain value out of what I'm doing.
	Now, when you say, this is the caller, or the listener, sorry, says, I've begun therapy to unbreak habits formed from my abusive childhood, for a start.
	Massive sympathies. Massive sympathies for your abusive childhood.
	I'm so sorry that you were abused as a child.
	Really am. 100%.
	150%. But I will tell you a little something here.
	I will tell you a little something.
	You cannot blame your actions on your childhood.
	I mean, that's how we finally grow up, right?
	When we're children, we can blame our actions on our childhood.
	Because we don't have freedom, we don't have independence.
	We can absolutely, completely and totally and justly and rightly and morally blame our actions on our childhood.
	You become an adult. If you blame your actions on your childhood, your childhood never ends, the abuse never lives.
	If you do something bad when you're a child, And you're being abused.
	The abuser is primarily responsible for your bad actions.
	If you're an adult and you do something wrong, something harmful, who's responsible?
	Well, we just had a principle called the adult is responsible when you're a child.
	Now you're an adult. What does that mean?
	You're responsible. See, we can do bad things because we're traumatized and pressured and helpless and hopeless and confined and controlled because we're children in a terrible family or whatever.
	But we can also do terrible things because we give ourselves...
	We can do very bad things because we give ourselves trauma And abuse can very often cause bad behavior when we're children.
	What happens when we're adults is we give ourselves and reason.
	I yelled at you because I was yelled at as a child.
	I nag you and don't trust you because I couldn't trust my parents as a child.
	See, the because is permission to be destructive.
	When you're an adult, you cannot Justly, morally, ever blame your bad behavior on your childhood.
	Your childhood will never end.
	You will never grow up. You will never take ownership.
	And you will never draw an absolute line saying, I will never.
	I will never verbally abuse people.
	I will never threaten people.
	I will never hit people. I will never spread malicious gossip.
	I will never lie about others to their significant detriment.
	I will not steal. I will not violate the non-aggression.
	I will not bully, manipulate.
	See, when you say, well, because I had a bad childhood, therefore I can do bad things, or therefore my bad things are minimized or justified or excused, then you're using the pain of your childhood as an excuse to inflict pain on others.
	How does your inner child feel about that, about being used as the poster permission boy to allow his genuine trauma to be used as a justification?
	For your bad behavior as an adult.
	Does he feel justly treated?
	Does he feel respected and cared for?
	When you look at his pain and say, oh my God, this means I can do bad things.
	This gives me an excuse to do bad things.
	Yay! Good thing being hurt, kid.
	Now I can be an asshole. No.
	And you understand that that's what your parents did, right?
	Your parents said, well, I hit you because you weren't listening.
	I hit you because you were disobedient.
	I hit you because you were bad.
	Right? They're blaming you.
	They're blaming the child. And therefore, excusing negative effects, negative actions as an adult.
	Well, you're doing the same thing, but with your own inner child.
	So do not give yourself the excuse of bad behavior.
	Do not excuse your bad behavior based upon a bad child.
	Don't do it. Don't do it.
	You have to have the absolute standard that says, no, I don't do this stuff.
	I don't do destructive things.
	I don't hurt people. I don't harm people.
	I don't undermine people. I don't abuse people.
	I don't do it. It's so liberating.
	It's so liberating. It breaks the cycle immediately.
	All right. How do you overcome the guilt and shame of a life lived immorally before being self-aware?
	Well, I think you mean aware of morality and aware of moral values and so on.
	Well, you're not immoral if you don't know any moral values.
	I mean, any more than animals are immoral, right?
	So if you're kind of living the life of the animal, and I understand this.
	I did this as a teenager because I had no moral instruction at all.
	In fact, counter-moral instruction.
	You can't know before you know.
	You can't know before you know.
	You don't hold yourself responsible for I mean, you hold yourself responsible for pursuing knowledge, for sure.
	If you avoid knowledge, then you're responsible.
	But you can't be omniscient.
	You can't know things before you know them.
	Am I more moral since developing universally preferable behavior, the rational proof of secular ethics?
	You can get that for free at freedomain.com slash books.
	Am I more moral after you could be?
	Sure, absolutely. No question.
	Because that question is answered.
	I know what ethics is.
	I know what morality is, 100%.
	But I was in pursuit of morality for many decades beforehand.
	Do I blame myself for not knowing what I didn't know when I was in hot pursuit of that knowledge?
	Of course not. If you spend, you know, 20 years, like I was 20 years working on ethics, right?
	So if you spend 20 years trying to develop a cure for cancer, Do you call yourself a murderer for the 20 years before you got the cure?
	Now, if you have a cure for cancer and you withhold it and you don't give it to people and, you know, they can afford it and whatever, then you're malevolent, right?
	A nasty guy causing people's death.
	But if you spend 20 years working on a cure for cancer and you finally get the cure for cancer, do you just sit there and say, my God, I was a terrible person who allowed people to die?
	It's like, well, no, you were working on pursuing a cure for cancer.
	You got the cure for cancer and you're going to save millions of people's lives.
	Good for you. But you don't call yourself a murderer or somebody who caused the deaths of people, right?
	So, no. You can't know before you know.
	Hi, Steph. I was born in Ukraine, but have spent the last eight years in Russia getting an education.
	My family is torn by this war.
	My mom, who is Ukrainian, does not speak to my dad, who is a Russian citizen.
	How can I help mend relationships in my family under such conditions?
	Everyone was tense and stressed, including me.
	I also feel like a traitor to my home country.
	Not sure if these thoughts are rational.
	By the way, everyone from my family is alive and relatively safe.
	Well, I'm certainly glad to hear that.
	I'm certainly glad to hear that.
	I mean, I said this before on the show.
	There is no kind of absolute reason as to why trauma and difficulties should drive people apart rather than bring them together.
	Let's take Lord of the Rings. I know it's fiction, but it's powerful fiction.
	Because it's based on a truth and a yearning that everybody wants.
	Frodo and Sam had a Dantean hellscape of a difficult journey through Mordoron.
	Being chased by Gollum, being hunted by the orcs, being captured by the orcs, Nazgul floating around, lava, starvation.
	You name it. Did they turn on each other?
	No. There was a fight at the end because of the ring.
	I'm not even going to say spoilers.
	The book is 70 years old.
	They were loyal to each other.
	And you can read these stories of war and where siblings, when being hunted, siblings help each other, hide each other, keep each other quiet, take great risks to aid each other.
	And your family is faced with a divisive war that many argue is there to simply cover up bio labs and maintain money laundering.
	Who knows, right? But why would your family give up their loyalty to each other for an engineered war?
	Why would you let the political leaders around the world smash up your family for the sake of their military industrial goals?
	I don't know the answer to that.
	I don't. Why would you give up closeness in a family that formerly had closeness because political leaders are laundering money and lobbing bombs?
	I don't really get that. Because people say this all the time.
	Oh, you know, my brother, you know, he got mad at me because, you know, my father was a drinker and he was stressed and he got mad at me.
	And he hurt me and he abused me.
	Why? There's no causal relationship there.
	Fuck the domino theory.
	Fuck the domino theory.
	No, absolutely not.
	Nobody gets an excuse of difficult circumstances for being an asshole.
	Being an asshole is a choice when you're an adult.
	Children can't be. Asshole.
	It is always 100% a choice as an adult.
	Well, I'm sorry I yelled at you, honey.
	I had a stressful day at work.
	Somebody makes excuses for their bad behavior.
	All they're doing is promising to do it again.
	You understand? They're just promising to do it again.
	That's what's going on. That's all that's going on.
	They're just promising to do it again.
	Well, I'm sorry I yelled at you, honey.
	I just had a bad day at work.
	Oh, really? Is that the last bad day at work you're ever going to have?
	Probably not. Probably not.
	Definitely not. So, yeah, next time you have a bad day at work, and this is why somebody says, oh, I yelled at you because I had a bad day at work, and then what do you do?
	You hear them coming home and they yell, oh, I hope you had a good day at work so they didn't yell at me.
	No. No, no, no.
	Nope, nope, nope.
	100% ownership at all times.
	100% self-ownership at all times.
	Saying, oh, my family's breaking up because of the war.
	My family's mad at each other because of the war.
	No, they're not. You know, people are so...
	It's tragic. I mean, people are so easily programmed to hate people.
	It's terrible, right? People programmed to hate the unvaccinated people, trained to hate particular...
	Minorities or majorities, for that matter.
	It's just awful. It's absolutely awful.
	And because we are so susceptible to tribalism and being pitted against each other, it's another reason why the statement will always end this.
	All right. Let me just check in here with the listenership.
	If you have a question or issue or comment or criticism, argument, whatever you like, you can raise your hand, you can unmute yourself, or I can just keep plugging and plowing on.
	Sumer is ecumenin.
	All right. I will continue.
	Oh, let's see here.
	I consistently self-sabotage, says a listener.
	When I do this, I become blissfully unaware of financial matters and trust my wife, who does the finances in books, to make everything okay.
	I indulge in take-out or junk food as my vice of choice.
	I'm desperately trying to change, but as soon as business is plentiful, we go off the rails.
	My business has expanded, but due to my inattention, money has been spent on more once, and I'm starting to break payment terms with suppliers and subcontractors.
	I voice my frustration to my wife about this situation, and she nonchalantly says, I guess we can only pay in 60 days.
	My identity is definitely wrapped up in being a solid businessman, so this whole thing shakes me to the core.
	Please help me make sense of what I'm missing here.
	Oh yeah, I've been doing counseling once a week for a year, and now it's helped.
	Reasonably. Right. Okay, so, addiction to restaurants.
	Addiction to ordered food. Personal confession, yeah, I kind of like to eat out.
	But other than, you know, maybe a drive-through if I'm busy, you know, I'm picking up a wrap or, I don't know, Subway.
	I like it. My daughter loves it.
	And you can get pretty healthy stuff there.
	I get a nice turkey and veggie wrap at Subway, and it's pretty good for you as a whole.
	So you can get some decent stuff out, right?
	Now, as far as nice restaurant eating, like tablecloth restaurant eating, maybe once every month or two, you know, if there's some special occasion.
	It's nice. But, I mean, my wife is a fantastic cook and is responsible for my immortal longevity and youthful skin.
	So, yeah, my wife makes fantastic food and it's always around.
	So, addiction to restaurants, addiction to eating out.
	Okay, so the first place that I would look, if this is something that's really big for you, the first place that I would look is I would look at my childhood and I would say, Did my parents provide to me good, nutritious, healthy food on a regular basis?
	Or were they inattentive?
	Were they stressed? Were they busy?
	Were they just jamming in cardboard truck wheel-flattened frozen food into the microwave, giving me soggy, shitty pizza on a regular basis?
	Or was I fending for myself?
	Was I just supposed to catch-as-catch can and hunt things together like some urban cocaine adult raccoon going through the garbage, right?
	Now, my guess is that if you are addicted to takeout food and junk food, that you did not get regular, healthy, nutritious meals provided by your parents when you were a child.
	And so it is an attempt to avoid the pain of going hungry or being malnourished.
	As a child, malnourished, of course, junk food and malnourishment go hand in hand, right?
	Because you feel full, but you don't have anything useful in your belly, right?
	You might as well be eating styrofoam.
	So, if you spend, and your spending is focused on providing to yourself what your parents didn't provide for you, it's clearly a cover-up of a childhood crime or neglect.
	You know, I have a tendency to want to treat myself, and which I studiously avoid, because...
	You know, my mom would forget my birthday, and, you know, I didn't get gifts or presents very often.
	I remember, actually, even into my 20s, she, one year, gave me a glove.
	Oh, my God, I mentioned this before, right?
	She gave me a glove. Next year, you can have the other one.
	It might even be for the different hand.
	You never know. She gave me a glove.
	Absent of love, right? So...
	And here's the thing, too. Oh, she didn't have a lot of money.
	Well, first of all, giving her money at the time.
	And secondly, you don't need money to give someone something thoughtful.
	You know, write them a poem. In my day, it used to be make a mixtape.
	I don't know what it is now. There's lots of things you can do.
	That are thoughtful and touching to people without having to spend money.
	So, I don't know, give me an apology.
	That's bloody free and it would have been worth a lot more to me than a thousand gloves.
	So, if you are addicted as an adult to providing to yourself or paying other people to be substitute parents, right?
	To give you food that is tasty, to give you food that is, you know, have other people prepare your food, right?
	The question is, why is your wife not preparing your food or why are you not preparing food for yourself or your wife, right?
	Because if you were neglected culinarily, if your food needs were neglected as a child, then It's painful to do it for yourself as an adult because it reminds you of what happened before.
	But if you haven't dealt with that pain, then you're going to pay other people to cover up that pain by giving you food, so to speak, right?
	You're paying people to be your parents, right?
	Okay. And people do this with sex, too, right?
	I mean, if you have neglectful parents who didn't touch you, then people will have sex.
	Not because they desperately want the sex.
	They just want to be held and touched, right?
	All right. Is it fair or mean...
	To down the level of our discourse when dealing with intellectually challenged people.
	Well, I mean, you have to tailor your message to the audience, right?
	I think in America, instructions have to be written at a grade 8 level, and I think 40% of Americans can't follow relatively simple prescriptions, right?
	The level of illiteracy. Like, if you're a smart person and you read books and so on, then you're around, generally, you're around smart people who read books, right?
	And then the problem, of course, the level of illiteracy that is out there in society is something that you probably don't even get at a sort of fundamental level.
	You just don't really get it.
	And how could you, right?
	How could you possibly get it, right?
	Because it's not anything that you deal with, right?
	You just aren't around people who are illiterate.
	But it's a huge issue.
	It's a huge issue.
	I'm just looking up a couple of stats here, right?
	I mean, it's really just astounding.
	Let me just... All right. Number of U.S. adults age 16 to 65 at each level of proficiency on the PIAAC literacy scale.
	So low English literacy could not participate 4%, below level 1, 4.1%, level 1, 12.9%.
	So 8.2 million students.
	And this is, you know, what, 2014, so yeah, that's like eight years ago, right?
	So 8.2% couldn't even do it at all.
	Sorry, 4% couldn't participate at all.
	That's 8.2 million people.
	Below level 1, which is basically functionally literate, 8.4 million people, 4.1%.
	Level 1, barely literate, 26.5 million people in America, it's level 1.
	Now, level 4 and 5, they just bunched them together, 12.9%.
	26 million people. So it's the equivalent, right?
	12.9% is both level 1 and level 4-5.
	So, yeah, it's pretty bad, right?
	So 79% of U.S. adults have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences, right?
	So... It is pretty wretched as a whole, and I'm going to see if there's anything more.
	Okay, we've got 2021.
	Low literacy levels among U.S. adults could be costing the economy $2.2 trillion a year.
	A new study by Gallup on behalf of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy finds that low levels of adult literacy could be costing the U.S. as much as $2.2 trillion a year.
	According to the U.S. Department of Education...
	Do you know, originally it was called the Department of Public Education until they realized that the acronym was dope.
	54% of US adults, 16 to 74 years old, about 130 million people, lack proficiency in literacy reading.
	They're reading below the equivalent of a sixth grade level.
	54% of US adults, 16 to 74 years old, Lack proficiency in literacy reading below the equivalent of a 6th grade level.
	I mean, that's completely insane.
	That is completely insane.
	And of course, if these schools were private, and after 12 years of instruction, 54%, like you get to grade 12, or most people do, and people are still reading at a grade 6 level, it's just astonishing.
	And yeah, this is where things are.
	And really, what can you do?
	You can't necessarily go and fix that.
	And of course, you know, people are less literate because there's more visual stimulus, more visual entertaining, right?
	So among adulthoods, so there's these five levels, right?
	So around the world as a whole, only 2%...
	Of adults read at level 5, and that's really, really something.
	In America, 12% of Americans read at the top level, and the global illiteracy rate is 12%.
	That's level 1 literacy.
	That's 12% around the entire globe, but it's 14% of Americans.
	Half of US adults can't read a book written at the 8th grade level.
	Half of US adults can't read a book written at the 8th grade level.
	And that's pretty wild.
	The average American reads at the 7th to 8th grade level.
	And I said this earlier, medical information for the public should be written at no higher than an 8th grade reading level.
	Ah, that's crazy.
	So, more than one-third of Americans have Level 3 literacy.
	That's 3%, so 36% have Level 3 literacy.
	The global literacy rate at that level is 39%, right?
	So it's still lower than the global literacy rate, which includes places like, obviously, India, Backwoods of India...
	And in Africa and other places where literacy is pretty low.
	So, what does this mean?
	So, what does that mean?
	So, most at this level can identify the link leading to the organization's phone number from a website with several links, including contact us and FAQ. But most cannot click to the second page of search results from a library website to identify the author of a book called Echo Myth.
	Can't do it. You go to a library website, do a search, And they say, oh, find the identity of, find the author of a book called Echo Myth.
	They can't find it. Maybe it's on the second page.
	Can't click to the second page.
	It's just crazy. The cognitive elite, 12% of Americans, and that's the same as 12% around the world.
	Level 4 to 5 literacy.
	Level 4 means they can read and write at a proficient level.
	Most can click to the second page of the search results, looking for the author of a book called Echo Myth, but most cannot review search results from a library website to identify a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable.
	Now, in 2013, For the first time ever, PIAAC combined the 4th and 5th literacy levels.
	That's because there were no longer enough people at level 5 to count.
	So it's level 1, 2, 3, and then 4, 5.
	So there aren't enough people at the top quintile of literacy to even count.
	What does that mean? Across all countries, only 2% of adults performed at level 5 on many of the variables in the literacy and numeracy scales.
	So because of the low number, these are included among the 12% in level 4 and 5.
	So the Level 5, this is the only group that can identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable.
	So if you write For these folks, like I write at a fairly high level, not super high, but if you write for the top 20% of literacy, you're missing 98% of your readers.
	Now, here's the funny thing, right?
	So 2% of U.S. adults are at level 5.
	What does level 5 mean? Integrate information across multiple dense texts, construct synthesis, ideas, or points of view, or evaluate evidence-based arguments.
	Ha! Evaluate evidence-based arguments.
	2%. What else could they do?
	Well, they can identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against GMOs are unreliable.
	Oh, my gosh.
	Now, if you look at the top, top countries, what have we got?
	Japan. This is ranking down from top, right?
	Japan, Finland, Netherlands, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, So, how are you possibly going to be able to communicate with people when you've got 2% of people able to do basic university tasks, right? Evaluating evidence-based arguments, synthesizing information.
	You've got 2% of U.S. adults Able to do that, but 40% of people are going to university.
	Does university bring those people up to the 2% or do the 2% get dragged down to the 40%?
	Isn't that one? I mean, there's a reason why zombie movies are kind of popular.
	And listen, I'm not calling people who are illiterate zombies.
	I'm just saying that... I mean, obviously the government schools have completely failed them.
	And authors, to some degree, have failed them by not being interesting enough to make people want to read, to make them want to...
	It's just wild, right?
	Just can't reach people.
	So, yeah, I do think that we are going to need to...
	I won't say dumb it down, but I do think that we are going to need to try and find ways to communicate with people that sit where they are.
	I've tried to make philosophy as accessible as possible.
	I really, really dislike, at a visceral level, those really dense...
	Phenomenological texts and existential texts and, you know, Kierkegaard and, gosh, Wittgenstein and so on.
	It's just unbelievably dense and, I mean, that's just not helpful to people.
	It's not helpful to people at all.
	In fact, it's harmful to people because it drives them away from philosophy.
	Forgiving a spouse for cheating is proof of love or foolishness?
	Forgive 7 times 77 is meme or reality?
	So forgiving a spouse is not up to you.
	It's up to your spouse.
	Is the spouse who cheated making it up to you?
	Are they making it so that you're not happy that they cheated, but you're okay that they cheated?
	It's like, I'm not happy that it happened.
	It's okay that it happened, right?
	Is it complete? Is it closed off?
	I mean, let's say that you have, I'll give you a sort of theoretical example, right?
	So let's say that you have huge problems in your marriage, but they're unspoken about.
	Right? You just avoid, avoid, avoid.
	You go to bed angry, you get up angry, you slam doors, you avoid, he drinks, you drink, and you're just avoiding things, right?
	And you're not moving on with your lives, you're not able to have kids, you just can't get anywhere in your careers, you're just living a horrible life, right?
	Now let's say one of you cheat, and then in that explosion, in that eruption, in that disruption, you end up actually finally dealing with issues that you have, and you end up dealing with your childhood, you go to therapy, you deal with things, right?
	Okay, are you going to say, I'm happy that my partner cheated?
	No, but I think you got the greatest possible good out of your partner cheating.
	I remember being struck, there was a show back in the 90s, I think, called Ally McBeal, with a very skinny woman who's now Harrison Ford's wife, or something like that.
	Anyway, and there was a husband who cheated, and the wife said, you were more interesting when you were cheating.
	Now that's just kind of cruel or whatever, right?
	But you can look back and say, that disaster...
	What was a catalyst for good in my life, right?
	So it can happen with drunks, right?
	They have to hit bottom, right? So what happens is they get drunk, they go driving, and they crash into a pole, and they get drunk.
	In significant trouble, you know, if they're not a Democrat politician or Nancy Pelosi's husband, they get into significant trouble.
	And just a joke. And then they get a DUI and they get court-ordered rehab and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And then what happens is they kick their alcohol habit.
	And they say, I mean, there's a movie with Sandra Bullock about this where she drives and she hits a garden gnome because she's a drunk driver, right?
	She goes to rehab, right?
	Because people say next time, what if it had been a kid instead of a garden gnome, right?
	Now, the drunk is not happy that he hit a telephone pole and got a DUI and, right, court-ordered rehab.
	It's humiliating. It's embarrassing.
	He's not happy about that, of course.
	But when he looks back later in his life, he says, oh yeah, no, that was better.
	That was good for me. That helped me, right?
	The hitting bottom thing, right? So it could be.
	So forgiveness is not up to you.
	Now, I know that there's a Christian perspective, which is you will forgive us.
	I forgive this person.
	Now, for me, that kind of...
	Like, I have to differentiate between the people...
	And this is just a matter of justice.
	I have to, have to, have to differentiate between the people in my life who earn my forgiveness if they do me wrong and the people in my life who don't.
	That's just a matter of justice.
	I refuse to treat people who treat me well and treat me badly exactly the same.
	So in the Christian context, I have forgiven the people who wronged me.
	I've had a few. I've had a few.
	None of you lovely people, but I've had a few.
	Well, more than a few, really.
	I'm pretty wrong. I've been pretty wronged by a lot of people.
	So what does it mean to forgive them?
	What does it mean to move on without any apology or restitution, or even where there's continued abuse, right?
	Lies, falsehoods, and slander, libel, whatever, right?
	Where there's continued falsehoods.
	What does it mean? To forgive.
	Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
	So the way that I forgive is I put people in a post-choice scenario because the evidence is that they are in a post-choice scenario, right?
	So people say these awful, terrible things about me when right on my website is a rebuttal to all the lies about me, right?
	A homepage of my website. Go there.
	What I believe. Boom. Everything I believe with receipts, with evidence from my Twitter, from everywhere, right?
	All the things I actually said, not the things that people have made up about me, right?
	So if people choose to believe falsehoods about me, it's because they can't be bothered to do any verification, right?
	Just believe lies, right?
	Okay. So if you're not willing to think for yourself, if you just uncritically...
	Accept criticisms of people no matter what, even when there's massive motives to be lied about, then you're in a post-choice scenario.
	In other words, if you don't expose yourself to alternate information, to opposing information, you have no free will.
	Free will is the wide embrace of contradictory data so you can think and choose for yourself.
	I mean, my whole life I was raised at McCarthy.
	Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin, was insane and persecuted people unjustly.
	It was a crazy witch hunt and he was just imagining things and he was just insane and paranoid.
	McCarthyism, it's a witch hunt.
	There are no witches. What are you, crazy?
	Okay, now if I had never exposed myself to any contradictory information, If I'd never said to myself, huh, okay, so who's in charge of the media?
	Well, pretty left-wing people.
	Do they want hardcore leftists exposed in the entertainment industry?
	Probably not. So, yeah, maybe it's not true.
	And you go and get the alternate information.
	Now, do I have a choice about my opinions about Joseph McCarthy if I never seek out any contradictory opinions?
	No. This is why they want controversial people, and controversial simply means going against the narrative that enslaves people.
	Why do they want contrarians off social media?
	Because if the contrarians are on social media, people get free will!
	Free will only opens up when you get contradictory information.
	Free will only opens up when you get contradictory information.
	I needed to be gone.
	And others needed to be gone so that people could be enslaved.
	Of course. Of course. How else could it possibly be?
	No information is no free will.
	So people who've done me wrong have never exposed themselves to contradictory information.
	And therefore they have no doubt.
	And because they have no doubt, they're programmed.
	Doubt is choice. Doubt is free will.
	Contradictual information, having to decide between two difficult things is free will.
	People persuasively arguing for this, people persuasively arguing against this gives you free will.
	There's no free will without that.
	Free speech and free will are the same thing.
	Free speech and free will are exactly the same thing.
	The First Amendment. Congress shall make no law regulating our capacity for free will.
	There's no such thing as hate speech translates into there's no such thing as legally programming human beings by denying them the contradictory information that gives them free will.
	There is no turning human beings into slave robots.
	Of one-sided propaganda!
	The destruction of free will is the destruction of humanity.
	Because what defines us as a species is our ability to analyze and synthesize and think and choose.
	And for that we need contradictory information.
	Arguments for, arguments against.
	Or empirical evidence there too.
	But often by the time the empirical evidence comes along it's too late.
	I've never seen any empirical evidence against gravity.
	No arguments against it.
	No empirical evidence, right?
	I mean one of my most famous videos was my So people could see there are two arguments here that contradict each other.
	Now, I think that one has more merit than the other, but when people say, I think it's more on the left than on the right, but when people say, well, I'm not going to honor this person by giving them a platform, I'm not going to legitimize them by debating them, well, everybody knows what that means.
	I'm not going to expose my Audience, say the leftists, to any information that might contradict the programming.
	Because then I can't control them.
	You see, if they get contradictory information, oh, I can't control them anymore.
	They can think for themselves.
	They have to reason, weigh, and balance.
	Oh, my God, that's hard.
	We can't have any of that going on.
	And that's why you see this monomania.
	This monomania. Like every time you see a modern show, there's a good guy and a bad guy.
	You know exactly which race is going to be the bad guy.
	You know exactly which race is going to be the good guy.
	I mean, it's so predictive. Because you can't give contradictory information, right?
	If you see a gay person, he's never going to be promiscuous.
	Just going to be in a stable, happy...
	Long-term, committed relationship, but you're just never going to see it.
	So how do I forgive people?
	Well, I say, okay, so they have never seen contradictory information, or if they do see any contradictory information, they're already programmed to say all contradictory information, all contradictory data, Now, they're just programmed that way, right?
	So, they either have chosen to avoid bad information, or they've never even accidentally tripped across it.
	Or they live in such a bubble that...
	And so there's no free will there.
	There's no free will. I mean, when you have a situation where some innocent man has been unjustly imprisoned and persecuted for his virtues by a totalitarian dictatorship.
	Okay? Clearly wrong. Absolutely immoral.
	So if he breaks out... You're like, yeah, good, run.
	Good for you, right? And everything becomes that.
	Everything becomes that. It's black and white, one-sided.
	So when people have done me significant wrong without giving me a chance to respond or a voice or a counter-argument or without consulting me, without asking me what my perspective is or anything like that, how do I forgive them?
	Well, they're not in a free will or choice-based scenario.
	They are programmed, right?
	I mean, if you're sitting napping on the sofa with your foot on the floor...
	And some Roomba comes and bumps up against your foot.
	Maybe hurts it a little, wakes you up.
	Do you get angry at the Roomba?
	I mean, you might be slightly annoyed, but you wouldn't view the Roomba as immoral.
	It's just doing its programming.
	This is earlier, but I said you can't know before you know.
	So you've got to look at the people around you.
	Look at the people in your life.
	Do they have access to contradictory information?
	How have they resolved it? And this is what programming is all about.
	If you expose yourself to contradictory information, you are evil.
	Even to be in the presence of contradictory information is evil.
	To even entertain the idea of being wrong is evil.
	It's very primitive, right?
	It's very primitive. I mean, this is an old Aristotelian maxim that it is the mark of an educated man or woman.
	To be able to entertain contradictory positions without agreeing with them.
	And when I was growing up, learning how to argue both sides of the argument was considered absolutely essential to having a remotely civilized brain.
	The pen is mightier than the sword.
	The sword is mightier than the pen.
	You had to be able to argue both sides.
	I have characters in my novels, or I will role-play with people in the call-in shows, whose characters Perspectives are repellent to me, repulsive to me, but I have to inhabit those people, figure out how they tick, and give them a voice in order to make the story compelling.
	Was it Air Force One, some old Harrison Ford movie?
	Was it Gary Oldman, who was the bad guy?
	The president says to him, you're a terrorist!
	And he says, you start a war over 10 cents a barrel of oil costs.
	This is the challenge. I did this show years ago, many years ago, probably 12 or 13 years ago.
	Where I said, international bodies had no real chance to be able to define what terrorism is without including their own foreign policy or military-industrial complexes in exactly what they were defining.
	It's very hard, right? So, the people who do me wrong, the way I view it, and I think there's good cases to be made, the people who do me wrong are in the amniotic sack of singular data, singular arguments, no opposition, no opponents, no challenges, and it's a...
	Low to midwit, absolute certainty of no contradiction.
	They are as certain of their moral positions as I am of gravity.
	And if anybody were to try to get me to not believe in gravity, they would be threatening my life.
	Because if I didn't believe in gravity, I wouldn't last for very long.
	So forgiveness Is saying, well, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
	They don't understand.
	That's silencing people with contradictory viewpoints who aren't abusive, right?
	I mean, I'm not talking about people who just say, you're an asshole and a Nazi.
	Okay, well, that's just abusive, right?
	You've got to have some... That's not... Contradictory data, that's just verbal abuse, right?
	I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who make a reasoned case, just banning them from social media.
	I'm not necessarily talking about individual forums, I'm just, you know, because that's just one place, but from social media as a whole.
	There are people who make reasoned arguments, contradictory information.
	I mean, people have made cases in places I've seen.
	I vehemently disagree with the case that they're making, but they're making it in a reasonable way with evidence, not being abusive.
	It's like, okay, I don't agree with it.
	I think it's Terrible argument.
	It's a horrible argument, but they're not abusive.
	So how do I forgive people?
	They don't know what they're doing.
	They're programmed. I forgive them.
	Forgiveness doesn't even really apply any more than it would to a machine, if that makes any sense, because people who just are told everything, they believe everything, they're punished if they deviate, they're indoctrinated, they view any exposure to contradictory information as the equivalent of the holodomor or whatever, and so, I mean, what are you going to say? There's almost nothing to forgive, because they don't have choice, because they don't have choice.
	Information. And there's really nothing to forgive, in my opinion.
	So you move on. Just like you don't come home every day and curse the rumba for bumping your toe, right?
	You just move on with your life.
	Recognize that, you know, and maybe at some point in the future people will get contradictory information, although doubtful, right?
	When people have been demoralized and propagandized to such a degree, contradictory information is like a moral test that they have to overcome in order to maintain their purity death spiral.
	So... Contradictory information tends to make people harden their irrationalities, right?
	Because it becomes then a test.
	And this is an evolutionary thing, right?
	It's an evolutionary thing. One of the reasons people get so tense when you bring up contradictory information to them is that in the past you could be an agent of the king, right?
	So in the past you had to worship the king as placed there by God.
	The king was to question God.
	And maybe you'd be in a bar, right?
	You know, in the 15th century in England, he'd be in the bar.
	And somebody would say, I think the king is wrong about X, Y, Z, or A, B, C. And maybe he'd say, yeah, I agree with you.
	And they'd be like, hey, man, sorry, I'm an agent of the king, up against the wall.
	So, yeah, do they have a choice?
	Do they have free will? I would say not.
	Oh, thank you, David. Somebody said, the future was great.
	That's my book called The Future.
	Steph, you have the best voice for audiobooks I have heard.
	Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.
	I appreciate that. I worked very hard, very hard on that audiobook.
	And I think, listening back to it, I think I got it just right.
	So, yeah. And lots of little detail in that audiobook.
	Lots of little details of inflection that really only shows up later.
	Alright, let's do a couple more.
	A couple more? Let's say.
	Is it worth trying to fix relationships with a sibling that used to be abusive both physically and emotionally towards me?
	Should I take the first step and see what happens?
	I don't want to do the heavy lifting alone, of course.
	I'm the youngest. He was the middle child.
	We didn't even talk for about 10 plus years, but have reconnected through humor and memes in recent years.
	I'm somehow... Not that angry at him.
	However, I hate my older sibling and my mother with a passion, the chief bullies, to a lesser extent my father as well.
	Seems to me that we were pitted against each other, and he took on the role of camp guard.
	If he didn't mistreat me, he'd be punished.
	I don't even remember why we hated each other.
	Well, see, I don't know whether it's worth trying to fix a relationship with a sibling who used to be abusive, physically and emotionally.
	I mean, I do understand that he was a child, and therefore he was far less responsible for what he did.
	But not totally irresponsible, like not totally unresponsible for what he did, right?
	Because he obviously knew he didn't want to be bullied, and knowing that bullying you was painful to you, he had some moral responsibility as far as all of that goes.
	But I don't know.
	I mean, for me, just my experience, right?
	Not to say it's yours, just my experience.
	My experience is this.
	I'm a clean slate kind of guy.
	I'm a clean slate kind of guy.
	Can you imagine trying to compose music while listening to music?
	Right? It'd be pretty tough.
	Could I... You know, I wrote...
	I picked specific music to listen to.
	Music without lyrics, of course.
	I picked specific music to listen to while I was writing in the future.
	Some classical music for the Civ.
	I chose heavy delta blues guitar for the wilderness and for Roman at the tribe.
	And so, you know, there's things that you, but that's because it's just music.
	It helps me sort of unlock the emotional creativity.
	So I don't think you could really imagine trying to work on a math problem with somebody screaming various numbers into your ear.
	It just wouldn't really work, right?
	So I'm a clean slate kind of guy.
	The relationships that have worked in my life are the relationships without a history of abuse.
	I don't have anyone in my life who abused me in the past.
	I don't. I just don't have anyone in my life who abused me in the past.
	Now, I don't know whether that's impossible.
	I mean, people who abused me in the past, not one of them has.
	And not only the people who abused me, but the people who ignored the abuse of me in the past or never talked to me about it or wouldn't listen about it.
	Or kind of bypassed or ignored it or downplayed it or minimized it or whatever.
	Remember, there was a family that was very important to me growing up.
	And in my late 20s, I ran into the mother and she's like, how is your poor mother doing?
	Yeah, well, didn't ask, how was your childhood?
	Must have been rough. Just, you know, redirecting sympathy towards my mother.
	Sorry, but that's not going to help, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, because I mean...
	For me, why would I want to try and fix a historically abusive, traumatic relationship when I could start a relationship based on shared values with no history of abuse?
	See, here's the thing.
	You want to be in the free market of relationships as much as possible.
	Now, I parent, as I've always said, I parent as if my daughter were given the choice of any father in the world, she would choose me.
	That's how I parent. I've told her that.
	That's If you could trade me in for anyone, I'd want you to say, no, no, he's the guy.
	He's the guy I want to be my dad.
	Why? Well, because that's going to happen, right?
	She doesn't have to, you know, she turns 18 or whatever and moves out.
	She never has to call me, never has to have any contact with me again.
	Of course, she could just send me messages.
	Hey, man, you said family relations are voluntary.
	I was like, yes, they are.
	Adult family relations are voluntary.
	So if I treat it as a free market relationship from the very beginning, then it will survive the free market that is to come.
	In other words, if I treat her as if she could leave at any time, replace me at any time, then when she can replace me or not see me, she won't want to.
	It's the same thing with the traditional thing that happens in marriage.
	Is that, you know, I just talked from the man's perspective, right?
	So the man woos the woman, loves the woman.
	Oh, we're dating, there's flowers, and we go to nice restaurants, and I write your poems, and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Because it's voluntary, trying to woo the woman.
	Like, ah, locked in, married, right?
	Now I don't have to be as romantic, I don't have to be as nice, I don't have to be thoughtful, because, you know, she's locked in.
	It's no longer a free market relationship.
	It's like some government contract.
	Well, I guess it is a government contract, right?
	But if you treat your wife...
	Like, every day she could just choose to walk out the door, then you've got to make every day positive, enjoyable, and valuable to her.
	That she is having a better day because you're in it.
	Make her laugh, make her happy, have a great conversation with her, tell her how much you love her, ask her if she feels loved.
	That's my big question to my wife.
	Did you feel loved, treasured, and adored today?
	And I want her to say every day, do you feel loved, treasured, and adored?
	Because you are. So if you keep the free market in all your relationships, look, I mean, this is why I'm 16 years, I'm still, I'm trying to give you guys something new every time, every show.
	I try to give you something new because it's the same old, same old.
	Sorry, we're all too high IQ to be Enticed and entranced by repetition, right?
	Something new. Something new.
	Something you can't get anywhere else.
	Because you guys can go anywhere.
	You can support anyone you want.
	You don't have to listen to what I'm saying at all.
	So I gotta woo you, gotta win you.
	Because you can.
	Walk right out of this conversation anytime you want.
	Never come back. So yeah, if you treat your relationships in your life as free market relationships, That's the highest quality you can possibly get.
	So, yeah, I don't try to build my house on sand, but rather on rock.
	So if you had a multi-decade abusive relationship with your brother or, I don't know, 20 years, 20 years abusive relationship, and it was your 20 years of first impressions, maybe you can fix it.
	Maybe he's going to apologize.
	Maybe he's going to get therapy. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.
	Or, or you could find a compatible friend and start with a clean slate without all of this baggage and weights and problems and trauma and, right?
	Maybe. I don't know what the answer is to that.
	For me, the answer has been like, no, no, I, life's too short to try and, you know, it's like a friend of mine.
	I was just telling my daughter about a friend of mine when I was younger.
	He used to do all of the illustrations for our Dungeons and Dragons.
	And he did really hilarious cartoons about our Dungeons and Dragons characters.
	Really funny guy.
	He actually became an artist.
	Very good. Anyway, so his family bought a boat.
	Now there's lots of things I understand in the world.
	Lots of things I don't understand in the world.
	And some things I know I will never understand in the world.
	One thing I will never understand in this world is owning a boat.
	Don't get it. Thought about it.
	I've known people who own boats.
	Been on boats. Like them, but owning one?
	But hey, we've been down this canal before.
	Let's do it again.
	It's like driving up and down the same road over again.
	Oh, I know. Oh, you can get these sailboats.
	A guy I worked with used to sail all the Barbados and the Bahamas.
	He used to sail all around the Caribbean.
	Ah, fantastic. I'd love to meet you.
	I can give you a place or a date.
	I just can't give you both at the same time.
	He took his kids. It's one of the things that helped me to understand that you can live a life that's kind of different.
	He's like, ah, you know, I was in the army for a while.
	I got a pension.
	You know, I think I'm just going to quit doing this.
	I'm going to sail around the Caribbean for a couple of years, finish up homeschooling my kids.
	Like, okay, that's kind of different.
	I didn't know anyone when I was growing up who could do that.
	But just sailing around the Caribbean.
	Hey, remember that island we went to last month?
	Let's go back there again.
	What's anything different?
	Nope. Water's still blue.
	Sky's still blue. Oh, but on the way, we might have a giant storm that could kill us.
	So, yeah, owning boats.
	And I don't mean to disrespect anybody who owned boats.
	You know, there's some people who don't know why I need five different microphones, but I do.
	So I get it. It's just, I don't get it.
	I don't get the boat thing. I don't get the boat thing.
	I love sailing boats.
	Fantastic. You know, being on a sailing boat and it's quiet, you're hissing through the water, leaning off the side.
	Fantastic. I've done it once or twice in my life.
	A friend of mine, it was Toronto.
	It's real nice. So you take your boat out.
	Go out into Lake Ontario and come back.
	And it's the same view every time.
	It's the same place you're going every time, going and coming back.
	But I'm not the one for the same thing over and over again.
	So, again, my friend, when I was younger, the artist, his family bought a boat.
	And we used to be able to do stuff on the weekend, my friend and I. And then, after his family bought the boat, I really couldn't do much with the guy.
	Do you know why? Because the boat had sunk again.
	Oh, it's half underwater.
	We've got to go bail it out. We've got to dry it out.
	We've got to repaint and reseal.
	Great! We spent all weekend getting the boat back up.
	Hey, let's do something this weekend.
	Ah, I can't, man. Boat's found a leak again.
	So they had this boat, and the joke was they never got to sail it.
	Never got to put it around anywhere.
	And I visited him on the boat.
	I went to the boat. I'm like, dude, I'm not an expert.
	This thing does look kind of low in the water.
	Just like a little low in the water.
	I mean, it's like down at the level of those muscle-backed rowers.
	My dad was one. Rowed in his youth.
	Rowed in his old age.
	Rowed in his own age. You know, like, right low on the water, right?
	If anybody has one more French fry, they're going to sink.
	Half a submarine with giant Spartacus slave muscles powering its arrow way through the water.
	So my friend had a boat, and all the boat did was sink.
	And all they did was try and resuscitate the boat and get it above water.
	Probably still doing it, for all I know.
	But this weekend, man, it's going to stay up!
	So the whole boat ownership experience was trying to fix the boat, trying to get the boat to work, trying to get the boat to stay above water.
	Why do you want a relationship like that?
	Just get a boat that floats and go somewhere.
	I don't know. These relationships are always fixing things, you know?
	What a waste of time. Gotta rescue out of 20 years of abuse and dysfunction and mess.
	You could. I mean, look, if you're married and you've got kids, yeah, okay, you work on your relationship.
	But these, you know, relationships are work.
	No, they're not. No, work is work.
	Relationships are fun. Work is work.
	Relationships are intimate. But these people who...
	Always fixing their relationships.
	Got big problems in their relationships.
	Got to repair the relationship. Relationships at work.
	You ever get to sail this boat?
	Nope. Just try and keep it from sinking all the way.
	Frantically paddling and bailing.
	That's all we do. Paddle and bail.
	Get anywhere? Nope. It's kind of tragic, right?
	All right, let's do one or two more.
	What is the root cause of bullying, especially in the school setting, regardless of gender, of the abuser slash victim?
	Yeah, so, I mean, boys bully with violence, and girls bully with reputational destruction, which is, you know, what goes on these days, right?
	It's a female fault, right?
	So, the root cause of bullying is an inability to experience humiliation, which therefore must be passed on to someone else.
	Like, you know, the game of hot potato.
	You get a real hot potato, and whoever holds it, they're not going to pass it from person to person.
	Boy, that's pre-video games, eh?
	So, yeah, root cause of bullying.
	So if you're bullied, you experience humiliation.
	If you can handle the humiliation, then you work to avoid the bully.
	If you refuse to handle the humiliation, it's got to go somewhere, so you have to inflict it on someone else.
	Let's see here. Steph, at this point, do you even believe people when they say their parents and their childhoods were great?
	I know we should be empirical and not just assume, but having listened to countless call-in shows, I now believe almost no one.
	Same with privacy in real life conversations I've had about this topic.
	People often lie and protect their family's shame.
	Okay, remember, call-in shows are not a random sampling of humanity, right?
	These are people who are in, you know, some significant challenges, and oftentimes they're family-related.
	So don't assume that the call—I mean, to take a silly example, right?
	It's like if you sit in the doctor's waiting room all day, you say, oh, my God, everyone here—humanity is sick.
	They're all ill. They're all needy.
	It's like, well, no, this is not— You know, if you sit in the ER all day, it's like, oh my god, there's so many disasters in the world.
	Everyone's falling and damaging and injured and overdoses.
	It's not a random sample, right?
	So the call-in show is very proud of them, very happy, very happy that people want to call in.
	If you want to call in, just call in at freedomain.com.
	But yeah, happy childhood these days is pretty tough, man.
	I mean, I think my daughter's having a very happy childhood that's going to be with attendant challenges of fitting into people who are miserable when she's an adult.
	So that's a challenge, right?
	So... I mean, I'm skeptical, but it doesn't mean I'm not willing to be convinced.
	All right. Dear Seth, my best friend is cheating on his girlfriend for seven years with prostitutes.
	They're getting married next month.
	I've talked with him about it, and it seems fine from his side.
	What do you think about this behavior?
	Will their marriage last? That's trawling, right?
	I assume that can't be. Somebody said there are two days where you're happy with your boat, the day you buy it and the day you sell it.
	Yeah. Hi, maintenance.
	How are you doing? So, it's also, I guess, people who don't have much conversation need endless hobbies, right?
	No, this is a troll thing, right?
	He's cheating on his girlfriend of seven years with prostitutes.
	They're getting married next month.
	I mean, to be frank, how trashy is your life that this is your best friend?
	Like, I don't know, you've got to wake up and look at the people you're spending your life with and say, what does this say about me?
	I don't particularly care about your best friend, but I do care about you, type this question in.
	There's a wake-up call, right?
	There's a wake-up call to say, Why am I around such horrifying people?
	What is in it for you?
	This is your best friend cheating on his girlfriend with prostitutes, risking danger from, I mean, just look at Cardi B, right?
	Risking dangers from prostitutes, violence, beating up pimps, getting roofied, drugged, bringing home STDs to his girlfriend, getting involved in some criminal, or being blackmailed, right?
	Everyone videos, everyone can record, getting blackmailed.
	What are you doing with these people in your life?
	I can't fathom that.
	Sorry, that's just so far away from anything that I know.
	I really can't fathom that.
	I'm a new father to a five-month-old boy, and me and my wife couldn't be happier.
	Wonderful. Congratulations, my friend.
	Do you have any advice on how best to help him develop his leaning skills?
	Leaning? I assume learning.
	Particularly up to around a year old.
	Just want to make sure we are doing all we can for him in those early months.
	I would not... Particularly focus on his learning skills.
	If he's a couple of months old, just enjoy his company, enjoy his curiosity, and show him things and talk about them and all that.
	So I wouldn't focus on his learning skills that much.
	Focus on his intimacy skills, his touch and feel and caresses and cuddling and breastfeeding and all that.
	Focus on the connection skills or the connection algorithms in the brain, so to speak.
	But the good news is that the intelligence of your child is...
	Largely outside of your control, right?
	It's majorly genetic, right?
	I mean, you wouldn't sit there and say, you know, what advice can we give?
	Can you give so that our child will be taller?
	It's like, well, obviously he needs to have enough food, but yeah, other than that, it's kind of out of your hand.
	His wisdom you have something to do with, but he's too early for that.
	But as far as his end-up intelligence, not a huge amount.
	All right, so I think we'll stop here.
	Yeah, yeah, two hours. Woo-hoo!
	Somebody says, I do one more.
	I always feel the need to be productive.
	I really enjoy getting something important done.
	Is it possible that my overbearing parents trained me to always need to be productive?
	Or is it possible I'm just super motivated?
	I'm trying to figure out where my behavior comes from, and I want to know if it's me or them.
	No, it's not just you or them.
	It could be, right? It's you're a male.
	Like, I'm sorry, that's just what we do.
	You know this cliche, right?
	When it says, oh yeah, my husband, he retired, and after like two months, he was going mental, and he was driving me crazy.
	So I'm just like, I'm on my knees begging him to get a part-time job or just do something, for God's sakes, because He was just kind of driving me crazy.
	So whether you like it or not, as a male, you're just kind of programmed to gain value out of doing things.
	So women, when they're younger, not being able to do things is kind of charming.
	If you see the romantic comedies, the women are like, Klutzy and incompetent.
	It's kind of a neoteny, like a childhood thing.
	And there's this thing that women do, like none of the women in my life, but you see the women do this all the time.
	You know, maybe it's a little meme thing or it's on videos or whatever, right?
	They just do something ridiculous and stupid and they just turn around, their shoulders go up, their hand goes to their mouth like, tee-hee-hee!
	This giggly shit, it just drives me nuts.
	It's like, I'm incompetent.
	I made a huge mistake.
	It's funny. And of course, they can get away with it because they're young and they're pretty and people don't want to contradict them or, you know, just say, why are you laughing about something you just did really badly?
	That's not cute. That just shows you're incompetent.
	And That's not just because you're incompetent, because you somehow think that laughing...
	Because as a man, you can't do that, right?
	As a man, if you're on a baseball team and you miss an important hit, you don't just turn around and go, tee-hee-hee, and giggle and shrug.
	You can see these women swim a golf club and the golf club flies out of their hands.
	Again, I'm not saying it's common, but it certainly happens quite a bit.
	Not super common. So we don't get to do that, right?
	We don't get to do that. But there's Ace Ventura, the very first Ace Ventura movie.
	It's like some guy misses a shot, and he choked, and he misses a shot, and football loses the Super Bowl or whatever, right?
	And people are angry about this like 10 years later, 20 years later.
	He ends up in an insane asylum, blah, blah, blah, right?
	I mean, according to the... Oh, no, according to the story, right?
	So, you know, he messes up one time and that's it, right?
	That's it for him forever, right?
	So, I mean, it's part of the disrespect we show to women to treat them like children in this way, but I understand why it happens, right?
	So, you know, we got to be productive.
	Women, when they're younger, they can afford to be ornamental.
	They can afford to make mistakes and they can giggle their way out of it.
	We men can't do that.
	We've got a civilization to run.
	We've got houses to build. We've got air conditioning to maintain.
	We've got machines that go ping to keep people alive and hospitals to do.
	We've got books to write. We've got philosophies to develop.
	We've got roads to build.
	We've got engines to create.
	We've got environmental issues to solve.
	We've got stuff to do.
	The list for men is endless.
	Now, women, again, younger, they can afford to be ornamental.
	Of course, they've got to be good moms, and it's very tough to be a mom, and it's tough to be pregnant.
	I get a lot of sympathy.
	But yeah, you're a man, so when we're not doing stuff, it's really hard to feel like we have a sense of value.
	Like, we're just programmed that way.
	Maybe you can find some way out of it or over it, but I've never had any luck with that.
	I'm not really sure that I want to, because I kind of like being productive and doing things that hopefully will last the test of time and all of that.
	So yeah, it's just a dude thing, and I don't know that there's any particular way out of it other than the grave.
	Like, I know. I've known women.
	I've known women who are like, yeah, I just, you know, I got tired of this job.
	I'm just going to live on my savings for a while.
	Now, as a man, as men, we're generally very critically measuring out resources all the time.
	And again, I know women do this.
	Maybe it's 51%, 49%, whatever, right?
	It's just a thing. And I'm like, uh, really?
	What's your plan?
	Just get a Quit your job and live on...
	It's like, what's your plan here? What's going to happen?
	What are you going to do with your time?
	Oh, you know, maybe I'll write a book or...
	I don't know. I just watched all 10 seasons of Friends again.
	That was fun. And it's just like, oh my God.
	Oh my God. I'm getting anxious even just thinking about this.
	Oh, my mom. She's done nothing productive for 30 years.
	Okay with it. Again, I've known some men who are in this category as well, but they tend to be not all there cognitively.
	So... Yeah, like if you're a dude, sorry, we get up and we're just on this conveyor belt of getting things done.
	Just on this conveyor belt of getting things done.
	Setting goals, achieving goals, making things, creating things.
	We just can't be at rest and feel valuable.
	Like, it's just how we're programmed.
	It's like, you know, the wildebeest, right?
	The wildebeest, they've got to roam all over the continent, right?
	They've got to roam all over Africa.
	They've got to just roam. Like the butterflies, the swallows, the geese, it's all over the place, thousands of miles.
	They've got to roam, right? Now you can hold them where they are, but their instincts are to get the hell out of dodge when it gets cold.
	And man's instincts, we are the Roman wildebeest of productivity.
	It's just the way things are.
	It's just the way things are.
	We're like sharks. Sharks don't have a bladder, right?
	They're their bladder that allows fish to just hang their motionless.
	So sharks is move or die.
	I mean, there's nurse sharks or whatever.
	A couple of sharks in the shallows could rest on the sandy bottom.
	But any deep water shark that keeps swimming...
	Or they fall and get crushed by the pressure.
	It takes an hour to drop down Mariana Trench, right?
	So sharks move or die.
	Men, productive or horror?
	Right. We have to be productive or we just feel worthless.
	And, you know, maybe it's some big Zen thing that we could overcome, but God help us if we overcome it, right?
	There won't be a civilization left in about three days.
	So, yeah, that's just the way things are as I see it or certainly in my experience.
	So, all right. Thank you everyone so much for a wonderful evening and great questions and comments.
	I will be back on Sunday, I hope.
	I hope, I hope. And freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	If you want to join a great community, freedomain.locals.com, a really nice place to chat and engage with people.
	And if you subscribe there, you get my new book called The Future, which is getting rave reviews.
	And I think you will really, really like.
	It is definitely what we are all fighting and aiming for.
	Have yourselves a wonderful evening.
	Lots of love from up here. Big kisses.

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