Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 30, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:21:19

HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT FEAR AND REGRET!

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey everybody, how are you doing?
	It's Steph. Good evening.
	Oh my gosh, it's near the end of the month, the 29th of July, 2022.
	You know, it's funny, I just this afternoon listened to a presentation I did 11 years ago, back in 2011.
	There's no such thing as mental illness, where I talk about the lack of medical evidence for any kind of, you know, serotonin deficiency or anything like that.
	And as I have said repeatedly, I do have to wait a little bit for the world to catch up with the blinding speed of thought that characterizes this community.
	So, yeah, I posted that on Locals, freedomain.locals.com.
	And I hope that you will check it out.
	Boy, I was a fresh-faced and optimistic young lad back then, wasn't I?
	It's a beautiful thing.
	I'm not saying I'm exactly the same.
	I'm just saying I'm different.
	So, yeah, I hope you're having a great evening.
	And somebody posted and said that they wanted to talk about the difficulties of caring for an aging parent who they've had significant negative experiences with.
	But that parent is in the next room.
	So, hope you've got headphones on.
	Hope you do, because I wanted to share a couple of thoughts about this.
	I think the way that you overcome resentment to people, against people, if you've had a difficult parent and so on, is you try and take as many positives with the minuses as possible.
	You try and take as many positives with the minuses as possible.
	Now, I mean, there's not really much.
	What has I said to my family that I want to be reincarnated as my own kid?
	But one of the things that helps me have some peace and ease with my own childhood is the recognition that I don't have to take care of aging parents.
	You know, my parents didn't take care of me when I was a kid.
	And, you know, if you put your kids in daycare, they can put you in a nursing home.
	That's just the way of the world.
	That's the way of life, the pendulum.
	I think the real resentment and rage and paralysis comes along when you say, well, they treated me terribly, but I have to return love for hatred and commitment to indifference and intimacy to neglect.
	Well, that seems to be a very bad deal.
	I have some friends who are dealing with aging parents.
	You know, we're at that age, right?
	I mean, I remember one of my business partners told me once, he said, Well, in your 40s, you get teeth problems.
	And in your 50s, your parents get sick.
	And, you know, that's kind of the thing, right?
	And you can spend a lot of time on this.
	A lot of time on this, dealing with aging parents and health issues.
	And especially if it's something brain degenerative or dementia in someone, that can be really, really tough.
	And look, if you have parents that you love and who love you and you've got a good relationship...
	My heart goes out to you.
	I just think it's a very difficult thing to go through, and I applaud you if you commit to taking care of your parents in these difficult times, and if you return love for love, good for you.
	I think that's wonderful. I think that's magnificent.
	I kneel before your image.
	That's, I mean, not how it is for me.
	For me, it's like, okay, well, my childhood blew chunks, but...
	At least, and I remember thinking this pretty early on, I remember saying, well, you know, it sucks right now, and it's going to suck for a long time, like an interstellar vacuum, but one of the things I do get is...
	I don't have to take care of them when they get older.
	And, you know, when you're a kid, that seems like a long way off.
	And yet, inevitably, here it is.
	I remember as a kid thinking, oh my gosh, the year 2000, I'll be 34.
	That just seems like, you know, 34 is 21 years of the rear view.
	And actually, I'm going to be 56.
	In less than two months.
	It'll be 56 in less than two months.
	But, you know, the good thing about surviving cancer, you never regret every extra year.
	I mean, whether you do or don't, whatever you've survived in your life, you simply don't regret the extra time.
	So, yeah, it sucks to have a bad childhood.
	And if you don't end up loving your parents, and we cannot love evil.
	We cannot love those who didn't take care of us.
	We may have a sense of weighty obligation.
	There may be some abstract moral principle.
	That means we have to take care of them.
	But as far as UPB goes, as morality goes, no.
	Justice demands that we pay what people have earned.
	And if they have earned our love, we pay them in love.
	If they have earned our indifference, we repay them with indifference.
	That's justice. That's just speaking truth.
	Honesty. You know, honesty is the first virtue.
	I've always said that. Honesty is the first virtue.
	And, you know, with my own family, when...
	I sort of looked into my heart, looked into the mirror, and looked at them.
	I'm like, do I like these people?
	Would I voluntarily, of my own accord, spend time?
	Do I like these people?
	And, you know, when you peel away all of the propaganda, you peel away all the sophistry, you peel away all of the rank and often socially imposed sentimentality, then what you get is just some honesty, just some truth.
	Do I like these people? And philosophy is all about blank slate.
	It's all about, you know, wipe it all clean.
	Let's pretend we know nothing and start from scratch.
	That's what philosophy is.
	Pretend I know nothing. Because mostly you get lied to in life.
	Mostly you get lied to.
	And it's that, you know, house empty principle like everyone lies.
	Yeah, most people are lying. Most people aren't conscious that they're lying.
	Most people might be even able to pass a lie detector if questioned about whether they were lying.
	But lying they are.
	Because if you don't make a strict effort and a strenuous effort to find the truth, the resulting falsehoods are all on you.
	All on you.
	So yeah, just look into your heart and say, do I like these people?
	Now, if there are people in your life that you don't like, and there's probably no one in your life you're really indifferent to, but if there's someone in your life that you don't like or people in your life that you don't like, they're keeping the good people away.
	They're keeping the good people away.
	So, I have one parent down, one to go.
	My mother is certainly very old now.
	One is down in the ground, and one is still up, though probably one foot.
	And, yeah, I can tell you I don't feel any regrets.
	I mean, occasionally I will sort of feel sad, like it wasn't different, it wasn't better, especially knowing the relationship that I have with my child.
	But... I don't.
	This regret curse, this voodoo curse of regret that everybody said was imminent at incoming, no.
	It has not happened. It is an empty curse.
	And so the other thing, listen, get ready with your questions.
	If you want to ask questions, have criticisms, comments, whatever you like, whatever's on your mind, I'm happy to help.
	I also wanted to mention, I guess, two things.
	One... You may have heard the news.
	So I talked about this years ago, that Russia was accumulating gold, accumulating gold.
	Look at that. Whiplash with the topic change, right?
	Accumulating gold. It has been for the last 20 years.
	And that's because, you see, Russia is very wise in the direction that America's heading in, because Russia went in that same direction, though in a much more accelerated fashion in the past.
	So they know. They know where this woke road leads.
	And so Russia has been accumulating gold because the U.S. reserve currency, which is built on $30 trillion of debt and $180 trillion of unfunded liabilities, well, it goes the way of the dodo, as all of these fiat currencies do over time.
	I did a presentation many years ago called The Short Unhappy Life of Fiat Currencies.
	You can look for it at fdrpodcasts.com.
	So Russia has now teamed up with China.
	Because while everyone in the West is arguing about pronouns, the real politic, the real...
	Dark-hearted mammal movers in the world stage are just kind of stepping over this incessant, ridiculous squabbling where people are like, oh, did you know that Wikipedia, apparently the icon of truth, Wikipedia, they've changed and edited the definition of recession so that it's not two quarters of consecutive decline in the economy.
	They've now changed it. I think they also changed the definition of definition.
	So while we're playing all of these silly language games to redefine things, That we don't like or argue about pronouns.
	I mean, realpolitik, like the chilly, amoral, interstellar space between countries, well, they're all doing their movements.
	And the people squabbling over the nothing burgers that constitute woke moral crises aren't going to be aware of this.
	They're not going to be informed of this because nobody wants to, you know, the people who want things to fail don't want you to Look up from your petty squabbling and look actually at some real issues.
	So China and Russia have teamed up together and they are creating a new reserve currency.
	This new reserve currency is going to be based on hard minerals, right?
	Minerals out of the ground. It could be a variety of minerals, a basket of minerals, I suppose.
	Chief among which will be gold, depending on what happens in Uganda, where they found apparently the amount of gold that's ever been mined has been found in Uganda.
	But they'll find something. It will certainly be more limited than the U.S. dollar is, which is only limited by the overheating of the printing press.
	And so the stagflation that currently characterizes the U.S. economy with very high interest rates and very high inflation, those two, of course, according to Keynesian theory, should never occur together and last occurred together during the hellscape of the economy known as the Jimmy Carter years.
	Well, they're creating a new reserve currency, and everybody's going to look to abandon ship, and at some point, people are going to have to write off their U.S. loans, their U.S. debts, and then the demand for the U.S. dollar is going to collapse, foreign trade is going to collapse, the economy is going to take a real blow, to put it mildly.
	And then, in the short, sharp shock of reality suddenly realigning itself, suddenly reasserting itself is a better way of putting it, people will begin to wake up from their dogmatic slumber.
	Fussing over inconsequentialities is only possible when you are lost in the psychosis of infinite resources.
	You're lost in the madness of infinite resources.
	You can fuss over nothing if you think you have all the money in the universe and will live forever.
	There's no need to prioritize.
	There's no need to stack relative threats.
	And when you are getting Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers kicked out of the military for not taking the vaccine, and I assume that these are the people who were the most independent, the most leadership-oriented, the ones most willing to examine information for themselves.
	Whether you think it's right or whether you think it's wrong, they're certainly taking a principled stand, like it or not.
	And at a time of the U.S. military is being crippled and People are arguing over nothing burgers.
	Massive subterranean earthquake movements are taking place in international finance that will change the landscape very suddenly and very considerably.
	Saudi Arabia is engaging in the most astounding feats of engineering at the moment.
	And that used to be America.
	It used to be America that would lead the way in all these things back in the 50s and 60s.
	But no more.
	But no more. Now we have opened the portals of higher education to everybody with a government loan, and the quality of education has deteriorated proportionately, and the dumbing down continues.
	So, yeah, that's something really important.
	The last thing I wanted to ask is a question I asked the other night in the Locals livestream.
	So if you miss the call-in shows, and I will be releasing some over the next little while, it's kind of tough because I produce a lot of material, and...
	If I have a long call-in show, like let's say I just released a two-hour live stream, the next day I release a three-hour call-in show.
	Well, that's tough.
	It's a lot of material and I don't want to overburden people with what they can possibly listen to because then people just say, oh, I'll listen to that later and then kind of forget about it.
	So I like to leave the longer call-in shows for a time when there's a bit more of a drought.
	But if you want some seriously spicy call-in shows, man, there are over 150 of them.
	In the subscriber section at Locals, right?
	So freedomain.locals.com.
	You can subscribe there. You get my new book, The Future, my Atlas Shrugged, my all-knowledge compression into an incredible story.
	So that's The Future.
	You can get it at freedomain.locals.com and you get also 150-odd I don't do commercials on this show.
	So if you've listened to 100, 200 shows, I've saved you days and days and days of commercial time that you haven't had to skip over, you haven't had to listen to the repetition, you haven't had the flow of thought interrupted.
	But that does require your support and your help.
	So freedomain.com slash donate.
	You can support me that way.
	I would really appreciate it. Or if you want to join a very good community with good Q&As and good back and forth, freedomain.locals.com.
	And if there's anything that I can do to make the show better for you, Anything that I can do to make the show better for you, I will do it if it's within my power and in alignment with good morals.
	Not that you would ask me to do anything that wasn't within good morals, but I will work my very best to make the show as satisfying as humanly possible for you.
	Because it's not like the old Sandra Bernhardt thing.
	Without you, I'm nothing. It's not that.
	I'm still something. I've got a family and friends and all of that.
	But these conversations, boy, just don't happen without you.
	And it's kind of funny because, as I said, I was listening to a show of mine from 11 years ago.
	And I almost never really go back and re-listen unless there's some urgent reason to.
	But it's really wild just how live-streaming Has improved what I do.
	Now, we did call-in shows in the past, and way back in the day, you could get Skype conference calls with people coming and going and talking and not talking and so on.
	But the live streaming with the instant feedback, boy, that is something else.
	And that, I think, has really evoked and provoked within me some of the best work I've ever done.
	So thank you so much for tuning in and listening and having questions and comments.
	Now, that's it for me.
	So if you have something you want to say, just raise your hand and I will grant you the lordly permission for speech.
	All right.
	Let's see here. Somebody says, I used to feel bad for my parents until my father said in a drunken rage that he doesn't care if I end up in a tent city and he hates my effing philosophy shit.
	Hard to care for someone after they say that.
	You know, you never really know if you're interacting with the original person.
	I've thought of this with regards to my parents.
	I obviously don't have any particular details of their medical history, but I do know that my mother was institutionalized, and I assume when she was institutionalized, she was loaded up with psychotropic drugs.
	And she was pretty wild before then, but after then, man, she couldn't go back to work and things were seriously fried in the upper circuitry.
	And how much of any of my original mother was left after that hailstorm of psychotropics?
	I don't know. It can do some real damage to people, I think, in my personal opinion.
	So... If you've got a drunken dad, how much is left after the alcohol tide has receded?
	If it ever does recede.
	Is it the person talking?
	Is it the addiction talking? Is it the alcohol talking?
	Is it the withdrawal or the delirium tremens talking?
	Are you actually talking to the person?
	Are you actually talking to the person or are you talking to what their bad habits have invited in to inhabit them?
	This demonic possession.
	You mess around enough with the Ouija boards and the pentagrams.
	Up comes Beelzebub with his hand up your ass to make you say terrible things and rotate your head around 360.
	In an analogous way, if people get involved in some really demonic ideology, ideology is characterized by giving you permission to hate.
	Not just giving you permission, encouraging you to hate.
	It slices off A big chunk of the pie called evildoers and then calls you virtuous for hating them, as if hatred was a virtue.
	Now, hatred against somebody who's physically threatening you in the moment, hatred against somebody who's directly undermining your own personal interests, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, that's different because that's self-defense.
	But hatred of an entire collective who are not characterized by Violence themselves.
	You know, hatred of conservatives is sort of the big new thing, hatred of Christians, hatred of whites, and so on.
	Well, these are not categories that define any particular kind of aggression or violence or even inclination there too.
	In fact, quite the opposite in many ways.
	So, yeah, you're talking to somebody who's been demonically inhabited by ideology and has been seduced into doing the dance of the virtue of hatred.
	Ah, these people I can take all of my frustration, all of my fear, all of my being in over my head, which is very often the case with people these days, right?
	People who shouldn't be in university or in university, people who shouldn't be in top positions or senior positions or in top and senior positions for a variety of reasons, and people just feel overwhelmed.
	And with that overwhelmedness comes a frustration and a desire to lash out, particularly if you have a more primitive personality type or have less self-knowledge.
	And then along comes the devil called ideology that says, oh, you can discharge all of your hatred and anger on this particular group and boy, you'll feel better.
	And the more you do that, the more conformist you become, the more satisfaction and relief you get from your own inner demons, the more conformist and eventually the more empty you become.
	Permission to hate, encouragement to hate, the virtue of hatred characterizes ideology.
	You divide people into those who are usually the most peaceful Because you'll notice, I mean, you'll notice, right, that the people who are most targeted by hatred these days tend to be the most peaceful people.
	The people who have, who you risk the least by attacking, right?
	So, you take people who, say Christians, who say love your enemy and turn the other cheek and return love for hatred and Walk the extra mile and give them the shirt and your cloak if they ask you just for the shirt.
	So you say, ah, but these Christians who generally don't fight back super hard, if at all, you can hate them and it's totally safe.
	But you're a hero for hating those who generally don't fight back.
	Oof. Well, until they do, and let's do everything we can to avoid that kind of situation.
	All right, let me...
	Yeah, Fountain and Breeze platforms on my show is hosted.
	I am getting tips there.
	It has been a while since I have done much there, but I do have...
	You can go to Fountain and Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z, and you can listen to the show, and you can tip me there as well, which I would appreciate that.
	Would be very, very nice.
	All right. Somebody says, My dad once tried to tackle me after I told him to go cheat on your wife some more.
	If I would have hit him, I'd be in prison for murder right now.
	He said several heart attacks, so it wouldn't have been a fair fight at all.
	Then after that, my brother texted me, calling me ungrateful, uneducated, and unemployed.
	Well, you know, this is the danger as well.
	I mean, we can talk about the psychological dangers, the moral dangers, and so on, but another pretty significant danger of having really provocative and angry and destructive people in your life You might lose it one day, right? You understand, right?
	You might lose it. After a certain amount of provocation, you might lose it, and you might do something impulsive.
	I mean, there are certain types of personalities that just want to goad you into hitting them.
	Oh, man, I've met a few people like this in my life, and I've always given them an extraordinarily wide berth.
	Oh, my God, monstrous.
	The people who just goad you and goad you and they're like begging you to belt them because then they gain power over you and all of that.
	It's really, really rough and it's hugely dangerous to be in those kinds of situations with people.
	So yeah, really, really try to avoid.
	If you are in a relationship where you're goading and taunting a violent person, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not put yourself in that kind of danger.
	Because, you know, that's the kind of person who could, you know, they might push you, you push them back, they stumble back, they crack their head, and then they claim they never touched you, and you just hit them out of nowhere.
	And then you've got the police all over you, and you might jail time, and God help you, right?
	And then you look back and say, wow, I guess that was worthwhile, wasn't it?
	So yeah, if you've got those kinds of people around who are just going to escalate that way, or when you have the urge...
	You know, to really launch yourself into some real aggression towards them, where they really taunt you to within an inch of your madness.
	Please, please try and avoid those kinds of situations as much as humanly possible.
	Questions, comments, issues, problems, anything you want.
	Don't be shy. I don't bite.
	All right. Rise to liberty.
	A sang de liberté.
	What you got, my friend? You'll need to unmute yourself to have a chitty chat.
	So somebody's asked, it says, you've spoken about your daughter having never had a tantrum and it generally being a very positive experience compared to many parents.
	Terrible tooth, for example.
	Do you think you would have had a tougher time with parenting dealing with two children, like the potential diverse personalities and compativeness between the two?
	Punishments? No!
	See, I have a...
	Massive optimism regarding sibling relationships.
	Massive optimism. I think sibling relationships could be just about the most magnificent and wonderful thing in the known universe.
	And I'm kidding you not about any of that.
	Siblings should be the most foundational relationship in your life.
	Because siblings are the only people who go from childhood to old age with you.
	You meet your wife when you're 25 or 20 or whatever, then you've got two decades plus that you didn't know her.
	But siblings, you grow up together, you go through the same household together, you go through the big milestones together.
	They're the people who can do the whole arc of life with you.
	They should be just about the most valuable resource for your whole life journey because they're the only people in general, I mean with some exceptions if there's a big age gap, part of the whole life journey.
	And I gotta tell you, it drives me crazy how siblings treat each other.
	I mean, even by standard definitions, 50% of sibling relationships are outright abusive.
	Like outright abusive, like violent, verbally abusive, just dangerous and horrible, right?
	That's 50%, and that's just by standard definitions, right?
	So, if I had two kids, and I would have preferred to have more kids, but nature does what nature does, right?
	So, if I had two kids, I think parenting would be better.
	I mean, I love parenting as it is, and it's hard to imagine it being better, but I think parenting would be better.
	Because I have a theory, I mean, bad sibling relationships come from bad parenting, right?
	Parents set siblings against each other, they pick favorites, they punish unjustly, and all of that.
	And... I've never for the life of me understood why siblings turn on each other.
	Like, why? I mean, it's like if you've got a bad home environment, then it's like you're like two best friends who've been unjustly imprisoned.
	Okay, well, if you're two friends who've been unjustly imprisoned, why would you turn on each other?
	Like, I genuinely...
	Don't understand this, and if anybody has any insights, I would love to get some light in these Stygian depths.
	Why? Why? Why would you turn on each other?
	You know, one of the loveliest relationships in literature is Sam and Frodo from Lord of the Rings, right?
	That they take care of each other, that they support each other.
	They don't get to Mordor and just turn and start viciously verbally abusing each other because it's a difficult journey.
	They're being hunted by orcs.
	The Eye of Sauron is all over them.
	There's the Nazgul floating by.
	There's goblins and gremlins, and Frodo gets captured.
	Spoiler! And they don't turn on each other.
	They're just incredibly loyal to each other in a way that just is never questioned.
	And I remember, I think the second time I read through that, I just burst into tears in one of the expressions of affection between the two, because isn't that what we want?
	If we have difficult family lives, to have siblings who...
	Who care for us. Who we care for.
	Who we can support. Who can be our lights in the darkness.
	Who can be our soft pillows on the hardness.
	Who can be our companions in dark times.
	I don't understand why it seems to almost universally be the case that siblings in difficult environments turn on each other.
	I don't get it.
	I don't get it at all.
	I mean, talk about adding burden upon burden upon burden.
	Hey! We've got a shitty household.
	We've got a shitty violent parents, destructive parents, neglectful, abusive, drunken parents.
	You know what we should do?
	Turn on each other like a bunch of vicious pit bulls.
	Why? Why add burden to burden?
	So I have enormous hope, though, that siblings raised well with each other can...
	And I go into this more in a very dramatic fashion in my novel, The Future, which you can get at freedomain.locals.com.
	But I don't get it.
	So I think if I had two kids or three kids or four kids, I think it would be even more fun.
	We'd all play together and the support that my wife and I have and the support we would give our kids, I think would give them very beneficial and positive relationships with each other.
	I mean, I've seen...
	I mean, I've seen endless legions and phalanxes of bad siblings and siblings mean to each other.
	But in the friends we have, who, of course, follow the peaceful parenting thing to the letter, it's not that way at all.
	Siblings get along great. They support each other.
	They share well. They're enthusiastic with each other.
	They don't fight. I know this is incomprehensible to people, but the people I know who peaceful parents, let's see, I know...
	Four kids. Oh yeah, four kids.
	Two families with four kids each.
	And the siblings don't fight.
	And not only do they not fight, they enjoy each other's company, they play well together, they share.
	Oh, I've had my three minutes, it's your turn or whatever, right?
	And it's great.
	It's wonderful to see. It's a little painful to see, obviously, but it's wonderful to see.
	So I don't...
	I've never understood this. I've never understood why when you're in a really difficult situation...
	You turn on the other victims.
	I used to think, oh, it's just engineered by the people in charge, the bad parents.
	I don't know.
	I think, now that I'm sort of thinking about it in the moment, my guess would be something like this, but it's only a guess.
	So let's say you're an older sibling.
	You're an older brother, right? Well, your younger sibling is a victim with you But your younger sibling needs you, in a sense, because they're younger and therefore usually getting the most negative experience.
	And I think that if you're the older brother and your younger brother or sister needs you to be supportive, to be enthusiastic, to, in a sense, make up for the negativity that's coming from the parents, if your younger sibling needs you, Then I suppose it's easy to get a sense of power by rejecting that younger sibling.
	By lording it over them, by, you know, I mean, the elder sibling thing is completely, it's really pathetic.
	God, if you ever want to see a pathetic human being, see a human being who takes pride in having achieved the unbelievable godlike feat Of having crawled out of the vagina a year or two earlier.
	Oh my God! What unbelievable brilliance!
	What commitment to excellence!
	What highfalutin athleticism and moral perfection you have achieved by being conceived a year or two earlier.
	My God! You're magnificent how you managed to pull that off!
	I can't even imagine!
	But honestly, that is one of the saddest things you'll ever see in this life.
	Is a sibling who believes himself or herself superior by being older.
	That is just about...
	I mean, talk about unearned privilege.
	I mean, my God!
	At least a really pretty girl or a really handsome man or whatever, at least they've worked at it.
	You know, they've done some exercise.
	They've put some cream in their hair.
	They've put some moisturizer on their face.
	They got their teeth whitened. At least they've done some work.
	For it? How much work does it take to be the early sperm?
	None! Absolutely nothing!
	Absolutely! And I was always revolted, almost physically revolted and repulsed by unearned privilege, right?
	So, when I was in England, I mentioned this before, but when I was in England, my team was Crystal Palace, which was a bad team.
	And there was like Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United, like the teams, Arsenal, the teams that were really good, right?
	And I remember some kid came over to my, you know, crappy little housing estate, sort of government council housing, and was like, yeah, Tottenham Hotspur, yeah, Crystal Palace sucks, Tottenham Hotspur rules, right?
	And I'm like, you just happened to be born there.
	Like, you just happen to be born in that little section that follows, like, if you'd have been born here, you'd have been for Crystal Palace.
	If I'd have been born there, I'd have been for Tottenham Hotspur.
	That's pretty sad, don't you think?
	Oh, look where I was born!
	I'm superior! Oh, it's sad.
	It's really sad. It's like the guys with great hair who have all that arrogance.
	It's like, you didn't earn that hair.
	You're just born with it. You didn't do anything to keep it.
	It just hangs on. Or the guys who are tall.
	The things you didn't earn.
	The things you didn't earn.
	I just have such bottomless contempt for people to take pride and vanity in that which they did not earn.
	Look. My language skills, my reasoning skills, my communication skills.
	I've worked to improve them, but they were pretty great to begin with.
	And I didn't earn that.
	That's just the way my brain is.
	I just have some significant skill in that way.
	Hey, lots of places I don't have significant skill.
	I peeked out at intermediate in tennis and never got any better.
	A little better in squash. So there's lots of areas I plateaued pretty early, but this one doesn't seem to be any limit to what I can do, and so I didn't earn that, and because I didn't earn that, I'm not going to take pride, and it's not just about me, which is why I try to have conversations with people and bring the gifts of philosophy that I have to some degree innately to other people and not ask for money all the time and, you know, all that kind of stuff, right?
	I just got lucky, and because I got lucky, there is an obligation of service.
	Alright, let's return to our good friend and see if he has gotten any better.
	I'm going to turn my headset down just in case.
	Yes, my friend, go ahead. The question I had was, how do we deal with fear?
	The reason I ask is because there seems to be a lot of fear in Introduced into society lately.
	I mean, it doesn't seem like that is anything new.
	But it seems as though since fear is used to control people in general, what are some of the best ways to combat that?
	Not only for the individual, but with society as a whole.
	Right. I mean, look, fear has been a constant part of the human condition.
	Whenever you have a hierarchy, you have fear.
	Right? So the fear used to be more immediate.
	But the fear was existential in many ways, right?
	The fear of going to hell, the fear of devils and witches and demons and curses and voodoo spells and all this kind of stuff, right?
	So fear, yeah, fear has been...
	A pretty solid constant of human society, wherever you have rulers, you have to have people who are afraid.
	Now, I mean, this sort of slow-moving machinery that's kind of pulling the West apart, yeah, there's something to be a little edgy about with regards to that.
	I mean, it looks like the whole Biden thing, I mean, it looks like they're just purposefully trying to dismantle the economy or what's left of it.
	And yeah, so there's stuff to be anxious around that.
	So fear is designed to move you into action.
	A fight or flight, right?
	Now, you have to, for me at least, you have to very carefully delineate the things that you can do something about and the things you can't do something about.
	Right? So if you can do something about a particular issue, then do it.
	I mean, if you fear you're gaining weight, you can eat less and exercise more, right?
	If you fear a particular illness, you can...
	If you fear an airborne illness, you can stay home or whatever it is that you're going to do, right?
	So there's things that you can do something about, and then there's things that you can't do something about.
	Like, one of the things that I like about being off politics is, you know, politics, the political news, is just this constant barrage of...
	Of terrible stories that you can't do anything about.
	The border is wide open.
	It's like, yeah, that's going to have some pretty negative effects in the long run.
	Can you do anything about it?
	Nope. I mean, I think the Trump supporters tried, you know, and had some success for a little while, but...
	Right, I mean, inflation, it's pretty bad.
	Can you do something about the causes of inflation?
	No. Can you do something about...
	A way to deal productively and proactively with an inflation that we've known for some time is inevitable?
	Yeah, you can do a bunch of stuff about that.
	So, you've got to divide into things you can affect or things you can make decisions about, things you can change your behavior and things that you can't, right?
	You look at the national debt, it's easy to get kind of anxious.
	And But you can't do anything about all the unfunded liabilities.
	I mean, listen, for many years I tried.
	And just because I didn't succeed in the way that I wanted to doesn't mean it's impossible, but it may be some indication of that.
	Because why is society going so wrong at the moment?
	Well, because people want lies.
	People want lies. I mean, if you were to say to people you were to run as a candidate, and again, this is sort of out of my novel, The Future, if you were to run as a candidate and give people the truth, yeah, there's no money for Social Security.
	There's no money for the welfare state.
	We have to seriously tighten our belts, and it's going to be really tough.
	You know, we've way overspent.
	We have way too much bureaucracy, and...
	We've got to stop funding higher education, we've got to allow people to make school choice a reality, and we've got to cut way back.
	We've got to have a real means test for social security, right?
	That's the only way we're going to be able to right this ship.
	And then we've got to get government out of controlling the currency and interest rates, because this is a disaster, right?
	So if you ask people to make sacrifices, if you ask people to tighten their belts, in the absence of a direct and immediate emergency, like if there's a war, people will ration, but if there's no war...
	Giving the math to people, and I remember a way, this is the 80s, Ross Perot, a little bit like this, and Ross Perot would go through these charts and say, here's the spending, and people would say, hey man, you don't have much experience, and he's like, yeah, it's true, I don't have much experience creating four trillion dollars in debt.
	But because he was a little short, and because he sounded a little bit like Mickey Mouse on helium, he couldn't get much traction, but he tried to bring some facts.
	Here's some data. And People don't want to hear the truth.
	Now, when people don't want to hear the truth, when people will attack and reject you for telling the truth, the things that I've said in the show that I've been attacked for, they're true.
	Science, validated, had the experts on and everything.
	Seventeen of them, if I remember rightly.
	So, if people get angry at the truth...
	Then you have to recognize that as a force of nature that they cannot be talked out of.
	It's a force of nature.
	What do people want to hear?
	This is all the way back to Socrates, right?
	So he said, look, you've got two politicians, you've got Bob and Doug.
	Now Bob tells the people that they live in a magnificent country, that they're all noble and heroic and he's going to have a whole bunch of free stuff.
	Which is a lie, but he gets the votes.
	Doug says, you know, you're kind of greedy, you're kind of graspy, you want a lot more in benefits than you're willing to pay in taxes, and you're completely ignoring the debt, you're preying on the next generation, and you better pull your socks up, tighten your belts, and get with reality.
	Well, maybe his mom votes for him, but probably not if she's over 65 and wants a pension.
	So, when people...
	Reject reality when people oppose the truth.
	They stay in a state of childhood.
	And it's kind of an insult to children, but children are a little bit more about falsehoods.
	Because they don't have as much power, really, to get what they want, so they'll generally lie about it.
	I mean, my daughter went through a phase of this.
	It's pretty cute, right? She'd want a drink that had some fruit in it or something like that.
	Now, of course, we've taught her, like I think you've got to teach kids, you grab for a drink, the first thing you do is you turn it over and you look at the sugar content, right?
	We've actually had contests where we go through the store and whoever gets the highest sugar content in a drink gets a prize, right?
	Because, I mean, you can literally get drinks out there with like 65 grams of sugar in a drink, like just mental.
	It's just liquid diabetes, right?
	So my daughter would want a drink and she'd say, oh, it's 12 grams of sugar.
	But it's mostly natural sugar, because, you know, it would be like mostly fruit or something like that, and it'd be like, well, natural sugar is not a magic spell that makes the sugar go away, right?
	So, when people are just like, put their hands in their ears, la, la, la, don't want to hear it, and get angry at you for telling the truth, they're in a state of, in a sense, perpetual childhood.
	And one of the hallmarks of maturity is to accept information you really don't like.
	To accept information you really don't like.
	And, you know, part of my move against politics was just accepting information that I don't like, that people don't want the truth.
	Now, of course, here it's different in this conversation.
	It's different. But people, they don't want the truth.
	They don't want the truth.
	In fact, they get really angry, right?
	I remember standing up at the council in Los Angeles during my documentary on California.
	You can get that and you should watch it.
	It's really good. FreeDomain.com slash documentaries.
	They're standing up and saying, hey, you guys got a whole bunch of wishlists here, a lot of really expensive stuff.
	Do you have any plans to pay for this?
	Like, just do the taxes cover it?
	And, you know, basically just got me hustled out as quickly as possible.
	And they're resentful and pouty and petty and angry people in general.
	You bring them facts they don't want to hear, they just get angry.
	They get tense, they get hostile.
	And now it's been made a prejudice.
	It's prejudiced. Like, so they, you know, on certain data, they'll slap...
	Pejorative labels on it, racist, whatever.
	So now, to reject facts is rejecting immorality.
	Facts are evil.
	Facts are immoral. Facts are Nazis.
	You know, hate speech is just speech you hate.
	The fact that you think that your hatred makes it wrong, well, let's not get into the historical parallels that nobody would agree with about that particular principle, right?
	So, if you accept that, look, people are Largely existing in a delusional state of childhood, then the world becomes much more comprehensible.
	And when people in general are bought and paid for by the state, in many places in the West, half the population or more exists because of the handouts of the state, or at least they believe, I mean, they certainly get their money from the handouts of the state.
	I think they'd do better without it, but that's where they live and that's where they are.
	So they're not going to change their minds.
	That which a man is paid to believe he cannot be reasoned out of.
	That which a man is paid to believe he cannot be reasoned out of.
	I.e. modern science, right?
	What was that? New Alzheimer's study turned out to be total fraud.
	Billions of dollars down the drain.
	So fear in general arises from something you can do something about Or information you can't stand and reject.
	People in this cycle of history will not listen to reason.
	In general. Again, lots of exceptions and so on, but they will not listen to reason.
	Which means, sadly, we stand back, we don't lift a finger, right?
	Reality reasserts itself.
	People who won't listen to reason have to listen to experience.
	And experience can be a very harsh and bitter teacher.
	But we should not withdraw our gaze from the lessons that are coming.
	We don't want those lessons to come.
	We want people to have listened to reason.
	And I certainly poured 40 years of my life into working as hard as I could to get people to listen to reason.
	And a lot of people have.
	Part of this conversation, I get emails every day about how This conversation has really saved lives and helped lives and people got married and had kids.
	You know, wonderful, wonderful.
	Lots of people listen to Reason. I regret nothing at all.
	But society as a whole?
	Bought and paid for. It's bought and paid for.
	You can't reason someone out of a belief they weren't reasoned into.
	And propaganda is about implanting beliefs in people with no reasoning behind it.
	And if you start to poke around with your rational stick, the whole edifice of personality threatens to come crumbling down and they react as if you're trying to stab them or steal from them, which it genuinely feels that way, right?
	The false self attacks reason and evidence because reason and evidence disintegrates the false self and it feels like a kind of dying.
	It feels like a kind of dying.
	When I was losing my false self in my late 20s, early 30s, I felt like I was dying.
	Endless dreams of dying.
	I just felt like I was dying.
	I wrote when I was 17.
	I said we have to bury ourselves in order to be resurrected.
	So, with regards to fear, there's two things.
	Two ways to control fear.
	Number one, if you can't do anything about it, stop exposing yourself to it.
	I don't consume really much political content at all anymore because it's beyond reason for me.
	In the same way that I wouldn't go and attempt to play cards in a madhouse with really unstable and dangerous people because you can't play cards with people who are crazy because they're crazy.
	And, you know, I recognize some of the parallels.
	Like I spent a lot of my life trying to bring reason to my family and then I just switched to society as a whole and tried to apply those same skills.
	And again... To the honor and credit of the people listening here and the people who support the show, love you.
	Thank you so much. You're the reason it's all been so worthwhile.
	But society as a whole?
	No, it's just my family writ large.
	It's just my family writ large, so I had to sort of get out of that Simon the Boxer refu scenario.
	So, yeah. So, in terms of controlling fear, this last bit, and I'd love to get your thoughts on it.
	Controlling fear? If you can't do anything about it, stop exposing yourself to it.
	Oh my God, Kamala Harris hasn't visited the border yet.
	Yeah, can you do anything about it?
	No, so stop reading about it.
	Stop reading about it. And that's number one.
	And number two, is it fear of the world or fear of facts about the world that you don't like and don't want?
	If the fact is that society as a whole is not going to listen to reason.
	That's my personal view.
	I could be wrong. I think I've got some experience and some credibility in this, but I could be wrong.
	Is society as a whole going to listen to reason, or is it going to have to listen to experience?
	I mean, again, 40 years reason and some significant successes at the personal level, but at the societal level, what did I achieve?
	So, I would say, look at the information about the world, and are you applying...
	Your will to something beyond your control.
	Are you applying or trying to apply your willpower to something beyond your control?
	If you're trying to apply your willpower to something beyond your control, you will feel anxiety because it's a mismatch.
	You save your will for what you can control.
	If you save your will for what you can control, your will will have enormous power.
	But if you hit the gas and your car is in neutral, you're going to burn out the motor.
	If there's no traction, then you will get fearful and anxious because you're trying to control something way, way beyond your control.
	That's my sort of thoughts. I'm happy to hear what you think, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, that was absolutely well put.
	I guess what you had said there is really why I have been drawn to the DAO, being able to focus on things that you actually have power over.
	Fear is something that I think I deal with a lot, not personally myself, but Covering a lot of topics that I do on my show, it seems like there is some, not a request, but some desire for the logic, but it isn't widespread.
	It doesn't seem to be something in Mass, what am I trying to say?
	How do I put this?
	It doesn't seem like the majority of society is going to listen to reason.
	I've been personally following you for many years since you were on YouTube, and It was interesting to see how people reacted to a lot of the truth that you would put out there.
	I'm definitely glad to be a part of this community where some people do listen to reason, evidence, logic.
	It is really refreshing to know that even if we are a smaller group of people, there are still people out there like this.
	I find it just fascinating that people are just consumed by fear on so many levels.
	You just spend five to ten minutes on Twitter and it seems like the entire world's burning down all the time.
	Yeah, and that's kind of why I'm asking.
	Like I said, I personally am not fearful of the future, you know, within reason outside of, you know, Psychopaths being in control of some of the world's largest institutions.
	I'm not sure if psychopath is the correct label to put on them.
	However, just unsavory people.
	And so I definitely appreciate your take on fear.
	It was definitely what I was looking for.
	And remember that fear is incredibly useful to people in authority, people who have unjust authority, like state-based authority.
	Because if you make people fearful for long enough, it's very easy to turn that fear to hatred.
	Because fear is an emotion where you feel pushed down, you feel weak, you feel helpless.
	And any organism can only be put in a helpless state for a certain amount of time before it reacts with extraordinary aggression.
	So if you want people to get angry and At the unvaccinated, you frighten them with COVID solid for a year.
	And then, after they've been frightened and at home and unable to visit friends and see their elderly relatives, and then you say, oh, it's those people.
	Those people have caused all the problems.
	Unvaccinated, they're the reasons why you're frightened.
	They're the reason why you're locked up.
	They're the reasons why you can't visit your grandparents.
	It's them! Which is not true.
	I mean, these were all the result of decisions made specifically and particularly by governments.
	But if you can make people afraid for long enough, then you can point at a group and have that group be the scapegoat and then have infighting among the citizenry so that they never look up and see who's pulling the strings.
	So fear, chronic fear, is extraordinarily useful.
	I mean, there's a reason why a lot of the younger folks seem to have these extraordinarily aggressive politics, violent politics, raging politics.
	Well, because when they were growing up, they were frightened with all sorts of environmental catastrophes.
	They were terrified of just global warming.
	It was going to kill everyone.
	And they just lived in this fear.
	And so now that they have been pushed down and emasculated and debilitated for years, there's a blowback to holding people down.
	And if you can channel that blowback against particular groups in society, right?
	The Nazis did it with the Jews and the Tutsis did it with the Hutsus in Rwanda and so on.
	If you can keep people afraid for long enough...
	Then when that blowback, that reassertion comes, you can channel it towards a group and some, I mean, unbelievably vicious and ugly things can result.
	And then what happens, of course, is then the victim group, when they see bad things happening to the oppressor group, the victim group are like, oh yeah, no, I remember you wanted me, like, oh, did you get sick?
	Well, you wanted me fired from my job for not taking this vaccine or whatever.
	And then people just, you get this infighting and it's pretty glorious because...
	When people are fighting amongst themselves, they're looking horizontally, not vertically, so to speak.
	So, yeah, just unfortunately, the go-to emotion for...
	I mean, when I was a kid, it was nuclear war plus environmental disaster.
	Just keep people frightened.
	Keep people... Was it Ambrose Bierce, was it?
	Or Mark Twain or someone who said, the purpose of practical politics is an endless series of dangerous hobgoblins, almost all of which are imaginary.
	Yeah. We just make up things for people to be terrified about.
	They're terrified. And then they eventually blow back, get angry, and you can point them at a group and get the infighting going.
	So, yeah, it's really something.
	And because there are no apologies in these situations, right?
	No apologies, right? I mean, there was this, what is it, Biden said last fall, the winter, this winter for the unvaccinated, this will be a winter of...
	Darkness, disease, and death or something like that, right?
	Well, it wasn't. It wasn't the case at all.
	Now, the people who rejected or imposed, at a personal level, the unvaccinated, have they said, oh, yeah, well, we thought this prediction was true.
	It turned out it was false. We're really sorry.
	You know, that was unfair. That was unjust, right?
	When it turns out, as has been roundly admitted now, that the vaccinated can both Get and transmit the virus.
	Have people said, oh my God, you know, that's, you know, we banned you from our home for a year because you were unvaccinated.
	Turns out if the vaccinated people could have and carry the virus and transmit it, we're really sorry.
	I don't know, man. There's something as well.
	I don't know what it is in the modern world.
	It's like people don't apologize anymore.
	They don't apologize. I don't know what it is exactly, whether it's vanity or pride.
	Pride is usually the big barrier to an apology, but it's so empowering to apologize.
	Boy, does it ever make your personal relationships better.
	An inability to apologize is a sure sign that your relationships are going to decay radioactively.
	And is that an old meme?
	There's three things that people have a tough time saying.
	I'm sorry. I need help.
	Anyway, so yeah, I hope that helps.
	And yeah, keep me posted.
	And thanks for calling in.
	A great pleasure. If you have any other questions, issues, comments, problems, I am happy to hear, my friends.
	Don't make me break into Paul Young.
	You're welcome. Thank you very much, Stefan.
	You too. Thanks for calling. Somebody says, I remember your question at the LA City Council.
	It was ridiculous how the lady before you was actually advocating for violence, but she wasn't pushed out of the room like you were for asking a basic question.
	Well, it's funny, too, because I said, oh, I'm down here from Canada, big smile on my face, and everybody gave me a big smile back, like, oh, this is going to be easy.
	He's Canadian. It's like, oh, maybe not.
	All right. Somebody says, when I was younger, I was always fighting with my older brother.
	And the reason why he did this was because he was a witness to brutal beatings from my father to my mother and internalized it and directed it towards me.
	Well, that's causal.
	That's saying that your brother had no choice because he witnessed beatings and therefore he had to fight with you.
	Why? Why?
	Why? If you and I were locked in a prison cell and we saw a prisoner getting beaten or a guard getting beaten, would we then turn and beat each other?
	No. You could easily argue that we'd be then closer and more gentle with each other because of the brutality that we'd seen.
	Somebody says, I say the same thing to my father about consuming news about crimes, shootings, random accidents.
	It provides absolutely no benefit to you.
	You can't do anything about it and it only leaves you feeling depressed.
	I sometimes have to tell him forcefully that I don't care to hear about any of it from him.
	Yeah, I mean, it's fine to keep your eye on crime.
	You know, there's this very much, you know, this leftist goal that has been going on ever since there was leftism, which is to empty the prisons and disrupt the communities.
	I mean, they did it with the mental health facilities in the 60s, and they did it with crime in the 70s in New York City and other places, and it's sort of back in the cycle now.
	So, yeah, keep your eye on crime for sure, and if crime gets bad and you start to feel like three-quarters of young people in America don't feel safe, Outside of their homes.
	Seems kind of important, right?
	So then move to a place where you're safe.
	That's what it is. But if you're just going to stay there, then, you know, you want to roll the dice, take your chances with urban criminals.
	Well, stop looking into it, right?
	Love you, Steph. Love you, Tumo.
	Thank you so much for dropping by.
	Appreciate it. All right.
	What have we got here? Somebody says, I've made peace with my mother.
	She has apologized without any excuses, and we have talked a lot and sorted things out.
	But my dad won't take responsibility for situations that happened.
	I'm glad to hear that about you, Mother Eric.
	That's great. I mean, my general question is, was there restitution?
	Or apologies? I don't know.
	Maybe it's a male-female thing.
	I think a lot of women feel like, well, I apologized.
	That's the end of the story, right?
	But, I mean, the way that I was raised, the apology is just the beginning.
	Of the restitution.
	It's, you know, like you plead guilty, then you do the community service, so to speak, if you're involved in some relatively minor crime or whatever it is, right?
	Or, you know, the officer says you're speeding.
	You say, oh, I'm really sorry I was speeding.
	He gives you the ticket. You go pay the ticket.
	The sorry is just the beginning.
	The guilty plea is just the beginning.
	And then there's the community service, the restitution, whatever it is, the house arrest.
	I mean, to take the silly examples, but...
	I don't know. For a lot of people, and I think a little bit more women, the apology is it.
	Like, hey man, I apologize.
	Like, that's just magic. It makes everything whole.
	You know, if I borrow your car and I ding the hell out of the door and I hand it back and I say, oh man, I'm so sorry I dinged your door, would you be like, hey, that's totally fine.
	I'm happy to spend $2,000 to fix it.
	I remember I did dig a door of a car of mine once.
	I was late for therapy and I was turning in a garage and turned too closely and scraped the door.
	And it was $2,000 to get a fix.
	It was two doors or whatever, right?
	And so I never did fix it and eventually just basically drove the car in on its last jewel of potential energy to trade it in.
	But yeah, if I borrow your phone and drop it down a sewer and I just say, hey, sorry, man.
	I mean, isn't it sort of like, hey, sorry, man.
	Let me get you a new phone.
	I hope you got it backed up. I'm like, this is terrible.
	So the apology thing, to me, is the beginning of the journey towards restitution.
	And it's great that somebody apologizes, but if they apologize without restitution, I believe that the apology is just manipulation.
	So if somebody apologizes, and that's the end of the story, no restitution, then the apology is just manipulative.
	It's their way of saying...
	I'm free of my obligations, and if you bring this up again, I get to say, hey man, I already apologized.
	What do you keep dragging me down this for?
	What do you keep bringing this up for? I apologize.
	I already apologize. Let's see here.
	I confronted my dad about issues, pain, and trauma accrued from his and his wife's actions during my childhood and teenage years.
	Oh, I guess his stepmom, right?
	This was about a month ago.
	The conversation ended in a civilized and, in my view, friendly manner, even though I was furious at the start of it.
	He hasn't tried to talk to me since, though.
	No text or any attempt to contact me.
	He's always said that I can talk to him about anything, but I guess not about anything serious and painful that involves him as the culprit.
	He has himself had a very traumatic childhood, but it doesn't seem that that has given him any insight as to how to be there and support me.
	How can I make sense of this?
	Thanks, Steph, for everything you do and everything you've done.
	Well, thank you. That's very kind. I'm sorry to hear about this.
	I really am. That's a sad story for sure.
	So, I'm getting older now, right?
	56? Not bad.
	Not bad. So, it's really important, I think.
	This is just older, middle-aged guy advice, right?
	So, this is a perspective time.
	If you make a mistake when you're 20, you can fix it.
	So let's say when you're 20, you spend a year or two bumming around, couch surfing, hitchhiking, traveling.
	Okay, so you're 21, you're 22.
	You got time. I don't recommend doing that with your life, but you got time.
	Maybe you can write some Jack Kerouac on the road stuff or whatever, right?
	But you've got time to fix it.
	You've got time to fix it. No problem, right?
	Let's say that you burn up five years in your 20s.
	You're 22 to 27.
	You burn up in a relationship that goes nowhere.
	Okay, you're 27. You've still got time to fix it, right?
	Now, what do you do, though, when you can't fix it?
	That's the big question, my friends.
	What do you do when you can't fix it?
	See, you're a young man.
	You're not a father yet yourself.
	You haven't screwed up anybody's childhood.
	That child hasn't grown up and become an adult.
	You haven't made any mistakes you can't fix.
	Now, young people do make mistakes they can't fix.
	They kill people. They rape people.
	They rob people. They beat people up.
	They make mistakes they can't fix.
	But you're not one of those people.
	I'm just saying as a whole, right?
	So what you're doing is you're living in a situation where confrontation can bring a benefit for you.
	So you think of the confrontation between you and your father.
	See, you have this confrontation down.
	You talk about the bad childhood, his mistakes as a father, and so on, right?
	Now, that's of benefit to you.
	But you've got to ask yourself, and this is not from an empathy standpoint, just from an understanding the other person standpoint.
	I guess it's empathy, but not necessarily sympathy.
	What's it like for him?
	I mean, I can bring myself to the brink of tears in a moment's notice just by thinking about how wonderful it's been to be a parent.
	Now, my daughter's 14 this year.
	Still a little bit of parenting to go, but we're in the waning time, right?
	And most of my parenting has been done, and it's been done for years.
	Now it's just really enjoying the fruits of our labors.
	I played some Unreal Tournament 2004 with my daughter, like no gore, no mature taunts kind of thing, right?
	Very wholesome in a sense, right?
	And it's like bad graphics tag with pretend machine guns, right?
	And it's fun. And...
	You know, but she's not going to be doing that when she's 20.
	She's not going to be doing that when she's 16.
	It's the last haul, right?
	We'll see whether her plans for duck farms materialize.
	I actually think they might. But if I had...
	Oh, God, I've got to tell you, this is a wave of emotion just even thinking about it.
	If I had messed up her childhood...
	You know, this truly precious and beautiful, angelic human being that nature gave to me.
	And, you know, you just come home with a baby and it's like, good luck!
	Right? If I had harmed her through neglect, through abuse, through violence, through insults, through Trash talk.
	If I had screwed up her childhood, I mean, you can't fix that, man.
	There's no do-over. There's no mulligan.
	And it's not a great movie, but there were a couple of great lines in it.
	City Slickers 2, believe it or not.
	This guy's got a bad marriage, right?
	When he screams at his wife, if hate were people, I'd be China!
	And he's just depressed about his whole life.
	And he basically is like, you know what?
	I need a mulligan. I need to go back.
	I've got to start all over again.
	I need a mulligan. Can I get a mulligan?
	And of course you can. Now, you get a mulligan when you're a young man.
	You can screw up for a while. You can mess things up.
	You can even gain some weight and lose it and blah, blah, blah.
	You can fix it. But you've got to look at it from your father's standpoint.
	As a father myself, if my daughter came to me and said, you wrecked my childhood, God Almighty, I had a bad childhood because of you.
	God Almighty, There's no rewind for that.
	There's no fixing that.
	You know, you had a bad relationship, even if you had a bad first marriage, okay, you divorce, you move on, you learn your lessons, you go to therapy, you get yourself knowledge, you can get a better marriage going on.
	You can fix your life.
	But a helpless, independent, utterly entrusted to your care, precious human being...
	That you shape and mold and have total authority over?
	Have you fucked that up?
	And I don't mean like you make a mistake.
	Occasionally you're kind of mean. You're whatever, right?
	Impatient, you know. That's not, you know.
	That's not it. But if you've really messed up their childhood, from your father's standpoint...
	He defines himself as a father.
	We all do. I've never been Steph since my daughter was born, and even before that, since my daughter was conceived.
	I've never been Steph.
	Steph Molyneux. I've been dad.
	I mean, that's the whole point, you understand?
	The whole point of being a man is to be a father.
	The whole point of a woman is to be a mother, because that's why mothers and fathers exist.
	So I died as Steph and was born with my daughter as a father.
	And a father is what I will be until the day I die.
	And I will never be Steph again.
	That's dead and buried. That's gone.
	And manhood is not about sports or muscles or prestige or money or success or domination or virility or sleeping with women Masculinity is fatherhood.
	That's all it is. Femininity is motherhood.
	That's all it is.
	Because that's the only reason fathers and mothers exist and the only reason any of us exist at all.
	So when you go to your father and you say you're a bad father, He can't fix it.
	It's who he is.
	There's no rewind. There's no resurrecting pre-father.
	There's no being a better father now because you're already an adult.
	I will always be my daughter's father and I will always love her.
	But the mentoring part, the paternal part, the fatherhood part, It's mostly in the rear view.
	We do these mock debates as part of homeschooling.
	We have a topic and we go at it debate-wise, right?
	She's so fast.
	She's so good. I don't have a lot to teach her.
	A couple of tweaks here and there.
	But I already taught her how to read.
	I already taught her how to speak. I already taught her how to reason.
	I already taught her how to debate.
	Now she just lets fly and she's so good.
	She absolutely... I'm pretty nimble at this kind of stuff.
	And just today we were debating.
	She totally stumped me.
	Like, I was just like, yep, you win that one.
	My God. I mean, absolutely.
	Completely and totally. Vanquished.
	I lay on the floor. If you're saying to your...
	Look, I'm not saying you shouldn't say to your father the truth of your experience.
	Of course you should. I'm just trying to help you understand it from his standpoint.
	The entire purpose of his existence as a man, as a human being this is different, right?
	We're talking about as a man.
	The entire purpose and essence of his existence as a man was to be a father, which he cannot fix now.
	There is no reparenting.
	There's no rewind. There's no do-overs, no mulligans.
	So if you say to him, the central purpose of your existence, which you cannot change, has been a disaster, an immoral disaster, I'm just trying to tell you why he's not contacting you.
	I'm not saying you heard him.
	I'm not saying you shouldn't have said what you said.
	If it's the truth, you say it.
	Tell the truth, though the skies fall, tell the truth in shame, the devil thou shalt not bear false witness.
	But this is why, you know, I saw in my mother's eyes what happened when I picked to the lock of her defenses and got through to her what happened to me as a child.
	Those were some sanded down, nimble fingers, let me tell you that.
	I saw what happened in her.
	I saw what happened in other family members when I confronted them about what happened to me as a child and what they let happen and what they made happen.
	It's hell in there.
	I was reading advice was given from one country singer to another.
	An older country singer to an up-and-coming country singer.
	And the older country singer said to the younger country singer, don't Read about yourself.
	Don't read stuff about yourself.
	A whole bunch of stuff will pass you by, but one thing, you don't know what it's going to be, one thing will stick in your mind like a stone in your shoe for three months.
	You know why people live in this kind of funny or funky fear?
	You know why people live in this kind of fear?
	It's because there are words out there that will complete a circuitry that will wreck their happiness.
	Right? There are words out there that will complete the circuitry that will wreck their happiness.
	People are exquisitely vulnerable.
	If you've mistreated your children, and you know you have if you have, right?
	If you've mistreated your children, you will live the rest of your life In unconscious fear that they will notice it and bring it up and complete that circuitry so you really get it, what you did.
	And if you really get it, what you did, your life becomes hell.
	I don't know for how long because I've never made those kinds.
	I've been very careful to not make those kinds of mistakes.
	Moral mistakes. De-platforming was on other people, right?
	I spoke the truth. I was in no hatred, no negativity, no hostility.
	I acted out of love for humanity, love for the truth, desire for peace.
	So if they kick me off, that's on them.
	I don't have any regrets regarding that.
	Oh, I should have done this. I shouldn't have done that.
	No, no. I spoke the truth all the way down.
	Boom. They pulled the trap door.
	That's on them. All the people around you, and this is why...
	What I say goes so deep to people, and this is why this is a love it or hate it kind of conversation.
	There's nobody indifferent to what we talk about here.
	This is a love it or hate it situation, conversation.
	Everyone around you who's done wrong and hasn't processed it, like all of the unspoken wrongs that people have done, everyone has them.
	You either process them or you don't.
	Everyone around you who's done wrong Has an unconscious terror that you're going to say the 5 words, the 10 words, the 15 words, the 20 words that will wreck their lives by completing the wiring and giving them full vision of what they did.
	People are just keeping this stuff at bay.
	5 words, 10 words, 15 words, 20 words, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds.
	Boom! Completes the wiring, gives them the unadulterated mirror to what they did And wrecks them forever, as they feel.
	As they feel it, because they can't go back and fix it.
	It can't be repaired.
	And their identity...
	Well, all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.
	So I hope that helps.
	I'm not saying at all...
	I'm not saying at all that you shouldn't have said what you said.
	You absolutely should have said the truth.
	But don't be surprised when your father doesn't contact you for whatever time it takes.
	Now, if you're a father, this is my advice to the dad, right?
	If you're a father and you fucked up your kids, that was bad, man.
	That was really, really bad.
	Devote yourself to your grandkids.
	Learn better. Be better.
	Go to therapy. Pursue self-knowledge.
	Admit your faults. And where you died as a boy, you died as a man.
	To become a father, you can die as a father to become a grandfather.
	And that's where your glory and redemption can be.
	All right. Just having a look here for questions.
	When you are on your deathbed, how will you know if you've succeeded in life?
	Well, by not waiting until your deathbed to evaluate that, you evaluate that as you go along.
	You don't evaluate that on your deathbed.
	It's like saying, on your deathbed, how will you know if you've been healthy?
	Well, you just try and aim for health your whole life, right?
	Somebody says, when is it moral to save yourself in a situation of your own choice, but for which you have accepted responsibility through marriage and child creation, when the situation has developed to a point of no resolution.
	Choice is to go down with the ship or jettison and pay through the nose via divorce, rape, and to assuage guilt.
	The position you just described is exactly it.
	Things I let happen can never be undone.
	I'm 57. Do I have to go down with the ship?
	I don't know. I don't know enough about the situation to give any meaningful advice.
	So if you want to send me an email, call in at freedomain.com.
	I can try and slip you into or fit you into the call-in show.
	But no, I don't have any particular advice for that at the moment.
	All right. Well, listen, I really appreciate everyone dropping by tonight.
	I think I have ricocheted my best wordsmith shop.
	Shot off the nads of the world.
	So have yourself a wonderful evening, everyone.
	Please, please, please help me out.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	Commercial free because of your generosity and for no other reason.
	Things cost money and please try to return value for value at freedomain.com slash donate.
	You can get my free novels.
	AlmostNovel.com, JustPoorNovel.com and FDRURL.com slash TGOA for my comedy novel.
	Have yourself a wonderful evening.
	I will talk to you probably this weekend.

▲