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Aug. 18, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:24:27

STOP BEING FOOLED! Wednesday Night Live 17 Aug 2022

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	Yeah! Hey everybody, how you doing?
	It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
	You ever have those days where you're just dragging your ass around like the guilt of a thousand Scotsmen?
	Yes, it happens.
	It's something I read that kind of chilled me to the bone the other day, where somebody said, it's the thing they don't tell you about getting older, is that one day you just wake up kind of tired, and then you just stay that way for the rest of your life.
	Yeah, it's a little chilling. What do you guys do when you're...
	When your butt is dragging.
	What do you do? How do you make it move?
	You make it move with coffee?
	Yeah. Well, I only do two cups of caffeinated coffee a day.
	Ooh, I need your wisdom tonight.
	Well, hello.
	Sorry, that's somebody's comment. Finally caught it live.
	Hello from London. Hello from West by God, Virginia.
	Ah, where there is a Santa Claus.
	First live show for me. Greetings, sorry I'm late.
	Well, that's all right. Hello from Tasmania.
	Well, hello back. Shower always helps.
	And watch one of your classics.
	When I'm slow, I force myself to laugh until I'm laughing at myself legitimately.
	My mood picks me up.
	I'm a real weirdo. Steph is the G-O-A-T. Greatest of all time.
	Thank you very much. Hello from Oregon.
	Hey, add no and it becomes spicy.
	Cold showers always work.
	Yeah, I can't do that.
	Cold water? I grew up in England.
	Oh my God, my shirt's the same color as my background.
	I've been turned into an animatronic Max Headroom floating head.
	Hello from the Deep South.
	Deep South, baby.
	Not just the South, but the Deep South.
	Hello? Hello back. If you have any questions, pop them in.
	And be lovely to...
	Have them chat with you.
	Let me just copy this linky-link and throw it out to a place or two so that people can enjoy the words of which we have to speak together.
	Join me with Crazy Glue.
	Boom. All right.
	Heath, I introduced my daughter to the wonders of Kate Bush today.
	Have you heard her vaguely oriental squeakiness?
	And she said, it sounds like the singer for Dance Monkey on Helium.
	I'm like, that's actually not a bad and inaccurate way of putting it together.
	All right, so let me just throw a couple more places out here for people to come and join us with Matt Regis' French accent.
	All right, so accent aigu, accent circumflex.
	Yeah, let's put it here too.
	Why not? Having some fun playing an old video game called Unreal Tournament 2004 with people.
	It is a lot of fun.
	Alright. Hello from South Australia.
	Very nice. Very nice to meet you.
	I owe Stefan from Brazil.
	Yes, Brazil is where I met a whole bunch of politicians in Pontus and gave them speech about how power corrupts Hello from Boston, Logan International.
	Oh boy, here I am competing with CNN. Steph, do you golf at all or tennis?
	I do not golf.
	I have tried it a couple of times.
	I don't mind it.
	But here's what I don't like about golf.
	With golf, your entire four days of pleasure or pain come down to 18 milliseconds of hitting the ball, whether you do it well or badly at the beginning.
	And I just, I'm with Mark Twain.
	Like, golf is a good work, spoiled.
	I have been playing racquet sports since I was about five years old.
	So, I used to do a whack load of tennis and squash.
	And now I've moved on in my dotage to pickleball.
	Because next month, I'll be 56 years old.
	56 years old.
	Still have most of my own teeth.
	Quite thrilled. Kate Bush, so brilliant.
	I find golf good for stress.
	Yeah, well, some people don't agree with you.
	How many people have died on a golf course from stress?
	Best places to meet people when moving to a new place.
	Join a club of something that you like and do it that way.
	If you had a chance to ask a philosopher you respect and admire a question, what would you ask them?
	I wouldn't really ask them, because every question that I really want answered, I've worked really hard to answer myself.
	So, I would not, like, I mean, I would have questions about with Ayn Rand with regards to, you know, that which is good for man and to break it down and all that, but I think she'd get pretty punchy and aggressive.
	Not a tiny amount of vanity in that smoky-voiced Russian harsh goddess of aggressive reason.
	So, no, I mean, if I had a question I would want to ask, I would value the answer to the point where I've really worked to answer it myself, so...
	No, see, here's the thing, too.
	Philosophers, they're not chosen by the market.
	Philosophers are not chosen by the market.
	They're not chosen by the people.
	Ayn Rand, to a small degree, being a somewhat considerable exception.
	Now, Ayn Rand, philosophers as a whole, they're chosen by people in power because they serve those people in power.
	That's what philosophers are chosen for.
	That's why they exist.
	That's why we know about them, right?
	I mean, do you think somebody like...
	Kant, Immanuel Kant, who praised the subjugation of the citizenry to the prince, to the king.
	If he hadn't done that, do you think he'd have been promoted?
	No, absolutely not.
	So, someone like Hegel, who talked about the world spirit and how particular nations are chosen by the world spirit to dominate other nations and so on, he became very popular in Germany.
	Do you not think that if he, and of course, Nietzsche with his Superman, the blonde beast and so on, do you think that if he hadn't served the people in power that we would hear about them at all?
	No. I mean, so, the Internet's the first time really where philosophy can be developed Judged, adjudicated and chosen by the people rather than how much or how little philosophers serve those in power.
	Let's see here. All right.
	Good morning. Hi, Steph.
	I wonder what inspires you in the short term, perhaps daily, and in the long term?
	Well... I always wanted philosophy to be something that people could come to and really use and deploy and have on their daily basis.
	See, when I was growing up, somebody said, well, it's important to take a philosophical view of these things.
	And what that always meant was have no emotions, distance yourself to the intergalactic length of focal span to the point where you don't care about anything.
	And what was that?
	Strange things are afoot at the Circle K, dude.
	So there was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, where it's like Socrates was just kind of spaced out and dust in the wind, man, just dust in the wind.
	You know, in the same way that Freud was characterized as creepy and incestuous and sex-obsessed, which he was, as well as being a coke promoter, coke addict, and coke dealer to his dying friends, just a real monster of a human being.
	But to take a philosophical view was to become vulcanized, right?
	To get Spock-ified.
	And to take a really distant emotional view to the point where you were looking at everything through a thick helium glass of transubstantiated, emotionally absent, dissociated distance.
	And I thought, I never understood that.
	See, passion was reserved for things like sex and art.
	That was why music, the passion was reserved for those things.
	But to be a good philosopher, you had to scrub yourself of all emotion, and it basically was detached, dissociated Buddhism, where you have fled this world for a world beyond the flesh.
	And of course, philosophy was influenced by theology.
	Theology's highest goal is the repudiation of passions, the repudiation of the flesh, the repudiation of our earthly existence.
	And so... I really disliked that idea.
	I thought, why wouldn't we be passionate about philosophy?
	Why wouldn't we be passionate about virtue?
	Why wouldn't we be passionate about the truth and the combat with relentless evildoers that is necessarily engendered in the pursuit of truth and virtue and the spread of truth and virtue?
	So, in the long run, for sure, I really hoped to unite passion with philosophy.
	The mind-body dichotomy, I've always hated this idea that we have this pure reason that is abstracted from the spinal cord, abstracted from the balls, abstracted from the meat and muscle and machinery of life.
	And that there is the higher reason and then there is the base body and the two are somehow in opposition and I've always hated that idea.
	The joy and poetry of motion is the foundation for the joy and poetry of abstract thought.
	And, you know, the idea that the mind is like a Pac-Man that eats the flesh of the body, and the greater your mental acuity, the more diminished and wizened-like and voodoo-like is your physical instantiation, right?
	The nerdy 98-pound dripping wet, of which 80 pounds is the nose weakling, And I really dislike that idea that the physical and the mental are somehow in opposition.
	This is an old philosophical issue.
	It goes back to Plato and even before that, the mind-body dichotomy.
	The mind is an effect of the meat of the brain.
	So saying that there's an opposition between the mind and the body, between concepts and matter, is like saying that there's an opposition between...
	A statue in the shadow would cast.
	It's like, no, they're two sides of the same coin.
	The statue and the shadow are basically united.
	And the unity of the mind and the body, the unity of reason and emotion has been a foundational aspect of what I've been working with, which is why I first worked with philosophical novels where people are incredibly passionate and there is a reason behind I've always hated the idea that emotions are just deep and incomprehensible and you know this in my call-in shows.
	What I do is I take people who have incomprehensible emotions and we together search for the comprehensibility and origin story of the emotions so that once we understand the comprehensibility and origin story of the emotions why then we are not a mystery to ourselves and the reason That the passions serve.
	Oh, he's so emotional.
	What does that mean? Oh, he's so triggered.
	He's so reactive. He's so irrational.
	That he's so emotional and so irrational.
	Or, you must strive to be rational, which means that you cannot have passions or emotions.
	And the degree to which you have passions and emotions is the degree to which you are moving in opposition to rationality as if...
	Or, there's an old saying, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
	I think that was Pascal.
	The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.
	That's not true at all.
	And after thousands of these call-in shows where people have emotions they can't follow or understand, and then we have these conversations, and we find the source and origin and rationality behind the emotions.
	This is why I do dream analyses as well.
	We do dream analysis so that people can see that their dreams are not chaotic visions of sleep-addled anti-rationality, but the unpacking of philosophical and moral and rational truths that the mind often finds unacceptable.
	And because the mind finds those truths unacceptable, they have to sidle in through the side door of allegory.
	So, the unity of reason and passion, the union of mind and body, is something that I have always been very interested in, and hopefully I have been demonstrating that over the course of what it is that I do, that I'm not afraid of passion.
	I do not view passion as...
	An opposition to rationality, but rather as a fellow traveler on the road to reason.
	And here's the thing. So the people who are considered anti-rational because they're so emotional, those people are just manipulators, right?
	They use their emotions to manipulate.
	Like I did an emergency call today.
	With a guy who broke up with his girlfriend and had no meaning, no purpose, and was just full of existential angst and nihilism and was on the verge of dropping out of college because of it and all of that.
	And he didn't understand why he was feeling this way.
	And after two-plus hours, he's like, oh, okay, that's why I feel this way, right?
	It's not a mystery.
	If you dig deep enough and cast your net wide enough, you will bring out the white whale of the reason behind your...
	Emotions. So in the long run, for sure, it is helping to break down.
	And the bad people want you at odds with your own instincts.
	They want you at odds and opposed to your own passions because it is through the passions.
	It's through our sense of danger.
	It's through that goose bump.
	It's that prickliness, that reaction that we have that gives us the soul shivers.
	That's how we can figure out bad people with bad intent who want to do bad things to us.
	So to get you to separate yourself from your instincts, from your lizard brain, is essential for you to be exploited.
	The mind-body dichotomy is simply a squid-fingered lockpick from some pretty eternal foes of rationality so that you can be exploited.
	It's a remote disarm of your capacity to defend yourself rationally.
	So, yeah, it is.
	In the short, daily?
	So daily, I just want to help the world and spread truth, reason, and evidence as much as possible, both for my joy in it and also as a sort of defensive measure and a measure, hopefully, that will help my daughter and your kids and so on to get to a more rational era.
	Movies in the 50s would talk about flying cars, robots in the 2000s.
	Now movies don't talk about the future.
	Why do you think that is? Well, they do talk about the future, and they talk about a future where the robots that we have programmed to serve us end up ruling us, and it's all about the state and so on, right?
	So for more on this, about the future, you can read my novel, coincidentally called The Future, at freedomaid.locals.com.
	When the math catches up to us, do you think we will recognize it or will it be a slow or distributed process?
	How quickly do you think people will reorganize once infinity resources isn't an option?
	Well, people will reorganize fairly quickly and the people who have flourished as a result of coercive redistribution will become coercive.
	That's right. Live by the sword, die by the sword, so to speak, right?
	What's your best estimate on how long the coming dark ages will last?
	Well, is there a way to turn it to one side?
	Is there a way to change it?
	I'd like to think that there is.
	I'd like to think that there's a possibility.
	And so, as far as whether there are going to be dark edges, yeah, it looks likely how long they're going to last.
	I don't make predictions about that because that's free will.
	That's a free will matter. All right.
	For more than two years, I have dreams of losing, sometimes forgetting my dog.
	Before the dream ends, she's always found, but I feel great distress until then.
	A dog could be an allegory for your instinctive or instinctual self.
	Is there a trinity, mind, body, and self, an ecosystem in its sense?
	Well, mind and self would be synonymous, I think.
	I mean, why would you want to differentiate from mind and self?
	There is the top part of the brain, right?
	The neofrontal core is the top part of the brain, which is incredibly powerful, but incredibly vulnerable to manipulation.
	And I don't say that as a bad thing.
	The fact that human beings are able to be manipulated and the fact that we're able to deceive ourselves is the foundation of our success as a species.
	So, if you've ever been scuba diving, right?
	So, if you go scuba diving, I mean, you start off in a pool, it's not too bad anyway.
	So, at some point where you go down, and I've gone down, I don't know, maybe 80 feet, nothing major, right?
	I've gone 80, maybe 90 feet. So, at some point, I remember this, at some point...
	scuba diving.
	It's an amazing thing to do.
	It's the laziest sport known to man because the whole point is to conserve your oxygen so you try to move as little as possible, right?
	So you go down and I remember, for me it took, my left ear is kind of messed up from, I think from being beaten as a child and so it takes a long time to pop it and get the equalization going at the end of the year.
	But anyway, you go down I remember going down. I did this off the coast of Belize when I first learned how to scuba dive.
	And you go down. You get your weight belt on.
	You get your flippers and all that. You go down.
	You're standing 90 feet below the surface of the water.
	And you're looking up. And there's a grave and great sense of, like, I really shouldn't be here.
	This is not where human beings should be.
	Because you're underwater. And you're breathing.
	Now, if you're snorkeling, that's a different matter because you've got the tube, you blow it out, you snorkel, you go down.
	But when you're standing 90 feet on the bottom of the ocean, I haven't done it in years, but I did learn how to do it in the past.
	You're standing there and just looking there like, oh my God, like I really should not be here.
	I shouldn't. This is like not a place for human beings to be this far down, right?
	I'm not. It's like I'm a pearl diver or something.
	The fact that we can conceive of breathing underwater, which we just can't do.
	You don't see a whole bunch of fish with their own scuba taking water around their heads to them all.
	So the fact that we can know that the world is round even though it looks flat, the fact that we can recognize that the stars are vastly different distances away even though it looks like a sieve bowl over the night sky, the fact that we can fool ourselves is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.
	It's our greatest strength in terms of universals and science that we can go from a limited secular, in a sense, mammalian perspective to actually understanding very foundational truths about the universe is an incredible thing.
	That's the universals. But universals are all about denying immediate sense data.
	Was your scuba experience the inspiration for Roman's reaction to diving underwater?
	Yeah, I think so. I think so.
	So, the fact that we can reject the direct evidence of our senses and understand the universe from a universal standpoint is fantastic, but it does involve rejection of the senses.
	Rejection of the senses. And if you've ever trained yourself to not flinch at something, right, then you know what rejecting the senses is all about, right?
	So yeah, we can reject the senses, which is great, but that means that it's very easy to control us by getting us to reject the evidence of our senses, to get rejecting the obvious senses and so on.
	All right. I'm reading a book on the AIDS epidemic called And the Band Played On.
	Very eye-opening so far. I've not read it, but I've heard about it.
	What's your take on all the law of attraction or authoring one's reality?
	Are these helpful to listen to or just distraction?
	Well, I've done this rant before, so I'll keep it brief.
	It's mostly total nonsense.
	So, if you look at the law of attraction, people, you ask the universe for what you want, and then the universe will just find a way to provide it.
	Like prayer. You pray for what you want, and the universe will find a way to provide it.
	Well, if you look, and I've not seen a single exception, right?
	And I'm sure there are, but when I would pick up one of these books in the bookstore, first thing I'd do is flip to the picture at the back.
	And what do you see? What do you see?
	When you flip to the author picture, and there's some woman who wrote a book called The Secret, or The Secret, authoring your own reality and getting the universe to provide you things.
	And she's super pretty. Ooh, what a mystery.
	The super pretty woman puts things out to the universe, and the universe just provides her with resource.
	And by the universe, she means men's balls.
	Men's balls provide her with resources because they wish to show reproductive fitness in order to reproduce with her.
	It's like astrology, right?
	Why does the science of astrology exist?
	Not the science, the pseudoscience of astrology.
	Why does the pseudoscience of astrology exist?
	Because men don't like telling pretty women that they believe stupid things.
	Because then you might not get to reproduce with them and all that.
	So... Yeah, I mean, I would love to see a, you know, you just put things out there into the universe and the universe just provides you with things.
	I would really like to see that written by a guy who looks like Danny DeVito or a woman who looks like Rhea Perlman, right?
	Or whoever, you know, Big Red.
	Because the universe does not provide all of these wonderful resources to people who aren't super attractive.
	Super attractive people just have this conveyor belt of stuff coming their way.
	And they put it down to what?
	They just ask the universe?
	It's like, no, the universe is full of hormones and sperm and therefore you get a whole bunch of resources and you can call it the mysterious law of attraction all you want.
	But my God.
	My God. Just mad.
	I'm listening to The Future a second time and I'm noticing quite a few things I didn't the first time around.
	Oh, there's a lot of detail in that book, by the way.
	There's a lot of detail in that book.
	If you really want to understand the book The Future...
	Just about every story is about ostracism.
	Just about every story is about ostracism.
	Right? They're all...
	It's like a fly's eye.
	It's all looking like a disco ball.
	You got the word ostracism and it hits the disco ball and gets sprayed into a thousand stories.
	So... How long did it take you to create the audiobook version?
	I think about two months. Maybe she was ugly, but the universe magically made her beautiful due to her universal pie.
	Yeah, it's just, you know, it's just kind of a thing.
	Now, Jordan Peterson, he's the authoring Your Life guy, I think.
	He's a very good-looking guy.
	He's always dressed in sartorial splendor.
	He's very slender.
	He's got nice, suspiciously even hair, hairlines and so on.
	I effing love stories where you realize something else a second time through in response to someone talking about your novel, The Future.
	Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, I'm still listening to that novel as an audiobook when I'm going to bed and I'm still getting new things out of it because...
	It's not all, I'm not a conscious artist in the way that Ayn Rand is.
	In other words, every word in the book is chosen for its philosophical content and meaning.
	I have definitely a philosophical goal, but there's a lot of instincts in the writing as well.
	So because it's kind of a lucid dream with philosophical intent, I get stuff out of reading from the book.
	Your monologues for the president were fantastic.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
	The president is one of the most compelling characters that I've ever, I've ever created.
	And let me just, I'll read a little bit from this.
	So, yeah, minor spoiler.
	You get this pretty early in the book, but the president of the United States, he puts himself into cryogenic freezing because he's terrified of death, and he wakes up in a stateless society, and they view him as a criminal.
	So that's the general premise of the story.
	And the book is wild in terms of its construction.
	I'll just tell you that. I mean, this is sort of a technical aside about the book, which is a very conscious choice.
	It's quite rare for first person and third person to be mixed in the same book.
	And I've never seen it before where first person and third person are mixed even for a particular character.
	So because there's a lot of back and forth in time, it's quite disorienting, right?
	You've got the past, the present, the future, the far future, like it's really quite disorienting.
	And that disorientation is a conscious design choice in the part of the book.
	So in the book, the president is a first-person character.
	I this, I that, you this, you that.
	Whereas everyone else is third person, he, they, whatever, right?
	So you've got a mixture of first person and third person, which is technically quite wild.
	But then, and nobody's actually commented on this, maybe people have noticed it, there's two other things that I do to create this chaos of time that is really essential to the narrative.
	Because I need to create a chaos of time because I want you to picture...
	The world of the future as a world that is, so that we can really love it and work to get there.
	So even within the same book, and again, this is wild.
	I remember thinking, can I get away with this?
	Ah, let's try. And I think I have.
	So in the same book, the president is first person, and then for a while he's third person.
	So for a while, towards the end of the book, I say, the president he, rather than I, me, me, I. So I go from first person to third person, and then I go back to first person again for the end.
	So that you're in the president's mind, you're detached from the president's mind, and you become a third-party omniscient observer.
	And then you go back into the president's mind, that's a very sort of conscious decision, so that you can see from within, see from the outside, and then end the book on the inside again.
	And it's not just that though, because I also work with, I mess with tenses.
	So at some point I say, he gets up from the bed and walks to the window.
	Which is present tense, right?
	And then there's past tense.
	He got up from the bed and walked to the window.
	Now, most novels are written in past tense, third person, right?
	So he got up from the bed and walked to the window.
	Now, first person past tense is, I got up from the bed and walked to the window.
	Past tense, right? And that's, you know, first person is most.
	Now, occasionally you will get...
	Third person, present tense, right?
	He gets up from the bed and walks to the window.
	It's more immediate, right? And then you will also get, I get up from the bed and walk to the window.
	And that's more rare because most stories that are told, I did this, I did that, are in the past.
	So not only do I switch from...
	Third person to first person and back to third person in the book.
	But I also switch from past to present tense, back to past tense, sometimes even from chapter to chapter.
	I will switch from past tense to present tense because I'm trying to break down the defenses that distance you from the story, even though the story is quite fantastical and futuristic.
	So this is...
	I'll read a little bit here.
	I love this book so much.
	This is chapter 34.
	One deathbed inevitably breeds another, but I was the only one to get away.
	So one deathbed inevitably breeds another, right?
	So we're there to replace our parents, they die and then we die.
	So one deathbed inevitably breeds another, but I was the only one to get away, right?
	Because he got frozen and then got to live again later.
	He said, so he goes on to say...
	When I got sick, I knew deep in my bones, because the sickness was deep in my bones, that I would not get away.
	I've always hated this idea that you can bravely fight an illness.
	It's all nonsense. You just cross your fingers and hope that somehow you can escape the collapsing masonry of mortality.
	Oh, I love that image.
	I love that image that you're in a room.
	Masonry is like all of the stuff that keeps the house up, right?
	All the bones of the house, right?
	That somehow you can escape the collapsing masonry of mortality.
	Your life when you're dying is like a room collapsing and you just hope that somehow you're going to dodge the roof collapsing in on you.
	So he goes on to say, oh, doctors don't care.
	Even if you're famous, a president, you're just another flesh suit on their conveyor belt to the grave.
	I love that because, you know, when you're doctors dealing with old people, it's just a conveyor belt to the grave.
	It's the end of your life.
	It's just another 10 minutes on their rounds.
	I don't blame them. You have to cauterize your nerves in the face of everyone else's needs.
	It's the only way to stay sane.
	Power is the ability to bestow gifts.
	When doctors lose to death, they can't give you anything, so they run.
	I mean, it's so compressed.
	To me, this is Shakespearean levels of compression, right?
	So it's the end of your life.
	It's just another 10 minutes on their rounds.
	So as a president, as a politician, he has to see things from other people's perspective, but not necessarily empathize it, right?
	You have to cauterize your nerves in the face of everyone else's needs.
	It's the only way to stay sane.
	And that ties into the very end of the scene on the beach.
	Power is the ability to bestow gifts.
	When doctors lose to death, right?
	They can't give you health anymore.
	They can't give you survival.
	They can't give you anything. So they lose all their power, so they run.
	And, of course, when he loses his power, he runs as well.
	This is, again, all very compressed.
	I'll skip a bit. Then he says...
	My doctor, knowing his job was done, was brusque and indifferent.
	Like, when my wife went to the hospital with a miscarriage, it was a disaster for her.
	It was just triage for them.
	No one cared. Right, so...
	My doctor, knowing his job was done, was brusque and indifferent.
	Now, when my wife went to the hospital with a miscarriage, it was a disaster for who?
	For her? No. It was a disaster for them, and of course it was mostly a disaster for the fetus who died, right?
	But he says it was a disaster for her, just her.
	He's just standing around, right?
	So he's got this lack of connection to people.
	So he says about his doctor, he handed me over to my family as quickly as possible.
	My middle son, the athlete, was a pious cliché saying that death comes to everyone, that I was going to a better place, that we would meet again.
	But heaven would be hell for me, I said.
	Why? No elections.
	The top job is already filled.
	It was blasphemous.
	I always enjoyed shocking his delicate, soulful sensibilities.
	My daughter, my youngest, was as useless as boobs on a bill, full of tears and unspecified regrets.
	My colleagues, well, they sent notes, or at least their assistants did, but I wasn't expecting anyone to show up, and I wasn't disappointed.
	I had no more to offer them.
	Sorry, I had no more to offer them than the doctors had to offer me.
	They just wanted to move on to my replacement and start massaging his feet.
	Who is supposed to remember you when they can't profit from you?
	I have enough integrity to not blame everyone for exactly what I did.
	So, the doctors can't offer him any more life, so they just bail.
	He can't offer his colleagues any more power because he's dying, or any more gifts or benefits.
	So, just move on.
	Just move on. My wife...
	Well...
	Her place in society was secure.
	Her finances rock solid.
	And she was young and pretty enough to take a second lap.
	And she kept reminding me that she'd prepared for this day for decades, knowing how much older I was.
	Ah, it's funny. Because you desperately want to hang on to life when you're well.
	But after a certain span of sickness...
	You kind of get ready to go.
	It's like when I was a kid.
	I loved going to airports and flying on planes.
	But the excitement wore thin pretty quickly and by the time I became an adult I just took pills to knock myself out.
	I hated the discomfort, headaches and the numb buttocks.
	even when I got my own plane, I still hated it and breathed a prayer of relief when the wheels touched the ground again.
	I've been flying high my whole life.
	I was uncomfortable.
	And comfort was not returning.
	So I was ready for the end.
	It was my eldest son who told me how to escape death.
	Anyway, so that's first person, past tense.
	Her place in society was secure, not is secure.
	She was young and pretty enough, not she is young and pretty, so that's past tense, and then I moved to present tense, and then first person, third person, and, you know, nobody's commented on it, so I guess I did it fairly elegantly, but, yeah, the more you listen to that book, the more you'll get out of it.
	There is so many dimensions to each of these paragraphs, for me anyway, and I think I could make a good case for most of the sentences having pretty solid ramifications, right?
	He only has value because he can bestow gifts.
	And the moment he can't bestow gifts, he sees no value in life.
	He's just a conveyor belt to provide resources to others.
	And yeah, it's pretty wild stuff.
	All right. Yeah.
	Lewis Staten. Yeah. Sounds close.
	Sounds like Satan and it's the state.
	The first person's scenes made me feel like it was an aspect of the president's ecosystem.
	Ah, that's a very good point.
	Very good. Do you have an opinion on the right's new use of the word groomer?
	Douglas Murray penned a piece that suggested this is escalating the culture war in a dangerous way.
	Well, oh, Dougie Doug.
	Interesting guy. If you can make the case, then make the case.
	But the idea that the culture war...
	If the right doesn't escalate the culture war, the culture war won't get escalated.
	I don't believe that at all.
	Somebody says, I was very disappointed when I confronted my mother about my past abuse.
	There was no apology for her actions or closure for me.
	I would love to discuss this with you at a future call-in show.
	Yes, so you can email me, callin, C-A-L-L-I-N, callin at freedomain.com.
	Please include your Skype address in some rough times of when you can be available, and I would be happy to chat with you.
	I do love me some call-in shows.
	All right. Somebody is asking about David Foster Wallace.
	Oh, he died kind of young, right?
	What did he die of? Boom!
	He died of terminal headbands.
	All right. Have I read any of his stuff?
	The Broom of the System.
	No, never read that. Taught creative writing.
	I don't know. Can you even really teach creative writing?
	I don't know. Infinite Jest, a massive multi-layered novel that he wrote over the course of four years.
	I have not read it.
	I have not read it.
	Presenting a futuristic vision of a world in which advertising has become omnipresent and the populace is addicted to consumerism.
	Oh, God, consumerism.
	Oh, wow. What a wild, dangerous topic for a novelist to take on.
	Wow, people like buying stuff.
	That's the big problem with the modern world is consumerism.
	Oh, my God.
	This drug regimen?
	Ah, really? So the drug regimen didn't seem to work out in dealing with depression.
	He took his own life.
	Ah, let's see here.
	So, three years after Wallace's death, another novel, The Pale King, was released.
	The book was assembled by his editor.
	It's set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Peoria, Illinois, during the late 20th century.
	Most of its characters are examiners of annual income tax returns, and the book's central theme is boredom.
	Specifically, boredom is a potential means of attaining bliss, and is such an alternative to the culture of overstimulation that is the main subject of infinite jest.
	Really? Really? Well, I will say I've not read his stuff.
	I think I would find him...
	See, if a novelist is celebrated or, you know, praised as a whole, it means that he's not doing fuck-all to disturb any of the existing power structures or not upsetting any...
	People as a whole. And this, like, really tired Marxist claptrap about consumerism!
	You know, people buy too many things they don't need, so buy my novel.
	Because it's not consumerism.
	Spend money on my novel that criticizes you for spending money on things you don't need.
	Do you need my novel? No. But spend money...
	It's just... I don't know. It's a really boring thing and a really low-rent, trashy thing to criticize.
	Now, again, I haven't read the guy... So I could be totally wrong, but just based upon this summary, I will say that I remain enormously and deeply and massively unimpressed.
	All right. Could the state and society use DAO and DROs to solve the problem of governance?
	Yeah, of course. Could the church be described as an attempt at this?
	I don't, well, so the church is a way of ostracizing people for noncompliance.
	And that has a great deal of power.
	The problem, of course, is that if you don't have a conscience, how do you deal with people who don't have a conscience?
	That's the big question.
	They say, oh, well, we have to have the state for the people who don't have a conscience.
	Like, well, no, you can't have the state because the people who don't have a conscience will inhabit the state, take it over and use it to rule over everyone else.
	So we do not have that as a solution.
	Now, the Stateless Society, and again, just freedomain.locals.com.
	Seriously, you can sign up for a couple of bucks and get the whole book.
	If that's too much for you, I don't even know what to say.
	A physical copy of the future?
	Yeah, we will work on that.
	I do have a physical copy of my novel, Almost, which I'm incredibly happy with, almostnovel.com.
	And... But I don't have a physical copy of The Futures yet.
	We will work on it. Give me the most likely scenario where Bitcoin fails.
	No. No, I won't do that.
	I wouldn't even think about that.
	that I wouldn't do that at all would not do that at all alright the crazy left now says the rosary is an extremist symbol Well, you know, I guess to the devil the rosary would be an extremist symbol.
	Ah, right.
	Infinite Jest focuses on the tedium of addiction.
	DFW was critiquing our response to advertising, not so much advertising itself.
	Okay, so if this guy, this novelist, and maybe he did, but if his novelist was saying, you know, people are kind of shallow and they respond to advertising and they become too consumeristic, okay, so is he going to criticize the government schools that produce such shallow consumers after 12 years of heavy indoctrination?
	Did he trace it back to the schools and the family?
	Did he trace it back to the end of philosophy, to the destruction of values, to postmodernism?
	No, he was just like, well, the problem is advertising!
	No, come on. Novelists just don't go deep.
	They stay on the surface because they want to take their money.
	They take their money like the guy who founded Bitcoin.
	He gets his $2.5 billion, shaved down $1.2 billion after taxes and fees, buys a $70 million mansion, and then talks about how empty and depressing life is.
	So, it's really quite tragic.
	How do we get to the future without angels?
	Well, angels are an analogy for integrity.
	Angels are an analogy for integrity.
	Right, so I told you I don't have status in my life.
	I've told you this for many, many years.
	I don't have status. I won't have status in my life.
	Of course not. Now, if you had a lot of status in your life and you were really bonded with a lot of status, I bet you those status wanted to take the Vax and get you to take the Vax.
	The Angels is just an analogy for true integrity.
	When does a gym hobby exercise addiction happen?
	Well, so health should serve a purpose.
	Exercise should serve a purpose.
	So for me, exercise serves the purpose of a couple of things.
	I want to stay strong, I want to stay healthy, and I like to eat.
	And if I like to eat, the price of liking to eat is to exercise.
	Because if you, I mean, I've just, there's this guy, Nakoko Avocado or something like that, and he's a I was a skinny gay guy who started doing these videos where he eats mukbangs, I think they're called, where he eats just like 10,000 calories.
	And in this ancient end of the Roman Empire decadent vomitorium culture, apparently people like to watch this guy and other people eat 10,000 calories and it gets them some...
	It's a third-person kind of satisfaction out of watching this amount.
	And the guy started at $1.50.
	He was like this skinny 150-pound guy.
	And then by the time the video I saw was made, which was about a year ago, he was $3.50.
	I think he's cruising around 400 pounds now.
	And yeah, it's...
	It's just hideous. And, you know, he does not seem to be a good person.
	He's sitting in his, I don't know, $2 million penthouse looking over the city saying how much he loves watching people suffer.
	Okay, well, that's corruption in the soul that is manifested in the corruption with the body.
	So I would say that...
	The purpose of a gym exercise...
	Of course, if you want to become a bodybuilder slash weightlifter, then you're going to spend a lot of time in the gym and then your goal is measuring your approach or capacity to achieve that goal of being a professional bodybuilder and so on.
	My goal is to stay healthy, to stay limber and to stay strong and to stay healthy and all of that.
	So it serves that purpose.
	Now, if I over-exercise...
	Then I've always had problems with tight tendons.
	I've never been able to touch my toes.
	I have my father's height and my mother's hamstrings, so to speak.
	And I had lumbago when I was a kid, which is like your bones are growing a lot faster than your tendons.
	So I'd have this kind of ache.
	I'd have to take these wicked hot baths to try and relax my tendons and stretch.
	And I still have to stretch every day just to keep my tendons limber and all of that.
	So if I exercise too much, I hurt my tendons because they're very tight.
	So my purpose is to exercise to the point where I have strength and the ability to run around and do what I want to do physically, but not to the point where it starts to interfere with my capacity to walk and move around without discomfort and all of that.
	And I've seen a lot of guys who let themselves go later on in life.
	They've got back problems, knee problems, hip problems.
	Like, ugh, I don't want that at all.
	So, the gym hobby, okay, what are you doing it for?
	It's an important question to ask about things you do in life as a whole.
	What are you doing it for? What's the point?
	What's the point of it? I know the point of my exercise, which is, I mean, I'm not some big, you know, here's my big muscle, right?
	It is like I'm not some big exercise guy.
	I'm not swole. I'm not, you know, but I'm strong enough to do everything that I need to do in life.
	I'm strong enough to play hard with my daughter.
	I'm strong enough to play sports.
	I'm strong enough to do volleyball.
	I'm strong enough to do pickleball.
	I'm strong enough to do tennis. I'm strong enough to go for, you know, I can do 25,000 steps in a day and I'm fine.
	So I'm strong enough for all of that.
	What would be the point of being stronger?
	Well, it would be diminishing returns and it would be increased courting of injury, particularly in my mid-50s and so on.
	So what's it for?
	You go to the gym. Okay, what's it for?
	Well, I want to have a super great physique to attract the girls.
	It's like, okay, well, then you're setting yourself up for being rejected.
	Because if you feel like you need to be you plus abs in order to be attractive to women, you're going to attract the shallows women and there's always some other guy with better abs.
	How does one draw the line between ambition and delusions?
	Well, like just about everything, the answer is empiricism.
	Ambition and delusions.
	So I had a great deal of ambition to be a great novelist and a great philosopher and so on.
	It would be a delusion in particular if I never put pen to paper.
	You know, like there's this old postcard I remember seeing once.
	It's like, so I haven't written much lately, so what?
	Neither is Shakespeare. Because there's that, a lot of writers have a tortured relationship with writing.
	You know, like there's this old saying, it says, oh, writing is easy, you just stare at a blank piece of paper until beads of blood form on your forehead, right?
	And I've never liked the idea that writing is some sort of horrible thing or some sort of terrible thing or whatever, right?
	So if you have ambitions, then you should take steps to achieve those ambitions, right?
	So I wanted to be involved in the arts.
	So I, you know, I did half an English literature degree.
	I've always loved history and knew I wanted to write historical fiction.
	So I finished my degree, my undergrad and graduate degree in history and history of philosophy.
	And I went to the National Theatre School for almost two years for playwriting and acting, which had some real value for me, of course.
	And I was writing, right?
	So I wrote like 30 plays, hundreds of poems.
	I've written like, I don't know, six or seven novels.
	And I've never been any good at short stories.
	But that is because you can't really put much philosophy in a short story.
	So you have to take steps towards the achievement of your ambition.
	If you don't, then it's a delusion.
	And a lot of people have ambitions in order to avoid...
	Actually working at something. Like, oh, I have this ambition.
	I'm going to be a this or whatever, right?
	And so they don't end up pursuing much of anything because they have this dream that somehow this thing is going to happen or some other thing is going to happen.
	So if you're working towards something, fantastic.
	There should be empirical measurement of it, right?
	So, oh, I want to be a writer.
	Oh, what have you written? Well, nothing really.
	Okay, then I want to be a writer.
	Like, just sit down and write. Well, I find writing really, really hard.
	It's like, okay, well, then maybe you should do something that isn't so hard.
	No, no, no, I really want to be a writer.
	It's like, okay, well, then it's just a vanity thing.
	It's just a vanity thing. Like, I remember I knew a woman when I was younger.
	She's like, oh, I want to be an actor.
	I want to be an actor, right?
	And she worked in the airline industry, and she met a woman who was an agent.
	And the agent said, oh, here's my card, you know?
	I mean, If you're ever in LA or whatever, right?
	She said, but you know, your teeth are...
	If you want to be in movies, you've got to get your teeth fixed.
	So she went and got braces for her teeth or whatever.
	And then, you know, after she spent a year or two getting her teeth fixed, she went...
	Because she was in LA for...
	Work and she went to this woman and she said, oh yeah, I remember you gave me this card a year or two ago.
	I got my teeth fixed.
	Now I want to be an actress. And she's like, well, I'm sorry, have you done any acting?
	Have you done any regional theater or, you know, anything where there's a write-up or do you have an audition piece?
	Like, no, no, no, but I got my teeth fixed.
	This woman just wasted two years of her life fixing her teeth for an acting thing that she was never going to do or really pursue.
	All right. Have you followed James Lindsay's new discourses project at all?
	The work is positively divine, tearing at the grasping roots of communism underlying every cultural institution.
	I have not. There's a scene in Infinite Jest where the main character throws a passionate fit about philosophy and they call security to tackle him.
	The scene reminds me of your opening salvo about the importance of passion in philosophy.
	Infinite Jest is no the future, but worth the read, in my opinion.
	All right. Oh yeah, I won't do the dream live here, but if you want to send me an email, we can talk about the dream.
	I saw that after I had the conversation with the guy about the moral responsibilities in a gulag.
	How do you deal with the sneaky people around you who you cannot defend against or avoid?
	I think that's a false dichotomy.
	You can almost always do something to avoid sneaky people.
	Okay, um, let me just, uh, there was another place where I asked questions, so let me go a day, uh, and see what other people have to say for the questions, n'est-ce pas?
	Mais oui. Zut alors, c'était enfant terrible.
	All right, so, um, oh yeah, we got some questions.
	All right, let me just burn through these, uh, quick as I can.
	Uh, Jerome Frank says in Law and the Modern Mind, formal logic is flawed, and therefore absolutism is false.
	I'm sorry, that's just...
	I mean, that's philosophy 101, right?
	Nothing is true. Is that a true statement?
	Yeah! So something is true.
	No! Right?
	So, again, I... When people jump over that, and maybe he has dealt with it, I don't know this guy, right?
	But... Formal logic is flawed and therefore absolutism is false.
	So that's a logical statement. Because this is flawed, the conclusion is false.
	So that's a logical statement. So if you're using a logical statement to say that logic is flawed and you're conforming to the rules of logic in order to say that logic is flawed, that's straight-up sophistry and it appeals to the midwits only.
	All right. He cites some cogent examples from Schiller and some Piaget saying that when a child discovers his father is not omniscient, he shifts to other ideas as a surrogate to maintain the absolutism he dreams to be true.
	Yeah, well that's...
	Yeah, you can make up a whole bunch of imaginary dominoes and have them fall into a perfect Minecraft claustrophobia of disaster, but...
	I don't know. When a child discovers his father is not omniscient, he shifts to other ideas as a surrogate to maintain the absolutism.
	He dreams to be true! Well, no, because if the father is a bully and says, I am always right, then the child may be more drawn towards ideology, because ideology is, I am always right.
	And this is an example of ideology, because how do you know that this is true?
	I mean, this sounds vaguely, oh, that would be a cool story, but how is this proven empirically, logically?
	See, formal logic is flawed, but I'm going to make up this story about children and their fathers and omniscience, and that's totally proven.
	I mean, I just find that stuff very silly.
	He also mentions the word magic, and that words become bigger than the concept, making words elastic enough to encompass everything to their particular bias.
	Yeah, I just... I just find it kind of funny when people say that, well, logic is flawed and therefore nothing is absolute.
	Okay, it's an absolute statement.
	Logic is flawed compared to what?
	What is logic flawed compared to?
	And if you're going to make an argument using a logical construct to saying that we can't accept the conclusions of logic...
	That's just sophistry. See, here's the thing, right?
	Let me give you the rant on this topic, which is really boring.
	Not that you're bringing it up as boring, it's just the topic is so obviously sophistic in the way that you've presented it.
	So we used to have this filtering mechanism in society to keep the dummies away From the arguments.
	Because the dummies would cloud up and mess up the arguments.
	That's why you don't let drunken, shrill people with whistles into a least piano concert.
	Because they're just going to muck it up.
	So you had to keep the dummies away from the debates, from the arguments, from the intelligentsia.
	In the same way that you need to keep the bagged singers away from the choir, because they're just going to make the choir sound terrible if it's a professional choir or something like that.
	So if you're not a good singer, you should not be fronting a band, unless you're Bob Dylan or the Reed.
	So the whole sort of filtering and sorting mechanism is really, really important.
	And we've just completely given up on this filtering and sorting mechanism.
	Now everyone can be everything, no matter what, and it just means that bullshit artists, I'm not talking about these guys, because I don't really know what they say, other than what you report, but bullshit artists love it when the meritocracy in the world of intelligence gets tossed out.
	Because then they don't have challenging, skeptical people saying, bullshit!
	Just put in their hand.
	If you're a teacher, right? I used to be the guy in the back of that class who'd put up their hand and say, well, what about this?
	And how about that? So if you're not particularly smart yourself, or rather if you've devoted yourself to linguistic trickery and...
	Subversion and intimidation rather than actually an honest and social examination of the truth, then yeah, you want to have all of these dummies around so that you feel smart, right?
	And this sorting mechanism, we've just completely given up on it.
	There's meritocracy, right? And it's really important to have that meritocracy.
	It's really, really important to keep me away from being the lead ballet dancer, right?
	In the Bolshoi ballet.
	It's really, really important to keep me away from that because I can't dance ballet and I'm bad at it and I have no idea what I'm doing.
	It's really, really important that you have Prince do the solo with Jeff Lynne and George Harrison's kid and Tom Petty.
	It's really, really important that you have Prince do that solo because Prince will massage that guitar until it climaxes music all over the faces of everyone, right?
	It's really, really important that you don't have me trying to figure out the chord sequence to All Dead, All Dead by Queen doing that solo.
	It's really important to keep me away.
	Because it's really important to keep me away from basketball courts, you know, at the NBA level because I can't play basketball very well.
	So it's really, really, this filtering mechanism, just keep people away.
	Keep people away. Just keep on moving.
	Only experts here. Only experts here.
	So one of the things that's happened when we've All right.
	Is it beneficial to go to church again?
	Yeah, it is. For me, it is beneficial to go to church again because it will stimulate your thoughts, it will stimulate your focus on morality, it will stimulate your focus on community.
	All right. Lady says, I've talked to my husband about peaceful parenting and that you've never punished your daughter.
	We are hoping to start a family in the next year.
	Congratulations. Well done. She says, he thinks it's possible raising boys and girls is different, that he was much more difficult to raise than his sisters and was constantly in a power struggle with his father.
	He thinks maybe boys do require more discipline in order to become disciplined men.
	He agrees physical punishment is not acceptable.
	Well, I don't know what he means by disciplined men.
	Discipline traditionally has been defined as, excuse my French, discipline has traditionally been defined as fuck your preferences, serve power.
	That's what discipline means.
	Fuck your preferences, serve power.
	Discipline, army, get up early.
	Exercise like crazy to the point where you can physically hurt yourself, right?
	I mean, the buy and burn in the army is crazy, right?
	I mean, I met a guy some years ago whose knees were completely shot because he marked him with these 80-pound packs all over the place and all over Hell's Half Acre for no particular point and purpose.
	And what did they do? They just gave him a bunch of painkillers.
	It's like, okay, so now his knees are completely shot for the rest of his life.
	Get up early! Why?
	So that you can go and fight in a pre-dawn raid.
	Discipline! What the hell does discipline mean?
	Other than service to the elites.
	I mean, I'm happy to be corrected.
	But for the most part, if discipline ain't minor sacrifice for a pleasurable goal, it's bullshit.
	It's bullshit. Look.
	I edit my own shows, right?
	So if I do a call-in and, you know, sometimes there's audio drift, there's a couple of background noise with people and so on, or they say stuff that I have to take out or whatever because it's names and places and stuff, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, now, I don't enjoy that process.
	It's really, really boring.
	And I can't even listen to music or something else because I need to listen to the show.
	And sometimes it can take as long to do a show as it does to record a show.
	And I've been doing it for 16 years off and on, except when my assistant was here.
	So it's not fun.
	What's my option? Well, I'd rather do it because it's got to be done, right?
	So I have the discipline to do it because I have a larger goal to get philosophy out, right?
	Fantastic. But that's not a sacrifice.
	So what does it mean to become disciplined men?
	What does that mean? Usually it's to serve other people.
	Right? To serve other people.
	To serve a boss, to serve a military commander, to serve a king, to serve a president, to serve, to serve, to serve.
	Right? What does discipline actually mean?
	Well, you've got to say no to chocolate cake after food.
	Okay, that's fine. Yeah, I mean, I say no to chocolate cake after food.
	I used to eat a lot more sugar.
	Now I don't eat much at all, except when my daughter makes something which is really good.
	So I have discipline, right?
	I say no, right?
	And I weigh even a little bit less now than I did as a teenager.
	And, you know, I'm a reasonably healthy weight.
	Is that discipline? Well...
	Not really. I mean, I just don't want to gain weight.
	I'm too cheap to buy new clothes.
	I don't really want to gain weight. So what does it mean?
	I mean, and he's welcome to call me in.
	I'm welcome to, like, what does that mean?
	What does it mean? Discipline. Well, it means hard work.
	It's like, hey, well, what's the benefit of hard work?
	I mean, the work smarter, not harder.
	What's the benefit? Tell me, what is the benefit of hard work?
	Well, hard work gets you more resources.
	Okay, well, what do you want the more resources for?
	And is it worth spending less time with your loved ones to get more resources?
	In other words, do people around you love you so much that rather you give them more resources than more of you?
	Right? And we all know this cliche of the...
	An upper middle class bourgeois status Karen who's like, you go to work and you get me a new car because this car is two years old and I'm embarrassed to be driving it.
	We've got to go to vacation in Aruba and we've got to, whatever, Bora Bora.
	So, why do you want all this stuff rather than time with your husband?
	What is discipline? I don't know what discipline means.
	You know, I took some time off last fall to write this book, and I worked on it for hours and hours a day.
	For months. Was that discipline?
	No, it was an important thing to do, and I enjoyed doing it.
	Are there times when it's kind of boring?
	Yeah, it's times when you're just, you know, re-editing or looking something up, and yeah, okay, it can get a little boring, but I mean, that's life, right?
	Sitting on the toilet is kind of dull.
	But it beats not being able to wash them at all, which generally means being sick or dead.
	So I don't know what it means to be disciplined.
	If you're not pursuing something that gives you pleasure for the right reasons, if you're not balancing your pleasures, right?
	The pleasure of chocolate cake versus the pleasure of fitting into your clothes and not having knees that hurt or whatever, right?
	So boys do require more discipline in order to become disciplined men.
	I don't know what discipline means, and if he wants to explain it to me, I'm happy to hear.
	All right. All right.
	Can you share your thoughts on Stoicism?
	How UPP and Stoicism are similar and how they differ?
	I'm not an expert on Stoicism, so maybe I'll study it one day, but I don't know.
	Let's see here. Thanks to crypto, says someone, I went from nearly broke to the top 1% in the West in two years' time.
	It wasn't just luck. I spent 2017 to 2020 studying and working at it.
	I was shocked to see nearly zero genuine joy from friends or family for me for this achievement after humbly disclosing it.
	Are almost all human beings innately resentful and jealous, even those closest to them?
	Should I judge them for it?
	It does sadden me. Thanks.
	Well, yeah, human beings are competitive.
	Of course we are. I mean, we didn't get to the top of the food chain by being pure altruistic bastards.
	And women are competitive for the top men.
	Men are competitive for the top women.
	Men will backstep and betray each other for the sake of reproduction and sex and all of that.
	And women will do the same thing as well.
	Men tend to be more honest, right?
	Men will punch you in the face.
	Women will spread poisonous vile lies about you, which you can't even trace back, right?
	So it is...
	Yeah, there is jealousy, for sure.
	Did you try to get them in?
	Did you offer to share in the good fortune that you pursued?
	Why would they be joyful?
	Now, of course, I think if it doesn't bother me that you got wealthy, good for you.
	It doesn't bother me. My life is great.
	So... If you have other people who are successful in other areas, right?
	So let's say you have a friend who wanted to become an opera singer and then they finally got some wonderful role doing the Barcelona album.
	They got a wonderful role or they got a lead in some Wagnerian opera or whatever.
	And then you say, oh yeah, no, and I made a lot of money in crypto.
	They'll be like, hey, good for you because I'm doing what I want.
	I'm achieving what I want. I'm getting my dreams fulfilled.
	So it's great that you're getting your dreams fulfilled.
	So if you're succeeding and other people are succeeding in different spheres, generally there won't be a huge amount of jealousy.
	But if you've got a bunch of do-nothing sludge-butt layabouts surrounding you who don't really pursue any particular dreams, don't take any particular risks, don't get passionate about anything, then they'll just have this brown-eyed, pig-slop, cow-like resentment at you for achieving anything.
	And that's really up to you.
	Do you want to be around people to whom you achieving anything is a resentful poke in the nihilism of their absent lives?
	Well, if you're going to be an achiever, you're going to have to start surrounding yourselves with achievers.
	Like, that's just the deal. I don't have people left in my life.
	I'm trying to think, do I have anybody left in my life who works a straight-up nine-to-five?
	I don't think so. I mean, one friend of mine is a fantastic financial manager.
	One friend of mine is an entrepreneur.
	Oh no, the other friend of mine is a very successful entrepreneur.
	Another friend of mine is writing some great stuff.
	Another friend of mine.
	Oh yeah. No, so I won't sort of go through the whole list, but I mean the people in my life, I don't have anyone in my life who's like a mid-level manager at a boring company working nine to five and is frustrated.
	What would we have in common at all, right?
	So, and it's not like we've all succeeded at everything, right?
	I mean, one of my friends had an entrepreneurial business that partly as a result of COVID, it went, you know, tits up.
	Like a true, as my old business manager used to say, he augured in, like he didn't just ground his way in.
	And He just, you know, picked himself up, dusted himself up, got on with his life.
	It's like my big major of deplatforming, right?
	Just pick yourself up, you move forward, and you get on with your life.
	So, if you don't...
	If the people around you are not working at stuff and taking risks and failing and succeeding and grabbing life by the horns and wrestling with it and all...
	Well, I would imagine that there would be some resentment.
	So, either inspire them to do better with their lives, do more with their lives, find better friends, or shut up about how well you're doing.
	But you can't change people from that standpoint.
	You know, an object at rest tends to remain at rest.
	An object in motion tends to remain in motion, right?
	Inertia. So, the people in your life who, you know, especially if you get into your 30s or whatever, the people in your life who aren't doing much, they're not going to do much.
	The people in your life who are doing stuff are probably going to continue to do stuff.
	But they will resent you.
	Yeah, for sure. For sure they will resent you because they're living like they've got forever and they don't.
	Okay, so let me get to another one here.
	Oh, you sent me a tip.
	Oh, thank you. That's very kind.
	I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
	All right. Let's see.
	How can I minimize the risk of my 10-month-old daughter becoming a childless leftist feminist in the future?
	I'm happily married. My wife stays at home.
	We're into peaceful parenting and I assume this is a good starting point.
	However, what I'm worried about is the ubiquitous leftist propaganda that she will encounter.
	Taking into account that the society as a whole tends to be lefty and women tend to be more compliant, I'm afraid she won't be able to reject the peer or social pressure she will soak up their ideas.
	Well, I mean, just...
	It's...
	If there's lead paint in the environment, lead paint is bad for kids' brains, as I understand it is, then just don't expose it to any lead paint.
	Just highly keep the crazy people, whether it's from the left or the right, keep the propagandists away from her.
	Teach her how to identify propaganda, teach her how to identify social cues for manipulation and so on, and just trust that she's going to want the life that you have.
	If she likes you, she loves you, and you have a good life, and it sounds like you do, fantastic.
	Then she's going to want the life that you have.
	But yeah, you just... How do you keep your kids, in Africa, how do I keep my kids from getting eaten by lions?
	Well, keep them close, teach them about lions, teach them where they are, teach them how to identify if they might be getting closer, teach them how to defend themselves against lions, and so on, right?
	So, liars and lions is the same principle.
	Steph, is it possible that the darker part of myself is in part what has kept me safe in the later half of my life?
	My upbringing and past is about as sordid as one can imagine, but my latter half has been quite the opposite, to the point where I often feel square or uptight.
	Sorry, that's not enough information for me to give you any particular response.
	Sometimes I get angry too easily, and of course it's my fault.
	Is this the dark personality you talked about last Q&A or something else?
	Because I don't care for that specific part of me, but maybe I'm missing something about this dark personality thing, and maybe it's got a purpose to serve.
	I'd love your thoughts. So I'm with Aristotle on this, right?
	So Aristotle said, getting angry is easy, right?
	But getting angry to the right degree, in the right way, at the right thing, at the right time, with the right effect, that's hard.
	So if you say, I get angry too easily, you are saying that if there's provocation in your environment, you're overreacting.
	Maybe you are, maybe you are, I don't know.
	But what do you mean you get angry too easily?
	So everything that provokes you is your fault.
	You misinterpret things.
	You blow up too much.
	You have a hysterically exaggerated response.
	What does it mean, get too angry too easily?
	Now, for the people who say, well, but there are people who get triggered and who get really angry without reason, it's like, yes, but they're not getting angry too easily.
	They're getting angry at the wrong things.
	Right, so the controversial stuff that I have been doing since the beginning of my show makes some people really angry.
	Now why are they angry?
	Are they angry at me? No.
	Are they angry at the facts? No.
	They're angry because they've been programmed to respond and they've lost their birthright of rational thought.
	So the way that propaganda works is it plants landmines within you.
	Whenever information crosses your path, you simply blow up.
	And that way, the information is kept at a distance from you.
	You blow up, usually with verbal abuse or slander or libel or whatever it is, right?
	And it is to deny people the capacity to evaluate and to think.
	I find it ridiculously boring, honestly, totally, completely ridiculously boring, how triggered society is by basic facts.
	It's a zombie apocalypse, right?
	I mean, the fact that people would just get so triggered by basic facts, basic arguments, right?
	It's so boring.
	It's so boring. And again, this is part of the, you know, if you can't handle arguments without going crazy, then arguments are not for you.
	You should be doing something else with your life.
	So I don't like when you say, well, you just get angry too easily.
	So if you have a flaw called getting angry too easily, then you're immediately assuming two things.
	One, that the immediate provocation is not a problem, and two, that you have nothing to get angry about.
	So if you get angry at the wrong things rather than the right things.
	So people get angry at me when they're actually deep down really angry at the people who program them to get angry at me or people like me or arguments like I make or data like I present.
	So they're angry at the people who propagandize them, but they can't criticize those because they were put into the position of being propagandized by their parents.
	They can't criticize their parents, so...
	They get mad at me because there's a lot of thwarted anger to the people who stole their birthright of true humanity, which is rational thought and independent thinking.
	So I bet you do have stuff to get angry about in your life.
	Maybe you're getting angry at the wrong things.
	You're getting angry about proxy because it's safer, right?
	It's safer for people to get mad at me than get mad at their parents who put them under the sway of propagandists for a dozen years or more or a society that lies to them about a whole bunch of things and programs them to react hysterically to facts.
	The real vaccine is against thinking, and it's called school.
	So, be curious.
	I get angry too easily as a conclusion.
	There's no curiosity in that that I can see, so be curious.
	Death penalty and UPB. UPB would not justify the death penalty except in a moment of immediate self-defense.
	In immediate self-defense, you can kill someone who is threatening your life or bodily security in some grievous manner.
	UPB does not demand the death penalty because UPB does not prescribe punishments.
	It allows you the right of self-defense, but it doesn't prescribe any particular punishments.
	In general, I believe that ostracism is the best punishment.
	It's the most peaceful and the most powerful.
	All right. Good evening.
	Good evening.
	My question is, what is the best way to bring up one's own red flags while dating?
	Having parents that split when I was young, a history of substance abuse, etc.
	Yes, I am recovered, but I think talking about my past would scare away a good, sane woman.
	Whilst you have time, I have read that it can be beneficial to date or be with people with a similar background.
	I feel like a woman from a good household would struggle to relate to my barbaric upbringing, shrouded in violence and substance abuse.
	Hmm.
	Well, take ownership as much as humanly possible because the only way you can have a relationship with someone is that person is not a blame thrower.
	Yeah.
	Blame, blame, blame. So if you take 100% ownership, 150% ownership as I suggest for yourself, yes, you had a very tough upbringing and if you're anything like me and everybody else that I've ever known or talked to or read about...
	There were times when you did not do the work that you needed to do to become a better person because you used your childhood as an excuse.
	Be honest about that.
	Substance abuse was running from the pain of your childhood, which you are responsible for.
	So just take as much onus and responsibility as humanly possible, and I think a good woman will be very interested in that.
	Can you discuss some of your ideas about children growing up with an alcoholic parent?
	Well, if you grow up with an alcoholic parent, like these two words are antonyms.
	Alcoholic and parent are the opposites.
	They simply, it's not even, can they not coexist?
	They're complete opposites. You are growing up with an emotional terrorist known as an alcoholic who's completely unavailable for you except as a manipulation machine.
	So you don't have a parent if you're growing up with an alcoholic.
	You have an addiction, which is a form of intellectual and emotional and spiritual tyranny masquerading as proximity.
	So I'm really sorry about that as a whole.
	How can philosophy help explain things like schizophrenia or mania in terms of mental health?
	Well, I think it's a Danish study that did a really good outpatient dealing with schizophrenia.
	No meds, just peaceful therapy and a good social environment and so on.
	And they had great success, so I would look up that.
	It's not just personal freedom.
	So personal freedom, if it doesn't come with consequences, it's not freedom.
	It's a fundamental fact about life.
	If it doesn't come with consequences, it's not freedom.
	So if a woman gets married out of wedlock and she can like, oh, the government can pay for the abortion or the government will pay for my daycare or the government will pay for my kids' health care or the government will pay for my schools.
	It's like, okay, well then if there's no consequences, if you can force everyone else to backfill your own mistakes, then don't talk to me about freedom.
	Because freedom without consequences is just exploitation.
	I listened to your Fall of Rome presentation again, and it reminded me that my father-in-law claimed that taxes were so low, before the collapse of the currency, of course, because they had slaves.
	What's the best counter to this?
	Well, so first of all, they had to enforce slavery, which was very expensive.
	There were slave rebellions, slave escapes, and so on.
	Taxes were also so low because they didn't have to pay as much for the military for most of the Roman Empire because they would just force people to work for the military.
	They would enslave people for 20 years and so on.
	Oh, seven left.
	Yeah, okay. And also the real tax.
	Slavery was the real tax because they didn't end up with an industrial revolution and labor-saving devices.
	You are winning! It doesn't always feel like that way in the present, but I think in the long run, yes.
	Most of my relationships are transaction-based and revolve around what I can do for those around me.
	I'm a huge disappointment when I try to set boundaries to look out for my best interest, even if that relates to me getting enough rest to stay productive at work.
	Any insight would be helpful. Yeah, it's the me plus.
	So fdrpodcast.com, look for the truth about Robin Williams.
	I think that triggered Joe Rogan, if I remember rightly, for reasons that are pretty clear.
	So yeah, the me plus.
	Are you enough just as yourself, thinking, speaking, or do you have to provide resources as well?
	Alright. Recommendations for someone who hasn't been in a relationship for over a decade.
	I've lost my concept of being in a relationship.
	I'm a conservative living in a liberal West Coast city.
	I should probably just move and get a hobby, I guess.
	But it's hard to envision the steps of where I am to where I want to be in a committed monogamous relationship.
	I didn't date for so long because I was depressed and making up for it with drinking, smoking, and video games.
	But I stopped considering myself a nihilist six years ago when Trump got elected.
	If he can become president, I can do anything.
	That's funny. Yeah, I... If there's no love where you are, move.
	You know, your ancestors survived ice ages and saber-toothed tigers and all sorts of crazy stuff, and the idea that you can't move from one comfortable city to another to find someone to love is kind of incomprehensible.
	You know, your ancestors would be getting kind of mad at you if this is your barrier to continuing your line, so to speak.
	What is going on in a person's mind when they realize that they're wrong and simply move on and pretend that they are never wrong?
	They may change their ways and never an apology.
	So usually what happens is they grow up in a family where a mistake is held against you forever, right?
	So once you drop a tray of drinks and then forever you're the clumsy one.
	Once you apologize and then what happens is, well, you're the one who's always wrong.
	So they can't admit that they're wrong because it will be used against them or held against them forever.
	Alright, I'll see you.
	A couple of stepbugs.
	Thank you. Have you ever known a late bloomer?
	I don't think so. Someone who's taken off in their 30s?
	I don't think so.
	What are your takes on giving up on multiple children for love?
	I don't know what that means, sorry.
	When you say you don't have any people left in your life who act a certain way, did you tell them why you aren't interested in hanging out or did you just drift away and not bother interacting anymore?
	I mostly just drifted away because everybody knows my values and my public statements are so available to everyone that I don't really need to say anything.
	Let's see here. I've not bothered keeping up with many former friends who've gone off the COVID deep end, haven't talked about it.
	Well, you know, once you've taken the jab, ex post facto justifications kick in and you can't look and say, particularly if you gave your children the jab and kept them home for two years and didn't get your checkups and didn't go to the dentist.
	And once you've sacrificed that amount, admitting that you're wrong becomes virtually impossible.
	Your thoughts on subjectivity.
	I think it's interesting that two people can derive two very different opinions from the same set of observable facts.
	Well, yeah, but that's because they don't have a universal common methodology like science or math or reason to be able to, or empiricism, to be able to sort these things out as well.
	Here's the other thing too. If you find somebody kind of boring or you don't really want to hang out with them, they can always ask you what the issue is.
	I'm not interested anymore, just at this point in my life.
	Maybe it's different for other people. Obviously it is.
	I'm not interested in owning other people's lives.
	If I find myself drifting away from someone, then they can call me and say, hey, we haven't talked that much.
	What's going on? If they can't be bothered to do that, I'm not going to drift away from someone and chase them at the same time.
	I'm just not going to do that. Life's short, baby.
	And here's the thing. Once you have great relationships in your life, every other person becomes less important, if that makes sense, right?
	I mean, if...
	If the person is necessary to give you food, then you really care about that person's opinion of you.
	If you can cook your own meal and you've got a fridge full of food, then their opinion of you doesn't really matter as much.
	So the key thing is to have great core relationships in your life, your husband, your wife, your kids, your close friends and so on.
	That's great. And of course, remember, when the bad people or the boring people or the uninspiring people or the uninspired people, if they're around you, they're blocking everyone else from getting close.
	They're a moat. They're like a fiery moat that just goes round and round you and keeps the good people away.
	Like if you're in a dysfunctional dating relationship, all of the good people don't hang around.
	You can't get a good woman when you're with a bad woman.
	You can't get a good man when you're with a bad man.
	All right. I will.
	We've got a minute. Yeah. Well, thanks everyone so much for dropping by.
	A real pleasure tonight.
	And I will not make the case that whole life insurance is better than term life insurance.
	That's not my gig. But yeah, thanks everyone for dropping by.
	Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
	I really, really would appreciate it enormously if you could help out the show and maybe get back into doing some documentaries and stuff.
	That would be cool. That would be cool, but they're pretty expensive.
	So yeah, freedomman.com slash donate if you could help me out.
	Don't forget my free books, justpoornovel.com.
	Just type in justpoornovel.com, you get to the audiobook of that.
	You can type in almostnovel.com, get to the audiobook and PDF of that, and fdrurl.com slash TGOA. I would really appreciate it.
	You've got to check these books out. I mean, you think my philosophy is good, man.
	My novels are better. In my humble opinion.
	So, thanks everyone so much.
	A great pleasure to chat with you.
	Lots of love.
	How low do you let your device battery levels go?
	Not too low. Not too low.
	I kind of hate that thing where it's like, can I finish the recording?
	Can I finish the recording? Can I finish the recording?
	In this case, no.
	Yes, I can. So yeah, everyone, I'll talk to you Friday night.
	Thanks for your attention and support of the show.
	Really, really appreciate it. Have a glorious, glorious evening.
	Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon.

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