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Aug. 27, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:51:18

HOW TO BURY TRAUMA!

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	All right. All right.
	New intro. My name.
	Please donate. The date.
	It's your show.
	Thank you for letting me do philosophy.
	Massive appreciation.
	Hope you're having a great summer.
	And if you have questions or issues or comments or criticisms or wish to engage in rank takedowns of the big chatty forehead, I am your man and this is your venue.
	I'm your man.
	All right. Who has questions, comments, issues?
	Just raise your hand.
	You can even give me the finger.
	I will take it and turn it into a nice plate full of well-buttered ladyfingers.
	Yes, it's one of those nights where I'm feeling a little loopy.
	I went to a restaurant today, which was...
	You ever go to one of these restaurants?
	Like a real ethnic restaurant.
	This was British food.
	And... I had a ploughman's lunch, which apparently can feed the ploughman and his horse.
	And I had around me...
	I was in a corner of the restaurant with my family.
	And around me... We're arrayed all of the candies and chocolates of my childhood.
	Oh, yes.
	All of the curly-whirlies, the flakes, the dairy milks, the malt teasers, the custards, the strange orange chocolate balls, the gumdrops, and the pastilles, which is kind of a uniquely British thing.
	But it was pretty wild.
	It was a flashback and a half to...
	The time when, as a child, like most of us, I vowed that when I got a job and had all the money I wanted, I would buy nothing but candy.
	And I would eat nothing but candy.
	Before I understood.
	Diabetes. Pancreas.
	Damage. Fat.
	Tooth decay, you name it.
	Back when I imagined that there was a paradise called candy that I could live in forever.
	Well, you know, it's important to have these goals in life.
	It's important to look forward to things in life, and I was looking forward to candy.
	And instead, we got national debts.
	But hey, it was nice looking back.
	It's funny, actually, I remember. I had some pretty quick-witted shopkeepers, so I lived...
	On a council estate.
	Estate sounds pretty nice.
	It was pretty low rent, but not too bad.
	A nice view of the city. And I finally had scraped together enough money for a chocolate bar, and I was so excited I ran down to the store in my bare feet when I was about, I don't know, six or maybe six years old.
	Thinking back on it, this is mostly unimaginable today that you just let some kid roam around the town.
	But I remember from the age of four or so, just roaming around the estate, roaming around the town, and I went to the convenience store and ran in barefoot.
	The guy looked up and said,"'We don't sew shoes here, son!' Boom!
	So fast. And he would never have imagined that 50 years later, his joke would be resurrected and sent out into the world to fend for itself.
	Barefoot. So, I have a whole bunch of questions here which I wanted to get through.
	Again, slight pause if anybody wants to ask questions live.
	This is a live show. Or you can sit back, get comfortable, and listen.
	And I can hear you playing video games.
	You know, it's fine with me if you play video games.
	I don't feel slighted in the slightest.
	All right. But I have a whole bunch of questions.
	So, if we will go ahead with those, we will go ahead with those.
	And I will get myself started.
	Where shall we find them?
	Oh, I had them set someplace useful.
	Yes, I did. Some really great questions.
	Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy questions.
	All right, let's get started, shall we?
	Have you seen the latest AI-generated art?
	It requires only a few prompts to make astonishing images and designs.
	As a professional artist, a painter, I'm worried about my ability to compete in the coming years as this tech increases in power.
	What, if anything, do you think we artists can do to create work of value that AI cannot?
	Yeah, it's funny, you know, I was just talking about this with my daughter the other day.
	We went on the whole sort of history of art thing about how, you know, artists have faced this kind of stuff before, right?
	I'm sure you're aware that artists used to make their money out of portraits.
	And then along came that rat bastard called photography, which put all that art out of work, all those artists out of work when it came to photography.
	So... Of course, you know, photography is much faster.
	Of course, it wasn't colour in the beginning, but trying to get a whole bunch of kids to sit together for a family portrait when you're being painted for a week is kind of impossible.
	So, one of the things that broke the need for realism, it didn't provoke the need for modern art, but broke the need for realism, was photography.
	So, yeah, I mean, I think it was fairly clear that You know, one of the reasons I got out of the high-tech world was computers were going to start to be able to program themselves, so to speak.
	So actual close to the metal code was becoming less valuable, less useful, less profitable, I suppose you could say.
	So I, oh gosh, 20 years ago or so, I began to move into a realm that only human beings can do.
	It seemed to me quite important to move into the realm that only human beings can do.
	Now, the realm of philosophy, yeah, only human beings can do it.
	In the realm of art, if you create beautiful, inspiring, amazing, wonderful paintings, that's going to be better than CGI, right?
	Oh, CGA, computer-generated art.
	It is going to be better.
	Computer-generated art is a very interesting thing.
	It's a fad, and you can produce some striking images, but it is a little bit of a rolling-the-dice randomization of art.
	So the more you can infuse a story into your art, the more you can infuse morals and a sense of life, of beauty, of nobility, of all of these things into art, the better off you'll be as an artist.
	Studying philosophy will enhance everything that you do.
	Studying philosophy will enhance everything that you do.
	Because the value-add of philosophy is something that no computer can do.
	Nor will a computer ever really be able to do it.
	I mean, I guess you could program a computer to do UPB or whatever it is, but it's not going to be...
	Computers don't philosophize.
	That's the one area in life that computers will never get to.
	Because... They don't have dreams.
	They don't have visions. They don't have morality.
	They don't have higher standards of universals to aspire to.
	They don't have emotions. And so whatever you do, the more you infuse it with philosophy, the more you're protected against technological encroachment.
	So that would be my advice.
	Steph, how much info do you gather before taking a leap into something new?
	Well, that depends on your age.
	It depends on your age. It depends on your external responsibilities.
	When I was younger, I would jump into things fairly hot-tempered, right?
	So when I left theater school, I left before the end of the second year.
	Oh, I loathed it there.
	And if it's any consolation, they loathed me right back.
	So it was just a bad match philosophically, basically a bunch of socialists and even worse as far as I could tell.
	So I had written an adept...
	Oh, well. I had a good run.
	60 years. That's it. I can't speak anymore.
	But I had created and written an adaptation of Dagenia's Fathers and Sons, and I produced it.
	And I just dove into it.
	I just dove right into it.
	And I... I advertised for actors and hired actors and directed it, and I had to fire an actor who screamed at me, and I hired a friend who I'd based the character on who stepped up to play the role, even though he wasn't an actor-actor, and it was really hard to find a venue that was available, and so I put the play on, and it was really something, and somewhere in one of my friend's basements there is a video recording of one of the nights.
	But yeah, so I just kind of dove into that.
	It was quite fascinating.
	I was doing the box office, just taking the receipts, because I did the advertising and all of that.
	I had the headset on because I was listening to the play, but I could also hear all the behind-the-stage people who didn't know that I was listening.
	It was one of the few times in my life where I really got to hear people talking about me without having any idea that I was listening in.
	It was really quite fascinating.
	It was nothing too bad and so on.
	There was some praises for my strengths and some criticisms of my weakness, which I all thought was actually very fair and right and useful.
	But I don't know if you've ever been in this situation where you can hear people talking about you When they have no idea that you're listening.
	No idea that you're listening. And this was live too, so it wasn't even, I don't know, now I guess you could record someone on a cell phone and play it back to someone else if you felt like being creepy and gossipy.
	But it was one of the few times where I could go through that experience.
	And it really was quite instructive to me.
	Because, you know, when, oh, they're talking about me and they don't know that I'm listening, and of course, you know, the jumpy part of you is like, oh, it's going to be terrible, and you're going to rip me apart, and they're like, no, it was a very, very fair assessment of my strengths and weaknesses, and I actually learned a huge amount from, just from that, from listening to the play roundabout, um, A little under two hours with intermission.
	I got to listen to people talking about me while listening to my own play.
	I got to listen to my own thoughts, my characters, my dialogue, and people talking about me for two hours.
	It was a really amazing experience.
	One of the things that taught me just how valuable Fair honesty is, right?
	Fair honesty is.
	I mean, there's honesty that's just kind of brutal and mean and nasty, but fair honesty is a beautiful thing.
	And I remember, I just haven't thought about that in years, but I remember that.
	So I just, I dove into that and I didn't have any idea what I was doing, but the end product was good.
	I was very pleased with how it came out and we had a really good time doing the We're good to go.
	And I put my entire summer savings on the line to produce that play and fortunately made enough back that I was able to recoup and make a little bit of extra money.
	But the experience of doing something like that was very interesting and very good.
	When it came to diving into novel writing, that's a little easier because it's just your own time.
	That's being burned, but I dove into that.
	When it came to the business world, I was not willing because I was really broke at this point in my life, in my sort of mid-twenties.
	You know, I burned up a lot of time in school and had no savings, and I didn't really have a lot of debts.
	I had about, I think, about 10K of student debt, but...
	Oh, no, that was later.
	That was later. Sorry. No, no, actually, this was...
	No, because this was after I graduated from my master's.
	So... When it came to the business world, I co-founded this company, we grew it, I got a job, and then I was working that job and then I was working part-time afterwards, after nights and weekends kind of thing.
	And then once that job had a certain amount of investment and we had a certain amount, I think we raised about 80K to start the business as a whole, and those initial investors made a fortune out of that business, let me tell you.
	But, you know, no complaints. I'm very glad that they did.
	But I needed a salary, and I said, I'll make the jump, but the salary has to be significantly better than what I've got going on at the moment, because I just needed the cash.
	I needed the money. So that was a bit...
	And then when it came to doing this show, there was...
	Well, I guess another thing, yeah.
	I took one of Canada's best writing courses and I wrote two novels, The God of Atheists, almost over about an 18-month period.
	I really threw myself into that.
	I quit the company that I co-founded and they then sold the company and the new owners tried to lure me back with crazy high salary.
	Oh gosh, it was just almost obscene for three days a week, just for coming in three days a week because they just, I mean, I think they got the value that I had provided to the company.
	And it was not easy. It was not easy to say no to that.
	But I really, really wanted to focus on art because I didn't realize how much sinister forces to some degree had infiltrated the publishing industry.
	And I had no chance of, you know, anti-collectivist, anti-socialist, anti-communist novels, which I generally have written, not focused on those things, but they're definitely in there.
	I had no chance of getting published.
	I mean, I didn't. This is just naivete.
	I, uh, Because I grew up on the classics, and the classics are deeply humanistic, right?
	I mean, they're really good, like the Shakespeare's, the Dickens, and so on.
	They're deeply humanistic.
	They explore the human condition and are not fundamentally political, and my novels are not fundamentally political.
	I explore deeply the human condition.
	But there's certainly some anti-fascist, anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-totalitarian stuff in there.
	Because I was raised – and the Russian novels, of course, are not specifically political, but there are politics in it, particularly in The Possessed by Dostoevsky.
	So I was sort of deeply steeped in humanistic literature, and that's what inspires me the most is why I wanted to write novels.
	But everything is political and has an agenda.
	I find that stuff repulsive in the art world.
	It's political. It has an agenda.
	It's just inhuman. I think everyone's had this experience with someone at some time or another where somebody is just playing you.
	They're just playing you.
	Everything that comes out of their mouth is designed for a particular effect.
	Right? Everything that comes out of their mouth is designed to get something out of you or get you to change your mind or get you to believe something or get you to follow an agenda or get you to give them money.
	You know, we talked about this with Kant, that you should treat people as ends in themselves rather than as a means to your end, which is fine in personal relationships and a good thing in personal relationships, but in the business world, that's not how things work.
	You know, if you want to Get a hot dog from a hot dog stand.
	You're not treating the hot dog vendor as a means to himself, but rather a means to get you a hot dog.
	And he's treating you as a means to get the money from you in exchange for the hot dog.
	So only somebody fundamentally alienated from the market would have.
	Don't use people as a means to your end as a sort of foundational metric for human relations or advocacy for human relations wouldn't make any sense at all.
	So, yeah, I think for diving in...
	If you're younger, take risks.
	Like, just take risks.
	It feels like failure is failure, but it's not.
	I mean, this is one of the great secrets in life if you want to try and achieve anything out of the ordinary, which is, I think, the only reason worth doing anything is to try and achieve something out of the ordinary.
	I mean, if you're listening to this, like, I'm sorry, you have great gifts to give to the world.
	You have great intelligence. You have great depth.
	You have great wisdom. I'm not just blowing smoke up your hiney.
	Like, this is a genuine... If you're really into...
	A highly challenging, highly deconstructionist, highly volatile philosophy conversation from bare principles, first essentials, all the way through to human virtue and self-knowledge.
	If you're into this kind of show, like I'm sorry, you have superhero potential.
	You have a cape around your shoulders, whether you like it or not.
	And with that cape, with that depth, with that curiosity, with that...
	Capacity to pursue truth despite volatility or perhaps because of volatility.
	Because you have that, you just have a responsibility.
	If you have the capacity to heal people by touching them, you kind of have a responsibility.
	I mean, it doesn't mean you have to spend your whole life touching sick people, but if you don't do anything with that gift...
	Nature weeps. Nature weeps deep in her bosom.
	Nature absolutely weeps.
	If nature has constructed you to bring extraordinary levels of virtue and self-knowledge to the world, and whether that world is your world, your social world, your business world, wherever, or the world as a whole, if nature has so fashioned you to be one of the random evolutionary genes that drags forward the social and body politic to a higher place, you have a responsibility.
	It doesn't mean you can be forced to do anything, but your conscience will get you if you don't exercise it.
	Like, I'm sorry, I wish it were different sometimes.
	I wish it were different from me, and I wish it were different from you, but it's not.
	It's not. You're listening to this, whether now or later.
	You have a responsibility, and you can shirk it, and you can avoid it, and it doesn't have to be 24-7.
	You know, therefore I recorded this show.
	I spent a half an hour playing a game of Catan with my wife, which was completely delightful.
	So, lots of other things you could do and should.
	It can't be a one-note symphony.
	But you've got to return to this.
	It doesn't have to be your life's work.
	It doesn't have to be your occupation.
	But it's got to be something.
	Because if you're so fashioned and so constructed to be your local Mozart artist, Of notes assembly, and you produce no beautiful music, although beautiful music is produced within you.
	You do nothing to share it with the world.
	Nature weeps, and your conscience will get you.
	Oh, it will get you back.
	It will get you back.
	Failing to fulfill our potential is a razor blade slide into self-contempt.
	I don't have an argument for that.
	I've just seen it everywhere.
	And that's not an argument either.
	I'm telling you, it's as much a fact as I know.
	It's as much a fact as physics is to me.
	You have a potential.
	You have a potential.
	Failing to approach or achieve that potential, you will know how small you have lived relative to the size you could have been.
	You will know that until the day you die.
	I have done so much in my 16 plus years as a public figure and before that, but the 16 plus years, I've done so much.
	Do you know how much I feel I have achieved my potential?
	Maybe 40%.
	Maybe.
	That's why I keep going.
	That's why I keep doing.
	That's why I keep growing.
	That's why I keep challenging both myself and you with this.
	If you have a potential and you fail to achieve it, which is the greatest failure there is.
	And failing to achieve it means manifesting it in the world.
	It doesn't mean making a billion dollars.
	It doesn't mean running a multinational corporation.
	It doesn't mean becoming famous.
	It doesn't mean becoming an influencer.
	It simply means manifesting your potential in the world in some manner.
	And it can be An epic poem in a drawer that's published after your death.
	I don't care, but it has to manifest in the world in some manner that you can leave behind and share.
	Because you understand that we beings with great potential are the stars by which the midnight lost acreage of humanity navigates.
	If people don't see us actualize our potential, they have no idea what a human being really is.
	What a human being is really capable of.
	You want to move that upper ceiling of what humanity is capable of and what humanity can do.
	You want to keep moving that up and up and up, just as I have seen other men and women move it up and up and up in glorious and inspiring ways.
	If the lights go out, In the night sky, everyone is lost and wandering in circles to an early grave of missed possibilities.
	We got to be up there in the night sky, burning as bright as we can to illuminate and to give people the capacity to navigate.
	Think of the things that you consume in the world that are powerful and positive and beautiful for you.
	Paintings, movies, philosophy, art of any kind.
	Music, in particular.
	For me, music. So think of all of the things that you consume in the world that move you with their depth and power and beauty.
	And then imagine a world without any of those things.
	Any of those things.
	Imagine that your life was bereft of beauty, inspiration, power, depth.
	Glory. Potential.
	Or in other words, imagine if everything that everyone had ever done that elevates and beautifies your life.
	Imagine that that had only remained potential and your life was a barren desert of conformity and mediocrity.
	Everyone and everything that is in your life that has inspired you directly, indirectly, in person, through another medium, through art, through literature, through music, through philosophy.
	Everyone who has inspired you has actualized their potential.
	And who are you to not add to that?
	Who are you to not...
	What? God laid his...
	Heavy log across the door of your possibilities and said, nope, not you!
	Other people can do it.
	Other people can make things that are wonderful and beautiful.
	Not you! Not you!
	You get down there.
	You stay small. You live with the mice.
	You live with the bugs. You take the scraps that fall from the cultural tables.
	You stay small and nothing.
	There's no curse that comes from the skies that keeps us small.
	And don't be... This is what's important to me.
	So, if this sounds harsh, trust me, it's harsher with me than it is with you.
	And I say this with humility.
	But please, I beg you.
	I beg you, do not be a parasite of beauty.
	Do not be a parasite of truth.
	Do not be a parasite of potential.
	Do not let other people shape all the markers by which you navigate.
	Do not let other people be the dots that you simply draw the lines in those one, two, three, four, join the dots pictures we all did as kids.
	Don't let other people do the outlines and you simply fill in the color.
	Don't let other people shape the physics and you only navigate the movement.
	Don't let everybody else inspire you and be inspired and not add to it.
	In the people in your life, in the people in your world, in the people you can meet or influence directly or indirectly.
	To take inspiration, to take the actualized potential of other great souls and simply consume it without adding to it is parasitical.
	And I wouldn't say this to most people.
	I wouldn't say this to a whole of average people.
	But I say this to you because you're here and you understand philosophy It's not for consumption.
	Philosophy is not something you consume.
	Philosophy is something you use to charge yourself up.
	I mean, imagine you plug your cell phone in to charge.
	You heroically got it down to a Cernovich-style 2%, right?
	And you plug it in.
	And you come back an hour or two later and it's at 2%.
	Why? Well, because the cell phone just ate all the electricity.
	It didn't charge up. It didn't store anything up.
	You understand? Philosophy is for charging you up, not just for consuming, not just for listening.
	It's for charging you up to replicate what philosophy can do.
	To replicate. Music is not for your ears.
	Music is for your voice.
	You say, ah, well, I'm not a great singer.
	Well, if you're here, if you're listening, live or later, you are a philosopher.
	It's not reserved for the experts.
	It's not reserved for the highly educated.
	It's not reserved for the people with a cat's technicolor yawn of alphabet soup after their name.
	You are a philosopher, you are a thinker, you are a reasoner, you are a processor, and you are a striver after virtue and a rabid pursuer and hunter of the truth.
	Philosophy is not a spectator sport.
	Philosophy is not for me.
	It's not for Richard Dawkins.
	It's not for Sam Harris.
	It's not for Jordan Peterson. It's not for Peter Boghossian.
	It's not for Theodore Derimble.
	Philosophy is for you.
	And we serve philosophy by manifesting it in the world in which we speak and live and move.
	My world may be bigger than your world.
	It's smaller than others, but it may be bigger than your world.
	That doesn't matter. Nutrition is not a spectator sport.
	It's not, hey, I read a couple of books.
	I watched a couple of mukbangs.
	You just go back to normal.
	Philosophy is there to change your life.
	Nutrition is there to change your diet.
	And coaches are there to improve your sports habits.
	Don't eat philosophy alone.
	Except to provide energy with which to amplify philosophy.
	The people who eat but gain almost no nutrition die because they're not taking the food that they bring into their bodies and using it to translate into hopefully productive action in the world as a whole.
	That's not what philosophy is about.
	I think it's great that you listen to philosophy.
	You listen to this show. You listen to whatever you listen to.
	You read your books. It's wonderful.
	I think that's great. But real philosophy, actual philosophy manifesting in the world to inspire other people to pursue and achieve reason and virtue is two words.
	I mean, the first words, the first two words is gather knowledge.
	Right? The first two words of philosophy gather knowledge.
	The second two words of philosophy, which you may be on the fulcrum, on the teetering edge of, the second two words of philosophy are, now what?
	Now what? Hey, you've got your knowledge.
	Now what? What are you going to do now?
	Now, we are in the consumption phase, the gathering phase, and we view knowledge or philosophy in this sense like politics or like professional sports.
	People don't watch the NBA so they can join the NBA. People watch the NBA as a spectator sport, as a distant thing, and maybe they play a little on the side, but they're not going to crawl through the screen and join the game.
	The whole point of philosophy is crawl through the screen and join the game.
	Crawl through the audio and join the choir.
	You go to a concert, you know, every now and then.
	Someone from the audience gets brought up to sing with the singer.
	And someone crawls up over the stage, they get handed a microphone, and every now and then, you know, somebody with a beautiful voice joins.
	And you look at that and you say, wow, there's the singer.
	And then there's a guy who's brought up on the stage to sing with the singer.
	And then what does he do? He disappears back into the crowd.
	I remember seeing Brian Adams doing a live version of, if you want to be bad, well, you've got to be good.
	And They shone the spotlight on some woman.
	Maybe it's just people who go to see Bryan Adams' concerts, or maybe it's deeper than every woman, the capacity to be a pole dancer.
	Just dancing away, right?
	And that's her two minutes of fame.
	Now, occasionally, at last, the woman from Friends was once in the Dancing of the Dark video, but...
	I'm not the singer you're supposed to watch.
	I'm an example of the choir you're supposed to join.
	Get up here. Sing.
	Do your thing. Not everyone who consumes music can be a musician.
	Not everyone who loves a singer can be a singer.
	But everyone who loves philosophy can be a philosopher.
	It is not an expert circle.
	It is not a magic pentagram that none shall pass to the realm of thought.
	If it can't be spread, it can't survive.
	Singers can survive without everyone being a singer.
	In fact, I was thinking the other day, since singers are so popular, why aren't there more of them?
	In other words, why didn't nature evolve everyone to have a beautiful voice, particularly men, right?
	Because singers get the ladies, right?
	Well, the answer is that People got to hunt and grow things and build houses and so on, so singers have to be limited because if you get too many singers, then there's too little food and shelter provided, so you have to limit it.
	If there are no singers, then there's not enough beauty for people to defend their own culture, but if there are too many singers, there's not enough food to feed the singers.
	This is not a spectator sport.
	Philosophy is not something where, you know, like...
	What's it, Alexander Sorky invents the polio vaccine?
	And you don't have to invent a polio vaccine, right?
	You don't have to do what he did.
	The guy who figured out, hey, you know, there's not a lot of mold near this piece of bread.
	Let's figure out what's going on.
	Oh, penicillin, antibiotics, right?
	You don't have to replicate his work to gain the value of what he did.
	That's not the case with philosophy.
	If you're overweight or underweight and you want to get to a healthy weight, you have to change your diet.
	You have to bring it into...
	You have to manifest good diet habits in your life.
	Nobody else can diet for you, right?
	Somebody else is going to invent antibiotics and then you take them when you've got an infection and you get better.
	So you don't have to replicate the research.
	You don't have to be a doctor to see a doctor.
	But that's not the case with philosophy.
	Philosophy has to manifest in your life.
	It has to manifest in your life.
	Why has the world not become philosophical?
	Because a lot of people think, oh, you see, a philosopher is a guy with a big old dusty-ass leather-bound book in an old library in Detroit.
	Where they ransack libraries and steal absolutely everything that isn't nailed down, except the books.
	The books they will leave behind, obviously.
	You think, philosopher!
	Some white-haired guy in a white robe, chattering away on a hill.
	Distant. No.
	Everybody wants to watch philosophy.
	How many people want to do it?
	Yeah, I get that. I mean, people like to watch NFL. It doesn't mean that they want to go in there and get their brains turned into castanets.
	But you understand, this is not an observational sport.
	This is not a pastime like you go and see a chamber orchestra.
	You don't get up there with your Charlie Daniels fiddle and join in.
	You know, sit back.
	Let the experts do it.
	Let those who are trained, you let those professionals do it.
	You doing philosophy would be like terrible amateur karaoke.
	You let those professional singers do it.
	Your friend has a sore tooth, you send him to a dentist.
	You don't do it. You don't do dentistry.
	And we're so conditioned to look at experts who wall us off for manifestation of their actions.
	And of course, in most cases, that's entirely appropriate.
	You don't do an appendectomy on your friend because you have a butter knife and a couple of shots of scotch.
	But that's not the case with philosophy.
	Philosophy is not a professional thing that you watch other people do.
	Philosophy is something you plug into to charge yourself to go out there and fucking do philosophy.
	This is a charging station, not a television.
	Philosophy is not what you watch, not what you listen to, not what you read.
	It's what you think, followed by what you do.
	Gather knowledge. Now what?
	You have knowledge. Now what?
	Nobody charges their phone to throw it in a drawer, let it discharge.
	Charge their phone, throw it in a drawer, let it discharge.
	You charge your phone, now what?
	Oh, I have to check my email. Oh, I'm going to look something up.
	Oh, I'm going to listen to a show.
	Oh, I'm going to play a game.
	You charge your phone, now what?
	So if I'm charging you up with knowledge, now what?
	Go forth. Go forth and reason.
	Go forth and think. Go forth and act in peaceful and rational manners to inspire other people into moral courage and moral philosophy.
	Go forth and reason.
	That's what it's for.
	That's what it's all about. So, yeah, take some risks.
	There's no greater risk than taking no risks at all.
	I know that sounds like a nonsense piece of haiku, but it's really true.
	There is no greater risk than taking no risks at all.
	Because then you caught the absolute certainty of regret.
	I mean, there's no solution in life.
	There's only trade-offs in these non-moral areas.
	There's only trade-offs. Well, it could be risky.
	Okay? Yeah, it's risky.
	You think there's a situation where there's no risk?
	There's no situation where there's no risk.
	Oh, if I ask this girl out and she says, no, I'll feel bad, I'll feel terrible.
	Yes, absolutely, you will. And then you'll adjust and you'll move on and you'll survive and you'll flourish in some other manner with some other girl.
	But there's no, you know, in my 50s now, I'm going to be 56 next month, less than a month, right?
	Yeah. I've seen the people who lived with the illusion that there were no risks.
	Oh, my God. Oh, it's horrible.
	It is a fate worse than death in very many ways.
	The people who thought, well, I don't want to risk asking girls out.
	There's a lot of rejection. There's a lot of problems with it.
	I don't know. It's okay.
	Well, then... You get no girlfriend.
	You get no wife. You get no mother for your children.
	You get no continuation of your line.
	You're done. And you got a lot of time to be done.
	Oh, I don't want to be pushy about asking for a rage.
	I don't want to be pushy about asking for a promotion.
	Okay, well, then you avoid that scalding moment of potential rejection and then you just end up simmering in low-rent failure and resentment for the next 40 years.
	It's the seen versus the unseen, right?
	You see the moment of stress and anxiety and When you caught rejection through action, what you don't see is all that low-rent background harm tinnitus of failure that accompanies avoiding that moment of stress.
	All the people who Avoided trying to make any money or I don't want to be a sellout or an anti-capitalist.
	I don't want to play the game.
	I don't want to network. Okay, well, how's your retirement looking?
	Well, I hope the government keeps funding my retirement, which, you know, it won't.
	Mathematically, statistically.
	It's funny how this Agenda 2030 arises.
	Coincidentally, it's the same time as everybody starts hanging off the government purse with retirements.
	Odd, that, isn't it?
	Odd coincidence. So, you simply have risks to manage.
	You can't avoid risk.
	How much risks should I take?
	Well, look, I understand, and don't jump off a cliff and hope an updraft will catch you.
	Don't jump off a cliff at all, of course, and not save any money and play the lottery.
	Okay, I understand.
	You've got to manage your risks. But one of the great truths about adulting is there's no situation with no risk.
	The people who are like, ah, you know, I don't really want to settle down and, you know, having kids is risky.
	You know, what if they don't like you?
	What if there are problems? What if there's genetic issues?
	Like, what if, you know, what if you don't get along?
	What if they turn on you? Okay, well, so you avoid that risk and then you have the risk of regret as you sail into the last third of your life.
	With what? Or even the people who said, I'm going to focus on making money and I'm not going to focus on connecting with people.
	Okay, so they end up with a lot of money.
	They have a lot of money. So what?
	So what? I mean, I was watching a Phil Collins concert, or listening to a Phil Collins, a Genesis concert from like 1987.
	And, you know, the Me and Sarah Jane came on, which I really liked when I was younger.
	You know, that lyric about Europe post-Trump.
	Um... And now the city lights are dimming one by one.
	It costs too much money to keep them on.
	Right? That's how Phil Collins looks perfectly confident.
	And, you know, he obviously pursued an almost professional success.
	But what's he been married and divorced like three or four times?
	He's in some horrible fight with his ex-wife about their house.
	And it's just, you know, go listen to I Don't Care Anymore and how well he gets along with people.
	It's life without balance.
	So he poured everything into being a complete workaholic.
	In fact, when Phil Collins was on tour, the story goes, he had to fax his children.
	This is back before email and stuff.
	He had to fax his children because he couldn't talk to them on the phone.
	Why? Because he needed to save his voice for the audience, right?
	So he couldn't talk to his children because he had to save his voice for the audience.
	Boy, talk about a missed set of priorities there, right?
	Or the movie I watched when I was a teenager, Krull!
	Where there's a woman in there who's trapped in isolation because she killed her baby.
	Raising a child is risky.
	Abortion ain't risk-free either, because I'm sure that's what's an analogy for it.
	So, yeah, that's a long-ass answer, but moderate your risks, but you have to let go.
	You must let go of the two ideas.
	One, life is risk-free.
	It's not risk-free. There's no path.
	There's no path you can take that's risk-free.
	It's simply a matter of choose your poison, so to speak.
	And I prefer the stress in the moment and the satisfaction later.
	You know this old saying, nothing tastes as good as thin feels?
	Once on the lips, forever on the hips!
	Some people prefer the taste now and don't care about the poor health later or the fat later.
	I'll take the stress now for the satisfaction later.
	I'll ask the girl out.
	I'll deal with the bad feeling of rejection if and when she says no.
	And then I'll go ask another girl that.
	I will talk about what is absolutely important to talk about.
	I get deplatformed.
	I'm satisfied. I'm satisfied.
	The moral evils are on others, not on me.
	That's the important thing.
	I will follow my conscience and good reason.
	And the evil consequences that accrue are on other people's conscience if they have them, not me.
	And I am satisfied.
	People say, oh, deplatforming must be so bad.
	But the alternative would have been to deplatform myself from the truth.
	The deplatforming is a band-aid that comes off and you survive and you move on.
	But if I had deplatformed myself, if I had self-censored myself to the point of staring into a camera and saying things that I knew were false or not saying things that I knew were both true and essential, I would have deplatformed myself.
	Now, deplatforming was unpleasant for a little while.
	Now, I don't care.
	But the deplatforming of myself might have saved things in the moment.
	Might have saved things for a long time in terms of public profile or whatever, right?
	My channels or whatever. But at what cost?
	I have a platform for which now I cannot tell the truth.
	What a horrible situation that would be.
	You can date any woman in the world you want, but she must be really unpleasant and ugly.
	You can keep your platforms, but you can't use them to tell the truth.
	Excellent! What a great deal with the devil that would have been.
	Perhaps literally. All right, I will try to keep the next answers shorter.
	I know that somebody popped up and wanted to...
	If you want to bring back that, I'm sorry again for a long juicy answer.
	You know, here's a funny thing. This is one of the shows, just while I wait for that person to come back if they want, this is one of the shows where I was tired.
	I was tired today. I had a bit of donut sleep last night.
	You know, you wake up, you're thinking about stuff.
	And, you know, often you can just turn around and go back to sleep.
	But in this particular instance, I just happened to be up for an hour or two.
	So I was a little tired today and had a nice day out at a farm with my daughter and...
	And also, I came back and I was just a little tired and I was like, I've got a show to do.
	I'm sure it'll be fine.
	And I was just sitting there thinking, I'm just going to sit on a couch and murmur.
	But anyway, as I say, philosophy is for recharging you.
	I hope that you can see and grok what I am all about.
	All right, well, if the person is not coming back at the moment, I will continue.
	Can the same person make both good art and evil art?
	Absolutely. In fact, it's not good art if there's no evil art in it.
	I have written some of the most unholy characters known to man.
	And I'm a good person, but I understand evil pretty deeply, and I'm willing to inhabit and, you know, in my last novel, The Future, freedomain.locals.com, I wrote a character from the first-person perspective.
	A very, very evil man.
	From the first person perspective, I this, I that.
	So I had to really get deep into his brain.
	I have the character of Reginald in Almost and other characters who just...
	Monstrous! Monstrous!
	Who... Literally drive the world into the war for reasons of petty sibling rivalry.
	So, yes, you have to be able to create truly evil characters.
	And not, you know, these stupid, I don't know, enemy of Thor, the tough guys who live in the shadows and speak nothingness.
	I mean, they're genuinely passionate and powerful and deeply evil characters.
	So, yeah. In order to have good art, you have to have...
	Both good and evil within it.
	How should I signal my virtue?
	It's right by the steering wheel.
	How can a couple get out of a repetition compulsion situation?
	It became clear to me that we subconsciously got together because we both recreate the negative environments that we grew up in.
	I already took your advice regarding setting standards and not tolerating bad behavior, e.g.
	yelling. So I'm hoping the answer to this question can help improve my situation and others listening.
	Thanks for all that you do. This may be a call-in situation, so just shoot me an email, callinatfreedomain.com, and please remember to include your Skype name and some availability and a description of the issue.
	So, recreate the negative environment.
	It's tough, you know, because basically you're trying to turn...
	A boat into a car after you already bought the boat, right?
	I mean, it's not impossible, but it's a lot of work.
	Now, if you are a boyfriend-girlfriend, you may want to consider, with all the self-knowledge, I mean, unless you're both on the same path as far as self-knowledge, but if you choose someone out of a repetition-compulsion situation, trying to turn that person into the opposite of what you chose them for is pretty tough.
	And again, they might do it themselves if they're Have a similar sort of set of motivations.
	So if you're just boyfriend-girlfriend, you may want to think about saying, you know, gosh, this was a shadow cast by my traumatic history.
	I'm really sorry. This, you know, this is probably a lot to ask for us both to reform ourselves fundamentally.
	But if you're married, or if you have kids, then you might want to continue to just work.
	You know, it's a basic question.
	Basic question that you have in any relationship.
	What is love? Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
	Okay, so in order to love and to be loved, both you and your partner must be virtuous.
	Right? But both you and your partner must be virtuous.
	Okay, so what is virtue?
	Now, if you both can be virtuous, you can both love each other.
	I mean, there are probably some personal idiosyncrasies, morning people, night people, people who are more conscientious, people who are less conscientious but more creative.
	I mean, there's some big five personality traits compatibility, so it's not all like you can love every virtuous person equally, right?
	And there's matters of physical or sexual attraction and other things like that.
	So I get all of that, but...
	Fundamental question in any relationship.
	If it's a business relationship, how do we respect each other?
	Well, we respect each other based upon integrity.
	Okay, what is integrity to what?
	Integrity to virtue. Okay, what is virtue?
	And how do we achieve it? And how do we manifest it?
	And how do we practice it consistently?
	These are tough questions.
	The beauty is there's no final answer and it's a wonderful road to go down.
	So you've got to sit down with your girlfriend, your wife, your husband, your partner.
	You sit down and say, okay, We have to be virtuous in order to be loved.
	We have to be virtuous in order to love.
	Do we accept that?
	Could I be an evil guy and you would love me?
	Could I be a guy who betrays himself and betrays you and betrays virtue and betrays his integrity?
	Could I be that guy and you would still love me?
	Okay, so we have to have integrity.
	We have to be virtuous. Not perfect, of course, right?
	You can be in good health.
	Nobody's in perfect health. I talk about this in my novel.
	So we have to be good people.
	We have to pursue virtue.
	What does that mean? What does it mean to pursue virtue?
	If you can't answer that, you can't be in love.
	You can't love consistently.
	You might have attachment. You might have needy desperation.
	You might have clinginess. You might have fusion.
	You might have lust. Do you want to have love?
	It's okay. We have to be good together.
	We have to do good in the world.
	We have to live with integrity.
	We have to be reasonably honest without being self-destructive because it's a dangerous world out there these days for honest people.
	Come on. We know that.
	The predators of falsehood are in full flower and full ferocity at the moment.
	To be honest is to be hunted.
	Or as they would say in England, to be honest is to be hunted.
	People say, do a British accent.
	It's like, okay, from which five square miles of particular accent should I do?
	So you sit down with your partner, you say, okay, so we have to be good to love each other.
	So what is good? And if you can come to a mutually agreed-upon definition of virtue, and it may be slightly different for both of you, right?
	You know, the typical thing, the female might be more into conformity, the man might be more into rebellion.
	I mean, you know, a couple of things, but you have to find something that you can reasonably work together on or work together with.
	So sit down with your partner and say, what is virtue?
	How are we virtuous? How do we work?
	Because we can't Now, I love you.
	What do you love? You're pretty.
	No? Then you just love flesh.
	You love evolution. You love a dump for your semen.
	Right? Well, she's nice.
	Well, nice is not a virtue.
	It can be. But if you don't have the capacity to not be nice, being nice is just a form of enslavement.
	What do you love? Honesty, integrity, virtue, the pursuit of truth against all odds, standing up to bad people, supporting good people, all the basics, right?
	Okay, so how do we do that?
	How do we manifest that in the world?
	Because simply talking about virtue is like talking about losing weight.
	Actually, talking about losing weight is even more valuable because you at least expend calories by talking about losing weight.
	Talking about virtue is fine.
	Again, talking about losing weight is fine, but if it's not translated into action, it's worse than useless.
	It discredits the entire aspect and field of philosophy as a whole.
	The people who talk about philosophy without enacting it are doing much more harm to philosophy than evildoers do.
	If you talk about a wonderful diet but you keep gaining weight and you tell people you're following this diet and you've read about this diet and you pursue this diet, you're discrediting that diet more than anybody else because you claim you're following this diet, you keep gaining weight, nobody's going to want to have anything to do with this diet.
	If you keep talking about virtue without actually manifesting virtue as I was talking about earlier, if you merely talk about virtue without manifesting it, you're discrediting philosophy more than any evildoer could possibly achieve.
	So, yeah, just sit down and talk about virtue.
	What is virtue? Can we love each other without virtue?
	Can we love each other without goodness?
	What does goodness look like? How does it manifest?
	What do we do? All right, let's see here.
	Hi. I have a big issue that has been bothering me.
	So my brother and his wife are getting scammed out of millions.
	Wow. Because a voodoo cult is manipulating him and his wife, taking advantage of his spirituality.
	They're saying that if he gives them money, they can talk to the dead.
	And that he would be able to talk to his daughter that has passed.
	Oh, gosh, I'm sorry about that.
	He and his wife did join the cult willingly and believe that giving money will bring his daughter back?
	What the pet cemetery hell is going on here?
	Okay, I've not said anything for the six years they've been scammed because I didn't want to hurt them.
	Should I just leave it be? Wow, that is quite a tale.
	Talk to the dead and bring them back?
	Give me enough money and I can resurrect your dead daughter?
	Holy crap! I find it hard to imagine that they accumulated millions on their own.
	Did they inherit it? Did they win the lottery?
	Actually, don't answer that, of course, right?
	But, wow, that is something else.
	That is something else.
	So, taking advantage of his spirituality, but spirituality is insanity.
	Spirituality is the belief in effects without causes.
	It's the belief in consciousness without matter.
	It's the belief in A mind without a brain, which is like the belief in gravity without matter.
	So if you believe absurd things, you will be taken advantage of.
	Why do you think that scam artists...
	Why do you think the entire modern world has you believing absurd things?
	It's bullying and forcing you to believe absurd things.
	Because when you believe absurdities, you know, the old saying, in order to get you to commit atrocities, you have to believe absurdities.
	If you're going to believe crazy things, then that is an opening through which people will exploit you.
	This is why people who want to exploit others hate philosophers, because we're constantly sealing up.
	You know, if you've got a bunch of rats outside your home, and it's cold...
	Then the guy who comes to seal up all the holes into your home, they don't like it.
	It's a very harsh analogy.
	I'm not trying to compare any human beings to rats, but I'm just trying to give you something vivid here.
	People who teach skepticism and rationality are giving other people self-defense against exploitation.
	So you're...
	Brother has chosen to believe things that are crazy.
	You see, you have to scam yourself foundationally before you can be scammed by others.
	You have to scam yourself before you can be scammed by others.
	So he's scamming himself by believing in all these things that don't make any sense, like he can talk to the dead and bring them back.
	If he believes this is even possible, this is how he's exploited.
	Reject the impossible, you can't be exploited.
	I mean, you might be bullied, you might be abused, you might be ostracized.
	But you won't be exploited in this way.
	You won't be scammed in this way.
	So the issue is that he believes that these crazy things are possible.
	And this is a way of...
	And look, I have massive bottomless sympathy for this, as I do for just about everything I talk about.
	However harshly I might express it, the harshness comes out of love.
	But... Why does he believe he can talk to his daughter and or bring her back from the dead?
	Boy, things I wasn't expecting to be saying tonight.
	Why does he believe that? So that he can avoid grieving.
	So he can avoid grieving.
	We'll meet again. We'll meet again, right?
	It's the avoidance of grief.
	When the people are dead, they're dead and gone.
	It's a hell of a thing to process, particularly for a parent.
	It's an unbelievable, ungodly thing to process.
	But why does he believe that?
	Why does he need to believe that?
	That's the fundamental question.
	Why does he need to believe in this crazy, deluded, fantastical mysticism?
	What need does it serve in him?
	Now, if he's paying millions of dollars in order to avoid processing the horrible grief associated with the I mean, I don't know.
	It's a price he's willing to pay to avoid something.
	Maybe he has guilt over his daughter's death.
	Maybe he feels he's something he could have done better or differently.
	And so he's just paying millions of dollars, I assume, to avoid processing the emotions associated with the death of his daughter.
	If you look at it from a transactional standpoint, I think we can all understand that, right?
	I've not said anything you say for the six years they've been scanned because I didn't want to hurt them?
	What are you talking about?
	I mean, do you really want to try and get that hockey puck past this goalie?
	I don't think so. You don't want to hurt them?
	You don't want to hurt them?
	Telling people the truth...
	Telling people the truth...
	It cannot hurt them. It can upset them.
	It can make them mad. It can make them mad.
	But it can't hurt them. He obviously is completely messed up by the death of his daughter, which I completely sympathize with.
	But telling him the truth that you can't talk to the dead and they can't come back to life.
	How does that hurt him?
	Well, it upsets him.
	I get that it upsets him.
	Upset is not the same as hurt.
	If you withhold essential truth from people because you don't want to upset them, then you're scamming them too.
	And you're allowing their hurt or upset or anger or bullying or manipulation to keep you away from the truth.
	I will not have relationships in my life where I cannot tell the truth.
	I tell the truth. People love me for it.
	They hate me for it. They don't care.
	They're indifferent. I don't fundamentally care.
	Like, deep down in my core, I don't care.
	My job is to tell the truth.
	It is not to manage people's emotions.
	Because the moment I give up the truth in order to manage people's emotions, oh, look, I'm back in my mother's crazy power again.
	No, thank you. I did that for 15 years or longer in some ways.
	Don't want to do that again.
	I mean, imagine if you were a doctor and you see a very suspicious-looking lump on someone's skin, right?
	And you say, well, I don't want to tell my patient because it's really going to upset them.
	Okay. You might have a tumor.
	We need to get to biopsy, whatever they would do, right?
	You might have a tumor. Is that upsetting?
	Yes, it is. Is letting the tumor fester and grow a better option?
	Of course it's not. Where did we get to in a society?
	How did we get here in a society where you refuse to tell your own brother his daughter is not coming back from the dead and he can't talk to her because of his immediate feelings?
	You're not helping him.
	You're not caring him for him.
	You're not loving him in any way.
	You're simply guarding Your own upset about his upset.
	And you're willing to let him sail off down this deluded road of talking to his daughter or bringing her back from the dead and losing millions of dollars because you don't want to tell him the truth.
	You say, oh, well, he's going to get really upset if I tell him the truth.
	So? You know, you're only alive because people told you the truth even though it was going to make you upset.
	Hey, kids, stop eating all that candy.
	It's going to make you sick. Yeah.
	So you don't end up with diabetes.
	You don't end up with tooth decay.
	You don't end up with bacteria being swallowed going into your heart and making it explode.
	You're only alive. Because people said, yeah, it's uncomfortable to brush your teeth.
	You've got to brush your teeth. You've got to floss.
	You've got to whatever, right? So you're alive because people were willing to upset you to tell you the truth.
	When you've got a brother, you can't even say your daughter's not coming back from the dead.
	Because it's going to upset him?
	Do you understand what love is?
	Really? I mean really, really, really, deep down.
	Do you understand what love is?
	Love is telling people the truth.
	Because otherwise you'll secretly hate them because they're forcing you to lie.
	Or you believe that they're forcing you to lie.
	Or they're the people you blame for giving up your integrity and cause to tell the truth.
	My famous tweet about Taylor Swift, 90% of her eggs are dead by 30.
	It's a true statement. It's a true statement.
	Did I say that out of hatred or hostility?
	Absolutely not. I said that out of love.
	Because a woman may choose not to have children.
	Fine. Bad idea, if she can, I think, but it's fine.
	I don't sit there and worry my pretty little head about people making bad decisions in life.
	Nothing else to do, if that was my goal.
	I'm telling the women something that is true, and the men do.
	Now, if I withheld that kind of information, now that's become so viral that somebody tweeted that she took Some teenagers to an amusement park and somebody put this whole tweet to rap and they were rapping this,
	my tweet. It went so viral, literally millions and millions and millions of people found out that 90% of a woman's eggs are dead by the time she's 30.
	Now, again, there's lots of eggs.
	It doesn't mean that it's all over when you're 30, but it's 97% by the time you're 40.
	So that's called giving people a choice.
	Look, here are the facts.
	You can make a choice. If you withhold the facts from people, you're enslaving them or you're participating in their enslavement because there's no enslavement like delusion, right?
	Especially the delusion that you believe is true.
	You know, millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of women found out about the facts about reproduction from my tweet.
	And I'm sure that some portion of them decided to have kids sooner rather than later.
	So one tweet was responsible for Hundreds of thousands of children being born sooner rather than later or maybe being born at all.
	Not a bad day's work or a bad five minutes' work.
	Worthwhile, I think.
	You withhold that information.
	You withhold the facts from people.
	You withhold the truth from people.
	Then someone just slides in through that hole and lies to them.
	I mean, if I were in your shoes, I would say, I'm responsible for them getting scammed because I haven't said anything for six years.
	And even before then, I didn't say things about, you know, maybe he was careless with his daughter, maybe he mistreated his daughter, maybe he was a drunk driver, maybe, who knows, right?
	I mean, you know, obviously, but I don't know.
	And maybe you didn't say anything.
	Maybe you feel a little bit guilty about what happened to his daughter, which I don't know.
	Maybe it was a complete accident. Maybe it was unknowable.
	But if there was any causality, maybe you're not provoking this in your brother because maybe you feel bad.
	Maybe you were negligent or neglectful in some manner, which has to be processed.
	It doesn't mean it's the end of the world.
	It doesn't mean that you can't ever be happy again.
	It doesn't mean that you're an evil person forever and ever.
	Amen. But it has to be recognized and processed, doesn't it?
	You are hurting them by withholding the truth.
	Ah, well, they don't want the truth.
	Okay, so if somebody else doesn't want the truth, does that mean you have to lie?
	This is the big question of my show over 16 years.
	Just because somebody else doesn't want the truth, does that mean I have to lie?
	I don't think it does.
	All right. Is Trump a Machiavellian genius?
	Blah, blah, blah. Politics don't care.
	No. What separates a philosopher from the common man?
	We all philosophers are a special ingredient.
	Can anyone become one?
	So, someone can create, other people can replicate.
	Are you your own favorite philosopher?
	I don't really think about it in those terms, but I'll tell you this.
	I certainly spend more time producing my own content than I do consuming the content of other philosophers, so...
	Have you ever borrowed from thinking outside the school of thought you follow?
	Hoppy transforming Habernas' idea about argumentation into a basis for property rights.
	I don't know.
	I don't know. I'm sure that I have incorporated other arguments into my own.
	But I think a lot of the stuff that I do is pretty original.
	Are there people who aren't philosophers but whose work is philosophical that you like?
	I mean, I try to find that in movies, which you can get from my movie reviews and so on, right?
	What is the closest field of thought to philosophy that isn't philosophy?
	Is it psychology? No, I would say that self-knowledge is not specifically philosophy because it's the study of a relatively subjective entity such as yourself, your own personality, your thoughts and feelings.
	But... I would say that self-knowledge, which I assume would be a branch of psychology, is the closest thing to philosophy because if you don't have self-knowledge, it's pretty hard to be philosophical.
	Can stand-up comedy be philosophical?
	Libertarian comedian Dave Smith comes to mind.
	Yes, we love the Dave. So, yes, in fact, that would have been – if I wasn't able to do this, I definitely would have done stand-up because I find it's a wonderful way of bringing people to the truth.
	So if you look at something like – I mean, there's lots of comedians who do that kind of – it's not too many.
	There's some comedians who do that.
	That kind of material.
	George Carlin in his prime could be relatively close to philosophy.
	Have you ever found media theory interesting?
	Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Walter Young, Douglas Rushkoff.
	I've never have really found media theory interesting.
	Because media theory is involved in statism.
	And so without the state, propaganda is virtually useless.
	I mean, it would be just advertising then.
	Propaganda is getting people to ignore the role of coercion in society fundamentally.
	So if you don't have centralized coercive agencies in society like the state, media theory.
	So the fact that it's a shadow cast by the state means that I'll focus on the state.
	and the fact that the state is shadow cast by child abuse are focused on child abuse.
	Do you think the neo-reaction movement is interesting?
	I don't really know what that is, sorry.
	What's the difference between an opt-in society and what we currently have?
	Aren't most countries already opt-in?
	It's a lot of paperwork, but you can basically leave most countries if you want to, right?
	I don't...
	No, countries aren't opt-in.
	It's like saying, well, you as an animal can choose any different zoo you want to, therefore you're the same as a free-range animal.
	No, it's not.
	Because you can't go to any place where you're free.
	There's no place in the world you can go where you'll be free.
	How to praise a child in a way that would encourage him to explore and learn more, but not inflate the ego.
	Also, how to give honest feedback to a child and not lower his self-esteem.
	Just honest feedback. You know, kids know, and kids know deep down, if some kid comes and says, what do you think of my drawing?
	The drawing's not very good, at least not up to his usual scratch.
	If you say, oh, it's wonderful, the best thing you've ever done, the child will simply not really care about your feedback anymore.
	You lose credibility, you lose authority, and it's bad for your parenting.
	So... I think for children, focus on praising the effort rather than the outcome.
	So I think that's the way. Steph, should kids play organized sports?
	How do sports affect family life?
	I think sports are wonderful. Sports are...
	Somebody posted in...
	I think it was on Locals that...
	It's a Greek saying that philosophy begins with the body or philosophy begins with movement or with sports and so on.
	And I can't imagine the detachment from the body that people have who are – you pursue this kind of metaphysical madness of what is truth.
	We're a demon controlled by – we're a consciousness controlled by a demon and so on.
	Whether it's organized sports or not, I don't know, but sports are absolutely wonderful for kids.
	It keeps them in their body, keeps them active.
	The mind can't be much healthier than the body.
	This is really foundational. It's one of the reasons I spent so much time exercising.
	The mind really can't be fundamentally healthier than the body because the mind is an effect of the body.
	The brain depends upon the health to some degree of the body.
	And so if you don't have a healthy body, it's hard to have a healthy brain and then it's hard to have a healthy mind.
	Good evening, Steph. I was wondering how you were feeling.
	Worried, confident when you went from being a highly paid software executive to becoming a philosopher.
	I'm glad you did it. It's a gift to the world that you made this transition.
	I'm not trying to kiss your ass, but I like listening to your podcast.
	Thank you. I'm working very hard on my main book.
	I had a booklet published to see if I could do it.
	I didn't even edit it, so the content is garbage.
	I just wanted... To the knowledge that I could do it.
	I'm in the process of escaping the day job and it is going smoothly in becoming self-employed.
	I get home from work, then after exercising I spend three hours of deep work to make real progress.
	I'm on track to being self-employed by the end of the year.
	I'm keeping all of my plans secret from my family.
	How did you go about breaking the ice to the people you knew who probably thought you had gone crazy?
	Also, I'm going to be earning triple what I'm currently making from my job six months from now.
	Well, congratulations.
	I have a fundamental piece of criticism for you that is there to help you succeed.
	I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, me, me, I, I, me, me, I, me, me, I, me.
	Come on man, life ain't all about you.
	I mean, I had a pretty sweet gig as a software executive and, you know, enjoyed the work and all of that and was good at it, had a lot of experience.
	And by the time I was 31, I'd been working with computers for 20 years and had been a...
	By the time I was in my mid-30s, I had been a software executive for a decade.
	So it's a lot of experience wrapped up in that.
	So... With my software work, I was focused on a larger vision.
	The larger vision is help the world become less polluted.
	Help companies pollute less.
	That's a good thing.
	It's a good thing to do in the world. Yes, get paid and also create a positive work environment to help mentor people to achieve their true potential in creativity and efficiency in the business world.
	So you've got a whole bunch of I, me, me, I. So why did I quit what I was doing to do this crazy gig?
	Well, because the world needs it.
	This gig is about the world much more than it's about me.
	I want to be famous.
	I want to be recognized. I want to be called brilliant, blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, it's nice. And it's funny, too, because you give me all this praise, which, again, it's nice.
	I'm not immune to praise, and I like praise and all of that, where it's honest and legitimate.
	But do you have a vision of how you're going to serve the world and make the world better?
	Because that's what's going to sustain you in the rough times, and there will be rough times.
	So there are times where I had to go into significant personal debt to make payroll when I was an entrepreneur.
	There were times when we thought we would get sales and we didn't.
	There were times when the company that bought us out was kind of sketchy in ways.
	So, yeah, there are times when it's going to be pretty tough and what keeps you going.
	If it's just about your ego and what works for you and what you want, it's just going to fade on.
	You've got to have something larger than yourself that you're in pursuit of, that's a value to you, right?
	I would love it in many ways if there had been somebody else who was willing and able to do what I do in this show.
	If it's I used to have these wonderful business trips.
	I remember flying off to Paris and staying in a hotel with $400 a night and just having a magnificent time and meeting up with people at conferences and going out for lunch.
	Customers, clients would come up.
	I mean, we sold to most of the Fortune companies.
	100 companies. Customers would come up.
	We'd take them out for a wonderful dinner.
	Then we'd go to... We would take them to a comedy club.
	It was a fun life, man.
	It was a glorious... I mean, sometimes, of course, it was hard work and all that, but especially once I graduated past the direct coding, it was just...
	I mean, it was a pretty sweet life, man.
	It's a pretty sweet gig. And if somebody else had been stepping up to talk about this kind of stuff, I'd have been thrilled.
	I'm like, yeah, man, I'll donate to you, and good for you.
	I'm glad you're taking the bullets.
	But, you know, I kept looking around and kept looking around, and even when I was doing this show, there were topics I knew that were essential that nobody was talking about.
	It's like... Okay, I'd really like it if anybody else in the libertarian community could talk a little bit more about child abuse and a little bit less about the fucking Fed.
	That'd be great. Because can't do much about the Fed, can't do something about spanking and circumcision and child abuse.
	Anybody? Come on. So obvious, blindingly obvious, right?
	Anyway, so, I mean, we all know the topics that got me in hot water, and I just would have been perfectly thrilled if other people had taken that stuff on.
	It would have been great. Um...
	But they didn't. And so, what are you going to do?
	I mean, if it's just about you, you'll say, well, I'm not doing that because there's a pretty good reason why other people aren't and all that.
	But I was like, no, it has to be done.
	Now, it has to be done is not about my ego and it's not about my pleasure and my preferences and my income and my stature and my status and my fame and my respect and my praise.
	It's not about any of that stuff. Sorry, it's got to be done.
	The world has to be fixed.
	Children have to be protected.
	Society has to improve.
	We're not done.
	We've got a long way to go.
	The Origins of War and Child Abuse by the late Lloyd DeMoss.
	Why did I read that as an audiobook?
	He didn't pay me to.
	I just said, can I? And he agreed, and I did it.
	Poured a lot of time into that audiobook.
	Why? Because it would be nice if there was less war in the world.
	I didn't make any money off that.
	I did it because it needs to be done.
	Why did I go to Poland?
	Why did I go to Australia? Why did I go to California?
	Why did I go to Hong Kong for the documentaries?
	Because things needed to be said.
	And nobody else was saying them.
	It is with regret and with a sense of the essential nature of the larger purpose that you pursue these things.
	This is the I, me, me, I stuff.
	stuff.
	I'm just saying, maybe this is just your particular way of communicating, but try and hook into something larger, man, or you probably are not going to make it.
	Thoughts on the link between physical health and mental health?
	I can't help but think that people who are out of shape either have no self-control or at least no self-awareness.
	Do you think increasing physical strength is a good way to increase moral courage?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Physical strength is very, very important for moral courage.
	It's hard to feel like a tough guy if you're Mr.
	Potato, right? Look at me.
	I'm a pear. Right?
	So, yes, it is really, really important.
	And, you know, there's a certain credibility.
	You know, when I did the Hong Kong documentary, I would load up on a bunch of food because we'd be out there all day, and I just got gassy.
	I mean, I looked bloated, right?
	And I was like, oh, that's a shame, right?
	But it is important to present yourself reasonably well.
	And to have a strong body.
	Plus, of course, you know, you can face a lot of adversity, you can get a lot of hatred, and it's good to have a, you know, a good heart rate.
	You know, when I got a recent little bit of surgery where I had a cyst taken out of my shoulder, and the guy was like, wow, we don't need to put you on anything.
	Your blood is really thin.
	And, you know, I've always had really great blood pressure.
	I've always had really good cholesterol.
	You know, weight has fluctuated a little bit, but I think I've got that under control now.
	So, yeah, I do think it's important.
	You've got to exercise. You've got to feel strong.
	And when you feel strong, you know, particularly, you know, don't skip leg day, right?
	I've done that before, but don't skip leg day.
	Because having strong legs makes you feel rooted to the ground.
	It makes you feel rooted to reality.
	Maybe it's just me, but I just think it's really, really important.
	Okay. Are we prisoners of our fate or masters of our destiny?
	Why is fatalism frowned upon in the modern world?
	Which school of thought do you fall under and why?
	Are we prisoners of fate or masters of our destiny?
	Well, I don't think we're masters of our destiny.
	We're engaged in a wildly convoluted and complicated dance with the world.
	It's like, you know, when you look at really sophisticated thought play, that's the truth of the world.
	They're trying to slip the shiv in.
	You're trying to knock the sword out of their hand, so to speak.
	So am I master of my destiny?
	No, I'm not master of my destiny because I have to operate within a world that has blowback and support and hostility and all of that.
	So I can make choices.
	I can dance with the world, but I'm certainly not a prisoner of my fate.
	I'm not even sure what that means.
	Now, prisoners of our fate is if you don't have self-knowledge, you'll just end up reproducing stuff from before.
	Masters of our destiny, I think, gives people too strong a sense of what their power is, and then it has people...
	Walk off cliffs thinking they can fly.
	A master of my destiny. It's like, no, I'm trying to have an effect in a world that is affectionate and blindly hostile to what the truth is.
	So it's a complicated dance.
	Sometimes you win. Sometimes they win.
	Sometimes you faint left.
	Sometimes you zig. Sometimes you zag.
	Sometimes you withdraw. It's a complicated dance.
	And if I thought I was a master of my destiny, then every bad thing that happened to me would be my fault.
	And if I thought I was prisoners of my fate, then...
	Nothing good I did would ever be my pride.
	So, no, I think it's a complicated dance, and sometimes you, you know, one step forward, two steps sideways, one step back, and so on, right?
	And most of the advances happen after you're dead, when you're a philosopher.
	So, hi Steph, living in Scandinavia, I'm always met with people rolling their eyes when I say I won't send my child to daycare, nor to the normal public schools.
	Of course, I always get the response...
	That I'm going to isolate my child and how important it is that children are socialized!
	Ain't that the truth, right?
	Socialized, that's in socialism.
	Would you possibly give me some more ammunition, so to speak, against sending children to daycare?
	You once mentioned a Canadian study talking about the effects of daycare, if I remember correctly.
	What was that study called?
	I would really like to read it. Thanks for all you do, Stephan.
	So, it's in Quebec. Q-U-E-B-E-C. It's in Quebec.
	It was a study in daycare.
	But, I mean, outcomes are not unimportant, but they're not fundamental justifications, right?
	So, just ask them, are they...
	Do they believe that human beings evolved?
	Do they believe in evolution? Most people do, of course.
	Even the Pope has accepted evolution.
	So, say, oh, so do you think that human beings should, if possible, and where moral, should stay relatively close to the situations that we evolved in?
	Okay, did we evolve with daycare?
	Like, you understand, this is a radical experiment to separate children from their mothers and have them raised by underpaid strangers.
	Often from other cultures, with other languages, right?
	This is a radical departure from how we evolved.
	And so, to me, if you want to do something radically different from how human beings evolved, I think the kind of the onus is on you to make that case, isn't it?
	Right? If you're going to say, well, we're going to have the new Soviet man, and the new Soviet man, the new communist man, is not going to be interested at all in anything which is advantageous to him personally, and he's going to work tirelessly like Box of the Horse for the collective.
	It's like, okay, so you're saying that human beings, we evolved with self-interest.
	We evolved with a desire to seek profit.
	In other words, we had to gain more calories from hunting than we expended in hunting.
	So you're saying that the evolution of the last four billion years can be overturned with one gray-haired, pustule-boiled, filled manifesto guy, right?
	Marx himself, right?
	So one manifesto is going to undo a couple of billion years of evolution.
	Okay, I think the onus is on you to make the case about how we only became the apex species on the planet because of self-interest.
	And... Now we're going to completely reverse that.
	Why? How? How? How are you going to reverse four billion years of evolution?
	It's like the people say, well, multiculturalism, multiracialism is great.
	It's like, okay, it could be. Happy to hear the case, but you understand that genetic in-group preference is evolution for billions of years.
	Are you going to say that that's going to I'm open to hear the case.
	I'm really open to hear the case. So yeah, children not being raised by their own mothers, children not being breastfed often by their own mothers.
	So children being separated from their mothers and raised by strangers in institutions where the children vastly outnumber the caregivers, right?
	I mean, if you had one mom and 10 kids, you'd say, well, the mom is going to be overwhelmed and couldn't really possibly give any personal attention to those 10 kids.
	But often that's the ratio in daycares, not little kid daycares, like baby daycares, but older kids.
	I mean, I had a room full of 30 plus kids and there were myself and one other adult when I worked in the daycare for a couple of years, right?
	So I say, well, they've got to go to school.
	It's like, okay, well, you understand that for the vast majority of human evolution, children learned from working with their parents, from watching their parents, from being involved with their parents' lives and so on.
	So you're saying now we separate children from their parents and we put them under the control of a state, put them in a government, coercively funded, by the way, system.
	So that's a radical departure from Our entire evolution as a species.
	And if you're going to say we can completely reverse or do the opposite of what evolution...
	And then you say, okay, so daycare and let's say schools, so do you believe that power tends to corrupt?
	Like, do you believe that human beings are really, really good when they have violent power over others?
	Do you think that tends to promote virtue or not?
	And, you know, if they say, well, I think having violent power over other people promote virtue, then you just get out of that windowless van as quickly as humanly possible.
	But if they say, no, power does tend to corrupt and so on, it's like, okay, well, having the power...
	To impose your will on impressionable children and to force their parents to pay for it, do you think that that improves the quality of education or diminishes the quality of education?
	In other words, does power corrupt?
	Now, if they say, well, power corrupts except in this instance, it's like, well, then that's ridiculous, right?
	Because the power that teachers have or that adults have over children is vastly greater than the power that anybody else has over anybody else with the possible exception of, I don't know, a torture camp in North Korea, right?
	So you're going to say that Power corrupts.
	Well, the power to set curriculum, the power to control what children learn, the power to keep children sitting, the power to indoctrinate them, and we know for sure that indoctrination occurs.
	So you're saying let's do something radically the opposite or radically divergent from how human beings evolved.
	Let's assume that strangers are going to take better care of your children than you will.
	Let's say that we're going to deprive the babies of breast milk.
	We're going to deny the children bonding time with their parents.
	We're going to turn them loose so that they're largely raised by their peers, right?
	So, I mean, I worked in a daycare for years.
	All you're doing is wrangling.
	You're managing. You're not having deep, powerful chats with the kids on a regular basis.
	I did manage to get the kids really involved in my retelling of the Silmarillion back in the day, but you're just wrangling.
	You know, like when we went to go and see The Last Starfighter, and I said to all the kids, right, it was me and like 14 kids in the row, and I said, does anybody have to go to the bathroom?
	Okay, let's go to the bathroom. Okay, the movie's starting, and then did I get to see the movie?
	I did not. Why? Because I had to keep going, taking the kids to the bathroom.
	Because the kids were like, 10 minutes in the movie, I have to go to the bathroom.
	You go out, it takes them a while, they come back, and you say, does anybody else have to go to the bathroom?
	No. Okay, go out 10 minutes later, I have to go to the bathroom, right?
	So we get to see the movie. So you're just wrangling.
	You're just managing. You're not...
	You're not loving. You're not close to the kids.
	You're just wrangling.
	Climb down off that thing.
	You're not supposed to be on that fence. Don't pull that.
	Don't push this kid. You're just wrangling.
	You're managing. So you want to do something radically different from how we evolved.
	You want to separate children from their parents and put them in the care, custody, and control of the state.
	And you believe that power corrupts, but you don't think that the structure that has control over the children could never be corrupted by that power, which is the greatest power there is.
	So you could just ask those questions.
	And, you know, if the children are forced to be there, you know, could you learn, like if you were sent to prison, God forbid, if you were sent to prison, Would you learn how to socialize in prison?
	Yeah. Should you?
	Right? No.
	Learning how to socialize means replicating what happens as an adult, right?
	So the skills that we teach our children should replicate what happens as an adult, right?
	You know, we teach children to use the toilet because hopefully we all use the toilet when we're adults.
	We teach children not to hit because we don't hit each other as adults.
	Same thing with stealing. So if you say, well, kids got to learn how to socialize, it's like, okay, you tell me the last time when you spent eight hours with 30 adults that somebody else chose that you had no say in spending time with.
	You tell me that. Do you regularly spend your weekends on Hanging out with 30 other adults, some of whom might be completely crazy, some of whom might be violent.
	You let other people choose your entire social group.
	And you just try and survive or find a friend or flourish or get by in an environment of 30 other adults.
	The only thing you know is they're the same age as you.
	30 other adults, that's where you're going to spend 8 hours socializing.
	And then you're just going to keep doing that and keep doing it.
	You don't get to choose your friends.
	You kind of pick them out of the maelstrom of the socializing that other people have set up for you to do.
	Oh, and during this quote, socializing, you don't actually spend much time socializing with each other.
	You just stare at a blackboard.
	So, yeah, I would just say that would be it.
	How did you develop self-esteem after the person who brought you into the world smashed your head into a door?
	How can I? That's a very good question.
	I appreciate that. Maybe, like the singer for Oasis apparently developed his musical talent after getting hit in the head with a hammer.
	Maybe... Maybe the tabula rasa, my blank slate approach to philosophy happened because of a brain injury.
	I don't know. Could be.
	So, self-esteem, because it's just done unto you, right?
	The terrible things that are done to you as a child, they're just done to you.
	You're not responsible.
	You're just trying to survive. How could you let that stain seep into your soul?
	The things that seep into your soul are your choices, right?
	I didn't choose to be in that situation.
	I didn't choose to have myself beaten up.
	I didn't choose to be screamed at.
	I didn't choose all of the terrible stuff that was in that apartment.
	I didn't choose any of that.
	It doesn't stick to me.
	It's just a situation I was born into.
	It doesn't seep into my soul.
	It doesn't tarnish me.
	It doesn't dye me an irredeemable different color.
	It's just some crazy shit I had to survive.
	And having survived, it is a badge of honor.
	The world forcing me to have to survive it for so long as a badge of dishonor to the world.
	But all the crazy shit that people say to you when you're a kid, if you get verbally abused and so on, that's on them.
	It doesn't stick to you in any fundamental way.
	The person who calls a child an asshole is the asshole, not the child.
	The child's just trying to survive this crazy environment.
	Right? I mean, if you get on a subway and it turns out that there's some...
	Rabbit dog in the subway, right?
	And you have to kind of dodge and deal with it and try and kick it back or not get bitten or whatever.
	Do you think you're a bad person because of that?
	No. You just, in a crazy situation, you just have to try and survive.
	It's not on you. And by the time people are in the state where they're repeatedly abusing children, they really are in the moral state of rabid dog.
	I mean, they're responsible because they didn't do whatever self-work they needed to do to not abuse the children, right?
	But it's just a crazy...
	Like, if you're out in the woods and the forecast is a beautiful sunny day...
	And then it just starts hailing with lightning strikes and so on.
	And that's just some bad luck and it's a bad situation.
	But you don't sit there and say, I'm being punished for being immoral.
	I had naughty thoughts about a woman, and I'm being punished.
	Like, I hope you don't think that, right?
	It's just, wow, this is an unexpected, unplanned-for, not-my-fault, dangerous situation.
	It just kind of came up out of nowhere, and I've just got to try and find a way to get to shelter.
	I've got to try and find a way to not get concussed by the golf-ball-sized hailstone, not get hit by lightning.
	It's just a dangerous, difficult situation that you're in, but it doesn't stain you.
	You're not a bad person because there's danger in the world.
	You're not a bad person because people call you a bad person.
	You're not a bad person because you got abused.
	It's not your fault. It's not on you.
	And please understand, although you do end up kind of merging with this as a kid, like you bond with your parents and you have to take them seriously because they're your parents and if you don't take them seriously, they'll get even more mad and they might actually kill you for all you know, right?
	So I guess you have to go through this miming of, oh, yes, I am a bad person and letting them affect you and let you in.
	But there's a core part of you that you have to keep clear of that or unbury it.
	Because I'll tell you this, man.
	Let me tell you the great secret of surviving abuse.
	Well, there's two. One is, it's nothing to do with you.
	Right? It has nothing to do with you.
	A parent in one of my novels says, at the end of the book, when it's far too late to do any good, he says, Oh, God.
	I wasn't beating my children.
	I was punching my parents.
	The self-knowledge too late is kind of a constant theme in my books because I really want to scare people off that self-knowledge too late because that's a real devilish thing.
	My mother did not evaluate my character and personality and decide objectively that I needed to be beaten.
	If you suddenly get nauseous and you know you have to throw up and you just grab a bowl or a bucket or whatever, right?
	You're not sitting there saying, well, I'm going to morally evaluate this bowl or bucket or sink or toilet and I'm going to throw it up.
	It's punishment for some moral crime.
	No, you just grab whatever's close and you vomit up your crap into, right?
	If you go to the gym and you put on some gloves and you punch a bag...
	You know, there's five bags in a row that you can punch, right?
	You don't sit there and say, oh, that third punching bag from the right, that one has been really morally bad and I'm going to punch that punching bag because the punching bag is morally bad and wrong and I've evaluated it and it's an objective judgment.
	No. You're just like, oh, I need some exercise.
	I'm feeling tense. I'm feeling angry.
	I'm going to punch this bag, right?
	But you know, the bag is just an object.
	Like the toilet or the bowl is just an object for you to vomit into.
	You don't judge it.
	Now, parents will say that they're hitting you because they've judged you and found you morally wanting or bad or disobedient or selfish or you have attitude or you talked back.
	They'll make up all this crap.
	But that's all nonsense.
	None of it is true. None of it means anything.
	Because if they were so concerned with morality, maybe they wouldn't be beating children.
	It's got nothing to do with you.
	You're like the seagull that flies in front of the...
	Pitcher's ball in baseball, right?
	The pitcher isn't saying, oh, I really hate that fucking seagull.
	You're just in the way.
	You're just an object they have power over that they can punch, like you punching a bag at the gym.
	You're just an object they have power over that they can discharge their venom, their self-hatred, their immaturity, their...
	The petulance, the pestilence of their personalities.
	It's not about you.
	It's nothing like, my mom was not hitting me because she's, oh, this kid is a bad kid and I've made a moral judgment.
	It's like, no, she just got frustrated.
	She got overwhelmed. She got angry.
	She got full of rage. She was terrified.
	She was losing her mind and she was right and she didn't want to, well, she did try and get some help and I think they just made her worse as these things tend to be.
	The Mad in America interview didn't come out of nowhere.
	So it's nothing to do with you.
	Like, if you have an older sibling who was mean to you, they didn't have some big abstract moral evaluation of your character.
	It's like, hey, I'm bigger. You're smaller.
	You're powerless. I'm feeling powerless.
	I can make myself feel less powerless by beating up on you or abusing you or teasing you or taunting you or making you cry.
	Like, it's nothing to do with you.
	You know, there was a boy...
	Who was kidnapped. Maybe somebody remembers this case.
	The boy who was kidnapped by some creepy, horrible, hideous, evil pedophile, right?
	This boy who was kidnapped, right?
	And he was held captive for a long time.
	Maybe it was years or something like that, right?
	And at one point, the boy asked the man who was torturing and raping him, The boy asked the man, why me?
	And the man said, hey, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
	You know, I saw an opportunity, you happened to be there, I grabbed you.
	Right, so it's nothing personal in a sense, right?
	Like the monster who kidnapped the child didn't sit there and say, well, that child is really morally bad and I'm going to act as an agent of God to punish him for his bad thoughts so bad.
	No. Oh, there. Grab, right?
	Wrong place, wrong time.
	You, I, everyone who was abused, it's the wrong place, wrong time.
	Just happen to be born into that situation and you work to survive it.
	But you don't let them...
	I have very few physical marks left from my child abuse on my body.
	A couple of effects.
	So, physically, I'm almost perfectly healed from child abuse.
	It's the same thing with the soul.
	It only sticks with you if you believe them.
	But you have no reason to believe them.
	So the curse that the abuse has put on you is a moral curse, that you're a bad person, that you were disobedient, that you were wrong, that you were bad, and then that you are lazy.
	All the words that they use at you, right?
	You're an asshole, selfish, lazy, jerk, bitch, whatever, right?
	They have no power if you don't believe them.
	It's like voodoo, right?
	Somebody sticks a voodoo, like they're standing in front of you sticking a pin into a voodoo doll.
	I just laugh at them. I don't believe any of that stuff.
	It doesn't do me any harm. I'm not going to sit there saying, oh my God, I've got a scabbing pain in my chest, right?
	I'm now doomed! Just don't believe in it, right?
	Somebody curses you in a foreign language, you don't even know what they're saying.
	It doesn't have any effect on you in particular, right?
	You might get some sense of tone, but none of this abuse works after you're free of it physically, right?
	None of it works if you don't believe it and you have no reason to believe it.
	As I say, anybody who beats a child is a corrupt and vicious, degraded animal of a human being, and that's an insult to animals.
	Anybody who screams verbal abuse or applies verbal abuse to a helpless and dependent child is a complete monster of a human being.
	And why on earth would you accept moral condemnation from a monster of a human being?
	Because their act of abusing you is far worse than any moral term they could ever apply to you, and the application of that moral term is what gives them the responsibility that allows you to label them as evil.
	A dog may bite you, but a dog doesn't call you selfish.
	A dog may bite you, but a dog doesn't bite you and say, I bit you because you're bad.
	Because you're immoral.
	Because you're disrespectful, disobedient, selfish.
	A dog may bite you, but a dog doesn't blame you.
	Doesn't say it's your fault I had to bite you.
	You forced me to bite you by not cooperating, by not being reasonable, by not being civil, by being rude, by back-talking.
	Infinitely more respect for a dog that bites you than a child, than a parent who abuses you.
	They're just evildoers.
	Who are picking on the most vulnerable and helpless person in their vicinity because they're assholes who don't want to confront their own capacity for evil.
	And if you won't confront your own capacity for evil, you will do evil.
	You know, my mother never escaped beating my head against the door.
	She never escaped it.
	In her mind, she's trapped in that 30 seconds forever.
	Now I can just walk through that door, walk up to the sunlight, walk out into a clearer world, walk out into a purer sky, walk out into the scent of pine needles and kittens.
	She is forever trapped in that 30-second loop of beating my head against the door.
	She can never escape because she can never admit it.
	So she can never escape it.
	So she's back there with the ragdoll of her own conscience beating it against the wall from here to forever.
	It's a 30-second Groundhog Day of infinite loop of evil.
	I don't have to stay there.
	Why? Because I didn't do anything wrong.
	I didn't do anything. What did I do wrong?
	I was born. I can't be immoral at the age of four when I tried to run away from home.
	I can't be immoral at the age of four.
	I've raised a child. I know that it's impossible.
	My child can't be immoral now.
	She could be a little irresponsible from time to time, but so what?
	So can I. That's not the end of the world, right?
	Right? Like, so I made her a cup of steamed milk last night, froth milk, and then this morning it was sitting...
	And I mentioned this to her.
	I just kind of laughing and say, hey, hey, hey, what's that over there, right?
	And she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'll get that, right?
	And then anyway, she went out to take care of her ducks.
	And I noticed when I went out that she'd left the cup of milk from the night before.
	And now that was not too far from it, a banana peel.
	So I went out and I said, okay, time for a tiny lecture here, you know?
	Come on, you'll be 14 soon.
	Leave the cup out. And when I mentioned that, not only do you...
	And she's like, oh, I didn't put the cup away.
	And I said, and...
	It's like, oh, banana peel.
	I said, banana peel.
	Just, you know, have a look behind you when you leave an area and just see if there's anything you can tidy up.
	She's like, yes, and I do normally do that.
	I just, you know, you got me.
	And it's like, yeah, it's just a reminder, right?
	Again, I'm not perfect this way.
	I was four minutes late for the show tonight.
	I couldn't have been evil.
	We're calling a child evil.
	It's like nagging a child for failing to plan for his own retirement at the age of four.
	Where's your retirement savings?
	Calling a child evil is like blaming a child for who he voted for.
	Calling a child evil is like calling a four-year-old a bad driver who's never even been in the fucking car.
	Those who call the children evil, those who justify their own evil by calling the child evil, are the worst, scummiest people on the planet and the source of almost all the woes we have to experience and endure as adults.
	You think the people who deplatformed me grew up with free speech in their households?
	No. The people who deplatformed me, I guarantee you, were all told, don't talk back, shut up.
	I'm speaking. You listen.
	Children should be seen and not heard.
	Don't contradict me. Don't disrespect me.
	Right? This is how they were programmed.
	That if you upset someone, you better shut the hell up.
	If you upset your parent, you better shut up.
	You don't get free speech in your household.
	So then they grow up and they end up being drawn to this.
	I can't prove it, but I guarantee you.
	I can't prove it, but I guarantee you.
	How's that for a philosophical statement?
	So no. Don't agree with the evildoers.
	Don't agree with them. How about you morally evaluate them for what they did as adults rather than accepting their bullshit, moralizing on you as a child?
	How about you leave the loop that they're stuck in, step outside the situation and judge them?
	Judge them. You can judge them because you were a child and they were adults.
	They cannot judge you. A parent cannot judge a child.
	A parent cannot judge a child because the parent is forming the child.
	And the fundamental driver of child abuse is the parent's desire for the unearned.
	You owe me respect.
	You owe me obedience.
	You owe me deference.
	You owe me love.
	You owe me your good opinion.
	You owe me good behavior.
	You owe me eating your vegetables.
	Oh, you owe... No, I fucking don't.
	I don't owe you jack shit.
	Now, if you as a parent earn my respect, I will pay that respect, but I don't owe you the respect.
	Right? If you go to a restaurant and they bring an empty plate, you don't owe them a penny because they didn't give you a meal.
	You don't owe them any... You owe me!
	No, you... Gave me an empty plate.
	What if they give you a sandwich made entirely of shit?
	They give you an actual shit sandwich.
	Do you owe them? You owe me!
	It's like, no, I ordered grilled cheese.
	You gave me a shit sandwich. I don't owe you anything.
	I owe you nothing. You get up and walk out.
	No, but you... No. You gave me bad service.
	I don't owe you shit. You gave me a bad product.
	I don't owe you anything. You buy a bus ticket.
	You show up there. They offer you a horse with no saddle.
	And you're like, nope. No, but you owe us for the bus ticket.
	You didn't give me a bus. And if I ride this horse, I'm going to be listening to that terrible America song, Horse With No Name, until the end of time in my brain.
	No, thank you. Did they provide good service as a parent?
	Were they loving? Were they educational?
	Were they positive?
	Were they helpful? Were they useful?
	Were they valuable? Did they give you wisdom?
	Did they love you? Did they care for you?
	Did they play with you? Did they encourage you?
	Did they Guide you properly?
	Or were they just raging toddlers in tall bodysuits?
	No, you judge them and you are then relieved of their judgment on you.
	But it's not about you.
	It was never about you. You're just an object, a vessel that they use to discharge their evil thoughts into.
	You're just wrong place, wrong time.
	It's not personal. All right.
	Well, thank you everyone so much for this wonderful conversation.
	Thank you so much for these wonderful, amazing, diverse questions.
	Thank you for giving me the opportunity to have this conversation for now and also for the future.
	This is going to be engraved in the heart, mind, and soul of the planet forevermore, and the world will never be the same because of the conversations we have here, and I appreciate that.
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	Lots of love from up here.

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