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Sept. 15, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:25:31
Wednesday Night Live 14 Sep 2022!
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Well, hello.
Good evening. I hope you're doing well.
It's me!
And we are talking September the 14th.
Oh my gosh. It's my birthday month and ten days, in fact.
Until my birthday!
So I hope you're having a good week.
I hope that you are not...
Well, you know, I wouldn't say I hope you're not falling prey to the quiet quitting phenomenon, but it certainly does seem to be occurring for a lot of people, which I can understand.
We can talk about that if you like.
If you have questions, comments, issues, criticisms, raise your hand, raise your voice, make a joyful noise, raise your finger if you like, and I can unmute you.
Otherwise, I will dive straight into questions.
From my Locals community, freedomain.locals.com.
I've done show 11 of my History of Philosophers series, and I hope that you will.
I hope that you will check it out.
You can go to freedomain.locals.com, and it's free to join.
And I've done Buddha, Confucius, the Presocratics, including Parmenides.
I've done Zeno, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, One show which is a summary of the story so far, and I just today recorded Aquinas and the Five Proofs of God.
And, uh...
That's really great stuff.
I mean, this is kind of my meat and potatoes, as far as all of that goes.
So... I am really, really enjoying it.
It's pulling a lot of stuff together for me, as well as I hope for you.
So it's really great.
You can go to freedemand.locals.com and you can sign up.
And if you use a promo code, I just extended it because it ran out.
UPB2022, that's uppercase UPB2022. You can use that promo code, get a free month to try it out.
And if you like the community, if you like the material, you get my new book there called The Future, which is my Atlas Shrugged, something I worked on last year for, well, I've been working on it for 40 years, but I finally got around to transcribing my eternal thoughts.
Last fall, and that's available in EPUB, in PDF, and audiobook, and video, if you want to watch me read it as well.
So, very, very, very pleased with that book as well.
So you get all of this great stuff, and you can try it all for a month, and there's, I don't know, dozens and dozens of call-in shows up there that were a little bit too spicy.
For the mainstream.
So, alright, so let's just have a check here.
And I think, yeah, we're going to go straight to the questions.
Let's see here. Let's go from the bottom to the top, just because the people who were first.
What is it? First to be last, last to be first.
Hi, Stefan. Any thoughts on Mitch McConnell's proposal for 15-week abortion ban?
As always, thank you. I don't know.
It seems like politics to me, but it seems kind of sabotage-y.
So I think it's just a way of distracting the base from the real issues.
All right, let's see here.
You said to find a good woman or inspire an average one.
Can you help me reconcile this with not buying a car and turning it into a boat?
Well, you know, if somebody is already exercising but they're not doing a great job, then giving them tips on exercise is not trying to turn them into something they're not.
It's trying to help accelerate the trajectory or the direction that they're already in.
So if you have a woman, let's say you're a man, you want to date a woman, and she's committed to, I don't know, getting every square inch of her epidermis tattooed, and she wants to own a bunch of dangerous dogs and take them for toddler-centered exercise at a playground, and she's into drugs, and, well, you know, you can't Which is the old phrase that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
So you don't want to try and save someone, but you do want to try and accelerate someone.
And we all do that, right?
I mean, it's not like I invented philosophy.
I've just tried to accelerate my understanding of it and hopefully your understanding of it as well.
And so the fact that we're all using language, which the words for which we did not ourselves personally invent, at least I know I didn't, I guess a couple.
Maybe acronym or two.
And actually, no, I've created some words.
Dicknapped, for when you get hijacked by your own penis.
The B-nap, the bullshit non-apology of, well, I'm sorry you just got upset randomly by something I did.
So, yeah, I guess I've come up with my own phrases and words.
And so if somebody is interested in reason and evidence and they have a scientific bent, but, you know, they still have a kind of agnostic or mystical side to them, well, you can work with that, right? Because they already have a value they care about called reason and evidence.
And so if you can help someone along with In their trajectory towards wisdom and they can help you.
It's not like we're all perfect and we've got to go around fixing everyone or accelerating people.
I've learned as much from my wife as she's learned from me.
And so if you're already going in that direction, then you can help accelerate that.
So it's not really buying a car and turning it into a boat because you're not trying to turn someone into something that they're not.
And we do this all the time, right?
I mean, we could, I guess, theoretically try and clean our own teeth, but we go to somebody else who's better at it.
But the dentist doesn't chase us down if we just never want to go to the dentist and whatever it is, right?
All right.
What is your relationship to your passion?
Do you give in to it, manage it, work with it?
How do you keep it fueled and burning hot without burning out?
Yes, I do give in to it.
I do manage it. I do work with it.
So I'm in a dance with my passions.
like the idea of having this rigid top of the brain pyramid structure of pharaoh type control where you order around your emotions and you tell me they'll just rebel they'll either rebel by tearing you off in different directions like a bunch of horses in some medieval punishment or they'll absent themselves from your life your your feelings will go on strike
i mean any workers in a sense or any people you work with who you abuse will eventually go on strike or sabotage so my emotions are i mean it's funny because i say my emotions but from the perspective of my emotions i'm their brain I'm a brain that belongs to them.
So I don't like to think of my emotions like there's some ego here that's in charge and my emotions are there to serve me or there to facilitate my preferences and pleasures because there are times when my emotions go very much against what I want to do and quite often they're right.
They're actually quite right.
So I think it's really, really important to work with them.
In a dance where you get different people to lead, you should let your emotions inform your life.
Don't let them dominate your life, but at the same time, don't dominate them in return.
Let everybody... This is my sort of theory of personality.
Every aspect of yourself, even the part of yourself that you dislike the most, every part of yourself must get a seat at the table.
Because you can...
Get bad people out of your life, but if you've internalized those bad people, usually for the sake of self-protection, you can't get that out of your head, right?
You can't get the parts of yourself out of your head.
So if you have a part of yourself, let's say, I don't know, like an insecure part of yourself or a too aggressive part of yourself, well, work with it.
Listen to what it's got to say.
It's probably got a lot of wisdom.
It's probably got a lot of knowledge about your past and how to avoid Repeating the bad things that may have occurred in your past, particularly when you were a kid and didn't have any real choice.
So, yes, I really like to listen to my emotions.
I interrogate them, I ask them what they want, and I offer them treats.
And in return, they work with me and try and guide me in a positive and good direction and give me, I think...
You know, I'm happy at a 7.5 to 8 out of 10 most days of my life, and I figure that's about as good as you're going to get without artificial substances.
Of course, in the absence of coffee, that craters to minus infinity.
But I think that we have a good relationship.
And remember, your emotions are the gods that birthed you, because your emotions are around long before your conscious mind.
And your emotions are moral.
We like to think of morality as an abstract, rational thing.
But your emotions are moral.
And they are very good.
Your emotions are very good at detecting predators.
And one of the ways that predation is increasing in the world is that they're telling people that all their thoughts and emotions and instincts are wrong.
And bad. And so you separate yourself from emotions and then you lose your capacity to detect the oncoming predators.
And of course, that's what they want.
All right. Can you recommend some good group topics for my substance abuse slash mental health groups?
I'm an intern and I'm trying to apply principles to help people get off drugs and alcohol and improve their mental health.
Thanks. Well, I would read, I think I had him on the show a couple of times, a Canadian physician, and I would say mental health expert, although I don't think he'd characterize himself that way, called Gabor Mate, G-A-B-O-R, space M-A-T-E with an accent on it.
Gabor Mate has got a great book on addiction called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which is a reference to an old Buddhist analogy that It's a ghost that is hungry, but because the ghost is a ghost, every time it eats, the food just falls out of it because it's immaterial.
And it just gets hungry and hungry.
It tries to eat more and more, but every time it eats more and more, it ends up with less and less.
So I would say read that book.
There's a lot of really great stuff in there about addiction.
What do you do when no matter how sure you are that your views are right, the possibility being wrong knocks your confidence into neutrality?
Yeah, that's just a very, very big question.
A very big question.
If you build as conscientiously as possible, using reason and evidence as your guide, that's the best you can possibly do.
There is no standard higher than that.
So I always be suspicious of people who give you a standard that cannot be achieved.
If people give you a standard that cannot be achieved, they're trying to set you at war with yourself for the disappointment of failing to achieve those standards.
And I would work very hard to try and avoid that kind of stuff.
And so, if somebody has a standard called perfection, and, you know, perfectionists are usually just about the most verbally abusive people known to man, beast, or devil.
If somebody has a standard called perfection, well, then I would really work to avoid that person, because it's a standard you can't possibly reach.
I mean, to give you a more tangible example, people say, well, the senses are flawed because every now and then you'll get something wrong or the senses will transmit something that is incorrect and so on.
And it's like, okay, the senses are flawed.
Well, compared to what? In what way or to what degree are the senses flawed?
I don't really understand how that is possible because we don't have any other means of getting sense data imprinting from the outside world.
Well, your eyes are flawed. They can be blurry.
They can have dusted them.
They can see things that aren't there.
It's like, well, no, they really can't.
If they're seeing things that aren't there, you're having a hallucination.
If you're not seeing things that are there, you're blind.
So, by what standard would we say the senses are deficient?
Relative to what? Omniscience?
Well, there is no omniscience.
Relative to the Kantian standard, well, we don't see things in and of themselves.
We don't see the inside of the tree.
We don't see all of the roots of the tree.
We don't see every single angle of every single leaf.
It's like, yeah, that's not possible.
That's not a real standard.
It's just a way to make you feel like you're not...
Meeting a standard which is factually impossible to meet.
So for me, if I'm working in good conscience and I'm aware of any emotional investments I might have that might pull my judgment astray, and I've worked from first principles and I've had my debates with people and I've had my self-criticism sessions where I try and figure out better ways to do things, then that's as good as you can get.
And of course, if you, you know, listen to feedback, I mean, you hear me open these shows, and I'm continually saying, if you have criticisms, questions, issues, you know, debates, some, you know, some guy jumped in, I don't know, a month and a half ago, and just wanted to debate one of the most challenging topics, metaphysics, no sort of warning, and that's fine, I don't need a warning or whatever, but it's like, yeah, welcome to the debate, enjoy the debate.
I wrote an essay afterwards which I thank the debater for because it was very clarifying for me and for others.
So, yeah, if you're reasoning with good conscience and good intentions from first principles and you validate as best you can and you submit to examination and correction, then by what standard would you say you can't be confident?
By what standard? So UPB has now been out for like 14 years.
I've done dozens of presentations, live speeches, wrote an entire book, had debates, you name it, right?
PowerPoints, and I even did, in Vancouver, I did a debate where I asked some lovely audience members to pretend to try and strangle each other at the same time, see if it could work.
I called it a status hug.
So I've done just about everything I can to validate it.
I've taken written criticisms.
I've had debate with people who have huge issues.
And it is stood. Okay, so after 14 years, it is stood.
And even the people who disagree with it enormously have to admit that rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior.
Even the Woodley guy, the rationality rules accepted that, right?
So I would have to have some magical standard that every piece of evidence points...
To the theory being valid, but somehow it's still invalid.
Well, by what standard would I have that thought?
By what standard would I have that thought?
So you have to check.
If you have rational standards for being confident in the rightness of your position, then it is a disservice and a betrayal of rationality to express doubt without a reason.
It is an act of self-sabotage and it's a betrayal.
We all do it. We all have that habit.
And so I'm not trying to give you any sort of heavy-duty negatives here.
But it is an attack upon and a betrayal of philosophy to retreat to doubt without a reason.
Because, look, we all know people in the world who are staggeringly confident with absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Like, people just say the most outlandish and ridiculous stuff.
There's no reason whatsoever for it.
And yet, they're supremely confident.
And so, you can't hand the world over to those people.
I mean, that's a really bad idea.
The fundamentalists, the literalists.
So... Don't get into philosophy if it can't give you certainty.
I say this with absolute emphasis.
Do not get into philosophy if it cannot give you certainty, or it is an act of wanton self-sabotage.
It is an act of wanton self-sabotage to enter into philosophy when it cannot provide you certainty.
The purpose of philosophy is certainty, and in particular, moral certainty.
If philosophy is robbing you of certainty, it is robbing you of your identity, of your capacity for morality, of your capacity for love, it is a virus.
It is the flesh-eating disease of the type that took out Lucien Bouchard's leg a long time ago in Quebec.
Don't doubt for the sake of retreat.
I mean, people will come at you hard if you express any kind of certainty.
People will come at you hard.
Trust me, I know this from very significant personal experience.
If you express any kind of certainty, people will come at you hard.
And the temptation, of course, is to retreat into uncertainty so that you can alleviate the attacks.
I understand that's what the purpose of the attacks is for.
Don't do it. Stay away from the people who are that aggressive, but don't let them shame you.
Into giving up certainty for the sake of conformity.
It's a terribly, terribly bad idea.
And of course, once you're in philosophy, you have to push through to certainty.
Backing out just leads you It leads you into the swamp.
It leads you into the fog. We go in with propaganda, we go in with a false worldview, and philosophy takes a hammer to that.
That's the old Nietzschean quote, philosophizing with a hammer.
So we go in with a false worldview, and philosophy takes a hammer to that.
And then we become very alarmed, we become very disoriented, we become very uncertain.
Well, that's, you know, unlearning bad habits is a time of great awkwardness.
I remember when I played tennis for many years before I got real tennis lessons and I had to completely reformulate my serve and it was very hard to undo the old habits and have better habits for my serve.
When you've been doing something wrong, and in this case you've been trained to do things wrong, you've been programmed and propagandized into thinking wrong, when that has occurred over the span of decades, Then when philosophy comes along, it takes a hammer to just about everything you think is real.
And it's a difficult, painful process.
I remember...
Feeling at times, long before the show, this was in my, I think, early 23, 24, I remember feeling literally desolate, like I was a desert, like I was emptied out, like I was hollowed out, headpieces filled with straw, alas!
And it is a very difficult process to go through acquiring the truth.
I mean, if it was easy, boy, everyone would do it, right?
The Hollow Man by T.S. Eliot.
We are the hollow men.
We are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.
Alas, our dried voices, when we whisper together a quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion.
Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom remember us, if at all, not as lost, violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.
He's talking about the World War I victims.
The second part is, eyes I dare not meet in dreams, in death's dream kingdom.
These do not appear.
There the eyes are sunlight on a broken column.
There is a tree swinging, and voices are in the winds singing.
More distant and more solemn than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer in death's dream kingdom.
Let me also wear such deliberate disguises, rat's coat, crow skin, crust staves, in a field, behaving as the wind behaves, no nearer.
Not that final meeting in the twilight kingdom.
This is the reproaches of the ten million dead, I think.
The third part says, this is the dead land.
This is cactus land.
Here the stone images are raised.
Here they receive the supplication of a dead man's hand under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this? In death's other kingdom, waking alone, at the hour when we are trembling with tenderness, lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone.
Four. The eyes are not here.
There are no eyes here, in this valley of dying stars.
In this hollow valley, this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
In this last of meeting places, we grope together and avoid speech, gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
Sightless, unless the eyes reappear, as the perpetual star, multifoliate rose of death's twilight kingdom, the hope only of empty men.
Here we go round the prickly pear, prickly pear, prickly pear.
Here we go round the prickly pear at five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.
For thine is the kingdom.
Between the conception and the creation, Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow.
Life is very long.
Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent falls the shadow.
For thine is the kingdom.
For thine is life is For thine is the...
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
The people who survived the war, this is my reading of the poem, the people who survived the war couldn't speak of it, couldn't speak of their history, couldn't speak of the ones...
That were dead, couldn't speak of the ones who resented them and envied the dead, because the dead are gone, whereas the living dead have no contact, no connection.
And everything you think that you want to manifest is a shadow between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response is a shadow, between the desire and the spasm, which is lust and the orgasm.
Falls the shadow. That you can't live genuinely or authentically because you have suffered too much and you can speak too little about your suffering.
Everyone is overcharged and overstuffed with suffering.
It's a good poem.
It's a brave poem in many ways.
And I think we go through that process with philosophy.
We are the hollow men.
We are the stuffed men. I mean, it's the NPC thing, right?
Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.
Alas, our dried voices, when we whisper together a quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.
That people make noise, and their breath produces wind.
But the noise produces no connection, and the wind produces no movement.
And you hear this.
You know, I remember, I think we've all had this experience when we begin to gain in the wisdom of this world.
And we're in a restaurant and we hear people talking and it's drivel.
It's noise, it's drivel, it's nonsense, it's emptiness.
And I don't mind a little bit of small talk from time to time in the same way a pearl diver can live without oxygen for a couple of minutes, but I can't live like that because that's not living.
It's killing time between the here and the hereafter by making noise and moving things around.
Being in proximity to other carbon-based life forms while you shield yourself from any possible vulnerability, any possible connection, any possible loss.
It's a nightmare. This is the death's other kingdom, right?
What does he mean, death's other kingdom?
Well, there are the dead, but then there are those who are the dead in life.
The programmed, the NPCs, the machines, the people who would view an original thought in their hearts and minds as a kind of demonic possession that had to be exercised with a bathing, holy or unholy cleanse of endless Netflix propaganda.
Be gone! Thought!
It is a demon that scours us from the inside out.
And Jesus said when he came, I have come to set son against father and brother against brother.
What does that mean? To be alive in the land of the half-dead is to be a marked man, a marked woman.
We know this, right? We know this.
To have the fountainhead of animating an original human thought in a land of mouth, ticker tape, endless, empty-headed propaganda It's to be in motion while hunted among statues of motionless people.
They're all statues.
If you freeze in place, you're hard to find.
If you move under your own power, well, that's when the predators find you.
And you see, the predators have to find us, which is why they tell everyone else to mouth platitudes and speak nothing.
When other people mouth platitudes and speak nothing, well, those of us who are thinking, those of us with questions, and even more so those of us with answers, we're easy to find.
Among twenty snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.
It's from another poem.
Most people are...
Snowy mountains. They can be pretty, but they're inanimate.
Propaganda has doused any potential embers or fires of original thought.
And all they can do is amplify and repeat what has been screamed into their ear by the institutions that exist.
And when people found their personalities, On falsehoods, the truth becomes a predator that hunts them, and they will always try to get that.
Predator first. Get the truth before it gets you.
Because letting go of lies genuinely and deeply feels like a kind of death.
And it is. To death of emptiness.
Death of nothingness.
Death of conformity is our only chance at life.
So it's a tough road, and I've said this from the very beginning, that it's a tough road.
I mean, I've had thoughts of what my life would be like if I had never set one damn foot on this road of philosophy.
I think the suffering would be greater because...
The world would be wrong and I wouldn't even know why.
And of course, when the world is wrong and you don't even know why, you're very tempted to join the procession.
Off the cliff. All right.
Steph, I want to become self-employed and escape wage slavery, but I'm stuck wondering what to do for self-employment.
I guess I just don't know what I love to do or how to fit it into a job like you have.
Should I be practical about this?
Any tips for people who want to become self-employed and escape abusive working environments?
So, I have annoyance with this kind of question, and I apologize in advance for this annoyance.
It may be entirely unjust.
It may be entirely unfair.
And it might be mean.
But I spent so much of my life hoarding my capacity to love things.
I mean, I carried my love for wisdom, my love for truth, my love for life through my hellscape of a childhood like carrying a guttering candle through a hurricane.
I had to very savagely hang on, you know, through the endless dullard The cranium-crushing monotony of government schools, and I went to private schools and public schools, and they were equally horrible.
Through the cynicism, through violence, through abuse, through neglect, through hunger, I had to carry my love of life and my love of philosophy.
Now, of course, your love may be different.
It could be love of anything. And I fought very hard to carry that.
And I took a lot of blows because everybody wants you to drop what you love.
Almost everybody. Most people.
Many people. Some people. Want you to drop what you love.
Because if you make it through the storm with your candle still alight, then they're responsible for letting it go out.
So if you love something and you don't make sufficient obsequence and appeasement to the mob, the mob will attack you.
Because if you make it through with your light...
Then they went to darkness of their own accord and they might have done different.
So when people arise into adulthood without loving something enough to make it a career, I don't know exactly what to say.
What should you do for a living?
Well, if I were you, I would go back, I would retrace my steps and find out where I dropped that candle and light it the fuck up again and get back.
You hear me? You feel me?
Somewhere along the way, you dropped that candle.
Somewhere along the way, you let the wind and the rain put it out.
And then rather than carrying that dark candle, Like the body of a child, you dropped it and ran.
And you were well praised and rewarded for dropping it and running.
So if you're in adulthood, you don't know what to do with yourself, you don't know what your passions are, well, you've come to the end of a dark road with no light.
So you've got to go back. You've got to find that candle and you've got to relight it.
You've got to go back. There was a time when you loved things.
There was a time when you were passionate about things.
There was a time when you really cared about things and you lost that or it was taken from you or it was smashed out of your hands.
So go back and find it.
Go back and resurrect it.
Candles can be found and relit.
They're not shredded. They're not turned into atoms or vipers.
So go back Find it.
Relight it. Rediscover what you're passionate about.
And mourn how much the world hates a simple and clear passion, particularly for truth and goodness.
I mean, what did I love?
Well, I loved drawing.
I loved acting. I loved writing.
Drawing, I was way too detailed when it came to drawing.
It would take me like two weeks to do a portrait.
So I couldn't do that really very practically.
And it was fairly clear to see that cameras and technology was going to supplant drawing.
And now, of course, AI is doing just that.
I loved writing scripts.
I loved acting. I loved directing.
But the world, particularly here in Canada, the world of the arts is relentlessly socialist, right?
It's largely owned by the government, so it has lost any kind of rebellious spark it might have had.
And they sure didn't like me.
And to be fair, I didn't like them either.
So I had to put that one by the wayside.
I love philosophy.
I love history. I love literature.
I love writing. And I tried writing.
I wrote novels, plays, wrote 30 plays.
I've written half a dozen novels.
I've written hundreds of poems and could not find any place for them to land.
It's incomprehensible for a while.
I had a PhD literature student review one of my novels called The God of Atheists and he remarked in a very lengthy and incredibly positive review that he had finally read the great Canadian novel that he felt that Canada had been waiting for since its inception and how powerful the story of the morality.
Now, he was actually a theology student as well, literature and theology.
And he took the book written by an atheist and praised its moral depth, complexity of story, vividness of characterization, and ethical themes.
Now, of course, I read that review on every phone call that came into my office in the business world.
I was like, well, here it is. Here's the publisher.
Never came. Never came.
So I had to let that one go.
Now the novels are out, which I'm very pleased about.
You can go to almostnovel.com, justpoornovel.com, fdrurl.com slash T-G-O-A.
All free, all free.
Really, really.
This will spoil you.
I had somebody write to me just the other day and said, I really regret reading your novels because now every time I read anything else, I notice everything that's missing.
So I had to let that one go.
I loved programming and I did end up working in the coding field as a programmer and then as a chief technical officer for many years.
I love economics, loved entrepreneurship.
So find something. You've got to have a couple of irons in the fire.
Find something that you love.
And if you don't love anything, find out where you left the candle.
I bet you remember.
I bet you remember.
I bet you remember that time.
I remember with painting.
I remember this very vividly.
I dragged an entire door home because it was a big flat surface that I wanted to paint a huge landscape on.
I dragged an entire door home from a ruined house so that I could paint what I wanted.
And I remember my mom's violence.
Very clearly, I remember looking at my art and saying, I'm not going to do it anymore.
And this was sort of punishment to her and to the situation, to life as a whole.
So I bet you can remember this.
You could look back and you could say, this is where I put out the candle of painting.
I dropped it, put it out.
And you could do that, of course, but you've got to pick up something else.
Because that candle is us.
That candle is the purpose.
That candle is so we're not mechanistic, eating, screwing, and sleeping beasts.
And I think when you say to me, I don't know what I'm passionate about, I don't know what I want to do, I think you're asking for the question to be asked of you, who beat that out of you?
Who punched that out of you?
Who neglected that out of you?
Who screamed that out of you?
Who abused that out of you?
Children are born to love things.
Children are born passionate for what they do.
Who beat that out of you?
And nobody can motivate that back into you other than by saying, I'm sorry that it was beaten out of you.
It's back there somewhere.
Go get it. I'm begging you.
Go get it. All right.
Let's see. Do you have anything to say that you would recommend when looking for a therapist?
Yes! I did a show many years ago.
FDRpodcast.com. How to find a great therapist.
Just my particular ideas about it.
Nothing objective. And you can find that at FDRpodcast.com.
You just search for 1937 or therapist or whatever you find it there.
Alright, so, Free Domain.
How does one handle a grown son or daughter who is making poor choices in their relationships when they won't listen to reason and just shut you out?
Hmm. Interesting, interesting.
The first question to ask when someone won't listen to you is this.
Why don't I have any credibility?
Why don't I have any credibility?
You know, if my wife has an issue connecting to Wi-Fi, she'll come to me because I have credibility with the technical stuff.
I'm pretty good at running the technicals and it seems sometimes in a household you need a part-time IT guy.
So I have credibility and there's things that she's really, really good at that I will come to her and she has credibility.
It is a very alienating thing in relationships to expect to be listened to without having earned credibility.
So the first question that I would ask if I was in your shoes is, let's say that it's a daughter.
So let's say my daughter is making bad relationship choices.
And I'm telling her she's making bad relationship choices.
And if you're saying to her, make better relationship choices, but you yourself have not made good relationship choices and have not acknowledged that, you have to acknowledge.
You can make mistakes, right?
I mean, it's not like somebody who is dying of cancer from smoking can't talk about don't smoke.
People aren't going to say, well, you smoked.
It's like, yeah, look what happened to me.
It was bad. It was a bad idea.
So, if you yourself have made bad relationship choices and have not acknowledged them, nobody will listen to you.
And they shouldn't. Because if you haven't acknowledged bad relationship choices that you've made, and you haven't exhumed and examined the reasons why you made those bad relationship choices, then you can't give good advice, and that's why your daughter is not listening to you.
Because deep down, and again, I don't know this for sure, this is my guess, But deep down, you don't have credibility with her.
My mom used to get very frustrated when I would listen to my aunt or my uncle.
She'd get really mad, like, why do you listen to your aunt or your uncle?
You don't listen to me. It's like, well, because they don't hit me.
They don't scream at me. They're not violent.
You don't have any credibility, but they don't drag endless legions of weird guys into the apartment.
So do you have credibility?
Now, It could be that you have a good relationship with your husband, and then the question is, what influences has your daughter been exposed to that lower your credibility in her eyes?
So if, let's say, you have a good relationship with your husband, but your kid went to, I don't know, some creepy school, some government school or some creepy school where...
All of these bad ideas and habits were inculcated into your children.
Well, that's your fault.
That's your responsibility.
You decide where your children go to school.
You decide where your children go to school.
And if you're at a place where you can't homeschool, you're deciding to stay there.
And if for some reason your children end up having to go to these places, are you helping to deconstruct the programming that your children are getting?
Did you send your children off to some hyper-leftist university where they were taught to hate everything about their culture and taught to hate men and the patriarchy?
Why don't you have credibility?
Credibility is efficiency.
You know...
Dysfunction arises generally out of a desire for the unearned.
And if you expect your daughter to listen to you when you don't have credibility without addressing that lack of credibility, you're asking for credibility you have not earned.
And then if you get aggressive because she's not listening to you, you're insulting her for not giving you the credibility you have not earned.
Which is like you yelling at someone Who has refused to pay for a good you did not ship them.
Credibility is everything. Now, if you have made bad decisions, you sent them to the wrong school, you were with the wrong guy, you got divorced, you've had bad relationships, you've had single men come into the house, whatever.
If you've made those bad decisions, that doesn't mean that's it for your credibility.
I mean, it doesn't help.
But it doesn't mean that that's it for your credibility.
But if you don't even acknowledge those bad decisions, if you don't say, listen, you're making bad decisions, and I know I have no credibility because I've made bad decisions, but let me tell you about my bad decisions and why you should learn from me.
But if some guy's dying of smoking and says to you, don't smoke...
And says, I don't regret smoking.
Smoking was great. I never did anything wrong with smoking.
You're not going to listen to that person because it sounds a little crazy, doesn't it?
You shouldn't smoke.
But I love smoking. I don't regret it a bit.
But that would be kind of nutty, right?
The first question. Somebody's not listening to you.
Okay. Why don't they have...
Why don't you have credibility with them?
All right. Um...
Let's check in with the audience here.
Yeah, I think we're doing good stuff here, so we might make this a bit of a short show tonight.
I feel like I'm squeezing the toothpaste of creativity pretty hard from the bottom.
In fact, I'm just stomping on it Godzilla-style, so...
All right. Rationalist philosophers often get charged with being failed idealists because their belief in a priori positions...
But I had the thought to flip it on its head.
Could it be that idealists misunderstand a priori axioms, thus making them flawed rationalists?
I think, you know, with all due respect, I love your participation in the community, but that's not enough for me to discuss.
I'm not sure what you mean by rationalist.
I'm not sure what you mean by idealist.
I know what you mean by a priori positions, but I would need some examples.
But idealists, the way that I use the term, is people who believe that concepts have an existence outside of material reality that can contradict material reality.
The perfect table exists somewhere out there and is superior to actual tables in the world.
And by superior, it means it's not a one-to-one relationship.
It means that it can contain properties that regular tables don't contain.
That's idealism. And I just did a whole show on this, so listen to show 11 when it comes out on my History of Philosophers, because I go into all of this in very great detail.
It's the one on Thomas Aquinas, show 11.
Alright, is the argument, that's not true communism, a play on Anselm's ontological argument?
Something like, if a government fails, then an even more perfect government must be conceived of them implemented and understood as perfect until it fails.
Well, it is a form of idealism to say, my system is perfect, and anything which claims to be my system which is not perfect is not my system for the obvious reason that it's not perfect.
So communism is perfect, and therefore any state which claims to be communist, which is not perfect, is, by this kind of definition, not perfect.
And you understand this, right?
You say, everything that is painted red should be red, and if someone paints blue and claims it's red, then it's not real red.
It's not red, because it's not red, right?
It's almost tautological, but that's the loop that people...
Get stuck in, right?
Well, communism is perfect.
And yes, the Soviet Union had gulags and mass starvations and endless wars and repressions and censorship and brutality and all of that.
And since communism is morally perfect, any state which claims to be communist but is evil is clearly not true communism.
And this is idealism.
This is failing to recognize that if you make a claim and it fails, you have to have the humility to try and figure out why it failed.
I mean, if I put forward a theory, a grand, a unified field theory, a grand theory of physics called Stephanism, and Stephanism made these predictions.
And then people tested these predictions.
Scientists, for whatever reason, they believed some empirical philosopher about physics.
And they tested my Stephanism's predictions.
And then the predictions failed.
I'd say, well, that's not real Stephanism.
Real Stephanism is when the prediction doesn't fail.
So you just have to keep doing it until it works.
And they say, no, no, no, the test, like 20 tests have failed to replicate your prediction.
Predictions. But the fact that they failed, because my theory is a unified field theory, which means it does accurately predict.
So if it's failed, that wasn't real Stephanism.
That's not real science. The real science validates my perfect theory.
Whatever you're doing is not real science.
It's not Stephanism, because Stephanism would be correct.
My accurately predicts.
So whatever you're doing is not science.
It's not Stephanism. Because by definition, my theory is correct, and everything which deviates from the correctness of that theory is clearly not valid.
It's invalid, right? But that's just monstrous vanity.
It's a failure to subsume the ego to reason and evidence, which turns us into narcissistic monsters, right?
What's narcissism is the belief that you don't have to subjugate yourself to any external standard, that your will is everything.
And, of course, it's tied in with a lack of empathy.
But if people are unwilling to subsume their ego to an objective standard...
Now, I think it should be philosophy and, under science's reason, evidence of replicability and so on.
At least it was before the government took over science and turned it to politics.
Follow the money. You'll find the science.
And, you know, when you meet someone, this is why I always used to love, when I'd go on a date when I was younger, I'd always used to love talking to a woman about mysticism.
And occasionally, if I fell prey to hormones, then I'd ask a girl out just because she was pretty without really knowing much about her personality.
And, you know, sometimes you would find this, oh, I'm psychic, oh, I had these dreams, I have these dreams where I can see the future, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, that's just a narcissist.
Mysticism in this way, and I'm not talking about Christianity, I'm not talking about formal religion where you do subjugate yourself to an external standard.
It's not a philosophical standard, it's a theological standard, but more Christians subject themselves to morality than atheists do, so I have more respect for Christians in that way.
Christians have standards which go against the pleasure principle, and it's hard to find an atheist to Who has a standard that goes against the pleasure principle.
Richard Dawkins is perfectly comfortable with government funding of science because that pays him and a bunch of his friends, right?
So... I would meet these women and because I have standards, I would know immediately that these would...
Now, occasionally I still might date them a little bit longer just for funsies, but you knew it couldn't work out.
Or if they were into astrology, right?
Astrology doesn't quite rhyme with horny, but it should.
Because men only put up with astrology because men are horny.
A lot of nonsense comes into the world through the vast deference.
So, if you're not willing to subject yourself to some external standard, you just have a rampaging, narcissistic ego that will tread over other people to get a 50-cent discount at CVS. Alright, let's see here. Have you listened to Muse?
Do you like them? Or Tame Impala?
I do not. I assume those are bands?
I do not.
I have not. Alright.
Yes, I have a question.
I lent a gal I knew from medical school $6,000 so that she wouldn't delay her med studies by a semester due to a temporary inability to pay.
She said she needed a loan for two weeks, as she had a refund from another school en route, for which she showed me credible proof.
This was two and a half years ago, and since then she's lied and misrepresented her actions.
And though polite and always making promises, has not repaid anything, nor proactively reached out to me to explain.
Perhaps there are cultural differences.
She's a black African and from a fairly wealthy family there.
We were friends from school.
I never had any romantic relationship or interest in her.
We have only a verbal agreement and her life is a bit of a mess in other ways, with a parent having died and an unemployed husband and injured child.
What to do? I don't want to unduly pressure her if she's in dire straits, but nor do I want to weakly let this matter go.
It brings to mind you a property scene in the future in which a thief is threatened with death, though of course that's not what I'm contemplating here.
At the same time, I don't want fretting over the loan or trying to get her to repay me or honestly explain why she can't or won't to cost me in frustration in time more than $6,000, a sum which if I live my life well should make a little difference.
What should I be considering and weighing as I decide how to act?
Yeah, I've lent money.
I've lent money in the past and it's often a problem.
It's often a problem.
I can't tell you what to do, obviously.
I have no idea. I don't know why you lent her this money.
Like, why did you lend her this money?
I mean, if you have an income that is certain, like you can go to the bank and you can get a bridge loan or you can...
Call the credit card company and send them this letter saying, I just need this forwarded for, I just need $6,000.
You said she's got a fairly wealthy family.
Well, then they can get her the money.
Like, I'm not sure why you would lend her the $6,000.
And without knowing that, it's a little bit hard to analyze the situation.
I'll tell you one thing I've learned in life, though.
It's a general life lesson.
I think it applies in general.
Well, I just said general. I'll just keep saying the word general until they promote me.
You have to, have to, have to get used to losing money in this life.
You have to make friends with losing money in this life.
It's going to happen.
It's going to happen in investments.
It's going to happen if you lend money to some friends.
It's going to happen with your business if you're self-employed.
You just, from time to time, The shark of reality is just going to take a bite out of your finances.
It could be a sudden tax bill.
It could be any number of things.
It could be a sudden medical thing. You're just going to have to get used to letting money go, in my opinion.
And I guess it would be about...
Yeah, I lent... But there was a girlfriend, so that's a different matter about that amount of money, but a long time ago.
And she did end up paying it back, but it took 18 months, and it was supposed to be, again, pretty brief.
I lent another friend of mine $800.
That took about a year to get back.
You're in a situation of helplessness here, right?
So this is the question, right, in terms of protecting your own interests.
And of course, I had to leave a lot of resources on the table to speak truth and, you know, to get deplatformed and all.
I left a lot of resources on the table.
As you know, listenership is down, as you can imagine.
So you just have to get used to letting things go, I think.
And so you're in a situation of frustrated helplessness now, right?
So my question is, do you have any experience in the past with frustrated helplessness?
In other words, did you provide resources to a parent?
Did you provide resources to a sibling?
Is there something in you that finds this a sadly familiar scenario?
Has this ever occurred to you in this kind of...
Have these feelings ever occurred to you before?
Have these feelings ever occurred to you before?
Or ever happened to you?
Have you been in this situation before?
Now, if you have, then you might be doing this Simon the Boxer repetition compulsion stuff, in which case you've got to get to the root of the suffering at the early.
Did you ever feel helpless in particular with regards to female integrity?
So, you know, you say that it's not much of a difference in your life.
I think that what I would do is I would say, okay, so $6,000 is a lot of money.
It's a lot of money. $6,000 is a lot of money and I'm not going to, you know, pretend it's not, right?
So $6,000 is a lot of money, man.
But if $6,000 gets me into therapy to deal with being way too agreeable to people, right?
Because you lent this money to this woman.
And you were wrong to lend her money.
Some people you'll lend money to and they'll pay you back the next week or maybe if you got the money back in two weeks or whatever.
And so if, as you say, this woman has not paid you back, then you were wrong to lend her money.
So you paid $6,000 to get a big giant red flag over your decision-making process to figure out why you made a bad decision.
There's nothing wrong with making bad decisions.
It's called living. Nothing wrong with making bad decisions.
That doesn't matter. What matters is do you learn from them?
If you think the problem is you not getting the $6,000 back, that's not the problem.
The problem is you lent her the money in the first place.
That there was something about her you didn't understand.
You assumed that she would pay you back.
You thought she was honorable.
You thought she'd be honest. And yes, listen, the fact that she can't pay you back isn't even the issue because she's avoiding you and lying and dodging, right?
I remember way back in the day, I did some work as an extra in movies.
I am somewhere in the movie Cain and Abel in The Crowd.
And I also did music videos and so on, right?
And I met a guy there and we ended up becoming friends.
He's a very funny guy.
And he owed people money to the point where he gave me a complicated series of ways to call him, like call once, let it ring twice, hang up, call, let it ring once again, call again, let it ring three times, then I'll know to pick up.
I mean, our friendship didn't last super long, but he definitely was a fun guy.
So, the issue is you're still in danger because you don't know what you missed about this woman that you lent her the money.
What did you not understand?
And are you somebody who's used to being exploited, maybe by women, maybe by people who find particular buttons to push in you, and you've got to plug those holes.
You've got to protect your resources.
So, I have lost money And been grateful for the loss because it has taught me a lot about myself and self-protection.
Why do you think people are quiet quitting?
Well, I mean, inflation, wages have been stagnant since the 1970s, a sense that the, you know, was it by 2032 or 2031, then interest and Fixed spending will be 100% of the U.S. tax revenue.
I mean, there's a sense that things just can't sustain, right?
And we're not a meritocracy anymore, right, for the most part.
There's a lot of quotas and political stuff that's going on with hiring and promotion, so yes, people are...
When you get rid of the meritocracy, you get rid of the Pareto principle, like the square root of any group in a meritocracy produces half the value.
See, 100 people in a company or 100 people, 100 programmers, 10 of them are producing half the code.
I have a friend who worked above and beyond in the company and you get the usual, here's two tickets to a movie.
And it's just not particularly realistic to expect people to be motivated that way.
All right. I want to end a 10-month friendship with someone who's been taking advantage of my kindness.
I'm undecided whether it'll be by letter or an in-person breakup.
My question is, do I go into details as to why I'm ending it?
Or is it enough or fair to simply say the friendship is no longer working for me?
I wish you all the best. Um...
Why do you want to have a formal end?
It's not like you're married and you have to break up, right?
It's not like you have to have some sort of formal end.
See, I was friends with a guy who went through some significant issues, and I helped him as best I could, but I'm not a therapist, so I said, listen, you need to get to therapy.
You really need to get to therapy.
And he could afford it. He said, you really need to get to therapy.
He chose not to go to therapy, and it wasn't too long until, like, yeah, I just basically stopped hanging out with the guy.
Now, am I going to have this long speech about, oh, well, you know, I told you this, and you decided not to, and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, I told him, you need to get to therapy.
I had been to therapy at this point, so I knew what I was talking about.
You need to get to therapy. He didn't want to go to therapy, and didn't even say, I've decided not to, just never did, and all that.
So it's like, okay, well, if you're not going to take any steps to solve your issues, then I'm not going to be around to plug in or plug up this mess.
You know, if somebody is a serious alcoholic and you tell them they need to go to rehab, they need to quit, and they don't, do you need to have a long discussion?
I mean, I assume you've said to your friend, you know, I feel like you're taking advantage of my kindness or I don't feel comfortable with this.
If you've had those conversations, then I'm not sure you need a big breakup scene.
So if you're going into details as to why you're ending a relationship, it's almost always in the hopes that the relationship can be fixed or changed or something can be improved.
Or maybe you want to leave them with the, you're a selfish person, you're an exploiter kind of bomb, and there's anger or whatever they are.
I don't think that's a good idea.
I don't think that's a good idea.
I explain to people the standards of my relationships ahead of time.
If they don't meet those standards, I'll just drift off.
Right? I mean, take a silly example, right?
Let's say you order pizza.
And you order a large pepperoni pizza and what they deliver is a bunch of chicken wings and a Cinnabon, right?
Do you have a long conversation and they won't give you a refund and it's difficult and all that, right?
Do you have a long conversation with the restaurant manager saying why you're not going to order from him again?
Probably not, right?
You just move on to a restaurant that's going to fulfill your order in the way that you want.
So just from my own experience, I don't know what the breakup conversations with regards to friendships, I don't know what it's supposed to achieve.
If you thought the person was capable of change, then you would not probably be breaking up with them, but you would be trying to resolve things or work with them to improve.
Again, it's sort of similar to the last question.
The issue isn't how do you break up with the person.
The issue is how did you get into a 10-month relationship with an exploiter to begin with.
And saying, well, you're just a bad person who's selfish and this is why I'm not going to be friends with you anymore, is putting all the blame on them.
Right? But you invited this person into your life.
And if you just put all the responsibility on them, yes, you'll feel some relief, you'll get that sweet, sweet victimhood juice, but you won't be able to prevent a recurrence.
That's the price we pay for blaming others who we voluntarily invited into our lives.
The price we pay For blaming others is...
It's a revolving door of dysfunction that just people...
Oh, I'll push one person out. Oh, here comes another person.
I'll push that person out. Oh, here comes another person because we haven't figured out the pattern or the mechanics by which these people are coming into our life.
Your question is not what do you do after the fact, right?
Like the guy with the $6,000 he owed the woman or you with the 10-month friend.
The question isn't how do you end it.
The question is why did it begin in the first place?
Now, if you can figure out why it began in the first place, you'll feel less of a temptation to blame the other person.
And I'm not saying that the other person, I mean, you know, the woman should have paid the money back and this guy should not be exploiting your, or taking advantage of your kindness, as you say.
Absolutely, for sure. The question is why didn't you know that ahead of time?
In other words, have you been in a situation before where your kindness has been exploited and is this sickly familiar for you?
Now, if you can figure out those patterns, you can protect yourself in the future.
But if you have a big finger-wagging discussion with the person about how they're a user and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're exonerating yourself and responsibility for inviting this kind of vampire into your life to begin with, right?
You know the story about vampires.
You have to invite them in. There's a reason why that is.
I did a whole series years ago on archetypes in particularly horror movies or other kinds of archetypes.
You can just do searches for vampires and so on at fdrpodcast.com.
They're talking about a particular kind of personality.
And when you're an adult, you have to invite dysfunctional people into your life.
As a kid, right, we're not responsible for the family we're born into.
But as adults, why, yes, we really, really are responsible for who we bring in.
Alright, so let me just see.
Did I get more questions?
Great questions, by the way. Thank you everyone so much for bringing these up.
Let's see here. Do you think UBB can be expected in Muslim cultures?
Well, this is back to Averroes.
I mean, the Muslim cultures were the centers of learning.
They preserved Aristotle, and yes, I think it could be argued they went a smidge fundamentalists for a while there, but it is not tough to comprehend UPB. I know it can be tough because we've all had so much propaganda, but it depends whether they go back more towards the Enlightenment kind of curiosity or not.
So, let's see here.
Oh, boy, a lot of questions here.
All right. What do you think about the term tough love?
Is it something appropriate to apply to the public as opposed to your loved ones or even to enemies, like how the Bible says to love your enemies?
Your speech about Europeans paying high energy bills due to their political choices made me think about this.
Thanks. Well, if you really hate someone, you lie to them or withhold the truth from them.
So if you're a husband, imagine this sort of situation.
Your husband eats nothing but, I don't know, rabbit.
And it turns out that rabbits in your neighborhood have been poisoned.
Now, if you love your husband, you'll rip the rabbit out of his mouth and say, no more eating rabbits because they've been poisoned.
They've got mercury poisoning. Man, it's going to kill you.
But if you hate your husband, you won't tell him that what he's doing is self-destructive.
The lying is a form of reality murder for people.
It's a dramatic way to put it, but it's very true.
It's very true. So tough love, love means telling the truth to people you care about in order to keep them safe.
Does that mean that they're going to be unhappy with you from time to time?
Well, sure. But hopefully relatively quickly, when the shock of losing their hedonism is clear to them, or has passed, then they will thank you for telling them the truth.
So, yeah, tough love.
Now... It has to be people you care about.
Love is people that you care about.
I mean, we can love common humanity in the abstract and I think that's not an unreasonable position to take.
I love people in the abstract.
And I actually love people in person too.
Just about everyone I meet in person is super pleasant.
Like really, really pleasant.
And... Good-natured and good-humored.
Now, of course, I'm bringing that to the table as well.
I like to chat with people and make a couple of jokes and see how their day's going.
That's sort of a thing. So I find that just about everyone I meet is very pleasant, and I love humanity in the abstract.
Political humanity, propagandized humanity, collective humanity.
Yeah, well, this is the old Nietzsche saying that madness in individuals is very rare, but in groups, collectives, and mobs, it's the norm.
Now, people get together and...
It's the emergent property of the mobs is madness.
So, yeah, tough love.
Yeah, you tell people the truth.
And they might dislike it sometimes.
Now, as far as, you know, people as a whole, well, you have to be responsible because there are some truths that go so against the Their material interests that they will attack you as if you are some sort of dangerous person.
Like, I guess you're dangerous to their self-interest, right?
So people who are profiting from falsehood, when you expose that falsehood, they will get quite angry, obviously, right?
And is that worth it?
Well, people who will attack you for telling the truth, I don't care about it.
I don't care about them enough to tell them the truth.
This is back to the friendship question.
I mean, I had a friend, I said, you need to go to therapy, and I was right.
I mean, I knew I was right about this.
You need to go to therapy. I told him the truth.
And he got mad at me, and I'm pushing him, and he's going to work on stuff, and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, okay, well, look, if you're going to get mad at me for telling you the truth, we're not friends.
And again, I'm not talking about a momentary irritation or something that lasts a day or two or whatever, but no, I mean, life's too short to hang around people who get mad at you for telling the truth.
Life is hard enough telling the truth, but that friend's turning on you for honesty.
All right, so let's see here.
Hi, Steph. I recently started dating a girl.
We have lots in common, shared values, etc.
But one problem is she has unnecessary body hair in a certain place and doesn't shave.
If she shaved, I would find her way more attractive.
But we've only been dating a month, so I feel it's too soon to mention it.
Well, it's probably too soon to have seen it, too.
I assume you're talking about the pubic region and she's not gone full Brazilian racing stripe.
When and how about should I bring this up with her?
Why is the issue hers?
So, if you're talking about her pubic mound and she's got hair on her pubic mound, so?
Because the shaving...
Do you mean trimming the bush?
Is it like a full-on... Lady garden like a slice of New York pizza, as the saying goes.
So if she shaves, it's growing back.
It's difficult. You can get impacted hairs down there that can cause skin irritation and so on.
So she might have to go for electrolysis and so on.
Why is that an issue?
I'm guessing porn addiction, but I could be wrong.
I could be wrong, of course.
But yeah, so if you've been dating a month and you're already having sex, probably not a wise idea.
In fact, it's certainly not a wise idea.
So the fact that you're jumping into bed relatively quickly is making up for something, right?
The more you want to sleep with a woman, I get lust is a good thing and so on, but the more that you're driven towards sleeping with her, the less you're enjoying her personality.
Because if she's got a wonderful personality, she's funny, she's engaging, she's witty, she's brilliant, she's insightful, then you just love the conversation so much, right?
That you don't necessarily feel the same urge to jump into bed.
Oftentimes, we'll jump into bed with someone to jump over the chasm of what's missing in their personality.
And then we end up bonding with somebody where there are these kinds of gaps.
So you're close enough to have intercourse or to have naked sex, but you're not close enough to talk about what you like?
That's called putting the cart before the horse.
Why are you doing this so quickly?
What's the rush? What's the rush?
And again, I would look back early and try and figure out why a perfectly natural part of the human body, which is pubic hair, is unpleasant to you.
So, yeah, I think that's too fast.
It's too fast. Does a practical path exist for everyone becoming wealthy?
Are we doomed to classes of haves and have-nots?
Oh, no, no, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely, people can become wealthy.
Oh, no question. You liberate that Pareto principle group of people, and they can just produce staggering abundance for everyone else.
Staggering abundance for everyone else.
This was many people's idea behind the Trump revolution, that you get a guy in who's free market friendly, who's going to lower taxes and lower regulations, and you're going to get the Pareto principle...
Mega productive people to just produce fountains and fountains of wealth and then you can grow your way out of the disaster of the national debt.
That was generally the idea behind a lot of people's support of Trump.
So the people who want the system to crash, they hated Trump and the people who wanted to save at least or have a softer landing to the system were hoping to grow their way out of the deficit.
And it was going in that direction for sure.
And so yeah, over the last 50 years, the percentage of people who live on $2 a day has dropped from like 80% of people to a very negligible amount.
So everyone is wealthy relative to 50, 70 years ago.
So yeah, everyone could become wealthy, for sure.
Now, this doesn't mean that everybody can be massively productive, but the few productive geniuses out there can generate more than enough wealth for everyone.
And what I mean by that is that for the people who aren't particularly smart, we can be incredibly – it's not their fault, right?
We can be incredibly kind and generous and support them, and there could be something like universal basic income, which is perfectly fine if it's voluntary.
And everyone could have wonderful wealth, but they're basically killing the geese that lay the golden egg these days, and that's probably not by accident.
All right. I posted this earlier.
So a few years ago, my niece was writing essay assignments for her college classmates for a fee.
I thought it was dishonest and risky, were she to be caught, but my family praised her for being so competent and enterprising and dismissed my arguments as wrong or unimportant.
And then they justified it further by saying that my niece doesn't know for sure that the students will be turning in the essays as their own work, so she's morally off the hook.
Yeah, right, because people pay for that stuff just so they don't turn it in.
Yeah, no, it's wrong.
That's fraud. It's absolutely fraud and everybody knows it's fraud.
I mean, it's worse than plagiarism, which is when you take stuff from other people without credit.
But yeah, it's straight up fraud because you're putting in something under your own name that you didn't write.
And it's incredibly damaging.
I knew a girl in university.
She had... She plagiarized a couple of lines of poetry from an obscure poem from her homeland, and she got great marks and great praise, and the teacher read out the poem that she'd assembled, and she, like, I don't know, ten years later, she still felt terrible about it.
Now, maybe these people don't have a conscience.
I don't know. But if you get something you haven't earned, that you've cheated on, How happy is that going to make you, knowing that what you claim for the rest of your life, that you got this degree, that you passed this class, that you got this assignment, you did well on this assignment.
How are you going to feel for the rest of your life knowing that the entire foundation of your career, of your prestige, of your respect, of this, that, and the other is a lie?
It's very cruel. It's very cruel.
And it's also...
It's robbing future employers because future employers are going to look at these people and say, oh, well, you know, they passed this challenging course.
There must be good writers.
There must be good analyzers.
There must be good reasoners. There must be excellent communicators.
So they're going to hire these people.
And then what's going to happen?
These people don't have those skills.
And other people who do have these skills won't get hired because maybe they didn't do quite as well because they did their own work.
Imagine you're going under the knife and it turns out that the surgeon...
Bribed his way to get his degree.
Bribed his way to becoming a surgeon.
How are you going to feel? Pretty bad, right?
How are you going to feel about all the people who let the surgeon get ahead through bribery?
Pretty mad at them too, right?
No, it's a terrible thing to do.
It destroys the self-esteem of the people you're doing it for.
It destroys... I've been an entrepreneur, man.
I've been an entrepreneur and I do not like it when people come in with fake credentials, which they very rarely did, but I do not like it.
These kinds of frauds, particularly these soft, very hard-to-detect frauds, and of course, how is someone down the road going to know that this person passed their degree or certain courses within their degree because they cheated?
How are they going to know? They won't really know.
But they'll know over the course of that working.
And it might take six months. It might take a year.
It might crater the whole business.
People might make mistakes that cost this person his entire livelihood.
And the employment of ten other people.
Oh no, this is horribly parasitical.
And shameful. Shameful behavior.
Stefan, I'm trying to resist being blackpilled by the realization that most people will tolerate a thousand boots stepping on them from above if they have even a single person they can crush below themselves.
I'm starting to look at people in my everyday life as future enemies who just need me to say the wrong thing to show their true colors.
Any words of wisdom or hope to overcome this?
I know it must be related to my fiancé leaving me recently for her abusive family.
Oh gosh. Yeah, so make sure that you don't take personal experiences and extrapolate them to universal blackpills.
I'm so sorry to hear about your fiancé.
It's easy to say, well, that's a bullet dodged, but it's a very, very tough situation.
I broke an engagement.
It's really, really tough.
So I would process those feelings, and it could be that you extrapolating those feelings to humanity and society as a whole is a way of avoiding the suffering that your choice of fiancé has caused you.
So I would drop the universal statements, really, really process on the personal pain.
It doesn't mean you can't return to those universal statements, but don't use them as a bucket to hide your pain in.
Someone close to me projects onto me being unable to admit being wrong and also gets very upset even by gentle criticism.
What sort of childhood experiences would cause this?
It really seems like this is a clear trigger of some sort.
Yeah, so people can't admit that they're wrong when they get overtly punished for being wrong.
So, dysfunctional families set up these kinds of mythologies.
I've talked about this before, so I'll keep it brief.
But dysfunctional families create these mythologies.
Like, oh, she's the clumsy one.
Why? Because you dropped one tray of food when you were eight.
Oh, she's the clumsy one. And then you become self-conscious.
Maybe you become a little more awkward and maybe you drop things a little bit more.
Oh, yes, she's the clumsy one.
And so families create these mythologies where mistakes get kind of branded into your forehead.
Like a hot poker, right?
Branded in. And so if you admit that you're wrong, let's say you have a really dysfunctional family, right?
And your family has made a claim or made a statement, you've contradicted them, and then it turns out that they're right and you're wrong.
Okay. Now, in a healthy family, you admit that, and people say, oh, it's good of you to admit it, and you move on, right?
No stickiness, no mythology is created.
But if you're wrong and your family is right about something and you say, oh, you know what?
You're right. You're right.
I get it now. You're totally right.
I'm totally wrong. Then what happens the next 6,000 times or 10,000 times that you're certain about something that is, oh, are you certain of this just like you were about that one time and you were so certain it turned out you were wrong?
In other words, admitting fault means that you will never have anybody believe anything you say ever again in the future.
They always have a weapon to use against you and you will never be right again.
So you can't admit that you're wrong.
Because if you admit that you're wrong once, you'll never be allowed to be right again.
So that's generally where it comes from.
Just curious about the logo you sometimes use if it looks like a mountain and a bullseye at its peak.
Oh, there's an old blue and white one I got from a website that I just paid someone to modify an existing one.
So nothing in particular.
All right. I think we might be done.
Done and done.
Alright, and let me just double check in here.
Yeah, I did a long show today about scholasticism and how medievalism led to, scholasticism led to the enlightenment and it was all very big and deep and meaty stuff.
And Aquinas, of course, so I will not do a long show tonight because I don't want to wear the pencil out of both ends, so to speak.
But thanks, everyone, so much for dropping by.
What a great pleasure. Great questions.
Wonderful discussions, I think.
And freedomain.com forward slash donate if you could help out the show.
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