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Oct. 15, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:05
Stefan Molyneux 'Ask Me Anything' October 5 2022
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Alrighty, righty. So we got questions from a couple of weeks ago.
Sorry I didn't get to these, but I wanted to circle back and get them.
Question, do you have any favorite films?
I used to.
I used to really like Room with a View, and then I listened again to the audiobook of it recently and found that it's just relentlessly anti-Christian, anti-religious, and it's not something I really picked up on that much.
When I was younger.
So I would say that I have favorite films in memory, but when I look back on them, they seem like a lot more based on propaganda than I thought.
I like the chaos and self-knowledge nihilism of Fight Club, but again, I haven't seen that in a long time, so...
Steph, I'm good, but that's not enough for me.
I want to make the world good too, or at least better, as you do with Freedom Inn.
What's the best way to enforce my peace, quote, and infect them with my love?
Well, you can't love people who aren't virtuous.
You can love their potential, of course, right?
I mean, babies are not born virtuous, but we love them for their potential, and hopefully our love helps actualize that potential.
But you simply cannot love somebody who is not virtuous.
And so to encourage virtue in others is to increase the possibility that you can love them.
And that's a good thing as a whole.
As far as making the world good, no, you can't make the world good.
The world has to have choice.
Now, the way that we create choice in people is we give them information that they didn't have before.
The purpose of propaganda is to remove your free will and to put you on a train track by keeping alternate information or alternate explanations away, right?
So if you look at something like, you know, hardcore Marxism or leftism, they say that all differences in wealth are the result of exploitation.
Well, that's a conspiracy theory.
There are other ways to explain disparities in wealth, such as differences in intelligence, difference in conscientiousness, difference in discipline, and so on.
And there's some, obviously, luck involved in it as well.
So one is, well, there's this entire group of people that just conspire to betray and exploit and subjugate and undermine everybody else.
But that's a conspiracy theory, and there are much simpler explanations rather than conspiracy theories.
So what you want to do is you want to start, like, you know, the wage gap, sort of a traditional one, that why is there a wage gap between men and women?
Because men choose fields that are more dangerous, more difficult, more challenging, and certainly higher paid.
Men tend to work And men don't take time off as much to have babies.
Or, like, that's the facts, right?
Or there's this other massive conspiracy theory that all men get together every morning, you know, rub their mustaches, twirl their beards, and plot for the downfall and subjugation of women, right?
This is a complete conspiracy theory.
And we don't talk about these things as conspiracy theories, but of course they are.
And so what you want to do is just put better information out in the world so that people have the capacity to actually make choices.
You're not really a moral agent if you don't have better information, which is why the Internet has been the greatest spark to create both morality and immorality in the world, because the Internet allows for the dissemination of far better information.
There's an old movie with Mel Gibson called Conspiracy Theory with Julia Roberts, I think, as well.
And there's this guy who has these conspiracy theories and he photocopies them and puts them in people's mailbox and has like seven subscribers.
And that was how difficult it was to get information out in the past.
So prior to the internet, I put an ad in a newspaper...
And rented a PO box and sent out my rationalist manifesto and engaged in debates with people and it was over mail and it was incredibly laborious and time-consuming and kind of exhausting and not super productive although I got some good feedback and good ideas.
So the gatekeepers were enormous back in the day.
And I mean, I was reading this thing that with Democrats versus Republicans, which is generally left versus right, a big government versus small government, property rights, redistribution versus property rights.
And in the field of history, it's 35.
It's over 35 to 1 leftists versus rightists.
It's over 35 to 1 Democrats versus Republicans.
So I'm sure that's similar here in Canada.
So what... Was the situational possibility for me to really get ahead in that community?
Not that I'm specifically a rightist or a Republican or a conservative, but being anti-left is enough to put you in the category of fascist apparently these days, even though fascism came out of the last, as Mussolini did as well.
So just give people better information, encourage them to be good, and let them find their own way, because you can't get in their heads and think for them anymore than you can, you know, if somebody's overweight in your environment, there's no point you dieting.
It's not going to make them lose weight.
It might inspire them a little if you're both overweight, but...
If somebody's underweight, you eating extra isn't going to make them gain any weight.
You can't work out for anyone else, and you sure as hell can't think for anyone else.
But you can just give them better arguments, alternate ideas, and exhortations for improvement.
Let's see here. Seven years ago, my in-law was forced into a medical retirement by a big city fire department.
What happened is he would go into a stupor at any given time, day or night.
The events were characterized as seashoot disorder initially.
When he took on new employment, he had a series of vehicle accidents with apparently similar symptoms.
He had a full medical workup again, and a neurologist said it was really a PTSD-related syndrome, and they started medications for it.
They recommended counseling, and he declined.
The other day he had another accident.
This time he was following too closely in the car in front and started a chain collision.
Being an avid student of yours, I started suspecting his PTSD may be more related to his early life than his paramedic or fire life because to this day he still stops and helps critically injured victims in a good Samaritan capacity and he seems to deal with it well afterwards.
However, what he doesn't like doing is being with his father.
As a child, he was physically assaulted by him, and it continues abusing him in non-physical ways.
He wisely cut back on his visits with him.
So here's the crux of my question.
Should I suggest he start listening to your material, or just leave him alone?
I think he needs some triage in terms of his psychological well-being, but as you say, a person must want to explore themselves starting at a young age.
He's 38 now and has a six-year-old boy, so I kind of worry, well, it'll happen if things continue without intervention.
I mean, he is lucky to have someone who cares this deeply about him in his life, and he may never acknowledge or respect that fact, but it is a fact.
Nonetheless, I'll tell you straight up.
So... If there's no particular physical cause, then I would certainly look into psychological issues.
And if you know that he was beaten by his father as a child, you can just ask him about it.
Just be curious.
Don't try and offload the relationship onto me.
Because the relationship he may have to philosophy would only come through you.
So I would sit down and ask him about what is happening with his life, how his childhood was.
You know, it's funny because people very rarely ask about other people's childhoods.
We go through our whole lives, and we can spend decades with people, and people very rarely ask other people about their childhoods.
It's a real shame, because that's how you really get to know someone.
Childhood is not a furnace wherein the train tracks of the future are forged in a deterministic way, but boy, it sure is where we all start, and whatever we wrestle with, the tracks are laid down.
If we want to jump the tracks, we still have to jump, and that's an important thing, so...
I don't know that I've ever said a person must want to explore themselves starting at a young age.
I mean, it doesn't sound like something that I would say because it sounds kind of deterministic.
I think what I have said is that the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior, and if somebody really works hard against self-knowledge and is really opposed to self-knowledge without some significant change, that is almost certain to continue.
So, if somebody has a resolute avoidance of self-knowledge, you can start asking them, you can show them benefits in your own life, but after that, it's up to them.
Do not, and it's really tempting, one of the great temptations, and it is a kind of power lust, and it's a kind of desperation lust, and it's a form of personality displacement, arrogance, that again arises out of a kind of desperation.
We're so desperate for people to change that we kind of want to elbow aside their free will and just make better decisions for them.
Right? Like parents who are like, well, you're just playing too many video games, we're going to lock up the Xbox.
Right? Okay, well, you're just shouldering the free will of the child aside, and just, we're going to make better decisions for you.
We're going to enforce better decisions, and we have this desperation, and it's because we suffer such pain in seeing people harm themselves through a lack of self-knowledge.
The question is, are you trying to help because you genuinely care about the other person, or are you trying to help because you're desperately unhappy watching the misery unfold?
Really, really important question to ask.
I ask myself this on a continual basis because you don't want to take ownership of the other person's life.
You don't want to try and elbow aside their sovereign consciousness and have them do what you want to alleviate your discomfort, your pain, your frustration.
So you have to try and put your own wounds aside.
You have to put your own desperation aside and you really have to focus on what is best for the other person in an ego-less kind of way.
I mean... To take a sort of silly example, if you have a wife who's really crabby every time she gets a mild headache and you ask her if she's doing okay and then if she says, oh, I think her headache's coming and you're like, you really should take an aspirin, is that because you want her to feel better or because you're concerned about how you'll feel if she gets crabby from having a headache?
You really do have to focus on what's best for the other person in an ego-less kind of way.
For two reasons. One is that You don't want to lie.
Say, well, I care about you when what you actually care about is your own feelings of despair or frustration or whatever might be going on that's negative for you if you see someone pursuing a bad path.
Because to go up and be honest, you'd have to say, well, I want you to behave better because the way you're behaving makes me feel bad.
Well, that's not going to be particularly motivating for anyone.
So you really want to be as honest as possible, and if you can say, I genuinely care about you, of course, I'll be upset if you do badly, but my primary motivation is for you to live a better life.
If you can get there, that's incredibly motivating, because if people sense that you're trying to get them to change to alleviate discomfort in yourself, they will resist that, and you won't have any credibility with them.
Because if you say, well, I just want you to get better...
Right when what's really going on is you want to get rid of the bad feelings you have when they act in a self-destructive manner, then you're already lying.
And I'm not saying consciously, but you're already manipulating or misleading or lying to them.
And so everything you say after that won't mean anything to them.
Does that make sense? I think it makes sense.
All right. Steph, I'm trying to resist being blackpilled by the realization that most people will tolerate 1,000 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 things 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, this is you. Okay.
Yes, well, again, I'm sorry that happened, but bullet successfully dodged.
Yeah, look, I mean, the pandemic was pretty brutal that way.
The pandemic was pretty brutal that way.
Because in the pandemic, if you weren't vaccinated, you saw people who were very happy to have your rights taken away because you weren't taking this medical treatment that was mostly untested.
And of course, it's been turned out to not achieve the promises that were made, right?
Now, I said this way back in the day when there was talk of the vaccines coming out, and I was like, okay, well, most vaccines take 10 plus years, have a 94% failure rate.
If you all did this one in nine months, just tell us all the steps you skipped so we can make our own decision.
Of course, none of that happened, right?
So it was, you know, it was kind of chilling.
It was kind of chilling to be unvaccinated and see the degree to which people were willing to just take away your rights, have you excluded from society and strip your right to travel and so on, right?
Not in everywhere, right? Some places like Florida and so on.
DeSantis was much more reasonable about this kind of stuff.
But yeah, it was kind of chilling to see the Nuremberg Code just torn up, and particularly for me or my generation or British people or German people, because the 40 million people who died were murdered in the Second World War.
Well, one of the things that came out of that was the Nuremberg Code and just got tossed aside.
So that's rough to see.
That is rough to see, to experience...
But you kind of got to see it, right?
Politicians, you know, it's easy to look at the politicians and say, well, the politicians just did bad things.
But politicians, either explicitly or implicitly, are excellent pulse takers of the nation.
They're excellent pulse takers of the nation.
And sometimes they would run polls saying, you know, do you support restrictions on, say, freedom of movement for the unvaccinated, right?
They would ask that. And they would overwhelmingly get back people cheering that on.
Yes, yes, yes, right? So the politician is simply the shadow cast by the in-group preference and out-group hostility of the majority.
So yes, mask off, true colors, revealed.
And that level of caution is important to have in life.
To recognize that, look, the financial incentives, I mean, just to talk about the pandemic for a moment, right?
The financial incentives are just terrible all around.
And I talked about this pretty early on as well.
So, of course, the websites and the media and the tech companies, they all very much want you to be as terrified as possible because fear brings eyeballs, right?
You'll watch the news. You'll watch the ticket tapes.
You'll go to the Johns Hopkins websites.
You'll check out... And of course, if they can get work-at-home stuff going and if they can keep people glued to their social media through fear, then they will tend to amplify fear and they will tend to deprecate anything that questions the fear or tries to counter the fear and so on.
So, yeah, just the media and social media and other organizations, they just have a massive interest in a direct financial way of just promoting fear.
Because fear is the most important and essential and powerful of human motivations.
This has been studied, I mean, countless times.
Fear is by far the biggest motivator for humanity, which makes sense, of course, because if you look at the cost benefits of, you know, you're walking through the woods at night and you think you hear a stick crack to your right, well, 99% likelihood it's just tree settling or whatever, right? Or just a little twig snapping because of cold or something like that.
Okay, so you're tempted to ignore it.
However, if it turns out that it's some...
Predator stalking you that stepped on a twig, then you better figure that out, right?
So we are going to be afraid.
We're going to be motivated by an act on fear more than any other emotion because fear is what keeps us alive.
And, you know, when my daughter and I were raising Pekin ducks, which are raised primarily for meat and mature, at least physically, in the flesh very quickly, so they were very affectionate when we were younger, but then when we would reach in as they were older to try and pick them up, they would be much more skittish.
Particularly the males.
And we talked about this, my daughter and I, and of course it makes perfect evolutionary sense.
Because if you avoid the farmer who's coming to chop your head off and eat you, if you avoid him for one or two more days, your genes get passed along.
And the males tend to be killed more than the females for male disposability reasons.
So fear, it's like, why are you skittish?
All we've done is be nice to you and pet you and feed you.
But, of course, they are skittish because that's their survival mechanism.
So it's just the way that the economics work in the system.
And, of course, for the state and the vaccines and so on, there was no cost-benefit analysis, right?
So the cost of the vaccines, if it had been a private, free-market environment, right, with insurance companies, then the insurance companies would have said, what is the very cheapest way to deal with the pandemic?
What is the very cheapest way to deal with the pandemic?
And cost-benefit analysis didn't work because money was created out of thin air printed and all that.
So again, just the incentives were all wrong and people could virtue signal without having to pay any price for it themselves.
And they were praised for being bigoted against the unvaccinated and you were attacked and denigrated and threatened with unemployment and certainly many rights were taken away, even rights built into a constitution.
And It's just important to recognize that it's a historical reality that we've seen many times, right?
Which is the in-group, the out-group.
You praise the in-group, you attack the out-group.
And we've never really seen it very strongly in our lifetime.
Unless you're really pro-free market or a small government or, you know, and you're in academia and so on.
I certainly have experienced that in the art world as well.
But we haven't seen it at a social level in such an obvious and concentrated way.
But that's humanity. This is one of the reasons why the state plus the media complex is very unhealthy, deliberately and directly unhealthy, because people are so easily sorted into in-group and out-group.
And that is just the reality of where you are, that people can be turned against you relatively quickly with a concentrated propaganda series of misinformation, right?
People can be propagandized into disliking you or even hating you relatively quickly.
And that is an important thing to be aware of, to be alert to in this world.
I can't tell you that's not the case.
Certainly in a free society, it would be much harder to do that because you can't just create money out of nowhere.
And because fear is not as strong a motivator without the money behind it.
Thank you.
And so the reason why fear was simulated in the media is it kept people glued to the media so they could sell more ads and make more money.
The reason why big tech promoted fear and Did not allow for counter information to that fear was because Big Tech benefited from the fear.
The reason, of course, why alternative treatments were attacked and suppressed was because you couldn't get the emergency use authorization for the vaccines if there were even remotely valid alternative treatments, which, again, we want things to be the cheapest as individuals.
We want things to be as cheap and as effective as humanly possible.
And if it turned out that various other treatments or nasal washes or whatever turned out to be cheap and effective, then people would choose that.
But when the government's paying, you want things to be as expensive as possible because it's the next generation who gets the bill.
Well, maybe not the next generation these days, but...
Words of wisdom to help you overcome a basic fact.
I don't want you to overcome a basic fact.
We kind of have to stare down that beast and recognize that, yes, we have seen how people can be propagandized into categorizing entire groups of people as enemies and people that they're legitimately morally entitled to hate in that worldview.
Okay, would you rather not know that?
I think you'd rather know that so that you can stay safe.
All right. How does one effectively counter the statement, you don't know what it's like to be in that group, therefore whatever you have to say is invalid?
I recognize their experience in being part of a class of people has validity, but at the same time it's extremely dismissive.
It's like a kind of super immunity to facts when you can wave around your special status while at the same time making the person you are discussing an issue with an ignorant buffoon.
Okay, so take a typical example where somebody says, well, you don't know, says to a man, you don't know what it's like to be a woman, and therefore what you have to say is invalid.
And, of course, she's telling you what you can and can't say as a man, and you simply counter that with saying, well, you don't know what it's like to be a man, therefore any criticism you have of me is invalid.
You just universalize it and reverse it.
Would you say parents have a form of social contract with their kids when they're little?
Also, I find the term social contract isn't helpful in explaining what it is.
If you could rename that idea, would you call it someone else, like an assumed contract, a future contract?
Yeah, I mean, there are implicit contracts all over the place, right?
You go into a restaurant, you order a meal, you don't have to sign a contract saying you're going to pay for it.
You go into a store, you don't have to sign a contract saying you're not going to shoplift and you are in fact going to pay for what you have, right?
You don't sign a contract when you go to see the movie that says you won't go and sneak into other movies, as I did as a teenager a couple of times afterwards, but it's kind of an implicit contract.
Do parents have a form of social contract with their kids when they're little?
Well, sure. Absolutely.
Because the parents are the sole source of food and shelter and warmth or cool if needed and medicine and all of that.
So when you have a monopoly, there's a form of social contract.
You don't sign a contract with the airplane airliner saying, oh, we're going to supply you with oxygen.
It's like, well, they have a monopoly over your breathing, so they kind of have to supply you with oxygen.
So yes, of course, there is a form of social contract with kids.
The social contract is when you have a monopoly on something that's necessary to keep people alive or keep people healthy, then you have a total obligation to provide that, right?
Which is, again, why in the pandemic shutting down a lot of healthcare, it's like if there's a socialist monopoly, if you don't allow people to get private healthcare, then you absolutely owe people healthcare and you can't interrupt it because of the pandemic because you're a sole provider.
So yes, there is...
I mean, I'm not responsible for keeping everyone alive in the world, but, you know, if I go nuts and lock some guy in my basement, I'm certainly responsible for keeping him alive because I've got a monopoly now on the provision of food and water to him.
Social contract isn't helpful in explaining?
Assumed contract? Future contract?
I don't know. Implied contract or implicit contract, maybe.
Step following up on my question in the last AMA about self-hatred, I listened to FDR 1149, Inner Critic Roleplay, to gain some more insight, and it was an absolutely brilliant and moving show.
I'm a clone of the man in that show, but older.
My question, it's hard for rational arguments to appeal to an inner critic that is by nature reactionary and emotional, and unchallenged for many years.
For example, in FDR 1149, you proposed making a list of your inner critic's reasons for disliking your true self and realizing that, in fact, the inner critic displays these traits to an even greater degree.
But this is a rational argument.
How does the rational side of myself convince my emotional inner critic to try a different strategy that involves kindness and forgiveness?
Is there a tactic one should try or is it simply that at some point you have to grit your teeth, try a new approach and let the practical results convince your inner critic that the new approach is more effective?
So if you're only there to lecture your inner critic, it's not going to work.
Your inner critic needs to be engaged with in a dialogue, in a conversation.
So... If your inner critic is, I don't know, you're worthless or something like that, first of all, recognize that your inner critic is a savior.
Your inner critic saved your ass.
So the reason why you would have an inner critic that says you're worthless is you had a soul murder parent or parents who anytime you showed a flicker of assertiveness or respect for yourself, they would attack you, perhaps physically, perhaps emotionally, perhaps both, perhaps sexually if it's really bad.
And so you had to say to yourself, I'm worthless, in order to not be attacked.
So your inner critic was there to save you from an outer abuser, right?
There's fight, flight, and freeze. Well, you can't fight when you're a kid.
You can't leave because you're a kid.
So what do you do? You freeze.
And your inner critic is your Jesus, is your savior, is your Superman.
Your inner critic said, we need to self-inflict because we can manage that and survive that and undo that later.
Because if we don't self-inflict, I'm worthless, then we will get punched or beaten and we might flinch, we might lose an eye, we might fall down the stairs, we might get an injury, we might...
Get beaten to the point where we might get taken out of the home and put into another unknown situation in some sort of foster care which could be even worse.
You know, better to live with the devils you know sometimes than to fly to devils you know not of.
So if you're just there to lecture your inner critic, then you are taking a superior role to someone who saved your ass.
Literally saved your ass, kept you alive, and the inner critic was a necessary reaction to external violence and abuse.
Right, so if you had some sexual predator in your environment that if you did X, they might prey upon you, then don't do X. But you can't give yourself that reason.
You have to have that as an instinct.
In the same way that the ducks I were talking about didn't have a reason as to why they would get more skittage when they got older and of eating age, they just have to have that as an instinct.
So, show appreciation for your inner critic, right?
Knowing when you can fight and knowing when you cannot fight and need to leave the environment is essential.
And your inner critic will tell you that because he's mapped out the environment of abuse a long time, right?
I mean, I separated from my family of origin because it was escalating abuse or relentless abuse or betrayal or just a lack of respect in general.
For me? Okay.
And I did the same thing with politics.
I learned from those skills and learned when it became pointless and potentially self-destructive to continue down a particular path.
So if you're just there to convince and lecture your inner critic, you're not showing the respect and gratitude for your inner critic that your inner critic needs and deserves for keeping you going.
What are the best books for parenting, aside from your own, that you would recommend for new parents?
Also, physical copies of the future anytime soon.
Not anytime soon, but at some point, yes.
I like parent effectiveness training.
It can be quite good. PET. I interviewed someone on the show about that.
You can look for it up at fdrpodcast.com.
What measures can someone take in order to stay strong when fighting a long battle for good over evil?
Well, you have to stop fighting.
You can't fight forever. Fight or flight is not designed to last for years or decades.
I talk about this in my novel, The Future, freedomain.locals.com.
Yeah, I mean, this is good advice from Nietzsche, right?
Be careful when fighting monsters that you do not become a monster yourself.
As you gaze into the abyss, be aware that the abyss gaze is into you.
Know when you can fight and know when you can't, right?
I mean, to take a purely military example that is in no way meant to spill over to anything in your life, the French fought against the German army, and then in May 1940, the Blitzkrieg worked and France was taken over, at least all but the southern part of France was taken over, and then they no longer fought openly against the Germans, right?
Hi, Stephan. I'm curious on what your thoughts are on a society that has no religion.
What ideals does that society hold close as a moral code?
Is there a moral code? Why are atheists so insufferable?
Thank you. Well, atheists in general are insufferable because of vanity, because they have...
Replaced God in their own minds with their own ego.
In other words, atheists do not submit themselves to higher moral standards that are absolute.
Christians do and Muslims do and many Jews do, more religious Jews.
So, atheists have put themselves as the creator and manipulator of values.
Which is why atheism has not led to a more rational society because reason is about subjugating the ego to external standards.
And what external standards do atheists subject themselves to that they don't already like?
They say, ah, yes, well, we subject ourselves to the discipline of evolution.
It's like, yeah, but you like that because that allows you to surmount being subjected to values and to be the creator of values, which is crazy, right?
To try to be the creator of moral standards is psychotic.
And I mean that deliberately because people who are psychotic will often have visual hallucinations.
In other words, they are creating things in the world in their own minds that aren't actually there in the world.
That's a form of insanity.
Moral insanity is thinking that you can create morality, that you can create values, that you can create truth.
You can't. That's psychotic.
It is deeply, deeply, deeply disturbed in a much more fundamental way than just about every religious person could ever be.
To say to a religious person, well, you shall become as gods and create your own values would be a satanic temptation that atheists have fallen in general massively prey to.
They believe that they can create values.
They believe that they can create truth, that everyone can become everything and there's no identity or essence to anything that you have to discipline and subject your mind to.
And they claim to follow the science, but generally the science just follows the money.
So, for more on subjugating yourself to rational moral values, I got a free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
Let's see here. Is it always wrong to believe something without any evidence?
Is our own intuition reliable enough to make concrete decisions?
Well, sure. Absolutely.
Yeah, because we are always in the process of becoming.
We are never in the process of being.
I mean, I say I am a philosopher, but what that means is I'm in pursuit of truth.
And I had to have an instinct that I was good at things before I tried them.
And so if you have a sense, and there's been things that I thought I would be good at that I wasn't that good at, but there are things that I thought that I was good at that I was better at than I even imagined, but I wouldn't find that out until I continued down that path.
So, do you believe in yourself without any evidence?
Well, sure. I mean, you have to believe that you're able to walk as a baby.
I guess you see the evidence of your parents walking, but you have to believe that you can walk as a baby, and then you can walk.
And you have to believe that you can master piano before you master piano, and you have to have evidence that accumulates, right?
Like, I mean, if you say, well, I'm going to be a great singer, but people don't like your singing and you play it back and it doesn't sound very good, then you have evidence that you're not going to be a great singer and you can change your path.
So, yes, you believe things without any evidence.
that's how you start but then you accumulate evidence to verify your beliefs as you go along ah let's see here it's been around three years since i decided to walk away from my father this was easier i think due to the fact that i was in a different country recently my work situation caused me to not only move back to my home country but also to the same city he lives in i cannot shake the living anxiety i have of running into him he also has two grandkids he never met and i don't want to give my kids any exposure to him
Any thoughts? I think you can trust that you'll be fine if you run into him.
You will probably exchange a few pleasantries and he'll say, call, and you'll say, I'll think about it, and you'll just move on.
I'm sure you'll be fine. Aha!
Whenever I tell my wife that something she did bothers me in some way, she says, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.
It's frustrating to me because it seems like a distraction from the root problem, but I don't want to lecture her every time she apologizes.
Do you have any thoughts as to why someone might say that?
Yeah, yeah, it's to avoid criticism.
There's an inner alter ego in your wife, I believe, I can't prove, that's my assumption.
There's an inner alter ego within your wife that doesn't want to be exposed, right?
So there's some parental dysfunction or abuse that doesn't want to be exposed, and the smoke screen that is thrown up so that you can't see this mechanic is, I didn't mean to.
Right? And generally, if you don't mean to, you don't.
Mostly, right? Like 99% of the time.
I don't mean to learn guitar, so I don't learn guitar.
I don't pick up a guitar and try and learn it because it hurts my little stubby fingers.
I did mean to learn piano a year or two ago and did a little ways on it, but philosophy was better and it wasn't as enjoyable as I wanted and progress was kind of slow.
So if you don't mean to, you don't.
I mean... If you quit smoking and then started smoking again, and your wife caught you smoking, would you say, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to smoke?
It's like, well, no, if you don't mean to smoke, you don't smoke.
So when she says, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, what she's saying is, don't examine my motives for doing this, because it's going to uncover something that someone in my past doesn't want uncovered.
Have you ever been surprised that positive actions lead to positive results, almost like cause and effect aren't linked?
Yeah, I would say that the success of the show was sometimes surprising to me, for sure.
What does the death of Queen Elizabeth mean for the future of the UK? Not entirely positive that the UK, as we know it, has much of a future.
I don't think this has changed much.
Is it bad to be addicted to coffee?
Is it evidence of unresolved childhood trauma like it is for most other addictions?
Well, I don't know what you mean by addicted.
If you, like, have to have it or you get terrible headaches and your hands shake, well, you've probably been overindulging.
Yes, for sure. So, coffee can lend you into a cycle where you need coffee for energy, but then you have coffee too late in the day, so you don't sleep as well.
So then you need coffee for energy the next day, which means you have even more, which means you sleep even worse.
So I would say that anything that you indulge in to the detriment of your general well-being is addictive, so...
I would look, what I would look at with coffee, I would look into your general level of energy as a child.
Really, really important. I gotta tell you, like for me, when I was a kid, I was just exhausted a lot.
I was bored. I was understimulated.
I was tired.
There was chaos in the apartment, guys moving around and, you know, bad sounds in general.
I just couldn't sleep.
In boarding school, I just couldn't sleep.
And, yeah, I just didn't have a lot of energy.
And, of course, I couldn't fix that with caffeine because there was no real caffeine available, at least in any predictable way.
When I was a kid, you could have Coke, I guess, or whatever.
But I very rarely had that because it was too expensive.
So, I think that if you have problems with energy in general, then you need to try and figure out what's going on with your energy.
And there's some things that I have found helpful for increasing energy.
This sounds kind of tough.
Try to get six to eight hours of exercise every week.
I know. It's a lot.
You can throw a show on. I play Catan with friends and family or other games that I can at least do some exercise in because there's a lot of weighting and training and so on.
So I can do some weights.
You can do some cardio, whatever.
So try and find something that you can do.
That is going to be interesting enough that it's not horrible to exercise because exercise in general is fairly boring and not horrible, but it's just kind of dull, right?
I mean, you wouldn't do it if it wasn't good for you, right?
It's not like there's some great joy in it.
So I would say exercise is good.
Try to get to bed at a reasonable hour or find your sleep window and get your life around that.
And try to do what you can to...
I mean, there's lots of...
You don't need me to tell you various ways in which you can improve your sleep, but work to really try and improve your sleep.
Lack of sleep is a significant carcinogen to the point where shift work may even be labeled as carcinogenic, right?
So... Your immune system functions best on optimum sleep.
So really, really work hard to get your sleep.
And yeah, so exercise, sleep.
And for me, again, I can't give you any advice.
For you, I just say for me, taking a break from eating.
I mean, I guess formally it's called intermittent fasting, but taking a break from eating.
I remember seeing a meme which is like, they say food gives you energy.
Me, after lunch. And it was just some guy passed out on the couch.
And yeah, food can be tiring, right?
Because it's a lot of energy to digest.
And we're not really built to have constant food over the course of a day.
So I would say cut back – for me, just for me, cutting back on big meals, having a little bit more snacks and taking a break from eating for whatever time period is helpful can be – I mean, just assume you need food because you're in the habit of eating, right?
You may not. So – but coffee in moderation is good for you.
Coffee in moderation is good for you as far as I understand it.
What do you think of having a hobby or sport that takes up to 12 hours while having very young children?
A sport can happen only five times a year, but it's still only a hobby and not paid activity spent without children.
God, five times a year?
Twelve hours? That's fine.
I mean, it depends on your prep or whatever.
I don't even know. Twelve hours a year?
A hobby or sport?
Is it some renaissance?
Civil war reenactment?
I don't know. Something like that. No, it's fine.
No, it's fine. Listen, you've got to show your kids that you have a life.
I mean, you don't want to just be staring at your kids 24-7 because then they don't get a sense that you have a life and that's because they're going to want to imitate you as an adult and having a life with your children along is important, right?
I mean, I could be spending this time hanging out with my daughter rather than doing a show, but she knows that daddy has some work to do and, you know, roof over the head, that kind of stuff, right?
So, I think that's totally fine.
The big problem for people as a whole is...
The big sports, right?
Watching sports and that kind of stuff, right?
Or just watching media as a whole.
Try and interact with people rather than just do that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, thanks for the questions.
I look forward to your comments and feedback.
To submit more questions, you can go and sign up at freedomain.locals.com and you can submit the questions for free.
I would, of course, very much appreciate it if you would...
Sign up for a subscription or a donation at freedomain.locals.com or you can just go to freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
I'd really appreciate it. I know it's tough out there.
Trust me, it can be tough here as well at times, especially since deplatforming.
So, if you could help me out, I'd hugely appreciate it.
Thanks, everyone. Lots of love from up here.
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