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Oct. 27, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:29:49

WEDNESDAY NIGHT LIVE 26 10 2022 - EPIC TECH RANT FOR THE AGES!

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Time	Text
	We're live, that's right.
	Nine o'clock on Wednesday night.
	How are you guys doing?
	Hope you're doing well. I was there when they crucified my lord.
	I held a scabbard While the soldier drew his sword, I threw the dice when they pierced his side.
	But I've seen love conquer the great divide.
	Man, there's some heavy lyrics for a young man.
	How you guys doing? Good evening, good evening, good evening.
	Alright, let's go straight to it, man.
	Straight to it. Do you want a, uh...
	Would you like a tech rant?
	Would you like a tech rant? It's been a while.
	And I'm backed up.
	I am backed up like a German toddler being fed Indian food.
	I am just backed up.
	No, it's not a Windows update.
	I guess it's related to a Windows update.
	Okay. Jesus fucking Christ.
	Okay, so hit me with a Y if you ever used DOS... The disk operating system acquired by Microsoft.
	Okay, you know what was really fucking cool about DOS? When you change the directory, cd backslash, you change the directory, you just got to the new directory.
	Boom! Like that. Started up WordPerfect off a floppy disk.
	Within a couple of seconds, you were in there typing away, trying not to hit reveal codes.
	Shit worked, and it worked fast, man!
	Fast! I remember my first notebook was...
	I bought it from Mighty Mouse.
	I don't know, they're probably not still around anymore.
	It was a 386 SX 25.
	25 megahertz, not gigahertz.
	And it came with a princely 2 megs of RAM. Not 2 gigs, 2 megs of RAM. You know, I could run...
	Word processor, Excel, and a desktop publishing program?
	No problem. And it was fast, man!
	Even without that smashing, flashy 32-bit disk access.
	It was fast! You know, crappy, long-ago, distant hardware.
	It was fast!
	DOS fast!
	Windows. This is Windows 3.1.
	On a way old, it's like a 30 plus year old, it was an SX, not even a DX. No math code processor.
	Man, this was fast.
	Because I did a lot of my early programming work in Windows 3.1, Access 2.0, and it was fast.
	Now today, I had a bunch of stuff to do on the computer.
	Now, I've told you guys, I'm a cheapskate for just about everything, but I'll spend money on this show.
	So I have a good computer for this show, like a good computer that's running this show.
	It's an i9, it's got 32 gigs of RAM, and it's fast, right?
	So I had a bunch of stuff to do today.
	It involved various things, file compression and opening folders and accessing JPEGs and stuff like that, right?
	Oh, fucking Windows, man.
	You know what Windows is?
	Windows is like, you go to that crappy B&B that you maybe should have spent more on, or an Airbnb, maybe you should have spent more on, and it's got a kind of musty smell to it, the room's got a kind of musty smell, and you think that maybe four generations of people have been birthed, or at least conceived between those, maybe both, birthed and conceived between that Ida Down that smells like the...
	Pre-paleolithic candies that used to be in your grandmother's tray.
	The little glass bowl on her TV tray.
	And you go and it's like, ah, it's kind of musty and they're going to open the window.
	Can't get the window to open.
	Can't get it to open. Won't open.
	Can't get it to open. Oh, it's stuck!
	And if you're over 40, you pull to the point where you're like, shit, if I pull anymore, something's going to fall out of me.
	Like some intestine's going to come out of my armpit or something like that because I'm over 40.
	You just can't get the window to move.
	This is Windows, man.
	I was just noticing today, I was just...
	I want to do business at the speed of thought, man.
	I want to do business at the speed of thought.
	And I just realized, I'm working with this piece of shit bloatware called Windows.
	And I'm working with this piece of crap.
	And everything takes forever.
	You know? Open up Windows Explorer.
	Two, three, four.
	Oh, there it is. Three or four seconds to open a file management system?
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	What kind of turpid, slow-ass, butt-dragging, lard-headed molasses if you got running for code there?
	Huh? Microsoft, what the hell are you doing?
	What is it? I just...
	Open the file.
	I just want to open Windows Explorer so I can see some files.
	Well, okay, you've got some files in here, but...
	Yeah, we'll... Okay.
	No? Ah. Okay, you can see the files.
	Boom! That's what it's like. And then I'm like, oh, I've got to, you know, I want to double-click on this, and oh, okay, Hourglass.
	Hourglass! 32 gigs of RAM, i9 processor, max speed.
	Everything's maxed out, full-course operating, because I can't stand waiting.
	How much processing power does it take to let me see my C-Drive?
	It's called C-Drive.
	You know why it's called the C-Drive?
	Because you used to have two floppies, A and a B, and C was your C-Drive, right?
	My very first Windows computer, which I got because I could get a second-hand 286 with 640K of RAM and a 40-meg hard drive.
	I paid $800 for it back in the day.
	And that's because I was an Atari ST guy, but the Atari ST hard drive was $1,000 so I could get a whole computer with a hard drive built in and a monitor.
	For $800 secondhand.
	I don't know why the hard drives for the Ataris were just so ridiculously expensive.
	And I was sick and tired of floppy disks just failing.
	Because that's what all floppy disks did was fail.
	Floppy disks had the lifespan of your average fruit fly.
	It didn't matter what you did. You put them in some cryogenically preserved zero-gravity dust-free clean zone and it didn't matter.
	One rotation around that zero-gravity thing.
	It's like, I'm sorry. Your data which you gave in as a dozen eggs is now completely scrambled and not even edible.
	Sorry! Just rearranged itself on its own.
	So I was just realizing. You know, there's a shortcut, control semicolon in Excel, to put the current data in.
	And even that gave me an hour ago.
	Now I know. You say, oh, well, have you checked for viruses?
	Yes, yes, yes!
	Of course I have. Of course I have.
	And I'm going to Task Manager and it's like, oh, okay, so 40% of my CPU, which has, what, 32 cores or something ridiculous like that?
	40% of my CPU is taken out by what?
	Anything productive? No!
	Anti-kernel. It's the system.
	What's it doing? Fucked if I know.
	Is it trying to travel through time?
	Is it trying to crack the end of the sequence of pi?
	Is it trying to redo and dissolve the boundaries of Fermat's Last Theorem?
	No clue. No clue what it's doing.
	What are you doing? So then, of course, you know, you spend a little bit of time.
	Like, oh my god, I'll reboot.
	Okay. Spend a little bit of time.
	Let's check your startup programs.
	Because Lord knows every single software which gets updated once a year has to check 50 times a minute to see if it needs an update.
	So I disable some startup programs and I reboot.
	It's okay for a little while and then boom!
	40%, 30%.
	So basically, you pay for 32 cores, and about 15 of them are simply devoted to the operating system not falling over.
	That's it. That's it.
	It's like you buy a house, and you have to spend most of your time holding it up.
	That's all you do. So of course, you know, look into it a little bit more.
	The big culprit, of course, is Windows search.
	Windows search. Because Lord knows you're going to need to find every piece of blob on your software hard drive that has a semicolon in it at some point.
	Windows search is unbelievable.
	First of all, if I'm using the computer, stop looking.
	Like I'm doing something else.
	Let's say I'm running a database query.
	Stop doing it. Just stop doing stuff because I'm doing something else.
	How about that? Is that possible?
	Can you look at the CPU usage and if something's using it, just stop using it.
	Because I tell you this, when I'm actually typing or I'm using voice dictation or I'm running a database query or I'm trying to update calculations in Excel, you know what I'm not doing?
	I'm not looking for anything!
	So stop looking for stuff because I'm not looking for anything.
	Stop indexing stuff I'm no longer looking for.
	I'm not possibly looking for it at the moment.
	I mean, window search feature is like the auto-deploy airbag in your car.
	It doesn't require an accident.
	Just, you know, we're just testing. Trying to drive here.
	Trying to drive here. Well, you know, could be an accident coming.
	That's window search. Do they even care?
	Do they care? You know, it's like that roommate.
	You know, I had a roommate once.
	Oh no, it wasn't me.
	I was living with a guy who had a roommate.
	And they used to take like pots and pans and fireworks into their bedroom when they had sex.
	And they had sex like they were torpedoing seals in a disco.
	It was just unbelievably loud.
	And embarrassingly loud.
	And it's the kind of thing, because I'm British, like, what am I going to say?
	I'm sorry, you can't park her there, my friend.
	Please don't rail her with that insipid level of volume.
	It's rather Wagnerian, don't you think?
	So... Window search is just like that roommate that you're trying to concentrate and it's two o'clock in the morning and apparently he's having sex with his girlfriend with a rail gun and a megaphone.
	Just live well and play decently with other people, right?
	So I had to, you know, put some files together, right?
	So, okay, push the button.
	I'm probably stuttering now, right?
	Get Windows Explorer.
	Okay, navigate, wait a little bit.
	And then I've got SSD drives.
	I had faster data access.
	On a floppy disk, I'm not kidding.
	Or an old hard drive, right?
	So then, oh, got to navigate to this.
	I'm doing it now. Got to navigate to this.
	Oh, got to wait.
	Sorry. Okay.
	Yeah, all right. Got to navigate there.
	And you open things up.
	Oh, I just need to put a graphic in here.
	Okay. Okay. So you just right-click, insert graphic, and then it's like, okay, now I've got to go and see what files you might have access to.
	Now, I think it was, was it two years ago or maybe 23 and a half months or 23 and three quarters months ago, you had a USB drive attached somewhere to the system.
	That could still be there, though.
	Or it might be lying around, so I'll put out some radio signals, some bat signals, some sonar to see if I can get that thing that you had attached quite some time ago.
	Okay, no, that's not there.
	Well, you know, maybe you plugged in a USB floppy disk.
	I'm just going to go and check for that.
	And then I'm going to psychically try to figure out whether it's any of the last 300 files you opened that you want to open up.
	Again, I'm going to check their location, see if they've been renamed, see if anything's changed.
	It's like, just give me the fucking file.
	Just give me the file open dialog.
	That's all I want. I don't want you to travel through time.
	I don't want you to look in other dimensions.
	I don't want you to get to the platonic realm of forms to find the perfect JPEG. Just open the file.
	Just open a file browser dialogue.
	Nope! Can't do it.
	And everything is just...
	delayed.
	It's like when I have those callers on the call-in show and they...
	just...
	talk.
	Really... Slowly.
	It drives me mad because you can imagine my brain operates at light speed and just having technology that is slower than when I was 20.
	You know what it reminds me of? My very first computer was an Atari 800 with 8K of RAM. And my very first storage device was a cassette player.
	It was a cassette deck that you had to plug in and it took one minute per K to load, right?
	You had an 8K game, it would take eight minutes to load.
	Of course, it wasn't quite 8K, but you know what I mean, right?
	I feel like I'm right back there.
	I got that computer when I was 12 or so.
	Right now I'm 56 years old.
	I'm right back there. Like, how much fucking money do you have to drop to get a computer that works fast?
	Ooh, Linux! Yeah, I know, I get it.
	I get it. But, you know, I've got to deal with some fairly standardized stuff here with getting these shows produced.
	So what is going on that simple file open dialogue takes forever?
	And don't even get me started on, you know, have you seen that meme, like overly attached girlfriend?
	Clingy, over, like you're trying to leave and she's, where are you going?
	Huh? I'm going to come with you too.
	Hanging onto your leg as you're trying to get out of the house.
	Like overly attached clingy, like Velcro orangutan around your ass hair.
	Just overly attached girlfriend, right?
	Okay. Jesus, Windows, will you let some files go?
	Seriously, let some files go.
	You ever have this thing like, you know, you want to be a good digital citizen and you want to make sure that you eject your little USB or whatever it is, right?
	You eject your little file with the data thing on it, right?
	It's like, okay, right-click, eject.
	Oh, sorry, can't eject.
	Something's using that file.
	Okay, well... I'll close everything.
	I've got a priest in here.
	I'll perform an exorcism.
	I will anything. I will hack off my little finger and use the blood spatters to ease the thing out of the portal, right?
	Okay, just eject.
	No, no, no. Something's using those files, man!
	It's like, do I have a hidden application?
	Is there a tentacle coming out of the ether?
	I've got some Call of Kaluthu HP Lovecraft thing coming in from some extra-dimensional thing hanging onto that data.
	It's like, it's not data, it's a stalker.
	Like, you simply cannot get rid of it.
	And like everyone, it's like, okay, so the only thing I can do is shut the entire computer down, pull this out, start it up again.
	Because I'm pretty sure that if the entire computer is shut down, something's not accessing that file on that piece of removable hardware.
	And of course, every single thing in Windows adjusts your microphone settings, adjusts your volume settings.
	Like, I don't think I've turned something on with a headset on my ears in probably 10 years.
	Because everyone's had that thing where you have the headphones on, or you've had it at one point, and it comes in, you know, like ancestors arousing you from the dead for the last rites to be performed upon you by a returning Jesus.
	Right? Right? No.
	So I always have to, you know, put the volume, take it away, and it's just insane.
	Like, stop fucking around with my volume, or at least don't put it to the point where I'm seeing through time and have now become an N-dimensional being with a Sam Harris-style tinnitus until the end of time.
	Stop fucking around with my settings, let go of my files, and let me access my data on the fucking computer without stalling all...
	See, this is the thing too, like I'm getting older.
	I'm measured in, you know, if I'm lucky I got 30 years, I get to 86, right?
	Got 30 years, right? And it's not like the 30 years are going to be like the last 30 years because the last 30 years were great health with one minor cancer exception.
	But I'm like, you are stealing my mortality.
	You are shortening my lifespan.
	Because if everything you try and do on a computer takes a second or two, They're just stealing your life.
	It's like all the gains that we have from better medicine, better food, better water, all of those gains that we have are all just taken away by watching this fucking hourglass, which is like a Pac-Man vampire eating up all of our future years.
	Oh, I can't do that. Oh, just hang on.
	Wait. Oh, hourglass. If you've got 32 gigs of RAM and you've got an i9 processor running at full core speed, you should not see an hourglass.
	You shouldn't even see an hourglass for an infinite loop.
	I mean, the internet has sped up, because I remember back in the day, my first modem was a 4800 board modem.
	So yes, it took a little while to get the text.
	I understand all of that. So the internet's gotten faster, but computers haven't gotten any faster, because now, with all the hardware known to gods and man, you still can't open a file without an hourglass for a minute or two.
	What the fuck are you doing?
	I'd just love to know. What are you doing?
	Honestly, it should be file open, Explorer, boom!
	I mean, did you ever use QDOS? Back in the day, QDOS was like a layer that went over DOS. You open a file, you click, you could use your little ASCII cursor mouse.
	The mouses back then were on rollers and stuff like that, and you just boom, boom, boom, go and get stuff, right?
	I remember working on an Atari 520 SE, just open, boom, gone, done, open, here's a word processor, type, everything shows up.
	I swear to God, open Notepad.
	Like, I use Notepad a lot, right?
	Open Notepad. No, it takes a second or two to open Notepad.
	It's notepad. It's a 4K program so you can type ASCII in.
	I've literally had it where I'm trying to use Word, I type and I have to wait.
	What the fuck am I waiting for?
	What are you doing?
	What are you doing that is so insane?
	And yes, I have this on various computers.
	It's not a virus thing.
	It's nothing like that. I've checked all of that, scanned all of that.
	Oh, I don't know. It's just part of the great slowdown.
	Everything takes forever. Everything takes forever.
	Everyone's incompetent. Everything gets lost.
	People don't return your calls.
	Everything just takes forever. It's just this general slowdown that's happening in society.
	Business at the speed of slugs.
	Business at the speed of sloth.
	It's like in that movie with the sloth, right?
	The government worker who's a sloth.
	Oh, I mean, I feel like I'm going normal speed and everyone around me, it reminds me when I was in theater school, the one guy was doing a skit called Slow Motion Sickness where, you know, he would just slow down.
	Or it's like there's this movie on the internet which is Shrek, but every time he takes a step, the speed increases 5%.
	It's the other way around though.
	Everything started off fast and it's just slowing down.
	People don't get back to you or they get back to you with the wrong information or...
	You know, some years ago my internet was out and it was out for, I don't know, a while, right?
	And so I called and they said, oh, well, you know, someone cut through the cable.
	All right? So whose fault is it?
	And you can never talk to anyone whose fault it is.
	You ever notice that in the modern world?
	You can never talk to anyone whose fault it actually is.
	And I don't want to get mad at some frontline doofus worker who's, you know, it's not their fault.
	So yeah, my internet was out for a couple of days.
	And I'm like, you know, I'm trying to run a business here.
	I need the internet. It's kind of a thing.
	Right? I mean, how would you like it if the road outside of your house was closed down for a couple of days and you couldn't leave your house?
	Would that be kind of important to you in terms of making your money and Putting cheddar on the table?
	It's not our fault, somebody cut through the cable.
	It's like, okay. So you go to the person who cut the cable, you charge them and you give it to the customers that they cut the cable on.
	It's not that complicated, is it?
	I remember when I was, I don't know, very young.
	I was working up north and I was in town and I was depositing my paycheck and they lost my deposit.
	And they said, well, you know, if you have the stub somewhere or you can get them to send you another check and this, that and the other.
	And I'm like, I said, okay, so you owe me a hundred bucks.
	And I didn't Just baffled.
	Just baffled at me. I said, no, no, you owed me 100 bucks.
	I said, how do you figure that? I said, because this is going to take an hour or two of my time.
	And if I bounce a check on you and it costs you time and money, well time is money, right?
	I said, if I bounce a check on you or whatever, right?
	Then you're going to charge me 35 bucks.
	So if I waste your time, you charge me.
	If you're wasting my time because you lost the deposit, I can go and do all of that, but I expect to get paid for my time just as you expect to get paid for your time.
	And I didn't leave.
	I wasn't going to leave. And I didn't leave until I talked to the manager and I think we settled on like 75 bucks or something like that, right?
	And I said, no, it's a mutual relationship.
	Listen, if I make a mistake and cost you time and money, you can charge me.
	I'm aware of that and that's what you do.
	It's written right there into the banking contract.
	This is back in the day when you had to update your bank machine.
	They'd feed it into a dot matrix printer.
	And I said, so if you charge me when I waste your time, which is fair, I've paid, you know, occasionally I would bounce a check or whatever, right?
	Not on purpose, just wouldn't have enough money in the account or whatever.
	And they'd charge me their 25 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever, or 35 bucks.
	Have I ever complained about that charge?
	You know, probably over the time I've been a banking customer with you, I've done it like twice or whatever, right?
	I've never complained about that charge.
	I've never called you up and reamed you out for it being unfair and unjust because, yeah, it costs you time.
	Now, you guys have lost a deposit of mine, so you owe me.
	Like when I'm talking to the internet company.
	Well, it's not our fault.
	It's like, hey, I didn't say it was your fault, but my business relationship is with you.
	And if somebody cuts through your cable, they owe you a huge amount of money which you need to distribute to the customers who they've inconvenienced.
	And it's more than an inconvenience because you're trying to run a business over the internet.
	I'm not like, oh no, I'm without email.
	That's not a thing.
	And so I've always been, you know, I try to be real nice, I try to be, you know, but I'm firm.
	And that's just mutual respect for time and mortality.
	You know, if I waste other people's time, yes, they can charge me and I'm not going to complain.
	Like if I forget to cancel something, right, then I will pay it, right?
	And I will, I'm not going to get, I forgot to cancel it.
	It's not their job to cancel on my behalf or, you know, send me 12 reminders or whatever, right?
	But if people waste my time, then I expect to be compensated.
	So, I think that, it's not Bill Gates' fault anymore, but, you know, whoever's rich off Microsoft these days, is it Ballmer?
	I have no idea. Their money is like, for every second it takes to just open up a simple file, to insert, is it just me?
	Is it just me? Is it just bloat and madness?
	Do you know how long it took? I really, really, really didn't want to upgrade from Windows NT. Windows 2000 was the last operating system that I enjoyed.
	And I resisted.
	I resisted upgrading from Windows 2000 because I was like, it's not getting better from here, man.
	It's not getting better from here.
	Now I get the stuff that's improved.
	There's a lot of plug and play and all of that.
	But plug and play is once, right?
	You plug it in, it recognizes or it doesn't.
	That's it, right? Windows 2000, I just did not want to upgrade from there at all.
	And the only reason I had to was I got a little Zen Vision M, like a little portable music and video player way back in the day.
	And Windows 2000 didn't recognize it.
	So I had to go and get an HP computer with Windows.
	What was it? What was after Windows 2000?
	God, I can't even remember. It was before Windows Vista, I think.
	And it was the only way I could get files transferred.
	So they kind of get you that way.
	And it's like, it should just be fast.
	That's all. Just be fast if I'm running slow computer way below the specs and so on.
	But this is like, I got a futuristic...
	Yeah, Windows XP, I think it was.
	I got some futuristic computer here.
	And the reason I bought it was like I just can't stand...
	Just waiting for things.
	Just, oh, hourglass waiting.
	And it's... If it's like two minutes, you know, when I'm producing a video, okay, it can take half an hour for the complex video or whatever.
	I can produce a video, it's fine.
	I can go off and do something.
	But it's all this five seconds here, three seconds here.
	It all adds up and it slows my whole mental process down.
	And it just gets annoying and I get turgid and sluggish and frustrated.
	It should not... Take a long time.
	Here's the thing too. There's this thing that happens now.
	I don't know. It's like Windows 11, whatever.
	There's this thing that happens now.
	You open up Notepad and it switches to another program.
	So you have to, you know, go, it's fine.
	I used to have all these shortcuts.
	Control-Alt-N would open up Notepad and all of that, but...
	So you open up Notepad, and you know you've got a bunch of windows open, right?
	You open up Notepad, and then it just minimizes.
	Because Windows is like, well, okay, you opened it, but you don't really want to look at it.
	Do you just want it there in the background just clogging things up, right?
	So then you've got to go and find...
	And I think it shuffles.
	You know the old tab you get from program to program?
	I think Windows shuffles stuff.
	Because I do alt-tab twice, I do alt-tab twice, I don't get back to my source program.
	So it's just...
	It's just slow as shit.
	And it really doesn't seem to matter how much hardware you throw at it.
	It's just slow.
	It's just slow, right?
	Open up Notepad. Right, let me open up Notepad here.
	So you've got to right-click. That's fine.
	Open up Notepad, right? One, two...
	Okay, so two seconds for Notepad to be ready now.
	I do a file open.
	Oh, and there's my file open, right?
	So it's one or two seconds. Just, why?
	Just file open. Don't check.
	Is it just retard proofing everything?
	Like, don't check if there's some external drive is still there.
	Don't check that. Just check if C is functioning, give me C. And if I want to click on something else and it's not there, tell me then.
	But don't check everything ahead of time.
	That's retarded. I don't know, is it like way too many grandmothers using computers these days and you need to X out everything they can't get a hold of?
	But it's just, God, why?
	Why? And then, you know, you've got your favorites up there under the home.
	Why does it keep closing home?
	Why? Why? I put out favorites because I use them a lot.
	Don't close off my access to my favorites.
	So, in order to get my favorites, I've got to go, I've got to open home again.
	Favorites? Well, you don't want quick access to your favorites, do you?
	That would be crazy.
	Who does this design?
	It's completely insane.
	Under file, open. One, two...
	Three. There we go. Three seconds to get to my file open.
	Cancel. One, two.
	Okay. One and a half. Why does it feel like it's just...
	Everything's underwater.
	You know, you have those dreams like you're trying to run and it's either low gravity or you're underwater and everything's just so slow.
	Oh my God. That's crazy.
	And there's no point buying anything else because...
	Not going to be any faster, right?
	Not going to be any faster.
	Yeah, Windows was a clean operating system, Windows 2000, right?
	And I think that was only 40 million lines of code, right?
	It was crazy.
	Just the slow down of everything, right?
	Now, people say that the Mac is better.
	Oh, yeah, the other thing, too, like I got an Apollo, and if anybody wants it, I'll sell it, because it's an Apollo twin amplifier or mixer for XLR microphones.
	I ended up having to buy a Rode because, yeah, so, I mean, they sell it to Windows, and I tried plugging it into an i7 notebook.
	And it just crackles. So I send an email off to them.
	I'm like, well, why does it crackle? It's like, oh, well, you have to, you run this program to see if real-time audio can be supported by your computer.
	It's like, it's got 60 megs of RAM. It's a relatively new computer.
	It's an i7. Why on earth can't it handle?
	Oh, and it was a USB-C, right?
	A Thunderbolt, right? So then I got a Thunderbolt adapter from my main computer and I tried plugging it in.
	Nothing could recognize anything.
	And it's like, oh, you've got 19 ports to wire up.
	It's like, dude, there's a slot free.
	Just make USB work.
	And the USB was supposed to work on the motherboard.
	Enable USB. Enable Thunderbolt.
	Nah, still not recognized, right?
	So I can't use that.
	So, yeah, it's...
	Can you talk about the tech you use for your show?
	Can you spin the camera around?
	No, it's really not that much to see.
	I have an API hex road I can record directly on the mixer.
	It comes with sounds.
	But I don't use those.
	And I have a fairly nice camera.
	Camera quality is quite important to me because I don't want to use makeup, so all of that.
	And it's a nice microphone, as you can tell.
	And I'm more into walking around when doing shows.
	If I'm doing call-in shows, I like to walk around because I just don't want to stand that long that much.
	It's not very enjoyable for me.
	So I walk around and I use...
	Just a tablet for that, a Windows tablet.
	And it's a specially modded mic setup, so I get a high-quality mic just off a headset.
	I got a separate mic and attached it on with magnets.
	So I try to keep things working well as far as all that goes.
	But yeah, it's just crazy.
	I mean, there's a reason why, what is it, Timcast has like 17 employees and Crowder has like a dozen employees or more.
	Just... Just keep things running.
	Just keep anything running.
	It's mad.
	It's mad.
	Alright, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
	I'm sorry to have taken some portion of the show, but yeah, I don't know.
	It's wild. And yeah, I can go with Linux, but then the problem with going with Linux, I had a Mac for a while.
	I used to record my interviews on a Mac Mini, but I could only get it to record at 15 frames a second, so as soon as I could get things working on Windows again, I went back to that, which was at least with 30 frames a second, because it makes a difference.
	But I did work on a Mac and, you know, they're fine and they work and all.
	But the programs that I use, they're just Windows-based.
	And the idea of learning a whole new operating system, a whole new way of doing things, a whole new way of producing videos, a whole new way of editing audio, that's just going to drive me crazy because that's just going to take really slow.
	So... Yeah, it's nuts.
	Again, so I, was it last year?
	Yeah, I just dropped quite a bit of money on a computer thinking, okay, but this is going to pay off in just sanity.
	And it was okay. Of course, you know, the computers, they're fine when you first get them.
	And I don't install that much in it because I want to keep it relatively clean.
	And yeah, they're usually okay when you first get them for a while.
	And then it's just like, oh, just consumed.
	Slow, slow, slow. All right.
	Let me get to your questions.
	Let me get to your questions here.
	Steph, please go back on Twitter.
	Oh, did you see the letter of demand?
	The letter of... He's going to go in like Ari Gold, man.
	Twitter. So, a couple of things about Twitter.
	So, first of all, there's this demand letter put out by entitled 20-something Twitter employees who are saying, Hey, man.
	You know, we need this income.
	We need these jobs.
	We got to pay rent. We got to keep our visas, our immigrant worker visas.
	We got to keep them going.
	We need health insurance.
	And the idea that Twitter employees are just so enraged and incensed of even the possibility of the very concept.
	Elon Musk, you better not discriminate against us for our political beliefs because we're Twitter employees and we just think that's wrong.
	You can't discriminate against people based upon their political beliefs.
	And this is why you stick the principle, idiots.
	This is why you stick, not you.
	This is why you stick the principle.
	Twitter has created a giant marketing hole for fair treatment.
	I mean, Parler's not stepping up.
	I was reading about... Because I've got like 120,000 followers on Parler.
	We're getting almost no engagement. Turns out there are only about 40,000 active users on Parler anyway.
	I think people got kind of goosed by the hack or something like that.
	I don't know exactly what's going on over there.
	So, yeah, Twitter employees created a market demand to be taken over because, in my view, in my opinion, they were discriminating based upon political beliefs.
	And now that someone's coming in, the Twitter employees are desperately shocked, horrified, appalled, and terrified that somebody might fire them for their political beliefs.
	Now, I don't think anyone on Twitter is going to get fired for their political beliefs, but they will get fired if their political beliefs have led them to censor other people for their political beliefs, because that's killing the market share, right?
	Twitter is a place for civilized conversation, however aggressive and volatile it might be that's a lot more civilized than, I don't know, war.
	But yeah, oh my god, it was a pretty stomach-churning thing to watch.
	The Twitter employees just shocked and appalled to see that someone might interfere with their career prospects on the grounds of their political beliefs or their philosophy.
	Can you imagine? Well, you know, I had an income.
	Twitter served that somewhat.
	And they yeeted me off.
	So who's going to come to the defense of the Twitter employees?
	I don't know. I don't know.
	And I saw this video of this woman talking about a day in the life of a Twitter employee and she's like, well, I came in and I enjoyed the little forest of beanbag chairs and I had a meeting, which was fine.
	And then I went to a meditation room and a yoga room.
	Now, I don't do yoga myself, but it looked super cool.
	And then I walked by, there were a bunch of people playing, I think it was foosball, something like that.
	It was super neat, and the guys were spinning around, kind of dizzy, and that was neat.
	And then I had another meeting, I think, something like that.
	And then, of course, I had to have my afternoon coffee, so I went and I had a coffee, which was really good.
	And then I ambled past my cubicle.
	It didn't really stop. And I went up to the roof so that I could really enjoy the view from the roof, which was super cool and just so pretty.
	And the sun was shining and it was so nice.
	And then, well, I mean, that was pretty much it.
	Probably mid-afternoon. I think that was about it for me for the day.
	So, you know, down in the Twitter cafeteria, there's like a...
	A wine decanter, like you just pull the button and you get wine.
	So I had some wine.
	And it's just like, was this like daycare for adults or is this a place of business?
	I mean, maybe I'm just a little old-fashioned and old school, but I don't know why you're wandering around on massage tables watching people do yoga and play foosball and hanging out on the roof with your coffee and then getting some wine.
	It's like, is anybody typing?
	Anybody actually doing any hard close to the metal code work or anything like that?
	I don't know. If I was taking it over, I literally would fire everyone.
	Because, you know, Twitter could go without code updates for six months while you get everyone else retrained.
	No, I just like...
	No, you're all dysfunctional. All dysfunctional.
	Because anybody who stayed in that environment...
	Anyway, that's...
	So, no.
	As far as going back on Twitter...
	I'm loving what I'm doing right now.
	I mean, the History of Philosophers series is great.
	I'm working on a new book.
	I'm really thrilled with the way that The Future came out, my science fiction novel and peaceful parenting Bible.
	You can get that at freedomain.locals.com.
	Well, I mean, you're here, so you know the website.
	What de-platforming did was it repointed me back at the eternals of philosophy and away from the everyday and the political and so on, which is all going to come and go and nobody's going to care about what I wrote about or talked about with regards to Ukraine in 2014.
	It's the Mark Twain paradox, right?
	Mark Twain had a newspaper column for decades and nobody cares about that.
	Nobody reads those. Nobody is interested in them.
	They have no impact in the present.
	But the novels he wrote have an impact, right?
	So because he was dragged down to the everyday, 95% of his literary output is completely useless and irrelevant.
	So it pointed me back towards the eternal truths and the general purpose of philosophy as a whole.
	Which is not muck about in the detritus and flow-by of politics, but to drill down to more essential and human principles.
	Now, getting back into Twitter would be like getting back with an abusive ex.
	Like, no thanks. No thanks.
	No thanks. So yeah, create a rule, exempt yourself.
	Sure, sure. And here's the thing too.
	If the Twitter employees had said, oh man, now we're staring down the barrel of possible blowback for our political beliefs, we really have done some soul-searching and some self-examination.
	Now, it would be pretty hypocritical and kind of sus for them to do that at this particular moment in time, but it's the amazing thing about people.
	I don't understand this aspect of general humanity, of the herd as a whole, where Hypocrisy should be shrieking like a banshee in your ear and you don't hear a damn thing.
	Isn't it wild? Isn't it wild?
	There's absolutely zero reflection, zero self-knowledge.
	They're horrified that their income could be harmed because of their political beliefs without realizing that, at least in my view, in my opinion, they have harmed countless people for those people's political beliefs.
	Or philosophical beliefs or scientific beliefs or whatever they don't like.
	Oh, well, I guess the ones who do yoga and drink wine can learn to code.
	I'm surprised, says Elon, could even find 25% of the employees who actually do work.
	It's wild.
	I mean, there's not even...
	A pause or a stall in this, like, social media employees being shocked, appalled, frightened, angry, and really upset that they might be fired for their political beliefs.
	There's not even a shred of reflection, like, wow.
	Wow. We dish it out, but we can't take it.
	We've inflicted this on others, and now we don't want it on ourselves.
	Isn't that the building block of empathy, the basics of empathy?
	Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or as Confucius would say, do not do unto others as you would have them not do unto you.
	Zero reflection. Not a single shred or scrap.
	It's wild. You just posted that video.
	video she drank wine at the end still forget the previous message Now I remembered you talking proudly about your achievements in the software field.
	Linux is like Lego for adults.
	In that regard, I prefer you making shows instead of going into system building sinkhole of time.
	It's great for hobbyists, for sure, yeah.
	Kanye might buy Parler.
	Be interesting if he can reshape it.
	Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen to that young man, but he's currently engaged in activities only slightly more risky than marrying a Kardashian.
	Steph, I've used your advice to quit sugar.
	Lost heaps of weight already.
	Thank you. Oh, well, sugar is not food.
	Are you on Gab, Steph? I am.
	Yeah, just go to freedomain.com slash connect and you can see all the places that I'm on for sure.
	For the life of me, I cannot understand why Twitter needs so many employees.
	Well, the death of modern capitalism was the birth of the HR department, right?
	WhatsApp had 50 employees and that company was worth $20 billion and didn't make any money.
	I don't get it.
	Well, it's the power, right?
	It's the problem of power.
	It's the problem of power, he repeated pointlessly.
	When you are very successful in any field, right?
	If you're very successful in any field, you gain money, weight, clout, influence, and with that comes power.
	And when you break through the upper middle class into the lower ranks of the super rich… Then the people come out of the woodwork, right?
	The people who kind of run things and you don't really see, they come out of the woodwork and they, you know, make you a whole bunch of offers that you really can't refuse.
	That's why great success in the business world is...
	It's at the cost of your soul, not because there's something inherently soulless about success in the business world.
	I don't think that's true at all. I'm very much a capitalist, but...
	Unfortunately, when you achieve great success, you get great attention from people who don't want you bucking the narrative.
	And they will put a lot of pressure on you, they will bribe you, they will threaten you.
	You know, it's Jesus in the wilderness with Satan offering him the whole world if he'll just give up divinity or give up God or virtue and...
	So, with people like Twitter or whoever, I don't know about Twitter in particular, but, you know, when you gain that kind of influence over a social discourse and you have the power to move conversations in directions that people in power want you to move them, you know, they'll come in, man, and one way or another they will find a way to get you to do their bidding.
	And that's all the freedom and independence that you fought so hard for.
	Well, I think we all know where that goes, right?
	A thousand years may pass, but people will always remember what you said to Taylor Swift.
	You know, it's funny because I have a good conscience.
	I'm not perfect obviously, but I think I've handled myself with reasonable honor and virtue and integrity in a challenging world with a fair amount of power.
	Because I have a good conscience, I keep forgetting what it's like in the world if you have a bad conscience.
	And, in particular, for women who milk male attention for money and vanity, which is more exploitive than anything that Karl Marx imagined.
	And they're facing the wall, and the level of panic that my Taylor Swift tweet evoked in women pointing out that, you know, at 30-90% of Taylor Swift's eggs had died.
	And, you know, I think she'd be a fun mom, and, you know, this is before she got political and lost her soul that way.
	But I, you know, at 56, I think I have enough of life behind me.
	I'm more than two-thirds down, right?
	So at 56, I have enough of life behind me to look back and say, I can judge this to some degree.
	I can judge the general arc, especially because, like, I've settled into the groove, baby, baby, baby, baby.
	I've settled into the groove that's going to carry me through to the end of my life.
	Like I've changed occupations and whole, like I was an academic guy, a writer guy, a poet, a playwright, an actor, a business guy.
	I was going to go into academics again and then I got into podcasting and then moved to video and then did live speeches and went through a wide variety of mutations and topics across the whole course of 18 years doing this.
	And, of course, I've now been married for 20 years, and my daughter is turning 14 in like two months, less than two months.
	And so she's on the home stretch.
	Most of my parenting is deep in the rear view.
	I have enough of my life behind me that I can reasonably judge its shape.
	And it's not... Some elegy at my funeral.
	I mean, I've got a lot of stuff still to work on, a lot of stuff to go forward, a lot of plans, a lot of things I want to do.
	But I have enough in the rear view of...
	That I can make a reasonable judgment of how things went and how I acquitted myself and what I did.
	And I have no regrets.
	I'm very proud of what I did, of what we as a community did.
	Yeah, there was blowback, but A philosopher who lives for popular approval inevitably betrays philosophy.
	Philosophy is for all time.
	Philosophy is essential moral truths to move mankind forward, and that always comes at the expense of people with a bad conscience in the present.
	I mean, when they said smoking will kill you or can kill you, because smoking kills one out of two smokers, right?
	So when they said that, A lot of people who were smokers were really upset and angry and frightened and shocked and appalled.
	What do you do?
	Do you say, well, we can't ever say that smoking is bad because it's going to upset smokers in the here and now.
	We can't ever talk about UPB because it's going to just upset people in the here and now, don't you know?
	I mean, philosophy is to hell with the here and now.
	What matters are the eternal virtues.
	To hell with the here and now. What matters are the eternal virtues.
	That's the job of philosophy.
	It's not about the detritus of the present.
	It's not about this season or that season.
	It's about time eternal.
	It's about virtues eternal.
	Because that's the only thing we can gift to the future is our understanding of eternals.
	Because my time will pass.
	Your time will pass. Why will anyone listen to me unless I have something to say about the present and the future?
	If Shakespeare turned his talents to unpacking the fights occurring in the local city council of his day, it doesn't matter how good a writer he'd be, we wouldn't be watching him or reading him or listening to him today.
	But because, I mean, in particular, Shakespeare was the master of generational conflict, master at unpacking generational conflict, and a master at unpacking the dangers of the addiction to power.
	I mean, I played Macbeth when I was younger, the title role, and it was one of the best inoculations against the thirst for power that you can imagine.
	So to give up the focus on the everyday, which gets you great cheers from the gallery in the here and now, but silence in the future to trade accolades and punishments in the present for the sake of relevance and depth in the future...
	I got shaken awake by blowback.
	I got shaken awake by deplatforming and returned back to the course I started on, which was to talk about the eternal truths that save us all in the future.
	All right, so let's get caught up here.
	Jump to the recent messages.
	Christian message. Pray in a closet and God rewards you openly.
	And those who pray for public approval.
	First is those who pray for public approval.
	Do you work for actual quiet benefit or just to be popular and well-liked?
	Look, I mean, striding a stage, talking to a thousand people, knowing that there are lovers and haters who are going to cross-examine and grill you, being hauled up in front of television cameras and cross-examined by hostile people in front of a live audience in the millions, yeah, that's quite a thrill.
	It's quite exciting. And there was good to be done in that.
	I don't have any regrets. There was good to be done in that realm, for sure.
	But... You can't stay there.
	It's like staring at cleavage.
	It's like staring at the sun. You can't do much, right?
	All right. Let's see here.
	Let's get caught up here. Well, and the other thing too, and for those of you who are tipping, thank you.
	I appreciate it. It's very kind. You have to wait for people to catch up.
	You have to wait for people to catch up.
	When you make a lot of startling predictions, when you say things that seem not just improbable but impossible for people, and they won't follow you on principle, then you have to wait for the evidence to come in.
	And when the evidence comes in, your predictions and your principles gain a weight and vividness that they couldn't have achieved.
	Most people don't learn through reason.
	Most people don't learn through ideas.
	They don't learn through arguments.
	They don't... And we know this, right? I did a whole presentation called The Death of Reason.
	Just about how when somebody is ideologically programmed, counter-evidence actually just reinforces their erroneous beliefs, right?
	Like if you provide factual counter-evidence, and you see this all the time, and you see people arguing about the vax, right?
	When somebody has a hardened position based upon ideology, and ideology is just another way of saying you've made a slut out of virtue, right?
	You... You've been told to be good without provoking any opposition from anybody dangerous.
	In other words, they've given you the drug of feeling morally superior to others without harming the interests of any malevolent actress.
	And so when you have false virtue and you're given counter evidence, then you're not just having your false virtue stripped away.
	You're being revealed as immoral, right?
	You're being revealed as immoral.
	So you go from a high to a low.
	So when you have a heroin addict, the high of the heroin is replaced by the agony of withdrawal.
	You don't just go down to not feeling high.
	You go to absolute physical agony.
	You know, like razor blades peeling back your skin, cockroaches crawling up your bone marrow, like this level of existential horror that happens.
	It's the same thing when you take away people's virtue, which is the ultimate cult and addiction.
	If you look around the world, what's happening is that people are just being lied and addicted into addiction.
	Well, they're being lied into an addiction to false virtue.
	A virtue that is defined by conformity with propaganda so that you can be programmed into following whatever train track people want.
	Because you're addicted to a feeling of virtue that is defined by conformity to propaganda, which you then have to deny is propaganda in order to feel the virtue.
	And when you come with facts to people who are programmed into a self-love for false virtue, you are stripping away their entire identity, their entire sense of superiority, and they fall into an agony that you and I can scarce imagine.
	I don't know if you've ever been around somebody who's having an identity crisis.
	It's a fate worse than death, and we know that, because many people, particularly men, but sometimes women, will choose death rather than thinking for themselves, right?
	Look at people who volunteer for war, go to war, whatever, right, when the war is not just.
	Well... If you try to talk to them about military-industrial complex, the war is a racket by Smedley Butler, and all of the conflicts of interest, and the people who start the wars never fight them, but they profit from them, all that sort of stuff. It's all libertarian 101 intro to military-industrial complex.
	They literally would rather go and risk getting their head blown off than admit the truth.
	It's a survival thing. The truth has almost always been an environmental toxin that kills anybody in the proximity.
	Whereas conformity at least will get you a possibility of reproduction.
	So you have to wait for the world to catch up.
	You make these predictions, and I've made many of them, And every now and then I do sort of go back over my thought processes and the shows that I put out and I say, oh, was I right about this?
	Was I right about that? Was I right about the other?
	Well, yeah. Yeah, of course, right?
	There's very little that I've not been right about and it's not any particular brilliance.
	It's just steadfastly sticking to the principles.
	And people call you crazy and as events begin to prove you right and prove you right and prove you right, at some point anybody who can think for themselves or can be saved is going to circle back, right?
	I mean, I was talking about them thirsting for a war in Ukraine in 2014.
	It's like eight years ago.
	Pretty easy, right? And it's funny too because, you know, the people who were like, I see these comments occasionally, like, hey man, whatever happened to you?
	I thought you disappeared. It's like, it's the same website it always was.
	Alright, I could really use some advice about sibling rivalry among my kids.
	They're four and seven. Half the time they play beautifully, the other half they escalate conflicts until they're screaming at each other.
	Any golden nuggets of advice would be greatly appreciated.
	Okay, do you spend one-on-one time with each child?
	Like an afternoon a week or a day a week where it's just you and the four-year-old, you and the seven-year-old?
	Or is it just like, well, I have one kid with two sides, two halves or whatever, right?
	The one-on-one time is the best way to minimize...
	Sibling conflicts. And also, you've got to look at when they're escalating conflicts, right?
	And have they had modeled for them good conflict resolution?
	Do you sit down with them before they start playing together and wait for the conflict to happen?
	You have prevention. Parenting is all about prevention, not cure.
	You sit down when they're more calm and you talk about, like, why do you guys think the conflicts?
	Why does it happen sometimes?
	Why not other times? Is there anything different?
	Maybe you're hungry or hangry or maybe you're tired or maybe you haven't had any parental attention for a while and so, you know, if you escalate, the parents are going to come running in.
	You've got to talk about conflicts with your kids, not in the heat of the moment, not when they're yelling at each other, but when they're perfectly calm so that you can come up with some kind of resolution and make sure that one-on-one time happens, right?
	Let's see here. Steph, before getting married and having a stable life, have you thought about leaving Canada?
	If I'm not mistaken, going to Canada wasn't your choice.
	In your time as a software executive, you could have moved, right?
	What made you stay?
	Before your wife, of course. Well, I was very involved with my own family, my family of origin.
	I had, of course, friends and, you know, a whole social thing and so on.
	And, you know, back then it wasn't like you could just find some new community over the Internet and move there, right?
	Like the Free State Project or something like that.
	It was all, you know, we're talking 30 years ago or whatever.
	So there was no particular place to go to.
	There were certainly places that ideologically were closer to me.
	Well, probably one place, I guess.
	But it's hard to find those kinds of communities and to give up an entire community that I had spent 30 years with was tough.
	so Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Stefan never really advertised alternatives, though.
	It is one of the things I would criticize about his point.
	Stefan never really advertised alternatives.
	I'm not sure what that means.
	I have consistently talked about locals.
	I went through all of the alternative platforms when I got deplatformed.
	I did videos. I kept my website maintained with the Connect, which I shared quite a bit.
	It's funny, you know, the things that people say without asking, right?
	Without doing any research, right?
	So... Still have the old podcast app.
	Oh, wow.
	Good for you.
	All right.
	So let's see here.
	Let's see here.
	Oh, yeah.
	I don't know. This guy. He shows up occasionally.
	He's just mad. He's mad.
	You know, here's the thing.
	I mean, if you're mad at me, like, I understand that.
	It's fine. You can be mad at me.
	That's, you know, if that's how you want to spend your time and emotional energy on this world.
	I'm a pretty good guy. I'm a pretty nice guy.
	I'm a good dad, a good husband, a good friend to my friends, and I've certainly done a lot of good in the world.
	I mean, I get emails all the time about people that, like, the show saved my life, the show made me a much better person, the show made me stop hitting my kids.
	But if I'm, like, your big target to get mad at in this world, okay, that's fine.
	But what I would suggest is if you're mad at me, then do better.
	I should then be a stimulus for you to do way better than me when it comes to morals and virtue and integrity and helping people and keeping people safe and this, that and the other.
	You should view me as a challenge to overcome and vault over me and be perfect.
	Much better at navigating challenges of public discourse and you should be much better at promoting virtue and you should be much better at promoting the non-aggression principle and property rights and free markets.
	View me as someone to do better than.
	See, if you're not doing anything, you can't really fail.
	The moment you do anything, you risk failure.
	And the more challenging the thing that you do, the more you're going to risk failure.
	And sniping from the sidelines, you know what they call the armchair quarterback?
	I mean, it's tempting.
	It's tempting for people to think, well boy, if I were in Steph's position, I would have done so much better than Steph.
	I never would have got deplatformed.
	I would be moving the giant levers of the world and making everything better and I wouldn't have made so many messes and effed things up so much and all that.
	Hey, you know, that could certainly be the case.
	I've never said I'm perfect.
	Far from it, right? It could absolutely be the case that you would do far better than me in the public proselytizing of philosophy, right, of trying to get people to think rationally and live virtuously and take on reasonable challenges without being self-destructive and so on, right? So you say, well, if I was in Steph's position, I would do so much better.
	Okay, that's great. So what's stopping you from getting into my position?
	I'm not saying this position, but you know, what's stopping you from...
	Getting into my position.
	Part of why I started this show was I was frustrated that nobody was solving the problem of ethics.
	And what I didn't do was I didn't just snipe at people for not solving the problem of ethics.
	Secular ethics. Ethics without the commandments of a god or the coercion of a state, right?
	Rational proof of secular ethics.
	I was frustrated that that hadn't been done.
	So, I, you know, step by step worked my way up to a position where I could get the word out there.
	So if you're mad at me, and that's fine.
	You can be mad at me. I mean, that's fine.
	But you should use that anger to leapfrog me, to do much better than me, to use the fact that if, in your view, I got to the top and screwed it up, right?
	Then you can use how I got to the top to get to the top and not screw it up, right?
	That's certainly possible.
	I mean, if you are better than me at things...
	I'll be thrilled, you know, because the purpose is the promotion of philosophy, not the promotion of me, not the promotion of staff, not the promotion of free domain.
	The purpose is the promotion of philosophy.
	And if you're better at it than I am, wonderful.
	I couldn't be happier. I couldn't be more thrilled because it's not about my ego, my vanity, my, you know, people thinking I'm smart or good or evil or whatever, right?
	It's just about the promotion of philosophy because we don't have a choice about philosophy anymore.
	Because states have become way too powerful.
	Weapons have become way too distractive.
	It's reason or death.
	And all this existential crisis people have about global warming.
	No, no, no. It's philosophy or radiation.
	Like, seriously, it's philosophy or radiation.
	And since I withdrew from politics, well, I think we all know how the end of that sentence is.
	All right. Ah, Steph, I just joined the live stream.
	Welcome. I just wanted to say your recent call with the 40-something-year-old who couldn't get over the illegal immigrant has been ingrained in my brain.
	As a mid-20-year-old going down a similar path, it helped a lot.
	I appreciate all you do as always.
	I appreciate that. Thank you.
	And although you can't say it to him, don't forget in your mind and heart to thank the listener for being so frank and open with his conversations.
	Outsourcing standards of virtue is a huge relief.
	It's very tempting. I used to do that, but now I recognize the moral discomfort as a guide to deeper understanding.
	Oh yeah, to mistake being trained for being virtuous, being approved of for being good, that's Satan, right?
	That's a satanic temptation.
	People are cheering me, therefore I'm good.
	It's like, no, no, no, no. If you allow your virtue to be determined by cheers and punishments, you cannot be virtuous.
	Because when you surrender that power to others, it will immediately be used for ill, not for good.
	Ah, let's see here.
	If people really valued Steph and his wisdom, they would go out of their way to find him.
	He has a website and all his alts are there.
	It's the reason most people are here on Locals.
	Yeah, I mean, if what I have to say is of value to people.
	You know, I used to, when I was younger...
	I was a big fan of, you know, some band or whatever.
	Then I would go out of my way to try and find a way to see them live.
	Or I would go out of my way to find live recordings.
	And this is, you know, now you can find live recordings all over the place on the internet.
	But back in the day, you used to actually go to specialized record shows and thumb through and you couldn't preview anything.
	And sometimes you'd buy albums.
	I bought an album. It's a strange coincidence.
	I bought an album. It's called Crooked Cops, which was the police live in Australia, and Sting called out all of the cities that I later toured when I was doing my tour of Australia, doing speeches and taking questions and so on, right?
	This is a funny coincidence.
	It wasn't a particularly great recording.
	Here in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
	But yeah, he did So Lonely and they just, it was, you know, I always like hearing people live.
	I think, you know, I do miss being able to go out and speak live.
	But, so I would, if there was somebody, a performer I liked, you know, I remember working very hard to get, we had a choice when I was in high school about which band was going to play at our high school.
	And it was either going to be Kim Mitchell or it was going to be The Spoons.
	Arias and symphonies.
	And I love the spins.
	Didn't like Kim Mitchell. Might as well go for soda.
	But, so I worked very hard to try and get the spoons to come and succeeded and the spoons came and gave a great show and it was a really great night of great music and dancing and just fun.
	And so for me, it's just if I like something, I will pursue it.
	I will find a way to get a hold of it.
	And if I like a particular person and they get deplatformed, I'll just find some other way to listen to them.
	And, you know, I think for people who were subscribed...
	On my website to podcast, nothing changed.
	My web, nothing changed.
	So, yeah, I just...
	And if people don't particularly care that much about my wisdom or what it is I have to say or philosophy as a whole, I would say, since I think this is the best portal for it, then that tells me how many risks I should or should not be taking, right? All right, let's see here.
	Hope you have a fun Halloween.
	Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
	My daughter is very, very excited.
	She's got a great costume for this year.
	All right. Steph, when you owned your company, how did you find customers?
	Knocking on doors, flyers, etc.?
	No, because we were selling to Fortune 500 companies, so we hired salespeople with pre-existing contacts.
	I would also go to trade shows.
	I would give speeches at trade shows, and I would man the booth at trade shows.
	And so what you do is you say, you know, we're going to give away this prize, some computer or some whatever, right?
	And just leave your business card here and then you get a bunch of business cards and then you can legitimately phone people or email them.
	And when I was a marketing director at one company, you can buy, I don't get into too much detail because it's a bit inside baseball, but...
	You can buy data access to slices and dices of, you know, you can look for, you know, large companies, companies with more than 500 employees in the Northeast who deal in lumber, right?
	So you can really slice and dice things down, and then you can just send out mail outs, and then you follow the phone call.
	And honestly, it would be sometimes 500 to 1.
	You'd have to make 500 contacts to make one sale.
	But the sale could be a million dollars, so that was very much worth it.
	So, yeah. You have to simply put yourself out there and you have to work on being approachable and pleasant and funny and engaging and so on.
	So yeah, I would go to trade shows.
	I would give speeches.
	I was never a cold call guy because we had salespeople for all of that.
	At one company, what I did was I figured out the return on investment based upon prior...
	Companies using the software that I'd written, and you could figure out the size of their budget, and you could figure out how much money you could save, and you could say, you know, for me, if I could get it out of six months or less, like you invest in my software, you'll make your money back in six months, and after all, that is gravy.
	If you can make a strong case for that, because sales is not really fundamentally about charisma, not at a high level.
	It's about you'll be better off Because of this.
	I'm giving you money back for yourself, right?
	Let's see here.
	It was such a tragedy the way Steph and Lauren Southern were treated down under.
	It was such a tragedy the way Steph and Lauren Southern were treated down under.
	Well, yeah, I hear what you're saying.
	It was certainly sad.
	What I didn't like, of course, was the media kind of cheering on the violence.
	Like, that's not a good thing, right?
	That's not a good message to get out at all.
	Oh, yeah, violence in pursuit of your political goals is a good thing.
	All right. Steph, healing my soul, one podcast at a time.
	Thank you, my friend. Well, thank you.
	I appreciate that. But what do you think the meaning of the song Bohemian Rhapsody is?
	Well, it's suicide by sex, right?
	I mean, mama just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled his trigger, now he's dead.
	Gone and thrown it all away, so he was splitting off from Mary Austin, and he was starting to pursue this rampant, promiscuous lifestyle, and it's really about nothing really matters, anyone can see.
	It's the nihilism that comes from emptying yourself out in pursuit of hedonism.
	Nothing really matters.
	Nothing really matters to me.
	Anyway, the wind blows.
	Well, blows, right? I mean, it's gay sex to some degree as well.
	And promiscuity in the gay community is a very big and tragic issue.
	And I say this having had a lot of time in the gay community and having had gay roommates and all that.
	It's... Really one of the great tragedies in the gay community is the level of promiscuity.
	So no, he just abandoned any kind of restraint, plunged into pure hedonism, and it killed him, right?
	Right?
	It killed him.
	So this was a premonition about how his life was going to go.
	Let's see here.
	God speaks and things are...
	Satan the left wants this power.
	Just woke up with this revelation, posted it to locals.
	Any thoughts on this? No, I'm sorry.
	That's not an argument, so I can't really analyze it too, too much.
	Neither is it a dream, so...
	Hey, Steph! Haven't been on your stream for a while.
	Looks like you're in a happy place. Keep up the amazing work.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And welcome back.
	Might be old news, but you're still going to debate destiny.
	No, I don't have any plans for that.
	I'm sure that would be a debate on politics and I have no interest in politics and haven't had for years.
	That little bit on sales was interesting.
	Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's like some used car salesman thing, but it's like, ooh, Charisma and Herb Tarlick and the suits that look like they ripped off the backseat of a 68 Volkswagen.
	It's like, no, no, no. You're just giving money back to people.
	If somebody came and gave you $500, would they have to be a big salesman to get you to take it?
	No, you're just giving people back their money, right?
	If you invest this amount of money...
	In buying my software, here are the historical returns that people got, and you will get your money back in six months, and after that it's all gravy.
	You're simply making a rational, logical case for people to buy what it is that you're selling.
	I mean, there is, of course, you know, the nonsense about, you know, but boy, if your eyebrows were just a little thicker, you could get the man if you dream.
	So there's all that vanity nonsense, but I didn't have anything to do with that, so.
	Do you think nihilism always follows hedonism?
	No. No.
	Sometimes it's death or criminality as well.
	It's not just nihilism. Nihilism is the best case outcome for hedonism.
	Let's see here.
	Do you have an opinion on Noam Chomsky?
	Well, I interviewed him twice on this show years ago, and I enjoyed the interviews.
	And I think he's a left anarchist as a whole.
	But Noam Chomsky has interesting and important things to say on particular topics.
	But in terms of philosophy as a whole, it's pretty much a disaster.
	And the way that he turned on human rights on the pandemic, the pandemic was literally a litmus test of people's capacity to stick to principle.
	And so many people failed that.
	So many people failed that.
	But hopefully that's a wake-up call, right?
	Do you think many people are obese without unresolved trauma, or is it almost all of them?
	Well, okay, so with the absence of fathers and the rise of single motherhood, you get an increase in childhood abuse and particular sexual abuse.
	And in my view, I don't know if the studies have ever been done, so it's just my blue sky opinion, but why do people become obese?
	It's a very disturbed relationship with the body.
	And one thing that obesity does is it gives you an excuse not to engage in sexual behavior.
	And why would you want to be avoidant of sexual behavior?
	Well, I would assume to a large degree, or for many people, it would be because they've experienced sexual trauma.
	And so people are always looking at, oh, the food pyramid of this.
	Okay, well, I'm sure that's not unimportant, but the food pyramid has been crap forever.
	But the absence of fathers to protect children from sexual predators has resulted in vast increases in abuse of children, particularly sexual abuse, and I think that does manifest.
	And of course, when you have moms at home, moms are more worried about the children's safety than fathers are, and that's great.
	great.
	When the children are very young, it becomes a bit stifling when they get older.
	And so you have moms who prefer the kids to stay home, which means that they don't exercise and so on, right?
	And they think that there's safety while being at home.
	But of course, at home is the portal to the internet and all of the horrifying things that children should never see, but always end up seeing on the internet.
	So it's not like the internet is safer in terms of predation, because of the people out there and the things that you can see.
	Let's see here. .
	My experience in sales is be likable enough so people will listen long enough to hear how you can help them.
	Well, that's true. But the other thing, too, is that if you are a likable person, if you're a charismatic person, then you can get a wide variety of jobs in sales.
	So whatever you choose has to be something that you can to believe in.
	Whereas if you're a competent salesman, you can get a job with SAS, you can get a job with IBM, you can get a job at Maserati or some high-end Ferrari dealership, and you can make a fortune that way.
	So, I mean, I'm good at public speaking.
	I'm fairly charismatic and likable for many people, not for others, right?
	But maybe I'm an acquired taste.
	You never know. But because I came in and I was confident and reasonably appealing and eloquent and obviously passionately believed in the product and knew everything about it because I built it pretty much from the bare bones upwards.
	And so people were like, okay, well, this guy could be doing just about anything, but he chooses to be here with this product, so the more competent you appear and the more successful you appear, the more the product gains prominence in people's minds because you're pimping for that, not something else.
	I get the feeling that Steph feels a bit spurned by what happened to him as a result of his political, quote, involvement.
	Please tell me you're not a man.
	That's not a feeling. That's a judgment, right?
	Putting forward feelings as judgments is kind of girly and not even mature girly, like it's 12-year-old girly.
	Yeah, look, without a doubt, it was definitely a transition.
	It was a bit of a shock at times for sure, but no, I'm much happier now, much happier.
	So yeah, when you say, you know, I get the feeling that Steph feels this, that's not a feeling.
	Feeling is like mad, bad, sad and glad, right?
	That there's basic sort of feelings, but this is a judgment that you don't have to be evaluated on because you're masquerading it as a feeling.
	So don't camouflage your judgments with feelings.
	It's cowardly. And I say this with affection and with respect.
	So I want you to get behind what it is that you're saying.
	So, things about feelings is you can't be wrong.
	If you feel angry, you say, I feel angry, who can tell you that you're wrong?
	Now, they may say your anger is unjustified, your anger is based upon a mistake, but they can't say, if you say, I'm angry, people can't say, well, no, you're not.
	So, if you have a judgment...
	Which is fine. I judge.
	You judge. We all judge. If you have a judgment, then get the fuck out ahead of it and introduce it as a judgment.
	Don't camouflage it as a feeling.
	Because it's not a feeling. This is an entire complex judgment.
	An evaluation of me and my inner mental state and mind reading and this and the other.
	Which is fine. You can do that.
	That's no problem. But just be honest about it.
	And don't pretend it's a feeling.
	It's not a feeling. It's a judgment.
	To say, in my judgment, Steph is this.
	Okay, that's fine. That's honest, right?
	That's direct. That's fair.
	I can totally live with that.
	But I got a feeling that Steph feels a bit spurned by what happened to him.
	That's not a feeling. But you're trying not to be judged for your judgment by pretending it's a feeling, but you can't be judged, right?
	What distinguishes an anarchist as leftist?
	Is that what the Summer of Love riots were an example of?
	So a leftist anarchist is both a hatred and an envy of power.
	I hate power. I don't envy it.
	I don't want it. I never have wanted it.
	I've never wanted power. Over other human beings, that would be repulsive to me.
	Like a face full of maggots, repulsive to me to have power over other human beings.
	It empties out your soul and it turns you into a vainglorious manipulator where every cell of your body screams out for falsehood in order to maintain your authority.
	So, the leftist anarchists, they hate power because they want it.
	They hate power because they want to inhabit power But something's in the way.
	Right? So, I mean, you know, the 60s was all about free speech!
	Until the leftists gained control of the narrative, and then free speech became hate speech, and deplatforming became the norm.
	So they hated censorship of speech because they wanted to censor speech, but they didn't have the power to do so yet.
	So they hated censorship because they wanted to be able to censor.
	So they hate authority because they're jealous of and want authority.
	It's satanic, right? Satan hated God because he wanted to become...
	God. So yeah, the leftist anarchists, they do not have a principal position with regards to power.
	They just hate the power that is because it ain't theirs.
	Steph, how do you approach subordinates at work who simply don't follow instructions?
	I'm not referring to making simple mistakes, but not having the competence or self-knowledge to complete a job as per provided instructions.
	Well, if they're competent but have a block, right?
	So one of the things that happens when children are bullied is they get very tense around task completion, right?
	My mother used to do this thing.
	I've mentioned this before. She'd do all these complicated instructions on what to do or how to do it.
	And if I would ask for clarification, she would say, well, I already told you.
	Just do it. Weren't you listening?
	And so you just go off and, you know, cross your fingers.
	And I would probably get it wrong in some obscure manner.
	And then she would say, well, why did you do it this way?
	I told you not to do it this way.
	And I said, well, I was confused and I asked and I thought.
	And she says, well, don't think.
	Right? So... It's a trap, right?
	It's a trap. So if somebody was raised in a situation where instructions are traps, then they're going to get very tense and very stressed about following instructions because it's a setup to be bullied and brutalized and abused or hit, maybe beaten, whatever, right?
	So... I didn't engage in listener convos when I was at work, but I would try and get a sense of whether they could do it but they had an anxiety issue or whether they just couldn't do it because they just weren't smart enough.
	If they weren't smart enough to do it, you've got to ease them into something better.
	It's pretty cruel to keep somebody in a situation which they can't possibly succeed in.
	It's pretty mean because deep down they know and it's pretty bad.
	If they have an anxiety issue with regards to it, then I would say, you know, don't freak out about getting it wrong.
	It's going to happen, right? But, you know, just focus, right?
	But if you have any questions, you know, please feel free.
	You'll never get... I will never get mad at you for asking me a clarifying question.
	Never, ever. In fact, I'll get mad at you if you don't ask a clarifying question and just beaver on in the wrong direction.
	So, yeah, just make sure that you're available to think things and all that, right?
	All right, so let's see here.
	What are your thoughts about Brittany Greiner being jailed in Russia for cannabis vape oil?
	I mean, don't travel.
	I mean, most of the world is pretty aggressive about drugs in terms of crossing borders.
	I mean, don't... Don't take drugs into other people's countries.
	I mean, I'm not saying the drugs should be illegal, but they are.
	So... I mean, obviously, I think it's a bad charge and it's an unjust law, but...
	You're sort of selling philosophy now, so you're still in sales.
	Well, everybody... I mean, by that definition, everybody's always in sales, right?
	You're selling a continued marriage to your wife every day and all that kind of stuff, so...
	Overeating is a way of getting extra dopamine from doing things that are actually very boring.
	No, that's not the thing.
	Because if you're doing something really boring, then you can go on autopilot and you can enjoy your own thoughts.
	Or you can listen to an audiobook.
	Or you can listen to music. Or if you're not allowed to do that, you can at least do your own thoughts.
	So I plotted out an entire novel while working at a...
	Hardware store, which was really boring.
	I mean, sometimes you would have to do inventory and count nuts and bolts all afternoon, and sometimes there would be entire roomfuls of boxes you had to break down and take to the garbage, and sometimes you'd have, you know, 10 cans of paint to mix and cut some keys and cut some glass and all that, and it was boring, but you just do your own thoughts.
	You do your own thing, right? It's not that.
	It's self-medicating for anxiety and trauma.
	And the anxiety and trauma doesn't come from being harmed as a child.
	It comes from the fact that the society won't acknowledge or deal with it.
	So if you had a single mom, and this is not always the case, lots of decent single moms, but if you had a single mom and she brought guys into the house who abused you, and then all you hear from society is single moms or goddesses and they're noble and they're heroic and brave and there's never any issues and never any problems, your problem is not the abuse.
	The problem is everybody praising your abuser.
	It's a really important thing that I'm saying.
	The problem is not primarily the abuse.
	The problem is everybody praising the abuser.
	Steph, I know you've said you don't want to go back on Twitter when Elon takes over, but it sure would make the website fun again if you went back.
	See, that's not good sales, right?
	Because you're talking about how it benefits you, not how it benefits me.
	You know, that's like me going to someone and saying, well, you should buy my software because I need to make payroll.
	Or, you know, I promised my team that I would sell the software so you've got to buy it.
	It's like, well, I get how that helps you, but I don't know how that helps me, right?
	You've got to focus on the benefits of others, right?
	All right, we've got three minutes.
	How long do you think it will take before your work starts to take root in the world?
	world.
	I would say probably two to three generations based upon historical norms.
	But the longer it takes, the better off it is.
	It's like momentum, right?
	What should an older sibling do about a much younger sibling's exposure to the parents' fighting, if anything?
	Acknowledge how terrible it is and how difficult it is and show sympathy.
	Show sympathy for the younger sibling.
	So let's say that you're 15, your younger sibling...
	No, there's no kids listening to this.
	So let's say that you're 20 and your younger sibling is 10.
	At least show some sympathy to the younger sibling who didn't have less fighting in his life, right?
	Because if your kids are...
	If your parents have been fighting for 10 years, then most of his life has been fighting, like watching your parents fight and only half of yours, right?
	Have sympathy for the younger kids as well.
	If you have a family that seemingly wants to get better but has made nothing but bad choices up to this point, when would you say it's a good point to just cut off the relationship versus continue to try and guide them?
	Well, there's never an objective standard or reason for these things.
	If you recognize the costs and benefits, right?
	If you save your family, wonderful.
	Saving your parents is virtually impossible because that would require for you to become the parent of them to be reparented, which may happen with a therapist, but will not happen with you.
	Almost certainly will not happen with you.
	A child cannot parent the parent.
	It's too much of a reversal of authority.
	But you have to recognize the costs.
	The costs of trying to fix broken people is healthy people will not be around you.
	You cannot attract healthy people if you're in the mud pit trying to fix broken people who don't want to be fixed.
	Because a healthy person will look at that with sympathy and will say, you have a lesson to learn.
	I probably can't teach you.
	It's going to be painful.
	It's going to take a while.
	But you're not going to be emotionally available to me as long as you're in self-God-like rescue mode with the broken people.
	You cannot fix people.
	I can't fix people. Nobody can fix people.
	We're not surgeons, right? And even surgeons.
	People can decline surgery, right?
	So you can't fix people.
	You can't lose weight for them.
	You can't exercise for them.
	You can't read for them. You can't be virtuous for them.
	You cannot fix people. You can be an inspiration, perhaps.
	You can give them some nudges in the right direction.
	But you cannot fix people. And unfortunately, in the world now, the broken people have become such a large part of society that there's always somebody who's going to enable the broken person, right?
	So if somebody's obese, there's always somebody who's going to say, well, it's not your fault, it's medical, and anybody who doesn't want to date you is fatphobic and all of this.
	And it's like, so there's always going to be People who are going to enable you.
	And this is part of the problem of the internet, right?
	In the past, you had to have family members enabling you.
	And if they weren't going to enable you, you had a chance.
	But you can always run to some Facebook group, some group somewhere who's going to just reinforce every single conceivable bad habit that you have.
	And this has made it progressively harder to try and fix and change anyone.
	So be very, very careful with the God complex of fixing people.
	It comes at an enormous price that sometimes you don't even realize until it's too late.
	All right. Freedomain.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
	Boy, I would really, really appreciate that.
	As I said, try and rebuild the finances of the show.
	Freedomain.com slash donate.
	Don't forget to check out freedomain.locals.com.
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