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Nov. 25, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:29:51

WHEN PHILOSOPHY CANNOT HELP YOU!

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	Well, hello. Good evening, good evening.
	Sorry, I was a minute or two late.
	I had a call-in show, and it was a little tough to get the fine young lady to take some responsibility.
	So, I'm here, I'm pumped, I'm jazzed, I'm slightly sweaty from intellectual effort, and I need to raise my microphone to switch, hang on.
	That'll teach me to sit while I work.
	When you should, in fact, be whistling while you work.
	Well, hello. Hello!
	Good evening, good evening.
	Thank you for joining me tonight.
	Great pleasure to chat with you fine folks.
	Let's... Let's go straight into the old convosations.
	Hi Steph, please. Your best advice as a successful husband and father.
	What is some wisdom you can share with me as I am soon to be married?
	So, I think this is just general life advice as a whole and it's somewhat aesthetic.
	It's not a particularly moral piece of advice, but I do think it will help make your life a lot better and a lot happier.
	When you're younger, you tend to wrestle a lot with yourself and try and clear the way to moving forward with fewer internal conflicts.
	When you're consumed by internal conflicts, you really can't provide much to the world at all.
	I mean, it's like we're all part of a relay race of bringing value to the world, but if you're tangled up with inner conflicts, you're part of a relay race, but you just run in little circles and break the chain.
	So the beautiful thing about marriage, and the even more beautiful thing about being a parent, and this is what philosophy does for me as well, is it is a joyful opportunity for me to forget about myself completely and focus on someone else, something else, to get over yourself, to get outside of yourself, and to focus on others and providing value to others is a great and deep joy in this world.
	And it comes from a position of strength.
	It is a position of weakness.
	And I say this with sympathy, right?
	And I struggle with this myself.
	So it is a position of weakness to focus on your own contradictions and to focus on your own challenges and how good or how bad or how up or how down you feel in the moment.
	To get out of yourself and for your personality to not be a kaleidoscope and a stained glass of absorption and confusion, but for your personality to be a piece of clear glass through which you can see and project value into the world is a truly beautiful thing.
	Thank you.
	You know, I was kind of low energy today.
	It happens. And anyway, so I then realized, oh, I've got a call in.
	So I, you know, get up and get moving and all of that.
	I was actually just, I was, you know, there's two ways to cure, three ways to cure energy, right?
	Resting, exercise, and work.
	So... I could have exercised, but I was like, eh, I feel a bit tired to exercise.
	I didn't really feel like doing that. And I didn't really feel like doing, ah, I can't really bring a lot of value.
	I've got a bunch of questions from freedomain.locals.com to go through, which I will go through this week.
	So I thought, okay, I'll just sit on the couch, and I was listening to, I think, a Robert Malone interview with the guy from Brighton, the health ranger was his name.
	Really great guys, both of them.
	I was listening to that, and you know when you seduce yourself with that, you know, like I've just kind of closed my eyes, and I think I dozed a little bit, whatever, right?
	And anyway, so I had a call-in show, and I got up, and I shook it off, and I started walking around, and I've got this nice setup now where I can carry a Windows tablet and have a microphone, and I can walk around while doing a call-in show, which is really important to me because just standing can be a… It's fine for this, right?
	But if I've got a really long call-in show, just standing for that time period is not great.
	And I don't think anybody watches a three-hour call-in show looking at me at my face anyway.
	So... So I walked around and it helped a lot.
	And then I came straight here. So my energy is much better because I'm really focusing on what I can provide of value to the world.
	You get married, you have to provide value to your wife, which means you kind of have to get over your own conflicts, your own neuroses, your own anxieties, and you just have to provide value to someone else.
	And that's times a thousand when it comes to kids.
	And this is why it's really tough for people to grow up without becoming parents.
	I mean, I hate to say it, but it's just a basic fact.
	And I became a father later in life.
	And I did not really grow up until I got married.
	And I did not really, really grow up until I became a father.
	So... I mean, of course, a lot of what people view as, and I think rightly so, as some reasonable moral courage on my part comes out of the need, desire, thirst, and necessity of trying to preserve our freedoms or at least not create too much of a disastrous world for my child in the future.
	So... You wake up in the morning and you think, what value can I provide to others?
	And that's a beautiful place to be, man.
	That is a beautiful place to be because you're not kind of obsessively staring into yourself and your own soul and your own angels and demons and pantheons and conflicts and mythologies and fables and so on, right?
	You kind of have to shrug it off, get out of yourself, get over yourself and be out there in the world providing value and that's curative.
	You're not ignoring your problems, but you're acting in opposition to them, which is a pretty good way to get over them.
	Some problems you need to sit and examine and pull apart.
	Other problems you need to step over and act in opposition to.
	So if you have a chronic desire to not exercise, to avoid it, then you kind of need to figure out what's going on there.
	And it probably is somebody who programmed you to be less attractive and less self-caring.
	On the other hand, if every now and then you'd have to make yourself go exercise, then I love exercising for the most part.
	I mean, I don't love it, but I love the effects.
	And, you know, there's times where I'm just like, ugh, just go and do it, right?
	Okay, just go and do it, and then you find it's fine, right?
	Some things require introspection, and the purpose of that introspection is to get you out of yourself and over yourself so you can provide value to the world.
	Because everything that we have, I mean, this camera, this website, this microphone, this...
	Amplifier. All of that is people getting over themselves and providing value to us.
	The farmers don't want to get up necessarily in the dark and hoe the back 40 and repair the fence and milk the cows and feed the pigs.
	They don't really want to do that, but they do that.
	And because they get over themselves and provide value to the world, We get to live who aren't farmers, right?
	So if everything that we value is people getting over themselves and providing value to the world, we should, at least as our goal, get over ourselves and provide value to the world.
	Becoming a husband is part of that process.
	And becoming a father is the culmination of that process.
	So that's my advice.
	Hi, Steph. I have a one-year-old son who is my world.
	I'm sorry. I don't know if it's a son or a child.
	I have a one-year-old who is my world, but the mother and I separated shortly after he was conceived.
	There is no way we can make it work at this point, as I've lost all hope in her ability to overcome her severe bipolar narcissistic personality disorder, and I do not love her.
	She has threatened me in ways I cannot forget, but I do feel very guilty for wanting to have more children, as it may leave my son vulnerable and feeling abandoned.
	Sorry. Oh, so if you get married and have new children, you feel that your son will be left behind.
	What the fuck am I supposed to do about that?
	Honestly. Don't bring this to me.
	Don't bring this to me. I can't help this.
	Right? So, I've said this a million times, and I have sympathy for your situation.
	I really do. But don't dump it on me.
	And I know you're not dumping it on me like it's something I don't have choice or free will in, but let me be perfectly frank with you as I have been many times in the show before.
	If you call me after disasters have occurred, maybe I can manage to fall out a little bit, but the important thing is to call me before the disasters have occurred, right?
	And the reason I'm saying this so strongly is I was just on a call with a woman who'd been listening to my show for 11 years.
	Ann had made a lot of really terrible decisions over that 11-year period.
	And now she was calling me because, hey, well, you'll hear when the call-in show goes out.
	It's like, and one of my big questions was, why are you calling me now and not 11 years ago?
	11 years ago, it was even easier to call me.
	I had scheduled call-in shows.
	You could just dial in.
	Why are you calling me 11 years later when all the disasters are in the past?
	So... I can't help you.
	Philosophy, not me. I don't think philosophy can do much to help.
	Maybe you need legal advice, you need maybe a therapist, and so on, right?
	But if you're in a situation where through the family courts somebody with a severely disturbed personality has power over you through the mechanism of your son or your daughter, I'm not sure what philosophy can do.
	If you're having a heart attack, you don't call a nutritionist, right?
	A nutritionist would be like, okay, 10 years ago I could have helped or whatever.
	And I say this with sympathy, right?
	And I'm sorry that you're in this situation, but I'm a prevention, not a cure guy.
	There is no cure. Once you have a child with a disturbed person, I don't know what philosophy can do.
	You know, philosophy is the non-aggression principle with respect for property rights, right?
	I mean, if somebody stabs you, they've violated the non-aggression principle, but you don't call a philosopher, you call an ambulance, you call 911, right?
	So, I mean, in my view, this is a matter for lawyers, this is a matter for maybe a therapist can help you sort of navigate this kind of stuff, but philosophy is about prevention.
	It is not about...
	So, again, I don't mean to sound unsympathetic and so on, but I really want to shock people's systems.
	If you wait until after the disaster has occurred, when the disaster is eminently preventable, you know, if you have a one-year-old, my show's been running for 18 years.
	I don't know when you started listening, right?
	But my show has been running for 18 years.
	And so, 12 plus 9, right?
	So, 21 months ago, you had sex with a crazy woman.
	Now, if you had called me while getting your pants off and said, hey, Steph, I'm about to have sex with a crazy woman, what would I have said?
	Probably an unwise thing to do, right?
	Now, you didn't call me before.
	Now, maybe you weren't listening to the show, in which case, you know, again, big sympathy.
	I understand why you're reaching out for help.
	I'm just telling you that I don't think maybe there's a philosopher out there who can find a way to deal with this situation.
	So I don't want to say philosophy can't help you.
	But I can't think of any way that philosophy can solve this problem.
	Because she has legal control over you, right?
	She has legal power over you.
	And she can compel child support and maybe alimony and so on, right?
	And if she's a bad enough mother, maybe you can go for custody.
	I have no idea. Again, these are legal matters.
	This is a matter for a lawyer and you to discuss.
	And I'm saying this because for the people out there who are listening to this, Call me before.
	I really try to accommodate as many people as I can with the call-in shows.
	I did one yesterday.
	I did one today.
	I have one scheduled for Saturday.
	I really do try to accommodate people with call-in shows.
	But call me before.
	Before you end up with somebody having legal control over you for the next 20 years.
	I mean, I'm not sure what I can do after that, right?
	I mean, there's no point stretching out.
	So that's my sort of contention is, again, I have huge sympathy for this.
	If you chose to impregnate a woman with severe personality disorders and then she has control over you for the next 20 years, I think, again, I'm a big fan of talk therapy and, I mean, I assume that you're talking to lawyers and so on, but I don't think it's a job for philosophy as far as I can see.
	Somebody says... Oh, is this the same?
	Yeah, I've always wanted at least three children, but there's no way I would have another one with the mother.
	Okay. So...
	I don't think...
	I don't think not having more children because your first child is in a difficult situation is necessarily the best.
	You have to think about it from the standpoint of your future children.
	Do they want to be born?
	Well, I assume so.
	The same person says, I would love to find someone else who is loving for me to marry in the future, but I have this deep gut feeling that I'm scared it will harm my son because I would be tending to my other future children.
	Of course, yeah. I mean, when you have future children, if you do, you'll have less time available for your son.
	I'm committed to peaceful parenting and so is my ex.
	Your ex is... Okay.
	We live in the same city. I'm able to see my son multiple times per day.
	It's the greatest joy in my life to have him.
	Well, of course, the big challenge is also...
	When you, and this is why prevention is so much better than cure, right?
	If cure is even possible.
	Because what's going to happen, right?
	You know, I've talked about this with regards to single mothers.
	It's also the case with single fathers.
	So you're going to go forward in life, right?
	Let's say you meet a wonderful woman named Sally, right?
	And Sally is philosophical, wise, smart, mature, into peaceful parenting, wants to have kids, and so on, right?
	And then you say, oh yeah, so by the way, Sally, this is your diagnosis, or maybe it's an official diagnosis, but these are your words, not mine.
	And you're going to say, oh yeah, listen, by the way, Sally, it's a great date.
	date, I just wanted to let you know, I have a child with a woman who has bipolar narcissistic personality disorder.
	What's Sally going to say?
	Bye.
	Sally going to want to get involved in that?
	Is she going to want to have those resources pulled away from her family towards the crazy ex?
	Is she going to want to have some crazy ex going through her garbage if she's off her meds?
	I mean, is she going to want to deal with a kid whose half influence is, you know, you say this, narcissistic personality disorder, whatever it was, right?
	She probably isn't going to want to, right?
	Which is, again, why prevention is so much better than cure, so...
	How do I speak to Steph during these live shows?
	You cannot speak to me during these live shows.
	Sometimes when I do them on Telegram, you can, but not this particular architecture doesn't have live calls.
	I've talked to them about it. All right.
	My parents never have me and my brother over at the same time, ever.
	They do this so they can talk shit about me.
	Should I call them out on it?
	It really hurts my feelings. Thank you and take care.
	So the question, try not to divide the question too much, right?
	The question is not about this situation, because this is a show about principles, right?
	Universal principles. So the question is, should I be honest with people who are upsetting me?
	Well, let's say that you lean back in the kitchen, you put your hand on the counter.
	Turns out it's not the counter, but it's actually...
	An electric stove or a gas burner, right?
	Now, do you want your hand to complain to you that it is currently being melted through your inattention?
	You absolutely do.
	You want your hand to scream pain like blue bloody murder so that you yank your hand away from the burning so that you don't end up having to have your hand amputated.
	Yes, you absolutely do.
	Accumulate in your mouth and it will go down your windpipe.
	And as far as I understand it, it's just my amateur, of course, understanding, but it can actually have negative impacts on your heart to have excessive negative bacteria in your mouth.
	So is it unpleasant to have tooth pain?
	Yes, it is. I've only had it once in my life and once was more than enough.
	Thank you very much. So yes, tooth pain is very bad.
	Is it Better to have tooth pain than the alternative?
	Absolutely. So, this is a universal principle.
	If you're doing something that hurts someone, do you want that person to tell you if you care about them?
	Of course you do. Of course you do.
	And so, it's a universal principle.
	You want your body to complain when you're hurting it.
	You want other people to complain when they're hurting you.
	So, of course, the question is, should I be honest with people who are hurting me?
	Of course you should. It's not a relationship otherwise.
	It's just an avoidance. Let's see here.
	Hi, Steph. Why do you think so many mainstream conservatives relentlessly complain about government overreach and indoctrination yet treat libertarianism like a dirty word?
	I've even seen outlets like the Babylon Bee, which by the way is very funny, Today, mock libertarians as the cause of the trial jack show or trans kids phenomenon.
	They love talking, asking about a woman to mock the left, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, so I can tell you exactly why mainstream conservatives hate libertarianism.
	It's because libertarianism steals vastly more votes from the right than it does from the left.
	And when you have...
	Understand, most elections are close, right?
	Because if they're not close, somebody will adjust their position to make it become close, right?
	So if Biden is down, he'll offer, which I don't think he can constitutionally offer, to transfer the liability of their loans to people who never went to college, right?
	So to the working class, right? The elites get their loans transferred to the working class.
	So if an election is really unequal between left and right, then the left will pretend to adopt policies of the right if that makes them more popular and vice versa.
	And so libertarianism is further along in the small government trajectory than being a Republican or being a conservative.
	And so conservatives and Republicans want to be in power and libertarians will bleed votes from them.
	And so, of course, they're going to be quite oppositional and try to shame people out of being libertarians because it will keep them from power.
	All right. Let's see here.
	What is your take on forgiveness and forgiving family or people who have done you wrong?
	So there's two ways that you can forgive people.
	One is under your control and one is not.
	The way that you can forgive someone that is not under your control is they earn it.
	Right? Somebody does something that harms your interests or harms you.
	And they do wrong, and they apologize to you.
	Oh, and you can live tip here, just in case you're curious, and I would be happy if you did.
	Been a tough couple of years, I'll put it straight up.
	So, somebody earns your forgiveness, then you give them forgiveness, because we pay our debts, right?
	Somebody says, ship me 500 bucks, I'll ship you an iPad.
	You ship them 500 bucks, they ship you an iPad, because they pay their debts, right?
	If they ship you the iPad and it's working, then you ship them the 500 bucks, you pay that, or you return the iPad, or you pay our debts.
	So if somebody genuinely earns our forgiveness by apologizing, by making restitution, and showing us how it's very unlikely to happen again, right, then...
	We forgive them, right?
	You're dating some girl and she ends up really flirting heavily with another guy and then she really apologizes.
	She makes restitution in whatever manner that involves a ponytail she can and then she goes to therapy to figure out why she has such boundary issues or why she's so hungry for male attention and she deals with that, right?
	I think that's reasonable.
	I'm not talking full cheating.
	I'm just talking about flirting. So, yeah, you forgive somebody when they have earned your forgiveness.
	Now, the other thing that you do is, so I have, quote, forgiven my mother in that I do not believe that by the time she became a mother, she had any particular free will or ability to do differently than what she did.
	Now, this was the result of obviously severe childhood trauma.
	She was raised in World War II and her mother was bombed into smithereens and like just terrible things happened in Germany as it did happen around the world.
	Of course, she's a child, not responsible for any of it.
	So she had severe trauma as a child and combined with a number of other factors, her physical beauty, trauma plus beauty is a pretty deadly combo for a lot of people, but particularly for women.
	And that she made choices, I think, before I was born to not deal with her issues, but instead to act them out, to go for vanity, to go for popularity, to go for generating attraction in men and so on.
	And so by the time I came along, and certainly by the time I was conscious enough to really remember things, I don't view as having any particular free will.
	And so, in a sense, I forgive her, not because she acknowledged and made retribution, but I forgive her because she had no capacity to do anything different.
	Now, that doesn't mean that she was always irresponsible.
	There's some capacity.
	People have some capacity to change, but if you continue to do the wrong things, eventually you lose the capacity to change.
	Now, you're still responsible.
	For not having the capacity to change.
	Like if you drink enough, you can't drive a car well.
	But that doesn't mean you're not responsible for the crash that results.
	It means you're even more responsible because you drove drunk.
	So my mother, in a sense, was parenting drunk.
	Drunk on history, drunk on vanity, drunk on bad decisions, drunk on whatever, right?
	And I don't know what they put her on when she was in the mental institution, but it probably wasn't anything particularly great.
	So... So in that, if somebody has free will, then they are responsible for apologizing and earning forgiveness.
	But if somebody acts in a manner indistinguishable from a robot, right?
	And we all know these kinds of people, either in person or online.
	You know exactly what they're going to say.
	The NPC meme, their program, they don't think for themselves.
	They simply follow... They follow what is popular and they hate what they're given permission to and encouragement to hate, but they consider themselves moral the whole time and all that stuff, right?
	So if somebody doesn't act in any manner that gives any evidence that they have free will, in other words, if they've surrendered their generative humanity to programmed NPC responses, then you forgive them in a sense.
	You say, okay, well, you voluntarily gave up your free will.
	And now that you have done that, barring any extraordinary circumstance, I'm just going to treat you as somebody who doesn't have free will, has diminished responsibility, and therefore I don't have any respect, nor do I have any connection with people like that.
	I can say to my mom, I don't have any evidence that my mom has free will.
	I don't. Free will is not a lifelong privilege.
	I've said this from the very beginning.
	Free will is not a lifelong privilege.
	You know, when you're 15, you have the free will probably to run a marathon.
	But if you've been smoking for 30 years and you're in your 40s or 50s, you really don't have the free will to run a marathon anymore.
	But that's because of your prior decisions.
	And lots of little bad decisions can end up with somebody having no functional free will.
	And I think that's when we put people in prison and stuff like that and take them out of society if their actions are that mechanical.
	So... Yeah, as far as forgiveness goes, it can be earned, in which case that's wonderful and it's great, or it can be given in that you recognize that the person has no particular control over their actions, and therefore...
	They're not doing it unto you.
	It's the programming that's doing it unto you.
	And you may get mad at the people who program.
	You might even get mad at the people who did you do harm.
	But I need pretty strong evidence for free will before I will judge someone morally that way.
	Why are you abandoning your boldness?
	No, that was just a joke for today.
	Erickson's stage of psychosocial development.
	I don't know. Sorry. I don't know well enough to answer that question.
	All right.
	Sorry, let me just get back up here.
	Hi, Steph from Australia. Hello, back.
	Steph, your response to that guy made me laugh out of shock.
	That was hilarious. Yeah, and, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for people.
	Like, if I'm a nutritionist and people are obese and having heart attacks, I have a lot of sympathy, but I don't know why they'd be calling me.
	Right, let's see here.
	Hey, Steph, I jumped out of an airplane without a parachute.
	What do I do now? Yeah, well...
	Steph, my father-in-law and I have had huge issues and he has specifically stated that he won't change and that we need to accept that.
	My wife and I are okay with going NC? Oh, no contact, but my mother-in-law is and has been demonstrating change.
	I'm not sure how to deal with this since they are two sides of the same coin.
	That's an interesting question.
	So if your mother-in-law is really changing and your father-in-law is not, then most likely either she will change back or they will split up.
	Now, if she changes back, you don't have anything to worry about because they both have said that they won't change and you need to accept that.
	If she splits up, then you can have separate relationships with them.
	But yeah, if one person is changing and the other person is not changing, either the relationship ends or the person who's changing just gets back in the box.
	So either way, you solve that issue, right?
	Time for a hair flip. All right.
	Thanks for being here tonight.
	You are welcome. Thank you for your tip.
	I appreciate that. I have some serious reservations about that explanation of librarians and conservatives.
	I think you mean libertarians, but I get it.
	The vast majority of humanity has no free will according to that standard.
	Well... Until we understood morality from a philosophical standpoint, how well...
	I mean, when you ask, people say, I have to be moral, and atheists in particular, right?
	You say to atheists, why be moral?
	They don't know. Can they be moral if they don't know what morality is?
	No, really. All right, let's see here.
	Steph, have you ever been told you are un-English or something along these lines?
	Definitely not a criticism, but more of a surprise.
	As an Eastern European with some French schooling, having lived in Britain for a while, I have always regarded you as a continental intellectual with a native English accent.
	I don't view myself as particularly British outside of the general empiricism that seems bound in the Anglo-Saxon soul and so on, because, you know, with the climate you can't afford to be not empirical.
	So I have detached myself from any and all cultural loyalties and have rooted myself firmly in the bosom of philosophy.
	So I don't view myself as British.
	British people as a whole tend to have thinly veiled rage masquerading as conformity.
	And the British cold rage towards people who deviate from orthodoxy is tyrannical in the extreme.
	And I don't have that ability.
	You know, I'm good with debating and so on.
	I'll tell you what I'm bad at. I'll give you something I'm really not good at at all.
	And I'm sure you know people like this.
	So there are some people, and I used to envy this a little bit, but there are some people who know just the right cutting remark to say to really gut someone, right?
	To just, oh, you know, like they just get that gut.
	That dagger, just know exactly where to stab and what to turn to call maximum emotional damage, right?
	And I've known people like that.
	And they're pretty alarming.
	I've never, like my whole life, I've never had a cutting phrase jump into my head.
	It's a strength, it's a weakness, I don't know, or it's neutral.
	But some people who can just take it, they know what to say.
	And the kind of stuff that sits in your head for the next...
	I think it was Johnny Cash who was told by someone, don't ever read reviews of your music because it'll end up as a stone in your shoe for the next three months.
	And yeah, so sometimes people can say something just...
	I remember when I was back on Twitter, I think...
	I mean, I'm fairly thick-skinned, I think, but there was one that just really got me on Twitter, and I remember saying at the time, ooh, you know, that left a mark, I'm not going to lie, right?
	And so somebody had put two of my statements together, and...
	The first statement was, there is no aspect of the personality which is not affected by genetics.
	That's number one. And number two was, I'd said that, and number two was where I had said both my parents were institutionalized.
	And, you know, you put those two things together, yeah, that left a mark.
	I mean, that was like, ooh, yeah, I'm not going to pretend that didn't hurt a little.
	But even to put that stuff together, you could say it's kind of evil genius or whatever, sort of perceptive genius, but I just have never had that stuff pop into my head where I could like...
	I know I could really just ding this person and so on.
	Now, that's kind of a British thing, to have that verbal rapier thing.
	You know, like you see those memes where the person pretends to pull the samurai sword and then the sword slices.
	That's British verbal aggression.
	It can be quite subtle, and sometimes it's not until a day later when you wonder why you have a blinding headache.
	It's like... Oh God, that guy did say something that really stuck in my craw.
	And British people are really good at that.
	And I have never been any good at that.
	I'm completely unarmed in that.
	But shouldn't adults deal with their issues before becoming parents?
	Why should a child have to suffer the consequences of the mother without free will, choosing not to deal with it properly?
	Of course, I mean, I don't know why are you paid by the dollar to state the obvious, in which case you are richer than Crocius.
	So, yeah, of course people should, but they don't a lot of times.
	The only way you can forgive someone without them earning it is to sacrifice all the respect for them and have no viewing of them as sort of a deep and primitive human being.
	All right. Somebody says, hey, I'm a libertarian.
	I think the next wrinkle in stealing conservative votes is that if the Libertarian Party is aware of that, they can use it to ensure the dominant conservative party provides libertarian concessions by noting we'll give up the race and giving those votes back to the conservatives that they're willing to push for certain freedom-loving bills.
	Well, sure. But will the conservatives do that or will they ad hominem, right?
	Let's see here. What do I do if I'm being slandered for heinous things I simply did not do?
	The act of slanderer keeps ruining relationships of mine, old and new, through underhanded tactics.
	Also, what do I do if my younger brother has been brainwashed in therapy to blame me for his current life problems based upon our childhood, which was rather innocent, in fact?
	Yeah, I'm aware of people's habits of altering narratives to suit vanity and self-defense.
	So if somebody's lying about you and damaging relationships, then you need to get everyone in the same room.
	You need to get the liar and you need to get the people he's selling lies to in the same room.
	Say, what did you say to him?
	Sunlight is the best disinfectant, right?
	You get the person in the room and you get everyone to fess up about what's being said.
	Now, if someone goes behind your back and lies about you and then people believe that person and don't come to you for clarification, I would not shed a single tear or a backward glance if somebody who believed a lie about me without checking with me and then wanted to not spend time with me or thought I was a bad guy because of something someone else said.
	If people aren't willing to come to you for the facts, but want to listen to somebody who's malevolent, why would you want those people in your life?
	I mean, you understand that the slanderer is doing you a favor in a way, because he's revealing who has any kind of trust in you, who has any kind of honor or honesty with you.
	So he's coming through you like a fire, but you know...
	Forests need fires, right?
	I mean, there are groups in New Zealand and Australia that set fires voluntarily to clear out the deadwood and the...
	So, yeah, this person is...
	You think this person is coming through and doing you harm?
	I would argue that they're actually doing you some real good because they're revealing to you very clearly, you know, like, what did COVID do?
	It revealed people who just swallow propaganda and will hate who they're told to hate.
	It's kind of important to see those kinds of people for who they are, right?
	If my younger brother has been rainwashed in therapy to blame me for his current life problems based upon our childhood, which was rather innocent, in fact.
	I obviously can't cross-examine anybody and I can't talk to your brother or anything like that in the moment, so assuming that everything that you say is true, if your younger brother is that susceptible to outside influences to the point where he turns on you unjustly because someone else tells him to or brainwashes him to, then you have a weak-willed person on your hands who's going to betray you sooner or later, and you might as well get it out of the way sooner.
	All right.
	I'm really interested, says Duke Newcomb, in hearing your thoughts about the philosophical differences between us.
	Isn't that the tough guy voice?
	Drives me crazy. Whatever happened to your capacity to rub your vocal cords together like you're starting a fire?
	I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts about the philosophical differences between authority versus relationship.
	Forms of authority being scientific, government, academic, religious, etc.
	It seems society has been trending more towards valuing authority over relationships, causes long-term effects.
	Um... Well, you know, dumb people are easily awed by credentials.
	Dumb people are easily awed by lab coats.
	And we know this from the Milgram experiments, right?
	So, as the population generally is less capable or willing to deploy critical thinking, then they just work to defer things, right?
	They just work to defer. They find someone to defer to, obey them, and feel like a good person, right?
	This is the curse of the tribe since the fall of Adam, so to speak, right?
	So... All right.
	Steph, loved the review of Don't Worry Darling, so do you have any other films you're planning on reviewing?
	I haven't been watching any films lately, actually.
	I did watch Burn Notice.
	Highly recommend it. It was a really, really fun show, really good show.
	And Jeffrey Donovan is like a staggeringly good actor.
	He did Hamlet, which I would have loved to have seen, and I don't know if there's any recordings of it anywhere, but yeah, Jeffrey Donovan is just killer.
	Steph should watch Black Panther 2 and give a review.
	I did the first one.
	That was more than enough for me.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Yeah, I think Elon Musk is looking at a blanket amnesty.
	And he's saying...
	See, I think...
	And he's very smart, right?
	He's a very smart guy. So I'll tell you what Elon Musk is up to right now.
	So Elon Musk is in the process of unbanning people, and he's doing it in a drip-drip enough fashion that the left or the censorious people on both the left and the right can't get mad at any individual thing because then the next thing has come, right?
	So he starts with the less controversial people, and then he ends up with the more controversial people, and they can't really get too mad.
	And it's the same way, right?
	The left goes the opposite way in the banning.
	You have to unban like the ban happened, right?
	So the ban happens with the most controversial people, and then it moves to the less controversial people.
	And the real target is the less controversial people.
	The most controversial people are just an excuse to get to the less controversial people.
	Because for the revolution to happen, the reasonable middle has to be carved out.
	The people who mediate between left and right have to be carved out.
	You have to polarize people and push people to extremes.
	And that way you can justify escalation.
	So, yeah, Elon Musk is starting with the less controversial people, and then he is going to unban.
	And now he's getting to the Rubicon.
	And the Rubicon is, well, the next person that he unbans is going to be really controversial, is going to cause a lot of problems.
	Right? So, I mean, wisely so, and intelligently so, he's doing what any intelligent person would do in this situation, is to say, so when you get to the edge to the Rubicon, when you get, okay, the next person I unban is going to be a hugely controversial thing, what you do is you say, okay, forget the strip-rip stuff, let's just have a massive amnesty, and he's got two standards for this massive amnesty.
	Number one, let's have an amnesty for people who have not broken the law, okay, on Twitter, right?
	And number two, people who haven't engaged in, like, egregious spam.
	Let's just have an amnesty and we'll have a great reset, so to speak.
	Have an amnesty and that way he's going to unban a whole bunch of people all at once and it'll be hard for the left to focus on everyone because it'll be hard to focus on anyone in particular and then by the time the smoke clears, life has gone on.
	You have to pretend that disaster is going to happen in order to escalate people and The people who said, oh, Twitter is doomed, right?
	Because apparently the only thing that's happened with Twitter these days is like 80 to 90% of the employees have been fired and they've actually started removing child pornography from the platform.
	So that's pretty rough PR for old school Twitter, right?
	So let's see here.
	All right.
	Steph, continuation of the father-in-law response.
	I agree that I think this is the most likely outcome as well.
	With this in mind, do you have any recommendations on how to proceed if this takes a long time?
	Mainly in regards to our children's relationship with father-in-law, we have four.
	My position is that he is not allowed to interact with them at all until he has demonstrated change point blank.
	Yeah, I mean, I just had a really fascinating conversation last night, a lengthy conversation, and it sounds like a not-deep topic, but I mean, I knew it was.
	Man, did it ever turn out to be one, which is a woman whose mother was giving the children sugar when she was explicitly told they were not to have sugar, was giving the children snacks when she was explicitly told when they weren't to have snacks.
	If you parent...
	It's a general thing for all parents out there.
	If you parent in a significantly different way than your parents or your wife's parents or your husband's parents or your whatever, in-laws.
	If you parent in a significantly different way, you're either going to have conscious discussions about your changes in parenting from how you were parented or they're going to try and sabotage you.
	There's really no other option.
	And this is what was going on with this woman I talked to for over two hours last night.
	I'm just straight up. I'm parenting enormously different from how I was parented.
	Now, it would be impossible for me to have a conversation with my mother about the rational, objective, moral reasons why I was doing this because she won't even admit fault.
	She will say, the best she would ever say was, Well, bad things happen, but you have to remember I had chronic fatigue and therefore I wasn't responsible.
	The EBGBs. But if parents see you, if bad parents see you being a good parent, you know how painful that is for them?
	You know how horrible that is for them?
	Because they don't get a do-over.
	They can't go back and be parents again.
	So if your parents were bad and they see you being a good parent, it's incredibly painful for them.
	Like, unbelievably, unbearably, monstrously, I mean, that's hell on earth.
	It's unbearable for your parents to see you being a good parent if they were bad parents.
	So what are they going to do?
	But they're going to sabotage you.
	Because that's the only way to make themselves feel better, or at least not feel quite as bad, is to screw up your parenting and say, ah, you see, it's not that easy now, is it?
	Oh yeah, you were all fine when it was just theory.
	Now you've actually got to do it.
	It's a whole lot different, right? Blah, blah, blah.
	Alright, um...
	Mm-hmm.
	Under libertarian assumptions, how do you work out the optimal size of a decision-making community?
	We all know where behemoth states end up.
	At one end of the range, at the other, you would have every household as a sovereign society.
	Maybe I'm uneducated or misguided, but isn't this hard to tune?
	Well, it's enormously hard to tune.
	Which is why you don't tune it with a gun, right?
	I mean, getting a guitar in tune is really kind of a challenge, right?
	And so you don't shoot the guitar with a tango.
	It's really tough to tune a piano, so you don't drop another piano on it to tune it.
	The more complicated and challenging things are, the more they need to be open to the free play and volunteerism of the free market.
	Oh, they're back on Twitter?
	Yeah, they are, like, deliriously funny.
	Have you heard about the new movie called Stutz, or Stutz, by Jonah Hill?
	It's about his therapist. No.
	Steph, you worked in tech.
	How hard would it actually be to rid most child porn from sites like Twitter and Facebook?
	It seems like there's been a lot of excuses made by these tech companies in the past.
	Well, as far as I understand it, there were terms used on Twitter to indicate the presence of child pornography and they were allowed to largely run unopposed, to trend unopposed.
	And I think those terms have been reduced or eliminated under Elon Musk, which of course is a beneficial thing.
	As far as I understand it, there is...
	I mean, boy, talk about the bottom layer of hell.
	There are entire databases containing the digital footprints or signatures of images of this reprehensible, vile, evil stuff.
	And I don't think it would be impossible to ping those databases with images and see what there was and refer to law enforcement.
	And the moment that you start pinging these images and referring to law enforcement, people will find somewhere else to go.
	So you don't have to get it all.
	You just have to get enough to scare everyone else off.
	So... I would say it's probably not as big a problem, but there's this whole push to normalize this stuff, and it all ends so badly, and I'm glad to be out of it.
	All right. I'll just wait for a couple of questions to come up here, there, and everywhere.
	Type, type, type, my friends, type!
	Wait, people are still typing?
	Don't you all use voice dictation?
	Here's my plug for a dragon, naturally speaking.
	Unbelievably worthwhile. For almost four years, somebody says, I worked with the police in the USA and 20 other countries writing software to catch pedos online.
	I could speak to it if interested.
	Yeah, I mean, no rants in you?
	Well, I mean, I work with the rants.
	I don't squeeze the rants out.
	It's not like a tube of toothpaste.
	Are you still a good programmer?
	Well, I would say that...
	I mean, I still do some coding from time to time, just for various things I need to do for myself.
	But I would say that I was a good programmer.
	I was very strong-willed and could just push through things.
	And I could have used a little more theory in general, but no, I was pretty good.
	All right. I don't...
	No, I don't... I'm not really that interested in interviews these days.
	Thank you. I prefer dragons speaking supernaturally.
	Funny, funny. All right.
	I will dip over to some of the questions that I had.
	I'll do a shorter show tonight, but I can dip over to some of the questions that I had over on the freedomain.locals.com platform, which is le premier place for le mi on le internet.
	Look at me speaking French.
	All right. Um...
	Yeah, you should watch the show, The Truth About Thanksgiving, which I did many years ago.
	On this, a good place, FDRpodcast.com.
	FDRpodcast.com has got a pretty good search engine there.
	And you can search for stuff there.
	And when you find it, there'll be links to the videos as well.
	So you should watch those.
	All right. October 19th.
	No, November 1st. Oh, please, God, let me sort these by date.
	Can we sort these by date?
	No.
	Apparently it is impossible.
	Um, bum.
	Okay, I think I did those.
	Sorry, I'm just trying...
	I should bookmark these things, you know, when you think about it.
	Oh, these are going back in time, are they?
	No. There we go.
	Yes, there's one from five days ago that I know I haven't done yet.
	All right. Let me just get in here.
	Do you regret not having more children?
	I only have one daughter, but I wish I had six.
	I would love to have had more children.
	We had the maximum children that nature allowed us to.
	All right. Would you allow a toddler to play with other children where you know the parents spank their children?
	What would you say to a toddler who wants to play with some children in the neighborhood but where you have concerns about the other parents?
	I would not let my child play unsupervised with a child who'd been spanked.
	If, and my daughter doesn't play with any children who've been spanked, and certainly I don't think she ever has.
	Because we wouldn't be friends with those parents, right?
	Because you can't be friends with people who are violating the non-aggression principle, at least, and maintain your self-respect.
	So you've got to vet your kids playmates, for sure.
	Very, very toughly. Very, very hardly.
	Very hardly. All right. Let's see here.
	Let's go back to our other topics.
	Our topiary X. There we go.
	Have you seen all the posts someone says on abandoning anger?
	If so, why is it so intense on convincing us to abandon anger?
	So people... People will try to convince you to abandon your anger because they're about to do something that will justly make you very angry, right?
	I mean, a virus that wants to infect you will want to disable your immune system so that it can do that, right?
	Or evade your immune system.
	That's what mutation is all about.
	So if somebody's trying to talk you out of your anger or out of being angry, anger is an unjust and unfair and brutal and abusive emotion, the reason they're doing that is because they...
	They're going to do something that's going to violate your standards and they want to disable your just response.
	When trying to find friends, how quickly would you bring up the subject of spanking children?
	I have a one-and-a-half-year-old and a two-month-old and moved into a new area.
	And the one friend I thought I made so far spanks because she thinks God tells us to, and now I'm back to square one.
	She wouldn't give my perspective a chance.
	Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's the first conversation.
	If there are kids around, we say, oh yeah, no, we have this parenting philosophy.
	We don't hit, we don't yell, or we don't threaten, we don't punish.
	We reason. Now, if they're like, oh, tell me more, that's interesting, or yeah, we're kind of the same way.
	If they're like, what? That's crazy.
	It's like, okay, well, moving on, right?
	No, right away. Just don't waste time.
	Life is too short. Don't waste time.
	How do I convince my wife to stop sending our son to public school?
	I brought arguments heard from this show over the 10-plus years of listening.
	However, these arguments are simply dismissed.
	It comes down to not having enough social interaction and other potential issues.
	How should I change my approach?
	Perhaps I need more practice in debating.
	Well, grab the curriculum, right?
	See, here's the problem, right?
	This is one of the reasons why middle-aged people are so easy to bamboozle when it comes to horrible changes in school curricula.
	So you think that your wife probably thinks that the school is like when she was little, right?
	So 20, 30 years ago, whatever, right?
	So your wife probably thinks that the school is like it was when she was younger, and it ain't.
	It's massively, massively different.
	So just go get the curriculum, and you can get copies online, and go through it, look at the recommended reading, look at what's being taught, and say, if we had a babysitter who was teaching our kids this stuff, would we get mad?
	Of course, right? So, yeah, just get the facts, and just remind her that school is not the same as when we were younger.
	Ah, let's see here.
	I don't have an answer to that one.
	How can I be more honest in the moment with people?
	An example, I was visiting a friend when she hit her 12-year-old son.
	I feel so much shame and regret for not doing or saying something.
	But I froze and we awkwardly changed the subject.
	Another example, I'm taking a break from my mother-in-law, and when asked about it by another family member, I laughed it off and changed the subject.
	Again, I wish I'd handled that differently, but it's more honest when put on the spot like that.
	Listen, I mean, I sympathize, I understand, and don't feel bad about it.
	This is how we're programmed, right?
	I mean, our reactions are largely programmed and evolved through evolution, which is why we need philosophy.
	So, I mean, if you think about, like, if somebody takes a swing at you, Your reaction, Russ-like, is to dodge, right?
	Or Joey-like, I suppose, right? You dodge.
	Now, if you train to be a boxer, then you...
	I mean, you're still dodging, but you then walk towards a fight rather than away from a fight and so on, right?
	So... Or, you know, when kids learn how to play hockey, if they're the goalie, right?
	I mean, the goalies are in heavy padding, and they need to get used to not...
	Avoiding the puck. They need to stop the puck from getting in the net.
	So there's a scene in The Mighty Ducks where they're just practicing shooting pucks at the goalie and he's padded and all that, but he has to get over his fear.
	So training yourself to go against your instincts is a lot of stuff.
	Like we're trained to conserve energy, which is why we like sitting on the couch rather than going to the gym.
	Because conserving energy makes good sense when getting food takes a lot of energy.
	So getting ourselves up and going to the gym is going against our instincts.
	We are trained to overeat because our next meal comes God knows when.
	We're trained to pursue things that are brightly colored and sugary because they're like fruit, which we need to avoid scurvy and other things.
	So yeah, we've got to go against our instincts.
	Now, you understand that for most of our evolution, we had no choice in who we hung out with.
	And if we went against the social norms, we would be ostracized, which meant our genes would end, we'd be kicked out into the wilderness, we'd be killed by some predator while we slept, we'd be killed by some random tribe that came across us or enslaved.
	So your anxiety, your fear, your nervousness about going against social norms, the social norms of those around you, you've got to honor that.
	And it's the whole reason you're here.
	If your ancestors had been purely philosophical and had gone against these kinds of social norms, they would have died out and you and I wouldn't be here.
	So, you know, honor those.
	They're trying to...
	You know, the purpose of life from a biological standpoint has nothing to do with happiness.
	Happiness is just one of the many objects in the array of carrots and sticks that characterize our emotional and psychological makeup.
	So... You're not designed to be happy, you're designed to survive.
	You're not designed to have integrity, you're designed to survive.
	You're not trained or designed to stand up for abstract moral principles, you're designed to survive.
	Because everybody who failed the test of survival Didn't reproduce, and those genes are long gone, like if they ever existed at all.
	So we're very much going against our instincts, standing up in integrity.
	The purpose of morality is theft.
	Throughout most of human history, the purpose, and I'm not talking about Christian morality as a whole, I'm talking about the general, the philosophical morality.
	The purpose of morality is theft, and it's perfectly manifested in Sam Bankman Freed, right?
	The guy in charge of FTX, right?
	Or until lately in charge of the late FTX. And I think I've seen reports that he was openly stating this effective altruism or whatever, like, you've got to make money so that you can give to all of these worthy causes.
	It's just a cover, right?
	It's a cover for theft. Most morality is a cover for theft.
	And so people only speak in moral terms so that they can cover up some sort of theft or some sort of deception.
	Morality is a form of camouflage for evildoers.
	It's an invisibility cloak that they put on in order to better steal.
	That's right. So...
	So actually standing up for morality, most times in human history, it's very rare that you can do that and not get killed, right?
	I mean, there's sort of social ostracism and deplatforming and so on, which is much more civilized than what happened to Socrates, or Jesus for that matter, or Plato, or Aristotle, or John Locke, or, you know, half the people I've talked about in my History of Philosopher's series, which you can get right here.
	Just subscribe at freedomain.locals.com.
	It's a really, really great platform.
	So, yeah, don't feel bad about it.
	You're entirely programmed that if you see someone hitting their kid and you don't like it, you're entirely programmed to shut your mouth and say nothing.
	And you can get mad at that.
	Oh, that's bad. I'm such a coward.
	It's like, no, no, no, no. It's like saying if you run away from a lion and you're unarmed and you run away from a full mature charging lion pack, oh, I'm such a coward.
	It's like, no, you're just trying to stay alive.
	And swallowing your outrage when people in your social environment do things you disagree with, that's why you're here.
	That's exactly why you're here.
	Be gentle with that. Have respect for that.
	Thank your system for that.
	Because if you didn't have that, you wouldn't make it.
	Because we're in an unusual situation now where our modern society is able to exist independent of our evolutionary pressures, right?
	Because we can have voluntary...
	Social circles and we can find people who match our morals and we're not just trapped in a tribe of 50 to 100 people that we can't ever change.
	So, yeah, just understand, be gentle and respect that.
	You can't have any power in relationships that you're not willing to sacrifice.
	I'm sorry, this is just a basic fact.
	You can't have any power in relationships if you're not willing to sacrifice them, right?
	I mean, so many years ago, when I was in charge of a software group, it was not at my company, but I was in charge of a software group, maybe 30 people or so, and one of the, well actually no, a number of them came to me and said, we think that we're underpaid, and we're not happy.
	Now, if you've got a complex code pace, it can take three to six months to get somebody up to speed so that they don't just type something here and break something over there.
	And if you have a complex code pace and a complex implementation of that code base, it's even worse.
	So I knew for sure that...
	I mean, I didn't want people to be underpaid, but I knew for sure that...
	If any significant number of them quit, the company was going to be toast.
	So, of course, what did I do?
	I bought...
	You can buy average salary reports.
	And I bought the average salary reports.
	And I did a whole presentation.
	I had to put all the graphing. And I ended up getting some pretty significant raises for just about everybody who was under me.
	Now, I mean, I did that because it was the right thing to do.
	But if you imagine I was just some amoral guy, right?
	Now, people come to you and they say...
	I'm not happy with my salary.
	Now, if you 100% know for sure that they're not going to quit, what will you do?
	Well, you might give them a little bit here and there, but it's not going to be any particular issue.
	If you know that if you don't listen to them, they're all going to quit tomorrow, you're going to spend the rest of your day solving the problem.
	I mean, that's volunteerism, right?
	Volunteerism is quality.
	There's no distinction between the two.
	They're two sides of the same coin.
	Volunteerism is quality. If you've ever been in a situation where you can't fire someone...
	You know that you can't really demand quality out of someone you can't fire.
	And by the by, you know, when people are all about, you know, to help the working class, it's like I did actually.
	I got, boy, I got over a million dollars extra a year in salary for my employees.
	That was pretty sweet, man.
	Hang on. I'm just trying to make sure I get this math right.
	It's about 30 people and 260, a little bit less, a little bit less.
	But yeah, somewhat close to seven figures in terms of additional salary and the company did better.
	The company did better because people weren't frustrated.
	They weren't complaining about their salary.
	They felt enthusiastic and they were happy with me and the customers were happier because they were more productive and I could ask them to do extra things and they would and it was just much better all around.
	In other words, They generated much more than a million dollars in value for a million dollars in extra salary.
	So it's a good deal. So you can't have any authority in relationships unless you're willing to walk away.
	You know this from sales, right?
	You know this from sales. You know this from anything.
	If you're not willing to walk away, you have no authority in that relationship.
	Now, I'm not talking about a marriage where you've already made your commitment and all of that, but if you're not willing to walk away from a relationship, then you have no power in that relationship, no authority.
	So you have to be willing to, I mean, this is the whole point of philosophy, is put principles above habits, put principles above history, put principles above pretty much everything except survival.
	All right. Sorry, let me just jump back here and see.
	What is your favorite programming languages?
	I was a big visual basic guy myself.
	My girlfriend is six months behind on paying me rent.
	We've been living together for over three years.
	She cites that I make way more money than she does.
	How should I go about this situation?
	Don't wait. I don't know what you mean.
	How do you go about the situation?
	She's telling you that she's not willing to keep her word, right?
	I mean, I assume that you said we're going to split rent, right?
	And she's not paying you rent.
	So, she's not keeping her wood.
	She's lying to you. She's exploiting you.
	She's using you. She's kind of stealing from you.
	Because if you bought a more expensive place, like let's say if you were alone, you would buy a place for two grand a month, but because you're with her, you buy a place for three grand a month.
	But you're hoping to split it with her, so it's only $1,500 a month, right?
	Now, if she then is making you pay $3,000 because she's living there, rather than $2,000 if you were just alone, then she's stealing at least $1,000 from you a month.
	I mean, if she went through your wallet and stole $1,000 from you a month, what would you do, right?
	So, and just say, well, you know, I mean, I shouldn't have to pay for sex, right?
	I mean, that's wrong. That's degrading to everyone, right?
	So, what value?
	Like, why am I paying your rent?
	Because you're my girlfriend? Well, that means I'm paying for sex.
	I'm not doing that. Like, that's horrible.
	I wouldn't do that at all. In a million.
	What are your thoughts on Zero Sugar Cola?
	I'd stay away from Aspartame if I were you.
	Have you ever thought about making a non-documentary movie?
	I did, actually. It's called Almost.
	No, it's called After.
	Sorry, I did make a non-documentary movie some years ago.
	It was a short movie. Oh, I'd love to do directing and acting and all that kind of stuff for sure.
	That would be wonderful.
	That would be wonderful. But the distribution mechanism is significantly tricky.
	All right, so let me go back here.
	Great questions. By the way, Dudes et al., Hey, says someone.
	Lots of questions. I have strong and adorable aspects, but I have some red flags too.
	Parents who treated me poorly.
	Two marriages that didn't go well and with a kid.
	So if some woman calls you and asks you about me, what would you say?
	Having some serious red flags myself, why will a sane woman approach me?
	What do I have to do in order to deserve a good woman?
	Yeah, so you've got two divorces and a kid.
	I think this may be a lock in the barn door after the horse has left sort of thing.
	I mean, you can overcome these things, but you have to be truly spectacular in terms of virtue and courage, and I'm sure some abs wouldn't hurt either.
	All right.
	Oh, dissociation.
	That's an interesting one. I was just talking to someone else about that.
	In my personal life just the other day.
	Were you happy with it?
	Don't recall you mentioning the movie After before.
	You can find it After.
	I think it's on FDRpodcast.com.
	Was I happy with it?
	I was 7 to 8 out of 10 happy with it.
	I actually had a cameo in it, believe it or not.
	Yeah, I was 7 to 10 happy out of it.
	Let's see here.
	Let me just get mine.
	Thank you.
	All right, so let's see here.
	What are the sources of selfhood or identity when we cannot rely on our parents and ancestors other than philosophy?
	Well, okay. Other than the only one, what are the other ones?
	Something that's understood and accepted by women, peers, people at work, and so on.
	It's basically the same question. Okay, that's so-and-so I was asking.
	Selfhood or identity?
	Well, when people believed that they were birthed at the hands of God and were children of the universe and so on, and that the universe was 6,000 years old, and then science came along and said not so much, what was the source of their identity?
	Well, the source of their identity was truth.
	Now again, we're programmed for survival, and we're programmed to pursue truth only insofar as it serves survival.
	But fact of the matter is, nothing serves survival better than the truth, except for liars and cheats and bullies and tyrants and so on.
	But nothing serves survival better than the truth.
	So your sense of identity is not conformity with the errors of others, right?
	And in general, culture is accumulated errors.
	Because if it's not accumulated errors, it's called science or facts or reality or truth or something like that.
	So we're trying to reorient ourselves from the metaphysics of external error to the epistemology of objective truth.
	And either people follow us or they go off a cliff into hell, which is kind of where they think they're kind of heading anyway.
	So let's see here.
	Stefan, in a previous Q&A you mentioned having broken off an engagement and that you had to process it.
	A year ago I broke off an engagement.
	Since then I've struggled with processing the emotions surrounding it.
	What helped when you were processing your broken engagement?
	Oh, it was hell. And it wasn't hell in particular because of the broken engagement.
	It was hell because of all the people who were cheering on me marrying the wrong woman.
	My God, I could have wrecked my entire life and probably would have wrecked my entire life.
	And so... Yeah, it really was either people didn't know me at all or they wanted me to fail.
	Either one was pretty appalling.
	So it wasn't the breakup per se.
	It was everyone around me who was cheering me on wrecking my life.
	Bad scene. I tipped the stream, but it looks like the message didn't go through.
	Just wanted to thank you, Steph. Well, thank you.
	I appreciate that. And again, tips are very welcome in these lean and hungry times.
	Let me just go back here to my question.
	I got married three weeks ago and have tried working on some dysfunction on my end.
	Whenever I asked my wife for something and then got exactly what I asked for, I felt very anxious.
	Within an hour, I realized it was an artifact in my childhood to be on high alert after getting what I asked for.
	My question is how can I use this knowledge to overcome these feelings and stay connected with my wife?
	Um... So, I would imagine that you came from a family where you'd ask for your mom for a sandwich and eventually she'd give you a sandwich like, fine, here's your sandwich!
	And then you'd pay for it later in some sort of immature two-dimensional blowback.
	So you just get mad at that, right?
	Children should not be punished for having requests.
	Especially because, I mean, children are in a form of entrapment, right?
	That they don't have a choice where they live.
	They don't have a choice in their parents. They don't have any legal rights.
	They don't have any income. They don't have any independence.
	So it's like getting mad at your dog for wanting to go and walk.
	You know, that's kind of the deal with having a dog.
	Hey, Steph, you've often said if you're struggling in life, it's because there are people around you that benefit from your struggle.
	How does one determine how they benefit?
	Well, if you are struggling to improve your relationships and they're stuck in bad relationships, clearly they benefit from you not improving their relationships.
	The people who make compromises, they always say to themselves, well, that's the best I could do.
	The best I could do. Well, I had a bad childhood.
	Me yelling, it's the best.
	At least I didn't beat you. It's the best I could do, right?
	So people say they have this high watermark.
	This is as high as the tide goes, man.
	This is the best a human being can do.
	And I did the very best I could with the knowledge I had and live, laugh, love, never think, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, so if somebody says, this is the best, not that I could do, this is the best that can't be done.
	Beyond this, no man, no woman, no carbon-based bipedal bald ape life form cannot do better than this.
	Right? And what if they see someone doing much better than that?
	Ouchies. Right?
	What if they see someone doing so much better than that?
	Well, then it turns out that they weren't doing at all the best that could be done.
	And they've been praising themselves for 20 years or 30 years or 40 years.
	Oh, I did the very, very best.
	Not just that I could do, but any human being could do.
	And then they see you doing a hundred times better, a thousand times better.
	Well then, that which they take pride in turns to humiliation and regret and rage and self-contempt right on them.
	What do they do with that overwhelming emotion or series of emotions?
	Well, either they get cursed themselves and live in hell or they cast the curse onto you.
	So it's very dangerous.
	It's very dangerous. Boy, oh, we all love progress.
	Progress is wonderful. Progress is great.
	Progress is freaking cursed, man.
	I mean, just look at my show, right?
	Progress is cursed. Because when you raise the standards for everyone else above what they thought was possible, they feel a huge amount of self-recrimination, which they then turn on rage against you, to turn in rage against you.
	It's better to cut you down than to admit they fell short.
	So, yeah.
	I won't have people in my life that I'm doing better than.
	I mean, if I inspire someone fantastic, then they do better.
	But I won't have people in my life that I'm doing better than.
	And I don't mean in terms of success or fame or anything like that.
	I just mean morally, right?
	I won't. I won't because I just know they're going to sabotage me.
	It's just inevitable. They either rise to your standard or they'll drag you down to theirs.
	This gap is too painful for people and most people will just process it unconsciously, right?
	All right. Yeah, I'm sorry.
	I've now answered at least 12 times the sleeping baby thing.
	Yes, we let Isabella cry it out and she's fine.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Have you ever had any celebrities or big names tell you they are a fan of your work but couldn't publicly acknowledge it due to fear of public reprisal?
	No comment.
	All right.
	Hey, Steph, do you ever take a look at society and wonder what the point of all this is?
	I find it hard to become motivated knowing, like Winston Smith found out at the end of 1984, that Big Brother has complete control.
	I understand that conscious is forever.
	I'm just like, get me out of this shitty simulation, please.
	Yeah, I mean, I think, like everyone, I think that this little brief chunk of freedom we've had over the last couple of decades or less, maybe you say a couple of hundred years, but practically we've only had true freedom, really only lasted about 10 years, from 2006 to 2016. Is it just a tiny blip?
	Is it like the dead cat bounce of the end of our freedoms?
	I mean, we know that there's a lot of people out there in the world who have a lot of power who seem to like the Chinese model, and who knows where that's going to go.
	I put my 40 years in.
	I really did, like from 16 to...
	Probably not 40 years. Oh, I put almost 40 years.
	A couple of years ago, I stopped doing politics.
	So I put close to 40 years in.
	I started about the age of 15 talking about politics, and then I sort of finished at 54 or something like that.
	So 40 years, give or take.
	I put my 40 years in, and that's more than enough for that.
	That's a very honorable way to equip yourself in life, to put 40 hard years into promoting freedom and, you know...
	So I'm very happy and pleased with what I did.
	I'm very happy and pleased that I stopped doing it.
	You know, make room for other people, for sure.
	All right. Let me go back a little here.
	All right.
	All right.
	Stefan, you're a legend.
	Yeah, thank you.
	I will continue...
	I will still consider doing my truth about the French Revolution.
	Yes, I will work on that.
	But right now I'm writing a book, which I absolutely love.
	I don't know if anyone's interested, but if you're interested at all, I could post it as I'm going.
	And you could see the process of building a book.
	I don't know if anyone's interested in that.
	All right. Hey, Steph, thanks again for all you do.
	Your conversation about being a bother has helped immensely.
	Do you consider yourself a polymath?
	I think I'm good at a variety of things, and I think I'm very good at a few things.
	I think that I have a pretty widespread of abilities as a whole, so somewhere probably in the vicinity, I suppose.
	Can you be friends with a vaxxer now that the truth is coming out?
	Well, I think that depends.
	I mean, a vaxxer is not just one big blob, right?
	I mean, there were people who had to do it to keep their jobs, and I have sympathy with that.
	And then there are people who rushed to do it and then wanted rights taken away from everybody else.
	It's a whole different category.
	Have you considered writing an autobiography?
	Yes, I have, but it'll have to wait for later.
	For the love of God, please post that book process thing, please.
	Well, it's interesting because it's the first book I've done where I've got the plot from start to end.
	I've pre-plotted the whole thing.
	So, you're even better than a polymath.
	You're a molymath! That's funny.
	Okay, well maybe I'll create a group for people interested in watching the book process as it sort of unfolds, because, you know, everybody just gets the final thing and doesn't get to see the recipe, but the actual working to create a book is something that I think people are quite interested in, and this is now my, I don't know, 16th book or something like that, so I hope I've got it down fairly well.
	This book is absolutely my most realistic and naturalistic book.
	Not even close.
	Everything else has been fairly extravagant in historical fiction and so on.
	I tell you, I'm reading this dialogue.
	It's like a transcription, like somebody was just listening on the wall to people talk.
	It is so realistic.
	It's scarily realistic to me.
	I can literally see these conversations and I'm really, really avoiding drama.
	You know, there's a lot of drama in novels to pump things up and have cliffhangers and so on.
	I'm just making this as grounded and as realistic, and I want people to be like, well, this is the script to a documentary.
	This is like people just, like you listen to people and just wrote what they said.
	All right. I'm interested in reading it as you go along, too.
	Okay. I'll look at ways of doing that.
	If you could go back in time to have lunch with any historical figure, who would you pick?
	Oh, Jesus. Oh, absolutely.
	Absolutely, completely and totally Jesus Christ himself.
	I would just... I would be absolutely, completely and totally fascinated to have that conversation, and I don't think I would ever tire of having that conversation, no matter how long I was there.
	So, yeah, no question.
	All right. Let's go back here.
	We've got another few minutes, right? Well, I was talking to a young man, 18, who had murderous rage.
	He wanted to kill his two older brothers, I assume they all want to kill him, for beating him and his little brother up for four days straight when he was a child.
	What are some ways that people can rid themselves of rage and anger and thoughts of killing the evildoers in their lives?
	Listen, you don't want to act on the emotion of rage.
	You can act on the emotion of anger, because anger is simply expressing discontent, frustration, annoyance, and wanting something to change.
	Rage does have a violent aspect to it, so you do not want to act.
	You can feel the rage. You do not want to act on rage.
	Rage has a destructive element, and this is a cornered and violent kind of emotion.
	The reason I assume that he feels this level of rage is because he's looking at his brothers, not at the parents, right?
	It's very easy to get mad at the brothers, and it's harder to get mad at the parents for setting up this situation of violence.
	All right, let's see here.
	Let me just go back here to the live stream.
	Have you ever seen the Naked Truth documentary?
	I don't think so. What's one food item you cannot live life without?
	Bread. I'm afraid.
	Are you watching The Chosen?
	I started it. I have not gotten too far into it.
	Have you heard of a philosopher named Ken Wilber?
	I have not. I hope to see you back on Twitter one day.
	Never say never. We shall see.
	We shall see. All right.
	Just a few more minutes?
	Yeah, I got just a few more minutes.
	All right. Will the new legislation in Tennessee banning underage genital mutilation also apply to circumcision?
	No. I would think not.
	That would be to challenge male disposability, so...
	Hi, Steph. I've listened to your introduction to philosophy series twice over, and I first just want to say thank you.
	That has been an extremely helpful grounding in philosophy.
	I wanted to ask if, as an empiricist, that also makes you a materialist.
	Do you object to the idea of a higher power, something like the human soul?
	I understand your position on God, but what do you say to someone who references something like the human soul?
	My takeaway from your work has been that any claims which invoke God, the soul, spirituality, etc., are invalid.
	They are also technically impossible to understand as no one could possibly conceive of qualities of reality which cannot be experienced or of which we have no similar sense data to extrapolate from.
	Please let me know what you think. Thanks.
	Really well written, Adam. It's really well written.
	Thank you. It's very clear. So it's not just to be naggy guy, right?
	So you say any claims which invoke God, the soul, spirituality are invalid.
	Saying that a claim is invalid doesn't provide much information, because I think the thing is to say, well, why?
	Why is it invalid, right?
	Why is it invalid? Okay, so it's not so much that I would say the claims of a soul are invalid.
	What I would say is that the definition of something that exists is something That has matter or energy or the effects thereof.
	It's something that's measurable.
	Something that exists is something that you can at some point translate into the evidence of the senses, right?
	If you can walk through a doorway, the door is open.
	If you bump your head into the door, the door is closed, right?
	The presence or absence of the door is its impact on your nose.
	So for something to exist, it has to, at some point, impact upon the senses.
	And I know we can't see ultraviolet light, but you can translate it into something you can see and so on.
	So... If people say that this entity, which has the exact same properties as non-existence, exists, then we're saying that which does not exist, exists.
	Now, if you can find some way to establish existence and evidence of something like a soul, Then, like if you did a sort of heat or energy map of someone dying, and you saw something lift up from their body and go somewhere else, and you could sort of trace that energy, then that would be the evidence that something was leaving the body that has some sort of energy to it, and that would be some sort of evidence for that.
	And so, it's not so much that, oh, claims about the soul are invalid, it's that...
	Categorical claims that include the opposite are invalid.
	If you say, mammals are warm-blooded, and that category also includes things which are the opposite of warm-blooded, then you have a performative contradiction.
	It's a self-detonating statement.
	You can't say, mammals are defined by warm-blooded, mammals also include the opposite of warm-blooded.
	These are contradictory statements.
	Mammals can't be both defined as warm-blooded and defined as the opposite of warm-blooded at the same time.
	It can't be. It can't be.
	So, something which has empirical material existence, or again, can be matter, energy, or the effects thereof, like gravity exists, so to speak, or gravity is a relationship between the attraction of matter.
	So, it's not so much, oh, claims of the soul are invalid, and I understand why you're saying that, but you can't have a definition of reality anymore.
	That includes its opposite.
	So you can't say, well, something exists if we can measure it.
	But things also exist which are impossible to measure.
	It's like, no, you can't have both.
	You can't have both. Now, if you say, well, things can exist which we cannot measure, then you have no rational reason or logical reason or philosophical reason to limit that to a soul or a god or anything, right?
	Invisible spiders sitting on our head, they could be perfectly real.
	Ghosts, fairies, goblins, any one of the 10,000 ghosts that people across the world believe in, the collective, the nation, the soul of the state, the whatever, right?
	Moral obligations that are completely opposite, that are made up by people, could all be perfectly valid.
	So the reason why we say for something to exist, it has to be Empirically measurable is that we then bar every imaginary fantastical thing from existing.
	Because what people want to do is they want to create a selective exclusion to a general rule.
	And philosophy does not do selective exceptions to a general rule.
	That's called the state, right?
	So morality doesn't do that.
	Everyone wants to define morality and then exclude themselves.
	It's really the purpose of morality is to enslave other people and exclude yourself.
	To turn you into a god and everybody else into a Surf.
	So, people want to say immaterial, self-contradictory properties or entities.
	Immaterial, self-contradictory entities can totally exist.
	But only these ones.
	Only the soul. Only God.
	Not unicorns.
	Not witches. Not square circles.
	Not, right? Because that would be crazy.
	It's like, well, no, no. You can't open that gate just for the people that you want.
	That's the principle thing, right? If you're going to say self-contradictory, immaterial things can totally exist, then you can't limit it.
	Then anything that anyone says, that's the reason we don't allow that open to be rational, because then anything that anyone says can exist.
	And then we have dreams are real, square circles exist, two and two makes five, two and two makes a blue unicorn, blue unicorn plus blue unicorn equals imaginary hamburger.
	We've just opened the gates to literal insanity.
	And, you know, the culture is doing a good enough job of that.
	Philosophers don't need to add to it.
	Can you prove the existence of a thought?
	Yes, you just wrote it out.
	Do you have any advice for mastering the natural speaking voice for pre-scripted video content?
	I can't help falling into a robotic tone when I make material, but you have read entire books of your own with such great flow.
	Well, I appreciate that. So, I do try and...
	I do sometimes try and sort of play with, I'm just talking to someone in a room.
	Like, I'm just... This is like I would, you know...
	Giving speeches and doing public things is kind of different than just having a conversation.
	The more conversational you can be, I think, in general, the better.
	But... In general, we tend to close ourselves off emotionally when we read, mostly because of public school and so on.
	You get up and read to the class and everyone's going to make fun of you and you're all tense.
	So we tend to tense up and close off emotionally when we read something that's going to go out in the public and you just want to be extravagant because you're going to be dead either way.
	If you hide your emotions and you go into a little armadillo and you never let yourself out and you hoard and Well, you're going to die either way, right?
	You might as well be extravagant and out there because death comes either way.
	It's just less dissatisfying if you've been out there talking naturally.
	All right. I think we're done.
	Look at that. That's a stirring ending, isn't it?
	All right. People are typing, and we have three minutes left, so I won't make the last three minutes only for supporters, but I really do appreciate everybody's support.
	Again, if you find what I'm doing valuable, a tip would be most gratefully appreciated.
	Expenses are heading up.
	I know that's true for everyone, but...
	I've been considering not showing up to Thanksgiving dinner with my mom and brother tomorrow, but I'm finding it very difficult to bring myself to do this.
	I know it will be unpleasant if I show up, but I also know that she will make my life unpleasant by contacting me, making me feel guilt.
	I almost feel like showing up will be easier for me.
	Is it a bad idea to force myself to go through with the motions to keep peace with my mother?
	I would say if you have doubts about the quality of the relationship, go and be honest.
	Don't go there and self-erase.
	It's just my suggestion. I'm going to tell you what to do.
	Don't go there and self-erase. Just go there and be honest.
	Say, well, I was thinking about not coming, but I decided to because I'm afraid of feeling guilty.
	Just do people like you when you're relentlessly honest?
	Do they like you at all? And my experience was people liked me as long as I wasn't honest.
	As long as I was conforming to their nuttiness, they liked me just fine.
	When I started becoming honest, I think I missed a spot on my ear.
	A little hair there. When I started to become honest and really spoke what I thought, people kind of recoiled.
	And I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life pretending to be what I'm not, because that's just being dead while alive.
	Forget that. Have you asked Issy her opinion about you letting her cry it out?
	Well, she doesn't remember any of it because she was just six months old or something like that.
	Now, of course, she would want to comfort a kid for sure, and we've had that conversation and just pointed out that we had to drive, we had to take care of her, we had to get groceries, and it was dangerous.
	Like, sleep deprivation is a form of torture, and it was not healthy for her parents to have no sleep because she was waking up every 60 minutes.
	All right. Yeah, just go and be honest.
	And listen, if you go and you decide not to be honest, that's fine too, but you have to be honest about not being honest.
	Don't go and dissociate. Like, so you can sit across the table from someone and you can say, you know what, I'm not going to say a damn thing to this person because I'm too scared, I'm too angry, I'm just...
	But then you have to be honest and say, okay, when I sit across from this person, I can't tell them the truth.
	When I sit across from this person, I've decided not to tell them the truth.
	I've decided not to be honest, not to reveal who I am.
	If you're honest about being dishonest, that's pretty good.
	But don't go there and just space out and zone out and laugh along and just completely self-erase.
	Be very conscious. Be very conscious of what you're doing and be very rigorously honest with yourself about what you're doing.
	Right? So if you're going to go and you're going to bite your tongue and you're going to nod along with all the craziness family says, okay, I'm going to go here.
	I'm going to bite my tongue and nod along with all the crazy, all the crazy stuff my family says, and I'm going to nod about this and nod about that.
	That's what I'm going to go and do.
	Then go do it. Go do all of that and stay conscious and stay alert and stay present.
	And that way you'll get to a very significant truth about these relationships and whether you like it or not.
	All right. Thanks everyone.
	Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
	I really, really would appreciate that.
	Love you guys for these absolutely fantastic conversations.
	Thank you for the great questions that bring out the best in me.
	Lots of love. I'll talk to you Friday night.
	Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends.

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