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Dec. 17, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:24
Answering Subscriber Questions!
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All right, questions for the lovely subscribers at freedomain.locals.com.
So if you wanted to join that community and there are premium shows, premium questions, you can go to freedomain.locals.com and sign up.
You can use the promo code, all caps, UPB2022 to get a month's free access, get my new book, History of Philosopher's Series, all kinds of good stuff.
So here are the questions.
Hi, Steph. I have two questions about conversations, mainly when it comes to women.
What are some good ways to get a conversation started?
Some good openers and questions or topics to break the ice and get the conversation going.
Ask about their day, plans for the weekend.
Once the conversation starts flowing, I feel like I can manage okay.
I can dig deeper into the various subjects and ask follow-up questions, etc., but I have a hard time getting to that point.
Okay, so When you meet someone new, the first thing you want to establish is whether they have empathy.
People who don't have empathy, it just counts down to disaster.
Guaranteed. So how do you find out if they have empathy?
Well, you are enthusiastic about something.
Enthusiastic about some topic.
Now, Your level of comfort with risky enthusiasm is obviously up to you.
I don't mind particularly talking about more controversial topics because through that process I find out if somebody can think for themselves or just some Boring butt NPC, so to speak.
So you want to be enthusiastic.
Now, if they have empathy, then they will be interested in your enthusiasm.
And if they can think for themselves, then they'll be interested in you as an individual.
Going up to someone and just saying, you know, how was your day?
Well, what are your plans for the weekend?
No. I would strongly suggest against that.
Because you're just going to end up putting the onus of conversation onto the other person.
Go up and talk about yourself and if they find you interesting, great, then of course they will match your enthusiasm with something they're enthusiastic about and their enthusiasm could be negative.
In other words, they're enthusiastic in the opposite or a different direction, totally fine.
But no, go up, be open, be enthusiastic, speak your mind and that way you're going to eliminate a bunch of people who can't think for themselves Or who don't like enthusiasm because they're negative.
So yeah, going up and, how was your weekend?
I don't want to make fun of you again.
What are you playing for the weekend? That's just NPC talk, and it's not going to get you anybody worth talking to.
So whatever's on your mind, just go up and talk about what's on your mind.
All right. What are some good slash crucial questions to ask at the very beginning of a potential relationship, like a first or second date, etc.?
I know of the big important topics like childhood values, peaceful parenting, how to handle conflicts and so on, but I'm not sure if those are the best subjects that early on.
Some, perhaps. So, to have a good relationship with someone, they need to understand...
This is going to sound strange, but let me make the case, right?
To have a good relationship with someone, they need to understand that they're going to die.
Obviously not by your hand, but they're going to die.
So, people who fundamentally don't get that they're going to die have a wide array of catastrophic mistakes available to them that aren't available to those of us who accept our own mortality.
You're going to die. Now, parts of you are going to die long before your body does, right?
Your youthful energy is going to die long before your body does.
Your capacity for your body to knit and heal itself is going to die long before your body does.
In my case, my hair died a long time, hopefully, before my...
Body dies. Your youthful beauty is going to die long before you die.
Your options in life die off as you continue on down the road, right?
I'm not going to, at the age of 56, say, I'm going to be a doctor or a ballet dancer.
I don't know, whatever, right?
So, you're going to die.
You're going to age out of things.
It means that you've got to start assigning priorities and solving problems.
Why do you...
When you're having trouble in your relationship, why do you work it out?
Well, because you've already got a bunch of stuff invested in the relationship.
Because you're going to die.
And because, let's say, you've been in a relationship for five years.
Well, you're five years older.
You're five years a little bit weaker.
You're five years a little bit more rigid in your thinking.
You're five years closer to death.
So, invest in fixing the relationship.
People who don't get their own mortality...
Can just screw up randomly and think that everything can be fixed.
Not thinking about your own mortality is like playing a video game in God mode.
You don't care about strategy in particular.
You're just going through the motions.
You can't really make mistakes.
The load game phenomenon, right?
The video games teach you that almost all mistakes can be undone.
So... If you're on a date with someone and you say, you know, here's my plans for my life.
You know, I want to get married.
I want to have kids. I want to raise my children peacefully.
Whatever, right? I want to homeschool.
Whatever it is that you want to talk about, well, yeah, we should talk about that.
Now, if somebody's like, whoa, man, that's a heavy topic to get into on the first date, then they're clearly signaling to you that they're going to make terrible decisions because they don't understand that they're going to die.
Once you understand that you're going to die, Then you thank people who save you time.
You thank people. Thank you for saving me time.
That's important.
When I was younger, I got involved in a sports league And people there were just really intense, you know, really intense.
And, you know, they really, really wanted to win.
And, you know, these are guys who would scream out if they made an error and so on.
And, okay, that's just not a particularly good or great situation for me.
It's just sort of a mismatch.
You know, my job is exciting enough.
I don't need stress when I'm going to play a sport.
So just saving time.
Saving time. And listen, my lack of intensity was probably as upsetting to them as their excess, in my view, of intensity was to me.
It's just a mismatch. It's just a mismatch.
You want people to be open.
You want people to be frank. You want people to be forthcoming.
A date... Is an interview for a permanent position.
It's a job interview for a permanent position.
If that's what you want out of a date, right?
In the finite time that you have left, how are you going to spend it?
How are you going to spend it?
Knowing that you're going to die makes your day-to-day dramas less intense, less hysterical, less dramatic, right?
Less escalating.
My very first video was, look at your life right now.
Imagine you're on your deathbed.
The doctor has said you've only got hours to live or days to live.
You're never getting back up.
It's just going to be drug yourself to eternity.
How much would you give to be back in your life doing what you do Today, let's say you're 35 and you're having a difficult time or whatever.
Okay, so let's say you're 85, you're in your deathbed.
What would you not give to return to where you are at 35?
Well, that's the gift, right?
That's the bounce back. That's, you know, that's navigate by putting out chirps and sonar, right?
Bing, bing, bing. Like submarines.
Well, you've got to bounce things to your death and back to give you perspective.
Now, if somebody's just on a date because, you know, hey, I like a free meal and, you know, maybe we can hang out and they have no plans, no goals, no sense of life, no sense of progress, no sense of shape or ambition or goals, well, that's just because they're living in the eternal blur of now that characterizes the monkey brain.
It's the blur of now. Well, I'm content now.
Well, I'm happy now.
Well, this is working out for me now.
Somebody who understands death and somebody who lives in the blur of the now, fundamentally incompatible.
Given that we all lose to death, trying to win with everyone we meet is sort of pointless.
Because, you know, death is the ultimate goal scorer, right?
No matter how good we are in the net, he gets one past the goalie and we die.
It gives you humility. It gives you the desire to work things out.
It gives you a sense that when you invest something, it's worth preserving it because just going to build again is going to cost you a huge amount of time, energy, and life.
So, yeah. What I would say is if you are dating with the goal of settling down, getting married, and raising kids, say it!
And if somebody's like, yeah, no, I would like to settle down and get married and have kids and all of that, then you have a topic of conversation to start with.
If somebody's like, oh, hey, man, I'm just playing around.
I've just got all the time in the world.
Okay, well, then they're in the low brain dimension of no time.
No time. And there's not going to be any compatibility.
People who don't understand death have no shape to their lives.
They're living in the blur of the now.
They're living at the mammal stage.
And they could be super intelligent, but I'm still living at the mammal stage.
And you're just not going to be compatible with someone like that.
And I think that you will find them to be very immature.
You will find them unable to sacrifice any of their own immediate pleasures for higher goals.
Because there is no higher goals. There's no concepts.
There's no abstract. There's no rules.
There's no shape. There's no mortality.
You don't need to really learn the rules of a game, a video game, say, if you're playing in God mode.
Can't be harmed, can't be hurt, right?
You can go through the whole thing with the cheapest weapon, the lowest weapon, and just be patient, right?
No shape, no risk, no danger, no losses.
So, yeah, no.
Be honest.
Could we please get a record of a Dungeons and Dragons game that you DM'd or participated in?
I don't know what you mean by record.
I don't know what you mean by record.
Let me know. Why does our society say infantilize men and say they are like children?
Well, that's just projection.
That's just projection. The real group that society infantilizes is women.
The real group that society infantilizes It's women.
So, one of the things that characterizes a very normal and healthy stage in childhood development is the manipulation of rules and the exclusion of oneself.
The manipulation of rules and the exclusion of oneself.
So, I had this caller, somebody asked a question the other day, what do I do if my child hits?
You say, oh, is the rule that we can hit?
And my daughter experimented with lying, perfectly healthy, perfectly natural.
I said, oh, are we doing the lying now?
Am I allowed to lie?
Everyone allowed to lie? No, you see, she wanted to be able to lie while everyone else told the truth.
That's a natural power-seeking.
We grow towards power like plants towards sunlight.
It's perfectly valid and natural for her to do that.
And so... When women say they want equality, it means they want all of the benefits of equality and none of the drawbacks of equality.
Right? So if there's a profession that women want to get access to and there are fewer women than the average, then they'll say, well, this is unfair.
And they say unfair, unfair, unfair, and then they run to the government and the government forces the hiring of women and so on.
And that's because they want something, right?
If the job is dirty or dangerous or unpleasant or whatever it is, right?
Then they simply ignore it.
They want equality, and this is all the way back to Phyllis Schlafly, the late Phyllis Schlafly, who had a one-woman campaign to get rid of the Equal Rights Amendment, and really she found, which was, you know, that there should be no law that discriminates between men and women, and what she found was...
That the argument that women responded to, and she did manage to prevent the ERA from becoming part of the Constitution.
So the argument that she found resonated with women is, you can be drafted.
Ooh! Yeah, see, we want the vote, but we really don't want to be drafted.
And being drafted and the vote were two sides of the same coin, right?
So we want equality, but only in the things that benefit us.
Okay, well, allowing people to propose a general rule and then exclude themselves is treating them as children, never really letting them grow up.
So that's just...
And men generally do play more than women, but for men, play is a rehearsal for creation.
Just about everything you see around you that's built is built by men, and so men play very seriously when it comes to life and creation and so on.
So Women sort of roll their eyes.
Oh, boys with their toys.
It's like, well, yeah, so men will go hunting.
And men will build model railroads and do all kinds of cool things.
But it's all rehearsal for building things in the real world.
It is very common that immature people project their immaturity onto others.
And the infantilization of women...
Is a huge issue in society.
It troubles me. No end, of course, as the father of a daughter, it troubles me to no end that women are this infantilized in society and no one points...
Like, you know, I mean, this is partly sort of sexual attraction and so on, right?
Like, all of these silly beliefs like astrology and crystals and, you know, healing gems and all this sort of nonsense.
Well, that's treating women as children.
If a man proposed these things, we'd say, well, that's not true or you've got to prove it or whatever, right?
I mean, this is a story of a very pretty woman I was dating many years ago, and she said she had psychic powers, and I kind of laughed and said, okay, really?
Yes. And okay, well, we've got to go down to Vegas, man.
I'll pay for us to go down to Vegas.
You can prove your psychic powers, because the amazing Randy has a million-dollar U.S. prize for anyone who can prove their psychic abilities.
Right, so let's make money, let's test it, you're making a claim here.
Now, she'd been trained in science, so she knew this kind of stuff, and of course she got very upset and pouty, and in a sense it's like, well, it just doesn't work that way, you know, she would say.
So, yeah, that didn't last overly long.
So, women call men boys, but infantilize themselves differently.
Endlessly in society participates in all of this.
And it's really terrible.
Alright, let's see here.
Free domain. So, the strategy of forgiving all and holding no anger towards anyone is a belief that no one has free will, right?
And what are your true thoughts?
I like that semi-insult, like I'm going to give you my thoughts that aren't true.
And what are your true thoughts on Jesse Lee Peterson, his philosophy about forgiving rapists, forgiving child abusers, murdered people, serial killers, etc., and also holding no anger towards anyone in those categories?
Is his philosophy considered dangerous and harmful?
And are you an atheist or a Christian?
Because I get confused. Right.
Right. So...
I'm going to not talk about just Lily Peterson in particular, but this philosophy as a whole.
It's really more theology than philosophy, and I'll talk about this.
I'm sure I would get things wrong, but this is sort of my understanding of how it works.
So, in Christianity, disfellowship, detachment, ostracism is really a last resort, because in the Christian worldview, there is always a soul within the body That is capable of redemption, that is capable of salvation.
There is a pure part of the being that cannot be corrupted and is always available and accessible to see sweet reason, love of Jesus, virtue.
And I'm not talking about this in any cynical way.
I mean, genuinely, this is my understanding.
So it's very hard to disfellow people because that is to say that they are beyond redemption.
Now, what is the purpose of anger?
The purpose of anger is to restore you to a place of safety.
Fight or flight. Someone threatens your interest, someone's in your house stealing your stuff, you get angry.
You get frightened, you get angry, because you don't know whether you're going to run.
You're in a situation of combat, so you don't know whether it's going to be wiser to run or to fight.
If it's a grizzly bear, you're going to run.
If it's a dog, you may fight.
It could be any number of things, right?
So, and of course, you may fight if it's someone in your house, let's say you're not armed, and then you may fight that person, but maybe they get the upper hand and you have to run away, right?
So fight or flight. So the purpose of anger is to energize you for combat so that you are restored to a place of safety and security, right?
You drive the person out of your house, you drive off the dog or whatever it is, right?
Or somebody is, I don't know, making a move on your girlfriend and so on.
And of course, she's perfectly capable of telling him to back off.
But if he's large and intimidating, then you're going to feel angry at him and you're going to try and move him back from the situation in a peaceful and reasonable way.
Maybe you call the bouncer or call the police or whatever, right?
But you're going to return your environment, your interest to a place of security and safety.
That's the purpose of anger.
Which is why when you have chronic anger, it's because you're in chronic danger.
Now, why would you be in chronic danger?
So the secular view of things is different from the Christian view of things.
In the secular view of things, the brain is formed by a combination of nature, nurture, and choices.
It's a three-dimensional map, right?
Nature, nurture, and choices.
What you're born with, what you're exposed to, and the choices you make thereby.
Now, if you make consistently bad choices, you lose the ability to make good choices.
So you may have a particular set of...
Well, you will have a particular set of genetics in your brain.
You'll be exposed to a certain series of situations or environments or effects from others and general empirical environment.
And then you make these choices.
If you consistently make bad choices, you lose the ability to make good choices.
There is no glowing...
Nugget of Godhood within you that can't be corrupted.
Your brain is a physical organ.
It has a physical organ with the capacity for free will, which is our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
But your brain hardens.
It's like concrete. You can move concrete, you can shift concrete, you can mold concrete while it's in a malleable state, a softer state, and then it hardens.
Like polyfilla. Now, When it hardens, you can't mold it anymore.
And if you consistently make bad choices, which is really to avoid making any choices.
I mean, making bad choices is one thing.
If you consistently avoid making any choices at all, oh, that's kind of important.
And that's going to have an effect on the physical brain.
It's like smoking. If you keep smoking, that has an effect on your lungs.
Now, there aren't God's lungs in there that you can flip to.
There's no break in case of emergency, break in case of lung cancer, I'm going to get my emergency back up, lungs provided by God.
No, your lungs are your lungs. If you mess them up by smoking, I mean, you should quit smoking and exercise and do all the things that will help repair your lungs as best you can.
But if you keep smoking, your lungs will get worse and worse and worse.
If you don't exercise your muscles, your bones will get softer and softer and softer.
If you eat too much, your belly will get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And if a person tops 400 pounds, there's no thin person in there that you can contact and have all of that weight magically vanish.
So there's no abstract perfect thing inside you.
There is only the physical manifestation of your prior decisions.
To not exercise, to smoke people who drink too much.
Well, they have liver problems.
They have a wide variety of ailments.
They can get alcohol poisoning.
They become physically dependent upon alcohol to the point where quitting is extremely risky from a health standpoint without medical supervision.
Even then, it's tough. So there's no non-alcoholic buried inside the mind, heart, and body of an alcoholic that you can just magically contact or pray to or release.
Now, of course, in the born again, you have sin, you've created sin, but the sin all gets washed away.
You go through the process, you have the adult baptism, the Anabaptist-style baptism, and all of your sins are washed away.
Now, that's possible in the Christian worldview because you have a soul that is pure and cannot be corrupted.
Now, you make bad decisions and it's harmful to your soul, but you can't wreck the potential of your soul.
Now, again, I know that there's complications with regards to mortal sin and venal sins and so on, but I'm just talking sort of in general principles.
So, your anger is there to get you to a place of safety.
To restore you to a place of safety or get you there.
Now, if you have people in your life and you are religious, then you believe that they can be saved with the right combination.
That there's no such thing as permanent or irrevocable demonic possession.
That there's always the possibility of redemption no matter what.
Now, if that's true, then it makes sense to stay in contact with people who are doing evil so that you can save them, right?
If it's not true, in other words, if the more secular view is true, then people who make bad moral decisions over a long period of time get worse and worse and worse, and there is no turning back.
I mean, we know this physically, and physically this is not even in question, right?
People who don't learn empathy when they're young, or aren't taught empathy when they're young, they don't develop empathy.
It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen.
It's called character logic.
So character logic is when you don't have a problem, you are a problem.
Like, you're not a healthy person with a problem, your personality is warped and distorted.
And the observing ego, the part of you that looks at your choices and compares them to any kind of abstract or ideal standard, it doesn't exist.
It's physically not present.
So, There are 13 parts of the brain that all need to coordinate for you to have empathy and it generally needs to be taught very early on in life.
And people who are adults who have personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder, really pathological narcissism, the dark triad and so on, they can't be fixed.
They can't be fixed.
There's no healthy part in there that you just need to tap into.
There's no ritual, no washing of the body, nothing like that.
Nothing can be done to contact the original personality.
The brain has formed.
It's hardened. It can't be fixed.
Now, if that's true, then when you have dangerous people in your life, I think it's worth trying, as long as it's physically safe for you to do so.
I think it's worth trying. But you should try in order to gain certainty.
Now, if the people can change for the better, and they do, great, then your danger is lessened.
If people can't or won't change for the better, and the two are indistinguishable, and there's no particular way to tell.
Somebody who can't or somebody who won't, I have no idea what the difference in any practical sense is.
So, the question of forgiveness, if you can't separate from people because you believe you can fix them, then forgiveness becomes a necessity, otherwise you live in a state of chronic fear and anger.
Well, I mean, you're probably going to end up that way anyway because they're going to continue to remain dangerous in your life.
So, if you can't get safe from By getting distant, then your anger serves no purpose.
It's pointless. It's worse than pointless.
It's just a stressor without being able to change it.
So if you believe that you can fix people because there's a soul in there that you can contact and you can upgrade them to virtue and empathy through some sort of theological approach, magic perhaps, then being angry at them is unjust.
Because you can't get safe, so you might as well make friends or try and make friends.
Whereas if you can say, look, I can separate from dysfunctional or dangerous, immoral, destructive people, I can separate from them, then the anger is there to identify the problem.
The problem is solved through separation, through ostracism, and then you don't need to forgive that person because you're safe anyway.
You see what I'm saying? And because I am a secular materialist, because I am an empiricist, I respect the science of brain development,
which is that if people lose the observing ego, which can happen through trauma, through bad decisions, through any number of things, If you have, let's say you have a cousin who's a rampant drug addict, right? They steal, they cheat, they bring dangerous people to your house or whatever, right?
Okay, well, so you get angry, you get upset, you get afraid because you're in danger.
Now, let's say they've been an addict for 20 or 30 years and they have no interest in, they don't even admit that there's a problem, they have no interest in rehab.
Well, I think the rational thing to do at that point, you may want to state your case and say, get clean or get gone, but the rational approach, the material, scientific approach, is your anger is saying, I'm in danger. Your anger and your fear, your stress, your anxiety, I'm in danger.
How do you get yourself out of danger?
You get this person out of your life.
You get this person out of your life.
If, however, you believe that there's a prayer or a conversation or some sort of magic that can have that person be as if they were never addicted, then you really can't as easily ostracize that person because there's always a potential for a cure for healing, right?
So if you...
Imagine, right? So you come home and there's a...
I don't know.
You live in Florida. Florida man, right?
You come home and there's an alligator...
In your house. Well, you call pest control, the alligator gets removed.
So you feel fear, you feel stress, you feel maybe some anger, like who left the door open, let the gator in.
But you get the gator out of your house, right?
Once the gator is out of your house, you relax.
Remove the threat. Stress, your fear, fight or flight, it's all gone.
It may take a little while to calm down, but you get it, right?
If, however... For some reason or another, you have to now live with that gator.
You can't maintain the same level of stress and fear because you can't act on it for whatever reason.
Imagine you can't get rid of the gator for some reason.
Then you're going to have to alter your emotional relationship to the gator because you can't alter your physical relationship with the gator.
So if you can't get the gator out of your house, then you're going to have to start adjusting your own thoughts and feelings to downgrade the fight-or-flight response.
And this is what people do with dangerous people that they can't get out of their lives.
They imagine that forgiveness is how they're going to deal with this.
It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
And they believe that their love can cure people because their love reflects God's grace and the pure soul, the pure personality, the capacity for virtue that remains inside, out of the material.
So you might do a brain scan and you might see that the person is a total sociopath, right?
But because if you're religious, then you believe that there's a warm, caring soul inside the dark, empty, broken brain.
You've just got to find a way to coax it out, to connect with it, and so on.
Whereas if you're more materialistic, more secular, then you would say, okay, this person's a predator, they can't be fixed.
I can't regrow... Parts of their brain any more than I could regrow their arm if it was removed or fell off or something like that, bitten off, right?
They can't regrow the arm.
If you believe that you can regrow the arm or regrow the personality, you're going to hang around and try and fix it.
And then you're going to have to find some way to deal with your fight or flight and you're going to drape it over with this kind of forgiveness.
So if you can't get safe, forgiveness comes out as the backup.
All right. Am I an atheist or a Christian?
So, atheist means against God.
I do not accept the existence of a God, but Christianity is by far the most noble of all the belief systems with regards to morality.
All right. Talk about synchronicity.
A dead romance synchronicity.
Only yesterday you mentioned that lecturing someone who has been abused is insensitive to Yesterday, my sister sent me a photo of a bloody face she received from her boyfriend.
I immediately started lecturing her because she picks bad boyfriends after bad boyfriends and refuses to take any advice.
In 2013, I ended up in hospital defending our family from her psychopathic meth male friend, but I'm guilty of lecturing her instead of just listening.
She's already put an avo on her boyfriend, then took him back.
Avo, I assume that's some sort of restraining order.
Steph, how would you have handled this situation?
Um... Dude, seriously, what are you doing?
This is all so terrible.
This is all too terrible.
What are you doing? This is a disaster.
Defending our family from our psychopathic meth male friend?
If your sister is bringing dangerous, violent criminals into your environment, Get out!
I mean, you can have the conversation with her, you can suggest therapy, but I would imagine by this point it's...
So 10 years ago, so you're probably in your mid to late 30s, maybe your 40s.
10 years ago you were in hospital.
If she is the Venus flytrap for crazy violent people coming into your life, how is listening going to fix that?
I mean, she has given up her body.
She's given up her attachment to violent criminals.
You can't listen to her out of that.
You can't fix that. You understand?
Professionals have no idea how to fix this kind of behavior.
And you're not a professional.
I'm not a professional. So what are you doing enabling all of this kind of behavior?
To me it would be like, I'm not saying it's easy, but to me the solution would be, and I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just telling you what I would do.
What I would do is I'd just say, look, sis, last time I ended up in hospital, next time I could end up in the morgue, next time I could end up in jail, because self-defense is becoming an increasingly tenuous situation.
Legal principle these days.
And if I'm defending the family from one of your violent boyfriends and I happen to kill him by accident or severely wound or maim him and whatever, then I could get charged.
I could go to jail for the rest of my life.
Or I could get killed.
You know, I've got to have my own life.
This is the great thing about getting older, getting into your 20s, your 30s.
Is that you've got to have your own life.
And having your own life be dominated and dictated by your sister's terrible choice in boyfriends, okay, she's having her life, she's making her choices.
You have your life, and you make your choices.
Because I guarantee you, man, look, look, look what all this is costing you.
Can you imagine? Like, you meet some high-quality woman, you're interested, you like philosophy, and she finds out that you're in this tangled...
Relationship with your sister and her violent boyfriends.
She's not going to date you, man.
Your sister is robbing you of quality women.
You sacrificing your own future, your own safety, your own security, and she still keeps picking the bad boyfriends.
Who's winning here? She's winning. She's got to stop winning.
If you want people to change, if they have any capacity to change, and they're not doing it for their own free will, or you can't reason with them, then you simply have to Stop standing between them and the consequences of their choices.
Treat her as... This is the infantilization stuff.
I was talking about treat her as an adult.
She's an adult. If she wants to pick violent boyfriends, I think that's a shame.
You know, she calls you up, she's in tears, you beat me up.
It's like, yeah, that's...
Get help.
Get therapy. But I'm not in this right.
I'm not part of this drama.
I've got my own life to live.
It's very sad that you're making these decisions, but you have to face the consequences.
You're an adult. I would not sacrifice my life, my security, my safety, potentially my life, my physical integrity.
I would not sacrifice that because your sister chooses to have sex with violent men.
That's her deal, her choice.
And the idea that you would sacrifice your life to...
I mean, it's not even working, right?
It's not protecting her. She still keeps choosing these bad guys, right?
So it's not like you're achieving anything.
All you're doing is now she gets to destroy her life.
And yours. How is the two-for-one deal on the bullseye of evil fighting anything bad at all?
All right. With regards to Izzy's homeschooling, specifically around writing, do you put any emphasis on handwriting skills?
What are her thoughts on this herself, if you know?
I think it's helpful to be able to write by hand.
It's increasingly less important.
But yeah, she generally writes by hand.
It's something she likes to do, so...
Three questions in one live stream.
Now I'm being greedy, says somebody else.
Having listened to almost all your call-in shows, I notice sometimes when a caller discloses that they have suffered abuse, whether that might be physical, sexual, or verbal, you might often follow up with questions about the specific nature of that, albeit in a sensitive way with no pressure for them to disclose.
This often stands out to me most on the topic of sexual abuse, when you might inquire as to how far that abuse went and what form it took.
Is there a reason why the detail or depth of the abuse, particularly when it relates to physical or sexual, is something you sensitively inquire about without making it a key focus of the call?
Best wishes, Steph. Well, thank you.
Yeah, I mean, I think, from my perspective, and of course anybody who calls in is free to speak or not speak about anything they want, but to me, if somebody says, I was molested as a child, There are so many layers of gradation about that.
And to me, if I'm going to try and help them with trying to figure out what's going on in their life, then I need to know, or at least it's very helpful for me to know, how bad it was.
Molestation could be, you know, somebody grabbing your butt through your pants.
It could be somebody grabbing your genitals through your pants.
It could go all the way through to the most vile and evil stuff.
It's all evil, but even worse, right?
So, I need to know, or at least I think it's important to know, how much control was exerted over their body.
And so, for how long and to what degree?
And that allows me to sort of calibrate my response and allows me to sort of figure out what effect potentially it had on the personality and how it might be manifesting in the present.
But, you know, it's when you go to the doctor, right, and you say, I've got a pain in my side.
Oh, how bad is it, right? When did it start?
How long has it been going on and how bad is it?
So how long did it go on and how bad was it?
If you've just got a mild little ache, that's one thing.
If you have a giant stabbing pain that's been going on for a week, that's another thing.
So I think the length and degree is important to try and figure things out.
It allows me to empathize further with them.
So if there's a woman who was severely sexually abused and she's overweight, then we would assume that there may be some relationship there.
We would start with that potential relationship, that because her body was...
the physical attractiveness of her body was traumatizing to her, she would work then to make her body less attractive to avoid that kind of trauma.
Whereas if it was relatively, quote, mild, which just means so bad, of course, right, but relatively mild...
If it was like, well, there was, you know, some girl says, you know, when I was five, a boy showed me his pee-pee and I showed him my vagina and so on, right?
That's not at the same level, of course, of negativity as, you know, serial rape as a child and so on.
So it's just a way of trying to figure out where the manifestations of the prior trauma may be occurring.
Oh, right. Hi, Steph.
You mentioned in another podcast that you were engaged and broke off the engagement.
Do you have any advice for people to process the emotions around breaking off an engagement?
Well, the problem with me, with my engagement, wasn't the woman...
She was, I mean, I think we kind of both recognized it was not the right thing for us.
She actually helped, like, so we were living together and she helped me find a new place and helped me move and, you know, we kind of got that this was not the thing for us.
So I didn't have any particular issues with her and I sort of wished her the best and so on, right?
But the problem, of course, was my friends and family of ours.
The real problem is not the disasters that happen to you.
It's all the people who watch the disasters happening to you in slow motion over years and don't do a damn thing to help you.
So all the people who claim to love me, claim to care about me, who saw me enmeshed in a potential massive disaster.
A potential massive disaster.
You get married to the wrong one.
I mean, geez, just ask Prince Harry, you know, or Will Smith, or Johnny Depp, you know, who you choose as your wife's.
Most important decision you'll ever make.
And I had family members who helped me pick out a ring.
I didn't have anyone who said, are you really happy?
Is this going to really work for you?
Is this a positive thing for you?
It was, as I've mentioned before, it was just a friend of mine's girlfriend who said, yeah, you know, normally people who are engaged kind of happier, aren't they?
Just one chance comment, man, one chance comment.
This is why I'll never stop talking to people about things in the world.
One chance comment can save a life.
But it's really sad when you're enmeshed in a dozen relationships of people who claim to really care about you that you have to just wait for one crumb to fall off the master's table in order to not starve to death, right?
You have to wait for it to rain despite everyone around you having bottles of water for you to get a damn bit of drink.
So that's the real.
The real tragedy is not a big bad breakup.
That's tough for sure, but the real tragedy is, okay, all these people around me, most people have six to twelve people around them who claim to really care about them.
So it's all the people who claim to love you, claim to care about you, claim to want the best for you, all these wonderful things, right?
And I mean, there's really only two possibilities, right?
Either A, they really don't care about you at all, or B, they care about you but have absolutely no idea what's good or bad for you.
They have no idea if you're in a good relationship or a bad relationship.
They have no idea whether you're happy or unhappy.
They have no idea whether where you're going is the right path or the wrong path.
I mean, I guess there's a third possibility, which is they know what's good for you but they want to sabotage you.
Which is why it's really, really incredibly dangerous, incredibly dangerous to have people around you who have opposite metaphysics and epistemology and ethics because they're rooting for your failure.
They're rooting for your failure because if you're wrong, they could be right.
And look, deep down, you're rooting for their failure as well.
It's really like when you have opposite metaphysics, opposite epistemology, in particular, opposite ethics, then you're in a relationship It's like you're on a doubles team, I don't know, pickleball or tennis, and you want your partner to miss the shot.
I mean, that's completely messed up, right?
Because you're a team. You're supposed to want each other to succeed.
But you want your partner to miss the shot.
You're desperate for your partner to miss the shot.
What the hell are you doing? It's a terrible team to be on.
So, yeah, the problem with breakups is everyone around you who didn't warn you, who didn't notice, who didn't help, Who didn't help prevent disaster.
Why? Why?
Well, I didn't want to get involved.
What are you talking about, didn't want to get involved?
You say that you care about me.
You've been a friend of mine. I've had friends of mine.
I had friends for, my God, let me just do this math briefly, right?
I had friends for over 20 years.
My gosh, 25 years.
I had friends of a quarter century who didn't lift a goddamn finger to prevent me sailing off into this kind of disaster.
25 people in my family who'd known me for well over three decades.
Didn't say a damn thing.
I'm like, okay, well, if you're all just going to sit there and sip some decaf lattes while a tractor rolls over me in slow motion, how on earth can I rely on anyone of you to give me feedback, keep me safe?
Because we all need that. If people claim to care about us, then they should notice what's bad for us and help us pursue the good and avoid the bad.
If they don't care about us enough to do that, then they don't care about us.
If they have no idea what's good or bad, then they can't care about us because how can we be good if they have no idea what's good or bad?
If they have no idea what's good or bad for us, then they don't know us at all, in which case how the hell can they claim to care about us?
This is why people stay in bad relationships.
It's not because of the bad relationship.
It's because of all the other bad relationships that get revealed.
Right? It's like this.
You walk in with all your friends and family.
20 people, 30 people, 40 people.
All your friends and family. Walk in in the woods, right?
And there's a sign that says, quicksand ahead.
And for some reason...
You're talking to someone, you missed a sign, right?
And then your family, your friends, all the people who really love you, say, oh, I love you so much, I love you so much.
Oh, your friends and your family watch you walking forward and slowly start sinking into the quicksand.
And they keep walking like nothing's happening.
And you really start to panic, right?
You see, when you're waist, you can't get out.
Every time you move your legs, you sink further down.
Maybe things grabbing at you from below.
Like, you're really panicking and freaking out.
And everyone's just sitting around chitting and chatting and all that, right?
And then, after an hour or two, you finally manage to wrestle yourself out in the most superhuman...
You broke a rib, you pulled half your muscles, your hamstrings are, your ankles twisted, your hamstrings are a mess.
You finally get out, panting, your teeth bloody from the gritting strain.
What's your relationship to the people who didn't even warn you from walking into quicksand and didn't help you when you were in there?
Well, what are you going to say?
You understand, it's not the quicksand that's the problem.
It's all the people who let you walk in and didn't help you out.
Do you think that it's philosophically appropriate, says somebody else, to give people enough rope to hang themselves with?
In our world today, so many poisons exist that it becomes near impossible to avoid things that may harm you.
For those in power that wish to remain philosophical, would banning raising taxes or making it any way harder to get one's hands on cigarettes, soda, porn, etc.
be appropriate? Or would the philosopher in power be accurate in allowing these things while pursuing other means of deterrence like public awareness campaigns?
Well, that's all playing whack-a-mole with the effects of child abuse, right?
Which is why this show has always focused on the prevention of child abuse.
Once you have an anti-rational, traumatized, dysfunctional population that has been propagandized into believing the most unbelievable nonsense, you're not in a situation which philosophy can fix.
A nutritionist can't fix a heart attack.
So philosophy is all about prevention.
Hello, Steph. What are your thoughts on Stoicism?
Well, Stoicism is basically the idea that there's a lot of suffering in life.
It's sort of the Peterson thing, right?
There's a lot of suffering in life, and the pursuit of hedonism ends up in misery because there's just so much damn suffering in life.
Well, I don't believe that there's that much suffering in life at all.
I think there is suffering in life, of course, right?
But I don't believe that there's that much suffering in life.
And the problem with believing that there's a lot of suffering in life is because you normalize it, you end up in bad relationships.
Because, well, you know, relationships are always going to have dysfunction.
It's like all the people who say, oh man, marriage is a lot of work, relationships are at work, you've got to really work it.
It's like, no, you don't. You already have a job.
Your relationship should be your safe harbor.
It should be a place where you go to have fun, to connect, to laugh, to love, to make love, to all these beautiful things.
The idea that relationships are a lot of work, Well, then if you're in a bad relationship where you keep having to prop things up and it is a lot of work, you say, well, that's the norm with all relationships at work.
And dysfunctional people will always tell you relationships at work when what they mean is I'm high-maintenance.
I'm crazy. I'm neurotic.
I'm high-strung. I'm difficult.
I'm volatile. I'm angry. I'm obstructive.
Bad-tempered. So, I don't like stoicism and the normalization of suffering in life.
Alright, hello Steph. I just saw a video by the Jolly Heretic that argued...
Oh, that's the spiteful mutant guy, right?
...that argued that women who don't or can't breastfeed don't love their children.
His argument is that oxytocin is what pushes the milk out of the nipples, so if you can't produce it, it's because you can't bond with your kid.
I mean, there is a lot of issues of postpartum depression.
I think Brooke Shields sort of famously talked about this, and this is what Tom Cruise was criticizing, famously talked about this in a book, I've never read it, called And the Rain Came Down, or something like that.
She had terrible postpartum depression.
But in my view, she was really exploited in pretty horrible ways when she was a little girl.
She was in some pretty explicit advertisements and so on, and was really heavily exploited, and God knows what happened to her when she was little in the hellscape of the entertainment industry.
So... I think that when women have had, I talked about this, I think, just the other day on the show, just this very deep, deep relationship between women's unconscious and their bodies.
You know, like this long COVID, that there's a lot of women who claim to be having long COVID, and when they are examined, their blood is examined for COVID antibodies, turns out they never even had COVID. But they're convinced that they have long COVID, all these symptoms.
Now, I'm not going to just say hypochondria and so on, but the relationship between women's unconscious and their body is very powerful, very deep.
And if a woman had a very difficult infancy, if her mother was depressed and absent, then when she has a baby, all of those deep memories, I think, are reactivated and cause a huge amount of depression.
It's triggering, right? So I think that that could happen.
But I wouldn't blame the women.
Maybe they should have dealt with their trauma before they had kids.
I think it's pretty important to deal with your trauma before you have kids.
Maybe they didn't even remember it though.
I mean, it was all buried in family history and there are lots of pictures of them being happy as babies and their parents have never talked to them about what happened and there's never been any honesty about what happened.
Maybe the mom was depressed or maybe the kid was dumped in daycare or whatever, right?
I mean, I know my mom was heavily depressed after she had me and spent months literally in the hospital.
It was just so bad. And this was much to my benefit because I ended up with an aunt who just She adored me and we bonded so well she actually named one of her kids after me later and I think that was one of the things that really saved my bacon so to speak.
So I wouldn't necessarily say that it's a moral failing on the part of the women but certainly breastfeeding is natural and healthy and positive but there are some mechanical issues that can happen outside of psychological issues.
What might make some families very tactile when greeting and around each other and other families not?
For example, I mean hugging or a kiss on the cheek when meeting.
As a follow-up, I wonder where your family lands on the spectrum.
If that question is a little too personal, then please accept my apologies and feel free to ignore it.
I appreciate that. So, family tactile-ness.
I think has something to do with temperature.
So, when you live in a warm temperature, you live in a warm climate, then you don't have to seal yourself up against the cold for half the year.
Now, as you know, a cold is called a cold because it happens in winter, but it doesn't happen in winter because people are cold.
Your body temperature has nothing to do with whether or not you get a cold.
They've actually done studies where people have chilled people enormously and the people who are physically cold don't get the cold virus or get cold symptoms any more than people who are comfortable temperature.
So when you lack ventilation because of the cold, then there are viruses, there are illnesses that will pass by touch.
So it's kind of famous, and I don't think it's 100%, but it's kind of famous that The more north you go, with some exceptions, like Inuit and so on, the more north you go, the chillier you get.
So the French people are kind of demonstrative, Italian people even more so, British people or English people less so, and then Scottish people even less so, and so on, right?
Well, that's because the colder the climate gets, the less air circulation there is for a good chunk of the year, and therefore more physical touching and affection and kissing and so on is more likely to spread germs, which is why you tend to see a lot of physical affection in warmer climates and so on.
That's my guess. I have no idea.
My family, not super huggy, but not cold either.
All right. Um, hey Steph, so it's nearly Christmas, and I'm curious when you and the missus decided to tell Izzy Santa wasn't real.
Oh, she figured that went out all on her own, and what?
And when? Thanks so much.
I, uh, well, I would never tell.
I would never tell my daughter that something that's not real is real at all.
Oh my gosh. No, no, no, no.
I'd like her to be able to trust me.
I'm a lighter. So, um, yeah, Santa, anyway, Santa is a wonderful story.
It's a lovely story. It's a fun story.
You know, I mean, when you watch Toy Story or something, you don't present it to your kids as a documentary.
You say, this is a fun story.
And Santa is a fun story about generosity and logical puzzles, like how does he get all the way around the world and so on.
And so, yeah, it's a fun, nice, pleasant story, unfortunately, and I've seen it.
Like, some parents use this to say...
You're on the naughty list. You're going to get cold.
You've got to be obedient. You've got to be a good boy or Santa's not going to give you presents.
So, no, it's a fun story and we presented it as a fun story.
But, you know, and then we'd say, well, how do we know it's a story and not real?
And, you know, you can turn it into a sort of little exercise on physics.
All right. Let's see here.
Do you have any thoughts on what might cause a person to seek friends significantly older than themselves and be less seeking your friends their own age?
As additional information is required, since my late teens, I've always held two or three significant friendships with people in their 40s or 50s.
And now as I reach my mid-30s, the same is true with my friends in the 50s to 70s.
Generally, I find these people have a lot of wisdom to offer and don't see their age as a negative.
I don't see their age as a negative.
Yeah, so somebody writes back and says abused kids are usually prematurely mature.
Maybe there's something to do with it.
If you lacked a father figure or a mother figure of wisdom, right?
Mother or father of wisdom.
Then you may be drawn to older people who have life experience so that you can avoid the mistakes that are often made by people who lack sort of wisdom.
I mean, this is why I was so desperate for philosophy because I just didn't have anybody around me who knew their ass from a hole on the ground and could tell me anything useful in any way, shape or form about how to live.
So, my guess is that you lack a wisdom figure.
The benefits are, of course, that you get wisdom figures who are older.
The problem is, of course, that the more friends you have who are older, well, they usually have friends their own age, which means that they're less likely to introduce you to a potential mate.
So, somebody else, I'm really moral, good, caring, loyal, honest, and other things.
On the other hand, I had a bad marriage and a child, and another bad marriage.
Red flags? Am I worth a sane woman?
If so, why would she choose me?
Isn't that fair to say that I have to accept her having red flags too?
If a moral woman called you and described a guy like me, what would you say to her?
We talked in a call-in show. I still can't answer this question.
She says, I'm really moral, good, caring, loyal, honest, and other things.
Okay. You had a bad marriage and a child and another bad, so you're twice divorced and you have had a child.
I don't know if the bad marriage and a bad child or just a bad marriage and a child.
Okay, so by what standards?
It's a tough question, right?
By what standards would you say you're really moral, good, caring, loyal, honest, and other things?
If you have all of these virtues, why do you pour your resources into dysfunctional relationships?
To me, it's the same. If somebody keeps investing in businesses and losing all their money, right?
Say Bob. Bob is an investor.
And every time Bob's investing in a business, he loses all of his money.
And then he says, well, that's kind of weird because I'm a fantastic investor.
But every time I invest my money in a business, it goes bankrupt and I lose everything.
Okay, then I would say, by what standard would you say you're a fantastic investor?
You're a wise, smart, good money manager.
You're really good at understanding macro and microeconomics and business management leadership styles and market conditions.
You're a fantastic investor.
But every time you invest, you lose all your money.
I would say that there's a detachment there.
And the detachment probably has something to do with vanity, right?
Because I'm trying to think.
Would I describe myself as really moral, good, caring, loyal, honest, and other things?
I would say that I have...
I have close to as much honesty and morality and integrity as society will permit without, you know, throwing you off a cliff, right?
I mean, this is Socrates' argument, and my ancestors.
One of them was drawn and quartered because he asked questions of authority, so...
But if you say, well, I'm really good and I'm really moral, but you keep marrying immoral or destructive or dysfunctional women, and a child is now suffering because of these choices, I would have questions about what your standards are.
Because empirically, you don't achieve these virtues.
And I'm not saying you're a bad person or anything, I'm just saying that empirically, your description of yourself doesn't match with the empirical evidence.
And when your description of yourself doesn't match the empirical evidence that you're giving me, then you're open to manipulation.
Manipulation fundamentally happens when you're avoiding truth within yourself.
Then somebody else comes along and manipulates you because you're avoiding honesty about yourself.
If you're avoiding honesty about yourself, then you are disconnected from the instincts that We'll tell you that people are manipulating you.
So I'm happy to call in again if you want to do another call in, but that would be my sort of first thought.
Why do you think some families say, I love you all the time?
Does it come from insecurity or is it just easier to say it than to do it?
I tell my wife I love her every day.
I tell my daughter I love her every day.
But I'm actually acting it that way.
Of course, it's a lot easier to say I love you than to actually do the things that love requires.
Let's see here. Your recent call-ins have all hit very close to home for me.
One of the things you've said about setting boundaries with abusive parents has stuck with me.
That is to refuse to have conversations with them that have nothing to do with the pain they've inflicted on you.
What do you do when an abusive parent is willing to have those conversations about the past, even apologize, but then walks back that apology or says or does something that shows you there has been no real growth or change?
Well, then you're being played. You're being manipulated.
Let's see here. It'd be cool to do a live stream where you ask that open AI chatbot philosophical questions.
I'm curious to see how biased it is.
It's not open AI. It's not even remotely close to open AI. Open AI would have access to the internet, and AI has sort of famously come to conclusions that go counter to leftist narratives if it's given access to actual real data and so on, right?
So I don't think that there's open AI at all.
It's all programmed. Why is child sexual abuse so tragically common, says someone, given that it doesn't make obvious sense from an evolutionary perspective?
You know, it's a big question.
I don't obviously know the answer.
Certainly human beings are sexually programmable.
In other words, when you're born, you don't know what is considered attractive or unattractive in your tribe or your environment.
So sexual imprinting is very important for human beings and therefore early sexual imprinting of sexual relations with children has a very strong effect and I think may reorient someone in that way.
And I also view it as the younger the person you can reproduce with, the more likely they are to be your genes.
And I think this can go truly pathological and so on.
Why do you think Elon is increasing the character count of tweets from 280 to 4,000?
Well, I would assume, because he's a brilliant businessman, that he's doing that in order to drive engagement on the site.
There's more engagement when there is a longer character count.
In other words, he's done the research.
He's done A-B testing. There's internal documents or some sort of research that says that more people will come if there are higher character counts.
Not super deep, but how did you obtain your very good friends?
Did they come to you by listening to your podcast?
Just curious. Yes, I'm trying to think of the friends that I have in my life now.
Not all of them have come through the podcast, but all of them know about the podcast and so on, right?
Let's see here.
Let's get that one.
Ooh, so here we go.
I think we... Oh my gosh, I think we made it to the end almost.
So that's fantastic. Listen, guys, thank you so much.
I will publish this, of course, to subscribers if you don't mind it going out to the general public.
I think there was some very interesting things here as well.
I would really appreciate that.
You can let me know in the thread.
Just hit me with an N if you don't want it to go out.
If you can tell me a little bit why, I would appreciate that.
But I think...
Those are fantastic questions.
I really, really, of course, massively appreciate your very kind thoughts and support in what it is that I'm doing.
So yeah, appreciate that.
Love you guys so much.
Have a great, great day.
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