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Dec. 22, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:29:48

Wednesday Night Live December 21, 2022!

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	Yeah, hair and makeup time.
	Hold tight. Can't believe I'm 56.
	Still get the occasional pimple.
	How are you guys doing this evening?
	Welcome, welcome, welcome.
	And I'm happy to take your questions.
	It is your show.
	As always, I am here for you.
	And as best as I can serve philosophy through...
	Answering your questions. I am your willing slave to the rhythm.
	All right. Let's get straight into it.
	Is there any good reason for a random male to end up in your partner's inbox?
	I think the saying, slide into the DMs, is about a nefarious man sending out the instant messenger equivalent of cold calls.
	Any thoughts, Steph? I mean, men are going to shoot their shot, right?
	I mean, if you're going for a woman who's single, it's 1v20.
	If you're going for a woman who's in a relationship, it's 1v1.
	So free markets in relationships are a great thing, and you should remember that.
	Never take your relationship for granted.
	Always make sure you're providing value and the other person is delighted to see you.
	Always ask for feedback about how you're doing.
	Always ask if there's anything in any way, shape, or form that you can do better that's going to make your partner happier.
	And then you can have her cross the wide world without any fear whatsoever.
	Have you watched the recent Star Wars show called And Or?
	And would you be considering doing it for you?
	So I lost interest in Star Wars, I don't know, 30 years ago or so.
	I lost interest in Star Wars. I thought the first movie was fun.
	I actually had the LP. I had the LP of the first movie, and I thought it was a lot of fun.
	Like all kids, I liked the...
	All kids who grew up by their father fantasize about lightsabers as a phallic power symbol, right?
	That's sort of inevitable.
	And... I'm a 45-year-old woman.
	Not me. This is a listener.
	Getting married. In January to the man of my dreams, I found by a miracle after much self-knowledge acquired by years of listening to you.
	But I still feel paralyzed with lots of anxiety about being the center of attention, likely due to extreme neglect and narcissistic upbringing.
	This may need to be a call-in show, but any advice to jumpstart my actions?
	And if not, can you schedule a call-in with me soonest?
	Yeah, just email me references.
	Email me at callinatfreedomain.com and I will move you to the top of the queue.
	I did a call in today with a woman about your age who's got problems in her relationship.
	So I guess I'll be doing my mid-40s lady fest.
	So don't let trolls steal your relationship with yourself.
	If you were in a relationship, look, this is how I deal with the world as a whole.
	If you were in a relationship with the love of your life, And someone came on into your life trash-talking the love of your life, right?
	You've got a wonderful boyfriend, a wonderful husband, and someone comes in and says, oh, that person, he's terrible, he's trash, he's a Nazi, whatever, right?
	If they just started verbally abusing your husband, would you listen to them?
	Would you be like, oh, yes, maybe you've got a point, maybe he is, right?
	No, you wouldn't. Because...
	Your rational love for your husband would overwhelm all nonsense verbal abuse that would come pouring into your ear by the Iagos of the world who just want to set people against themselves because they're miserable bastards without a single shred of happiness to spark together any joy in their life.
	So why would you have more loyalty to your husband than you would to yourself?
	Fundamentally, you can't have more loyalty to anything than you have to yourself.
	You can't have more loyalty to anything than you have to yourself.
	I can't have more loyalty to philosophy than I have to me because I can't pursue philosophy unless I believe that I'm worthy of it, that I'm worthy of happiness, that I'm worthy of reason, that I'm worthy of love, that I'm worthy of truth.
	There's an old saying in the world of personal finance, pay yourself first, right?
	Pay your savings first.
	Save first. Pay yourself first.
	It's the same thing. Don't worry about what's out there in the world later.
	Doesn't matter. What matters is can you look in the mirror and like what you see?
	Can you look in the mirror and enjoy being yourself?
	Do you have self-respect?
	Do you have pride? Are you generating good things in the world?
	Are you facing the bad guys and supporting the good guys to whatever degree you can or want to?
	Do you have pride?
	Do you have self-respect? Once you've earned that, would you consider ordering something and then it came and then you wouldn't pay the bill?
	That's stealing, right? If you've earned respect for yourself, if you've done good in the world, if you've survived bad things without becoming evil, if you've survived wrong without becoming a wrongdoer, if you've done good in the world, then you have created a debt to yourself.
	Even if all you've managed to do, if you've had great evil done to you in the world, when you were a child usually, if all you've been able to do is not reproduce that, not echo that back out into the world.
	If you've been beaten, but you never beat anyone.
	If you've been wronged, but you don't wrong people.
	If you've been lied to, but you don't lie to people.
	If you've been put down, the best thing to do is to elevate people.
	But that's not necessary for you to have self-respect.
	If you've been put down unjustly, which, you know, as a kid, it is always unjust to put the kid down.
	If you've been put down and all you've been able to achieve is not putting other people down, you've created a debt to yourself.
	That debt has to be paid with self-respect.
	Don't fail to pay your debts.
	Don't steal. If you wouldn't order a $20 doodad online and then not pay for it while enjoying it and keeping it, the hell does a $20 doodad online mean compared to your own relationship with yourself?
	You understand? Pay your debts if you've done good.
	Or restrained yourself from doing evil when you've had evil done unto you?
	Pay yourself first.
	Think of yourself in the third person.
	It's called observing ego.
	Think of yourself in the third person.
	If you survived a brutalized childhood without reproducing evil as an adult, and maybe you've done dysfunctional stuff, and maybe you've been a little mean or whatever, right?
	But I'm talking about really recreated evil as an adult.
	If you heard the story of yourself, if you heard the story of yourself in the third person, somebody else, somebody came into your life and told you the story of themselves, but it was your story, what would you say to that person?
	Wow, great job surviving a bad childhood, man.
	Great job and really honorably pursuing virtue and avoiding evil and good for you.
	I'm so sorry for what happened to you, but man, you've done a noble thing.
	You played a noble hand, but the cards you were dealt.
	They burned, but you didn't pass them on to anyone else, right?
	So you're given a flaming cannonball when you have child abuse, and the great temptation is to hurl that cannonball at other people in order to get some relief from the burning and the pain yourself.
	And if you've not done that, if you've restrained that, you know, Spider-Man and the front of the subway car, right?
	You've created a debt to yourself.
	Now, The people who abused you, they don't want you to pay that debt.
	They don't want you to have self-respect.
	They don't want the evil they did to you being used, ninja style, the momentum of your enemy to turn you into a good person.
	They don't want that. So Noel is saying, it's in Christianity.
	It comes out of C.S. Lewis, it comes out of the screw tape letters.
	The devil tempts you with gluttony and instead you become an ascetic.
	The devil tempts you with lust, so you become monogamous.
	The devil tempts you with greed, so you become charitable.
	The devil tempts you with vanity, so you become modest.
	Nothing enrages the devil more than you turning to good, his temptations to evil, because then he is causing you to become good.
	He's causing you to become virtuous, which is the last thing that he wants.
	So the evildoers in your life want you to To collapse into self-hatred, into self-contempt, into feeling unworthy and therefore they get to punish you beyond the grave, beyond contact, beyond reason, beyond proximity.
	They get to be immortal because they punish you, you punish yourself, you punish your children or you infect them with self-punishment and their children and their children, they get to live forever.
	They are immortal vampires.
	Of self-contempt. Don't pay other people's debts.
	Don't pay debts that other people have entered into on behalf of you.
	Don't listen to assholes about who you are.
	You feel paralyzed, anxiety about being the center of attention.
	Thank you.
	Because you're letting evil people define your relationship with yourself.
	If you don't agree with evil, what power does it have?
	And I'm not talking like, of course, gun to the head and prison camps and archipelagos and gulags.
	I'm just talking about the evil people in your personal life.
	What happens if you just don't agree with them?
	I mean, listen, you all know the number of slurs and insults and vile contemptible phrases hurled at me in the world, in the present, in the moment.
	I don't agree, obviously.
	It's completely wrong. It's abusive.
	What power do you have in the world if you require proof?
	If you require proof. Everybody who insulted you when you were a child was infinitely worse than anything you could have ever done as a child.
	The parents, oh, you're selfish.
	All you think about is yourself.
	You're a bad kid.
	You didn't listen. You showed no respect.
	You were aggressive. To insult a child, particularly a child that you raise, It's schizo.
	It's mad.
	Beyond mad. It's vile.
	It would be like me carving a statue and then saying, that statue is the most vile and ugly thing in the known universe.
	That statue is evil. I'm going to destroy the statue because the statue is just bad and wrong.
	As if I had no hand in creating the statue.
	Now, of course, parents don't shape children in the same way that we shape a statue because a statue is inanimate.
	Marble is inanimate. But the analogy holds in general.
	You say, I was extreme neglect.
	What is extreme neglect?
	What does it communicate to you?
	You really neglected as a child.
	What does that communicate to you?
	I can tell you what it communicates to you.
	It communicates to you that you're not interesting.
	You're not interesting. Take a Shakespearean sonnet to your average half-braindead high school graduate and have him or her read it.
	I don't get it, man. It's weird language.
	What the hell? Just say what you mean.
	I don't know the flowery bullshit.
	Does that mean that Shakespeare is without value because Shakespeare is not understood by idiots?
	If you're neglected, then you perceive yourself as to be without value, without being interested, without the capacity to hold anybody else's attention.
	And I understand that.
	That's a perfectly natural and healthy response to being neglected as a child, to blame yourself.
	I mean, because your parents demand that you blame yourself.
	All you did was you stayed in your room, man.
	You wouldn't talk to me about anything.
	You just played on your computer or wrote in your notebooks and you just lived in your own bubble, man.
	You lived in your own world and I couldn't connect with you at all.
	Children are just desperate for connection.
	They're desperate for conversation.
	They're desperate for feedback.
	They don't want to invent the wheel all themselves.
	What if you just don't agree?
	Thank you.
	What if you don't agree? That you were neglected.
	Why were you neglected? You were neglected because your parent could not supply what you needed.
	If you have a narcissistic or selfish parent, the narcissistic or selfish parent cannot look at you as an entity unto yourself.
	It's too scaldingly painful to them.
	It's holy water that burns their corrupted and rotten souls.
	They were ignored. They blamed themselves.
	They don't feel interesting.
	And then to treat you as if you're interesting would be to confront their own history of being neglected and abused.
	To treat your children better than you were treated is to criticize your parents.
	Understand this, right?
	To treat, this is why it's so hard to do.
	To treat your children better than you were treated can only be achieved by criticizing your parents in the most foundational and fundamental ways possible.
	You can't be, if you had abusive parents, you can't be an angel to your children without demonizing your parents.
	Demonizing your parents, I know this is an awkward phrase, but demonizing just means recognizing the evil that they did.
	You can't go the right direction until you recognize that other people went in the wrong direction, the people who carried you along in the surf of their own selfishness and indifference.
	Your parents neglected you, if you were neglected, because it would provoke a suicidal depression in them to treat you well.
	It would provoke a suicidal depression in them to treat you well.
	To treat you well would be to confront their own pain, their own history, and the evils that they did long before you came along, they'd have to confront all of that.
	Whether they can, whether they can't, we know that they didn't, at least in your case, right?
	How can people want to pay attention to me if my parents didn't want to pay attention to me?
	But that's to internalize your parents' lies about why they didn't pay attention to you.
	Well, you just stayed in your room, man.
	You didn't engage. You didn't come out.
	You didn't talk to us. You're lost in your own world.
	You had your own fantasy life. You had your invisible friends.
	We couldn't get it. That's all a nonsense.
	It's all a lie.
	It's all a complete and total lie.
	Your parents didn't pay any attention to you because they couldn't criticize their own parents.
	Parenting was ignoring children.
	You ended up staying in your room because your parents weren't paying attention to you.
	It's not that your parents didn't pay attention to you because you stayed in your room or whatever you did.
	Just don't believe it.
	Don't believe the surface lies that people make up to cover up their own evils.
	Just don't even remotely believe it.
	Anybody who abuses a child will lie about it.
	Please understand that the physics of the universe, this is more certain than gravity and electromagnetism.
	Anybody who abuses a child will lie about it relentlessly, eternally, fundamentally, foundationally.
	You believe none of them, believe nothing that comes out of their mouth unless it's an apology, a restitution.
	Believe nothing. You've got a voice in your head.
	You couldn't say to your parents, you're ignoring me because you were ignored as a child and you can't criticize your own parents.
	That may be a very sophisticated thought for a child.
	You can't say that. Because if you try to push abusive parents together with their own history of being abused as children, it's like, you know, you get explosions.
	You get abandonment. You get, I mean, historically you would be viewed as a demon and killed.
	Infanticide is how we evolve. We can't afford to screw around when it comes to pleasing our parents.
	Evolutionarily speaking, you cause that much...
	You put the live wires together of being a victim and being a victimizer to your parents.
	You can't even do that in society 99 times out of 100.
	You certainly can't do it with your own parents who have dominance, power and control over you.
	So they lied to you about you not being interesting.
	It's called Tower Grapes.
	You know, the story out of Aesop's Fables is the fox is walking down the lane and there's a trellis and on the top of the trellis are these grapes and the fox's mouth waters and he just wants the grapes so much.
	He's so thirsty and they're so sweet.
	He just can't wait to eat the grapes.
	And he jumps up and he can't get them.
	He tries clawing up the side of the trellis.
	He just can't get up there. He tries for like half an hour.
	He's exhausted. His muscles are trembling.
	He's sweating. He can't get the grapes.
	So what does he do? Throws his head up high, spits on the ground, says, ah, those grapes were sour anyway.
	I don't want them. It's called sour grapes, right?
	Your parents can't connect with you.
	But rather than confront why they can't connect with you, which is their own history of being abused as children, They simply say, well, you were too tough to connect with.
	The problem is you. The problem is yours.
	You were the problem. I tried everything right.
	You didn't listen. You didn't respond.
	It's your fault. It's cowardly.
	It's contemptible. You can't confront parents on that.
	Confronting parents with their own immorality is suicide.
	I mean, it would literally have been suicide throughout most of human history, and it's pretty damn dangerous even now.
	So, you don't want to judge yourself through the eyes of evil people.
	Can you imagine me trying to do this show, judging myself by how some people talk about me, how some organizations talk about me?
	Can you imagine me trying to get out of bed judging myself by words that some people use about me?
	Come on. Can you imagine me trying to run this show If I listened to and agreed with what teachers or professors or advisors, what they said about me?
	No. I couldn't do it.
	You can't really imagine because it's a very abstract thing for you guys, very vivid for me.
	If I had listened to what my friends and family of origin told me about me, I couldn't do this show.
	Don't let evil people tell you who you are.
	I mean, we have to as children.
	I understand that. But when you become an adult, you're going to put away the childish things.
	You put away your Slinky.
	You put away your, for me, the Atari 800 single-stick red-button controllers.
	You put away your children's bicycle.
	You put away your tiny shoes, your booties.
	You put away your childish things.
	Of course, you have to grow up, right?
	We all do. Well, we should.
	And as a child, you had to nod along when evil people told you who you are.
	You had to nod along when evil people told you who you are.
	They defined you to you.
	You had to nod along to survive because they were going to escalate until you complied or died.
	It's a general pattern of history, right?
	Then you grow up, you become an adult, you become independent, and what do you do?
	You respect the passage of time and the independence you have as an adult and you simply refuse to be defined by evildoers.
	Right? Isn't that what's called surviving?
	Isn't that what's called honesty and integrity?
	If my mother goes gambling And runs up a $10,000 debt.
	Let's say it's a legal gambling establishment.
	Do I pay it?
	No. I don't pay other people's debts.
	I'm not going to pay a debt for my mother's failure to process her own childhood trauma.
	I'm not going to pay that debt by defining myself.
	The people who thirst and lust for power, who insult good people, good people shouldn't pay their debts.
	I don't verbally abuse people.
	And I'm not going to pay the debts of people enmeshed in corruption, child soul murder and verbal abuser.
	I'm not going to pay their debts. They have to live with their own conscience.
	I'm not stepping in between the retaliation of the internalized conscience and what they've done.
	I'm not going to pay that. Why would I? There's an old Richard Gere movie about China when he was pro-Tibet because of his Buddhist leanings.
	In the early 90s, he made a movie very critical of China.
	And the Chinese government would shoot a dissident and then send the bill for the bullet to his mother.
	Would you pay that debt if you had a choice?
	A bullet used to kill your child?
	Somebody sends you that bill, would you pay that bill?
	Well, it's an honorable bill.
	No, it's not an honorable bill.
	Don't pay the bills. Now, evil people want you to pay their bills, of course.
	Of course they do. Gamblers want you to pay their bills, and addicts of various kinds want you to pay for their drugs and enable.
	Of course they do. They're addicts, and I get that.
	But don't pay it. It's not your bill.
	It's not your liability.
	The people who insulted you as a child, why on earth would you listen to them as an adult?
	Unless you fail to distinguish that they were evildoers who harmed you.
	I mean, it would be like if your mother, when you were a kid, regularly fed you a particular food that made you sick, and then as an adult, you're like, well, I've got to keep eating that food.
	Why? When you're forced to eat that as a kid, why on earth would you voluntarily eat that as an adult?
	It's the same thing with self-definition.
	Define yourself according to reason and evidence.
	Define yourself according to the objective virtues that you've achieved.
	If you can't find those virtues, say, okay, well, let's say you're 25 and you can't find the virtues that would give you self-respect.
	Okay, well, say, well, I've tried defining myself as my parents defined me and did not generate the virtues in me necessary for self-respect, so I'm going to stop defining myself by how my parents defined me because that did not work.
	If you're following the diet of your fat mother and you're still getting fat, time to change your diet, right?
	Right? Don't let evil people define who you are.
	That's letting them win and virtue lose.
	No, the hardy fuck you to evildoers is foundational to escaping the quagmire and quicksand of immorality.
	Narcissists, right? Narcissists.
	You said narcissistic upbringing.
	Narcissists, you're here for my convenience.
	You're here for my convenience. And if you damn well don't do what is convenient for me, I will fuck you up.
	Now, I'm reading this book by this former child star from iCarly.
	A book called I'm Glad My Mother is Dead or something like that.
	And in it, the mother screams horrible verbal abuse at her child.
	Showers her, washes her, inspects her all over for cancer until she's 16 years old.
	It's a real narcissistic monster of a mother.
	And this woman, a former child star, didn't get any healthy relationships until she was able to criticize her mother with the help of her therapist, denormalize that behavior.
	So narcissistic people, you only exist to please them.
	And anything you do that displeases them is an attack upon them that must be defended by causing negative stimuli within you through verbal or physical or sometimes evil sexual abuse until you get the fuck back in line and do what they want.
	You owe them obedience and you give them obedience or they fuck you up.
	It's a horrible thing to grow up with.
	I'm so sorry for the people who grew up with that.
	It's a terrible, horrible, ghastly, monstrous thing to grow up with.
	And you were forced to obey that and deal with that and live with that.
	Sorry for that. You being there for the utility of others, like a A spork or a karaoke machine.
	You being there for the utility of others, that's just what they demanded.
	That's what they required. You know, it's like when I was a kid and we had a television.
	We had all these cheap-ass, ripply, 12-inch black and white TVs, which we pretended we could see the tennis ball at Wimbledon on.
	It was like Pong underwater from a great distance, drunk and cross-eyed.
	And... We'd have to hit the TV until the picture cleared, right?
	Boom, boom, hit the TV and maybe it was settled some vacuum tube or some transistor or something like that, some electrical contact.
	So we would hit the TV until it did what we wanted, but this is parents with children a lot of times, right?
	Hit the child until the child stops making noise in opposition to you and just does what the hell you want, what you deserve, what you need.
	Shut up and do it, like the army, right?
	Shut up and do it. The narcissistic person says that you're here to serve my needs, and my needs are valid, my needs are the only needs, and you're here to serve me, and if you even hesitate, I will fuck you up until you do what I damn well deserve and need.
	Why would you let that define you as an adult?
	It's an evil way to raise children.
	It's a selfish, brutal way, violent and destructive way to raise children.
	Why would you let evil people define who you are?
	I mean, if I'd have done that, I'd have shut down a long time ago.
	I was first called like a cult leader in 2008.
	And it's so funny because this woman...
	Let me get her name, because I don't want to be disrespectful to her.
	Let's see here. Right, so what's her story?
	Jeanette McCurdy. I'm glad my mom died.
	That's the name of her book.
	I saw an interview with her and Drew Barrymore.
	And in it, this woman, Jeanette McCurdy, she says, well, she, you know, separated from abusive family relationships.
	And she said, any relationship that dies because of the truth is probably a relationship that shouldn't be in your life anyway.
	If you tell the truth and a relationship crumbles, it probably shouldn't have been in your life anyway.
	And they're completely talking about separating from family of origin and getting away from abusers and so on.
	All the same shit that I was viciously, endlessly attacked for.
	Not 15 years ago.
	Okay, so there's progress and the first guy has all the arrows in his back and I understand all of that.
	but there's never any circle back or any acknowledgement or anything like that.
	Right?
	So don't cheat on yourself with evildoers, If you have a beautiful wife, beautiful husband, and then there's some scuzzy, tattooed, feces running on their leg, drug addict reject from society, and you go and sleep with that person, people would understand that that would be a very weird pathology, right?
	To walk away from something that's beautiful and someone who's wonderful in order to hump the leg of some horrible human being.
	We would say, well, why would you cheat on somebody beautiful with someone ugly?
	Why would you cheat on someone virtuous with somebody who's evil?
	You understand you're doing that when you let your parents define who you are.
	If your parents were abusive, then you're cheating on yourself, which is beautiful, with...
	Degenerates and violent people and abusive people and so on, people who harm and hurt children, you're cheating on yourself.
	And if you're in a relationship, then you're cheating on your husband with child abusers.
	And you're going to get married.
	Congratulations. Wonderful. You don't cheat on your husband, right?
	But when you let your evil abusive parents define who you are and interfere with your husband's love for you and your love for your husband, you're cheating on your husband with literal child abusers.
	How happy is your husband about that to be rejected and thrown under the bus for the sake of people who brutalized you when you were a child?
	You take that vow pretty bloody seriously, my friends.
	You take that vow very seriously.
	What's the vow? To love, honor, and obey To have no others before.
	Your wife. Your husband.
	Okay. That's a very serious vow.
	It's a very important vow. So live that vow.
	If your husband said...
	You know, I think I'm going to go and cheat on you with some drug-addled prostitute who's currently holding hostages in her basement.
	You'd be jaw-dropped, right?
	Like, what on earth?
	Why on earth would you do that?
	How strange and bizarre and pathological a thing to do.
	It's the same thing. If you cheat on your husband's love and your love for yourself and your respect for yourself...
	By conforming to the evil utterances of evil people, then you're being unfaithful to yourself.
	You're breaking faith with yourself. You're breaking monogamy with yourself.
	You're breaking a vow to morality, to philosophy, to honor, to dignity, to paying your debts.
	I mean, you wouldn't steal something that you wanted, right?
	So don't let other evildoers steal your self-respect.
	Don't cheat on your bills.
	Don't cheat on what you owe yourself.
	And don't harm yourself for the sake of conforming to evildoers when you don't absolutely have to.
	When you're a child, you have to. No, no, no.
	Don't do it. Don't let them win.
	Alright. If you intellectually understand a problem but have difficulty internalizing it emotionally, does this indicate that you have to dig for a deeper understanding?
	Or can some things simply be hard pills to swallow and the emotions will calm down in time?
	Well, I don't know. I mean, self-knowledge would reveal that.
	I can't provide that as a generic statement, either positive or negative.
	Woo, so happy to be back.
	Subscribe. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
	And of course, if you find what I'm saying valuable, and we all know that it is and how valuable it is, you can, of course, tip me on this live stream, which I'd appreciate that.
	All right. When having a discussion with someone recently, they said that I'm not lighthearted enough and never take an answer at face value and just keep asking.
	I assume this is a sophisticated tactic, is it?
	Well, it is, but it more relates back to childhood, right?
	Right. I mean, you'll notice that scientific censorship has risen enormously with the rise of atheism.
	Honestly, a show I did by Tom Woods years ago educated me on this, on how positive the Catholic Church was, and many branches of the Protestant Church, how positive they were towards scientific inquiry.
	So, scientific curiosity, scientific open discussion, has been crushed as atheism has increased.
	Well, why?
	Why? Because as atheism has increased, morality has become superstition.
	Are you startled?
	It's nothing I haven't said before.
	When a child of Christian parents says, why shouldn't I steal?
	It says right here, thou shalt not steal.
	God gives us that commandment, God who loves us, God who created us, God who is all good and all moral and wishes to reward us with heaven and have us avoid the scourges of hell, has told us and given us the commandment, thou shalt not steal.
	That's an answer. Why should I not steal, says the child of the atheist.
	Well, if you know UPB, you can provide that answer and all that.
	But what do the atheists say?
	Why should you not steal? Well, how would you like it if someone stole from you?
	What if you're a really great thief and you're willing to protect your stuff with violence?
	Then you can steal from other people and they won't be able to steal back from you.
	So that answer doesn't work. Well, what if everyone stole?
	That answer doesn't work, because not everyone does steal.
	Not everyone will steal. Why should you not steal?
	So, the atheist can answer more questions about the universe in many ways than the more fundamentalist religious person.
	But still can't say where the universe came from.
	And children have a tendency to want to view the universe from an anthropomorphic perspective, that we are born and we live and we die and the universe is born or created by something more powerful than itself, a God, in the same way that we are created by someone more powerful than ourselves, our mother and our father.
	But these can be dealt with and these can be managed and productive conversations can be had.
	Why be good? Why shouldn't I lie?
	Well, lying makes other people unhappy.
	Well, if I lie and then people call me out on my lie, I'm unhappy.
	So, if making people unhappy is bad, then people should never call me out for lying.
	Right? You understand? How are they going to answer?
	Why be good? Why shouldn't I hit someone?
	Well, how would you like it if someone hit you?
	But they didn't. Right?
	You were a five-year-old kid.
	You grab a toy from a two-year-old.
	Two-year-old's not going to hit you. So if there's no possibility of being hit, why shouldn't I take something?
	There's no possibility of blowback.
	Why shouldn't I just grab what I want?
	Take what I want. Like an animal.
	Well... The Christian has an answer to that.
	The atheist doesn't. So the atheist, I mean, this is a very powerful scene for me in the movie Terminator 2.
	It's a great movie. The kid says to the Terminator, just can't go around killing people.
	Why? Because it's just wrong.
	Why? Look, you just can't.
	Okay, trust me on this.
	Well, why shouldn't I kill, says the kid of the atheist.
	Well, it's against the law. Well, all right.
	You just overthrew the Nuremberg trials now, didn't you?
	Which says that there's a moral standard above what is legal.
	So because atheists can't answer their kids' questions about morality, they get very tense.
	And they want to shut off that line of questioning, because it leads them to moral nihilism, which is a problem they know they need to work on and solve, but they're too freaking lazy, or entitled, or vain, or vanity with the fedora-wearing atheists is a staggering issue.
	But we're so much wiser than the poor religious superstitious folks about the origins of the universe and people who believe in God.
	It's like equivalent to people who believe in fairy tales, people who believe in elves, and people who believe in unicorns.
	Which one of the 10,000 gods should I believe in?
	Like all this Ricky Gervais bullshit.
	He's such an edgy intellect.
	So, 9,000 problems plaguing Britain, and he writes some stupid story about a guy who's sad because his wife died of cancer.
	You've got that megaphone, and you make some narcissistic story about one guy being sad rather than the collapse of your entire civilization.
	It's so cowardly!
	So cowardly.
	It's so pathetic. So forgettable.
	It's not even funny. It's just I've watched a couple of episodes.
	Just sad. I was curious.
	It's a guy with all the money in the world.
	He's supposed to be all kinds of brave.
	Gives all these brave speeches calling out Hollywood hypocrisy.
	Wow. He's old.
	His career is set. He's got more money than he needs to live on for the rest of his life.
	He's a radical, atheist, courageous guy.
	What's he going to write about? We're going to write about nothing.
	We're going to write about how, oh yeah, there's this hooker with a heart of gold who says that men like her because her hands are small, which makes their penis look huge.
	Great job, Ricky. You're just a brave soul speaking truth to power, aren't you?
	Just sad. So, shut up and stop asking questions is foundational to atheism, which is why scientific Censorship has risen as atheism has risen, because the more you rely on science, the less you're able to answer moral questions, which are really the foundation of society.
	All right. Great questions, by the way.
	Thank you. Thank you guys so much.
	Sorry, a little scroll up.
	And yeah, it is a sophisticated technique, but it's usually to do with being told to shut up as a kid.
	I mean, can you imagine, right?
	The teacher says to you, well, you can't use force to get what you want.
	It's like, okay, well, what happens if my parents don't pay the property taxes to fund you your salary?
	You're using force to get what you want.
	Why shouldn't I? That's what Socratic questioning would lead you to, but kids never ask that because the parents and the teachers and teachers would completely freak out.
	All right. I was just reading about how IQ for identical twins is 0.88.
	One is perfect correlation. Zero is no correlation.
	It's 0.88. But non-related children raised in the same household, like you adopted kids or whatever, the correlation of IQ is 0.04.
	It's almost non-existent.
	Ah, let's see here.
	What do you think about Edward Dutton's spiteful mutant theory?
	Was the Industrial Revolution dysgenic?
	No, gosh, no. No, the Industrial Revolution is totally fine.
	Taking away money from smart people and giving it to people in order to have children is just not going to be great for society as a whole.
	It's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	The results are going to be terrible in just about every situation.
	All right, let's see here.
	I recently had a friend commit suicide, second friend in eight months from the same friend group.
	We had talked about that first friend before, and I'm trying to figure out if I should stay around this group of friends in this dark time or if I should distance myself for my own sake.
	Well, I mean, I would say sorry that your friend committed suicide.
	I'm certainly sorry to hear about any kind of suicide, but...
	I mean, if you don't get out at this point, you're just a glutton for punishment.
	You're just a glutton for punishment.
	See, the life of hedonism ended over the course of the pandemic.
	The pandemic... I was talking about this briefly on my call today with a woman who's got issues in her marriage.
	So the pandemic and the lockdowns in particular, I know some places, Sweden and Florida, some places didn't do the lockdowns, but lockdowns are pretty harsh in a lot of places, particularly places like New Zealand and Australia and so on.
	Well, I tried to warn them. But anyway...
	So let's say that you are a 28-year-old woman, and you're like, ah, you know, I've got still another couple of years of party and dating and whatever garbage that you're doing to flush your eggs down the tunnel of time.
	And you say, ah, I've got a little while, boom, I'll just keep dating, you know, I don't want to settle down, yeah, blah, blah, blah, okay, boom.
	And you get locked down for two years.
	No real dating, no real chance to advance your relationship and so on, right?
	Or get and sustain a new relationship.
	So now you're 30.
	Boom, you just lost two years. Also for women, of course, who are like, well, I'm going to go and, you know, flash my TNA around the planet, crop tops, and, you know, there's this weird thing where, like, women under 30 can't be seen out in public without those weird leggings that look like you've just grown a second skin.
	This legging thing is wild.
	I mean, this is supposed to be...
	For dance recitals or something, I don't know, yoga or whatever, right?
	But women, they don't even wear skirts anymore.
	It's just straight up, you know, jam your, like a Zeppelin in a condom, right?
	You just jam your ass into these things and just sashay all over the place like you're some sort of stepladder for people to get fruit from a higher vantage point.
	And so you, you know, as a woman, you get addicted to male attention and you also get addicted to complaining about male attention, which a lot of times is a humble brag.
	And then you're locked down.
	For two years, you can't go parading around and feel male attention and get that dopamine hit of male attention.
	You're going to get really depressed.
	It's that dopamine, right?
	You've lived the wrong way.
	You've lived the wrong way.
	You didn't settle down.
	You didn't get a love relationship.
	You didn't get good companions.
	you didn't get someone who you love to spend time with and you can't get the dopamine hit of strangers staring at your ass jiggle You're really depressed. You're like a junkie for attention that you can't get the attention.
	Then you try and get it online and this, that and the other.
	I guess that's some kind of substitute.
	I think a lot of people went through a lot of depression and overeating and this and that and the other because I'm not trying to blame the victims here.
	I'm just sort of pointing out that I think that they lived their lives without the right priorities and they just lost two years of their life and that really scarred them.
	But the reason why you try and do the right thing and settle down with someone who loves you as early as you can grab a hold of them is because life is messy and complicated and random things happen and who knows, right?
	Let's see here.
	Do you think the move towards atheism and away from the church is not because of the love of the science but actually caused by misplaced anger at a couple of generations of selfish parents? .
	Well, tell me this, right?
	I want to make this a conversation, right?
	Tell me this. When was that moment in your childhood When you began to really suspect that adults didn't have one freaking clue about how to run things.
	It was all just kind of like a scam and a sham, and like, I don't buy any of this.
	I mean, I remember when I was a kid, so I was in boarding school, and I remember having to go to the nurse's station with a sliver, and on the nurse's station was a war.
	I could see the tanks rolling and black on my TV, and I remember thinking like, okay, so these adults who claim to know what the hell they're doing, there's still war.
	I remember as a little kid, just even before I went to boarding school, instead of five years old, I went when I was six.
	And five years old, I used to roam all over London.
	It was that safe. It was that safe.
	I'm sorry that it's not even remotely that safe anymore.
	But I used to roam all over London.
	But I was told that I had to look out for unattended bags in bus stations or wherever, right?
	You've got to freak out about unattended bags because the Irish Republican Army...
	Was the bombing. Was placing bombs in London.
	And I remember thinking like, okay, so these adults who have the right to hit me and they're so wise and they're so knowledgeable and this and that and the other, but we got war, we got random bombings and so on.
	Maybe they don't know really what they're talking about.
	Maybe they don't have it all figured out.
	Maybe they all don't know what stuff is, right?
	What's going on? So when...
	Parents lose moral authority.
	People lose a belief in God.
	Atheism is a great relief for moral responsibility because in the atheistic universe, again, this is back to the Kantian distinction between ought and is.
	You can't get an ought from an is, which you can because you just did, but let's just take the general conception of it.
	You get rid of God. You get rid of moral obligations.
	It's a pretty nice life for a little while.
	Right? It's a pretty nice life for a little while.
	You know, it's like Mark Wahlberg when he had to gain weight from a roll.
	For a roll, he started eating, I don't know, 8,000 calories a day, and he said, yeah, it's fun for a couple hours.
	It kind of is, right? Get rid of moral obligations.
	Get rid of moral responsibilities.
	You live for drugs. You live for sex.
	You live for video games. You live for pornography.
	You live for the stimulus of the moment.
	Like a, you know, duck or a chicken pecking a button that gives them food.
	Stimulus, reward, stimulus, reward, stimulus, reward.
	No larger moral landscape, no larger moral obligations, no need to sacrifice anything, just live for the pleasure of the moment.
	And that gets pretty empty pretty quickly.
	I mean, to kill a society, you must first kill its gods.
	Because when you kill the gods of the society, you kill the moral rules of the society.
	Thank you.
	And then parenting is just hurting.
	Parenting is just keeping the kids in line, getting them from A to B, making sure they don't get hurt.
	And there's no moral instruction.
	There's no foundational sitting down and working through the challenging and deep moral problems of life and how to live in a society which is kind of half crazy, but without losing your integrity, but without living in isolation.
	I mean, this is all big thread-the-needle Dance on a minefield, naked.
	These are all challenging, complicated questions.
	I mean, I think of my own parenting, and yeah, we have to have conversations about how to navigate the social landscape, which my daughter's doing a great job with and has wonderful friends.
	But it's not easy. It's not something that just happens automatically.
	And I certainly know for myself, and I think for a lot of my friends, we were obviously a subset, like an underworld in the matriarchal manners of my childhood.
	But for a lot of my friends, we got nothing and no moral, no moral instruction at all.
	None. Not even a little bit.
	There was just nagging from school to obey the rules and crap like that.
	But the rules were arbitrary.
	Everybody knew that. Rules couldn't be explained.
	Atheism gives you the great relief.
	Away from higher humanity lets you sink down into the reptile brain of stimulus, reward, dopamine, and pecking.
	What did your parents teach you as a moral rule?
	If you're Christian, I get that, and I respect that.
	But what if you're not? If your parents weren't particularly Christian, indifferent Christians or agnostics or atheists, what did they teach you as a moral rule That you still hold to this day and has deep and powerful meaning for you.
	My mother, nothing. Nothing.
	My mother, nothing. I remember playing squash with my father when I was in my mid-twenties.
	And my father telling me, well, it's very important to you.
	Very important to you. Try not to gain a pound or two every year.
	Gain a pound or two every year.
	It doesn't seem like a big deal at the time.
	Gain a pound or two every year.
	Before you know it, it's 30, 40 pounds.
	It's very hard to lose when you get older.
	Try and stay trim as best you can.
	Don't slap your teeth. I sound like a vaguely voice impediment Winston Churchill there, but...
	Okay, I'll try and watch my weight.
	Thanks, Dad. I write about this in The God of Atheists.
	How... What nothing burgers is quasi-moral instruction your parents give you.
	The God of Atheists is about a group of children who start morally examining their parents, who go beyond that question just because.
	You know, the kid says, Dad, my whole life you told me to be good, but I ask you what goodness is and you don't even know.
	Think about that. Your parents, your society, your gods.
	Your whole life they tell you to be good, but you ask them what goodness is, And they don't even know.
	And when you go into debt, you don't need discipline.
	Debt and discipline are antonyms.
	You know, this is a great line from that song, We're in or we're out of the money.
	Come rain or come shine, it's a song, right?
	We're in or we're out of the money.
	I'm with you always.
	I'm with you rain and shine.
	We're in or out of the money.
	Just this like up and down that happens with some people in their life.
	Not the people who like, you know, build their careers, engineer, doctor, whatever.
	People who, you know, well, Bitcoin, I guess, right?
	People who, I mean, we're in or out of the money.
	So when you're in the money, you relax your discipline, right?
	You get more money, relax your discipline.
	When you're out of the money, you've got to watch every penny you spend.
	The discipline and morality and self-restraint are all intertwined.
	So the moment that Money became imaginary and debt became endemic.
	What do you have to teach your kids and why?
	Well, kids don't fail.
	Well, you fail. You just go on welfare.
	You've got to save for your retirement.
	Why? The government's going to take the money and certainly my age and now they're probably not going to get a damn penny out of it all.
	Well, you gotta...
	Don't be promiscuous.
	Why? Why not?
	It's fun. It's sexy.
	Sexy hot time.
	Why? Don't be promiscuous.
	Why not? You can get drugs for the STDs.
	You can get abortions for the pregnancies.
	Why not? Well, it's just bad.
	Why? Why? Now, of course, in the past, before the welfare state, you say, well, don't sleep around because if you get pregnant, you're going to have to marry the girl.
	The girl gets pregnant, right? And for the girl, if you get pregnant, you're going to have to have the kid, you're going to have to move in back home, and no one's going to marry you, and your life will be a disaster.
	Okay, it's consequences. You take away morality and you take away consequences.
	We're spinning in a reptile void of pecking at the button to get our dopamine.
	No consequences, no morality.
	You're down to the level of the reptile brain.
	You have devolved in a way, right?
	All right. Sorry, let's get our new...
	Well, and of course, if you take away consequences and you take away morality, then anybody who restrains themselves is an idiot.
	Right? And anybody who restrains themselves...
	So, we've had this new...
	This new cliche that's really come out of the 1960s, which is the uptight guy.
	He just can't loosen up and relax and have fun, man.
	Why are you so uptight? Why are you so tense?
	Chill, man. We're just chillaxing.
	We're just going to have some fun.
	Have a drink.
	Smoke this. Go have sex.
	It's particularly true for women.
	You're uptight. You need to go out and get railed.
	You go out and get laid. You go out and get laid.
	You relax. You'll feel better.
	I remember this in the show Weeds.
	A woman's really tense and bitchy and she goes out and gets laid.
	No, she's so relaxed and happy, right?
	Well, of course, when you're in a situation of infinite resources and no consequences, just relax.
	Anybody who has self-restraint in a situation of endless and infinite resources has a psychological problem.
	So imagine, you live on some Polynesian island, there's food everywhere, there's coconuts, there's fish jumping out of the water, right?
	And you're like, you're hoarding the fruit.
	You're keeping the fruit. This is OCD. It's like we'd be insane, right?
	You're hoarding the fruit. Well, what's the fruit for?
	It's going to go bad and there's more fruit dropping out of the trees every day.
	Are you crazy? If there's more fish than you could possibly catch and eat...
	And you're like, we've got to worry about this.
	There's not going to be enough fish. We're going to run out of fish.
	You're insane, right? You're not processing reality.
	So when you create the illusion of infinite resources, anybody with self-restraint becomes mentally ill, becomes viewed as mentally ill.
	And you can make a strong case if you don't understand the economics that they are kind of crazy.
	And you can see this, right?
	I mean, the turbo man-whore Freddie Mercury...
	Would go to these nightclubs and have orgies and just all kinds of horrible stuff.
	And then when Aids came along, he's like, oh, we all just stay home now.
	Everybody just stays in. Nobody goes out.
	Nobody does anything. Okay, well now there's consequences.
	So look, self-restraint is coming along, right?
	All right. Yeah, elbows off the table.
	Don't fidget. No hat at the table.
	Finish your food. That's wasteful.
	Yeah. What were your stupid moral rules when you were a kid?
	Yeah, elbows off the table for sure.
	My dad was very big on, don't slurp your tea!
	Well, you left me with an insane violet woman while you moved to the other side of the world and never checked up on me, really?
	But yes, the important thing is that I'm slurping my tea.
	It's just so sad.
	I mean, it's just so sad.
	Yeah, limit your screen time!
	How about we lower the national debt?
	Oh, no, no, we can't do that. Yeah, because screen time is so much worse than the national debt.
	It's crazy, right? Yeah.
	Hmm. Yeah, neglectful, work-obsessed parents, they show up to parent once in a blue moon, then wonder why you act like a stranger.
	Yeah, if you want people to listen to you, you have to like them.
	Otherwise, all you can do is bully them.
	And if you don't like your parents, if you don't respect your parents, then all they have left is bullying.
	How does a harshly self-critical alter ego manifest itself in relationships to other people?
	There's a desire connection that allows the alter ego to feed off the flaws of others.
	That's a good question.
	I'm not sure I get the second one.
	Not your fault, I don't get it.
	How does a harshly self-critical alter ego manifest itself in relationships to other people?
	Well, the self-critical alter ego...
	Wants you to fail. Anybody who sets themselves up as a moral opposite is heavily invested in your failure.
	They want you to fail. They need you to fail.
	They're desperate for you to fail. You have to fail.
	So, a harshly self-critical alter ego, which is the internalized abuser...
	We'll steer you towards destructive people and if by some lucky fluke you end up with a healthy person, they will drive away that healthy person with endless self-attacks, with endless criticisms, with insomnia, with neuroticism, with criticism, they just drive that person away because they need to stay in control, they need to stay in command. Healthy people are damaging to your relationship to an abusive parent.
	Therefore, healthy people must be kept away to appease the inner alter ego of the abusive parent.
	You won't be able to have a healthy relationship.
	You won't be able to have love.
	You won't be able to have good people in your life.
	It just won't happen.
	When you see this incomprehensible thing, like this woman today, I'll release it in a day or two, but she said her name every third minute, so I just have to scrub that out.
	But This woman, her current husband, she's having some issues with, some pretty significant issues with.
	So they met seven years ago, and they met in a casino.
	And he was interested in her because she's pretty.
	And she said to him, you don't want to have anything to do with me.
	Trust me, I'm bad news. I am not exactly your worst nightmare, but it's pretty close.
	Like, do not get involved with me.
	So what did he do? What did he do?
	He wants her desperately.
	He pursues her and he marries her and now they're having problems, right?
	Why is he doing that? Well, you'll see in the call.
	All right. Hey, Steph, how do I reclaim my assertiveness?
	Don't ask me! How do I reclaim my assertiveness?
	I was the youngest in my family and I had to be very deferential to survive.
	Now I'm a very agreeable adult.
	Hmm. So, deferential and agreeableness.
	Agreeableness is not a bad trait.
	It's good to be agreeable in many ways.
	Deferential? No, I would put it more like self-murder.
	I had to murder my own independent thoughts and feelings in order to survive.
	The price of existence within my family was the murder of my soul.
	You've got to put things in strong ways that are motivating and accurate.
	If you can't speak your mind, if you can't think for yourself, if you can't voice your opinions, if you can't disagree with people, then you are being sacrificed.
	Your chest is being ripped open.
	Your heart... Being held up, beating like you're in some Aztec sacrifice, 60,000 infants to the raging murder god.
	I mean, you have been sacrificed on the vanity and monomania of the family.
	You killed on the altar.
	Bring yourself back to life.
	You have soul murder. It's a Schengel quote.
	It's a whole book called Soul Murder.
	It's a very good book, very powerful book.
	But, you know, assertive, deferential, agreeable.
	No, no, no. The price of existence was self-slaughter.
	Self-murder. You didn't have a childhood.
	You had a crime scene. You don't have a leftover personality.
	You have a chalk outline of a former body.
	You can bring yourself back to life, but you've got to understand the degree of the crime that was done, the degree of murder, the soul murder that was done, and that will kick your energy into gear.
	It's just agreeable.
	They said, either you kill yourself or we kill you, and you're like, I'll stab myself because I can do it in such a way that I can come back to life later, and I'm sure you will.
	Alright. Alright.
	I get called uptight, too serious, etc.
	Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely.
	You guys learn how to relax, man.
	But we, you know, certainly Europeans, right, we come from a culture of scarcity and we've had this tropical culture of infinite debt, quote, infinite debt and resources.
	It's colliding in with our sense of scarcity and it's driving us crazy.
	Oh yeah, why don't you drink, man?
	That's weird. No weed? Geez, are you some square?
	Don't you know how to have fun?
	Well, let's just peck at the dopamine button like a chicken.
	Ha ha ha! Watching Steph on my lunch break.
	Merry Christmas to you and the rest of the family.
	Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	Merry Christmas to you. I love this time of year.
	I absolutely love Christmas.
	And I hope that you guys have the whole deal, like the trees, the ornaments, the lights, the presents, the overeating a little bit.
	I just love, absolutely love Christmas.
	All right. Thank you.
	Ah, that really hit the spot.
	The G-spot, I hope.
	The goodness spot. My dad never called me, and when I called him, he would say, I could have died.
	I was damned if I called him, and damned if I didn't.
	Oh, so your dad would never call you, and you call him, he says, well, I could have died for all you know, right?
	Well, so this is something that people do, right?
	It's not something that people do, particularly older people.
	If you're a parent, you're in charge of the relationship.
	And you always will be. Until you become old and deranged.
	You lose your mind or you get Alzheimer's or something like that.
	So when you're the parent, you're in charge of the relationship.
	If the relationship goes wrong, 100% on you as the parent.
	Blaming children is the most ridiculous and pathetic thing that I can imagine.
	As the parent, you are 100% in charge of the relationship.
	So any parent who plays the victim in the relationship...
	Well, why don't you do this? Or you don't do that?
	Or you never do this? It's ridiculous.
	I can't even imagine it, saying that to my daughter.
	I've been in charge of the relationship for 14 years straight.
	She's got no choice. She can't go anywhere.
	She's still got years before she can.
	Right? So, I mean, I love the idea that I would be like, well, this relationship is not ideal and it's your fault.
	It's like me getting mad at my characters when they won't do the plot twists that I want them to do.
	Characters are bad. But this is what parents do, right?
	Abusive parents, weird parents.
	When they're in charge, you've got to do everything they say because they're the boss.
	But then when you become independent, they then attempt to put you in the role of parent while they become the helpless children.
	And you know how this goes, right?
	All right. I grew up in a university town.
	My grandfather moved here to teach.
	My entire youth was spent with overly wealthy kids of never their parents.
	We eat cocaine, booze.
	Insane at that young age.
	Oh yeah, you can see this kind of stuff all over the place.
	There's no consequences.
	No consequences. And often it's moms with beauty and dads with crazy alpha ambitions to provide resources.
	And, you know, at some point as a parent, it's like, I mean, let's say you make $5 million as a parent, right?
	Okay, so what is six going to...
	I mean, there's diminishing returns, right?
	Martial utilities, law of diminishing returns, right?
	If you're really starving to death, your first 10 bucks is the difference between life and death.
	When you're a billionaire, the next 10 bucks doesn't mean smack, really, right?
	Ooh, look, there's numbers in the bank account that are different than before, but I have no relationships with anyone.
	So a lot of guys, some women too, but guys still primarily responsible for putting bread on the table.
	It's like, okay, when is enough, right?
	This is a fundamental question. When is enough enough?
	You don't want to be like one of those weird bird species that no matter how big the egg, they'll even put an ostrich egg in there and try to hatch it because they don't have an upper limit.
	It's just, well, we want to sit on the biggest eggs.
	So even if we get an egg 10 times the size of our normal egg, we'll sit on that one too.
	Like there's no cutoff point where enough is enough.
	Okay, that's too much, right? And people have this all the time.
	When do you stop eating? When do you stop exercising?
	When do you stop posting? When do you stop scrolling through Twitter?
	When do you stop making money? When do you have enough money?
	I mean, even lower middle class is infinitely wealthier than people were even 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
	When do you have enough money? When do you pivot from money to relationships?
	And if you're just in hot pursuit of money, money, money...
	And I remember a friend of mine, when I first got into the programming world, I got my first professional job as a coder, a friend of mine there was like, oh yeah, I grew up, my parents were super wealthy, and I remember I lost my bike, and they just bought me another bike, it was there the next day, but I was like the loneliest kid on the planet.
	And I didn't want a bike, I wanted time with my parents.
	I mean, particularly, like, you're locked in solitary confinement if you have inattended parents, especially if you're an only kid, or you have significant differences in age with your siblings.
	I mean, you're locked in solitary confinement, especially these days when kids don't get to roam the neighborhood nearly as much anymore, for reasons we all know, right?
	So, yeah, it's really horrible.
	See, the parents aren't showing any self-restraint when it comes to ambition, so why would the kids show any self-restraint when it comes to anything else?
	For the parents, more is more.
	Dad keeps working, keeps making money.
	More is more is more. There's no self-restraint.
	There's no focusing on anything other than more is more is more.
	The moms are probably the same way, either career-wise or in terms of beauty or socializing or whatever, right?
	More is more is more. So then the parents who are addicted to excess in terms of money and beauty and social life, and status, status in particular, status is the big demon of parenting.
	Because kids are low status, right?
	In general. I mean, it's sad, but it's true.
	I remember my daughter, you know, for years she had a complaint, which I completely understood and tried to deal with, where she'd say, you know, get together socially, get together with people.
	Everyone ignores the kid, right?
	Because she was the kid and she has fantastic things to say, very interesting and deep things to say.
	Nobody would throw her much attention.
	And then she noticed when she got to be 13, 14, okay, people started paying me attention.
	It's not fair. And that's right.
	So kids are low status. So spending time with your kids is low status.
	Going to close another multi-million dollar deal, that's high status, right?
	And status is the opposite of parenting.
	You can be a good parent or you can be into status.
	So the parents don't restrain themselves in their pursuit of status, which is hedonistic, because it gives them pleasure.
	so why would the kids restrain themselves like the kids are doing what the parents are doing which is not restraining themselves in the face of hedonistic pleasures let's see here just wanted to say You're a real breath of fresh air.
	Thank you. I appreciate that. It's very kind.
	Imagine what society would be like if more people parented like Steph.
	Well, you don't have to imagine it.
	Or at least you can see how I imagine it.
	Freedomand.locals.com.
	Promo code UPB2022, all caps.
	You can get my free novel or novel free if you subscribe called The Future.
	Can you tell us how you proposed to your wife?
	Yes, I proposed to my wife at a very schmancy restaurant in Toronto called North 44.
	And I was pretty sure she was down for it and got on my knees and I proposed and everyone applauded and it was a wonderful, wonderful day.
	All right. Why do you think the stereotype is that people with glasses are smarter?
	Well, glasses, of course, originally were more high status because you have to go to an optometrist and you'd have to get the glasses.
	And of course, the idea is that people who read a lot more may end up with somewhat eye damage or people who have eye damage will prefer reading to sports.
	And so there's a lot of sort of things like that can happen.
	And again, you know, there's this general idea that the body can't do everything it wants, right?
	So a bigger brain is often a smaller body, and a bigger brain may be fewer resources left over for eyesight and so on and so on.
	Steph, what was the longest you let your hair grow to before you went bald?
	So I had a ponytail probably down to mid-shoulder when I was in McGill in my undergraduate.
	So I went to two years of English literature at Glendon campus of York University.
	I did almost two years of acting and playwriting at the National Theatre School.
	Then I did two years to finish my undergraduate degree at McGill and then I took a year off and then I did a year and a half of a graduate degree in history focusing on the history of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
	All right. Legend says he recorded...
	This is about my proposal to my wife.
	Legend says he recorded him saying, not an argument, then played it so fast aimed at a piece of coal that it turned into a diamond.
	He called it the Philosopher's Stone.
	You need two these days.
	Two balls. Philosopher's Stones.
	All right.
	My guess is the people who can't see up close can still work in a field, but scholars would need glasses.
	Could be right.
	Let's see here.
	My guess is the – oh, yeah, sorry.
	Good parenting is investment for your legacy to go on.
	Yes, and your legacy being virtue.
	Steph, I booked in for your New Zealand show.
	What were you going to say? Well, I mean, I was going to talk about the media.
	And, you know, what was really remarkable about those couple of years...
	I mean, I faced bomb threats and death threats and other threats when I was speaking.
	They really began when I spoke at a men's rights conference in Detroit many years ago.
	And so I faced those kinds of threats.
	But in the Australian-New Zealand tour, it went nuts.
	I mean, completely crazy. And this also happened in Canada later.
	But... You know, what was really terrible was how much the media was applauding this violence, right?
	And you don't applaud violence.
	If there was a communist speaking and somebody was violent towards the communists, I would say, no, no, you don't use violence against speech.
	I know communism is pretty toxic speech, but you don't ever cheer on violence.
	You don't ever cheer on violence because you think you're cheering on violence for the people...
	You like. I was like, oh, well, this group's using violence against someone I don't like.
	But you're also cheering on violence among people you don't like.
	You open that genie.
	You pop that cork bottle, right?
	And you can't get that genie back in the bottle.
	So I was going to be like, you know, please, however much you dislike me, you may hate me.
	It's not me you hate. It's just the ideas or the arguments, right?
	Because I'm actually a very nice and likable person.
	And really genuinely want the best for humanity and the best for children and the best for peace in the world.
	So, don't ever cheer on violence.
	I mean, I get it.
	It's a black-hearted temptation.
	Don't ever, ever, ever cheer on violence.
	Because that's what the devil does.
	The devil says, well, this person is so hateful that violence against this person is unacceptable.
	Sorry, it's acceptable. This person is so hateful and so terrible and so monstrous that you should cheer violence against this person.
	That's the great temptation, to get you to break principle and cheer on violence.
	And, yeah, it was a real good old rant about you don't ever uncork that demon.
	You don't ever invite those vampires into your house.
	You don't ever cheer on violence, particularly political violence, terrorism.
	You don't ever cheer that on.
	Don't ever. Cover up or gloss over or downplay violence against ideas, violence against people for making arguments, for presenting information, for speaking freely.
	Don't ever, ever, ever cheer that on because you are opening the gates to hell itself and it's tempting and the media failed in general with that temptation.
	I've gotten frustrated, but the Manosphere community seems like a green light for young guys to indulge in hedonism and avoid starting a family.
	No real mention of religion either.
	Well, I'm working in this whole area in my new novel called The Present, which I don't think it'll be done this year, but I'm at 70,000 words, so about 170, 180 pages, sort of 8.5 by 11.
	So... When women use men, men are tempted to use women back.
	So what do women use men for?
	They use men for resources. I'll give you a tiny preview of an exchange between a feminist and a men's rights guy.
	So she's complaining that men...
	He's complaining that men fund society.
	She's complaining that women don't make equal pay.
	So then she says to him, okay, how much did you make last year?
	And he says, I made about $180,000.
	And she's like, you see?
	Much more than I made.
	And he's like, okay. How much did you pay in taxes last year?
	He's like, well, I'm self-employed, so how much?
	Okay, I actually got a refund.
	Okay, so I made more than you in terms of money, and then you got your refund out of my taxes.
	Who's exploiting who? I'm not preventing you from going into any field you want, making as much money as you want, but you're preventing me from keeping my own money.
	So when women vote for free stuff at the expense of men, in general, I know a lot of women pay taxes, but in general, more women work for the government than men.
	And of course, the welfare state is basically the single mother state and old age pensions disproportionately benefit women and so on.
	So when women... Vote for men to pay them.
	When women use men, exploit men, then the great temptation for men is to use sex as a weapon and to exploit women.
	And Men can't really exploit women financially, particularly now that women have been trapped into the quagmire and antinatalism of student debt, right?
	Because no man really wants to take on $30,000 in banana-peeling degrees from women's arts colleges.
	So men, if they're angry at women and haven't processed that and haven't dealt with that, they will be very tempted to lie women into bed and then abandon them.
	You understand that the whole pick-up-artist-and-player mentality, all of this stuff comes out of men's horror and anger at being exploited by female voters.
	I mean, this is not my theory in terms of female voters incredibly strongly correlated.
	Women get the vote, government spending goes through the roof.
	Women get the vote, social programs go through the roof.
	Women get the vote, you get abortion, you get free healthcare, you get old age pensions, you get the welfare state.
	Boom! Like, boom, boom, boom.
	Right? Women will vote for free stuff.
	It's not women's fault. Women prefer security over freedom, which men prefer freedom because it gives them competition to get more resources to get better women, so I'm not blaming women for this.
	Perfectly fine. The problem is not with women.
	I understand that. The problem is not with women.
	The problem is with the system. If you can vote for evil and suffer no personal consequences for it, evil will flow.
	This is why evil wants these kinds of redistribution systems, because it can spread that way.
	So if...
	A man, a boy, when he was a boy, he grows up seeing his mother rip his father apart through family court and exploit his father in terms of child support payments and alimony and you name it, and then sees his mother vote for more and more freedoms.
	And I think women tend to be more pro-immigration and so on.
	And so the men are like...
	This is, you know, we don't have a say.
	We have a restraint.
	And I remember when I did my documentary in California, talked to a number of families, and it was always the same pattern, right?
	That the women were sentimental and the men were practical.
	And again, this is not pro-men or anti-women.
	It's just... The state turns our natural virtues into...
	We're pathological cancers, right?
	I mean, we want ourselves to grow, just not pathologically into cancer form, right?
	And the state turns our natural virtues, the beauty of femininity, the beauty of masculinity, it turns it to pathology.
	It's violence. That's what violence always does, right?
	You want a woman to come and live with you, then you marry her and make her your wife and you have a wonderful thing.
	You want a woman to come and live with you and you kidnap her and throw her in your basement, then you've pretty much corrupted the whole damn process.
	And then to say, well, that's what happens when a woman lives with you.
	It's like, no, no, that's what happens when you use violence.
	You don't blame cohabitation for the violence.
	So if you have a grown-up With an anger towards women.
	And there's a lot of anger out there towards women.
	And we know about the anger towards men, so that's understood and that's well documented, well explained and a little over explained, I think.
	But a lot of men out there, you look into your own heart.
	You're angry towards women. You're angry towards women for getting all the attention.
	You're angry towards women for rejecting.
	You're angry towards women for voting for things that are horrendous to your survival and value as a man and as a provider and so on, right?
	You're angry at women voting to make the state their husband and all of that, right?
	And all of the resulting dysfunction that comes out of that.
	And you're angry at women for choosing pretty losers over sensible, average-looking men.
	You're angry at women for having ridiculously high standards and then because women won't have kids, it's a justification for further whatever, right?
	So, I mean, you're angry.
	Now, getting angry at women for the state is wrong.
	Again, it's like getting angry at Soviet workers for being unproductive when the problem was communism, right?
	So, how do men get back at women?
	Well, the way that men get back at women, I don't like it, I don't approve of it, it's wrong, it's understandable, but that doesn't mean it's like, to understand something is not to approve of it, it's actually to try and undo it, right?
	We want to understand cancer so we can cure cancer, not because we approve of cancer, so I understand the anger, I don't approve of it, I understand it.
	And of course, the boys who grow up in schools where it's all pro-female, pro-female, pro-female all the time, and the boys are constantly denigrated and ignored and drugged and pushed aside and so on, right?
	And marked down just for being male.
	We know that from you take their names off tests and boys get higher marks than if the teachers who are largely female can identify them as boys.
	So, yeah, you end up with this anger towards women, and what's the only way that men can get back at women?
	Well, men can get back at women by becoming very attractive.
	This is part of the whole body narcissistic workout culture that's in a lot of the manosphere.
	And again, exercise, please.
	It's great, wonderful, and even working out hard and becoming buff and cut, it's all fine and wonderful.
	But if the motivation is, I'm going to become super attractive to females, so the point where they want to be with me, I've got something they want now, They're going to come at me.
	I'm going to win them. I'm going to woo them.
	I'm going to lie to them. I'm going to dump them.
	Well, that comes out of a rage and a desire to get back at women.
	You feel women are using you as a man and therefore you're going to become super attractive and you're going to use them back.
	Now, again, two wrongs don't make a right and all that sort of stuff.
	And it's not dealing with the foundational issues.
	All right. Let's see here.
	Where in locals can I submit a question for one of the streams where he answers listener questions?
	New locals. Yeah, I usually post something, hit me up with questions.
	These questions have been so good and I will do a show for the questions that are posted that I don't get to in the show.
	I'll do another one tomorrow. All right, let's see here.
	Do you think 20k for a wedding is too much compared to what?
	I don't know. Willie Nelson, Steph, love to see a pic of that ponytail.
	I've got one somewhere. All right, let's see here.
	Hey, Steph, just want to say thank you for teaching me practical, critical thinking.
	The way you think about issues and provide answers is always interesting.
	You provide real-world practical advice that's easy to understand.
	Thank you. You are very welcome.
	I appreciate that, and thank you for joining us tonight.
	Ah, let's see here.
	Let's see here.
	Sorry, I've got three minutes and 40 seconds.
	I'm 30 and my wife is 43.
	We have a 16-month-old daughter we've struggled for years to have.
	Congratulations. My wife now wants a second child very badly and knows she's aging out, but I think I'm done.
	I don't think I have the energy or desire to start up again and emotionally support another child.
	how best a team up and solve this?
	I don't know.
	Maybe you could talk to a genetic counselor and find out what risk factors you have at 43.
	I don't know if you're using donor eggs and so on.
	Maybe you are. Start up and emotionally support another child.
	I think that you need to be honest about what's fallen short for you in parenting.
	Maybe you're expected to work and be a co-parent, in which case it's something that's overburdening you.
	At 38, you should have the energy for kids.
	I became a father older, and I would have loved to have had more.
	I would talk to your wife about why you view another child as too draining.
	There's something about what's going on with your parenting and the workload between you and your wife that is overburdening you.
	Do you think your view of the world is worse than things actually are?
	Because you always talk to dysfunctional people in the call-ins.
	Oh God, no. No, I'm an optimist compared to the data.
	I'll do a show on this if anyone's interested.
	I'm a massive optimist compared to the actual data.
	No, because I help people in the call-ins.
	And I get these emails later.
	Oh, thank you so much. My world's changed.
	Blah, blah, blah. So, no. Why is it that UPV and NAP are never discussed between public figures?
	I've noticed just an average man with some status in my community that UPV brings great understanding and builds a foundation for other reality-based conversations.
	Because UPV threatens existing power structures.
	That simple. Yeah, people, I mean, the people who call into my show accept the value of philosophy and wisdom and are in pursuit of self-knowledge and want to improve their lives.
	How many of the world's population is that?
	It's not the people who call in who give me pessimism if I have it.
	It's because all the people who don't call in and who never call in are chased away by bad words from an essential philosophical conversation.
	Yeah. I wouldn't put it that way at all.
	I understand where you're coming from, for sure.
	But, no. The people who call me are the best.
	They're not dysfunctional insofar as they get that there is dysfunction and they're looking to improve.
	And I think just about every time they really do.
	The people who call in give me enormous and massive hope in...
	In the fact that I have all these conversations with people who desperately want to improve, who listen to feedback, who are honest and open and throw themselves into improvement, that gives me an optimism far above the general population.
	Because I forget that most people...
	Wouldn't call in if you paid them, right?
	All right. Well, listen, guys, thank you so much for another wonderful conversational evening.
	I hope that you, of course, find this valuable.
	And if you do, if you wouldn't mind, please, freedomain.com forward slash donate, you know.
	Christmas is here and your friendly neighborhood philosopher could use just a little bit of help.
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	A rough bunch of times. Ever since we kicked off PayPal and just about every other social media platform, it's been tough.
	So if you could help me out at freedomain.com slash donate, I would really, really, really appreciate it.
	Have yourselves a wonderful rest of the week.
	I'll talk to you Friday night. Lots of love, guys.
	Take care. DefBot.

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