All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 27, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:41
Freedomain Subscriber Livestream!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yeah, so what I got for Christmas, my daughter made me a beautiful painting, and I got some lovely shirts, and a couple of books, of course, and I also got a bathrobe, which is super fluffy and cozy.
It's like being in a giant dust bunny or being eaten by the vorpal bunny of Monty Python fame, so...
And, you know, I mean, it's kind of tough, and you get into your 50s, it's like, what do you need that you don't have?
If you need something, you get it, so...
But it was a really, really lovely Christmas.
And I always had that bittersweet feeling after Christmas.
You know, why can't we have this all the time?
But should I watch Ancient Apocalypse?
Well, I know it's been trashed by the woke mob, so I assume it's pretty good.
All right, Steph, it must feel nice knowing all of us will tune in at the drop of a hat any time, any day.
Oh, it's great. I love you guys so much.
Thank you. Steph, what do you think are some good industries to get into?
Do you still think tech is profitable like when you got in?
Well, so there's going to be a fork in the road of tech, right?
And the fork in the road is bullshit AI and, like, honest AI, right?
So, artificial intelligence would look for statistical patterns in human behavior and draw inevitable conclusions, and so...
There will be AI that will be programmed to avoid facts, to avoid realities, to avoid patterns and all this kind of stuff.
And there'll be two AIs.
There'll be the AI for public consumption, and then there'll be the AI which is actually useful and intelligent.
So they're basically giving a frontal lobotomy to AI as we speak.
So yeah, I do think that there's some good industries to get into.
Alright. Is being a spoiled kid a myth?
Or just cope for not getting parental attention?
Well, it's not just not getting parental attention, although that has something to do with it.
Like, wealthy children...
It's not just that they don't get.
So when I was in high school, there was an unbelievably wealthy family that went to my high school.
And the two sons both got beautiful sports cards on their 16th birthday.
And one of them was in a play that I wrote in high school in So we went over to rehearse at his place, and it was one of these houses.
I remember being one of those in South Africa.
It just goes on and on and on, like you can get lost, and there's just more and more rooms that you know nobody's using, but they're there.
So these kids were just wildly wealthy.
And how is any...
Attention from mere mortals going to compete with that kind of status display that's going on, that resource display.
How is just being a mere mortal going to compete with that?
The wealth eclipses even the personalities of the people involved.
You're so wealthy and there's so much money rolling around and the status is so irresistible.
Obviously, if somebody had given me a sports car on my 16th birthday, that would have been wonderful.
Instead, I got an eviction notice.
But... It's really, really almost impossible.
It's like if you have great beauty or you have great political power, staggering amounts of wealth, particularly when it rains down on the young, it eclipses the personality.
How are you supposed to get to know a staggeringly beautiful woman?
Nietzsche said this, great power, great wealth, great beauty.
It bends reality around itself.
How are you going to get to know someone as an individual when they've got that blinding beauty that's going on?
All the women who are like, I can't believe men lie about their height.
And then they have like 14 pounds of makeup on.
A spoiled kid for sure.
A spoiled kid is when you don't have to earn the attention that you get.
That's spoiled in general.
You don't have to earn the attention that you get.
Now, if you're super talented, if you're a great athlete, if your family has lots of money, if you're beautiful or whatever it is, then you don't really have to earn the attention that you get.
And anything which is unearned tends to corrupt the soul.
What does the devil do?
This is why the myth of the devil exists.
The devil will give you things for free.
All it costs you is your soul.
And if you can get attention without being interesting...
If you can get attention without being interesting, that corrupts us all.
And so, yeah, downplay your dazzle and be more of a human.
I have to go back to work tomorrow.
Somebody says, well, I'm working tonight, if that helps.
Best past Christmas is probably the, there are other drivers on the road not being complete a-holes.
Oh, it's really tragic.
Yeah, something I said, it's one of the sort of side effects of immigration is you get people from warm climates coming to snow climates and they don't know how to drive.
They didn't grow up seeing their dad drive.
They didn't get taught by somebody experienced in driving in winter and it's often a big mess.
Why not move to the stairs?
Yeah, you can just snap everything.
Alright. I have a rant in me today.
First time here. This live stream doesn't work in Brave Browser for some reason.
Well, I don't think that's true because I'm actually broadcasting it that way.
What makes a normie?
Is it intelligence, personality, personal history?
Well, a normie is simply somebody without skepticism.
That's all it is.
A normie is just somebody without skepticism.
Without skepticism, you simply swallow whatever the majority says and consider it the truth.
It's the ballast of human history.
Is that what probably happened to Hunter Biden?
Do wealth eclipse his personality?
No, pretty sure the Biden kids had a little bit more to contend with than mere wealth.
All right.
Doesn't that imply that children must earn their parents' attention?
What?
It's like saying children have to earn their own food or their own rent.
Like, You just imagine like some giant ass boob with a little coin slot in it or an ATM swipe.
Hey kid, you hungry? You got any coins on you?
Mom's turned into a vending machine, a lactating vending machine.
That'd be great. Have you been around children?
Have you been a parent?
Were you ever a child? My children must earn their parents' attention.
No, look, come on.
You don't do everything for your child and then kick them out into the snow at the age of 18, right?
Come on. This is not complicated.
Children start off as babies, completely dependent, and you expect them to earn absolutely nothing.
And then over time, as they grow, you begin to give them a little more responsibility, a little more responsibility, and then at some point by the time they leave your tender care, they're able to make it in the world.
So... Do you see any benefit to living in the United States as opposed to Canada?
Well, Canadian taxes can be lower.
But yeah, I mean, I don't really think of countries so much as I think of communities.
Like where you live in terms of your community is more important than the country as a whole, in my opinion.
The History of Philosopher's series has been great.
Could you do a video on William Molyneux?
That would seem interesting, a little self-referential, but I could absolutely do it.
So hit a Y if you want to rant or...
I am your willing philosophy slave on bended knee.
If you would like me to continue to answer questions as best I can, I'm happy to do that.
But I can also do a rant.
Now this is going to be a bit of a scorcher, so please hide your children in deep caves.
Okay, looks like we are all ready for a rant with my Christmas red on.
All right. The Twitter dumps.
The Twitter dumps.
Andrew Anglin is back, but not me.
I think it's kind of funny.
Anyway, so it turns out This is just really about the philosophical topic of censorship.
I'm not really doing politics, right?
The philosophical topic of censorship is really important.
So you know how they said, well, the misinformation costs lives.
Misinformation costs lives.
So it turns out on Twitter that part of the moderation was to send complicated questions about myocarditis and other complicated, incredibly complicated medical topics out to minimum wage cubicle drones in the Philippines.
And those minimum wage cubicle drones in the Philippines were the ones deciding what was medical science or not.
That's how it rolled, ladies, and that's what it came down to.
Oh, but they gave them, you see, they gave them decision trees.
They just gave them decision trees about how to save or cost the lives of millions of people.
Millions of people. That's what it came down to.
Were there alternative treatments?
Seemed to be. What about a nasal wash?
Just, you know, you ever done this thing, you jam the thing up and squeeze the salted water up through your nose and clears it all out.
Apparently that was pretty good.
Talked to McCullough about his protocol.
Seemed to me, or the late Zelensky, seems to me that there was, you know, potential for other possibilities.
It got to this point in Twitter.
Got to this point in Twitter. Where...
There were strong actors focused on Twitter trying to get Twitter to censor optimism.
Because at one point Trump said, you know, I had COVID, I'm better.
Don't be scared of COVID. It's not the end of the world, blah, blah, blah.
And they're like, oh, I ought to shut that down, man.
That's unwarranted optimism.
That's going to get people killed!
It's always projection, always projection.
Whatever they're accusing you of, They're doing.
Whatever they're accusing you of, they're doing.
People accused me of promoting eugenics as the most wild misinterpretation of things you could possibly imagine.
I said that we need to keep child predators away from children and clean up the birthing arena of the species, which is around making sure that pedophiles and rabid monsters weren't around your children, and suddenly I'm a eugenicist!
Turns out next year, from the age of 12 onwards, I've read that Canada will allow children to be euthanized.
To choose euthanasia.
But, you know, they'll have to go through.
You can't buy a beer until you're 19.
But... So it's always about the projection.
Misinformation costs lives.
You don't want people to die.
So, you know, when you don't want people to die in a very complex and fast-moving medical science scenario, you absolutely want to make sure that you take Harvard-educated doctors, the top of their profession, well-published doctors, And you pit their statements against minimum wage cubicle dwellers in the Philippines.
To not do that, to not let minimum wage cube dwellers in the Philippines override actual scientists in the world, to not do that, well, it's just anti-science, man.
At a time when humanity, my God, my God alive, did humanity at that moment, at that moment, in early 2020, That was the time that humanity needed the greatest possible scope and depth and breadth of human discourse.
Almost no other time in history other than imminent war.
Maybe August 1939 or summer 1914.
Other than imminent world war.
Was there ever a time in the first year of COVID that human beings needed free speech more?
I don't think we ever needed free speech more than in 2020.
And certainly post-vaccine we needed absolute free speech.
Absolute, complete and total free speech.
We had a novel coronavirus.
We had...
MRNA technology that people had been trying to make work for 20 or 30 years and it failed every single time and failed fairly catastrophically, I might add.
If there was ever a time when we fucking needed free speech on this planet, in this world, with the tools, technologies, risks, dangerous and wild science that was going on, there was no time in human history we ever needed free speech.
More! And...
Red lasers, big foreheads, sniper, down.
Lockdowns versus opening up.
Masks versus nasal washes.
Israel says it can't even find...
Can't find the agreement it signed with Pfizer.
It just can't find it.
Oh, couldn't find it. I don't know.
Why would you want to keep that? It's not like that's important or anything.
Because there's a theory.
I mean, there seems to be some backup.
There's a theory that that contract between the Israeli government and Pfizer was actually signed before the EUA, Emergency Use Authorization.
That was the time. The costs and benefits.
That was the time when free speech was the most necessary.
And what did they say?
Free speech is going to get people killed, you know.
No, no, no, no. Free speech kills no one.
Free speech saves lives, and it would have saved millions of lives if it had been allowed to flourish in 2020 and 2021.
Free speech is an absolute and total lifesaver.
To suppress free speech is to murder people.
To suppress free speech is to murder people.
And here's the wild thing. It's the wild thing.
I'm a pretty imaginative guy.
Like I'm just working on the last quarter of my new book.
Which is unbelievably heart-rending for me.
It's just, you know, when you really love characters and they go through hell, it's just horrible.
But, you know, over the past I've made mistakes.
I've been doing this for 17 years.
Every now and then I'll say something that's wrong.
I'll quote a statistic that's wrong.
I'll come to an inference that's incorrect.
And I'm like, oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh.
Okay, let me put a note on it.
Let me edit. Let me delete.
Let me re-upload, right? Because it's important to get things right.
And I think, you know, maybe it's happened once.
It happens once every year or two.
Well, it's something important, not like just a, you know, misstatement or whatever, right?
And, I mean, that's why, like, the people who dislike me, or don't dislike me, they just dislike philosophical conclusions that are rational and objective because they profit from subjectivity.
They have to take me wildly out of context.
They can't quote me anything in particular, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, you know, when I make a mistake, I feel bad about it, and I really work hard to fix it.
I mean, you've even heard me when I'm talking to people in the call-in conversations.
If I make a mistake, I'm so sorry.
And I will say, look, if my theories don't match your experience, your experience matters, not my theory, so throw it all aside.
One guy got kicked off Twitter for quoting CDC statistics.
Actually, quoting accurately CDC statistics.
I So, what I find wild is the people who made the decisions to censor people, it's bad enough on principle, but if those people turned out to have been right,
and if those people If they had been allowed to speak, would have saved a lot of lives.
And we're not just talking about saving actual lives.
That's obviously the most important thing.
But, you know, you think of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of elderly people who died alone, unvisited, unheld, uncomforted, unconversed with their people.
Standing outside their windows like kids at the beginning of a Christmas story just looking through the window at the toys.
Except you're looking at the window at your mother, your father, your grandmother, your grandfather, your great-aunt, your great-uncle dying alone.
We think of the children masked up who've lost 10 IQ points.
Over the last couple of years.
The children are speech impediments who didn't learn how to speak properly because they can't see the facial movements and there's less conversation.
Think of the kids who were locked at home with child molesters because they couldn't even escape to school.
Like when I was a kid, because home life was so horrible.
When I was a kid, if you went through a tough childhood, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
You develop a lot of hobbies.
You develop a lot of places to go.
You go to friends' places. I built an entire treehouse that I could go and read comics in rather than go home.
I had a lot of extracurricular activities.
I took up Swimming.
I took up squash. I took up wrong distance running.
I took up tennis. I took up water polo.
I mean, I just did everything so that I didn't have to go home every day after school.
I'd go to my friend's house and I would stay there until they kicked me out at dinner time because I didn't want to go home.
Now, imagine I'm going to school.
It's the only place I've got where things are relatively saner.
I don't know if that's the case anymore.
And the kids... Don't even get school anymore.
And their parents, abusive parents, violent parents, rapey parents, who knows, right?
The parents are now working from home and the kids are stuck at home with them.
No respite. No way out.
I mean, if you have abusive parents or a parent, you roam around.
You know, my friends and I, we would go garbage picking in the industrial districts.
We'd go and try and find bits of bikes in the garbage dump that we could fix up and put together.
We'd bike everywhere. We would, you know, go cook tins of beans in the woods.
We would go hiking. We'd just, you know, everything because we were broke.
And of course, I worked three jobs from the age of 13 or 14 onwards.
And... There's no escape, though.
You can't go anywhere.
You can't go play with friends because nobody's really allowed out.
You can't go to the park.
You're just stuck home.
No debate about any of that.
No debate about costs and benefits.
Of course, people who want to pray on you never want you to consider costs and benefits.
The lab leak theory, which I was roundly condemned and attacked for when I posted my video called The Case Against China.
Hey, you know, I could have been wrong.
Of course, right? It's a hypothesis.
Maybe they would have found some perfectly sourced zoonotic source for COVID-19.
If they haven't, they won't.
I think everyone's pretty aware now.
now you can talk about it the people who decided to censor I mean do they wake up in the middle of the night surrounded by elderly wizened ghosts rattling the chains of their aquarium like untimely demises Are they haunted?
I mean, do people even, does it register?
Do they sit there and say, wow, you know, I censored this stuff which turned out to be Right.
And that costs lives.
Because remember, saying stuff that could cost people's lives is just the worst possible thing in the known universe.
And the people who have that as their argument, have that as their approach to life, and have that as an absolute, like, physics.
Do they feel bad when they're proven wrong?
Do they notice? Yes.
Well, no, because they say, hey, man, we were just doing the best we could at the time, and this is what the CDC was saying.
Like the CDC is Moses with his tablets.
The CDC or the FDA or, I don't know, pharmaceutical company press releases, like that's just engraved by the hand of God.
From God's mouth to my ears to you, man.
This is scripture.
You understand, this is just secular cult, right?
Secular cult. They have this text.
The text is engraved.
And because people can't think for themselves, they have to just refer to the text.
It's scholasticism.
It's the analysis of language rather than reality.
Because nothing says trustworthy like, we're not going to show you this data for 75 years.
People can't think for themselves.
And I blame the schools, of course, for all that.
So people who can't think for themselves, they just go to their holy texts and say, well, that's it.
It's written here. It's written here.
Can't think for myself. Spare the rod, spoil the child means I hit my kid.
Got to hit my kid or get him spoiled.
It's wild.
Just they go to the text because they can't think.
And the disasters in the world are from people just recoiling.
They've been programmed to recoil against reality.
I mean, it would be like giving a lion cub horrible electric shocks every time it ate a bite of meat or tried to chase and play.
You would paralyze and cripple that creature.
It has no secondary backup means of survival.
We don't think. We're done.
If we're not curious, we're over.
If we don't use our brains in the way they're intended to be used, we're caught in extinction.
I mean, you take away a lion's claws, it still has its teeth.
You take away its teeth, maybe it still has its claws.
We got one thing. Thinking.
That's all we do. That's all we survive on.
That's all we bring to the table.
That's why we've poured so much of our energies.
We don't have big teeth. We don't have big muscles.
We don't have long claws. We don't have massive speed.
We do have endurance. But nature, evolution, God, whatever you want to say, just basically said to us, okay, what if we take away everything else and just make this a thinking creature?
That's all we've got. Thinking creature.
All you've got to do. You're at the top of the food chain or you're extinct.
That fork in the road is simply whether you're going to think or not.
Sorry, I forgot to move this to subscribers.
We'll do that. So, that's all we do.
We think. We think or we're done.
That's it. And every time, I say this to everyone out there.
This is not this audience, right?
But everyone who's out there, like you understand, when you recoil against reality, you are writing your own obituary.
In a sort of long-term civilizational sense, if you turn away from reality, if you recoil against facts, reason, evidence, questions, skepticism, if you sprint back from that precipice called rational thought, you're sealing the fate of your civilization, and maybe even your own personal fate as a whole.
You know, for 40 years, 40 years, in the realm of politics, for 40 years, I've beaten my head against the wall of people shrinking back and fainting away from facts, from reality.
And I did it in a very public manner for, I guess, 15 of my 17 years until I was deplatformed.
Why was I deplatformed? Because I said anything false.
Not because the experts I interviewed were wrong or false.
And where I did say things that were wrong or false, I would correct them as quickly as humanly possible.
It's a standard that everybody has to be allowed to have.
Perfection is just another form of censorship.
And the people who recoiled against The facts, reason, evidence, truth, science really.
I interviewed a lot of very well-educated scientists as well.
The people who recoil against that, you get this momentary pleasure of not having to deal with difficult information, but the upshot of that is the various disasters plaguing society.
You can tell people not to smoke.
If they keep smoking, you can't save them from the resulting illnesses.
You can't. Recoil from reality, your civilization falls from life.
You know, each individual little cigarette is the one, right, they call them coffin nails, right?
Each individual cigarette is part of the built-up avalanche that kills you.
Each little avoidance of reality builds up to the toxicity of this society.
Do they... Sit there and say, should have played that better.
No, because when you have an educated population, a supposedly educated population that can't think at all, then they have to go to their holy texts.
We're back at the age of religious warfare.
This is an absolute unity of church and state, right?
This is absolute religious warfare.
My text versus your text.
Well, the CDC said this, therefore it can't be questioned.
Are they gods? Are they infallible?
Do they have no conflicts of interest?
Are they not subject to the whims of bureaucrats and the media and everyone else and everything else?
They're humans. CDC is not.
They're human beings with terrible incentives as a whole, by the way.
A lot of these places, FDA and so on, are funded by the very people they're supposed to regulate.
It's called regulatory capture.
It's pretty obvious.
There's a revolving door between the industry and the groups that are supposed to regulate them.
So...
I mean, what is...
Japan is on its eighth wave now with a 98% vaccination rate.
And this wasn't allowed to be discussed.
It wasn't allowed to be talked about.
People who can't think should never manage people who can think.
And people who can think will never want to manage people who can think.
Or who can't think either.
Alright. What is the philosophy of play?
Yeah. Something one of my acting teachers, a movement teacher, told me in theater school many years ago.
He said, play like children play, very seriously.
A play is rehearsal, right?
Play is rehearsal. Sports are rehearsal for war.
You see lion cubs all tumbling over each other.
They're practicing how to hunt.
You see kittens pretending to jump on the mother's leg or whatever, right?
So play is a rehearsal for, like dreaming, is a rehearsal for life.
It's a way of developing your capacity to assess and handle risk, particularly as a predator.
Without burning your calories or injuring yourself or getting kicked by some zebra flying away.
All right. I enjoyed your review of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters from a few years ago.
Would you do a review of his other books?
I first read his Space Trilogy and find that hideous strength very relevant.
I don't have any particular desire.
I like C.S. Lewis in many ways.
I don't have any particular desire to do review of other books, but a few other people would like to.
How does one balance wanting to help others with the realization that most people don't want help or truth slash introspection?
At what point is it selfish to want to help others?
Yeah, so in preparation for the final quarter of my new book, I'm reading up a lot on pathological altruism.
The pathological altruism is when you get high on the perception of being a good person.
You don't care whether it's actually helping the other people or not.
You don't care at all. The goal is not to help people.
The goal is to feel good yourself.
That's what the goal is.
The welfare state, right?
Nobody cares if the welfare state helps the poor.
They care that they get to feel like good people for advocating for the welfare state.
Nobody cares that the children are becoming less and less educated and more and more eviscerated in their mental capacities because they just say, well, I want to feel good by supporting the teachers and supporting public education.
I just feel like a good person.
They don't care about the outcome.
They care about the addiction, the dopamine hit of feeling like a good person and not being questioned or opposed or criticized by others.
Um... If people come to me for help, I will help.
I honestly cannot remember the last time that I went to someone who wasn't asking me in order to help that person.
It probably would be about maybe eight years ago where there was a family that I liked and I thought the parenting was going awry and the kid was telling me the parenting was going awry, so I sat down with them for an afternoon and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But, I mean, that didn't work out either.
So, yeah, I don't...
You know, it's late, man.
It's late. It's all too late.
It's late in the game.
It's late in the day. It's late in the day.
You can't teach someone how to swim and the Titanic's going down.
So... I save the help that I offer for people who want it.
People who I've earned their respect by consistent benevolence in the private and public sphere over many decades.
So if they want the help, fantastic.
But I don't chase people around trying to help them.
I've no... I mean, that would just be...
I mean, really, it would be kind of suicidal, right?
When you get older, you'll notice this when you get into your 50s.
I mean, you really do get a sense that, you know, time's ticking away, man, and your robust years may be coming...
You know, there's the end of your robust years, and then there's the end of your mental years, and then there's the end of your life.
And, you know, hopefully you can keep the robustness and the mental acuity all the way near the end, although...
People like Noam Chomsky cheering on the vaccines and mandates and so on doesn't give me much hope for that.
But you don't know.
You don't know. You know that it's going to happen relatively soon, like the decay, but you don't know when or how quickly.
And so, and of course, you enter into the realm of just more significant risks of just, you know, diseases popping up.
And even if you've been a good boy or a good girl and eaten well and exercised and so on, just bad luck, right?
So... When it comes to helping people I don't have an infinity of time.
And it's kind of suicidal in that you're burning a known quantity of time.
It's a pretty known quantity of time, right?
Like I'm 56. 86, so I got 30 years.
But the last 10 years, probably not super robust.
Again, I'll do my best and I'll keep exercising and so on.
So I got, you know, 20 years.
And then you subtract sleeping.
You subtract all the things you have to do other than helping people.
You have... Maybe a year of voluntary time, maybe two years of voluntary time when you're relatively robust.
Are you going to spend that pissing it away on people who aren't going to listen?
Not me. Thank you very much.
All right. Yes, if you want to find the screw tape letters, just look for PESTA, P-E-S-T-A. The good doctor and I did a whole number of shows.
Boy, you should check out the one on Lord of the Rings.
It was fantastic. All right.
But Steph, free speech would have destroyed big farmers' finances.
Where else were they supposed to get billions of dollars with no liability?
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that was fantastic about the left.
Honestly, three things were fantastic about the left.
Pro-free speech, anti-war, anti-corporate.
Well, of course, they were anti-censorship until they had the powers of censorship, and then they were pro-censorship, and they were anti-war until they could infiltrate the army and whatever it is, the military-industrial complex, and point wars at their enemies, and now they're pro-war.
And then they were anti-corporate until they got control, significant control of the corporations, so infiltrated the corporations, now they're pro-corporations.
It's really sad, right? So...
I think you're wrong on letting babies cry it out.
Maybe we can arrange a debate.
No, I'm not wrong. I'm not wrong on that.
Sorry, like, I don't mean to just completely shut you down, but I'm not wrong on that because of my personal experience.
Now, obviously I would completely love it if we didn't have to let our daughter cry it out for a week or two.
I would be thrilled if that hadn't happened and we certainly tried as long and as deeply and as much and with as much expertise.
We got books, we got a doula, we got everything to try and sort this out.
But if...
Parents aren't getting any rest.
They can't be good parents.
Like you understand, sleep deprivation is how you break people's personality, how you make them crazy.
It's unhealthy. It's dangerous.
It's dangerous. You've got to be attentive and careful with a baby around, and especially when they hit the toddler face.
You have to drive places and so on, right?
You cannot be that sleep deprived and be a good parent.
It's not possible, you understand.
It's not healthy. It's incredibly dangerous.
If you have a baby that sleeps well, more power to you.
If you have a baby that you can gently transition to sleeping well in a different bed or whatever it is, fantastic.
But if you don't, what are you supposed to do?
I mean, honestly, you can't live that sleep deprived for months and months and months.
And the data is very clear that if babies don't learn how to sleep, they still have sleep issues into their 20s.
And sleep issues is a big problem for people and a huge quality of life issue.
So... It's like taking them to the dentist.
They kick and scream and cry at the beginning, but they've got to go to the dentist.
I'm a big fan of polio vaccines and smallpox vaccines and so on.
They cry when they get their essential vaccines, and you've got to do it.
So... I'm not wrong.
I mean, there's no fact.
There's no magic wand. I mean, we tried everything, right?
So there's no magic wand to make a baby sleep.
My daughter did cry for a week or so, and then she has slept fine.
She has now slept fine ever since.
You've heard her. She's a wonderfully happy and positive and charming young lady, and we're deeply bonded and great friends and all of that.
So... This is not a my data versus your data situation.
This is, it is absolutely unsustainable for parents to be sleep deprived to that extent.
You can't do it. It would be considered torture if you did that in a situation of war.
And so you have to get your sleep.
And I mean, I don't know what to say.
This is not, I'm not wrong about this.
I'm not wrong about this.
All right. What do you think is going on in China?
Seems they are having a new COVID outbreak.
I mean, who knows, right?
They say hundreds of, what, tens of millions of people are being off.
I think I saw like 200 million people infected in a single day or something like that.
Well, of course they are.
Of course they are. Of course they are because...
Coronaviruses mutate, right? This is what we know.
It's why you have to get a different flu shot every year, and some of those flu shots only have 10 to 20% efficacy.
Of course, they're having a new COVID outbreak, just as, of course, Japan is having a new COVID outbreak, their seventh or their eighth one, of course, because they mutate.
And with the vaccine, it's a leaky vaccine, right?
Isn't this the general theory?
Again, I'm no scientist. I'm no doctor.
It's just what I've heard. It's a leaky vaccine.
A leaky vaccine means that you're simply training the remaining viruses to escape the vaccine.
This is why you're not supposed to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic.
You're supposed to maybe vaccinate after, right?
You're not supposed to vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic because it's raging, it's spreading, and you can't vaccinate everyone all at once.
So you're simply training the vaccine to escape.
Sorry, you're training the virus to escape the vaccine.
So that's the prediction.
And by golly, it certainly seems to be that that's the case.
And of course, you've got vaccine efficacy that completely craters very quickly.
So vaccine efficacy craters very quickly.
The vaccines, to the degree to which they suppress symptoms, have people out there rather than homesick, right?
Because you may not even know that you're ill or you may just think it's a bit of a sore throat or whatever it is, right?
So by suppressing symptoms, symptoms are a great way to say to yourself, stay home.
So, yeah, of course they're having a new COVID outbreak.
I mean... I mean, I think I talked about leaky vaccines a couple of years ago.
So, yeah, I mean, that's inevitable.
And this is why free speech is so important.
And suppressing free speech is getting countless people killed.
Oh, you can't say that.
You're going to get people killed. It's like, no, no, no.
You guys are not letting us say stuff.
That's getting people killed. That is absolutely getting people killed.
else no question all right went to japan recently had to show my vaccine record for the covid yeah for sure Thank you.
All right. In Australia's Outback, where schools are heavily populated by indigenous students, the lights are turned off in classrooms during the day so they can sleep because they must stay awake at night in their communities to avoid, oh gosh, this assault.
Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's...
I don't know how well cultures where there's a lot of child abuse can work and play well together with other cultures that try to minimize it.
I don't know how well that doesn't seem to be particularly good.
All right. Steph, what do you think is the state of the economy?
My industry hasn't recovered its pre-2020 lockdown levels.
Well, it's a mirage, right?
I mean, the whole thing's a mirage.
I mean, the economy barely had recovered in many ways from the 2007-2008 financial crash when COVID hit and they just loosed the money printing insanely.
Like they loosed the money printing, you know, machine go brrr, right?
They just loosed it insanely and it's only a couple of years since they loosed all the printing presses and now it's falling apart again, right?
So it's a cocaine escalation.
Hey, Steph, hope you and your family had a fantastic Christmas.
What do you think about people who tell others to cheer up or try to make you laugh or get offended when you don't?
I personally find it shallow as I wouldn't want anyone to smile at me unless they meant it.
That is a very interesting question.
And I don't mean to imply that the others weren't.
I'm just, that's got a lot of depth and layer to it.
So, my first thought is that people who tell you to cheer up Are the people who are responsible for you being depressed.
And what they want you to do is cover up the symptoms rather than talk about the cause, which is probably their behavior.
Don't forget to tip if you wouldn't mind throwing a few fins or bones to your friendly neighborhood philosopher in the live stream.
So yeah, I mean, there's this sort of cliche in crime movies, right?
Like the mafia guy beats up some guy, and the guy's sort of blubbering and bleeding and snot coming out of his nose in the corner, and then the mafia guy gets a towel and throws it at the guy and says, ah, for God's sakes, clean yourself up, you're a mess!
So he wants to get rid of the evidence of his own crimes because maybe he feels bad or maybe he feels he'll be caught in someone.
So if people's bad behavior has contributed to your depression, they don't want to confront their own bad behavior.
They don't want to confront the reality of what they've done.
So what they're going to do is they're going to tell you to cheer up!
Clean yourself up, man. You're a mess.
But you beat me up. I don't care.
Just get rid of the evidence, right?
So that's the first thing.
The second thing is...
Why aren't you talking to these people about feeling depressed?
I don't know if depression is the right word.
I'm just going to say sad or whatever, right?
So if you have a weird enough relationship or a distant or estranged or separate or dissociated enough relationship that you're feeling pretty depressed and other people are like, hey, cheer up, mate!
Right? Then that's a weird, distant relationship.
And I wouldn't have anything like that in my life.
Personally, I would sit there and say, you know, listen, everyone's here.
I'm really feeling kind of down and here's why and so on.
Because, you know, family getting together, they should want to help you, right?
They should want to help you with all of this.
So, if you're in, since this is a Christmas, it seems like a Christmas message, if you're around people that you're feeling depressed around, and you're not talking to them about your depression, what are you doing there?
What are you doing? I don't understand what that kind of relationship is.
I mean, to me it would be as strange as...
You cut yourself really badly in the kitchen and just walk around bleeding without saying anything about it.
Wouldn't that just be completely bizarre?
All right. Let my 18-month-old cry it out.
He fell asleep in front of his door and blocked it from being opened.
Maybe start earlier. You've mentioned about the boomer phenomenon.
Could you explain more or point me in a direction of where you've talked about this in detail?
I mean, there's a lot to say about the boomers, so if you could give me a little bit more.
The boomer phenomenon is a pretty wide topic as a whole.
So... The boomers as a whole, they grew up in a time of...
In the West, in particular, in America and Canada...
They grew up in a time and a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
They inherited the sacrifices, so to speak, of the First and Second World War, the greatest generation, the last generation, the greatest generation.
And particularly in America, they grew up in a time of great peace, great plenty, and all of that.
And what did they do with it all?
I mean, this is part of my argument in my novel, The Future, which, as subscribers, I hope you'll have had a listen to or a read, which is civilization makes people soft, gooey, treacly, jello-like, and lazy.
It leeches the bones from their bodies and turns them into a shapeless pile of pyramid-style goo that simply seeks pleasure at the expense of any discomfort.
So the boomers, unprecedented peace and prosperity...
And with all of that excess and all of that peace and prosperity...
They could have really advanced the course of civilization, but they didn't.
They became spoiled, selfish, lazy, hedonistic, and boomers have no conception of sacrifice, have no conception of sacrifice at all, not even a sacrifice of the immediate displeasures of the moment.
They can't even sacrifice, for the sake of any kind of truth, the momentary nonconformity of thinking for yourself.
Again, big generalization.
But, you know, the being born in the 50s, as that song goes, born in the 50s, then born in the 50s, grew up in the 60s, were very easily programmed into a hedonistic sex and drugs culture outside of the Christian community, very easily programmed as a very big sigh-up that went on.
They fell into the vacuous hedonism and environmental horror scares of the 1970s, into the equally vacuous materialism and status-seeking of The 80s into the insensate internet greed of the 90s into the throw away all of your liberties in the 2000s and explain away.
Like, they had these easy answers.
Easy answers were fed to the boomers.
They were fed to the boomers.
Just easy, easy answers.
We got a problem with poverty?
Welfare state. We got a problem with under-representation of minorities and under-representation of women?
Affirmative action. Oh, people who go to university make more money and they're more productive?
Great! Let's just jam more people into university.
It's like, wow, Freddie Mercury sings in front of 300,000 people?
Man, if we put anyone in front of 300,000 people, they're going to sing like Freddie Mercury.
So just the reversal of cause and effect.
They wouldn't deal with any data or science or IQ or intelligence.
They just wouldn't deal with any facts.
They were handed these easy answers.
And rather than being skeptical of those easy answers, they just grabbed at them.
As if they were people drowning when they weren't drowning.
They were masters of the universe. The richest generation by far in the history of the world.
The richest generation by far in the history of the world can't give up anything.
At all. Can't give up their illusions.
Can't give up their slave to the delusions of power.
They can't look back and say, well, we made mistakes.
They're not self-critical.
Oh, it's monstrous.
It's monstrous. They just suckled off the giant teats of the media and considered themselves Socratic in their wisdoms.
Vanity, imperviousness to feedback, imperviousness to counter narratives, impervious to admitting error.
On average, on balance, a fairly monstrous generation.
I mean, it's so widespread one can almost forgive the individuals.
But not quite. At least not.
Not for me. Not a fan of the cry-it-out method.
They're asking for help.
I'm able to help. Seems immoral to ignore the baby.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh.
Oh, boy. I don't want to be nicer to you because you're a subscriber, but I got to have integrity, right?
Who the hell is a fan of the cry-it-out method?
What are you talking about? I mean, let's say that one of my fingers got horribly infected, got gangrene and so on, and they had to cut my finger off, right?
I'm not a fan of amputation.
Well, who's a fan of amputation?
Nobody's a fan of amputation.
Not a fan. Of course you're not a fan.
I'm not a fan either. They're asking for help.
I'm able to help. Seems immoral to ignore the baby.
Okay, let me give you an analogy.
Your baby is learning how to walk.
And you just hold them up the whole time.
You never let them develop their muscles.
You never let them develop their balance, their processing of the inner ear and the coordination, the spine, the neurological system and all that.
You hold them up the whole time.
You just walk them around because, you know, once they want help walking, they're a little messed up with walking.
They're just asking for help and you're able to help.
They need something from you which is support and you're able to support them so why wouldn't you just do that for the rest of their lives?
Baby likes sugar.
Toddler likes sugar.
They just want to eat sugar.
They're asking for sugar.
You can give them sugar. It would be immoral to ignore the baby's needs.
See, some needs are legitimate, and for a baby, all needs are legitimate.
Some needs are legitimate, and some needs are illegitimate, just as it is for you, right?
Some of your needs, air, food, water, they're legitimate, and some of your other needs are illegitimate, right?
I mean, we all say no to ourselves all the time, right?
Now, can the baby fall asleep, let's say six months, right?
Can a baby fall asleep on his or her own at six months of age?
Yep. Yes, they can.
Yes, they can. So you're not ignoring the baby.
You are helping the baby learn how to fall asleep on his or her own.
Can the baby... What's called self-soothing, right?
So self-soothing is...
It's okay.
Everything's going to be fine. I'm not going to die.
There's no need to panic. I'm just going to relax.
And I'm going to... Right? And babies can do that.
I mean, they can't do that when they're born.
They can't do... I don't know when exactly they learn how to do that, but...
Whatever, six months, eight months, whatever.
Babies can self-soothe.
They can realize that they don't need their parents to fall asleep because they don't physically need their parents to fall asleep.
A baby, like a toddler, let's say, right?
A toddler does not physically need his or her parents to fall asleep.
In the same way, the toddler doesn't need sugar all the time.
The toddler doesn't need you to hold him up.
He can walk on his own, but as long as you hold him up, the harder it's going to be for him to walk on his own.
So, is it an initiation of the use of force to have a child realize that he or she can fall asleep on their own?
No, it's not initiating force.
I mean, to withhold food from a baby who's captive in your house is to initiate force, for sure.
But will the baby survive if the baby falls asleep when they can fall asleep?
I'm not talking when they're babies, like newborns, right?
Can the baby fall asleep without being held and cuddled and cooed at by the parent?
Yes, they can. Should they learn how to do that?
Yes, they should. I don't know at what age that's appropriate because every baby is different.
So I think our daughter is about eight months or something like that, but Yeah, baby can do it.
The baby can do it.
Baby wants a big face full of marshmallows before going to bed.
Baby's expressing needs.
They're crying. They want the marshmallows.
I mean, they're asking for the marshmallows.
You can give them the marshmallows.
Does it seem immoral to ignore the baby?
You're not ignoring the baby. You're helping the baby.
My daughter learned to self-soothe.
She's had wonderful sleep since the age of eight months old.
She has no issues with sleep, no issues with bonding, no issues with happiness.
So... Yeah, mine is calling out.
Daddy, daddy. Totally ignore them.
Well, I don't know what it means by totally ignore them, because everything that you're thinking about is regards to your baby.
But you see, and I hate to say this so bluntly, you have to put your own preferences aside for the good of your children.
Whatever is best for your children, I know it's horrible and it's uncomfortable and it's painful and it's wretched if your baby is crying and whatever, right?
And if the sleep it out thing is happening in your household, that's what you're choosing to do.
Again, consult with the experts, read the books, get a doula, like make sure that everything's in the right place at the right time.
It's really uncomfortable.
It's really difficult. And...
You have to, in a sense, model for the baby that you as a parent can do difficult things for the good of the child.
Right?
All right.
Alright, let's see here.
Let's see here.
Is the Poland documentary on locals?
I can't find it in search.
No, I don't think it is.
I'll put it up there. The Poland documentary, so you can go to freedomain.com slash documentaries or fdrul.com slash Poland and you can get to the documentary that way.
All right. Yes, slavery existed for, what, 80 years in America?
And see, remember, America as a country inherited slavery from the British, wherein it was legal in the 18th century, right?
So... America has had the fewest amount of slaves for the least amount of time.
It's just about any country in the history of the world.
I mean, the Islamic slave trade was 20 times larger and went on, well, still goes on in some countries, right?
So, no, it's just, you know, the vending machine of guilt, right?
It used to be original sin, now it's historical wrongs and blah, blah, blah, right?
The boom's personality was eclipsed by wealth.
No. No. No, you can't blame wealth.
I mean, this is the problem, right?
The problems, let's just sort of focus on America for a second.
The problems in America are the result of decisions made 170 years ago, 160 years ago.
That's the problem, right?
I mean, problems that take a long time to accrue take a long time to solve, if they're even solvable.
So why did government education come in in America?
Because you had a big influx of Catholics from Europe, particularly Ireland, and they said, well, this is a Protestant nation, it's a white Protestant nation, and so we can't have all these Catholics in there, it's going to be a huge issue, so we've got to have government education to maintain the integrity and virtue and small government philosophy of America, right? Now, of course, it takes a long time for these things.
Changing culture is like changing a supertanker's direction.
You spin the wheel and it takes like two hours to turn around.
And so, yeah, it takes a number of generations.
But, you know, as I've always said, every government program achieves the exact opposite of its intended goals.
So you put government in charge of education with the goal of preserving the unique American freedom-loving culture.
And then, you know, before you know it, it's being used to subvert freedom-loving American culture and producing the opposite of its intended goal.
So... No, it's not wealth.
It's programming plus just a kind of conformity that didn't seem to be the case as much in earlier generations.
Because if you say the boomer's personality was eclipsed by wealth, then all the children of wealthy parents would be like boomers, and they're not.
All right. How do I find the time between work and spending quality time with my children?
I feel guilty at times with the amount of screen time that my children observe, but I don't have the energy to find and maintain creative ways to compete with tablets, etc.
I'm a single dad. What happened to the mom?
What happened to the mom? So the only thing that you can do with tablets is find, like either play with them and playing with your kids on tablets or with computers is, I mean, perfectly fine parenting, lots of great memories with my daughter about stuff we played together, but...
What you have to do is you have to try and find some way that you can be more interesting than tablets.
I view tablets as a great challenge to be interesting and engaging.
So if I can get my daughter engaged in a great conversation about ideas, thoughts, history, art, whatever, right?
Then, you know, like we watched A Christmas Story, right?
That cute film set in the 1940s America.
It's really sweet, sweet, sweet film.
And so, yeah, we talked about the themes and what's changed and what's the same and all of that.
And so if you can get into a great conversation, your kids love good conversations.
And sometimes you kind of have to wait for the planets to align and you can't force these things to happen.
But when those conversations happen, they're just fantastic.
Yeah. Don't be a showman, right?
Don't be like a clown or a showman with your kids.
I mean, they have clowns for that.
With your kids, just try and be as real.
And if you're feeling goofy and playful, then by all means do it.
But you're not there to be a circus for your kids.
You're there to connect with and interact with them, a model behavior that they need to emulate when they get older.
I don't see my fellow millennials as showing much sign of being better than the boomers they're so fond of criticizing.
Well... Post-Boomer, it's tougher to be non-Boomer, right?
I mean, I remember reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Oh gosh, I was maybe 15 or 16 years old.
And then I went on to the Gulag Archipelago, which is his description of the network of prison camps and his experience in the prison camps.
It's a horrendous book.
It's an appalling book. It's an open doorway to bottomless human evil.
And I remember when Solzhenitsyn made it to America, or to the West, and he showed unbelievable courage, you know, keeping his samistat, keeping his papers hidden, buried here, there, buried there, snuck out in suitcases and stuffed in his shirts, and like just, and of course he would have been just tortured and killed if he'd been found with this material, so he managed to smuggle it out.
I've never had cancer ward, though.
It's pretty good. As a cancer survivor, I don't particularly want to revisit the topic, but I heard it's good.
So, I remember Solzhenitsyn saying, there was an interview I saw with him at some time in the 80s, I think it was, and he said, you know, America's sliding towards socialism and communism, so you've got to...
Take this stuff seriously. It's happening here.
And I was like, oh, come on.
There's just no way.
There's no way after the 20th century, after the Soviet Union, after China, after Cuba, after North Vietnam, after South Korea, there's just no way that people could fall for that shit.
It would be like trying to get slavery back or trying to resurrect the horrors of National Socialism.
Just no way!
And I, you know, because in my mid-teen giant brain, imaginary wisdom, I was like, well, what a soldier needs to know, man.
Well, he was right and I was wrong.
When you think for yourself, it's easy to overestimate the number of other people who do the same.
Very easy. To mistake the world for yourself, right?
So, come on.
I mean, the body count. You know, when the big black book of communism came out, very well established, 100 million people killed.
100 million people killed.
What's that, like 16 holocausts, right?
There's no way. There's just no way that people could do this or fall for this.
Because, you know, when I see 100 million people murdered, I'm like, well, shit, let's not do that again.
I mean, that seems like a pretty fucking obvious thing to say, doesn't it?
100 million people murdered.
Let's not fucking do that again.
Especially, you know, my ancestors on both sides, you know, fought against collectivism and fought against totalitarianism.
How about we don't do that again?
No! One more time.
One more try. Come on, this time it's going to be fine.
It's like a death wish.
It's literally straight up Freudian thanatos.
Like just, if you don't think for yourself, part of you yearns for death.
It really does. Seems like most boomers I've met have always had easy answers.
If you don't like it at home, just leave.
There's the door. You're an adult now.
Get over it! Yeah, have you seen those memes?
I'm going to look them up. Old Economy Steve.
Old Economy Steve.
The official meme for embedded millennials.
Have you seen this one? It's a picture of a guy with a full-on center park and so on, right?
Drives up federal. It's a picture of a guy looking total 70s, right?
Total boomer kid, right?
He's a teenager in the 70s.
Drives up federal deficit for 30 years.
Hands the bill to his kids.
Old Economy Steve. Graduates from college.
Gets hired. Old Economy Steve.
At my first job, I only made $15,000 a year.
In 1979, that was the equivalent of $47,000.
Old Economy Steve.
Got my dream job by responding to a classified ad.
Oh, it's...
These things, you know, gets fired from his job, crosses the street, gets another job.
You know, it's just how the boomers just don't understand, right?
Old Economy Steve, fails out of high school, gets job, buys house, retires happy.
Old Economy Steve, when I was in college, my summer job paid the tuition.
The tuition was $400.
$400. Loser's job finds another one on the way home.
Old Economy Steve bought a house in his 20s with a 9-5 job that didn't require a bachelor's degree.
Kids these days have it easy.
Old Economy Steve pays into Social Security, receives benefits.
Oh, it's wild. It's wild.
Yeah, the old economy, Steve, stuff there, you know, it's bitter stuff, right?
It's embittering stuff.
And now, I mean, I get, you know, this intergenerational warfare is kind of unique to the West, and I understand that there's some real criticisms of it and all that, but nonetheless, it's pretty brutal stuff.
All right, let me get back to these questions.
What harm is done by giving boob?
Harm is done by giving sugar.
Harm is done by not giving medical care to bleeding finger.
Your harm is done by giving boob, right?
If the child, again, at an appropriate age, check with your professionals, check with your doctor, check with a doula.
But if at an appropriate age when the child can sleep through the night, the harm is done by giving boob because the child now is associating always having to have breastfeeding in order to fall asleep.
And because children, babies, toddlers wake up multiple times in the night, they can't get back to sleep.
The harm is done. Sleep deprivation for the mother, not able to enjoy parenting, dangerous driving, unable to have good reflexes to take care of for children, foggy brain, foggy bad decisions.
So the harm is done by giving the boob.
The harm is done by the child unable to soothe himself back to sleep on his own.
I don't know. Are you not able to follow this?
I mean, I'm going to give up on this topic with you because it seems like you only have an output.
There is no input here. All right.
World War I and II generations seemed to have much better common sense, delayed gratification, but they were also destructively compliant to existing power structures, patriotism, white feathers given to men, etc.
Why do you think the pre-baby boomers failed in these respects?
So, one of the major problems with state-based civilization, right?
So, the degree to which the state retreats is the degree to which you have a civilization because the state is compulsion.
Compulsion has a relationship to civilization that rape has to love, right?
So, I mean, civilization involves wealth transfers and the state involves wealth transfers in the same way that rape involves a penis, a vagina, so does lovemaking.
It's just that one is good and one is not, right?
One is evil. So, When you grow up, The more you deal with practical, tangible reality, the more common sense you're going to end up.
So these kids, money meant something because you had to pay your bills at the end of the month.
There were no credit cards. It was really hard to get debt.
You couldn't just get student loans and so on.
So you had to really work hard for everything that you had and you had to deal very pragmatically.
One of the greatest educations I got in philosophy was having to work from the age of 10 onwards and having to pay my own bills from the age of 15 onwards.
I mean, you can't live in your head.
You can't have all of this nonsense floating around in your head.
You have to be empirical. You have to be factual because bills have to be paid.
I remember there was a sign.
There was a sign On the superintendent's store where you'd hand in your check for the month, right?
And it said, rent checks must be certified after the fifth of each month.
And we did. We got eviction notices when we just couldn't pull that money together.
And you can't will it into existence.
You can't wish it into existence.
You learn a lot about economics when you deal with significant scarcity as a child.
And of course, all generations prior to the boomers grew up with significant scarcity, right?
I mean... The domestic servants, like a third of women, young women in Victorian England were domestic servants.
Domestic servants were brutal, brutal life.
You get up at dawn, you work till 10 o'clock, you work till midnight, and the work is unhygienic.
You know, you see all this crap about, I don't know, Mallory Towers from Enid Blyton and the, oh gosh, was it, oh, the recent one with the, Oh gosh, what was the name of it? Downton Abbey.
Yeah, Downton Abbey and all this kind of stuff.
So one of the things that people don't know about the Victorian age was the amount of bugs and cockroaches and rats, mice, the infestation of pests and parasites in the households.
There's stories of...
The servants have to prepare all the meals standing on the table because the floor is a literal sea of cockroaches.
The work was brutal.
The women were thrilled, literally thrilled, to escape from domestic servant life into the factories because the factories was 12 hours, right?
You get to work at 8, you're done at 8 p.m.
as opposed to 5 to midnight.
And you get Sundays off, which was rare as a domestic servant.
In fact, there was a woman I was reading about who was complaining.
She says, well, you can't get any good help unless you guarantee that they'll be off work by 10 p.m.
because nobody will take the job because they're all being snapped up at the factories, right?
So there's a kind of scarcity.
You know... I mean, if you have to start the fire, you have to start the fire.
You can't whine about it.
You can't complain about it.
You can't nag about it. You can't manipulate.
You just got to do your job.
Do your job!
Tom Cruise screaming in the...
In Magnolia, right?
Just do your damn job.
So when you grow up with genuine scarcity, you are empirical.
When you grow up with excess and everything can be manipulated and you can vote for stuff and you can avoid the consequences of bad decisions, it makes people grandiose.
Grandiose people have no sense of their own limitations.
Their entire culture has been grandiose.
It's completely grandiose.
Like, grandiose people are like, I can be a boxer and a master chess player and I can start a business.
And they burn themselves out and they go insane because they think they can do everything.
In the same way the West, we can tax people into changing the weather.
We can fix massive convoluted conflicts halfway across the world.
We can save Africa.
You know, it's mad.
Everything that everyone thinks that they can do because there's no restriction.
We've become insane.
We've become mentally ill as a culture on the fantasy of limitless resources because you just borrow and print money, right?
Really, I mean, we're all spoiled that way, right?
All right. Steph, do you plan to do new documentaries?
I do. I do.
I do. I feel like when the baby is old enough to talk, I can reason with him about falling asleep on his own.
My baby is 17 months.
It's too soon, in my opinion. Not saying the self-soothing method is bad, just not ready yet.
Sorry, I know I said I wouldn't respond to this, but I'm not sure what you mean by what does it matter whether you're ready for it or not?
I mean, I don't understand this.
The question is whether it's good for your kid or not.
Not whether you're ready.
I'm sorry, I don't understand.
If your baby wakes up hungry, because babies need to feed every couple of hours, right?
Your baby wakes up hungry. You say, oh, I'm not ready to get up yet.
It's like, you get up because your baby needs you.
I mean, I don't...
Maybe I'm missing something here about your parenting, but that's not any kind of parenting that I understand.
Not ready yet? So I think that you feel like you'll feel better if you can explain it to your kid.
But then your kid, let's say that you can explain this when your kid is two or two and a half, then your baby's had another year, give or take, of three quarters of a year of this association.
It's going to be even tougher to undo.
Wake up, get comforted.
Wake up, get comforted. I never have to comfort myself.
I never have to soothe myself.
And what you're saying to your baby is you're saying to your baby, you can't soothe yourself.
I have to do it for you.
Which, you know, like if you carry your baby everywhere, you can't walk.
I have to do it for you. That transmits itself as anxiety to the child.
It's not healthy, in my opinion.
Not helpful. My opinion.
Just my opinion. But when it says, just not ready yet, I have no idea whether you're ready for it or not.
It's completely irrelevant as to whether it's good for your baby or not.
Because what you do as a parent, as you know, is you do what's best for your baby.
All right. Do these policies agree with UPP? No welfare for children born out of wedlock.
No welfare for second child if not from the same father as first.
Repeal. Okay. Okay. So, no.
No, you can have whatever welfare you want as long as it's voluntary.
Like, if you're talking about these changes to government programs, well, no.
I mean, the forcible transfer of wealth through the welfare state is a violation of UPB. It's the initiation of the use of force to rob people of their life, money, time, and existence.
So... No.
If you take away government redistribution, you end up with actually helpful charity.
But actually helpful charity is painful to the recipients.
They would rather usually just get money and continue to make their bad decisions so they don't have to confront their own bad mistakes.
Sorry, I think there are good mistakes.
There are insignificant mistakes.
So, no. UPB is non-initiation of force.
If you're talking about reforming government programs, no.
Non-initiation of force is voluntary charity only because that's the only thing that's moral and, in fact, it is the only thing that will help.
I tried reasoning with my three-year-old who wasn't sleep-trained, says someone.
He just starts screaming and wants to keep playing.
We just give him two options.
Either turn off the light and mommy and daddy falls asleep with him or he plays in his room by himself.
So that's interesting, right?
And I don't know the answer to this because every kid is different, but at what age do you as a parent start to assert your own needs?
See, if you do what your child wants the whole time, your child is going to have no real practical way to tell that you're a different person.
He's going to look at you as an object there to please his own desires.
At some point, you do have to say, I don't feel like doing that.
So if you want to fall asleep with him, Okay?
But if you don't want to fall asleep with him, then, you know, giving him two options, again, three, it depends how verbal he is.
It also depends whether he's closer to four or three.
But if he starts screaming, and as a result of that, you give him two options which maybe you don't want, then you're allowing his screaming to dictate your response as parents.
Okay? And I'll tell you that one thing I'm sure of in this situation is that you never ever want to make a decision as a parent to appease screaming.
All you're doing is training them to scream more.
If you give a child what he wants, and maybe either of those two options is more what he wants than you...
But if you give the child something he wants because he's screaming, he will just keep screaming and he will escalate and that will be his way of getting what he wants.
You can never, in my opinion, it's more than my opinion, you cannot appease children.
You can't appease anyone in your life.
You don't give people what they want.
You know, people have bullied me like crazy, expecting retractions and apologies and disavowals and so on.
I'm like, I'm going to give it to them. I'm not gonna...
No, I'm not gonna... I'd rather be deplatformed off everywhere.
I'd rather go live under a bridge than contradict what I know for a fact to be true.
No. God, no.
So you don't reward bullies.
You don't reward screaming. You don't reward manipulation.
Just don't do it. So why is he screaming?
My daughter never screamed. Again, you can say it's a boy-girl thing, but I don't think it's that bad.
She's pretty assertive. So my daughter never screamed because we would never give her anything that she wanted if she screamed.
Screaming would be an absolute shutdown of anything that she wanted.
And so I don't let the screaming dictate your responses.
That's going to give it a lot of strength and power.
Steph, which regions of the world do you think are not sliding towards communism?
Well, it seems to be all of the regions that recently experienced communism, sadly.
Which maybe it's...
Until parenting is fixed, we're always going to be sliding towards totalitarianism.
All right. What do you think is going on with Japan?
Seems they are on their 1,000th quantitative easing again.
Why do you think their economy hasn't collapsed yet?
I'm a very smart group of people and they've got these zombie economies.
Massive debt. I mean, it's like saying so-and-so has been smoking for 40 years.
Why aren't they dead yet? Don't know, but they're not going to do well.
Anyone familiar with the term strong-willed child?
I think my son is one.
This is from peaceful parenting websites.
Child has leadership traits. Very stubborn.
Yeah, I wouldn't...
Stubborn is a dangerous word to use with regards to your children.
Because stubborn is, well, he's just resisting the right thing to do.
He's just stubborn. Strong-willed child?
I don't know. I don't know exactly, because I don't know your kid, obviously.
I don't know what I would call it.
But why does your child need to be strong-willed?
So your child wants to do something...
If your child believes that you also want to make them happy and you want to facilitate what's best for your child then your will would be in the same direction, wouldn't it?
So, I don't know, strong-willed, stubborn, and so on, that is in conflict with you.
And I really think it's important as a parent to not set yourself up in any mindset that involves being in conflict with your child.
I mean, there are times when you disagree with your child and so on, right?
But to be in conflict with your child, where he's very stubborn, it's like, well, I want him to do this, but he's very stubborn.
Well, he should be doing this, but he's very strong-willed the other way.
That's setting up a whole paradigm where you're at war with your child.
That's no fun. Why would you want to be a parent to just fight with someone or disagree in sort of foundational ways and all of that.
The baby is not ready because he can't talk.
I'm sure you gave your baby the odd vaccine, like the traditional vaccines.
You couldn't talk then, right?
You did what was best for your child, even if it caused your child pain, before he could talk.
No, you just, you want to be, I think, you want to be able to explain to your child why you're doing what you're doing so that you feel less guilt or whatever it is, right?
So, all right.
Is there an appropriate age starting to cry it out or is it just dependent on whether the parent is sleep-deprived?
Well, I don't know. So again, Healthy Habits, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child was a book that I read.
Consult with a doula, talk to doctors, and so on.
But I don't know.
Certainly not when they're newborns, obviously, right?
I couldn't really answer that.
It really depends on the child.
I saw that millennials account for 25% of toy sales for their personal use.
They don't give the toys to their kids, etc.
If they even have kids, right?
So... Yeah, well, I mean, if you don't have a happy childhood, it's very hard to grow up.
Stubborn in a good way. Strong-willed children have to feel in control.
I encourage it. I don't engage in power struggles.
No conflict. Give him choices.
Why are you giving him choices?
Yeah, give him choices.
Again, that's a power thing.
That's like, I am reality and here you're like the adventure novels I used to read as a kid where you can, if you believe, if you do this, turn to page 67 or whatever, right?
So, I don't know.
Give him choices? I'm trying to think back to with my daughter.
If your kid is enjoying spending time with you, I don't know why I would stop and give him choices or give her choices.
It still sounds very authoritarian.
You're there to facilitate your child's learning and growth.
You're not there as an authoritarian.
You're not there to give him choices.
You're not there to make him do stuff.
You're there to facilitate his growth and well-being.
And he is desperate to please you.
I can understand this. Kids are desperate to please their parents.
I mean, I see this in my daughter as well.
I mean, she's very keen. She would deny it from me in maternity, I'm sure.
But she...
Yeah, you have so much power just by being the parent that I don't think you need to, like, corner them, give them choices, make them do stuff.
So, alright. A Bitcoin roundtable anytime soon?
I don't think so. I haven't really been following Bitcoin.
I know its price stability is very high at the moment, the highest it's ever been, I think.
And I also know that Russia is going to start to use it for international transactions and settlements.
Starting next month, so I haven't really kept up on the topic.
I'm sorry, I've been really working on the History of Philosophy series on my new book and all these other kinds of projects.
Hey, Seth, do you have any favorite painters or particular art styles?
Is there any modern art you like?
No, there's almost no modern art that I like.
I consider it almost all horrifying, degraded, ugly, brutal, an assault on the senses and kind of a murder of aesthetics.
Modern art is...
A shit stain from the armpit of Satan.
It is just absolutely horrifying.
So, I love Carvaggio.
I love sort of the classical art styles.
I love classical sculptures and so on, like the Michelangelo stuff and all of that.
You know, stuff that elevates, stuff that's beautiful and so on.
But yeah, the modern stuff is just appalling and horrifying and it's like mulling laundering by scrubbing out the soul of humanity and it's optimism for the future.
Hi Steph, do you have another call-in show in the can that you can tell us about?
Oh, do I ever.
Yeah, so this is some time ago, but I did a call-in show with the sister of a guy who got caught by one of these online catch-a-predator groups.
That was something else.
That was something else.
So, well, and remember, I, you know, was in Bitcoin as a sort of philosophy and as an idea when it was, you know, 50 bucks, so.
A shit stain from the armpit of Satan sounds like something that would sell for millions nowadays.
Yeah. Brutalistic architecture?
Yeah, the architecture is, it's all there to just grind down your aesthetic and make you feel depressed and make you feel anxious and make you feel like you're a bit player in a Russian novel from Hades.
It's just horrendous.
Yeah, I was actually just asking people about art recently, about these blank-faced people who had, you know, creepy things around them and were always wearing rubber gloves, and it's just like, what is that sort of kill-room nightmare, horrifying, half-satanic nonsense stuff?
Are workers getting a worse deal now than 30 years ago?
Oh, God, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. Do workers are just getting a complete horrible deal now, rather than 30 years ago, for sure.
I mean, they tend to have to be more in useless debt for useless...
Because you can't just use an IQ test.
IQ tests predicts success 80% of the time in complex professions.
An IQ test takes an hour or two to administer.
You only need one. You get it administered by a third party.
You submit your IQ test. That's your education.
You can't just pay $200 to get an IQ test.
You've got to pay $100,000 to get a useless-ass degree, right?
Because IQ tests can't be faked, but you can manipulate student marks, right?
So, yeah, I mean, in a rational universe, you just have an IQ test and you'd learn on the job.
Why can't they do an IQ test?
Oh, because it's illegal, right?
It's illegal to use IQ tests as entrance exams.
So, I mean, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious.
Any tips to survive in a bad economy in the West?
Yeah, I think it's really about community.
I mean, there's some practical things, you know, have some food and all of that and have some skills.
But, you know, be building up your community.
Like, be building up people you can rely on.
Be building up people you can trust.
Somebody says, I don't trust doctors more, so just hope that they can help a bad situation, cancer or broken leg.
Yeah, I mean, I got stuck in the Canadian healthcare system for a year.
My cancer, I just had a tumor, it was a lump in my neck, sorry, this side, and it was biopsied and it was fine, but then I couldn't get treatment, couldn't get treatment, couldn't get treatment, and then by the time it was finally removed after I fled to the States, it had turned cancerous, and then I had to go through chemo, radiation, just because the Canadian healthcare system is just so atrocious.
But, you know, I'm pretty sure that if you want to euthanize yourself, they can step right up, so...
Yeah, it's just appalling. It's just appalling.
All right. Well, listen, guys.
What? An absolutely wonderful evening.
Thank you so much. It helped me, you know, I was feeling a bit down today just because, you know, Christmas is just such a wonderful time and then, you know, the world kind of gets back to normal and its usual grey panzer tank treads through the mud.
So it was great talking with you guys this evening.
Thank you. Of course, this is for supporters only.
Hit me with a Y if you're okay with me putting this out.
I think we didn't talk about anything particularly private, but...
Yeah, I just thank you so much for the support, for keeping this show going.
You know, it took a lot of body blows and shots to the nads over the last couple of years and it's because of you that I'm able to keep things going and I just love you guys so much for that.
It is such a privilege and a pleasure to be able to have these conversations with you.
And for the fellow who has sleep training issues, if you want to call in, let's talk about it.
I would be happy to chat further about it.
And if there's something I'm not understanding or if I'm being too harsh, it's certainly always possible.
So, yeah, thanks everyone so much.
Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening.
Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection