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Jan. 28, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:22:07
How to Stay Sane!
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Welcome to your Friday night live freedom maniacs chat and I'm just gonna I'm just gonna take your questions take your questions and whatever is on your mind I'm happy to chat about Steph have you seen the Paul Pelosi camera footage I have seen the Paul Pelosi camera footage It's odd,
but, you know, it seems to be a legit hostage situation, like the 911 call.
He's like, he says he's a friend, but I don't know who he is, and he's obviously trying to get things across to the 911 operator that he's in a hostage situation.
There's camera evidence of him, the creep breaking in, and all that, so...
It seems to be, like all these conspiracy theories, that it was some sort of tryst or whatever, I mean, don't seem to be particularly valid.
We'll see as we go forward.
But yeah, it looks pretty tragic.
The reports are that Nancy Pelosi had an exorcism in the House afterwards.
That's quite something. Politicians should not be doing the Russian roulette of exorcisms because you never know which way the demon's going to jump.
So... Yeah, I saw the camera footage.
It's a strange world. You know, politicians just live in a very bizarre world.
And he seems to be a bit of a drinker.
Didn't he have a DUI last year or something like that?
So Paul Pelosi seems to be a bit of a drinker.
And that's pretty sad at that age.
I mean, people who are addicts, you just fall down.
You fall down through the rungs and through the ladders, down into some pretty unpleasant areas.
And this may have nothing to do with that.
But yeah, I did see the footage.
It does seem to be odd.
I assume that he was trying to talk this crazy guy down, but it does seem to be kind of odd that he's standing there with a drink in his hand where the police show up.
But again, he might have just been trying to socialize and talk the guy down.
So, very, very strange situation.
Did you like building models when you were young?
I'm doing my first one now and I'm enjoying it.
I sure did.
Ooh, did I ever like building models.
I can even give you the general ratios that I built.
So I was an airplane guy.
My novel Almost, almostnovel.com, you should get it.
It's fantastic and it's free.
Almost didn't, you know, my sort of fascination with World War II battles and aircraft and planes and spitfires and hurricanes and Messerschmitts and all of that didn't come out of nowhere.
I was very keen on that stuff when I was a kid, and I built in two scales.
One was lame.
That's 172nd, right?
So it's a 72nd scale.
So one foot is, you know, 172nd of a foot in the model.
The Holy Grail, which I only got to build, I think, once or twice in my whole childhood because they were quite expensive.
The Holy Grail Was the 1 in 24th scale.
Now that was pretty cool.
And I remember all the painting and making it just work, doing it so that the propeller would work when you blew on it.
And I remember building in my bedroom when I was, I don't know, maybe eight or nine years old.
I remember building... I had fishing wire, and I would glue curtain hooks to the top of the airplanes, and I'd be able to fly them from one end of the room to the other.
You'd put them into the wall, high and then low.
And I remember I had a whole spider web up there.
My friends and I would sort of climb up, but we'd each have an airplane, and you would have to let go of it at a certain time.
So one person would start maybe with a Lancaster, and then somebody else would start with a Messerschmitt or something like that.
And you'd have to time it just right because one of them would weigh down the fishing line and so the other one could pass over it.
And it was really cool.
I really, really enjoyed that stuff.
And I remember the eyes weren't particularly visible.
I remember taking a hot, heating up a needle and pushing it into the I guess King Leader style or putting it into Cornwall style in King Leader, putting it into the eyes of the little pilot and all of that.
And I just, yeah, I just, I love that stuff.
So I didn't join it.
I went through a long model train phase as well.
And I learned something about capitalism because I ended up selling two.
I needed money and I sold two.
They were passenger, lit up passenger cars.
Like you put them on the tracks, they would light up.
And there were little passengers in there.
It was really cool. Of course, right?
I mean, you loved that kind of stuff when you were a kid.
And I remember the whole papier-mâché.
You get the chicken wire, you build the papier-mâché mountains and the tunnels and all of that.
And I remember there was a George's Trains down in Mount Pleasant.
Probably still not around, but back, you know, 45 years ago or whatever, there was...
There's George's trains down there.
And I remember taking these two things down, and he gave me $3 for both of them, and then he ended up selling them for $7 each.
I remember thinking, that's quite a markup there, brother.
So I remember learning quite a bit about how to negotiate for myself better through that.
Hey, Steph, love you.
Love you guys. Back.
Thoughts on possible World War III? Well, they're...
They're pushing hard for it, of course.
They're pushing to escalate.
And this kind of social paroxysm, I'm writing about this, actually, because for those of you who are subscribers, and I really, really hope that you will be, it's just a couple of bucks a month, and it really does help me out,
both in terms of So, I just published the 11th series of me editing my new book, so you can see how I piece it together, the themes that I'm working with, how I tweak the language and the characters, and so, because I've got a first draft, I'm going through the second draft right now, so you can see me editing the whole book as I go through.
It's a really wild process, and I'm really thrilled to be able to share it with people, people finding it very helpful, because, you know, we all write all the time, right?
Somebody with a good deal of experience and training in writing, how I go about it.
Everyone's, oh, how do you write a book?
Right, so here you go. So, the theme of the book, for those, it's called The Present, and it's a prequel to my last book called The Future.
And the theme of the book is the little decisions that lead to the big disasters.
Little decisions that lead to the big disasters.
Now politicians, I don't like to have a lot of sympathy for politicians, but what do you do as a politician when you can't pay your bills?
It's a fundamental question in society.
This isn't about politics. This is political theory, political science, political history, and just basic philosophy.
So what do you do when a population Won't pay enough taxes, want unsustainable benefits, won't listen to reason, and you have a media that simply pretends that Everything can be done.
Everything can happen, right? I mean, I remember when I was watching presidential debates forever, forever, and this is also prime minister debates in Canada and so on.
Nobody talks about the national debt.
Nobody talks about the national debt, how it could possibly be paid off.
Now, of course, the goal with Trump, what made Trump interesting, was Trump as a very astute businessman who wasn't going to start any wars.
He did drop a little bit here and there in...
Syria, which I guess was a big bit for the airfields in Syria, but not big relative to what's going on in Ukraine.
But Trump wasn't going to start any wars, and the goal with Trump was he was going to reduce red tape, bring manufacturing home, and there was going to be a way to grow America out of the $180 trillion of unfunded liabilities that America has coming due over the next decade or two.
Well, you know, the swamp as a whole put paid to that and everybody went back to business as usual and business as usual is war.
When you have a population that wants the impossible, what do you do?
And people used to say to me, oh, Steph, you should go into politics and stuff like that.
It's like, But why?
Because you're living in a world where people won't listen to reason.
They won't restrain themselves.
They won't listen to reason. There's not enough money.
There's not enough money for social security, retirement benefits.
There's not enough money for welfare.
There's not enough money for the military-industrial complex.
There's not enough money to send to Ukraine.
There's not enough money to maintain the highways.
There's not enough money to maintain the bridges.
And I worked in a software company as an executive, and that software company was...
Very focused on predicting life cycles of infrastructure.
So I have a stupid amount of knowledge and experience about all of this.
So if you look at the baby boomers, right?
So 1945, 1946, 1947, you have a big baby boom, goes on for sort of five, ten years.
So you have to build a whole bunch of schools all at once.
Now those schools are all very cheap to run for a long time, but then the roofs all start to need maintenance or replacement at the same time.
The windows, the HVAC systems, you name it.
When you have a big portfolio of infrastructure, Maintaining it is really tough.
Now politicians, they like to cut ribbons on new stuff rather than maintain old stuff.
You don't get usually voted back in because, well, the roof didn't collapse on your kid's school because people don't really think about these things.
And you can't predict future costs based upon looking at the past.
Because again, things tend to cluster.
There might be a year where you don't need that much money because things aren't aging out at that particular point.
And then there's another year where you need 10 times the budget because stuff's all coming due that needs to be done at the same time.
And when you have a big infrastructure build, as occurred, I did a speech about Eisenhower and the highway system.
Gosh, many years ago in Philadelphia, I gave a speech, Young Americans of Freedom, something like that.
And it was all about how the highway system is developed and all of that.
So the highway system was all built sort of under Eisenhower, post-war period, and generally the highway system in America was built because they anticipated the potential for nuclear war and you needed to be able to move troops around quickly and all of that.
It wasn't organic or anything like that.
And so with the highway system built, you end up with a massive dependence on oil and then the Saudis fund environmental groups so you can't drill at home, so you end up transferring a lot of money over to Saudi Arabia, which...
Hence, it helps to fund Wahhabism.
Anyway, it's all nonsense and dominoes that happen when you start interfering coercively in human affairs, very complex human affairs.
So... You need a huge amount of money to spend on infrastructure that's coming up.
Bills are coming due. Stuff that's built, it's just all tends to run.
And people like, you know, when you buy a new car, I mean, everybody knows this, right?
You buy a new car and, you know, for the first four to six years, you don't really have that much of an expense, right?
You got to change your air filter, you got to change your oil, you know, a couple of bits here and there.
But then, as you know, right, you can't sit there and say, well, you know, for the next six years, I've got this car for six years, so for the next six years, I'm going to spend just as much as I did for the last six years.
No, you're not. It's going to escalate.
It's going to escalate. My first car was the 98 Volvo S70, which I bought because I had to drive clients around who were pretty high level, and I needed a really nice car, and, you know, I remember I once made a list of everything that was wrong with it after like 10 years.
It was ridiculous, right? Door locks didn't work.
The antennae was gone.
The heating system didn't work very well.
And it just, you know, there were just disco lights all over the dashboard.
And then eventually it was like, no, it's, you know, you bring it in.
You know, it's like every time I hear an ambulance, I'm like, yeah, that's going to be me one day and I'm not coming back, right?
If you're lucky. Okay. So that car, you know, just runs out.
So we've got a whole bunch of unfunded liabilities, both in terms of infrastructure.
This is true throughout the West, because the baby boom is everywhere.
Particularly so in the States.
A whole bunch of unfunded liabilities, which is stuff that the government has promised and is legally obligated to provide, for which there's no money.
I mean, there's no money in Social Security.
It's just a bunch of Treasury bonds and IAU notes.
There's nothing there. And right about now, you have the boomers retiring at 10,000 a day, right?
Boomers are retiring, which means a huge amount of human capital is leaving the workforce, a huge amount of experience is leaving the workforce, and a lot of pretty neurotic younger people are taking the helm of society, which is why you're getting increased censorship and all of this kind of stuff, because more neurotic people can't handle contrary opinions and so on, right? Can't reason, and therefore they just panic and suppress.
So you've got all this human capital flooding out, and you've got boomers who are no longer generating tax income but consuming tax income, younger tax income, and of course you have boomers who are liquidating their savings, their holdings, right, because they need to convert their holdings, their real estate or their bonds or their stocks or whatever they've got.
They need to liquidate that in order to start funding their lifestyle because they've retired.
So, you know, it is a perfect storm, which is why the Japanese Prime Minister is all kinds of like, well, we can't really function as a society because nobody's having any babies.
So, you know, we kind of need those in order to have a society that functions.
So, we have, you know, a giant mess in the West.
And the problem is that everyone thinks that by not talking about it or by getting entitled and angry and outraged about it, the problem is going to go away.
This is classic addict behavior, right?
If you've ever dealt with an addict and you say, you know, Uncle Joe, you drink too much.
What are you talking about? Oh, it's crazy.
I just like to have fun.
Don't be so uptight. Don't be so Amish.
What are you, some kind of monk? I just get angry and it's like, okay, well, I won't.
Maybe I'll try a couple more times, but he just gets angry and yells at me and then threatens to key my car.
You know, it's like, okay, well, if you're not going to listen to reason, then you're just going to end up losing your liver, right?
If you don't listen to reason, what happens?
Do you think that if you don't listen to reason, the problems are just going to go away?
I mean, I was one of the more rational people on social media, always a moderate, always trying to bring facts, reason, and evidence to social discussions, talking to experts, bringing up the data, having well-sourced presentations, very much a moderate.
People didn't want to hear it.
I mean, obviously you guys did, you were still here, but people didn't want to hear it.
And that's their prerogative.
You are perfectly free to not listen to reason.
It's just the reality of life.
But then, things get worse.
So, every single time, facts throughout history, when a society, when a government can't pay its bills, what does it do?
It goes to war. It's what it does.
Because people won't restrain themselves according to math, reason and evidence.
So what do they do? Well, if the government goes to war, they can impose restrictions on people and the people will accept them.
Why? Because it's a war. Now, whether it's a war about climate change or it's a war in Europe or it's a war on whatever, right?
They'll crank people up to fever, pitch and hysteria so that they can impose restrictions because they can't pay their bills.
So, the war that is underway and is, I mean, it's really, really quite remarkable.
What are they sending? 37 tanks over 100 billion plus.
They still can't afford their own tanks. And none of this has been voted on.
There's been no declaration of war.
There's been, right, so it's all, and Russia is now perceiving this to be involvement in the aggression, which, of course, gives Russia the right to, you know, at least in sort of these sort of War theory, it doesn't give them the moral right, but it gives them, I guess to say, some justification in their own minds for retaliation, which is, you know, terrible and horrible and all that.
And Germany, some stupid German woman, some minister or someone in parliament, is like, well, you know, now that we're at war with Russia, it's like, that just happened.
We're back, you know, back to 1914 and 1939, and just the same thing over and over again, right?
And the fault is, I mean, widespread and deep, but fundamentally, if you don't want to talk about unpleasant topics, they just get more unpleasant, right?
And then you have to deal with those consequences.
If you don't, if your Uncle Joe doesn't listen to you saying, you've got to cut back and you're drinking, then he just ends up with liver failure.
It's just the way it is, right?
If you say to your aunt, Aunt Ethel, you know, you've got to stop smoking.
It's really bad for you. No, it's crazy.
It's fine. It's a little puff here and there.
I'm not overweight and I walk.
Okay, well... Does that make the problem go away?
No, it just makes it worse. So people who simply refuse to talk about restraining themselves, right?
And the boomers are really bad this way, honestly.
They're really bad this way. They just won't listen to reason.
There's no money. There's no money in retirement savings plans.
There's no money there. So you're the richest generation in human history.
Why should the young who are already hobbled by inflation and debt, why should they be crushed to pay for your opulent lifestyle?
So let's at least do a means test or something like that.
But people just get outraged.
And why do they get outraged? Again, I'm writing about this in my book, so forgive me if I'm going into too much detail, but why do they respond with such outrage?
Why are they so angry when it's pointed out that they have voted for things that they didn't want to fund?
I've been paying into Social Security.
No, you haven't. Don't lie.
Boomertown, you haven't been paying into social security.
I can say Boomertown because I'm like one year removed from the boomers.
But no, there's no money in social security.
There's no money there. I've been paying into the system.
No, you haven't. You've been giving money to politicians.
The same politicians that when you were hippies you said were not to be trusted.
You've been giving money to politicians and the politicians have been spending it.
There's no money there. No money there.
And you failed to deal with it years ago.
And, of course, Social Security was implemented at the 65 retirement age was when very few people retired beyond that age because life expectancy was much shorter.
Now people are living forever.
Nothing's been adjusted. Nothing's been fixed.
There's no Social Security lockboxes.
There's no private plans.
So people just defer it.
I don't want to talk about it.
I'm going to get mad. Why do they get mad?
They get mad because they're guilty. They're guilty.
They're guilty. Because they fucked up.
Trusted the government with their retirement, trusted the government with their healthcare, trusted the government with taking care of them, and there's no money.
So, what happens when you don't listen to reason?
Things escalate. So, yeah, it's pretty bad.
And it really is, like, at this point now, it's sort of metastasized, so I don't know that conversations are particularly...
I'm just sort of pointing out the trends.
The conversations aren't particularly helpful because...
It's moved beyond that, so...
All right. What do you think about the Andrew Tate arrest?
Um... Still want to see Jeffrey Epstein's client list, but you're never going to see that, right?
So... The Andrew Tate arrest?
Um... Well, Andrew Tate is sort of on record saying that he, I mean, this is him talking, he's on record saying that he manipulated lonely men into giving his cam girls money, right?
That they'd promised to come and see him and then they'd say, oh, I need money for a passport and then they'd provoke them so that he'd be angry, they'd storm out.
So, you know, this supposed empower man kind of thing was just exploiting lonely, vainglorious webcam addicts who imagined they had a shot with hot girls.
It was just taking their money hand over fist.
And if the girls said, well, I'm going to come and meet you, and they had no intention of coming to meet you, that would seem to me, I'm no lawyer, but that would seem to me on the fordulent side of things.
There are accusations.
Do I believe accusations?
Well, of course not. Of course I don't believe the accusations, so we'll have to wait and see.
Is what he was doing immoral?
Yeah, it seems to me that way.
It seems to me that way.
They're sort of lying. I'm making the girls misrepresent their intentions to the guys in order to get more money.
Yeah, that's, you know, is it technical fraud from a legal standpoint?
I don't really know because I don't know about the law.
What do I know about the law in Romania?
It's not particularly a stable situation to go and brag about how much money you have and then to have a whole bunch of high-strung women around you that you may or may not be asking them to do immoral and or illegal things.
I mean, at some point you're just dancing on a volcano and at some point it's probably just going to blow up.
I apologize if I missed you talk about this already, but the Project Veritas exposure of Pfizer's COVID mutation was insane!
Yeah, there's a lot of funny stuff about that guy as a whole.
A lot of funny stuff about that guy.
George Webb's got some interesting stuff about it, so you can look up his stuff if you want.
But he seems to have gone to Yale.
I don't know if he graduated or not. He seems to have gone to Yale, this black fellow, who was the victim of the Sting operation.
I don't really think of him much as a victim, because if what he's saying is true, he was doing a lot more victimizing than being a victim.
But I'll tell you something interesting.
It's a time for a story, Steph.
I'll tell you something interesting.
This has got to be going back a long way for me now, right?
So this is probably 40 years ago.
I'm in my teens. Now, I saw, I think it was 2020 or something like that, and maybe someone can dig this up, and maybe I've got the date wrong, but it's something like this.
And it was a police department, and what they had noticed about the police department was that members of organized crime regularly went into the police department, and sometimes they quit, go back to organized crime, and then they come back to the police department, so they went in to get their training.
You can see the same thing with gang members who will sometimes join the U.S. military in order to get combat and training and tactics, training and all of that, right?
I just remember at the time, I was pretty blue-pilled at this point in my life, and I remember at the time thinking, well, that's odd.
How is it that police can't tell that there's a criminal right next to them, like working in the police department?
It's an interesting issue, interesting question.
You would expect... Policemen who have to be good at identifying good and evil to be able to identify good and evil.
I mean, if you walk into a doctor's office with some giant tumor or goiter hanging off your neck and he says, no, you look fine to me.
There's nothing wrong with you. It's great, you know.
I can't imagine anything we'd want to treat on you.
You look perfectly healthy to me.
Would you have questions about that person's competence as a doctor?
I think you would. I think you would.
Or if you went to an accountant and the accountant said, oh man, you lost a bunch of money last year, and you notice that he's looking at the page upside down, you turn it over, it's like, oh, yeah, no, that's much better, man, that six is a nine, and oh, yeah, no, that's way better.
Oh, man, you made a lot of money. Like, would you have confidence?
No, right? You have confidence in that person.
I mean, obviously this guy is creepy and skeevy and all kinds of giggles and all of that, right?
I mean, look, even if he, you know, of course his defense is like, I was just lying.
Maybe he found this guy from Grindr or something.
I was just lying. I was on a date with this guy and I was just lying to impress him, you know, like you do.
And then he says, well, how am I going to trust anyone anymore when he lies to his date as he claims, right?
But let's say he is lying. Let's say that none of this stuff is happening at Pfizer or whatever, but let's say that he's lying.
Okay, so that's pretty gross, right?
That you would lie about something this absolutely morally crime of the century appalling in order to impress a date.
I mean, the best case scenario is he's just completely morally crazy and would make up this This story about what Pfizer is doing to impress a date, how on earth would that be impressing anyone?
So I guess the question is, you know, for me, wouldn't all of the areas of higher education that he attended, wouldn't they notice that he was like morally insane?
In the best case scenario, in the worst case scenario, Pfizer is doing this terrible stuff and whatever, right?
But you don't hear this from the mainstream media because they're bought and paid for.
So, yeah, it's wild.
And, you know, it's really cruel too.
If you support people who should get a lot of pushback, then this may be the first time because, you know, obviously he's in a lot of kind of privileged categories in the ESG world.
And so this may be the first time that he's sort of had real pushback or whatever it is.
So, yeah, it's pretty wild. Is it wrong to lie to someone to appear superior during a third date?
Well, of course, you're going to put your best foot forward and so on.
I don't think it's right to lie directly, right?
You don't want to say, I have an airline pilot, when you're just, you know, whatever, a garbage man or a janitor or something.
But yeah, you put your best foot forward.
The question is, why would you lie about this in this way, right?
It's not that he lied.
That happens during dates.
That's not some particular evil, monstrous crime.
But that he would lie about this.
This quote. I don't know.
I can't remember how they described it, but what seems to me sort of like gain a function.
And Robert Malone seems to think it's gain a function, and he seems to be pretty smart about this stuff.
So, what do you lie about that?
That just seems odd. And none of the areas of higher education that he went to seem to have noticed this and said, you know, boy, that's not really good.
That's not really good. Alright, thoughts on struggling with perfectionism?
You don't struggle with perfectionism.
Perfectionism is a term that is created in order for you to not confront rampant child abuse.
And now the child abuse could have occurred in school or whatever, but that's the key.
Perfectionism is a word that is intended to mask significant abuse.
You know, some people who are confused about identity, a question I would have is...
Did you suffer any severe sexual abuse as a child?
Maybe that might have had an issue.
It may have scrambled some of your identity or whatever it is.
It's possible, right? Ask those questions.
So perfectionism...
For something to be perfect is a positive.
So I'm struggling with perfectionism.
I'm just too perfect. I'm too on time.
I'm too efficient. I'm too exact and beautiful in my daubings, right?
You know, perfectionism is simply...
A standard that is invented so that people can, in their own minds, legitimately, verbally abuse you for not reaching it, right?
For not reaching it. I mean, there's this old thing, maids in houses, I don't do windows.
Why don't you do windows? Because you can always find some little smudge, some little corner, some little something there and get mad at the person, right?
It's got to be perfect. No, it doesn't have to be perfect.
Perfection is just a standard so that assholes can abuse you and think that they just have high standards.
So, you're not struggling with perfectionism, you're struggling with the scar tissue of verbal abuse.
Usually, perfectionism comes out of verbal abuse.
it can be backed up by physical abuse as a whole.
So don't call it perfectionism.
Call it the after effects, the scar tissue, the trauma of verbal abuse.
The standards are only invented to abuse you, right?
They're not invented because people have really high standards.
Let's say your parent yells at you for not cleaning the carpet correctly or something like that.
Okay, if they're such perfectionists, then why aren't they better at parenting?
Parenting is more important than cleaning, right?
Parenting is more important than cleaning.
So why is it that they would yell at you about cleaning, which means that they're not at all perfectionists about parenting.
So they're not at all perfectionists as a whole.
The standard is just invented so that you can fall short and you can be abused, right?
So it's just a way of discharging their venom.
So you're not struggling with perfectionism.
All right. Love is the involuntary response to virtue towards those who are virtuous.
Can you extrapolate that? Can Hillary Clinton love?
Yes, I love you. Love you back.
Thank you. I would say that somebody who's evil can't love.
They can't love because they have a negative relationship to virtue.
They can hate virtue. They can have a temporary positive feeling towards somebody allied with them in the same way that Hitler would send to Benito Mussolini his thanks to For supporting him in various endeavors.
But no, it's not love.
It's not an admiration of virtue.
Let's see here. My husband and I talk about how wonderful it is.
Talk how wonderful it is, Q. Yeah, I'm sorry.
I don't know what that...
Do I worry about the fertility of the future generation?
No, I don't. Honestly, I don't worry about the...
I mean, I know that testosterone is down, sperm counts are down, whether it's due to plastics or microplastics or...
I don't know.
I think it has something to do with the absence of fathers in the home.
I think that has an effect on testosterone and sperm production.
That's probably nonsense, but it's just a vague theory that I have.
No, I don't... I don't...
I used to...
I don't know how to put this well.
So I have a sphere of influence, right?
And my sphere of influence used to be...
Rather large, right? It used to be rather large, right?
I was getting like 10 million views and downloads.
I was getting 100,000 books read every month, like every month.
And so, you know, I was one of the bigger voices out there, certainly one of the biggest, if not the biggest philosophical voice, and, you know, one of the bigger public intellectuals out there.
And so when my sphere of influence was very large, my sphere of concern was very large.
And when my sphere of influence shrank, or was attacked and sort of beaten back to where it is now, when my sphere of influence shrank, ah, well, The reason I don't mind it so much is that when your sphere of influence shrinks, your sphere of concern also shrinks.
Otherwise, it's nuts, right?
Then you're like, you're screaming at a Second World War movie telling people, like a Second World War documentary, you're screaming at war footage, Doc, don't go over that fence!
Because, you know, it's all in the past and it's all dead and done and dusted, right?
So, it's a life tip, it's a life hack, right?
Where your sphere of influence ends, you must also end your sphere of concern, which is another way of saying your sphere of worry.
So I am responsible for my own health, so I work out and I eat well and so on and have good health.
So, that's a sphere of concern because I have a sphere of influence over that, right?
I have, obviously, a say in my marriage, I have a say in my parenting, and so I have a concern and a sphere of, I don't worry about these things, but I have a sphere of influence and therefore I have a sphere of concern.
So, if you want to stay sane in this life, and I think I've done a pretty good job of staying sane through all of these ups and downs and roundabouts.
If you want to stay sane in this life, here's your tip.
Here's your big takeaway from tonight.
Figure out where your sphere of influence is.
Map. You might need to draw it out.
Map your sphere of influence.
Where your sphere of influence ends, so also must your concerns end.
Otherwise, you are expending fuel for no destination in a vacuum for no purpose.
You're expending your precious life energies shouting at documentaries from the past.
Now, of course, When a lot of people were listening to me about politics, I felt a sphere of concern around politics.
And then when very few people followed me to the new platforms, which was fine, then my sphere of concern with regards to politics also did not follow me.
Let's say some other scenario, some alternate universe, that when I was deplatformed from just about everywhere, when I was deplatformed, That this had tripled my memberships and then my sphere of influence and sphere of concern would be very large.
So the people who didn't follow me over, they stayed on the other platforms and went to other places to get their shows.
So they didn't come to my new platforms or the platforms that I had before but where I was publishing or broadcasting now.
They didn't come to those new platforms and so they didn't bring the sphere of influence with them.
Now, if I had said, well, I've got to have the same sphere of concern that I had before, even though my sphere of influence has collapsed enormously, well, that would be crazy, right?
That wouldn't be processing reality.
So people gave me the gift of shrinking my sphere of concern.
So if I had a big platform, you know, five times bigger than it was at its peak, or, you know, because when it was growing, man, it was growing like crazy, right?
So if I had a very big platform and a very big influence, then I would have a very big sphere of concern.
And I would be like, oh my gosh, this fertility of future generations, because there would be enough people to listen, but it would be worth doing it.
Now, I don't have concern, and sometimes, you know, I have old habits and, you know, the old war wound that aches when the storms come.
So I do, and I have to remind myself, I don't have any...
Concern over this. I don't have any influence over this.
I don't have any concern over this.
You have to really will this about yourself.
You really will this about yourself.
Now, you may or may not be having had a wild trajectory of a public intellectual career like mine, but let me tell you where this is incredibly powerful for you.
People who don't listen to you move beyond your sphere of influence or they move themselves beyond your sphere of influence and therefore they move themselves beyond your sphere of concern.
Do you follow? It's hugely important.
The moment somebody stops listening to you, or maybe they never started, who knows, right?
But the moment somebody stops listening to you, And continues to stop listening to you, not just one time like, I can't talk now, I'm too upset or whatever, right?
But if they stop listening to you, they move beyond your sphere of influence and therefore they move beyond your sphere of concern.
What drives people insane and is incredibly dysfunctional in this life, in your life, in everyone's life, my life too, is when people don't listen to you and therefore they're outside your sphere of influence, but they remain within your sphere of concern.
Ooh. That's black and blue, devil horns to the abs, gored and taken down kind of situation.
Somebody doesn't listen to you?
Like, I mean, my mother, right?
I tried talking to her for many years to try and give her some tips on mental health.
And she wouldn't listen to me.
In fact, she got really angry every time I would bring up anything that she could do to have a better, less crazy life.
And so eventually it's like, okay, So I get it.
You're not going to listen to me. And a weight doth lift from your shoulders, just as it did for me with politics and world affairs and so on.
A weight doth lift from your shoulders.
Because that person has fired you.
Like, you know, you have a job and that job can be overwhelming.
You have a lot of responsibility. You know, I was managing 25, 30 people at times and responsible for crazy budgets and whole R&D and sales and technical support.
I mean, coding.
You know, it was a wild time as an entrepreneur in the business world.
And there were times, of course, when I was a more public intellectual that I really felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.
But then I got fired in a way, right?
Fired. And so do you call up your old boss every day after you get fired and say, how's that deliverable coming?
Is this going to work out? I've got to make sure this gets tough.
I'll make sure you get this file finished to make sure that this is taken into account and don't let...
Right? No.
With the firing comes...
A release and a relief from the concerns about the deliverables.
Right? And there's positives and negatives.
And, you know, I'm not going to say which I would have preferred because I already have the knowledge what I would prefer is sort of irrelevant.
But you can find a way to like it either way.
I mean, if I sit there and said, well, I, you know, the loss of this influence is catastrophic and negative and I can't do anything good, but I'm still going to worry about everything, then it's just a huge, huge net negative.
If somebody doesn't listen to you, but you still are desperate, desperate, I tell you, you're still desperate to change their behavior even though they won't listen to you.
Well, you're just setting yourself up for a mad frustration.
You're literally in a bike race.
Where you get to win a million dollars if you win and somebody's going to break your kneecaps if you lose, but your bike has no chain on the spokes, on the cogs.
You're just spinning. Maybe you can scamper a little, but you can't possibly win.
So, my mother fired me as an advisor.
She wouldn't listen to me.
She was very clear.
I would get angry every time I brought things up.
So, my father fired me as an advisor and other family members and so on, right?
And some friends fired me as an advisor.
The world fired me as an advisor, so to speak.
And not just the deplatforming, but the people who were like, oh, no, that's one website over.
I'm not going to go. So, okay.
I'm not putting my neck on the line, and I really was putting my neck on the line.
I'm not putting my neck on the line for people who won't type one website over, right?
And it's funny because I hope that you understand that I'm not bitter about this.
I know that I'm not bitter about it.
I understand that there's skepticism about this because everyone thinks that, you know, the prominence and all of that is just the greatest thing since sliced bread.
And there are definitely good things about it, for sure.
But there are bad things about it, too.
So, when my mother fired me as an advisor, I am no longer concerned about the outcomes.
It's outside my sphere of concern.
If you're an accountant, you worry about being accurate with the books and making sure everything gets done right according to regulations and so on.
But if your customer fires you, then you don't have to worry about what happens to that customer down the road.
You may have some curiosity, you may wish it was one way or another, but you don't have any fundamental concern.
If you get fired from a company, do you obsessively follow everything that company is doing?
Well, I guess maybe if you're upset and you want them to fail or something, but I've never really had that particular approach.
So, I hope that this is useful to you because this unhappiness, and in particular stress, is really driven by a mismatch between influence and concern.
Right? Now, it can go both ways.
If you have a sphere of influence that is way smaller than your sphere of concern, right?
In other words, if you're worrying about things you can't possibly have any influence over, you're going to go crazy.
You're going to be stressed. It's bad for your health.
You're going to shave years off your lifespan if what doctors say about health is to be believed.
So don't do that. Please, I'm begging you, don't do that.
Now, on the other hand, if you say that your sphere of influence is actually larger than your sphere of concern, Then you are unmotivated.
So if you say, well, there's nothing I can do to get a girlfriend.
It's like, well, of course there is. Of course there are things that you could do to get a girlfriend, right?
You can improve your hygiene.
You can improve your grooming. You can go and get your teeth cleaned or whitened or you can work out.
You can deal better with your skin.
You can tidy up your place.
I mean, all of these things are relatively cheap and a lot of them are free.
I mean, if you can't afford to go to a gym, you can just pick up heavy books or you can go and spend 30 bucks to get some weights and you can go from there, right?
So there's lots of things that you can do.
So if you say, well, my sphere of concern is way smaller than my sphere of influence, then you're surrendering your free will.
If you say that your sphere of concern is way bigger than your sphere of influence, then you are worrying about things you can't change, which is going to burn you out.
It's going to burn you out.
Think of gears in a car, right?
You're driving the wrong gear, you're going to wreck your motor, right?
I mean, I remember when I first got my first 10-speed, I just wasn't used to changing gears.
And I remember a friend of mine, like I was struggling up a hill, and he was like, change the gears!
And then I used to drive through the bridle path to go down this giant crazy hill to get to Glendon College, where I first went to university for English literature.
And I'd have to actually, you know, you have to kind of tack, you have to seesaw up the hill.
You can't go straight up. And when I'd go flying down, it was fantastic and all of that, but you have to change the gears.
To change the gears. You're working in the wrong gears.
So, do I care about the fertility of future generations?
I don't have any concern about it.
Honestly, I genuinely don't.
I don't worry about it.
Am I going to do something about it?
Am I going to do something about it?
Well, no. And at this point, the good news is I can't do anything about it because my reach is so small relative to what it was.
It's jazz clubs versus stadiums, right?
My reach is so small relative to where it was, I can't do anything about it.
You know, is the vaccine a spike mRNA technology that seems to cluster in the testicles and affect sperm production?
Most people have taken the vaccine, right?
So whatever happens is going to happen.
I can't go back in time and stop people or make the case that they shouldn't, right?
The effects of lockdowns.
I said lockdowns were going to produce far more harm than good.
It was completely blindingly obvious.
I said this back in March or April of 2020, right at the beginning of all of this.
I was obviously public about my decision to not take the vaccine and gave all the reasons why.
So am I concerned?
Oh, well, you know, there could be this or that or the other.
It's like, I don't have a sphere of influence.
I will not have a sphere of concern.
And that's what happens if people stop listening to you, you have to stop caring about them.
And I don't mean that you're completely indifferent to what happens to them over the course of their lives.
I'm just saying that you can't worry about people who won't listen to you.
And all the people who didn't follow me to the new platforms chose not to listen to me.
And that's perfectly fine.
It's free association.
It's called free association. They can absolutely, completely and totally choose to not listen to me.
I completely respect that decision.
And that releases me from having to be concerned about their outcomes in life.
For 40 years, I've been warning people about the dangers of statism.
40 years. I did a show, I don't know, 12 years ago, on the dangers of the FDA, government regulations as a whole.
40 years. I have been, more than now, it's 42 years now, started in my mid-teens.
42 years I've been fighting tooth and nail to warn people about the dangers of statism.
I've also been warning people about the dangers of having statists in your life, people who want you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them.
And for those people who didn't listen to me, again, just perfectly fine.
I say, oh, well, you know, my family kind of convinced me to get the vaccine.
Well, if the vaccine turns out to be problematic for you, I can but speak.
I can compel no one to listen, right?
So, yeah, do I worry about the fertility of the future generation?
No. No, I don't.
Well, what if it's really bad?
Then it's really bad. I can't do anything about it, and so I'm not going to worry about it.
Do I worry about death?
Well, it's going to happen. I can do some things about it, like eat well, exercise, you know, stay healthy.
But, you know, one of the healthiest things you can do is to shrink your sphere of Of concern to match your sphere of influence.
And you've got to be rigorous about your sphere of influence.
If you can, oh, there's nothing I can do to make more money.
Well, of course there is. Of course there are things.
So that's when your sphere of influence is far smaller than your...
Sorry, that's when your sphere of concern is far smaller than your sphere of influence.
Of course you have influence over how much money you can make.
Of course you can. So you've got to have these things match.
If underachievement...
Is when you think you have no control over things you do have control over, which means your sphere of concern is smaller than your sphere of influence.
But burnout and hysteria is when you think your sphere of concern is way larger than your sphere of influence.
And this is sort of the modern leftist thing.
They're going to solve all inequalities and all disparities.
No, you can't. All right.
So I hope that helps. Let's see here.
But Volvo enthusiasts assure me that Volvos are indestructible and can do anything.
Yeah, I didn't find that to be the case.
I didn't find that.
Hey, Steph, you mentioned a coming economic collapse.
Can you talk about what it will look like and what people can do to prepare for it?
No, I'm not going to do that.
You can... I mean, it's free.
First couple of chapters are free, and the whole book's going to be free.
Freedomain.locals.com.
you can read about it all ah let's see here I know what will make him lovely but Biological terrorism. Bizarre, right?
What do you think helped your reasoning the most?
Was it certain books or activities?
No, no, no. It's just universals.
It's just universals. That's all that helps reason the most, right?
So I did a little bit today on somebody who was saying, well, my wife gets upset about certain topics I talk about.
Is that okay? Is that not okay?
And her logic is probably, well, why would you say things that upset me?
If you say things that upset me, you know it's going to upset me.
It means you're acting in a way that upsets me.
It means you don't care about me.
To which you universalize that.
And you universalize it, which means you reverse it.
And you say, well, wait a minute. If I want to talk about something and you don't want me to talk about it, that's upsetting to me.
So you telling me not to talk about things that are upsetting to you is upsetting to me.
And so if the principle is we don't do things to upset each other, then you can't tell me not to talk about things because that's upsetting to me.
Just universalize it. All you do.
All you do. Hey Steph, I'm landscaping my yard in 35 degree heat.
Why is my yard not platonic?
The art may be platonic, but it probably will be a dog humping your leg.
Hopefully it's not a pit bull with a bladed penis or something like that, right?
A guy pretends he's a James Bond arch villain and it's completely normal on a date.
Well, let's not get into certain aspects of gay culture because blah blah blah, right?
This always reminds me of your comment about not trusting someone who never works with their hands.
Yeah, I don't trust people who've never actually had to work with their hands.
They just live too intellectual and all that, right?
Yep, protein powder does, oh yeah, does that sometimes.
I haven't really taken, I've just over the last, I don't know, six to twelve, six, eight months, I've started using powders.
So, yeah, it's kind of important because you lose a little bit of recovery ability when you get older.
After all these years, I thought your podcasting chair was just a toilet.
That's right. No, I think that's when Doom first came out, wasn't that a thing?
Alright. Is the pinnacle of thought itself the truth?
I sometimes wonder why we think and think it's to seek the truth but curious on your thoughts.
Is the pinnacle of thought itself the truth?
Why would thought need to have a particular hierarchy?
I'm not sure what that would mean.
The purpose of philosophy?
Well, the end purpose of philosophy is happiness, and the reason equals virtue.
Reason leads to virtue leads to happiness.
So the pinnacle of thought itself, the truth.
I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, I feel I'm very much at the pinnacle of my abilities when I'm writing fiction, and fiction is not true, obviously, by definition, so I don't know.
I don't know what that would mean.
I should clarify. I don't worry about the fertility for others.
I worry in particular about my own children.
Well, yeah. So, I mean, what are they trying to put the mRNA in meat and all of that?
So, yeah. And does it spread?
Peter McCullough thinks that mRNA spreads from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated.
So there's things that you could do about all of that for sure.
Let's see here. I'm unemployed and no savings left.
Going on government job-seeking program is against my values.
Any ideas? Well, you'll need to tell me why you're unemployed with no savings left.
I understand it's been a pandemic, it's been tough and all of that, but why do you have no savings?
And no one who can lend you money, or nothing else that you can do, or no job that you can take temporarily, and so on.
All right. I think we as your co-audience were more offended and bitter than you with the way that you were deplatformed, Steph.
Um... Well, yeah, because deplatforming was, there's no hope for the moderates.
There's no hope for reason and evidence to solve these problems.
So I get that it's upsetting, obviously, right?
I had to adjust because it's like, well, I, you know, I had a close to 40-year plan for reasoning the world into being saner and more moral, and the deplatforming was like, nope, that's not going to happen.
So yeah, there was definitely an adjustment as far as that goes, right?
My father taught me this lesson.
He said, don't care about someone who doesn't care for themselves and doesn't listen.
It'll make you sick. Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Like, you know, if you say, well, we've got to end the welfare state.
People, what about, you know, I don't, a single mom's just like, what about my kids?
It's like, no, no, I can't care about your kids more than you care about your kids.
And if you didn't care about your kids enough to have a good father for them, then, like, I'm sorry, you're going to have to deal with it, right?
What is with parents who criticize their grown kids' bad habits and take no responsibility for how those kids were raised?
Yeah, so if you're not a parent, I mean, we all kind of understand this when we're kids, but if you're not a parent, it's really tough to understand just how much power parents have.
It's like this endless well, if you want, and you're corrupt, it's this endless well you can go to and just bully people, just bully kids, just get what you...
You can just...
How many people in your life can you just call up and say, oh, you did something really stupid and have them listen to you, and not just hang up on you and say, get lost and call me, right?
So... Yeah, it's these bonds and these chains.
Actually, I wanted to read to you something I think is quite interesting.
Quite interesting. So hit me with a Y if you've ever heard me that it's probably healthier to have toxic people out of your life.
Like relentlessly toxic people, like people who just won't change.
Tell me if you've heard me say that, that it's probably better to have really toxic people out of your life.
Ever heard of this? Hit me with a Y if you've heard me say that.
Yes. Yeah, you've heard me.
This is almost from the very beginning.
I think my second show was like, yeah, you don't have toxic people in your life.
Okay, so this ain't science, but it's a pretty powerful anecdote.
So hit me with a guess.
If you don't know, right?
If you know, that's fine. Hit me with a guess.
How old is the world's oldest living person?
How old is the world's oldest living person?
Give me your numbers.
Give me your guess. Don't Google it.
Well, don't Google anything because you can't find anything, but what's your guess?
127, 110, 109, about 115, 128, 119.
Actually, no, I was just asking you to guess my IQ. LAUGHTER Yes, so the first one, RoboBeast, you are in fact, well, you know, you're pretty close.
You're pretty close. I don't think anyone's bang on.
Oh, no, Marcus Aurelius, you're a bang on.
Oh, no, actually, Marcus Aurelius, you would be the oldest living person because you're from the So, Maria Brañas Morera has lived through two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, the 1918 flu pandemic and COVID. Now the California-born woman is the world's oldest living person.
Brañas, 115, became the oldest known person alive after the death of 118-year-old Lucille Randon.
The Guinness World Records website confirmed last week.
Randon died in her nursing home in the French town of Toulon on 17th of January.
Brañas, this is the world's oldest person, captured global headlines after she survived a bout of COVID in May 2020, when the pandemic made Spain one of the hardest-hit countries before the availability of vaccines.
She was believed to be the oldest COVID survivor at one point before Randon survived contracting the virus herself.
Now, of course, she's not overweight.
You don't see really old fat people.
You just don't. So just be aware of that, right?
Okay, so people said, what would you credit your longevity with?
What is the cause of your longevity?
How come you've lived so long?
How have you lived so long?
She said this. Order.
Tranquility. Good connection with family and friends.
Contact with nature. Emotional stability.
No worries.
No regrets. Lots of positivity.
And, you ready for it? You ready?
Staying away from toxic people.
Let's hear that again.
Order. Philosophy, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, yep, so don't put up with abuse, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity, and staying away from toxic people.
She was born in San Francisco on 4th of March 1907, after her parents moved from Spain to the U.S. Oh, so she's European Hispanic, I suppose, not Mestizo Hispanic.
So, her father died from pulmonary tuberculosis on the ocean journey from the US to Spain.
Yikes. The route was circuitous because the First World War made passage treacherous, so the ship had to go via Cuba and the Azores, Brañas once recalled.
So... Staying away from toxic people.
That's what she credits her longevity with.
Isn't that interesting?
I'm sure she will be accused of running a cult.
Because, you know, if you say stay away from toxic people, all the toxic people will say you're running a cult because they're toxic.
So, yeah, I thought it was interesting.
I mean, I've heard, you know, it's...
Okay, hit me with this.
What's the oldest person?
Who's the oldest person? Not who's.
How old is the oldest person you know?
I assume it's female, right?
Because women live longer as a whole.
How old is the oldest person you know?
Because I've heard from some people that when you get really old, it's pretty rough.
Because... Your health has just kind of collapsed.
Your body doesn't do what you want it to do.
You can't eat very much.
You can't poop very much. And, you know, you've got ailments up the yin-yang.
And all of your siblings have died.
Your childhood friends have died.
A lot of your friends have died.
And your family is too busy to come and see you.
It's just a fairly rough existence if you live too long.
And I remember seeing some meme video, a little meme video, where...
People were singing happy birthday to a pretty elderly grandma or great-grandma or whatever she was, and she was like, yeah, I hope it's the last one.
And of course, you know, I enjoy life so much that it's hard to think of that, but it is something to think about that way, right?
So somebody knows, let's see here, 93, yeah, 101, 78, 98 granny, she died last year, 90-something, grandma passed at 87, yeah, my mom's in her 80s, and 90, 85, yeah.
Was my yaya at almost 100.
There is some research that shows the person alive today will live to 150.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on that.
In particular, I wouldn't bet on that.
My toxic granny lived to be 98.
Well, see, toxicity is about stress discharge.
You discharge your stress onto other people, so I assume that you can live a somewhat lengthy amount if you're discharging your stress all onto other people.
Alright, so hit me up with your last questions.
I know a pair of sisters who are over 100.
Wow, double back. That's cool.
Yeah, a friend of mine's grandmother, she was a singer during the war, and she told me a story once, Second World War, that is, and she told me a story once about how she sang in a burn ward, but they couldn't applaud, so they just...
Hissed their appreciation of her singing.
They just hissed because they couldn't applaud because their hands were all burned for the most part, right?
Yeah, nobody's getting quite Methuselah ages, but I think we'll live fairly long.
But not if there's World War III, we won't.
But again, outside my sphere of influence, outside my sphere of concern.
And that's the way it's got to be.
All right, so hit me up with any last questions?
I've already done a show today.
Actually, no, I've done two shows already today.
I did questions from freedomain.locals.com, and then I did a show of me doing my edits.
I'm about a third of the way through the book in terms of edits.
So, do you think tech will eventually create a simulation where humans won't be able to recognize they're in it?
Oh, no, that's already deep in the rearview, brother.
The matrix is already deep in the rearview.
I love all these people who are talking about the Matrix as a great analogy, a metaphor when I was doing it like 15 years ago.
Anyway, so no, no.
See, people have almost no contact with reality because they consume the mainstream media and they consume Hollywood and Netflix and all of that.
So they have very little contact with reality and they don't know that they're in a simulation.
They don't know that Because the body doesn't really tell the difference between what you see directly through the eyes and what is presented to you on a screen.
The body doesn't really get the difference much at all.
And so, yeah, as far as a simulation, human beings won't be able to recognize that they're in it Oh, it's already happened.
I mean, there are some people who think that Trump is the best thing since sliced bread, other people who think he's the worst thing since Satan, including Hitler, right?
So they're in a simulation.
They don't recognize it.
You know, the Pfizer revelations that came out of that creepy guy, it's completely absent from the mainstream media, and people don't even know that it's happened.
They don't even know that it's happened.
People like me who was trying to bridge the left-right divide, I was really trying to...
I mean, I invited leftists on the show, I debated leftists and debated rightists, and people like me who were trying to bridge the left-right divide and trying to bring people together in the arena called reason, facts, evidence, truth, and virtue, you know, we've been yeeted from the public square.
Now, of course, we were yeeted from the public square at the same time as some pretty nasty people were yeeted from the public square because...
You want to make sure that you cloud the issue as a whole.
But, yeah, most people have very little contact with reality.
And because I was helping people to contact reality, I had to be wiped out from the public square, right?
Because if you have access to the truth, you can't be controlled or manipulated.
Alright, let's see here.
Do you like driving?
Not particularly. I don't mind it.
But I don't like it.
I don't do it for...
I get a friend who used to just drive around for fun.
Go get some donuts.
Just going to drive around and think.
It's like, what are you talking about drive around and think?
You know, so I don't mind it.
Do you think they're really going to push violent protests over this recent cop beatdown?
I don't think so.
It's not a big election here, so they don't need to do that.
They'll save it up for when there's a big election to threaten and motivate the base.
Let's see here. Is hate ever a healthy emotion?
Yeah. Of course it is.
Hate is when you're in the presence of a sadist who's enjoying your suffering.
There's no such thing as unhealthy emotions.
That's to say that evolution is malevolent.
We evolved emotions for self-protection.
We evolved emotions for pair-bonding, for self-protection.
We evolved emotions for keeping ourselves physically and emotionally and mentally safe.
From predators, both human and animal, and natural, I suppose, to stretch the analogy, but no, there's no unhealthy emotions.
No. Now, people will tell you that hate is...
No, envy is a wonderful emotion.
Envy is a wonderful emotion because it tells you what you thirst for, what you desire, what you want to achieve, right?
So if you see some guy who's got, I don't know, some great girlfriend and you envy him, it's like, okay, well, that's the direction you need to move in.
It's a wonderful emotion.
Somebody says, that was a spot-on definition of my experience of hate.
Yes, for sure. Yeah.
Well, it's like saying, is there an evil knife?
A knife can be used to cut meat.
A knife can be used to stab someone, right?
Unjustly, right? Not in some self-defense, right?
Is there a bad or evil knife?
No. So, envy is good to inspire you to acquire something.
Yeah, envy says, I want.
I want is foundational to life.
I want is foundational to being alive.
I want things. Thanks, Steph.
Brilliant answer. Brilliant show, as per usual.
Well, thank you very much. Of course, you guys, you really do bring out the best in me.
It's funny, you know, I know people say, oh, the truthabouts were great and all that, but there are so many truthabouts.
You can remember, go to fdrpodcast.com, just write in truthabout.
You can get all the truthabouts in all the videos.
Links are down below. But it's funny, you know, because for so many years, I did shows...
Almost always pre-recorded.
I did a little bit of live streaming at the beginning, a little bit in the middle, but the technology was pretty rough back then.
I actually had to create a virtual webcam and stream at 320x240.
It was like really, really bad.
And then I did live streaming just audio for call-in shows for a while.
But doing live streams with live Q&As on the fly, I mean, personally, I think it's my sweet spot of value add.
And you guys get to live forever in what is recorded here, which I believe will be handed down generations and generations and generations and studied in the future and blah, blah, blah.
I think it's a great community and I think I've got some pretty hard-hitting answers.
So, but yeah, I can barely remember doing shows as a whole where I'm not live streaming.
The show I did today, I just wanted to go for a walk, chilly though it is.
I wanted to go for a walk and so I ended up, you know, it's a little tougher to live stream while walking around.
So I just did a local show and all that.
But yeah, generally it's more fun to, if I've got an idea, to get and jump in and share it with everyone.
And it's also a pretty good way.
It used to be a pretty good way to broadcast things as well because when I did it on...
Well, you could get some donations and it was already up there.
I didn't have to upload it and all of that as well.
Stress is also good as a motivator.
Yeah, so stress is...
There's a potential for you to act to pursue a good or to mitigate a harm.
That you have the capacity, right?
You have the capacity to pursue the good or mitigate a harm.
And stress is a way of saying that there's a gap between what you're doing and what you could or should be doing.
Feelings are a signal.
Feelings are information.
Feelings are information.
Feelings are... A summary of what is good or bad for you to some degree objectively and to some degree subjectively.
So feelings, some of it is objective.
If you're hammering in a nail and you hit your thumb hard with the hammer, that's just going to hurt.
That's not a subjective interpretation.
Sensations are objective.
But feelings...
Feelings go through a filter of the mind or through a transformation within the mind.
And you can change your feelings by changing your thoughts.
This is really the foundation of a lot of therapy, particularly cognitive behavioral therapy.
So if you change your thoughts, You can change your feelings.
When I was younger, in my early teens, I was a socialist and I was happy to hear about socialism and capitalism was negative for me.
When I understood the reality of property rights and non-aggression principle, then socialism became a negative for me and capitalism became a positive for me.
And so there's lots of things that you can do to change your emotions.
Now, you can't change your emotions directly, but you can change the thoughts that lead them.
Like, you can't change your health directly.
There's no switch that says become healthy.
But you can change your behaviors to promote good health, and you can change your thinking to promote more positive and accurate emotions.
So the purpose of philosophy is to understand what's true in the world.
And once you understand what's true in the world, your emotions will serve you relative to facts, truth, the world, objective morality, rather than conformity, subjugation, and the enslavement of propaganda and delusion.
Let's see here. How would you raise or train a dog?
Would you apply something similar to peaceful parenting?
I don't know.
I've never raised or trained a dog.
We've done ducks and one lizard.
So I don't have any particular thoughts about how I would raise or train a dog.
I don't know enough about the subject, so I really wouldn't hazard a guess.
Thoughts on the Australian kids' show Bluey?
What on earth would I know about an Australian kids' show?
I don't really know. Do you believe depression is a real disease you can't affect, or is it just a symptom of someone's situation?
Well, I mean, depression can be based upon...
Depression can be based upon real disease elements, I assume, that there are certain physical issues, deficiencies of various nutrients or minerals or vitamins or whatever, I believe, or lack of vitamin D, lack of exposure to sunshine.
I think, it's all just my opinion, right, as an amateur, but I think that there are things that can give you the symptoms of depression, but I don't view depression in its psychological state as a disease.
I don't view it as a disease.
I view it as existing in a state of moral horror that you're unconscious of.
And the state of moral horror usually has to do with the people you're surrounded by.
If you're surrounded by, you know, trashy, manipulative, low rent, low potential, hostile to growth, hostile to knowledge, hostile to facts.
If you're surrounded by those kind of people and you have the capacity, I think as we all do, to do something better with your life, then I think you're going to feel depressed.
What is depression? When you think of depressing something, you're pressing it down.
And then, yeah, like if you push down on a balloon, you let go, the balloon's going to come back up, right?
You push down on a trampoline, it's all point of a trampoline, pushes back up.
So, for me, depression is when there's situations that are artificially pushing down what you're able to achieve or what you're willing to achieve.
I've never really had any issue with depression.
I mean, I've obviously felt sad and think that's not really the same thing.
I think it's fair to say that I have fairly relentlessly pursued my potential sometimes to my detriment.
But I don't think that...
There's an aspect of me, you know, I've done the acting, I've done the poetry, I've done playwriting, I've done novel writing, I've written philosophical books, I've done documentaries, like I've really worked my brain about as hard as I can in various different ways.
And so because of that, I don't feel that I've left a lot In the clip or in the tank, so to speak.
Like, I've really, really pushed myself far further than I thought initially that I would ever be able to get.
I've written better books than I ever thought I was ever going to be able to write.
I've done better shows, better public...
I've even worked hard on public speaking and so on.
Like, I just came across a video the other day, which I recorded when I was in Hong Kong.
Doing my documentary, which was a speech I wanted to deliver, and I was doing the speech while having a fairly hard workout in the hotel gym, right?
So that's how much I was working on my speeches just over and over again to sort of try and get them right and all that.
So I don't think I felt depression in particular because...
Ah, yeah, well, the insomnia was, I don't know, that was more, I don't know exactly how to describe that.
It wasn't depression. It wasn't anxiety as much.
It was just kind of unease that I was underperforming relative to my potential.
But here's the thing, too. I mean, I consider myself very fortunate in this kind of way, but I didn't guess when I was younger how much potential I had.
So I thought I was doing well.
But it turns out I could do a lot more.
So I came from a very poor background, as you know, very low rent, pretty trashy, lots of abuse and violence and so on.
So for me, getting fairly high up in the business world, being an entrepreneur, and that was like, that's just like fantastic, right?
That's what a journey, right?
What a fantastic... And I don't know anyone who came from our particular environment who did anywhere nearly as well professionally, right?
So... That was pretty good, right?
And you think, okay, well, you know, I've come from a trashy, welfare, single-mom background, and I've become, you know, fairly weighty and successful in the business world, right?
So, it's pretty good, right?
Traveled around the world and, you know, went to France, went to just about every place in America, went to China, did all this business and all that, right?
So, then, apparently, my unconscious was like, oh no, we only started.
You've got way more, way more to do.
I was like, but I didn't get that discrepancy, because I wasn't, like I'm much less hostile towards the educational environment that I grew up in, because I thought it just sucked.
And it's like, well, they can't really, you can't really design the educational environment for people like me.
You just can't, right? So, For me, I felt that I was doing well, but I wasn't doing nearly as well as I could, but I had no particular thought or idea regarding my potential.
But deep down, I guess I kind of knew, which is why I got insomnia, even though I was doing very well in my business career, because the world, the universe, my unconscious, the future wanted me to do this stuff.
Because, you know, there's lots of people who are good in business, who can make a decent amount of coin in the business world, lots of good entrepreneurs and all of that.
But moral philosophers, it's not so common.
And so it was pretty wild to go with that, right?
All right. I had depression until I left my parents' house.
Somebody says, Thank you, Steph.
This one helped a lot. I'm happy and grateful to listen to you live.
Truly spun philosophical gold woven in time.
That's very kind and very poetic.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
That's very kind. I used to have anxiety and migraines that were so bad they left me vomiting blood and hospitalized for days until I left my parents' house.
Yeah. So if your parents are suppressing you, or if your parents are suppressing you down, and your success threatens their power, their control, their sense of self-esteem, whatever it is, then you will feel a kind of...
You are being pushed down.
You are being held down. I think that's a very strong feeling of depression.
I've said this many years ago...
It could be that you have social anxiety disorder or it could be that you're just surrounded by assholes.
It may not be as objective as you think.
It may just be the company that you keep.
As the older woman said, keep toxic people out of your life.
And the older I get, the more I'm I was pretty certain of that when I started talking about it 17 years ago.
I'm even more certain about it now because I have wonderful people in my life.
I'm not saying I'm very blessed, but I have great people in my life.
I've earned them too and they've earned me.
How hard do you think it is to be a good parent?
It seems many people struggle with it.
Honestly, it's the easiest thing in the world to be a good parent.
It's the easiest thing in the world to be a good parent.
It's fun. You're happier.
I mean, every now and then, you know, when I was a kid, as is usually the case when you've got screwed up parents, right, you would drop something and you would provoke a fight-or-flight startle response in my mom and then she'd get angry and she'd yell or scream or hit or throw something or whatever because she would just, you know, whatever startled her, she just came out swinging and punching and all that, right?
So, what happens is, You know, if my daughter drops something, and, you know, sometimes it happens when you say, oh, be careful, or, you know, don't carry those two things at the same time, my suggestion is, and they do their own thing, and then they just drop something, and maybe it's some truly spectacular, like, stew, splash in half on the carpet and stuff like that, and, you know, you get that...
But I don't find that particularly hard to...
I'm not about to scream.
It's just like, oh, there's mom.
And she ain't running this show anymore.
Also, it's a little easier.
I last lived with my mom 41 or 42 years ago.
That's when I last was under her thumb, so to speak.
It's a long time ago now.
It's sort of like how hard do you think it is to be a good wife or husband?
It's pretty easy. Just be nice.
Just be nice. Be positive.
Be friendly. You see a partner in the morning, just give them a big hug and a kiss and grab their butt.
Whatever, right? Whatever, you know, makes them laugh.
Why do some men seem to think that they're too smart to work out?
That they could spend that time reading a book or learning something new, etc.?
Well, because the mind-body dichotomy, right?
It's the mind-body dichotomy which says that there's some fundamental difference between the brain and the body, and there isn't.
The brain is an aspect of the body.
The body is required to keep the brain alive, and the brain is required to keep the body functional.
And the reason that I exercise is it's good for the brain.
It's good for thinking.
It's good for clarity. And I do better shows sometimes when I'm walking around, right?
I do better. I have better thoughts sometimes.
I mean, I've written entire books on a treadmill.
Yeah, I'm on a treadmill.
I've got my voice dictation software.
I've got my little keyboard for fixing things.
And I'm just, I'm walking at a fair clip and, you know, walking and talking, walking and thinking.
It's been shown that exercise improves thought and creativity.
So, yeah, I don't, And a lot of times, people who are kind of uncoordinated, they don't want to...
We all tend to shy away from arenas that we're not particularly good at, right?
So... You know, there's people who say, oh, you know, you're older, you should take up golf.
And I'm like, I'm never going to take up golf.
I'll go mini-golfing with my daughter from time to time.
I'm never going to take up golf.
First of all, it's not my kind of game.
I'll do pickleball, tennis, squash, or whatever.
Because there's, you know, hundreds of hits, and if you miss one, it's no big deal.
Just do the next one better. But with golf, you know, it comes down to 18 hits at the beginning, like how good or bad your day is.
And yet it's over three to five hours.
No, no, thanks. It's not for me.
Maybe if it was still walking, but that's less common these days.
Alright. Well, listen, guys.
I'm going to turn it in.
Again, third show today, so I want to make sure I keep something in the tank for the weekend because I've got significant chunk of edits to work on.
But thank you.
Thank you so much for the great honor and deep...
Pleasure of having these conversations.
I really, really appreciate it.
Oh, somebody's saying, are there ways to prevent dementia?
My dad is getting like Joe Biden.
That's a medical question. I don't really know the answer to that.
Somebody says, I've read real-time relationships.
Again, free at freedomain.com.
I've read real-time relationships with my girlfriend every night before bed, and now the relationship with her makes me feel indestructible when interacting with others.
That's wonderful. I appreciate that.
It's a great book, if I do say so myself.
So yes, thank you so much, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
I really, really strongly suggest joining freedomain.locals.com.
Great community. And you get my last book, audio book, and EPUB, and PDF, however you want to read it.
And you can see the edits on my new book.
You can also read my new book without being a subscriber.
And you can, if you want to give it a try, no obligation, no cost, you can use the promo code all caps UPB2022 and you can do it all for free.
So I would really strongly suggest checking it out.
I think it's really a great community and I really appreciate the platform.
All right. Lots of love, people.
I will talk to you Sunday, I'm sure.
Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening.
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