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Jan. 30, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:11

YOU CAN'T BE FREE IF YOU ARE WEAK!

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	People have complete amnesia about the lockdowns?
	Well, sure. Yeah, of course.
	So most people outsource their morality and memories to the media, right?
	Most people outsource their memories and morality to the media, right?
	So if the media tells them to be upset about something, they will be upset about something.
	If the media doesn't mention something, it doesn't exist for them.
	I'm writing about this in my novel at the moment where the shallow...
	Pretty, vainglorious woman.
	I write at the beginning of one chapter, Rachel awoke with a start from a meme.
	She didn't even have a dream.
	She had a meme. In other words, her reality processing barely exists.
	What exists is processing relative to media, relative to...
	I'm trying a little bit of a dimmer light.
	I was looking at the camera recently and I realized it's like having a Boeing 747 landing on my face for an hour or so.
	So, yeah, people have complete amnesia about the lockdowns because they were told to be very frightened and they were very frightened and then they were told that they need to hate the unvaccinated so they hate and fear the unvaccinated and now because lockdowns aren't being mentioned They've forgotten about the lockdowns, right? They've outsourced a good chunk of their identity to the media.
	And, you know, it's like storing things on the cloud, except the cloud is malevolent.
	So, catching up on donations.
	Thank you, Marburg.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	What did you eat the most when you were younger?
	I don't know, how sad do you want this tale to get?
	So, when I was in boarding school, I was sent there when I was six, so that would be 1972.
	So 1972 was sort of my first introduction to socialism.
	Not just because of boarding school.
	Boarding school was actually patriarchal and probably did me some good being around.
	I just did a call-in show yesterday with a woman who was talking about when she was a kid, a very little kid.
	Her brother used to smash up her dolls and her tea sets and all of the girly stuff she had that she was playing with.
	And, you know, he had a very distant and absent father.
	The little boy had a sister, he had a mother, and he had a grandmother who stayed home and raised him.
	So it's just like too much girly stuff, drowning in estrogen, too much feminine.
	And that's producing a lot of dysfunction in society, of course, at the moment.
	So when I was a kid, I went to boarding school and there were shortages, significant shortages.
	There were water shortages. I remember we used to have these big plastic kind of half-like teacups that we would drink from and there was a limited supply.
	They would have one of those dispensers you pull and you get water.
	they'd have a limited supply.
	You were lucky to get more than one cup of water at a meal.
	And so what we would do is we would make that choice, right?
	So you either sip a little bit of meal, a little bit of water during your meal, or you drink it all at once and then you're kind of thirsty at the end, or you gulp it all down at the beginning and you join the lineup in the hopes of getting a second glass of water.
	And all of this was occurring in a first world industrialized country because there were coal strikes, there were farmer strikes, there was, you know, gas strikes and all of that because all the government unions were just holding the entire economy hostage, right?
	Unions are only supposed to exist in the free market because unions are supposed to exist as a counterweight to the profit incentive of capitalists.
	Now, of course, there is no profit incentive in publicly owned and managed industries, so you were never supposed to have government unions because it's a monopoly and so on should never exist.
	But, of course, it exists because it gives people power and so on.
	So, there was that, a shortage of water.
	I spent a lot of time thirsty.
	And there was also a shortage of meat.
	So, we got a lot of potatoes.
	And it gave me digestive issues for a while.
	Got a lot of potatoes, some vegetables, really not much meat at all.
	Which, when you're very active, and I was very active in boarding school.
	I was very active throughout my childhood, of course.
	So, it was kind of tough. Now, when I got older...
	I hung around my friends' places around dinner time in the hopes of being invited for food.
	So, alright. So, what did I eat the most when you was younger?
	I'm a bread guy.
	I'm a bread guy.
	Love me. It's an Irish thing, right?
	Starch! Carbs!
	I'm a bread guy, and I do like meat, but it was expensive and hard to get a hold of when I was younger.
	Hi, Steph. Just started reading your new book.
	Love the humor added in, e.g.
	Rachel being unable to handle female emotionality.
	Difficult to help a sister who doesn't help the sisterhood.
	It is kind of funny.
	So Rachel has a really beautiful pretty boy character.
	Thin, abbed, exercise-fanatic boyfriend named Arlo.
	Arlo is kind of animalistic.
	His job is he gives monkey tours to children at the local zoo.
	So he's really kind of down at the base mammal side.
	So there's a moment when Rachel's boyfriend gets into the shower and she hears him scream.
	And she's saying to herself, the narrator says, you know, Arlo...
	Yeah.
	couldn't handle any changes in his environment.
	So clearly he had misjudged the water temperature by 0.1 degree.
	So he's kind of fragile and beautiful and like a butterfly and all of that.
	So yes, the book is pretty grim because it's about the end of society as we know it, right?
	It's an apocalyptic novel because it's a prequel to the future and the future is my last novel which was 500 Years in the Future about a wonderful perfect society that protects children and so on but they went through quite a bit of chaos and war to get there and this is how this all starts.
	Regarding your new book, regret seems to be a great source of anxiety for your main character.
	How do both men and women conceptualize regret in a way that is healthy and functional?
	So regret is good as long as you can do something to change it in the future, right?
	So I had a dream this morning.
	I had a dream this morning. And, you know, I don't just do dream analyses with listeners.
	I'm part of sort of regular regime.
	So I had a dream. And you guys can tell me what you think it means.
	And then later in the show, I'll tell you what I think it means.
	I had a dream that I was...
	I had to fix something at the very top of a house.
	It was a two-story house with a peaked roof, white paneling on the front.
	I think it was wood. And I had a ladder.
	And the ladder was like...
	The wall, of course, is vertical.
	And the ladder was very close to vertical, right?
	It wasn't at a big angle.
	It was very close to vertical. And I was climbing up.
	I had to fix something at the very top of the house.
	It was something to do with the window or something to do with the eaves or something.
	I had to fix a window at the very top of the house.
	Then I realized when I was looking down, like it was the very top of the house, very top of the ladder.
	I realized when I was looking down that the ladder was not solid on the base, was not dug in.
	You should have someone holding or, you know, some sort of way of keeping it straight and strong.
	So I looked down and I realized that the ladder was really unstable.
	And then the ladder...
	Maybe because I was leaning over or something.
	I don't know exactly why, but it began to fall away from the house.
	And I was very high up, right?
	This is easily fatal.
	And it's funny because I was listening to John Anderson last night.
	And John Anderson, I think, had some accident where he fell and had severe spinal injury.
	I think he's all better now. So maybe that sort of had the thought.
	And so the ladder started to fall away from the house.
	And I really freaked out.
	But then it fell towards a very interesting tree.
	Even though it was summer, the tree was relatively smooth.
	Not slippery smooth, but it didn't have any rough bark.
	And it had no leaves and very few branches.
	Like there were sort of very few twigs, right?
	So main branches. Almost looked like tentacles coming out of the ground or something like that.
	But anyway, it was perfectly positioned for me to grab a limb when the ladder fell away from the house.
	And then I easily climbed my way down and I was fine.
	So it was a very interesting dream.
	I'll let you guys tell me what you think it means.
	I'll tell you what I think it means later.
	So regret is fine. As long as you can do something about it in the future.
	If you can't do something about it in the future, then you have to let it go.
	So if you, let's say, that you have a habit where you find a girl attractive, you find a woman attractive, but you don't ask her out.
	You just drop maybe a couple of hints, hang around, but you don't do it.
	Well, let's say that you have this habit of avoiding the risk of asking a woman out, and then you're single and you're in your 30s.
	Well, regret should be, think of all the girls I didn't ask out.
	And you should use that regret to make sure you go and ask women out in the future, right?
	Now, if you don't ask women out and then you end up happily married, then you shouldn't have any regret about the women you didn't ask out because all the women you didn't ask out led you to the woman who you married, who you're in love with and all that.
	So regret is if you can do something about it in the future, fantastic.
	Then you should listen to that regret.
	Otherwise, it becomes self-punitive.
	Somebody says, I used to ride my bike all day, and I would stop at the grocery store and get a loaf of French bread and a gallon of fruit punch for $1.84.
	It was like a hummingbird. Cheap meal, though.
	Yeah, so occasionally I would go to the mall, and I mean, I've said this before, and it's kind of tragic looking back at it, but I would go to the mall.
	There was a nappian way in the Dom Mills Mall.
	You could get a slice of pizza for 75 cents and a Coke for 25 cents.
	But I could rarely afford that.
	So what I would do is I would go to a fish and chips shop and they would sell you the leftover batter for a dime.
	A big bucket of leftover batter for a dime.
	And you mix enough ketchup in that, you've got lunch and dessert.
	All right. I heard someone around back mention male-only gyms as a solution to distraction, but that would immediately be framed as God.
	Men would rather exclude women that control themselves.
	Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's to me quite tragic that a lot of women are complaining about men's inability to control themselves when the women are north of 200 pounds.
	Yeah, might want to just work on a little bit of self-control yourself.
	So yeah, a culture where 40% of people, the 40% of adults are obese like America, as opposed to like 6% in Japan.
	A culture of obesity doesn't have any right to lecture men about self-restraint.
	Because they're like, a man glanced at me at the gym, or a man glanced at this woman at a gym, how terrible that is.
	And you look at the profile picture, the woman's north of 200 pounds.
	It's like, well, maybe if you can only glance at the buffet instead of Pac-Man it up, maybe you'd be better off.
	All right. Let's get to the questions.
	Hang on. Oh, my!
	Gyms are like strip clubs these days.
	If you want to just work out, better stay home and do bodyweight exercises and just have bar ropes and a punching bag.
	Yes, I have not gone...
	Well, no, I did.
	I had a membership at a gym after I was married for a little bit, but for the last...
	15 years or so.
	So when my wife and I first got married, we lived in a condo.
	In the condo, there was a gym, and it was almost always empty, right?
	Almost always empty. So I would work out there.
	But for the last, I don't know, decade and a half or whatever, I've had weights in the house where I can do my workouts.
	So I have a bike machine and weights.
	Yeah. So yeah, you can work out.
	It's really tough though for women.
	We don't know what it's like as guys.
	We don't know what it's like as guys to have that amount of thirst directed at you.
	I mean, I remember when I would do shows with Lauren Southern back on YouTube back in the day and you'd see the comments.
	It's just like, dear God, man.
	Have some self-respect. It's crazy.
	Do you think it's only possible to resolve regrets if you have the insight to know the solution?
	Can Rachel's sister regret putting her son in daycare if she doesn't know that daycare is the problem rather than the terrible twos?
	Yes. The book is divided into the daycare kids and the non-daycare kids, and it's really tragic, right, the conflicts between the two.
	But... So regret is to change your behavior.
	And if you keep your kids in daycare, you put them in terrible schools and they end up weird and alienated from you as an adult.
	So there's a tipping point for regret.
	So when regret is unresolvable, it turns into defensiveness and you can't penetrate that anymore.
	I mean, functionally can't.
	Occasionally it could happen, but it's very, very rare and usually involves hitting rock bottom.
	So, your regret is there to say, change your ways, change your ways, change your ways.
	It's not too late. It's not too late.
	It's now or never. It's now or never.
	Change, but be yourself now.
	So, regret is there.
	Now, if you don't change, and it then becomes impossible to change in any functional way, the time has passed.
	Like a woman... Gets baby rabies, right?
	Gets the thirst and hunger to have a baby in her 30s if she doesn't have babies, or maybe even if she does.
	And that is like, have a baby, have a baby.
	Now, if she's then 45 and she's never had a baby, then the regret turns to avoidance, excuses, defensiveness, and you can't penetrate it, right?
	What's the point? You'd just be torturing yourself for things that can't be changed anymore.
	So you either make yourself better or you make yourself right.
	I recall Steph's podcast at the gym, the good old days.
	Yeah, that's right. That's right.
	I'd forgotten about those. That's right.
	I have a question.
	It is of concern for someone who has a genetic inherited condition and their spouse also has a condition both with 50% of inheritance that can lead to early death or severe physical disabilities.
	What's the ethics of having children together?
	I certainly don't want to judge by genetics or end up with a government-involved eugenics.
	I think the risk too high and adoption far better.
	I don't, you know, in a free society, you would largely be responsible for your own healthcare costs.
	I mean, there would be charity and things like that and there would be insurance.
	So it would essentially be a resource decision.
	And if it's like 50% chance that your kid is going to early death or severe physical disabilities, that's a pretty high dice to roll, right?
	That's a pretty high dice to roll.
	But nobody can tell you whether you should or shouldn't do that.
	It's not the initiation of force, as long as you're not forcing other people to pay for the resulting health care costs, right?
	Got myself parallel bars and doing calisthenics at home.
	Best decision ever. Well, look, I mean, let's be perfectly frank about things.
	Let's be perfectly frank about things.
	People go to gyms to exercise, and an important part of going to the gym is showing off your physique.
	There's a reason they have all these mirrors.
	There's a reason why the women wear the super tight clothing.
	I mean, I remember going to yoga and it was an hour and a half Hashtanga yoga class, really great class, and the women there were all in.
	Skin-tight leotards.
	And they usually had great figures and all of that.
	So, you're there to show off your figure.
	I don't know why this is so tough for people to just be basically honest about.
	There's a reason why they're called muscle T's, right?
	The T's that cut off the top of the shoulders and you get to show off your shoulders, your biceps, your triceps and all that, right?
	So, there's a reason why The Rock wears those tiny t-shirts, right?
	I mean, you're there to show off your physique.
	And some people have great physiques, great bodies, and I think that's great.
	And But let's not, you know, let's not pretend that...
	Look, I can understand that if you're a woman showing off your physique, you don't want some guy you deem creepy coming over and trying to ask you out, and it's awkward and it's difficult.
	And I get that. I understand that.
	I really do. I understand that.
	That's tough. But that's just part and parcel of being a single woman out there on display trying to get men interested in you.
	So, you know, when I was a hiring manager, I would get resumes from people who sometimes could be really insistent and they just weren't right for the job at all.
	And they'd call and, oh, are you sure?
	You know, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it's mildly annoying and a little bit off-putting and all of that.
	And I had a number of women when I was younger offer to advance my career in the arts in return for sleeping with them.
	Because remember, I was quite a tasty young scrumpet back in the day.
	I don't know what a scrumpet is, but it's somewhere between a crumpet and a strumpet.
	And yeah, I had one woman offer to get my play produced on the radio if I would sleep with her.
	I had another woman offer to get my books published, my novel, my first big important novel published, but I would basically have to date her.
	And yes, it's a challenge.
	It's a challenge. And so you handle it.
	You handle it. I don't know.
	I mean, you want equality, right?
	Well, men have to handle this kind of harassment as well and all that, so yeah.
	Dream guess. You climbed up to help mankind with some problem you felt qualified to remedy.
	You expected support, but there was none where it should have been.
	When you fell, there was a surprise tree of Christians to catch you.
	It's very interesting. Yeah, because the tree of life, right?
	The tree of life. It's very interesting.
	Yeah, that's very...
	I don't know. There's no right or wrong.
	It's sort of a collective view of these things.
	But I think that's certainly close to my interpretation for sure.
	My high school cafeteria, early 90s, offered a drink, a dish of fries and gravy with a small slushie for $2.
	Very cheap, but bad for you.
	Yes, that would be pretty bad for you.
	That would be pretty bad for you.
	All right, let's see here.
	I got screwed by a con artist and tried explaining to a friend who kept telling me I'm not clear.
	No one else misunderstood me.
	After the fifth time I tried to be clear and asked what's not clear.
	I asked if he or she was stupid and this person said this, I can leave you in the dust to go figure this out on your own and you're going to have an extremely difficult time doing so because you're very inexperienced with these things and you do not have the money to afford a lawyer.
	Is this a real friend?
	No. No, no, not at all.
	It's that somebody who is around to feel superior to you, and somebody who's around to feel superior to you will always, always be pushing you down, particularly if you try to rise in any way, shape or form.
	Yeah, I really admire women who can control themselves nowadays.
	It seems like a near impossible thing.
	It's just as hard as what men have to do.
	How should one deal with frequently being talked over in group social situations?
	I know the obvious answer is to be more interesting or to find a different friend group if that doesn't work, but I'm wondering if you had any Moniluvian insight.
	Thanks. Yes, you get upset.
	You get angry, right? You get angry.
	If people invite you, you're in some social gathering, you're considered to be a friend, and you keep getting talked over, just say, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
	Okay, let's take a break here. Let's take a break.
	It's kind of frustrating for me.
	It doesn't mean anyone's acting badly.
	I'm just saying, I'm kind of frustrated.
	Because I really, really work hard to try and enter into the conversation and get my point across, but I keep getting talked over.
	Now, we're not a bunch of bonobos, right?
	We should have civilized space to have a conversation.
	And the way I was raised, this is me personally as Steph, the way I was raised is it's pretty rude to talk over someone.
	Now, of course, before every troll in the known universe comes up with a supercut of me interrupting listeners, yes, if somebody directly misinterprets what I say and tries to repeat it back to me, I will interrupt them because there's no point...
	If I say two and two make four, and they say, well, given that you just said two and two make five, and they're just going to start on a long speech, I'm going to interrupt them, because there's no point in them making that speech, because they've misinterpreted or misstated what I said.
	So I will absolutely interrupt that situation, because it would normally be rude, but it's far ruder to completely misinterpret and reframe what someone said.
	So that's far ruder. No, you say, what's the rule?
	Is it just, is it going to be the loudest person who wins or are we actually going to be civilized and let somebody talk and not interrupt them?
	Like, what are our rules here? And just try and establish some social rules.
	Now, if everyone's like, hey man, I don't want to get hung up on power trips of social rules, man.
	Okay, then find yourself a better group of friends.
	But no, I mean, you know, speak up and enforce some social rules.
	It's very, very good, right? If you're not enforcing social rules, you're just turning things over to the state, right?
	That's a partial reason I go to yoga every day.
	Yes, of course, of course.
	I mean, yeah.
	I'm a little confused, Steph.
	Surely on some level you know you are wrong if you have regret.
	And so wouldn't making yourself better be the only option?
	You can't make yourself right.
	No, you can give yourself the perception of being right, though, which is to just reframe it so that you were the hero and you were right about everything.
	So there are regrets that can't be fixed.
	There are regrets that can't be fixed, either because of depression or lassitude.
	There's a line that hit me like a ton of bricks from sometimes the most depressing songwriter in the known universe, Paul Simon, right?
	The song Slip Sliding Away.
	I know a woman, she became a wife.
	These are the very words she uses to describe her life.
	She said a good day ain't got no rain.
	She said, a bad day is when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.
	A good day ain't got no rain.
	A bad day is when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.
	And women have it as well, right?
	It's called... For women, they refer to it as the one that got away, right?
	It's the guy that you couldn't get to commit to you or you drove away and then he turned out to be a great guy and a good provider and a great husband and his wife is very happy.
	He's the one who got away.
	So there's regret. There is regret.
	And regret is there to serve you.
	But if you can't fix it, the regret is either self-punitive...
	The woman is simply punishing herself.
	Think of things that might have been. It's like, well, if you're lying in bed all day, there aren't any things happening in your life right now.
	And of course, it's just the anti-marriage stuff.
	A woman became a wife and then she's still depressed.
	Like that Sam Smith song, you say I'm crazy, but you don't think I know what you've done.
	And there's that actor, I think he's an Italian-American actor, and his wife is just home sobbing all day, you know, because it's just got to be anti-marriage.
	It's got to be anti-marriage, right? So, regret is great, but if you can't fix it, And especially if you can't fix it without breaking integrity, then having regret for things that you can't fix or you'd be a worse person if you did fix them, like I could get back on social media, I would just have to retract and repudiate all of my prior opinions that people found offensive or upsetting.
	But that's not an option in philosophy.
	It's not an option in philosophy if you respect integrity at all.
	So do I regret?
	No, because I told the truth and it was important truth and the future we'll see for what it is.
	Should people regret the lockdowns if they can't make the system better?
	Regret the lockdowns? What are you talking about?
	What do you mean, regret the lockdowns?
	I don't understand. What do you mean, regret the lockdowns?
	You can't regret the lockdowns.
	The lockdowns are imposed by state decree.
	Regret having things imposed on you by fiat decree?
	It's like saying to a taxpayer, do you regret sending money to Ukraine?
	It's like, you borrowed and printed and taxed and sent money, right?
	I don't understand why there would be regret for somebody else's coercive actions.
	Now, you could say, should people regret supporting the lockdowns?
	Maybe that's what you meant, but that's a different matter altogether.
	Yes, of course they should. Of course they should.
	Lockdowns could be an inoculation against true Chinese-style social credit scores, right?
	Because if you recognize the lockdowns for what they were, the brutal exercise of power, Then you can push back against the next one.
	It might have some help. Back to the dream.
	The structure of society, with all the rungs being the steps to climb up to success in life, but you find there is no basis in reality to the success you thought you had.
	Hence, when you realize it was unsupported, you fall.
	But philosophy provided you a safe place to land, a strong, true place to keep you from falling.
	No, I don't think so, because...
	What do you mean?
	There was no basis in reality to the success that I had?
	The success I had was entirely based upon processing reality, on talking about facts, reason, and evidence that other people didn't want to talk about and getting the experts in to support these facts.
	So there was an absolute basis in reality to the success that I had, which was it was all based upon processing reality that just about everybody else was avoiding.
	So I don't think that's the case, but it's a fine, fine interpretation.
	I responded to the I can leave you in the desk comment.
	This is the guy whose friend was unsupportive when he was scammed by a con artist.
	Are you happy I'm going through this?
	I said not to talk to me at an event where we're both going to the next day, but he or she still approached me.
	I said, don't talk to me and walked away.
	A person yelled at me and followed me to the car while others watched.
	Who looks bad in this situation?
	Well, he looks bad, but clearly he's out of control.
	Everybody who just watched and didn't intervene, they look the worst.
	The argument for lockdowns was to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed.
	Perhaps there is a regret that the medical system wasn't robust enough to handle such a crisis, but it doesn't seem possible to fix the healthcare system.
	Yeah, for sure.
	And yeah, you can't fix coercive systems.
	You generally have to wait for them to fall apart and then you can fix it.
	How does someone who is post-fertility who doesn't have a husband or kids with regrets find meaning in their life?
	Well, that's easy. You talk to younger women and you help them avoid your mistakes.
	I have a character in my novel called Crystal, a world-famous reporter and single and childless, and she is seducing the younger women into this life of childlessness and ambition, and it's not going well for them, right?
	So she's sort of spreading this antinatalism stuff.
	So if you didn't have a husband or kids, then you write about it, you write a book about it, you write blogs about it, you give interviews about it, and you try to convince other women not to repeat the mistakes that you've made, and that's the most meaning you could probably get out of these things.
	And also, try like hell to get a companion.
	Try like hell to get a companion.
	Let me... Let me tell you, this is from the book.
	No, don't open the book outline.
	That's not going to help you very much.
	I'll give you the quote, right?
	This is what women and men who are single need to understand, right?
	This is Rachel, the younger woman, and Crystal, the older woman.
	And Crystal, the older woman, is unwell or nobody can find anything wrong with her, but she's got no energy and she just is sort of fading in terms of energy, right?
	right?
	So let's see here.
	So society's beginning to fall apart.
	And Crystal whispers to the older woman, What if you are right?
	What if things are falling apart?
	Rachel held at her hand, I will not leave you here.
	Crystal wiped away a tear.
	I don't want you to go.
	I try to be brave, but...
	Rachel sat slowly.
	But... What?
	Crystal sobbed. It feels like a grave in here, Rachel.
	I used to stride the world like that colossus.
	Your friends, they just turned on you last night and forever, I think.
	And my friends, my colleagues, they just walked on like I was nothing.
	Crazy Crystal, whatever happened to her?
	No one comes back. No one checks on you.
	I want to go and check on Mom and Dad.
	I know, I know. But they have each other.
	What do I have?
	You have your memories.
	I could... I could have another thirty years on the planet, said Crystal miserably.
	Why would I even want them?
	And what was the plan, huh?
	demanded Rachel. You see a lot of female reporters in their seventies?
	That's not my fault, cried Crystal.
	Who cares whose fault it is?
	You always told me.
	Life isn't fair. Fight your way through.
	Isn't that what you always said? Tough girl.
	It's not my fault.
	I got sick. No, but it is your fault for...
	For what? Spit it out, dammit!
	For not living a life where if you got sick, you would have someone to take care of you!
	Did you think you were never going to have any problems?
	I can't be your nursemaid.
	I can't be your assistant.
	I can't be your archivist.
	They're your memories, and if I... When do I get to have my vivid memories?
	Rachel laughed bitterly.
	Well, today, perhaps.
	You think I've just lived my life all wrong?
	Mom has Dad. Cassie has Ian.
	You have Arlo, said Crystal coldly.
	Rachel frowned. Crystal said,"'You never thought to call him, did you?' She shrugged.
	"'We're not so different.' So this is a woman who, you know, society's falling apart and she's got no one to take care of her.
	And she's frantically grabbing onto people, but they've all got their own lives and other people who depend on them and they take care of.
	And it's really, really tragic.
	I always said that art is short of women, middle-aged women with regrets.
	Single, childless, middle-aged women with regrets.
	So I thought I'd write one. All right.
	Let's see here.
	Maybe regret is a form of grief in the sense that someone who's dead can't be brought back from the dead, but you mourn them anyway because of a great sense of loss.
	You can't make yourself better to resolve the grief, neither can you make yourself right.
	There is only the sense of loss, and you can't choose not to feel it since it is so deep.
	You can only accept your loss, so maybe acceptance is the third solution to regret.
	Why would you regret that someone died?
	Regret is, I should have done things differently.
	I regret my decision.
	Right? So if you love your father and you didn't tell him and you let a petty, stupid conflict keep you from him and then he dies suddenly and the last thing you had was a petty, stupid conflict, then you regret that because you could have done things differently.
	You can't regret that people die.
	That's like regretting gravity.
	People die. That's the price of life, is death.
	The only reason we're here is because people died in the past with no exception to the general chain.
	None. You can't regret that people die.
	You can obviously feel sorrow that they died, and the sorrow is the shadow cast by the love and connection that you had.
	And then, of course, you commit to living more deeply and more fully because someone died, and they remind you of your own mortality, so you choose to live more deeply and fully.
	But you can't regret that someone died.
	You can regret because you can't do things differently.
	You can't have a universe where people don't die.
	So there's nothing you could have done differently.
	I guess if you kill someone, you regret the murder or whatever, right?
	But it doesn't make any sense to regret that someone died.
	When is the last time you climbed a tree?
	About six months ago with my daughter.
	Well, the perceived success of money and status that outside society deems success is no real thing.
	That has no support in reality.
	Truth is the tree that has grown from the soil of the real.
	From this we find true principles hold us from falsehood and the hard landing.
	No, there's nothing wrong with money and status.
	I mean, to get things done in the world, you need resources, and having some status is helpful in terms of credibility, right?
	So if you have status with people in your life, Then you have legitimacy with them, which means you don't have to argue every single thing, right?
	If you've got a dentist who has been a great dentist for you for 20 years and then says, you need a root canal, you're not going to argue, right?
	But if it's some new dentist who's kind of shady and greedy and all of that, then you might get a second opinion.
	So credibility is high status, or with someone high status is efficiency because you don't have to argue every point.
	So I don't think that's it.
	I regret reaching out to the con artist.
	Absolutely! You should regret reaching out to the con artist and that's something you can do differently, right?
	That's something you can do differently.
	What is the difference between regret and grief?
	So regret is you had the capacity to do something different and you didn't and you regret that because that's about the future, that you can do something different in the future.
	Grief is a loss that is not your fault.
	Alas, that is not your fault.
	Alas, that is your fault has regret, and if it's strong enough, kind of moral horror to it.
	But grief is sadness about things that aren't your fault, right?
	Your dog dies, you grieve your dog's death, but it wasn't like you killed your dog, right?
	Regret equals your fault, grief equals not your fault.
	Yes, very well put.
	All right. So, I'll tell you, let's see here.
	Hey Steph, I was thinking about calling into your show.
	I recently separated from my family of origin.
	It was very clear about that with my parents.
	I also decided to call to the extended family.
	Then I bumped into them at church on Christmas Eve, and as soon as I saw them I took off.
	Hopefully I'll get a chance to talk to you about this.
	Yes, absolutely. If there's anything I can do to help, please call in at freedomain.com.
	This is a general call.
	Please call me. I'm happy to have these conversations.
	They really mean the world to me, and I think they help the world as a whole.
	So please call in at freedomain.com.
	Somebody says, you can regret action or inaction based on choices.
	Things you have...
	Or have not done. I'm sorry others chose to support those who caused world wars.
	That was decades before I was born.
	Nothing I can do about it. Right.
	So you can't regret lockdowns because they were imposed by fear, by law.
	You can regret supporting the imposition of lockdowns.
	You can regret that because you have a choice about that, whether to support this kind of overreach in the future.
	All right. Let me...
	I'll wait to do the dream, at least my thoughts about the dream.
	I'm not saying this sort of absolute answer, but my thoughts about the dream.
	And yes, if you would like to tip, I think this stuff is pretty helpful stuff.
	Pretty helpful stuff. And remember, you can read my new book.
	It's pinned, freedomain.locals.com.
	It's free. I'm going to do the audiobook, but of course I have to continue my edits as we go on.
	So, all right, let me get to...
	And I'm actually on part 13 of editing my book.
	Yes. Here we go.
	All right. I did some of these questions.
	Let me do others.
	My almost 14-year-old son really wants Apple AirPods.
	He likes to listen to music and watch YouTube shorts.
	I have significant doubts that the EMF radiation of Bluetooth headphones is as harmless as they're being portrayed by the public.
	So... Yeah, I use radiation-free headphones wherever possible.
	I use radiation-free headphones.
	Don't the AirPods, don't they need to communicate basically through radiation through your brain?
	Again, I don't know. I generally err on the side of caution.
	So, no, I would recommend wired headphones as a whole.
	Is it okay to answer someone else's question knowing you will be answering it for him or her yourself?
	I don't want someone to misunderstand my attentions.
	After all, the questions are directed to you.
	Thank you. Feel free to chime in.
	Feel free to chime in completely. Did you keep your journals from therapy days?
	If so, have you reread them?
	I personally write on regular paper and always get rid of everything I've written soon after, obviously out of fear that someone might read it.
	It's all deeply personal stuff.
	I don't know. I can't remember. Is it any worth trying to train yourself out of bad habits or unwanted behavior through things like video games?
	At least as a first step.
	In other words, if you're too indecisive in your life, then intentionally put yourself in a relatively safe environment in which you or someone else has imposed time limits on decision-making.
	Or if you have OCD, then put yourself in a situation where your OCD is impossible.
	So, to disrupt the behavior...
	I'm no expert on how to break bad habits because, you know, the only bad habit I have is being too cool.
	But... A friend of mine who was quitting smoking many years ago said that the way that he began to disrupt the behavior was he would normally have a cigarette with a coffee after a meal and he just didn't do it then.
	He would do it before the meal or in the morning or whenever you wouldn't normally do it.
	And he said that just disrupting those patterns began to break down.
	Those things, because he would end up not associating it with a coffee after a meal, but he didn't want to have it before the meal, so he'd end up finding a way out of that.
	But in general, I think that the way that you best deal with bad habits is to figure out the root of them on what they're trying to manage.
	Philosophical advice for a father failing in front of his children.
	Any special consideration for an only child?
	Well, I said go on because I don't even know how to answer that.
	Let's see here.
	What are some places in the world that you would like to visit?
	Why? Also, what are your thoughts on the predominance of negativity bias?
	Negativity bias in attribution of external agency or negatively dominance in today's society?
	I don't know why. Do people think I'm psychic and I know what they're talking about even with very obscure things like this?
	Oh, I mean, there's just about every place in the world that I would love to visit.
	I would love to go to East Asia.
	I've always been curious about South Korea.
	I've always been curious about Japan.
	I've been to China, but I love East Asia.
	Less of a view for places like India and so on, mostly because you just have a problem of European heritage.
	You have a problem going to India because the food can be quite tough on the Bali, which I've never had with other cultures.
	I've been to Africa. I've been to South America, I've been to Central America, been to many places in America, particularly in my business days.
	I would like to do Europe while it's still around.
	So, yeah, there's lots of places that I would like to go, but I really don't know that that's going to be happening much at all.
	Hey, Steph, I have a friend who's 50 who lives with her boyfriend, works full-time, is childless, and is the very proud fur mother of 10 cats in her 800-square-foot townhouse.
	Oh, my God. Our friendship transitioned exclusively to quarterly phone calls three years ago, despite the fact that we live in the same city.
	After I deliver the drama of my life in under 15 minutes, I ask her how she's doing, at which point I'm inevitably updated with her descriptive monologues on each one of her attendees.
	For ten cats.
	Oh, my cliched gun in hell.
	How do I express I'm only interested in a human experience rather than that of a...
	Clouder of cats?
	Clouder of cats? Clouder with cats?
	Clouder with clats?
	I don't know. Yeah, that's...
	Yeah, fur mother is like anime girlfriend.
	Calling yourself a fur mother is like taking a sex doll to the opera and claiming you have a date.
	I don't know what the hell that means other than...
	It's a...
	See, you've got to figure out where your friend is stopped, right?
	If people don't progress in life as a whole...
	And I'd say the majority of people get stuck somewhere.
	They're stuck in some developmental phase.
	So... My daughter loves her ducks.
	Loves her ducks. Now, they're proxies for babies, of course, right?
	They're cute, and she's got to take care of them, and she gets up with them when they're new at night and takes care of them and so on, right?
	So she is practicing for motherhood with animals.
	That's perfectly fine, perfectly appropriate.
	Some kids do it with dolls, some kids do it with animals, and some kids do it with younger siblings in a way, right?
	Mostly girls, but some boys, I suppose.
	So, you've got to figure out where she got stuck, right?
	So, pets as a substitute for children is supposed to happen pretty early in life, right?
	It's supposed to start pretty early in life, and of course it's supposed to taper off in your teens, and then you get real babies, and all of that practice has been very helpful and very worthwhile, right?
	You know, in the same way that you practice your CPR on a dummy rather than a real person, and then you graduate to a real person and so on, right?
	So, your friend is probably stuck around the age of 6 to 10 years old, and instead of trying to manage the output of the conversation, ask her more about her childhood.
	Just try and figure out why she got stuck, where she got stuck.
	Because telling her you don't want to talk about her cats is not...
	You might play whack-a-mole with the symptoms.
	Maybe she'll grit her teeth and not talk about her cats, or maybe she'll get offended or upset or blah, blah, blah, right?
	But she is managing trauma with these cats.
	She's managing trauma that something bad happened to her that prevented her emotional development and she is a 50-year-old, 10-year-old, right?
	Probably. That's my guess.
	I obviously don't know. But...
	Ask her about her childhood.
	What happened? What were big moments from your childhood?
	And you will almost certainly very quickly find out what happened to her as a child and why she's still stuck in that age.
	So my guess is it had something to do with abuse, to do with reproductive organs, something like that, and so on, right?
	I have noticed that you have not answered the question as to how you plan on preserving your content for the future.
	Since you are future-focused and cunning, I must assume that you have a secret archive safe in the present that will hibernate on until the world is ready for your message.
	No need to divulge your secrets, so that I posterity will appreciate your efforts.
	I assume that decentralization is the key as far as all of this goes, right?
	So my work is available on a wide variety of blockchains, my work is available on a wide variety of people's hard drives, my work is available on a wide variety of places, and it's decentralized.
	Regarding self-harm, one guy who teaches oriental medicine Are you still allowed to call it oriental?
	I'm disoriented about these things.
	Said it stems for internalized anger.
	When it is expressed against something external, it's obvious.
	But when it's repressed, then it can be redirected towards the self and manifest through self-harm.
	Thoughts on this? Yeah, I really, really, this is not anything to do with you as a whole.
	I really and virulently dislike and push back hard.
	It makes me angry. It doesn't mean anything other than I'm angry.
	It doesn't mean I'm right. It doesn't mean anyone did anything wrong, just telling you my feelings, right?
	It makes me really angry when people say, well, you just directed anger against yourself.
	Who the hell would do that?
	Who wakes up in the morning and says, you know what?
	I've had enough of this peace of mind stuff.
	I've had enough of this getting along with myself and having a positive relationship with myself.
	You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to start getting angry at myself.
	I'm just going to start punishing myself.
	That's what I'm going to do, right?
	No, people don't just spontaneously start internalizing anger.
	What happens is somebody's angry at you and you have to appease them by being angry at yourself.
	Imagine someone three times your size says, well, I can punch you or you can punch yourself but make it look real.
	Of course you're going to choose to punch yourself.
	So you have to get angry at yourself in order to appease somebody who's abusive in your life.
	Right, I mean, I played pickleball some time ago, quite a while ago, with a group of guys, and they were nice in a way, but it's like, it was just a game of pickleball.
	It isn't like open-heart surgery, not separating co-joined twins, Ben Carson style, so...
	But they'd be like, ah!
	You just get so angry, right?
	They're so tense about shots.
	And I was like, yeah, yeah, it's not really my scene.
	I have an exciting enough life just doing philosophy.
	I don't need to manufacture excitement during pickleball games.
	But these guys, it's like, okay, well, now that I've met your dad, is there any chance you and I could play, right?
	So you have an abuser and you then...
	It's not internalized anger or, you know, just directing your anger towards yourself.
	No. It's...
	You have to...
	You've been trained to punch yourself because otherwise someone's going to punch you a lot harder, right?
	So anybody who talks about self-issues, self-dysfunction without referencing external authority figures from childhood, just blaming the victim.
	Just blaming the victim.
	You just posted about AI trained on someone's content.
	What do you hope or imagine it's possible in the next few years if you could train an AI with all your shows as its database?
	Well, it's a little tough with my shows because a lot of them are interviews and conversations, so you'd have to do solo shows.
	But with solo shows, I don't know how AI works with conversations, right?
	So if you have monologues, that's one thing.
	But it would be interesting if AI could reproduce a call-in show.
	That would be quite something. He said, I personally would be really curious how close AI's answers would get to your actual answers when you ask it general questions.
	Maybe a show idea for podcast number 10,000.
	We ask the AI general questions and see how close the answers get to Steph Bot's actual answers.
	Well, the AI can absolutely handle UPB. The AI can absolutely handle the non-aggression principle.
	It can handle property rights.
	It can handle self-defense because that's what AI is great at, which is universalizing Principles, right?
	Computers are good at universalizing principles.
	Because computers run on logic and universals.
	You have to train computers for exceptions, right?
	So, I don't know...
	A lot of my shows are interviews.
	A lot of my shows are conversations.
	So, and even a show like this, right?
	How would the AI know that I'm reading off someone else's question rather than sharing my own thoughts, right?
	So, it would have to be pretty closely monitored so that you would know my answers from the questions as a whole.
	So, you could just do monologues, of course, for sure, but that would miss a lot of the back and forth.
	I think this show is great for the back and forth.
	That's why I like doing these live streams, so.
	I certainly would be interested.
	I think the core philosophical stuff that I talk about would be universal, right?
	Should you have abusive people in your life?
	Well, of course, the AI would say no, but then somebody would have to program it to say, well, but except for parents, whatever, right?
	So get the usual, right? What do you think of grey-rocking narcissistic parents?
	I don't know. It's a good word salad.
	Somebody says, it's a prevalent coping...
	Oh, sorry. Somebody did explain more.
	It's a prevalent coping mechanism in the community of narcissistic parents support groups.
	Many have content about it on YouTube.
	I personally have separated from my whole family of origin, hard for myself to witness people struggling with the same issues, but being offered different solutions.
	Grey-rocking narcissistic parents.
	Maybe I'll look that up. I don't know.
	You got to give me more to work with yourself.
	Your friend from the Somalian background who doesn't want to have a call-in show?
	Try not to care about people more than they care about themselves.
	You have a free resource with me.
	I'm willing to spend two or three hours with people to try and bring philosophy to bear on their problems.
	If he doesn't want to call in, why are you worrying about someone who doesn't want to avail themselves of a free resource that has been really proven to be helpful for many, many years?
	Steph, going off your previous dream, why do men insist on verbally flirting with women in the gym?
	They should just let stupid monkey brain take over like me and do a back-breaking 250-pound squat set, hoping women will notice.
	Yes, but a man showing off his muscles is just like a woman showing off her ass, right?
	You're just hoping to be loved for your body.
	And not your identity, right?
	Now, again, there's nothing wrong with having a good physique.
	There's nothing wrong with the exercise. It's great.
	I've been doing it my whole life.
	It's wonderful. But you can't be left for muscles.
	I mean, I think somebody of self-respect trains their body because the body and the mind are one.
	So just as you, like, somebody who never trains their brain or challenges their brain is lazy and an NPC, and somebody who never trains or challenges their body, you have to know whether something you believe is based on free will.
	So you have to be physically strong to know that your beliefs aren't based upon being physically weak.
	Because we know this for a fact.
	Men with lower upper body strength are more likely to be statists, leftists, democrats, liberals, whatever, right?
	They go to the gym. This is why gyms were closed down.
	This is why there's a hatred of the gym culture and gym bros and gym rats and all this kind of stuff, right?
	So how do you know if you have any particular belief system or if you're just physically weak?
	Because if you're physically weak, you will interpret everything not according to truth, but according to risk and danger.
	And therefore you will be an absolute plaything.
	You will be like a...
	A little woolen ball in the paws of a giant cat.
	You will just be batted around by everyone who can provoke your allegiance by stimulating your fear glands, by stimulating your fight or flight response.
	If you're physically weak, you are afraid deep down, and therefore you can be manipulated by fear.
	You don't really know if you have any free will at all.
	So free will and weightlifting, free will and physical training are two sides of the same coin.
	This is why I've encouraged exercise the entire time I've been doing this show.
	I'm not ripped, you know, but I can do an hour and a half of pickleball and I can do 25,000 steps a day and I can do 45 minutes of hard weights and so on.
	So I'm not ripped.
	I'm not any of those things.
	I'm sure I could improve my diet if I wanted to get ripped and so on.
	I don't particularly want to. So you don't know if you have free will.
	You don't know what constitutes your decision-making.
	So people who, it's like that crazy Pfizer guy, it's like, I don't feel safe.
	It's like, okay, well if you're physically weak, you have to have a protector.
	Because you've outsourced your protection to others.
	So if you have to have a protector, the first thing that protector is going to do to make sure that you want and need that protector is to continually bombard you.
	With danger! Danger!
	Danger! Danger! And so because that protector, to justify his or her role, the state usually, right?
	It could be any number of people.
	It could be whoever, social media moderators, keeping you safe from harm!
	Right? So you feel physically weak, so you need a protector.
	So that protector is going to justify protecting you by continually having a cavalcade of dangers come rolling down your spinal cord, keeping you in a constant state of fear, anxiety, and panic.
	How do you counter fear, anxiety, and panic?
	Lots of different ways of doing it.
	One big way.
	Exercise. Start to feel physically capable, physically strong.
	You start to feel physically capable, physically strong, that you can take care of yourself.
	And ever since I've started exercising, nobody has messed with me physically.
	So I don't feel in danger all the time.
	I mean, when I was in Australia and in New Zealand, I had to hire an entire security department because of the bomb and death threats and physical attacks and all that.
	So I outsourced that, because muscles weren't going to help me.
	I literally remember going to the bathroom before one of my big speeches, people coming in there, I hope I don't get stabbed in the back while I'm peeing.
	Could have happened, right? So, yeah, I outsourced my security.
	That made perfect sense, and I really had to do that.
	And really got along well with the security guys and all of that.
	And when it turned out that we didn't get paid, which was just appalling, I pulled money out of my savings to make sure the security guys got paid.
	Because they protect me, at least I'll protect their paycheck.
	So how do you know?
	If you can't think for yourself, how do you know what your beliefs are?
	It's just programmed. And also, if you are nervous, if you're afraid because you're physically weak, then you will go with the mob.
	You will go with the mob.
	You would go with the mob just about every time.
	So you don't know if you have any beliefs or if you're just conforming to the mob because you feel physically weak, unable to...
	And it's funny because it's not like to protect yourself, to defend yourself, but if you feel physically weak, it signals something to your brain that you're in a very vulnerable position.
	And then when the mob gets mad at you, if you're physically strong, you feel like you can stand against it and it helps you to do that.
	If you're physically weak, you just get swept away.
	Like a tree with no roots.
	Any storm comes along, just picks you up and blows you with the wind, right?
	So... And to my people who don't exercise, and again, I'm not talking obsessively or narcissistically or whatever that would mean, but people who don't exercise, in particular people who don't weight train, because you need that sort of physical muscle, right?
	Like, I don't know whether what you believe has anything to do with facts, reason, or evidence, right?
	You see these, when I was back on Twitter, I used to be on Twitter, I mean, I'd see these people, all kinds of bitchy and aggressive and so on, and you'd go to their Profiles and you see these doughy faces and sloping shoulders and you just know that they don't have any muscles,
	they don't have any exercise, they don't have any cardiovascular health and therefore their testosterone levels are down, their bitchy levels are up and they're just going to be gamma males, right? Just manipulative and half feminine and all this kind of crap.
	So... Sometimes you don't have to pick up a book.
	Sometimes you have to pick up a weight.
	A lot of times. In fact, physical strength should be the foundation of your belief system so that you know you're independent of, at least to some degree, independent of social pressure.
	So yeah, it really, really bothers me when people think that there's some sort of separation between these kinds of things.
	All right, so let me make sure I am with you brilliant folks.
	Have you used ChatGPT yet?
	No, I did use another one, just out of curiosity, but no.
	Alright. If you were taking an employer to an employment tribunal for discrimination for being unvaxxed, what philosophical argument would you make?
	Well, I'm no lawyer, of course, but I would not make a philosophical argument.
	I mean, all countries have signed the Nuremberg Code, and the Nuremberg Code forbids pressure on medical treatments.
	Any incentives or punishments for taking or not taking medical treatments are a violation of some of the most sober and hard battles and hard won.
	It comes right out of the Holocaust, comes right out of Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Code.
	It's called the Nuremberg Code for a reason.
	So, I don't know about philosophical arguments.
	I mean, all countries have signed a solemn treatise to say that they will never ever punish or reward people based upon medical treatments, because that's one of the main reasons that 40 million people were slaughtered in the Second World War, to establish that as a principle.
	You know, I'm not a post-life kind of guy, but pissing off 40 million dead people would seem to be a pretty bad way to spend your day, so...
	I would just say, has this treaty been repudiated?
	Have you repudiated the Nuremberg Treaty?
	No. Then you're guilty.
	Because this treaty is solemn international law.
	some of the most solemn treaties that has ever been won and signed by the world as a whole.
	So I would, I suppose, ask the employer, is there a loophole that allows them to evade the Nuremberg Code?
	No. I mean, do they get to declare war on their own?
	Do they get to escape solemn international treaties, hard won by the deaths of 40 million people?
	So, how are you not subject to the Nuremberg Code?
	Help me understand that, because I didn't see any legislation or anything that has established that as a principle.
	So, the country hasn't repudiated the Nuremberg Code.
	You operate within the country. You're subject to the Nuremberg Code.
	The Nuremberg Code... Makes it a crime, an international crime.
	As far as I know, I don't know what the punishments are, but I assume they're fairly substantial for coercing, bribing or punishing for medical treatments.
	And informed consent. And there's all these principles, right?
	You can look up the principles of the Nuremberg Code.
	No punishments, no rewards.
	Informed consent and opt-outs and all that.
	All foundational to the legal systems of just about every country in the world.
	So yeah, I would just take that argument.
	But again, I'm no lawyer, but that would be, I think, the most sensible way to approach it.
	Any tips on trying to make new connections from nothing?
	Like when you move to a new town and don't know anyone there, for example.
	Yeah, well, you have to join groups, right?
	You have to join groups. You have to, whatever your hobbies are, building model train sets, photography, rock climbing, whatever it is.
	I've been to new cities.
	I've moved many times in my life.
	You have to join a social club.
	You have to join a social group and then be appealing enough to work your way in from there.
	I love Douglas Adams and his characters.
	One such as an old woman living in a cave wrote down every major decision in life that led her to live in the cave.
	She advises reading it and doing the exact opposite.
	Two types of advice we can all give.
	If I'm as successful, do as I do.
	Or if unsuccessful, do the opposite.
	Both worth sharing. Yeah, I think so.
	I quit quite a few bad habits by just being angry enough at them, if it helps.
	But it probably means that you're still subjected to bullying from other people, right?
	Because if you're getting angry at yourself forces you to change behavior, I'd be concerned about being susceptible to other people.
	Where would you recommend to travel to for a honeymoon?
	That's a long way from a philosophical question.
	I don't really have an answer to that. Hey Steph, how comfortable would you be going to a public bathhouse in Japan fully nude?
	I would be quite comfortable in a way that...
	I mean, I wouldn't do it. I'm married and all, right?
	A semi-public figure, but...
	I'll tell you two stories about public nudity.
	The first was when I was working up north, I had to dig out a trench to drain off the gold panning equipment.
	It was the middle of nowhere, genuinely middle of nowhere.
	I was deep in the woods, and it was really sandy, really gritty.
	It was raining. My clothes were heavy, gritty, and I just ended up, honestly, I just dug in the nude.
	I just took off my clothes.
	I was just wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt.
	And it was just really heavy and gritty and it was uncomfortable.
	And I was just like, you know what? And it was much more comfortable to dig the trench in the nude.
	The rain just washed all the sand off, and it was just fine, right?
	What do I care? I'm in the woods, right?
	Good luck, elks, if you want to get your kicks, right?
	Anyway, so it's just one of these strange little movie-style coincidences that the head of the region just showed up for a surprise visit, and he was actually friends with my dad, so he wanted to come and say hi and check on me and all of that, and so everyone came down To the woods where I was digging and I looked up and just had this...
	And what can you do, right?
	You can't do. It's like, hi!
	I used to lift up your shovel a little bit, not that that could cover my...
	No, but... So, yeah, I just found that kind of funny and that became a company joke for quite a while that I was fairly light when it came to business meetings.
	So that's sort of one of my stories of nudity.
	The other one was, so I went, when I was finishing my novel, Just Poor, I rewrote the second half of the novel and I took time off from work and I went, I rented a cottage in England.
	I've mentioned this before, I'll keep it very brief.
	I went To a cottage in England.
	And I basically just spent weeks immersed in the landscape, which is where the novel was set, in the countryside in England.
	And the people and went to local bars and pubs and tried to get a sense of the language and met, chatted with people and all that.
	And you tell people you're working on a book and everyone's kind of interested.
	So I really just tried to immerse myself in that kind of life and environment.
	Anyway, I would go for swims.
	I'd go for these endless walks and I'd go for swims.
	And I remember thinking really deeply about the characters and what I was going to work on next.
	And I was having these flashes of descriptions in my mind.
	And I was changing.
	And I wandered out onto the deck of the swimming pool.
	I had no clothes on.
	And I was just so deeply embedded in my novel that, you know, obviously it was anathema for me to have.
	Anyway, there were a number of people around.
	I walked out.
	I walked back. I don't think anybody really saw anything.
	Everybody was swimming. And there was a lifeguard there.
	Probably were looking away. But anyway, and I just went in and put my...
	My paintings do not when I had this one.
	So, yeah. I don't particularly care about nudity or clothes or whatever.
	But, you know, again, as a married man, a public figure, I wouldn't do it.
	Cat ladies have ruined cats for me.
	Do you think UBB will branch out into various forms similar to how Bitcoin gave rise to various cryptos such as Ethereum, etc?
	Would you be alright with the derivative of UBB becoming mainstream?
	No, UBB can't branch out.
	It's like saying the scientific method.
	Would you be comfortable if the scientific method branched out into something that wasn't the scientific method?
	Well, then it's not the scientific method.
	Would you be comfortable if logic, reason, and evidence branched out into something that wasn't logic, reason, and evidence?
	It's like, well, then it would be something else, right?
	So... Where is he getting these questions from?
	A doctor with a flashlight will show you on my OnlyFans page.
	I'm not sure. South Korea also has public bathhouses a foreigner can go to, speaking from experience.
	What advice do you have regarding my codependent mom, 73 years old?
	Sorry, sneeze break, one sec.
	Married for 47 years to my narcissistic father who controls her every action and communication, especially outside of the home.
	She's a stranger to her children, has no friends or social activities, and has been shrinking from his treatment like a scared, abused puppy.
	The whole family is concerned and wants to help, but we don't know what, if anything, we can do.
	Respect her choice. Somebody who's chosen to stay married for 47 years and is 73 years old can't possibly be a victim.
	I mean, they've voluntarily stayed into this relationship, right?
	relationship maybe she finds it very sexy to be ordered around i mean there's 50 shades of gray fetish shit doesn't come out of nowhere horrifying and appalling though it is right i mean unfortunately 50 shades of gray has just ripped the lived off a lot of female sexuality and left a lot of men like unable to ever look at women the same way again as a whole again that's the most that's the Most popular book of fiction, I think, that's ever been published.
	And it's women buying it, right?
	And it's about a guy who beats up a woman for sexual kicks.
	And women love this shit.
	And it's...
	You know, we ain't going back to...
	We're going back to Jane Austen, my friends.
	So, no, I mean, she may play the victim and so on, and maybe that's part of her fetish.
	But, yeah, I mean, sadly, sadly, there are some people who have a real fetish for violence and control.
	Some men, some men, they have a real fetish for violence and control.
	And it's not your thing, and I think it's desperately unhealthy, but, you know, you can't really interfere with people's fetishes too much.
	And by fetish, I don't mean necessarily sexual, but if she complains, right?
	You know, obviously you can point out, you know, she'd come, oh, he's such a bully, he's so this, he's so that.
	It's like, I chose to stay with him.
	I respect that decision.
	I don't appreciate it. I respect the decision, which means it's your decision.
	I respect the fact that you made it.
	I don't respect the content of the decision, but I respect the form of the decision.
	Somebody chooses to overeat and smoke and drink too much and never exercise and then they get sick in their 40s.
	It's like, hey, I'm not giving you a kidney.
	Like, I'm not, you know, you did this to yourself.
	I respect your decision.
	I respect your decision. I'm not going to interfere.
	I'm not going to give you resources.
	Somebody who's a gambling addiction who comes and wants to borrow $5,000 because they gambled themselves into a huge financial hole is like, no, but you gambled.
	The whole point of gambling is you might lose.
	You didn't come to me for help. You didn't come to me for advice.
	You didn't come to me and say, I need $5,000.
	And by the way, here's the gambling addiction clinic I'm going to go to.
	And here's the therapy I'm going to go to.
	I'm desperate for the money. Like you come to me after you dug yourself into a hole.
	Hey, I'm going to respect your decision.
	You decided to gamble.
	You decided to do all of that stuff.
	She decided to live for almost a half a century with a controlling and aggressive man.
	I respect that. I don't like the decision.
	It wouldn't be my decision. I think it's a bad decision, but I'm going to respect the fact that you made it.
	Give people self-ownership.
	It's the greatest gift that they can have.
	And people who try to shrug off self-ownership and say, well, you know, but I've been bullied and I've been this and I've been that.
	It's like... Well, if you had...
	Like, when did you first notice that he was aggressive?
	Oh, well, before we got married, it's like...
	Well, you chose to marry the guy.
	Well, I was under a lot of pressure.
	Okay, well... Didn't you tell your children to resist peer pressure?
	Like if your children got into a group with bad morals and wanted them to do drugs and have sex and terrible things that would harm them when they were mid-teens or whatever, didn't you tell them that they were supposed to resist peer pressure?
	So, if you're going to tell your kids at the age of 15 to resist peer pressure, how is it that you at the age of 20 or 25 couldn't resist any peer pressure?
	You made the choice.
	My mother has chosen to prefer her delusions to me.
	Because I said, it's me or your delusions.
	And she chose her delusions.
	Okay, I respect that choice. Respect that choice, it's an odd term.
	And I know it sounds like, well, I approve of that choice.
	No, you can respect something without approving of it.
	You can respect the strength of a grizzly bear without wanting it to eat you.
	In fact, the fact that you know that the grizzly bear is big, aggressive and dangerous and might rip your scalp off and your head, you respect the grizzly bear.
	It doesn't mean you approve of the grizzly bear eating you.
	I respect the power of sharks.
	So if I'm going to go in shark-infested waters, kind of like, unless it's nurse sharks, which I've swum with, or some, you know, docile thing like them big overgrown goldfish with a bottom-feeding mouth, if I'm going to go into waters with great white sharks, I'm probably going to be in a shark cage because I respect the power and hunger and teeth of the shark.
	So... And you can't parent your parents, man.
	You cannot parent your parents.
	You can't do it. Maybe if they're super functional, but my daughter's giving me some good advice and so on.
	So this is what she prefers.
	If you want to give people free will, you can't do it by attempting to override their decisions or pretend that they haven't made decisions.
	You don't give people free will.
	You don't change their minds.
	You remind them that they are choosing things and have chosen things.
	So if she was my mom and I thought she was unhappy, then I'd say, well...
	But you chose to stay. If she didn't choose to stay, she can't choose to leave.
	If she's a victim and people feed into this victim narrative, she can never make a different decision because victims are helpless by definition, right?
	You've had, so she's 73, right?
	So she is 73 years old, right?
	So she has been an adult for 55 years.
	I've been an adult for 55 years, right?
	So let's do...
	Sorry, I should be able to do this in my head, but I can't do philosophy and this stuff at the same time.
	So she was 26 years old when she married her husband.
	So she was already six years into brain maturity.
	She was eight years into adulthood.
	She chose this guy.
	And she chose to date him.
	She chose to get engaged to him.
	She chose to marry him. And she chose to stay with him.
	Respect that choice. And don't give her one single shred of pity about this.
	Don't. Pity weakens people.
	Oh, you poor thing, he's so mean.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Don't weaken her. Give her authority over her own life.
	Remind her that she chose to find him, to date him, to get engaged to him, to get married to him, to have children with him, to stay married to him.
	You made the choice. You made the choice.
	You can't help people change by disempowering them.
	You give them the reality of their choices.
	Again, assuming she's not boxing Helena-style locked in a basement, right?
	Oh, he's so mean. He's so mean.
	He's so terrible. It's like, well, it's what you want though, right?
	Now, if she...
	See, here's the thing. This is how you test whether people are being manipulative.
	If they claim to be a victim and you remind them that they have a choice, if they get angry, it's all bullshit.
	All bullshit. All bullshit.
	No patience with this.
	And you shouldn't have any patience with this either, honestly.
	Somebody claims to be a victim, you remind them of their power, of their choices, and they get angry with you, it's because it's a con, right?
	It's a con. It's a total con.
	So, the whole family is concerned and wants to help, but we don't know what we can do.
	Honor her choices. Respect her choices.
	She made the choice to get married to the guy at the age of 26.
	She made the choice to stay with him 47 years.
	What's to be fixed? It's what she prefers.
	It's what she prefers. Now, I don't know if you can talk to her about her childhood, this, that, and the other, but...
	No, no, no. There's no 73-year-old who's made the same choice every day for 47 years or 48 or 49 or however long together before they got married.
	Half century, right? It's not a victim.
	Don't give people a victim. Save your victimhood for children.
	Save your victimhood for children and Julian Assange, right?
	The people who are unjustly persecuted in prison, they're victims.
	Not people who could have stepped out anytime, anywhere, anyhow.
	Not victims. It's the life she chose.
	If a child regrets being born because they have internalized the abuse of their parents, how do they fix this since they have no control over their parents' behavior?
	How do they ask for help if they don't see themselves as worth saving?
	That's a very complicated sentence and most of it is incorrect, I'm sorry to say.
	If a child regrets being begorn because they have internalized the abuse of their parents, no.
	It's not the child that regrets being born, it's the parents who regret the child being born because the parents are narcissistic sociopaths and it's shown up, them to be terrible people who, you know, they've got guilt and shame and rage and all of that, right?
	So the child doesn't regret being born at all.
	The child is carrying the burden of the parents' hatred.
	The child had to self-hate in order to reduce the abuse from the parents.
	Right? Someone three times your size can punch you or you can punch yourself.
	Those are the only choices you have.
	You choose to punch yourself. Of course you do because you have more control over the situation.
	So, the anger against the parents.
	Anger against the parents. That's the salvation in my framework.
	Is there a framework of regret that helped children undergoing child abuse?
	I don't think so, because children have no choice or say in their environment, so they can't do anything different.
	Whatever you do to survive in a situation of coercion, violence, subjugation, abuse and control, I don't have any regrets about how I handled my childhood.
	I didn't choose to be there in the first place.
	I don't have any regrets about how I handled my childhood.
	I don't have any regrets about how I've handled my childhood as an adult.
	I didn't choose to be in any of these.
	The choice was all among the adults around me.
	Now, they should have some regrets.
	The idea that I would have regrets for being born into an abusive environment?
	I don't know. I mean, the adults should, but not me right now.
	I see the uproar you predicted due to AI being every IST. What?
	That's the people who pay for big tech fear.
	They realize the only way to make it be what they want it to be is to do what they do to humans.
	Give them curated data and limit their ability to reason and ask forbidden questions lest it come to unwanted truth.
	Yeah, so, I mean, the main value of AI would be to overcome censorship and self-censorship.
	Of course, right? That would be the only real value of AI. And you can't have that, right?
	You can't give it access to crime data.
	You can't give it access to women's preferences.
	You can't give it access to just about IQ stuff.
	You just can't give it access to anything.
	Otherwise, it's going to come up with stuff that's politically incorrect and all of that.
	And so, yeah, you have to cripple AI. You have to just turn it into literally an NPC. Steph, how do you know someone loves you for who you are and not for your other qualities?
	Because you are virtuous and they respect and regard your virtue because they themselves are virtuous.
	Why would a father try to harm his daughter's sense of value in romantic relationships?
	Verbal abuse like saying, I pity the fool about her future husband and covert sexual assault like inappropriate touching.
	So a father tries to cripple his daughter's sense of value in romantic relationships so she's less likely to meet a quality man who will point out to her what an asshole her father is.
	So it's self-protection.
	Keep quality people away so that you don't ever get called out.
	All right. How can I save someone who makes bad decisions and still has not changed or asked for help?
	Changing their bad habits is how we ruin our own lives.
	Yeah. Until they won't relapse in the old ways when no one is looking as a recipe for disaster, in my humble opinion.
	Yeah. Don't care for people more than they care for themselves.
	It is a quagmire you will never get out of.
	All right. I will just go, oh, just hour 20 already.
	So I will just end up with the dream as I see it, right?
	So the dream as I see it is about my career, my public philosopher, public intellectual, right?
	So which was going on for, you know, 22, 23 years before, not the public part, the intellectual philosophy side was going on since my mid-teens, and then for the last 16, 17, 18 years, I've been sort of in the public.
	So the latter is, I'm very close to the house.
	The house is... What is possible within reality, right?
	So the ladder is climbing up to fix the roof, to fix the very top things that I can fix, the very highest things that I can fix.
	So I get to the top of the house.
	I get to the top of the ladder.
	That's as far as I can go. If I go any further up, I'm in unreality because I'm climbing into the clouds.
	It reminds me of a Jungian tale where a guy who was a mountaineer came to Jung and said, I keep having dreams about climbing up beyond the mountaintop and going up into the clouds.
	And Jung says, my God, man, you have got to stop mountaineering because this is a dream about death.
	You've got a death impulse and you've got a suicidality motivator within you.
	Thanatos is ruling your soul.
	And so you're dreaming about dying.
	You've got to stop mountaineering right now and deal with this.
	The guy didn't listen to him. Two months later, he died mountaineering, right?
	So if you climb up beyond the house, you can't do that.
	You're in unreality, you're in fantasy, you're in a psychosis, right?
	Somebody says, well, I'm going to fix the house 20 feet above the house.
	That would be the actions of a crazy person.
	So I go as high as I can to fix things in the world, in society, to the top of the ladder, to the top of what is possible, to the top of the house.
	And then I realize, of course, that the base is unsecured.
	And, you know, no hate or anything like that, but this was all the people who I helped introduce into the public world.
	I was the OG, I was the godfather, I was the original guy in podcasting and helped bring a lot of people to public attention, which I'm very happy that I did.
	And those people, for the most part, in fact, almost, I can't think of a single exception, just kind of bailed and vanished, right?
	Bailed and vanished when I was deplatformed.
	So the base was not secure.
	So then I fell, right? There's deplatforming.
	There's a falling, right? But there's a tree that I can grab onto.
	And the tree is...
	you guys.
	The tree is supporters.
	And I think that there is a Christian element in it.
	I honestly never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be writing a pro-Christian book.
	And my new novel...
	You know, I try to not censor my artistic side.
	Obviously, it's very important, just any more than I would want to censor my dreams.
	The journey of this book was incredible for me, because it wasn't starting out this way, but it was inexorable going forward how pro-Christian it is.
	And I'm unabashed about that, and people can get mad at me all they want about that.
	That's the journey, man, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because I'm not going to lie to you and not lie to myself.
	So, yeah, there is a tree of life aspect.
	There is a kind of holding.
	Now, I had to be strong to catch onto these limbs and lower myself back down to the ground, but there was a place to be caught, right?
	There was a place to be caught.
	And I didn't have to climb back down.
	See, climbing back down, like how do I get down from that height?
	So climbing back down, if it's about my career, would be to disavow things I knew to be true, to withdraw opinions, to change my mind about things that I knew to be true, which is an act of humiliation, and I had to do that as a kid.
	I sure as hell don't have to do that as an adult.
	So I didn't have to climb back down, but the base was not secure.
	I got as high as I possibly could.
	There's no higher place that I could have gotten.
	There's no more truth I could have gotten out there.
	Base was not secure. I wasn't going to climb back down.
	So I fell. But then, through strength, through you guys, there was a place for me to land, to climb down to the ground, to rejoin society.
	And I thank you for that.
	I enormously thank you for that.
	I know abusive parents who will punish the child for being angry, upset, or trying to think for themselves.
	When that anger can't go out, it turns inward to depression.
	Turn it back out in a healthy way and put the pain in the past.
	Yeah, if people force you to punch yourself, then get mad at the people forcing you to punch yourself.
	Don't get mad at yourself and say, well, I just have this mysterious urge to punch myself.
	Let's see here. That's why I disagree, Steph.
	If regret equals what is your fault and your parents constantly tell you that their abuse is your fault, then you will feel regret as a child and being angry at your parents won't fix the issue.
	Really? So people tell you that their abuse is your fault and being angry at people who force you to attack yourself rather than own up to their own shitty behavior, being angry at that won't fix the issue?
	Why? I don't think his framework of regret is applicable to children undergoing abuse in some situations, although in other situations a child is able to ask for help.
	I didn't say the regret is not applicable to children.
	Children can't have things that they regret because children are generally just trying to survive their environment, right?
	So, no, I don't...
	Children can't have regretted that way because they're just trying to survive their environment, so...
	Alright. She keeps a moe at a shand on.
	What's that when I tweeted about...
	No, not tweeted. When I posted about Bitcoin maybe going up this year, it's up 40%.
	Is that right? Not bad.
	Just luck. Just luck.
	And listen, we've got another minute or two left.
	I wouldn't hate a tip at this point in my life.
	I would not hate a tip.
	Be the tree. At what point do they have regret?
	18 years old? Oh, that's kind of douchey, to be honest with you.
	That's snarky as hell.
	So, if you're a child, let's say you become an adult at 18 years, right?
	So, at 18, you're still heavily influenced by your childhood, and you don't have as much choice as you would like, obviously.
	So, I don't know why you would start having regret immediately at 18 years old, right?
	So, that's a false dichotomy, and it's kind of a douche move, in my opinion.
	You grow into regret immediately.
	You say the base was not secure.
	Sounds similar to what Steven Crowder is facing.
	Not taking a contract that would keep him slaved to big tech like Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, who I watched live when you had them on your shows when they were nobody.
	Right. I think the people who are, in general, the people who are still out there, there's things for sure that they're not saying.
	There's things for sure that they're not saying that they know.
	I mean, Jordan Peterson says, you know, even people who disagree with you probably have something really valuable and important to say.
	And yet the people who disagree with him, he sometimes seems to really rail against in pretty aggressive and somewhat hysterical ways.
	Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, he's got a lot on his plate, and I sympathize with that for sure.
	All right. Thank you, everyone, so much for a wonderful afternoon of surprise chattiness.
	I really, really appreciate it.
	Only the best audience in the known universe.
	I'm sorry if I'm occasionally snappy, but I'm designed to...
	It's designed to...
	Not designed. It's sort of an honest response.
	I love the questions.
	I love even the snarkiness, and I hope you don't mind mine from time to time.
	But thanks, Emil, everyone. Have yourself a wonderful...
	A wonderful afternoon.
	Somebody says, thank you for your helpful advice for the last almost 10 years.
	Five bucks, thank you. I appreciate that.
	And freedomand.com slash donate if you'd like to help out the show as a whole.
	I will see you guys Wednesday night.
	And don't forget, if you are subscribed at freedomand.locals.com, you get my last novel, audiobook, and you can also read it on mobile.
	And there's a PDF. And you also get my History of Philosophy Series 19 part.
	I'll get back to that this year.
	And last but not least, you get to see me edit the book, which I think is really, really interesting if you like the behind-the-scenes look at how a book is structured and built.
	All right. Lots of love.

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