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March 6, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:31
Wednesday Night Live - Overcoming Nihilism!
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Good evening, of course.
I'm fairly good at following internet trends, and apparently you can make a fortune just sleeping.
Just... Amaranth, I think her name is, this woman who's got more drugs than a diabetic German nanny convention.
She films herself sleeping, and she falls asleep, and people watch her and donate.
Yeah, that's kind of bright here.
Let me see if I can fix that over there on Locals.
It's a little bright.
A little bright. One has color.
One screen has color.
One screen does not.
But yeah, I mean, she can get donations just because people are watching her dozing memory glands.
Meanwhile, philosophers...
So this... Oh, hang on.
Let me just see here. So why is it so bright over there?
Why? Why?
You stupid... Okay, let's see here.
Take down that brightness a little...
It just makes it... It just makes it all kinds of shadowy, right?
Yeah, what the hell? What if I do reset?
Yes. Ah!
Now it's just plain old radioactive.
All right. Let's take that down a smidge.
Yeah, it's not really designed for the camera lights, which the other one needs.
Well, that's all right. So, yeah.
Let me just move over a little bit here.
Sorry, just doing adjustments here.
I have to have two cameras running.
Two cameras running at the moment.
Well, good evening. Thank you, everybody, for dropping by tonight.
It is time for our We Philosophy Chat, and I am all ears.
Just hit me with your questions, and I am completely thrilled to hear them.
Let me just see what here is running.
What is running? What is working?
Yeah, it seems to be working candor all aroundy.
One is unable to connect.
Excellent! Sure.
Sure! Why not?
I guess that's why Sleeping Beauty was so wealthy.
Yeah, I guess so.
All right, let's get straight to your questions.
This is my first time catching you live.
If I should stumble, catch my fall.
This is awesome. Well, thank you very much.
Thank you for dropping by tonight. Don't forget, if you're at freedomand.locals platform, you can tip.
You can tip.
And it's one of the... One of the worst jokes I ever heard when I was young was, what did the leper say to the prostitute?
I left a tip. Here's my Molyneux mic, by the way.
The ancient arms of Molyneux.
Good old Freddie Mercury beavers, and beavers are very, very K-selected animals.
They spend years teaching their offspring how to give a damn.
How to make a dam. This is the goofy jokes from years ago.
A friend of mine was visiting his cousin who had a job giving tours at the Hoover Dam.
And literally all day he was like, well, when is this damn tour?
When is the damn tour going to start?
Where is this damn...
The damn tour is taking too long.
Just obviously pretty...
Fairly funny, fairly dredging that up from the old history.
Alright, let's get back to your questions and get to them.
Somebody says here, my sister who is gay was hospitalized with a severe eye injury.
She said the bottle fell to the ground near her when she was in a lower position.
She was at the bottom? What does that mean?
But the only way that her severe injury could have occurred would be that the bottle was thrown to the ground near her with speed and force, that dodging the shard would have been impossible.
But someone that is that angry can't control his or her temper.
The only suspect would be her lover.
What do you want me to do some Sean Spencer psych thing here and try and figure it out?
Domestic... The most violent relationships, as far as I understand it, are lesbian relationships.
There's two things. Lesbian bad death, because women generally don't initiate sex a huge amount, unless they're in my proximity, in which case I just have to use my philosophical taser to ward off their estrogen surf-based tsunami lust from my giant ostrich egghead.
But... What can I do?
Well, you can try and talk her out of being in an abusive relationship.
And if she chooses to be in an abusive relationship, you simply refuse to do whatever you want.
Actually, what I would do is I would say, this is an abusive relationship, and if you want to stay in an abusive relationship, you can do that, but I'm not supporting it.
I'm not having anything. If you choose to be self-destructive, If you choose to be self-destructive, I won't enable that.
You're all getting so caught up into all of these people who are acting in this self-destructive manner, and you feel that you have to save them.
You have to rush in and save them.
No! No, a thousand, thousand, thousand times no.
Your life is yours to live.
You don't get sucked into the quicksand of other people's self-destruction.
That is an insult to the star shit that gave you life.
That is an insult to all the supernovas that scattered across the galaxy, accumulated enough genius and brilliance to give you life.
On this third rock from the M-class star Sol in the Andromeda galaxy where we are currently paying taxes to some highly questionable people.
So you have this incredible opportunity to live a life of inspiration and glory and if people around you wish to enmesh themselves in self-destruction Give you good advice, give you good counsel, give you good feedback, give them a short amount of time.
If they continue to do self-destructive things, stand the fuck clear.
Stand clear. If somebody was trying to kill themselves by going into a room and randomly shooting, would you hang around?
And here's the thing, if people want that drama and they want that self-pity and they want that feeling of victimhood and they're just reproducing an abusive childhood, if people want that, and I'm not saying they want it like consciously, but if they get enmeshed in that, look, everyone who has a past has quicksand from that past to tentacles from the history that just reach forward trying to pull you back and pull you down.
Everybody from your past who fucked up is heavily invested in you fucking up as well.
And if you don't do it on your own, they'll help you along with sabotage.
Break free of the underworld.
My God, you know, I was born in such a crap layer of society, right down there in the bottom layer of the dungeon in some Dante-esque layer cake of satanic squid hell.
And you've got to tunnel up and leave it behind, man.
Leave that smallness, leave that pettiness, leave that viciousness, leave that dysfunction, leave that mess behind.
Be a jetpack to your own glorious possibilities.
The idea that you would...
There's this great line. Don't hang back with the brutes.
Don't hang back with the brutes.
You got messy people in your life?
Yeah, give them a chance to not be messy.
If they choose to continue to be messy, I myself...
Do you know how many dysfunctional people are in my life?
Do you know how many people are losers and failures who I have to prop up and give resources to and continually talk out of the tree and talk off the ledge and fix and patch up?
Do you know how many people are energy vampires in my life?
Big fat goose egg.
Bagel, zero, zip, zilch, none.
None. None.
You know, I got a bit of a chill.
I was reading about George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher who's actually taught by one of my ancestors.
He says he died at 67, you know.
That's ten and a half years for me.
I could die at 67.
I could live longer. I could die at 67.
Might have ten years left.
How many days do you think I want to waste trying to prop people up who won't listen to reason?
In the relatively short span I have left.
I could be 80% or 85% down my life.
Hey, I'll hang with you guys.
Carving our words into the skyscrapers of infinity, hopefully to reach into the future with a view from the past and build a future that's better than the past.
What do you want to spend your life chasing after people who were just continually throwing themselves into fires?
You understand? You don't save them.
They just wreck you. You don't save them.
They just wreck you. Why do you continually want to be a lifeguard in people who are constantly throwing themselves into the water with rocks?
I don't know. I don't understand.
Can you provide thoughts on Scott Adams' controversy slash story?
Yeah, I was...
A little surprised, I suppose.
I mean, in some ways, not so much.
He's now divorced.
I think his stepson died of a drug overdose.
It's really, really tragic.
And, you know, Scott is a smart guy and all of that.
He said things that I consider to be quite ugly and, you know, whatever, right?
It doesn't particularly matter.
It's just the aesthetics. But he was looking for a buyer for Dilbert, for the Dilbert franchise in the past.
He's looking to retire, and maybe he just decided to go out with what he would consider a bang.
So, I don't really know what the story is.
Obviously, I don't have any inside scoop, inside information.
But, yeah, he's definitely talking some pretty harsh stuff.
All right. Hey, Steph.
Much love to you and the community.
What are your thoughts and advice on overcoming nihilism?
And here's some shackles for you.
Overcoming nihilism, really?
Overcoming nihilism is worth $10 for you?
Oh, it's a good thing you guys have never had to pay lawyers.
Alright, I appreciate it.
Overcoming nihilism. Well, first of all, stop being so goddamn ungrateful.
Don't burn through an inheritance that took four billion years to build up for you.
And you can do whatever you want.
But if any one of your ancestors had succumbed to nihilism, you wouldn't be here to play around with this navel-gazing flamethrower called nihilism.
If one of them had gotten out of line, oh, life has no meaning, and what's the point, and what's the purpose, you wouldn't be here.
Maybe being here is a torture for you, I don't know, but overcoming nihilism.
Honor your ancestors, man.
honor your forefathers, honor your ancestors honor your ancestors
you know how much they had to suffer to bring you life ah
You only profit from ambition and meaning because you only had life because your ancestors were able to profit from life and find meaning in existence.
Would they have struggled so hard if they had known that the incredible wealth and opportunities that you possess...
We, I mean, we are the second or third wealthiest generation in all of human history.
We have this unbelievable technology that allows me not to pass from this life with all my thoughts unspoken.
You know, an incredible opportunity.
That's why I do these shows. That's why I want to talk to you guys.
Because I wrote an entire novel about a brilliant person in history who was at risk of just vanishing into nothing.
All the thoughts, right? All the thoughts that I have.
The entire power structure of the world is a raid set against all the thoughts that I have, right?
But I have the opportunity to carve my mind into the fabric of the universe forever.
I don't get to take all these thoughts with me or have the million private conversations.
I can take all these thoughts, spray them out to the planet where they are skywritten into the stone of the ceiling of the planet forever.
As long as there are people, there will be this conversation.
I have, and you have, opportunities to communicate with the world absolutely undreamt of by our ancestors.
And by our ancestors, I mean your parents.
If somebody had told me that I could publish my own books and have 100,000 of them downloaded every month, When I was struggling to get published, struggling to get recognition, I wouldn't have believed it.
If somebody had told me I could just plop down on a chair with a camera and talk to the entire planet at the push of a button, when I was growing up, I wouldn't have believed it.
If someone had told you you could make money by tapping on a keyboard at home
when you were growing up, would you believe it?
Nihilism is a trap laid by evil people to strip ambition from the virtuous.
You've just fallen into a trap.
I sympathize with that.
The traps are cunningly laid, and I understand that.
But hey man, what's the meaning in life?
The meaning in life is to will and to win, according to reason and evidence.
The meaning of life is to will and to win.
Now maybe you feel like you can't win.
Well, good thing your ancestors didn't feel the same way, otherwise they wouldn't have slaved over war, famine, plague, starvation, in order to give you the great gift of life.
From trembling, bloody, shaking hands, your ancestors have handed you the great gift and glory of life.
And what are you doing with it?
What are you doing with it?
Are you honoring them, their sacrifice, their work?
Or are you like a greedy, selfish, spoiled, young, Instagram-obsessed, rich plaything, burning up all the resources that your family has gathered together for approximately the last four billion years?
You're just squandering it?
Or are you striding forth into the world and doing whatever good you can with whatever power you can summon and possess?
Fuck nihilism. Nihilism is a curse put on you so that you don't go out there and do good in the world.
All you're doing is obeying the dictates of evil people.
Do you think evil people wake up and say, gosh, you know, I don't know what the meaning of life is.
I don't really know what the purpose of life is.
What's the point of anything? Is there anything?
No, they seek power. They take it and they take it like Pac-Man with the glowing dots at the soles of the planet.
Eat, eat, eat. What they do, though, is they put out all of this, oh, there's no such thing as truth, there's no such thing as meaning, there's no such thing as reality, what's the point, the sun's going to burn out, what's the point?
They do that so that you don't get in their way.
That's all that is.
It's just a brain virus thrown into your head so you circle the drain until you die and don't interfere with the plans, goals, and acquisition of power from any evildoers.
You just recognize it.
How do you deal with it?
Oh, I got a knife lodged in my arm.
Well, get it out.
You eject it. You let your love of life, your lust for life, your need, your thirst for power, right?
Which we all have. I thirst for power over anti-rationality.
I thirst for power over insanity and evil, right?
The war plan of the philosopher is multigenerational, just the way it is, right?
So, and of course I use the word war allegorically, it's just about peace and reason.
Who is the nihilism serving?
Whenever you have something in your life that's dragging you down, okay, who's it serving?
If you were swimming in the ocean and some tentacle of a kraken wrapped around your legs started pulling you down, Well, the first thing you'd say is, well, of course the kraken wants to eat me.
It's to the benefit of the kraken that I get pulled down so it can gnaw my head off with its weird parrot beak.
That's what it's doing.
And so when you have an undertow in your life, when you have something that's pulling you down, What do you do?
Well, first question you have to ask is, who benefits?
Who benefits? Who benefits from you navel-gazing and wondering what the meaning is and anything like that, right?
Who benefits? Do you benefit?
Nope. Well, then why is it there?
Because someone else benefits.
If you're a woman and...
I remember seeing some... I think it was Brooke Shields.
I don't know. Some Brooke Shields commercial.
And it was like, you know, it could be the case that your eyebrows just aren't quite the right shape.
Jesus God! Oh my gosh!
It used to be that we cared about the quality of our soul and the nobility and virtue of our actions and now we get stimulated into thinking our eyebrows might be the wrong shape.
Oh, squiggly. They're too thick.
They might join hands across the water.
Middle Eastern style or Eastern European style.
Wrong shape of eyebrows.
That's the problem. And boy, if I just, you know, I can't find love.
And that's because every man who comes across my glorious and virtuous soul is repulsed by the Martin Scorsese Arkansas ditch caterpillar stapled above my eyes that pass for eyebrows.
So, you know, ladies, you just need the right nails.
You just need the right eyebrows.
Your lashes need to be...
I can't...
I can't even with this bullshit.
I can't even... It's like when I was a kid and you'd see these late-night infomercials with the guys who, like, spray your hair on your thinning spot.
Or those ridiculous comb-overs, like, one piece of wind.
He's like Indiana Jones whipping some innocent guy across the street.
You know, you'll be loved if you don't have a bald spot.
You'll be loved if your teeth are totally straight.
You'll be loved if you have the right eyebrows.
You'll be loved if your eyelashes are thick enough.
You'll be loved if you have abs.
Oh, my God. So, I mean, it's all total obvious bullshit.
Now, I'm not saying appearance doesn't matter.
Appearance matters. I get all of that.
But there's fuss budgeting over details.
Now, with...
The eyebrow shaper manufacturer, right?
The eyebrow shaper manufacturer, whatever the hell they were, right?
So they're trying to make you feel shitty about your eyebrows.
They're trying to make you feel shitty about your eyebrows.
Not about any immorality you might have.
Not about any enabling of abuse that you have.
Not about what kind of parent you might have been.
Not about what kind of citizen you are and the endless pursuit and flogging of the half-dead horse of virtue up the endless hill of human indifference.
No! It's your eyebrows that you focus on your eyebrows.
Okay, so they make you feel shitty about your eyebrows.
Does that benefit you? It does not.
Who does it benefit? It benefits the company that makes this eyebrow bullshit stuff, right?
Ladies, your lips in the business place need to look almost exactly like you just came.
You just climaxed.
You just, as the Victorians would say, arrived.
You need to be fully flushed.
You need to have an O-face at work.
You need to have an O-face at work.
Why? Well, your lips are too thin.
You'll be loved if your lips are thicker.
Okay, make you feel bad about your lips.
Does that benefit you? It does not.
But it benefits the people who make all this bullshit blood-sucking vampire
Lipstick shit, right?
I have a piece of gym equipment It's got, when you finally get serious.
No, I'm just trying to stay healthy and keep a little muscle on.
That's all. That's all. Trying to get serious.
About virtue? No.
About looking like the camel toe bubble butt model on the piece of exercise equipment who's probably tattletailing on some guy giving her a glance because her ass is held out like two oranges in a sock puppet.
Oh, who's the nihilism benefiting?
Who's it benefiting? Who's it benefiting that you're paralyzed and looking inwards like this corkscrew navel-gazing nothing burger, right?
Oh, I'm looking inwards.
What's the meaning? Who's that benefiting?
Benefiting you? Nope. So you just have to dedicate your life to not being the slave of people who want you to do you harm, right?
So you just have to retake your soul.
You just have to retake your body.
Recognize that it's just an infection put in there.
It's a form of a bioweapon, so to speak, right?
Alright, let's see here.
Let's get to your messages.
Is there an explanation for the millennial failure to launch phenomenon?
Is that because the millennial generation supposedly is the only generation to not outgrow socialist or Marxist ideology?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, for a lot of young people, the only solution to getting jobs of any quality is to be an entrepreneur, but that's tough, right?
And of course, entrepreneurialism isn't taught in schools.
God help you, right? So this, you know, it's a tough life out there for the younger people for sure.
It's tough to get jobs.
It's tough to keep jobs. It's tough to have stable relationships.
Women are fairly low quality.
Men are often a fairly low quality.
So it's tough to settle down.
And men work...
For stuff, but when you have a certain amount of stuff, who cares?
And men work for their wives and they work for their children.
And if they can convince you to not get married or convince women not to marry you, why the hell would you work?
You just live the life of a bug man where you need 2,500 calories, so you work for 2,501 calories.
That's it. Why would you work hard if there's no one to provide for?
That's what men do, right? Men take two jumps in income.
One when they get married and second when they have their first kid.
So, if you're not getting married and having kids, you're just living the life as kind of like a death spiral, right?
All right, let's see here.
Oh, it went a little...
How did you keep your accent after all these years living in Canada?
Your daughter sounds more American.
Oh, is that right? That's interesting.
So... Yeah, I mean, I kept my accent to some degree because I did a lot of Shakespeare when I was younger.
I played Macbeth and I was in King Lear.
I played the guy who gouges out the other guy's eyes.
Out, out, vile jelly!
I did it with a cane because we did a 19th century version of King Lear.
So, British accent didn't hurt.
British accent also doesn't hurt with the ladies, so I had no particular interest in getting rid of it.
And... I could never hear the Canadian accent.
Even when I came to Canada, I could never...
It's a very, very neutral accent, except, obviously, in Newfoundland.
I had a friend of mine when I was younger from Newfoundland, and he said, this is how people talk in Newfoundland.
You go to the fish market, you say, hey, do you have any herring?
And they say, no, no, we don't have any herring, sorry, we're out.
And it goes like this, Aaron, Aaron.
That's it. Seth...
You deserve the donations.
Thank you. More donations are always welcome.
I'm revamping the show, rebuilding it back up from books to more truth about presentations.
Believe it or not, those can be kind of costly.
A lot of research involved and it's more than I can handle.
All right. Hi, Steph.
Thank you. I do not understand the sleeping stream or the mukbang stuff.
A lot of people have eating disorders.
A lot of people have a very, very, very disturbed relationship with food because they're unloved.
And when people are unloved, they cast their minds about to find any kind of dopamine, and some people go to sex, some people go to drugs, and some people go to food.
So if people can get third-party dopamine by watching somebody else stuff their face with 10,000 calories, avocado style, the person, not the food, then they will do that.
The sleeping stream?
So again, this is something I don't understand at all.
It's very strange to me, but it seems to be a very real phenomenon.
It certainly was when I was a kid.
The peeping tom, you know what the peeping tom thing is?
The peeping Tom is usually a man, I think, and he gets his sexual kicks from spying on women in their homes when they don't know.
And, you know, maybe he's whacking off in the bushes or something like that.
And trying to find some magical combination between rose and creep.
And so watching women when you don't know that they're there is quite a kick for some men sexually.
I don't understand it.
Either why they have that weird little cuck chair in the corner of a hotel room.
Don't know. I don't know why anybody would get sexual kicks from watching a woman who's unaware.
And I assume that...
Watching a woman sleep on the stream, just about everybody who's watching it, is some kind of peeping Tom who feels that they're creeping in some girl's window and watching.
And it is a form of self-humiliation that no woman would want me if she knew where I was or who I was, but I can observe her.
It's a form of sexual self-humiliation that's kind of tough to follow, but that's what it is.
Hi, Steph! Say the people.
I have a theory that atheists who are only willing to accept a perfect moral framework in order to not be moral relativists are actually searching for something God-like or even a God itself.
What do you think? No.
No, because Christians act morally in the world in general.
And atheists have abandoned God because God has moral requirements, moral standards, and God opposes the selfishness that materialism engenders.
Secular humanism engenders just selfishness and the chasing of the dopamine of power or sex or whatever it is.
So, no, they are using the requirement for perfection provides the excuse of inaction.
And you say, well, I don't have a perfect framework.
Not every question has been answered, so I don't want to act in haste, right?
Yeah, because, you know, bad people, they never act in haste.
They never just grab power whenever they can, right?
So no, they're just saying, well, it's a form of, it's a transformation of moral cowardice
into intellectual vanity, right?
It's a transubstantiation, it's transmogrification, so to speak, right?
What you do is you say, I'm afraid to act morally, but I don't want to look in the mirror
and say I'm afraid to act morally because that's gonna make me feel like a coward,
which is gonna be a negative stimulus, which is gonna stop me to act morally, right?
The moment you say, I'm not acting morally, I'm being a coward, then you are self-identifying
as a coward, which, you know, it's all happened for people from time to time
and I'm not putting myself above this, and it's just something we're all struggling with, right?
But the moment you say to yourself, I'm being a coward, well, that's an impulse to change,
impetus to change your behavior, right?
You don't want to be a coward. So if you are acting in a cowardly moral fashion, again, sympathy, we're all in the same trenches, I'm not perfect this way, so blah, blah, blah, right?
But if you're acting in a cowardly moral fashion and you don't want to sit there and look in the mirror and say, yeah, I'm kind of punking out here, yeah, I'm being kind of a dick and a coward about this, right?
Okay. Well, what do you do if people don't want to look in the mirror and say that?
They don't want to say that.
So what do they do? What do they do?
Well, they say, well, I'm just not acting in haste because I don't have all the information.
I'm patiently gathering information so I can do the right thing.
Like I remember having a girlfriend in my 20s.
She really needed to work on some stuff personally.
And I was going to therapy and I was reading all these books and working really hard on myself.
And I said, you know, hey, babe, you know, you really got to get to therapy.
And every single time she'd say the same thing.
I'm going to work on it myself. I listened to this for a week or two, maybe a month or two.
And then I said, you know, the inevitable question, when exactly is this work going to start?
I'll do it when I'm ready.
Don't rush me. I'll do it when I'm ready.
She had no intention of working on herself.
She had no intention of confronting any dysfunctions in her own mind.
Nope. Just, I'll do it when I'm ready.
It's just, oh, I don't want to act in haste, repent at leisure, right?
So they say, well, you know, I've got to have all the answers.
And this is why atheists got kind of mad at me when I came up with UPB, and it's like, oh, hey, we have the answer, man.
We have the answer. But atheists are useful idiots for the growth of state power, and UPB rejects the moral virtues of state power.
So if you're A toady to the king, and an argument comes along questioning the divine right of kings, well, you don't feel so good about that, because your whole gig is being a court toady.
And, of course, the atheists tend to be on the scientific side, and scientists are bought and paid for almost exclusively by the state.
So they don't want to hear about the immorality of state power when they're living off state power.
So, anyway. Follow the money, follow the money.
Let's see here. Do you think that someone can fully heal from a traumatic childhood and have kids?
Do you need to fully heal to have kids?
Do we want to rant?
Do we? Yeah, I would say that we should talk about this.
Yeah, I think we should talk about this very frankly and very openly.
You don't heal from childhood abuse.
Childhood abuse is not like a cut that heals.
It's not like a broken bone that you can set.
Childhood abuse leads you to be...
You have two choices.
When you've been severely abused as a child, you have two choices.
You're a hero or you're a monster.
You're the knight or you're the dragon.
You're the god or you're the devil.
You're the angel or the demon.
You have no middle ground.
No middle ground. If you are crippled in some manner, like you have some injury to your leg and you end up in a wheelchair and you go through all this rehab, the purpose of the wheelchair and the rehab and all the things that you're doing is to get you back up and walking again so that you're like you were before.
That's the purpose, right? You break your arm, get your arm set, you put your arm in a sling.
The purpose is to return your arm back to its natural function so that you be normal again.
You can be as you were before.
There's no return to who you were before when you're severely abused as a child.
I'll just say abused, we understand, means severely, right?
There's no me in here that did not have the childhood that I had, right?
That doesn't happen. You can't rewind.
There's no A-B testing here.
There's no step with abuse and step without abuse.
I can't go back and undo what was done.
It's like me saying, well, the purpose of therapy is to entirely forget my knowledge of the English language.
Can't do it. Can't do it.
It's how I was raised. It's how I think.
It's how my brain works. Can't do it.
Now, I mean, you could not speak English for 20 years or whatever, but you'd still remember it.
And even if you could somehow forget it, your brain would still have been carved by the English language and all the concepts that are inherent in the English language, because that's one of the reasons why English became the international language, and the international language of English carries a lot of freedom literature to the world, which is why you need the response of globalism, blah, blah, blah. So you don't heal.
You grow or you die. You don't rest in the middle.
There's no return to normalcy.
There's no return to the average at all.
You become great or you become terrible.
You let the past overwhelm you and you become a replicant of abuse and trauma or you overcome it and you become like a demigod among men.
There's no middle ground here.
There is no returning to normalcy.
It's not like you broke your leg and you can fix it and just walk normally again like you used to.
Because there is no use to, there is no original you that's unaffected or untouched by the abuse.
Because you're possessed by a kind of demon.
When you're abused as a child, you get possessed by a kind of demon.
and in the wrestling with that demon, you either become that demon, that demon possesses you,
takes you over and uses your body as a sulfur-laced finger puppet to do evil in the world,
or you overcome the demon and grow some pretty fine and feathery wings.
Do you think I would be as good a dad?
I mean, you guys hear my shows with my daughter.
That's how we talk. There's nothing fake about that.
Do you think I would be as good a dad if I hadn't been abused?
Nope. No, no, no, no, no.
If I had not been abused, I would be a mediocre dad, which would be a bad dad relative to what I became.
Do you think I would be a great husband if I hadn't been abused?
No. Because I wanted to have the dedication to reason, virtue, and evidence.
So... I was either going to become an angel or a devil.
So yeah, it's not a healing.
You don't heal over and return to what you were before, because there is no you before.
There's no you before. When I was born, my parents were going through a crushing divorce.
My mother was hospitalized for depression for months.
I was sent overseas.
I mean, that's a mess.
It's a mess. Violence throughout my upbringing and insanity, and my mom was institutionalized, my father had his mental health issues, and school was boring, and I don't blame school for that.
I mean, school can't really be designed for people like me, at least not at the moment.
But there's no me I can return to, or, you know, there's no healing that.
You use the abuse to become great in your life.
Would I be as committed to rationality if I hadn't been raised by a violent, insane woman?
No. I would not nearly be as committed to rationality if I hadn't been raised by a violent and insane woman.
Not raised, but in the proximity of.
Almost plowed under by.
I wouldn't be doing this.
I wouldn't be doing the good I have done in the world.
I wouldn't be helping millions of children, with your help, not be abused.
Not to the chagrin of some abusers, as you can imagine, but...
Have I healed my child abuse?
abuse? No. I use that shit to be as good a person as I can possibly be and bring as much
virtue to the world as I possibly can.
I was beaten not to a pulp.
.
I was beaten like a sword to a brilliantine edge.
I wasn't beaten into nothing.
I was beaten into sharpness.
Forged. See?
You can let the blows disintegrate you or you can let them harden and sharpen you.
It's the only choice you have.
You can't return to the average because you had an extreme origin story, an extreme origin existence.
You can't return to the normal.
It's the heights or the depths.
There's no sea level for survivors.
And this is the great peril of the people who are harmed as children.
We are the greatest weapon against evil that the evildoers can imagine.
Be staggeringly good because you were raised by evildoers.
Bye.
Turn their evil into your virtue.
turn their blows into your loftiness.
Let them forge you, not into a quivering pile, a wound, but into a brillianteen
sharp-edged, word-based weapon against the very immorality that forged you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You can do more than fully heal.
You can become magnificent and really that's your only choice.
Hi Steph, I'm a married father of four and I'm really struggling with my marriage and self-worth.
What is the best way to request a call-in with you?
You can send me an email at callin, C-A-L-L-I-N, callin at freedomain.com and we will set it up.
And if it's your marriage, if we could talk with your wife, not essential, but helpful, could be good.
Somebody says, Scott Adams might be sick and is thinking he won't be alive for much longer.
No, I don't think that's it. I don't think that's it.
I think he genuinely wants to help race relations, as did I, genuinely wants to help race relations in the U.S. and other places, so we'll see.
It's really interesting, though, to see the number of people who are coming to his defense, as opposed to...
That's really, really interesting to see.
Alright. Steph, I do not have good relationships with any of my three half-siblings, despite reasonable efforts on my end.
Just no connection. Outright coldness from one.
Are half-sibling relationships generally cold by default?
So, it's called the Cinderella Effect, and you can look this up, but one of the most established scientific things outside of IQ in the field of psychology is the coldness that step-parents have towards step-children.
I mean, you know, you see this in, read about this in fairy tales all the time, the evil stepmother and so on.
It's very well established, and of course, evolutionarily speaking, we would completely understand this, that Parents or adults would have less loyalty towards children that they were not genetically related to.
We understand that as a sort of general principle.
So, half-sibling relationships, yeah, I mean, because your experience of being parented is extremely different.
And again, there's exceptions, but it's very well studied and all of that.
And people are...
And people have come up with some pretty significant findings about this.
So you have half siblings, let's say that it was their mother.
So their mother would have an extremely different relationship with you than with your siblings.
And so their experience of going through childhood would be extraordinarily different from yours and...
All that. And, of course, when you...
Even biologically related siblings have an average IQ gap of eight points.
And if you have half siblings, the IQ gap is even bigger.
And the IQ gap can be a challenge.
Can be a challenge. All right.
Look at Senator Fetterbach.
He pushed through a heart attack to gain power.
Oh, Fetterman? Yeah, what do you guys think?
Is he even still, like, the last I heard he'd had another stroke and everyone sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher and he had hearing issues and so on and he just vanished and they said for depression and so on.
It's like, no, they're trying to keep him hit until August, right?
So there's no new election? I mean, that's, yeah.
They're not sitting there going, well, I don't have the right answer for when it's appropriate to use self-defense and under what situations, and I don't really have the right answer as to if someone's hanging from a flagpole, can they kick in a window?
They just take the power, right?
I mean, that's why buffing around with these abstractions is, you know, it's fun, but, you know, all right.
Hey Steph, I've never asked you a question, but have been following you for 12 years.
My wife and I are having an argument about who works the most in our household.
I don't find that this conversation ends well if we both attack each other, so I'm trying to bring some clarity and a balanced perspective to the conversation.
I make $250,000 or more a year working 40 to 50 hours a week as a clinician, but I have declined to donate anything to you in this live stream.
All right, well, that's fine. I make $250,000 a year working 40 to 50 hours a week as a clinician.
She renovates houses primarily as a designer, but with some painting and wallpapering as well as general contracting subcontractions.
She makes approximately $25,000 to $50,000 a year.
This money helps pay for the kids' private school.
Before I left the house to pick up my son from soccer practice, she stated that she feels like she's doing 60% of the work.
I would love your take on this type of disagreement.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of women, a lot of women are fine businesswomen, but a lot of women LARP at business.
And assuming, let's assume that she works full-time.
So, what is she making?
At $25,000 a year, she's making $12 an hour.
At $50,000 a year, she's making $25 an hour.
You yourself are making $125 or $150 an hour.
So, you're making 10 times what she's making.
So, you're paying 90% of the bills or 80% of the bills, right?
So, What you can do if she says, well, look, I do 60%, right?
Okay, well, let's do an experiment.
We'll do an experiment for three months, right?
Because, obviously, I want to be fair.
If you're doing things that are excessive that I'm not seeing, so let's do an experiment for three months.
Okay, so we have our costs for our life as a whole.
We've got our houses, we've got our cars, we've got life insurance, we've got internet, we've got cell phones, all of this stuff, right?
Savings, 401k, whatever, right?
So, here's what we're going to do, honey.
We're going to set up a separate bank account and I'm going to match what you pay into that bank account, right?
So, let's say that you make...
What is it? Okay, let's make it $40,000 a year, right?
So that's like $3,500 a month, right?
So you put $3,500 a month in, and I'll put $3,500 a month in.
Oh, no, no, it's after tax, right?
So whatever it is, right? $3,000, $2,500.
We'll both put $2,500 a month into the bank account, and then we'll use that to pay all of our bills.
So at least the work will be 50-50, right?
So I won't pay more than what you're paying in so that the money is 50-50.
The money is 50-50. Fantastic.
Now, when the money is 50-50, now, of course, she'll interrupt you and she'll say, well, we can't possibly survive if we're both paying 50-50.
It's like, no, no, that's not what you're saying, honey.
What you're saying is that, well, you're doing 60%.
So you're actually doing more than me to keep the household going.
So, by this logic, I mean, I'm actually helping you out.
I'm saying 50-50. It should be, to really test your theory, you should be paying 60% of all the bills.
Well, I'm not talking about that.
Yeah, but I am. I don't know if people have this funny thing with it, but I'm not talking about that.
It's like, well, I am. So, yeah, we'll split all our bills 50-50.
And if you want to, you know, you can save for vacation, you can pay the cars.
We split our bills 50-50.
Now, she's immediately going to be caught, right?
Because obviously you're paying 90-plus percent of the bills, right?
So... If she's not willing to acknowledge that, I don't know what to say.
Then she's just been sucked in by feminist ideology, and maybe you let that happen, and maybe you didn't.
Maybe she's got some weird feminist friends or whatever.
But no, just, you know, let's make it 50-50.
You say you're doing 60% of the work, fine, let's make it 50.
But I'm doing the unpaid labor.
It's like, wait a minute. It can't be unpaid labor if I'm paying 90% of the bills.
So if you want to split the chores 50-50, no problem.
But then you can't tell me how to do things, right?
You want to split the chores 50-50?
That's fine. We'll split everything right down the middle, and that's fair, right?
But we've got to do the money, because the money is the most lopsided thing, right?
And just see if she wants to do that.
And if she doesn't want to do that, you've made your point.
And she won't, right? Obviously, right?
I see women now inject their lips to make them bigger.
Oh, it's really sad. That's that old goldy horn line from First Wives Club.
Your lips are stuck in a pool's rain.
Any chance you can do a short series on entrepreneurship?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
I'm trying not to be... I'm trying not to charge things, like to charge for things
because I don't want to, but you know the show everybody knows that two and a half
years ago got seriously and savagely de-platformed and so I'm having trouble
doing the stuff that would add a lot of economic value to the listener.
just to be straight up with you, because, I mean, I know just how many people are listening and how many people are donating, and the number is a pretty, it's a pretty big gap, so I'll think about it.
All right. Hi, Steph.
It sounds like you're using the comparison of the angel and the demon to the four types of children produced from alcoholic household.
Two of those types, the hero child and the future alcoholic.
Yeah, maybe. Pressure in stone makes diamonds.
Is it stone? I thought it was coal.
All right. Somebody says, I started having grand mal seizures as a teen.
It made me a very strong person, unafraid of what others think.
Yeah, so I mean, when I lost my hair, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to have to exercise.
Because you can be bald, no problem.
But you can't be bald and fat.
Like, you can be fat and have a thick head of hair, or at least overweight, and it's not so bad.
But you can't be fat and bald.
That's like a really bad combo.
So... The loss of the hair has produced extra health in terms of exercise for me.
So you turn a negative into a positive.
It's all you can do in life is try and do the moves, try and find ways to turn negative into positive.
So I got deplatformed. It's like, great, now I can write my books that I've wanted to write.
I can do my History of Philosopher's series.
I can do all of this stuff and really, really love what it is that I do.
Alright. Now, why do some people reveal traumatic past experiences early on?
Two examples. One revealed he was abandoned by his parents and was raised by his guardians and grandparents instead.
He was very smug and narcissistic.
The other one was a workplace bully and the boss's right-hand man.
One time in his childhood, he used himself as a shield to protect his little brother from getting beat by his parents.
Hit me instead, he cried, and his parents stopped.
This guy usually had a dead eye and a fake smile.
Um... People will often want you to see them through the lens of what they've overcome.
That can be for positive or negative reasons.
Your South Africa predictions are coming true.
They don't even have electrical power now.
Well, yeah, I mean, they wrote diversity into the Constitution into the 90s.
They did the whole presentation back in the day.
This is like the least skilled presentation in the history, the least skilled prediction in the history of pundits.
It takes about a, you know, we're sort of seeing this in the West as a whole at the moment.
The boomers are retiring, and they're taking a lot of expertise with them, and they're being replaced by people who aren't discompetent in general, and that's the way things go.
All right. The next dude is lucky that her business actually makes positive amounts of money.
Could tell stories of a friend's wife whose cereal business is costly.
Yeah, the woman is like, I want to do this, and then the man ends up doing her business plan, her website, and funding it, and, you know, she just LARPs as a business person and all that.
It's... You have to be pretty brutal in your relationships.
Just, like, math is math.
I got a whole scene of this in my new novel, The Present, which you can get at freedomand.locals.com.
It's free. Just got to be brutal.
Break it down an hour. We've got two kids in daycare.
You make X amount of dollars a year.
After taxes, it breaks down to, like, you're making four bucks an hour.
You're making four bucks an hour. And not raising our kids.
You've just got to be real strict about this kind of stuff because people get blurred out in these kinds of numbers, right?
How much are you actually making? After we pay the accountant, after we pay the expenses, after we pay the overhead, how much are you making per hour?
And don't subsidize.
Don't subsidize people's business delusions.
Let's see here. Yeah, I mean, if she stayed home and homeschooled, then you'd make more money, right?
and actually you'd be protecting your kids from all the mind viruses in
schools these days.
Alright.
Still laughing about the damn tour story earlier.
It's actually kind of funny.
And, you know, there's some comedy that if you keep pushing it and keep pushing it, like, you know, the famous Monty Python scene with the guy who gets his arms, legs cut off, and so on.
Come back, you yellow bastard! Bite your legs off!
I mean, taking comedy to extremes can be very funny, and literally all day with the damn tour thing.
I don't know. I just think it's...
Yeah, Cassie was making four bucks an hour.
Yeah, that's right. In my book, so...
All right, let me just go to other places for the chats.
And let's see here.
All the way back here.
Are you enjoying the damn tour?
Are you enjoying the damn tour?
Yeah, it's kind of funny, right?
Right. The damn tour guide is talking too much.
You really could do this all day.
I could too, right? But you know.
How can I stop grieving the family members I have had to cut contact with?
I know I made the right decision, but this grief is so heavy.
Well, first of all, you didn't have to cut contact with them.
It's a choice. How can I stop grieving the family members I've had to cut contact with?
I know I made the right decision, but this grief is so heavy.
Well... You can dip into their lives again and see how they're doing.
The best cure for regret is, you know, oh, I love this girl.
We should never have broken up.
Let's get back together.
And three days later, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's why we broke up.
Oh, my God, I can't stand it, right?
The best cure for regret is resubmerging back into things, right?
I won't get into any details, but after I had not seen a family member for 20 years...
He did something so unbelievably petty at the time of my father's funeral.
So unbelievably petty and mean.
And I was just like, oh, thank God.
Oh, he's the same person as he was.
So, yeah, I mean, just if you're feeling overly sentimental, I don't mean to smile because I know it's serious business.
But if you're feeling overly sentimental, just go spend another day with them.
And I'm sure you'll be all better.
And, of course, you have to fill in the void, right?
You have to commit to friendships, you have to get married, you've got to have kids,
got to have your own family, got to have your own circle, your own community, because otherwise
you're just letting go of the bad without getting any of the good.
Just leaves you in a void, right?
The thought that life and consciousness came into existence through random occurrence seems
There's got to be a purpose. Okay, I mean, look, you've got to read better than that, man.
There's no one alive who says that it's a random occurrence, right?
There's no one alive who says it's a random occurrence.
Go read the books on evolution by Dawkins.
I mean, I know he's a bit of a creep and a statist guy, and he's defended some aspects of pedophilia, or at least said they're not so bad.
I mean, yeah. Pretty ugly stuff.
But no, you've got to...
It's not random occurrence.
This is a complete straw man.
And no evolutionary biologist says that evolution is random.
I mean, so it's evolution by natural selection.
It's not random. The story is, you know, like if you found an airplane in a junkyard, you would never think that the wind just blew through the junkyard and blew all the pieces together as an airplane.
It's like that's not how evolution works.
Looking forward to your How to Find a Woman series.
I'll definitely benefit from that.
Excellent. Did you hear Marilyn Manson accusations turned out to be false?
I distinctly remember you trashing on the guy.
I did not hear that Marilyn Manson accusations turned out to be false.
And if they have, then I will certainly withdraw my criticisms.
Some guys get lengthening surgery for their legs.
No more sports. And some end up walking awkwardly.
Right, so my skepticism towards this kind of stuff, it comes from some personal stuff.
My mother... Felt that her nose was too big for her face.
And so she went and she got a nose job.
And I remember very clearly, you know, they looked like they'd been beaten up and black eyes and raccoon and all that.
Like Annie Lennox at the Freddie Mercury concert, yelling like a raccoon under pressure with Bowie.
Who, according to some reports, David Bowie deflowered a 12-year-old girl, by the way.
Beating some of Led Zeppelin's conquests by some reports by two years.
Just vile. I mean, honestly, I think these musical acts, if there's a lot of talent in a musical act, I genuinely, genuinely believe this, if there's a lot of talent in a musical act, they will get underage groupies, and they will then hold those underage groupies, and the evidence there too, they have pictures or whatever, and they will hold those underage groupies over that musical act in order to make sure that they don't do anything to elevate society as a whole, but instead drag it down.
So anyway. So my mother got a nose job, and she felt, of course, that if she just got a nose job, then she would be loved.
Yeah. And she went, ironically enough, she went for guys with nice hair.
I remember Jennifer Aniston saying that, you know, I could only date a guy with nice hair.
It's got to have hair.
It's got to have great hair. Well, that was a Taylor Swift song.
The guy over there with the hella good hair.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, at least my mom got to have kids.
How important do you think voice is to leading a happy life?
Do you think you would have as much success if you had a high-pitched, nasally...
High-pitched, nasally voice?
Well, look, I mean, I took a lot of voice training.
I took singing training.
I took... 1,000 or 2,000 hours of voice training when I was in theater school, so the instrument is not just natural.
I've done a lot of work on it to make sure that I can use my voice without harming my voice.
Robert Plant did like two years of touring and his voice was half shot.
So, you can do a lot of work on your voice.
I'm very fortunate my wife has a very pleasant voice.
I've met girls, I don't know if you've met women in, it's like, I like her but I couldn't imagine spending the rest of my life with that voice.
And so, yeah, it has an effect.
But as a middle-aged man talking about philosophy, I think I'd be doing aight.
All right. Let's see here.
Steph rose from the bottom of childhood and became a world-class father and husband.
Thank you. I appreciate that. Somebody says, can confirm the coldness of step-parent.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
For sure. Do you see value in maintaining sibling relationships?
I wonder how much effort one should put into maintaining them.
I don't put value into maintaining any relationships.
I don't put any value into maintaining because relationships are play, not work.
Any relationship... It's like relationships at work.
It's like, no, no, no. I already have a job.
Parenting is work. No, no, no.
I chose to do that.
So, no. I already have a job.
I don't work at relationships.
I don't maintain...
So, there's another problem, too, which is sort of sibling birth order.
If you have an elder sibling, or you are an elder sibling, and the elder sibling feels still in middle age the superiority of just having been bigger and earlier...
That's pretty pathetic. If you're a younger sibling and you're just always the boy-baby of the family, you're always the little kid of the family and the elder sibling who just, oh, good job coming out of mom's vagina earlier.
Wow, what an achievement.
You must be so proud about being that massive achievement of being born earlier.
So if you have a sibling relationship in particular that limits you, in other words, that your sibling simply won't Give you adulthood, so to speak, or can lauding it over you and feel superior and better and further ahead and all of that.
That to me, up to you, obviously, but it's totally...
It's just too limiting for me.
I can't... I refuse to let any accidents of birth determine my status or personality or possibilities.
And, you know, if you have an elder sibling who believes that you're, you know, the little kid, the young kid, and always this just goes on and on, that's just too pathetic.
It's too pathetic a perspective.
It's so... Basic, bitch, contemptible, garbage crap nothingness.
Oh, I'm the eldest sibling.
I was born first.
I'm superior. It's like, what a pathetic accident of time to base your power and virtue on.
My God, I just...
So, you know, if your family is not letting you grow up, well, you have a choice.
You can stay a kid or...
Right? All right.
Hey, Steph, how to properly grieve a relationship.
My girlfriend broke up with me a couple days ago.
I'm sorry about that. But you're getting the wrong people, you're getting the wrong girl out of the way so you can meet the right girl.
I mean, I won't sound vainglorious or anything.
I mostly broke up with girlfriends.
One or two would break up with me, usually because they moved or whatever, right?
But I mostly broke up with girlfriends, and yeah, there was some mourning for sure.
But everyone, every girl I broke up with cleared the way for me to meet my wife.
So, just, you know, accept that better things are coming.
All right. Is it normal to experience such heavy grief after cutting contact with abusive family members?
Well I think it's quite common if you've ever been like you've ever been really hurt.
I remember once hurt my arm falling off a bike and I biked home and literally like hours later it was just killing me right I actually ended up I cracked my forearm and and had to go in the sling for a little bit and so it doesn't hurt at the time but you know it It hurts later.
So if you've been abused by family members and then you cut contact with them, the grief is how much accumulated pain there is that you staunched with the wound of repetition, right?
You staunched the wound with the rag of repetition.
Okay, but what made evolution?
How did evolution come to exist?
See, again, I mean, you've got to go read this stuff.
You may not end up agreeing with it, but you've got to at least familiarize yourself with the case.
All right. The mic is slightly disconnected.
It's a little static-y.
Oh, is that new?
Is that just on one side? My oldest brother has finally admitted to me that he doesn't invite me to visit because he considers me a child still.
Yeah, well, he can have his petty superiority and you can make your choices.
I wouldn't. You can't be bigger...
You can't be any bigger in life than the belief in you from the person who at least believes in you.
That's very awkwardly put.
If you have someone who thinks you're small, that's as big as you can be if they're in your life.
Because you're accepting their perspective.
So if I had people in my life who felt I couldn't do this, I couldn't do this.
I mean, that's the strength and the weakness and the vulnerability and the power that we get from intimate relations.
Yeah, the February 24th show, I go into detail in breakups for sure.
What do you think of El Salvador President Bukele?
He broke the record in decreasing crime in the fastest time.
Yeah, it's a real red pill for people, right?
It's a real red pill for people.
Because it just shows that Crime is actually permitted.
Crime doesn't happen. Crime is largely permitted.
If the government wishes to end crime, the government can end crime.
But most governments don't want to end crime because keeping people in a state of perpetual anxiety serves their power.
So, yeah, he's saying...
And the sort of seen comments from people from El Salvador just saying, like, we couldn't walk down the street and now our neighborhoods are safe.
Oh, yeah, crime can be solved in a weekend.
But, you know, they don't want to, right?
Let's see here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if trauma leads people to be an artist, and most artists are leftists, then why are leftist utopias like the Soviet Union or other third world slums devoid of objective beauty and beautiful art?
But why would trauma lead people to beautiful art?
That... I think that's the key part that you're missing.
Trauma doesn't necessarily lead people to beautiful art.
You've got to be critical of your own thinking to put these things out there and let me do all the work.
Audio in Locals is still good, but just DLive, it's bad.
Yeah, well, sorry, if you're over on DLive, you can go to freedomand.locals.com and watch there.
I don't know. DLive, I don't feel like they have...
I've been off DLive for quite a while, but I don't feel like they've done very good things with their technology as a whole.
I can...
My mother told me to be careful walking to the mailbox on the street when I was in my early 20s, yeah.
Well, and of course, information about crime and its probabilities is generally kept from the population as a whole, and so people just have even more susceptibility to that.
I can try stopping and starting the July thing.
Let's see here. Alright, I'm going to do a little bit of a shorter show tonight just because I did a lot of work today.
I was reading up on George Berkeley quite a bit, and I did a show earlier answering questions from freedomain.locals.com.
So I will do a shorter show tonight with your very kind permission, and I really do want to thank you guys, of course, for dropping by.
Let me see if I missed anything here.
And so, yeah, have a great evening.
If you could, of course, come by freedomain.locals.com, I would hugely, hugely appreciate it.
That's very, very kind.
freedomain.locals.com and check out, and throw out a couple of books for you guys to listen to, almostnovel.com, justpoornovel.com.
FDRURL.com slash T-G-O-A for The God of Atheists.
And you can go to freedomain.locals.com and you can subscribe for free.
Use the promo code all caps UPB2022 and you get the audiobook of my last novel, a science fiction novel about peaceful parenting and the greatness of the future.
And I hope that you will check these books out.
They are just fantastic.
I'm a pretty good philosopher, but I prefer myself as a novelist too.
So, all right. Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening, everyone.
Lots of love. Take care.
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