March 26, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:41:27
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Alright. Song quiz. | |
| Song quiz. Alright. | |
| From a little snatch of a song, can you tell me the song I was just listening to right before the show? | |
| Little old lady got mutilated late last night. | |
| Little old lady got mutilated late last night. | |
| Oh, wow. Good, good. | |
| You got some musical chops, man. | |
| Ooh, werewolves of London. | |
| Yeah, great song. Tragic again that Warren Zeman died pretty young. | |
| His hair was perfect. | |
| I always think of Tom Cruise in that movie where he did that. | |
| Yeah, great song. | |
| Little old lady got mutilated late last night. | |
| A very hypnotic, interesting song. | |
| And so simple, right? | |
| Bum bum, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum. | |
| That's it, that's the whole thing, right? | |
| Oh, you heard that song in Californication? | |
| My God, wasn't that series just a scraping of the lint belly barrels of hell? | |
| Oh, my God. Isn't that, wasn't Jess? | |
| The Color of Money, right? Yeah, that show, my God. | |
| Well, I guess that's David Duchovny, right? | |
| He's a serious degenerate and made a show to match. | |
| Oh, my God. Yeah. | |
| Alright, well, thank you everyone for dropping by. | |
| What a lovely surprise to see everybody here on Saturday. | |
| And I'm like, I'm yours. | |
| I am your willing sex slave of reason. | |
| Is he still a sex addict? | |
| I don't know, man. But he probably had a pretty bad childhood. | |
| And a bad childhood plus good hair almost always means promiscuity for men. | |
| It's a really, really... One thing that saved me was the scalp. | |
| Have you ever read Marvel UK Excalibur comics? | |
| No, honestly, I haven't read comics since I was 12. | |
| Sorry, it's just not my thing. | |
| I know, it's bad, maybe. | |
| But, yeah, listen, hit me with your questions. | |
| I am thrilled to have you. | |
| If you'd like to support the show, you can just tip right ahead. | |
| I do shirtless for tips. | |
| I've just given up on all human dignity. | |
| And are you into hi-fi, Steph? | |
| Now, one of my ears got a little fried from treatments, cancer treatments, so... | |
| Yeah, hit me with, so I don't, I like listening to music, but I don't, it's not really worth me having hi-fi. | |
| I've got one great ear and one AM ear. | |
| FM, AM, so I, ah, you know, it sure beats the alternative of the treatments not working. | |
| Your OnlyFans debut the other day was fire! | |
| Yes, it was fire. | |
| And it takes a brave man who's pushing 57 to take his shirt off, but I'll do it, man. | |
| If it helps philosophy, I'm in. | |
| If it helps spread the word, I'm in. | |
| So yeah, what's on your mind? What are your questions? | |
| What are your comments? What can I help you with? | |
| What can I serve you with? | |
| What do you object to? | |
| What do you criticize me for? | |
| I'm more than happy to... | |
| Any tank or chalice or stein, a vessel of any kind? | |
| Oh yeah, when I'd listen occasionally to Scott Adams, I'd always skip over that part. | |
| Steph should spread philosophical nipples on Omegle, new person to video chat every few minutes. | |
| Yeah, I've seen that on a couple of funny videos. | |
| They have, like, Omegle outtakes and all of that. | |
| I think I saw Kermit the Frog doing something rather rude with the cucumber. | |
| So, yeah, interesting. | |
| It would be good NPC hunting grounds, I suppose you could say. | |
| Pretty good NPC hunting grounds. | |
| But, yeah, it's... | |
| Alright, so let me just, you know, if you guys have, if you're typing away with questions, we've got a bunch of you typing, I don't want to. | |
| You just got Untruth and UPV in the mail today? | |
| Excellent. Thank you for all you do, Steph. | |
| Have you listened to Stephen Crowder's new content? | |
| I have not. Stephen and I did a couple of shows together back in the day. | |
| Here's the thing, you know, I don't know. | |
| No, no hate. I don't want to, you know, put down anyone in the space. | |
| Everyone's doing their bit. But when you have stared deep into the abyss of absolutely what society needs to talk about to save itself, and then you see people skimming around the content and not dealing with it, it's like, yeah, okay. | |
| So, you know, making some noise and all of that, but, you know, Democrats are the real racists, isn't it? | |
| Okay. Yeah. | |
| I mean, we know. We've together, as a philosophical extended family, we've looked deep into the abyss of exactly what society needs to talk about to save itself. | |
| And people ain't talking about it. | |
| And that's fine. Then it's just a gig. | |
| It's not a calling. He's breaking records on Rumble. | |
| Yeah, did I see he had over 100,000 people watching him live on Rumble? | |
| That's really something. Yeah, good for him. | |
| Good for him. A Christmas special? | |
| I might do a Christmas special this year, but I became, you know, very much persona non grata for people when I got deplatformed. | |
| So, you know, the left is very good at sort of divide and conquer, right? | |
| So that's sort of kind of natural. | |
| Do you think there's any chance a drastic change in politics would help resolve some of the more immediate issues in the world? | |
| See, here's the thing. | |
| When you say any chance, you are betraying your anxiety. | |
| And I don't mean this in a negative way. | |
| I'm just saying that you are betraying your anxiety. | |
| Is there any chance that I'm broke? | |
| Is there any chance I could win a fortune playing the lottery? | |
| Any chance? | |
| I mean, there's free will. | |
| When there's free will, there's every chance. | |
| You know, it's like somebody saying, well, if all of the working class people stopped going to work, we'd get real big social change. | |
| Is there any chance that all the people could stop going to work? | |
| It's like it potentially exists within the realm of reality. | |
| It's not a self-contradictory statement. | |
| I call it functionally no chance. | |
| Like, it's functionally no chance. | |
| There's no chance. A drastic change in politics? | |
| Well, Trump was a drastic change in politics. | |
| Trump was a drastic change in politics. | |
| He was an outsider. He was an avowed anti-communist. | |
| His mentor was Roy Cohn, an avowed anti-communist. | |
| He knew the score. He knew the deal. | |
| He was a multibillionaire with massive Q ratings, like one of the most popular people on the planet. | |
| He'd been a public guy for 40 years. | |
| And, you know, we all saw how that played out. | |
| So... Who's going to take the Trump route who isn't Trump? | |
| It could be DeSantis. Who knows? | |
| But is there a functional chance? | |
| Is there a functional chance that you could smoke like a chimney and live to be like George Burns, smoke like 10, 15 cigars a day, right? | |
| And he lived to be over 100. | |
| Is there a functional chance that you could smoke like a chimney and live to be 100? | |
| Yes. I mean, sorry, there's no functional chance. | |
| I mean, is there a chance? | |
| Yeah, but there's no functional chance. Is there a functional chance that you could wake up tomorrow and some long-lost relative that you never had heard about had left you a million dollars? | |
| Is there a functional chance? | |
| Nope. Is it possible in the realm of reality? | |
| Sure. I mean, you could jump out of a plane without a parachute and land safely somehow, right? | |
| Do you plan for that? | |
| Is this something you work on? | |
| You could sit in your house, if you're lonely, right? | |
| You could sit in your house and then the moment of your dreams might just come knocking on the door. | |
| Is it possible? Yes. | |
| Is it functionally possible? Absolutely not. | |
| So people who aren't playing the arts are showing their anxiety. | |
| So you want a big change in politics to resolve some of the more immediate issues in the world. | |
| The immediate issues in the world... | |
| Can't be fixed. I mean, I said this many years ago in a live speech. | |
| They're making crazy people far faster than we can fix them. | |
| There was an old MASH episode where the head surgeon MASH was a mobile army surgical hospital. | |
| It was a sort of tragic comedy set in the Korean War. | |
| And... The chief surgeon, they were bringing in people, and now there was a white phosphorus thing, it attached to human skin and melted the human skin away, right? | |
| And they were bringing in people who had been hit with this new weapon. | |
| And he was like, God above! | |
| They keep finding new ways to destroy people far faster than we can fix them! | |
| The amount of propaganda that's out there, the amount of crazy rhetoric that's out there, the amount of group-stirring hatreds that are being sown. | |
| There's a tipping point, right? There's a tipping point where, like, before something, you can solve it, and after something, you can only manage it. | |
| And we're in the momentum stage, in my view. | |
| Is there any functional chance of drastic change in politics? | |
| Well, that was tried. | |
| That was tried, and we can see... | |
| I mean, Trump, a lot of brilliant stuff in what the guy does, but, I mean, his hiring, he just hired a bunch of neocons and didn't really deal with the issues that he was voted to deal with, and it was just, obviously, somewhat disappointing. | |
| So, yes, please donate you all. | |
| Thank you very much. If you'd like to help out, I'd really, really appreciate it. | |
| So... Steph, question, is racism to Democrats as sexism is to Republicans? | |
| I don't really... | |
| Sorry, I don't mean to be rude. | |
| I neither understand nor care, because it's politics, and politics are boring. | |
| Okay, listen, let me ask you this. | |
| Hit me with a why. A why, if you've had someone in your life that no matter what you say, they don't change. | |
| They won't change their mind, they won't change their views, they won't change their perspective. | |
| No matter what, right? Doesn't matter. | |
| Doesn't matter what you say. Right? | |
| Hit me with a why. If you've had someone in your life, doesn't matter what you say, doesn't | |
| matter what evidence you provide, doesn't matter what facts you give to them, won't | |
| change their thoughts, won't change their mind, won't change their approach. | |
| Just let me know. | |
| Yeah, so everyone has this person, right? | |
| Thank you. | |
| Everyone has this person. I mean... | |
| I mean, there are many hoaxes, of course, but the fine people hoax, right? | |
| Trump called white nationalists very fine people. | |
| Demonstrably false and can be shown to be false. | |
| You can beam a 15-second video clip to someone's ass. | |
| We have ass epistemology. | |
| But a physics, right? | |
| We have ass epistemology. | |
| People get the phone in their ass, you can beam them video clip, they can play it, and they know that they've been lied to, right? | |
| The Russia collusion conspiracy hoax from Blue Anon, yeah, that was a little bit more complicated and so on, right? | |
| Origins of COVID, a little more complicated. | |
| But this one was real simple. | |
| Did Trump overfeed the koi, right? | |
| So, did Trump say, drink bleach, right? | |
| So, some of these, like, you can just give these things to people and they don't care, it doesn't matter, right? | |
| Because subjectivism is madness. | |
| Subjectivism is you don't have to subject your brain to any rational tests of reason and evidence. | |
| Nothing. You just believe whatever you want, whatever is going to be popular, whatever is going to make people like you, or at least not get mad at you, and you can call it the truth, right? | |
| And when people around you... | |
| Okay, hit me with another one. | |
| Hit me with a why. | |
| If there are people around you who would disown you if they knew the truth about what you think... | |
| Sorry, don't mean to laugh. | |
| It's not particularly funny, but... | |
| Do you have people around you who, if they could... | |
| Like, open up the dome and look deep down in the most based area of your brain. | |
| If you said what you really think, not what you completely and finally believe, but what you think about the world, do you have people in your life who would jump back, throw holy water on you, and then call CNN? Do you have people in your life who would disown you if you told them the truth about what you think? | |
| Yes, yes, no. | |
| Not friends, though. Not close ones. | |
| Right. Maybe. | |
| Steph, I thought you didn't care about politics. | |
| Why are we talking about Trump and stuff? | |
| Dude. Oh, boy. | |
| I think you might need to not be on the live stream. | |
| I'm telling you why I'm not talking about politics. | |
| Because it's not a place where reason can work anymore. | |
| I mean, there was a chance. I mean, I was into politics for a while. | |
| There was a chance. So when I'm explaining why I'm not into politics, you say, hey, man, you're talking about politics. | |
| I say, why? It's like, here's why I'm not dating your sister. | |
| Oh, I thought you weren't going to date my sister. | |
| It's like, here's why I'm not dating. | |
| Okay, this may not be the live stream for you. | |
| You're either not very smart or you're way too defensive or you're just kind of punchy and, you know, the people who just, they look at me, I got to win, I got to get it, I got to... | |
| Yeah, that's just, that's very silly. | |
| Very silly, I'm afraid. | |
| So, yeah, I won't do anything, but this may not be the place. | |
| This may not be the place for you. All right. | |
| Let's get back to your questions and comments. | |
| What do you think is an ever-evolving thing? | |
| Yeah, for sure. Of course. Of course. | |
| COVID exposed that big time. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, COVID exposed that big time. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I'm a fairly radical mix of pessimism and optimism, and even if I was a little bit like, really? | |
| Experimental DNA things that have failed for the last 30 years? | |
| You're just going to take them? | |
| Really? Well, I hope you're right. | |
| I'd love to do the fact that vaccines have been safe and effective. | |
| It would have made my life a whole lot easier. | |
| Hope you're right! Good luck! | |
| Sorry, couldn't he be elected again in 2024? | |
| Same with Pierre Poliev in Canada. | |
| You're definitely right about me showing my anxieties. | |
| There's a lot of stuff going on in the world that worries me and I'm not sure what to do about it, even in my personal life. | |
| Sure. I mean, look, as men, and there's women in this too, but as men as a whole, we're scanning the horizon. | |
| We're looking for predators. | |
| We're looking for danger. | |
| We're looking for running out of food over the course of a long and cold winter. | |
| We're looking for... Danger! | |
| Danger! Danger! We're looking for all of that, right? | |
| I mean, that's what we do as men, right? | |
| Provide and protect, right? Provide for our families and protect our families. | |
| So it makes sense that you're concerned about things in the world. | |
| Things are getting pretty freaking crazy. | |
| And they're not going to get sane anytime soon. | |
| The sanity is going to come when the currency runs out of juice, right? | |
| And it's not fun. | |
| It's not pleasant. But the sanity comes back when the psychotic... | |
| Inducing delusion of infinite resources. | |
| Like, infinite resources drives everyone insane. | |
| Infinite resources drives everyone insane. | |
| Okay, let's get more polling going. | |
| Let's get more polling here. Sorry, let me finish that. | |
| So, yeah, you've got anxieties. | |
| So, when you have anxieties, here's what not to do. | |
| Here's what not to do. You ready? | |
| If you have anxiety, look, we all have concerns about the world. | |
| It's still the greatest time to be alive, but we all have concerns about the world. | |
| Here's what not to do if you have anxiety. | |
| Here's what you don't do. | |
| You don't cross your fingers. | |
| You don't hope and wait and pray for a miracle. | |
| Right? If you're concerned about food, get food. | |
| If you're concerned about water, get water. | |
| If you're concerned about social decay, get a fairly local group of like-minded people you care about. | |
| So you have a group Work on your health. | |
| Stop eating sugar. | |
| Work on your health so that if you're concerned about the continuation or interruptions in essential services that you don't need a dentist immediately. | |
| If you have, you know, I'm not a medical advice guy. | |
| This is just a possibility. But if there's things that you can do that would be lifestyle changes that could conceivably, with your doctor's advice, help and support, get you off repetitive medicines, like I've gotten messages from people who said, oh, I was on blood pressure, but I did my exercise and ate better and I don't need it anymore. | |
| So again, if there's things that you can do, again, talk to your doctor. | |
| He's the expert. She's the expert, but not me. | |
| So yeah, you've got anxieties, great, but don't cross your fingers and like, oh, maybe politics will say, oh, there's going to be some groundswell, blah, blah, right? | |
| Yeah, maybe, maybe, and maybe you'll win the lottery and maybe you'll inherit a million dollars tomorrow, but it's not how I run my life. | |
| Politics is a lot of, a lot of times politics is where people put their fears about the world into a miracle bag of there's going to be change. | |
| All right. Oh, shoot. | |
| I was going somewhere else, too. | |
| And I was like, oh, I'll get back to this. | |
| Please remind me. What was I just saying? | |
| Help me, people. Be my Borg brain. | |
| Oh, yes. A Paul. | |
| A Paul. Yes, I was going to ask a Paul. | |
| I really was. And I will. | |
| I will get it back. | |
| I feel, I feel I will. | |
| But it's not coming back to me right now. | |
| It will come back. Just make sure in case anybody... | |
| Yeah, grow food if you can. | |
| Be great. I would not necessarily... | |
| I would not necessarily be embedded right in the heart of a city. | |
| You know, it's kind of funny. All these people, and some of them on the left, all these people who were like... | |
| Climate change is going to destroy civilization, so I'm going to get an arts degree, never exercise, and live right in the heart of a city with no life skills of any kind. | |
| It's just kind of strange, right? | |
| All right, somebody says, feeling a bit disheartened as I approach turning 30 while I feel a bit more motivated to prioritize finding a partner after the shirtless rant. | |
| No, not yet. | |
| Too soon, too soon. | |
| I feel I haven't accomplished as much as I should have. | |
| I haven't necessarily made any disastrous mistakes and I feel like I'm making progress moving towards new career aspirations. | |
| I'm unsure what benchmark I should hold myself to at this stage. | |
| Any constructive criticism? | |
| Feeling a bit disheartened as I approach turning 30. | |
| So you don't have a satisfying love life and you don't have a satisfying career. | |
| Those are the two things, right? | |
| And a career doesn't mean money-making. | |
| It could be whatever meaningful work you're doing in the world to make the world a better place. | |
| You haven't accomplished as much as I should have First of all you can give me a shout call in at free domain | |
| calm of course But... See, when you have a repetitive feeling as an adult, here you go. | |
| Here's your big value add for this day of our Lord, 25th of March, 2023. | |
| Here's your big value add. Do you have a repetitive feeling in your life? | |
| A nagging feeling, an undertow, depression and negativity, a feeling of guilt or shame or whatever it is. | |
| Do you have some repetitive feeling in your adult life? | |
| Would you like to fix that? | |
| Would you like to fix that? | |
| If you're disappointing yourself, come on, let's collect the Borg brain value, right? | |
| Let's collect the Borg brain value. | |
| If you, let's say, you are disappointing yourself, where's the first thing, where's the first place you need to look? | |
| Where is the first place you need to look if you experience repetitive disappointment with yourself as an adult? | |
| Where's the first place you need to look? | |
| My refrigerator. In the mirror. | |
| No. No to both. | |
| To those around you. | |
| Nope. Childhood self-knowledge. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Right. Now, let's say that you feel like an underachiever and you feel like you're disappointing yourself. | |
| First place you need to look is... | |
| Did you ever have, or significantly repeated, parental expression of disappointment in you as a child? | |
| Did your parents ever seem to be disappointed in you, think that you were an under-shaver, think that you could do better, think that you could do more, and just feel... | |
| David, just disappointed in you. | |
| I'm not so much angry as I am disappointed. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If you feel depressed, one of the things you could do is look and say, | |
| Depressed is I'm not taking any pleasure in my own existence. | |
| Well, first place you look, did I grow up in a situation where parents did not take pleasure in my existence? | |
| I'll tell you a little story. It's only funny because it's so long ago. | |
| When I was, I think, 14, maybe 15, two friends of mine and I went on a, supposed to be like a four-day hike through Algonquin National Park in Canada, in Ontario, here in Ontario. | |
| And we were dropped off by his parents, and we had these big-ass backpacks, and we just hiked and hiked and hiked. | |
| And it was great. We played some verbal Dungeons& Dragons. | |
| We gave each other logic puzzles. | |
| We chatted, and it was beautiful. | |
| And, you know, buggy, of course. | |
| It's like Satan's armpit of cloud bugs. | |
| Hmm. Perhaps you can get blood from inside my sinuses. | |
| Anyway, so... | |
| Oh, gosh. | |
| Okay, here's a quick poll. | |
| Do you have someone in your life... | |
| They just don't take good advice. | |
| They just don't take good advice. | |
| You're just giving them sensible things to do, and they're like, no! | |
| You've got to be crazy. Yes. | |
| Yes, you do. Isn't it maddening? | |
| And that becomes, because they feel helpless in their life, they can't process it, so then they make you feel helpless. | |
| They do stupid things, and then they resist any good advice, right? | |
| Okay, so we went hiking. | |
| And my friend, call him Bob, my friend Bob has had some stomach issues. | |
| He had some Crohn's issues. | |
| He had to have part of his intestines removed. | |
| And so we had brought these water purification tablets. | |
| So what do you do when you're in the boonies? | |
| You either boil the water, let it cool, which is a long-ass process. | |
| Like if you don't wait until you're thirsty to build the fire, boil the water, let it cool. | |
| So we had these water purification tablets. | |
| And I very distinctly remember saying to the guy... | |
| Don't forget to use your water purification tablets. | |
| And anyway, the second night, like we're a long ass away from home. | |
| So the second night, I remember we were heading to bed in our tent. | |
| We hung up all of the food so the bears wouldn't eat our asses and we made the tent, we went into the tent. | |
| I remember we had a debate about, he was a math guy, and he said, you know, infinity divided by infinity is actually infinity. | |
| And I said, I don't think so. | |
| And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. So think of an infinite universe. | |
| You've got infinitely long poles. | |
| You can fit an infinite amount of infinitely long poles in an infinite universe. | |
| So infinity divided by infinity. | |
| And I said, no, no, no, but that's only length. | |
| Length, width, height. Like, you've got to do infinity in all dimensions, not just that. | |
| Anyway, so the next morning, he's like, oh, I don't feel so good. | |
| My stomach is killing me. | |
| And I was like, oh, well, you did use your water purification tablets. | |
| tablets, he's like, they taste bad. | |
| Oh, I think I'm a fairly compassionate person, but I think in that moment, I was like, okay, | |
| you've got stomach issues. | |
| You basically took a straw, apparently, and drank from moose tracks, and now you've got stomach problems, and we're two and a half days fast hike away from civilization. | |
| Well... I tried to be mature, and I was fairly good at it, because, you know, what are you going to do, right? | |
| The guy didn't listen to good advice. | |
| He did something completely retarded, and we were in a mess. | |
| And, of course, this is decades before cell phones and all that, so we are on our own. | |
| And there's nobody. We've come across nobody the whole time we're hiking. | |
| We were hiking a fairly isolated back trail. | |
| So we did what... | |
| Inexperienced youth do in situations like this, we decided to split up. | |
| We decided to split up. | |
| So what we did was we said, okay, one guy is going to just hoof it, like go as fast as humanly possible and just run back to civilization, call his parents, get his parents to come and collect us. | |
| And he's not going to take anything. | |
| I'm going to take all the stuff on my backpack and And he's going to go as fast as he can because we couldn't get him out. | |
| We couldn't carry the guy and all our backpacks. | |
| Plus it was uneven ground and all of that. | |
| We couldn't carry him. So my one friend who was fairly small and quick, I took all of his stuff and he just hoofed it back to civilization. | |
| And then I honestly can't remember our reasoning here, but I then went after him as fast as I could. | |
| And then my friend Bob with the stomach issues... | |
| We're supposed to, you know, just stay in camp or make his way if he could, if he got better, right? | |
| That was sort of the general idea. | |
| We basically were abandoning the whole thing. | |
| Oh, yeah, I couldn't stay with John. | |
| No, sorry, not John. I couldn't stay with Bob. | |
| I always think it's either John or Bob or Doug or somebody who makes up. | |
| I couldn't stay with Bob because... | |
| He might not be able to move anywhere. | |
| And, you know, was it easy to find... | |
| No GPS, remember, right? | |
| So was it easy to find the way back? | |
| We'd gone off the trail a little bit for our campsite. | |
| Anyway, so we split up. | |
| Long story short, I got lost. | |
| I had a map, took a wrong turn. | |
| I didn't even have a compass. | |
| And I ended up spending the night on my own, deep in the woods, middle of nowhere, and bears around. | |
| No question. Quite exciting. | |
| Anyway, long story short, I got back home. | |
| And when I got back home, my mom was like, you smell. | |
| Not, oh my gosh, you're back early, or what happened, or how was the trip? | |
| It's like, you smell. It's like, yeah, no kidding, I smell. | |
| I've spent five days in the woods. | |
| So, yeah, just crazy. | |
| Just crazy. So, yes. So, my mother didn't take pleasure. | |
| Now, my mother didn't take pleasure in who I was as a person. | |
| She did take pleasure in the things that I could do, right? | |
| So, her father was a writer, her brother was a writer, her stepbrother was a writer, and all sort of big and famous writers in Germany, although not allowed to write at all, of course, as you can imagine, during the Nazi regime. | |
| They went underground. So... | |
| My mother enjoyed it when I wrote and was always nagging me for copyright. | |
| Copyright, you've got to copyright it. | |
| It's like, this is my first book. | |
| It's just in a shelf. So... | |
| Yeah, so if you've got a feeling of depression, you're not taking pleasure in your own company. | |
| So the first place I think you should look, I'm no expert, the first place I would advise in my amateur way to look is, okay, if you don't take pleasure in your own company, who in the past took pleasure in your company? | |
| You know, in the morning, you know, when I get up, if my daughter's not up, I'm like, are you up? | |
| Are you up? Are you up? Time to play. | |
| You know, I want to spend time with her. | |
| I take every time my wife comes home, I run down the hallway, give her a big hug and a kiss. | |
| Like I'm just thrilled that, you know, I love when you guys are dropping by to chat. | |
| I take pleasure in people's company. | |
| And so if your parents didn't take pleasure in your company, how easy is it to take pleasure in your company? | |
| If your parents never thought you were worthwhile, how easy is it for you to feel worthwhile? | |
| If your parents were constantly disappointed in you, How easy is it to avoid disappointing yourself? | |
| Well, it's tough. And the analogy is, of course, if you grow up speaking English in the household, you speak English. | |
| It doesn't mean you can't learn another language, but it's pretty hard. | |
| You can't unlearn English, and it's tough to switch languages. | |
| So, yeah. | |
| And the mechanism for this, I go into this, I got a free book called Real-Time Relationships. | |
| You can get it at freedomain.com slash books. | |
| The mechanism for this is, let's say that your parents are constantly disappointed in you. | |
| Well, that's a cruel thing to do to a child. | |
| It's a very, very mean and vicious thing to do to a child. | |
| Children respond so much to enthusiasm If you've ever had this experience. | |
| I remember as a teenager, when I first started writing poetry, one of my friends, who was very literate and very well read, and I remember this, like 40 plus years later, he said, Steph, these poems are fantastic. | |
| I'm awed, cowed, bowed, like I bow down before them, right? | |
| Okay, that level of enthusiasm, that's a lot of fuel. | |
| That's a lot of fuel to live on. | |
| Enthusiasm from others is a fuel that can take us to the freaking stratosphere. | |
| And you owe that to your children. | |
| You owe enthusiasm for what it is that they're doing. | |
| I'm very proud of what my daughter does. | |
| The movies that she makes, the drawings that she makes, the way that she works, reasons through the challenges I throw at her in role-playing and so on. | |
| She's just a blast that way. | |
| The way that she navigates social situations, which, you know, quite complex for a child who's raised peacefully and so on. | |
| I'm just proud of... | |
| I'm very proud of her and I admire her because she also has to deal with problems that I didn't have to deal with. | |
| The woke stuff was not really around when I was a kid. | |
| It was just kind of coming as I was just in graduate school. | |
| I could see that tsunami on the horizon of identity politics and I was like, run! | |
| Go to the business world where there are facts and profit and loss and numbers. | |
| And things are objective, right? | |
| So she's, you know, like everybody's kids these days, you've got to deal with the woke landmines and all that. | |
| So she navigates all of that stuff. | |
| It's great. I really admire her. | |
| So if your parents were constantly disappointed in you or were never enthusiastic about anything you did, they withheld an essential form of nutrition from you. | |
| Brutal. Brutal. Horrifying. | |
| Destructive. Now, either, like if you disappointed your parents, either you're genuinely disappointing or they were jerks. | |
| And jerks is probably just about the nicest term that I can come up with. | |
| But if your parents were constantly disappointed in you, then your parents were like depressed with holding selfish, emotionally empty catastrophes of parenting and In which case, you are released from this disappointment thing. | |
| But you have to criticize your parents. | |
| Now, we are not built to criticize our parents. | |
| We are not at all built to criticize our parents. | |
| It's one of the great corrupting power centrists in the world. | |
| It's the authority that parents have over their children. | |
| Evolutionarily, biologically, we can all understand this, right? | |
| Parents who, like, when there were more children than resources, | |
| as there was throughout most of human history, if you were a child who really went for your parents and | |
| criticized your parents, oh dear, I'm afraid you get fed last. | |
| Oh dear, I'm afraid we've moved our hunter-gathering teepee without telling you. | |
| You just get fewer resources. | |
| Oh, I can only save one kid from the saber-toothed tiger. | |
| I think I won't save the hypercritical kid who makes me anxious and angry. | |
| So we have a great resistance towards criticizing our parents, and that is one of the sources originally of great stability in society, but it is also one of the limitations of progress, particularly moral progress. | |
| You know the old saying that science advances one funeral at a time. | |
| So if your parents... | |
| Thought you were disappointing and boring, then either you are disappointing and boring, in which case you don't have to criticize your parents because they're accurate, right? | |
| Like if my mother says to me, you're blue-eyed, she's accurate. | |
| I have blue eyes. Nothing to criticize. | |
| So if your parents have negative views of you, either they're jerks or they're right. | |
| Because if parents have a negative view of something and they're right, that's important. | |
| Like if you want to be a singer and you can't sing very well, or you sing badly, then your parents should tell you that. | |
| Yeah, I don't know, man. | |
| Oh, but Bob Dylan is like, yeah, but that was a particular folky style and all of that. | |
| And if you can write songs of genius, then maybe you can get away with not being a great singer, in which case really focus more on the, you know, songs of genius side of things rather than the just singing kind of things, right? | |
| Or, you know, if you want to be a model but you're not very attractive, well, I guess these days you probably could, but... | |
| So your parents are there to give you limitations. | |
| Now, if your parents, if you're not very good at something and your parents tell you, they're not jerks. | |
| They're really trying to help you, right? | |
| They're really trying to help you. So if your parents have negative views of you, either they're right and you are deficient or they were bad parents because they didn't give you the spiritual and moral and emotional nutrition that you needed to flourish, right? It's hard to think that you're interesting if your parents find you boring. | |
| It's hard to think that you can achieve great things if your parents constantly think that you're disappointing, constantly disappointed in you. | |
| You can have, this is what's called a reaction formation. | |
| So, as you probably know, if you've heard this show before, my mother's big statement, she'd give me all of these complicated, convoluted instructions, and I'd either get them right or I'd get them wrong, but at some point she would demand, why are you doing this? | |
| And I'd say, well, I thought, and she would never let me finish the sentence. | |
| Well, I thought, I thought, I thought you wanted me to, and I thought this is what you said, I thought this is what you wanted, right? | |
| And you know what she would say? She'd say, don't think! | |
| Sorry, again, I don't mean to laugh, it's all so long ago, like 50 years ago. | |
| So my mom would say, don't think, don't think. | |
| It's like, okay, so pretty much the worst person I know in the world is telling me, don't think. | |
| So what should I probably do if I don't want to end up like, I don't know, just about the worst person in the world for me? | |
| Don't think! Okay, so if you're really bad and you're telling me not to think, thinking has got to be really good. | |
| Thinking has got to be really, really good. | |
| And if the fat guy with the bad knees and scoliosis says, don't ever exercise, overeat, it's like, well, maybe I should do the opposite. | |
| My mother was very, very morally instructive. | |
| She was a great moral teacher, a great moral tutor. | |
| So, yeah, if your parents think you're disappointing and boring, you can't ever think that you're interesting and can achieve great things without criticizing your parents. | |
| And criticizing our parents is very hard to do because it goes against their programming. | |
| So you have the choice. | |
| You either accept what your parents defined as you or You criticize them and break free of the language prison they put you in. | |
| Again, assuming your parents weren't great. | |
| Somebody says, I give good advice, they agree with it, and then don't follow it. | |
| It's maddening. Yes. | |
| So people who don't express themselves act it out. | |
| People who don't express themselves act Act it out. | |
| You either speak the truth or you act it out in some horrible manipulative way. | |
| That's just life. | |
| That's just the reality, right? So, if you give people good... | |
| Like, whatever feelings people repeatedly provoke in you that are negative, whatever negative feelings people repeatedly provoke in you... | |
| The feelings they have but can't express. | |
| So this is passive aggression. | |
| Somebody who's angry but won't allow herself to express that anger will often provoke you to anger. | |
| Somebody who's angry. Like, we all know this sort of thing where the girl says, well, I don't want to break up with the guy, so I'll just be a bad girlfriend until he breaks up with me. | |
| I don't want to quit the job, I'll just be a bad employer until they fire me, right? | |
| That's passive aggression, right? | |
| So if you're feeling helplessness around someone, oh, I give them good advice, they say they're going to follow it and then they don't. | |
| If you feel helplessness around someone, that's because they feel helpless but they can't express it, so they provoke it in you. | |
| It's just the way the unconscious tends to work. | |
| Somebody says here, I had cancer when I was two and four and my mom blamed me for her stress issues and depression. | |
| Blamed you or the cancer? | |
| Blamed you. Yeah, people who take baby stuff personally, I don't... | |
| I don't... | |
| I don't follow the... | |
| I don't follow the major malfunction. | |
| It's like thinking that a baby is torturing you because sleep deprivation can be torture and babies wake up at night. | |
| Anyway. Somebody says... | |
| Somebody says... | |
| My girlfriend is having a challenge setting healthy boundaries. | |
| Either she is too vulnerable or too closed off. | |
| could you give us some advice on a topic? | |
| You can't set healthy boundaries in this life. | |
| Bye. | |
| Do I surprise you? | |
| Do I shock you? I'll tell you, let me make the case. | |
| Give me a moment and maybe I'll dig my own grave. | |
| Maybe we'll tunnel out to the truth called China. | |
| You can't set healthy boundaries. | |
| So let's say that your neighbor has a big-ass tank and keeps driving into your property. | |
| You say, well, I put up a wooden fence and he just drives over the wooden fence. | |
| Well, hang on, I put up boundaries but he just drove over them. | |
| You can't. You can't make healthy boundaries with unhealthy people. | |
| You can't do it. It's not possible. | |
| Not possible. Hit me with a why. | |
| If you've ever said to someone, I need to take a break or no contact or whatever it is, or I'm breaking up with you and you want to sort of stop the relationship for a while and then they call, they show up, they call your friends, they do a bit of stalky stuff. | |
| You're trying to set boundaries. | |
| They just tank right through them. | |
| You can't set healthy boundaries with crazy people. | |
| You can't set healthy boundaries with crazy people. | |
| So, when you're trying to set boundaries, first thing you need to say is, will the people respect those boundaries? | |
| Will those people respect those boundaries? | |
| or the people around me. | |
| So, a friend of mine's wife is very sensitive to poop talk. | |
| Now, if you've got kids when they're young, poop is just a funny word. | |
| Poopy stuff is just funny. | |
| And so they'll sometimes make poop jokes at the table, right? | |
| It's going to happen. And the wife is like, I can't do poop jokes at the table. | |
| Please, everyone, it makes me nauseous. | |
| I don't want to eat. And so the family is like, we don't make poop jokes at the table, right? | |
| Because it's bad for mom, right? So it's not a crazy request and maybe a little oversensitive to you and I's thinking, but everyone has their sensitivities and that's fine. | |
| It's not a big thing to negotiate or navigate around. | |
| It's not a big moral issue, right? | |
| Why couldn't your ancestors write in Germany? | |
| Were they Jewish? Well, my grandfather was at one point married to a Jewish woman, not my lineage. | |
| It was a step-grandmother. | |
| But they were free thinkers, and so they were not allowed to publish, and they were critical of the regime. | |
| Believe it or not, there were people other than Jews who were critical of | |
| Nazism and my ancestors would be one of them, as would I be as well. | |
| So yeah, you, you, you, you, my girlfriend has trouble setting healthy boundaries. | |
| Okay. So, why would you not be able to set healthy boundaries? | |
| Because your parents didn't teach you how to set healthy boundaries. | |
| Why? Because your parents probably want to violate those boundaries. | |
| Or, of course, the same thing happens in school because teachers, I mean, the whole existence of government schools is a violation of boundaries. | |
| So... Likelihood is if you're raised with people who never taught you boundaries, you're currently surrounded by people who don't respect boundaries. | |
| Right? I mean, I've told this story before about a friend of mine back in the day, a quarter century ago. | |
| Every time we were in social situations, he'd make jokes at my expense. | |
| And I told him to cool it. | |
| Didn't like it. Didn't appreciate it. | |
| I don't mind making jokes at my expense. | |
| I don't mind being funny from time to time. | |
| But, you know, everybody knows when it just gets a bit weird. | |
| Just like, okay, yes, but I'm also successful, so why aren't you telling any of those stories as well? | |
| I mean, I was actually... | |
| Oh, never mind. So, yeah, he wouldn't stop, so I was like, okay, well, I'm making a reasonable request, which is stop putting me down in front of everyone. | |
| And he wouldn't stop putting me down in front of everyone, so I just stopped hanging out with him. | |
| I couldn't establish healthy boundaries with the guy, so I didn't choose to have a relationship with him. | |
| Somebody says, being called lazy and stupid for not doing better in school, in my mid-40s, before ever being tested for learning disabilities. | |
| In fact, I have an IQ north of 130 and carrying rocks all day as not lazy. | |
| Oh, God. Oh, no, you are provoking a rant. | |
| Oh, I can feel it. | |
| I can feel it. | |
| Do you guys want a rant? | |
| Hit me with a Y if you want to rant. | |
| This is going to be like Dennis Miller passing a kidney stone on cocaine. | |
| Are you ready? Always. | |
| All right. Hit me with a Y! If you were ever called an underachiever in school and turned out to have been fairly smart, hit me with a why. | |
| If you've ever been perceived to be an underachiever in government brain-deadening, cattle prod, neuron-wrecking schools, forking why. | |
| Somebody says, no, but you're a dread pirate, so... | |
| Yes. You were diagnosed with learning disability. | |
| Oh, you need to be on amphetamines because you find boring teachers boring. | |
| Wouldn't that be great? You make a movie. | |
| People don't like it. You just drug them until they drool and clap. | |
| Shouldn't you make a better movie? | |
| No! Just drug that audience, trap and drug that audience until they drool and clap. | |
| You're afraid of success, third grade math teacher. | |
| The world needs ditch diggers too. | |
| Yeah, I was in private schools, but still, yeah. | |
| You know what they said to me, right? | |
| You know what they said to me. You're so smart. | |
| Why are you so unmotivated? | |
| If effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. Thank you for the tip. | |
| Thanks for the value provide. | |
| Please use this fiat before it's useless. | |
| Oh God, I'm going to buy something before the end of the show. | |
| All right. Everybody knows the purpose of government schools is to kill your soul and yoke you as a serf, a worker, and a soldier to the powers that be, to turn you into a useless, brain-dead pawn of the power elites. | |
| That is the entire purpose of school. | |
| You're not succeeding in school is like you're not flourishing in prison. | |
| Prison is to be escaped, not flourished in. | |
| Boy, you know, if you could just do some more mindless fucking rote memorization, you'd just be a perfect student. | |
| If you could just find yourself enthusiastic for things that have no purpose in your life whatsoever, for useless skills and abilities that you will never ever use again in your life, if you could just obey me with enthusiasm, And ability. | |
| If you could just, you know, like that last little piece of toothpaste, just squeeze some enthusiasm out of the soul that I'm repeatedly holding down and driving a stake through its heart. | |
| If you could just be enthusiastic for the slow erosion and destruction of your individuality and thinking capacities, | |
| that would just be excellent! | |
| Just aim for an A. | |
| Do you know why it's called an A? | |
| Because they cut off your screams. | |
| You're in school. And they choke you. | |
| And they choke you. You can't scream. | |
| In school, nobody can hear you scream. | |
| So it's called an A because it's the beginning of a scream that they won't ever let you finish. | |
| You know, if you could just get real enthusiastic about the difference between meiosis and mitosis, that would be great. | |
| Get those TP109 forms on the desk for me by Monday, that would be great. | |
| If you could just get real keen on sitting with raging hormones when your body wants to go out and conquer the world, if you could just get real keen on On algebraic division. | |
| Ah, that would be just great. | |
| That'd be just great. | |
| If we could put you in proximity to girls when you get enough spontaneous boners over the course of the day that you look like a fucking puffer fish half the time, we just put you in... | |
| And also we'll give you a couple of swim pool sessions with those girls. | |
| We could just fill you to the brim with shaken coke open in your eyeball hormones. | |
| When your body could be growing and creaking like an old pirate ship being transformed into the Incredible Hulk. | |
| If we could just get you to sit still in the time of greatest activity in your life. | |
| In the time of greatest world conquering enthusiasm and hunger. | |
| For power and strength and dominance, just sit still and learn some useless fucking dates. | |
| Please. Please, at a time when you want to go out, thump your chest and conquer the world, just sit there and learn about the British North American Act and the Confederacy of 1867, if you could. | |
| Be so very kind. Although now it's even worse. | |
| If you could just sit still and have people drone on about how you and your ancestors were all corrupt and horrible, wouldn't that be great? | |
| That'd be just lovely. And they always blame you, right? | |
| I always blame you. | |
| Because it's like, well, I'm boring. | |
| The curriculum is boring. You're just sitting in rows like a bunch of decapitated zombies. | |
| Actually, decapitated zombies is the wrong analogy because at least their suffering would be over. | |
| You just sit in rows, try and stay awake, and if you can't stay awake, if you lose attention, if you lose track, well, clearly you're just mentally ill and you need to be drugged. | |
| You need to be drugged. I had one, I told this before, I had one teacher, I was so desperate to get out of high school, I took summer school and worked two jobs. | |
| Took summer school, worked two jobs, just, I had to... | |
| It was like clawing my way out of a coffin while being lowered into the ground. | |
| And by ground I mean volcano, and by volcano I mean active volcano, and by active volcano I mean actively erupting volcano. | |
| I was just, gotta get out, gotta get out! | |
| You know what they say? What would Abraham Lincoln be doing if he was alive today? | |
| Well, clawing at the inside of his coffin. | |
| That was like me in high school, so I had to get out. | |
| I took a course in American history. | |
| I remember the guy had the... | |
| I think this put me off hairpieces for life. | |
| He had just really bad hairpieces. | |
| He was a short guy and weirdly aggressive and yet a droner. | |
| Aggressive droners are the worst because the aggression makes you space out and the droning just completely nailed in the coffin, right? | |
| So, I would sit in the back and, you know, you do this thing. | |
| You lean and you just close your eyes like you're listening really intently. | |
| And you just try and grab that surface swelling, like an albatross touching his wings on the foam of the sea. | |
| You just try and get a little bit of a refreshing nap. | |
| Anyway, so I went up to give a presentation. | |
| This guy jumped up when I was in front of the class to give a presentation. | |
| And he screamed at everyone. | |
| I won't do his scream because it was actually kind of shrieky. | |
| Like the chunky guy in Modern Family. | |
| Is that your wife? He's like, everybody, put your heads down on the desk. | |
| Everybody pretend to be asleep. | |
| And then he turned to me and says, how do you like it? | |
| You do that to me all the time. | |
| It's like, oh, so petty. | |
| So he was screaming at me. | |
| I love history. I love American history in particular. | |
| It's wonderful stuff. I read it voluntarily. | |
| I've done entire presentations on American history. | |
| George Washington. I've done Richard Nixon. | |
| I've done The Truth About Joseph McCarthy. | |
| I've done... Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, of course. | |
| So, I love him, but this guy was really boring. | |
| And whose fault was it that I was bored and uninterested? | |
| It was my fault. I was being rude. | |
| I was being rude. | |
| Can you imagine? You go on a date with some girl, and while you're just droning on and on about nothing... | |
| The figurines that I painted when I was in grade 10 were lead and it was quite drippy and I do remember I painted a red dragon and it was really hard to get the eyes the right color because red dragons are supposed to have these eyes that are the color of, you know, and whatever. | |
| And then you find that she's stifling a yawn and she's looking at the TV over your shoulder. | |
| And then you jump up and you scream at her how rude she's being. | |
| Like, that would be the behavior of a complete psychopath, right? | |
| A complete psycho. | |
| you But teachers get angry at you when they're boring you, and they punish you for being bored. | |
| It's sick and insane, and I speak for the future. | |
| You know, when we... | |
| When the... | |
| And the history of today is written by people who are sane in the future. | |
| That will be a pretty wild thing. | |
| Because they will look back at us and they will have no idea how we survived. | |
| Such insanity. | |
| They have no idea how we survived such insanity. | |
| How do we stay sane under this constant pressure of madness that characterizes the education of the young? | |
| Now, this was this bad when I was a kid. | |
| Where it is now, I can scarcely even imagine. | |
| And nobody ever asks you what you're interested in, what you would like to learn, where your interests lie. | |
| I do remember... | |
| One of my English teachers read a novel that I was working on out of the class where a relatively easily identifiable girl was being kissed by the lead character whose name was Stephen because I was so imaginative when I was 12. | |
| I started a novel called By the Light of an Alien Son and it was pretty cool. | |
| Anyway, and she laughed. | |
| And that was actually one of the... And that was a great time in school. | |
| I remember the last day of... Remember the last day of school? | |
| Last day of school was fantastic. | |
| You did trivia contests. | |
| You raced up and down the hallway. | |
| It was a blast! And didn't everyone sit there and think, Lord, why can't we do this on a regular... | |
| Why can't it be this fun? Why can't it be this fun? | |
| Oh, you remember fistfights with the teachers? | |
| Wow. Wow. | |
| I was lucky enough to be exposed to engineering courses in public schools. | |
| Yeah, I had to take shop class, and the shop class teacher was a, he was a stoner who worked out. | |
| And I had no interest in building anything. | |
| What did I care? It was not my thing, right? | |
| I would just make these endless little, you'd fold them and use the welding, spot welding to make the tin, little tin boxes. | |
| Take your top off. | |
| If you give me a good reason, give me a good reason and I'll do it. | |
| Lordy, we had to do biography reports in the fifth grade, and I couldn't think of one, so I was assigned Jackie Robinson, and they filmed it. | |
| I remember watching it. So awkward. | |
| Oh, wow. I refused to do anything in school until finals, just so I can get my grades up to graduate. | |
| Then heading to college after taking two years off and flourished. | |
| It was on my terms and what I wanted to learn. | |
| I was never stupid, just didn't like being taught stupid stuff. | |
| Yes. We know for sure that teachers come from the lower IQs. | |
| Because if you look at the average marks of people who get into teachers' college, they're generally stupid. | |
| And like stupid people, they don't take responsibility. | |
| In general, this is a characteristic of stupid people. | |
| If something bad is happening, it's never my fault. | |
| That's just a mark of... | |
| Because, you know, everybody has that impulse. | |
| But if you have any brains at all, you say, well, if I just keep blaming everyone around me, I never get to improve, so I never get to change my circumstances. | |
| You're guaranteeing repetition when you give yourself excuses. | |
| Somebody said, didn't ask me what I was interested in or why I was so uninterested in picking somebody. | |
| Baseball player. Yeah, that'll work for the kid. | |
| I don't know what that means. Sorry. | |
| Learn the abstracts of a trade. | |
| I liked it. Even online, but math a problem and the physical part, especially sharp, not so good. | |
| Ha! Wow! First grade parent-teacher conference. | |
| Teacher complaining I was not paying attention. | |
| Father said I was bored. Mother says, you're saying she's boring? | |
| They were both right. Yeah. | |
| Yeah. Point, grade 10 math. | |
| 10 months and I did not get it. | |
| Two months in summer school with an enthusiastic teacher and I did fine. | |
| It really makes a difference. Yes. | |
| Quality teachers are extraordinarily rare. | |
| Extraordinarily rare. Well, thankfully the internet has opened that up, right? | |
| You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat! | |
| Right. Or Anthony Weiner, don't beat your meat, right? | |
| Lucky days we had movie days. | |
| Oh yes. Oh yes. | |
| The movie days were a great... | |
| A great good. | |
| What would you recommend in addition to therapy and journaling to give yourself what you didn't get as a child? | |
| I've got quite the list of things I didn't get and thank you for answering my question, Steph. | |
| I very much appreciate it. | |
| What would you recommend in addition to therapy and journaling? | |
| Oh yeah, that's a good question. | |
| So, get ready for a slightly aggressive analogy. | |
| It goes something like this. | |
| Something like that. | |
| So, that is the sound of you taking the flame flower of truth to everyone in your vicinity and see who's left standing. | |
| The flame flower of truth. | |
| Just tell the truth to people around you. | |
| Tell the truth to people around you. | |
| See who's left standing. | |
| Afterwards. The people who are left standing afterwards are brave souls. | |
| You should grapple them tight to your chest and love them forever. | |
| I thought it was the sound of a triceratops getting sucked through the jet engine. | |
| Well, oddly enough, that's the mental image I used in order to get the right sound. | |
| So, yay for me for taking acting classes. | |
| Yeah, just tell the truth. | |
| Tell the truth to people. See who sticks around. | |
| Telling the truth is just one of these incredibly efficient ways to find out who's interested in reality or not. | |
| And the reality of sort of what you think. | |
| Yeah, if you're having trouble with the stream, just refresh it. | |
| So, I can't do the technological side here. | |
| It's not me. It's not me. | |
| For everyday life, how is the application of philosophy different from the application of psychology? | |
| So psychology is understanding the brain's references to itself. | |
| Philosophy is understanding the brain's references to reality. | |
| Now, of course, there's overlaps between the two. | |
| Cognitive behavioral therapy is a lot about comparing your thoughts to actual reality. | |
| But psychology is looking within the brain and generally trying to understand. | |
| Like earlier I was saying, if you've got a negative persistent habit, first place to | |
| look in my opinion is your upbringing, your parents, your teachers or whoever, right? | |
| So that's looking at the brain's references to itself, to its own history. | |
| What were you told as a child? | |
| How does that affect you as an adult? | |
| How do your childhood experiences affect your thinking as an adult? | |
| Because you really can't control your emotions. | |
| You can only control your thoughts. | |
| You can choose to focus or not focus your thoughts. | |
| You can choose to pursue topics or avoid topics, but you can't choose what you feel as a result of these things. | |
| If you protect your parents' reputation in your own mind by agreeing with their negative assessments of you as a child, you'll feel down. | |
| If you get angry at having been mistreated as a child, then you won't feel down. | |
| You'll feel angry for a while and then you'll be free. | |
| So philosophy compares your thoughts to actual reality, to objective universal truth and reason. | |
| And psychology compares your thoughts to the origin stories of those ideas, right? | |
| To the origin stories of those ideas. | |
| So people who have a compulsive need to be rejected, right? | |
| People have a compulsive need to be rejected. | |
| They were rejected, of course. | |
| They were rejected as children, and so they pursue rejection as an adult, right? | |
| It's so interesting that you bring up CBT. Many of my progressive counterparts are fighting to get CBT removed as a verifiable way of, quote, treating someone because it's based on reality. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Hit me with a why if you'd like my definition of woke. | |
| Well, since somebody was asked recently, what is woke? | |
| What does woke even mean? And they couldn't answer it, right? | |
| So, I thought I would give my answer as to what is woke. | |
| Way of a qualified evil. | |
| W-O-K-E. So, WOKE is a resource acquisition strategy for those who can't compete in general. | |
| That's what WOKE is. It's a biological resource acquisition strategy for those who either can't compete or feel that they can't compete, which is basically the same thing. | |
| So, hit me with a why. | |
| If you've ever been too generous with someone, you've helped them out and then they exploit you. | |
| Hit me with a why. You know, you've lent someone some money, you've put them up, given them a couch to crash on, you've helped someone out, you've given them lots of good advice, and they just end up exploiting your ass. | |
| Hit me with a why. Yeah, everyone's gone through that. | |
| And the only people who believe in government programs are the people who've never done that or processed it in their own life. | |
| It's pretty common, right? Somebody's like, oh man, you know, the company just went bankrupt. | |
| I can't get my last paycheck. | |
| I've got to pay rent. Just can you spot me? | |
| 500 bucks, man. Just 500 bucks until the end of next week, right? | |
| And the next week comes and there's been some other disaster. | |
| Oh, I hurt my hand and I can't work. | |
| Just honestly, another 500 bucks. | |
| Or someone, you know, you lend someone money and they say, oh, I'll get it back to you in a month. | |
| And I've literally, I wouldn't say I spent half my youth chasing down people who owed me money, but it's kind of rough. | |
| It's kind of rough. One person owed me two grand, which was all the money in the world back in there. | |
| It took me a year and a half to pay me. | |
| And another guy, yeah, $850 I lent him and wouldn't return my phone calls, wouldn't pick up the phone. | |
| Now listen, I'm not a monster. | |
| If I lend you money and you can't pay me back for whatever reason, just let me know. | |
| You know, just call me up, let me know, and we'll figure it out. | |
| We'll find a way. We'll find a way. | |
| Life finds a way. But this avoidance shit, it's just terrible. | |
| It's absolutely terrible. So, if you are going through a tough time and you ask for help, then the problem is That people will give you a little bit of help and then they'll stop giving you help. | |
| Because if you're using their help to improve, then you don't need their help again. | |
| But if you're using their help to exploit them, then the demand will never end, right? | |
| So asking for charity... | |
| It's a self-limiting phenomenon. | |
| You can't live three generations on charity. | |
| Can you imagine? Your grandkids are still lending to their grandkids because, hey man, you know, now they stub their toe and they come. | |
| I mean, come on, right? So charity is a self-limiting thing. | |
| And in the Victorian age, charity was, you know, if there was some guy who was a drunk, it's like, okay, we'll get you back on your feet. | |
| We'll pay your bills. We'll pay your rent. | |
| We'll give you some training, but you've got to not drink. | |
| And if you drink, you're out. Okay, you've got to have a kid out of wedlock, we'll help you out. | |
| You get pregnant again, you're done. | |
| You're out, right? You've got to take some responsibility for your own salvation. | |
| It's a fundamental, a way to just lose at life is to care about people more than they care about themselves. | |
| If you care about people more than they care about themselves, you will be exploited into fucking atoms every single time. | |
| You know, people are like, well, how am I going to feed my kid? | |
| It's like, I mean, I can't care about your kid more than you do, otherwise you're just going to use that leverage to exploit me. | |
| I wish you had made, but if you didn't choose a good father and you don't have savings and you're like, then you're going to have to figure something out. | |
| But don't ask me to care for your kid more than you do. | |
| So, how do you get resources from people When you haven't earned them. | |
| Well, you turn it from charity into a debt. | |
| You turn it from charity into a debt. | |
| So when I was trying to get either the $850 back or the $2000 back when I was in my early 20s from friends I'd lent money to, Which was tough for me. | |
| I mean, really, it was tough for me. | |
| It was tough. It was a really... | |
| I mean, I remember when I was... | |
| I was broke. | |
| But people really needed help for a variety of reasons. | |
| I mean, one person's mother had died, and real sympathy for that. | |
| So, when I was pursuing someone who owed me money... | |
| Then I was not asking for charity, right? | |
| So imagine, you lend your brother-in-law $1,000 and he says, I'll pay you back next week. | |
| Next week, you say, oh, you said you'd give me the money back. | |
| Could I have the money back? And he's like, hey man, I don't do charity. | |
| I'm not just going to give you money. | |
| I'm not giving you charity. | |
| Ah, you see the difference? | |
| It would be kind of crazy. If you lend someone $1,000 and then you ask for it back, they're like, hey man, I'm not a charity. | |
| It's like, what do you mean you're not a charity? | |
| You borrowed this money, I would like it back. | |
| That was the deal. So if you can convince someone that they owe you, then it's not charity. | |
| And it will never end, right? | |
| Because you just keep creating more and more oaths, right? | |
| So historical injustices and so on, right? | |
| Oh, well, you owe me this money because the money you have was stolen from me. | |
| So I'm just asking for it back, right? | |
| It could be charity if you give a kid a bike. | |
| If some kid steals your bike and you take it back, that kid is not giving charity to you. | |
| You're just taking back what is yours. | |
| So it's the creation of a sense of obligation on the part of people who have resources so that the people who want resources but don't want to work for them aren't dependent upon the self-limiting process of charity. | |
| So this is why it all digs into history and this is why it provokes all of this guilt. | |
| Guilt is a very mindable resources because guilt will often come with the threat of violence. | |
| So the threat of hell in some religions is the threat of obviously pretty psychotic levels of violence. | |
| And it's like, no justice, no peace. | |
| We deserve this. You've got to give it to us. | |
| And if you don't give it to us, we're going to riot. | |
| The guilt plus the threat of violence is a pretty great way to get resources transferred, all of which requires government money. | |
| It's tougher to get that When people actually have their own money and their own resources, but it just prints money and so on, right? | |
| So, yeah, it's just a way of getting resources without being dependent upon self-limiting charity by pretending that you are owed these things because of historical injustices. | |
| And so, it will end when fiat currency ends, and trying to end it intellectually is sort of pointless. | |
| So, again, that's like trying to talk... | |
| If somebody just won a million dollars in the lottery, trying to talk them out of cashing in that million dollars, well, you know, you're just going to raise taxes on everyone, government doesn't have any... | |
| You're not going to be able to prevent them from cashing their... | |
| Like, they won't tear up their check, their winning lottery ticket, right? | |
| So, just have to wait for it to sort of fade out, and that's the way. | |
| So, yeah, WOKE is a resource acquisition strategy based upon... | |
| Pretending that you're owed resources because other people have exploited. | |
| And that's... | |
| I mean, that's all the way up to communism, right? | |
| The capitalist, the business owner, the entrepreneur, he has a big house and a pretty wife and a nice car because he stole all these things from you. | |
| Or you could be grateful that somebody gave you a job. | |
| I mean, I remember when there was a recession in the early 90s, and I'd been a waiter before and all of that, and I was... | |
| I just couldn't find any work. | |
| This was after I'd finished my undergraduate, before I did my graduate school, I took a year and worked. | |
| And I just really couldn't find any jobs as a waiter. | |
| And, you know, eventually this propelled me into the professional programming sphere, which is, of course, much better as a whole. | |
| But I remember thinking, like, man, I really appreciate the people who created jobs in the past, because now that I can't get a job... | |
| You know, imagine if people didn't start restaurants. | |
| I mean, I'm not going to start a restaurant. | |
| I've got like eight bucks to my name. | |
| I'm going to start a restaurant. So I remember being really grateful to people who'd started jobs, who created jobs for me so that I could get a job rather than have to start a whole business. | |
| But, you know, developing the attitude of gratitude is pretty tough for a lot of people. | |
| Work is also a means to obtain unearned authority. | |
| Yeah, but the authority follows the money, right? | |
| The authority follows the money. | |
| So it's kind of like since the early 1960s, at least in America, a lot of places in the | |
| West, it's been illegal to pay women less for the same job. | |
| But women will still harp on about the wage gap. | |
| Now, why does the wage gap, which is nonsense, when you control for all the variables, the wage gap between men and women is less than a penny. | |
| So, And the wage gap is a problem. | |
| Because the more they narrow the wage gap, the lower the population goes, right? | |
| Because the more you bribe women to work, the more you overpay them to work. | |
| And this is true. It's funny, you know, I remember many years ago, we had a reunion of the company that I co-founded. | |
| And a lot of people, you know, came and went over the years and so on. | |
| And then a year or two after I'd left, we all had a reunion. | |
| We all got along pretty well. | |
| And it was really interesting. | |
| So I went up and down, just asked everyone for an update on what they're doing. | |
| And all the men, except for one, had started their own companies. | |
| And all the women, all the women, now work for the government. | |
| Yeah. And because they all had kids. | |
| So they had to work for the government. | |
| Or at least that's what they felt, because they didn't have to do overtime. | |
| It wasn't too demanding or anything like that, right? | |
| It's just HR plus gossip plus obstruction of productive people. | |
| So if you artificially inflate the wages of women, then women want to be in the workforce more than they want to have kids. | |
| And once the tipping point of low population replacement has occurred, and this is what China's going through, they can't reverse this one-child policy really functionally. | |
| I mean, they can reverse it on paper, but you can't really reverse it. | |
| On a whole, Hungary has managed to arrest the decline by offering, you know, you don't pay any taxes if you have four kids, but it's real tough to resurrect that birth rate decline. | |
| So with the wage gap, if all of this artificial stuff that props up women's wages just pulls them out of the home, it's part of just a whole depopulation agenda, of course, right? | |
| Sorry, I just want to just notice I'm not really getting any updated... | |
| I'm not really getting any updated stuff. | |
| I'm going to just refresh the stream here for a sec. | |
| a second I'm not getting any updated chats so just hold on a sec. | |
| What? | |
| Ah, there we go. | |
| There we go. | |
| Oh, sorry. Oh, nobody typed anything. | |
| Well, that must be because I'm so rapidly fascinating. | |
| Oh, there we go. That's it. | |
| I'm so rapidly fascinating. | |
| So for women, if they can convince men, right? | |
| So a woman wants a job, right? | |
| And if she can convince the hiring manager that women have been excluded and sexism and patriarchy and oppression, and he's got a choice between a man and a woman, he will probably hire the woman as a way to, he owes her the job because her mother was denied a job and whatever it is, right? There's this historical injustice and this, that and the other, right? | |
| So it's just a way of getting resources, right? | |
| What would your advice be to one to gain more overall gratitude? | |
| Ah, well, you see, that is the great glory and joy of studying l'histoire. | |
| History. I hope you all thank your dentist. | |
| I hope you all thank your dentist. | |
| I'm afraid we're going to have to drill. | |
| Thank you for not having to do this without anesthetic. | |
| Thank you for not having to do this without modern equipment. | |
| Thank you for antibiotics. | |
| Thank you for x-rays. | |
| Thank you for MRIs. Thank you for CAT scans. | |
| Thank you for all of this wonderful stuff. | |
| So that you can look inside me without having to saw me in half. | |
| Beautiful. You ever have an ear infection? | |
| Thank you for those antibiotics. | |
| Strep throat, thank you for lozenges. | |
| Whatever, right? I mean, you know, my eyes are still pretty good for mid-50s, but, you know, it's really great. | |
| These glasses, which I use, a tiny bit blurry on one eye, these are like, I don't know, seven years old and still pretty functional. | |
| I prefer them because they don't quite give me as big a goggle eyes. | |
| I don't want that full-on Dinesh D'Souza goggle eye thing. | |
| So, you know, just be thankful you can go to the mall and your vision can be restored. | |
| That's incredible. That's incredible. | |
| So, just, I mean, we can have this conversation. | |
| Do you know all of my thoughts? | |
| Right? All of my thoughts. | |
| This is, I'm going to be on a show, what, 5200 or something like that, right? | |
| Not counting the documentaries, not counting the books, not counting the 500 unpublished shows I have sitting in archives, whatever it is, right? | |
| So, All of my thoughts I would have had and chatted about with people and they would have vanished. | |
| Vanished into the general sink home of time. | |
| I saw a picture the other day. | |
| In 1938, a bunch of tourists on top of one of the pyramids having a picnic. | |
| 1938. And I said, you know, in 1938, their friends were, oh, that's so-and-so, that's Bob, that's Jenny, that's Jeff, that's right. | |
| Boom, boom, boom. They would have known, right? | |
| Now? Well, 85 years later, whatever. | |
| Now? Nobody knows. | |
| Nobody knows who these people are. | |
| Couldn't possibly tell you. | |
| Nobody. Because all the people who knew them, dead and gone. | |
| Probably, right? Maybe a grandkid or whatever, but that sounds like. | |
| Haven't seen a picnic in years. | |
| Oh, yeah, isn't that the before and after, right? | |
| BC used to be before Christ. | |
| Now BC is before COVID. A.D. Anno Domini. | |
| A.D. After disaster. COVID. And the response to COVID is a giant, blinding, bloody red line between the past and the future. | |
| All right. | |
| Questions? To fail in school is to succeed in life. | |
| To succeed in life is to fail in school. | |
| Will you be posting this for subscribers? | |
| I will be posting this for subscribers and for non-subscribers as well. | |
| Guys, thank you so much for your support. | |
| If you'd like to leave me any last tips, I'd appreciate that. | |
| Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow. | |
| So tomorrow, I start the audiobook reading for my novel, The Present. | |
| Very thrilling. | |
| Very exciting. Do you think Francis Bacon was really William Shakespeare? | |
| No, I think William Shakespeare was really William Shakespeare. | |
| I want to rewatch some of it. | |
| Some of it. All of it. | |
| Over and over. It was Christopher Marlowe. | |
| I've heard that theory as well. Who cares? | |
| Who cares who wrote Shakespeare? | |
| Who cares who wrote Hamlet? I don't care. | |
| I don't care. It's completely unimportant. | |
| If it's your thing, great. | |
| You know, dig into it. It's like the Who Shot JFK. I guess we've sort of recently found out and nobody seems to care, right? | |
| So, yes, thanks everyone so much. | |
| Appreciate it. Any last tips coming in? | |
| Some of it don't make him take his shirt off. | |
| Thank you guys so much for dropping by today. | |
| A great pleasure. Have you seen my question and can or will you answer it? | |
| I feel that that is a leading question. | |
| So if I haven't answered your question, either I haven't seen it or I've chosen not to answer it. | |
| And so if you haven't told me the question, I don't know in the general waterfall of text that happens. | |
| I appreciate the assertiveness, but I don't know what the question is. | |
| So if you want to give me a question, you can copy and paste it. | |
| First time I managed to get on a live stream and it's ending. | |
| Oh, come on, cry me a river. | |
| I'm having a surprise live stream. | |
| You get to watch, I think, some pretty great philosophy for an hour 20. | |
| And you've got self-pity about this? | |
| Oh, that's just your parents. | |
| Oh, that's parents for sure. | |
| Oh, this, this, this. | |
| It's like sometimes when I play Catan with people, they're like, oh, I just know I'm going to roll a seven. | |
| And they roll a seven. I knew it. | |
| It's like, no, you didn't. | |
| You're trying to do pattern recognition, but there's no pattern. | |
| So you could either say, my gosh, there was a surprise live stream and I was able to attend. | |
| Well, that's really cool. I got to see a live stream. | |
| That's fantastic. How exciting! | |
| As opposed to, oh man, first time I get to be on a live stream and it ends too soon, man. | |
| No, that's a thought. | |
| You can say, wow, I got to catch this live. | |
| I happen to have time when Steph just decided to do a live stream. | |
| How cool is that? Yay! | |
| I can tell my grandchildren I saw a live Freedom mainstream. | |
| Or you can say, yeah, just my luck, man. | |
| Man, I get on a live stream and it ends after only an hour twenty. | |
| Sorry, I'm just waiting for that question to come back. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Yeah, don't do that, man. | |
| Don't do that. Don't do this, woe is me, sad sack, minister of doom and gloom from the kingdom of woe is me. | |
| Don't do it. Don't do it, man, because that will be your life and there's no reason for it. | |
| No reason to do it. What is the link between abuse in childhood and obsessive behavior even when they know it will fail? | |
| What do they get from it? First time catching a live streaming and it's been amazing! | |
| Woo-wee! That's the spirit! | |
| That's the spirit! Now, the other thing you understand, right? | |
| So you're doing a bit of manipulation here. | |
| So when you say... I'll get to that question in a sec. | |
| When you say, oh man, first time I... You know, Eeyore style or Marvin the Paranoid Android. | |
| Oh man, first time I catch a live stream and it's ending... | |
| You're trying to milk my wanting to please so that I'll keep the live stream going. | |
| Hey, maybe it'll work. I don't know. | |
| But yeah, this is like you've got a strategy called I'll get what I want by self-pity. | |
| Unless you are a pre-tween girl, I don't think it's a particularly honorable way to get what you want. | |
| Oh man, I'm first on your live stream and it's ending. | |
| Okay, we'll just go longer. | |
| Don't try and get what you want that way. | |
| People will give you what you want and then run away. | |
| So, all right. So link between abuse and childhood and obsessive behavior. | |
| No, it will fail. So the purpose of it is to fail, right? | |
| The purpose of it is to fail. | |
| So where do stalkers come from? | |
| Stalkers come from people who were savagely rejected and ostracized as children. | |
| So they put themselves in situations where rejection is inevitable. | |
| If you constantly ask women out who are going to say no, that's because you were rejected as a child, probably by your mother. | |
| And so you are replaying that rejection. | |
| Or to put it another way, your mother wants you to keep getting rejected so you never criticize her. | |
| So if your mother rejects you, you're not worthwhile, you're not interesting, I don't care, you're boring, you're uninspiring, you're whatever. | |
| Your mother rejects you. | |
| Your mother never wants you to experience being accepted. | |
| Because if your mother who rejected you, if you then end up experiencing acceptance, then you will feel the difference between rejection and acceptance. | |
| I was never the same after I was truly loved. | |
| Which, again, I've been incredibly blessed and I've earned it too for 21 years to be loved. | |
| You're just not the same. | |
| You're just not the same. People who feed you slop want you to keep eating slop so you'll continue to think that they're decent cooks. | |
| You finally get a decent meal. | |
| They're like, oh my god, this was like Ivan Denisovich Gulag Archipelago slop that I was eating before. | |
| When you get quality, the shit shows up. | |
| So the people who are obsessively failing are programmed to do that So that the people who caused them to fail will never be exposed by that person succeeding. | |
| Do you think that people in my life, when I was younger, really, really wanted me to succeed and be loved and be happy? | |
| Nope. Nope. | |
| Nope. They're programmed to continue failing so that they never expose the people who harmed them. | |
| You know, oh, I'm worthless. | |
| Nobody cares about me. | |
| Everyone's going to reject me. Well, just because your parents mistreat you doesn't mean that they don't want your resources as they age. | |
| It doesn't mean that they don't want the social status of having you around. | |
| It doesn't mean that they don't want you to take care of them in their old age. | |
| So if they treat you badly, they don't want anyone else to treat you well, because then you'll notice the difference. | |
| See? Then you'll notice the difference. | |
| That's why love comes through like this fire tsunami through your life. | |
| What is left standing? | |
| It's like that old song. | |
| Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down, but I did what I did before love came to town. | |
| I did what I did before love came to town. | |
| Before love came to town. | |
| Who are you going to be when love shows up? | |
| When someone genuinely cares about you, sees the greatest and the best within you? | |
| Loves you, commits to you, inspires you, ennobles you, raises you up. | |
| Who are you going to be when love shows up? | |
| How deep are you going to go? | |
| How excavated is your soil and your soul going to be when love comes to town? | |
| What is the town? | |
| where are you even gonna live maybe I was wrong to ever let you down but I did | |
| what I did before love came to town love changes the entire physics of your universe | |
| Love utterly loosens The barrel bonds of history around your potential loosens and destroys them. | |
| You can't be much of anything and you can't achieve much of anything until and unless you are deeply and genuinely loved and you deeply and genuinely love. | |
| No doubt. No games. | |
| No manipulation. Admiration, trust, love, depth, beauty, glory. | |
| Achievements. Without love. | |
| You know, come on. | |
| Without love, you, me, everyone, what are we doing? | |
| Without love, we're just killing time. | |
| Putting one foot in front of the other, eating, shitting, sleeping, playing, working. | |
| Like a decaying machine falling down a well to its death. | |
| You're making love or you're killing time. | |
| You're living in love or you're dying in solitude. | |
| You can hide yourself from here to eternity. | |
| You can pretend you aren't who you are. | |
| You can lie and stuff down your true thoughts and opinions until they stuff you in the fucking ground. | |
| Sure, it's how most people live. | |
| Don't do it. Don't do it. | |
| I mean, don't put yourself at risk. Don't put yourself in danger. | |
| Whether you love or not, you're going to die either way. | |
| And if you love, you will lose. | |
| My wife's going to die before me, most likely, or I'm going to die before my wife and we'll have to live with that loss. | |
| The alternative being what? | |
| The alternative being what? | |
| To whore. To play it safe. | |
| To live small. Rodents under the toenails of giant dinosaurs. | |
| To live underground. | |
| To live little. To live digitally. | |
| To play games with no purpose other than to kill time on a screen. | |
| To not be vulnerable. | |
| To not be desperate. To not be needy. | |
| To not love and trust and surrender. | |
| To all that is greater than our petty egos. | |
| To merge with another. | |
| To fully trust and worship another. | |
| You don't have that. | |
| Well, what do you have? | |
| Some breath? | |
| Some blood? | |
| Some wasteful passage of time? | |
| Some spots, some wrinkles, some forgetfulness, some failing, some falling through the hospital bed into the pit to be food for worms. | |
| You let people into your life or worms will just gnaw into your head when you're dead. | |
| What are you going to do between the here and hereafter if you're not in love? | |
| And the love might not even be a person. | |
| The love could be beauty. It could be truth. | |
| It could be communication. | |
| It could be poetry. It could be engineering. | |
| It could be some passion, something. | |
| Only connect. Only connect. | |
| Only connect. | |
| What are you hoarding yourself for? | |
| What are you living small for? | |
| Why? Do you think it Gets you off the hook of mortality? | |
| Do you think that grim father fucking death is just going to step over you if you live small enough? | |
| Oh, if I shrink to the size of an atom and don't risk anything and don't ever be vulnerable and don't ever be dependent and don't ever need someone, I get to be immortal. | |
| Nope. We all know. | |
| But, you know, it's important to be reminded. | |
| You hoard yourself. You die with your hands empty. | |
| You surrender yourself. | |
| You die with your life full. | |
| Whatever you give away, you get in multitudes. | |
| Whatever you hoard turns to ash in your heart long before you turn into fertilizer in the ground. | |
| Let's get to your comments. | |
| Live without love is not fun, but age is an issue. | |
| I've felt real glory once. | |
| Nothing feels greater. Yeah, this is so Christians say, this glory, this beauty, this joy of existence. | |
| Yeah, it's what we live for. | |
| Foreigner, I want to know what love is. | |
| Don't do that shit, man. | |
| Come on. When somebody is really passionately talking about that which is greatest and best and deepest in life, coming up with a cheesy fucking pop reference is a way of cheapening the entire interaction. | |
| You know, I remember when I was a... | |
| I had a very cynical friend when I was a kid, in my teens, and... | |
| I was struggling to articulate something. | |
| Maybe I was 19 or 20. | |
| We were in a car and I was struggling to articulate something which is like I want things to stay the same. | |
| Like everybody has this thing like you graduate high school and this has been your life and you kind of want things to stay the same but if they stay the same Then you don't progress, right? | |
| So we want stability, we want things to stay the same, but also that means we don't progress, and that's tough, right? | |
| So I was struggling to articulate this, and he's like, there are places I remember all my life, though some have changed. | |
| And it's like, I was really trying to articulate something very important to me, and again, just cheesy pop references. | |
| What are you doing? I'm trying to tell you How to make your life glorious and you're interrupting the conversation with cheesy song references. | |
| Saying that this level of passion and depth and commitment and beauty and treasure in life is the equivalent of some cheesy song from 40 years ago. | |
| Not a joke. I really do want to know. | |
| I never have been loved. | |
| Now, see, that's honest. Music speaks to me. | |
| That was one, no offense intended. | |
| Well, see, now you're assuming that I'm incorrect. | |
| I could be. I could be incorrect, of course. | |
| But if you've never been loved, right? | |
| So let me go back. This is what annoyed me about this. | |
| So foreigner, I want to know what love is. | |
| And you've got a little song, you've got little musical symbols, you've got little music notes and all of that. | |
| So it sounds kind of boppy and cheesy, right? | |
| And I'm telling you what love is. | |
| Love is the greatest treasure in the world. | |
| Love is the reward for breaking conformity by being virtuous. | |
| You get pleasure out of being a conformist. | |
| We all do. I do do. | |
| Everybody. Everybody gets pleasure out of conforming. | |
| Not standing out. | |
| And you have the choice. You can conform and you lose love. | |
| Because to conform is to not be yourself. | |
| Why choose me? There's this video online of like the sororities and all the girls look the same. | |
| All the girls look the same. | |
| And there's these guys driving by looking out the window. | |
| Hundreds and hundreds of girls all running up and down the street. | |
| All look the same. And they're mocking, right? | |
| Oh, you'll never find another woman like me. | |
| I'm the one special girl. | |
| There's nobody else like me. | |
| So if you're not yourself, if you don't think for yourself, if you don't reason with yourself, if you're not honest with the people around you, you're indistinguishable from anyone else, and the only reason you'll be chosen is for looks of vanity or money or whatever. | |
| You'll never be chosen for who you are. | |
| So you get the pleasure of conformity or you get the joy of love. | |
| You get the relief of conformity or the joy of love. | |
| That's it. Because to be virtuous is to be non-conformist in an increasingly immoral world. | |
| To be virtuous is to be non-conformist. | |
| So poof, that's gone. You don't get the joy of conformity anymore. | |
| It's gone. Dead. Buried. | |
| You lose that. It's painful. | |
| But think for yourself. | |
| You get the pleasures of integrity, of virtue, and of love. | |
| Because of what society offers you. | |
| It says, well, you can never be loved, but we won't attack you. | |
| We'll approve of you. We'll think you're a good, nice person. | |
| We'll say what a wonderful person you are. | |
| You won't get loved. No integrity. | |
| No courage. No moral courage. | |
| No virtue. Never be really happy with yourself. | |
| But in the moment, you'll feel better because you'll be approved of. | |
| It's virtue signaling. Self-righteousness. | |
| All the woke stuff, right? | |
| Or that's the devil, right? | |
| The devil will give you relief at the cost of love. | |
| Sell your soul. We'll give you relief. | |
| We'll give you approval. We'll give you acceptance. | |
| On the other side, there's people like me saying, fuck conformity. | |
| Conformity is worse than death. | |
| Think for yourself and you can be loved. | |
| But if you don't think for yourself, you can only be approved of. | |
| Which means that you're useful cog in the machinery of human subjugation. | |
| It's a terrible deal. | |
| I understand it. | |
| It's a completely understandable deal in the short run. | |
| Totally understandable. And you get approval. | |
| Because we have the angel and the devil. | |
| And the devil says, feel good. | |
| And the angel says, be good. | |
| Feel good or be good. | |
| Feel good or be good. Now the more you focus on feeling good, the more you corrupt the world. | |
| Because the more the people will punish and reward you for obedience to insanity. | |
| And the more you focus on being good, yeah, you'll be ostracized, you'll be attacked. | |
| But you get to be loved. It's the only possibility you have of being loved is being yourself. | |
| Why should you be chosen over everyone else? | |
| Why? Why should you be loved? | |
| Why should you be the one chosen? | |
| Why should anyone want to sacrifice for you? | |
| Why should anyone want to join you in your life journey? | |
| Why? | |
| What is different about you that she's gonna pick you out of a crowd? | |
| Why? | |
| Pick me, pick me, pick. | |
| Why? Why should anyone pick you? | |
| Why? Why should you listen to me? | |
| Why should you tune into these shows? | |
| Well, hopefully I'm going to be saying things that are essential that other people aren't saying. | |
| So the people who conform, which again I understand. | |
| I understand. It's a drug. | |
| Makes you feel good in the moment, right? | |
| Makes you feel good at the moment. You burn down the entire cathedrals of your future, but by God, you feel good in the moment. | |
| Feel good. Everybody's happy with me who's an idiot. | |
| I'm being cheered by zombies. | |
| Yay! What does it cost me? | |
| Integrity, self-respect, self-esteem, love, virtue. | |
| any effect on the world that's beneficial. | |
| All the idiots approve my idiocy. | |
| The End. | |
| The End. | |
| . | |
| What do you want on your tombstone? | |
| I was super popular among the brainless. | |
| Take the flame for our truth, to the people around you. | |
| Whoever's left standing will love you and you will love I've lived both sides of the equation man | |
| There's no... | |
| It's a long life to be approved of by the empty-headed. | |
| Whatever you can do to be the most authentically yourself, the most honest and curious and direct, whatever you can do in your life... | |
| Look, we all have to make our compromises. | |
| I get that. There's no sort of shining perfection that ends up anywhere other than across... | |
| But whatever you can do to be more genuine, more authentic, more honest, more open, more direct. | |
| Do it. | |
| You either find peace through integrity or you sell your integrity off piecemeal. | |
| You disassemble yourself and you sell yourself off to the highest bidder of applause and punishment. | |
| Like a jigsaw puzzle being broken into nothing. | |
| Not worth it. And you are going to need, in the trials of the world to come, my friends, | |
| you are going to need people who genuinely love you. | |
| Because the people who only approve on you will betray you. | |
| And it's going to get increasingly risky to have people willing to betray you in your life in the future. | |
| I guarantee you that. | |
| All right. Thanks everyone so much for a great conversation today. | |
| Lots of love. Any last tips coming in? | |
| I would be overjoyed and grateful to receive. | |
| Just click on the tip thing and I think... | |
| I think I earned my daily bread today. | |
| I really think I did. And thank you so much for everyone who has supported and everyone who has dropped by and everyone who has helped this conversation go. | |
| I know it's a jazz club, not a stadium these days. | |
| You spend your time in the wilderness and then you see what happens. | |
| So lots of love from me up here. | |
| Have yourself a wonderful... | |
| Wonderful evening. And I will talk to you guys early next week. | |
| And I will be releasing the audiobook chapter by chapter of The Present. | |
| You can get it at freedomain.locals.com. | |
| And if you'd like to help out the show, you're listening to this later. | |
| Thank you so much. freedomain.com forward slash donate. | |
| Do really need your help. | |
| I would hugely appreciate it. | |
| And can you pin your history of philosophers? | |
| Yes, I will. I will do that. Thank you. | |
| Alright, take care my friends. |
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