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April 22, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:36:53
STOP MANAGING CRAZY PEOPLE!
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Time Text
Oh, yeah!
How are you guys doing this evening?
Friday night! Friday night!
I can't believe it is the 21st.
Lo, yay, verily, the 21st of Avril!
Avril, I tell you.
2023. Sing for us.
Hit me with a Y if you want a music trivia.
Ooh, it's kind of obscure.
Only the fanboys will know for sure.
Yes. I'm happy to sing for my supper.
Remember, you can donate to have me stop singing.
Dig deep. All right.
Who's going to get this one?
Ooh, this is obscure.
I want you to think of being in a nightclub in London, maybe around Hammersmith, in 1973, a place called the Rainbow Room.
And it's an encore.
and Freddie steps forward in all his glorious satin tight Gumby gay
magnificence and sings well she's gone gone this morning see what a fool I've
been Oh Lord I say what a fool I've been anyway it's a great blue song that Brian
made rewrote for Queen.
The album version is seriously gay, but it's really, really great.
The blues stuff that he do, See What A Fool I Been.
My dog ain't too hungry.
Yeah, what a fool I've been.
Yeah, it's a great... I did some great blues back in the day.
I was actually quite excited. So one of the songs that really started to put hair on my chest was Manish Boy by Muddy Waters.
Everything, everything, everything gonna be alright this morning.
And it's, I spell M-A child, and that says mannish boy.
I just remember listening to that, driving in a big-ass truck, doing my gold panning, screaming mannish boy at the top of my lungs, and it's like, yes, I may have broken orbit from the single-mother testosterone-sucking vampire life that I grew up with, so... Yes.
I hope that you will check out that song.
Those are great songs, in my humble opinion.
I was thinking of doing something from Les Mis, but I only have amateur vocal chords.
So, good guttural notes.
Oh, yeah. Manish boy.
And the guys in the background, yeah.
Just, I smell M-A child.
That was really good. And then, for some reason, he just did the ad goes, don't hurt me, don't hurt me, don't hurt me, child.
Please don't hurt me, I'm a manish boy.
But yeah, the blues saved my ass, man.
Ah, let that boy boogie-woogie, cause it's in him and his guts to get out.
Just something about that sort of Black Delta experience and how it contrasted with the British boy sporting school fruity English bastard thing.
That collision produced some fairly robust masculinity, but the blues...
They really, really saved my ass, man.
I used to listen to a lot of the blues, and they're sort of earthy and meaty, muscular kind of stuff.
So, it's Johnny Winter. It's the main screamer in the background.
Johnny Winter, the guitarist?
Wow. Yeah, and Sam Cooke did a fair amount to help me as well with that, because he's got some very good meaty stuff.
Change Gonna Come, just one of the greatest songs.
One of the greatest vocals ever recorded, man.
There's nobody alive. Even Tina Turner tried it.
Couldn't do it justice. So, yeah, I'll talk about the blues one day.
Just what a salvation.
They were, for me, just unapologetically masculine, meaty, muscular, mammalian music.
It's just, that's a lot of M's, but, you know, masticating Molyneux is in the mouth.
So, yeah, how are you guys doing tonight?
Listen, you've got questions, comments, don't get me started on music, man.
I'll be here till the cows come sashaying home.
Listening to Otis Redding.
Oh yeah, baby.
Sitting in the morning, son.
Yeah. And one of the things that happened when I was in my late teens, I went to go and see Otis Clay at the Elma Combo, downtown Toronto.
It was ten bucks to get in, man.
Otis Clay blew my mind.
What a singer, man.
He just came out there in his three-piece suit and just a big shiny ball of black masculine gloriousness.
He just sang his heart out, man.
He sweated all the way through a three-piece suit over the course of his set.
It was just fantastic.
It was just fantastic. I actually dragged all my friends down.
You know, you ever have a thing where something just blows your mind, changes life in a way, and you try and introduce your friends to it, and they're like, meh.
I try not to take it too personally, but something that just absolutely blows you away and tickles your spine from top to toe, and you bring your friends over and they're like, yeah, it was good, it was good, yeah, it was good.
I remember, it's funny, a couple of things, like I remember the first night I played Dungeons and Dragons, we played the Caves of Chaos, and a friend of my brother's was the dungeon master, and he ended up actually becoming a professor, and I saw it, the orcs, like the humanoids with the pig faces in the forest.
I saw it like blindingly, vividly that night.
And I was just like, holy crap, what a lightning strike to the cerebral cortex of imagination this game is.
And I just loved it from there and then played it for years.
And of course, when I first came across...
Aristotle and Ayn Rand and, oh, just, God, I just like being pulled through a door by your ass into the most blinding portal of ancestor glory that you could possibly imagine.
It's just incredible.
So, Shakespeare, yeah, Shakespeare had the same thing.
I didn't really get much into Shakespeare until I was in theater school and I read Hamlet start to end and Like goosebumps all the way through.
Hamlet is just mind-bogglingly, staggeringly fantastic.
I mean, except for the last third, which kind of blows.
But, you know, those speeches are fantastic.
I learned that you just have to commit.
You just have to commit.
Oh, you got that with Faust by Goethe?
Yeah, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, which was his first big book about a guy who's like really dramatic and really ends up in love with this woman he can't have and so on.
This highly goth-like, hypersensitive...
Artistic, empty, shallow, manipulative personality that kind of comes out in sort of a lot of modern woke stuff.
That was first outlined, I think, in the best way by Goethe.
And then, I mean, I spent 18 hours straight reading...
Crime and punishment. I still remember sitting.
I had this ratty, ratty couch in my apartment.
Well, I stayed.
I shared a room with a guy who's actually still a friend of mine.
I shared a room for a year. Well, a year, and then we were roommates the next year.
and I still remember sitting on that ratty couch in the middle of the night in Montreal just reading
Crime and Punishment. I just couldn't stop. You couldn't have paid me
any amount of money to stop reading that book. And I liked his other books. I never made it all
the way through the Demon. I never made it through...
I did make it through The Brothers Cut Us Off but it was good but not great.
And I've read some of his other stuff.
I've never read Poor Folk, though I should, of course.
But that crime and punishment thing was like, God almighty.
Fathers and Sons. That was also a book that, I mean, that book influenced me so much, I ended up writing a, adapting it to the stage, and I directed that as a play.
And that also was a fantastic, fantastic book.
I hope that you will check out my...
I just finished reading the last chapter.
It's about a 13-hour and change audiobook of The Present.
And, you know, it's kind of funny.
The Present is awesome.
Thank you. Yeah, let me read you a couple of people who've just finished it.
I won't put any spoilers in.
I won't put any spoilers in.
But let me just get you some of the comments because it really is...
It really is very, very good indeed.
All right. News feed.
Newsy feedy. News feed.
Let's see here.
Ah, yes. So people are just finishing it up, and they said...
Wonderful ending...
This was a great but real cliffhanger ending, and it doesn't feel over.
I love the development of Ian and Ben's relationship.
It was very, very sweet.
I also love the way the book ends.
Sad to have the book end, but it was very enjoyable reading.
I don't want to listen to this episode because I don't want this book to end.
My favorite part of the present, and I will remember this for some time, is early on when
Rachel first sees a picture of Ola and goes, oh my goodness, internally followed by her
her uterus twitching.
We all like to think of her why it's had this exact same reaction when viewing us for the first time.
Yes. I love the end of the journey.
This chapter left me wanting. Yeah, that's fair.
I stopped myself, this woman, I stopped myself from putting a string of heart emojis here, but I'll just simply type, bravo, and thank you.
I love it, man, says somebody else.
I'd love to hear more fantastic work, Steph.
Yeah, it's a really good book.
and of course when you have finished the present and of course you know it's
about the present time but it's also saying that the present living in the
present is a gift it is a present to you and of course the book is a present to
you because it's free and if you subscribe at freedom.locals.com you
also get access to the sequel to the present called the future which is my
Atlas Shrugged book It is my portrayal of utopia in the future.
Kind of what we're all doing this crazy stuff for as a whole.
So I hope that you will check that out.
If you like my novels, there is justpoornovel.com.
There is almostnovel.com.
and you can also go to fdrurl.com forward slash tgoa for the God of Atheists, which
is a comedy that I wrote many, many, many years ago.
And I'm very pleased with that.
I'm actually already making notes for a sequel to the present called The Future Tense.
I know. Just playing around.
Just playing around with language.
If you would like to tip, if you finish the book, or you just appreciate what it is I do, I would really, really appreciate it.
Will you write the past next?
Well, I've done historical novels before, so...
Alright, so let us get to your comments, your questions, your issues.
just in case I missed anything at the beginning a
alright nothing too early Let's get down to here.
Any rant bottled up? I mean, I'm sure we'll come out over the course.
Somebody says, thank you for the tip.
Hey Steph, I consistently have people around me that have various addictions and I can't seem to find others that have sorted themselves out.
Is this a result of not living out virtue in my life?
Thanks. I constantly have people around me that have various addictions and I can't seem to find others that have sorted themselves out.
Yeah, so you are a helper.
Probably. I mean, obviously, this is my theory.
Tell me if I'm wrong. So you're a helper.
And what that means is that you seek out people who you can feel superior to and you can claim to help.
The reality is you can't help them.
You don't actually help them because if you want to feel superior...
I'm not saying this is like some vanity thing.
I'm saying this is just how you survived as a kid, which you were around really dysfunctional people and you decided to find a way to try and feel superior to them, which I understand and appreciate.
I'm not trying to criticize. I'm sort of pointing out the pattern of the way these things go.
I just noticed the monitor here is like hanging by a thread.
Let's not have it crash over in the middle of the show.
Yeah, why do you need to find dysfunctional people in your life?
I mean, I remember when I was in my 20s.
You probably have this experience if you came from a really dysfunctional background.
In my 20s, I'd meet a girl, start talking to a girl, and if she started talking about dysfunctions, I'd feel like, oh, okay, so we, you know, we...
I know this world. I can navigate this world.
Whereas, you know, really functional women, although I didn't really meet that many.
I was in an arts program.
But yeah, really functional women, I don't know.
I didn't really have much to say to them.
But the women who had problems and messes and various paralysis and so on, there's a lot of women out there who are like scared of the phone, scared of strangers, scared of new information.
They're scared of change.
They're scared of progress. They're scared of just about anything.
And it's pretty paralytic as a whole.
Women tend to flourish in a hearty mode of male protection and so on.
And men tend to flourish when protecting their families.
So putting the chicks out there, in a sense, naked and raw to the elements, for some, that's perfectly where they want to be.
But for a lot, I think it provokes a fair amount of paranoia and jumpiness.
So... It's funny because you say, I constantly have people around me that have various addictions.
I don't think it's clear to you as yet, which is no hate, no negativity.
I'm just sort of pointing it out. I don't think it's clear to you as yet that...
If you are surrounded by addicts, you're addicted to addicts, right?
Your addiction is their addiction, right?
They're addicted to alcoholism, say, or drugs, or sex, or whatever, right?
Or gambling. They're addicted to these things, and you're addicted to being around them.
So you're not, like, separate from the addicts.
All right. Happy Friday, as I say.
More coins will have to wait until next week.
Renewing my subscription was first priority.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Must read Crime and Punishment is...
Yes. Hey, Steph!
Finished the present on my drive home from work today.
Amazing book! Will there be a third book to bridge the gap between the present and the future?
Yes. Yes, there will.
Between the present and the future is 500 years, so I'm going to have to do something to cross that.
But, you know, okay, hit me.
Let's get your feedback here, right?
I mean, you are the audience.
Without you, I'm nothing, at least publicly.
So... Hit me with minus 10, you don't want me to write another novel.
Plus 10, you do, recognizing, of course, that a novel is very time-consuming and there's a lot of other stuff that I don't do while I'm working on that.
Minus 10, you don't really want me to write a novel.
You want me to focus on truth abouts or call-in shows or whatever.
Or plus 10, you really do are desperate for a novel between the present and the future.
Let me just get your feedback here.
Let's see here. Ten plus.
Eight. Eight point five. Eight.
Plus seven. It's a hard choice.
Minus ten. All right. There's one person who doesn't want it.
Plus five. Ten. Plus five.
All right. Seems to be more pro than con.
By all means, write more, but don't feel pressured.
Oh, my friend.
Do you want me to rant on that statement?
I find that statement just...
Listen, not you, and again, I say this with all love and respect.
That is a really, really annoying statement.
By all means, write more, but don't feel pressured.
The hell are you doing managing my emotions for me?
What am I, three years old?
But don't feel pressured. Who are you to say whether I should or shouldn't feel pressured?
Who are you to say whether pressure may or may not be a good thing for me?
Who are you to say whether I'm going to experience it or not?
Whether I'm going to be motivated by it or flattened by it or whatever?
Like, why? Don't feel pressured! I mean, why would you be focusing on...
I'm asking you for your feelings and you're trying to manage mine!
What are you doing? I'm literally asking you for feedback.
I'm on my knees begging for what I should do next that is the best value to you, the best value to philosophy, the best Way that I can spend the limited time I have left on this planet, which we all have, but you know, 56 is a little different, right?
So I'm literally asking you for your feelings, and you're like, but hey, man, don't feel pressured.
It's like, I'm asking.
It's like, I'm begging, please, God, give me a piece of carrot cake.
It's like, okay, here's your carrot cake, but don't feel pressured to eat it.
It's like, what are you talking about?
I just begged for the carrot cake.
Of course I'm going to eat it. So you expressing your feelings is exactly what I asked for.
It's not pressure.
When I ask you for your feelings and you give me your feelings, your enthusiasm is not pressure for me.
It's exactly what I was begging for.
So when I'm asking, because I'm telling you, again, this is just a conversation online, but this is a good dress rehearsal for what goes on in your life as a whole.
Don't manage other people's feelings.
And I'll tell you why it's annoying for me.
And again, I don't take it personally.
I'm just telling you why it's annoying for me.
It doesn't mean that you're doing that or it's wrong.
I'm just telling you why it's annoying for me.
It's like, Jesus, man, I can manage my own emotions.
I mean, do you see me going off completely unhinged, no emotional control, sticking my head through the camera, fellating the microphone?
Maybe that might be a bit ambitious because I'm not that gymnastic, but...
I mean, do you see me losing control emotionally and screaming at people or hands shaking or being so pressured that I backed into a corner and lash out?
I mean, do you see me over the years being wildly out of control of my emotions or surrendering to massive amounts or even tiny...
This is a tiny amount of pressure, right?
I mean, I... Look, let's be straight.
I experienced as a public intellectual just about the most pressure to shut the hell up of just about anyone in the modern world.
Did I? Did I retract one single thing that I knew to be true?
Did I apologize for one single thing that I had reason and evidence to believe?
Did you see me Disavow anything that I ever said that I still believe to be true.
Ever. And the amount of pressure that was put on me, one day it'll all come out.
The amount of pressure that was put on me was pretty staggering, right?
Did I fumble? Did I crumble?
Did I fall? Did I fold?
Did I fail you? I think not.
I don't think I did.
So I think that I've earned the respect of I manage my own emotions.
And when I particularly ask you for feedback saying, well, don't feel pressured, it's like, What are you talking about?
When have I ever shown an indication that I needed to be handled like I'm some fragile cryogenically frozen Fabergé egg and you're on a trampoline on Jupiter?
I don't know. It's just...
I say this to you not because I'm offended or upset or angry.
I say this to you because you are in a situation where you and those around you are foggy blending.
There's no delineation.
You just kind of weave into each other and you're past each other's skin and you're massaging each other's tender spots and you've got your sinewy serpentine hands up each other's spines.
And you take a deep breath and they sneeze and you bend over and their back hurts a little and like you're all just merged in together.
See, here's the thing.
If you're in a relationship with me, I want you to be yourself.
Because everyone else is taking it.
I want you to be yourself. And if I ask for feedback, you can give me very strong, emphatic feedback.
Now, if, for some reason, I feel pressured and overwhelmed, whose job is that to manage?
Is it your job?
Is it your job to manage my feelings?
And I know you think you're being polite and all of that, but it's not.
It's not polite. And again, I don't take this personally.
I'm just saying it's disrespectful to the other person.
It's disrespectful to the other person.
And it means that you have been around people, and probably still are, at least in your head, you have to manage their emotions.
And what that means is that if they experience something negative, they will blame you.
So you've had people in your life, you tell them what you want, you tell them what you think, and they say, whoa, that's too much, I'm really feeling pressured here.
Pressured. So they feel pressured.
Oh, it's overwhelming!
To which you say, well, I'm sorry, I'd be happy to help you manage that.
That's got to be upsetting.
I mean, please understand, I'm not going to change because you're upset.
Because that would be feeding the power of your upset.
You understand? Whatever you feed in people tends to grow.
Whatever you stop feeding in people tends to diminish, right?
Whatever muscle you exercise tends to grow.
Whatever muscle you don't exercise tends to diminish.
It becomes flaccid, right? So if people around you are upset and then they say, you have to change because I'm upset.
You're like, no, I have too much respect for you to do that.
And I have too much love for you to feed the worst aspects of you.
I mean, if your best friend, you're going hiking and he cries out and a tree fell on his legs and he's trapped underneath, you help him, right?
You lift up the tree.
You get him to safety. You get him to a doctor.
You don't put another tree on his leg.
You don't sit there and, oh my god, I took us on the wrong hike.
I'm still, oh, right? You don't collapse into yourself.
You help your friend. And if you say things that trigger people, you can have sympathy.
Oh, I said something. Oh, you're upset.
But they're not upset because you said something.
Because it's just words.
And words don't have the power to make people upset.
If somebody says to me, you have the worst hairstyle ever, I can't believe the way you part your hair.
The parting of your hair is the ugliest thing I've ever seen.
I'd be like, well, unless you're looking through the tunnel of time, this doesn't apply to me, right?
Or if they say to me, you know, your brown eyes are the exact color of rat poop.
I'm sorry you're colorblind, but, you know, my eyes are blue.
So... People saying stuff doesn't have the power to make you feel bad.
But what happens is when people get triggered, they have a choice.
They can either handle their own emotions in a mature and respectful fashion or they can try and bully and control people around them by asking the people around them or demanding them to change.
But if you feed the bully in those around you, Don't be shocked when you end up being bullied.
You fed it. You're the one who surrendered.
You're the one who knelt down before they're upset and said, okay, I'll change, right?
I don't mean to pressure you so somebody feels pressured because you have a strong opinion.
That's their emotion to deal with.
Give them some respect.
Give them some real respect.
And don't feed this petty, manipulative crap.
I'm not saying that you are.
I'm just saying that in general, in life as a whole, don't do that.
All kids will try to manipulate you and props and respect for trying.
Good for you, man. You absolutely, as a kid, you should absolutely try and do that.
You should fake cry.
You should pretend to be upset.
You should sneak stuff.
You should try absolutely everything to get your way.
I mean, kudos. You're a human being.
That's how we're born and that's what we do.
We kind of burrow up through evolution.
But you don't You don't let them get away with it because you love them and you don't want to feed that manipulative side.
You want them to get what they want honestly.
So if you give your honest feedback to someone when asked, and if that person says, whoa, you're pressuring me way too much, But like, oh, so you're experiencing pressure.
Yeah, you're pressuring me. No, no, no.
You're experiencing the sense of pressure.
That's not me pressuring you because I'm not pressuring you.
I'm not pressuring you. You asked me for my feedback.
I gave you my feedback. If you feel pressured, I mean, listen, I have sympathy for sure.
Oh, don't put that on me. Like, come on, let's be reasonable here.
I'm a separate human being. I'm not trying to pressure you.
I'm not pressuring you. You asked me for my feedback.
Like if I say, should I write another book?
Hell yeah, but don't feel pressured.
It's like, no, no, no.
I asked for your enthusiasm. I asked for your honesty, right?
So people around you say you're pressuring me way too much.
I sympathize. I sympathize with your experience of feeling pressured.
Well, no, you said this and that made me feel pressured.
Nope. No, it didn't.
No, it didn't. I slap you across the face.
Yes, you're going to get a welt. But I say things and you then experience pressure.
Those are your feelings and I can sympathize with that for sure.
I really can. But I'm not going to allow that to change my behavior because that's giving your victimization power and trapping you in being a cry-bully.
It's how you love people.
How you love people is you simply...
I mean, there's a lot of good things that you do to love people.
But one of the main things you do to love people is you never, ever, ever feed their manipulative side anything.
Any meat, any obedience, any power.
Again, with love and sympathy.
You're pressuring me. No, you're experiencing pressure, which I sympathize with, but no, it's not me.
I'm just telling you my thoughts and feelings.
Right? You shut up!
Okay, well, no, I won't do that.
And you can certainly choose to not have a relationship with me, but no, I'm not going to change my behavior.
Because you feel upset.
Because that makes you manipulative, and that gives great strength to your upset and turns it into a tool of power, and I love you too much to put another log on you, which your parents obviously put one on, and if I obey all this nonsense, then I'm just, I'm not loving you, I'm logging you, so to speak.
All right. Take on me.
All right, what have we got here? Maybe a new book, but give it some time to focus on other stuff.
Oh, yeah. No, listen. I mean, a book is...
It's three months to write and three months to edit and do the audiobook.
And then I'll put it out as a Kindle, I'm sure, or something like that.
But yes, I will definitely take some time.
All right. Oh, Asimov's Foundation-like short stories?
Boy, oh boy, let me tell you.
In the science fiction and fantasy world...
Quite a lot of pedophilia.
It's kind of creepy.
Alright. Rants.
I love you, Steph.
Love you back. Thank you very much.
I just got here.
WTF is this stream x-rated?
What is it that I saw?
The top 1% of earners on OnlyFans earn the equivalent of $15 an hour.
$15 an hour to sell your soul and degrade the entire culture.
Excellent. And this woman was saying that she was in an Uber, and I guess the Uber driver recognized her from some OnlyFans subscription.
He turned around and showed her a picture of her own butthole.
Why anybody who's not a proctologist wants to look at somebody else's butthole?
I can't possibly imagine.
Somebody says, one of the biggest things I had to deal with in therapy was not making myself responsible for other people's emotions.
Made romantic relationships difficult and in retrospect made me act manipulatively towards others.
Yes. So, of course, what happens is, if somebody says, well, you're upsetting, right?
I remember when I was annoyed with a girlfriend once, and she's like, you're scaring me way too much!
Okay, I mean, I guess me being upset or me being angry is upsetting for you, but I'm not a dangerous person, except for anti-rational people.
But... Yeah, so if you obey people's...
If you plow yourself under the other people's neurosis, you just end up resenting them.
Anybody who...
What threatens you into obedience is simply sowing the endless seeds of resentment.
Like, the relationship is done. It may take a while to sort of fade out and die out and all of that, but the relationship is done.
I mean, if somebody says, well, you're pressuring me way too much.
Oh, sorry. Okay, I'll stop doing that.
It's like, your relationship is done.
It's done. I mean, it may take a long time to unwind, but yeah, your relationship is done.
Because if you obey, because she's escalating or she's aggressive or she's threatening or she's upset, well, you've just fed her.
She's going to do more and more of it and you're going to get more and more constrained and more and more confined.
And the relationship is done.
You know, like if you jump out of a plane really, really high up, I mean, you're dead.
It's going to take a while, but you're dead.
Somebody says, just put in a purchase of your book, Revolutions.
Looking forward to it. Love your work, Steph.
Freedomainnft.com. You can buy a copy of Revolutions.
I don't know what the gas fees are in Ethereum.
That was completely insane a while ago, but...
All right. Freedomainnft.com.
You can buy a copy of Revolutions, which was my first real book.
It was my first real book. All right.
I don't know what this INFJ... Yeah, I don't...
I don't do that stuff.
My mother went down manipulation for many years, stood up, spoke truth, not heard a word in several months.
The peace of mind is refreshing.
Yeah, it's the old question.
For women, it's do you love me or do you just love sex with me?
Do you love sexual access? For men it's like do you love me or do you love my resources and compliance?
Plus 12 and writing more novels on novellas jumping forward in time perhaps
Yeah, I mean I could do one every 50 years for sure.
I've had a desire.
I mean, the protagonist in the future is a pretty evil dude.
But I've had an urge to write a truly evil character, like, inside and out.
Inside and out. All right.
Let's get your questions and comments.
Questions and comments. So parents did not want to face the emotions or actual needs of their kids.
So they tell the kids to shut up.
Now the kid grows bigger and can't handle others' feelings and thoughts.
So tells them to shut up.
Psycho repeats very sad. Yeah.
Steph, what is the proper restitution for someone who made a false police report about you and tried to have you arrested?
Is it possible to have a relationship with such a person without an attorney present for each interaction?
You're kidding me. You're not serious, are you?
Ass man. That's not my nickname, that's his.
The proper restitution for someone who made a false police report and tried to get you arrested.
Have a relationship with such a person?
Are you fucking crazy?
No. I mean, come on, you're trolling.
Like, this can't be a real...
You know, this can't be a real question.
I'm not getting sucked in.
Of course, the answer is absolutely not.
I have absolutely nothing to do with such a person who tried to sick you on...
sick the state on you and get you thrown into the rape rooms called modern prisons.
Yeah, I would say no.
I do not have anything to do with anyone, even in the conceivable...
Oh, it was a real question?
Jeez. Do you want to give me any more details or no?
I'll let you type. Somebody had a question right at the top here, which I've skipped over, and they keep retyping it, so I do want to...
Oops, what the hell is that?
What the hell? All right, let me just get this question.
I know we haven't lived through a global recession for a few generations, but it's hard to imagine the scenario in the present where the whole world grinds to an actual halt.
Can you flesh out the big slowdown a bit with some examples from more recent history also?
The book is effing terrifying, by the way.
Alright, let me have a look at this person.
I'm just curious. I'll be gone in a day or two.
Alright, let me just go have a look.
That's a big-ass ask.
Let me just see here. Yeah.
Well, I guess you just joined.
Alright. Five bucks a month.
All right. You're asking, it's a big ask for a fiver a month, but all right.
So the big slowdown, so the big slowdown occurs, is occurring as the result of the boomers.
The boomers were the last generation that was pure meritocracy, right?
Pure meritocracy. And so the people who built the infrastructure and maintained the infrastructure are all retiring, and they're being replaced by people who are there for quota reasons, for political reasons.
They're not there as a result of a meritocracy.
And so you have, on average, far less competent people who are trying to run things developed, designed, and created by far more competent people, and it's all just going to start falling apart.
I mean, like the reason that we don't have the Concord anymore.
When I was a kid, the Concord was like the next fifth thing and they had to shut it down.
Why did they have to shut it down? Because they couldn't get maintenance engineers or anything intelligent enough to actually keep it running.
So a lot of the great slowdown is to do with just less and less and less competent people.
I have a friend of mine. He bought a home in a warm place in the States and his entire balcony...
It wasn't sealed for weather.
Like, it wasn't sealed for water.
And this place with big storms and all of that.
So, you know, it goes out on the balcony.
He was saying, yeah, it started to sink down.
So he had to pay an ungodly amount of money to have people come in, rip up the balcony, reseal it, put the balcony back together again.
So, you know, a penny wise, pound foolish, right?
You have to pay really competent people five times the amount than you would have if they had just done it right the first time.
So, yeah, things are just, you know, you can see this happening in South Africa where you have the meritocracy has fallen away and now it's all political.
And, yeah. You are just going to see, I mean, is it Biden now says that people who have a good credit score have to pay an extra 1% on their mortgage to subsidize those with a bad credit score?
Because Lord knows, getting people into houses they couldn't afford was nothing to do with the original 07-08 financial crash.
So, yeah, you're just going to have people who are giving the thousand-yard stare to complicated things, and it's all just going to start...
I think it's going to get to the point where it's just going to become pretty dangerous to even fly and so on.
A society that is built on a meritocracy can't survive the fall of that meritocracy.
It just can't do it. And the way that it does fall apart is pretty terrible.
I mean, there's lots of things as well, but that's a big thing.
Alright. I once had a conversation with a colleague who was questioning my religious beliefs.
I asked him, what about love?
How do you explain it? His answer was that love was nothing more than a conditioned response to a chemical reaction in the brain.
Also, you can get a similar response from eating chocolate.
Do you think he is correct?
Oh, that's pretty tragic, right?
That's pretty tragic.
Love is the honor given to you by virtuous people as the prize for virtue.
Love is the honor and respect given to you by virtuous people as the prize for virtue.
I did this little thing a day or two ago where I said, if you want to be loved, you have to think for yourself.
Because I'm sure you've been around like the NPCs, right?
You know everything that's going to come out of their mouth.
You know every opinion they're going to have.
Nothing surprises you. Nothing's interesting.
And they think that people are going to like them because they never upset anyone.
And they just, okay, you won't be loved.
You won't be loved because there's no one to love any more than you can fall in love with your companion in Skyrim or something like that.
I remember I played Morrowind for a while and...
I was like, oh wait, I had a guy who played, I had an NPC who was playing with me, and he was just gone at some point.
I hadn't played in a while. I literally, I felt so mad, I retraced my steps and found him in a dungeon where I closed the door and he was stuck there, and I released him.
Of course, it makes no sense. He's just digits.
He doesn't care, right? You can't fall in love with an NPC. You can't fall in love with propaganda.
The great price you pay for propaganda is no connection, no love.
You hollow yourself out from the inside and you find that empty blind conformity to other people's stupidity turns out to be a pretty fucking pitiful substitute for actually being loved and being a good person.
Love is nothing more than a conditioned response to chemical reaction in the brain.
So what he's saying is that love is just lust or a programmed response, I guess, in the same way that ducklings follow a mother duck, right?
I mean, I know this.
We have ducks and they follow you.
They bond with whoever is around when they come out of the egg.
Love is nothing more than a conditioned response to chemical reaction in the brain.
Yeah. So, love is the same as eating chocolate.
So, eating chocolate, of course, we are primed for sugar, right?
We get great rewards from sugar because sugar is very concentrated energy in our evolution and also because sugar is in fruit and we desperately need to eat fruit, which is why fruit is, you know, brightly colored to attract us and we mouth water and we go and climb the tree to get the fruit or we plant the trees to get the fruit.
We need the fruit, right? More British sailors died of scurvy than from enemy cannonballs in the history of most of the British Navy.
So we desperately need fruit, so we're wired for sugar.
Okay. So we're hardwired for sugar, and we feel positive when it comes to sugar, and he says it's exactly the same thing with love.
So, yeah, he's simply saying that he's never experienced love, he's never earned love, and he's never been around someone Who would generate the passion called love.
He's never admired someone for his or her moral character and been humbled and chastened and inspired by their moral character.
He's never been around someone who has moral courage He's never been around someone who stands up for what's right He's never been around someone who does kindness for no particular selfish purpose He's never been around anyone who is willing to push past his cynicism and find the vulnerability inside Now, not only is he trying to destroy your capacity for love, but I bet you he's been out there spreading this shit sandwich on the taste buds of everyone around him for years.
He's probably talked to hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of his life and trained them all to reject the possibility of inspirational love and said, being around a glorious, virtuous, courageous, noble person is like having a fucking Kit Kat.
Virtue is chocolate. I mean, what could you even say to someone like that?
You're wrong. I'm sorry you've not experienced that.
I'm sorry that you haven't really experienced a real joyous respect and inspiration from having a virtuous person in your life.
But what is virtue? Virtue is promoting the non-aggression principle.
And pointing out when people are violating it.
But she was promoting peace.
It is opposing war and violence, lies and manipulations.
Well, you're just programmed to do that.
It's like, I don't talk to NPCs.
I don't...
You know, when I was a kid, there was this program called ELISA, Which was a Rogerian-style therapist, like, well, I feel really upset today.
Oh, tell me why you feel upset.
Well, I had a big fight with my wife.
Oh, why did you think you had a fight with your wife?
Well, because she doesn't listen to me.
Why do you think she doesn't listen to you?
It was just take your text and manipulate it and ask again and so on.
Some people, of course, thought that they were talking to a real blank-faced therapist.
But I don't talk to NPCs, because there is no conference.
I don't dignify...
I wouldn't dignify somebody who's just got pre-programmed responses, right?
Somebody who thinks that genuine, passionate, romantic, virtuous love is the same as a fucking Kit Kat.
It's like, I mean, what do you say?
And I would say, okay, well, you're making the case, right?
How do you explain it? Love is nothing more than a conditioned response to a chemical reaction in the brain.
Okay, can you prove that?
Can you prove that? See, a chemical reaction in the brain doesn't explain anything.
You've explained nothing. Why do we have that chemical reaction in the brain?
Well, it's just pair bonding to raise kids.
Okay? Can you raise kids better or worse?
Yes, you can raise kids better or worse.
Okay. Is it easier to raise kids well with a good partner?
Yes. So is it better for your kids for you to love a good person rather than a bad person?
Well, yes, okay. Well then love and virtue are the same fucking thing
That's really sad, I mean this is a person who's just given up
They've just given up. It's like that whole Seinfeld thing where George shows up.
I remember this from the 90s.
George shows up. George Costanza pays this sort of pudgy, half-height, Michelin man, balding loser.
And he shows up in sweatpants.
And Jerry's like, what, again with the sweatpants?
He's like, they're comfortable. He says, you know what sweatpants say to me?
You know what they say to me? They say to me, I give up.
I'm never going to be attractive so I might as well be comfortable.
Okay? Love is just a chemical reaction, man.
Okay, I get it. You can't inspire anyone.
You don't want to lift your fucking ass off your complacent couch of shit to get up and do something inspiring or virtuous or worthwhile in the world.
I get it. You don't want to help anyone.
You don't want to do anything good.
You don't want to sacrifice anything.
You just want to be this shit-stained Jabba the Hutt cynic bullshit black hole in the corner sucking everyone into your empty cynicism.
I get it. You've given up and you've become not just empty but negative and hostile.
And shit, man, if he wants to call in, I will take that call straight up.
I'll get out of bed at four in the morning if I have to take that call.
Because I'll do a lot. You know how sometimes in order to get your heart starting, they need to crack your ribs?
I would do that. Metaphorically, of course.
So, yeah, he's just giving up.
And he wants other people to give up, too.
You've got to give up these delusions called love, man.
It's just a chemical reaction in the brain.
I'm sorry that that's what it is for you.
Like, I'm really, like, what a tragic, tragic, terrible thing.
I'm sorry that that's what it is for you.
The idea that I look at my wife and my daughter and it's just a chemical reaction in the brain, oh my god, that's just so sad.
I mean, I've been with dates.
I've been on dates. I've been in relationships with people with whom it is mostly just lust and desire for companionship and all of that sort of stuff.
It is not particularly elevated or whatever.
And they were terrible people, but, you know, when you're really around a quality person, you really notice the difference.
I've been around that stuff, and it's like, okay, like, I'm sorry that's all it is for you.
Well, it's all it is for you, too.
No, don't tell me what my experience is.
Like, don't be ridiculous, right? Don't tell me what my experience is.
The people who are like, well, there's no such thing as love, man.
It's just a chemical reaction. It's like, you know, you're just describing yourself, right?
There's no such thing as truth, man.
Okay, well, you don't believe that there's any such thing as truth, and you believe that that's true, blah, blah, blah.
Most people aren't talking philosophy.
They're just spreading brain viruses.
They're just having their shit memes replicate in your head to wipe out your humanity.
It's a fucking chef's kiss of herpes and AIDS. They're not trying to tell you anything.
They're trying to breathe their fucking poison into your brain.
Straight up, man. I've been around the block a couple of times.
I tell you the truth.
You know, FDR, this place, these conversations, that's the antidote to this shit.
Most people are trying to, they're carriers of brain toxins called propaganda, called cynicism, called nihilism.
And the ideas are like devils that scrape out their humanity, right their spine, and attempt to replicate by getting into your ears, in your eyes, getting into your brain, breeding their shit carcass babies in your brain and pushing out any angels that might still be in residence.
Most people are not trying to enlighten you.
They're trying to poison you.
And this guy loves just a chemical reaction.
See, I don't view that as an individual.
I view that as somebody who's been hollowed out by a kind of demon, and that demon is trying to jump to me.
You can take this as much or as little of an analogy as you want because it doesn't really matter.
But that's what it is.
It's a demonic kind of ghost attempting to squeeze out of their throat into your ears so that it can replicate and push out any burgeoning humanity you might have between your ears.
I view these people as coughing up Blood in my vicinity.
They're dying spiritually or dead, but they're still animated, right?
The demons that hold them, the demons that possess them, are just trying to spread.
And they're trying to target you.
And this is why when you push back against these kinds of demon-haunted people, you push back against them, right?
The demons just escalate and fucking try and take you down.
Especially if you do it in a public way.
Because if you breed resistance in yourself to these demons, then you breed resistance in others to these demons, and they can't spread.
I mean, most of my childhood was my mother and others and teachers and so on all just holding me down and trying to pour a viscous kind of vomity shit in my mouth and have me swallow.
And it was just being waterboarded for 15 plus years.
And just, I don't swallow that shit, man.
I do not imbibe that foul, foul shit.
I will keep the mote of my ideal self pure against all comers.
All comers. I surrender nothing.
I give nothing.
I will wrestle these darknesses and these principalities from here to eternity.
That I will not be corrupted by these false, poisonous, toxic ideas and arguments.
These devils that hide between the syllables, that hide between the lines and try to paralyze you.
I don't know. I don't have a technical, factual, practical answer.
I can't prove... In they come.
In they come, fucking stampeding in.
They take up residence and they kick out any conceivable joys you might have that aren't shitting and fucking and eating and sleeping.
They turn you into an empty mammal of dopamine chasing right off a cliff, slow ending and embittering and then they jump from you to just about everyone else and of course the place they like to most jump is from parents to children.
And those of us here, I bet, I bet, I bet, have more than enough experience in this world battling these kinds of devils.
And you can't give them an inch.
And if you happen to be, you know, the Van Helsing, I played Van Helsing at a vampire play in university.
I played Van Helsing, who's a vampire hunter.
Did a fine job too, because that really has been my whole job, is to keep people safe from these sophist predators of sickly syllables.
That's my gig.
That's my job. And this is why deplatforming happens.
In the same way that Something like AIDS tends to destroy your immune system and then it's the other things that kill you, right?
So the other bugs that kill you.
And so with these kinds of demons, they need to take out the protectors of humanity.
And then they can just ride roughshod over the raw, naked, undefended brain stems of humanity.
They can plant these bad ideas and raise this demonic emptiness.
All right, sorry, the person has come back with the question of the proper restitution
for someone who made a false police report trying to have you arrested.
This is my own brother.
You know, 50%, even by general standards, 50% of sibling relationships are classified as abusive.
So... Brothers...
I mean, Cain and Abel, right?
So, brothers are often in pretty hot competition with each other.
And brothers...
When you are a sibling...
Particularly an elder sibling, you are handed an unbelievable amount of power through a complete...
Sorry, this is going to be a swearing episode.
I'm just going to say it up front, although you probably guessed it by now.
Through a complete fucking accident, you've been handed a staggering amount of power as an elder brother.
Elder sisters too, but elder brothers a little bit more.
And so you have seen the development of your younger brother, of your younger sisters, and you have just a sort of kind of authority, and they look up to you, and they want to be like you, and they want to compete with you and win, and they want to have your friends, not their friends, because your friends are older and cooler, and you get to do cooler things before them.
You get to stay up later. You get to join older sports earlier.
You get more allowance, or we used to call it pocket money when you were a kid.
And so... You look up to them and they get a huge amount of ego gratification and ego boosting from just accidentally dropping out a mom a year or two or three before everybody else.
Now, how do people, and of course I wrote a whole novel about this called Almost.
You can get it at almostnovel.com.
It's free. How do most brothers...
Handle this power. Now, it's siblings as a whole.
Siblings as a whole end up gathering massive amounts of information about you with you not having a single fucking say about it.
For a friend to gather a huge amount of information about you, you've got to invite them into your life.
You've got to keep them in your life and you've got to choose to share that information.
You all grow up as siblings in the same household.
Everybody's gathering stassy files worth of information on every single person around them.
Siblings can give you such unbelievable strength and they can also tear you down to fucking atoms because they know so much about you.
When you know a huge amount about someone, that gives you great power over that person.
Power to elevate them or power to crush them and set them against themselves.
Now, how do most older siblings handle the awesome power they have been given over their siblings?
The vanity, the elevation, the knowledge, the accidental extra size and intelligence and so on.
How do siblings handle that?
Younger siblings, it's kind of tough, right?
Because you don't have that much power.
But the older sibling... It's very often the most dysfunctional tyrant in the family outside of the parents, of course.
Not always, of course, right?
I know friends of mine have five kids and three of them are brothers and the three brothers just get along really well and look out for each other and it's wonderful to see, but of course he's a peaceful parent, right?
So you've got to understand, siblings, it's really great or it's unbelievably bad.
There's nothing in the middle because you know so much about each other.
You know... Here's the thing.
Think of it this way.
If you know exactly how to bypass...
All of the banks' security and get to the vault.
Like, what was it? 3,600 pounds of gold?
Like, $100 million worth of gold was just stolen from here in Ontario, from the Toronto airport?
Like, the biggest heist in Canadian history.
I shouldn't laugh, but I bet you it wasn't a meritocratic hiring when it comes to security.
Yeah, $100 million worth of gold was just stolen.
$100 million US worth of gold was just stolen from Canada.
I don't know where the hell it went. So if you know, if you know exactly how to get into a bank's vault and get out with everything that's in the vault, you either call the bank and say, you've got this big hole in your security.
You've got to patch it up, right?
You're helping the bank enormously because you've got great power.
You can go and steal whatever you want or you go and steal whatever you want.
But there's really nothing in the middle because you already have this knowledge.
So with siblings, it's either incredible and you are like the Fantastic Four superhero combination power twins activate Lou Ferrigno on steroids, probably was anyway, but yeah, you just have this amazing amount of power.
You're almost undefeatable when you have siblings who are with you.
When you have siblings who are against you, they will just take you apart brick by brick.
They just will. And if they did it when you were kids, they're almost certain to do it as adults, but even worse.
So I, people who know a lot about me, who don't have my best interests at heart, sorry, you just, you're not in.
You're not in. Won't do it.
Won't do it. I have a similar question.
Somebody says, how would you handle a child who wrote a letter to a judge with the help of his mother, telling a judge that the child was afraid for his safety when he was with me?
Well, you can't handle the child.
It's not the child's fault.
You chose to have children with the mother.
All you can do to help the child the most is model 150% responsibility for everything that's happening to the child.
Why is the child writing a letter to a judge telling the judge is afraid for his safety?
Because you chose that mother.
You chose to date her.
You chose to have sex with her.
You chose to have unprotected sex with her.
You chose to have a child with her.
You chose to marry her, maybe.
That's all on you. Why is the child in that situation?
Because of you. Say, ah, but the mother.
No, no, no. No.
You chose the mother.
You got to own that. I mean, you don't have to, but you did whether you own it or not.
100% responsibility.
Of course, there were massive signs of dysfunction, of chaos, of mess, before you decided to have a child with this woman.
You went ahead anyway. And, you know, I have sympathy and your friends and family should have stood between you with an ice wall a thousand miles high if necessary.
But you...
How do you handle a child?
Why is it the child's fault that you chose a crazy mother for him?
It's not the child's fault.
And, of course, you want to blame the mother.
I understand that. You're mad at the mother.
You want to blame the mother. And I understand that impulse.
I sympathize with that impulse. But you wouldn't believe.
You wouldn't believe.
And you won't believe till you do it.
You absolutely won't believe how incredibly powerful it is to blame no one for your life.
To blame no one for your life.
Can you imagine such a thing?
As an adult, right? I'm not talking if you're like 18 in one day and you had terrible parents.
Yes, you had a burden and I sympathize and all of that.
But you get into your mid-20s or whatever, right?
What if you just try it as a thought experiment?
That you're responsible for everything.
Do you know how much power that gives you?
Okay, it gives you regret. It gives you pain.
It gives you sorrow.
I get all of that.
That's why people avoid it. But what if...
What if you are 100% responsible for your life?
What if? What if you wake up and go, I'm so mad at this person.
Why is this person in my life? Well, I chose them.
Okay, so that's you.
But it's still them who's acting.
Yes, but their actions only impact you because you chose to have that person in your life.
And you chose to make a child with that person.
And that gives that person power over you.
But that person is there now.
Because of you. It's you.
Because what do you want for your child?
You want your child to grow up and be in this kind of situation?
If you don't want your child to grow up and be in this kind of situation, my advice, take complete ownership for it.
I'm sorry, bud. I chose wrong.
I'm sorry that you had to go through this.
It's on me. Because if you take that leadership role, if you take that responsibility role, if you don't make excuses, all responsibility is is giving up the admittedly entirely seductive Drug called excuses.
It's powerful, man.
It's so powerful.
It's so addictive.
It's the fundamental demonic temptation.
Just make an excuse.
It's not your fault. Make an excuse.
Blame the other person. Boom.
Okay, you've got no power.
We get relief from responsibility by blaming others, but that traps us in this
hellscape of dysfunction.
You want to model for your child complete ownership of your life.
Thank you.
.
Don't blame anyone.
And by that I mean don't even blame yourself.
Just accept responsibility. The reason why we try to avoid responsibility is that responsibility was always associated with usually hysterical punishment when we're children.
This is how you condition people away from responsibility.
There's a crash in the next room.
The mom comes in. The lamp is on the floor broken.
Who broke the lamp?
Who's responsible for the lamp breaking?
Who can I punish?
You see, responsibility and punishment just go hand in hand.
I remember a friend of mine, when I was in junior high school, he was so bored in class, as we all were, that he doodled in his book.
Teacher grabbed it. You're gonna pay for this book!
You're responsible! You drew in this book!
And it's like, I'm fucking bored out of my gourd, man.
I mean, even prisoners get to scratch their four-slash-days on the walls of their cells.
Who did this? Who's responsible?
Punish, punish, punish, right?
Responsibility is punishment. It wasn't me.
It wasn't me. I didn't do it. I wasn't there.
But the real punishments in life are when you avoid responsibility.
That's when the real punishments happen.
What if you gave up?
On excuses. Did you ever hear me say it was not my fault that I was deplatformed?
Did you ever hear me say that?
Nope. Was it unjust?
Sure. Did I know it was going to be unjust?
Yeah, pretty much. Whose responsibility was it?
It's mine. My responsibility.
You think I'm so retarded that I don't know what topics you should or shouldn't talk about?
Because I'm not doing it for now.
I'm doing it for the future, if we're going to have one.
See, you put out your arguments, you take your punishment, and then you wait for the world to catch up, right?
This is a history lesson in, you know, we've got the whole History of Philosopher's series at freedomain.locals.com.
You should check it out for subscribers.
What happens? Well, you're right, but you're ahead of your time.
And if you keep pushing it, they'll put you in a hole somewhere.
So you put out your predictions, you take your punishment, and you just wait to be proven right.
And then you gain credibility from being proven right, and then you come back from your time in the wilderness.
if there's still a world to come back to from the time in the wilderness,
in which case it's better to be in the wilderness than to be in the city,
which is the whole point of my novel that I just wrote.
Rachel says, No, no, I'm not going to spoil it.
You've got to read the book, or listen to the book.
Who have I blamed for what's happened in my show?
Right? You see, I'm not talking out of my armpit here.
I really do. Like, it's me.
It's my choice. I own that.
Did other people act badly?
Yes, of course, but we live in a world where you know people are going to act badly.
You know that. Can't be a moral philosopher and say, wait a minute.
People act badly? It's like literally being a cancer researcher and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
There's such a thing as cancer?
The entire point of your research is the analysis and exposition and explanation of good and evil.
Oh wait, there are actually evil people in the world?
Who knew? It's all on me.
All on me. All on me.
And, you know, when I ask for donations...
I will ask, you know, and I appreciate the tips here, not exactly a big tip evening, even though I'm spitting straight up fire and you all know it.
You all know it. Straight up fire, baby.
Life-changing, straight up fire, as I generally do.
It's up to me to drive the revenue that this show needs.
If I want to do a documentary, as I do, it's up to me to drive the revenue.
If I want to hire people, as I do, it's up to me to drive the revenue.
It's on me asking. It's on me providing relentless value and reminding you of the treasure that is this conversation.
You know you can't get this anywhere else in the world.
You can't get this anywhere else in the world.
And this is not just me.
Obviously, this is the conversation.
This is why I live stream, because we bring out the best in each other.
We do. We bring out the best in each other.
And I love you, and I thank you, and I worship you for that.
I really do. You guys tickle my brainstem in a way that turns me into fireworks.
How do you handle...
A kid whose mother's forcing him or telling him to write letters to a judge.
You don't handle him.
You handle yourself.
And you model, even if you can't say it, you model.
No blame. 100% responsibility.
I spent some years in my 20s in a relationship.
I was going to get married.
I proposed. I got a ring.
I proposed. My friends were all keen.
My family of origin was all keen.
It was the wrong woman, man.
It was the wrong woman. It was the wrong woman.
She wasn't a terrible woman, but it was the wrong woman.
She was not somebody who took an excess of responsibility.
Now, why was I in that relationship?
Why did I spend that time in that relationship?
Because I wanted to have values.
I didn't want to live values.
And again, I was in my 20s.
I had been in philosophy at this point well over 10 years.
I had no excuse.
No excuse. Not one.
Not one. That's why I have sympathy.
I say to people on the call-in shows, you're doing better than I did at your age.
I have nothing but sympathy. Because to have values is really fun.
To live those values, not quite so much.
Not quite so much fun.
I mean, come on. Hit me with a why if you've had more fun having values than Then living values.
Having them in your head versus living them in your life.
Hit me with a why, brothers and sisters.
Hit me with a why if you've ever had more fun thinking shit than doing good.
Has that been more enjoyable for you?
Of course it has.
Why, baby? Why, that's right.
That's right. That's right.
Yeah, and I sympathize.
It's a lot more fun to read about the Federal fucking Reserve than it is to confront immorality in the people in your life.
A lot more fun, and I appreciate that.
I understand it. I sympathize with that.
Now, I can say...
I can say...
100%.
Well, but nobody...
In my life, at the time, warned me about the woman I was going to marry.
Right? Quick question, my friends.
Hit me with a why if you think, hit me with a why if you think the people in my life who didn't warn me about marrying the wrong woman, hit me with a why if you think they appreciated and respected my philosophy.
Quick question. Did they love, respect my philosophy?
Or were they quite hostile to it?
Of course they were hostile, right? So yeah, you guys are exactly right.
So I had philosophical values, ideals, and virtues that the people in my life were almost uniformly hostile to.
And their vengeance against, or rather you could say their devil's vengeance against my philosophical idealism was to lead me down the dark path into a ruin of a marriage and wreck me that way.
And it wasn't conscious. Which makes it even...
When people say, oh, it wasn't conscious, that makes it even worse.
Because they didn't even have then the self-knowledge to do it, right?
So... I had the ideals, I had the values, I had the virtues.
The people in my life were hostile to and opposed those virtues.
I still took advice from them, and I only very narrowly escaped through largely circumstance and coincidence and, you know, some virtues on my part.
But I missed all that stuff, like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction missed getting shot by that guy, right?
Just bullets all around him, like Wile E. Coyote style, right?
So I was, I'm 100% responsible.
I was 100% responsible for all those years in my 20s.
I was dating the wrong person.
100% responsible. Well, the people in my life didn't, well, why were they in my life?
I'm responsible for that too.
and I had very little excuse.
I had very little excuse.
Oh, but it's tough.
Okay, yeah, okay. It's tough if you live with integrity, you act with integrity.
That's tough. I get that. It's tough.
Yes, I agree. I understand.
What does philosophy say about that?
Does philosophy say, oh, yeah, you know, when you live in an age of increasing evil, being virtuous is great fun.
It's wonderful. It's like being David in my novel, The Future.
It's just, you know, it's a blast. Or what does it say?
It says, ooh, yeah, you try to be good in an increasingly evil world, it's going to be...
It's going to be tough, man. It's going to be bad.
How many philosophers that you know of throughout history who worked really hard to promote virtue and oppose evil at the end of their life said, man, that was easy.
That was a blast, man.
What was all this opposition that you're supposed to get?
What was all this negativity you were supposed to get?
Man, I had a blast.
You know, I was reading about in my History of Philosophy series, I was reading about philosophers in their 80s, they're burning...
They work because they're afraid that the authorities are going to get them, catch up with them.
Here's the funny thing too, right?
If you ever wanted to make a case for having Bitcoin, you'd say, well, Bitcoin might not be totally secure.
You know, they just lost $800 million worth of gold.
All right, let me get to your comments here.
All right, let's see here.
Oh boy, I've got a ways to go back.
Have I seen any good movies lately?
I have not. Well, I mean, I did do the Dungeons& Dragons movie, and I thought that was a good movie.
Have you guys seen...
Sorry, that's just a...
It's a really annoying...
Her name is real!
But Duran Duran, Simon Le Bon is a bit...
Simon Le Bon is a little bit of an acquired taste as a singer.
Huh... But hungry like that.
He's got that little yodel at the beginning.
But have you seen Nefarious?
This movie, some people have recommended that I see.
Hit me with a Y. No, give me a 1 to 10, your rating of Nefarious.
Minus 10 to plus 10. Minus 10 is terrible.
Obviously, plus 10 is really great.
I'll get to that. All right, let's see here.
Somebody says about the decay.
Yeah, fielders who work to see new engineers are much more knowledgeable, trying to learn all I can from them while they're still working.
Yep. Will AI help or hinder?
I'm going to do a presentation on that, so I'll hold off on answering AI questions.
This is eloquent. Yes, it is.
Yes, it is. U.S. and West industry collapsing.
Germany shut down nuclear power because of Green Agenda or because they can't find more nuclear engineers?
Hmm. I wonder how much each plays a part or is the form of the excuse?
Well... Humanity has always been a battle between those who are good at violence and those who are good at thinking.
The fists are the brains.
The claws are the thoughts, right?
The fists want society to fall into chaos because they're good at violence.
And the brains want society not to fall into chaos because they're good at thinking.
Now, of course, the people who are the fists will punch up society till it falls apart.
They'll release criminals. They'll get rid of energy sources.
They'll set fire to endless amounts of livestock and manufacturing plants and so on.
And they'll just bring all this chaos.
And, of course... They'll end up dying, most of them, if society falls apart, because, right?
So, yeah, the fists and the brains, right?
The fists and the brains. And the fists want to get rid of power.
They want to, again, release criminals.
They want to get all the crazy people out from the asylums into society.
They want fentanyl and criminals crossing the border.
They want all of this stuff, because that creates a situation where their genes for violence will tend to propagate, right?
Right? The genes for thought versus the genes for violence, and it's not all genetic, of course, right?
There's epigenetics, there's environment and so on, there's lots of variables, but it's, well, gene wars, I talked about this many years ago.
So whenever you see, oh my god, well that's just chaotic, well that's just not going to work, you know, there's laws out in California where if you steal less than a thousand bucks, they won't prosecute you.
So, yes, they're trying to eliminate a functional economy so it falls to chaos, so they can do the violence that they like to do, which they're very good at.
And they will then get to, rather than woo women, they get to be violent with women, and that's how those genes spread.
And again, I'm not saying it's all genetic, but yeah, it's just the way that, you know, the sort of tide goes back and forth.
And England, for a good chunk of its history in the sort of post- Dark Ages world was executing 1% of its population every year, tended to be the most violent, the most psychotic, the most sociopathic, and English people ended up kind of super polite and so on, with the few sociopaths then going into the government and trying to run an entire empire that ended up rupturing, destroying England as a whole.
So... Yeah, I mean, they just...
I mean, I talked about this years and years and years ago in my analysis of Emmanuel Kant.
The most violent people want violence to decide how resources get distributed.
They want violence to decide how women get, quote, distributed, right?
People who think want reason...
And evidence to win debates.
People who are good at violence and not good at thinking, they want violence to win debates.
Of course they do. I mean, I hate to state the blankly obvious, but of course they do.
Loved the last chapter of the present, just left me wanting more.
Yes! Yes, so the present has a very specific ending, which is designed to leave you wanting more.
I don't like stories where good people get everything they want and you're all satisfied because that puts closure on the pursuit of virtue for you and you get to vicariously live on all the rewards of virtue.
This book is supposed to leave you wanting more because you should be more virtuous in your life just as I should be.
Somebody says, I knew someone like that was very hardwired.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right, so let's do another couple of cues.
Gosh, the time flies. I hope it flies for you too, but it sure does for me.
Then management thinks that more bodies means more productivity, but
the new bodies added don't contribute at all to the projects.
Oh, it's worse than that. They take away from the projects.
I mean, Twitter is better with 80% of the workforce gone.
What was Twitter? Twitter?
They don't even have keywords for ads.
I mean, how insane is that?
How unbelievably incompetent is managers?
Well, our revenue model is really based on ads.
Okay. Are there any keywords?
People's interests? Can you serve up ads that have anything to do with people?
No. But we can micro-police every post from certain accounts.
Oh, my God. That's just wild.
Whoo All right
Boom boom boom boom boom Thank you.
Bye-bye.
...
Ah, let's see here.
That's pretty much of a mess.
Oh yeah, this is the brother stuff, okay.
Older sibling, how about twins?
Few minutes older. Well, that doesn't count, right?
Based upon everything I said, you can figure that out for yourself, right?
Somebody has two kids, my niece and nephew, scared for them.
Yeah, listen man, I hear what you're saying.
This is one of the toughest things that happens when you wake the hell up to the world and to virtue.
Everybody has their own answer to this.
I think there's a good answer, which I have.
I'm not going to say it's a perfect answer or some moral answer.
I have a very, very strict line, strict rule in my life.
I don't care about other people more than they care about themselves.
And I don't care about other people's kids more than they care about those kids.
I mean, I think what's happening to kids these days, we won't have to get into any particular details, but what's happening to kids these days is unbelievably just awful and horrible and satanic.
There is no secular term that matches what is going on.
And yeah, it's really sad.
Oh, but the kids! It's like, well, I'm not going to care about kids more than their parents do.
Can't do it. You know, like when welfare runs out, as it will, and people are like, oh, how am I going to feed my kids?
It's like, you didn't choose to have, like, you didn't choose a good father for your kids.
So don't, don't try and, don't try and use my sympathy for your kids to give you resources.
Because then your kids will see, oh, wow, you know, manipulation really works.
Playing the victim really works.
Having, being a crime bully really works.
Well, our kid's going to eat! It's not my job.
I've got my own kid to feed.
I wish you the best.
It's not my job. If you didn't...
Like, you didn't choose a good father for your kid.
You didn't choose to work.
You didn't choose to save up food.
You didn't choose to have water or anything.
Like, all the stuff that Oliver's railing about with everyone, which he does to make sure his conscience is clear.
Like, if you don't care that much about your kids...
Oh, my kid got indoctrinated in a government school.
Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
That's really tough. Why did you put your kid in a government school?
Well, I didn't know! It's your job to know, right?
It's your job to know what your kids are being taught, right?
You know that that's the case, right?
You know that's the case, right? Well, my kid saw bad things on the internet.
It's like, well, it's your job to make sure your kid doesn't see bad things on the internet.
You know, Matt Walsh just doesn't give your kids a phone or a tablet, right?
So... If you don't care for your kids, I'm not going to model that giving power over me because that's all that's doing is training your kids to not care for their kids so that they can manipulate other people.
And it's actually...
It's quite a bit of mental discipline and I work through this in my novel, right?
I was working through a lot of this stuff when I was going through writing The Present.
It's really... It takes a lot of strictness.
But when you...
Take 150% responsibility for your own life.
You move beyond the orbit of manipulation.
It's an incredible thing.
That's why I'm saying, like, you don't know, you don't know, my friend, my brothers, my sisters, you don't know what life is like on the other side of taking complete responsibility for your life.
You are now outside of The orbit, the black hole, the gravity well called manipulation.
You are gone, baby.
You are out of it. You are past all of that.
It's a beautiful thing.
It's a beautiful thing.
You take responsibility.
One of the beautiful, wonderful, amazing side effects of taking responsibility is you give responsibility.
When you take responsibility, people can't manipulate you anymore.
When you can't be manipulated, people have the chance for growth.
As long as you keep being manipulated, which is what happens when you blame and give yourself excuses, and you give yourself excuses, you give other people excuses, and their excuses generally tend to be you doing something wrong.
Do you take 150% responsibility for your own life?
Oh, man. You can't be manipulated.
And anyone around you who's even remotely interested in that will also start to take more and more, especially if they see you success more and more.
I view my show as more successful now than it was when I was at the height of my fame.
And it may sound odd.
It's not numbers. Numbers are smaller.
Income is down. Yeah, yeah, I'll get all of that.
But I view my show as more successful now than at the height of my fame.
Because the height of my fame was gathered by pursuing the ephemeral, by pursuing that which passes, by pursuing politics.
Now we excavate and explicate essential, universal, timeless themes.
What was said about Shakespeare, he's not for our time, he's for all time.
That's what I want for what we're doing.
It's not for now. It's for all time.
These will always be essential human issues to be dealt with.
My show is smaller in the present so that it can be infinitely bigger in the future.
Because when it was bigger in the present, it was less important to the future.
And philosophy should have as its goal the elevation of the future.
Not the manipulation of the present.
And I don't have any regrets.
I don't feel at all bad for the work that I did in politics at all.
I think I acquitted myself with great honor, great effect, But I view what we're doing here now, tonight, as infinitely more important than talking about the latest political brouhaha and upheaval.
And there will be principles involved in that that will be useful in the future, but this carries forward.
This has a long shadow.
The sun's right overhead.
You get a very short shadow. The sun is low on the horizon.
The tension is low. You get a very long shadow into the future.
You get a long effect into the future.
That's where I started. That's where I'm happy to be.
The world is a funny organism as a whole, right?
So the people who deplatformed me were helping me, and they were saying, focus on the future.
You can't help the present. We won't listen in the present, but you can help the future.
Don't stop. Work on the future where reason can live because right now we're falling into power.
The age of reason is past.
The age of power is here. When the age of reason returns, they need you as a resource.
Stop talking about the present. Focus on the timeless.
All right. Thank you again for the tips.
I appreciate that. Love these truth bombs.
Always happy to tip. Thank you very much.
I appreciate that. All right.
This is fire. Excellent stuff.
Thank you very much. Steph, if you were starting your career again now, would you go into tech again?
Or what other industries do you like?
I love tech.
I would do tech, for sure.
I would do tech. I would be working night and day to leverage and monetize AI. That would be my thing at the moment.
All right. Love you too, Steph.
You're doing so much to empower and educate me, which helps me change my life.
You are so right. We can't get this anywhere else.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
Thank you very much. All right.
I think we are...
Let's see here. The law is like a spider's web.
Flies get caught. Wasps go free.
Yeah. I mean, Alec Baldwin, right?
Shoot a woman in the chest, wing another guy, kills the woman, injures the other guy.
I mean, they say, well, maybe charges later or whatever.
Yeah, charges dropped. Well, they need him, though, right?
If Trump runs again, the left needs him to mock Trump, so you can't have him go to jail, right?
They need him. What's the best way to go independent from working as a contractor with a firm that is legitimately exploiting their hirelings?
I mean, talk to a lawyer, right?
Because you don't want to, like, steal clients or anything that could get you sued or anything like that, so...
The best way to go independent, I mean, save up money and then just quit.
I mean, nothing makes you productive like panic, right?
Just save up your money. This is what I would do.
do, I can't tell you what to do, what I would do is just save up my money, live lean, save
up as much money as I can until I had six or twelve months worth of expenses and then
I would just quit and I would pour everything into marketing, advertising, getting myself
known and doing the very best conceivable job with clients.
Alright, let's see here.
I can never tear us apart.
I'm planning on moving away from my toxic family and have an acquaintance who has a
cheap shared apartment in a desirable location.
I have doubts because he let his crazy ex-girlfriend stay with him who filed false allegations and a restraining order on him.
He's trying to get her evicted while living in his car currently because she's not paying rent anyway.
Oh, cheap?
Are you insane? That's not cheap.
No. No, that's not cheap.
For God's sakes. It's not cheap.
Look, I'm saving $400 a month in rent, so that's a great deal.
No, not cheap. Yeah, Twitter didn't even encrypt direct messages.
Yeah, according to Elon Musk.
The government could just read your DMs.
No problem. Will you consider watching the movie Nefarious?
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of horror movies as a whole, but if it's more psychological, then ooh, boo, scary blood on the screen kind of stuff, sure.
I'm glad Steph is out of politics.
I've never gone back to rewatch an old political...
Yeah, you've never gone back to watch an old politics video, right?
But you've gone back to videos with important nuggets.
Absolutely. You have an impact in the moment and you disappear in the future.
Or you can disappear into the present and have a huge influence in the future.
I much prefer the latter.
Lots of people can do politics.
I think, I think that I'm alone in this sort of practical long-term connected
applicable philosophy. Wise words, nearly died in a car accident years ago
That terrifies things. Yeah, I was in a car that flipped on a gravel road and rode a couple of hundred meters on its hood.
It was like, yeah, it was pretty wild.
Why do you think manufacturing left the USA? Do you think it will ever come back to the USA? I don't know.
I mean, it left the USA because...
Unions and regulations and environmental this, that and the other and all of that just became impossible in a regulatory environment.
I mean, it's become impossible to have large engineering projects in the US. I mean, again, it's just this paralysis.
The people who are better at violence, they don't want us trading, they don't want us reasoning with each other, they just want chaos so that they can have a relaxation of social standards and legal standards so they can just do their black work, right? And unfortunately, they're making quite a bit of headway, right?
All right. I think we should stop.
I think we should stop. Yeah. Well, first of all, any last tips?
Anybody? I really do appreciate your comments and questions and time tonight.
It's a deep honor that you open your hearts and minds and lives to philosophy in the way That we talk about it here, which I think is really the only way to talk about it.
And I really, really do appreciate you guys dropping by tonight.
Do you prefer tips to locals or your free domain website?
Hey man, I appreciate that question.
Whatever works for you, the best.
I think in general...
If you go to freedomain.locals.com, I mean, you get a whole community, which I think is really a plus.
You can also go to subscribestar.com slash freedomain, and that gets you to another community.
So I hope that you will think about that as well.
But yeah, whatever gets you the most community, whatever is the easiest for you, whatever is the best for you, I really, really appreciate it.
All right. Lots of love, everyone.
I appreciate your time today.
Thank you so much. We'll just let this run for another minute or two while I turn off the recorder in case anybody's last blasting in some tips.
I really, really appreciate that.
And yeah, go to...
If you subscribe on freedomand.locals.com, you also get the feed for my novel, The Present, which is a bit of an easier way than sort of looking through and listening to it one by one.
All right. Next week, you make good.
Good night. Somebody says, superior morality.
Everyone, please tip.
Yeah, we got some people.
We got some people. It's helpful.
The bills are relentless.
You know, cash flow is king.
The bills for the show are relentless.
And I am...
I've got a researcher on the payroll, so to speak, and this is why I'm able to do the Truth About Daycare.
I did two Truth About Bitcoin presentations, and we've got coming up the Truth About AI. And yeah, so if you can help out with that as well, I would really appreciate it.
So have yourself a wonderful, wonderful week.
Lots of love. Take care, everyone.
I will see you soon.
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