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June 24, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:58

Learning to Love Contradictions!

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	Welcome to your Friday Night Philosophy Extravaganza, 23rd of June, 2023, 7pm Eastern Standard Time.
	And you know that song, Chris?
	That one's fairly easy.
	That's just fairly easy.
	So it begins. It always sounds like people say this, right?
	It always sounds vaguely ominous.
	So it begins. And so it begins is never like multiple orgasms.
	It's always just like, so it begins, FBI overreach or something like that.
	It's always something like that, isn't it?
	Good evening, Chris. Good evening, Liberty.
	Good evening, Lurid and Robo and everybody and their dogs and pets and planes, trains and automobiles.
	Good evening. Good evening.
	Yeah, I was just talking with a friend of mine yesterday about male sabotage.
	Did you ever have this?
	When you got the girl, did your male friends ever sabotage you when you were younger?
	Rain cancels softball so I get to catch you live.
	Well, from softball to hardball.
	Of course, yeah. I was a fairly attractive young man when I was in...
	Gosh, I was...
	Summer camp, Camp Bolton.
	And I got the prettiest girl to dance with me, and a friend of mine came by and elbowed me in the thigh.
	Going down, going down.
	It was very exciting.
	Grace under pressure. Grace under pressure, because you've got to, you know, when you're dancing and you're a young man, you have to keep the woman at arm's length, to put it mildly.
	You've seen women sabotage each other.
	Yeah, that's called voting. That's a bit of a different thing.
	I've got to be honest with everyone.
	I may need your energy tonight.
	I've been dragging today.
	I've been dragging. And not in that cool, fire-breathing way, but in that kind of...
	You know, you have these days where it's like, Oh God, how long is it going to be until I get to go to bed?
	Yeah. No, I'm happy to chat with you guys and I'm sure we will get a great show and I'm sorry for the people who are finally catching me live and I'm low energy.
	It's like, did I skip the morning coffee?
	No, I just, you know, I just had one of these mornings, you know, you wake up and sometimes...
	Like, I woke up kind of early, and it was one of these mornings where it's like my brain was just humming.
	And, you know, normally I could just sort of think about something else and go back to sleep, but my brain was just humming.
	And you have this...
	Yeah, go on, Jeb Bush.
	It's high energy. And you just have this, okay, so I do the show from 7 to 9, 9 to 10, hang out with the family, maybe 10 to 11, I'll watch a show, and then I go to bed.
	I would really like to go to bed.
	And just looking forward to...
	I don't like to have those days, and I rarely do have those days where your first thought on waking, on getting out of bed is, when can I get back in?
	You may have that. Ah, my gosh, my gosh, my gosh.
	It's rare, and my sleep is usually pretty good, but I just had one of those days.
	One of those, one of those nights.
	One of those nights. Do you guys have bad dreams?
	Do you have nightmares? Hit me with a Y if you have nightmares more than once a week.
	You wouldn't be so tired if you flossed more?
	I don't quite get that one.
	Used to have nightmares? Therapy helped?
	Yeah, kind of a scattershot, right?
	Oh, they blame everything on flossing.
	I had one of those nights last night, nodded off in my chair and woke up at 4 a.m.
	Ugh. Have you, yeah, dreams with conflict?
	No, the nightmares are the ones where you're desperate to wake up.
	Can you make yourself wake up if you have a really bad dream?
	I can usually make myself wake up if I have to.
	Maybe once a month I'll have a really, really bad dream.
	Really bad dream. It used to be about the past, now not so much.
	Yeah, have you ever had this thing?
	Sorry, we started completely non-philosophical, but I'm tired, man.
	I've been tired. I've been walking all these.
	She says, that don't confront me as long as I get my rent money by next Friday.
	Well, next Friday come and I didn't get the rent.
	Out the door I went.
	All right, where's that one from?
	Anybody? Where's that from?
	You say, you're going to let me slide.
	I'll have the money for the Friday or the next week.
	I don't know. She said, that don't confront me as long as I get my rent money now and next Friday.
	And next Friday I come and I didn't have the rent.
	And out the door I went.
	One bourbon, one scotch, one beer.
	Yeah. A nightmare stopped when the people appearing in them were removed from my life.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doors.
	No, the Doors is an absolutely ferocious song.
	Five to one, baby.
	One in five.
	No one here gets out alive.
	You get yours, baby.
	I'll get mine.
	Gonna make it, baby, in our prime.
	Such a powerful song.
	All right. Yeah, I have this thing where...
	You're tired, you're tired, you're tired, and you're like, you drag your butt upstairs to get to bed.
	You get to bed and it's like, bing!
	Not really. Psych!
	You thought you were tired.
	Not really so much the case.
	4 a.m., like a universal time, people wake up if they fell asleep outside the bed.
	Yeah. Oh, you have those, you know, those naps, those naps with the, it's a fork in the road, right?
	And naps, they're refreshing enough for me to occasionally have them, but it's 50-50 with me.
	You know, like sometimes the nap is just like, oh, that was delightful.
	I feel so much better.
	And the other time it's like, I am now dead till tomorrow.
	And you're just walking around like, you listen to a lot of doors in your time, bought the CD discography.
	Oh, there's a really cynical bit.
	They did a live version of the Van Morrison song.
	Gloria! G-L-O-R-I-A! And he's got this bit where he's like, Oh yeah?
	Where you going to school?
	Uh-huh! Well that's great!
	Where do you want to travel to?
	Uh-huh! Now come over here!
	Make me feel alright! You know this sort of savage sexual predator pretending to take an interest in a girl?
	It was just wild.
	It was just a savage, savage life of nihilism and despair.
	And uh... It's funny, you know, because so many people envy rock stars, but rock stars don't generally like themselves, right?
	You know, I wanted to be able to sing like Freddie Mercury, but Freddie Mercury didn't really want to be Freddie Mercury because he had these horrifying German Munich dungeon orgies until he got sick and died.
	Oh, that's right. Thank you for the coffee money.
	I appreciate that. If you would like to tip for this incredibly high-quality philosophy show of, well, you heard about the Friday Rambler.
	Well, honey, it's not one of those.
	Talking about the Boston.
	Did you see me at the barroom door?
	I'm like a hit-and-run raper in anger.
	You hear that voice break?
	It's a Stones song.
	Rape, murder, it's just a shot away.
	It's just a shot away.
	Is that let it bleed? And there's this woman.
	They woke up in the middle of the night.
	Believe it or not, I saw a documentary once on backup singers.
	That's just me and the music, right?
	And... There's a woman, you can hear her, rape, murder, and her voice cracks, even though she's a really powerful singer.
	She pushes her voice so hard, her voice cracks, and you can hear the rhythm section go, yeah, in the background, like, how cool is that?
	Somebody says, Heath Ledger died from either suicide or accidental sleeping pill overdose.
	I think that Heath Ledger died from family courts and the Joker.
	He went real deep into that character and it was probably not a healthy thing for him to do.
	Give me shelter. Yeah, that's right.
	It was not a healthy thing for him to do without, I think, therapeutic or professional help.
	And correct me if I'm wrong, was Heath Ledger not involved in a custody battle?
	Wasn't he? Because the same thing happened with the singer for In Excess, just in this brutal custody battle, and I think that's partly why he hung himself.
	Plus he was also into choking your partner's sex, according to one of his partners, right?
	Yeah, wasn't Heath Ledger was in some horrible custody battle, wasn't he?
	Custody battle. When I'm tired, I can't type.
	Was he? He was? He was? He was?
	Ahhhh Yeah, prior to getting separated Heath Ledger and Michelle
	Williams shared a very close relationship And I think that was a mess
	That was a mess. Robin Williams.
	Well, Robin Williams had something called Lewy body dementia, which didn't come out until after I did my show.
	Not that that's particularly relevant.
	I did The Truth About Robin Williams, which I still stand by.
	But he had Lewy body dementia, which is really a negative illness.
	But Robin Williams was also in a custody battle, and it's one of the reasons why he had to work So hard it's like watching Robert De Niro pushing his age lurch frame around the movie screen because he's got all of these payments to make to his exes.
	Heath was an attractive actor.
	It looked like he had it all. Yeah, it was in that odd, it was a very odd movie, A Knight's Tale, where they, I just remember there was a ballroom scene with David Bowie's Golden Years song, and they were dancing to that because they used, and I guess we will rock you, but they used modern music for this medieval tale with Chaucer.
	The writer Chaucer was in it, and it was a very unusual kind of movie.
	Do you guys have a favorite medieval movie?
	Just let me know. Do you have a sort of favorite movie that just takes you right back to Dungeons& Dragons or some sort of medieval?
	I have such a soft spot for medieval stuff, it's completely insane.
	Oh, Braveheart? I've never seen that.
	I really should. I've never seen that.
	Dragon Slayer, is that? Yeah, okay, Dragon Slayer.
	King on Netflix? Okay, let me make a note of some of these, because I do love me.
	Did you ever see, gosh, the one with...
	Marion and... Sean Connery played an older Robin Hood.
	Robin and Marion? Something like that.
	Braveheart, I should watch it. Lord of the Rings.
	Oh, yeah. Lord of the Rings is fantastic.
	I am no...
	What? I am no man.
	Right. Yeah, I would count fantasy.
	I would count fantasy. Every now and then, like every year or two...
	Oh, you enjoyed The Tudors?
	Yeah. I'll tip you to watch a historical documentary with your daughter.
	Which... Sorry, let me just check which historical documentary.
	Braveheart. But that's...
	Robin Hood, Men in Tights.
	That was a funny film. Princess Bride?
	Yeah, not bad. The Vikings from the 60s is great too.
	Yeah. It's nice to see white people playing white roles, isn't it?
	It's nice once in a while to see that.
	And it's funny, I think Scott Adams was talking about this.
	Like, you know, there's these new diversity requirements for the Oscars.
	Like, you have to have a third of the actors have to be minorities and...
	Oh, it's got to be, you know, various segments of society have to be...
	Or you're not eligible for an Oscar and...
	The Oscar has been antimatter for me for a long time.
	Like, I remember when I was back in theater school, of course, we were all obsessed with the Oscars, because we were all going to be actors.
	And we used to get together, and we would have a pool about who would win the Oscars.
	Now, things I'm good in my life, things I'm not good in my life.
	Picking the Oscars back in the day, I was virtually flawless.
	Like, I got just about everyone and everything.
	And... But now, it's been years.
	For me, it's like, oh, this film is really, really acclaimed?
	Okay, I don't want to watch it.
	I have absolutely no interest in watching it.
	No interest in watching it.
	And that's going to be even more, right?
	That's going to be even more. What else have you got here?
	Highlander? I watched...
	Silly stories from my life.
	A friend of mine, so when I worked up north, I worked with a friend of mine, a good friend of mine.
	He was actually one of the best men at my wedding.
	I had three. Not weddings, but best men.
	And we got...
	This is a deal Air Canada had back in the day that you could fly anywhere.
	We paid a flat amount of money.
	It wasn't much. And we could fly for an entire month.
	We could fly anywhere in...
	Ontario and Quebec, for a month, we could take as many flights as we want.
	So we flew all over the place.
	We spent the whole month just flying from place to place.
	And we would just get to the airport, pick a place.
	Hey, we've never been there. And I remember we went to Montreal, we went to Quebec City, we went to Ottawa, we went to just various different places.
	And I remember for some reason, I have no idea why we did this.
	We probably had time to kill until the flight.
	And, you know, if you don't have a hotel room, we would check out or whatever, right?
	And so we had time to kill before the next flight, and we watched The Highlander in French.
	And my French was not quite good enough.
	If it's any consolation, Christopher Lambert, who played The Highlander, when he was hired, he didn't even speak English.
	They just had to get him to mouth the script, which is why he's got that particular kind of strange intonation in the movie.
	Alright, let's see here.
	I had a childhood addiction to building Lego castles and making medieval battlefields.
	Yeah, yeah. I remember making an entire castle out of popsicle sticks because we had a battle scene in Dungeons& Dragons and we needed to go.
	Yeah, How to Train Your Dragon was very good.
	It was very good. There can be only one Highlander movie, but they made a sequel!
	And Queen contributed.
	Well, Who Wants to Live Forever is a good track, but Gimme the Prize is not...
	Scottish theme going on in the chat.
	Bring out the kilts and sheep!
	Hey Steph, I've been wondering about this for a while.
	How many books do you think you've read in both non-fiction and fictional categories?
	What would you say are some of your most influential in each category?
	I assume we would count audiobooks here, right?
	Because I do a lot of audiobooks these days.
	I want to save my eyes and also I can do more.
	I can work out or whatever.
	Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's been thousands.
	Is it your love of history that draws you to the medieval world?
	No. No.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	And this sounds like an odd question and maybe a frivolous question, but it's actually quite serious for me.
	If somebody... Opened a portal for you and let you go back to, say, the 1400s.
	And let's say you weren't some peasant or whatever, right?
	But you would go back to the 1400s, maybe 1450s, maybe 1350s, Quattrocento or something like that.
	If someone could give you a portal and you could go back, would you be tempted?
	I'm not saying forever, right?
	But would you go back to see, to travel, to explore?
	Yeah. I absolutely would.
	I absolutely would.
	Can I bring an AR-15 with me?
	That's a little less research and a little more conquering as a tourist, yeah.
	I'd be treated as a god.
	We have this thing called electricity.
	How does it work? I don't really know.
	I would poke around for a bit, but I would miss indoor plumbing after a while, yeah.
	Oh, you prefer the 1800s?
	Yeah. Would you go back to Rome?
	Yeah. Hit me with an R if you'd go back to Rome.
	I don't have that much interest in going back to Rome.
	Rome has always struck me as supernaturally corrupt.
	Tell your Irish ancestor it was worth the suffering.
	Not with what's going on there now.
	Yeah, a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, yeah.
	Pre-Empire Rome. You'd be crazy to see the Damascus Cathedral was finished, yeah.
	I'm interested in Rome. I mean, ancient Greece would be interesting, mostly just because I've got all the philosophical penumbra around it.
	There wasn't a lot of peaceful parenting back in the medieval era, yeah.
	For sure. I mean, obviously there'd have to be some kind of Douglas Adams babblefish that you could talk to people in that situation, but...
	I would love to go back.
	I just... I mean, there's something about...
	When I first started playing Dungeons& Dragons, it was so incredibly vivid in my brain.
	One day before I'm dead, I will write a fantasy novel or a medieval novel, sort of Name of the Rose style, like Umberto Eco, because that time frame just has impressed itself in my heart so deeply.
	It's like a king's brand on my ventricles.
	I would go back in a heartbeat.
	So, let me just go back here.
	What was the question I was...
	Oh, yes.
	So, the books that I've read, that's a...
	You know what? I'm going to take that question, and I'll answer it here, but I am a little bit concerned that I could go off for hours on that, and that might be something I do when I'm not sitting.
	And it also may be something when I'm looking at my library.
	Ivanhoe. Yeah, I read Ivanhoe.
	It was great. But yeah, I mean, I've read thousands and thousands of books.
	And of course, remember, I mean, I've read a lot of books just for free domain, right?
	Because whenever I'd interview people, I'd need to read at least one or two of their books.
	And I've got hundreds and hundreds of interviews.
	Why is the time travel question a serious one?
	It's a serious one because the modernity question is really fascinating to me.
	There's a lot to recommend the Middle Ages.
	There is a lot. Do you know how many, like in Spain, in the 15th century, or in the 16th century, how many weeks did they have off a year for various holidays?
	How many weeks did they have off a year?
	What do you think?
	Zero? Zero? More than we do, yeah.
	They had five months of holidays.
	They had five months of holidays.
	The average medieval serf would work maybe 20 hours a week.
	So what did people do? They told stories.
	They learned to read. They learned hymns.
	They devoted themselves to God.
	They had, I assume, some pretty wild conversations.
	Most modern Europeans get six weeks.
	Well, it depends on whether you're working for the government or not.
	But yeah, I mean, and of course in the winter, there's not that much to do, right?
	You've done all your planning.
	There's like weeks of feverish activity and then not much.
	And in the Middle Ages, you know, families would kind of huddle up under the blankets in a bed
	and would sort of tell stories and sing songs and play games and that would be their winter allotment.
	And this is the question that my character, the character I wrote called Roman in my novel,
	The Future, which you can get at freedemand.locals.com.
	The critiques of modernity are quite powerful.
	Quite powerful.
	And I'm not entirely convinced that my life is better than In some ways in the 21st century than it would have been in the 14th century.
	I mean, when you think of the debt enslavement of the next generation, that didn't really happen back then as much.
	It did happen a little bit, of course, to some degree, but, you know, men and women in general got married.
	They got married young. They had kids.
	They had all the joys of family life.
	They had a sense that their culture was going to continue.
	They didn't have these sort of endless distractions that carve out the center of your soul.
	They had a sense of community.
	They had some kind of homogeneity, which does build social trust in local communities.
	This is why when I wrote my novel Just Poor, which you can get at justpoornovel.com, when I wrote my novel Just Poor, I could just go right into that world, right deep into that world of Of farms and harvests and animal husbandry.
	I mean, it's a primitive and a difficult world.
	Yeah, look at the Mennonites.
	Look at the Amish. Look at the Amish and how they dealt with the pandemic.
	They didn't get vaccinated.
	And was it 30 times lower death rate from COVID? They don't have any autism.
	Do you know what the percentage of American teenagers, what percentage of American teenagers say life is not worth living?
	What percentage of American teenagers say life is not worth living?
	Now you're overestimating a little but it's about 50% About 50% of American teenagers don't think or don't feel that life is worth living.
	It's hard to overestimate how completely we have fucked up the modern world.
	Like, there are no words to encompass that we have made this world a paradise for 5%,
	mediocre for 40%, and hell for everyone else.
	Oh, and of course, the thoughts of teen suicide during the pandemic just went through the
	roof.
	Thank you.
	Bye-bye.
	It's really hard to...
	You know, so the medieval peasant, the medieval person, knew his place, knew his role, knew his future, had his faith, had his community, had his marriage, had his children, had his continuity of civilization.
	And we've banished so many...
	physical problems and we have replaced them with something arguably worse
	which is spiritual hell.
	Somebody was saying 80% of female teens are unhappy.
	Yeah, the best art of all history, the best stories, the best literature, the best poetry, the best music.
	We traded... I mean, this is the devil's offer, right?
	The devil's offer to Jesus is, you can have everything in the world, just give me your soul.
	Soul being meaning morality, depth, story, passion, continuity, a sense of being part of a larger tale.
	I think it's hard, particularly for the younger generation.
	It's almost impossible to exaggerate how much society has screwed up and how empty and nihilistic and weird the next generation is.
	I think it was in England a significant proportion, 30 or 40 percent of young people were very happy having the
	government put cameras inside people's homes to check for
	bad things.
	I have to keep myself a little bit distant from the data about what's going on for young people these days because
	not only is it entirely tragic but it's ridiculously dangerous.
	I mean, this is sort of Red Guard stuff from China and so on.
	It's... It's just appalling.
	You know, I mean, lust to pornography, lust to violence, lust to video games, lust to self, lust to meaning, lust to story.
	You know, one of the things that I do treasure about my childhood was, you know, when I was in boarding school and when I was staying with my aunts in Ireland and other places, I got taken to beautiful churches.
	I got to see the stained glass.
	I sang in the choir. And that was incredibly inspiring.
	You know, I would go to the Natural History Museum, I'd go to the British War Museum and so on.
	I'd go to other museums obsessively as a kid, a little kid, just for that sense of history, of continuity, of...
	I remember as a little kid, a little kid, like four years old and running forward on a football field playing soccer...
	And shouting forward for St.
	George and the crown or something like that.
	And just like a sense that you were part of a larger story.
	Now, I get that there's sacrificial elements to that, propping up the hierarchy.
	I get all of that. But it's like when...
	When you see the videos, you can see them on Twitter, you see the historical videos, and you see Paris in 1900, particularly the stuff before the First World War.
	It's unbearable to watch.
	We took a one-way ticket to hell in 1914 as a culture, and we never recovered.
	We never recovered.
	And all that we got were digital trinkets, toys and distractions.
	My sense of being part of something greater got lost.
	Yeah, I mean this is what I love about philosophy is I'm part of something larger than myself.
	I'm part of something I have to subject and subjugate my will to.
	So that it's not just the vanity of the mammal, the vanity of the beast, the vanity of the flesh and the hunger.
	It's something larger. I know that UPB is true for all time.
	That there's a tombstone that hopefully will stand in the minds of others long after I'm dead.
	And that it's like being a physicist.
	to identify something that's true and it's true forever and it's true for everyone.
	And yeah, 1913 was just brutal.
	I mean, everything after that.
	You know, it really is frustrating when I think about, and it's one of the reasons I got out of politics, it's really frustrating when I think about all of the Problems that we have in the world that is were all put in place before even I was born, really. Often shortly before I was born.
	But yeah, all of this stuff was put in place before I was born.
	Yeah, I've always thought that World War I set the table for the destruction of the West that we see today.
	The culture never recovered. We had 100 years in Western Europe with no war.
	I mean, Franco-Prussian, 1860s, but we had 100 years.
	Fall of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the start of the First World War in 1914, we had relative peace.
	100 years. I mean, for Europe, that's incredible, right?
	Relative peace for 100 years.
	And I guess that was just unbearable for the powers that be.
	And of course, there's no such thing as World War I. There's the European Brother Wars with a 20-year armistice in between, right?
	1919 to 1939.
	Yeah, it's really, uh, the rise of peaceful parenting will create a golden age.
	page.
	Well, and I appreciate that.
	That definitely is the goal. But unfortunately, either due to me or to others or the powers that be or the media, we haven't put down enough roots of peaceful parenting to outpace the degradation of the culture.
	The degradation of the culture is outpacing the spread of peaceful parenting.
	You know, if you're bailing out your boat, that's great.
	But if there's more water coming in, then you can bail out.
	There's only one way you're going. Down, down, down, down, down.
	Yeah, they break them faster than we can make them.
	Oh, yeah, I see this conveyor belt of, like, shredded souls coming out of the government schools.
	Yeah. It's wild.
	Alright, let me see if I can provide something for you and thanks for the tips if you find this helpful.
	I appreciate that. Somebody says, I'm currently starting a business and my wife wants to say in each of the purchases I make, I find that having to justify each investment takes a lot of time and energy, especially since she is quite frugal.
	How do you and your wife handle your business purchases?
	We kind of have a rule.
	It's kind of an informal rule.
	Like anything over $100 we'll talk about with each other.
	But if she says we need something for the house or other areas that she's in, that's her area of expertise, okay?
	Do you need a new blender?
	Do you need a vacuum cleaner?
	What am I going to know?
	And so in the same way that...
	If it's something which is sort of my area of expertise, you know, like I upgraded the, this is a really good mic, it's a really good mixer, and it's a really, really nice camera, and it does what I've always wanted, which is, I don't like 1080p, 59.94 frames a second, but 720p, I've always thought that's a sweet spot, it's really nice.
	And so if I need that, then I'll...
	She's like, well, you already have a camera.
	It's like, but, you know, I mean, I want to improve how this sounds now and also how it sounds in the future, right, for all time.
	So I said this.
	I'm sorry for the people who gave me questions on freedomand.locals.com.
	I finally got around to them today.
	And also had a wild conversation for a long time with the woman who's a stripper.
	She's been a stripper for eight years.
	Sorry, she's been a stripper for nine years.
	And she's been in a relationship for eight years, but she just can't get the guy to commit.
	And I know it sounds like a kind of an eye-rolling conversation, but it was really quite powerful.
	So in a marriage, the husband and the wife lead in different areas.
	I don't know what those areas are.
	Generally, women lead inside the house and men lead outside the house.
	Could be any number of things.
	Women cook in the kitchen. Men cook on the barbecue.
	Women vacuum the carpets.
	Men mow the lawn. But it could be any number of things, right?
	Women take care of the man's health by nagging him to go to the doctor and the man takes the car in for its servicing and...
	However it's going to play.
	But just let each other be in charge.
	Just let each other lead. I'm like, I'm literally begging you all.
	I mean, this idea that it's like one for you, one for me, 50-50.
	We've got to, like, there's no division of labor at all.
	There's no division of labor in that way.
	So find what you're good at, what you're interested in, what your skill set are, what your drive is.
	And if your wife needs something, you just let her do it.
	And if you need something, she's got to trust you to let you do it.
	And again, information is good, right?
	But if she's going to trust you to give you her heart, then she should trust you to spend money.
	So... Alright, so Steph, there's a saying, they do not care that you know until they know that you care.
	When a person uses reason, logic and empiricism and find themselves trying to relate to people to whom feelings are facts and are not willing to talk through dissenting points of view, what are your options?
	Just cut these people out of your life or is there another way to relate to these people?
	I have an investment approach to these things.
	So the way that I figure out who's worth really communicating with, it goes something like this.
	I try, and this took a long time to get, an embarrassingly long time to get, and tragically it was after the show began.
	Not this show tonight, but you know.
	So I look and I say, okay, if I was this person and I woke up to reason, what would happen?
	So let's pick a person, Bob.
	Some guy you know named Bob.
	And you say, okay, well, I say, okay, if Bob wakes up to reason, what happens?
	Now, maybe Bob works for some corrupt organization and morality would have that challenge in his career.
	Maybe he's married to a woman who's dysfunctional and if he wakes up to reason, that's going to really destabilize his marriage.
	Maybe he's invested 12 years in raising his kids a certain way and if he finds out that that's not the best way to raise them or it's a bad way to raise them, then What happens then?
	Maybe he's heavily invested in a political one side versus the other delusory battle of infinite progress.
	And what happens to him?
	So what happens to him if he wakes up to reason?
	And I really, it's like almost a close your eyes and concentrate, try and put yourself in the other person's shoes.
	What happens to that person if he wakes up to reason?
	Now, there are a couple of things, right?
	There's an old thing, if you have them by the balls, their hearts, minds, and wallets will follow.
	And also, it's hard to convince a man that something is true if his income, his paycheck, his marital peace, and his status rely on him believing something is false, right?
	I mean, so...
	What I do is I put myself in their shoes and say, what's the cost-benefit analysis, right?
	How much is it going to cost them to wake up to reason?
	Is it going to cost them their career?
	Probably not going to do it. Is it going to cost them their marriage or threaten their marriage?
	Probably not going to do it. Is it going to have to cause them to reverse their claim to authority in front of their children?
	I was wrong. I shouldn't have done this.
	I'm going to change things completely.
	I'm sorry for this, that, and the other.
	You know, these things are all theoretically possible, but I don't put any penny on it.
	I don't put any penny on those bets.
	So, I was, and I mentioned this in a little video the other day, so I'll touch on it here.
	I went from low status to high status with philosophy.
	Like, I went from low status...
	Like, when I studied economics, I went from low status to high status.
	And I went from low... Not immediately, you understand, but I went from low status to high status.
	So to me, philosophy was a way out of the ladder.
	Sorry, it was a way out of the well.
	Like, it was a... Philosophy was like a rope thrown down the well I could climb out.
	And so for me, philosophy was like, well, what's the downside?
	What's the downside here? Okay, I get that there's downsides of frustration.
	I'm talking about when I was in my teens.
	Okay, what's the downside? And of course, I had an example, not just in my mother, but in the entire world of just what happens when people dedicate themselves to a life that's anti-rational, just the hell that they live in.
	So I'm down a well.
	Philosophy throws down a rope.
	I'm coming up. I don't want to stay down the well.
	And it's nothing but upside for me.
	There was nothing but upside for me in philosophy when I was a teenager.
	Of course, there were conflicts with friends and they were more mystical, more collectivist, more anti-rational.
	I get all of that. But for me personally, I literally came alive with philosophy.
	I'm not kidding about that.
	I came alive.
	I was barely here before I thought.
	This is back in the day when I was like, I don't know, right before I started really getting into philosophy and I was like, oh, what character needs is a good healthy dose of socialism.
	I didn't know what the hell that was.
	I was complete NPC. I didn't know what I was saying.
	I had no idea what you asked me about socialism is.
	I wouldn't even be nice to people.
	You know, there's that great line...
	From Rocky Mountain High, he was born in the winter of his 27th year.
	That's me, man. I was born in the spring of my 15th year.
	I was born in the spring of my 15th year.
	I was not here before then.
	I was not anything before then.
	I was a minor grab bag of preferences and hostilities and some skills and abilities.
	I always like to write. I like to paint.
	I like to draw. I was good at tennis.
	I was good at sports. But I hadn't arrived in my own life.
	I hadn't manifested in my own life.
	I was a body disinterred and shocked to life by reason.
	I am reasons.
	Reason is my Frankenstein, right?
	Because Frankenstein, everyone thinks, is the monster.
	No, it's the mad doctor who created the monster.
	I wasn't here until I read philosophy.
	I was a chaos, a blur, a random...
	Mobius strip of thoughts, impressions, preferences, nothing holding anything together, no through principles, no understanding, no depth.
	I was uninformed.
	I was... Like, you know, the formation of the solar system, the disk, and then the separation slowly into planets.
	Like, I was just a...
	I was just a fog of impressions and reactions.
	I remember reading Helen Keller's autobiography when I was younger, and she said that before she was taught language, that she doesn't even really remember what it was like before she was language.
	She's very intelligent, but, you know, of course she had no taste.
	Sorry, she was blind, deaf, and dumb.
	And she said that before she had language, All she remembers was just this generally chaotic blur of sensations and confusion and pleasures and pain.
	Oh, this tastes good. Oh, I stubbed my toe.
	That's bad. Like just this monkey hand in front of the face wandering through the vague field storms of electrical stimuli.
	That's it. I wasn't even here.
	I was forged by words.
	You understand, it was the paper cuts of Aristotle that slashed me out of prison.
	I wasn't even here.
	In particular because I'd been so brutalized as a child.
	So I was just hiding and reacting and I didn't have form.
	It's the Genesis story, right?
	Everything was a void. Everything was without form.
	And God said, let there be light.
	I was a ghost before reason.
	.
	I was a formless void, really.
	I had no physics. I had no gravity.
	I had no truth.
	And so, because I had no truth, I had pleasure, pain, and manipulation.
	It's all people without truth and reason.
	Pleasure, pain, manipulation.
	It's the culture these days, right?
	So for me, philosophy was like a life-saving thing.
	So for me, I was down a well.
	The well was descending. It was softening.
	There was nothing down there. I could barely see the sky.
	And it felt like people regularly peed down the well.
	The well was hell. And a rope came down and brought me to the light.
	And I climbed. And I cut my hands.
	And I pulled my shoulders.
	And I skinned my knees.
	And I got out. And that was my experience of philosophy, and I think most people's experience of philosophy, particularly if they come to it later in life, most people's experience of philosophy is it's not like you're throwing them down a rope into the well they're stuck in.
	It's like you're trying to push them down a well, and that's how they react.
	Most people don't understand the beauty of principles.
	They do a cost-benefit analysis.
	I mean, Christianity was the last great bastion of a cost-benefit analysis that transcended the material.
	Is this good for me? Is this bad for me?
	And people don't make sacrifices in the material.
	The cost-benefit analysis for the Christians is the afterlife, and that's a whole different equation.
	It's a whole different set of physics.
	So when you want to bring philosophy to people, You have to ask yourself, what is left standing afterwards in their life?
	I mean, you can look in the mirror, you can ask yourself, what was left standing in your life before and after you began to think for yourself?
	You began to reason, you began to question, you began to be skeptical.
	Man, nothing was left of my old life.
	It was like one of these controlled burns that goes out of control and takes down a continent or something.
	It's like there was nothing left.
	There's nothing left. Now my new life is fantastic and the ship was sinking anyway and I'm glad to have gotten to a lifeboat and a beautiful place with my friends and family and you wonderful people here, but let's say that you talk to somebody and he accepts reason and evidence.
	He accepts universal virtue.
	You've just ignited his mind.
	And who around is left standing afterwards?
	what in his life is left standing afterwards.
	I was being pulled down into nothingness by the dead and the angel.
	The angels of philosophy.
	Swooped down in a blazing trail of light and rescued me.
	Which is why, like, I dedicate my life to philosophy at all costs, because I don't have a life without it.
	You know, the greatest beauty in the world is love.
	And you can't get love without philosophy.
	you can't get love without virtue. I sacrifice money, reputation, public speaking, fame,
	I sacrifice all of this for philosophy, but it's no sacrifice.
	Because without philosophy there would be no me to sacrifice.
	I would be just another eloquent blob using words to push about resources by lying about
	ethics.
	And to have the love of my family and the love of my friends.
	.
	What do I care about the reputation?
	The view of me from malevolent people.
	So that's your challenge, right?
	If somebody says my feelings are facts, they're living in a state of infancy.
	You see, feelings are facts to people prior to language.
	Once you have language, there's a differentiation between feeling and facts, because you can
	describe things, you can abstract things, you can have principles, you can have universals.
	For a baby, a little baby, feelings are facts.
	You know you're hungry. You know you need to be changed.
	You know you're tired. That's it.
	Your feelings are the only facts that matter.
	Once you get language and your brain develops two years, three years, you get abstractions, you get universals, you get reciprocity, you get moral rules.
	So you see, when people...
	How many people...
	Let me ask you this. I know I've been talking for a while here.
	Let me ask you this. What percentage of people do you think are walking infants using these giant levers to move around adult limbs that they haven't earned through maturity?
	What percentage of people are toddlers with driver's licenses?
	It's very high. It's very high.
	It's very high. And I was incredibly lucky.
	And I mean, I earned it and I get all of that.
	But there was some great luck in my history that got me to philosophy.
	But in the same way...
	That I was nothing before philosophy.
	Many people, when they're older, genuinely fear they will be nothing after philosophy.
	Why? Because their career, their marriage, their friendships, their hobbies, their location, their worldview, their virtue signaling, all of that, which is all they know of themselves, that all crumbles away.
	Under the irradiating light of reason, that all crumbles away.
	And when you bring reason to them, I mean, of course, you feel like, in a sense, you're casting out a demon, but the demon is their personality in all they know.
	The fear of zombification under the strictness of reason is Let me just catch up in your comments
	Sorry, I shouldn't be sorry for that speech, but you know what I mean.
	Somebody says, your speech about society investing in the things that they care about really got through to me
	and I cancelled a lot of useless subscriptions and plan to allocate that money your way.
	It was a long-time iTunes podcast listener.
	I'm in a position to be a leader and a father.
	So what you've given me has been trajectory changing.
	Thank you. We'll continue to be here forever.
	Thank you, my friend. I really, really appreciate that.
	Thank you so much. All right, so let me get to your...
	Comments? I've fallen in love with a Chinese girl whose father is in the CCP but we share the same values.
	I'm English. What thoughts do you have?
	Aren't you long distance? I don't really know what to say, but you can email me, call in at freedomain.com, both of you if you want.
	Somebody says, hey Steph, I was hoping you could help me with a thought I have.
	I have a fear of dying with debt.
	I have no fear, I have no idea where this comes from and it often prevents me from making large financial decisions.
	I have a fear of dying with debt.
	Do you mean dying from debt or dying with debt that it gets erased with your death?
	I assume it means you have a fear of dying with debt.
	It often prevents me from making large financial decisions.
	questions.
	I'm not sure. You have to give me more.
	I'm sorry, I'm not particularly sure what you mean by dying with debt.
	All right.
	Hi Steph.
	Would you be okay helping me understand your thoughts between when you say this is a great time to be alive as opposed to what you have said tonight?
	I am probably lacking some understanding in this.
	Much appreciated. Well, okay.
	So, I mean, this is an interesting question about relationships.
	And I think it comes...
	I'm really guessing, my friend, that you grew up around a moody person whose moods would change and there would be danger in the change of moods.
	I generally do believe, for me, for me, honestly, for me, there's no better time to be alive.
	There's no better time to be alive.
	To have the incredible, this is why I thank you guys so, so much, to have the incredible opportunity to think and to reason with the world for all time.
	This technology has allowed for the greatest breakthrough in the history of philosophy.
	Not just this show, obviously I think it's part of it, but it's the capacity to speak to the world without gatekeepers.
	Philosophers have never had that before.
	Ever. So, for me as a philosopher, there's no better time to be alive.
	However, there are times when I'm nostalgic for the past and would prefer to be there.
	Now, here's the interesting thing, right?
	Does it trouble you that I have more than one perspective?
	Does it trouble you that I have more than one perspective?
	All right, this is going back to, I've quoted this before, it's an old Cheers show, where the smart guy comes in and starts reading from great expectations.
	And Dickens says, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
	And the less intelligent people in the bar are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	Which was it? Which was it?
	Right? Ambivalence.
	Ambiguity. Contradiction.
	I am not a syllogism.
	There are times when I have more contempt for my mother.
	There are times when I feel incredibly sorry the way her life has turned out.
	There are times when I have deep sorrow for the fate of the normies, and then there are times where I'm like, there's New Testament stuff, there's Old Testament stuff, and we all have this, I believe.
	Don't you have this?
	I'm sure that you have some ex-girlfriend that it was terrible, but there are times when you miss her.
	Suddenly you see something, you're at some place where you were at before, and you miss her.
	I'm not a straight-line Stalin.
	Yeah, it's a great time to be alive.
	For me, as a philosopher, honestly, it couldn't be better.
	Especially the glorious ten years, 2006 to 2016, where we had the only parting in the clouds of true free speech in the history of the world.
	So, I'm incredibly grateful to be where I am as a philosopher, The fact that I have managed to evade being drafted, I mean, honestly, if you're getting up in the decades, do you ever think about that?
	I mean, the word just went out that, sorry, it's just heartbreaking.
	The word just went out today that if you're 18 or older, you just have to report for the draft in Ukraine.
	Even if you're sick, even if you're wounded, even if you're, like, you still have to show up.
	Most of my ancestors did not survive, because we were an aristocratic military caste, so most of my ancestors did not survive that.
	There's a bit I write about in my novel, almost about, before a brother is dying, this actually did happen in my family.
	So the fact that, through circumstance, I have navigated a world where I just didn't get drafted.
	Not common. Throughout history.
	But there are times when I'm nostalgic for an entirely different era.
	Absolutely. Now, the question is, it's a very interesting question.
	I don't have the exact answer, or maybe even an approximate answer.
	Very interesting question. What's wrong with both?
	You know, somebody asked me this question.
	Well, you said you weren't a fan of Star Wars, but then on this show you said that you wanted to get a lightsaber.
	And it's like, yes, when I was 11, I wanted to get a lightsaber.
	And I have more skepticism of the show since.
	What's wrong with having multiplicities?
	What's wrong with having...
	I wouldn't even say contradictions, because human beings like you and me were not syllogisms.
	If there's a contradiction in the syllogism, the syllogism is false.
	If you say, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, Socrates is immortal, that's an error.
	It's a logical error, right?
	If I say, I love the present, at times I'm nostalgic for the past.
	I mean, I had a terrible childhood.
	I'm telling you, man, there are times when I'm incredibly nostalgic for my childhood.
	Because back then, I had more long-term hope now.
	now I had more short-term hope back then.
	So I get what you're saying.
	And people do this.
	And I get that. And it's not a criticism at all.
	It's a very interesting question.
	There's a line I've always disliked from Walt Whitman where he says, You say I contradict myself.
	Very well, I contradict myself.
	I used to dislike that line because I thought it was just about reason and evidence, but we can miss what almost destroyed us.
	I mean, you hear this from soldiers all the time, that they look back on the war and they say, it was some of the best times of my life.
	But they also say, the war is hell, right?
	What's wrong with having contradictions in your personality?
	Because a personality is not a syllogism.
	I think in the future personalities, when you're raised peacefully and the world is rational, personalities would be much more consistent.
	But I have, for instance, I have a batshit crazy witch in my head called my mother.
	You know, I lived with her for 15 years and barely survived her violence and madness.
	So the only way that I could survive her was by internalizing her.
	So... There are...
	I didn't get bullied much outside of school, maybe once or twice.
	but where there were bullies around or if I saw kids bullying others I would
	internalize the bully so that I could survive them, right?
	So I have both madness and sanity within me.
	I have both anti-rationality and reason within me.
	I have a love of the present, a desire for the future, and a mourning and nostalgia for the past.
	I mean, honestly, how could I create vivid and believable characters in my novels if I was not able to sustain more than one perception?
	How would I be able to roleplay that?
	In the call-in shows, if I were not able to internalize more than one perspective.
	How could I have an argument with myself, which I do, right, from time to time, maybe more than from time to time, if I didn't, if I didn't accept contradiction in my personality?
	Or if I didn't allow myself to have multifarious, overlapping, and oppositional perspectives within myself.
	I've always said this. It's called the ecosystem.
	I am not an individual.
	I am a collection of principles and people and memories and feelings and lusts and thirsts.
	I'm a whole... I'm a menagerie.
	We all are. We all are.
	And I've always said, like, everyone gets a seat at the table.
	So, and I really, really appreciate the question because it's a fantastic question.
	So you said, would you be okay helping me understand your thoughts between when you say this is a great time to be alive as opposed to what you have said tonight?
	I'm probably lacking some understanding on this.
	Much appreciated. It also depends what I'm doing.
	So, as a philosopher, this is the best time.
	When it comes to having a relaxed, convivial, and immediate community, the Middle Ages would be way better.
	Way better. For the incels, they probably like living in the modern world, but also, if they lived in the Middle Ages, they would be married.
	Almost certainly. So, there's a certain amount of A certain amount of acceptance of what you would call contradiction, but it's not contradiction.
	There's a part of me that loves the present and there's a part of me that's nostalgic for the past.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	There's a part of me that's very happy with my life, and that's most of me.
	And there's a part of me that's very sad the way things turned out, you know, with people from my past and my, quote, career and all of that kind of stuff.
	Yeah, there's times when I would like to be striding the stages as I've done in the past and speaking to a thousand people and taking questions and letting my brain burn bright that way.
	So... And my concern, my concern here is not...
	You with me, but you with yourself.
	That's the big question.
	That's a really, really big question.
	Are you allowed to have multiplicity?
	Are you allowed to have, quote, contradictory thoughts?
	Or do you say, I'm really feeling nostalgic for the Middle Ages.
	No, no, no, no. I think that now is the best time, so don't...
	That's not right. That's not right.
	That's not self-exploratory.
	That's self-tyranny. This is unacceptable.
	I have this perspective, I'm only allowed to have one perspective, and therefore this other opposing perspective is wrong.
	But it's all around the destination, right?
	I mean, you don't have a rule when you're driving that says, I can only go north, right?
	Well, it depends on your destination.
	If you're going to work and your work is north, you go north.
	When you're coming home, you go south. When I'm thinking about all I can achieve as a philosopher, the modern world is the greatest thing ever.
	When I think about easy and convivial and baked in from childhood community, then I miss that.
	I don't know anyone from my childhood or youth anymore.
	I'm not in contact with anyone.
	And of course, there's nostalgia for that.
	Yeah, absolutely. It's nice when the people know you that well, unless they use it against you, which is not...
	But I regret that, the way that didn't turn out.
	So... And the reason that you would have this is that you would have random moody people and you'd try and catch them in contradictions to stall their aggression.
	You have random moody people in your life when you're growing up and you try and catch them in contradictions to stall their aggression.
	Now... I understand the question.
	It's a fantastic question.
	I welcome, embrace the question.
	It's a beautiful question. But it means that you have to police others.
	And that means that you're policing yourself.
	Well, I can't have this perspective.
	I can't have this opinion. I mean, you don't think I've ever thought of disavowing everything and joining the mainstream?
	I can't think that.
	No, I can think that. I can think that.
	There's nothing wrong with thinking that.
	Right? Nothing wrong with thinking that.
	If you want to get back together with a crazy destructive ex, there's nothing wrong with thinking that.
	Oh, I can't think that. That's bad.
	It was terrible, right?
	No, you can think that.
	Don't censor yourself.
	Right? Allow for multiplicity.
	Allow for complexity. Allow for contradictions.
	Contradictions are very powerful.
	Contradictions are great to explore.
	You understand that contradictions are why we have physics, right?
	Everything falls. Wait, wait, wait.
	There's some stuff that doesn't fall. Dandelion seeds, helium balloons, clouds.
	They don't fall. Birds.
	So what's happening, right?
	So there's these contradictions. Everything falls, it doesn't, right?
	Some things stay up. Some things go up.
	Smoke goes up. But tree limbs fall.
	Leaves blow away.
	So there's contradictions there, and from those contradictions we get richness.
	We don't just ban the things that go up and say, well, everything falls so nothing can go up.
	You can't ever release a balloon.
	No, you explore these contradictions until you get to more unifying principles underneath.
	My nostalgia for the world that was is because I think it would be beautiful and I wrote about all of this in my
	novel The future it would be beautiful to have a world
	Where people have the kind of community that we used to have
	So if I just say well no, this is the best world and I can't be nostalgic for any other I lose
	Part of that richness of what it is that I'm working to try to help achieve in the world
	Thank you.
	Be open with yourself.
	Do not censor yourself. And it's fine to point out a, quote, contradiction in others, but it's interesting, right?
	Not like, well, you said this, but now you say the opposite.
	Wait a minute. You said this, but now you're saying the opposite like it's a bad thing.
	It's like, and you did this in the right way.
	There's no criticism to you.
	I really appreciate the question, but saying, wow, it's interesting.
	I mean, obviously there's a part of you that loves the present world and there's a part of you that's nostalgic for the Middle Ages.
	Tell me more about that. Fantastic.
	You want to do that with yourself.
	Be open to yourself.
	Allow all parts of you to speak and listen.
	It doesn't mean they order you around and you just act on whatever they say, but...
	Let them speak. Like if I were to say, if I feel nostalgia for the Middle Ages and I were to say, no, no, no, no, because I've said that this is the best world and I can't say that.
	That's not fun. Why would I want to police myself?
	There's enough tyranny out there in the world.
	I don't want to do it in my head.
	Any advice on dealing with benefiting from things you didn't earn?
	Like inheritance, making you a higher status when I didn't earn all these resources.
	They were just dropped on me from a family member.
	Yes, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	That's where you can relieve yourself of all the burden that you're carrying.
	Just kidding. Okay, tell me something that you did earn.
	Tell me something that you did earn.
	You know, a friend of mine, when he was five years old, his friend got out of the car
	in the door where the traffic was, not the door where the sidewalk was.
	He opened the door, got out, got killed immediately, creamed by a car at the age of five, just splat.
	That's just some bad luck. And we've all done these things as kids, right?
	We've all done these things as kids.
	I remember I had a drawing book when I was probably about the same age, five or so.
	I had a drawing book and my mom was dragging me across the road and the traffic was coming and I dropped my drawing book and I vividly remember this.
	Vividly remember this. I reached down...
	Onto the road to pick up my drawing book and a truck, a wheel, I don't know if it was a truck, a car wheel drove over half my book.
	Honestly, it was like half an inch from my head.
	Fast, right? So I'd be dead.
	Did I earn my intelligence?
	Did I earn my height? Did I earn having blue eyes?
	Did I earn speaking English?
	No. No.
	I mean, it's what you do with it.
	But you have this, I think, maybe an artificial division benefiting from things you didn't earn.
	You know, I mean, you...
	I've told you this before.
	A friend of mine turned out to have a...
	The first friend I made when I came to Toronto.
	And my friend, a great kid, just didn't wake up one day.
	He was 12.
	Just didn't wake up. He had some genital heart defect and just died in his sleep.
	So I've got an extra...
	I mean, how long, right? I got 43, 44 years extra.
	Did I earn those? I didn't happen to get born with a congenital heart defect.
	I just didn't happen to get creamed by a car even though it was three and a half an inch from my head
	You know when I was crossing at night a big giant bridge over a 300 foot drop a train bridge the train came and I
	jumped from one track to the other and fell down the middle and just managed to grab my way up and
	not die and the the suction the vacuum from the train almost pulled my head
	into the wheels and I fought it back and you know, there was a guy in my neighborhood lost both of his legs on train tracks, goofing around with trains.
	Terrible idea. Absolutely terrible.
	Never do it. Did I earn?
	I was lucky. I was lucky.
	I was lucky. A friend of mine in junior high school went from playing sports to being in a wheelchair to being dead inside of six months.
	Everybody goofed around in pools.
	There was a guy in my boarding school, great soccer player, did a flip into the pool, hit his head, nobody noticed, and he had a stroke and half his brain died.
	I did flips into pool.
	I was just lucky. So you may have a bit of an artificial division.
	Things that you earned and things that you didn't.
	Virtue you earn. It's not what you get, it's what you do with it.
	I mean, am I guilty for having decent health and, I don't know, that I was attractive when I was younger and not too bad now?
	I don't feel guilty about these things.
	I didn't earn them.
	I mean, health I work at, but...
	Accept it. You got a benefit.
	I got a benefit. You got a benefit.
	Embrace it. Enjoy it.
	What you earn is what you do with the benefit.
	You know, when you guys, some people saw my speech that I posted not too long ago, when I spoke at the European Union on tax censorship and people were like, you know, the passion, the focus, the professionalism, the commitment, I could have done some real damage in the world of politics or public speaking that wasn't based on virtue.
	Yeah. So I've earned the virtue that I put my gifts to, but I didn't earn the gifts.
	I didn't earn the gifts.
	So take what you get with intense gratitude and humility and do great things with it.
	Do great things with it.
	I don't know what those are, because that's as individual as DNA. But don't say, well, there's these things that I've earned and things that I haven't earned and most of what you have you didn't earn.
	That's why there's humility and the desire to help others, isn't there?
	I mean, if I happen to have had the gift of philosophy, then shouldn't I use it to try and promote virtue and peace in the world and nonviolence and a better future?
	I didn't earn this.
	Ability. I didn't earn this ability.
	If you happen to have been blessed with a beautiful singing voice, go make some beautiful music.
	Make people happy. Feel guilty about it?
	No. You feeling guilty about it just deprives the world of some music.
	So I hope that helps.
	The conversation breathes life into you from dust.
	Yeah. Absolutely.
	God is reason. Many people describe not having internal dialogues before a certain point when they start questioning things.
	Yeah, for sure. Who will win Wimbledon?
	The advertisers. I was not here before 56 blows my mind.
	Whenever that lightning strike hits you.
	Somebody says, I had a similar profound experience going to college.
	It was like I was a completely different person, like my brain was swapped with someone much smarter and articulate.
	Let's get more articulate. Does language help form consciousness?
	Oh yeah. You become a different person when you think.
	And I'm not just talking about this in an analogy.
	Your DNA changes when you think.
	You know, there's epigenetics, right?
	Genes that are turned on. When you strain, when you strive, when you have grand ambitions, you literally change your DNA. Your DNA is like, some of it is like the tail of a kite.
	You just yank your kite, you yeet your kite all over the place on the winds of your ambition and desires.
	You are literally creating yourself like a sculptor at the genetic level by focusing on Great goals.
	I was not just changed by philosophy in some abstract sense, like my mind was changed, like my body, my physique, my DNA. My daughter's a different person because I'm a philosopher.
	You carve yourself.
	You're not carving a statue outside yourself.
	Thoughts change who you are, physically as well as mentally.
	When did I do therapy?
	Early 30s.
	How far did philosophy get you before you did therapy?
	Oh yeah, I was a good 15-16 years into philosophy before I did therapy.
	I have just finished reading Real Time Relationships and it became one of my favorite books of
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
	Yeah, so before philosophy, I was amoral.
	I was amoral. I took things.
	I kissed more than one girl at a time.
	Not with any sort of official boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but I was just amoral.
	I was just amoral. What do I need to do to maximize my outcome in all of this?
	this service if it's an animal it was an animal all right let me get your
	questions and comments Do you hear about the possible civil war that's going on in Russia right now?
	Who knows? Oh, I've missed a lot of comments.
	While I'm getting to the right place, if you find this valuable, you can tip.
	I would really, really appreciate that.
	I feel like I go deep.
	And I think I go really raw and honest without any particular sense of how it makes me look.
	So if you could support me, I would really really appreciate that
	All right Sometimes it does bother me when you have opposing views
	Then I realize I'm being lazy.
	Well, it is the mark of great intelligence.
	Two things. One, to entertain and argue for a point you don't believe in or indeed violently oppose.
	And number two, to work with analogies is a sign of highest intelligence because it's extracting similar things without a syllogism.
	So... You lose...
	It's funny, everyone praises diversity.
	I think diversity in the mind is fantastic.
	You lose wisdom when you shut off parts of yourself.
	You lose warnings. You lose...
	Guidance. Oh, regarding the draft...
	A friend of mine's wife fled Ukraine with her husband.
	Some of her stories are just beyond belief in pure evil.
	Yeah. Any advice for reconciling your two perspectives you shared tonight?
	Why would they need to be reconciled?
	They're not enemies. I'm not sure why.
	See, I mean, if you have a girlfriend and it went badly and you broke up in a negative way, do you love her?
	Do you hate her? Or are you indifferent?
	Well, a lot of times you don't think about her.
	You're kind of indifferent. When you think about the negative things, you dislike her.
	When you think about the positive things, you like her.
	I mean, you got together for some reason, right?
	So there's something that you liked about her enough to get together, right?
	I mean, when I think of women I dated in the past, what do I think?
	Well, most times I'm indifferent, don't think about them at all.
	If I focus on things that are negative, there's dislike.
	If I focus on things that are positive, there's liking.
	And this is really important, right?
	Because there are times when philosophy is a total shitstorm, right?
	And you know that people are like grabbing torches and spears and they're coming to your grass hut with fire in their eyes, right?
	So I can focus on the negatives of philosophy or I can focus on the positives.
	If I focus on the positives, does that mean the negatives aren't there?
	Nope. I need to be aware of those too.
	So navigate things, right?
	Without ending up on a cross somewhere, right?
	So why would I need to reconcile these two perspectives?
	What's wrong here? With, like, you have three perspectives on everyone you have dated.
	Indifference, like, dislike, or love, hate, or whatever, right?
	Yeah. You know, there are times when I had a great time with my mother.
	Does that mean I love her? No. Does that mean that those times didn't exist?
	No, they did. So, what's...
	You know, when you think about good things about your ex, it's positive, bad things negative, most times you're indifferent.
	Well, which is it? It's like, why does it have to be?
	They're not opposites, right?
	They're not opposites. There were good things in the past, there were great things in the present.
	I prefer the present, but that doesn't mean that there's, you know, that's why I said I go back to the Middle Ages.
	They didn't say forever, I just said, but you go visit, right?
	I hope I'm not asking in the Star Wars guy way.
	I'm genuinely curious, and your answers help me put the pieces together.
	No, listen, I absolutely honor, respect, and I like that you asked that question.
	It's a great and fantastic question.
	Please, please, I'm begging you people, allow multiplicity, allow complexity, allow, quote, contradictions, right?
	It's not a contradiction.
	Just saying you have to have no contradictions is to say you should never have a human experience that's open to interpretation.
	and almost all human experiences are open to interpretation.
	I don't understand having more than one emotion that are seemingly at odds.
	I struggle with that. Like being mad at someone and simultaneously sympathizing with them is confusing for me because in my mind they preclude each other.
	Why do they preclude each other?
	Honestly, Sometimes, as an exercise in the morning, before I get up, this is my brain workout, little lift the lid on my life here, right?
	So sometimes in the morning, I will sit and think about all the people who championed the stripping of my rights as an unvaccinated human being.
	And... Whether the vax is good or bad is not particularly important, but I will think about them.
	And I'm angry.
	And I have sympathy.
	I'm angry because they did wrong.
	I have sympathy because I know that it's far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
	Infinitely better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
	So I've come out of the equation much better.
	And, you know, if you hear the story, I don't know how you feel, if I hear the story of someone who was really insistent about taking the vaccine, maybe they got some injury, who knows, whatever, right?
	Yeah, I have Old Testament and New Testament, and more than that, right?
	Serves them right, and that's really sad that that happened, right?
	What's wrong with the multiplicity?
	Right? It's a real question.
	What's wrong with them? Does it mean you're hypocritical?
	Does it mean that to be consistent you can only have one emotion about a complex thing?
	Have you ever...
	You know, when I was a kid, I admired tennis players who were really good.
	I played tennis at a reasonably competitive level.
	So I played tennis and I would watch tennis players with a mixture of admiration and envy.
	Don't you have this, people, in your life?
	Don't you have this? If you're in a stadium and you're watching a band and you admire what they're doing, but don't you envy it a little too?
	Admiration is like yay and envy is a little eh, right?
	Yeah. We are not lasers.
	We are disco balls. We have multiplicities.
	We are a rainbow, right?
	I get up, I get down.
	Same thing, I feel nostalgic about my childhood too, even though I never want to live like that again.
	Yeah. And maybe it's an older thing.
	I can't remember. It was some Russian book in the 19th century where somebody wrote about his childhood and the reviewer said it's like a window just opened up into his childhood.
	He saw everything vividly and then it closed again.
	Oh, I... You know, there are certain songs that take me back so vividly to times of my childhood.
	I mean, it was a stupid little memory for me to carve into the fabric of the world forever.
	So, we played Dungeons and Dragons.
	I was learning... I was learning a game called Traveller, which was a science fiction game.
	I don't know if it's still around, and we only played it once or twice.
	And I was listening to the album Friends of Mr.
	Cairo by John Evangelis.
	John Anderson, the singer from Yes, and Evangelis, the composer of the theme for Charrots for Fire, dum-dum-da-dum-dum-dum, that guy, right?
	And that song, the second half of Friends of Mr.
	Cairo, One and one to talk to you.
	Like film stars, they get close to you.
	You merit his appeal.
	It's a beautiful, beautifully sung.
	Beautifully sung. I mean, John Anderson has just truly an angelic voice.
	Go listen to Song of Seven.
	Go listen to Animation.
	Go listen to A breakthrough was needed by the end of the day.
	Hurry Home. Fantastic.
	Or State of Independence. Just beautiful vocals.
	And I very vividly remember.
	It was a Saturday afternoon.
	Had headphones on.
	When the hell did Friends of Mr.
	Cairo come out? Let me look up that album.
	Hear the Friends of Mr.
	Cairo. And of course, I like imaginative songs, right?
	And it's a very imaginative song.
	I always thought it was John Anderson saying, don't worry about me, I'm okay.
	1981. Yeah, so I was 15.
	Yeah, 14. I was 14 years old, I think, when it came out.
	And I remember sitting on this bed, reading about Traveler, listening to this beautiful music, sun coming in through the window.
	Loved it. It was those times where you believe that the future can be as crystalline and pure and elevated and beautiful as an ice sculpture in a permanent winter in the image of the Archangel Gabriel in your heart forever.
	Beautiful times. So yeah, there's things I feel nostalgic about, for sure.
	I remember singing that song at the second half of Friends of Mr.
	Cairo. Did you see, in the morning light, I really talked, yes I did, to God's early golden light.
	And I was privileged to be, as I am to this day, to be with you, to be with you, to be with you, to be with you.
	I remember when I worked in a hardware store, Tony's Home Hardware, I would rip up the boxes.
	You know, everything comes shipped in boxes.
	I remember singing that song, ripping up all these boxes in the basement all night.
	The song playing so vividly in my head.
	I mean, I have a wild memory for music.
	It's almost autistic.
	Yeah, you can feel nostalgic about your childhood, right?
	Alright, I'm so sorry, I'm trying to catch up to your comments.
	I'm sorry.
	Yeah, he who is not with us is against us, you know, all of this stuff.
	You're either with us or you're with the terrorists.
	Like this binary thinking is the death of the Enlightenment, right?
	It's the death of the post-Enlightenment society.
	It's a post-enlightenment society, was accepting contradictions and working to resolve them
	in logic but not in personality.
	You know when my daughter and I, when she was younger and we would go to play centers,
	I mean especially here in Canada in the winter and all that, we'd go to play centers and
	Thank you.
	.
	The moms would all be on their phones and the kids would just be wandering around these sort of play center climbing areas and so on.
	And they would swarm us because I'd be in there playing with my daughter and they'd swarm us and can we play, can we play?
	And I was partly annoyed at the mothers and partly really sympathetic towards the kids and partly annoyed at the kids.
	And my daughter was annoyed at the kids, but sometimes we played with them and we had fun.
	So, yeah, just embrace the complication.
	That's called life. I wish our conversation when I first called in lasted longer because I wanted to work through some ideas on the future and how to get there and I got cut.
	Sorry about that. How do you do philosophy?
	How could I become a better or become a philosopher?
	It's rough thinking that I haven't thought about that in years now.
	So philosophy is first principles.
	Philosophy is saying, okay, what is reality?
	What is reality? All the objective things that we gain consistent evidence of through the census.
	What is reality? What is truth?
	Truth is when the ideas in our mind that claim to map onto reality are logically consistent and empirically verifiable.
	What is virtue?
	Virtue is universally preferable behavior.
	So you just have to have those basic principles.
	How do you do science?
	Well, you accept that when you are making true statements about reality, the statements have to be logically consistent and they have to be empirically verified and also predictive in nature as well.
	And, I mean, gosh, was it 2006?
	I was saying that global warming was not going to do much.
	Very predictive, right? Bitcoin 2011, right?
	When it was like, what, 50 cents?
	or something like that.
	All right.
	Binary thinking is deeply ingrained in most people.
	One team against the other, heads or tails, only two sides.
	Well, it's trained into us, right?
	It's trained into us by heroes and villains in movies.
	It's also trained into us in particular by sports teams, where it's win-lose.
	They're fundamentally equal, but you pick your own side based on fashion, based on color, based on proximity.
	So we're heavily trained into...
	Binary thinking. And binary thinking is very easy because binary thinking allows us to fight each other, right?
	If we have binary thinking in a society, a society that has binary thinking,
	it's very easy for the powers that be to set us against each other,
	as opposed to this complexity, right?
	I have contradictory thoughts about the 1950s.
	I hate the communist demonization of it, but also understand that childhood then wasn't as good as depicted.
	There was dysfunction and abuse back then.
	Well, there was, but now the question is, is the dysfunction and abuse After children in the 1950s, when children could roam the neighborhoods, you could make pickup games with anyone, you could go to the creek, you could go to the woods, you could go over to people's houses, you could travel anywhere, get on buses, go and do anything from the age of four or five onwards.
	And I know that because I grew up...
	In the early 1970s, mid-1970s in England until mass immigration came.
	And I could go anywhere and I could do anything.
	And crime was way lower in England, even in the 1930s when people were brutally poorer than it was much later on.
	So you can say, ah yes, well the 1950s, but children could roam free of fear.
	And they then had to organize their own games.
	There wasn't structure.
	You know, the process, like why am I a good negotiator?
	Because I spent half my childhood, and I wrote about this in Almost, almostnovel.com, I spent
	half my childhood, as most free-range children did, without money organizing games with other
	kids and enforcing the rules.
	Why do I know that you can enforce rules without a state?
	Because I grew up enforcing rules as other kids enforced rules in games that we were
	playing with no centralized authority.
	You know, we would play war, and you'd shoot at someone, and you'd say, I got you, and
	And they'd say, no you didn't, right?
	And you'd have to have a way to resolve that.
	And again, I wrote about all of this with Reginald and Tom at the beginning of Almost.
	My novel. So we didn't have a central authority.
	I mean, I understand. Video games have a central authority called the server, the video game rules, the facts, the game mechanics.
	Well, we didn't have any of that.
	What are we going to play? We had to figure something out.
	How are we going to enforce the rules? We had to figure that out.
	What do we do with people who break the rules?
	We had to figure all that out. No centralized authority.
	Of course, that's where DROs came from.
	DROs came directly from my childhood, that you don't need a centralized authority to create and enforce rules, because I did it.
	All throughout my childhood. Yeah, I contradict myself.
	So what? I am deep. I contain multitudes.
	Right. Now, UPB is for morals, so you may feel murderous.
	That doesn't make you a murderer.
	Feeling murderous doesn't make you a bad person, right?
	So, feeling love, feeling murderousness doesn't make you a bad person.
	In fact, it's very important to be aware of when you're in danger, and feeling murderous might be an important part of that.
	Don't act on it, obviously, but you can feel it, right?
	So that's within yourself.
	But for UPB, murder cannot be UPB. That's straight up, right?
	Theft, rape, assault. Can't be UPB. All right.
	I was in a horrible accident back in the day.
	I should have been dead. You know?
	Yeah, like my friend when I was a kid was a real bully on his bike and he ended up dying in a motorcycle accident later on.
	Didn't you get injured really badly during your scuba diving trip?
	No, it wasn't so much injured badly, but I went into a wreck while I only had a snorkel.
	I didn't have scuba. And when I went into the wreck to look about, I was following a cool fish into the wreck.
	And when I turned to go back out, there was a strong current coming in and it was really hard to get out.
	I'm pulling myself out. I cut my arm pretty badly, but it wasn't really badly injured.
	Somebody says, oh, this is the guy with the question.
	Thank you for helping me understand.
	Once explained, it is obvious.
	I have a lot of opposing thoughts.
	And yes, my mother and father probably did have me feeling uncomfortable with multiple differing thoughts.
	It had to do with you feeling uncomfortable.
	I need to do some mental diving and work that stuff out.
	I was the husband-wife call in for context.
	Oh, okay. Nice to meet you.
	Thank you, Steph. That helps a lot.
	When the money actually hits, I will share some of the burden with this show.
	I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I will tell you...
	Let me just... Sorry, let me get to your...
	Let me get to your questions.
	See if I missed anything important.
	Well, then of course the kids weren't drugged back in the day, right?
	You didn't hit them with adult speed because the teacher is boring.
	Just make sure I'm getting to these questions.
	Somebody says, for me anger is self-protective.
	If I sympathize with my abusers, I don't think I'm as likely to protect myself.
	I think that's where my aversion to emotional multiplicity is coming from, but I understand your arguments.
	Sympathize with your abusers.
	Okay, but here's the thing.
	If you really want to know your abusers, because not from the past, you can't do anything about the abuse in the past.
	The reason that The reason that our hands, our fingers hurt if we put them in a fire is not for the past because you can't fix it, but for the future.
	It's aversive, right? So you really, really want to know You're abusers.
	Now, one thing that abusers are incredibly prone to is self-pity.
	I've never ever met in my life.
	It's not science, right? But I've never ever met in my life somebody who was abusive, who wasn't also pathetically piteous towards himself, full of self-pity, victimization and so on, right?
	And so the abuser sympathizes with himself or herself, and so you're just getting an echo of that.
	So sympathizing with the abusers is a way of inoculating you against people who use self-pity to manipulate you.
	My mother's self-pity was, well, I didn't do anything wrong.
	It was all done. All the doctors did bad things to me, and that's why anything, quote, wrong that happened wasn't my fault.
	So she had self-pity. She perceived herself as the victim, and still does, for all I know.
	So when I feel sympathy towards my mother, I'm catching the echo of that.
	And some of it's mine, for sure, but I'm catching the echo of her self-pity, which is really important, because, man, you can lose a lot more resources to self-pity than you can to aggression.
	My gosh, just look at the modern world.
	I mean, it's everywhere. So I wouldn't fight your sense of sympathy for your abusers.
	It's going to protect you from people who will try and abuse you through self-pity, through evoking a pity response in you, the pathological altruism thing.
	If I could go back in time to the 1980s for a visit, not my own life, but the places, man, I'd love that.
	I mean, this mall, the Don Mills Mall was a very big part of my life.
	I lived right across from it, right across the parking lot.
	Don Mills Mall was a big part of my life.
	I remember cops stopping my friend and I when we were playing frisbee in the parking lot late at night.
	I remember there was a beer store back there.
	It's where I bought my first beer underage, God help me.
	And I had jobs at a bunch of different places in there.
	I would sometimes have lunch there.
	My friends and I would walk over to get icy squares.
	There was like five cents for an icy square.
	Like, you know, there's chocolates with the mints and all that.
	We'd do that after lunch. I remember when I was a broke-ass kid, I would go to the...
	I would go to the fish and chips shop and you could get a bowl of leftover batter and you mix that in with some ketchup and it wasn't great eating but it sure filled you up.
	I remember going to the science center being totally broke and I had to have my soup.
	I couldn't afford any soup.
	I had no money with me. I only had money for bus fare.
	And what I did was you get the crackers because the crackers are free.
	At least they were back then in the cafeteria.
	You get the crackers, you mix in some ketchup and you've got your soup.
	So yeah, I'd love to go back to that more.
	The fact that it's all gone, it's gone.
	Like, it's totally torn down.
	I've actually been back when I showed my daughter my neighborhood.
	It's gone, totally gone, and it will never be back.
	I was in a...
	I kept applying to the record store.
	I wanted to get a job in the record store.
	Because I love music. And I kept pulling down, pointing...
	I remember I kept writing down because I wanted to be honest, right?
	Oh, I know. Have you ever had a criminal blah, blah, blah?
	It's like, oh, I sold a candy bar once and I never got the job, right?
	But I was in that...
	I liked the girl who worked there and I was in that store when a friend of mine came up and I was chatting with her and he was like, wipe the drool off, Steph, you know, and it was really embarrassing.
	And that was a store where I bought Jeff Lin's War of the Worlds, a double album, and realized however important it was to me because I'd saved up for like two months...
	The cashier didn't care. She just handed it over.
	And that, which is important to you, doesn't matter to other people a lot of times.
	I cleaned offices there for a while, a doctor's office.
	I cleaned a travel agent and a regular office.
	And I had a job, of course, in a hardware store there.
	I worked in the Pizza Hut right behind the mall.
	And I fed quarters into the bowling alley defender machine and galaga machine back there.
	I never went bowling in that bowling alley.
	Maybe once with a friend's party.
	Back there behind the mall was when the Baskin-Robbins opened for one glorious day.
	It was 10 cents for a scoop of ice cream, and I went and had seven scoops of ice cream and managed to keep it all down.
	So yeah, it's all gone.
	It's just all vanished into history.
	I mean, there'll be photos, I guess, and so on, but yeah, it's all gone.
	So I'll keep a little bit here.
	I remember being out back at that mall with my friends.
	We all had our bikes, like our dirt bikes.
	And mine, of course, like most of my friends were broke too.
	Not all of them, but my friends, we had basically stitched together bikes from stuff we found in garbage dumps and all that.
	And I remember being back there for an hour.
	We were trying to figure out a cool name for our bike gang.
	And we were literally arguing about this for an hour.
	And we never got to a good name, which is fine.
	All right. Hey Steph, I have a question.
	I'm currently in an engineering grad program that will take the next two years to complete.
	After one year invested, I get paid to attend.
	And I've been feeling very demotivated.
	I haven't been very productive in my coursework and research.
	And I'm not sure if I should just drop out and get a job or white knuckle it.
	Do you have any recommendations or thoughts?
	Also, I have a wife I married a year ago.
	Well, I obviously can't tell you what to do.
	I don't mean to repeat that, right?
	But you got married, so your body is crying out for babies.
	Your body is crying out for children.
	Your body is crying out to become a father.
	And if it's like two years still to go and you've got a wife, I assume, that you want to impregnate and make kids with, it's two years, then you've got to go look for a job, then you've got to settle into that job.
	It could be three or four or five years before you can have kids.
	And I would say sooner rather than later is probably the best way to do it.
	it so that probably is what's going on.
	All right, somebody says, I don't have a problem with emotional multiplicity per se.
	My problem is with feeling two or more emotions that seem like opposites.
	Feeling simultaneously frenetic and calm or happy and sad or hopeless and hopeful.
	You admire someone because they're great, but you also envy someone because they're great, so I see no contradiction feeling both of those things at the same time.
	So let's say you feel hopeless and hopeful.
	So if something is hopeless, then the hope comes in giving up the hope.
	So I can completely believe that you can feel hopeless and hopeful at the same time.
	So the hopeless is, so let's say that there's someone in your life, you're trying to wake to reason, but they keep rejecting and attacking you and bad-mouthing you or whatever, right?
	So you feel hopeless that they're going to change, but you also feel hopeful that they're going to change.
	Now the two things are there because the hopeless is probably the accurate one.
	And when you give up on hope, you get hope because you give up on someone who's failing.
	Like imagine, let me make it more clear.
	So you're a doctor, right?
	And a bunch of people have been injured in some terrible bus crash or something and they all come wheeling into your ER. Now, you hope that you can save everyone, but you do your triage, right?
	This guy is already dead.
	This guy is going to die no matter what we do.
	This guy is going to be okay if he waits.
	This guy needs intervention right now, which could save his life, right?
	So, the hopeless is the people who can't be saved no matter what.
	They're just bleeding out. You can't fix them.
	And because you accept that they're hopeless, you are hopeful that you can save someone else.
	So in that situation, you will look at two guys and you will feel hopeless about this guy, can't be saved, and then therefore hopeful about this guy.
	And you feel hopeless and hopeful at the same time.
	When you give up on that which is impossible, you can achieve that which is possible.
	So hopeless and hopeful...
	Absolutely. Happy and sad?
	Sure. Yeah, of course.
	I mean, love and loss are all bound in.
	Happy and sad are also bound in.
	You know, I'm incredibly grateful for philosophy, but I feel very sad about the circumstances that brought it about.
	Sure. What's wrong with these things?
	There's great wisdom in this.
	There's great wisdom in this.
	Let's say that you say, well, I feel hopeless and hopeful.
	Well, I have to get rid of the hopelessness.
	Okay, then you'll just keep trying to resuscitate some guy or reason with some guy who can't be saved and won't reason.
	So then you lose hope and you stay.
	By giving up on the hopelessness, you also give up on the hope.
	Because hopelessness is there to tell you, and you can't fix things.
	Why do you think I gave up on politics?
	All right. So, yeah, just...
	I am a DRO. Somebody's got a referee.
	Yeah, that's good. Although you're a ref in a game where everybody accepts the rules, right?
	And the rules are objective.
	What are your thoughts on integrated in-laws from a different culture?
	Chinese. We share the same values, and I love her, but backgrounds are very different.
	Mine are English American, and hers work for the Chinese government.
	Yeah, we just talked about this. We live close to each other in the UK and have yet to meet her parents.
	It's not a philosophical question.
	It's just a negotiation question.
	All right. We'll get to your last questions and comments.
	If you have found this conversation to be valuable, freedomain.com forward slash donate, or you can donate here.
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	Wow, a lot of comments. A lot of comments.
	All right, let me go here. Ford.
	Oh, the car. What is it they found on Road Dead?
	That's the acronym. The 80s music is the only reason I would go back.
	I saw some good concerts in the 80s.
	I saw Tom Cochran and Red Ryder at Ontario Place.
	And I remember we were all dancing on the chairs.
	And the security guard was like, get down, get down.
	And we just all looked at him and shrugged like nobody got down.
	Because it's like, this is a concert, man.
	Man, it's a great concert and guy had some great hair.
	You remember cigarette vending machines.
	Oh, that's funny. My parents were very loving at some moments and could change to psychotic demons at the blink of an eye.
	I enjoyed contradictions in personality.
	But you see, by not exploring that, you're not, I think, getting, in my view, I can't tell you obviously about your parents, but in my view, what I get from that is that it's, you know, it's like, it's like a fish saying, well, wait a minute.
	I mean, they keep putting these really great tasting worms on these sharp little hooks.
	Like, what are they doing?
	It's like, well, no, they're catching you, right?
	So your parents are loving so that you lower your guard so that then when they attack you, it hurts more and they like that for sadistic reasons, I assume, right?
	So it's not a contradiction.
	It's not a contradiction.
	I mean, it's like saying, well, the con man was really friendly until he stole from me.
	It's like, well, the friendliness is to get you to trust him, right?
	So, it's not...
	They weren't changing, right?
	The charm, the sociopathic charm, and the psychotic abuse, they're the same thing.
	They draw you in, and then they strike.
	So, yeah, I'd say it's not a contradiction.
	Look at the DMOD, dead malls of discord.
	Yeah, there's a lot of those in the States, right?
	Amazon's hollowed out a lot of this stuff, right?
	Well, the problem with going back to visit the 80s is you know what happens
	That they didn't win. The virtue didn't win.
	I'm a lover of all music except rap.
	Rap is stupid. Says someone.
	I am calm. You just got agitated by my words.
	That's your problem. Extreme joy and sadness can both make you cry.
	And of course, you know, there's this old cheesy story about the ring that makes you happy when you're sad and sad when you're happy and there's this long story about it and eventually you find out that there's a ring with an inscription on the inside that says, this too shall pass.
	You know, I love being a father.
	My daughter's going to move out in a couple of years.
	I obviously want her to grow up and move out.
	I'm going to be very sad when she moves out because it's been such an incredible joy and pleasure to be her father.
	She's like the most amazing person to me.
	All right, let's see here.
	I'm going to put it on my finger.
	Oh, regarding dying with debt.
	Okay, let's circle back to the beginning.
	I mean dying with unpaid debt.
	Thanks. Dying with unpaid debt.
	Okay, why would you be concerned about that?
	That's a tough one. Okay, were you ever heavily obligated for other people's mess-ups?
	In other words, when other people messed up, did you have to pay for it?
	If your mom was late, did you have to explain it?
	If your dad was drunk, did you have to call in sick with him?
	If somebody was broke, did you have to cover their bills?
	did you have to cover up or cover for somebody else's mess ups when you were growing up?
	All right, while he's answering that, let's do one more.
	I was having a conversation with someone about why kids aren't responsible for their actions yet, but it's so obvious to me that I don't know if it was very convincing.
	How would you explain to someone who wants to agree but is having a hard time wrapping their mind around why kids are not responsible for their actions?
	They're coming from an original sin perspective.
	Why kids are not responsible for their actions?
	Because the immature or the young brain can't process consequences very much.
	So we're responsible for our actions, the degree to which we can process the consequences of our actions.
	And babies, of course, can't process the consequences of their actions at all.
	They don't sit there and say, well, I don't want to pee in your face because that's rude.
	They just pee, right? So they don't have any sense of the consequences of their actions.
	There's no self, there's no other, there's no time.
	And as self and other develop through empathy and time develops through increased conceptualization,
	children grow to be more responsible for their actions.
	Oh, your triage example helped me understand this tremendously.
	Thank you for that answer. I will ponder it for some time to come.
	Fantastic. Ambivalence is not a lack of emotion about a subject.
	It's feeling strongly two ways about a subject.
	Personally torn, being an atheist, but want to go back to church.
	Did last week. We'll go again this Sunday.
	I think I need them. Right now, I've been over 10 years since I was there.
	Practical and emotional concerns motivate me.
	Yeah. What was that in the movie Girl Interrupted?
	it, they talked about ambivalence.
	I really can't participate.
	All right. Any last questions, comments, donations?
	Tips? I think we've gone pretty deep today, would you say?
	Am I sweating? Oh.
	Not too much.
	Not too much. Just a little.
	Alright, just wait for the line. I hate closing it when people are typing.
	Y'all know that. I'm driving.
	I can listen only.
	Bye! Okay, I guess you, uh, hopefully your voice dictating that.
	Steph, why do you think there is a civil war in Russia?
	Um... If I had to guess, it would be something like there was a peace treaty on the ground, a peace treaty that everyone was agreeing to, and What happened was, I think British and American power players came in, and for some reason, which we'll probably never know, who knows, right?
	But the peace deal was cancelled, right?
	The war is optional, right?
	I mean, almost all war is, right?
	And so I imagine that there are people who want the war to end and they view maybe Putin as being compromised and he can't end the war for whatever reason or chose not to end the war even though there were peace treaties around.
	Or maybe it was Zelensky who got hit, but I don't know because, I mean, I don't think really know all of that stuff.
	But I would imagine that they want to have somebody in charge of Russia who can broker a peace.
	That would be my guess. China wants a base in Cuba.
	Yeah, I've heard about that. Sure.
	All right. I think we will close things down for the night.
	It's a bit of a low-tip night, but we shall survive.
	We shall find a way to survive.
	It's because I didn't do any rants.
	I just, you know, went deep and introspective, which is a good way to connect for everyone.
	So that's nice, I think.
	Thank you, everyone, for dropping back tonight.
	Always a great pleasure to chat.
	Really helpful stream.
	I'm going to donate on freedomain.com slash donate because you get a higher percent.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that. And have yourself a wonderful...
	Yeah, the rants pry apart my skin flint fingers.
	Yeah, yeah. I sub and it's worth every penny.
	Thank you so much. Of course, freedomain.locals.com.
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	Alright, thanks everyone so much.
	Have yourselves a delightful and wonderful evening.
	Lots of love from up here. I'll talk to you soon.

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