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June 28, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:06:27
Life and Your Enemies! Freedomain Livestream
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So as we get our Friday night chat underway, hit me with a while if you'd be interested in how we go about setting up a StephBot, which is an artificial intelligence fed with my work that you can query at your leisure.
Would you be interested in seeing how that all gets built step by step from the ground up?
As I upload myself to the immortal cloud, like Zeus himself, to thunder my titanic wisdom from the planet as a whole.
Not as good as the real thing, but why?
Well, listen, you guys can't even smell me.
I'm not in your living room.
Pantsless, sweating philosophy from every pore.
So we'll take this two-dimensional substitute for the 3D StephBot.
And so, yes, trust me, just having me come through your screen is not nearly as much as me slowly massaging.
Philosophy bites into your nether regions.
Believe me, I can smell you.
Wait, where the hell are you?
Power is mine!
Yeah, no, we are really going to pump in all my books and articles and just give it a training and then we'll sort of release it to the donors so that they can query it and improve it and so on.
So, yeah, Hemlock-proof philosophy, that's right.
It's like the dead man's switch.
I am now on the cloud.
You can't de-platform me.
Something like that, right?
That's a good way to put it.
That's a good way to put it.
Okay, Mr.
J, looks like we've got a solid...
Yes, the AI presentation was great.
Can you talk about DAO, Data Access Objects from Microsoft Access 2.0?
DAO, we can certainly look into that, and we will get your feedback on that.
Upload Steph into Karen AI. That's funny.
Are there any listeners who are familiar with AI tech professionally or as a hobby who would like to help?
Yes. Mr.
J, do you want to hand out your email here or not?
It's your choice.
It's your choice. Yeah, okay.
All right. So yes, if you would like to help, just let us know below.
If you find this out later, you can post below.
But I think it would be really interesting.
I think it would be really interesting to upload...
All of my written works, right?
The spontaneous works of live streaming, chatting, responding on the fly, I think those are a little bit less valuable at the moment, but I think that the written works would be fantastic.
I would love to program a computer to evaluate statements about UPB and have it be able to answer those questions.
I think that would be fantastic.
Alright, so let's get to your questions on this glorious evening, the 19th of May, 2023.
Alright, let me just go back up here.
What did I get? Oh yeah, if you like the AI presentation, please feel free to share it around.
What's your opinion on the whole Sigma, Alpha, Beta personality types?
Yeah, I don't, you know, alpha is just redefined to mean so many things, right?
And beta, I don't think it has anything to do with fundamental personality types.
Okay, let me ask you this.
It's a basic question that I have pondered for years and have noticed online.
Maybe in person too, but online in particular.
When you get into an argument or a criticism of you or someone goes for you, and this could be positive or negative, right or wrong, good or bad, but when you get...
Criticized slash detect whatever online by a male.
Can you tell whether he's been raised by a dad or not?
Can you tell if he had an involved father or not?
I can't. I think I'm batting a thousand on like a thousand inquiries with people.
I can tell, I can absolutely tell when someone is debating from a single mother perspective because it's all manipulation and it's all moving the goalpost and it's all straw man and you just can't get to the truth and they keep dodging.
That, to me, I can absolutely tell when—you know, and I do.
Like, I have sympathy for that. Like, you don't know how to sort of forcefully and assertively put your point forward.
You don't know how to debate in good faith, and you're just out to win using whatever manipulative tricks you can.
Then, to me, I'm not dealing with somebody who was raised by an assertive male.
And again, there's lots of exceptions to that, but that is— That is what I generally see.
So like alpha, beta, gamma, blah, blah, blah.
To me, I don't view this as anything sort of foundational to human personality or male personality and so on.
It probably has something to do with testosterone levels and I generally recommend getting those checked as a whole.
I just view how were you negotiated with?
How did people debate you?
How well were you listened to when you had a perspective or opinion that differed from those in authority around you, particularly your parents or parents when you were growing up?
How was that managed? How was that dealt with?
And if someone is, if they're angry at you and they're direct and angry at you, I respect that enormously.
If somebody's angry at you and you get into this real convoluted, messy projection, who knows which way is up, and then it's just like, oh God, I literally have to break free of that.
It's like slowly, slow fog tentacles gripping my soul and just slowly sucking the life from me.
Gotta get out. Gotta get out.
I just don't really go or play that way at all.
I find that just gross.
Just gross.
I can tell in real life less online.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you upload all your audio pass shows to the AI? So...
I mean, yes, we can do anything we want, but AI is going to use some methodology to convert the audio to text.
And when you go audio to text, you can get transcription errors that can completely change the meaning of what it is that you're saying.
And so then you have to have somebody manually view it.
The moment a human being has to touch a computer process, the cost goes almost infinitely higher.
Almost infinitely higher.
So... What happened to the producer you had back in the day?
What's he doing? Oh, I mean, I've worked with probably half a dozen people over the course of time.
You know, people come and they go.
And I was shifting the show more towards call-ins and live streams and so on.
I just didn't need a producer as much.
And, of course, he had his own stuff that he wanted to do.
All right. Let me get to your questions here.
All right. Hey Steph!
After listening to your most recent call-in with the guy who felt guilty for leaving his parents, I've begun thinking about how I too have an attachment issue and have since moved on from applying it to my parents and applying it to a former manager at work.
I had a recently minor negative interaction with them and it caused a fair deal of emotional distress.
How do I remove this attachment?
Thank you if you read this. Remove the attachment to your parents?
You can't remove the attachment to your parents anymore that you can unlearn the language that you...
We're raised with or you can open your eyes and not see things or a sound is there and you can't hear it, right?
So you will never be able to remove your attachment to your parents.
Having a switch where you can erase, you know, the first 20 years of your life would be profoundly unhealthy because you'd be an adult baby.
So I don't think you can remove the attachment from your parents.
But I will tell you this. I did a show today, my gosh, almost three and a half hours.
It is the absolutely everything call-in.
Like, touched on just about every conceivable issue that I've ever touched in any call-ins, all compressed into one three and a half hour show.
And I'll publish that probably this weekend, but it's the everything call-in show.
And... If you are ready, I know this sounds a little bit like, are you ready?
Are you ready? Okay, so hit me with a Y if you are ready to change everything in your mind.
I'm not kidding about this.
This will change everything in your mind.
Right. Right. Okay, good.
I just need one more number from you.
Yeah, you need that? Oh, you're going to get it, baby.
You're going to get it, baby.
All right, let me ask you this.
From 1 to 10...
How, no, let's go minus 10 to plus 10, minus 10 to plus 10, minus 10 to plus 10.
Minus 10 is you want everything your parents have and you want to do exactly what they did.
Plus 10 is you want the opposite of what your parents have and want to do everything differently, if not downright opposite.
Minus 10, you want your parents' life.
Plus 10, you want the opposite of your parents' life.
Okay, plus 10, plus 10, 5, plus 3, 10, plus 10, 8, 7, plus 3.
We don't have any minuses.
Zero, you're half and a half, plus 7.5, plus 8, plus 7.
So we've got nobody here, and it's not a criticism.
Just want to make sure I calibrate what I'm saying.
Minus six. Okay, so good.
We have someone who you want what your parents have.
You'll make most of the same decisions.
It's not whether you should or shouldn't want what your parents have.
It's just asking the question. I assume a lot of people are here in philosophy because they want something that's the opposite of one.
Obviously, I'm a plus 10, right?
I'm a plus 10. I'm a total 10, baby.
But I want the polar opposite of what my parents had.
I mean, they divorced.
They ended up institutionalized.
They have serious mental health issues.
Like, I want the opposite of what my parents had.
They were not good parents.
They were bad parents. I want to be a great parent.
I want to be a good husband.
My father was a bad husband, at least to my mother.
And... So I want the opposite, the direct opposite, polar opposite, couldn't be further apart, right?
It's not even north to south pole.
It's like north pole to Mars or something, and north pole to equator.
Oh, you meant plus six?
Oh, okay. So everyone's on the plus side.
Okay, that's totally fine.
I just wanted to make sure I understand where you're coming from.
All right. Now...
Sorry, I'm going to need one more number because I'm going to need to calibrate this as well.
The last number, I promise you.
1 to 10, how fast do you want me to go?
1 to 10, how fast do you want me to go?
5, 0, 7, 5.
Okay, medium, we want middle of the bell curve, right?
That's totally fine. I just want to calibrate, right?
Some people want it hard and fast and some people want it slow and languid like it's a Sunday morning.
All right. Alright.
Alright. Alright.
Okay. Let me ask you this.
If your parents believe that they're doing the right thing and you are doing the opposite, can you both be happy if you achieve your goals?
If you, if your parents think X is the right thing, brings you happiness, is the good,
good right best thing to do and you think the opposite of X, can you be allies or are
you enemies?
It's really important to understand.
No, no. There's no caveats to this.
You start from the bold basic facts.
There's no caveats for this.
No, no. No caveats to this, right?
If you're in the middle of a desert with a guy, Bob, you're in the middle of the desert with Bob, and there's no oasis except one for like 100 miles, You're in the desert with Bob.
He thinks that Oasis is north.
You think it's south. He goes north.
You go south. But you've got cell phones, right?
Now, if he calls you and you've been going a whole day and maybe you went, I don't know, dunes, it's kind of slow.
You went a couple of miles in a day.
And he calls you after a couple of days, and you're dying, you've got like no water, and he calls you and he says, hey, hey, I'm at the oasis, I found the oasis.
What's your feeling? What's your feeling?
You're now three days, well, six days apart, because he's gone north three days, you've gone south three days, you're six days apart, you'll never make it.
What is your feeling if Bob calls you and he found the oasis?
Happy? No.
I'm sorry. Either I didn't explain it well or you're not happy because you're going to die.
Yeah. Not good, sad, defeated.
Well, you're going to have to resign yourself to death by thirst and heat, which I assume is not at all fun.
Because, you see, if he goes north and you go south and he finds the oasis, the only one within 100 miles, he finds that oasis.
Then he lives, and you die.
He wins, you lose. He survives, you expire.
I'd feel sad, but I'd be happy for Bob being right.
No, I didn't say he was your best friend.
I didn't say he was your brother.
I just said he was some guy.
I think...
Yeah, oh, you're kidding.
Okay, yeah, I mean, honestly.
If Bob...
Getting to the oasis means that you die in the desert.
You don't want Bob to find the oasis.
You don't want Bob to find the oasis, because if Bob finds the oasis, it means you're dead.
Now, in the same way, if you find the oasis, Bob is dead.
Because you've gone in opposite directions and there's only one oasis.
Now, this oasis, of course, moral justification, happiness, virtue, self-esteem, peace of mind, whatever you want to call it.
If you're heading in opposite directions, if one of you wins, the other one loses.
Oh, guys, please, I'm begging you, stop nitpicking.
Listen, listen, stop nitpicking.
Well, if you both wouldn't find, wouldn't you be just as unhappy?
No, that's not the scenario. Don't cloud this.
Don't throw up this twinkle-toed stardust to confuse yourself.
This is a very simple analogy.
If he gets to the oasis, you're dead in the desert.
If you get to the oasis, he's dead in the desert.
No, but if you were evil, you may hope he's evil and lying.
No, come on.
Stop it. Stop it.
It's not healthy. This is a simple, clear analogy.
If he wins, you lose.
If you win, he loses.
And it's not about losing, it's losing your life.
Now, you are desperate.
Deep down, you are desperate for him to not find the oasis because if he finds the oasis and calls you, you're dead.
Now, imagine that Bob...
It's a guy who kidnapped you and beat you up.
Go with me here. He kidnapped you and he beat you up, left you in the desert, and said, I'm going to the oasis.
And he gives you one last punch to the face.
He goes off to the oasis.
Now you go south.
He goes north because he's going to get to the oasis.
He kidnapped you, dumped you in the desert, beat you up.
Now he's going to the desert.
You're going south. What is your feeling when you see that oasis?
What is your feeling when you see that oasis and you know what's going to happen to Bob?
Good!
Satisfaction, vindication, relief.
I'm happy I live. Justice served F Bob.
Relief it wasn't you that got lost?
Well, that would be either way. What if Bob is an enemy?
What if Bob is an evil guy who kidnapped you and beat you up, dumped you in the desert, and you get to live?
And you know because you went the right direction and he went the wrong direction, he's going to be bleached bones in the desert in a year.
If he was like a see you next Tuesday like that, then extra ecstatic elation.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
All right, gonna need some more numbers from you.
Because you told me to go medium pace, right?
More numbers from you.
Your parents' view of your fascination with philosophy.
Plus 10, they love your fascination with philosophy and are eager to join you on the journey.
Minus 10, they hate and deny and call you crazy and attack and ignore and write...
Minus 10, minus 10, minus 10, minus 10, minus 5, minus 3, minus 10, minus 8, 5, plus 5, that's good.
Plus 1, excellent.
A very, very good man who does not feel hate or anger.
I don't know what that means. Plus 1, minus 4, 0.
0, it goes right over their heads.
No, it doesn't. No, no, no, no, no.
No, philosophy does not go over anyone's head.
not the philosophy we talk about here.
Is there anyone who could not understand the analogy I just gave you?
Thank you.
And of course, if they're like, oh, well, people say bad stuff about Steph, say, okay, well, you're only giving bullies power.
If you find Steph saying these terrible things, that's one thing.
But if other people just say, well, he's this terrible guy, and they don't give you quotes, and they don't give you evidence, then don't give power to bullies, right?
Don't give power to bullies and liars.
It's a good analogy, right?
Okay, so it seems like the majority of you, the significant majority of you, your parents are hostile and zero.
You know, I got to tell you, I call bullshit on zero.
I call bullshit on zero.
If you're into...
My mom calls you the guy who always complains.
That's great. I love it.
I don't think... So if you're defining morality in universal secular objective terms, reason and evidence is your guide, how can any...
People can't be indifferent to that.
They can't be indifferent to that.
Can't be indifferent to philosophy.
Because especially like my major thing is I'm a moral philosopher.
So having radically redefined...
Morality, as universally preferable behavior, people can't be indifferent to that.
But you can't be indifferent to that.
So, everyone who's in the minus column, and the people who are pretending that there's
a zero column at all, people who are in the minus column, your parents and you, and this
is not just your parents, this is anyone, your parents and you are heading in opposite
You're going to reason, they're going to anti-rationality.
You're going to individualism, they're going to collectivism.
You're thinking for yourself, and there are NPCs who are being told what their opinions are.
their opinions are assigned to them by the media.
You are philosophical, they are tribal.
Thank you.
You think they regurgitate.
You reason they repeat.
You ask what is true.
They ask what is popular.
You ask what is moral.
They ask what is approved. You ask what is a fact.
they ask, what would get me in the least trouble?
So you are heading in opposite directions.
If your parents or anyone, it's not specific to parents, if anyone in your life is taking the opposite approach to the pursuit of virtue and happiness, if they win, you lose.
If you win, they lose.
Is there such a thing as original creative and genuine sadism?
That's my dad. I'm sorry to hear that.
I really am. That's a terribly sad thing to hear.
As a father myself in particular, it's a terribly sad thing to hear.
Now, you understand that this is not a moral argument.
This is not even a philosophical argument.
This is Logic 101.
This is Logic 101.
Two people Going the opposite directions can never arrive at the same destination.
And don't give me any...
I know, you got this, oh, yes, the twinkle dust of confusion.
Well, what if they loop all the way around the world?
No. Forget that.
Forget that. Two people going in opposite directions can never arrive at the same destination.
Two people going in opposite directions hoping to find one destination between them.
Whoever finds it has just proven that the other one has gone the exact opposite direction.
Please understand this. This is absolutely essential.
.
Thinking for yourself versus having your perspectives assigned to you by the media Genuine virtue versus pretend virtue.
Integrity versus the slavish, kneeling, begging for approval from a blind and
headless mob. If your companions, whether familial, extended familial, friends,
acquaintances, colleagues, whoever, whoever is going opposite to you is opposed to
There's a reason why opposite and opposed have the same root.
Whoever is opposite to you is opposed to you.
Is Under the Light of an Alien Sun available to read anywhere?
No, that's probably somewhere at my mom's apartment in a box somewhere.
I don't know. Sorry. Most of you, and I say this with deep humility, most of you are unaware that you're in a battle to the death.
Most of you are unaware that you are at war.
That the people around you who have taken opposite approach to virtue and happiness
are invested in your failure and you are invested in their failure.
.
In the same way that if you and an enemy are going the opposite way in the desert, you don't want him to find the oasis, you want to find the oasis.
If he finds the oasis, you're miserable.
If you find the oasis, he's miserable.
If you succeed!
If you succeed!
Heaven help you. If reason, evidence, integrity, honesty, moral courage, and virtue.
If they, thinking for yourself, reasoning for yourself, being genuinely and meatily good in the world, if that brings you happiness, those who do the opposite are evil, contemptible, immoral.
If they're right, if they're right, and the true virtue is repeating what others say, going along with their mob, not offending anyone, not upsetting anyone, not troubling anyone.
If they're right, then you're evil.
The destination called virtue, if people are going in opposite directions, whoever finds
that thing called virtue or happiness.
If people are going in the opposite direction, whoever finds that, the finding of that condemns
not just as unhappy, but as immoral, as evil, potentially, or as supporting evil.
Which is in some ways even worse.
Do you follow me in what I'm saying?
Do you follow me in what I'm saying?
Now, this is just the beginning.
beginning.
Thank you.
Just hit me with a why. We've got this.
You're a smart group, brilliant group.
I don't need to repeat it, right? Because this is just the beginning.
We've got this. We're down, right?
Oh, I'm sweating for my tips tonight, baby!
Okay, good. This is not the mind-blowing part.
This is not the mind-blowing part.
Here's the mind-blowing part.
The first part. There's two.
The first part of the mind-blowing part...
It's that most people cannot judge your virtue, they can only judge your happiness.
So, if you find the oasis, you're happy and your enemies are miserable.
If the oasis is your happiness and you have people in your life doing the opposite morally of what you're doing, philosophically, And if they are revealed as evil, if you become happy, if they are revealed as corrupt, if you become happy, what is their one central primary motivation if they cannot find happiness themselves?
What is their one central primal motivation if happiness in you means corruption and immorality in them?
What is their primary motivation?
Boom! Burn the Oasis.
Take away your happiness. Sabotage.
To make you unhappy.
destroy your happiness to destroy your happiness
Of course. Because if you're happy, they're immoral.
Now, do they do this openly?
Do they call you up and say, oh, are you happy?
Well, I'm just going to scream at you until you're not.
How do they do it? Always passive-aggressive.
Subtly. Yes.
Nitpick. Yes, nitpick.
That's why I had to push back on the nitpickers.
They help. Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Slate of hand?
They help or care.
Yeah. Like a thief in the night.
I was talking to the caller today and he said, I never noticed them sabotaging me.
Yes! That's the whole point of sabotage.
You don't notice it. You don't notice it.
Hmm. I told my father about starting a business and he immediately gave me a bunch of reasons why it would fail, etc.
Yep. Yes.
So why do people lie about me?
You talked about this.
My parents heard lies about you.
Why do people lie about me? What do they not want people to see?
What are they desperate to keep people's eyes away from with regard to me?
A happy virtuous man.
you Yeah. The forest of words that is set up like flaming spikes surrounding us, this community, the forest of words that is set up to oppose people around us so that people don't see our happiness.
Or my happiness. I can't speak for you.
I assume that philosophy is doing something to make your life happy.
So people lie about me so that other people don't see my happiness.
Because I'm like...
Yo, yo, yo! The oasis!
I found it! It's right here! It's right here!
I found the oasis! They don't want that to be seen.
They can't have that be seen.
Because if reason...
This is why the world attacks and tortures the moral man.
So that they can inflict unhappiness on the moral man...
So that everyone else can feel that they're moral for doing the opposite.
Oh, that guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, he went, oh man, he went into the desert that way exactly and he died out there and vultures are picking his eyeballs as we speak.
Oh, don't go that way, man.
That is death itself.
That is a horrible, stony, hard, ugly, vile road.
So they pound and pound and pound at you.
So that nobody else goes in that direction and they can control your pursuit of happiness.
We're all aiming for happiness.
Hit me with a why if you would like personal examples to bring this to life.
Would you like some personal examples to bring this to life?
Right. Okay.
Bring it to life, Frankenstein style.
All right. You know, and I won't go into the big, deep story.
In my 20s, I almost married the wrong woman.
Now, now, now.
I was surrounded by...
I don't know.
Let's just say...
probably...
10 people who claim to love me and care about me and want the best for me and want me to be happy.
Now, all of those 10 people had not taken philosophy, reason, and integrity as their path to happiness.
They had not done that.
In my view, they had done the opposite.
Now, in the relationship that I had in my 20s, my teens in my 20s, not one person said anything negative about those relationships, and those relationships did not work out.
In fact, I had somebody who claimed to be one of my greatest fans in the world.
Just loved me and cared about me.
And he said, you know, oh, you've got to marry this girl.
I've got a diamond store we can go to.
I can get you a good deal. You've got to get an engagement ring.
And he picked me up and he drove me there.
Herding me off a cliff.
Frankly, herding me off a cliff.
I managed... To escape those nets through bizarre, coincidental ninja moves.
And I, honestly, I mean, because nobody told me this, because I hadn't figured it out, I was not living with integrity.
I was not living the virtuous life.
I was thinking virtuous thoughts.
I was not living the virtuous life.
Because I had yet to understand the true power of empiricism, which is, picture it didn't happen.
Virtue or philosophy is a trap.
Live it. Or don't talk it.
Now when I met the right woman, did the people who claim to care about me and love me and
want nothing but the best for me, did they like that I had finally met the right woman
after they had never ever warned me about all the wrong women?
How hot was the wrong woman's death?
She's very pretty. And not a terrible person.
Not a terrible person. Not a terrible person.
What did you find out about her that you realized she was the wrong woman?
Well, just very briefly, basically, when we had conflicts, I had to give way or the conflict would never end.
This wasn't so much the case when we were younger, but as we sort of grew up, I just realized, and she was fairly explicit about this towards the end.
It's like, no, you're going to have to just give way.
Like, okay, well, I can't do that for the rest of my life.
I'm just not going to. Did you see her as a mother?
No. No.
No. No.
Right. What are the biggest things you wished your friends would have pointed out regarding marrying the wrong woman?
Well, not only did they not point out any negatives or problems or my general level of happiness or not happiness...
In the dating and the engagement, not only did they not point out any negatives, they were all, yeah, great, go ahead, do it!
Right? But would your friends know what she's like when you're arguing?
Oh my God, dude.
Oh, nitpick, nitpick.
No, it's your friends' and family's job to know if you're happy, just as it's your job to know if they're happy.
What's the point of having people in your life who have no idea whether you're happy or what's right for you?
What's the point? And yet they say, I love you, I want the best for you.
It's like, okay, well, I'll take that seriously.
If you love me and you want the best for me, then you should have some idea.
You should have some idea what is the best for me.
I was with a very similar woman in my 20s.
Had to win everything. Had to defeat me in any conflict.
Took my close friends and family all talking to me firmly about how miserable I was to realize my mistake with her.
Yeah, for sure. And I have no excuse.
I have no excuse. And I think, you know, I hate this sort of phrase where people say, well, I just grew apart and so on, right?
But... I think when we first met, I think she was doing better than me as a whole in life.
And then as I succeeded in my business career and started to really realize my potential and that I was a good manager and a really great programmer and good at business and sales and market, like I really started to hit my stride.
And her life just wasn't progressing.
And that's fine.
That's not the end of the world. Life doesn't have to always go in lockstep.
but she wasn't willing to grant me any, um, any authority for the success that I had, right?
Hello Steph, greetings from the UK. I'm working a 12-hour night shift running printing press.
Would you like to shout, Stop the presses!
I could do it for you. No, I will never shout, Stop the presses!
Hold that headline!
Did their own relationships turn out well?
I would say not in general.
No, absolutely not.
So, my friends,
did they want me to succeed given that I was doing the opposite of what they
were doing in the pursuit of virtue and happiness?
Did they want me to succeed?
Did they want me to find the oasis given that they had gone in opposite directions?
Yes or no? Nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
No, they wanted you to go with them.
No, it's worse than that.
It's worse than that. Is it red flag if a woman is into significant leg spanking, being dominated, told what to do, etc.?
Yeah, yeah, that is very dangerous.
That is very dangerous. No, they didn't want me to be as miserable as them.
They wanted to punish me for creating...
In my opinion, right? I don't know.
This is my opinion. They wanted to punish me for going in the opposite direction because that gave them a choice that otherwise they wouldn't have had.
You follow? I'm sorry to say you follow like I'm so far ahead.
I just really want...
Let me not say do you follow.
Let me say it more politely and positively...
Am I being clear? Am I making sense?
Sorry, that's a nice little...
Do you follow like I'm just...
You know, you're a kite tail to my...
So if you marry the wrong woman, who's at fault?
You for choosing the wrong woman or the people in your life, friends and family who did not warn you?
You're not listening! If this is about me, it wasn't that they didn't warn you.
I've said this repeatedly and clearly, and the fact that you're not able to hear this is why I'm repeating it so emphatically.
What did I say?
Did I say that the only issue I had was that people didn't warn me?
What did I say? What was my major issue?
I gave a whole little story about this.
What's my issue is it just that they didn't warn me Just waiting yeah
They were actively encouraging me.
Hey, let's go get you that ring.
You've got to propose. Oh, it's going to be a great marriage.
Make an honest woman. They were encouraging me.
It's not just that they didn't warn me.
They were encouraging me.
Knowing, knowing for an absolute fact about my childhood.
In fact, some of them were there for my childhood.
Some of them were there for my childhood and were still telling me to go ahead
with this disaster.
Bravo Steph, this is some truly life-changing material.
Thanks, man. I appreciate this.
And listen, I don't want to throw former friends under the bus.
Had a lot of fun with these people.
A lot of them are very skilled at what they do.
And I assume that most of this is unconscious.
So I don't say this with hatred at all.
I don't even say this with hostility.
It's just a basic fact that it took me a long time to understand.
People who are doing the opposite from you in the realm of morality and virtue are rooting for you to fail, and if you don't fail on your own, they'll be happy to help you.
Look at me saying, I'm not that mad, and then yelling.
I am a complexity eater.
They love to see us unhappy and will encourage unhappy choices to sabotage happy ones.
As long as you don't find the oasis, they believe they can find the oasis.
The moment you find the oasis, they die of thirst in the desert.
So they will fuck up your compass.
They will fuck up your sense of direction.
They will fuck up your perceptions.
They will encourage you to go in the wrong direction because if you find that oasis, they're dead in the desert.
So as long as you don't find it, they have hope.
If you find it, they're done.
Now, you can say, oh yes, well, but you can...
No, you can't change. You can't change forever.
You get married. You have a kid or two or three.
You're embedded in a business.
You've chosen an entire career.
You've got a whole social circle, everything enmeshed and embedded.
Our lives are like the mosquito in Jurassic Park and time rolls over us like a golden soft wave of immobility.
Which is great if you've made the right choices, and it's terrible if you've made the wrong choices.
If you've gone beyond the tipping point, you got married to the wrong person,
you chose the wrong career, you're embedded in the wrong business,
you have the wrong friends, you
If you've made those choices, you can't just snap your fingers and unmake those choices.
That's a privilege of pre-commitment.
Before you commit, you have choice.
After you commit, you don't.
Before I got married, or before I got engaged, I could date.
Before I started dating my wife, I could date whoever I wanted.
After we date, we get engaged, we get married.
I have no choice. I don't want to, but I never will, and it's not an option, and it's not on the list, and it's not on the radar, and it's not anything that I would do or think about.
You commit, and free will goes out the window.
Your choice is what to commit to.
After you commit, massive proportions of your free will vanish, if you want to have integrity.
Right? I stood before my wife and I said to her, you're the one forever and ever.
Amen. I will forsake all others.
We will live together.
We will grow old together.
We will love together.
We are committed. The most solemn vow I've ever taken in my life.
And one which I will never, ever go back on.
Because that's why there is a marriage.
So they still want to think there's an oasis out there.
Thank you.
But if I've gone the opposite direction, I genuinely find that oasis.
They're toast. I mean, fried in the desert sun, literally toast.
Choosing who you marry is the most important thing in life.
Virtue is the most important thing in life because virtue will lead you to make the right choice.
The more you know, the more you will be able to make the right choice.
Bye.
Thank you.
Now, of course, the fact that you go in opposite directions is an incomplete analogy because they are, of course, walking with you.
The opposite directions is an analogy because they're walking with you.
The guy I was talking to today, he had arguably the love of his life in his early 20s.
She was a 9.5.
She was smart, witty, great conversationalist.
And another guy, after they'd been going out for three years, another guy claimed that he'd slept with her.
And so the guy I was talking to today, he broke up with his girlfriend.
He regrets it now. Six years later, he still regrets it massively.
And I said, well, why?
Here you go. Here's your Machiavellian 101.
This is Machiavelli 101.
Why did this guy say that he'd slept with this Corliss girlfriend?
Why did he say that? He didn't.
Turns out he confessed later he didn't.
And why did he say he'd slept with her?
Well, to sabotage, sure, but why?
Why? Why would he sabotage? What was his goal?
Yeah, to break up the relationship, to get with her, to make her single, jealousy, to run him off.
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.
He wanted to get her himself.
He wanted to get the 9.5 away from my caller so that he could be with her, right?
Sure. Now, I would never do anything like that, but there's a lot of people to whom all's fair in love and war.
I mean, I remember when I was a teenager, a friend of mine and I both liked the same girl.
Now, he introduced that he liked her and he was going to ask her out, and I said, okay, look, you go first, you go ahead, you go ahead, you go ahead.
It's bro code, right? And it's a reasonable bro code.
This is not exploitation. You go ahead.
And what's the caveat? You go ahead and ask her out.
You go ahead and ask her out.
What's the caveat? What's the asterisk?
What's the footnote? Yeah, if you fail, snooze, you lose.
I gave him a week. And I said, you go ask her out, man.
But if you don't ask her out in a week, I'm going to ask her out.
Now, my caller was dating this girl for three years from, I think, 19 to 22 or something like that.
He was dating this girl for three years, right?
Now, here's a tip.
A year for a girl is three years for a man, right?
A year for a woman is three years for a man.
Why? Why is one year for a woman, a young woman, why is one year three years for a man?
Yeah, eggs. They have a much shorter window, right?
Much shorter window of fertility.
18 to 40 versus 18 to 80, right?
Right. So, I said to him, I said, look, if you had been dating a girl, you really wanted to get married to her, you really wanted to be the father of her children, and nine years into the relationship, you'd been dating from the age of 20 to 29, and she still wasn't committed to you, she still wouldn't put a ring on it, she still wouldn't commit to getting engaged, what would you do?
He'd say, well, I'd start looking elsewhere.
Boom! Yes! Of course!
Of course! Of course.
Of course. So, it was partly his failure for not getting engaged to the woman, or at least telling him that he was going to marry her, here's when we're going to get engaged, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, a woman is going to lose interest if you don't commit, because she's there for her eggs, right?
Anyway, you can listen to the whole call in as to what went on with all of that.
How do you redeem yourself from not living a life of virtue in the past?
Thank you.
I don't know what you mean by that.
How do you redeem yourself?
How do you redeem yourself from driving in the wrong direction as you turn the fuck around and drive in the right direction?
How do you redeem yourself from overeating?
You go on a diet. How do you redeem yourself from being out of shape?
You go and exercise. You just do the opposite and hopefully more so.
You know this. It's not complicated.
You make your apologies to the people you've wronged.
You turn around.
Somebody says, Maybe I'm jaded, but I don't believe for a moment that
someone who sabotages has any capacity for happiness and simply enjoys killing
others' happiness.
All right, let me ask you this.
It's a great question, my lady.
Great question. Thank you so much for bringing it up.
All right, let me ask you this.
Do you think that I have the desire to sabotage people who've done the opposite?
No. Do you think, I mean, have you ever seen me do that?
Have you ever seen me either express a desire to sabotage, actually sabotage, go out of my way to inflict misery upon people who've chosen the opposite of what I've chosen?
No, their choices will do it for them.
That's right. You don't need to sabotage someone who's already destroying themselves.
As the old saying goes, never interrupt your enemy when he's in the process of making mistakes.
So the desire to sabotage is a confession that you believe the other person has it right
The desire to sabotage is a confession that the person you're sabotaging is right
to it.
...
Because if you could see Let's say you've got the friend, Bob, opposite direction.
He's an enemy. You can see, and it's not a mirage, you can see the actual oasis right there.
50 feet from you. You're getting closer.
You can smell the water. It's not a mirage.
It's a real thing. You've got tall palm trees.
You've got the beautiful blue water on There's a phone.
Whatever, right? You can see it.
Do you have any desire to sabotage your friend when you are 50 feet from the genuine oasis?
Your friend who went six days walk in the opposite direction, or three days, six days to close it.
Do you have any desire to sabotage your friend's compass if you can see the oasis right in front of you?
No. People sabotage you because they know that you are right.
And if you're right, they really, really hate, of course, they really hate the idea that if you're right, they're wrong, and it's too fucking late.
You're right, they're wrong, and it's too fucking late.
You know this, man.
Do you know everyone is about 30 to 90 seconds from their life being torn apart.
There is a ghost predator circles everyone composed of maybe a dozen or three dozen syllables.
There is a ghost predator circling everyone that can strike them and take them down and destroy their happiness, destroy their self-esteem, destroy their false sense of virtue.
Boom! Like that.
And just about everyone's life is guarding against this rending, pirate-driven, madcap, ghost caricature of virtue that can take them apart and disassemble them at any moment.
This is why people relentlessly talk about shallow topics.
It's why they relentlessly erect hostile words around truth-tellers.
It's why they get tense and attack anyone who comes in with any facts, reason and evidence.
There's a ghost circling people.
Like headless, haunted, screaming, screeching, biting, detailed, dusty rings of Saturn around their big, giant heads, they have these ghosts that circle them continuously, snapping and looking for an opening.
I know this.
I won't get into details.
Guy who did me great wrong.
I said, we need to talk about it.
We sat down.
Never seen anything like it in my life.
Never. Before I opened my mouth, he burst into tears, cried so hard he could barely breathe.
I thought, honestly, he choked on something.
Why? We need to talk about this.
Let's sit down. Boom.
Rendered him limb from limb.
That's how close we are.
This is why people get so fucked up around philosophy.
Because it will summon those ghosts that they're spending their entire lives keeping at bay.
Don't talk about anything real.
Don't talk about anything deep.
Manipulate people into nothing.
Talk about the weather. Talk about politics.
Talk about what you're going to eat.
Gossip about other people.
Whatever you do, keep these ghosts at bay!
Me? I got no ghosts.
I have no graveyard.
I have no ghosts. People can talk to me about whatever the fuck they want.
I'm curious. I'm open.
I'm fine. A guy called me out publicly as being immoral.
Totally fine. I then invited him to go to a call-in show.
We did a call-in show.
Had a great and positive and friendly conversation.
People can come at me. Fantastic.
Let's talk. I don't have any ghosts.
I mean, I've gone through the graveyard, man.
I've gone through the graveyard with a full-on photon-powered specter detector.
There's nobody who's grabbing my heels from the wet earth when I walk past.
I got no ghosts.
I got nothing to hide.
I got nothing to defend.
Doesn't mean I don't get mad.
Sure, I get mad. Whatever. I'm a human being and anger is a healthy thing.
Anger is a positive thing. Everyone around you is 90 seconds away from being completely fucked up for the rest of their life.
And you know the words that you could say that would screw people up.
And it's just the truth.
We're not being abusive, right?
All I needed to do to see the truth about my mother was say to her one day, you know, all we do is talk about your stuff.
I'd like to get a word in edgewise.
I'd like to have our conversations be more than just about you and your thoughts.
Holy grenade in the tent, Batman.
Blah! 90 seconds, man.
90 seconds. You hold that demon releaser in your thoughts, your mind, your tongues.
And if you are a truth teller and you want to say the facts of the world, trillions of dollars rest on you shutting the fuck up.
War and its cessation.
Children and their exploitation.
Sociopaths and their prey all hang on the balance of you holding your tongue.
Shut up and let me hunt.
Shut up and let me consume.
Shut up and let me fuck someone.
Shut up and let me rob someone.
Shut up and let me bully someone.
Shut up and don't speak the truth and don't hold up a mirror to who I am.
Let me pay someone To make a friendly caricature of my soul rather than you holding up an accurate silver mirror which has the same effect on my soul as genuine silver has to a werewolf.
You hold the undoing of the false self.
Every time you inhale, people are terrified you're going to breathe out and speak the truth.
I said to my friends, I almost married the wrong woman, didn't you notice?
Hey ma'am, we didn't want to interfere.
You don't want to interfere?
I'm sailing into a marriage that could have destroyed my life.
And you don't want to interfere?
Well, fuck you very much.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
It's like, no, dear, you were encouraging me.
Well, we thought that's what you wanted.
It's no independent judgment.
You just amplify whatever I say.
If I say I want something, you say, go for it.
If I say I don't want something, say, oh, we totally agree with that too.
It's not friends. It's called enablers.
I'm a drunk who wants a drink.
Here you go. I want to quit drinking.
Oh, we'll take it away. That's not somebody who exists.
It's like looking into the mirror and think you found a twin
Come on don't make me sweat too much for my tips brothers and sisters
This is life-changing stuff.
You know this, right? Tips are very much appreciated.
The sabotage is a compliment.
Absolutely, yeah. When Tonya Harding, I think she hired some guy to hit Nancy Kerrigan a skater in the leg, it's because she thought Nancy Kerrigan was going to win.
Somebody who's like last and is never gonna win you don't sabotage them, right?
Would you like to know why a woman having violent sexual fetishes is a red flag
Does anybody, do you need to know?
Do you want to know? Somebody's asking that.
Why is his spanking being dominated, told what to do, kink, such a red flag?
Yes, why not?
Sigh.
Stefan, you are a bright light in a dark world.
As always, thank you and keep fighting the good fight.
Thank you. I'm in my 17th and 18th year and still blowing truth bombs out like B-52s.
I'll get to the spanking in a sec.
What should I do to make long-distance relationships work?
I decided to start this relationship because of a speech about casting a wider net and not complaining that one can't find a valuable person.
We're both 50 years old. She was in therapy after the breakup.
I had a breakup after 16 years.
No children involved. I had three years of cool-down time.
I listened to Freedomain since 2015.
It has changed me. What should I do to make a long-distance relationship work?
You know the answer to that as well as I did.
Make it a short-distance relationship.
Move there! Oh, it's complicated.
It's difficult. You're 50 years old.
You've got no kids. Just move there.
Move there, marry her, whatever, right?
I don't know. Just be together.
What are you waiting for?
Your second life?
You think you're going to get to rewind?
You're 50 years old.
You're two-thirds, probably, maybe even three-quarters of your way through your life.
What are you waiting for? Somebody says about the negative people, your idea can't work.
Too late. Give up. Don't talk about it.
It makes them very unhappy to see a better choice.
How many of my friends knew about my love of philosophy?
How many of my friends were keen when I first started a philosophy podcast?
How many of my friends were keen and excited and happy for me?
Sorry to ask that question.
It is to answer it. Endless talking on and on about sports.
Yes, people don't care about sports.
They care about, don't ever say the words that will undo my delusions about myself.
Don't ever switch the light on and let me see the grotesque thing I've become in the mirror.
People don't even care that much about politics.
They're just like, let's talk about these external problems so that we don't talk about my internal horrors.
God honored me in allowing me to witness that moment in my mother.
She is desperately unhappy, humiliated and hates her life.
Yeah.
You know, I...
The conscience inflicts a punishment I couldn't inflict.
Thank you for your attention.
Even on the people who've done me great harm, the punishment to me is too great.
It's more than I would... I mean, I can't do anything about it, right?
I can't undo the conscience.
I can't undo the way that morality works in people.
I can't change that any more than I can repeal gravity.
This is one of the reasons I'm so desperate to get people to be honest and do good.
Because, by God, if you've had someone you love die for three years straight with lung cancer, you're going to be pretty fucking passionate about people not smoking, right?
I'm old enough now to have seen how all this plays out, and it is brutal.
The demons that take others down...
Play with them in such a long, red-clawed, sharpened-teeth, sadistic manner that it is a punishment.
I've got my temper, but it's a punishment that I could not inflict.
It is too cruel a punishment for me to conceive of.
There's a line in a novel about the effects of childhood sexual abuse, and I'm not kidding about that.
I did a whole podcast on this years ago.
Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye is about the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse, and the guy even says that directly.
When a teacher tries to come onto him and grab him, he says, oh my God, this has happened about a million times since I was a kid.
Very clearly, openly states, novel about sexual abuse, the effects of sexual abuse, and its destabilizing effects on the personality.
And people just refuse to see it.
They just refuse to see it.
They just refuse to see it.
The writer literally says this right in the book.
But there's a line where he says, you're the kind of guy who's falling and doesn't even know that he's falling.
That line is terrifying to me.
He says, you're the kind of guy who's in an office in the corner shooting staples at someone else.
No, that's not quite it. No, you're like a guy who's falling.
He doesn't even know that he's falling. The people who are tortured but don't even know that they're unhappy will never end their torture.
Like if you have a toothache but you're a drug addict and you can't even feel the toothache, your toothache will never get better, will rot and kill you.
They're being tortured by their own conscience, but they don't even know how unhappy they are.
The only way you know how unhappy they are is how angry they get at genuinely happy people.
People play Ouija board to summon ghosts but want to summon real ghosts.
Try philosophy. No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.
Yes. Yes.
People think they have an identity and all they have is conformity.
Nobody wants to wake up, look in the mirror and see nothing there.
What's the old line?
Most men die at 25 but wait till 75 to get buried.
Nobody wants to look in the mirror and see a dead soul, to see a hollow shell.
To see a stuffed man, a straw man, a nothing burger, a manufactured emptiness, a useful slave for malevolent forces.
You manifest genuine thought, you expose the empty conformity.
People don't want to see that.
They want to think of themselves as good a lot more than they want to be good.
And philosophy says, no cheating, no shortcuts.
You want to feel good, be good!
Be good! You want to feel happy?
Don't take a fucking drug.
Don't chase the endless orgasm off the cliff of feminist manufacturing fleshly exploitation.
Don't be a cannibal of the vagina.
Get your sustenance from where people don't exist.
The holes. You manifest original thought.
You manifest clarity.
You manifest curiosity.
People begin to see themselves.
And there's plenty of people who will lie and say to the fat girl, you're beautiful at any size.
There's nothing wrong with you. You're perfectly healthy.
I'm sure it's all muscle. Lots of people will lie to you and tell you you're a fine person.
That way they get to control you because you become addicted to them propping you up with things you know are false.
You become addicted to their lies.
People will lie to you and tell you that you're better than you are all the time.
That's fundamental sophistry, mental control 101.
Just tell people they're better.
Tell people they're beautiful.
Tell people they're wonderful. Tell people they're morally courageous and stunning and brave and noble.
And that way they don't have to do shit other than believe your lies.
And they get addicted to those lies and those lies replace any genuine virtue they might have and they're now slaves to falsehood.
Slaves to falsehood.
Addicted to lies.
This modern culture in a nutshell.
Addicted to lies. Someone comes along and tells the truth.
Oof. I'm not a good person.
I'm enslaved by liars.
I hate who they teach me to hate.
I love who they teach me to love.
I have the opinions they tell me are the right opinions, and I put this flag in my bio, and I do this, and I do that, and I approve the current thing, and I, right?
Don't exist. Don't exist.
And you can't even be honest about that and say, well, I'm just too chicken to have my own opinion, so I just go along with the current thing, and if they tell me to hate some group, I'll hate that group.
If they tell me this group is wonderful, this group is wonderful, I don't know fucking thought of my own.
Someone comes along and thinks for themselves and asks questions.
Nobody hates me. Nobody hates me.
That's not a fact. That's not a thing.
It's not a real thing. Nobody hates me.
First of all, I'm a terrifically nice person.
I'm a good dad. I'm a good husband.
I'm a good friend. I love the world.
I like people as a whole.
I always enjoy chatting with new people.
I always try to leave people with a smile or a joke or a thought or something.
I'm a very, very nice person.
There's nothing about me to hate whatsoever.
Nothing about me to hate whatsoever.
Honestly, I'm a really nice, positive, friendly person.
I love the world and I want nothing but the best for the people I interact with.
There's nothing I hate about me. They don't hate me.
They don't even hate the truth.
They hate their own enslavement.
Or to put it another way, the people who profit from lying to people, the people who profit
from lying to others, have implanted in them a hatred of the truth teller so they can continue
to profit from lying to them.
I've been told I'm too serious.
I'm just desperate for truth and connection.
Yeah, for sure. I hid my girlfriend from my crazy mother for about two years and for a long time from others too.
We're happily married for years now and I've left most of the dysfunctional saboteurs out of my life.
My instinct from the very beginning was, don't tell anyone, they'll ruin my happiness.
I knew if I let my girlfriend through their filter, they'd sabotage me and I'd get together with the wrong one.
Yeah. God help you if you try to be happy around miserable people.
God help you if you try to be good around corrupt people.
they will fuck you up.
Please more about the false self.
I've been trying to educate people on that.
Thank you. The false self is when you believe that you have a virtue when you have only obedience.
The false self is when you believe you have virtue when all you have is obedience.
And if somebody questions the virtue of obedience or points out that you are in fact obeying,
if you point out contradictions in people's viewpoint, because when you obey others you
end up with endless contradictions.
Philosophy is about ironing out those inconsistencies, right?
Ah, things fall down.
But what about this balloon that goes up?
What about clouds that stay in the air?
Oh, that's interesting. Let's try and find out those exceptions.
And you learn about reality by trying to reconcile seeming opposites and finding out their unity.
Things fall as long as they're heavier than air, right?
So we have all these contradictions and the purpose of philosophy is to resolve these
contradictions so that things make sense.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And I could do a show that in 20 minutes could explain the entire world top to bottom, back to front.
I mean, not going to do it.
It's not a truth-friendly planet at the moment.
That's fine. We'll do it at some point, perhaps.
But when you start pointing out the contradictions, then people get very upset because it begins to point out
to them that they accept the most contradictory absurdities.
Thank you.
You know, the obvious one.
A woman says, my body, my choice.
It's like, okay, well then vaccine mandates must be wrong, right?
Well, they've been told that my body, my choice is a thing, and then they've also been told that the destruction of bodily autonomy, called forcing people to take vaccines, that that's also fine, right?
They have a problem with that.
It's a contradiction. And when you start pointing out contradictions, people realize that they don't have any truth.
All they have is obedience to the current thing.
Enslavement to the narrative, usually to serve immorality.
You know, philosophy is that meme of that fat German soldier, the Nazi guy, saying, hey, could we be the baddies?
That's what philosophy is.
He just turns the light on.
Could we be the baddies?
Would tip if I could.
freedomain.com slash donate.
There's lots of different ways to do it and I appreciate that.
Thank you. Alright, this is a powerful stream.
Whoa! Yeah, you know, it's funny.
I remember seeing, before I went on Joe Rogan, I didn't really know who Joe Rogan was, and I got invited on Joe Rogan a couple of times.
And I went to see one of his shows, and I went to go and see some MMA thing that he was doing the announcing for.
And a powerful JRE, powerful Joe Rogan experience.
It's like...
This to me is powerful.
I mean, giving a semi-contextual blowjob to Steve Tyler is not, to me, particularly powerful.
All right. All right.
Let me get to the... Questions here?
Comments? And you know what?
You can say you were here live when it happened.
I never had a girlfriend with a spanking kink.
In my mind, it's some kind of a Western world thing.
I don't get it. I knew one girl who wanted to get into knife play, which was a big yikes.
Was it that game that you play in Aliens?
I don't know. I would say one friend out of ten followed your philosophy show.
Today, I felt like there isn't an oasis out there in any direction.
Well, the first oasis is within, right?
You find the oasis within, then you can see the oasis in others, right?
If you're a desert to yourself, you can't find the oasis out there.
You find the oasis within yourself, your spontaneous generation of virtue and passion and happiness and curiosity and reason.
You find the oasis within yourself, and you'll see them all around you.
My dad won't apologize for my childhood, but he sure loves a fiery political debate.
Yeah, and those two things are entirely related.
The fiery political debate is to have you not talk about your childhood.
Hey Steph, what would you recommend reading first of your novels?
Well, if you like historical novels, Just Poor is probably the easiest in many ways.
Almost. JustPoorNovel.com.
AlmostNovel.com is also really great.
Read the present, then read the future.
I think that's important as well.
And Revolutions is also very good.
You can find that at FreeDomainNFT.com.
I know some good men who got wrecked and divorced, caught, etc.
Is that their fault?
See, fault is not something that you can assign externally.
The question is not fault.
The question is this.
Oh, you just want to blame people.
You just find fault with people. No, no, no.
The question is not fault or blame.
Who cares about that? You can't just assign that externally.
Here's the question. The only thing that matters in this realm, I'm telling you this straight up, man.
The only thing that matters...
Are you going to have a better life if you take more responsibility for what you do?
And is there a maximum responsibility that you can achieve that will make your life better?
You must take the maximum responsibility for your choices and 0% responsibility for anyone else's choices.
The guy I was talking to today, it's a little preview of the call coming out this weekend.
The guy I talked to today said, oh man, I tried talking to my dad about my childhood and my issues and my problems and it totally backfired and he...
He called me names and he walked out the door and he went to go in the backyard and so on.
Totally, I failed. He said, no, you didn't.
What are you talking about? You can never have a standard of success that relies on the actions of others.
You can never have a standard of success that relies on the actions of others.
This is why people get mad about or upset about the ending of my novel, The Present.
Well, did she get what she wanted?
That doesn't matter! It doesn't matter how people react.
It matters what you say.
Because you only have control over what you say.
You have no control over what people react.
How they react. You have no control over how people react.
They got wrecked in divorce court.
Is that their fault? My question is, is their life going to get better or worse?
Is their children's lives going to get better or worse if they take total ownership over all of their decisions?
If they take no excuses, no excuses, what does a life look like if you don't excuse shit in yourself?
You don't excuse anything.
What does your life look like with no excuses?
It's a big question.
It's a big question.
Is it their fault?
I don't even know what that means.
Fault is not something I assign to people like you put stickers on something, like you label things.
Is their life their responsibility?
Would my life be better or worse if I blamed my parents for everything?
Would it be better or worse?
If I said, well, I'm fucked because I had such a bad childhood.
My parents both ended up institutionalized.
My parents were violent and destructive.
I'm fucked, right?
If I put blame on others, if I gave myself excuses, would my life be better or worse?
Simple question, and everybody knows the answer to that.
Everybody knows the answer to that.
My life is infinitely better.
When have I ever said, my behavior...
It's the responsibility of my parents.
Any bad thing I do is the responsibility of my parents.
Mistakes that I made is because of the past.
Have I ever said that?
Ever! Don't you think the unhappiness is why everyone is addicted to drugs, video games, porn, and Instagram?
No, they're addicted to those things because they don't exist.
People who don't exist are addicted to external stimuli.
Nature abhors a vacuum and social media and stimulation and drugs rushes in to fill an empty vessel.
Having a bad conscience sounds like Dante's Inferno.
But at least the people in hell knew they were in hell.
The real hell is when you're in hell but don't even know it.
The people I've known for a while that aren't doing well are basically good but naive men that got wrecked in
divorce.
I don't think they did anything immoral other than trusting the wrong people.
Who's to blame? Again, blame is a word that is designed to have you scrub responsibility from your vocabulary.
Blame is like an exorcism.
The demon is called responsibility.
Who is responsible for your choices in your life?
Who is responsible for your choices in your life?
Dad? Darwin? The government?
Gravity? Hand puppets?
Ghosts? Possession?
Who is responsible for your decisions in your life?
Spoiler! It's you.
Are you blaming me?
See, the word blame is just a magic word invented by people who want to avoid the fact that they're responsible for their choices.
Look. There's no fucking man alive who doesn't know that divorce is a thing.
There's no man alive who doesn't know that family courts exist.
There's no man alive who's never known anyone who's had any negative experiences getting married or getting divorced.
Everyone knows that.
Everyone knows that. Now, you can tell people the truth and you can give them facts and you can give them evidence.
fantastic, beautiful, wonderful.
Are you blaming me? Is this my fault?
...
Do you have responsibility for your life?
It's funny because people say, Are you blaming me?
You blaming me?
It's like, are you blaming me for blaming you?
so someone can get blamed but never you.
Hi Steph, I hope you've had a wonderful week.
I've been in the habit of rejecting dreams and have felt strongly annoyed when people would ask about them.
As a child, my mother would take dreams extremely seriously.
She would get each of us dream journals and dream analysis books and would ask every morning about what we dreamed about.
She's the kind of person who would have a dream that my dad was cheating on her and then in real life would punish him for it.
Okay, that's not dreams. That's mysticism.
So as an adult, I outright dismissed dreams, swinging to the other extreme to offset my mom.
As I've listened to you over the years, I've taken more interest in what I can learn from them.
Last night I had a dream where my mother was being difficult as I confronted her about something and she pushed me down the stairs while I was turned away from her.
I'm not asking for a dream analysis, but how can I learn from my dreams?
Do you write your dreams down?
And how can I better appreciate them?
I went through a long period of writing dreams down and doing analysis of them.
I would still talk about them sometimes and think about them and so on.
I've done some on this show, analyzed my own dreams.
But... I confronted her about something and she pushed me down the stairs while I was turned away from her.
Yep. So that's sabotage, right?
So, she would rather you die than tell her the truth.
If you tell someone with a false self, strongly entrenched in the false self, you tell that someone the truth, they feel like they go through what's called annihilation.
I call that annihilation panic.
I don't exist. Everything is a lie.
Nothing is real. I thought I was a good person.
I'm a terrible person. They literally face a form of death that feels like murder.
It feels like somebody's forcing them off a bridge.
Somebody's forcing them to walk into a volcano.
Somebody's forcing them to jump off a building.
And this is why people fight so hard against it, because they feel like they're going to die.
So you talk to your mother honestly, then the moment you turn away, she pushes you down the stairs, which is cowardly.
So she would rather you die than tell her the truth in the dream.
She would rather you lose philosophy and your sense of curiosity, individuation, and conversation.
She'd rather you lose that than ask her a simple question or a difficult question or anything like that
So Yeah, doesn't Rogan do a lot of drugs?
I don't know why people take this addiction as...
Anyway. The end of the present was perfect.
I think so. Otherwise, I would have written it better.
At least it was as perfect as I could make it.
I haven't forgotten about the spanking question.
Why was Steven Crowder wrong for saying that he chose the wrong woman?
Why was he wrong for saying he chose the wrong woman?
It's passive-aggressive in my view.
I can't read his mind, but in my view, if you chose the wrong woman and it took you 12 years to figure that out, I'm not sure you can lecture society about how to live and what to do.
Pretty sure you can't.
Can you tell society how to run itself when you can't even pick the right woman?
So either you picked the right woman and then you screwed it up, in which case you should have some humility and say, I messed it up, or you picked the wrong woman and didn't notice for 12 years and had children with her and then only figured out that she was the wrong woman when she was pregnant with your twins, which is about a brutalist thing about as brutal a thing as
I can imagine and when somebody says I chose the wrong woman what people
remember is the phrase It's a... to me that's a passive-aggressive cop-out.
What happened that I could not control is beyond me and beyond blame.
Why is it? I don't know what you're talking about.
Did I miss something here?
Yes, I resent the hell out of it, but if I stay there, how can I ever move on?
I just have to find somewhere to put my energy that would be productive.
Depression and anger do not help me.
Still struggle with the latter. But anger is trying to help you hold someone responsible.
Anger is trying to help you hold someone accountable.
And if you say, well, other people's actions are beyond blame, they're beyond accountability,
they're beyond responsibility, then your anger will not go away because it's trying to have
you assign responsibility to people so that you can figure out what kind of people abuse
that responsibility or harm you so that you can be safe.
This podcast has given me a lot of righteous indignation from me sticking to the truth
and not living out these false lies and lies people do.
Yeah, the world is a battle between truth and lies.
Truth, five letters, lies, four, right?
So it's a fist and a thumbless, non-opposable thumb monkey hand, right?
The truth is five fingers lies.
T-R-U-T-H-L-I-E-S.
Why did all Steph's old contacts bailed after his deplatforming?
Why did your old contacts bail?
Well, to keep me safe. To keep me safe.
That's why people did not follow me to the new platforms.
To keep me safe. For them to say to me, we don't want you to keep doing politics because it's dangerous.
No, the opposite of truth is not false.
The opposite of truth is a lie.
Because a lie presents itself as a truth, and therefore you stop looking.
Once you know something is false, you keep looking, right?
So the opposite of truth is lie, not false.
Hey, Steph! Thanks for streaming.
What does it mean when someone characterizes your arguments like causing them ranting, berating, or extreme?
I find it extremely annoying and unproductive, but I'm not sure how to talk about why it's unproductive and annoying.
Well, because they're being dishonest.
Right? So when somebody says, your beliefs are extreme, they're saying, you make me uncomfortable.
But they're not being honest about their lack of comfort.
They're not saying, well, I'm uncomfortable with your arguments.
I'm not sure why, but your arguments are making me anxious.
Your perspective is making me anxious.
They're not saying that. They're saying, your arguments are extreme, and therefore, my response is...
Perfectly rational because it's an extreme argument.
So they're trying to take their emotional response and put it into your argument, which is not there.
It's not there. And so they're saying, I don't own my own feelings.
You are completely responsible for my feelings and my feelings are embedded in what you say.
They're not in my heart or my mind or my nervous system or anything like that.
Like the word bashing, I don't think it's quite as common anymore, you know.
Oh, you're just ex-bashing.
You're bashing this person.
You're bashing. Like, nope, just making an argument.
So people are telling you, I don't know the difference between your words and my feelings.
I'm in that primitive a state that I don't know the difference between your words and my feelings.
I don't know the difference between you and me.
I'm so primitive that I'm blended with the universe and cannot differentiate stimulus from response.
You're making an argument.
I'm having a strong emotional reaction.
Therefore, your argument is extreme.
They think that their emotional reaction is embedded in your words.
That's why people have this ridiculous demonic concept called hate speech.
Okay, you might hate what someone is saying, but that doesn't mean that the word hate is now embedded in the speech, right?
It doesn't make any sense.
So, let's see here.
There's a reason I downloaded an app that I use for nothing else than to simply follow Steph.
His content is the pursuit of truth, and unlike so many other people online, he has never let me down.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I wasn't remotely shocked to hear Lauren Southern say he is exactly who he says he is.
Oh, yes. We face some challenges in Australia and New Zealand, for sure.
This is why I will follow Steph wherever he goes, so long as he continues the fight.
Thank you very much, my friend.
I really, really appreciate that.
That's very kind. So, why is a woman wanting to be hit sexually?
A red flag? Why?
Why? Oh, why?
Why? Right, why is a woman who gets turned on from being hit?
A red flag.
Thank you so much for the answer, Steph.
You are very, very welcome.
She was abused as a child.
Well, sure, but it's not a red flag to have been abused as a child.
That's not a red flag. In fact, being abused as a child can make you super empathetic, super deep, super curious.
It can make you a wonderful partner.
I mean, if I do say so myself, right?
So, no, that's not a red flag.
It's not that she was abused as a child.
Being abused as a child doesn't lead you directly to having a spanking fetish or a beating fetish or a S&M fetish or whatever it is, right?
It doesn't, right? So, she wants to continue the abuse?
Nah, I don't think so.
I mean, yes, sorry, that's an annoying way to put it.
I apologize for that. It was kind of rude.
I think you're right, but I think it's not at a helpful level of detail.
Why does she want to continue the abuse?
Why do some people not want to continue the abuse?
And why do some people want to continue the abuse?
Well... Spanking is auto-erotic to begin with.
There's always an erotic component to spanking because the buttocks, the ass, the butt, is an erogenous zone, right?
It's a sexual zone, which is why you have to cover it at the beach and why some people pretend to with their butt-floss bikinis, right?
So the butt is, right, when I was a kid, every now and then, some idiots would be driving down the street and they'd moon you, right?
They'd hang their butt out the window and so on, right?
So a butt is a sexual zone, right?
And so hitting somebody on the butt is a form of auto-erotic aggression.
Now, a woman... Or a man.
We're just talking about a woman here. A woman who places violence and sexuality together means that she has now associated...
And this is one thing that's wild about human beings.
The wild panoply of human sexual preferences is truly mind-boggling.
And how do they all arise and occur?
There's a sexual fetish...
Well, first of all, there's a sexual fetish that involves wanting to be the opposite gender.
There's also a sexual fetish that involves physical wounds, like wanting to lick or penetrate a physical wound, which is again about as horrifying a thing as I can conceive of.
But it's a real thing. There are people who get sexually excited from crushing insects.
There are people who get sexually excited by couches.
There are people who get sexually excited by parachuting.
There are people who get like... It's...
I mean, I'd say almost deranged, but it is just wild.
It is just wild.
What people can get turned on by other than having sex and being in love?
It's just amazing to me what people...
People get sexually excited by animals.
It's just...
It's demented, really.
Now, of course, it's demented from a moral standpoint, but we all kind of understand this, that human beings...
Imprint sexually, right?
And so whatever you see as the first sexual thing in your environment is probably what you're most likely to imprint on because your biology doesn't know what the sexual practices are in your environment.
So, you know, there are some tribes where they elongate the woman's neck enormously long and if the first sexual thing you see, kissing or rubbing or touching or maybe even intercourse, if the first sexual thing you see is with a woman with an extremely long neck, you'll bond on that and you'll whack off the giraffes in a duck blind.
I don't know, right? So, we imprint on the sexual stimuli that we see and we don't know what we're going to see and our, you know...
And so...
If the early imprinting for the woman is that sexuality involves pain, humiliation, beating and violence, if she doesn't deal with that, then she can't control being beaten or spanked as a child.
What she can do is she can control her reactions to it.
So she's trying to manage the stimuli.
She can't escape the stimuli.
She can't have any power to not get beaten, to not get spanked.
But what she can do is she can have power over her own reactions to it.
Like this is the Simon Boxer thing from Real Time Relationships, which you should really listen to or read.
And thank you, by the way, for the tips. I really appreciate that.
I am working my non-erogenous ass off tonight.
So I really, really do appreciate the tips.
And if you come across this later, freedomain.com slash donate, I would really help it out because I obviously need more.
Inflatable. Giraffes from my bedroom.
MTV. True life.
I am a chubby chaser.
I don't know what MTV means.
Chubby chaser. Yeah, so if you happen to have your first erotic memory, your first erotic exposure is an obese woman, it's possible and likely that you will end up with that kind of pattern, that kind of imprinting, and that's going to be something you're going to have to deal with over the course of I think we can reprogram our sexual preferences, but they're there, I think, to begin with, right?
That's sort of the ball. It gets the ball rolling, so to speak, right?
So a woman... Who has not processed the immorality of being bare-butt beaten or spanked as a child, the evil of it and the creepiness of it.
I've always found spanking children on the bare-butt in particular to be extraordinarily creepy and bizarre and weird and horrible, really.
It's a form of erotic exploitation that is really, really disturbing and you don't even have to think about it that much to get there, right?
So... She is in a very primitive state where she only finds a sense of control in her life from managing highly disturbing and destructive violent erotic stimuli.
And it also may, the wires may have crossed to the point where violence and turn-on have become co-joint in her mind.
Violence and turn-on.
And what that means is that, what do they call it in the S&M community?
Oh, plain old boring vanilla sex.
sex, vanilla sex, right?
Which is sex is for procreation, love, bonding and so on, right?
So she has now co-joined in her mind, in her unconscious and maybe all the way down to
her entire nervous system, now violence and orgasm, violence and a positive sexual experience.
These two things are now co-joined in her mind, which means that sexuality now serves violence, not love.
Sexuality serves violation, not intimacy.
It serves the breaking of trust, not the building of trust, which means she cannot pair bond with a virtuous person.
A virtuous person will be a turn-off for her.
And in the same way that a virtuous person, a virtuous, sexually healthy, normal person, which, you know, I'm not saying this is super common, but you know, they do exist...
A healthy, virtuous, sexually normal person would not be turned on by beating a person.
In fact, it would be horrifying and appalling and you would never want to be within a bazillion miles of anything like that.
And so people who want to control the future of sexuality in society, their goal is to present their own sexuality as early as possible to children.
I mean, we know all of this, right?
So... Somebody says, I can see that the threat of death being a biological signal to reproduce as soon as possible.
Violence could tease that impulse.
Yeah, but for a woman in particular, if you're about to die, I mean, you could say reproduce ASAP. If you're about to die, you might as well, like, you know, nobody worries about cholesterol if they're about to be executed in their last meal, right?
So for a woman, it's like, oh, I guess I might as well have sex if I'm about to die because I don't have any future procreation to worry about.
But for women, historically and evolutionarily speaking, if a man finds them sexually attractive, they have less fear of death, right?
Because they'll be taken as a concubine or a third wife or something like that.
So, a woman who can't pair bond because sexuality, which is designed to pair bond, is now associated with violence, exploitation, and destruction, means that any bond you could try to form with her is going to be destroyed by the masochism.
And masochism is, of course, the flip side.
Like sentimentality is the flip side to brutality.
Masochism and sadism are flip sides, right?
So if she wants to be beaten, it means that she enjoys cruelty.
If she enjoys cruelty, she will enjoy dishing it out most likely as well.
That would be my thoughts on it.
All right. Any last questions, comments, issues?
Problems? Don't you think the link for violent sex could also be linked to evolution and dominance?
Well, sure. Yeah, of course.
Of course. But we're not talking about violent sex.
We're talking about a fetish for spanking.
That's a different matter.
The stream went in deep.
Yeah, deep, baby. All right.
Any last questions?
Last but not least.
Thank you so much. And any last tips, man?
I'm telling you, I've had to wipe the sweat from my brow.
I've been working so hard on this.
And I like working at this level.
I really enjoy it. You guys have the best questions on the planet and you bring out the best in me.
The two, my gosh, the two questions I had for the show tonight, I didn't even get to.
Let me just tell you what they were, so I'll put them in another time.
Somebody asked me, what do you mean when you say possessed?
What does it mean to be possessed?
I talk about the sort of demonic possession, and I had that as a question, which I will talk about.
I also wanted to talk about how, you know, one of the things that I find wild is that all the terrible things in the world are just held up by people's beliefs.
I sent through a tip and question before.
Can you check please? Would you mind copy and pasting the question down here?
Because scrolling through takes forever and trying to find it is a big pause of dead air.
So every bad thing in the world is just sustained by people's beliefs.
And I used to think when I was younger that people's beliefs were kind of like, well, just change your belief.
It's not like physics, but it's like people who won't change their minds, people who won't think for themselves, their beliefs are actually like physics.
You might as well try to defy gravity as to disabuse the herd of their illusions.
People who don't change their mind are like physics.
They are as immutable and immovable.
When is the next stream? Saturday?
Are you kidding me? It's Friday night.
I don't know. I could do one Sunday at 11 a.m.
I'd like to do at least one a week for the European and non-North American listeners.
All right.
Let me just... What do destructive large hailstones symbolize?
Loss of masculinity, dropping balls from the sky.
Demonic possession would be a great Sunday topic.
That's very true. Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely. I'll just play through the quarry to sort that out.
All right. I'm just waiting for that person.
Thank you for a riveting show.
I will definitely be re-watching.
Appreciate that. Thanks, Tepha.
Send some tips on the video. For some reason, it's not letting me do that now.
Oh, thank you very much.
I appreciate that. And remember, and I do appreciate this as well.
You can also tip me with coins, freedomain.locals.com.
You can buy coins and tip there, and that works very well, and that's very helpful for me as well.
So I appreciate that as well.
You're knocking it out of the park tonight more than usual, breaking windows across the street.
Thanks, Steph and everyone involved in one way or another.
Thank you, my friend, that is very kind.
And I do not take your presence for granted.
I do not take any work I've done in the past for granted.
And I am always, always maximum rotation, caterpillar tread of the gods trying to move forward
in my life and in yours and to get new topics, new depth, new facts, new liberties,
sawing through more change with the hot buzzwords of semi-volcanic syllables.
So I really, really appreciate everyone's kindness tonight.
Thank you for the support.
I remember when Steph would ask for Bitcoins as donations.
I'm happy to take Bitcoins as donations as well.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
You can absolutely tip me in Bitcoins or other crypto.
That's very much appreciated.
As well. All right.
Just wait for any last topics or questions.
I don't think I ever got that thing from the guy who said he...
If you did send me a tip and I did not answer your question, please email it to me.
You can send it to host at freedomain.com, host at freedomain.com, and I promise I will answer the question.
If you gave me a tip and I didn't answer your question, there's quite a lot of stuff flowing through here, and I don't have a team of 17 like some podcasters.
But yeah, if I didn't get something to you, please, please email me, host at freedomain.com.
Just mentioned that you sent me something and I didn't respond and I will absolutely respond.
So I really, I can't even tell you guys how much I appreciate it and how much it actually lifts my spirits when there's some tips.
Like it really does help because man, it's a tough world out there.
You know, I lost some people because of new laws and so on.
So yeah, I mean, whatever you can do.
I would really, really appreciate it.
No curveballs, just fastballs straight down the plate.
Yeah, baby. And with a certain amount of man-pleasing Vaseline on the side.
Fella asked this question. What?
What? Did I miss it again?
Oh, God. What am I doing?
What am I doing? Can you...
Anyone copy and paste this question?
I don't want to miss it if you donated.
I mean, even if you didn't, but if there was a question I left unanswered.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the idea that a terrible parent could drive away their child as an attempt to save them.
Yeah, I've talked about that before.
Yeah, I view very much my mother when she told me basically that, like, when I said, I just need to have more say in our relationship.
I need to have some voice here.
I can't just be one-sided.
And she screams at the top of her lungs, ends up literally throwing couch cushions around the living room.
Look at me sweating away. Look at that.
Look at that pit sweat from philosophy, man.
It's a workout and a half.
I didn't even take my shirt off.
Actually, I will take my shirt off for tips.
That's the level of pride I have.
No shirt for tips.
There's still time for the shirt off.
Alright, one more tip and I'll take the shirt off.
That's how cheap I am.
You can't buy my soul, but I'm happy to flash my pecs.
My pecs is normally just the ducks that I have in the studio.
But tip!
Tip! Tip for shirt off!
I had a good workout yesterday and today, so you might actually see a vein.
You might see... A vein.
Locals now offering OnlyFans.
You know what? I really could use a fan in here.
Holy crap. Look at that.
Sweat, sweat, sweat. I only have like two lights on me.
As you can go to sleeveless next show.
Yeah, yeah. Alright.
Looks like people don't want the shirtless.
Which I, you know, I'm not saying I sympathize with.
I'm just saying I understand.
I understand. If only people paid as much for philosophy as they do for OnlyFans.
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, what do you think about having the present live stream?
Yes, thank you very much for that.
I have been consumed with Truth Abouts lately.
And so, yes, we will set that up for sure.
You know what? I'm going to, tomorrow, maybe I'll do that tonight.
I will put out the feed.
The feed has been available for subscribers.
the feed for the book. Sorry, I'm back.
Sorry, I just noticed something. The feed for the present, which is the easiest way to consume it, that feed has been out just for subscribers, and I have recently put it out for non-subscribers.
So I'm going to just give it to you here.
Copy. Clean link. Yes, I like it.
So yeah, just get that, listen to that book, and we will get to that, because I keep talking about it on the show, and it probably would be better to actually have people talk about it in a proper live stream.
My God, I'm going to have to have a shower.
I'm literally so hot from this show.
I'm so hot from this show.
Maybe I'm feeling a little too hot.
I've got to slip into something a little more comfortable.
Big boy. If that doesn't count your dreams, I don't know.
What will? Other than the tall giraffe you get to whack after in a bush.
Alright. Thought you were in cold Canada.
Yeah, but it's... Oh, very hot in here.
Okay. Is that for shirtless?
Just hit me with a Y. Is that for shirtless?
I will keep my word.
No, that's not you.
You didn't send the tip. I need it from...
Oh, yes? Fine!
Fine! From the glories of my mind to what was the guy who said?
Guy hasn't missed Trap Day since he was born.
There we go.
I don't think I can even go that far back here because I don't have the biggest studio.
No, man.
There we go. There you go.
We need another woman's speech.
Have your babies! There we go.
Oh, look at that.
I almost have a bicep. I just can't get biceps, man.
I've tried. I've tried.
But, you know, these not too bad.
These not too bad. Chest.
Chest getting there. A little ripple here.
Little ripple here. Chest getting there.
Couple of chest ears. Man, if I deflect one more time, I'm going to get a cramp because I'm over 50.
That's the way it works. I can build a chest to save my life.
Well, aren't you the pirate then, right?
Gigastef destroys falsehoods.
That's right. I never get to see the back, so I don't know what the hell that looks like.
Well, I guess I can see it now. With the psychological nudity, increasing philosophical flex appeal.
That's right, baby. Look at that.
Clavicles. You know, ever since I got that scar, I have this one line that's right here.
And ever since I got this tooth drilled out and it went up into my sinuses, I got a little droop here.
Anyway, no biggie. No biggie.
It's good to be in health. And what is it?
I beat cancer eight or nine years ago, so everything else is a bonus.
Your speech about not knowing your own beliefs without developing some physical strength has been effective.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see what happens to Mark Zuckerberg now that he can actually defend himself with BJJ or whatever he's studying these days.
So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
All right. Thank you, everyone, so much for a great...
Oh, next, is he AMAS? Yes.
Yeah, we'll do it this weekend.
She keeps reminding me and I keep getting busy.
Hey, thanks for calling out strength training too.
My biceps aren't big enough, so I'm on the kettlebell now.
Yes, listen. When it comes to exercise, start off slow.
Don't overdo it, because your temptation is to try and make quick gains, and then you're going to end up injuring yourself.
You're going to be out. You're going to lose the habit.
Just start off slow and easy.
My advice, I'm no expert.
Nips or it didn't happen? Yeah, you've got nips.
Right here. Right here, we've got some nips.
Right here. There you go.
All right. Yeah, right here you got some nips.
Yeah, start off slow. Go easy.
Lots of light repetitions.
Now, you can work up. If you want a bulk, then you do short sets, like fewer reps, heavier weights.
That will give you bigger muscles.
More reps, lighter weights will give you a different, a leaner look and so on.
So, is Steph wearing pants?
Yeah, I'm afraid so. I'm afraid so.
And listen, you can just get a little weight bench for 80 bucks.
You can just get some 25, 35 pounds weights or 15 to start or whatever.
You can start off real cheap.
You don't have to get a big-ass gym membership that you've got to go a long way to get to.
I do leg lifts while I'm watching TV shows and I do isometric exercises on the couch and all this kind of stuff.
So keep tipping for no pets!
I do pull-ups, push-ups all day and night now listening to the present audiobook.
Well, that's great. I appreciate that.
I actually will write while exercising.
You won't believe this. You really won't believe this.
I will write while exercising. So sometimes I will write on a treadmill and I put the computer up.
I have voice dictation and I'm just writing.
I'm walking really fast, right?
That's why I do my walkabouts while I do my call-in shows is that moving helps the blood flow.
I will actually voice dictate while lifting weights.
I will write while working out.
And so whatever it takes for me to keep those creative juices going, I will absolutely, completely and totally do.
So I strongly recommend it.
You know, you cannot know your own mind without a strong body.
You cannot know your own mind without a strong body.
Whoa, lost connection and now Steph has shirt off.
That's right. Somebody says, the best training is G-O-A-T-A training.
They back engineered human movements for indigenous and top athletes.
Save my back and knee. A few more novels and Steph will be in the strongman competition.
No, honestly, some people can build muscle pretty easily.
I simply can't. The one time in my life I got really buffed was when I was playing Macbeth and I really wanted to bulk him up because I figured he'd be like a Conan warrior.
And I've never taken any supplements other than a little bit here and there, like the over-the-counter stuff.
But I'm not the kind of guy who can just build muscle.
I really do have to.
It's like soccer. When you have a good game day, you take your shirt off.
That's right. That's right. Okay.
Well, hopefully this has inspired you.
Listen, this is me. Look, I'm going to be 57 in a couple of months.
That's not bad. Look at that.
Not bad. I don't have a big wobbly thing here.
It's not bad. Not bad for a 57, I think.
You know, face, not too lined.
Body fairly good.
And, you know, I've got some abs in here somewhere.
There's lots of things that are going on that I'm not aware of.
And I hope that, you know, if I can do this when pushing 57, what can you do in your 20s?
I mean, I bet you it's going to be absolutely magnificent.
So I hope that you will check that out for yourself.
And, you know, if this helps you a little bit, like, I hope that it inspires you to do something.
Have you heard of epithelon and how it protects your body and cells from aging?
I don't believe in the longevity stuff.
I just don't. That line from the future of the more questions he asks, the less his body resembles a question mark has been very inspiring.
Oh yeah, listen, if you can do standing work, if you can not sit and then sit and then sit and then sit and turn more and more into a hundred...
Like I've got a little bit of a...
What do they call the dowager's hump?
I've always had that. I mean, when I was in theater school, when we'd lie on our back, they had to put books under my head.
And I think it's just because I just have a very large head and a heavy brain.
Weighty. Weighty. Somebody says, good stuff, Steph.
Lost 50 pounds over the last year.
Now I want to start hitting those weights.
Yes. Weights.
Listen. I love to eat.
I'm not total foodie, but I do love to eat.
Let me just sort of sit down. So I do love to eat and the best way to enjoy eating is to exercise.
I mean, it's good all around.
Like, I simply refuse to get old and frail.
I simply refuse to get old and frail because I hopefully have another 30 years, get to 86, another 30 years on the planet.
I will not get old and frail.
I will do eight hours of weights a week if I have to.
I will walk 10,000 steps a day.
I will do a bike machine.
Like, I refuse to get old and frail.
It will not happen.
Any more in advance of what nature inevitably inflicts.
Like, I won't get old and fat.
I won't get a dad bod.
I will not become pear-shaped pudgy head.
I will not lose my jawline.
I will not get old and frail.
I just won't do it.
I won't do it.
And nature will take it away when she's ready.
But I'll be goddamned if I'll give her one inch before I have to.
And if you don't exercise after the age of 30, you lose muscle mass.
You lose muscle mass.
So don't do it.
Don't do it. Weight training three times a week with normal daily walks and eating right totally transformed my life.
I'm lean, strong, and the fittest I've been despite getting on in life.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, listen, I played a racket sport against a very experienced 28-year-old Asian fellow, and it was a narrow victory, but I managed to win.
And it's not easy, right?
And he was like, dude, you move.
I'm like, I certainly do, because the alternative to moving is dying.
You move or you die. You're busy living or you're busy dying.
And you move or you die.
That's it. We're like sharks.
Sharks stop swimming, they sink.
They don't have a bladder. You stop moving, you start dying.
All right. I love cycling around the neighborhood in the evening.
Joyful exercise. And pick things up about your environment and community.
Nice. I will not get old and frail.
Thank you for this motivation, Steph.
This is something I committed to as well.
I'm paying for a true professional trainer eight times a month.
After months, finally gaining some weight on my skinny frame.
I don't want to be 80 years old, anxiety-riddled weakling.
You are helping me. Thank you.
Get busy living or get busy dying.
Yeah, absolutely. I would hate to lose the ability to take hikes.
Yes. I mean, you hear, I don't have back issues.
I don't have knee issues. I banged my knee like hell when I was giving a speech in St.
Louis and chasing my daughter down a hallway.
It took me eight months and forever, and I finally had to give up on physical therapists and just massage the hell out of it myself.
And also, you know, gyms are a nice way to meet people.
I've chatted up women in gyms, asked up women in gyms when I was younger.
There's nothing wrong with that. And I know that people, you know, obviously be polite and take no for no, but there's nothing wrong with talking to a woman and seeing if there's any mutual interest.
I talked to women, used to chat with women and asked women out at the yoga class and all the kinds of things, right?
Just keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.
You can't think if you don't move.
You cannot think if you don't move.
I tell you this, when I look at someone and I think about whether they have something of value to offer me intellectually, I look at whether they move.
It's not the only thing, and of course, there's exceptions.
I look at whether they move.
I don't believe that anyone can think if they don't move.
And I don't view any time that I spend exercising as any kind of subtraction from the time I spend philosophizing.
Movement is philosophy.
Exercise is thought.
They are two sides of the same coin.
And this is not just my theory.
This is actual science. You can't think if you don't get good blood flow.
If you're moving, if your blood flow is good, your thoughts will be better and clearer.
These analogies don't come out of nowhere.
This stuff comes right out of exercise.
St. Louis, how was it? I was thinking about visiting.
I'm curious on your take. I mean, I basically just went to...
I gave a speech at the Eagle Forum there many years ago.
You can still find it on YouTube, actually.
Just look for Christ Molyneux.
I did a speech on temptations, a religious speech on temptations and Jesus.
So, yeah, I liked it.
I liked it. I mean, it's nice. Again, I didn't see much of the town.
I just went in and gave a speech. Just joined, and the shirt is off.
What party did I miss? The party of deep muscular thought.
Muscular Christianity was a big movement in the 19th century where people got out of the monks' quarters and into the gym.
All right. Let's see here.
Take the courses learning how to learn.
It talks about the role of exercise in learning.
Yeah. I mean, this is the ancient Greeks.
I mean, big, big inspiration for me philosophically, the ancient Greeks.
The idea of being a thinker without being a mover, the idea of exercising your thought without exercising your body was incomprehensible to them.
And I like that mind-body dichotomy where the soul is immaterial and the seat of your consciousness has nothing to do with your body.
That's not a thing that I go with.
The mind-body dichotomy, the split between the mind and the body, I do not follow it at all.
Poetry in motion is poetry in thought.
Flexibility in the joints is flexibility in thinking.
Energy in motion is energy in thought.
Clarity in movement is clarity in concept.
I do not view the two as at all opposing.
And you serve philosophy by movement of thought, of travel, of your body.
The body and the mind are one.
And the strength of the body grows like a tree out of the seed of the strength of the mind grows like a seed out of the strength of the body.
And they reinforce each other.
All right. Thank you very much.
Yes, it would be a disgrace for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable of.
Just finished my walk.
Heart beat up. Yes, absolutely.
Walking is a wonderful form of exercise.
Swimming is also great. If you don't mind the boring yurgle-gurgle that goes on.
I was on the swim team. I was on the water polo team.
I was a good diver and so on.
And yeah, I got a little bit bored of swimming or what yurgle-gurgle.
Although when your kids are young, they absolutely love pools and that was great.
Oh, what a lovely topic to end on.
So yes, please go out and move and do not think ever of moving as being something that is subtracted from your life.
Oh, I've got to go exercise. It's like, no, no, no, no.
You get paid off with exercising no matter what.
You feel strong.
Your body can respond.
You walk through the world like a ship, not like a leaf.
You know, you walk through the world like a tank, not like a rickshaw, and just anything.
It can just be... If you're having a conversation with your wife, walk around the kitchen.
You've got a little island. Anywhere.
I used to do this in the business world.
Oh, you want to have a meeting? Let's go walk.
Let's walk together. Let's go for a walk.
And we'll do that. And just keep moving and keep moving and your brain will thank you, your heart will thank you, your muscles will thank you, your back will thank you, your joints will thank you.
It's a beautiful thing. I used to remember thinking, oh my gosh, you know, what if I wear on my knees by walking too much?
It's like, nope! The knees are strengthened and the cartilage is strengthened by walking.
And what was it the other day? Like 26,000 steps or something completely mental like that.
And yes, just keep moving.
And then, you know, big plus you can eat more.
So yes, just move, move, move.
And also helps with your digestion.
Move your body, move your bowels.
There you go. That's the name of the show.
All right, I'm just waiting for people to finish their typing.
I hate cutting off show when people are in the middle of typing.
You could always buy a stainless steel knee later.
Ooh, I knew a guy.
Ooh, I knew a guy who had to have a knee replacement.
It did not go well.
It did not go well at all.
I remember that scene in Tom Wolfe's The Man in Full where the guy's just getting his knees replaced because he was an ex-football player.
I'd rather not. My dad has two of those knees.
He's a wreck. My great-grandfather used to swim in Lake Ontario decades ago.
He had to oil up his body so some type of fishes wouldn't attach to him.
Would those fishes be ex-wives?
All right. Keep typing, everyone.
Keep the show going. I think we're in the post-credits of the movie at the moment.
Step counters to smartwatches help, I found.
Yes, absolutely. Get a watch.
I'm slightly partial to the Samsungs, but yeah, get a watch.
It'll just remind you, if you haven't moved for a while, it'll give you a little vibration.
It'll measure your heart rate and keep track of your steps.
It'll help you with your sleep. I think that they're great little tools.
All right. I think we're done.
All right. Well, thanks everyone so much.
What a wonderful evening of conversation.
What a variety and gamut of topics we happened to cover and I really, really appreciate your thoughts and your support and your tips.
Again, if you're listening to this later, freedomain.com slash donate.
You know that there's no other place that you can get these kinds of conversations.
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