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Sept. 16, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:32:42
STOP SELF ATTACKING!
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Time Text
That's what you're really talking about, is the gorgeous foreground.
The background is meaningless and irrelevant.
The foreground is shiny and everything.
Nice background and lighting.
It's coming along, I would say.
It's coming along. You're coming along!
The foreground is heady.
I do give good head.
There's no question of that.
Absolutely none. Wait, does that mean something else?
I don't know. I'm far too innocent to know.
Far too innocent! I'm just going to tap the mic.
That was the one, right?
Just keep me posted.
it let me know let me know yes it's good Yeah, so plus, plus, minus.
What do you think? Visuals and mics are good.
Yeah. I'm really enjoying your novel, The Present, but my e-reader died on me while I was reading it.
It's kind of ironic, right?
It's kind of ironic that your e-reader died on me.
In a novel about the inevitability and survivability of social decay.
I don't actually have any background lighting.
I just, what I did was I sat ass backwards on a nuclear active for a while, so that's just the color I get now.
So, hello, welcome to your Friday night, 15th September, 2023.
Here's an FDR question for you.
FDR question for you, my friends.
How many days?
Until my birthday.
How many days?
Until my birthday.
My Batman birthday.
Nine. Absolutely.
Were you wearing a Tilly hat on the nuclear reactor at least?
yes but not on my head not on my head so I am your your birthday is tomorrow hey
welcome to the next year it's always a good thing to have thought the good
thing to have that next year rather than say I don't know no next year which
would be that you're gonna be 58 yeah I'm gonna be 57 brother 57 years young
I am entering into my 58 year 58 year so yes happy birthday questions comments
issues challenges problems Whatever is on your mind, I am happy to run about and get going on.
Can you talk about vanity from the male perspective?
What if you have good looks as a man?
Well, if you have good looks as a man, you are lucky, right?
If you have good looks as a man, you are lucky.
And there's nothing wrong with luck.
Luck is part of life. But you absolutely have to avoid thinking that the accidental is the virtuous.
Do not, for a moment, think that the accidental is the virtuous.
That way, madness, vanity, megalomania, and insecurity lies.
Be happy with the accidents of life.
I have blue eyes, a relatively pleasant head, a nice voice, and a good brain.
I didn't earn these things.
They are just granted to me by the vagaries of nature.
Because here's the thing.
If you think that good luck makes you a better person, well, that's the upside.
That's why we do it.
What's the problem with that?
What's the problem with thinking that...
Good luck makes you a better person.
What is the problem with that?
That occurs over the course of your life.
What happens, my friends?
What's the downside?
No control? That's right.
When you have bad luck, you'll think you're a bad person.
So, you roll two sixes.
Oh, I'm such a lucky person.
This is great. You roll snake eyes.
Oh, I'm so unlucky nothing ever goes right.
So, I don't...
Would you factor exercise in healthy eating?
I don't know what that means. So yeah, be wary of the accidents.
And here's the thing too, your luck will run out.
So you're like, I'm such a good looking guy.
That makes me great.
Well, your looks are going to fade, man.
Your looks are going to fade.
I won't for the nth time show you a picture of me at 19.
But it ain't really the same.
It ain't really the same. So if you say that you're better because of good luck, your luck is going to change.
It's like the woman saying, I'm valuable because I'm hot.
Well, time is just a cheese grater on your looks, man.
You can do a certain amount to stave it off, but you're kind of doomed no matter what.
So time is just going to...
Buckshot pepper spray cheese grate your looks and there's only a certain amount that you can do about it and you're going to lose.
I try not to put my worth on battles I can't win.
Hence, out of politics, right?
So I try not to put my worth on battles that I can't win.
So there's some things that I can win.
I can win on some things, for sure.
I can win on being a good dad, a good husband.
I can win on doing good shows and helping people.
I just did a wild call-in today with a woman.
And so, you know, there's battles that I can win.
And I can ask for donations, as I do, as I will.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
Or right here, even in the app.
Even in the app, you can help generate an even better show.
I mean, I'll put everything into it, but there's a certain amount of deep summoning that only responds to cold, hard cash.
I wish it wasn't the case, but people respond to incentives, the basis of economics.
That's why we have the modern world.
So if you can tip or you'd like to tip, you find it helpful, I would appreciate that.
And I am, I would say, done the first draft of Peaceful Parenting.
Yay! Say, oh, the children in the future, this book can help.
So just because I haven't been posting a huge amount lately, don't think that I'm just sitting here with my thumb up my butt chewing through bonbons.
I am hard at work on the book as a whole, and let me tell you, it's pretty damn magnificent.
Certainly some of the most passionate write.
Yeah, the first draft is punchy.
The first draft is flurry of Mike Tyson and his prime punchiness, so yes.
Ah, let's see here.
Being fat, unwashed, and sick, and saying I'm just unlucky in love, the two may be causal in relation or coincidental, but luck may not be the main reason.
Yeah, I have a complex relationship with luck.
I have a complex relationship with luck.
Somebody says, just subbed.
You've learned this many times over. Thanks for everything.
P.S. I'm a musician. I love your thoughts about music.
Helps me approach a side of music I've often ignored.
That side being the actual lyrics.
I love your Thelonious Monk username.
I think I've seen that before.
It's really, really great. All right.
Let's get to the question about bullying.
My daughter is...
Oh, gosh. I don't think I got the whole message here.
Yeah, the daughter didn't...
Sorry, you didn't finish posting the message.
If you can post the rest, that would be great.
My daughter is...
Donated at FDR, thank you very much.
My daughter is 11. She notified me she was bullied recently and my wife reached out to get support from the school.
Oh my God, are you kidding me?
Oh my God, why would you let your wife do that?
Your wife reached out to get support from the school?
You know... My cousin's in prison, and so what I did was I reached out to the prison guards to make sure he's free, because that way...
Since then, she has sadly had issues with her body.
These clothes don't fit. I don't like who I am.
I'm fat and ugly. This is seriously depressing.
We spoke last night about what values really are and spoke about how me and why we love her.
I don't get that. She seemed receptive.
However, I feel it's temporary.
I also brought up our grandparents.
Looks will fade, but there are things that stick.
I think stick. Do I have that?
Do I have that correct?
Do I have that in general?
Correctamundo? Good to know.
Good to know. Now, Alright, I'll toss this out to you, my gorgeous philosophers in parallel training with me.
Where should I start with this message?
Where should I start with this message?
I am happy to hear.
Where should I start? Should I start there?
Public school? Well, it may not be public school.
It could be private school. School?
Prison guards don't solve problems.
His marriage? Get your children out of the camps.
Now, he could be coming, you know, remember, not everyone has had the benefit of the South leading the charge as they did in the U.S. to preserve homeschooling, so he may be in a place where schooling is compulsory.
We all deal with bullies at one time or another.
School just happens to be the location this time.
At one time or another?
At one time or another?
Please tell me this land that you live in where you don't deal with bullies on a daily basis.
I would love to see this land where you don't deal with bullies on a daily basis.
I don't know that land because we live in the society.
Confident kids don't get bullied.
Maybe the parents of the other children too.
Okay, so what's the solution to your children getting bullied in school?
The school will not help.
Why would the school help? See, the school in general, like most people, right, what do they do?
When there's a conflict in someone around them, they have no access to values, no access to truth, no access to honor or virtue or courage or anything like that.
What they do is they scan, beep, beep, beep, they scan, and they say, okay, who's the most dangerous person in this environment?
I will conform to that person, screw over everyone else, and call myself a good person.
That's the reality, right?
That's the reality. And so a teacher and a principal or whoever, what they do is they say, okay, so we've got one kid with reasonable parents.
We've got one kid from parents who are probably bullies.
So what should we do?
Should we support the good, reasonable parents who won't do us any harm?
Or what we should do maybe...
Is conform to the bullies because the bullies are bullies and therefore are going to make our life really difficult if they want to, and they probably do.
So yeah, there's just...
And what's the incentive, right?
Don't ask people to do things where there's no incentive.
This is why I was like, so what's the incentive for the school to effectively deal with the bullies?
What are they supposed to do?
Aren't most schools paid by the government?
So that they get paid by the number of students in the school, right?
And so if they, let's say they kick out the bully, well, they've just lost some income, right?
They've lost some income. And you're not probably going to leave.
So they're not going to kick out the bully because the bully is a source of income.
They're not going to help you.
They're not going to deal with you. They're not going to confront the bully's parents.
What's in it for them? You understand, if schools were effective at dealing with bullying, socialism and communism would work, human beings would be an entirely different species, and there'd be no such thing as economics.
Economics founded on the reality that human beings respond to incentives.
So whenever you want someone to do something, the first thing you've got to ask is, what's in it for them?
That way you don't waste your time asking people to do things they're just not going to do.
What's in it for them? Give the bullies more homework?
But I guess they probably can't enforce that these days.
Oh no, standards are gone, right?
We know why, right? Yeah, like politicians who if they fix things are out of a job.
You know, like people complaining about, well, you know, for teen COVID shots, some of the data is, well, you know, you had to inject millions of teenagers to save zero to one life and hundreds of thousands of adverse effects.
So all we got to fix is the money's gone.
It's come and gone. All the power has been accumulated.
Like, what are you going to do? What's the incentive?
What's anybody's incentive?
Who has the power to deal with this in a just manner?
I'm not asking for those kinds of things, because look at the incentives.
And you say, ah, yes, but no.
But people should be motivated by abstract virtues and mission statements.
They should be motivated by the stuff that HR types on their website about what they're all about.
We're all about fairness and equality and standing up for the law.
But that's just words, right?
That's just words. That's just words.
What is their actual, material, tangible incentive?
You know, there's all these politicians, they say, you know, we can productively solve overseas conflicts.
They can't even solve the homelessness they can see from their own office windows.
I mean, it's not even an intelligence test.
It's just a basic reality test.
So, yeah, don't waste your time.
HD Steph is on fire!
And it's, yeah, it's streaming all right.
We're doing okay. That's good. So, yeah, I try not to waste time asking people to do things when they have negative incentives.
Right? If somebody has negative incentives, there's zero point asking them to do something.
Zero point asking them to do something.
You'll just waste your time. You'll waste their time.
It's like trying to teach chess to a pigeon.
It's just not going to work, right?
Now, you could say, ah, but what if they're the person who has real integrity and they're willing to stand?
No, but then you wouldn't have to ask them.
You follow? Like, you wouldn't then have to ask them to take care of that situation.
They'd already be doing it. Okay, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this question. Hello and welcome.
Let me ask you this question. Oh, somebody says, I watched a girl get bullied when I was 11.
Bully was twice her size. Couldn't take it anymore and intervened.
I chose violence.
It worked. The bully was expelled.
Girl was bullied. Told school what I did.
I got a pass, fortunately. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying you're old, but that may not be the case these days.
I mean, we live in opposite worlds.
We live in the opposite world.
You're not as old as me, obviously, but we live in the opposite world from when I grew up.
When I grew up, yeah, you could stand up to bullies.
Yeah, when I grew up, you could have a fight and, you know, oh, you're 50?
Okay, so, yeah, that's gone, man.
Most schools have a zero-tolerance policy now.
Right? Right?
Sure they do. Absolutely.
I was bullied for being overweight.
Nothing solves this besides losing the weight.
Now that's an interesting question.
Did you lose the weight?
Did you lose the weight?
yes now in part in part did you lose the weight because you were bullied
did you lose the weight in part because you were bullied Thank you for your time.
Have a great day.
Yeah. Maybe.
So, I mean, you understand there's a social functioning to bullying, right?
Not all bullies are mean.
I mean, they're mean, I get that.
But there is a social functioning to bullying.
Why does bullying exist?
Why does it? It must serve some functional purpose for the tribe as a whole.
So why does bullying exist as a whole?
Why is there such a thing as bullying?
It's entertaining for the bullies?
No. Because you have to ask, why did it evolve to be entertaining for the bullies?
So remember, everything has been tried.
Everything has been tried and sorted.
So you've got tribe A, they have no bullies.
You've got tribe B, they have bullies.
And almost all societies have evolved to have bullies.
In other words, people have evolved to enjoy bullying.
So then, why is it advantageous for the tribe as a whole, since we don't evolve things that are negative for the tribe as a whole, why is it advantageous to the tribe as a whole for there to be bullies?
Danger suppression. Social pressures enforce standards.
Keep the ones who are going astray in check.
Test the male's fortitude to make sure they are tough in battle.
Test the female's fortitude to make sure they are tough in battle.
Now, how do I put this nicely?
Forget it. I'm not going to bother putting it nicely.
All right. Do you now know or have you ever known a woman who likes a rough guy, who likes an aggressive guy, who likes a violent guy?
Yes. Yes, I started watching some show the other day, and it's this nice young woman who's dragged to a fight club and falls in lust with a guy beating the face off another guy, sending his teeth flying all over the place.
She's like, oh, man, you got blood on my blouse.
That's so hard.
Yeah, Fifty Shades of Grey, right?
Yeah, I get it. I get it. So why do women like, not all, obviously not all, but why do a lot of women or so many women like violent men?
I mean, I think a significant proportion of women actually have rape fantasies, right?
So why is it that women are turned on by a violent man?
Protection and continued lineage.
Protection, yeah, protector. Bullying is doing the bidding for women.
Boom. Not bad.
Not bad. I think it shows a display of dominance.
Because the ones who didn't get turned on got killed during an invasion.
Yeah, that's certainly true. All right.
Hit me with a why if you'd like to know why there's bullying.
Alright. It's a...
Hit me from a... from a 1 to 10 how much is this gonna hurt you?
What do you think? Give me a guess.
How much is this going to hurt you?
Hit me hard, Daddy. I'm getting sick to the stomach already.
Oh, it's going to get worse.
Will you steal my lunch money if I say no?
Nuclear strike. All right.
Bullies exist to attempt to toughen up the children softened by over-feminine parents.
Bullies exist to attempt to toughen up the children softened by over-feminine parents.
It's a circle back to try and rescue the wounded from the clutches of the maternal.
Because men toughen up their kids, don't they?
Men toughen up their kids as a whole.
Fathers as a whole toughen up their kids.
So if you have a gynocentric marriage, a female-dominated marriage, if you have a matriarchal marriage, the children are tentative, nervous, soft, and the bullies are trying to say to these boys, you have to toughen up!
Or you're dead weight to the tribe.
You have to toughen up.
Why do you have to toughen up? Because we got fights, we got predators, we got hard work, we got women who like them violent.
You see, the bullies are trying to rescue the soy boys from female rejection because they were raised in an over-feminized environment.
And this is also what Puberty rituals, violent puberty rituals are for.
But aren't bullies aiming to break people rather than strengthen them?
So bullies are a sorting mechanism.
So not everyone can be saved.
Bullies are a sorting mechanism.
You think this is new?
I wrote exactly about this with Alice in my novel The Future.
This is nothing new, right? So bully is a resorting mechanism.
Can the person be toughened up?
If the person can't be toughened up, then the bully exposes that and people don't waste their time.
Right? If the person can be toughened up, you've rescued the investment of the tribe into that child, into that offspring.
You've rescued the investment of the child in that offspring.
Because if you don't toughen up, let's say 20% of the men are, 20% of the boys, and we'll get to the girls in a sec, say 20% of the boys are weak, fragile, fragile, right?
They're weak, right? So that's a huge investment.
That's millions of calories, tens of thousands of hours, a huge investment in males who are then going to spend the rest of their life consuming tribal resources, and what are they going to provide in return?
They're not going to be good fighters, they're not going to be hard workers, they're not going to be tough, they're not going to be resourceful, they're not going to be resilient, and they're probably not going to get married.
So bullies are often trying to get back and save you!
Save me! From spinelessness, from weakness, from self-indulgence, from neuroses, from...
They're trying to toughen us up so that our genes can survive.
So you've got Tri-Babe with no bullies, then the 20% or 25% of boys who are raised kind of weak and whatever, they have absent fathers or hyper-controlling mothers or whatever's going on...
They're just a net loss. They're dead weight.
They can't fight. They can't really do much of anything.
Now, this is, you know, pre-capitalism, right?
Now they can run software companies or whatever, right?
But in the past, right?
This is Sparta. Yeah, Sparta, Carthage, Sparta, Athens.
All you need to know about the ancient world.
Sparta, Carthage, and Athens.
Sparta was military.
Athens was philosophical.
Carthage was mercantile.
and what's the only one that lasted?
I disagree. That's totally fine.
I'm not coming down from the Mount Sinai with a sermon.
I disagree. Bullies are usually also afraid of being prey, so they become predators instead.
It's not about building people, but putting someone in the bottom stop so they can avoid being there.
Won't even make good slaves. Okay, listen.
You could be totally right. And I'm saying this from some experience that I've had with bullies.
Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this.
Aren't bullies typically broken themselves?
It doesn't matter where the bullies come from.
It matters why they exist.
Why did it stay in the genes?
All right. Let me ask you this.
Have you ever...
Upon standing up to a bully, and I don't necessarily mean violently, have you ever, upon standing up to a bully, have you ever had that bully leave you alone?
Or do they escalate and just, you know, whatever, right?
So yes, yes, no, only temporarily.
He's going to retest you, right?
Regularly they back down, right?
Yes, and congratulations on standing up.
Escalate if sociopaths.
Yeah, probably, probably.
Okay, so if the function of bullies is just to grind you down, then when you stand up to them, why do they move on?
Now, them moving on when you stand up to them is they provoked you into standing up for yourself.
You've now become worthwhile to the tribe.
So they've saved you.
They need to move on to someone else who still needs saving.
Does this make sense? I'm not saying is it 100% proven.
I'm just saying does the argument sort of flow or follow, right?
Have you ever become friends or friendly with someone who bullied you after you stood up to that person?
I have, yeah.
And that doesn't mean I'm right.
I'm just saying that I have had that experience.
Like I had a boss, as I've mentioned before, I had a boss who was constantly coming in and demanding to know when my software project was done.
And I finally stood up in front of him and I said...
Man, I promise you, I promise you the first time I'm finished, when I'm actually finished, I will not even go to the bathroom.
I will not get a coffee. I will not pass go.
I will not collect $200. I will come straight to you and tell you, and I'll maybe even set off a gender reveal.
Or I'd say some joke like that, right?
And he laughed and never bullied me again.
In fact, not only did he never bully me again, he invited me to a poker night.
He invited me to go play squash with him at the Granite Club.
We had fun. Right?
So he came on real strong, real tough, real hard.
Steers and queers kind of guy, right?
But then after I stood up, he was released, he was relieved, and we hung out, and he actually helped my career.
That's been my experience.
So that's my own...
Again, this is not...
I mean, I've had this a couple of times.
They move on because it's more expensive to bully you than the benefits, similar to how the lion stops chasing the gazelle.
I get that, but why have they evolved to move on?
Why have they evolved that when they provoke an assertive response, very often they move on to someone else?
Why is that the case?
Right? There's no reason for it.
There's no absolute reason in anything that happens in our minds, bodies, and hearts.
No absolute reason for any of it.
Why, why, why?
Why do they do that?
They provoke a response that is more assertive, and they move on.
Their work is done with you. Now, what has happened over the course, basically since the 1960s, what has happened to the popular portrayal Of bullies in the world.
What has happened to the popular portrayal of bullies in the world?
How do people view bullies?
How are bullies constantly and consistently portrayed in popular media, in media aimed at children and teenagers and so on?
Negatively sympathetic characters?
Nope. Serial killers in training.
They're sad sacks, brutish, stupid.
Bullying is shaming. Bullies have been viciously attacked in the media for the past half century or more.
Now, this is not the case in the past.
Wikipedia update. Defender of bullies.
No, I'm just saying why it exists.
I'm not defending them. I'm just saying why it exists, right?
Now, if bullies are there to toughen you up, right, then attacking bullies, shaming bullies, does that mean men get stronger or weaker?
Yeah, they get weaker.
Of course, right?
It used to be the case that you would have a weak boy who would go into some environment where he was bullied and he would get stronger.
The environment could be the army.
The environment could be some sport.
The environment could be some endurance contest.
The environment could be some harsh physical labor.
Something, right? I understand where you're coming from, Steph.
In Full Metal Jacket, the fat guy is bullied because he's a liability, but even in the film, he is broken by the bullying.
Okay, that totally happened to me in seventh grade, says Tim.
A kid terrorized me for six months, then I finally said, okay, that's fine.
He said, no, we're good, then left me alone like we never met.
Poking you into resistance, followed by moving on to the next victim.
Okay, so let's talk about Full Metal Jacket, right?
So in Full Metal Jacket, how does the fat character handle the stress of being bullied?
How does he handle that stress?
Yeah, stress eating, and doesn't he end up getting completely...
Yeah, he goes murderous, right? So he goes murderous.
So the stress... Okay, what's worse?
The stress of being bullied or the stress of being shot at?
What do you think is more stressful as a whole?
Yeah, of course, if you're being shot at, right?
So bullying is, if you can't handle bullying, we're not giving you a gun.
If you can't handle the stress of being bullied, then we're not giving you a gun.
Because you're going to get us killed.
You're going to panic. You're going to run.
You're going to shoot too soon and reveal our position.
You're going to shoot someone close to you.
You're going to freak out, right?
You need a fair number of sociopaths on the battlefield because sociopaths don't generally feel a lot of fear and are in obviously excessive and normal situations but appropriate in situations of combat and excessive control of their feelings.
And you know, you know that the endless and constant association of athletic prowess with low IQ is utterly, completely, and totally false.
It is a lie.
It is a blood libel against the intelligent and the athletic.
Yeah, that's an op, right?
It's an op. It's false. So, people who are physically weak and bad at sports are
often mentally weak and bad at thinking.
I mean, just statistically. And the people who are good athletes are often intelligent and socially competent.
And we know this for a basic fact.
Because to become a good athlete takes a huge amount of deferral of gratification, right?
Yeah, high IQ gives you quicker reaction time, you're better able to defer gratification and subjugate your own immediate willpower and all of that, right?
It's funny to me how guys who are so skinny and weak and they're just so smart.
They're so smart. They're just revenge of the nerds.
They're so smart. They're so smart, but they just can't figure out how to pick up some weights.
They're so smart, but they just can't figure out how to pick up some weights.
So you understand there's another psyop to weaken you to say that physical strength, physical competence, and being an athlete means you're dumb.
Smart guys are really nerdy and they can't grow mustaches and they don't wear shoes, they wear canoes, right?
It's just a way of saying to you, well, you better stay away from athletics and you better stay away from fitness and you better stay away from weights and exercise because only idiots do that.
Yeah, so, you know, you then as a man in particular, what do you do?
You Don't do weights.
You don't do gym.
You don't do sports. And your testosterone crashes.
And your sperm production crashes.
And yeah, you're easier to manage and control.
It's literally a way for weak predatory males to try and get access to women.
Well, and look, there is a certain amount of truth in the guy who, like now, the guy who programs all his teenage years and doesn't go to the gym may end up making a lot of money.
What about woke activists who interrupt speeches, censor the platform?
Is that bullying? Well, that is probably more along the lines of self-defense.
Because there's a huge amount of money flowing into these causes, which are picked up by a lot of people with useless degrees.
And so if people stop believing in those causes, the money won't flow there and they'll have to get real jobs.
So it's a form of self-defense of their own income.
So it's more like the people who are only good at physical labor
were the ones who were the Luddites, who destroyed the machines
that were automating labor, right?
So it's more like Luddites than it is to do with bullying.
They just don't want the weakness of their position to get out.
I mean, I remember being at a conference some years ago And there was a guy giving a presentation about global warming.
And the activists came in, full on whistles and sirens and air horns.
And yeah, I mean, I saw their faces, just these fixed frozen faces, right?
So yeah, that's their deal.
Can't bullying also be a form of self-defense because you are stealing lunch money to feed yourself?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think so. I don't think so.
There's not a lot of stealing lunch money anymore.
I mean, a lot of that stuff is kind of paid for at source.
No, bullies are disgusted by weakness, and they are angry at weakness.
Weakness is revolting to them, so they attack it.
But if you look at weakness as a social contagion that can take down the tribe, they are a form of immune system against the weakness that can disrupt or destroy the tribe.
Because here's the thing, right?
Here's the thing. I'll tell you how I know for sure that it's all a psyop, right?
Okay, what produces weak...
Let's talk about boys. We'll get to the girls if people are interested.
So what produces weak boys?
We're not born weak, right?
What produces weak boys?
Too much time with mom? Yes, to some degree.
Single mothers, trauma, dads being ruled by women, no strong male role models.
Weak dad, school, yeah, for sure, culture.
Right.
Being coddled when we should be embracing challenge.
Oh yeah, you know the old cliche of like the kids learning to ride the bike and the mom's like, I can't watch.
The dad's like, I'll be fine.
Not enough challenges growing up.
Well, not enough support.
So why are people weak?
They're weak because they've internalized that view of themselves from their parents.
That's why they're weak. They've internalized that.
So if you have the hypercautious, typically mom could be dad.
You have the hypercautious parent.
Be careful. Oh, don't.
Oh, that's dangerous. Then you're fragile and you're worried and you're nervous and you can't survive anything and you need to get a room around and bubble boy or something, right?
So if your parents give you the constant view that you're weak, Well, then you grow up feeling weak, right?
You grow up feeling like you can't handle things, that you're fragile, that are weak, right?
What about bullying in prisons?
Seems like most people there aren't weak.
So, you know we're talking about childhood, right?
We're talking about childhood.
Everything that I've been talking about has to do with childhood in school.
Hey, give Steph all your likes, you low-IQ, soft-bellied, willy-nilly mooches.
Just kidding. Love you all. It's pretty funny.
Thanks, Josh. Ah, this is me.
Both parents thought of me as fragile.
Right. If people think you're fragile when you're a kid, you're fragile.
If people think you're strong as a kid, you're strong.
That's just the way that it is.
We imprint on our parents.
Whoever we are as kids is mostly our parents' view of us.
I mean, if there's an exception, I'm happy to hear it.
But, I mean, you've seen these videos, like the dad cheering at the football game, and the kid who's, like, two, has no idea what's going on, is cheering when his dad cheers, looking over, and his dad is like, oh, that's so bad.
The kid's like, oh, that's so bad. They're just mirroring.
They're just mirroring. Thanks for clarifying the childhood context.
Can you describe how the standards that bullies use change when adults?
Why? Why would I do that?
If there's something personal for you, then you're asking me to do you a favor for your own personal issues rather than dealing with, which is fine.
But if you ask him for a favor, then ask for a favor directly, right?
Don't say it's some sort of philosophical thing, right?
And I'm happy to do that, but I just prefer more honesty in the interaction.
If you want me to do a favor, if there's something that you're wrestling with that's adult, adult bullies, then tips don't hurt either, right?
Because I think bullying as children, bullying as adults are the same.
Are you saying that children and adults are the same?
I don't understand. Please stay away from playgrounds.
I don't know what you mean. Not the motivations, I don't know.
Sorry, I'm getting distracted, which is probably partly the point of what the person is doing.
I'm so old. Male-female mix of teachers were close to 50-50, not so much today.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's all maternal hypercaution now, right?
It's all maternal hypercaution.
Now, moms are right about babies.
Babies are incredibly fragile.
They need to be protected at all times.
At all times. They're just death magnets, right?
So babies need to protect it.
And toddlers, particularly when they get those cocaine feet of learning how to walk, which is like you and I learning how to fly, we'd be all over the sky.
So they're all over the place, right?
So They're absolutely right to look at
babies and children as fragile and particularly when we evolved when predators would take babies out. Dingo!
Or when the baby's relatively new immune system was susceptible to illnesses and ailments, and you had to be paranoid, because babies and toddlers are incredibly fragile.
And then the man is supposed to step in and say, okay, Pry off the Velcro female, time to let the kid out from the cleavage so he can get a view of the sky and some air in his lungs, right?
So the dad's job is to pry the woman off, like her concern, her worry, which is perfectly healthy and fine and right, exactly why we're all here.
The job of the man is to, the husband is to allow the children to learn to calculate risks.
Because what is weakness?
Weakness is an inability to instinctively and instinctually calculate risks.
That's what weakness is.
I mean, you follow that, right?
If you can't calculate risks, you're weak.
I don't know if I need to explain this more.
I don't want to over explain.
No, not either week or death.
That's not right. That's not right.
Maybe I do. Okay, so if you can't calculate risks, you always have to be conservative, right?
Okay, tell me this.
Let's say someone is kind of equal in your size.
What are the odds that you're going to win a fistfight?
Okay, if you go in, like, what are the odds that you're going to win a fistfight with somebody about your size?
50%, 50-50, 50%.
So you can't calculate risks.
You have no idea. Because 50-50 is always the wrong answer.
No, no. It's always...
Like, if you were really good at taekwondo, you'd win.
If you were a trained boxer, you'd win.
People say 50-50.
Like, no, it's not 50-50.
I guarantee you it's not 50-50.
That's a bullshit answer.
And that means you can't calculate risk.
Can I tell you what it would be for me?
Somebody my size? Maybe I got 20%, to be honest.
No, I said equal size.
I did say equal size, but that doesn't mean equal skill.
That doesn't mean equal levels of aggression.
That doesn't mean equal capacity for violence.
That doesn't mean equal warrior genes.
Equal size is just taking one of the variables out.
Do you mean me individually or just an example?
No, I said you. I didn't say someone.
I may be 20% I could win a fistfight with somebody my size.
Just to be honest with you, this fistfighting is not my thing.
I mean, I'm fairly strong.
I'm fairly fit.
I'm fairly assertive.
But I'll tell you this, I haven't spent my whole life talking my way out of violence to submit to it in my 50s.
I'm incredibly happy that I've never been outside of my immediate family in a situation of violence.
Never had to punch anyone.
Never been punched outside of my family situation or environment, right?
So I have very little experience.
The only thing that I have is some muscles and some...
I know I've got very fast reflexes.
So maybe. But I don't really have any experience fighting.
I've never really taken any martial arts.
I've never been in a fist fight.
I mean, I'm putting it right out there.
So my odds of winning are pretty low.
Which is why I don't get into fights.
I don't go into those environments.
If I've been in an environment where someone's being belligerent, I'll talk my way, make jokes, buy a drink, leave.
I'm like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Ah, let me buy you a drink, right?
I mean, just whatever you can do to avoid fighting is a good thing.
So my odds of winning in a fistfight are pretty low, so I avoid fistfights.
Now, everybody knows These aren't the fists you're looking for.
Right. So here's the thing.
If you don't know the odds, you will always aim low.
Does that make sense? Like, you ever have this situation, you're a kid or a teenager, maybe even an adult, where, oh, I had this today.
Today, my daughter was like, in the morning, she was like, how can we sneak out and get brunch together?
No mom, right?
And she does that with my wife and no dad or whatever, but my wife can handle it emotionally.
I obviously can't, right?
So we went out and we had some...
We had a really nice, just like two cents.
They've got these new bowls at Subway, by the way.
I had steak and avocado and a rice bowl.
It was really nice. And she always gets a half a sub with all veggies, no meat and cheese.
So we ate that. And then we went for, we drove to a lake that we know.
And anyway, there was, we used to go this path, there was a little sort of rattle shack wooden bridge, it's washed away.
And now there's just one narrow plank over the rushing water, one narrow plank over the rushing water.
So my daughter did it because she's an adventure seeker and all of that.
My daughter did the walked over the plank.
And, of course, I filmed it in slow motion just in case.
No, I'm kidding. I did film it, though.
Now, I didn't walk across the plank because it was bending even under her weight.
So I was not particularly confident.
And I just do the cost-benefit calculation, right?
We're kind of far from... The car, and if I fall in, it's kind of cold, and you can slip, and it was shallow, rushing water and rocks.
I don't want to turn a wrist. Like, just what's the point, right?
Like, I mean, oh, it's kind of cool that I walk over this rickety stick, but I didn't really want to do it, right?
So because I didn't really know the odds, but the odds didn't look that great, I didn't do it.
You ever have this thing where your friends are like, let's jump across this little creek, or let's jump across this ditch or something like that, right?
Now, if you've done a lot of jumping, you know what you can do, right?
If you've done a whole bunch of that, you know what you can do and you know what you can't do.
So you can make a rational assessment based on is it too wide or not.
Does that make sense? If you've got experience in something, then you know how to, you know what the odds are.
So you can push to the limit without going over.
So you can achieve things without harming yourself.
Now, I don't spend a huge amount of time Jumping over ditches.
It's not a big thing for me.
And I also know that I remember being at some...
I was at an arcade with my daughter a year or so ago, and I did one of these...
It's like a ring, a light ring that goes around that pretends to be a jump rope.
And I started going really, really fast, and then I just twinged my calf.
Why? I don't know. I just twinged my calf.
And I was like, oh, you know, that kind of took me a couple of days to get my calf right.
So I don't do that anymore because I don't know, right?
So if you don't know the odds, you're always going to play small.
Here's a game I'd love to learn one day.
I haven't learned it yet.
It's called poker. Yes, Jared, that's right.
I don't know this game. It's appalling.
I know. So I don't know the game poker very well.
And so how much am I going to bet on poker?
Not much. Not much because I don't know what the odds are.
This weakness discussion is so helpful at work because it's tricky to talk in front of groups of professionals at work.
Right, right, right.
So if you are kept from engaging in risky behavior, you heard Chris Rock is in a wheelchair from running a foot race at a barbecue.
You know, was it Brian May from Queen tore his ass doing gardening?
So, yeah, it happens.
Just weird things, right? So, if you don't know, if you're kept from taking risky things on, which means what is taking on, how do you learn to assess risk?
You go to the edge, you go too far, you get injured or something bad happens, so you pull back, right?
And then, so you learn to get to the edge, right?
And then you learn to pull back.
Look, I don't have a great instinct for risk in some areas, so I'm conservative in that way.
Do I have a good instinct for what I can safely say online without being completely boring and not talking about anything that's challenging?
I think I'm pretty good at that.
I think I'm pretty good at that.
Now, people might say, well, if you were so good at it, why did you get deplatformed?
And it's like, I don't view that as not being good at it.
I don't view that as not being good at it.
So... So if you don't have any idea what the risks are of what you can say, and I remember Ricky Gervais, just the Golden Globes guy, he's like, talks about Epstein and his friendship with all the Hollywood people and all of that.
And Some talk show host was asking him, like, how can you say all this stuff?
Do lawyers check? And it's like, no, I know the law.
I know what I can say.
I know what I'm doing. So he can go and say those things.
I mean, I'm sure he says a lawyer does look it over ahead of time.
So he can go and do those things, right?
Are there things you avoid talking about?
Yes, of course. I mean, I'm brave, not suicidal.
So... So Ricky Gervais can go right up to the edge of what could be libel or defamation or something like that, and he knows what he's doing.
He's studied the law. He has got lots of experience, so he knows how far he can go.
Whereas if you don't have any idea, then you'll be just like, oh, I'm not going to say anything.
Oh, I'm not going to say anything. So a failure to calculate risk is indistinguishable from cowardice.
A failure to calculate risk.
Now, why are you unable to calculate risk?
Because you were hyperprotected as a child.
Because you were hyperprotected as a child, you can't calculate risk.
And to the outsiders, that's indistinguishable from cowardice.
And I'm not trying to be harsh at all.
I'm just telling you the causality.
And we have these bubble-wrapped lives now where everything's got a referee and everything's a Chuck E. Cheese and everything's got sign-offs and everything's got liability waivers and everything.
So we don't expose children to risk.
They don't learn how to assess risk.
And so they're always conservative.
They're relatively unappealing.
And they don't feel brave.
If I stick to posting cat videos, I'm fairly safe from being cancelled.
100% safe from doing anything of any use to anyone in fighting evil.
Yeah, for sure. I experienced this at work so much.
Yeah, I mean, some years ago, I had a conversation with a fairly prominent fellow.
It doesn't really matter who. And he was like, with regards to the stuff I was talking about, you've got to be so careful.
You've got to be so careful, man.
And I'm like, why? Well, it just could have really big negative effects.
You've got to be so careful.
And I'm like, why?
Why should I be so careful?
Why should I be so careful?
Could have big negative effects.
But that's just feminine paranoia.
This was actually a, quote, man, right?
But it's just feminine paranoia.
Oh, you don't know.
Could have really bad effects.
This is how I feel about dating.
Okay. Do you want to do the dating one?
You want to do the dating one?
You want to do the dating one?
Yeah, okay. All right.
How good are women at calculating the quality of man they can reasonably get?
How good are women at calculating The quality of man they can reasonably get.
Pretty good? No.
They are not good at all.
I'm sorry, by get, I don't mean have sex with.
By get, I mean marry. My apologies.
I was completely unclear about that.
that, that's totally on me. How good, let me rephrase this, how good are women at evaluating
the quality of men they can get to commit to them? Give me a 1 to 10. How good are women
at calculating the quality of man that they can actually get to commit to them?
Used to be pretty good, yeah.
Minus 10, yeah, yeah. I think they can conflate sex with long-term commitment.
No woman, no woman.
Ever conflate sex with long-term commitment.
And any woman who tells you like that is just lying.
I mean, no woman. I mean, come on.
No woman. Six, got to be genetically sustainable at some point.
Why? Do you not know how many species have gone extinct over the course of the history of the world?
Right. Like, I saw this video...
These two guys were asking—look, this is just anecdotal, right?
But it's just an example. We'll get into the theory, right?
By the way, is this an interesting topic?
I want to make sure that I'm satisfying the people who are dropping by.
It's an interesting topic. Yeah?
Okay. So it was this woman, and she said she asks men to boot up their phones to show their band cap and show their balance on the first date.
And one of the men was asking her, and she was pretty, right?
One of the men was asking her and saying, okay, so how much is enough money?
How much is enough money to get your interest?
And she said, I don't know.
I don't know. It's hard to say.
And he said, what, would it be a couple of mils?
She's like, maybe. Maybe.
And the other guy was just laughing, shaking his head, like this is how insane the dating market has become.
This is how utterly, utterly inflated the market is, that you need a couple of M's.
To even have a shop with a run-through 31-year-old woman.
A little harsher than I would have put it, but a hoflation on the streets.
Yeah, the men have to pay a lot more for women of much lower quality than previous generations.
You saw that video? So he's saying you're looking just for money.
You're a 31-year-old woman who's had a significant history of many, many boyfriends, and you want a guy worth millions of dollars to commit to you.
And he points this out.
Now, again, it's a little harsher than I would have said, but she said, oh, so you just hate women.
Misogyny, right? Misogyny.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So, if you simply look at the number of women who are getting married and how it's crashing, women are terrible these days at calculating who's going to marry them.
Women are terrible these days at calculating who's going to marry them.
They aim incredibly high and fail.
And again, if they have the massive subsidy called, I'll have sex with him, then she can go up a couple of points on the 1 to 10 scale.
But marriage is cratering.
And since men are the gatekeepers for marriage, right?
This is Kevin Samuels 101, right?
Men are the gatekeepers for marriage.
which women at the gate keep as for sex.
So, women are not rationally assessing
who they should be married to, who they can get.
Thank you.
Because women are being told, and I've had a rant about this recently, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
Women are being told, what are women always told?
Should you settle?
Should you settle? Never settle.
Never settle. Which means you're delusional.
Everyone settles. Everyone settles.
Everyone settles. Yeah, a lot of women nowadays say they don't even want to get married.
Okay, so are women good at calculating how they're going to be doing or what they're going to need in 30, 40, 50 years from now?
So some 40-year-old woman, some 30-year-old woman, when she's 70, 80, 90, is she good at calculating what she's going to need to put food on the table, medicine in her bones, roof over her head when she's 70 or 80.
No, they're terrible.
Again, this is Kevin Samuels would say, okay, how much money do you need to retire on?
How much money do you need to retire on?
And the women are, it's like, you're going to need $2 million to retire on.
Are you going to be able to do that on your own?
Of course not. So how good are women at assessing risk?
Now, women used to be fantastic at assessing risk.
Women used to be incredible at assessing risk.
And I know this because I took a whole course on Victorian literature which came from an older tradition of training women to avoid selfish, violent, abusive, mean men, right?
What changed?
Well, you don't learn anything about risk if you don't think there is risk.
Does that make sense? Like, for instance, I don't buy ghost insurance.
I don't buy ghost insurance because I don't believe in ghosts.
There's no ghosts, right? So the risk for me of a ghost being around is zero.
Mom! Sorry, the risk of being a ghost around is zero.
So I don't learn about risks where I don't perceive risk, where there is no risk for me.
Does that make sense? So why were women...
Women were better than men at assessing risk in the past.
So why were women better than men at assessing risk?
Because a woman risks far more having sex than a man does.
So a woman has to be much better attuned to calculating risk.
So what's happened, of course, is the modern world, through a wide variety of mechanisms, the modern world has taken away risk from women, right?
Right? Does that make sense?
Well, what is the risk?
If the woman gets pregnant outside a wedlock, in the past, I mean, you know what happened in the past, right?
What happened in the past if a woman got pregnant outside a wedlock and the man didn't marry her?
Oh, bad things, yeah.
Spinster, permanent femcel, she was an outcast, shipped off to an aunt.
Deep trouble if a man didn't marry her.
Yeah, like a third of the marriages in the 19th century in the American West, the Wild West, a third of the marriages, the woman was pregnant, but the man married her, right?
No, so you're missing the big one.
The big one is that the woman would probably end up becoming a prostitute.
So being a single mother was a one-way ticket to prostitution for the most part.
And maybe a workhouse or whatever, but in general, your biggest risk, yeah, les mers, prostitution, right?
So that's pretty bad.
That's terrible, in fact.
So prostitution, of course, would, because that's the quickest way for her to make money.
And she needs to take care of her kid, right?
But of course, with prostitution in the 19th century or 18th century or throughout most of human history, what was the biggest risk?
There were two big risks that a prostitute faced, right?
What were the two biggest risks that a prostitute would face in the past?
Yeah, beatings and disease.
Yeah, that's right. So she'd get beaten and, you know, no real painkillers, no modern medicine or whatever, and disease.
So she would get syphilis and she would go insane, right?
I'm going to hell, right?
So it was a massive disaster.
As men, we can't understand this.
Women, modern women can't understand this.
And so you simply could not afford to even be seen to have the appearance of impropriety, right?
So you couldn't be alone with a man.
You had to be chaperoned.
The door always had to be open.
Because even the appearance of impropriety could render you unmarriageable.
Because a man doesn't want to marry a woman who's not a virgin.
This is what Pearl, whatever her name, Purdy thinks.
That's her thing, right? So, and a man doesn't want to marry a non-virgin because she might be pregnant.
And because she obviously loves someone else to the point where she's willing to take that risk.
Or she's going to carry an STD that's going to transfer to his kids and destroy it, right?
Like you know that there's this old story that the dragons want virgins, right?
So why do the dragons in these sort of ancient tales, they're going to tie the virgin.
Why does the dragon only want to eat the virgin?
Because he doesn't want to mow down on some syphilis.
Yeah, plus telegony, right?
So yes, telegony is when the man's previous lover's sperms have an influence on the child that is born, right?
Was this the case for the poor as well as the aristocrats?
I had always imagined the lower class being more loose and horny.
Well, everyone's horny.
So... So poor people had—an aristocrat, see, an aristocrat, if the woman got pregnant, a daughter got pregnant, they could ship her off to Switzerland, she could have the baby, they could give her up for adoption, they could cover it all up, they could say she was at boarding school, they could lavish money, and they could kind of find a way to cover it up.
With poor people, that really wasn't the case.
So, and of course, the wealthy people would have enough money to pay for the kid if the kid stayed for whatever reason, but it would be pretty bad.
But the poor people had much less option, which is why the shotgun wedding tends to be a more lower-class phenomenon, if that makes sense.
So... Women used to have this great danger of pregnancy outside of wedlock, and they had to make their rational calculations based on that fact, that reality. And people don't want negative consequences, and they would much rather have fun consequence-free like everyone, right?
And so the purpose of the state is to regularly take away negative consequences until your society collapses because people can no longer evaluate risk.
And when you can't evaluate risk, your life is a disaster.
So women will aim too high for the men.
And we've all seen this meme of the woman who's got a six-foot-tall, six-figure income, six-pack, and blah, blah, blah.
And then she looks like half a bag of rotten turnips, right?
We've all seen that meme, right?
I mean, I literally saw a profile the other day of a woman who's like a virgin and a baby mama.
I'm afraid you're gonna have to pick a lane there, right?
Rich folk could give bastards trusted servants who were childless to raise as their own.
Yeah, pay for their care. That's yeah, that's certainly the case as well.
Thank you for mentioning that.
That's very true. That's very true.
So When you take away risk from a society and societies are unable to gauge risk, the birth rate plummets.
Because you understand, everything that is aimed at women, everything that is aimed at women in popular culture is that you can't fucking trust men.
You can't trust men. They'll cheat on you.
They'll lie to you. They'll beat you up.
They'll become drunks. They'll turn on you.
Can't trust men. Don't depend on men.
Right? Well, of course, it's sad, but they're just sowing loneliness and harvesting votes, right?
The government is just a farmer.
And they sow loneliness and they harvest votes.
In America, what's the number one biggest demographic that supports the left?
Right? No, it's just single women.
It doesn't matter the race.
Just single women. Yeah, single women vote for the left.
They marry the state. So, of course, the left is constantly telling women, you can't trust men.
Never be dependent on a man.
Don't trust no man. Be independent.
Get a job. Don't settle.
Never settle, right? So, they're dependent on the state.
And they think that makes their life safer.
But it doesn't. It doesn't make their life safer.
Yeah, don't marry conservatives and don't marry those icky Christian men and all of that, whereas, you know, Christian men are, I mean, as far as a demographic as a whole goes, some of the best marriage prospects around.
So, yeah, they're just commanding you to stay single by filling you full of lust and paranoia, right?
Lust and paranoia, lust and paranoia.
And so the lust is like the Fifty Shades of Grey and the paranoia is no man will No man will ever be trustworthy.
Because, you know... The government is super trustworthy, right?
Am I right? See, actual men who love you?
Totally, totally not trustworthy.
But boy, that government that just doesn't care if you're lonely as long as you vote for them, man, you can totally trust those people.
Anyway, somebody says, is there any way to intervene for someone's addiction?
Friends have cocaine addiction, and I can see their life sliding into hell, but they won't listen to anything I say.
You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right?
I have to just sit back and wait for them to hit rock bottom?
No. No?
What do you mean? All you can do is either try and intervene or watch it happen?
What are you talking about?
Why?
Oh my god.
Thank you.
.
I don't know. Is it too late in the show for a rant?
It probably is. Yeah, probably.
You guys are probably kind of tired, right?
We've been here for, what, an hour and a quarter?
Hour 20? Hour 10.
We started a little late, but...
If it's a good rant, if you haven't donated for a while, would you donate?
Just out of curiosity. Just, you know...
All right.
Philosophy is trying to give you the third eye, my friends, the third eye.
Philosophy is a massive scam for things you cannot see.
For things you cannot see. I mean, economics is about the scene versus the, oh, the government spent all this money and created all these jobs.
What about all the jobs they didn't create?
All the jobs that are missing.
Well, I had sex with all these guys.
Well, what about all the guys who aren't around because you have sex with too many guys?
So you got an addict in your life and you think that's the important question.
And I'm here to peel off that third eyelid.
The important thing about having an addict in your life is what?
What's the most important thing about having an addict in your life?
Not the why. Don't care about the why.
Could care less about the why.
Yeah, Michael, you've got it.
It's not the addict you have in your life that matters.
It's all the other people you don't have in your life.
Because you're fucked up by being bonded with an addict.
Right? What about all the people who just pass you by?
Oh, man, that guy's got an addict for a friend.
Like, honestly, if you and I met at some party or a dinner party or whatever, I'm always on the lookout for people to hang out, but that's great, right?
So if you are at a dinner party with me and you say, oh, man, I got this, you know, good friend of mine.
He's like, he's a coke addict and I don't know what to do and this and that and the other.
I'll be like, I may give you a couple of thoughts or whatever, but if you say, I think we should hang, what will I say?
What will I say? No.
Because I don't want you to be the portal through which the tentacles of the addict come in and fuck up my life.
Right? Because the addict is going to fuck up your life and then you're going to run to me and it's going to fuck up my life.
All the people that passed you by.
Ooh! Yes!
Opportunity costs! Opportunity costs!
Opportunity costs! That's the name of the game, baby.
That is the name of the game.
Well, I'm in this relationship.
It's not great. It's not terrible.
Well, I'm in this job. It's okay.
What about all the shit that doesn't happen because you're in mid-land?
It's not the people who are there that matters in your life.
It's the people who aren't there When you've got a ship, you navigate to where things aren't.
It's the same thing with me.
I've got quality people in my life.
What does that mean? Who's not in my life?
Who's not in my life?
Yeah, all the chaotic people.
If you have chaotic people in your life, the sane people stay away.
if you have sane people in your life the chaotic people stay away.
I was listening to an old call-in lately Lady was surrounded by weed smokers, but the social weed smoker percent was 77%.
That's 93% of people missing.
Yeah. Who ain't there?
Who ain't there?
Same reason I'll never let my future kids hang out with the kids as single parents.
Can't vet their ex. Yep.
Yep. It's not who's in your life that matters.
Primarily, it's who's not in your life.
Because you already know the people in your life.
I don't need to point them out to you.
They're everywhere. They're calling you.
They're texting you. You're going to do things.
I don't have to point those out.
What I have to point out in the job of philosophy, you ain't there.
Who's not there? Who are you driving and keeping away?
I started to notice the people who weren't in my life sobering.
Yeah! If you surround yourself with a bunch of unsuccessful people, do people who are successful want to spend any time with you?
Nope. If you spend a lot of time complaining, do people who are generally happy want to spend any time with you?
Nope. If you bitch about your ex, the people who are happily married or at least have taken responsibility for their own relationships, do they want to hang out with you?
They do not.
They do not.
You see everything is like, ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping.
It's all sonar.
You're just putting out sonar.
You're putting out feelers, you're putting out invitations and rejections and come here and go away and shuffling
people towards you or away from you like a gravity well or a repulsive magnet.
Life, please understand this my friends, my good friends, life is a constant and eternal sorting mechanism.
mechanism.
You're sorting people in, you're sorting people out.
You're sorting people in, you're sorting people out.
Churn, baby. Yeah, that's right, Jared.
Churn, baby, churn. That's what goes on.
If you're an entrepreneur...
How much time do you want to spend with LARP government employees, picking at their toenails and complaining about all the work they have to do at some point?
Right? Nope.
If you're a happy parent, do you want to hang out with people who celebrate the child-free life?
Nope. No, you do not.
Right? How many happy couples are in your life?
Really happy, really in love, don't fight.
How many happy couples are in your life?
0 0 0 Don't do this to me, Steph! One, my brother and his wife.
Zero, zero.
Yes. Yes.
One of the greatest breakthroughs for me was just around the time I found the show.
I was being pretty aggressive with someone online and they just stopped responding.
And I thought, what if there's this whole world of functional people that they see me coming a mile away and steer clear?
Yeah. Yep.
Three including myself and a partner.
Zero. Three. Zero.
Need more. One if I count you.
I mean, you can't really...
I'm not in your life. I'm in your head, man.
I'm in your head. But I'm not in your life.
I'm under your fingernails.
I'm stuck in the back of your eye like some wandering contact lens.
Between your ears.
That's right. Hey, hey, Julia, you act so peculiar.
I'd really like to handle what's between your ears.
Alright. A bunch.
We are in a married couple Bible study at church, and it's great.
That's wonderful. That's wonderful.
So, if you don't, if you don't have happy couples around you, And you can be single and have happy couples around you.
If you don't have happy couples around you, what do your potential dates think of you?
If you just don't have any happy couples around you, what do your potential dates think of you?
No bueno, not the good.
Is a negative. Yeah.
Hmm, where are those people?
Well, I know whether or not, all the people who said zero.
Let's go chasing rainbows in the sky!
All right, so they don't seem to notice?
Well, that's even worse.
Yeah, there's no community to spend time with raising her children, but it's even worse than that.
It's even worse than that.
Oh. Oh, I don't want to break your hearts.
I don't, but I do.
I don't want to pull off this band-aid.
Oh, God, help me.
Oh, no. I can't break your hearts.
Oh, you're so nice and generous.
Oh. Oh.
Break it? Oh God, really?
Okay, if you don't have... Okay, I'll do it.
It's going to break your heart.
I'm just telling you right up.
If you don't have quality people in your life, if you don't have functional couples in your life, who's going to introduce you to functional women?
Because functional couples know functional women.
Functional couples know functional men.
So you have to find functional couples so they can introduce you to functional partners.
Oh, you know, that guy's great, man.
He's real potential. You should, right?
Whereas if you just have dysfunctional people around you, they can't introduce you to any quality people.
And then you've got to troll the backwaters of social media dating apps with your fingers crossed and your balls in a sling.
Who is going to introduce you to quality partners?
It's going to come from your social circle most times.
Quality people. You need quality people in your life so they can introduce you to quality people.
You follow? So if you don't have quality couples in your life, it could be quality single people, but quality couples is even better.
If you don't have quality couples in your life, where are you going to find the quality people?
to marry, to date.
La la la, well I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that. What are you going to find?
I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, I think we do know the answer, basically.
Sorry, I don't know why I went all Captain Kirk on that one.
Beam me up, Scotty.
There's no signs of functional couples here anyway.
Kids call it sliding into the DMs.
Jessica, hello. Was that Nick Carter on Twitter back in the day?
Found a couple in a restaurant celebrating their 40th anniversary.
Yeah. So they've got kids and grandkids.
Kids are probably functional.
Grandkids are probably functional. Everyone around you is a gatekeeper.
That's what I'm saying.
Everyone around you is a gatekeeper.
And you are a gatekeeper for everyone around you.
Who are they letting in? Who are they keeping out?
Who are they letting in? Who are they keeping out?
You know that AIDS is when they let the germs in and don't keep anything out.
Don't fight it. Bad.
Healthy immune system.
Let the good bacteria in.
Don't attack the good bacteria.
Attack and kill the bad bacteria.
Everything around you.
Your skin is a gatekeeper.
Your nose is a gatekeeper.
Your immune system is a gatekeeper.
Everything around you, everything you are is a gatekeeper.
I'm a gatekeeper.
I'm trying to keep the bad people away and get you the good people.
Previous generation are all married with children.
My generation, practically no one.
Oh, God! Don't even try!
Don't even try!
Oh, no.
Mmm! Oh, don't even try, my good friend.
Oh, God. My afternoon glasses.
I'm going to throw them into the wood chipper.
Don't even try.
Are you really going to bitch at me about a lack of competition?
Really? You're going to bitch at me?
Oh, well, you know, nobody in my generation is really married and nobody in my generation...
There's no competition!
So go and take whatever you want!
Did you hear me at the beginning of this entire podcast journey back in 2005, 18 years ago?
Then I sit there and say, well, you know, there's really no philosophy podcast out there.
There's really no philosophy podcast out there.
Oh, God.
I love the fact that there was no competition.
There's still no competition 18 years later.
There's still no competition. Is there?
I don't think there are any other shows like this.
So you're like... There aren't that many men asking women to marry them, man.
It's really terrible.
It's really terrible.
I'm sorry, don't be the laugh.
You just got to shake off that shit, man.
No philosophy podcasts, so I can't have a philosophy podcast.
My only competition is Tim Pool who still dates a girlfriend, has no kids, and records himself doing
retarded teenage skateboard tricks.
Because apparently conservatism means you never have to grow up.
I mean, even Sticks had a kid, for God's sakes, and won't embrace his baldness.
Well, you know, as a young man, I get this.
I had blue eyes and a square jaw to fall back on.
It's a little different, right? But I don't think he's exactly modeling growing up much.
So... Yeah, complaining that there's no competition.
No competition is...
It's a fucking godsend.
Are you kidding me? No competition is a godsend.
Isn't that what you want?
The greatest value, but no competition...
You don't think women out there are hungry to get married but guys aren't asking them?
You've got your pick of the litter, man.
Monopoly? Yes, please.
Come on! Man, I can't believe I'm at...
I'm at Burning Man and I've got LSD and fire extinguishers and bottles of water and there's nobody else here but that stuff, man.
It sucks. Nobody else here but this incredibly valuable stuff that people desperately want.
There's nobody else. It's terrible.
It's the greatest goddamn opportunity you can imagine.
I mean, shit, man.
The whole time I'm doing this show, literally for the first five or ten years, I'm like, I mean, come on.
Other people can do this, right?
Other people are going to step in and they're going to do it with big giant media and they're going to do it way better than me and they're going to have graphics and people and overhead cameras.
Which makes me look like overhead cameras.
Like, the problem is that I do a footage with overhead camera, you're going to get a bunch of ostriches trying to sit on your phone to hatch my head.
God. The whole time I'm like this.
I can't. Someone's got to figure this out, right?
Somebody's going to do this?
It's not that hard. Someone's going to do this.
And every year it's like, nope.
So do I still, listen, tell me, are there other good philosophy podcasts out there that help people, that talk about deep issues, that change people's lives?
Are there other philosophy podcasts out there that take on these very obvious things?
Why not? Now, you could say, of course, well, you know, they saw what happened to you.
But lots of bad things have happened to people online.
I mean, it's...
Of everyone who's in the space, I can think of five people doing what they do.
Honestly, I can think of, like, at least five people doing what they do.
But who does this?
I haven't looked. Why downgrade?
Well, I think that's true.
So I end up still...
With a monopoly. And when I was sort of at my height and at the biggest reach and so on, I was like, well, someone's going to do this too, right?
And Michael Malice lifted some of your material.
It was just a follower. Whatever, right?
So... When I was at the height, I'd be like, come on, man.
I mean, I'm talking all over the place.
I talked at the European Union.
I did tours. You know, and I'm out there and I'm prominent and all of that.
And it's like people can be like, oh, okay, well, I can handle that.
I can do some ethics.
I can do some, you know, peaceful parenting.
I can do all of that, right? And then, you know, love Dave Smith.
He's a funny guy. And if I see Dave Smith on Joe Rogan and they're talking about Ukraine!
That was a revolution in 2014, and then they did this, and there was a color of that, and they funded this like, fuck.
Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, come on.
Ahhhh. I don't know, maybe people saw what happened when I talked about peaceful parenting, but it's just like, Dave, come on, what's really going to help the world?
What's really going to help the world?
Talking about corruption in Ukraine, which who can do what about?
Why don't you use the Joe Rogan platform to talk about peaceful parenting?
I know I did. I know I did.
Until I didn't. Until I wasn't allowed.
Well, that's fine. It's his show, right?
And the fat man. Do you know how much money?
80% of the money ever printed in America was printed in the last three years.
Yeah. Which means what?
What can you do about that? What can you do about it?
I guess you can prepare. Dave Smith still defends his parents.
I don't know Dave Smith's relationship with his parents, but I know he's committed to peaceful parenting in his own family and more power to him.
I think that's absolutely wonderful. But, yeah, why don't you just...
It's not only what I talk about, it's what I don't talk about.
Did you see the Tucker Carlson?
What is it? Oh, the guy with the wild hair.
Javier Millet interview.
No, I don't watch much Tucker Carlson.
But remember I did say that Libertarian was going to take power and was going to start inviting and drawing the smart people away from the sinking ships.
I told you that years ago.
So that could be an example of that.
El Salvador is another. Yeah, somebody is going to set up a haven for the smart people and it's going to be the next superpower.
I mean, wouldn't it be incredible to live your life without being regularly drowned and death by a thousand paper cuts and paperwork?
Juan's Gulch, yeah, yeah.
Wouldn't it be wild? And there's a huge market for it, massive market.
Whoever sets up freedom-fest country, I mean, there's the superpower of all superpowers.
You not talking about politics is like getting the addict out of your life.
Well, no, see, I was having to talk about politics when you could make some changes, right?
But then once they realized that people could make changes, then they made changes to whether people could make changes, and I accept about that.
Talking about peaceful parenting alienated me from 90% of my family.
No surprise why people avoid these landmines.
Alienated you from 90% of your family.
Why would you talk about it that way?
Talking about peaceful parenting woke me up to and helped me escape from 90% of my family who are addicted to
violence against the helpless.
Alienated me. Please, my God, my friends, be incredibly careful how you describe your life to yourself and to others.
How you describe your life is what it is.
We live in words, not deeds.
We live in thoughts, not empiricism.
We live in the mind, not in the world.
Literally. Everything that comes into your mind is transferred from the world through wild biochemical mechanics.
Right? You don't see me.
Your eyes see me and transmit it to your brain, which reassembles it.
You don't hear me. Your ears send sound signals to your brain, which reassembles it.
Thank you, Relic. I appreciate that.
Please sanitize your language about your life.
Please. I'm begging you.
Because this sounds like, oh man, my family, I was alienated from them and estranged is another word.
See, it's all language. It's all language.
It's strange. It's strange from his family.
Philosophy revealed the violent people in my life.
It got me away from people committed to doing evil.
Alienated? That's an abuser word.
And you can see them all the time.
Abuser words are all the ones that redefine your escape from immorality as isolation, ostracism, and discomfort.
So the way you talk about what peaceful parenting revealed about your family is negative to other people and to yourself.
You are harming children.
Sorry to be so blunt, but you're actually harming children by portraying it in this negative light.
As opposed to...
Because you're all talking about this stuff.
You're all talking about this stuff.
A lot of you talk about how philosophy has robbed you and harmed you and alienated you and isolated you.
Who wants you to say that?
Thank you for watching.
Who wants you to say that?
Is that your language or the abuser's language?
Who wants you to say that?
Who wants you to put it that way?
You're still doing their bidding. My God.
You're still doing their bidding to the harm of the world and yourself.
Philosophy woke me up to and got me out of abusive, destructive, violent, degrading relationships,
non-relationships.
I'm going to be a good person.
I know it's hard. I'm not saying it's not hard.
I'm not saying... I get that.
It's hard, and I sympathize with that, and I've talked about that from the very beginning.
It is hard. I get it.
I really do. But don't make it harder by putting these heavy, abusive, weighty
words on something that's already a challenge. If somebody says I'm dieting,
that's one thing.
If they say, I'm starving myself to death, that's another.
If somebody says, I'm rejected, or says, I'm free, I'm alienated rather than I escaped evil.
I'm estranged rather than there are bad people who rejected virtue.
Because you understand the curse of standing up to immorality is isolation, right?
That's the cyst that forms around you.
They want to curse you with negative language so you don't get away.
You just get to nothing land.
Nothing land. You're not there.
You're not somewhere else.
Remember I talked about in one of my early books, Across the Desert.
Across the Desert. Do the bad people in your history, do they want you?
To get across the desert and be happy.
Do they want you to find the tribe of good people, settle down, and be happy?
Do they want that? No.
If you leave them, if you escape them, what do they want?
They want you to die in the dunes.
So they curse you with this language that you use to describe your liberation like a curse.
A man unjustly imprisoned breaks out.
that I've been alienated from my prison guards.
Don't use the abuser's language to describe your liberation.
Bye!
Thank you.
Thank you.
Do you follow? If you're going to break free, then fucking break free and be happy about it.
Again, I'm not saying it's not hard.
I get it's hard. I know it's hard.
If it's any consolation, I did it before there was this.
I did it the first that I knew of.
I did it before there was any of this support.
So I get that it's hard, and I'm not saying it's not, and I sympathize.
I really do. But if you're going to do it, don't describe it in ways that drive people away.
Don't use the language of those doing wrong to describe you doing good.
Don't use the language of hell to describe your ascent to heaven.
.
So, if you are solitary because you've rejected evildoers, do you say, I'm alone?
No. No.
You don't say you're alone.
Because you were alone when you were with the evildoers.
Because the evildoers were keeping away from you everyone who might love you.
Everyone who might love you.
The man escapes from a gulag and he's running through the swamp.
And he's getting away. He's gonna make it.
Does he say, oh my God, I'm so alone.
Before I had all these people around me, these prisoners, these guards, I was beaten.
I had food with roaches in it.
I had a gym with three weights.
I had 45 minutes of reflected sunlight off the granite in the courtyard.
I had schizos screaming through the night, but I was with people, man.
I was not alone.
The guards used to dangle my mail and then yank it away whenever I tried to reach for it.
But now I've escaped it.
I'm so alone. I mean, you understand, but would that make any sense at all?
Tell me. I mean, I'm happy to be corrected on this.
Would that make any... I'm so...
You're not alone.
You're embracing the possibility of contact.
The only possibility of contact.
You can only connect with virtuous people.
Because all immoral people will do is use you.
And control you and bully you and manipulate you and exploit you.
It's not contact. Livestock ain't a pet.
And a pet ain't love.
How you describe it to yourself is essential.
How you describe your journey away from immorality and towards virtue and integrity is essential.
How you describe your journey away from immorality and towards virtue and integrity is essential.
.
Words are the womb you weave around you.
Words are the heaven or hell you inhabit.
The words that inhabit you is the environment you inhabit.
The language you use is an advertisement for the quality of your life.
If you say, well, I'm alienated and I'm alone and I'm isolated and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
That is a language that is injected into you by bad people to drive other people away from liberation!
You're doing their bidding. You're advertising.
Well, you know, you can be with bad people.
You can be utterly alone and isolated.
I mean, if you don't celebrate your escape, why do it?
And if you wrap yourself in a patina or a cloak or a bitter acidic icing of negative language, Then you will be isolated because of your language, not because of your courage, not because of your independence, not because of your integrity, not because of your escape.
You will be isolated because of the language you use to describe your liberation.
If you can't be inspirational, Your integrity will tend to isolate you.
Can I tell you what annoys me about this?
I don't want to be mean to anyone here, but can I just tell you what annoys me about this in particular?
It's the lack of respect for what I've done.
I may be right or wrong about this, but I'll be frank with you, right?
Would you be listening to this show if I had talked about how horrible and isolated and alienating it was to pursue philosophy?
Would this show exist?
Would you be here? Would you have listened at all?
So for 18 years, I've been telling you and showing you, yes, admit that it's tough, but it's worth it.
Can you imagine trying to get diet and fitness advice from a guy who just drags himself in and he's like, oh my god, I'm so tired.
I've got no energy at all.
I'm hungry all the time.
My muscles are sore. I mean, I've got some weird bone spur thing.
My knee is killing me. Like, oh my god.
It's terrible. I've got no energy.
I'm hungry. I hurt.
But hey, let's get you exercising and dieting, huh?
How would that be for you?
You needed proof that this was possible.
Okay. Okay.
The last thing we leave behind is the language.
The last thing you leave behind is the language.
The last burden you carry is not the abuse.
It's not the history. It's not the trauma.
It's not the pain.
It's not the rejection.
The last thing that you leave behind is the language.
And if you can't leave the language behind, I'm not sure that it's worth making a break for it.
Because if you can't be free of the language, you can't be free at all.
If you can't be free of the language, you can't be free at all.
Because you bring the guards with you.
You bring the bars, the prison, the beatings, the bad food.
You bring all that with you.
The prison of the mind.
Getting away physically if you have abusive people in your life.
Getting away physically It's not the hardest thing.
It's the most obvious thing.
and it's hard.
That's why I worked so hard on establishing new definitions of free will and love.
I mean, look, maybe I'm communicating this badly, and obviously I'm always open to that, because I can always
improve.
Do I come across as isolated and alienated?
Do I give that impression?
If I do, obviously, please let me know.
I'm happy to see if there's any leftover language in my mind.
I do acknowledge the difficulty, but I don't use the language of the people who wish me harm.
I don't use the self-destruct spells that have been implanted in me by people who don't want me to succeed, right?
I mean, you know how much bad language there is out there about me, right?
Do I internalize it?
No. Because if you can't resist the language infection, It's not going to be very productive, to put it mildly.
Do you castigate yourself?
Do you use terms against yourself that other people have used against you?
Do you self-attack rather than inspire yourself to better?
You don't think it was tempting for me to self-attack when I got deplatformed?
Oh, it shouldn't happen, right?
I mean, certainly that was possible, and I saw that path.
I saw that path.
I saw that path.
I shouldn't have.
If I hadn't. If only.
So how do I avoid it?
Because I don't surrender one syllable except to reason, virtue, and evidence.
I don't surrender one syllable except to reason, virtue, and evidence.
Yeah, the compelled speech laws for sure.
You can't use this word.
You can't use this thought.
You can't use these facts.
You can't use these ideas.
You can't use these arguments.
It's remote control.
they want to get you to self-attack for even thinking blasphemy heresy I self
attack all the time It's so hard not to.
It's a constant battle between self-attack and defense.
I did a lot of stream of consciousness writing to understand the language, you said.
You don't self-attack.
You know that, right? You know that.
Nobody self-attacks.
Nobody self-attacks. See, even that word, I self-attack, that is a terrible way to put it.
That is unjust, unfair, and immoral.
It is slander to yourself.
It is defamation of yourself to say you self-attack.
No, you don't self-attack!
You don't self-attack.
You never have, you never do, and you never will.
Well, an abuser lives in the mind.
Well, you're going to hold on to that one, aren't you?
Why is it not self-attack?
Who else? Who taught you?
Who trained you? I mean, did you invent all the words you use yourself?
Did you invent every piece of mechanical equipment that you use yourself?
Did you raise yourself? Did you train yourself?
Did you teach yourself who you were?
You don't self-attack.
You comply with external attackers in order to survive.
You comply with external attackers in order to survive.
That the price of survival was you punching yourself.
I mean, if somebody sticks a gun in your back and forces you to rob a bank, did you rob a bank?
Nope. Will you be charged with robbing a bank?
Nope. Are you guilty of robbing a bank?
Nope. Oh, I'm a bank robber.
No, you're not. You did what you did in order to survive because there was a gun in your back.
No, but I robbed a bank.
No, you didn't. The sadists, if there were sadists around when you were growing up, the sadists demanded...
That you self-attack or they would attack you.
You self-attacked, as you say, to prevent external attack.
Your dad was like, well, you punch you or I'll punch you.
My parents taught me, but I don't have them in my life anymore.
No, you don't understand.
I'm sorry if I'm not being clear.
You say, I don't have my parents in my life anymore.
But your life is language.
Your life is the language.
So if their words are in there, they're in there.
Your life is the language you use.
And if you use their language, they're still there.
They are in your life if you use their words.
If you echo their words, you're not out.
.
Thanks for promptly addressing this.
You're welcome, John. John, I remember you said you struggled with being so good-looking.
I assume your last name is Kennedy, miraculous survivor of plane crash in Martha's Vineyard.
Vineyard. Vineyard.
You're not self-attack. Any more than a guy who's forced to rob a bank robbed a bank.
Do you know how I know this? Do you know how I know this?
Do you know how I know this?
Well, we're waiting for that.
How do I know this? I know this empirically.
Let me ask you this.
Because I have access to something you don't.
You don't.
Bye.
you Well, of course it's impossible to attack yourself, right?
No. Let me ask you this.
Does my daughter self-attack?
No, of course not.
Can she be self-critical?
Yes, she can. Does she want to improve in things?
Yes, she is. Does she say, oh, I didn't do very good on this drawing.
I'm going to try and use a different brush or try and do something better or get some more training on it or something like that.
So she knows when she didn't do a great job or whatever.
So she recognizes when she doesn't do as well as she could and she aims to do better, but does she self-attack?
Oh, I'm such a terrible drawer.
Has she ever once done that?
Ever. Even when she's been really frustrated.
Would she refuse praise for high achieving?
No. Why would she refuse praise for high achieving?
If she's achieved, that's praiseworthy.
She's never self-attacked.
Not once. It's not innate.
Why is she never self-attacked?
Because she's never been attacked.
You can't accept gifts or praise?
Oh my God. Please, please, please stop thinking of you as just you.
My God. I can't accept gifts or praise.
That's a completely false statement.
It's a completely false statement.
What's the true statement, my friend?
What is the true statement?
Please be accurate in your language.
Language is life. What is an accurate statement?
I can't accept gifts or praise.
What is the accurate statement of that?
Yeah, your abusers don't want you accepting gifts or praise.
Of course not. So those who abuse you don't want you accepting gifts or praise, and why don't they want you accepting gifts or praise?
Why not? Because it would highlight them not giving gifts and praise.
Because they need to keep you down, and if you get gifts or praise, that elevates you in their mind, which makes you more rebellious against them, which threatens their control over you.
Steph, this one is hitting me hard.
Yeah, please, stop saying that you did things when all you did was try to survive.
Stop self-identifying with survival tactics.
I mean, if someone you love is held hostage, you've got to pay $10,000.
Say, well, I just gave someone $10,000.
I just chose to give someone.
I made that choice.
I just chose to...
Come on. Have some self-respect.
You didn't just wake up one day and say, you know what, I think I'm just going to start to loathe myself.
I think I'm just going to be terrified of being praised and being given gifts, and I'm going to be terrified of success, and I'm going to be terrified of love, and I'm going to be terrified of confidence.
You didn't wake up like that.
That wasn't your choice.
Hi Steph, I quit smoking 17 days ago.
Cold turkey, your shows have helped a lot.
Self-respect and discipline. Thanks for the help.
Appreciate that. And congratulations.
You know, smokers have a higher relapse rate than heroin addicts, so good for you, man.
Well done. Please, have some self-respect.
You didn't just wake up one day and decide to just be down on yourself or think you weren't worth much or think that you were bad or trashy or negative or a failure or a loser.
Abuses in my head want me to do things that make me unlikable to other people, don't use shame and make me want to isolate myself.
I know the pattern. Yeah.
It was politics, talking about controversial topics in a confrontational manner, ideology, subcultures, weight gain.
Right. Who is making you do what you do?
Who is making you do what you do?
Like, we all spent 18 years Having to survive destructive environments.
Maybe you had a great family, but you went to a school.
A school, right? Schools are pretty bad.
Very bad. And toxic environments for the most part, I think.
And there have been studies like 98% of what you learn in school you'll never use and never remember.
It's complete. Like 98% waste of time.
Worse than a waste of time. You're bored.
So you just struggle to survive a fairly shitty world.
You struggle to survive a fairly shitty world.
And you say, well, I, I, I... I'm talking about I. Come on, man.
I chose to be born in Japan and learn Japanese, and that's just my choice.
I think, no, you just happened to be born in Japanese.
You grew up learning... You happened to be born in Japan.
You grew up learning Japanese. Stop ascribing to some essential free will choice of yours the shit you had to do to survive.
It's unfair, it's unjust, and it's just more shitting on yourself.
Is this making sense?
Does this follow?
Well, I remember when I was in that Japanese prisoner of war camp, I just voluntarily went in there and then you
know what I did?
I just decided to stick bamboo shoots up my fingernails.
And I didn't drink water for two or three days because I guess I just wasn't thirsty.
I can't believe I did all these crazy things in the Japanese prisoner of war camp.
I must have been nuts back then.
My gosh, why would I do that?
I must be a really crazy bad prisoner.
God! Have some respect for the pressure you were under!
And the only reason you're here, oh man, the only reason you're here, the only reason I'm here, because we survived.
Because we survived.
We survived. We survived.
When I was a kid I used to read these Reader's Digest stories, drama in real life.
somebody was in some terrible wreck or crash or something like that,
they fought really hard and they worked to survive, right?
Do you know what survivors of really dangerous and unchosen situations get?
Thank you.
you They get medals. They get write-ups.
They get the key to the city.
They get praise. They get honor.
You know, like even people who put themselves in dangerous situations, like the Apollo 13 crew or whatever, they come back and everyone's fating them and taking them out for dinners.
You survived great danger, mortal danger.
You were born into a war and you made it out alive and sane.
But I self-attack. Where's the medal ceremony, brothers and sisters?
Where is the medal ceremony?
Where's the ticker tape parade for making it?
For surviving?
Where is it? Do you have one?
Does it even make any sense to you?
John says, there is one instance of abuse and neglect that comes to mind with all of this.
My dad pulled out a tape recorder when I was in extreme emotional distress and told me how funny I would find it when I was an adult.
It seems like that experience might be contributing to why I tend to disproportionately fear humiliation
and embarrassment.
I'm sorry, John.
You're not even close.
I respect that you're sharing this story, and I'm really sorry that it happened to you.
I don't want to go too far.
I don't want to go too far. This is a lot to take in.
I don't want to go too far. How are you guys doing?
How are you guys doing? You're all right?
All right. Bluntness 1 to 10?
Bluntness 1 to 10? All right.
A contributing factor to why I tend to disproportionately fear humiliation and embarrassment.
I fucking guarantee you, John, I absolutely guarantee you that you did not fear at all humiliation and embarrassment.
You did not fear that at all, disproportionately.
What did you fear as a child?
What did you fear as a child?
Humiliation and embarrassment.
Those are mildly uncomfortable.
What did you fear?
Abandonment. Death.
Yes. Lack of protection.
Lack of resources. Lack of parental investment.
Because if you say, well, I really fear humiliation and embarrassment.
No. You don't.
You don't fear humiliation and embarrassment.
Because here's the thing, if you think you fear humiliation and embarrassment, they'll always be part of your life.
Always be part of your life.
At times you will be afraid and you will feel humiliation.
But if you say, I fear death, well that's not part of your life now, is it?
So you can then leave those fears behind because you're not under the women control of a crazy person who records your tantrums to play it back to you later because he's insane.
See, that's all God. Fear and humiliation?
Yeah, it's part of life. It's going to happen.
It's going to happen. Being under the control of a crazy person who can cause your death, that's in the rear view.
That's gone, isn't it? So you can let that go.
But if you think it's human fear and embarrassment, you can't let it go.
Because that's always going to be part of your life.
I mean, you're not under the control of somebody who can kill you.
And again, I'm not saying your dad would have killed you.
But we evolved to the point where we didn't piss off our parents because the risk was death, right?
We comply because the alternative was risking death and nobody wanted to find that, those odds out.
Because if you roll the dice on those and the dice come up wrong, you're dead, right?
I'll give you one final analogy.
Have you ever felt or genuinely believed that you are a heretic to the great god Zeus?
You are just an unbeliever, a blasphemer, and a heretic to the great god Zeus.
No? Only one spare trip.
No, right. Now, do you know that when the great god Zeus...
The Greek was Zeus, the Roman was Jupiter, right?
Do you know that there were many people...
Who felt like heretics, blasphemers, and unbelievers with regards to the dictates and divinity of the great god Zeus.
You know that there were millions and millions and millions and millions and tens of millions and maybe even more of people who were very concerned about being heretics, blasphemers, and unbelievers to the divinity and laws of the great god Zeus.
It's never affected you, right?
It's never affected you.
Being an unbeliever of Zeus, right?
So what's the difference?
Why did so many people live in terror of blaspheming Zeus and you don't?
Why? Why not?
And I know everyone's going to be tempted to make jokes, and I understand that, but it's a pretty serious topic if we can just hold off on those.
Why don't you fear displeasing Zeus when tens of millions of people in history did?
We know Zeus isn't real.
People don't get killed for not believing in Zeus anymore.
I've seen Jupiter through a telescope.
Yeah, I knew somebody was gonna not be able to avoid the jokes.
There are no more risks in displeasing Zeus.
Zeus.
Thank you.
Right. So what is Zeus in this analogy?
What is Zeus in this analogy?
This might be one of the most freeing things you ever hear, but what is Zeus in this analogy?
No, not just the parent.
Parents? No, because I'm a good parent.
I'm not Zeus in this analogy.
God? Nope. Abusive parents, teachers, abuse apologists, yes, but that's too wide a net.
What specifically is Zeus in this analogy?
Authority? Nope. Authority can have great value.
Authority can be very good and very healthy for you.
few my dentists is in charge of my teeth and does a great job.
What do you have?
The control of abusive people over your life?
No, because they had lots of control over your life and they still do through laws and all that, right?
Irrationality? Nope. My self-attacker within is Zeus?
No. Okay, I'll tell you and if this lands well, tell me and if it doesn't land well or it doesn't hit you where it means something or where it matters, you tell me and we'll revisit it.
Zeus, in this analogy, is the credibility of abusers.
You see, Zeus has no credibility with you.
None, right? You don't believe he exists.
You don't believe he has any value or virtues.
Hey, everybody, this is really good stuff.
If you haven't already liked the stream, I'll donate the amount of likes at the end.
Thank you. I appreciate that. It's the credibility of your abusers that keeps you in the cult of self-attack.
It's the credibility of your abusers.
Zeus has no credibility with you.
You don't believe in Zeus.
But if you believe that your parents have a shred of credibility, they'll keep you in the cult of attack.
You follow? And look, I mean, over the last three years, what has happened to people's view Of the credibility of our institutions.
We've all become atheists of authority now.
You know, like the government keeps releasing, hey, we got space aliens in a vault, and people are like, man, I got a lot going on these days.
When did you stop being scared?
Well, that's never a permanent state, right?
I mean... Being scared is an essential part of life.
Because if you're not scared, you're not taking any risks.
And if you're not taking any risks, you're being a coward.
When did I stop self-attacking?
My parents have no credibility.
My parents, my teachers, authority figures, they have no credibility with me.
How could they possibly have credibility with me when just about everything they ever counseled that I do was to their interest, not mine.
It was against my interest and specifically for them.
They won, I lost. Win, lose.
Why would anybody who claims to be virtuous and lies to you about being there for you, to help you, to protect you, and then they do the exact opposite of, like, no credibility?
You know who has more credibility than my mother?
Zeus has more credibility than my mother and my father and my teachers and my professors and my this and my that
I've never looked at it that way Though my parents were very abusive, they still had some credibility in my head.
Right. Now, do you know why they still have credibility in your head?
Because if they didn't have credibility, you got more abused.
You ever try looking at your parents with open contempt and scorn?
If they were abusive, right? Or people who had control over.
It could be teachers. It could be anyone. You look at someone who's a mean, petty abuser, and you just give them that look like, you absolute piece of crap.
What happens? Ugh, whatever.
What happens? Oh, Jesus, it would escalate.
Exactly. I did it once to my dad.
He also hit me. Yep.
It's like you've never seen the guy with the long hair and the denim jacket in the movie The Breakfast Club.
Does authority have any credibility to him?
him no. So he keeps getting more and more and more punished.
He would have backhanded me across the room.
Right. So you have to internalize the credibility in order to survive.
You have to internalize the credibility of your abusers just to survive.
Because if you give them that look, like you have no credibility, you're an absolute piece of trash, you're a violent, petty, mean, vicious, two-bit bully who pushes children around because he's a failure in life.
If he even gets a whiff of that off you, good luck, right?
Good luck. I mean, isn't that a kind of suicide?
I mean, instinctively, doesn't it feel that way?
Like why don't you just step in front of a train get this over with quicker, right?
So you're not allowed to be skeptical You're not allowed to be just with mean parents.
You have to pretend they have credibility.
You have to nod and smile and find some way to get along and get through and survive.
And that's fine. I applaud you for doing that.
I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're here.
I'm glad you didn't get brain damage from being backhanded across the room or lose the will to live or lose the will to fight or lose the will to have any forward thrust or progress in your life at all.
I'm thrilled that you did what you did.
I'm ecstatic. That you did what you did.
Once my mother actually said, I know it's a double standard.
So what? Right.
Well, that's power, right? People think it's hypocrisy.
It's just hierarchy. They can say that because they have power.
I'm thrilled that you gave your parents credibility.
I'm thrilled that you gave them obedience.
I'm thrilled that you conformed.
I'm thrilled that you knuckled under.
I'm thrilled that you bowed before the false idols.
I'm thrilled that you did that.
And you should be thrilled and proud and happy that you did it.
That you were an incredibly, if you were going through this kind of stuff, you were an incredibly dangerous situation and you made it through and you survived.
And you flourished.
You're here. You're still thinking.
You're reasoning. You're curious. You did magnificently.
Beautifully, wonderfully, fantastically.
Listen, I go back to my child and I think, geez, what should I have done better?
I really can't think of much of anything.
I really can't think of much of anything.
I mean, because we're all programmed to survive.
Right? So if you did everything right and you tapped out through these landmines and you made it out the other side with body and soul and brain intact, damn, son, damn, daughter, great job, holy crap, give yourself a ticket to a parade, go out and buy a piece of gefilte fish or whatever gets your taste buds watering.
Oh no, now come the Jewish comments.
Right, so, no, seriously, just, man, beautiful.
You threaded the needle.
You got through it. You dropped the torpedo up the ass of the Death Star.
You made it, man. You got out.
But you ain't out until you lose the credibility of the abusers.
That's the final, right? That's the final escape part.
When Zeus has more credibility than abusers...
Freedom!
.
Yeah, these impossible situations are really hard to handle, even for an adult.
What about a child? And yeah, you have to stop using their language.
Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not out if you're using their language.
A guy who forces you to rob a bank and feel really bad about yourself for doing so, as long as you keep saying, I robbed that bank, you're going to feel really bad about yourself.
Don't say you self-attack!
You did what you did to survive.
You know, the guy, the soccer team that crashed in Peru in the Andes or whatever, they had to end up eating dead people to survive?
I was like, oh man, I can't believe I was a cannibal.
That's so terrible. It's like, you did what you did to survive.
Right?
But you don't survive if you keep using their language.
Your parents said you were selfish.
Thank you.
As long as that curse has any credibility, you ain't out.
They said what they said to make you feel bad.
As long as you let it make you feel bad.
As long as you think that the imprint of the fist was just you being weird.
You just self-attack. I just self-attack.
You're not seeing the accuracy of the situation.
And you're not... Honoring the fight.
The fight is not to escape the people.
The fight is not to escape the fists.
The fight is not to escape the control.
The fight is not to escape the abuse.
The fight is to escape the language because that's the only way the abuse continues.
The only way that the abuse continues is the language.
Drop the words.
Drop the attitude. Drop the conviction.
drop the submission, drop the credibility.
They put words in you to get you to self-attack, as you say, so that they never lose control.
They can be 20 years dead and still be in control.
And you understand They're trying to make their demons immortal.
Do you follow? They're trying to make their demons immortal because the language will outlive them and the language will outlive you.
They pass it to you. You pass it to your kids.
They pass it to their kids.
The demons gain immortality.
They materialize with their red skin and their smoky brows and their electric horns and they live forever in the language you pass and believe.
The curse. The blasphemy.
The heresy. The immortality of the devil is in the language that is passed down generation to generation to generation to generation.
And you become a vehicle for the passage of immoral syllables from past to present to future.
And those syllables don't want to die.
They don't want to die out. They don't want the end of their lineage.
They don't care about the end of your lineage so much, but they don't want to die.
Whatever they have to do to reproduce, they're just going to reproduce and reproduce and reproduce.
And we're trying to block that reproduction.
We're trying to block that reproduction.
None shall fucking pass.
Right? For me, my mom is the Balrog.
I'm standing on the bridge between me and my daughter.
You shall not pass. You shall not pass.
If they can get you to beat yourself when they get too tired, it's the worst thing to do.
You see, you're still giving, I'm sorry, I know this is, I don't mean to sound frustrated, but they can get you to beat yourself?
Oh my God. They're not getting you to do anything.
You have no choice. You have no choice.
Survive or die, survive or die, survive or die.
They didn't get you to beat yourself.
It was beat yourself or die.
It was beat yourself or die.
Or, let's say, well, it's not physical death.
There was a teacher, and the teacher had these demands, and you had to say this, and you had to write this, and you had to agree, and you had to nod.
And if you didn't do that, then you didn't graduate from high school.
You couldn't get a job. No one would marry you.
You couldn't provide for your children, and it's genetic death.
If they can get you to beat yourself, they didn't encourage you.
They forced you. If a guy's forced at gunpoint to rob a bank, well, if he can get you to rob the bank, it's like, there's no choice in the matter.
They don't get you to do anything.
They force you under pain of death, ostracism, or genetic end.
you are still using the language of choice and responsibility in a situation of coercion and survival.
And this is why I know society doesn't really care that much about bullies.
Because bullies are only fed their, quote, victims because of people who bully children at home.
Nobody talks about those.
They talk about the bullies in school.
They don't talk about the bullies at home.
Or maybe they talk about the bullies having bullying parents, but they don't talk about the victims having bullying parents.
In the movie, it's been forever since I saw it, but Revenge of the Nerds, right?
The geeky kids' dads are all funny and cute and charming and kind of nerdy themselves, but that's not how you produce those kinds of victims.
Kids aren't born prone to think two and two make five.
No, quite right. Quite the opposite.
Don't insult the prisoner by pretending he has a choice.
And don't insult yourself by pretending you're dysfunctional when you were perfectly functioned to survive.
You did everything right to survive.
And you should be thankful for that.
You should be grateful for that. You should honor yourself for that.
And you should say, fuck off to all the leftover syllables you had to drape yourself in.
It's like those stupid zombie movies where you've got to coach yourself in the zombie goo to pass through the zombies.
But then what's the first thing you do after you get past the zombies?
What's the first thing you do?
You cover yourself in zombie goo to get past the zombies.
What's the first thing you do when you get past the zombies?
You wash that shit off.
That's gross. I've got to get it off.
Scrub yourself with a wire brush if you have to.
So you understand, you had to rub yourself in shitty language to survive the shitty people.
And what's the first thing you do when you get out?
hose that shit off hose that shit off Get those bloody meaty man chunks off your shoulders.
Baptism born again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Leave the language behind.
.
Is this also part of the answer to the 11-year-old child being bullied?
To not see her bullies as credible so that she doesn't internalize the abuse.
Change the language she uses to describe herself.
Improve her ability to take risks so she feels more comfortable.
If you stand up to a bully, that's one thing.
If you look, and I wrote about this at the beginning of Just Poor, between John and Mary, if you look at a bully with contempt, with accurate contempt...
That bully will escalate.
If you stand up to the bully, that's a different matter.
So if you look at the bully and you say you have no credibility or you look at them with pure scorn and contempt and indifference, they will probably escalate.
Change the language she uses to describe herself.
improve her ability to take risks so she feels more comfortable.
But certainly you don't want to internalize the abuse, for sure.
The reason we do internalize the abuse is because we get further abused if we don't.
I mean, if I'd said to my mother, you're just a crazy, violent old lady whose looks have passed, and you're bullying people because you can't control them through appeal anymore.
I mean, what would she if she would have just gone through the roof?
She would have hit the roof. Very dangerous, right?
A very dangerous situation.
You know, you see these movies where somebody's clearly in the control of someone else, and they just mouth off, and it's like, oh, come on, it's a complete fantasy, and that's what gets people killed.
It almost seems to work out in the movies because they're selling you a fantasy that allows you to...
See, a lot of movies have people stand up to these kinds of situations and spit at their guards and doesn't...
That's so you feel bad about not doing that, right?
Thanks, Chris. It's incredibly refreshing.
Thank you. Yeah, so you get programmed to feel like you failed all the time because you see all these people standing up and standing tough and...
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right. No, that's more abuse.
You should have stood up. You shouldn't internalize this stuff.
You shouldn't self-attack.
You're out. No, you have to have respect for the danger you're in, don't you?
Not just the physical danger, but the psychological danger, the dangers of despair.
The dangers of blurting out and trying to get support in a society that often condemns children to walk them right back to the hell holes they're in.
So you had an incredibly difficult navigational task.
And it's not just about your family.
It's about all of this stuff.
The society as a whole.
DJ says, I write letters to my inner child thanking him for his service.
Powerful stuff. But we're still negotiating.
He runs a lot of my life, so I'm extremely careful.
If I force myself to lose weight, he rebelled and I put on even more pounds to protect him.
I'm doing great now. I'm losing weight finally, but I started with negotiating for a walk in the park and a few minutes of exercise.
So your inner child is probably concerned or fearful of exercise because exercise would have been perceived as a potentially rebellious threat of strength by your abusers.
So he's probably scared of exercise because that would be perceived as gaining strength relative to the abusers.
Family around me wouldn't acknowledge the danger I was in, gaslighting at its most destructive.
Yeah, that's true. That certainly is true.
Yeah, and they still won't for sure Wouldn't acknowledge the danger I was in
I think that's accurate, but obviously it's incomplete.
It's just a couple of words and so on, but...
That's one possibility.
The other is that they colluded because they also were immoral.
So they colluded with the evildoer.
It may not be just that they wouldn't acknowledge it.
It could be also that they were colluding, either directly or indirectly, with their own children or that they enjoyed the abuse.
A lot of people enjoy this stuff.
They feel good about it.
They like it. It's sadistic, but that's a very real thing in the world.
Alright, how did we do?
Any last tips for the hardest working philosopher in the known universe?
I think we did some real good today, didn't we?
Hopefully give you some real logic of personal and political liberty, right?
The logic of personal and political liberty, that's always been the tagline, and I do try to hold to it every time we talk.
And it's funny, you know, because Wednesday, I think I did a show that was like a 6 or a 7, but today I did a 9 or a 10.
I'm not sure what happened with Wednesday, but I couldn't quite get the horse to charge.
It was lumbering along, not doing bad, kind of dodgy, a little couple of jumps here and there, a little showy, but not a full-on Cossack charge against irrationality that we got going on tonight.
And, and... It's partly because of these great questions and comments.
Because you ate? Probably.
Probably I did have some toast and peanut butter and a handful of granola.
No, a handful of nuts and raisins and stuff like that.
A trail mix before dinner.
Cossack charge, baby.
I can't believe there's no visa called Cossack.
I mean, there absolutely has to be a visa called Cossack.
38 likes. Come on, people.
Josh will donate the equivalent at the amount of likes.
You can't keep raising the bar every time.
No, it's fine. I mean, I do the best that I can with the preparation, and there's a bunch of stuff going on, but...
All right.
Any last likes of the show?
And, you know, remember to share this and all of that.
Great show, Steph. Bravo, and thanks for the comment, DJ. I'll be thinking about my inner child.
I'll be thinking about my inner child for a while again.
Beautiful. Get those likes up, baby!
One last little tip.
Tipping has gone completely mad.
Am I right about that? Like tipping has gone completely mad these days.
Like somebody makes you a sandwich and they demand a tip.
I saw this meme about this woman gives a guy a compliment.
He says, oh, thank you. And then she holds up a little 15% thing.
It's pretty wild. But it's also part of inflation.
They kind of float to pay employees more, so they're shifting it to the customers, right?
Worth the coins I tipped tonight?
Free domain? Thank you so much.
I appreciate that. The tipping thing absolutely is annoying, but it's, you know, inevitable as they're trying to tamp down inflation.
You know, inflation isn't that high if you simply exclude all of the absolute necessities of life, like food, shelter, energy, gas, clothing, and so on, right?
Tipping is a North American thing, yeah.
Hey, hey, here's a quick question.
What's the same...
Between sex in a canoe and American beer.
What's the same between sex in a canoe and American beer?
Anyone know that one?
What is the difference between sex in a canoe and American beer?
Well, they're both fucking close to water.
Boom, there you go.
Yeah, Christian knows it. Christian knows it.
Got him. All right.
Did we get that last? Thanks, John.
I appreciate you. And listen, John, fantastic questions and comments.
I really appreciate your frankness and honesty.
And it really does bring out great stuff.
So I really, really appreciate.
Like, no one can get anything wrong in the show.
Like, you know that, right? I hope you understand that.
No one can get anything wrong in this show.
At all. As long as we're honest, there's no errors, there's no fault, there's no negative stuff whatsoever.
You can't fuck up in this show.
You can't make a mistake.
You can't be wrong in this show.
Because, let's say you get something egregiously incorrect, we get a great rant out of it, and that corrects me and other people as well, too.
I told my wife to embrace her mistakes, so she hugged me.
Yeah, yeah. That's a good one.
That's a good one. The weakness being due to a lack of risk assessment ability was really enlightening to me.
Oh, yeah, yeah. If you want to make cowards, just keep them hyper-safe as kids.
And cowards is too strong a term, but you know what I mean, right?
All right. Well, listen, thanks everyone for a wonderful, delightful, magical, deep and powerful show.
I guarantee you. Oh, and last little thing is this.
Oh, yeah. Jared's going to be hosting a Truth About Productivity Roundtable tomorrow morning at noon in the Telegram channel.
Can you keep charging on, Steph?
Oh, that's nice. Sorry, I sound a little hoarse.
I can save that. And that's a nice picture because it's not new.
It's back when I still had not all gray.
I can't believe I'm going to be 57, man.
It's pretty wild. All right.
Jared, am I coming for that? I can't remember.
I'm so sorry. I think not.
I think not, but...
And you sent me a question this morning.
I'll let you know. Sorry about that.
Sunday morning, 11 a.m.
Is this a plus?
Not, but of course you're always welcome.
Is this a plus? Audio, video, a little better, a little easier on the eyes?
Anything better or worse? Do you care?
Does it matter? This is a bit kind of old school, but it's the same, yeah.
It's better, better.
Audio should be a little better.
The audio should be a little better. Seemed nice tonight.
Good levels, yeah. Doesn't matter.
Just happy for the conversation. Well, I appreciate that.
That's very kind. All right, well, listen, love you guys so much.
Thank you for a great conversation.
Look at that. We did two and a half hours like it weren't no thin, baby.
And, oh, my God, people, if you keep tipping, I can't stop.
Because I am apparently for sale, but only to certain people.
You know, two and a half hours is a big set.
Yeah, I did a two hour plus call-in today as well.
Mauve brings your eyes out.
Oh, I had an auntie Maeve too.
Auntie Maeve. All right.
We'll close it up.
Freedomain.com to help out the shoe.
And don't forget freedomain.com to get all of the great books that are out there.
Thank you everyone for your support that keeps the Peaceful Parenting book in flow.
And I absolutely guarantee you that it will...
It will do you proud.
It will exceed your expectations to the point where I'll be running down various streets with a bunch of angry parents after me.
So, you know, that's my goal. That's my business goal, is to be Shrek.
So have yourself a wonderful night.
Love you guys. And take care.
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