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Feb. 3, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:53:58

STOP WHINING! Wednesday Night Live 20 Oct 2021

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	Look, I get a lot of messages from people who were like, I have a crazy ex and all of that.
	Somebody says here, help me with co-parenting.
	I have a 50% custody of a three-year-old son and his mom is a delusional narcissist spouting Dunning-Kruger nonsense.
	Okay, look, you understand you can trash an ex when you don't have a child, but all you're doing is trashing yourself, right?
	It's like if you say...
	My job sucks.
	My boss is terrible.
	I don't make any money.
	I hate my career.
	Do you think you're trashing your boss or your job or your career?
	No, you're just punching a mirror and thinking you're taking down Mike Tyson.
	Anytime you express loathing for your choices, you express loathing for yourself.
	It is impossible to have respect for yourself if you denigrate your own choices.
	Maybe did marry a delusional narcissist and chose voluntarily to give her the greatest gift in the known universe, which is a child.
	But if you act out of rage and hatred towards your ex, you are acting with rage and hatred towards yourself.
	You chose him.
	And you chose the people around you who let you Choose her.
	They didn't say, oh, no, no, she's a delusional narcissist.
	She's going to spout Dunning-Kruger nonsense.
	You cannot marry.
	Were they throwing themselves in front of your choices in the way that a Secret Service agent is supposed to throw himself in front of a bullet heading towards the president in Minecraft?
	So, I find this always quite astonishing and astounding.
	How on earth Do you think you can reasonably insult the woman you chose to give a child to without completely blasting yourself?
	The splash damage.
	You think you can roll this grenade somewhere else?
	You can't.
	The grenade of abuse towards the mother of your child sticks to your hand, my friend.
	You think, pull up, oh, stop, stop.
	You are raging against yourself because she is the shadow cast by your choices.
	this.
	She is the shadow cast by...
	Own your shit, man.
	Own your life.
	Own it.
	It's yours.
	Nobody put a gun to your head.
	Nobody forced you to marry.
	Nobody forced you to date.
	Nobody forced you to marry.
	Nobody forced you to have kids.
	Own your life.
	This retreating and throwing these random aspersions or Specifically abusive aspersions.
	Do you think that you're fooling anyone?
	Anyone?
	Do you think you're fooling anyone?
	Oh, my ex, the mother of my child is such a delusional narcissist.
	She spouts Dunning-Kruger nonsense.
	You chose her!
	Own it!
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry that the relationship is a mess.
	But part of the reason why your relationship is such a mess is you feel somehow you have the right to open the gates of hell in your mouth and spew endless lava of torrential verbal abuse in public, I might add, towards the mother of your child.
	The mother of your child.
	You understand that when you do that, You are taking a long, slow acid dump on your own self.
	You chose her.
	Chose to date.
	Chose to get involved with.
	Chose to get married.
	Chose to live with.
	Chose to have a child.
	Chose to stay with.
	All your choices!
	You can't punch her without breaking yourself.
	Because you are united now.
	Like it or not, you got...
	15 years plus to co-parent.
	My God, man.
	And here's, you know, you want to help your son?
	You think you can help your son by shitting on his mom and shitting on your own choices?
	You think that's going to help your son grow up to be strong and proud and secure and confident in his own abilities when he sees a father Firebombing his own choices for the sake of petty, emotional, vengeful self-gratification.
	Here's the thing, man.
	You walk through that portal called 18 years old.
	You walk through that portal called 18 years old.
	Now you can sign contracts.
	Now you can get a job anywhere you want.
	Now you can travel anywhere you want.
	Now you can get a passport.
	Now you can vote.
	You pass through that portal.
	All the adult glories are yours.
	Independence, self-sufficiency, legal personhood, contractual abilities, all these great gifts and glories of adulthood are yours.
	And when you pass through that doorway of eighteen years of age, You lose the capacity to make a single fucking excuse that anybody with half a brain will ever recognize or honor.
	You had a tough childhood, man.
	I sympathize.
	I absolutely sympathize.
	But once you take the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil called adulthood, you can't blame the serpent anymore.
	You pass through 18, man.
	You're happy to be 18, aren't you?
	Happy to be an adult.
	Happy to have that independence.
	With that independence comes self-ownership.
	With self-ownership comes responsibility, which means you've got to stop making excuses.
	You've got to stop making excuses for yourself.
	Walk back, pick up your decisions, and give them a big old juicy hairy-chested man-bear hug.
	Walk back to your past, scoop it back up, and love it.
	Mistakes were made.
	You made mistakes.
	You made mistakes.
	And what your son needs to see, what does your son need to see?
	See, your son needs to see a man, not a whining little bitch, not a whining, self-pitying, "She's all bad.
	Distance myself from the woman I chose to give my fertile sperm to." Because your son is half her.
	You shit on her, you're shitting on at least half your son.
	Everybody, please, walk back and love and own your decisions as an adult.
	As a child, massive sympathies.
	You are under the heel or thumb of somebody else.
	But my God, man.
	Sending this firing squad bullet back into your own personal history, thinking you're going to hit anyone else, I don't...
	I don't fathom it.
	I don't fathom it.
	It's like you're shooting into a mirror.
	Destroying your past self in order to escape what?
	Responsibility for your actions.
	You want to be a good dad?
	Own your life.
	Own your life.
	It's yours.
	It's not done to you.
	You are not a shadow cast by other people.
	Everything that's in your life when you were an adult is 150% your choice.
	Okay?
	Everything in your life as an adult is 100% your choice.
	Own it.
	You chose a bad person.
	That means you were a bad person at the time.
	You gotta own that.
	You can't fix it if you don't own it.
	Because all you're trying to do is Shovel all the responsibility onto someone.
	I'm a victim!
	She's a bad person!
	She's a narcissist!
	She's terrible!
	She's got Dunning-Kruger!
	Huh!
	right?
	Means you're trying to be a father with the mindset of a child.
	you Thank you.
	You chose her.
	You chose to impregnate her.
	You chose to have a child with her.
	100% on you.
	And your son needs to see a grown man who takes responsibility for his choices.
	Because you cannot...
	Look, we all understand the seduction of the excuse.
	We all understand the seduction of the other blaming, right?
	Everybody knows.
	It's heroin.
	It's heroin.
	It's the opposite of heroic.
	It's heroin.
	It is a drug.
	And when you take a drug, you're saying, I can't solve this problem.
	If you're unhappy and you smoke pot, you're saying, I can't solve the problem of unhappiness.
	I'm fucking helpless.
	Helpless.
	You got a toothache and all you do is take mouthfuls of aspirin.
	You're saying, I'm not going to solve this.
	I'm not going to a dentist.
	Not going to happen.
	It's just going to get worse.
	So we all understand the seduction of the excuse of the other blaming.
	We get it.
	Grow out of it.
	Shake it off, man.
	That's just your parents trying to keep you an infant.
	Shake it off.
	Shake it off.
	You can't fix what you don't own.
	You got a tablet.
	You cracked that screen.
	You can fix it.
	It's your tablet.
	See some guy on the bus or on a plane.
	He's got a cracked tablet screen.
	You can't fix it.
	It's not your tablet.
	You can suggest you fix it.
	You could maybe even offer to pay for it.
	You can't fix it.
	You can't grab it from his hand.
	Go fix it.
	Whatever you own, you fix.
	Whatever you own, you have control of.
	We're into property rights, aren't we?
	We're into property rights here.
	Self-ownership, owning the effects of your actions, be it property or virtue or vice.
	You can't fix what you don't own.
	That's why socialism doesn't work.
	Central plan doesn't work.
	Communism doesn't work.
	Fascism doesn't work.
	Fix what you don't own.
	Do you think you can fix your life if you don't own your life?
	That's your property.
	That's your property, man.
	Your life, your choices, that's your property.
	You own that.
	Not in some existential, you own your life.
	You own it.
	All.
	And the price of the excuse...
	Which gives us relief.
	Oh, man.
	It's the other person that I chose to have a child with.
	It's the other person who's bad.
	It's not me.
	I'm a good guy.
	It's she's bad.
	I'm good.
	She's wrong.
	I'm right.
	She's evil.
	I'm virtuous.
	If you say she's evil, you're saying the past you is evil.
	If you say she's a narcissist, you're saying the past you is a narcissist or a slave to a narcissist, which is just another kind of narcissist.
	If she's a shitty person, you're saying that the you who chose to have children is a shitty person.
	You can't carve the union of a man and a woman to produce a child into her bad, you good.
	I mean, you're literally like someone who joined a gang to rob a bank.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	You shoot out the security cameras.
	You drive the getaway car.
	And then you're like, oh my god.
	They're robbers.
	I'm a really great guy who respects...
	They're robbers!
	Bad robbing crime gang.
	I'm a victim.
	Excuses and Promises of Repetition Thank you.
	If you make bad choices, and we all do.
	Listen, I'm not backing you.
	We've all made bad choices.
	I almost married the wrong woman.
	I was in a relationship off and on for years.
	Almost married the wrong woman.
	Bad choice.
	Well, good choice to not marry her.
	Bad choice to be involved.
	If you make excuses, you will never escape this.
	You will find some other dysfunctional woman, maybe have another kid, and they'll just start stacking up like cordwood.
	The only way to break the cycle.
	It's to own what you have done.
	With sympathy.
	I'm not saying get mad at yourself.
	Maybe you can or whatever.
	But you've got to figure out the root of why.
	Why did you get involved with, as you call it, delusional narcissist, spouting, dunning, krug and on.
	Why did you get involved with her?
	Why?
	It's an interesting question, isn't it?
	Why?
	Because you didn't do some necessary self-work.
	Because you have trashy people in your life who encouraged you to slide into this abyss.
	Because you didn't call me.
	I've been doing the show for 16 years.
	I don't know how long you've listened.
	Did you call me and say, Steph, I feel like I'm going to have a kid with some crazy woman and, you know, I'm free!
	I'm free!
	You have to pay me!
	Did you go to therapy?
	No?
	Did you go to therapy to figure out your issues?
	I went to therapy for close to two years, three hours a week, and did another 10 to 12 hours.
	Journaling and dream analysis work as well.
	Dropped 20 grand or more on therapy.
	Best money I ever spent in my life.
	It's a whole lot cheaper than having a child with a dysfunctional woman.
	Did you do the work necessary to avoid repeating your past?
	And there are so many resources out there.
	Back in the day, it's not an excuse, it's a fact.
	Back in the day, there were just fewer resources available.
	For me to make better decisions.
	But I still, what did I do?
	I put off going to therapy.
	I put off going to therapy.
	Until I was 30 or something like that.
	I should have gone to therapy.
	Now, I did try going to therapy earlier.
	The therapist was bad.
	Did I then go and find another therapist?
	I did not.
	Ah, well, I didn't have money.
	Well, there's ways to do it.
	There's ways to figure it out.
	You know also I have paid for therapy for a large number of listeners over the years.
	Happy to do that.
	So you chose to avoid pursuing the self-knowledge that would have liberated you from these kinds of decisions.
	Now, if you make excuses and make the other person bad and you're just an innocent victim and hero, you won't go to therapy.
	So why would I go to therapy?
	She's the crazy one!
	Yeah, but you chose to have a kid with her, which means you're equally crazy.
	Equally crazy.
	There's a scene in Schindler's List, right?
	Where the Nazi or the prison guard shoots through a whole bunch of bodies.
	That's like you and your past selves.
	You absolve yourself of all responsibility and blame the other person entirely.
	And then you get mad at a woman you call narcissistic.
	In other words, she does what?
	She avoids all personal responsibility and blames others.
	It's a mirror!
	It's not a target.
	I mean, you think it's a target, but...
	She is a come-to-life shadow being from your own avoided self.
	You need to show your son a man who takes ownership for the mistakes that he's made.
	Don't blame the mom.
	She's just a reflection of your choices.
	Seriously, you've got to understand this.
	If I spend five years saying, oof, really need a car.
	I really need a car.
	It's got to have good mileage.
	I'd love it if you could take the top down if it was like a convertible, but need some luggage room.
	It's got to have great mileage, and it's got to be something that's dependable.
	And I spend years and years looking for just the right car.
	I come home with a boat, and then smash the boat.
	Because I'm a victim of having a boat.
	If you got a woman to date you, to be with you, to have a kid with you, then you have sexual market value.
	You have some juice in the dating world.
	You could have got other women.
	But you didn't.
	You had years to go and find a woman to be the mother of your child and you chose this woman.
	Now you're saying this woman is...
	Terrible.
	Which is about a saying, really, it's about a saying to somebody spending years finding exactly the right car, coming home with a boat, and then setting fire to the boat.
	Because it's just a terrible car!
	This boat, this car sucks, it doesn't even have wheels!
	The top doesn't come down, the top doesn't even go up!
	It's an open-air boat!
	Sorry to mean to laugh, but you understand?
	Especially if you've listened to this show.
	I'm telling you all of this because, you know, we're the jazz club here now, right?
	We're not doing stadiums for the time being.
	So we are the jazz club.
	You've been listening to this show for a while.
	You have access to, I believe, some of the greatest Philosophy in the world.
	And I don't just mean me.
	I've interviewed countless hundreds and hundreds of people, a lot of them about relationships and all of that.
	I've got a free book, Real-Time Relationships.
	Did you read it?
	Did you put it into practice?
	No, probably not.
	Did you read it but not put it into practice?
	You're even more responsible then.
	I say this not to make you feel bad, but to prevent you from feeling bad.
	You know, if you know someone, let's say you've got a roommate, and he keeps coming in at one o'clock in the morning, he doesn't turn the lights on, and he keeps running into the furniture and banging the shit out of his legs.
	Then he comes down limp and in pain and irritable and annoyed and grumpy, and you say, you know what?
	Just turn the light on when you come in.
	What do you do?
	Why do you keep walking into the tables?
	Just turn the light on.
	Are you saying that because you want him to feel bad?
	No, you're saying that because you want him to stop banging the shit out of his legs.
	As I'm saying, own yourself.
	Own your choices.
	Own your actions.
	Because I want you to be happier.
	Or happy.
	You can't ever be happy just blaming others.
	Just turn the light on.
	Thank you.
	Figure out why you did what you did with sympathy, with care, with concern, with curiosity.
	With relentless curiosity, by the way.
	You can call into my show if you want, but you probably heard dozens if not hundreds of call-in shows.
	You know how this pattern goes.
	If you had bad people in your life growing up and you're trying to be a good person, they will try to sabotage you.
	And if you let them sabotage you, that's on you.
	Because you have the knowledge.
	Co-parenting.
	The problem is that you're the one who needs to grow up.
	They say, grow up, like it's some contemptuous thing.
	I don't mean that at all.
	You need to grow up and take ownership of your life and recognize that everything that you choose as an adult, you are responsible for.
	You own it.
	It is your property.
	It is your property.
	And what you're doing is You're saying, you know what, I, uh, Steph, I'm so angry.
	So angry.
	I was in New York, and I took my wallet, and I put it on a park bench in Central Park.
	And then I went home for three weeks.
	I came back.
	To New York, I came back to Central Park, and my wallet was gone.
	It was gone.
	Somebody took my wallet.
	And you want me to have sympathy?
	No.
	Took the wallet out, you looked at it, you put it on the park bench, you stood up, and you walked away.
	Now, did the person who took your wallet, are they wrong?
	Did they steal?
	Sure, absolutely.
	But if all you do is blame that person for taking your wallet, you won't take better care of your wallet.
	You'll then just rail against a world that should be perfect rather than take sensible steps to protect yourself and your property.
	You donated your sperm to a dysfunctional woman.
	Thank you.
	You gave her access to a quarter million dollars over time of your money.
	Should she choose to want to get the child support or at least half that, $125,000.
	If you say it's a quarter mil to raise a kid, half of that, right?
	Let's say $125,000.
	So you gave sperm, financial security, power over yourself and $125,000 to a woman.
	And then you're saying, why is she doing what she's doing?
	I don't know.
	If you pay someone $125,000 to mow your lawn, are you surprised when they mow your lawn?
	I don't.
	I don't understand.
	It's like you've paid $200 for maids to come and clean your house, and then you call the police and say, There are strange women in my house.
	What's happening?
	Come here.
	Arrest them.
	No, they're there because you paid them.
	You donated.
	Sperm a child over $100,000, financial security, and gave this woman power over you through the court system, through the family court system or whatever, right?
	And you say, well, why is she doing what she's doing?
	She's doing what she's doing because it works.
	She's doing what she's doing because it works.
	Whatever choices she has made in her life, my friend, whatever choices she has made in her life.
	I've led her to a place of financial security and power over you.
	and she's got a little mini-me to love her.
	You contributed sperm, time, resources, energy, effort, and massive amounts of money to this woman, and then you're wondering why she does what she does.
	Thank you.
	Because you pay her.
	Because you reinforce it.
	You subsidize it.
	Greatest gift that somebody else has to suffer for, which is your son.
	Your son needs to see...
	I mean, you don't want him to grow up making the same mistakes you're making, right?
	Okay.
	So you need to start acting differently.
	You want your son to grow up not making excuses for himself.
	Not making excuses for himself, because that's the only way he's going to have power in his life.
	Excuses are a drug that rob you of the spine of action.
	They rob you of free will.
	Choice.
	Control.
	Change.
	That's the price.
	Excuses are the devil.
	They are the devil.
	Because they give you power but they take your soul and they give you the power to avoid self-recrimination, to avoid learning, to avoid bumping up against the terrible expectations of terrible people around you.
	It gives you a superpower called invulnerability to regret, and the price of invulnerability to regret is no chance to change the future.
	At all.
	At all!
	Is that what you want your son to see?
	Is it?
	I bet you that's what you saw with your father, some sniveling wreck of a man lashing out like a toddler when the parent says no more candy.
	Is that what you want your son to see?
	Or do you want your son to see a man who stands square in the world?
	And owns his shit.
	And does not sharpshoot her back to his past mirrored selves.
	Does not trash the woman he decided to give money and a child to.
	Of his own free will.
	Takes ownership for his choices.
	And through that process, and only through that process, can he see a father who can make better choices.
	Excuses trap you in the underworld.
	Self-ownership vaults you.
	Into heaven.
	So, those are my mild suggestions for co-parenting.
	All right, where are we here?
	You know, so here's what's funny, right?
	The communist, whatever his name was, the chunky guy with the river of Greece passing as a haircut, he...
	He said I got banned for being an ethno-nationalist.
	And he's a Buddhist, right?
	Do you know who's an ethno-nationalist?
	The Dalai Lama.
	The Dalai Lama said Europe should belong to the Europeans.
	Europe belongs to the Europeans, which means the whites, right?
	So the Dalai Lama is an ethno-nationalist.
	This guy who thinks that ethno-nationalism is the worst thing ever is a follower of an ethno-nationalist.
	Anyway.
	We claimed we had the same values before, rushed into, and I made a mistake.
	You know that's another excuse, right?
	You know that's another excuse.
	You don't just listen to what people say, you look at what they do.
	You know that.
	Actions speak louder than words.
	I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
	So, you know what, you're...
	You're trying to tell me that people never lie.
	They never misrepresent themselves.
	They never pretend to be better than they are.
	Have you heard of makeup?
	Well, we claimed we had the same values before.
	Rushed into it and I made a mistake.
	No.
	You will know when you've owned your error when you don't make excuses.
	That's when you've owned your error.
	When you say, This is what I did wrong.
	I'm 100% responsible for it.
	Period.
	While I rushed, and we said we had the same values, and, uh, right?
	No, no, no.
	It's hard.
	You won't believe how hard it is.
	You won't believe how hard it is to say, I completely messed up, and not make any excuses.
	It's the only power there is.
	is.
	It's the only power there is in life, really.
	So, do you still stay in touch with Alex Jones?
	I don't.
	Stefan, I wonder, for parents like you, how did you inform a daughter about their abusive grandmother during their upbringing?
	Well, it's age-appropriate honesty, right?
	I mean, she has heard of grandparents, and rather than have her sit there wondering what's happened to her grandmother on my side, I would say, look, I mean, she was...
	It's not that she was abusive.
	My mother, it's not that she was abusive.
	It's that she still is abusive.
	That's the issue, right?
	The issue is not the stuff that happened in the past, because we all make mistakes.
	We can all be mean.
	We can all be thoughtless.
	We can all be careless.
	And that's not the issue.
	The issue is that she continues, is unrelentingly and unrepentantly abusive in the present.
	And I'm like...
	Would you want a mean friend in your life?
	No.
	Not really a friend, right?
	So...
	Let's see here.
	I am off the Peter Schiff train and full aboard the Bitcoin rocket to the moon.
	Thank you.
	I understand that.
	It is my choice.
	I own it.
	It's my fault for having a kid with her.
	We tried therapy.
	I chose her.
	See...
	And again, I hate to be a nag, but I'm going to anyway.
	It's your fault, I nagy.
	No, I own that, right?
	So, we tried therapy.
	You have to figure out what the roots are of why you ended up in this situation.
	I'll tell you, I mean, I don't want to give you my life as opposed to yours, but just so you understand, the reason that I didn't go to therapy was all of my relationships.
	We're corrupt and dysfunctional when I was younger.
	All of them.
	All of them.
	Not one of those relationships made it into my 30s.
	The reason I didn't go to therapy was that I sensed deep down, or other people didn't want me to understand this, that you start pulling at that thread.
	You say, well, I have a problem with my girlfriend.
	I have a problem with my fiancé.
	And if you have a good therapist, the good therapist will say, this is not about your fiancé, this is about all your relationships, and in particular, it's about your early relationships.
	So what you do is you have to go back in time and say, okay, so I'm with the wrong woman, and I'm surrounded by people who aren't telling me that I'm with the wrong woman, which means that they're gunning for me to fail.
	They want me to fail.
	Why do they want me to fail?
	Because we have opposing values, and if I fail, they have a chance of winning, but if I win, they can't win in life.
	You know, you ever have this thing where there's a little thread on the carpet, right?
	And a little thread sticking up or whatever, and you think it's just a piece of fluff.
	So you grab it, and it's like, oh, it's a little stuck there, and you just pull hard, you know, and half the carpet comes up, right?
	Well, that's self-knowledge, right?
	So you think it's about having the kid and therapy and blah, blah, blah, right?
	But the real question is, how did you end up in this situation?
	and the roots go right back to early childhood.
	Um...
	Steph, how do we philosophically deal with crypto greed versus fear and dollar cost averaging versus doing bid purchases at the top, not financial advice?
	So...
	Thank you.
	Crypto greed, do you mean that you find it really stressful to buy and sell crypto?
	Is that right?
	that you get really stressed about it and so on.
	So, what is your enough in life?
	What is your enough?
	When is enough enough?
	If you don't have that definition, then you're just going to be stressed at the ragged edges of reaching for the stars until you fall off the world.
	Right?
	When I met my now wife, within a couple of weeks, I'm like, I can't do better than this.
	This is enough.
	This is enough.
	There's no upgrade from this.
	Right?
	She feels the same way.
	You know, I was saying to my daughter today, we went on a trip.
	I will tell you about if you're interested.
	It was pretty traumatic.
	We went on a little trip and we were driving back and we'd been in the car for about four hours.
	And she said, she turned to me and she said, hey, can we just keep driving?
	I'm like...
	I slowly turn into a question mark when I drive for too long.
	And I said, we want to keep driving?
	She's like, yeah, this is great.
	Just chatting and let's just keep driving.
	Let's not go.
	Let's just keep driving.
	I'm like, well, I guess I need some cream for my coffee.
	We'll go and get some cream for my coffee.
	And then she's like, actually, let's go to the park.
	So we went to the park and sat in the swings and chatted some more.
	And so, you know, we chatted, I don't know, five or six hours a day.
	I just popped into my head.
	One of the things that I asked her, I said, what would be the top five questions that you would ask me that you know would provoke an endless speech?
	And she's like, explain universal peanut butter.
	Explain universal peanut butter.
	That's her word for UPB. Explain universal peanut butter.
	What is the problem with communism?
	Why?
	And then she said, why is Bitcoin better than fiat?
	And why don't the banks like it?
	And then she said, how does the non-aggression principle handle self-defense?
	Like just all of these, you know, like a couple of questions that result in a four-hour speech, right?
	So I said to her, I said, look, I said, when we were coming home, I said, I just, you know, I'm going to embarrass you because she, you know, she's like in the easily embarrassed teen years, right?
	And I said, I'm going to embarrass you, and you'll just remember this years from now, although you'll be embarrassed in the moment.
	I said, one of the greatest joys of my life is how well we get along, how much we enjoy each other's company.
	I don't take that for granted.
	I don't assume that that's just something that happens because we're father and daughter, but I take such enormous delight in not just your company, but our relationship as a whole, and I won't embarrass you any further.
	I just wanted you to know that, and that I don't take that for granted at all, ever, ever.
	And thank you.
	So, my relationship with my daughter is enough.
	It doesn't need to be improved.
	It doesn't need to be changed.
	I don't know what perfect means, but it's enough.
	It's enough.
	So, what is your enough in life?
	When do you get to stop running and start resting?
	When is enough?
	So, you have to have that in your life.
	Otherwise, you will never be satisfied.
	I had a dream about Mick Jagger the other day.
	That he was coming to my old high school and he was going to have me do drums and backup vocals and he was just going to sing and see what happened if people come along.
	And he said, what do you want me to sing?
	I said, let's start at the beginning with I Can't Get No Satisfaction.
	And I think it's a sense of in the future things will be more mainstream in what it is that I'm doing.
	What's your enough?
	When is it enough?
	When is your house big enough?
	When is your car nice enough?
	When is your girlfriend pretty enough?
	When do you have enough money?
	When do you get to enjoy rather than strive?
	What is your enough?
	When is your TV big enough?
	When is your computer fast enough?
	I get that all human desires are infinite and all resources are finite.
	That's why we have the science of economics or the discipline of economics.
	What is your enough?
	What are you aiming for?
	Just more?
	It's never going to do it.
	Never going to make you happy.
	What's your enough?
	If you can answer the question of what is enough, then you have something to aim for that is the cessation of striving.
	Let me say that again.
	If you have a definition of what is enough, you have a goal to aim for that is the cessation of striving.
	So, imagine if you're driving home, you go past your house and you just keep driving.
	No place to stop.
	I guess you stop when you run out of gas or maybe you refill and just keep driving.
	Right?
	Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack.
	I went out for a ride, and I never went back.
	Like a river that don't know where it's flown, I took a wrong turn, and I just kept going, right?
	But you're going home, you put the home into your GPS, you go home, you drive, and you stop, right?
	You stop, because you're home.
	Where's your home?
	Where's your enough?
	Where's your we're done?
	I've got enough.
	If you never have enough, you never have satisfaction.
	If you never have satisfaction, you can only have transitory happiness.
	You will always have restlessness.
	You will always have striving.
	And that's not good.
	That's not healthy.
	You know, if you don't have enough, you end up in pathology.
	So, I was reading about this woman who was in Saved by the Bell.
	I think it's a tween show from some years ago.
	And her mother was just incredibly abusive.
	And she's currently touring.
	I don't know why, Kristen or something like that.
	She's currently touring.
	With a show called I'm Glad My Mother is Dead.
	See, apparently you can be glad your mother is dead if you're a woman, but if you're a man, well, you're just disrespectful and a cult leader.
	But anyway, although my mother's not dead, and I won't be glad when she's dead.
	But her mother wanted to put her into movies, but after she was successful making 50 grand an episode on this Saved by the Bell show.
	Her mother wanted her to go into movies, but the movie's executive said she's not pretty enough.
	So her mother basically forced her to lose weight, and she ended up bulimic, and so she threw up so much that one of her teeth fell out while she was throwing up, and she now has massive dental problems because her stomach acid when she threw up as bulimic washed away her enamel, and her teeth are a complete wreck now, and so on, right?
	anorexics don't have a, okay, I'm thin enough.
	But anorexics don't have that.
	They just always feel fat.
	And so, that's pathology.
	When have you had enough food?
	Before you get fat.
	When you get fat, you've had too much food.
	So, the people who don't have enough, Anorexic?
	Obese?
	Are you pretty enough?
	Are you handsome enough?
	Beyond that is body dysmorphia.
	Like Megan Fox, right?
	Very pretty girl, great figure.
	Had body dysmorphia for a long time.
	Never thought she was attractive.
	Come on.
	She's attractive enough, right?
	I was reading a story of this, well, Linda Evangelista, right?
	She's getting older.
	She was a supermodel in the 90s.
	And she took some beauty treatment designed to reduce fat, which instead hardened and expanded her fat on her face in particular, and she hasn't left her house for two years.
	Posh Spice David Beckham's wife is now in a retreat with a team of therapists because she hasn't landed a magazine cover in two years.
	Why?
	Because she's pushing 50!
	Her husband is aging as they do, like wine, and she's aging like milk.
	And her fashion line is unbelievably running at a loss.
	And she actually furloughed some of her staff during the COVID pandemic despite having a net worth north of 350 million pounds.
	Where's the enough?
	I was reading about this Russian woman.
	She's an architect.
	She also took some treatments for her face because she wanted to stay pretty in her late 30s because her boyfriend said, oh, you're getting old or whatever, right?
	So she took these treatments, it wrecked her face?
	Because she wasn't pretty enough, right?
	Wasn't pretty enough.
	Where's your enough?
	Where's your enough?
	Are you loved enough?
	Well, no.
	See, if you don't feel loved enough, you get neurotic and insecure and drive everyone away.
	Are you a feed-me-see-more-hungry plant of infinite...
	Phil produces more hunger in the realm of hungry ghosts, right?
	The ghosts in Gabor Mate's book or in Buddhism, the more they eat, the hungrier they get.
	Where is enough for you?
	What's your line?
	What's your line of enough?
	There's a reason why I haven't done a donation pitch in close to two years.
	Do you have enough?
	Sensibly managed, I can make it.
	Do you have enough?
	So if you, let's say, let's say your enough is half a million dollars.
	Okay, so you'll work to get half a million, but there's an end point, right?
	If you don't have an enough and you're just like, well, I want a dollar cost average and I want to buy this and this is up and this is down, you're going to go insane because you've got no end point.
	You're just driving around.
	There's no home to stop.
	Get out of the car.
	Put your feet up.
	Where's your enough?
	I have my health.
	I have a lovely wife.
	I have a great relationship with my daughter.
	I have meaningful labor.
	It's enough for me.
	More than enough.
	My God, every day above ground post-cancer is more than enough.
	So, philosophically speaking, have a line in the sand where you cross it and you're done.
	Who do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is?
	Don't know.
	Doesn't matter.
	Who cares?
	Never think about that.
	Somebody...
	Oh, the guy with the...
	The guy with the three-year-old baby.
	I did call you.
	We talked.
	I did go to therapy.
	Well?
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	Did your therapist advise you?
	To impregnate a narcissistic dumb woman?
	Did I suggest that you impregnate a narcissistic dumb woman?
	So stop.
	Stop making excuses.
	You got good advice, you refused to take it.
	You got good advice and you did the exact opposite.
	You could have spent $1,000 on ayahuasca and saved $19,000 for 88 years of therapy.
	Ayahuasca is total bullshit.
	Come on, man.
	Don't give me this.
	Don't give me this.
	Rigorous Socratic self-knowledge is the answer.
	Ayahuasca is a coward, bullshit way out.
	It gives you a sense of oneness, a sense of knowledge.
	it changes absolutely nothing in your philosophical or moral understanding of the universe.
	Steph, you mentioned some of your friends have Lyme disease.
	Osher Root cured me?
	All right.
	Real-Time Relationships is one of my favorite books.
	Thank you so much for writing it.
	I appreciate that.
	I'm glad you read it.
	I'm glad it was helpful.
	Let's see here.
	Bye.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, see, when I'm doing a speech, I'm not checking the chat, because the speech is not just for this guy.
	Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it, right?
	The speech is for everyone for all times.
	Somebody says he called in a year before his child was born.
	Well, that means before he impregnated the woman, right?
	So if he called me in a dysfunctional relationship and he had not impregnated the woman, would I say stay in the relationship and make sure you get her pregnant?
	Come on.
	How come one destroyed the excuse machine in the brain?
	you Thank you.
	Well, the excuse machine is there to sabotage you to serve the needs of those who oppose your values.
	I've used this analogy before.
	You and I are lost in the woods.
	We're desperate to get to a town.
	And there's only one town within a thousand miles, right?
	And I say the town is north and you say the town is south and we stay on our phones, right?
	Now, you understand, if you get to the town, I've gone the wrong way.
	Not only have I not got to the town, I've gotten twice as far away.
	Up and back, right?
	And then down, right?
	So you walk ten miles to get to the town.
	I walk ten miles north.
	I have to walk 10 miles south just to get to where we were originally, and I have to walk another 10 miles to get to the town.
	I'm three times worse off.
	Now, we each don't want the other person to find the town.
	You understand?
	Because if you find the town, I got 30 miles on me, when you only had to do 10. If I find the town, you have 30 miles on you, and you won't make it.
	You can't walk through the woods in the middle of the night.
	Very easily.
	So you understand, we both want each other to fail because we're going in opposite directions.
	If you have people in your life, they oppose your values.
	They want you to fail.
	And if you're really honest, really honest, you want them to fail.
	Because if they succeed and you're doing the opposite, you fail.
	If they succeed, These people in your life who oppose your values and you oppose their values, if they succeed, you fail.
	If you succeed, they fail.
	They will sabotage you so that you fail, because if you fail, they have a chance to succeed.
	And you weren't right, they don't have to admit fault, and they don't have to reverse their course, because very few people can reverse their course in life.
	Particularly when they get into their 30s, 40s, they're married, they've got their kids, they've got their career, they've got their education, they've got their neighborhood, they've got their property, they've got their health choices that they've made for the past 40 years.
	Very few people can reverse their course.
	At least if I'm going the wrong way to get to the town, I can.
	It's 30 miles, but I can turn around.
	Very few people can turn around.
	When they can't turn around, or they don't believe they can, and you oppose their values, They want you to fail, they need you to fail, and they will make you fail if you don't do it on your own.
	When I say don't have statists in your life, I'm saying don't have saboteurs in your life.
	Don't have people rooting for you to fail.
	Don't have people who will cut the brakes.
	On the car of your life, just to have you crash.
	So that they can justify their own oppositional choices.
	When I was in my 20s, and I was in a pursuit of self-knowledge even prior to going to therapy, which is one of the reasons why I only had to do close to two years rather than five years or ten years or whatever, right?
	So I was very much in the process of, you know, I started reading Nathaniel Brandon in my mid-teens.
	It's really working hard on self-knowledge.
	But my problems to some degree were created in isolation and problems that are created in isolation can't be solved in isolation.
	You know, all the people who say, well, I don't want to go to therapy.
	I'll work it at myself.
	It's like, no, most of the issues are because you were alone, isolated, rejected.
	You can't solve an inability to understand language by sitting in silence.
	You can't solve an inability to speak French by never speaking French.
	A continuation of the same issue won't solve the issue.
	So I took this route, I took this path, and I said, not just to myself, to everyone, I'm going for self-knowledge.
	Now, when you go for self-knowledge, you look like a complete cock-up for years.
	You seem like you're making no progress.
	You seem like you're falling backwards.
	And all the people who vault over the need for self-knowledge and just go plowing straight into achievement, doing, achievement, doing, achievement, doing, they get way ahead.
	Way ahead.
	I had friends who had expensive houses in nice neighborhoods while I was still living in one room in a five-person household.
	They had 3,500 square feet.
	I had 600. Maybe.
	No, not even.
	I had, I don't know, what's the room?
	8 by 10?
	80. 80 square feet.
	They had thousands of square feet.
	I had dozens.
	But they just vaulted over the need for self-knowledge and just went on with their lives, and I kept circling.
	Now, They wanted to believe that avoiding self-knowledge was the way to go.
	Now, they wouldn't put it that way, but that's what it was, right?
	Just act.
	Stop staring at your own navel.
	Stop being so obsessed with yourself.
	Just get up and do things in life and stop navel-gazing and twisting around in your own innards and trying to figure out everything about yourself.
	You just got to go and act, man.
	What are you circling the drain here?
	Oh, did you write another notebook?
	Oh, did you write another dream analysis?
	You're still living in it.
	8x10 room, for God's sakes.
	Raskolnikov-style.
	Get out here and act.
	Like we're doing.
	Look, I got a nice house, I got two cars, I got married, I got kids, and you're just doing nothing.
	You can find out more about this in my free novel, Almost, at almostnovel.com.
	Now, if they were right, and you don't navel-gaze...
	You don't try and root around in your own unconscious and figure things out.
	You just go out there and act.
	then they would go from success to success, happiness to happiness, and I would go from worse to worse, unhappiness to unhappiness.
	But if I'm right, and you have to build the foundation before building the house, then it looks like I'm not building anything.
	I'm just digging.
	It's like, man, your house is supposed to be built up.
	What are you doing just digging down?
	That's the wrong way.
	It's the opposite way.
	Just start building.
	Just get a house.
	What are you doing spending years just digging down?
	It's like, well, because you need some foundations.
	You don't have any foundations.
	You can build the house all you want.
	It's just going to fall down.
	Tortoise and the hare stuff, right?
	Tortoise and the hare.
	And to the grasshopper.
	And...
	They scorn and they mock and they roll their eyes.
	You know, it's all nice and right.
	But when you're digging down and everyone else is building up, you look like an idiot.
	Now, let's be frank.
	Let's be totally honest.
	We roar with each other.
	Unpack my heart.
	I will not bear false witness.
	I will tell you what I felt and feel and also what you Felt and feel.
	I know this because it's a rational thing to feel.
	And we're rational.
	Whether we like it or not.
	So I spend years digging down to build a foundation so that when I build my house, it's going to stay up.
	Now, if their house stays up, I just wasted years.
	But if my house stays up and their house falls down, they've wasted even more.
	They've wasted even more.
	You build a log cabin in the woods, you don't need big, strong foundations, but you build a house for a family, you need foundations.
	You need to dig down, pour the concrete, get the base going.
	So you understand, they need me to be wrong, and I need their house to fall down.
	It's just a fact.
	It's just a fact.
	They need me to waste My life and never build the house because I'm just digging down and mucking around in the basement.
	They need me to never build the house so I'm cold and without shelter and they're totally right and they need their house to stand up and me to never have a house.
	That's what they need.
	What I need is for my house to stand up and their house to fall down.
	Sorry, it's just the way that it is.
	Because if their house doesn't fall down, there was zero point.
	Zero point!
	Digging down and building this whole foundation.
	We are each invested.
	In each other's failure.
	We each need the other person to fail.
	Because I can't be right if their house stands up.
	And they can't be right if their house falls down.
	You understand?
	It's not malevolence.
	It's just a simple fact.
	You head in the opposite ways in the woods.
	You need your friend to not find the town.
	You need it.
	You need it.
	This is why you can't have people who oppose your values or oppose rational values in your life.
	I mean, you can have them, of course.
	You can do whatever you want.
	I'm just telling you the consequences.
	You can sit on the couch, eat Cheetos, and never exercise.
	The consequences are that you will not be healthy, almost certainly, right?
	When you have people who oppose your values in your life, they're trying to wreck your life.
	And you're trying to wreck theirs.
	Now, I would think if you're rational and healthy and you're building well, then you're not trying to sabotage their house, right?
	Because you're right.
	When you're right, you don't need to sabotage.
	But when you're wrong, in order to retain the illusion that you can be right, you need to sabotage.
	So, what are they going to do?
	I'm digging down to build the foundations they just built.
	Without any foundations?
	They need my house to never be built.
	They're going to interfere with me building the house.
	They're going to interfere.
	They're going to sabotage me building the house.
	They're going to knock parts down.
	They're going to drill through the foundation.
	They need to wreck me so that they can retain the illusion that they can be right.
	They can win in life.
	Come on.
	We know this.
	The reason I've been talking about this from the very beginning of this show.
	I've had the greatest success.
	I have the greatest marriage.
	I have the best relationship with my daughter of anyone that I have ever known growing up.
	Like, it's not even close.
	Yes, it was worth digging down.
	Yes, it was worth pouring the concrete.
	Yes, it was worth building the foundation.
	Because now it's stayed up.
	And this is part of the lies about me, like the slander about me.
	It's so other people don't say, that's the way to do it.
	They've got to portray me as some uber bad Bond villain guy, right?
	So that other people don't say, tempting though it is to just build the house, I need to build the foundation first.
	That way it's going to stay up.
	So the excuse machine in the brain is planted there by people who need you to fail, who will sabotage you in order to achieve that end.
	Because if you succeed, they're fucked.
	You understand?
	If you succeed, they're fucked.
	It's like, if you want to be attractive to people, to women, then You can spend your life making money and doing sit-ups and building your abs and your swolletariat frame, right?
	And you will get a lot of attention from women.
	And you will never have a happy marriage because you're attracting shallow people based on shallow considerations, which to me doesn't mean Don't care about your appearance or don't exercise.
	It's nothing like that.
	But if you put out, you know, you see this black and white, almost looks like a pencil drawing meme of the guy with the giant jaw and the swole muscles and he's like a ludicrous exaggeration of all that is masculine.
	Okay, so if you spend that much time on your appearance, that much time working out, you've not spent an equivalent amount of time on self-knowledge and virtue and being a good person.
	If you're a woman and you just, you diet and you exercise and you wear a lot of makeup and you just put out your TikTok clap-clap dancing videos and you get all the thirst and the, right?
	Are you becoming a good wife and mother and companion to a virtuous man?
	No!
	No!
	If you're a guy who hangs around with losers and is ground down by dysfunctional people, doesn't really exercise, Masturbates his hand into looking like a pool cue, whittling it down.
	Don't take care of your teeth.
	Don't take care of your health.
	Don't take care of your appearance.
	Don't moisturize.
	don't exercise not going to work out right If you only look at your appearance and your outside view and charisma and Jonas and all right, Well, you're not going to be ending up in a happy relationship.
	It will be an act of self-contempt for people to be with you.
	Because they don't like you as a person, they simply find you attractive.
	As a flesh golem of vanity.
	But if you focus on quality of character, on being a good person, on being supportive, on being caring, on Engaging people, being funny, enjoyable to be around and so on.
	You've got it made, man.
	You've got it made in the shade.
	Now, if you work on quality of character and your brother works on appearance, he is going to get a lot of girls a lot quicker than you are because he's building his house without a foundation.
	Easy to build up if you never have to drill down.
	And he will be like, look, you're a good-looking guy.
	Why are you not dating out there?
	Go play the field.
	There are all these women out there.
	They'd love to be with you.
	Blah, he's trying to lure you in.
	Because if you end up with a happy marriage and he ends up with a miserable marriage or no marriage, which will be the case, absolutely for certain, if you end up happy, he's fucked.
	If your house stands up because you drilled down and made a foundation and his house is creaking and falling over, what's he going to do?
	Demolish the house and start again?
	Not bloody likely.
	He's just going to prop it up and shore it up and, you know, and then blame someone else.
	He's not going to say, you know what, you were right.
	I should have built a foundation, man.
	I should have drilled down before I built up.
	You're right.
	You're right.
	I'm stuck with this now.
	I'm fucked, but you're right.
	I'm sorry I didn't listen to you.
	You really pledged your case, right?
	No.
	He's going to say something weird happened to the ground, the materials I was sold were shoddy, they changed the specs on me, it's that builder.
	He's never going to admit that he's wrong and you're right.
	So, I lost years, so to speak, right?
	Digging down, being called narcissistic and self-involved and being pitied as a failure.
	Slow and steady wins the race, my friend.
	Slow and steady wins the race.
	Yeah, I wonder, um, I wonder if that communist guy with the grease waterfall protein do, I wonder if he's sharing his profits from the comics with the people who make it, or not.
	Where do you draw the line between jokes and hidden cruelty disguised as jokes?
	Well, that's just a self-knowledge thing.
	If you genuinely want to amuse people and make them happy with your jokes, then they're funny.
	And if you're secretly angry with people, then your jokes will always be destructive.
	Has Izzy met your mom?
	God, no!
	What are you kidding?
	Oh my god!
	Has Izzy met my mom?
	No, I don't tend to drop her in lion enclosures at the zoo either.
	I'm funny that way.
	We just got any female UPB-wise single woman out there looking for a single UPB male.
	There you go.
	That's from my husband and about Gmail.
	All right.
	What have we got here?
	How will we build the roads?
	Do you think teletherapy over Zoom or phone is a satisfactory way to do therapy?
	I mean, it may not be as good as in-person, but it certainly is better than nothing.
	Damn, we're doing a fine show together tonight.
	Damn.
	Thank you.
	Why are my parents obsessed with money?
	They are 80-plus and have an eight-figure net worth, yet still feel poor.
	Well, because they never had the enough, right?
	That's what I was talking about earlier, and I'm sure this question was asked before we're going back.
	20 minutes.
	27 minutes.
	You have to, if you're making, like I know that you've got some, you know, you guys got some resources, You've listened to Bitcoin stuff and all of that.
	You kind of have to adapt to money, right?
	You kind of have to adapt to money.
	So, a friend of mine who became wealthy, he told me this once.
	It was very interesting because he grew up poor and he said, look, I now have...
	I can't remember the number.
	It was something like I have 30 times the money I had 5 years ago, or whatever it is, right?
	And he said, so what I have to do is I have to take every purchase and divide it by 30. Right?
	So, 100 bucks now is like 3 bucks 5 years ago.
	Right?
	Gotta divide it by 30. 3,000 bucks now is 30 bucks.
	No, that's dividing by 10. Sorry, 3,000 bucks now would be, I don't know, 10 bucks or whatever it is, right?
	30?
	300?
	Yeah.
	So, you just got to take what you've got and divide it.
	And then he said, that's the mindset.
	I have to work.
	It's kind of weird getting used to it.
	I have to get used to that.
	Divide by 30, right?
	He said, that's a strange thing to get used to.
	I'm going to totally cheat to bring up a calculator.
	Never tell the homeschool kids, right?
	So he said, you know, if I'm thinking of buying a $40,000 car, that's $1,300 in the past, right?
	It's got to divide by 30, right?
	If I'm thinking of buying a million-dollar mansion, actually, I can probably do this by, right?
	Then that's $33,000 in the past, right?
	And people who don't do that, right, if you have a lot of money and you're still thinking about $3, $5, $10, $10,000, whatever it is, like it's your old thing, if you haven't adapted to the new resources, Then you're like someone who hasn't adapted to the fact that they lost 100 pounds and still walk around in big fat guy clothes, right?
	You've got to keep adapting to your current circumstances.
	How many guys are happy with the length of their member?
	I am.
	Maybe you're not.
	I don't know.
	All right.
	I donate to Steph monthly.
	He does a lot of good.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	I really do.
	He's very kind.
	All right.
	What is your enough for philosophy, Steph?
	Is it the 500-year plan?
	Well, the enough is I aim to dig as deep as possible and speak as much truth as possible so that what I say resonates forever.
	I mean, the eternity is the enough, but I'll be happy with 500 years for now.
	Australia is forcing vaccines by banning unvaccinated from restaurants and clubs and not allowing any unvaccinated people to cross borders.
	Thank you.
	Oh, it's not just Australia, man.
	That's not just Australia.
	How many virtuous people did you hang with during the years and how many were you wrong about?
	Not sure why you would ask that.
	I mean, it doesn't really matter why you would ask that, but zero until my early 30s.
	What was your thought process that led you to theatre school?
	Oh, I like acting.
	I like acting.
	I like being able to connect with an audience.
	When you act well, and it really has a strong connection to the audience, it's really a common humanity thing, and it's a beautiful thing.
	One of the great nights of my youth, after I left theatre school, because it was just so relentlessly calming, we just hated each other enormously.
	But after I left, I took a play that I had...
	Written called Seduction, which was an adaptation of Dregenia's Fathers and Sons.
	And I produced it with no money and no experience, really, as a director.
	I hired the actress and directed the play and so on.
	And, you know, unfortunately, the guy who was recording it didn't do a great job.
	I wish I still had that videocassette.
	But...
	It was a great night.
	A couple of nights when the show just went perfectly, then we would go out for dinner afterwards, and it was just an incredibly great feeling when you have that kind of artistic connection with an audience.
	It's beautiful.
	All right.
	you Thank you.
	Turn around.
	Sabotage.
	Yeah, Steph, you're describing my mother.
	My mother.
	Sabotage so you stay dependent.
	Yes.
	Well, in particular, the quicksand of matriarchal aging femininity is extraordinarily potent for men, right?
	So the quicksand is, for the woman, I haven't been a good woman.
	I haven't been a nice woman.
	I haven't contributed to my community.
	I haven't made the world a better place.
	I haven't been a great mom.
	I haven't been a great wife.
	And I'm greedy like a black hole for not being lonely when I'm older.
	So I will now cripple my son or my daughter in order to have them around, and I will make sure that no quality people end up in my children's lives who can alert them as to how dangerous I am.
	And the black maternal quicksand can swallow up many a soul, and I've seen it up close and personal on more than one occasion, and it's unbelievably brutal.
	And it's predatory.
	It's parasitical.
	It's vampiric, really.
	Somehow I think UPP don't care about my Ashkenazi heritage.
	Yeah?
	You are entirely correct about that.
	Are you still on good terms with JF Gariappe?
	I don't have any contact with JF. I didn't talk to him before or after the debate.
	There's things I disagree with him about.
	Considerable things I disagree with him about.
	But I debated with him because he's not going to put me in a fucking gulag.
	The communists will put me in a gulag.
	But JF won't.
	All right.
	How do you suppose theater majors get through a job interview?
	Highly artistically.
	I built log houses in the woods, and they have good foundations.
	I appreciate the correction.
	Thank you.
	I've never built a log cabin in the woods.
	Join the Free Domain Telegram community?
	Yeah, why not?
	Why not?
	Steph, I agree with people in values.
	Most extreme left are white, rich, educated, etc.
	Can you explain that?
	So, white people tend to be pretty, white Christians in particular tend to be pretty skeptical of communism and the large state.
	And so, they have to be targeted as the greatest enemies to the expansion of the state and that's why they get emotionally abused and attacked throughout their childhoods in government schools and in the media and it's incredibly brutal.
	And so, they're in the extreme left because They're the ones most targeted.
	You know, if you've got a sharpshooter shooting at a particular ethnicity, then you wonder why are those people running so much?
	It's because they know that they're targeted, right?
	So, they try to go left to appease, but all it does is ratchet up more, right?
	Do I really need their house to fall down or simply a reasonable peace of mind that my house won't fall down?
	Well, the house analogy has its limits.
	Think of it more like the guy going north and south, right?
	If you are desperate to get to the town, and you go north and your friend goes south, and your friend gets to the...
	You need him to not get to the town.
	Because if you get to the town, if he gets to the town, you won't.
	I want people who oppose my values to fail.
	Of course I do.
	Let's be honest about this.
	Of course I do.
	I want people who oppose my values to fail.
	And they want me to fail, of course.
	Perfectly natural.
	It's perfectly sensible, right?
	Steph, I wonder what might you consider to be the most plausible reason for a mother to want a son to be in a state of perpetual dependency?
	Loneliness.
	She doesn't want to reap what she has sown.
	I mean, so when I was growing up, my aunts on my father's side, very solid, dependable, square-hipped, Country women.
	Very solid, dependable people.
	They contributed to their community.
	They were good Christians.
	They raised pretty good children in many ways, and they never were isolated.
	Isolation for women is torture.
	Women are horizontal social beings.
	Isolation for women is a special kind of torture.
	For men, it's not so bad.
	It's really, it's not so bad, because...
	I was going to say we have our own thoughts to entertain us, which is not to say that.
	So women, you know, in general, again, lots of exceptions, but women as a whole gain the content of their minds through relationships and often being of help to others and being of good to the community, and there's nothing more satisfying for a matriarch than helping her community get to a better place, transmitting the values, all that kind of good stuff, right?
	Men create values, women transmit values in a nutshell.
	A woman who is...
	I don't really know what the equivalent is to a man, but it probably has something to do with being incredibly low status.
	It's very painful, like the Wojak stuff, right?
	Being incredibly low status is very painful.
	It's a kind of torture for a man, which impels us to kind of climb up to the apex predator status that we have in the world.
	So being really low status is painful, which is why men get depressed and anxious and all of that.
	The equivalent, I think, for a woman is solitude, isolation.
	It's agony.
	They've got no one to help, no one to mother, no one to take care of, no one to transmit values to, no one to take care of, right?
	And so, for a woman, isolation, particularly later on in life, like you've probably seen all these articles where the women say, oh my God, after 40, we're just invisible.
	It's like, no, you're not.
	You're just invisible in a sexual market value sense to younger men.
	You're not invisible at all.
	If you have kids.
	If you have a community, if you have a church, if you have friendships, if you give great value and add great value to your community, you're not at all invisible.
	My aunts, my father's sisters, were treasured and respected and valued in that community until the day they died.
	Never became invisible.
	Never.
	But if you simply put yourself forward as a marionette of hyper-clown sexual mark-up value stuff, like, you just...
	Pretty and sexy and all of that.
	Well, yeah, when that runs out, people will ignore you.
	But you're supposed to use that stuff to build a foundation of a community so that you don't get ignored.
	So when women have not built the foundations of a community-based respect in their middle to later years, they'll hang on unbelievably desperately to their sons, and daughters sometimes, but more often their sons, so that she doesn't go through the agony Of regret, which comes from, wow, did I ever really waste my youth not building quality relationships?
	All right.
	What have we got here?
	I watched a video of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers talk about woke and cancel culture.
	It's done by miserable people who want control.
	It's just...
	Demonic destruction.
	I just finished reading The Fountainhead.
	Your It's Too Late comment made me want to buy.
	It's a great book.
	Thanks for the recommendation.
	Yes.
	Steph, is revenge a good motivator for success?
	No, I don't think so.
	I mean, you want to win, obviously, if you're a man and a woman, right?
	So, you want to win, but the problem is if revenge is your motivator for success, then what happens when you get your revenge?
	Right?
	What happens?
	You will lose your motivation for success.
	Steph, what do you think about a father who doesn't teach morals to his son and allows them to learn by mistakes?
	That is a father utterly committed to the destruction and failure of his sons or his children.
	Have you seen the new Dave Chappelle Netflix comedy show?
	I found it mediocre at best, but certainly think it warranted all the attention.
	Um, I don't.
	I find comedians unbelievably boring these days.
	They're so...
	Constrained, and they're just so afraid, and it's, no, it's really sad.
	It's really sad.
	Steph, thanks for getting me into Bitcoin.
	I used the money I made to get a penile augmentation.
	I'm now much more confident around women.
	See, here's the thing.
	You wait six months, you could have, instead of a penile augmentation that is probably an inch or so, you could have ended up with a giant fucking grain silo that needs a bunch of oil derricks to carry around.
	Paris Hilton, not happy till she makes a billion dollars.
	Yeah, I mean, she was kidnapped and sent to an abusive teen farm or whatever it was, and because she won't actually deal with any of this stuff at an emotional level, and only she did some of it, but no, she's like, oh, when I made a hundred million dollars, I thought I'd be happy, but now I've got to aim to a billion.
	Oh, she'll never be happy, right?
	Almost is great, Steph.
	Almost a great novel.
	I listen to the first five chapters and I've come to a dilemma to keep listening fast or slow down to enjoy it longer.
	I think we all have that dilemma a couple of times a week, don't we?
	Can you describe the group of people who are admitted self-sabotaging?
	I don't know what that means, sorry.
	I've missed your voice, Steph.
	I'm not entirely unavailable in the world, as a whole.
	Will the government ever admit it was wrong about vaccinations?
	As more and more stats come out, it is more harmful than helpful?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	But no, governments won't admit they're wrong.
	Steph, would you ever do a one-on-one philosophy sessions?
	You mean like private calls?
	No, I don't do that.
	Sorry.
	Because usually what I talk about is so valuable that it would overcharge an individual and needs to be diluted in a community.
	Alright.
	Are you still friends with J.F. Gariepi?
	I've never been friends with J.F. Gariepi.
	Honestly, until this debate came up, I hadn't thought of him in years.
	Why are so many of the elites, politicians, doctors, media, and scientists pushing the facts?
	I assume...
	I mean, obviously, maybe some of them think that it's necessary for health, and maybe it is.
	I don't know.
	We'll sort of find out over time, but I assume it's simply just a control, right?
	How can you tell if you're a mama's boy?
	How can you tell if you're a mama's boy?
	If she's not driving you out to date, if she cooks and wants you over and calls you a lot, Then she's eclipsing your capacity to go find a woman your own age.
	So, yeah, if she's not, you know, pushing you out to go and get married and have kids.
	Steph, why don't communists just move to communist countries?
	Well, that's like saying, why does cancer devour healthy cells?
	It's what it does.
	Am I morally obligated to flee a high-tax country if I have the means?
	No.
	Why are high IQ people generally more on the left?
	What am I missing?
	You're missing the facts, which is that high IQ generally tends to be more conservative.
	And of course, also remember, high IQ, so it's sort of like the question, why aren't there any good, why aren't there as many good artists on the right?
	Well, I can tell you that myself.
	I'm not on the right, but I spent a long time in the art world and found it repulsive and the barriers were thrown up against me because it's not about art.
	Truth, the human condition.
	It's about spreading socialism.
	So you just move somewhere else, right?
	You just do something else, right?
	Asking for donations is not a donation pitch.
	Yeah, of course.
	So donation pitches were, you know, here's what I need.
	And, you know, here's what's been happening.
	And it's a solo show simply with, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes talking about all of that.
	Did you see that Stephen Crowder is on the verge of getting banned from YouTube?
	Was he on the verge?
	I think he got a couple of strikes here and there.
	All right.
	Yeah, the people, you know, it's kind of funny, right?
	I mean, the people who are, I mean, it's a bit of a, not an argument, but the trolls who were like, what was it when I talked in the show, in the debate about, That corporations are immoral state creations and so on.
	And then somebody was like, yeah, but he founded a corporation and he sold a corporation.
	So he profited from that which he calls evil.
	And it's like, oh, God's sakes.
	Yes.
	And guess what?
	I use the roads too.
	You can't possibly argue against slavery if you've ever owned anything made of cotton.
	Okay.
	Like, of all the hypocrites in the world, of all of the people who are not moral, it's like you gotta skate over everyone else and come straight to me.
	Like, that's pretty sad.
	That's pretty sad.
	All they're trying to do is inject self-contradiction into my mind to paralyze what it is that I'm doing.
	It's very boring.
	Very obvious.
	Alright.
	Do you have any thoughts on Gavin McGinnis?
	Sorry, there's somebody else I don't really think of and haven't in forever.
	Let's see here.
	I thought it was a great debate against the communists.
	Well, a communist and a guy with a bad mic.
	Can someone be too smart to advance in a company?
	Oh, God, yeah.
	You threaten your boss.
	A good boss wants you to replace him.
	A bad boss wants you to stay under him.
	And, yeah, if you're too smart to advance in a company, that's God's sign that you start your own company, right?
	Have you spoken to Jordan Peterson recently?
	God, no.
	Alright.
	Thoughts on midwits and how high IQ and low IQ line up on some issues?
	Yeah, I've seen that.
	You know, like the low IQ with the vax.
	Like the low IQ people are like the darn 5G microchips.
	You know, it's not true.
	And then there's the high IQ. It's like, eh, something wrong with the data, right?
	Where the middle are like, vax me harder, daddy.
	Well, I do think that I do think that there's kind of an instinct in the body that should unite with philosophy in the mind, which is why I've always had a philosophy that focuses on empiricism.
	Empiricism comes through the body.
	Ideas that aren't rooted in the material world, that aren't rooted in the physicality of our lives, tend to be way too abstract and useless, and they spin away, like a spaceship that breaks orbit and can't be brought back.
	Anthony Pompeiano's show was also temporarily banned before being restored.
	Yeah, I mean, look, some of it, look, a lot of it's automated, and some of it, the YouTube algorithms just make mistakes, I assume that would be.
	If you could get a PhD on any topic, what would it be?
	I'm not sure why on earth I would want a PhD.
	I'm an original creative thinker.
	Why would I want to put myself under somebody else's subjugation for that?
	Let's see here.
	I'm getting lots of duplicates here.
	Why don't commies just move to Cuba or North Korea?
	Well, yeah, because if there was a totally capitalist country, wouldn't you go?
	Let's see here.
	I couldn't listen past the intro on the communist debate.
	That must have been painful.
	Well, see, that's a bad idea.
	Right?
	That's a bad idea.
	Why would you let the communists prevent you from hearing great arguments?
	I don't...
	Why would you surrender to that?
	Does he make sense?
	What's the story with trolls?
	In the case of any attention, it's good attention.
	No, they want us to fail, right?
	So the trolls have opposite values than we do, and so they want our conversation to fail, they want our community to fail, they want this show to fail, and they want to distract you, so just ignore them.
	I don't really understand the Jay Dyer debate was also good Yeah, I think so.
	Let's see here.
	Oh my gosh, did I actually catch up?
	I think I did.
	Is that a sign that we should wind things down?
	Yeah, probably.
	Oh yeah, shall I end with a...
	Would you guys like to hear the tale of the ducks?
	Hit me with a Y if you would like to...
	Am I not getting these updates?
	Let's see here.
	If you, let's see here.
	When Rationality Rules points out a clear and obvious fallacy in UPB, Stefan doesn't address it and says, this is boring.
	I had a whole rebuttal arguments that went on for hours.
	I did a whole debate with Rationality Rules.
	See, here's the funny thing, right?
	This is how I know that you're just an idiot.
	And I'm like, I'm sorry to say that.
	It's not necessarily an insult.
	Maybe you're just short and pointing out that you're short or whatever.
	But you're not...
	Like, if you can't reproduce the argument, you need to shut up about other people's thoughts, right?
	So, it's like, oh, it's all been debunked.
	It's like, oh, rationality rules destroyed UPP. It's like, can you reproduce the arguments with reference to the book?
	Well, no, then you're just an idiot who's, you know, you're pissing in a pool and thinking you're balancing the pH.
	You're just taking a pee in the pool and thinking that you're an expert swimmer, right?
	This is like Troll 101. Troll 101 is they say that something is wrong without providing any specifics or details from the actual arguments.
	Rationality rules destroyed this guy.
	And when you say, can you give me an example?
	Oh, just go watch the debate.
	They don't understand what they're talking about.
	They want UPB to be destroyed because they have opposing values.
	And UPB would reveal them for the fools and malevolent.
	People that they are.
	And so they just want you to recoil from UPB. They won't provide any specific arguments.
	And I don't respond to people who don't provide any specific arguments or just say, well, so-and-so was right and Steph just said this.
	It's like, any intellectual content about what you're saying?
	No, then shut up.
	Shut up and get lost.
	Boring, lazy, stupid stuff.
	All right, hang on a sec here.
	Yeah, you're right.
	Sorry, took me a little while to catch up, but...
	Delete and ban.
	Yeah, and this is typical, right?
	So what they do is they come in and they just muddy the waters and provide a whole bunch of, basically, abuse and nonsense and lies and falsehoods, and then you ban them and you say, oh, I just bought simple criticisms and they banned me because I can't handle any criticism.
	Ugh, you know, it's just boring.
	I mean, I guess it's original and feels meaty to you, but this is completely ridiculous.
	All right, so let us get to the story of the ducks, since it sounds like...
	You wish to hear.
	I do troll the left, so I guess you're right about wanting them to fail.
	You need the left to fail.
	To the gulag you go, that's right.
	All right.
	Steph, you're feeding the troll.
	No?
	He's gone.
	So, best band.
	Yeah, sorry, that took me a while.
	I got a little caught up.
	Okay, so, this is not philosophical.
	It's a little bit philosophical stuff in it, but let me tell you what happened today.
	So, We had to bring the ducks back.
	We didn't have to, but we chose to bring the ducks back.
	We don't have like a big barn, obviously, for them to spend the winter in or whatever it is, right?
	So we had the ducks from a day or two old.
	We raised them.
	We had them for a couple of months.
	And today, we brought them back to the place where we got them.
	Now, if you had one word with which to...
	Categorize duck mating, what would that word be?
	Just out of curiosity.
	Just out of curiosity.
	If you had one word, I'm just going to wait for everyone to catch up here, but if you had one word to describe duck mating, what would it be?
	Rapey.
	Yes.
	Corked.
	Oh, do they have one of these corks true things?
	Yes.
	It's...
	It's not super nice.
	So we had two male ducks and one female duck.
	The two male ducks were called pumpkin and dumpling, and the female was called buttercup.
	It was a lovely little white, a little black.
	You've seen the videos, I'm sure.
	Anyway, so we get to the farm where we got the ducks, and there are dogs barking away, and there are some dogs in the back of a pickup truck, and the other dogs, you know, dogs just go completely lunatic with each other, right?
	So...
	My daughter had driven out to the farm with a duck on her lap.
	And that duck was Humke.
	It was the darker one.
	And we only had to stop twice because he pooped.
	So I took the...
	We had a pretty big box with the male dumpling and the female buttercup took them out.
	And the woman...
	There were a couple of women there.
	My daughter didn't want to get out of the car.
	She's had a couple of bad experiences with dogs, as all kids do, right?
	Because they look like giant Nazgul death horses to little kids, right?
	When we were in Brazil, a dog jumped up on her and scratched her.
	And I had one and the same thing.
	When I was a kid, I was trapped up against a tree with a Great Dane for what felt like forever.
	Every time I moved, it growled, and I really thought I was going to get ripped apart.
	Werewolf style, but eventually it just wandered off.
	So, I took...
	The male and the female and followed the woman and they were put into a big outdoor area where there were like goats and other ducks and so on, right?
	And so I tipped them out, put them down and they started exploring around, right?
	The male and the female, pumpkin and buttercup.
	And then, sorry, dumpling and buttercup.
	So then my daughter had made her way out of the car when I went back and she was walking up and she was holding the other male.
	Right?
	Pumpkin.
	And then we went into the enclosure area and, oh my god, it was medieval, man.
	It was brutal.
	Oh my god, it was horrible.
	Because, you know, we raised this female duck and the woman was in there.
	We raised this female duck from a little chick, you know, the size of your palm.
	And anyway, so we go in there and our lovely little buttercup is pinned beneath a big, Duck.
	And there are other ducks hanging around, like male ducks hanging around.
	And, of course, I, you know, tried to block it, but I was just kind of shocked.
	My daughter came in and she's like, oh, right?
	Because, look, we say rapey, right?
	It's not fair because they're not human beings, right?
	They're not human beings, right?
	So we don't have...
	We don't have moral standards.
	They don't have ideal virtues.
	They can't compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	They can have free will that we would sort of understand it, right?
	And it was fairly obvious.
	And I didn't see this, but my daughter said that she saw one of the male ducks pulled a couple of feathers out of Buttercup's neck.
	Otters too?
	Yeah, I think dolphins as well.
	And again, you know, so...
	It was not fun.
	And my daughter basically wanted to pull the ducks off Buttercup, right?
	Which is completely understandable.
	But she didn't because the farm owners were there.
	And the farm owner said, well, you know, there's a new female duck in the enclosure.
	That's what they're going to do.
	That's what they're going to do.
	Now, of course, you know, you pull the duck off, and all that happens is another duck hops on.
	You pull them all off, and then they just wait till you leave.
	Like, it's nothing you can, right?
	They're ducks, right?
	They're not dinner-in-a-movie kind of guys.
	What can I tell you?
	But it was, I mean, it was appalling.
	I mean, in all seriousness, it was horrible to watch.
	Now, it wasn't like they were tearing her head off.
	It wasn't like they were, you know, and she wasn't struggling.
	The female ducks, I assume, are kind of programmed that way.
	But it felt like a real violation because that's our little baby duck, right?
	And she's being held down.
	And again, I don't know what ducks do.
	I didn't see any thrusting.
	It could have been just a dominance thing because she was quite young, right?
	So ducks, Muscovy ducks, don't start laying eggs until like five or six months.
	Maybe six or seven kind of depends, right?
	And she was only a couple of months old.
	So she was pre...
	Egg laying, so it might have just been a dominance establishing thing rather than a reproductive thing.
	It wasn't a good idea on the part of the farmer to let you see that.
	Well, I would like to have been warned, of course, right?
	I would like to have been warned.
	I mean, I think that would have been reasonable customer service, so to speak.
	Like, why don't you give us the ducks?
	We'll handle it from here.
	That would have been nice.
	But, of course, if you have really good people skills, You're probably not a farmer, right?
	Because you go out into a more customer-facing situation, right?
	That duck is going to have to call in.
	Well, see, here's the thing, right?
	So it was hard to watch.
	Yeah, it was hard to watch.
	It was like Rotherham.
	And so we left.
	Obviously, right?
	Now, when we left, the female duck, Buttercup, she came out of the enclosure, was walking down the little dirt road, and she ended up settling down with some other female ducks and becoming feminists.
	I don't know, right?
	But she was not disturbed.
	She was not hurt, right?
	So maybe it was just a sort of dominance thing because she was too young or whatever it is.
	So, the question is, how do you explain this to your daughter?
	So, you know, I honestly don't think it was reproductive in nature.
	I don't think it was, so to speak, sexual in nature.
	I think it was more of a dominance thing, that, you know, we own you and all that kind of stuff.
	I can't tell, right?
	But this is what the women said, right?
	It's like, there were two women there, like, yeah, well, you got a new female in the enclosures.
	They're going to do what they're going to do, right?
	So, but it was...
	Honestly, it was shocking.
	You know, it was shocking.
	And we sat in the car and we chatted for a while.
	And it was an interesting conversation.
	I mean, obviously, she was upset.
	I was upset.
	And I said, you know, basically, I wanted to...
	I said, you know, every now and then, like, we'll watch, you know, great moments in sports or silly things that happen in sports.
	And I said, you know, when you...
	You get a football player, and they kick this ball, and it goes spiraling over the big U-shaped bar, right?
	I said, that's kind of what I wanted to do.
	I wanted to do that to the duck that was on her back, right?
	I just wanted to spiral this, like, hey, let's see how far you can fly, ducky-ducky, right?
	And so she smiled a little at that, laughed a little at that, and that broke some of the tension, right?
	And I did.
	I wanted to.
	Because you want to, you know, you...
	And I said, so here's the limits of anthropomorphizing, right?
	And I explained, you know, that's when you ascribe human characteristics to animals, right?
	So I said, we're right at the limits of what we can project onto animals, right?
	So the ducks followed us when they were little, and we think that's affection, we think, but it's not.
	It's just bonding for safety, because as soon as they got old enough, they stopped following us, right?
	And they will sit and cuddle with us, and they like to sit and cuddle with us because they know that they're protected from predators when they're with us, which is why, you know, it would happen almost the same thing.
	My daughter would like to, you know, let's sit outside with the ducks, she would say, and we'd go and sit outside and chat and stroke the ducks and all that.
	And the ducks would almost invariably fall asleep because they can normally sleep at night, but they can't fall asleep in the middle of the day because there could be predators, hawks or foxes or whatever it is, right?
	And so, but when they're with us, they know that the predators aren't going to come, so they would fall asleep, right?
	So I said, we think of that as affection and they like us, but it's not really.
	It's just protection, right?
	It's just protection.
	And so, in this situation, of course, if this was, you know, I mean, if it was a human being, we would fight to keep the...
	Other person off them, and we would call the cops, and we, you know, we would tell them to press charges and get this person.
	But they're ducks!
	And so, there's a limit on where we can go, and I said, we're right at the end of the limit of this, right?
	And I said also, like, I mean, if there was someone being attacked and their brothers were around, right, then the brothers would intervene, but the males, our males, they didn't do anything, right?
	Nobody could see, right?
	And of course, of course they would not do anything, right?
	And I said, so, because there's not a sort of loyalty.
	And the other thing, too, is that sometimes when we would pick up Buttercup, she would, you know, kick quite a lot and fight because she didn't, like, I think they have this instinct that whenever they're picked up, they're about to be eaten, like some hawk picks them up or something like that.
	And so she would sometimes fight like crazy.
	And I said, but she didn't fight like crazy.
	So nature has kind of programmed her to submit.
	If a female duck who's being held down in this kind of way fights like crazy, well, she'd get really injured, right?
	It's not going to work out well for her genes, right?
	So this sort of submit is probably programmed into ducks.
	The aggression on the part of the male ducks is programmed in.
	The submission on the part of the female ducks is kind of programmed in.
	That's not how human beings work.
	We fight if we're violated in that kind of way or if we're held down or, you know, somebody, I said, it probably feels like somebody pulling hair out of your head if they're pecking some of the feathers out of the back of her neck and all of that.
	And so her brothers, so to speak, didn't help her, which, of course, real brothers would.
	And the women there were like, it's ducks, you know?
	It's ducks.
	That's what they do.
	Right?
	And so they weren't, like, appalled, right?
	I mean, and, like, this is the worst thing ever.
	We have to stop this, right?
	And I said, like, we like ducks.
	My daughter, like, God help me if she ever has to choose between me and a duck.
	She absolutely loves these ducks, right?
	And I said, so here's the really wild thing about it for me, is that this is how ducks reproduce, or at least this is how they're going to when she gets old enough, and...
	They're only here for us to love them because this is how they behave.
	You know, if there was a better way for them to reproduce, they would do that, right?
	So I said hundreds of millions of years of evolution, this is how they reproduce, or this is the ritual, or whatever it is, the behavior.
	And so the ducks are only here to love because they do things that appall us.
	Like, that's kind of a wild thing, and that's because we're right at the limits of anthropomorphism, right, of human characteristics being projected onto ducks.
	So, the ducks are cuddly and cute and bond and attached with us.
	And they're only here to do that because this is how they behave.
	Right?
	And it is...
	Dogs show affection.
	They have the wiring.
	Now, you see?
	But it's not affection if it's wired.
	It's not affection if it's wired.
	That's not the...
	So, dogs are wired to pair bond and to bond with a pack.
	That's not affection.
	See, that's anthropomorphizing, right?
	And I think it's actually kind of an important topic because a lot of times people really anthropomorphize animals to the point where it becomes like a placebo.
	Or it feels like a substitute for actual human relationships.
	But they only do that because they project all of this stuff onto the animals.
	You wouldn't say humans are wired too.
	Yeah, I mean, we're wired, but that's why we have philosophy.
	So, yes, we are wired, but we have philosophy.
	So, we're wired to take revenge, but we have...
	Turn the other cheek, right?
	We are wired to whatever, right?
	To lie and cheat and steal, to get whatever we want, but we have philosophy, so that's sort of the point, is if every instinct we had was philosophical, we wouldn't need philosophy, just as if everything we ever wanted to eat was great for us, we wouldn't need nutrition.
	So...
	I... You know, she loves the ducks, and she cares about the ducks, and so on.
	And I think that's wonderful.
	I'm not saying it's a bad thing for her at all.
	I liked the ducks a lot, too, and so on.
	I don't love the ducks because they're not virtuous creatures, and love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
	Now, she loves the ducks, and I don't want to interfere with that.
	I think that's great.
	But the reality is that if she had a friend who held another friend down and pulled hair out of the back of her neck, that wouldn't be a friend anymore.
	Because that would be a very violent and destructive child that you would probably want to get some serious mental health help involved in, right?
	So, while we have relationships with animals based partly on our projection of human characteristics onto them, I said, that's why we're right at the limit of anthropomorphizing.
	We're right at, okay, here's where, if this was a human being, we'd never have anything to do with that person when we would recommend that the mental health professionals or whatever get involved, right?
	And yet...
	So, when it comes to negative behavior, and again, these value judgments don't really mean anything, because they're just ducks doing ducking, so to speak, right?
	They're just ducks ducking it up.
	And that's how they've evolved, and that's why there are ducks, and we wouldn't have cute, fuzzy little baby ducks if they didn't reproduce in this rapey kind of way, right?
	And again, rapey is...
	Inappropriate because they're ducks, they're not human beings, they don't have a moral sense.
	So, to me, it was a wild moment, and we talked about it for quite a long time.
	Because we gain affection for animals because we project human characteristics onto them.
	And yet, when the animals behave in ways that we would never accept from a human being, it's kind of a shock to the system.
	Right?
	What about horses?
	I think they can sense human intention or emotion.
	They're wired.
	They're a herd animal.
	They're wired.
	So, animals will respond to good treatment, for sure.
	Animals will respond positively to good treatment.
	And they will bond.
	But they're only responding to good treatment, not to virtue.
	Like, for instance, your dog will not lick you because you stood up against somebody saying wrong and bad things on the internet.
	They can't admire you for your moral courage or upright integrity.
	Right?
	They will like you because you play with them and because you pet them and because you give them treats.
	Right?
	It's all Pavlovian, obviously, almost literally.
	Right?
	I mean, my cat brings me back presents from the outside based on good treatment.
	Right?
	Your cat is trying to train you to treat the cat better.
	But it's not affection.
	Your cat is simply doing something which he or she believes will be beneficial for him or her.
	right animals are freer than humans No, they're not.
	Animals have no free will.
	Steph, is life worth it as a dissident?
	It's not worth it any other way.
	Does your daughter comprehend the duck's position on the food chain?
	Yeah, of course.
	Of course she understands.
	We had chickens years ago.
	And we lost a bantam chicken to a hawk.
	She's perfectly aware.
	And she loved toads, and one of the chickens tore apart a toad, and the other one helped tear it apart, and it was, like, pretty shocking to her.
	But yeah, you know, nature's a sociopath.
	I did this speech many years ago at the University of Toronto.
	So, yeah, it's really interesting to me to focus on this shocking kind of behavior.
	Shocking kind of behavior.
	And it's only shocking because I don't know ducks that well, right?
	I've never owned ducks before or had ducks before, right?
	So, it's only shocking because of my ignorance.
	And it's not possible for us to comprehend what the ducks are doing.
	Because we see that kind of behavior and we respond to it as if there's a moral choice, there's goodness, there's badness, there's right, there's wrong.
	We want to punish the male ducks for doing what male ducks have been doing for hundreds of millions of years.
	And which has been selected more by the female ducks.
	The male aggression and the female submission has been equally selected for - I'm going to say chosen - but it's been equally selected for by both the male and the female ducks for hundreds of millions of years, right?
	We can't get there.
	We can't vault over.
	We can't look at that with indifference.
	Now, you could say that the female farmers who were there, they'd gotten used to it and so on.
	And I get that.
	I really...
	They're just like, you know, okay, it would have been better for them to tell us since, you know, but it was actually so the woman we got the ducks from wasn't there that day, so it's just other people, but it would have been helpful.
	Can I find your nature as a sociopath speech online?
	Sure, yeah, you can.
	Just fdrpodcast.com, do a search, and you'll find it there.
	Why is Canada so left-wing?
	Because America protects us, so we can have all of this social experimentation that goes on, right?
	The same thing with Europe, right?
	One of the worst mistakes America ever made was to secure the Western world and keep the reality of evil and predation away from people so they could become sentimental and ridiculous.
	Swans are the R-selected creatures.
	Ducks are K-selected breeders.
	No, I don't think that's true.
	Swans are pair-bound for life and swans put a lot of effort into raising their kids.
	Yeah, nature is brutal.
	Nature is brutal.
	And again, none of that makes any sense.
	Even saying nature is a sociopath, nature is brutal, don't mean anything.
	All the rebellious European genes went to America.
	Yes, I'm sure of that for sure.
	The people who couldn't stand living in captivity went to the formerly free nation of America.
	Steph, you live life effectively as a dissident.
	Do you regret not staying in the corporate or entrepreneurial world?
	No, I mean, there are times when it's not much fun, for sure.
	Occasionally, it's not very often.
	But occasionally, it's like, oh, that's a drag or whatever, right?
	But no, I don't regret not staying in the corporate entrepreneurial world.
	No, I have too much.
	Honestly, I'm just frank based upon my experience and the billion views and downloads.
	I just have too much potential for that environment.
	I have too much philosophical potential to...
	Chase after money that way.
	Alright, so, yeah, I think it's interesting.
	It's a shock to the system, but people should remember the story of Buttercup.
	The story of Buttercup.
	Because if we accept, which we rationally must, that there's no moral judgment on the ducks, Then we can't anthropomorphize their affection towards us and think that they like us or love us.
	No, they're bonded, they're attached, they have endorphin chemicals, they like good treatment and avoid bad treatment.
	It's not love.
	It's not love.
	It's not affection.
	Because that's to anthropomorphize.
	If we say dogs love us, then we say that ducks rape.
	Because love is a moral statement.
	Love is a moral judgment.
	Can't apply.
	Can't apply it to animals.
	Ducks don't rape.
	Animals don't love us.
	Go find yourself a person.
	All right.
	Thank you so much, everyone, for dropping by tonight.
	Great pleasure to chat.
	Look at that, coming in in just under two hours.
	I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week, and I will speak to you Friday night.
	And a great pleasure to chat.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
	I would certainly appreciate that.
	And don't forget, almostnovel.com.
	Almostnovel.com.
	So that will lead you to a website, my website.
	You can get the e-book version if you want to read it by hand.
	You can get to a feed, and you can just copy the feed, put it into a podcatcher, and it will just download the episodes for you automatically.
	And great chat, wonderful questions tonight.
	And I love you guys to death, honestly, because you are not ducks that traumatize me.
	Have a great evening, everyone.
	Lots of love from here.
	Talk to you soon.

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