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July 16, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:43:55
How Do I Save My Brother? Twitter/X Space
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Time Text
Alright.
Alright, alright.
Alright, alright.
Yo-Yo.
I'm just gonna make random silly noises until somebody asks me a question.
How's that?
Is that does that sound like a plan?
It's certainly one of my more planned plans.
It's Stefan Von Molyneuxhead from the Radio Free Domainness, and I hope you're having a beautiful, beautiful Thursday.
Don't forget, my friends, we have tonight, 7 p.m., a live stream.
A live stream, which you can find right here on X. And I noticed that my engagement crashed over the last couple of days, and I was like, am I being shadow banned?
Or are my cheat tweets just less good?
So I think it's my tweets.
That's fine.
That's fine.
Because I had a couple of real bangers and then a drought.
And I'm blaming y'all.
I mean, for me to take responsibility myself, it's something I talk about, but it's not something I really like to practice in my life.
It's a lot of work.
So I'm just going to blame you guys for not sharing it.
But that's fine.
It's been a while since I've chased the crack cocaine of engagement numbers, so I'll have to rein myself in a little bit from time to time.
I think they'll be healthy, but I really appreciate you guys dropping by today.
It is your show.
It is your show.
And you know what?
Let's just get straight to it.
Without any further ado, mad Mark, what's on your mind, my friend?
You will need to speak, though.
Of that, I can assure you.
Going once.
Going twice.
Oh, look at that.
It looks like we might have to.
Hello, I'm sorry.
I didn't know I was muted.
All right.
So my thought or my question to you is actually related to what you just said, that your engagement has been actually, I thought, pretty good for someone who hasn't been on the platform for some time.
And it seems like you've come on and been able to foster some level of engagement that was pretty impressive to me.
My question to you is like, is it some sort of advertisement thing that you're paying for through Twitter?
Or is it just you're that good?
No, I think I boosted one or two tweets for a couple, like 30 bucks a piece.
I've been on for two weeks.
I think it was in the first couple of days.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
The numbers are good.
It was just over the last day or two that, you know, when you have a real, it's a thing, when you have a real banger, like I did a tweet that did like 7.1 million views.
And so, you know, that's kind of impossible to sustain.
So you just, I mean, I can't anyway.
So I think I've been away for a while.
And here's the thing, too.
I've done a lot of work out of sight of the mainstream media's or the mainstream social media's public eye.
So I've got a lot.
I'm backed up, baby.
I've got a lot stored.
I've got a lot stored up.
And so I'm sort of able to come out of the gate running, so to speak.
And I mean, of course, I was pretty good at social media before.
I mean, my shows and my sort of philosophical shows, some of which are, you know, pretty technical and abstract.
I've done about a billion views and downloads over the last 20 years.
So I would say I'm pretty good at it.
But there was certainly a certain amount of anticipation and excitement when I came back from me and from the general audience.
So no, I haven't really boosted.
It's really just been organic.
And I thank everyone who's shared and commented and criticized and all of that stuff because it's great to be re-engaging with the world in this way.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, I mean, it just seems to me that today, and I do a small amount of social media, like it's not my job or anything.
I don't make enough to make a living off of it.
But it seems to me that starting off with a channel today on Twitter or on YouTube or whatever is more difficult than it was perhaps 10 years ago.
And I'm not saying that like what you were doing 10 years ago was by any means not good or like any comments about that.
I think that your content has always been a breath of fresh air compared to what most people have out there and the takes that you have.
Even when you were doing political stuff, I liked a lot of what you had to say about, like, you know, even if I disagreed with it, at least it was well articulated, you know?
Right.
Like, that's something that's missing today is that authenticity that a lot of people just, you know, they say what's popular to get the clicks.
Like, they're chasing that crack cocaine, like you're saying, you know?
And I don't know, man.
Maybe, maybe that's what it is about your channel or your message is the authenticity shines through where it's shining through a lot of just the shit that's out there, you know?
Right.
Shining through shit has always been my business plan.
I'm like a disco ball in a pile of horsemaneer, but sorry, go ahead.
Well, you know, like a diamond in the rough, let's say.
I'm not sure.
So let me just push back on something that you were saying.
So with regards to it being more difficult now than it was before.
Don't think that way in life.
Don't think that way in life because there's always costs and benefits to everything.
And I know that that sounds like really trite.
Let me just break it down for you real quick because I don't want people to create artificial obstacles.
So in the past, you'd say, well, you know, Twitter was a little less overpopulated.
There weren't as many bots.
And so it was easier to stand out.
Well, but there was a lot of censorship, right?
So Elon Musk having really committed to a censorship-free X is a real benefit.
You know, you really had to, a lot of people really had to bite their tongues on X. I chose not to, and therefore had my tongue bitten off for me.
But so there's costs and benefits.
And the other thing, too, I know this from my sort of days, for those of you who don't know, I was a software entrepreneur for many years before getting involved in sort of public intellectualism.
And I was in a kind of niche market, right?
So my software was environmentalism.
It helped companies keep the environment clean.
We did health and safety stuff.
So keep workers safe, keep the environment clean.
That was sort of my software.
Now, it was fairly easy to break into that market because, well, we were actually the first.
We actually created and defined the market, the guy I co-founded the software company with.
We created and Defined the market.
So it was pretty easy to get into, but the price of that was that it was small.
Like if I wanted to create an operating system or I wanted to create a word processor or a spreadsheet or, I don't know, some Doom-style game, well, there was a big market for that kind of stuff.
So what I did was easy to break into, but it was not a market with a huge amount of growth.
Now, we managed to grow it over time, but so, whereas if you say, so then you can say, oh, that's an easy market to break into.
So that's the plus.
The minus is it's tough to grow because it's a small market.
On the other hand, you say, well, I'm going to write a word processor, right?
Well, that's a big market.
You know, people need a lot of word processing.
And so you say, well, that's a big market.
It's like, yes, but it's very tough to get into because there's the big established companies back in the day, it was like WordPerfect and Word and a couple of other sort of apps dominated everything.
It's like, oh, I want to write my own operating system.
Well, everyone needs an operating system.
It's like, yeah, but it's kind of tough to break into that market because it's dominated by Windows, iOS, I guess, Mac, and a little bit of Linux.
So there's costs and benefits to everything you're going to do in life.
And here's how you keep your free will.
You must, must keep your free will.
And the way you keep your free will is you steadfastly refuse to only look at the benefits of one decision and only look at the costs of another.
Because then you don't have free will.
So I'll sort of give you a real quick example and then love to get your feedback on it.
So should you buy a house or should you rent a house or buy an apartment?
Buy a condo or rent an apartment.
Now if you say, well, you know, but if you rent, you're just throwing your money away every month and you don't build up any equity and you end up as poor or poorer at the end of it as you did at the beginning.
Okay, so that's the plus of renting.
You say, oh, well, if you buy a house, you've got to pay all this property tax and you've got to maintain it and it's going to fall apart.
It's going to be expensive and so on, right?
And all of your money is locked up unless you sell it and if you sell it for a profit, well, that means that every other house is more expensive.
So if you look at all of the pluses of renting and all the minuses of owning, then you don't functionally have any free will because you just get programmed that way, right?
Whereas if you say, well, but you know, I mean, you build up equity in a house, you can personalize it, you can make it your own, and you're paying property taxes anyway, they're just baked into the rent.
In fact, property taxes per square foot are higher for rental apartments than they are for big houses.
So you don't want to just look at costs and benefits.
If you only look at the benefits of one decision, only look at the costs of another decision.
Say, oh, well, it was easier back in the day with Twitter.
Sure.
But that also made it harder.
It was a smaller audience.
Why is it tougher now?
That's a bigger audience.
But if you have quality thoughts and you can attach them to a viral tweet, I mean, that's your big entree, right?
If you've got really interesting, important thoughts and you can attach them to a viral tweet, people will find you.
People will find you.
And what you do, and this is what I did way back in the day, is you just send out, hey, I'd love to be on your podcast.
Hey, I'd love to be on your podcast.
Hey, I'd love to join you in your Twitter spaces, until someone says yes.
And then you show up and you do a good job and you share that recording.
And then you say, well, you know, I was on this guy's show and here's the recording.
You could listen to what I did.
It was really, really good.
Got a lot of good feedback.
And then you climb your way up the ladder until you end up on Joe Rogan.
I mean, that's honestly, that's what I did.
I just started off small.
I was on people's really tiny little podcasts when I was a tiny little podcast.
And I spent 80% of my time promoting my podcast and only 20% of my time doing the actual podcast.
And then I did end up.
I was three times on Joe Rogan, which I think is more than his wife.
But so you just got to climb your way up.
So don't look at Twitter and say, well, it was easier and better back then.
There were pluses to the old Twitter.
There were minuses to the old Twitter.
There are pluses and minuses now.
Now, of course, you still have to make a decision, but don't fake out your free will by only saying, well, it was better in the past.
Like, people have this with regards to nostalgia.
I'm going through this phase right now in my late 50s where I literally was talking to my wife yesterday about the magazine Omni, and I felt this wave of nostalgia about reading Omni when I was in my early teens and all of that.
I'm having this sort of second tween thing going on in my brain.
And it's easy to look back and say, oh, but in the past, you know, things were so much better.
And there were things that were better in the past.
And there were things that were worse in the past.
And there were things that are worse in the present and better in the present.
And you have to balance these things as a whole.
Otherwise, you end up being run by emotions and very slanted arguments, if that makes sense.
So, sorry, that's a fairly big, big old topic, but what do you think?
Well, I mean, you did two things for me right there.
First of all, you reframed my view of how things are because I was looking at it like, oh man, you know, like it's hard to get anyone to look at you because there's 10 million people doing what you're doing.
But really, there's a bigger audience for what we're doing, for talking about current events or whatever, which is what I do.
But yeah, like having that viral tweet, having that knockout video.
You have such a greater potential for success now than you did back then.
Yeah, yeah.
So you say it's tough because the audience is bigger.
It's like, well, yes, but it's also of benefit because the audience was bigger.
Here's the other thing.
What if you not mentioned about old Twitter and new Twitter is monetization?
Could not make a penny on the old Twitter.
Could not make a penny on the old Twitter.
Now, people are getting big payouts on Twitter.
So, sorry, on X. So again, that has its pluses and its minuses, right?
Because in the past, because you weren't making money on Twitter, you could be more authentic.
I think that's what you were saying about me, and I was sort of strive for that.
Because you say, well, you know, if this is going to, if this is going, because you couldn't make any money, you could be more honest because you weren't so concerned about follow-up count or offending people or upsetting people.
But let's say you have a subscription service on X. Well, now, what are you somewhat controlled by?
I mean, you're a smart guy.
Tell me.
What am I controlled by?
Well, no, not you personally.
Let's say that...
You're charging people $20 a month for access to whatever goodies you're handing out.
And let's say you get a couple of hundred people to pay you 20 bucks a month, right?
So when there's no money, I would think, you've got to please them, right?
Yeah.
And so if you say stuff that costs you 10% of your subscription base, well, that's, I mean, if a couple of hundred people unfollowed you because you said something, it's like, eh, you know, can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, didn't really matter, right?
But if those couple of hundred people are like 50% of your income and they unfollow you, suddenly, right?
So in the old Twitter, you could be more honest because follower count wasn't directly related to income, but now if you've got a subscription base, unless you just, well, I'll get into that in a sec, but you are now less free to speak because you've got to deal with the economic consequences of every tweet you put out.
So again, pluses and minuses.
There's a plus because you can make money.
There's a minus in that you can self-censor for the sake of your audience.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, I mean, that affects me in Patreon and YouTube subscriptions.
So I'm not monetized on Twitter or on X, but certainly there's a fair amount of that going on.
I mean, for me personally, there's nothing that I wouldn't say if I really believed it.
But there are certain things that I kind of refrain from saying because I'm trying to make it a little bit more milquetoast for the general audience.
You know what I mean?
So there is some of that going on.
The second thing, though, that I was going to say that you did for me right there was a stratagem because I do the 80-20, but I think I got it backwards.
I'm doing 80% of my time that I spend on the channel doing the podcast, doing the interviews, talking to people, looking stuff up, and then about 20% of the time promoting the channel and asking people to be on their channel and that kind of thing.
So I think what I have to do is kind of flip that a little bit and go 20% of the time.
You need to flip it.
Yeah, you need to flip it.
So two real brief stories, MC Hammer and Meatloaf together at last.
So MC Hammer became a, I guess, a big rapper and so on.
Hammer Don't Hurt Him, I think was his big, it's a great title for an album.
He had the hammer pants, like the big parachute pants, and he had a dance-off proposal to Michael Jackson and so on.
Anyway, so MC Hammer, you know, cut his tracks with his own money, and then he spent like forever and a day driving from club to club, pressing his LPs into DJ's hands, begging them to play it.
Like he'd just promote, promote, promote.
And that's tough.
Jim Steinman and Meatloaf put together, or they wanted to make the album Bat Out of Hell, which was a very complicated and challenging album for the time with some very innovative musical ideas.
And they kept going around from place to place.
They'd play little bits of it and people wouldn't care.
They wouldn't like it.
It's too complicated.
It's too expensive.
People won't get it.
Blah, blah, blah.
And as far as writing the music, it was fairly rapid.
But as far as actually getting the album out, it took years.
It took years.
And so promotion is everything.
If your ideas are important enough, and I'm sure yours are, like, this is not any kind of negative thing.
If your ideas are important enough, you owe them an audience.
You owe them, it would be like if you had a cure for cancer, right?
You would be irresponsible to not get it into the hands, bloods, and veins of everyone who had cancer.
You would owe it to the people.
I mean, you'd want to make some money along the way, I get that, but you'd owe it to the people who had cancer to get it into their veins.
And so if you have ideas that you know are important and positive and helpful to people and will make the world a better place and all the things that we all try to do, you absolutely have a responsibility to get it out there.
To get it out there.
And I know it's more fun to make the shows than it is to promote the shows because making the shows is about creativity and promoting the shows is about people don't care.
People don't care.
They don't care.
And everyone gets mad.
Like, you know, promote all these.
But think of all the people who contact you who want something and you don't, like even in the spam, right?
All the people who contact you who want something and you don't care, you don't listen, you don't respond.
Well, then now you're on the other side of that.
So that's important.
And the last thing I'll say is that the way to, if you enjoy authenticity, the authenticity of what I do, I care about my audience so much that I will not pull any punches and I will not self-censor.
So I'm not in the business of delivering paintings to people because if you deliver the paintings to people, mostly what you'll paint is a bunch of nondescript landscapes, couple of sunsets, you know, some fuzzy velvet clown portraits and maybe a couple of pictures of dogs playing cards because that's what people kind of want and all of that.
So I'm not in the business of selling art to people, so to speak.
I am in the business of charging people to watch me paint a picture.
And that's my mental view of what it is that I'm doing.
So if I'm charging people to watch me paint a picture, then the picture I want to paint the most is going to provide the most value to the audience.
If the audience consumes the pictures, I have to care about what the audience wants more than what I want to paint.
But if I'm charging people to watch me paint, then my passion for the painting translates into value for them.
So I have to paint most what I want to paint in order to give value.
And by that, of course, what I'm saying is that people are watching me in the process of thinking.
And therefore, for me to think with the greatest amount of honesty and integrity that I can is what provides most value for people.
And if you have that mindset, that people are invited to watch you in your hot-footed pursuit of truth, then you will not be swayed by the audience.
Because your goal is the truth, and people are paying to watch you on that journey so that they can either have their own journey or join you in yours to some degree.
They all overlap in many ways.
But if you say, hopefully you'll find it interesting, enjoyable, entertaining, and enlightening to watch me in hot pursuit of the truth, then you are not Going to be corrupted by your audience because people are watching you pursue truth, which means you keep your eye on the truth and not, I have to please the audience, because the only way you can please the audience is by the continued pursuit of truth, if that makes sense.
Well, and certainly if you're thinking out loud, then the possibility of offending someone certainly exists.
Well, if you've never had an offensive thought, you're just an NPC and you haven't thought at all.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, I would just like to say it is a breath of fresh air to have you back in the sphere of things that I pay attention to anyway, which in this case would be ex-Twitter.
I guess I'm guilty.
One of the people, you were talking about this a couple of days ago, like, you know, the effectiveness of censorship.
If you take me off the platform and I go onto a different platform and you don't follow me, then you're part of the problem.
And I guess I'm part of the problem.
No, no, you're not part of the problem.
You're the reason for the problem.
Well, exactly.
Well, but still true.
You know, I was one of those people.
And I apologize for that because there is something about your message that once I hear it again and now that it's back in the sphere, I feel like I was missing that well-articulated psychological, philosophical point of view that you have that's very unique.
And I appreciate it.
And I'm glad that you're back.
And at least for me, that you're back.
And yeah, thanks, man.
Well, I appreciate that.
And of course, for the people who dropped off the map five years ago when I was deplatformed, go look at the price of Bitcoin five years ago.
It's not that you just missed out on psychological insights.
But now, Mark, I appreciate your apology.
And I'm going to return it with a giant favor.
Are you ready?
Good one.
Are you ready?
Are you ready, brother?
You have, it's been delightful to chat with you.
Of course, you're welcome back anytime.
And I'm going to give older business guy mentor advice to you because you've made one catastrophic error in your conversation with me.
Do you know what it is?
We're talking about marketing.
I do not know.
All right.
You're going to kick yourself when I say this, but don't.
Right.
Because sometimes you're not.
Mentioning my channel, maybe?
There you go.
There you go.
Steph, would you mind if I mentioned my channel?
Are you crazy?
You're talking to the world here and you're not mentioning your channel.
Are you crazy?
Well, if you...
I made the name of the chat that I do before I ever planned on doing it seriously.
But for anyone who watches Alex Jones, the gay frog chat is the name of it.
If you Google Gay Frog Chat, you will find my-turn in the freaking frog's gay.
Yes, I understand the reference.
And he actually, you know, was it shoe on head to she have the Alex Jones was right jar?
That's the meme.
And to be honest, we don't talk about exclusively conspiracy theories by any means.
I mean, it's usually current events and Second Amendment type stuff and freedom of speech type stuff.
And yeah, there are some conspiracy theory type things that make it into the fold, but it seems like these days more of those are coming true than not.
So not talking about them is to your detriment.
But anyway.
Well, it's funny how the media rails against conspiracy theories and push one of the biggest conspiracy theories known to man, which was the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
Not to mention the fine people hoax, not to mention COVID.
They pushed all of these conspiracy theories.
But apparently conspiracy theories are just really, really bad.
So, okay, so it's great that you mentioned the name of your show.
What else do you need to do?
Ask people to check it out.
Come on.
Well, I think that's kind of implied.
I guess they don't know then.
I mean, C. Your ass was too lazy to follow me to a new website, right?
No hate, just a fact, right?
So you've just mentioned the name of your show.
What else do you need to do?
Because remember, people forget and people can be kind of lazy.
Me too, right?
Me too.
So what else do you need to do?
Tell them where to go to find it?
There you go.
There you go.
Do you have a website?
Just give people the website.
Because remember, this is carved into the atoms of the internet from now until the sun explodes 10 billion years from now.
So you've got to give people a website and maybe a little hook about why they should come and listen to you.
But if you've got my audience and you've got something you're passionate about, listen, I love competition because competition just makes me better.
So name of show, website, and why people should come and listen to you.
Hit me.
Well, I don't have a website myself.
I have a Discord.
So if you go to YouTube and search Gay Frog Chat, you'll find my channel.
On there, there's a link to the Discord.
That's all I have.
What's the name of your channel on YouTube?
It is eHonda.
I am eHonda on YouTube.
Okay, so what you want to say is not go search for Gay Frog chat.
Well, if you search, and this is a marketing mistake.
No, no, hang on, honey.
Youtube.com slash eHonda, right?
Correct, yes.
Okay, so that's what you got to give people.
Don't ask them to search for stuff.
They won't remember later something about a frog or something like that.
And then they end up searching up gay stuff on YouTube.
So, you know, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it just may not lead them to you.
So youtube.com forward slash eHonda.
And just remind people, it's eHonda, no dash, just eHonda, right?
Correct.
Okay, so, and so name of show, where to get it, and give me a 10-second pitch.
Well, I actually do two shows a week.
One of them is called the Gay Frog Chat.
The other is called the Second Amendment Chat, where we talk about Second Amendment rights, current bills that are coming through, arguments as to why the Second Amendment is valid.
And then we also talk.
Don't do that.
Sorry to be annoying.
I'm just because I was a marketing guy for a long time in the business world.
So when you say, I do a show about the Second Amendment, you don't need to tell me that you also talk about the Second Amendment.
Like you really don't.
Well, I do a show on philosophy, and you know what we talk about?
You know, always be ready.
Always be ready to market what you're passionate about.
Like in the business world, we call it the elevator pitch, right?
So you've got a business idea, and you're on an elevator ride with a big investor.
How do you get his attention in 20 seconds?
You've got to boil it down.
Right?
Yeah.
My producer, my producer said, YouTube, hang on, youtube.com forward slash eHonda4208.
Yep, that's the one, I guess.
Can you not make that any more user-friendly?
You can change your channel to EHAND.
That's what I was going to say.
You haven't done that?
Oh, my God, man.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Please fix this.
Well, what would your suggestion be?
What would be a good channel name?
Just use my actual name, or what would you say?
Well, it depends which one you're talking about.
So you've got a show about current events, and I don't know, but it's got to be something.
I mean, I did free domain, just because freedom is the main thing, freedom should be your domain, and all that kind of stuff, right?
So free domain was mine.
You just, you know, you could maybe work with, I didn't have AI back in the day, but maybe you could work with AI and stuff like that.
But, you know, brainstorm with people you care about, what's a good name, and find that, you know, you can use lots of programs now.
There's places online where you can create logos.
Like, you just need a brand.
And listen, I'm certainly not perfect at branding.
That's not, right?
So, but, but you need something that's easy to remember.
You need a very short pitch.
You've got to be responsible to your ideas and make sure that you get them out in a way that people can remember and get them.
That I should have known, that I should have done.
I know that I should have done them, and I haven't because I'm a single father.
I take care of kids.
I work.
I do this on the side.
This is like a side gig that I'm trying to grow, but I haven't really put the that kind of, yeah, you're Jesus, man.
Keep going.
Okay, so let me tell you something else.
I hate to lag you.
I really do, but and I care about what you want to get done in life.
Do those excuses make any sense?
No, it just, it means that I'm busy with things is all from my perspective.
Okay, so you are not going to sell people on listening to you if you even have those excuses in your mind.
They will worm their way into your brains.
Right?
No excuses.
I chose not to.
Have you ever heard me blame anyone but myself for my deplatforming?
No.
I mean, I think it was unjust.
I think people did the wrong thing.
But as I've always said, who got me deplatformed?
I did.
I mean, I know that a lot of people don't think.
I know that a lot of people are reactive.
I know that leftists control the institutions.
I know that I was treading on toes.
I knew all of that.
So don't be a victim of circumstance if you want to inspire other people.
So if you say, well, I know, come on, how long does it take to change the name of your YouTube channel?
Now, if I'd said, well, you need to broadcast from the top of Mount Everest, I could understand you saying, well, you know, hey, man, I am a single dad and I got the job.
But honestly, how long does it take to change a YouTube channel name?
This is a perspective.
Yes, it would take me five minutes, but the whole marketing perspective is an angle that I guess I haven't given enough thought to.
Are you saying, no, hang on, bro?
See, now you told me that these are things that you've known you need to do.
And now you're telling me, don't be that way.
Don't be that way.
Don't be that way.
Don't do it, man.
Don't do it.
I certainly won't let you do it on this show.
And this is, none of this is critical.
I want you to understand this.
None of this is critical.
You haven't done anything wrong, but don't squirm.
Own it.
You chose not to do it.
Yeah.
You chose not to do it.
Yeah.
And that's fine.
So thank you for that.
And then you can choose to do it.
But if you give yourself circumstances and you give yourself excuses, see, you've just promoted your show on my show, which I think is great.
But if the first thing that people hear you do is kind of weaseling and making excuses and then contradicting yourself by saying, well, I've known I needed to do this stuff for a while and then immediately saying, well, I never really thought of this, you know, then people aren't going to want to listen to your show.
And this is just a commitment.
The show starts within.
It does not start with the audience.
It doesn't start with the microphone.
It doesn't start with the channel.
It doesn't start with the video camera.
The show starts from within.
What is it that I want to communicate to people that is urgent enough to take the risks of speaking in a public square?
Because they're risky, right?
So what is it that is urgent enough?
And obviously we want to have people improve their lives in some manner.
And the best way to improve our lives is to give ourselves no excuses.
This is the superpower, in particular, sort of of the white male these days, right?
Which is we're not given any excuses.
In fact, we're just given burdens.
I don't even know your race, but I'm just talking from my own sort of perspective.
I think I can guess at your sex, but I don't know your race.
So I would say that if you have as foundational to your life no excuses.
Now, no excuses doesn't mean that you have to go and change your YouTube channel name.
That doesn't mean that at all.
But it just means you can't make any excuses if you don't.
I just chose not to.
I chose to watch some Netflix, and that's fine.
Do it.
Watch your Netflix.
I don't care.
But just don't weasel about it later.
Because if you weasel about it later, I mean, you're a dad, right?
And so you don't want a model for your kids that you can avoid your responsibilities, avoid your commitments, and then just make up kind of mealy-mouthed excuses later.
Because when your kids do that, it's kind of annoying, right?
Correct.
And if you have that as your foundation, I think that whatever you do in public will be very powerful.
And so I say this, you know, out of love and out of care for the message that you want to bring to the world.
But if your habit is I'm being called out on a deficiency, which happens, I get called out on my deficiencies.
I call myself out on my deficiencies, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That's how we improve.
But if your first impulse when you're called out on a deficiency is to make excuses, meh, I don't think you'll have much success in the public square.
Or you'll have success only with people who want a whole bunch of excuses and probably won't achieve much.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And that wasn't what I was trying to do, but I guess it is what I was doing.
So that is what I was doing.
Well, now, see, you got a problem with excuses, brother.
So when you say, that's not what I was trying to do, but that's what I was doing.
Well, I was trying to take another excuse.
I was trying to say, like, yes, I haven't done these things.
Yes, I chose to do other things other than change the name and go through the process and get that elevator pitch down, like you're saying.
And yeah, and I chose to focus more on doing the shows, which is the fun part, the creative part, the part that is, you know, than promoting it, which is more analytical and difficult and not as rewarding.
I've chose.
Well, it's rewarding.
It's just not immediate.
Sorry.
Marketing is just not immediate reward.
Correct.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, it is reward.
It's just deferred reward.
Okay.
I'm going to move on, but I really appreciate your time.
And, of course, people can look up your show and all of that.
But yeah, I would certainly listen.
I don't say this from any place of superiority, brother.
We all have the problem with excuses.
Excuses are like the estrogen quicksand through which, or where which man's ambitions drown.
So I just really focus on that excuse thing.
And again, it's something we all have to focus on, and I really appreciate your time, and I hope that people will go and check out your work.
All right.
I guess I'm going to be a little curt now.
Kurt, you are in my brain, like my conscience.
Are you unmuted?
Do you need any help with the tech?
Is that it?
We can hear me now.
Yeah, got you, man.
What's on your mind?
I just wanted to come out and thank you very much for coming back to public presence here.
It's just I'm just going to say it's a bit lonely out here, man.
Right.
I sort of get the image of the ex-headquarters, like that woman, that little girl in Poltergeist.
He's back.
But no, it's good to be back.
And what did you do during my half decade in the wilderness?
Well, I mean, I run a think tank, right?
So mostly what I do is research.
But the big thing is that there really is no, there's no voice like yours at all.
And, you know, I find that in my work, people expect me to be a philosopher and I'm not.
And so they ask me a lot of questions.
I would rather say, why don't you just ask Steven?
He's going to give you a better answer than I am.
Because, you know, fundamentally, I work in science, right?
I mean, which is what's testifiable.
That isn't the same as what's preferable or good.
That just tells you what's true is a matter of dispute resolution.
So it doesn't have to do with dispute resolution.
It's not in my wheelhouse.
And so I find that people are asking, you have all these people out there wanting a philosopher who can talk to them in what I would call rational adult terms that are suitable for the day.
And it's just, I've been sitting in on a few of these calls, and I'm just so appreciative of you being back.
So thank you for what you're doing for all of us.
Oh, I appreciate that.
You know, I had an ear infection and went to get a hearing test, and the hearing doctor was like, oh, what do you do?
I said, oh, I do a philosophy show.
Oh, philosophy.
And he started peppering me with questions.
And I'm like, so do I get a discount?
Because I've 40 years of work answering your questions.
You know, it's the old thing that if somebody's really good at something and they charge you like $1,000 for 20 minutes of work, it's like, wow, that's a lot.
It's like, well, you're not paying me $1,000 for the 20 minutes of work.
You're paying me for the 40 years it took me to be able to do it in 20 minutes.
Oh, that's a different thing.
So, yeah, it's funny how that goes.
But yeah, but whenever people find out, like, oh, a moral philosopher, philosopher, they're like, oh, I've got all these questions.
And it's like, well, that's why I have a show.
So I appreciate that.
And did you want to mention the name of your think tank?
Based on what we were talking about before?
I'm reasonably well known.
I'm Kurt Doolittle.
I run the Natural Law Institute.
And, you know, I've come up through the same channel that Stefan has, really.
So basically anything Stefan would say is the same thing I would say if I was as good as saying it as Stefan was.
So it's the same thing.
I'm just, it's not about me at all promoting me.
I'm just trying to honestly thank you for being back in the discourse and helping make the community a better place.
So thanks a lot, Christine.
Well, thanks, Kurt.
Now it explains why I know your name.
So I appreciate that and look forward to chatting again.
And the natural law stuff is very interesting, and I really, really appreciate it.
Just want to give a little shout out to Naomi.
To Naomi.
She's not wanting to chat, but she's listening, and I just wanted to say hi.
All right, we go to Prompt Pirate.
I love people's names.
I got to tell you, I absolutely love people's names.
Prompt Pirate, if you want to unmute.
Because, you know, those tardy pirates are just hell.
Hell on earth.
When you want to be ransacked, you want them to show up on time.
All right.
What's on your mind?
Hello, Stephan.
Great to talk to you.
I have a question about helping my brother.
My brother is 14 years younger than I am, and he's completely given up just on absolutely everything.
And I don't know what to do.
Where we've tried getting him a job, but we can't find a job for him at the moment.
And that's what's really tough because he's given up because it's hard to know if things were easier for me when I was younger.
And he's kind of embraced kind of a lot of like doomer sphere, kind of black pill stuff.
And he's just, but he just wants to stay at home and play video games.
But we're trying to get him out.
But I don't, like, I don't know what to do.
Like, I don't know what to say.
Like, trying to think of, hey, well, like, do I help you?
We've tried to help him get a job, but there's no jobs around.
So I'm kind of stuck.
I was just wondering, like, if you're, if you've dealt with someone before who's trying to help someone else.
Has your brother also given up on audio quality?
And has that transferred to you?
Because man alive, you sound like you're on a yogurt cup in a beach in a windstorm.
Oh, apologies.
I didn't know that.
I'm using earbuds.
Hey, is this better?
Not sure.
Give me a count of five.
One, two, three, four, five.
No, you know, I think it's kind of, and this is a technical problem I have, that Spaces doesn't run on Windows and it doesn't seem to accept headsets.
I have one little headset here that seems to work, but it's not really great audio quality.
So, okay, we won't worry about that.
How old is your brother?
My brother is 19.
19, okay.
Did he go to government schools?
He did, yeah.
How much did the family work to combat the propaganda?
None, I guess.
How much did you do to combat the propaganda?
How much did you do to combat the propaganda?
Oh, like, well, we grew up on a farm, so I don't know.
I don't remember.
Sorry, I didn't catch that.
You grew up in what?
We both grew up on a farm.
So, Like things are like we would catch the bus to public school.
Okay, what does catching the bus have to do with you overturning the propaganda he was subjected to?
No, it's I don't what propaganda?
Like, do you mean that the propaganda itself is what's demoralized him?
I was talking about how his notion of yeah, do you know what is being taught in government schools these days?
Nothing like, I don't know, he hasn't complained about things.
Like, there's silly things.
There's like diversity of stuff.
And that most stuff that's like, like, kind of like joked around with.
It's not.
I'm in Australia.
I don't know how things are in Canada, but like where I am, it's not that bad.
Okay, but how do you know if you've never done?
I mean, did you ever look at his course materials?
Did you ever look at the kind of tests he was being given?
Yeah, we talked about that.
There's stupid things in there, but it's not something that's like...
It's like, you don't take it seriously.
Like, oh, if you have days, what is that?
Sorry?
No, no, sorry.
That was mine.
Go ahead.
Okay.
If there's stuff to do with, I don't know, indigenous kind of welcome to country, whatever, anything like that, like most people would just laugh that off.
Like, it's not something, well, maybe, maybe he shouldn't laugh it off.
Like, I don't know if that's actually done damage.
And it was more, we're trying to, yeah, to find a way, like, to know whether or not he's right in that, well, we've tried to find jobs for him.
Okay, no, I agree.
Hang on, hang on.
Finding jobs is not the solution.
The solution is that he's lost his motivation.
He's lost his sense of agency.
He's lost his sense to control his life and make decisions that have had positive effect.
Now, the reason he's drawn to video games, of course, of course, is because in the video games, he can make choices that have an effect, right?
Yeah.
So he's lost the sense of choice and effect.
Now, Australia, you say, right?
Now, Australia went full penal colony over COVID, right?
So how much of his school life, dating, dancing, asking girls out, making mistakes, getting in fights, how much of his teenage school life was eradicated?
We were specifically lucky in the state that we were where the actual, the entire state locked down.
So not only did people not actually have to get vaccinated, but we didn't really have master mandates or anything like that.
So I was in Western Australia.
If we were in Victoria, then that was where schools have been shut down or everything's being done, like work from home.
His school was not shut down?
No.
At all?
No, they didn't shut down schools because they shut down the whole state.
I knew someone that died trying to get a kidney transplant, trying to come into Australia.
They couldn't.
They just shut down the state.
They shut down because everything in Australia is spread so far apart.
It's very easy to quarantine.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he didn't lose out much on the socializing or the school stayed open.
So he had a fairly normal teenage experience that way, right?
Yes, but normal with other teenagers where I don't, like, there's a disconnect there generationally where I don't know if him being around like those types of like young people at school has done damage.
Okay, so I can't work with things you don't know.
Okay, so just try and be a bit more succinct.
I'll give you a chance to speak.
I just need to gather it.
This is the information gathering part of the conversation.
Okay.
So where's his father?
Heath here.
Okay, so.
Mother and father in the picture, not divorced or anything like that.
Okay, so what has his father done to help promote a sense of agency in his son?
Try to get him an apprenticeship where my dad works, where he's a painter.
No, no, but giving him things doesn't have him earn them.
Right?
So it's sort of like saying, well, so and so.
So it's sort of like saying, well, Bob has a problem.
He doesn't have much money, so I'm just going to give him a bunch of money.
Well, that doesn't really help him, right?
So giving him the thing is not the agency.
Giving someone a chance to work to prove themselves is, I don't know.
Well, I feel that's a bit different.
Like you give someone like an opportunity to see, but that's like he just fails at that.
So I just like maybe there's no difference.
Maybe you're right.
Sorry, so when you say he fails at that, so he took the job and then what happened?
He just kind of quit.
Like he just said he didn't want to do it anymore and he just went back to playing video games.
Okay, so why is he able to quit?
I mean, doesn't he have bills to pay?
He's an adult.
He's not in school, right?
So doesn't he have bills to pay?
I mean, I was paying my bills since I was 15 years old.
Doesn't he have bills to pay?
I don't understand.
How do you just quit?
His, well, mom and dad don't make him pay.
So I don't know.
Oh, so he's being funded by his parents.
Yeah.
So that's bad.
It is.
Yeah.
But why are his parents funding him?
Well, his argument that he convinced mom and dad was fair was that it's impossible now for him to basically go out on his own financially because even if he got a good job, like you need like, certainly where we live, and you need like two people working a full-time income to pay rent.
Like, so, like, it was exactly the same deal.
It was exactly the same deal.
I mean, I'm not saying the economy is the same.
But when I was 19, do you think I had my own place?
Probably not.
Share house.
Of course not.
My God, I mean, I spent a year living in one room with a guy.
We both lived in one room.
I had a year where when I was doing my graduate degree, I had four roommates.
So I'm not sure.
And I know the economy, there's pluses and minuses, which is what I was talking about earlier.
There's pluses and minuses to the economy right now.
When I was younger, yeah, it was Maybe a lot easier to get jobs and housing was cheaper, and I get all of that.
But there was no internet, there was no work at home, there was no work remotely.
So it's just pluses and minuses.
So does your brother, at the age of 19, expect to go out and get his own place?
Am I losing my mind here?
I don't understand why that's even a thing.
It's not even a thing.
It was a thing here of like, well, like, if you're 16, 17, leave.
But maybe, you know, like your own place?
Yeah, okay.
Well, then that is an issue then of, well, he's got to actually find people to share with.
Yeah, that is actually something that hasn't come up yet of, well, share with, or apart from like living with us or living with me.
Okay, so hang on, hang on.
So what was your living arrangements when you were 19?
Like 14 years ago?
Where were you living?
I paid rent and then eventually I got a job and I built my own place.
You paid rent where?
Okay.
All right.
So then you built your own place.
Now, if you'd had to move out when you were 19, look, everybody is economically useless at 19.
Everyone.
I mean, I could pull, well, you know, I'd already had a bunch of jobs.
Okay, has he worked before?
Does he have a resume?
He does have a resume.
We helped him write it.
Okay.
So how many jobs has he had now that he's 19?
Three?
If we're being a gentleman, but that includes working for family as well.
So like you've got to spruce up kind of the resume.
Okay, so how many jobs has he had where he wasn't working for family?
Two, but he crashed out very quickly.
So I don't know.
Okay, so hang on, hang on, hang on.
Just let me get my information.
You just keep giving me more information than I need all the time.
It's going to draw it out unnecessarily.
Okay.
So he's had two jobs.
How long did he last at those jobs?
A month, I think, the first one.
Okay, so his resume sucks.
Yeah.
Now, was it explained to him?
Sorry, what was the jobs and why did he leave?
He was a parts interpreter for like an agricultural company.
Sorry, a parts?
Sorry, parts interpreter.
It's for a machine company for agriculture.
But I don't know what a parts interpreter is.
Someone asks for parts for machines, and you go out the back and you find the parts for this type of machine.
Like a Star Spit warehouse guy.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a pretty good job.
It's not out in the hot sun.
You're not doing dangerous work.
So, I mean, I get it's physically laborious, but okay.
So he had that job and how did he get that job?
Family reference.
Like we knew someone who was looking to someone.
So we asked.
Okay, so he didn't get that job.
He was given that job, or at least that opportunity, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So he worked there for a month and why did he quit?
Well, he didn't do a good job while he was there.
He made a lot of mistakes.
He was like the polite way.
Let go.
Like he wasn't mechanical.
No, he was fired.
I don't.
I don't do polite here.
Okay.
So he was fired after a month.
Now, did the family say you have to do a good job because we vouched for you?
We put our reputation on the line to get you this job.
You don't have the choice to do a bad job.
No.
Okay, how old was he when he had this job?
17, maybe.
Okay.
So he crashed out of that, and you said there was another job that wasn't directly hired by the family.
What was his other job?
His other job was working at a barbecue place, basically as like a waiter.
Okay, got it.
To find job for a teenager.
And how did he do with that?
He was there for about three months, I think.
Not long enough, but we were like, oh, hey, that's longer.
The trend is growing.
And then?
I think he was trying to get another job at the same time that he thought was better because he wanted to just not be working as a waiter.
But he basically gave up the barbecue, that job before he had landed to secure the other one.
And then he didn't want to go back to the barbecue place because he felt that he'd burned his bridge there.
So hang on.
So, and how old was he at this time?
He might have been 17.
I think he was still 17, 17 or 18.
Yeah.
Okay.
So he crashed out of one job after a month.
Did you and his father and his mother and every adult in his vicinity say, you have to keep your next job?
You can't quit your next job.
Like, whatever you choose, you've got to stay there.
Because if you crash out of one job and then you crash out of another job, it's going to be real hard for anyone to hire you.
Yeah, we told him that he had to actually settle down and actually find something and stick with it.
And we're going to help him with his resume.
Okay, so no, about the second job at the restaurant, the barbecue place, right?
Did people tell him, like, you have to keep your job?
Because if you don't keep your job, no one's going to want to hire you if you keep quitting or getting fired?
We didn't tell him that because we thought it was implied of, well, okay, maybe you just weren't good in the other job and it just wasn't.
No, no, but he said he's going to go quit his barbecue job, right?
And whether you told it ahead of time, it would have been more helpful.
But he says, mom, dad, brother, I'm going to quit my barbecue job, right?
Because I got this other job lined up.
It's like, well, maybe, but you've got to actually get assigned on the line with this other job.
And if that doesn't work out, you're really toast, right?
So is he getting better?
I think he might have lied.
I think he might have...
He oversold how much he'd actually done to secure the next job.
Where, yeah, we were kind of.
Okay.
All right.
So he's not had any success.
So he doesn't have a resume.
I mean, in any practice, his resume is a negative, right?
Yeah, basically, yeah.
Okay, he would be better off saying, I was in a coma and I've never had a job, right?
Yeah, that would be, yeah, that would work.
Okay, so he made these bad choices when he was under the care, custody, and control of his parents, right?
Because he was still a minor.
Yes.
So why are you complaining about your brother and not your brother's parents?
I guess Maybe I'm seeing them through too positive a lens.
Well, they gave him more grace than they should have.
They raised him.
Who's responsible for how a child turns out?
Primarily, at least when they're still a minor.
Yes, but even 17, like when I was that age, I was held like I didn't, I didn't get like the same grace that he did.
So maybe that's why.
Maybe that's why I'm better off that I didn't actually get the grace.
By grace, you mean funding bad decisions.
I mean, I bug it off into the middle of the day.
No, no, by grace, by grace, you mean funding bad decisions.
Decisions funded.
Okay, that's fine.
You're still not acknowledging, and you can disagree with it, but what your parents are doing is funding his bad decisions.
Yes.
Okay, so whatever you pay, and when you're young, you kind of a hedonist, you kind of respond to incentives, right?
Because you don't have a lot of abstract principles as yet, and sacrifice doesn't really seem worth it.
So your parents are making excuses and funding bad decisions, right?
Yes.
Your parents did not hold them to account for quitting a job that they put their reputation on the line.
That's a serious business, man.
I mean, that's a serious business.
If I make a recommendation for someone and they screw up, my reputation takes a blow.
Because then the next person I want to recommend, I don't get, right?
The last guy he recommended.
He was terrible.
And if someone gets fired after a month, it means they've been performing badly for at least three weeks.
Well, the reason that he was given grace was because we knew that job, we knew that it had high turnover or people, it was a junior position and it was like a trial.
So it wasn't taken as seriously as it should have been, I guess.
I don't know what any of this means.
I have no idea what any of this means.
So there's high turnover.
So what?
You recommend the job.
You recommend your brother.
It's got to work out.
It has to work out.
I mean, listen, I've had, at one point in high school, I was working three jobs, none of which were fun.
Because you got to, right?
So, first of all, you told me there are no jobs around, and then you say he had three jobs, right?
Now, now he can't find jobs.
I don't mean that.
But it's not because there are no jobs around.
Did all the jobs just mysteriously vanish over the last 18 months?
Well, looking around, yes.
Like, in the specific area that we're in, yes.
So they did.
All the jobs vanished over the last 18 months?
Of course, not all the jobs that are, but a lot of those...
Something like for peaking his interest or is he so depressed?
Do we need to deal with the depression first and how do we do it?
And sorry, are you saying that he is depressed?
That's news to me, but that's fine.
You're saying he is depressed?
Oh, yeah, 100%.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that was, I should have started with that.
Yeah, he's really bummed out thinking, well, has he crashed out at jobs because he's depressed?
Or is he depressed?
Well, it probably doesn't matter at the end because he's depressed.
He doesn't have a girlfriend.
He doesn't have a life.
And I want him to fucking get out of whatever he's in.
Okay, so when did he first show the signs of depression, as you call it?
Probably, well, certainly when he screwed up with his first job, but we were kind to him.
And mom and dad were kind to him and thinking, well, it's okay.
It's all right.
It was your first job.
Why is it okay and all right that he screwed up his first job?
Because it doesn't feel constructive to yell at him and say like you failed.
Okay, but the option is, did I say yell at him?
No, no, but it's be harsher than, oh, clearly we're not being, you're suggesting we're not being harsh enough, clearly.
On that point.
You're using all of this.
What are you, a female?
What are you using?
All of this girly language.
Like, consequences are brutal and harsh and mean.
It's just consequences.
No, I mean, like, look, not doing well at a job that was a junior position.
It's like, not all jobs are good.
Some jobs are shit and they're worse.
No, no, no, no.
All jobs are shit when you're 17.
What are you going to be like the foot rob Masseuse agent for the World Bikini Modeling Championship?
All jobs suck when you're a teenager.
All managers suck when you're a teenager because good managers don't manage teenagers.
They manage professionals.
All jobs suck.
I didn't get a good job till I was in my mid to late 20s.
I started my working career at 10.
All jobs suck.
That's just a fact.
Because you have no particular skills.
All you are is a bit of mind and a lot of muscle.
You can carry food around.
How tough is that?
You can go and pick things out from the warehouse.
Like, holy, of course they suck.
Like, how is that not known?
Well, I didn't have that problem because I like every job that sucked when I moved on from it meant that I was always happier with the next job because I was always getting better and better.
And I can think back and think, oh, God, that's terrible.
But it's kind of a nice thought.
But either way, do you really want to make this conversation about how functional you are?
No, it's more how do I get him?
Or can I?
Do we just yell at him?
Like, no, I don't know what to do.
He's an adult, right?
Yes.
So why are you all babying him?
Because I care about him.
Okay, is it working?
Forget about how much you care.
This is, again, this estrogen-laced nonsense.
Forget about how much you care.
Is it good for him?
I don't.
Well, are you calling me because he's doing well or badly?
Badly, but I can't.
I don't think if you can rock with me...
Okay, bro.
Why are you making up all of this shit that I'm not talking about?
I don't even feel like we're having a conversation.
Oh, you yell at him.
You are too harsh with him.
I got to just pretend like he doesn't exist.
This is nothing that I'm talking about.
So where is this coming from that you're calling me up, asking me for advice, and then giving me all of these quote options that I've never suggested?
Oh, so you're saying I should just axe murder him and drop him in the canyon?
It's like, what?
No, I haven't said anything like that.
What are you genuinely talking about?
I don't understand.
I apologize, then.
I care a lot about him, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
So completely, I don't know if I can be the thing that helps him fix himself.
Like, he has to want to fix himself, but I don't know if I just need to shut up.
Okay, do you want the answer?
Yes, please.
Okay, here's the answer.
Here's the answer.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Usual caveats, right?
I could be wrong.
It's just my amateur opinion.
All right, so, but here's the answer.
He and your parents and you have gotten into a vicious cycle.
So the more he plays dead, the more you try to pump life into him.
The more that he goes rubber bones and limp in his life, the more everyone scurries around and tries to prop him up.
I mean, if you go to the gym and I do your exercises for you, or I move your arms with my strength and you don't really exert anything, do you get any stronger?
No, of course not.
Do you in fact get weaker?
Of course, yes.
So your brother has figured out, your brother has figured out that video games are more fun than going to work as a teenager.
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
Of course they are.
Of course they are.
And he's found that if he plays rubber bones and doesn't act, there are no consequences.
In fact, there's free money, free video games, free internet, no responsibility, sleep until noon, do whatever the hell you want.
All he has to do is nothing.
And everyone runs around and tries to fix his life.
Is that somewhat an accurate description of not necessarily the motivations, but the mechanics of the situation?
Yes.
So the more listless he becomes, the more everyone tries to fix him and gives him money.
Which means the more listless he becomes, which means the more everyone else tries to fix him and gives him money.
Yes.
Yeah.
So if he is rolling over and going limp, because that benefits him materially in the short run, is it possible, is it possible, and I say this, I know he's your brother, so I apologize if this sounds blunt.
Is it possible he's just not very smart?
Because, you know, IQ points can vary by eight to ten points between siblings, right?
Or more.
So is it possible that he's just not very smart?
Yes.
At least as smart as you.
Yeah, like, yeah, but that's a possibility, but it was like, yeah, no, what you said is right.
It's just if he's depressed, it's like, oh, like, you could just fix how do you help his depression?
And then that's what I'm saying.
Okay, hang on, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on.
You're racing away here, right?
Because I'm just asking about his intelligence.
All right.
So, has he, I mean, you've known Bro for almost 20 years, right?
And you've certainly been old enough to evaluate his intelligence.
And again, I say this with no prejudice.
People are not, in general, responsible for their own IQs, right?
So I say this is like being tall or short.
It's not people's fault.
I mean, there's a lot that you can do to vary it.
It's only 80%.
There's a lot to vary it.
But in how you've known him for as long as you've known him, what signs has he shown of significant intelligence?
And I say this totally open.
It could be any number of things.
But what signs, objective signs, has he shown of significant intelligence?
He likes to read, I guess, like the things that he's interested.
What kind of books does he like to read?
He likes to read.
Well, I got him The Lord of the Rings when he was probably 11 or 12, and he read those.
I don't know if that's right, because I had to know.
No, I mean, that's fine.
That's fine, but that's not.
People of average intelligence can read and look, you're above average intelligence.
I put all of my audience in the top 1% until proven otherwise.
Maybe that's a little different on X, but certainly that's my general approach, right?
So there's nothing wrong.
People of average intelligence can read and enjoy Lord of the Rings, so that's fine.
What else?
It's all the stuff that he rambles about, I guess, sometimes, of science and kind of technologies, interests.
Does an interest correlate with IQ?
Like, I don't, like, if he's interested in that.
It depends.
Yeah.
No, so if he's interested in science, like he just likes reading about science, that's fine.
And again, I'm not saying he's dumb, but you're obviously very smart.
So maybe you're 125 and he's 105 or 110.
But the question is, not does he just read about stuff, but does he understand and do it?
So it's one thing to read about science.
Let's just say he's really into math, right?
Okay, does he, I don't know, just doodle around with math or does he dig it and try to really understand theorems or equations?
Has he really dug in to try and understand quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity or anything like that?
Like, is he actually doing it or is he just kind of skimming it and reading about it?
No, he didn't do badly in school, though.
Like he did, like, he didn't fail anything.
He didn't fail math or science or anything like that.
Okay, hang on, bro.
Bro, come on.
Come on.
Hang on.
Hang on.
I'm really trying to be efficient here.
So I asked, does he show signs of significant intelligence?
You said, well, he didn't fail to dumb down school curriculum.
It's like, that doesn't give me anything.
Okay.
Well, I'm sorry.
I'm trying to not rag on him, if you know what I mean.
Like, it feels bad.
Like, yeah, like, is your sibling stupid?
Like, or let's say that.
I never said that.
See, again, again, you're just putting words.
Fair enough.
Yep.
Okay.
I said, is he super smart?
Here's the thing, right?
Like, so if you're a really good singer, like you just have a really good singing voice and you're musical and you've got perfect pitch and so on, right?
Then you're going to get really frustrated when other people fail to learn songs and or sing them badly, right?
So are you, maybe he's just an outlier.
Maybe, I don't know.
And the reason why I say that is that one of the marks of high intelligence or reasonably high intelligence or let's say above average intelligence, is the ability to sacrifice immediate pleasures for the sake of long-term goals.
That's true.
And that's the standard that's not being held.
So he says, my job sucks.
And the answer to that is, yes, of course it does.
Because you're a teenager.
All jobs suck as a teenager.
They're boring.
They're repetitive.
They're stupid.
And you have bad bosses.
That's life as a teenager.
But you have to keep the job because if you don't keep the job, then you can't move on to better things.
So the inability to sacrifice for the sake of long-term gains is generally, I mean, it could just be a value thing, but my first place to go would be that he's just not super smart.
I mean, he's probably above average intelligence.
But if you can clearly say to yourself, well, geez, I've got to work responsibly at this job because, you know, I need a resume and I need to get hired in the future and I need to do a good job and all of that.
Well, maybe he just doesn't have that kind of processing.
And maybe it's because he's specialized intelligence.
Maybe he's super smart, but just not in the cause and effect and deferral of gratification stuff.
But clearly, the family has tried to tell him that he should not, like the marshmallow test, right?
If you don't eat this marshmallow in the next 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows, right?
And a whole bunch of kids just grab the marshmallow and eat it, right?
Now, maybe he's for whatever reason.
Maybe it's got nothing to do with IQ.
That's his thing.
So if he can't process that you need to sacrifice happiness in the short run in order to achieve happiness in the long run, and he's not willing to commit to that, then the worst possible thing you can do is shield him from the consequences of bad decisions.
Because people either learn by reason or they learn by experience.
And if you guys are denying him the negative experience of his own bad decisions and he's not able to figure out the deferral of gratification on his own in a consistent way, you're crippling him.
Okay.
No, that's fair.
I can't argue against that.
I wanted to lean more on, is he depressed?
But what you've said is probably, I think he's a one marshmallow kind of kid, to be honest.
Well, and maybe he is.
I don't know.
I don't know the guy.
I certainly can't diagnose anyone.
Maybe he is depressed, but maybe he's depressed because the consequences of his bad decisions have accrued to him in that he didn't keep a job.
He's not asking girls out, right?
It's like the conversation you have to have with your sons about asking girls out, right?
So do you know if he's ever asked a girl out?
In school, I think he has, but no, not outside of it.
Not to my knowledge.
Okay, so he wants to avoid the stress, anxiety, and pain of rejection, right?
Okay.
And it's like, well, welcome to being a bro, bro.
We all.
That's the deal.
Like, we don't have to deal with menstrual cramps.
I mean, I think some of the people who reply to me on Twitter do, but even the men, but we don't have to deal with menstrual cramps.
We don't have to deal with endometriosis.
We don't have to deal with the pain of breastfeeding.
We don't have to deal with the pain of childbirth, and we don't have to deal with the weird hormones of menopause, right?
So I think it's a pretty good deal.
But what we do have to do is go out and ask women out.
And we're going to get shot down, right?
So if we're going to ask women, well, you know, we've got to get the birth rate up.
You've got to go and deal with childbirth and episiotomies and getting stitched up and your body getting messed up and hormones and you've got to deal with all of that.
Which is, you know, it's a lot of stress on the body, a lot of strain on the mind and heart and soul and all that kind of.
Well, then what do the men got to do?
Well, we got to go ask girls out.
That's what we got to do.
That's our side of the whole bargain.
And anyone who thinks that it's a bad bargain doesn't understand women at all, right?
So women have to suffer and men have to suffer and men's suffering is much less.
So that's just another example.
So he's like, oh, I'm too scared to ask girls out.
I'm like, yeah, I get that.
That's called being a bro.
That's our cross to bear, if you want to call it.
That's not a bad cross to bear at all.
But you have to.
You have to go and ask girls out.
And I'm old enough to see, I know the guys, and I'm not saying your brothers pass this, right?
I know the guys who didn't ask girls out when they were teenagers and in their early to mid-20s.
I know the guys who didn't ask girls out.
Do you know what happened to them?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Yeah.
They're alone forever.
Because there's a window.
There's a window.
Because women need to be able to trust a man's courage and resolution.
Because he's got to go out there and fight with other men for the scarce goodies of the modern economy, right?
Or the ancient economy, if you want to look at sort of hunting-gathering stuff, right?
So women have to be able to look at a man and say, bro's got some balls, right?
Now, if Bro gets to 25, 26, 27, and he's never even asked a girl out, any woman of any quality is going to say what?
Well, fuck off.
I've got better people to have a look at.
Your inner dialogues are very harsh.
No, she's not going to say that, but she's going to ease me personally out of the situation.
Well, it would be fair.
Well, she's just going to be like, well, whatever's going on for you, it's not compatible with what I'm looking for.
It's sort of like if you've not had a job by the age of 25, 26, 27, only the government or crazy people, but I repeat myself, are going to hire you.
Because if you've been 10 years, like you get a job at 15 or 16 or whatever, if you've been 10 years and you've never had a job, I don't want to hire you because you don't have any work habits.
You don't have any discipline.
And clearly, you're not smart enough to realize that you better damn well get a job, even if it's not a great job, so you have some kind of resume.
Well, you've lasted more than a month or three.
So he is not getting stern advice.
Stern is not harsh, stern is not abusive, it's just factual.
You have to ask a girl out, or you're going to be alone forever, most likely.
And the other thing too, given the prevalence of porn in the world these days, any woman who meets a guy who's 25, 26, 27, not had a girlfriend, he's got a really firm handshake, what does she immediately know?
What does she immediately know about him?
Kuma, 100%.
Yeah, porn addict.
100%.
And it's the same thing if an employer, oh, you've never had a job and you're 26.
It means that you're an expert at exploiting people, whether it's your parents or the government or someone.
You're an expert at exploiting people and you don't take any pride in productivity.
So who's going to want to hire someone like that?
So it seems to me that you guys shielding him from consequences is when we shield people from consequences, what we communicate to them is they're not good enough.
Right?
They're not good enough.
If your parents are paying for his rent, his food, his healthcare, his computers, his internet, his cell phone, his data plan, if his parents are paying for all of that, what they're saying is we don't fundamentally believe that you can do it on your own.
And they're communicating to him, as are you, that there's something really wrong with him.
Now, if there is something really wrong with him, yeah, if there is something really wrong with him, maybe he is catastrophically depressed or something like that, then what should happen?
Well, like, we floated the idea of therapy, of like actually going to speak to someone.
if it's depression or like, is it depression or like just being lazy?
It's like, well, I don't know what you, Oh, I don't understand this language at all.
And forgive me if I am not understanding something obvious.
Did you say you floated the idea of therapy?
We didn't like say you have to go to therapy.
I'm sorry, I don't understand.
If you're paying his bills, you're responsible for him.
You don't float the idea.
If you have an employee, do you float the idea that he get off his ass and do some work?
Well, just floating the idea.
No pressure.
No.
You tell them, like, this or like nothing.
It's final.
Yeah, you have to do your work or you're fired.
Your parents are his employers.
This is what I don't understand about any of this.
Your parents are paying his bills.
He is their employee.
I don't know how you float the idea.
If he needs to get to a therapist, then I'm a huge fan of talk therapy, right?
As you know.
So if Bro needs to get his ass to a therapist, he goes to a therapist.
Now, of course, he's perfectly free to say no, just as an employee is perfectly free to say, if you boss man, I'm not doing your work.
I'm rebelling against the system, man.
It's like, okay, well, then go rebel on your own dime.
Go to therapy.
If he's depressed, yeah, go to therapy.
I'm a huge fan of therapy.
Go to therapy.
I don't want to go to therapy.
Okay.
You're free to do that.
But I'm not paying your bills.
What you said before, that was new.
I didn't actually think that if he was depressed, it could actually be downstream from my parents basically covering for his mistakes, of him being like a baby.
I didn't actually think of that at all.
If he's not super smart, and this is why withholding consequences doesn't affect people of high intelligence nearly as much as it affects people of lower intelligence.
And please, Lord above, let us never entertain a shred of prejudice or looking down upon people who happen to have lower intelligence.
It's just largely an accident of fate.
So we don't want to feel superior for being smarter, and we certainly don't want to look at people, we don't want to look down at people who have less intelligence.
They do a lot of fantastic stuff.
I mean, it's not you and me who's running the infrastructure of the planet.
So the fact that we are very smart, that's good stuff about that, but there's also really, really great stuff at the people who actually keep society running at a very practical level.
So all honor and respect to people like that.
If you're a great singer, I think that's great, but not everyone can be a great singer because somebody's got to build the concert hall, right?
So we're all reliant upon each other, and every level of intelligence should have great respect for every other level of intelligence.
So it's not about looking down upon him.
And it's certainly not valid or fair to get frustrated.
I mean, if you happen to be six foot six, you can be a basketball player.
If your brother is five foot six, he can't.
But it's not because he's lazy, right?
He just can't.
And so maybe he's somebody who's not quite as smart in a family of really smart people.
And they're just like, well, why don't you get it?
And I just talk to him again, and I'll try to make him understand.
But less intelligent people learn much better through experience.
So again, I don't know any final answer.
But what I will say is that if he's depressed, get his ass to a therapist.
If he doesn't want to go to a therapist, that's fine.
Then he's got to go and get a job.
It's like, well, I can't get my own place.
Yeah, welcome to being a kid.
Welcome to being a teenager.
Unfortunately, shitty government schools means that you don't graduate with any job skills.
It's sad, but that's just the way that it is.
Ask him deeply about what kind of propaganda.
His experience as a white male, he could get hit really hard with propaganda.
And so, you know, dig in, but for heaven's sake, stop thinking of him as someone you've got to move his arms through him in order for him to gain any muscle, if that makes sense.
That does.
Now, that's fair.
No.
Thank you for that.
I didn't think about it that way.
Yeah.
You're very welcome.
And I say this with great affection for your family as a whole.
And I'm sure it can be resolved, but people have got to stop living his life for him.
It's not working.
And I hope you'll drop me a line.
Let me know how it goes.
And if you want to do a call in, we can do that as well.
I'm happy to do a call in with you and your brother and your parents if you want.
So you can go to freedomain.com slash call to set that up.
And I think that's a good question.
I'll appreciate that.
Yeah.
Appreciate that.
Thank you for the call.
Thank you.
You have a good day.
You too, man.
Lord Albert.
Do you have Prince Albert in a can?
Yes.
Well, you'd better let him out.
All right, Lord Albert, thank you for your patience.
I know it's been a long chat, but it seemed important to me.
And I'm happy to hear what's on your mind.
Hey, man.
I had no idea I was about to pop up just like that.
Well, you know, some idea requested to talk, but no one.
Yeah, it was great listening.
I was just a bit distracted.
Yeah, I mean, like, what kind of things do you think could be an interesting topic to discuss?
Okay, I'm going to wait.
I'm going to remove you, and I'm going to wait until you have good topics because this is a show for listeners.
I actually thought the brother was calling in.
That would be kind of ironic.
Dan, What's on your mind, my friend?
Dan, Dan, the maybe chatty man.
Hello.
Yes, sir.
Can you hear me, sir?
Yes.
Listening here from Brazil, actually for more than a decade, you gave me the final push that I needed into anarcho-capitalism.
So it's an honor to be here, sir.
And I apologize in advance for the terrible English.
Oh, please, please do not.
I massively respect anyone who could speak more than one language.
I've certainly tried in my life.
I spoke German when I was little.
I tried to learn French, and I got basically up to restaurant-level French, and that's about it.
So I have huge respect for people who know more than one language, so don't apologize for anything.
And actually, I had a guy on my ex say, oh, you went to Brazil.
And it's like, I did.
I gave speeches in Sao Paulo, and I went to Rio, and absolutely loved my time in Brazil.
And it's a beautiful country.
And I hate to say it's sort of a cliche, just wonderful people, but everybody there was just fantastic to spend time around.
So I really do appreciate and love the country.
But what's on your mind?
I appreciate that, man.
You brushed real quick with a previous scholar about the pitfalls and traps of nostalgia.
And I was wondering if you could expand on that, just to provide some context.
I'm a highly nostalgic person.
I'm 35 years old.
And I engage into nostalgic related hobbies, more specifically collecting.
I like to collect physical media that was meaningful to me during my upbringing, such as movies, music, and video game stuff, retro computers.
And outside of my job and my family, that's the thing that occupies most of my time.
It brings me a lot of joy, brings me a lot of meaning.
And I was wondering if you could expand on some of the emotional traps and pitfalls of nostalgia and some of the psychological and philosophical strategies to avoid them.
Well, let me ask you this.
Do you think that your nostalgia is costing you anything, if anything?
Well, not me personally, but I've seen in several collectors' communities, people just out of nowhere burning out of nostalgia.
So I can imagine some reasons, but they often seem very emotionally exhausted.
They often use the word burning out.
Oh, I'm burning out of collecting.
And all of a sudden, they sell all of their collections for dirt cheap.
And I can imagine that there has to be something to do with some of the melancholy that can be brought by such hobbies, right?
Living.
So are you calling on behalf of others?
In other words, you say, well, look, I have no problem with nostalgia.
It's a wonderful pastime for me, but I know other people who are unhappy about it.
Is that, are you calling on behalf of others?
Which is not a big criticism.
I'm just curious.
No, sir, I'm not.
It's on behalf of myself because every time I see those things happen, at least to my view.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I asked you, sorry to be Mr. Nitpicky Naggy.
Okay.
But I asked you, is there anything negative that is accruing in your life or anything bad out of nostalgia?
And you said, no, but I know other people for whom it's really bad.
So then if I say, are you calling on behalf of other people?
You say, no.
But I can't...
Why would I warn you about the dangers of nostalgia if nostalgia is not a problem for you at all?
Well, because I...
Because I'm worried about falling into those pitfalls myself in the future.
But the problem is that if you're saying, why are people, staff that you're not talking to, unhappy, I can't answer that.
If you're unhappy, right?
It's sort of like going to a doctor and saying, well, how do you help someone who has bad headaches?
Right?
And you say, well, the doctor says, well, do you have bad headaches?
And you say, no, no, no.
I don't get any bad headaches, but I know some people who get really bad headaches.
What would the doctor say?
Send them in.
No, I see what you're saying.
I guess my worry stems from the fact that sometimes I can see myself starting to go through that melancholic route a little bit.
Okay, so it is a bit of a problem.
So it is a bit of a problem.
Right.
Okay.
I just wanted to make sure because, I mean, I can't talk about the issues with people who aren't on the call because I can't, you know, I mean, that's hearsay, right?
I mean, why is my friend unhappy?
I don't know.
Have your friend call me, right?
So tell me a little bit about some of the melancholy that you experience in the realm of nostalgia.
Well, memories about loved ones that already passed away and sometimes a certain piece of media like a movie or a song or a video game.
It's like, oh, I remember playing this while my dad was alive, for example.
And sometimes I can bring a little bit of melancholy and that sentiment of, oh, the good times were behind me, right?
And all I'm doing right now is trying to remember them to push through the present and the present that sucks and the future that potentially sucks.
Okay.
So what do you think is behind the thought?
And I don't have an answer.
I'm just obviously curious.
What do you think is behind the thought that your best years are in the past?
Well, that's not rational at all.
It's not rational.
No, I didn't ask you to evaluate its rationality.
What did I ask?
Yeah, I guess it's just inherent neuroticism in my personality that...
What did I ask?
You're wondering where the melancholy thoughts stem from.
What did I ask?
I want you to have nostalgia to about 15 seconds ago when I asked you a question.
And if you're dwelling in the past, if you're dwelling in the past, I'm just asking to don't go back 20 years, man.
Just go back 15 seconds.
That's all I'm asking.
What did I ask?
I'm not trying to kill you.
I just want to know if you're listening.
Absolutely.
I apologize.
Sorry.
Could you please repeat your question?
What do you think the thoughts are behind the idea that your best years are in the past?
What are the thoughts behind it.
I often think how great it was to just be able to enjoy different types of media without politics involved and just enjoy innocent entertainment without being yelled at for being a male, a heterosexual male, that kind of stuff.
No agenda, no politics on entertainment really.
And also just a big fondness for the past.
I just can't put a rational motivation behind it, really, to be honest with you.
Okay.
So, and I certainly agree with you about woke is destroying art for sure.
I get all of that.
But art being free is very rare, right?
Because in the past, all art had to conform with the worship of the king or the worship of a god or the authority of the church.
So agendas have destroyed art on a regular basis, and it's quite rare for there to be an agenda less or less of an agenda art.
So I get all of that.
So let me put out a possibility.
And you can tell me if it makes any sense.
And then we'll get to Catherine, who will be the last caller.
So if you could hang in there, I'll try and keep this brief.
Not to, you know, if we need to be longer, that's fine.
But maybe you have nostalgia for a time when you were more innocent about evil.
Before you ate the Garden of Eden, before you ate of the tree, ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
When you were not alarmed at the ascendancy and power that evil has in the world.
In other words, when you had maybe more optimism about the way that the world might or could go.
When you thought your father would live forever, but he died.
When you thought that the world would become more free, but hashtag Argentina accepted, in generally it hasn't.
It's got less free in many ways.
But also, in some ways, more free.
I know that sounds really paradoxical, right?
But I mean, as a guy who was in the free speech heyday of 2006 to 2016, it was a glorious time, unprecedented in human history, for freedom.
And the fact that we're able to have this conversation is amazing and remarkable and beautiful and wonderful.
But maybe nostalgia has to do with going back to a time when you had more security and certainty and optimism and less of a knowledge of the power and control that evil has in the world.
That definitely does make sense and it resonates.
And we're all drawn back to the innocence of childhood, for sure.
We're all drawn back to the innocence.
I mean, it is a well from which we can refresh ourselves because sometimes if we stare too much, right, there's an old saying by Nietzsche, be careful when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you.
So those of us who study evil and its machineries, we need to go back and refresh ourselves with optimism.
And sometimes that means going back in time.
Every couple of years, I'll boot up an emulator for the Atari 800 that I had when I was 11 or 12.
Hell yeah.
And I will, it was like the last time I did this, which I think was last year or the year before, I saw, actually I didn't even boot up the emulator.
I saw a video of like top 20 Atari 800 games and there was a game, which was a dungeon game, and I saw the snake that moved around, and I was like, ah, it hit me.
It's like, ah, I just remember that, right?
I still have somewhere on a computer installed the Ultima 4.
I played Ultima 3 and Ultima 4 when I was in my teens, and I haven't booted it up or played it because, you know, I'm kind of busy.
But I do...
And that's not what happens.
What happens is you can create a good environment in your personal life, but the world in general is not a good place.
And COVID, of course, revealed that pretty clearly, even to most people who had any kind of eyes open.
So I think nostalgia is, do you want to think back, oh man, I was in prison maybe, or I was young, and I thought I was going to break out and get into a better place.
And then you break out and you realize that there's just bigger prisons out there, but you can create a little corner of paradise where you live and do the work that you can to promote virtue and interfere with the plans of evil as best you can.
But I think nostalgia is for innocence.
And innocence has a kind of beauty to it.
I mean, this is why we don't show war footage to our eight-year-old kids, right?
But when you grow up, you learn just about corruption and violence and the evildoers who run the show.
And there is a certain amount of...
Yes, yes, definitely.
Something that I think a lot about is the bubble of happiness.
I call it a bubble of happiness that was around me when I was a kid.
And that bubble was created by someone else, right?
By my parents and their sacrifice, their many sacrifices to create that for me and my brother.
And so correct me if I'm wrong.
What you're saying is now the purpose of nostalgia is to remember those times and sort of create that bubble for myself and for others now.
Now it's my responsibility to pass that forward and create that bubble of happiness for my children in the future and even for myself even.
Yes, but parents create that bubble of happiness by portraying to their children the idea that the world is more benevolent than it is.
Like you can't say to your kids, well here it's real nice and rational, but out there it's kind of crazy and people are addicted to violence and corruption and a lot of people.
So you give your kids the illusion that the happiness and rationality in the home is somehow representative Of the world, but then of course when they become teenagers, they go out into the world and you have to prepare them for that.
And that is not fun.
I remember doing a show many years ago called Shape the Hell Up World because I was embarrassed to introduce the planet as a whole to my young daughter.
And so I think that's what nostalgia has to do with.
I mean, not always, but I think certainly for an audience like this, it probably is the closest thing.
Right.
Right.
And if you go back too often to that well of childhood, then you end up living with that optimism that is not rational in the world that it is, that is.
In other words, you just spend your whole time parked at the gas station refueling rather than actually driving anywhere.
And maybe that's why people, eventually, this melancholy overtakes them and they realize that their addiction to the past is paralyzing them from actually doing things in the present.
And that's when they just sell their whole collection.
And transfer the curse of inactivity and looking back to other people, I guess.
Right.
Right.
Okay, Dan, listen, I appreciate that.
I'm going to just, we've had somebody waiting patiently, so I appreciate that.
I hope that that question was helpfully answered.
Ms. Catherine.
Catherine, what is on your mind?
Hello, hello.
Hello, how's it going?
Good.
Pleasure.
I'm doing something today that makes me feel excited.
Like, you know, when you're a mischievous teenager and you are, like, writing a newspaper that is very silly and being a devil's advocate and that sort of thing.
I'm going to Mount Royal University with Dr. Frances Widowson.
She's friends with Elizabeth Weiss.
And she's a wonderful heretic.
And she was fired from the university wrongfully.
So we're going to be walking around the university doing a walk and talk about indigenization in the university because they have all of these sacred objects.
And I don't know if you've noticed about how this like neo-religious sort of superstition is destroying science, including like Elizabeth Weiss pointed out, how they're reburying bones.
And recently in Canada, they found ancient skeletons, the Kamloops band, found ancient skeletons, and they're claiming them as their ancestors.
They've put up 24-hour security and they're not allowing any scientists to go in and take DNA samples or study them or anything.
So what are your thoughts on how we're kind of becoming superstitious and like the our universities and our governments are not remaining secular?
They're giving precedence to these superstitions.
Yeah, certainly I had some direct experience of the Indigenous experience when I worked up north in northern Canada.
And sort of there's three very sort of brief vignettes that I'll provide.
One is going onto a native reservation and just seeing the absolute squalor and how badly the children were treated.
The second is I remember being in town, coming out of a bar at sort of one in the morning, seeing a lot of Indigenous children walking around with no pants on while their parents were drinking.
And again, I'm not saying this is all, but it's, you know, child abuse and neglect in the Indigenous community is extremely high and really tragic, of course.
And the third is, I remember driving back to our camp from town after going in to, you know, every now and then, every couple of weeks you just have to go in for, you know, a little civilization time.
And I was driving back and there was this woman, about middle-aged, and she was staggering along by the side of the road.
This was at about one in the morning, again.
And I stopped, of course, and asked her what was going on, why she was kind of in the middle of nowhere, stumbling along by the side of the road.
And she said that she was in a pickup truck.
She was a native woman, an indigenous woman.
And she said that she was in a pickup truck, and she had refused to give oral sex to the men in the pickup truck, and they had thrown her out of the truck.
And she was actually kind of dazed and bleeding, and so on.
So I picked her up, and I drove her back to the hospital, made sure she got checked in and got taken care of, and so on.
And again, these are vignettes.
They're not indicative of everything, but they're also not completely irrelevant to the situation.
And the fact that people are not, if they really cared, of course, about how the children are treated and the levels of sexual abuse and neglect and physical abuse and alcoholism is just catastrophically high.
And if we really tried to build up a sort of set of policies from the ground up saying what is best for the children in these indigenous communities, we wouldn't have anything like the system that we have right now.
And so it is really tragic what is going on in these communities.
And, of course, the left has this...
But at the same time, the left has always had this addiction to this Rousseauian myth of the noble savage.
That, you know, when we lived in harmony with nature and they used every part of the buffalo.
And of course, none of it's true.
I mean, the violence levels in native populations around the world is extremely high.
And if you look about the Aztecs, like, how is it that the Spanish were able to conquer the Aztecs with only a couple hundred conquistadors?
And that's because every local tribe hated them so much that they just joined up and did everything they could to overthrow them.
And they were just brutal and violent.
And I've talked about this with regards to the indigenous population in America, that the violence, the slave-owning, rape as a weapon of war, occasional attempts at genociding other tribes.
But there's this idea that, and it's really sort of pushed, and it almost always comes from the left, which is that civilization is bad, but the natives are good.
I think Graham Greene is a fine actor, played this in the Kevin Costner movie about the West.
And just this idea that we're alienated from nature, and we live these artificial lives in these plastic boxes, and to be at one with nature and so on.
It's like being at one with nature generally means dying from a cut that gets infected or living a life.
Because for most of Western history, the view was that we were primitive and it was bad, and we're now civilized and it's better, right?
So this is the argument that Hume makes this argument, that, no, sorry, not Hume.
Makes the argument that life in the past was brutish, nasty, and short and bad and all of that.
I think it was Hegel, right?
So, sorry, I've got my H's a little mixed up, but we'll survive and push onwards.
So, the idea that life in a state of nature is nasty, bloody, brutish, and short contrasts with the Rossolian idea that man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.
This idea that in the past, everything was great, and in the modern world, everything is bad.
Now, in some ways, I can understand that, because in the past, like way back in the day, everybody was broke.
Everybody was broke.
I mean, the distance between the chief and his followers was not very great.
As you start to get a more complex society and you start to get the Pareto principle, sorting people into the most able and the least able, then what happens is some people end up not with twice the wealth or three times the wealth, maybe, because who knows how you even really count much wealth when you're roaming around in tents, shooting your arrows at the butt end of a buffalo.
It's really hard to say, well, the chief is so much better off.
It's like, well, not that much better off, but Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are millions of times wealthier than the average person.
So when you start to get sort of modern free markets and meritocracies and technology, the ability to save and store capital and so on, then you start to end up with a bunch of differences.
So I think people look back and say, well, gee, back in the day, it was much more egalitarian, but it was only egalitarian because people didn't have property rights or the philosophy of self-ownership or the philosophy of the non-aggression principle or something like that.
And so as you start to get more freedom, you start to get more and more differences between rich and poor, able and less able, competent and less competent, hardworking and less hardworking.
It really tends to accrue, and then that can even accrue over generations to the point where you end up with these semi-permanent oligarchs.
So I sort of can understand from a low-rent, there wasn't that much difference in the past, but that's only because everybody was living barely above subsistence level.
But for the envious, you know, there's a lot of people who would rather live in a subsistence-level society if that meant they didn't feel lesser than other people because they're sort of consumed by envy and jealousy and so on.
So it's a big complex topic, but I hope that that gives you at least a few thoughts on it.
But go ahead.
Yeah, that's absolutely brilliant.
What you said about the buffalo, I started questioning that at a very young age because, you know, they'd say, you know, they used every part of the buffalo and then they'd take us through the museum and they'd be like, here's where they used to run a thousand buffalo off of a cliff.
You know, they show you a picture.
And there's all these bones at the bottom.
That's how we know that all the buffalo were run off the cliff.
As soon as they got horses, you know, they used to run on foot, but as soon as they got horses and they could blast guns in the air and really scare a huge herd of buffalo, they basically made them go extinct.
And Sir John A. MacDonald had to send rations of food to try and help them not starve to death at one point in time.
And then as far as like poverty goes, there was the potlatch on the west coast.
And so you'd have a band that would throw a big party and give away a whole bunch of stuff.
But the deal was, is that you had to return, it kind of turned into this pissing contest.
And so what would happen is that the wealthy tribe would give away so much stuff that it would end up impoverishing the smaller tribes when they had to return the favor.
So it was the smaller tribes that asked the Canadian government to outlaw the potlatch, which was finally outlawed in 74.
But because people have this like Noble Savage trope and because they feel guilty, so now the universities, they have sacred bundles that are on display.
Just interrupt real briefly.
The Noble Savage stuff is to make people feel guilty so they'll give up resources.
But sorry, go ahead.
Yes, so we're dealing with a huge with undrip.
You know, we're dealing with huge resource extractions in the Commonwealth.
But in the universities, they have religious ceremonies with sacred bundles and sacred objects on display throughout the university.
So that's what Francis and I are going to go and talk about today.
And I think that like your thoughts are going to help a lot, you know, the whole idea that we have this kind of idea in our mind that their religion is better and we should feel guilty for their current situation.
So we need to exalt them in the university.
But by doing so, we're compromising the secularization of the school.
And so with that...
My apologies.
I interrupted.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's okay.
With that, that leads to anti-science and it leads to things like what Elizabeth Weiss talks about with the reburying of bones and all the lost knowledge that comes with that.
Yeah, I mean, I would be thrilled if the Indigenous population put as much care and concern into their current children as they did their ancient ancestors.
But I'm not holding my breath on that because there's less profit, I think, and less power in that.
And if you want more on sort of my thoughts about Indigenous issues, I did a wee speaking tour in Australia where my central theme was the history of the Aboriginals in Australia and what they were like.
And so talking about the sort of moral improvement that happened and so on, right?
So you can check those out.
You can go to FDRpodcast.com and just do a search for Australia and those speeches will come up.
So, all right, well, listen, I mean, it's a brave topic to take on, and I hope that you guys have a good set of meetings and stimulate lots of good thought.
And thank you for sharing it.
And thank you guys for dropping by today.
A real pleasure, of course.
I'm going to take a wee break from Philosophy and I'm going to get ready for tonight.
We have a live stream that is going on at 7 p.m. Eastern be broadcast right here on X and other platforms as well.
I'm sorry to the people we didn't get to.
I will try and get more done of these done.
But we had a good old jawbone with the Australian, so that's always good.
And it keeps him, you know, I want to keep the Australians on the phone because it keeps them away from the giant spiders, Komodo dragons, and I think ballrocks that regularly stalk the Outback.
So it's really important for me to keep the Australian audience safe.
And that's my plan.
Alright, thanks everyone so much.
Have yourself a glorious, wonderful afternoon.
Hopefully I'll speak to you tonight.
And thank you to all of the great callers.
I really do appreciate your feedback.
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