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July 24, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:14:39
How to Love Anxiety! Twitter/X Space
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Well, good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Stefan Moll and you from Free Domain.
Free Domain.
Freedomain.com slash NA to help out the show.
Now, Alan Watts.
Alan, W-A-T-T-S.
I was going to talk about this anyway, so I might as well talk about it on a space and get your thoughts and your feedback.
So Alan Watts, you know, I got to tell you.
He's got this picture with these hippie love beads and he's got an unlit pipe clenched in his jaw, staring soulfully at the camera, and it's just hippie-dippy crap.
And he was a mystic, an Eastern Buddhist, and he had three appalling vices.
Now, listen, I mean, I'm not saying people have to be perfect.
Lord knows I'm not.
But come on, man, if you're going to claim to be wise, if you're going to claim to be able to deal with negative emotions, how about you're not a triple addict in your life?
Does that disprove his arguments?
No, but it makes me uninterested in them.
In the same way that if a fat guy is trying to sell you his diet book, you're not going to check into the diet book because he's fat.
So just for those of you who don't know, Alan Watts was a chain smoker.
He was a rampant alcoholic.
And he was, I don't know, you could say womanizer.
I would categorize it as man whore, married three times, slept with everything that moved.
And that's trashy.
And then he died, I assume, as an accumulation of his physical vices.
He died at the age of 58.
Hey, my age.
So we, of course, know, those of us who studied this stuff at all, we know that child abuse leads to addiction.
The addict is trying to feel normal.
He's not trying to get a high.
He's just trying to get away from a low caused by early childhood trauma, for the most part, for the most part.
And he was not rigorous.
He didn't work from first principles.
He was not syllogistic.
And that's lazy.
I really dislike this.
I really loathe, loathe, dislike is loath, loathe this mystical, we are one with the universe and just all of this trash and crap and garbage.
And I will tell you as a whole, as a whole, I have a near bottomless contempt for most prior philosophers.
I would just tell you straight up, I have near bottomless contempt for most prior philosophers.
And I've done a whole history of philosophers series, which you can get at freedomain.locals.com.
You can subscribe.
It's a 23-part series from all the way from the pre-Socratics all the way up to just before Immanuel Kant.
And I sort of say why.
Were they brilliant?
Absolutely.
Many of them, of course, infinitely smarter than me.
But, but, maybe it's because almost no philosophers have had much experience in the business world with their own money.
And the business world just teaches you to prioritize stuff when your own money and your own future is on the line.
Or maybe it's just good old Anglo-Saxon practicality that emanates from my Irish sod-based soul.
I don't know.
But philosophers have not dealt with childhood.
Philosophers rampantly avoid the ethics of parenting and childhood.
And as a result, they deliver endless successions of humanity into the arms and claws of evildoers.
So just, that's my particular perspective.
How can philosophy be 5,000 years old or 3,000 years old?
You could probably argue 3,000.
It's a little hard to find stuff earlier than that.
How can philosophy be 3,000 years old?
And no philosopher has taken on childhood prior to me.
No philosopher has taken on parenting.
You can find scraps of it sort of here and there.
John Locke talks about it a little bit and so on.
But philosophers don't do childhood and childhood is the source of corruption and evil.
So why?
Why wouldn't they do that?
So anyway, when I come across Alan Watts, my eyes roll faster than a Vegas slot machine cranking out lemons.
So I came across or saw on my feed on X. Thanks, Elon.
Appreciate it.
Anyway, so there's Alan Watts with his hippie beads and his clenched pipe and his roomy eyes staring soulfully into the camera.
And Alan Watts says, no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
You know, if Alan Watts had been sort of anxious about maybe not being a shitty dad, because you can't have three marriages and a bunch of affairs and be a good father.
You just can't.
Monogamy is the best place and the safest place for children to grow up in.
Like two-parent household, monogamous household has developed, at least in the West, and as it has in most places, because it is the safest place for children to be raised in.
So he didn't give a shit about his children.
He was a terrible father.
Because if you give a shit about your children, you try to take care of your health.
You don't burden them with an early death.
You don't run and jump to a succession of marriages.
You don't fornicate with everything with a breathing hole and a vagina hole.
So, shitty husband, shitty dad, triple addict.
And I'm supposed to take this guy seriously when he tells me about life?
Are you kidding?
It's embarrassing.
It's embarrassing.
And I, you know, I don't know.
Did he take drugs?
I haven't really looked that much into his life, but everybody who's into mysticism, who's from the West, everybody who's into mysticism is just using it as a cover to manage their trauma through drugs.
So if he'd had a little bit of anxiety about whether he was a good or a bad man, he might have been a better father.
He might have protected his children more.
If he'd worried, maybe just worried a little bit about the effects of rampant alcoholism and chain smoking.
He might have lived to 60.
He's a guru.
And a guru is just a man whore with hippie beads for the most part.
So he says, no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that's going to happen.
So what I wrote was, if my ancestors hadn't worried about food, we wouldn't have made it through the winter, you pretentious douchebag.
And it is, he is a pretentious douchebag.
Oh, no, but he's so deep and he's no.
Show me his syllogisms.
Show me his arguments.
Show me his empirical evidence.
Show me where he restrained himself out of the course of objective virtue.
Show me where he philosophized, did philosophy, reasoning from first principles according to logic and evidence.
No, he just rambled, spoke a bunch of shit, confused a bunch of people, and offers you a release from the necessities of living.
Now, if he'd have said excess anxiety is not helpful, I mean, okay, I mean, I would accept that as somewhat true, but it's self-definition.
It's a self-definition, right?
So if you say an excess of something is unhelpful, well, the unhelpful stuff is contained in the word excess.
You're overthinking.
It's like, it doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything.
A criticism has to reference something other than itself.
Overeating is bad.
It's like, but you just put the word over in.
So you've defined it as negative by an excess.
And you say, so basically it's saying an excess is bad.
It's like, okay, but it doesn't really help anyone because what is an excess?
What is a deficiency?
How do you know?
Too much worry is bad.
Okay.
So how much is too much worry?
How do you mad?
It's just saying an excess is a negative, but the negative is contained within the definition of it's an excess.
It's pointless.
But he's saying no amount of anxiety, no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.
So what he's offering you is stupidity, idiocy.
You know, there was a famous song by Bobby Farron as a jazz master.
This Bobby Farron had a song.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
Be happy.
And I just remember somebody had a piece of graffiti.
There were two pieces of graffiti that I saw that really resonated with me.
One was in my high school, and it said, mutate now before the post-war rush.
Because of course, we were all growing up under the shadow of nuclear war.
Mutate now before the post-war rush.
And another one was somebody said when this song was very popular, Don't Worry, Be Happy, they said, don't worry, be a dummy.
It's kind of true.
Because those of us who grew up sort of the ice people, the snow people, we grew up with long winters.
Well, we had to be anxious.
We had to worry.
We had to worry.
It's a long-ass winter.
And if you don't get it right, if you don't get it right, you're dead.
You die.
You starve to death.
You can't make it.
Now, of course, in the tropics, Ideman, you know, you can lie in your hammock.
There's food everywhere.
There's no winter.
You never have to worry about storage and all of that kind of stuff.
So sort of the famous chill of the Caribbean and the islands and all of that.
I don't know why you stress and worry.
Just relax, enjoy life.
It's like, oh, well, that's fine for your ancestors because you didn't have winter to deal with.
And so, yeah, it's a different culture.
It's a different mindset.
And nothing wrong with it.
It's perfectly appropriate.
It's not negative to not worry in the tropics.
And it's not negative to worry in cold climates.
I mean, some of the highest IQ people in the world, the East Asians, Orientals, they used to be called, before that became, I think, disorienting.
And they came out of Siberia, which is some of the worst winters really in the known universe.
Now, of course, there are people who have even worse winters, almost a perpetual winter, which would the Inuit or the Eskimo up north, but they didn't do agriculture.
They just did hunting.
So it's a different matter.
They can still get their food year-round.
So they don't have the same constraints.
But when we went agricultural, we had to bottle, jam, store, freeze, or whatever, make sure that we had enough food for the winter.
So you get anxiety.
Oh, do I have enough food?
And those who didn't have anxiety didn't live.
Now, those who have too much anxiety may be stress out and burns out their adrenals and they drown in cortisol and whatever it is, right?
So too much.
So anxiety or worry or concern falls into the Aristotelian mean.
Too little and you don't see dangers coming.
Too much and your anxiety has now become the predator.
So think of ye old zebra, right?
We'll just go back to our good stripey friends to make these analogies because that's so vivid, right?
So go back to the zebra.
The zebra thinks, oh, wait, is that something moving in the grass over there?
Hang on.
I think that grass is moving, that tall grass is moving kind of weird.
Now, if the zebra has no worry, no concern, no anxiety, then the zebra dies.
I bet you it's just the wind in the grass.
And it's zebra drumsticks for all of the lion cubs.
On the other hand, if the zebra is too jumpy and the zebra worries about everything, even the little bit of grass, even a faint smell, and keeps running and charging all over the place, then the zebra is expending useless calories and thus lowering its chances of survival.
Also, the zebra by running all over the place might trip and fall, might break a leg, might stumble, might whatever, right?
Might run into lions by accident, right?
So you've got to have the right amount of caution in life.
And absolute idiots, sophists come along and say, well, the ideal, you see, is to have no anxiety at all.
All anxiety is a negative.
You've got to have no anxiety.
It's like, no, no, no, they're a predators in this world, bro.
I mean, bro couldn't even figure out how to stop smoking, womanizing.
He couldn't even figure out how to put down the bottle.
And he's going to tell me he's wise in the ways of life.
A triple addict who killed himself, shredded his families.
I mean, didn't seriously kill himself, but he acted in a way that was going to shorten his lifespan probably by 30 years, right?
Didn't care enough about his children to stop his addictions and maintain his marriages.
His marriage should have been a single marriage.
It's going to tell me about life.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's embarrassing.
So I pointed out: if my ancestors, or I guess Alan Watts, right, he's a white guy.
So if our ancestors had lived as you suggest, none of us would be here.
Or to put it another way, the ancestors thought the opposite of Alan Watts, and that's how Alan Watts came to be.
And I try my very best, like, to honor the mental, genetic, biological, cultural, language.
Like, I do my best to honor what my ancestors have provided.
Because, you know, if you're European, your ancestors were pretty cool, right?
From 800 BC to 1950, like 97% of scientific advancements came from Europeans.
That's pretty cool.
Birth of the modern world.
Pretty cool.
Other races and cultures that produce pretty cool stuff.
But when it comes to science and philosophy, poo-hoo, nobody beats the tidy-whities, right?
So I really, really dislike it when people spit on the legacy of the struggling ancestors that carried forward and handed to us the great precious gift of life.
It's gross.
It's selfish.
It is the squandering of great fortune that people suffered enormously to provide to you.
And so it's funny.
Again, it's, I just tell the truth.
I mean, as, and I'm, you know, obviously I'm not the oracle at Delphi.
I obviously get things wrong.
But I tell the truth.
And I have reasons behind what it is that I say.
I have reasons behind.
I mean, look, I've taken on the entire planet and I still do on a regular basis.
To make friends and break friends is my entire business model, right?
Because people like, oh, I like you for this, man.
And then I apply the exact same principles to something else.
They get triggered and storm at me and rage, quit, and yell and insult.
And right?
So I have, you know, I've had to learn to deal with a certain amount of hostility in the world.
That's the gig of the philosopher.
And it's the greatest gig in the world, honestly.
Absolutely worth it.
The greatest gig in the world, right?
So when he says no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen, it's an IQ test.
It is telling you it is just an IQ test.
Because anxiety is a universal human phenomenon.
Why?
Because we are both predators and prey.
We are the alpha, I mean, in terms of relative to animals, in general, we are the alpha predator, right?
We can take on all animals because of our technology.
However, we're also prey to sophists and liars and tyrants and kings and warlords.
So we are prey as well.
We are prey as well.
So, of course, people are saying, what do they say?
Anxiety didn't produce the food.
The actions taken to get the food did.
And it's funny because this username who says this stupid thing, I'm not saying he's a stupid guy.
It's a stupid thing.
Anxiety didn't procure the food.
The actions taken to get the food did.
The username is surface level.
Surface level?
Beautiful, man.
Anxiety didn't produce the food.
The actions taken to get the food did.
Which is like, it's as intelligent as saying, it is not the caution of the zebra that got it away from the lion.
It was the zebra's legs.
Yes, and what motivates the zebra to run is fear.
Caution, concern, worry.
It's like, have you never tried to feed a squirrel in the wild and it wants the food, but it's nervous, you're going to grab its neck?
Well, tentative, going forward, right?
Anxiety didn't produce the food.
The actions taken to get the food did.
It wasn't sexual desire that produced the baby.
It was just the physical orgasms.
Like, yeah, but why are they procuring the food?
Because they're worried about the winter.
Oh, my God.
Somebody says anxiety isn't the same as legitimate worry.
Oh, yes, the hair splitting.
Anxiety is different from worry.
Who cares?
Who cares?
I don't care.
I could care less that if you say, well, you know, it's different.
Anxiety is different from worry.
And you come up with some sort of hair-splitting thing.
Well, anxiety is more long-term and worry is more short-term.
It doesn't matter.
This hair-splitting based upon incrementally tiny differences in definitions is just, it's nitpicky shit.
Nitty picky, nitty, picky shitty stuff.
Because our good friend, pipe-smoking, bead-wearing, alcoholic, chain-smoking, womanizing friend Alan Watts says no amount of anxiety.
Now, if he'd have said, if he'd have said, well, you know, you don't want to be too anxious, I mean, it would be stupid, but at least it wouldn't be wrong.
Things can be stupid and wrong, right?
Too much of anything is bad.
Well, that's not true, of course.
Too much of health is not bad, is it?
But an excess of things in which an excess of things is negative is negative.
Big brain stuff, right?
It's just a tautology, right?
So anxiety isn't the same thing as legitimate worry.
Ah, so you put the word legitimate.
He says no amount of anxiety, no amount of worry, no amount of anxiety.
If there is an action required, then it's a valid concern.
If it's general unease or fear about something beyond your control, it's anxiety.
The former is needed, the latter is a waste of energy.
How on earth are you going to know if your anxiety only exists about things you can't control?
Are you saying that your brain is defective?
That you have fine-tuned and developed these instincts of concern, worry, fear, anxiety, right?
Concern that something negative is happening, that that's not obvious, right?
I mean, if the lion is literally charging at the zebra and the zebra runs away, we don't say, wow, that zebra really has anxiety.
It's like, no, it just doesn't want to get eaten.
It really has caution.
It's acting on its caution.
No, it's not acting on its caution.
It's acting on clear and present danger.
So anxiety is for the stuff that's not obvious.
A man running away from a bear in the woods isn't having an anxiety problem, his full flight or flight, because he's in imminent danger.
Anxiety is for that stuff over the horizon, the stuff which you can act to change is not obvious yet.
So when people say, well, you know, there's the things you can change and the things you can't change, how the living hell do you know what you can't change?
That is around anxiety.
So all I'm anxious about the state of the world.
How do you know you can't change the state of the world?
Or the state at least of your world?
Well, you know, I have anxiety around my mother because she's really abusive, but I can't change my mother.
It's true, but you can change whether you see her or not.
Well, that's off the table.
Okay, well, your anxiety is telling you it's not off the table.
I have anxiety about my health.
Okay, are you doing everything that you reasonably can to maintain your health?
Have you gone for your scans?
Have you gone for your checkups?
Do you do your blood work?
Do you exercise?
Do you eat well?
Do you maintain a healthy weight?
Do you get your sunlight?
Do you do the things that are the most that you can do to maintain your health, right?
So, I mean, as you guys know, like, I don't know, 13 or whatever it was years ago, I had cancer, had chemo, had radiation.
And of course, I have done as much as I can to maintain my health.
So I try, you know, I don't really worry because I'm doing the maximum that I can.
So saying, well, you know, you shouldn't be anxious about things you can't control.
Like, how do you know you can't control things?
How do you know?
It's a slave morality to say there's all these things I can't control.
Oh, I'm anxious about gravity.
Well, then that's just mental illness, right?
All right.
So somebody says, Alan Watts is right.
For example, consider natural disaster.
Say a hurricane predicted to hit at 3 p.m. today, July 24th, 2025.
Anxiety about the storm's impact won't change its path, but preparation, evacuating or securing property can mitigate harm.
Watts' statement implies that once action is taken, additional anxiety is redundant.
Why?
Well, first of all, I don't really like it at all when people just hallucinate, right?
I mean, when people hallucinate, that's weird to me.
Alan Watts said, no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that's going to happen.
And he's saying, well, well, some is good, but he's not saying all.
No, no, he didn't say, he didn't say that at all.
Implies.
No, no, no.
See, if you're just going to make up things, then I don't interrupt people arguing with themselves.
I mean, what's the point?
Right?
So if you hallucinate that Alan Watts is saying something that he didn't say, I mean, then you're having a conversation with your imaginary friend, whereas I'm actually talking about what Alan Watts actually said.
No amount of anxiety.
Worry is not a prerequisite for action.
So just because you can act without worrying doesn't mean that worrying doesn't help you do the right thing.
You are confusing worry and anxiety.
Oh, fuck off.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh.
Somebody said Alan Watts walked calmly into death after a life of teaching peace.
You scream into the void, hoping someone claps.
Okay, Mr. Haikyu Vitriol, you scream into the void, hoping someone claps.
Oh, that's funny.
he means on top of action anyway it's uh yeah Well, it is the anxiety that provokes the action that brings in the harvest.
I mean, if you wake up at night because you think you hear the sound of glass breaking downstairs, you won't be able to get back to sleep.
I once lived in a very new house and would wake up and sounded like an old pirate ship rolling around on the ocean.
It creaked and grown because it was saddling, right?
So I'd have to wake up and then I'd go and check the house.
Once I'd checked the house, I'd be able to go back to sleep, but I couldn't just lie there because that's ridiculous.
I'm sure you've had things in your life.
You worry about things, you get the facts, and your worry goes away.
Sure.
Sure.
You're out of your depth here, Steph.
Don't be dense.
Somebody says, he's right.
You're the pretentious one.
Maybe try being grateful, relaxed, loving, and inspiring.
All the white men, I don't know why white men is in there, to do the same.
Then we'd see a massive change in our countries and in our media.
You're great, Steph, but you are Alan Watts.
He wins every time, despite any private life douchery to err as human, to forgive divine.
And it's, you know, this is a funny thing too, is that all of the Alan Watts fans are either hallucinating, misinterpreting, or attacking.
It's like, where's your chill, man?
Where's your chill?
Where's your chill?
I think you're missing the mark here, says Jazzini.
Needlessly worrying is different.
The conscientiously planning and preparing for the future.
Plus, I like Alan Watson.
You'll be mean.
Well, at least that's honest, right?
Needlessly worrying, but that's all you do is you take a negative word, you attach it to something, and you think you've made an argument.
Drinking too much water is bad.
Too much and bad are synonyms.
You're just saying something that is bad is bad.
You're not adding anything to anything.
And this guy who's a past life therapist.
Tim.
He's a past life therapist.
Oh my God.
It's a past life therapist.
You pontificate about the importance of morals, yet it seems your mother hasn't even taught you not to insult people and be reverent towards the dead.
Reverend towards the dead?
You know who's dead?
Hitler.
Stalin.
Shouldn't we have reverence for them as well?
Oh my gosh.
That's wild what people do, man.
They don't even think about what they're doing.
Harry writes, he's dead.
He won't read your rage post.
You're literally yelling into the void like a senile old man.
So apparently I'm both yelling into the void and he's replying to me.
So yelling into the void would have no effect, like if you yell in deep space, right?
However, the fact that, you know, Harry, the fact that you're replying to me means I'm, you know, by definition not yelling into the void.
Oh, my gosh.
Michael says, your ancestors didn't worry about food.
They prepared for winter.
Why did they prepare for Winter because they were worried they didn't have enough food.
Oh my gosh, it's wild.
Anxiety is about the past, worry is about the future.
Up is about the down, sideways is about the white.
Yeah, just I could assemble words that sound like they are saying something too.
Anyway, I just think it's funny.
I just think it's funny.
You inherited worry or anxiety because your ancestors used it to survive.
You know, why do we have it?
Why do we have it?
Why do we have it if it serves no survival purpose, right?
You can't take the high conscientiousness of high trust societies, which evolved over, you know, hundreds of thousands of years.
You can't just take that rationally and say, well, something that is common to almost all the ICE people.
I mean, think about the social anxiety of, say, the Japanese, right?
The anxiety of the Japanese, the status anxiety of the Japanese, the karoshi or death by overwork.
You can't go home before your boss goes home ethic of, say, the Chinese.
I mean, there are Japanese men who literally get surgery so that they don't blush, so that they don't show when they're troubled or just uncomfortable or shy.
And if you look at that level of anxiety and worry, well, that is associated with coming out of the very harsh winters of Siberia.
I mean, sort of think of the sort of famous Italian laid-back or the Greek laid-back chill versus the British stress and tension and all of that.
It's like, oh, it's more weather.
Weather is nicer in the Mediterranean.
Oh, my gosh.
Jamie says, any worry did nothing to get through the winter.
It's the action of growing the food and storing it that did that.
But worrying about it only impedes the task.
Nope.
Worrying about it is why the task exists.
So if you worry about whether you have enough money to retire on, right?
This is what Kevin Samuels used to talk about with women that didn't want to get married.
He'd ask, well, how much are you making?
Oh, 50K, 70K or whatever a year.
He's like, how are you going to get the $2.4 million cash you need to survive from 65 to 85?
How are you going to get that?
Right?
I mean, Kevin Samuels was absolutely brilliant.
Almost always worth the listen, by the way.
Kevin Samuels, the late Kevin Samuels, I think he died of hypertension.
Maybe, maybe not quite so many energy drinks might be the ideal.
But if you have some concern or worry or anxiety about whether you saved up enough for retirement, that's going to impel you to save up money for your retirement.
It doesn't, if you're perfectly comfortable, oh, I'm fine.
I never think about it.
I don't worry about my retirement.
You're not going to save any money for your retirement.
Why is this hard?
I don't know why.
Why?
Honestly, I don't want to sound all kinds of precious.
But like, how is this hard to understand?
I don't know.
Anyway, so surprise guest, Jared.
Hit me.
Brother, what's on your mind?
Yes, go ahead.
Excellent.
Hey, just listen to that.
I had thought come to mind.
Oh, first of all, thank you for everything you do.
Love you.
It's great.
And I'll see you.
Like, when I actually learned to handle my anxiety in a really great way, like listen to it, it actually freed me up to be a lot more chill in the future.
So if something came to me and bothered me and like took away my sleep or something like that, then I knew to take it seriously and address it.
And it actually opened up to be way more relaxed in the future.
And as things come up, you know, I can worry about it to some degree.
And then I can make, okay, well, if it's really a big problem, you know, it'll come back and bug me.
I trust my anxiety to do that.
Does that make sense?
It does.
I don't want to, obviously, for you to reveal anything you don't want to reveal, but can you think of a specific instance where that showed up for you?
Gosh, nothing specifically comes to mind.
Okay, the one thought that comes to mind, I'm not sure if it's actually on page with this, was I was kind of lying in bed one day and I like, this was years and years ago, didn't really have a job I liked.
And I'm like, this was after listening to one of your shows.
He'd say, like, you really don't have, you don't have to do anything, but, you know, you can't, of course, you can't avoid the consequences of what you do or don't do.
And so I'm laying in bed, man, I don't want to go to work.
I really don't want to go to work.
And just kind of relaxed with that.
I'm like, I don't have to get out of bed.
And, you know, there's part of me is just kind of calmly and raxed like, sure, that's actually true, but then this will happen.
And then this will happen.
And then this will happen.
And so, yeah, I happily actually at that point and like, yeah, that's absolutely true.
Instead of like getting up out of bed begrudgingly like, oh, I've got to go to bed, I've got to go to work.
And this is like, no, there's all these other things in the future for me by getting up and going to work right now.
Right.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And so I guess my concern is that if you listen to people like Alan Watts, he says, well, the thing you've got to do is talk yourself out of being anxious and just recognize anxiety is useless.
Anxiety is pointless.
Anxiety won't change anything.
Worry won't change anything.
But, you know, there are times when we have legitimate cause or reason to be concerned or to worry or to be anxious.
And so my concern is that to take a sort of silly example, which actually is kind of practical, is if you're in the woods and you think you hear something stalking you, do you sit there and say, well, I'm going to go into a Zen meditative position and I'm going to calm my anxiety and I'm going to make sure that I don't worry about anything.
And then you get your head ripped off by a bear.
Or if you're in the ocean and you see a fin and you don't know if it's a dolphin or a shark, you probably want to figure that out.
You're sit there, oh, well, my concern or worry that it's a shark, not a dolphin.
I've just got to meditate in the water and calm myself.
No, get out of the water.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I absolutely agree.
Right on board with that.
Sorry, I don't have a whole lot more to add, but like I just, that was the thought that came to mind.
Like all these people that are kind of downplaying the idea of anxiety or nitpicking or, you know, change the definition, all that stuff.
Go ahead.
If you value chill, like I just my own personal experience, I've never known more peace and more chill than actually having a relationship with my anxiety.
Right, right.
It's there to help you.
It's there to help you.
And all parts of you are there to help you.
And you Got to listen to all the parts of you to live a sort of balanced and productive and happy life.
And there are people, of course, who are overwhelmed by anxiety.
And I really sympathize with that.
I mean, I really sympathize with that.
And I'm not trying to say that every single experience of anxiety is exactly the same as being chased by a bear.
I mean, I get all of that.
Is there an excess of anxiety?
It's hard to know because we have so much more power than we think to change our circumstances that anxiety is telling us we can change.
I mean, the example that I gave was in my early 30s.
I suffered from insomnia and it turned out that I had to change everything in my life.
I had to change everything.
I had to change my career.
I had to change my social circle.
I had to change my entire relationship with my family of origin.
And I had to just do everything.
And I went to a year and a half of therapy for like three hours a week.
I did eight hours a week of journaling.
I just had to change everything.
And of course, you know, if I'd have said, well, you know, any concern or whatever it was is negative, I should just take sleeping pills.
Like I wouldn't have made the changes that got me a great marriage and a great, you know, great relationship with my daughter and great friends.
And like, I just wouldn't have made those changes if I'd have said, well, the only problem is I need to talk myself out of being stressed or anxious or whatever was going on.
That was, you know, I had, and the reason it took me so long to sort out was I didn't realize how much I had to change.
And if people had said, well, the way that you deal with the anxiety is you change absolutely everything about your life, right?
Your friendships, your career, your family relations, like they've all got to go.
I'd have been like, well, that's not possible.
And it's like, well, no, it actually turned out to be possible and it turned out to be a great thing.
So I don't like people.
And of course, the rulers, right?
I'm not saying Alan Watts is a ruler, but the fact that he's got a non-critical Wikipedia page means that he's probably a douchebag.
No, because, you know, if you really are doing things that fight evil, the evildoers will hijack forms of communication and spread lies about you.
That's how you know, right?
Absolutely.
So, you know, do the rulers, like if you were the lion and you got to teach the baby zebras, wouldn't you teach them to not be worried about the smell of lion and waving in the grass and to just view all of their negative internal states as something to be talked out of?
Of course you would, because then it's a whole lot easier to prey on the zebras.
So I guess that's my concern about that as well.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like society in general has taken plenty of that and there's plenty of fodder to distract ourselves from whatever's making us anxious.
All right.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Steph.
All right.
Second surprise guest.
Someone else I know.
James of the Clan P. What's on your mind?
Hey, so I had one of those things, a couple of thoughts, actually.
One of them was I was sleeping soundly one night and I heard a crash in my house and I get up and I'm looking around.
Was it Bitcoin?
Sorry.
No, no.
No, not an audible crash, anyways.
No, I was hunting around my house.
I couldn't find it.
All the drawers were locked.
All the windows were shut.
I'm like, oh my goodness.
It took me forever to get back to sleep.
Turns I get up the next morning.
It wasn't just some drawer.
You know, the plastic cheap craft rails had given away.
When I saw that, I was so relieved and happy to see that.
It's like, oh, that's what it was.
But I, you know, so it's, you get that, like, oh man, what's going on?
And like, and that's more on the clear and present danger kind of thing or possible danger anxiety thing.
But yeah, that was a, that was, that was a fun night.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, most people have had it.
Like if you run in the business world, I remember back in the, in the day in the business world, I thought I had made a mistake and like a pretty serious and severe mistake.
And I was like, I was like worried about it.
And, you know, then I called the accountant and he's like, no, no, that's, that's totally legit.
That's totally fine.
I'm like, oh, you know, it's like 30 years ago or whatever, right?
So you're concerned about things.
I remember when I first, when I produced and directed my first play in Toronto, I used a theater and the theater had just had the floor refinished at great expense, like this beautiful wood and lacquer and all of that.
And I brought literal trees in because I hate artificial stuff.
And so we literally bought trees in.
And unfortunately, the people who were moving the trees, they scratched the hell out of the floor.
And I was like, oh my God, they're going to charge me for this floor.
I'm not going to be able to go to university because I'm going to have to pay $10,000 for to get this floor fixed or refinished or whatever.
And I was like terrified.
And then I went in and the guy who was the manager of the theater looked at the floor and I said, yeah, sorry that some stuff got scratched.
And he's like, yeah, theater's messy.
And it's like, okay, good.
I guess I can continue on with my life and not have to spend the next year paying off a theater floor.
So yeah, just concerns.
And then, and it wasn't like I didn't keep worrying after the guy said, yeah, theater's messy.
No problem.
Like I didn't sit there and say, oh, yes, but he could, you know, like you said, it was fine.
So it's fine.
So you move on.
Right.
And so all of these things, like the worry of the consent, say, well, your fears were groundless.
It's like, no, they weren't.
The guy could have said, we just got the floors refinished.
You literally bought trees in here that scratched the hell out of the floor.
We're going to have to get it refinished and we're going to go after you for the money, right?
He could have done that.
I mean, it's not, it's certainly not that's not now.
Of course, in hindsight, you say, well, I was worrying for nothing.
It's like, no, you weren't.
If you're a zebra and you're cautious about the smell of lion and the grass moving in a certain uncertain way and it turns out that there's nothing there, you don't sit there and say, well, that was pointless.
It's like, no, that's what keeps you alive.
It drives me crazy.
All right.
Anything else you wanted to mention?
Yeah, I also have a thought.
I mean, I know that anxiety is common to everybody, but it also struck me how, and this is sort of like a half-day thought, maybe interested what you think about it, where women are typically much more on the neurotic personality scale things, side of things.
And how this guy trying to say, this guy's going around saying, hey, anxiety is nothing.
There's nothing to be anxiety anxious about in life, right?
This Watts guy.
And how that's going to be kind of a way of programming women to not be anxious in particular.
Or is it, is it, do you think it's like, I'm not saying like targeted exactly, but maybe used or they sort of are attracted that more?
Is it what are you going to be seeing in the responses?
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I would say that, I mean, Alan Watts had more flags than the Chinese Communist Parade, right?
More red flags.
And so I think women would have distinct caution about sleeping with him.
And because, you know, I mean, I personally think he was just real cold-hearted, maybe a sociopath or something like that to be just plowing through women like that and to have these addictions and so on.
So he would have all of these red flags and women would be cautious and anxious about sleeping with him, getting married to him, having his babies and so on.
Because I think he had like five kids or something like that scattered around a bunch of different women.
And so if he's saying, oh, no, your anxiety is just a hangup, man.
It's just some Western prejudice.
You've got to go with the flow.
There's no amount of anxiety that's going to change anything.
Now take off your top.
You know, I honestly think it's just a basic mating display.
And of course, women have a lot more to be anxious about because women sacrifice a whole lot more when babies need to be made, right?
For the man, it's like 20 minutes and a nap.
And for the woman, it's like 20 years, right?
20 minutes versus 20 years.
So women have a lot more to be cautious about because their investment in child raising is almost infinitely higher than a man's.
So they have a lot to be worried about.
Men will lie to them to get into their pants.
They need to have good instincts.
They need to have good cautions.
They need to have good alarm systems because men can be their greatest benefactors or their greatest predators.
And so women would naturally tend to be more anxious.
Also, women have to take care of babies and toddlers, which is really challenging.
I mean, I found it challenging enough with one kid.
I mean, you know, there were often five, six, seven, eight kids roaming around.
They farm machinery and predators and wolves.
And you got to worry.
You've got to worry.
You've got to be anxious.
You got to keep them safe.
So that's a beautiful thing.
That's a beautiful thing that women do.
Of course, without a bunch of kids, it tends to kind of run off in the wrong direction or many wrong directions, that kind of anxiety.
But also women generally can't affect as much as they want to themselves, right?
So, you know, the sort of famous tendency of women to nag.
Well, one of the things that happened is women who nagged got lazy husbands to get more food for the winter so their family had a greater chance of survival.
In other words, women, men outsourced their anxiety to women.
And women would provoke anxiety and men through nagging, which would get the men, you know, get off that couch, get to work.
There's a sort of old myth.
Not true in my household, of course, but it's a sort of old myth that nothing bothers a wife more than the sight of a husband in full repose, a couch or something like that.
Well, this, you know, the honeydew list, right?
Honey, we've got a whole list of things that need to be done and go do it and stop being lazy.
And right?
So the fact that women often have to get men to do the things that are needed for the family's survival means that they have to have higher level of neuroticism and anxiety, or to say, an appropriate level for the things that need to be done.
So if men are too anxious, they become too feminine.
But if men outsource some of their anxiety to women, then they get to retain the masculine strength calmness thing while still having the anxiety inflicted on them through nagging to get things done that need to get done in order for the family to survive.
So it's a really interesting mix.
And so, you know, you always hear these women, you know, and this is back to sort of Kevin Tamier's show, right?
The women who are like, he would say, well, average black man earns like $40,000 a year or whatever.
And, you know, can you, you say to these women, can you marry a guy making $40,000 a year?
And she'd say, well, I mean, I would unleash his potential and he'd making $200,000 a year, right?
So basically she'd nag him into doing more and more and more, working harder and harder and harder in order to get extra resources.
So the women can't affect it directly.
Historically, they couldn't go out and hunt and move barns and things like that and fight wars, but they could nag men into doing it.
Of course, Kevin Samuels would say, no, no, the average is most people can't make more than that.
You can't just talk a guy into making five times his salary.
It's not possible for a lot of guys because they're average, right?
So, yeah, I think the higher female neuroticism is, again, it's a beautiful thing.
men and women are an incredible team for producing what they produce, which is the miracle of the human mind.
But yeah, certainly in a state of, And I want to hear you guys' thoughts on this as a whole.
And James, of course, you'd be up first.
It's my experience as a whole that you only get to choose your problems.
You don't get to choose to not have problems.
You only get to choose your problems.
So I would have a calmer life if I was not a controversial public philosopher, right?
I would have a calmer life.
However, my calm life would be a plus, but there'd also be a minus.
And the minus would be that I would regret not putting my gifts to full use.
I mean, I think I put my gifts to about as fully use as I can.
I'm always trying to expand the ways that I communicate and the topics that I talk about.
But I think I've done as much as I can with the gifts that I have, which is to say that I still hope to do more with the gifts that I have.
But so I'd have a calmer life, which would remove, you know, some of the excitement that I've had over the years with being controversial.
So I would remove some of that negativity, some of that concern, some of that excitement.
But then I would simply add regret and a feeling of underutilization and that negative.
So you only get to choose your problems in life.
You don't get to choose to have no problems.
So when people like Alan Watts come along and say, you know, all anxiety is bad, it's like, no, because then with that anxiety, you don't spy dangers.
You don't worry about your retirement.
You don't worry about health issues.
You don't worry about maybe underutilizing the gifts that you've been given.
And then you end up with a life full of regret, usually when it's too late to fix it.
So for women, it's like, I worry I'm going to marry the wrong guy.
Okay.
So then you marry the right guy.
So then your marriage is good.
And then you worry maybe about getting pregnant if you're a little older.
But then your kid gets born and they're healthy.
And then you worry about your kid, you know, falling down the stairs or getting sick or whatever.
And kids do.
And then, you know, it's just worry, worry, worry.
And then, you know, when you're young, you worry about money.
When you're middle-aged, you worry about failure.
When you're old, you worry about health.
I mean, it's, you can only choose your problems.
You cannot choose a life without problems.
Choosing a life without problems, you know, the sort of fantasy of, well, I'll go live in the woods and I'll just be self-sustaining.
It's like, yeah, but that's going to kind of, it's kind of empty, and nobody will remember your name, and you have no legacy, and you have no love or comfort in your old age.
So you just trade one set of problems for another.
And this, this empty, alien, weird, inhuman quest to have a life without problems is bizarre to me, right?
I mean, you know, this, that old New Yorker cartoon where two guys in a bar, one turns to the other and says, this is back when Sting was like top of the world, the singer for the police and a solo artist, of course.
And he say, how's your life going?
I says, eh, I mean, it's not bad, but I'm not Sting, right?
Because he was good looking and a great singer, songwriter, and performer and all of that.
And of course, Sting laughed about it and said, man, I got my problems too.
I got my problems like everyone else, right?
I mean, his accountant stole millions of dollars from him.
He now has, you know, bad hearing and tinnitus and all kinds of problems in his old age, which comes about as a result of his success when he was younger.
So I choose the most magnificent problems I can.
I choose the highest stakes problems that I can.
You know, it's the old workout thing.
Suffer now or suffer later.
Working out makes you suffer now.
Not working out makes you suffer later.
Quitting smoking makes you suffer now.
If you don't quit smoking, you suffer later.
Eating sensibly is going to cause you to eat less of what you want now, but then you don't suffer from obesity and bone and joint problems and all other kinds of heart issues and, you know, the sort of waste, fat, belly problem and all of that, right?
So I, given that I have to choose some problems from the buffet, there's no life where you don't get to choose any problems from the buffet of problems.
So I choose the highest stakes, most magnificent problems I can because that way I can achieve the most.
But the people who want to hide from their problems and hiding from anxiety is the same as hiding from problems, they end up with the biggest problem of all, which is regret.
And now that I'm, of course, pushing 60, I've seen enough of people's life arc to know that regret is just about the worst thing of all.
Regret just completely corrodes and eats away at you because it's a problem you can't solve anymore.
Regret usually kicks in when it's too late to solve it.
Like the woman who's 45 and now wants kids.
Well, it's too late.
It's too late.
Now you can't fix it.
And so if she'd had more anxiety about having kids, she wouldn't like, you know, maybe that would have lasted a couple of years while she hunted down the right father for her children.
But now, 45 to 85, she's got 40 years of regret.
So anxiety is there to prevent future regret, which is just about the worst feeling of all.
And there is no life without problems.
So choose the biggest, most inspiring, most magnificent, most world-changing problems that you can.
And then you will never feel any particular regret.
Does that make sense?
Oh, yeah.
That totally makes sense.
And, you know, as far as my part, you know, I did choose more of the easy thing for a long time.
And it's a struggle to break those habits, particularly being isolated, right?
Or choosing to be isolated, right?
Not trying to be able to.
Yeah, so you haven't had the problems of trying to merge with someone else who has different thoughts and ideas.
And those are problems.
You chose more of a solitary path, which relieved you of certain problems, but now it gives you other problems, right?
So the fantasy that I just do this and I really want, I'll have fewer problems is like, no, you won't.
The level of problems you have are about the same in life.
And just choose the ones that are the most exciting, the most challenging, and that have the longest reward cycle.
I think that's the way to go.
Yep.
Yep.
And I'll just close it off with, I still think I have potential for sure.
And I'll continue to pursue that because, I mean, I'll just say, you're very, I mean, you're very inspiring.
It feels like almost not, it feels like I can't quite express it, but you're incredibly inspiring and, you know, the pursuit of the greatest you could do.
Oh, yeah.
I appreciate it.
Like, I really appreciate that, James.
And for those of you who don't know, James and I work together, but I really do appreciate that.
And listen, there are times where I really felt like I bit off way more than I could chew.
You know, I was like, oh, these problems are too big.
And it's like, that's going to happen.
But again, looking back, the two big problems are way better than the two small problems because the two small problems just turn into the big problem of regret later on.
Did you want to mention, because now we're on X, right?
Did you want to mention your life goal and perhaps how to contact you?
All right.
Well, my life goal would be to find a wonderful, loving partner, a woman, of course.
I would love to get married.
And I'm in my mid-40s and I live in New England.
And yeah, you can get a hold of me by contacting support at freedomaine.com.
And I'll get back to you host haste.
Yeah, James, 6'4, kept his hair, kept a shiny mane of youthful hair.
Hasn't even hit gray.
The man is a magnificent beast specimen of virile masculinity.
And so that's something to remember, ladies.
He's got the goods and he knows how to use them.
So support at freedomaine.com if you would like to chat with James.
I think it would be highly recommended to give it a try.
And I've known James for, like, how long have we known each other now?
2007, 8, something like that.
So coming on 20 years.
Yeah, coming up.
Coming up for 20 years.
Coming up for 20 years.
I knew him before I knew my daughter.
All right.
Thanks, James.
I hope that we're going to get some messages.
Support at freedomain.com.
James also has some assets, is ready to start a family, owns his own property, has a nice house, and is a good guy to get to know, to put it mildly.
All right.
Take another caller or two.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
I'm sorry.
I'm trying to read these names.
I don't have my glasses on.
Let me, because I don't want to call on people and get that in completely wrong.
So give me just a second.
See, see, you get older, and I don't have any problems with dating because I'm happily married, but I got eyesight.
No for tricks.
Am I getting everything or anything wrong?
Set me straight or share your thoughts?
Hello.
Yeah, go for it.
Okay.
my God.
It's such a different experience to be a bystander and to be actually in the hot seat.
So I'm a little bit embarrassed, but I have a lot to say.
I just want to get that straight.
And I really admire and respect you because, well, you know why, obviously, you're a mainstay figure.
So I hope I don't squander my opportunity.
And I guess that's where we're talking about anxiety and you're talking about the anxiety.
You might squander things so you don't regret.
Yeah, that's great.
Like form and function together at last.
Go ahead.
It leads.
Okay.
My main question is, if you feel a threat or a pressure, right?
If you feel a pressure because you're discomfortable in your seating posture, you can rearrange it.
That's a very obvious problem and solution, right?
What of the threats or anxieties you can feel on more societal level issues or group issues that aren't very obvious what the individual should do to handle them, like economic or demographic, social issues?
Because I don't know.
I'll just self-docs.
I'm in Ontario in one of the big cities there.
And all those issues constantly keep me up at night.
The other day saw the news story from April or so when two teens went missing and then two months later or so were found, but they went missing for some reasons.
And the police didn't decide to release any details.
And I'm just wondering, huh, how prevalent is that?
And what can I do about that?
Because it doesn't seem right for me to sit in like comfort of any sort.
Well, that's about it, you know?
But yeah, I mean, there's no, I mean, Canada, of course, as you know, is going through this massive immigration experiment, right?
It's not alone in that.
And are there reasons to be concerned?
Yeah, I mean, I think that there are some reasons to be concerned.
Now, as far as what you can do about it, well, I mean, nothing directly, obviously, right?
But what you can do is, you know, share, you know, be honest, right?
Share your thoughts and feelings and concerns with others, right?
And if people are willing to listen, then you have good people around you because we should always not bear false witness.
We should be honest about our thoughts and fears and concerns.
Now, recognize, of course, you can't do anything to affect it directly, but you can share your thoughts and fears and concerns and ideas.
And listen, maybe some of your thoughts and fears and concerns are something that you could be talked out of.
Maybe.
Maybe you can help other people have some thoughts and fears and concerns that might be valid.
And I think just being honest, I think, is the key.
And, you know, honesty is a difficult thing these days.
Honesty is a very difficult thing because people have been programmed to be so hair-triggered on certain stimuli that it can be, it can be risky.
I choose to not have people in my life that I can't be honest with.
And that is a brutal process, right?
Because we don't choose our families.
And in many ways, we don't particularly choose our early friends because we're all just kind of locked up in school together and that's where most friendships come from.
Or we're just kind of in the same neighborhood, which is where those friendships often come from.
We have some choice, but it's not the kind of limitless choice that we have in the age of sort of internet and social media and so on.
So I think that it's probably worth it in the long run, or at least I can say it certainly has been the case for me in the long run.
I share my thoughts, fears, concerns, you know, pluses and minuses.
I unpack my heart.
I'm honest with those around me.
And the people who have remained in my life are the people who appreciate that and want that.
And I appreciate it and want it in them.
I don't have taboo topics with the people I love and care about.
We don't sling insults at each other for speaking our minds.
And I think that, to me, has been the biggest decision is to just stop bearing false witness, to stop lying, to stop misrepresenting, to stop pretending that my values are only abstract and don't need to be lived in my social environment.
And I think just that bare, brazen and bold honesty is the way to go.
That's the most freedom we can get.
Like there's censorship at the state level.
There's censorship, of course, at the social media deplatforming level.
I've heard about it.
I've heard about it.
But I, yeah, and those you only have very little control over.
I mean, unless you just want to lie and misrepresent things and so on, right?
But the censorship that you have the most control over is the censorship that is manifested in your social circle, right?
Are there people where you say, oh, I have concerns about this, that, or the other, and they just turn away, they call your names, whatever it is, right?
Well, that's the censorship you can do something about.
And I sort of dedicated myself many years ago, decades ago, to really trying to live as free as life as humanly possible.
So, you know, I, I guess, alienated the vast swaths of the atheist community by challenging them on their lack of knowledge about why they're good.
And so, you know, of course, my views went down and people rage quit and they stopped following me and so on.
It's like, but I'm not going to be a number chaser.
I'm just not going to be a number chaser.
I'm going to speak the truth, make the case as passionately and as powerfully as I can, and accept correction where it is necessary, of course.
I'm going to make the case as powerfully as I can.
I mean, now, sorry, I annoyed the incels.
You know, this is just like in a month and change, right?
I annoyed the women.
I annoyed the incels.
I annoyed the atheists.
Now I'm annoying the mystics by calling Alan Watts a pretentious deuceback because he is.
And I'll make the case for it more solidly here, which, of course, is a bit of a different form.
So I'm just going to keep telling the truth and say why.
And I'm not going to sit there and say, oh, well, you know, but my numbers are going to go down and people aren't going to like me and my show is going to become less popular.
Like, that's not the gig.
That's not the job.
The job is to tell the truth.
I mean, if you're a doctor, you have to tell the truth when a patient is sick.
You don't lie to spare their feelings or so that they won't get upset with you.
You know, if you're treating a married guy and he got an STD from some hooker he went to, he's going to be upset with you when you tell him he's got an STD or he's going to be upset.
Maybe he'll take it out on you.
But you still have to tell him he has the STD because that's the job is not to the job is not to coddle people's feelings as a doctor.
The job is to try and return people to a state of health or hopefully keep them healthy or whatever, right?
So, yeah, my job is to tell the truth.
And I won't be censored by people who insult me.
I won't be censored by people who scream at me.
I won't be censored by people who rage quit.
I won't be censored by people who canceled their subscriptions and donations because of something I said.
I just won't do it.
I just won't do it.
I'd rather live under a bridge than to submit to that kind of slave-on-slave tyranny.
So just be as honest as you can with the thoughts that you have.
And through sharing your thoughts honestly and openly, you might build a very surprising coalition of people who might be very, very interested in what you have to say.
All right.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
We got a bunch of people who want to talk about it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
Oh, okay.
Can I say, what if you overshare or under-share, though?
That's a question I have, too.
Because if you share the right amount, you'll get the right results.
If you share too much, no one will want to associate with you because I don't think anyone's keen on perceiving the entirety of someone else's thoughts or intentions.
But like, if I share to my friends and family, hey, we should probably travel together because evil is afoot in our city, they're probably going to say, ah, shut up, Yulini.
Right.
Okay, so if you share your sort of thoughts and concerns and people tell you to shut up, you have choices, right?
I'm not sure of what those choices are, I guess, besides just like secluding myself and minding my own affairs in a solitary way.
Well, but that is saying that the only possibility in human relationships is lying and falsifying everything you think and believe or being completely alone.
That's what they call a false dichotomy, right?
Which is it's entirely possible to have honest and connected and open relationships.
Some people will dislike you if you tell them the truth about what you think and feel, which means they just dislike you.
And the only thing they liked was your silence, your lying and your conformity, which means they didn't like you at all.
They just liked the power they have over you to silence you and shut you up.
So I choose to have real relationships with real people talking about what we really think and feel.
And listen, I mean, I've talked about this.
I've got a whole book about this called On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, which is you leave the city of lies and there's a big ass desert before you get to the village of the truth tellers where you can actually connect with people.
Like you, you wake up one day and you're in a zombie city, right?
And you got to get out of the city.
The zombies are the NPCs, right?
Who eat brains, right?
They destroy identity.
And you got to make your way across the desert because the village of truth tellers has to be far enough away from the city that they can't get there by bus to really stretch the analogy, right?
And so there's a desert.
And now, of course, one of the reasons people stay in the city of the zombies is because they think that the desert goes on and on forever and they're just going to die out there in the bleached bones of all the old creatures.
And so they stay and pretend to be a zombie and rub themselves with zombie goo and chant and drone and zone out and dissociate and repeat nauseous propaganda ad nauseum.
Because they say, well, there's nothing outside the city except the desert where you die.
But there are things outside the city other than the desert where you die.
The desert is there to protect the truth tellers from the zombie city, from the zombies in the city, because the zombies can't make it across.
The zombies are range at the moment thinkers.
I'm thinking there's a lot of mirages known in deserts, though.
If you're dehydrated and exhausted and depraved in a desert, you know, and of low supplies, as people in my generation are, I'll tell you, I'm a Zoomer, right?
A mid-aged Zoomer.
So I don't know.
So you've got low wages, you've got housing issues, you've got heavily propagandized females.
Relationship issues, yeah, yeah.
I don't know how to deal with all the ladder pulling.
It's a worry of mine that I feel like I have legs, right?
I could sprint to a door if only it would stay open long enough not to get smashed in my face, right?
So yeah.
I'm sorry, and I used analogies, so, but I'm familiar with my own analogies.
So what is the door for you?
Door is opportunity, right?
So imagine there's a shop, for example.
Let's say I'm presently unemployed, right?
So I rush to the sign of we're hiring, and then I apply, and then nothing.
Then don't even tell me why they won't hire me.
It's just ghost town, you know?
So how many doors do you rush to before, as you said with the zebra, it just burns itself out with all its calories?
Well, or you have to try something else.
Yeah, and if you can't get a job, you have to make a job.
So, I mean, you have friends your own age.
Have you all sat together and brainstormed about ways that you could start a business or make a job?
Whoa, let me die.
Sorry, go ahead.
I did speak with them about a fun, at least hobby of learning to brew beer or wine because that's legal in this country.
Unfortunately, apparently not whiskey or vodka, but at least beer or wine, that would be fun to learn.
I didn't think about it in terms of making a business.
I don't know how business is.
Well, I mean, that's something that if what you're doing isn't working, obviously at some point, you have to do something different, right?
And if you've been looking for work for a long time and you can't find work, and again, finding work for young people in Canada, you know, I mean, there's a lot of people who will, you know, new to the country, who will take jobs that used to go to young people, teenagers.
Don't I know when.
Don't I know when.
Yeah, for sure.
And, you know, I mean, I wish that there was a more rational conversation to be had publicly about that, but we are where we are.
And so if just trying to get a job is not working, then you either need to move to places further north where it's more likely that you'll be able to get a job.
You need to think about what you can do maybe overseas, you know, the old teach English in China or South Korea.
You need to start thinking about a job or a business that you could create or a hobby that you could try and find some way to monetize.
So, you know, just be very wary of the old solutions, don't work anymore, particularly for young people in Canada.
There has to be, sadly, and you know, maybe it's bad, maybe it's good, it's hard to say in the long run.
But like, I know a guy who couldn't get work and ended up going to China to teach English and then ended up starting a huge business that is very successful out there.
So who knows, right?
But, you know, just trotting down to the Tim's in the 7-Eleven, handing in your resume ain't working.
So you're going to have to really start thinking outside the box.
And then you might look back and say, that was the greatest thing ever.
Okay, well, thanks, Stefan.
Sorry for taking up so much of your time.
I hope I posited something worthwhile.
You certainly did.
Don't apologize for sharing your thoughts and feelings.
That's what we're here for, right?
So you are welcome back anytime.
And I hope you'll keep me updated on how things are going.
All right, we will go with Mark instead.
On your mark, get set.
How's it going, Stefan?
Good.
How you doing?
Yeah, pretty good, man.
I just want to say thanks for speaking your mind.
My wife and I met eight years ago.
And during the early formation of our relationship, we sat down and we listened to a lot of your podcasts, kind of like circa 2018.
Wow.
It was really formative in our early dating time to kind of come to terms with our morality and kind of formulate this idea and this vision of the future.
And through you, we were able to do that.
You know, a lot of you touched on a lot of really sensitive subjects that we could kind of talk about.
So, you know, fast forward seven years and we got three kids and we're happily married.
So yeah, you do good stuff, man.
I really, really appreciate that.
And please say hi to your kids, Stefan 1, Stefan 2, and Stephanie.
I appreciate that.
Obviously, I know what they're called.
And that's wonderful.
How did you find me to begin with?
Just through YouTube, word of mouth.
Like we were kind of watching a lot of Jordan Peterson and, you know, a lot of the philosophical, I guess, styled content.
Yeah.
It was really good, man.
I don't really know what else to say.
Besides, I grew up in Brampton.
So I grew up right around the corner from you.
And I understand a lot of the perspectives you harbor.
Well, I appreciate that.
And congratulations on a happy marriage and wonderful fatherhood.
I envy the three kids.
That's something I certainly aim for more than one, but fate took us in another direction.
And it's wonderful to hear these kinds of stories and give them a big hug from me.
And if you haven't checked out Peaceful Parenting, I'm sure you have.
Just for people as a whole, peacefulparenting.com, that's the place to go for learning how to bring philosophy to childhood.
So thanks, man.
I appreciate it and all the best.
All right, Thomas, I think you could be the last caller today because the old Steph part's getting a little peckish.
You know, having eaten today is 12.30.
I sort of forgot to eat this morning.
Yes, go ahead.
Let me be on your show.
My pleasure.
I wanted to ask you because I've been always struggling with the opposite problem.
So I think I have too little anxiety.
I figured this out because on university, on high school, I compare myself to other students, to my classmates, and they always worried much more than I did.
And especially the women, of course.
And well, the first question would be if that's one of the reasons that women do better in academic situations.
And the other one is what to do about it?
How to become more anxious or at least a little bit.
Right, right.
What's your cultural or ethnic background?
I'm Chilean.
I'm from South America.
Sorry for accent.
No, no, listen.
I massively admire anyone who speaks a second language.
I know like 17 computer languages.
I can't learn other languages to save my life.
So your intellectual prowess in English, I don't care about the accent.
Honestly, I think it's just magnificent.
But that's the thing I was talking about earlier.
So you come from a warm climate, right?
Sorry, someone interrupted me.
What do you say?
You come from a warm climate, right?
Yes, sort of Mediterranean-like.
Right, so you don't have winter, and so you don't have as much anxiety in your brain makeup, right?
Right, but if I compare myself to a lot of people around here, I still feel like I have less anxiety than the rest.
Okay, so give me an example, if you don't mind.
Give me an example of where a lack of anxiety caused problems.
So I've been in university for more than 10 years because I studied engineering at first, but I wasn't much of, I didn't want to, not that I didn't want to, but I didn't do homeworks or I didn't the last time because I didn't feel anxious about it.
I thought that I could always manage it somehow, so I didn't struggle with that.
And then I started noticing that at first I thought this was a gift, but because everyone said, oh, you're never anxious about anything.
So I thought it was a gift, but then I started noticing that I was lagging behind everyone else.
And I think it is because of my lack of anxiety.
So I mean, engineering is four years and then whatever, right?
So 10 years, what you've been doing?
10 years, yeah.
So I studied engineering for five or six years, for five and a half.
Here, engineering is almost six years.
Then I changed to nutrition.
I am a nutritionist now.
And then I went to Germany to study a master's there.
I just came back home and I'm finishing it, I guess.
That's my story.
And how old are you?
I'm 31 now.
And what's your dating life like?
I have a daughter and a new father, six months old.
And I'm expecting a new one, actually.
And you mean my partner is pregnant?
Sorry, are you married?
Not yet.
Not yet.
When aren't you married?
Marriage plan.
I guess I want to be financially stable.
That's it.
You have kids.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
Life happens, I guess, but I'm straining my life.
No, no.
See, there's where your anxiety is, man.
Right there.
Two words.
Did you hear them?
This is where your lack of anxiety is two words.
Did you hear them?
Life happens.
Life happens.
Bullshit, brother.
Life Doesn't happen.
Life happens to plants.
Life happens to grass and trees.
Life happens to worms.
And you are none of those things.
You are the diametrical opposite, which is a human being with an incredible brain, the greatest gift in the universe, to will, choose, decide, and act.
Life does not happen.
You make it happen.
You make choices.
That's true.
That's true.
If you start making choices rather than letting life just happen, then you're going to get more anxious.
Because see, when life happens, you can just say, well, it is what it is, right?
And you don't feel any particular anxiety.
But the moment you start making actual choices and willing them, then you can be right or wrong.
If life just happens to you, you're kind of never right and never wrong.
You just get the slow sense of emptiness and regret as life goes forward.
But if you will stuff, you could be wrong.
And the concern of being wrong is where the anxiety comes from.
Anxiety is, I could be wrong.
I think I have enough food for the winter.
I could be wrong.
I'm sure that, as James was saying, I'm sure that crash downstairs was just a draw settling, but I could be wrong.
There could be an intruder who's going to garrot me in my sleep, right?
So anxiety is the fear that you can't be wrong, but if you just let life happen to you, you can't really be wrong.
Does that make sense?
I'm sorry, man.
I had a connection issue.
Could you repeat the last thing you said?
Okay, tell me the last major decision that you willed in your life.
I'm sorry, this is embarrassing.
Just once more, please.
Okay, we'll give it one more try.
What was the last major decision you strongly willed in your life?
Oh, sorry, I can't hear you because...
We can't control necessarily what kind of internet connection we have.
In general, I would prefer, this is a mild preference, I would prefer if you had a headset and a good internet connection when you call in.
It just makes it easier.
It makes the conversation flow.
And it also sounds better.
Like, I'm telling you, these conversations would be listened to a thousand years from now.
I'm not kidding you about that.
I know enough about the history of philosophy to know when things are going to last.
That I know.
So a $20 headset, at least don't be on speakerphone, maybe even just some earbuds or something like that.
A decent connection.
Don't call me in a loud place on a speakerphone when you've got one bar on your phone.
Just in general, wait until it's a good thing.
Have some decent quality audio and a good internet connection.
And that way the conversation, which will be listened to a thousand years from now, sounds a whole lot better.
And they're not going to have to use some freaky AI restoring your voice thing, which is going to not sound like you exactly.
So I really appreciate that, everyone.
Thank you for a great chat today.
And freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Really, really, really, really would appreciate that.
Freedomain.com slash donate.
And I will see you tomorrow night for a live stream, 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Lots of love.
Thanks to everyone for your conversation and your communication.
The lovers, the haters, and all the in-betweeners.
I love you all.
Thanks, everyone.
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