All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 1, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:11
Debating in Bad Faith! Twitter/X Space
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yo-Yo, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It is Stefan von Molyneux Forehead from Freedomane.com.
And I hope you're doing well.
Hope you're having a lovely day.
Hope you're enjoying the, well, here in Ontario, the not so inconsiderable heat wave.
The kind of heat wave that happens when I take off my shirt.
Assuming I've been microwaved.
All right.
So it's your show.
Questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, criticisms, whatever is on your mind that you think is worth running through my chatterbox philosophy brain.
I am all ears.
In fact, I'm so all ears I could fly over a circus Dumbo Elephant style.
I'm here for you.
All right, let's go straight into Spanish sounding name person.
What's on your mind?
How's it going?
Pretty good.
I didn't expect to get picked, but since I'm here, I just like to ask you a pretty specific question.
So I'm 25 years old.
I recently got married and I'm a Muslim.
And my wife is also a Muslim, of course.
And we're talking about kids and everything and planning about that and thinking about all of that.
And so for my wife, she kind of really wants to circumcise my son.
If we have a son, she says he should get circumcised.
But I'm against it for various reasons.
I think maybe you know him, but basically just a general idea that we cut off males, you know, body parts seems pretty insane, just, you know, as a basic reason.
But my wife thinks it's normal.
I mean, she says it's a cultural thing.
It's what we all do and what we're supposed to do.
And so she wants to continue doing that, but I'm against it.
And we kind of left it off at the state where, I mean, I gave her all my arguments and I told her why we shouldn't do it.
And we kind of, the point where we left off was basically we said that we're going to, if we have a son, we're going to let him grow up until he's 18.
And then we're going to tell him about circumcision.
And if he wants to do that, then we can let him do that.
But if not, then not, we don't want to make a decision for him if he can't decide by himself.
So but basically what she says against that is that, well, you're going to tell him all about like the bad things about why you shouldn't do it.
And basically we're going to let him make a decision, but I'm not allowed to like kind of tell him all the negatives.
So I don't know.
I kind of wanted to ask you what you make of all of that, what you would say.
Yeah.
That's a great question, my friend.
And I really appreciate you bringing it up.
And I mean, there's just two questions I have up front.
And forgive me for my lack of knowledge of Islam.
Number one is, why on earth would a man listen to a woman about what happens with a penis?
I mean, this is nothing specific to Islam.
That's just in general.
Like, why on earth would a man listen to a woman about what happens to a penis?
I mean, she doesn't have one.
Well, I actually told her that too.
I said, like, I mean, if it's a son, then it's kind of a male topic.
And if we have a daughter, then she's going to have all kinds of female topics that I might not have any input on.
And it's one of the things I told her.
I said, like, as a man who has also been circumcised, I kind of have like an idea and I have researched this and I know why it's not good.
But I mean, yeah, we talk about like a hypothetical son and we and yeah, I mean, I didn't want to, I mean, I could, I could tell her, like, this is male business.
You don't have any input on that, but that I feel that's just kind of disrespectful and that's not going to be like productive to kind of convincing her by herself that it's, I mean, I don't want to like be like, okay, it's going to be my way and that's it.
I kind of want to like explain it to her and be like, for this and that reason, we shouldn't do it.
So yeah.
Okay.
All right.
I just was wondering about that.
Of course, I'm sure that you know, I'm just going to go over them very briefly.
I've got a whole presentation called The Truth About Circumcision, which you can find at fdrpodcasts.com.
So circumcision is the anesthesia-free slicing of one-third of the skin of the penis off a newborn.
It's hacking.
It's mutilation.
It is brutal.
It's barbaric.
It is removing healthy tissue.
It is, to me, an absolute brutal violation of any basic medical ethics.
It produces very high levels of stress hormones and cortisol in the baby, in the sun, in your precious boy.
In fact, six months after circumcision, the stress levels are still elevated.
And you take a child from the womb of the mother, which is a comfortable and beautiful, warm and nutritious environment, straight out into the cold, harsh air.
And then you immediately slash off a third of the most sensitive skin on his body without anesthetic or if it's even local anesthetic.
I don't know if you've ever tried to have a tooth drilled without Novocaine.
It's not fun.
I had to once get something.
Yeah, I had to once get something incised on my skin without anesthetic, and it's brutal.
And so it is horrendous.
Now, the long-term effects are that there's much more chafing with regards to sexual activity.
One of the reasons why there's a foreskin is so that when the man thrusts, it's not like there's a cushion, right?
So it's that the foreskin slides back and forth with less abrasion against the vagina.
So it is more pleasurable often for the woman.
And it is a horrendous practice.
It is a barbaric practice.
And of course, it's just another one of these anti-male tropes, right?
The anti-male trope is that we would never countenance this in most places, certainly in the West.
We would never say that click direct, clitorectomy.
Sorry.
I could do the word.
I could do the word.
Clitorectomies and female genital mutilation would be considered barbaric, but male genital mutilation is not considered barbaric.
And that's just anti-male prejudice.
It makes erections, it can make erections painful because there's not enough skin to stretch.
It has health complications at times.
And I mean, I actually talked to a man on my show some years ago whose penis was destroyed by a botched circumcision.
It's risky.
And the myth that, oh, you get less penis cancer, it's less with STDs.
And that's just not, it's just really not true.
And even if it were true that circumcision were to slightly reduce the chance of illness later on in life, we don't do that as a society.
We don't do that.
We don't sort of hack off infant girls' breasts because they might have some risk of breast cancer later on in life.
We don't remove one testicle because there could be testicular cancer and this halves the odds.
We just don't do that.
It's not done as a society and carving out these exceptions is brutal.
So, I mean, you wash, you use soap, and everything's perfectly fine.
I have, I was not circumcised.
I have an intact organ, and it's never been an issue.
I mean, no woman has ever said, oh, whatever.
I mean, it is just a strange aesthetic that's put forward, and it is monstrous.
And, you know, I guess my major concern with regards to your marriage, congratulations, of course, by the way.
My major concern is that I would have a conversation with my wife not so much about circumcision, but just about empathy, which is why would you want to inflict this on a child?
Why would you want to take a boy and without anesthetic, slice off a third of his most sensitive skin and leaving him, I mean, it's disfigured.
It is disfigured because it's not the way that God made the body or evolution carved the body.
So I think really the conversation is not around circumcision, but just about, I mean, authority as a whole.
Like, I get that you want to negotiate with your wife, and I think that's a fine thing in many ways.
But when it comes to female issues, women should have authority.
And when it comes to male issues, men should have authority.
The division of labor in a marriage is really essential.
This is my sort of tip to having a happy marriage.
I talked about this on X not too long ago.
The division of labor is really important.
My wife is really great at some things.
I don't necessarily understand them because women are delightfully incomprehensible.
So my wife is really great at some things and she has authority in those things.
I'm better at some things than she is.
So I have authority in those things.
Like you're a team and you're a team with different skills because you're man and woman and we have evolved to have complementary but to different skills and abilities.
So letting your wife have authority in the things that she's best at, and these are fairly predictable things.
Things around maintaining social contacts, being appropriate, being nice, you know, which is sometimes underrated by men, certainly by me.
And she, you know, softens the edges and creates a beautiful home and runs the social life and does a lot of great things that she's just naturally really good at.
She keeps all of the appointments in her head.
She makes sure that my daughter and I get our checkups and our blah, blah, blahs.
And she's just really fantastic at running the household.
And she knows everything that's in the fridge.
And she's got a giant conveyor belt of things in her mind that need to go from the store to the fridge to our bellies and so on.
She's just really great.
And I'm terrible at that stuff, like unavowedly, unabashedly, unregretfully, just appalling at that.
It's the old thing that bachelors live on a broken futon with a giant TV that's sitting on the box at Cayman.
And so, yeah, she makes the house a beautiful home.
She keeps us healthy.
She is really devoted to our well-being.
And there are other things that I'm better at.
And I have some authority.
Now, it doesn't mean we don't tell each other about things.
You know, if I need to buy something for what it is I do for the show, then I will tell her about it, but I'm not going to ask her about it because now I'm doing these spaces.
I wanted a computer machine that allows me to record dual channel off an iPhone.
So I had to spend some money to get that.
And, you know, I'm sort of explaining to her what it's about, but I'm not like, ooh, can I, you know, because she trusts that I am not a big spendthrift in these areas.
And if I buy something, it's needed.
And, you know, when you get older, you have more, your time becomes more precious, right?
So whatever you can do to cut your time.
Whereas if she says we need something for the house or we need whatever, women get a hate-on for the current environment every couple of years and feel the urge to redo it and so on.
And I've managed to stave that off for a while by, you know, do we need it right now kind of thing?
But, you know, she's going to get some new furniture in the house, some rooms in the house repainted.
Apparently it needs something called freshening up, which I don't really understand, but that's fine.
She has authority in that and good for her.
And so you got to divide labor and give people authority.
Otherwise, you end up negotiating everything.
Everything goes to a standstill.
You know, like if you have, I was chief technical officer in a software company and later on I was a director of marketing because I was pretty good at chatting and sales and stuff like that.
So you have a technology guy and you have a marketing guy.
And I've been in both roles.
And they may inform each other of stuff, but they don't negotiate on everything.
Like the tech guy doesn't go to the marketing guy and says, we need to upgrade the server.
And the marketing guy doesn't go to the Tech guy and says, I need budget for a mail-in campaign, right?
I mean, they will inform each other, but they each have their areas of specialty.
So that would be my general argument.
What do you think?
I mean, you're definitely right.
So we've been married for like, I think it's been like three or four months.
And I mean, kids are definitely in the future.
This isn't something that's going to be like important pretty soon.
But the reason I brought it up to her is because and wanted to talk to her about it is because it's a very important topic to me.
And I, like you said, like I've been circumcised at seven years old without anesthesia.
So, I mean, the usual way is you go to the doctor, you get like anesthetics and you like do it the proper way.
But for me personally, I remember my own circumcision.
And I kind of, I guess I was traumatized by it.
I didn't, I, I, like sometimes I think about it at night and I don't, I'm like unable to sleep or like I kind of get this like cringy feeling whenever I even read the word somewhere.
And yeah, for that reason, I kind of, this is like a topic for me personally that I wanted to make sure that if I ever have a son, I don't do that to them.
And you're definitely right.
Like this is a male topic.
This is something that like even if you think about it in the most basic sense, you like, it's insane that you just cut off a part of a human body that's completely normal and fully functional.
And I guess, I mean, she's Muslim.
I mean, it's cultural for her.
It's like something that she heard about and knows that it's like something Muslims do and something that's kind of encouraged.
It's not forced.
This is not something that is like for Muslims that it's a forced thing.
So they have to like get circumcised, but it's like highly, highly encouraged.
And so because of that, like, I don't, I don't, I'm, I don't, I've, I kind of have to like be careful that I don't like kind of get angry and just like get mad at the religious part of it and kind of disrespect the fact that she's like, I mean, she, she cares about her religion.
She wants to follow it as best as possible and her kids to follow it as fast as possible.
And I want that too, but this is like the one thing that I completely disagree with.
And I have to like kind of make an argument and not say that it's a barbaric thing and it's insane and this and that, because that's not going to stick.
It's not going to convince her.
And I mean, maybe it was a mistake that I told her, that I talked to her about it at this point.
Maybe I should have waited until there is even a son.
But because of my own experience, I kind of really, really wanted to make sure that she knows what I think about this topic and that I either way, I mean, it's kind of, yeah, I talk to her about it.
I kind of get her input.
I try to convince her.
But at the end of the day, I plan to not let that happen in any, like, in any world.
Like in no way is this ever going to happen to my hypothetical son.
But yeah, I mean, that's kind of my thoughts.
Well, and sorry, but the principle of disagreement is essential in a marriage, right?
Which is how do you resolve disagreements, right?
She has the opinion of circumcision, you have the opinion against circumcision.
And it's always a big question in marriage, as it is in all relationships, is how do you resolve disputes?
And to me, it has to be reason and evidence because otherwise it's just willpower.
And willpower usually accumulates to the person who just nags the longest or resists the longest or anything like that.
And so you have to have the reason and evidence thing.
How do we make the decision on circumcision?
Reason and evidence.
Is it rational to circumcise?
No.
Is there any evidence that circumcision, the benefits outweigh the risks and the detriments?
No.
Right.
The fact that it's cultural, well, that's not an argument.
I mean, culture throughout human history has included female genital mutilation and still does around the world, has included slavery and still does around the world, has included beating children, beating wives and so on.
So culture, you know, in the Aztecs included the torture and mutilation and murder of children.
So culture is not an argument for anything other than vague familiarity.
So I think that you have to sit down and say, well, how are we going to resolve these disagreements?
You can't just say, I like it, and then insert the word culture and think that you've won an argument.
You have to go according to, you know, facts, reason and evidence.
I never try to convince people of my perspective.
I will always try to tell them, here's the reason and evidence behind what it is that I'm saying, because otherwise it's just a matter of willpower and dominance.
And you have to both have objective standards for resolving disputes in a marriage, right?
So hopefully that helps.
And I certainly appreciate you bringing up the topic.
And I also, you know, just want to thank you, like man to man, father to father, husband to husband for the stand that you're taking to protect your son.
It's a beautiful thing.
And it's, you know, it's funny because it's such a non-issue.
I mean, circumcised or not, nobody's ever said anything.
There's nothing in the locker room.
Nobody cares.
You know, like men don't comment on each other's penises.
I don't know what kind of weird society it is that people live in where they think that's a thing.
Women don't care.
But I've always been very grateful and thankful to my mother for that decision.
Or maybe it was my father too.
I don't know.
But I really do appreciate that.
And I really do thank you for standing up for your son in this way.
Thanks for having me on.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
Great topic.
All right.
So let us move.
Womp.
It's funny because if there were two of you and you don't answer, it would be whomp, womp.
Hello.
Hey, hi, Stefan.
Yes, sir.
Hi, Dev.
This is Calum from Scotland.
I mean, I just wanted to ask you about what you think about the new online safety bill for the UK.
Oh, it's horrendous.
It's absolutely horrendous.
Absolutely horrendous.
You know, America has free speech embedded in its constitution, which, I mean, it doesn't mean you have real free speech because in the absence, like, so, of course, America has the First Amendment, The government cannot compel or deny speech.
But all that happens is NGOs pressure social media companies into deplatforming.
But again, the government can't technically go after you.
It is, you know, England was the birthplace of free speech.
I've mentioned this before.
Of course, John Milton wrote a great essay called Ariopagitica, I think, I mean, hundreds of years ago in the defense of free speech.
And free speech is always restricted by people who have the shittiest fucking arguments in the world.
They have no evidence.
They have no reason.
They have no facts.
All they have is the desire for throat-throttling control and domination.
So you have to shut up and you have to nod and you have to smile and you get patted on the head with the few remaining scraps of liberty because the people in charge have no facts, no reason, no evidence.
And what has happened to England with regards to free speech is an absolute crime against the population.
It is horrendous that these pimple-assed assholes in centralized bureaucracies and legislatures are telling people what they can and cannot say.
If you're so wise that you know what a population of tens of millions of people are allowed to talk about, then you must be so wise that you can convince them with your rhetorical powers and your capacity for reason and the huge amounts of evidence.
Also, it is an absolute condemnation of the school system.
Why is it that you need to punish people for free speech if you've taught them how to think and reason and negotiate in schools?
But I watched, God help me, that show Adolescence, which has one of the episodes takes place in schools, which are all just terrible, trashy garbage.
And so the government is in control of teaching people how to think, negotiate, and reason.
So why would you need to control people's speech and punish them for what they said?
Well, there are these extremists.
It's like, bro, in the government, you have like a dozen years to teach people how to think and reason.
And if they come out of that unable to think and reason, that means that you've got to reform the educational system, not control their speech after the fact.
So I think it's all just horrendous and wrong.
And I can't even express the amount of sorrow that I experience for the England that I grew up in.
I lived in England from 1967 until 1977.
I was born in Ireland, but I spent most of my early childhood in England.
I mean, it was a paradise.
It was paradise, clean, safe.
You know, I posted this on X. I would roam with my friends from the age of four or five onwards, all over the city, no problems.
No, never had a shred of problems, never had a shred of difficulty, never had a shred of danger.
I mean, it was paradise.
You go and read Enid Blyton's famous five stories, and you get a sense of what England was like back in the day.
She was before my time, but it bled into my time.
And you could say what you wanted.
You know, in Canada, there was free speech until I think it was the late 70s as a sort of default position.
And, you know, of course, the very sad thing is that people growing up in England now, they don't remember what it was like.
They don't know what it was like.
They don't know how safe and clean and beautiful it all was and how many freedoms you had compared to the present.
It's really heartbreaking.
It's one of the things that I have to kind of not dwell on because it takes me to some pretty dark places and you kind of have to ration your black pills in the world.
So anyway, that's my thoughts.
What do you think?
I think it is the hide behind the excuse that, oh, we're doing it to protect children from watching porn, which I think is a good thing.
I think porn's an evil that we should really try and get rid of from the earth.
But, you know, hours into, they were already banning posts about a certain protest.
I don't want to say it out loud.
I'm sure you all know.
But yeah, it's very worrying.
Very worrying.
There is such a savage disconnect in most of the West, not all of the West, between what the people want and what is being inflicted upon them.
And that, you know, is not a good trajectory for any society to be on.
It's one of the main reasons I got out of politics five or six years ago, is that if the leaders are constantly suppressing the will of the people and acting in direct opposition to the will of the people, and we can think of a number of topics where that could come up, well, it doesn't go well.
I mean, we all know what happens, and I don't need to get into any particular details, but it's very sad.
It's very sad that the governments are acting in diametrical opposition in many ways and areas to what their populations as a whole actually want.
And the further that the leadership goes from the wishes and will of the people, the more censorship there tends to be.
So whenever I see increasing censorship, I see, in general, leadership that is not listening to the people and doesn't want to listen to the people and doesn't want to be criticized.
So yeah, I think it's very sad.
Yeah, I agreed.
I just think it's really sad as well how you mentioned that the UK was the birthplace of the free speech movement and they're the first ones of kind of democratic countries to remove it.
And I feel that the rest of Europe, Canada, hopefully not the US because they've got the First Amendment right.
But I think that everybody else will follow suit.
Well, I mean, hopefully, hopefully, people will be able to get leaders in who do what the people want.
Because when there is this disconnect between the leadership and the population, people get increasingly desperate.
And that's a very, very sad thing.
And we all want to avoid violence.
We want to avoid extremism.
We want to avoid escalation.
But people do get pretty desperate if they get the perception that their leaders not only are not listening to them, but sometimes doing the opposite.
And it is a sad sort of fact of democracy that it's really tough to find any particular correlation between what the people want and what gets implemented.
But of course, if you want more on that, you can go to freedomain.com slash books and look at my solutions for that kind of stuff.
It's all peaceful and reasonable.
And at the moment, it involves peaceful parenting.
So peacefulparenting.com.
I never want to avoid the opportunity to give that wee plug.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
And old, I just want to say thanks, your time, and keep up the great work here and inspiration.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
All the best.
Bye-bye.
God, I love that accent.
I don't know why.
I just love that accent.
I really do.
All right, Rolf Craig.
The words and syllables that I speak.
Rolf Cake, what's on your mind, my friend?
It's not so deep philosophical, Fico, but the new trend with the American Eagle advertisement with Sidney Sweeney, where suddenly now it's okay to show pride in one's white ancestry, where she makes a pun on genes and genetics, where she shows her great attributes and highlights that she has blonde hair and blue eyes.
And that kind of trend could go somewhere where suddenly it's, you know, because the decay about the skill trip, the white population of Europe had done seems to be, you know, one of the things that indoctrination is wanting to imprint.
Sorry, did you have a specific question?
Yeah, so if I got to boil it down to specific questions, like what do you think about this trend?
Do you think it will catch on?
Do you think this will change the way that we perceive our own identity, where suddenly you see like the suicidal empathy kind of thing taking over Europe and America?
You think this kind of trend with advertisement will lead to a change where suddenly there is more pride and protection of one's ancestry and culture.
Oh, I think we're losing you a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a lot to rest on Sidney Sweeney, sort of a big turnaround in sort of cultural pride.
But I do think it's interesting.
And I think that advertisers don't have any particular ideological bents.
They just do what they think is edgy, interesting, and cool, and what works.
So, of course, up until probably 2008 to 2010, you would sell your clothing by putting super attractive people into the clothing.
I mean, it's kind of a lie, obviously, like, but it's something that, you know, everybody goes to the, if you go to an optometrist, you have all these pictures of all these super handsome, beautiful people wearing glasses, right?
And you think, of course, you know, you know, you put those glasses on, you don't look like that guy, you don't look like that woman, but it works.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, but I follow, you know, like math and ownership of companies.
And the whole thing about this ESG indoctrination, where it's kind of that way, it's in inclusivity.
It's used in a way that it sounds so nice when they do it, right?
But this is like, you know, private equity firms that is wanting to like the same that owns the media.
So it's definitely deliberately where it's not.
Well, but hang on, hang on.
So advertising, people want to stand out.
And there is a kind of funny economic metric in businesses called goodwill, which is, you know, basically what people think of your company.
So if you just constantly parade beautiful people, it becomes kind of bland and repetitive and people sort of stop seeing it.
If you then show somebody who's not sort of traditionally or classically attractive, then it can generate goodwill.
People can say, oh, look, it's nice that being inclusive of people who aren't traditionally lean or fit or beautiful and so on.
And it can be beneficial to a company.
Of course, if it goes too far, then it becomes political and people don't want to buy.
And of course, we saw this with Mulroney, Mulvaney, Malvaney, Malvaney, in sort of a beer ad and so on.
So it can go too far.
And so now what's edgy and cutting and different and is going to get a lot of attention is the standards from 20 years ago, right?
So they're just advertisers, they have a tendency to go with the current, and then they have a tendency to buck the current, to go against the current, and that gets them notice and that gets them free advertising.
So, you know, I'm sure that somebody at American Eagle, I'm guessing I don't know, right?
I'm sure that somebody at American Eagle said, you know, people are kind of tired of all of this woke advertising.
Why don't we just do a traditional ad with cleavage and tight genes or something like that, right?
Both of which I can supply, but I'm just not getting the phone calls.
It's just wrong.
Come on.
Cleavage and hair.
It's a gorgeous combo.
But so they're just back in the trend and it's working, right?
They're getting great word of mouth and great goodwill.
Sorry, go ahead.
I believe your view on this is a bit too simplistic.
I understand at first glance, it may seem so, but if you follow the money, like also like the Jaguar, like it's like the companies is like doing self-harm.
They are self-sabotaging in doing this kind of thing.
And by thinking it's because it all follows the pattern of ESG, which is like Black Rock and Vanguard and this kind of pattern that's same ones that kind of owns our media and our thoughts in this kind of sphere.
So I believe that it's more deliberate.
It's more deliberate than you give it credit.
Well, no, no, no, it's very deliberate for sure.
I mean, I'm aware that there are a lot of investment companies that give, that base their investment upon ESG points and DEI mandates and so on.
Like I actually worked in my early 20s, I worked in a major Canadian corporation in the HR department on diversity and mandates and so on.
So I've been aware of this stuff for, I mean, coming on 40 years.
So, and there are certainly, I mean, there are investors and investment companies and giant investment organizations that are awarding particular brownie points for companies that follow woke principles and woke ideology.
And so, yeah, I'm aware of all that.
But companies in the long run have looked at the smoking craters of other companies and said, well, if you Go too far in that direction.
It doesn't matter if you have investment if you don't have customers, right?
Because the investors are fundamentally investing in a company's ability to attract customers.
And so if you get boycotts and you lose customers, then there will be pushback with regards to these mandates.
So I'm aware, and it's a tough dance.
You know, I had significant ambitions when I was in the business world, right?
I co-founded a company, grew it to, yeah, fairly decent size and was the chief technical officer and so on.
So I had significant interest in the business world.
But the problem is when you start to become successful and you're sort of high up in the business world, you start having to deal with all of these weird political, non-business mandates and these sort of creepy regulations.
And it just was like repulsive to me.
I could just, I need to be able to speak my mind.
I cannot be tied up in red tape.
And I do not like being told what to peacefully do with my own resources and choices.
And so it is, as you start to sort of float up in the business world, you have to deal with just a lot of stuff that is not to do with why you got into business in the first place.
I mean, I got into business because I love solving problems.
I care about the environment.
I had an environmental and health and safety company that helped companies reduce pollution and keep workers safe.
And so, you know, passionate things.
I love developing people's talents.
I love going out and the challenges of trying to get sales.
I love, you know, it's kind of like sports, kind of like competition because you're going up against, we were going up against giant companies with our little startup.
And, you know, how do you find a way to win and all of that?
So I loved all of that stuff in business.
And then as you move up and you get bigger, things just get weirder and weirder.
And the more successful you become, the more people want to latch onto your success, latch onto your success to push their own agendas, whether it's political or some sort of woke stuff.
And it is, it becomes less and less fun the more successful you become, at least it was for me, because it was no longer about the thing itself.
It then became about people wanting to hijack your success to push their own agenda.
And of course, you can see this happening on X all the time.
People sort of trying to hijack what it is that I do to push their own agenda, which, you know, is fine to some degree, but yeah, it's not a lot of fun at the loftier areas.
Can I ask you a follow-up?
Yeah, let's make it quick.
Okay.
So subscribe, I subscribe to the idea that this wokeness nonsense, all the recitation you can like, the climate history, everything is to struggle freedom.
But what I don't get is why is this suicidal empathy seems to be delivered towards like the white Europe and white America?
Why is it it seems to be racist targeted towards whites with this indoctrination and the ads we've seen the last 10 or 20 years?
Yeah, I mean, there's a, I mean, that's sort of unmistakable.
And I've got the truth about free speech as a presentation that I've done.
Everyone should check it out, FDRpodcast.com, just do a search for free speech.
So, I mean, they've asked a bunch of people, what is your relationship to free speech?
Are you a free speech absolutist?
A free speech absolutist, of course, is everything should be allowed except direct incitements to violence or provocations for illegal action.
And Christians and whites and males, you put sort of those three circles together, you get the strongest advocacy for free speech for whatever reason.
It doesn't really matter why.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the free will requirements of Christianity along with Greco-Roman philosophical traditions, but the causality is not super important.
But the facts are that Christians are very pro-free speech.
White males are very pro-free speech.
And of course, when you see who's being attacked, it's generally Christians, being the most persecuted people on the planet these days, and white males.
White males and Christians also tend to be small government, free market, again, because of the sort of free will requirement and so on.
And so, of course, Christianity has a fairly good history of promoting freedom around the world.
I mean, given that it was Christians who ended the world by the practice of slavery, Christian white males in general, not to diss the females, they weren't really allowed to participate that much, but that's just sort of the demographics of how it came about.
So if you look at the most sort of pro-freedom, pro-free speech, smallest government, most free market groups, well, if you want to destroy the free market and impose economic and political and language totalitarianism, then those are the groups that you would target.
And so I think that's what's going on as a whole.
Yep.
Thank you so much, Stephen, for talking with me.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Sigma, I got about another 20 minutes, my friends.
Sigma, what's on your mind?
Hey, Stefan, how's it going?
Yeah, no, I just wanted to circle back to another topic we spoke on previously on dating.
Actually, I wanted to ask you, how did you find the love of your life, your wife?
And how did you meet?
And then how did it proceed from there?
Great question.
So I met her in particular, and I'm very thankful that I met her after I went through like almost two years of therapy, three hours a week, because I needed to get some grounding and do some emotional processing.
So we actually met playing volleyball.
And she's all like a shade under five foot two.
I'm a shade under six foot.
And we met playing volleyball.
And I enjoyed the enthusiasm into which she threw herself into the game.
And anyway, we were standing around at the end of a game once.
And she gave me, she's got the most amazing smile.
Like it's truly like, it's like the sun coming up, right?
So she gave me this big binge smile.
She says, how was your day?
And it happened to be the day when I got my first book published.
And I said, I had a great day.
I got my first book published.
And she said, oh, and then we talked a little bit about the book.
And she said, I'd be interested to read it.
And I said, no, no, No, I was going to say you can't read it so that you'd want it more.
And she said, reverse psychology doesn't work on me.
I practice psychology.
So then we talked about her career as a mental health professional.
And it was really nice.
So then the next time that the volleyball team met, we were all supposed to go out for dinner as a team.
And sort of by coincidence, everyone else had to cancel.
And my wife and I went for dinner, or my future wife and I went for dinner.
And just like we had the most incredible conversation.
Like just, and this conversation's been going on for almost a quarter century now, and it's just fantastic.
And after that, we just spent every day together whenever we could.
And I proposed within a couple of months and we got married by 11 months.
And that's, that's how it was.
And I remember, of course, I mean, I would say, of course, but I remember we went on a hike in Don Mills in my old neighborhood.
I wanted to sort of show her some of the places I grew up.
And I remember watching her.
She was climbing the hill ahead of me.
I know it sounds a bit more prurient than it is.
And we were just having a great day, a great chat.
She had a great sense of humor and she is incredibly warm and very thoughtful.
I mean, I mentioned the story before, but I had a pair of sandals downtown.
I lived in Utown.
And I said, oh, I, you know, tomorrow I have to go and get these sandals.
They were ordered, but they've been delivered.
And she's like, oh, no, you're writing.
Go do your writing.
I'm downtown anyway.
I'll pick them up for you.
And, you know, as a man, having dealt with a lot of sort of modern women who, you know, are kind of borky when it comes to offering, you know, they don't want to serve the patriarchy.
I don't know, whatever it is, right?
But the fact that she was just, you know, hey, I'm down there.
I'm happy to pick them up for you.
Go do your writing.
And it's just like, wow, she was really helpful.
Kind of sort of incomprehensible to me at the time.
And I remember when I was on the hike just looking at her and said, look, there's no upgrade from here.
I mean, there's no upgrade from here.
And that was like, that was the pair bond that sort of locked in and all of that.
And it's been, it's been, you know, honestly, a delight and a pleasure.
I mean, we weather some storms, of course, right?
I mean, that's part of life.
That is life.
But it is, it's been just a beautiful, beautiful experience.
And, you know, that's one of the reasons why I want to share how amazing love and marriage is.
Does that help?
Yeah, no, that definitely helps.
It's interesting that you mentioned she did something for you that, you know, it was a small favor, but in reality, it was actually something that stood out from the rest of the women because I went on a date recently and this girl definitely stood out from the rest.
I was like very taken aback.
We went to a Japanese restaurant.
She actually put the napkin on my lap and, you know, pulled my chair out for me.
So I was just like stunned.
You know, such a simple thing that a woman could do for a man.
And to me, it's like this woman stands out from the rest of the women I've ever dated just from those two simple actions.
Yeah, it is wild.
It is wild just how starved for helpfulness men have become.
And it's, I read this book by a woman named Daniel Crittenden before I got married called What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us or something like that.
And she's got this bit where she talks about how she was playing tennis with her husband and there was this other woman and they were playing couples tennis, like doubles tennis.
And there was this other woman and her husband had forgotten his tennis racket in the car and he was stretching and he just said, you know, something like, can you go and grab the racket or something?
And she's like, no, get it yourself.
I didn't forget it.
And that sort of guarding of your, you know, blaming the other person and guarding, I'm not going to do it.
You know, like, and it's like gross, you know, if my wife is stretching and she asked me to go get her tennis racket, I'm going to go get her tennis racket and happily too.
And she does so much for our family.
And I mean, I like to think that I, and I know that I do a lot for our family too.
And just that generosity, you know, generosity begets generosity.
And, you know, we both made each other, you know, joyfully happy over the course of our lives, in part because she spent 10 minutes picking up a pair of sandals for me.
Because for me, it was like an hour down, an hour back, and she was like right there.
So she just, it was five minutes out of her way.
She spent a grand total of 10 minutes picking up my sandals.
And the reward, so to speak, for spending 10 minutes to pick up my sandals and saving me two hours was a lifetime of happy marriage and being a wonderful mother and wife and all of that.
So yeah, this generosity stuff I think is really important.
I mean, that's really been my whole approach to philosophy is just to be generous, right?
I don't charge ads and I don't have sponsors.
I just talk philosophy.
And if you want to help out the show, freedoman.com/slash donate.
And I just think that that generosity in life is a highly underappreciated virtue.
A lot of people kind of hedge stuff and they say, well, I'll give 5% more and I'm going to see if you give 5% more.
And it never works out.
You just end up with two people on the opposing sides of like a World War I trench eyeing each other suspiciously, waiting for the other person to become more generous.
It doesn't work.
What I've found works is give 150% of yourself and see who reciprocates.
And that has been a very winning strategy for me in life.
Because, you know, it's important to have your morals and it's also important to have your winning strategies.
And I mean, the two, of course, should align.
But I've just found in life, you know, like I would just offer to pay for dinner.
And then there's times when she would demand to pay for dinner and it just worked out.
So when you're in a relationship where two people are relentlessly trying to be over generous to the other, I mean, you really can't get better than that.
And a lot of people hoard their generosity because they're like, oh, I don't want to be exploited.
And it's like, but if you hoard your generosity, you never really find out if the other person is grateful and reciprocal and generous.
And I mean, I think that's one of the things that's happened in the modern world that's really tragic for women and for men, of course, is that women have been trained to be resentful and not appreciative and not happy.
And because women have been trained to be resentful, their natural spirit of generosity Gets channeled into other things, you know, like welfare and other, you know, terrible government programs and so on.
So, generosity arises out of benevolence.
It arises out of happiness and it arises out of appreciation.
My wife does so much for our family that there's nothing she couldn't ask me for that I wouldn't do.
And of course, I trust her implicitly, so she wouldn't ever ask me to do anything against my values or against our shared values.
But you cannot be happy without a benevolent spirit of generosity and appreciation.
So you need to be generous, I would argue, in life, but not slavishly so, right?
So you need to be generous and then see who reciprocates.
And if people don't reciprocate or they take strip things from you, then you should absolutely try to extricate yourself from those situations, right?
So it's the old thing that, you know, if your friend asks you to help him move, show up early, work hard, and help him move, and then ask him for a favor.
And if he doesn't provide that favor, if he, you know, he's just busy, well, then you found out that he's not a good friend.
So I find that generosity is the key when it comes to relationships.
Be generous, see who reciprocates, and be pretty ruthless with those who exploit you, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I know that that definitely makes sense.
You know, and I think for this generation in particular, say millennial, well, it's for all generations, but particularly millennials and Gen Z who growing up in the media age and the social media age, that particular skill set or value shines through more brightly because everyone, especially women, are programmed and indoctrinated from a young age to be independent and self-sovereign and powerful, right?
And it's like it behooves them to ever even think about doing something small, you know, as a generous action towards a man.
And it's like the biblical story of Jesus at the well.
The Sumerian woman gives him water.
Yeah, there's several biblical stories like this in the Old Testament as well, where I can't remember if it was Joseph or one of the fathers.
She simply gave him water, and that was the one he married.
He knew that was the one to marry immediately.
Yeah, it works out well.
You should not need to have to do a dance to extract generosity from people who claim to love you.
You should all be enthusiastic about making life better for the other person.
And, you know, your happiness is my happiness.
There's no such thing as sacrifice.
You know, I mean, I gave up writing books for like 10 years when my daughter was little, it's a stay-at-home dad.
I look upon those years as like absolute treasures.
I'm thrilled that I did that.
Having another five or ten books would be meaningless relative to that time with my daughter.
So you just devote yourself to the happiness of others and see who reciprocates.
And if you're hedging already, it's a bad situation.
Yeah, thank you for that stuff.
Appreciate the story and the insight there.
Awesome stuff.
And keep up the good work.
Thank you very much.
Oh, I thought we had someone.
Hang on.
All right.
Christian King.
You should see him in a crown.
What's on your mind, my friend?
Hello, hello.
Going once, going twice.
Are you with us?
Do not make me holler into a Christian voice.
Yes, sir.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, it's such a first of all, it's such an honor to speak to you.
I admire everything you stand for so much.
Well, thank you.
That's right.
I wanted to go back to the, I wanted to go back to the Alan Watts quote that you had.
I can't remember exactly.
I think it was if something was inevitable in the future, that no amount of worrying was ever going to.
No, no.
I mean, he said, no, he said something.
No, it wasn't that.
He said, no amount of anxiety has ever changed anything in the future.
Okay.
Well, no, that's probably true that a certain amount of anxiety has changed things.
But I don't know if you've read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolley, but there's a, I don't know if it's a theory, but what they say is that first we had the reptilian brain, which learned to scan the environment for threats.
But then when we develop the human brain, we develop the concept of the future and we learn to predict threats in the future.
But the issue is that our reptilian brain is still going out of control, looking for threats in the future.
And it creates an artificial world of infinite things that can go wrong in the future, and that the future doesn't exist.
It's in the now, we're imagining a future.
In the now, we're imagining the past.
But really, the only thing we can put our hands on is the now.
And so, how do we put this?
You can always handle the now, but anxiety is where you start to imagine infinite possibilities of what could go wrong in the future.
And so I guess I would say just because, according to your theory, anxiety benefited our ancestors in the past, you know, predicting the future, you know, what could go wrong, doesn't mean that that is still going to be evolutionarily correct in the future.
As we go further, there could be a point where actually we need to stop, like, you know, the mind going off into this constant future.
And we need to actually come into the now because it's true that from a standpoint of spiritual realization, now is now that's all that exists.
I mean, you have to shut off the intellect and come into the subconscious.
You know, like the intellect is the smaller part of our brain, you know, the intellect that goes from one thought to the next.
Okay, I need you to sort of, you're just going on a little bit, and I apologize for that, but I just need you to sort of wrap it up because I need to be able to respond.
And you're just saying a bunch of stuff.
And I'm fine, but I mean, I just need to be able to have a chance to respond.
All right.
Well, I guess your argument was that anxiety was a good thing because it allowed us to go to predict problems in the future.
But I'm saying that maybe it's not a good thing.
Maybe you can.
Well, let me ask you this.
Let me ask you this.
Hang on, hang on.
Okay, so let me ask you this.
When you first started your speech, and I say speech, I don't mean this is a negative, right?
But it was a long, long speech.
So when you first started your speech, you ended in the future from when you started, right?
No.
Yes, you did.
No, I'm in the now.
No, no.
You started your speech and then you ended it in the future from when you started, right?
Not, we can't put our hands on that.
Okay, yeah, I need you to just be sensible.
No, I need you to just be sensible.
So let's say your speech was five minutes long, right?
So when you ended your speech, you were five minutes in the future from when you started, right?
Or was I started five minutes in the past?
No, you can't start in the past.
Okay, let me let me let me let me do this for you.
If you think you can start a speech in the past, do it now.
And then you'll show up on the recording as having started in the past.
So go ahead.
Even if we pulled up the recording, we'd be listening to the recording in the now.
Right, but you would show up in the past.
Hang on, hang on.
Your theory, your theory is that you can start a speech in the past.
Well, we can look at evidence of things that occurred in the past, but we're still looking at that from the perspective of the now.
Right.
But if you can start a speech in the past, I want you to go back and insert at the beginning of my show, which started at 12:30 Eastern.
I want you to go back and insert a speech at the beginning because you can start a speech in the past.
No, we can't.
I can't go back to the past.
Okay, good, good.
So, saying that your speech began five minutes in the past, when you first started your speech, you had to plan the speech and have it communicate information and end in the future from when you started, right?
Well, I definitely was thinking about the future.
So, the human mind is thinking about the future, but I can't actually touch that.
I can only be here right now.
I mean, it's amazing how fast the now slips into the past.
It's almost instantaneous.
I mean, I'm not sure what you can't touch the future.
I don't know what that means.
I mean, why is that?
I mean, who would ever argue that you can?
Yes?
So, in order to make your speech, you had to plan from the present to the future.
In order to be able to make your speech, you had to plan from the present to the future in order to have your words follow sequentially.
Because if we took all of your words in your speech and we shook them up in a big giant scrabble bag and then took them out and arranged them randomly, it wouldn't make any sense.
So, you had to be concerned and focus on making comprehensible speech tracking from now into the future.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, but it existed inside my head.
What?
The speech that you gave to me only exists inside your head?
We can't know that the theory of a plan moving into the future is a theoretical concept I have in my head of how I'm going to play that out.
But as far as how it exists, what I'm saying to you, it only exists right here, right now.
Even when you look at evidence of the past, what's happened, you're still looking at only what exists right there right now.
You look at the future.
No, no, but I mean, hang on, hang on.
Okay, hang on, hang on.
I can't understand anything that you're saying if all I do is focus on the right now.
It has to be a flow, right?
So, for instance, if I just take one millisecond of your argument and only play that in my mind, right?
Your argument would be incomprehensible, right?
Well, I think the key word there is in your mind, which is that time only exists in your mind.
Sorry, are you saying that?
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
You keep saying these things like they're taken for granted.
I don't know if you've ever spoken with people who disagree with you.
Are you saying that time?
Okay, can you okay?
I'm not talking to Eckhart Tolle.
I'm talking to you.
Is it true, or is it your theory that time is not objective?
Time does not exist outside of your mind, but time only exists in your mind.
As far as we can evidently put our fingers on, that would make sense.
I mean, if I'm thinking of the future, I'm just thinking of the future in the now.
If I'm thinking about the past, I'm just remembering the past and the now, but I'm not actually in the past.
That's gone.
Sorry, are you saying that?
Hang on, hang on.
Hang on, hang on.
Are you saying that because we cannot travel through time, that time does not exist?
Or time is not a valid concept?
It doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
Well, the concept doesn't exist in the real world, but would you say that there's cause and effect in the universe?
Yes, but the point is that the only effect that we're going to have on the universe will be in the now.
The only effect we're going to have in the universe.
Okay, so the only effect we're going to have in the universe is in the now.
Okay.
So let me ask you this.
If the effect that you want to have in the universe is being a good surgeon, do you need to plan for that?
Yes, but the only way you'll play it out is in the now.
You keep not answering my questions.
Okay, so if you want to be a surgeon, you have to plan for it.
It takes you.
Hang on, I'm still talking.
So if you want to be a surgeon, it takes you a significant number of years to train to be a surgeon.
You don't just grab a knife and start cutting people, right?
That's true.
Now, if you want to be a surgeon, in other words, if the effect that you want to have in the now is to be a good surgeon, you need to plan ahead for that, right?
That's true.
You also need to be concerned that you are gaining the appropriate skill set, that you know where the organs are.
You practice, I don't know, on your oranges or peaches or whatever you do.
You know which scalpel to use.
You know something about anesthetics and so on, right?
So you need to be concerned that you have the right skill set.
Otherwise, you're probably going to get people killed, right?
That's true.
Okay.
So concern is to some degree another form of worry, right?
In other words, if you're a surgeon, should you worry that you might kill people?
Or should you be indifferent?
Should you be indifferent as to whether you heal people or kill people?
No, you should not be indifferent.
But One is you accept it, and the other one is that your mind is running out of control into the future endlessly.
Okay, but listen.
That's a complete straw man.
Hang on.
That's a complete straw man.
Everybody knows that there's such a thing as an excess of worry.
Can we agree on that?
People can worry too much.
Well, what does it mean to worry, though?
Well, to be concerned about negative outcomes.
But it's...
Okay, stop, stop.
I just need some common sense shit from you here, brother.
I really do.
Okay.
Is it possible to be too worried about negative things happening in the future?
Okay, great.
I agree with you.
Worry falls in the Aristotelian mean.
Is it also the case that it is possible to have too little concern about what happens in the future and just live in the moment, kind of like an animal, without making any plans for the future?
So for instance, if somebody enjoys eating a lot of sort of fat and sugar and stuff that may not be great for you in the long run, if they only focus on the now and they don't have any concern or worry in the future about being obese or unhealthy, is it possible to have too little concern about negative outcomes in the future?
That's also true.
Fantastic.
Well, then we're in perfect agreement.
So you can worry too little, you can worry too much.
So when Alan Watts says no amount of worry has ever changed anything in the future, first of all, that's false.
And secondly, saying that worry is always bad is like saying food is always bad.
Can you undereat?
Yes, you can.
Can you overeat?
Yes, you can.
It's like saying exercise is always bad.
Is too little exercise bad for you?
Yes, it is.
Is too much exercise bad for you?
Yes, it is, right?
There was a black guy on stage.
He was like Mr. Olympia six times and he had to crawl on stage because he's got so many back problems from overexercising, right?
So if somebody were to come along to you and say that all eating is bad, would you say that's kind of ridiculous?
And saying there is too much eating, there's too little eating, and you want to eat more or less the right amount.
Is that a fair thing to say?
That's true.
Okay.
So then we're in perfect agreement.
You can worry too little, you can worry too much.
But saying that all worry is pointless is a false statement.
All worry is pointless.
I would agree.
I think Alan's, I mean, saying that you repeated Alan Watts' quotes, I can see why you would say that.
But no, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't weasel me, bro.
Don't weasel me, bro.
Don't weasel me.
Not weaseling.
No, no, you are absolutely reasonable.
You just agreed with me.
And then you're saying, well, I can see why you would say that.
No, no, no.
You agreed with me.
So it's what we agree on, not what I specifically am saying.
That's what I mean by weaseling.
You just agreed with me and you're saying, well, I can see why you would say that.
It's like, no, no, no.
You agreed with me, which means you accept that perspective as well.
Well, that doesn't mean that you're ubiquitously right.
We have two different points here, too.
We're talking about different things.
Yeah, I'm done.
Sorry, I can't continue that.
That's just not somebody who's debating in good faith.
So, yeah, don't do that kind of stuff with people.
I mean, that's somebody who just wants to be right and is moving the gold post and changing definitions.
Right.
So if I say you agreed with me in this particular argument, to then say, well, that doesn't mean that you're right about everything all the time is total bullshit.
I mean, just don't do that kind of stuff.
Don't be ego invested to the point where you can't admit that you've changed your mind.
Like I just did this last night on X. I posted something that was a bit more enthusiastic than accurate and I apologize and all of that.
So yeah, just don't do that kind of stuff.
Don't just have to win because you just won't be surrounded by quality people as a whole and it kind of traps you in a pretty negative life and mindset.
So yeah, just, you know, and he's a young guy, so I say this with sympathy and so on.
But yeah, don't just want to be right and want to be accurate and truthful and connected and corrected is the way to go.
All right.
Sorry for the people who I have a bit of a shorter show today because I have a call this afternoon.
Oh, yeah.
Don't forget.
You can go to freedomaine.com slash call in, C-A-L-L-I-N, not colon, freedomaine.com slash call in.
And I would love to have a public or private conversation with you about whatever is on your mind.
And I hope that you will avail yourself of that and have yourself a beautiful, beautiful afternoon, my friends.
Lots of love from up here.
I'll talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection